The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria

by Carlos Hernandez

  We drove out of Havana and headed toward Brota Flor. It’s a speck on the map between Matanzas and Cienfuegos (i.e., between “The Killing Place” and “Land of a Hundred Fires”). It lay on the way to Santa Clara, where my extended family had lived ever since my uncles had fled town. Our Easter-Island luggage was tied to the roof and back of Gustavito’s Tata Nano, a tiny car from India that was only slightly less roomy than a model-railroad prop. Gustavito was “driving”: comemierda spent more time looking over his shoulder to joke with Jesús and me than he did keeping us on the road. That left poor Sophie to lean over and try to hold the wheel straight whenever Gustavito remembered a new chiste or chisme to share with me.

  The pig sat like a finishing-school valedictorian between Jesús and me, smiling and enjoying the ride. She was surprisingly clean. Fresh from the market was my guess.

  Jesús saw me eyeing his pig. “We’re going to eat like kings tonight,” he said. “That is, if we don’t end up using her for the other thing.”

  I noticed he was touching his left guayabera pocket again. He’d been doing that periodically since we met. And now that we were sitting, I could tell he seemed to have stored something long and hard there. Its outline reminded me of a two-barreled cigar case.

  “Feel free to smoke,” I said. “My wife and I don’t mind.”

  He looked at me, momentarily confused. Then he stopped touching his pocket and, with a slight, contemplative smile, said, “My wife was killed four years ago.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” was all I could muster. ¿The hell did that come from?

  “She was murdered by her lover,” Jesús continued. “I didn’t mind that she had a lover, and I had lovers too—¿who in Cuba doesn’t? But her lover was jealous and violent. He wanted her to leave me, to be his alone. When she wouldn’t, he knifed her to death.”

  “It’s not easy,” said Gustavito. “No es facil” is the island’s collective catchphrase. Everyone uses it. Fits pretty much any situation in Cuba.

  I asked Jesús, “¿Is that when you became interested in the spirit world? ¿When you learned to contact the other side?”

  “Yes,” he said simply. Fingering his left breast pocket.

  Now we were in Sophie’s territory. For the last 25 years she’d worked all over the world as a photojournalist, mostly stories on travel and culture. She practiced no religion but believed in them all; I termed her worldview (when I wanted to piss her off) “sedimentary religion.” And now she was ready to add another layer: “How exactly does it work?” she asked Jesús, peeking around her seat to face him. “How do we speak to the dead?”

  “We probably won’t speak,” he answered. “Speaking would require the spirit to enter a living human being, and that is very dangerous. If you want, we could put her in this sow. That’s why she’s here, in fact. Pigs are very intelligent, so they make good vessels for spirits. They give the spirit a lot of options for communicating with us. But sometimes pigs are driven insane in the process. Sometimes, two souls is too many for one little pig-brain to handle. Then the spirit is just along for the ride as the crazy pig runs itself to death, releasing both souls forever.”

  “¿We are Legion, eh?” Gustavito quoted, smacking Sophie on the shoulder. He enjoyed fucking with her as much as I did. And just like she would me, she smacked him back twice as hard. He pretended to lose control of the car, she gripped the dashboard and cursed him out, he giggled, and Jesús, softly, told him to drive carefully, or he’d upset the pig, and then she wouldn’t be able to serve as my mother’s host. Gustavito sobered up immediately, concentrated on his driving.

  “You seemed to imply there was another option besides putting Mámi in the pig,” I said to Jesús.

  “Yes,” said Jesús. “We could place her in a meaningful object. That is in fact what I suggest we do.”

  “¿What does that mean, a ‘meaningful object’?” Sophie called from the front.

  “Something important to you to serve as the new home for Milhuevos’s soul. It’s your attraction to the object that makes the soul interested in it. And then, once the soul decides to stay there, you can hold the object in your hands, press it to your forehead, kiss it, do all sorts of the things to commune with it. But if the soul gets greedy, starts pulling at you, you can put it away for a while. That way, everyone stays safe.”

  “So it’s good to take breaks and maintain a little distance from spirits.”

