The Passage

by David Poyer

  Then she went into the deputy superintendent’s office to explain why she wouldn’t be able to work for a while. She hadn’t looked forward to this—he was not a warm man—but it went off all right. The cutting was over; there was slack time now before planting began. But he wouldn’t give her an advance on her wages and refused anything at all for Armando, since he was no longer officially attached to the cooperative. She started to argue, but he turned away. Graciela picked up her pay for the two days she’d worked that week—ten pesos, the worn bills with the picture of José Martí—and stopped by the cooperative store for rice, dried beans, a little cornmeal. Then she went back to the dispensary.

  When the médico came in, she helped her husband into the office, then waited, looking blankly at an old map on the wall as he examined Armando, peeling back his lids and peering into his eyes with a flashlight. Finally, he washed his hands gravely in a sink and dried them on a threadbare towel.

  “Well, señor? What is it, do you know?”

  “Don’t call me ‘señor,’ I’m a comrade like you,” said the man. To Armando, he said, “Compañero, I will have a word with your wife, if that is all right with you.”

  In the corridor, he put his hands in his pockets. “How long has your husband been unable to see?”

  “Since he returned from prison. I told you that.”

  “But there was a loss before that, no? As if there was a part of the world that to him, was no longer there?”

  “No. He could see perfectly when he went away—like a hawk, miles away.”

  “In that case … The paralysis of the eye muscles, lesions … I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do. He’s blind.”

  “I can see that, but why? Have they beaten him so badly?”

  “I see no evidence of trauma,” said the doctor uncomfortably. Then, seeing that she did not understand the technical word, he added, “Of beatings. Much of what they say about prisons is exaggerated … . At any rate, I don’t think—”

  “Then what causes it?” She cut him off angrily, looking down the hall to where two of the managers were talking with the secretary. All three were smoking. They glanced at her and chuckled.

  “It’s what we call neuritis óptica. It’s a disease of malnutrition. The nerve damage leads to blindness. Why did your husband go to prison?”

  “He stole a sack of ground corn to feed his family,” Graciela said, loudly enough that the managers stopped speaking. “They caught him and sent him away. They fed him nothing, so he went blind. So they let him go. How merciful they are.”

  “Comrade, por favor . . . You are upset, but remember yourself, no?”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m upset … . I didn’t mean to speak against anyone … . What medicine are you going to give him?”

  “This disease is not well understood.”

  “There must be a medicine. Tell me what it is. I’ll get it if I have to walk to Neuvitas.”

  “We could give him thiamine, if we had any. But that wouldn’t help his heart.” The médico shrugged. “It’s plain he cannot work. I’ll give you a sick pass. He’ll get the ration for the sick, and some dried milk.”

  “Should he go to the hospital?”

  “It can be done, but not right this minute. You can leave him here if you like. Then when transport is available, we’ll take him in to Camagüey.”

  She turned her face from the médico’s and said, “I’ll take care of him at home till you’re ready to take him.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said. “I will arrange for transport, the hospital … . Now, if you please, others are waiting. Is that a machete cut, compañero? Come in. Don’t drip blood there; that is clean.”

  BUT of course he never had arranged any transport or any care. And he didn’t come to the house, not once.

  So there’d been nothing for her to do but go back to work, walking behind the harrow that disked up the fields where the cane had to be replanted, pulling up the uprooted stumps and piling them for burning, or digging out irrigation trenches with shovels and hoes. And in the nights, she would sit up with him, and pray when she could. He’s always been strong