  “Absolutely. The past is greedy and gluttonous. It wants nothing more than to consume the present and replace it. And ghosts are living instances of the past. You must always keep them at a safe distance.”

  “¡Don’t be a hypocrite!” Gustavito yelled from the front. In the rearview mirror I could see the mischief in his screwed-up mouth.

  “I’m not a hypocrite. I put Gladys in a meaningful object, just like I’m telling them to.”

  “¡Hypocrite!” Gustavito repeated.

  The car went quiet. Then: “He’s right,” said Jesús finally. “I am a hypocrite. I’m telling you not to do the thing I myself did. But from experience I know how perilous it can be to try to house another soul inside you.”

  “Enseñale,” said Gustavito, his face gibbous in the rearview mirror.

  I hugged the pig to get her out of my line of sight. Jesús had already begun to unbutton his shirt. When he finished, he opened it wide, revealing his black and white chest, the map of some alien planet. Sunk vertically into his left pectoral was the thing I had mistaken for a cigar case in his pocket. It was in fact an old knife, its wooden hilt shabby and worn. There was a mouth of scar tissue around the permanent, puckered wound above his nipple, another, smaller one at the bottom of his pec, where about two inches of the well-maintained blade poked out. The knife had worried a crescent-shaped scar into his side, where the point of the blade had scraped his belly for God-knows-how-long.

  Jesús carefully pulled the knife free from his chest. The white continents vanished from his body, consumed like sinking islands. He became uniformly black.

  Sophie’s face, peeking over the seat, was a portrait of wonder. Not good wonder. This-can’t-be-happening wonder.

  Jesús held the knife aloft, point-down, and said, “This is the knife that killed my wife, Gladys. This was my meaningful object, the vessel I use to ferry her back to me. So long as this knife is in me, she is with me.”

  Jesús slipped the knife back into his chest. His vitiligo returned, patches emerging from his skin as small, white points, and spreading like drops of watercolor touched to tissue paper.

  After witnessing Jesús’s metamorphosis, both Sophie and I were deranged. For Sophie, who loved myths and legends and local religious practices, what we had seen presented an unprecedented problem: nothing she had ever observed in any of her travels actually challenged her way of understanding the world. When she was writing her human-interest stories, she could always treat the rituals she participated in as curious, anthropologically valuable, but ultimately removed from her way of framing reality. But Jesús has patches of white flesh so long as the knife with his wife’s soul was inserted into his body. It was a testable, repeatable, objectively verifiable reality. It was physiology, chemistry, scientific fact. Nothing in her American way of knowing had prepared her to assimilate this into her worldview.

  My derangement was of a different order. To me, it marked a return. This was the world I grew up in; this was my native language. The fact is, things like this happen all the time in Cuba. Tell this story to ten Cubans and nine would believe it without blinking. There in the back of that Tato Nano, I embraced the sweet pig and was flooded now with the memory of everything that had been lost in translation for all these years.

  And that is exactly what I wanted. That’s why I came. I can’t say I believed Gustavito’s letter; I’m less a believer than Sophie when it comes to oogie-boogie spirit stuff. But something in my DNA made me come, some part of me I trusted more than my piss-poor, Plato’s-cave understanding of reality. We do not know th
e world. We only know of it what we have known.

  Gustavito sensed our consternation. So he tried to help the only way he knew how: by telling her funny stories about his most recent crimes. It so happened his most recent crime was stealing the well-behaved pig in the car with us.

  Just telling Sophie that was enough to start to ground her, get her laughing. “Really? The pig in the back? Because you had her on a leash.”

  “I always keep a leash in my car. Put an animal on a leash and people assume you own it. I have collars that will fit any animal: cow, goat, dog, cat, caiman, nutria, and of course pig. I have cages for smaller animals, too, and a nice terrarium for things like snakes and iguanas. I even have tack and harness for horses. ¡I’m like the Cuban Noah!”

  “¿But how’d you do it? You can’t just walk up to a pig and put a leash on it and say it is yours.”

  Gustavito rocked his head back and forth as if to say, “Well, actually, yes you can.”

  “Stealing is like magic,” Jesús explained. “The secret is misdirection.”

  Gustavito honked the horn. “¡Exactly! So before we pick you and Pedrito up, we go to a farmer’s market just outside of Havana. I have the leash hidden in my pocket. I send Jesús ahead of me to the pig stall. Because Jesús, he causes a scene wherever he goes. ¡People think he’s a leper!”

  “He’s right. Honestly, it’s why I took the job in the museum; so I wouldn’t be surrounded by so many ignorant people.”

  “¡Cuba’s the number one country in the world for picking on people with disabilities!” Gustavito added gleefully.

  “The pig,” Sophie reminded.

  “Yes, yes. So I send Jesús ahead of me. People clear a path; it’s like the parting of the Red Sea. Rude children are staring and pointing, and their mothers swat their butts to try to get them to stop. Jesús, all smiles, walks up to the pig farmer and tells him he wants to buy a pair of pigs for breeding. The farmer, obviously a racist comemierda, asks to see Jesús’s cash first. So Jesús shows him a ball of money. Now the crowd is really interested. ¿How’d this leper get so rich? So then … you’re going to love this, Sophie. The next thing the farmer asks him is, “¿Compañero, are you blanco or negro?”

  “No!” said Sophie.

  “¡Of course!” said Gustavito. “This isn’t the US. Here if you’re racist, you don’t have to hide it.”

  Sophie turned to face Jesús: “What did you say?”

  “I told him I was ‘blanegro.’”

  We must have laughed for two solid kilometers.

  “They all pissed themselves laughing, too,” Gustavito said finally. “The whole crowd, the pig farmer, coño, I think even the pigs were giggling under their breath. Well, that’s all the distraction I needed. I mean, fuck, I would have starved to death 20 years ago if I couldn’t steal a pig under those circumstances. I put the leash on her and that was that, dicho y hecho.”

  “¿But how did you know the pig would go along? ¿What if it started squealing and fighting with you?” I asked.

  “It’s like picking up women at a disco,” Gustavito said philosophically. “You have to see which ones are interested. Which ones are scoping you out. But once you notice a woman giving you the eye, you don’t wait around eating shit, or some other fulano will get her. You go over and you put the leash on her, but you don’t pull. That’s the secret. Don’t pull, or she’ll fight you. Once the leash is on, she’s yours. So let her lead. That’s the gentleman’s way.”

  “You pick up women at the disco with a leash,” I said dryly.

  “That’s where I learned it. And it works on pigs, too. I have the sow in the back seat to prove it, ¿don’t I?”

  “But how’d you leave with it?” Sophie asked. “Somebody would have noticed.”

  “Gustavito is the king of thieves,” said Jesús. “He tried to sell the pig to the pig farmer.”

  “Coño,” I said, and meant it.

  Gustavito went into full-on gallo fino. “I walk over with the pig on the leash, and she’s totally in love with me, trotting alongside me like I’m the one that raised her, and I say to the pig farmer, ‘¡Hey! ¡Listen! ¿Are you going to stand here all day talking to this black leper, or are we going to do business? I want to sell you this pig.’

  “And he says back, ‘¿Buy a pig? ¿Are you crazy? I have more pigs than I know what to do with.’

  “’But this pig is great,’ I said. ‘She’ll give you a hundred beautiful piglets.’

  “‘I wouldn’t take that pig if you paid me,’ he said. ‘That mongrel isn’t fit to breed or eat.’ So you see, he wasn’t even really looking at her. Then he said, ‘Find someone else to buy that sickly sow. ¡But not around here! I don’t want you stealing my business. ¡Get out of here, you son of a whore!’

  “So I left.”

  After an appreciative pause, Sophie said, “You’ve got balls, Gustavito. My God.”

  “My aunt was Milhuevos,” he said proudly. “She had a thousand eggs. I’d better have at least two.”

  We arrived in what was left of Brota Flor at about 3:00 PM. We wouldn’t stay long; my family was waiting for us in Santa Clara. We would just go to the paredón and get Mámi and get out.

  It had become one of those almost-dead Cuban towns. Nature was slowly reclaiming it weed by weed. There were no animals: no chickens, no dogs, not even any birds—probably because there were no trees. The big well in the center of town lay in ruins. Not a soul in sight.

  Gustavito drove us up to a large wall opposite the town well. Whatever store this wall belonged to had closed a long time ago. On it, someone had painted a caricature of Jesse Helms, complete with Hitler mustache and swastika armband. “¡Heil Helms!” said the speech balloon.

  The caricature was faded, damaged. No one’d been by to touch it up for a long time. But despite the ravages of time, some of the artist’s original flair still remained. He or she had incorporated the holes in the wall as part of the message. Old Jesse was riddled with bullets. Of course the largest bullet hole was centered on Helms’s crotch.

  We got out of the car and made for the wall. Gustavito had the pig on a leash, Jesús carried a bottle of aguardiente, and Sophie had her complicated, expensive photojournalist camera hanging from her neck. She raised it occasionally and snapped a few shots.

  I ran the modest rosary that had belonged to my mother through my fingers. I had brought it to Cuba with the intention of giving it to my Tía Prieta, but now I figured it would be the perfect “meaningful object” to serve as Mámi’s new home.

  “¿So what do we do?” I asked. I was suddenly nervous. “Bueno,” said Jesús, “I will draw her out of the wall. But then it depends on you.”

  “¿What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t put Gladys’s soul in an animal because an animal—another body—would be too far away from me. So I moved her into the knife that killed her and stuck the knife in my chest. Now our spirits commingle without the need for words. It’s wonderful. It’s an actual marriage we have now. I don’t need other lovers anymore.

  “That rosary in your hands, if Milhuevos goes to live there, will let you feel her presence, bask in the warmth of her existence. You will know a mother’s love, a beautiful, meaningful thing. But it will be an inarticulate love, and it will only be as close as your hands can hold a rosary. In some ways, the pig might be a better option for you. Maybe there are things you want to ask your mother. Maybe you want a clearer kind of … ‘interface,’ let’s call it. If the pig doesn’t go crazy, you’ll have a more direct way to interact with your mother. Not words, but the kinds of responses an intelligent animal is capable of, which is quite a bit, if you are observant and patient.”

  He took a swig of aguardiente, then finished. “It’s up to you, compañero. Tell me what you want.”

  I borrowed the aguardiente from Jesús. ¿What did I want? I stared into Helms’s eyes—one of his pupils was a bullet hole—and drank and wiped my mouth and sighed. “I was hoping for more, Jesús. Apparentl
y more than rosaries and pigs can give. I’m sorry, but I thought this was going to be like a seance in the movies. I want to ask her about everything. I want to find out who she was. Who Pápi was. What I was like as a little boy.”

  Another pull from the bottle, then: “I want to know, more than anything, if she’s okay with how I turned out. I grew up in the States and lived an American life. I became a meatpacker like my father, then a lectór at the meatpacking plant. I read to the workers day in and day out, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes English, stories of valor and triumph that had nothing to do with the small life I led. I read them the news, too, all the different ways the world is going to hell, and I never did a thing about it except laugh at the terribleness of it all and then turn to the Sports page. I retired early, and all I do now is watch baseball. I don’t think I’m doing any harm, but I’m not doing any good, either. If my mother is ashamed of me, I want to know now, while I still have the power to change.”

  I had no idea all that was in me. ¿Had I always been this broken?

  Sophie came up behind me and slipped her arms around my chest and squeezed. “You’re okay, mi vida,” she whispered. I put a hand on the two she had fastened around me.

  Jesús shook his head. “We’d have to put her inside someone for questions that complex. And I won’t do that. It’s too dangerous. I’m sorry, my friend.”

  Gustavito came around front and said, sheepishly, “I’m the one who’s sorry. I brought you here. I thought this was a good idea.”

  “You meant well,” I said. With this much love coming in from all sides, I couldn’t help but feel better.

  “Maybe there’s a way,” Sophie said. She removed her arms from my chest and a few seconds later placed something in Jesús’s palm. “Can we use this?”

  Jesús’s eyes bugged. “¿Is it meaningful to Pedrito as well?” he asked.

  “Even more than it is to me.”

  “¿Is what meaningful?” I asked.

  Jesús showed me what Sophie had placed in his hand. It was her fake front tooth.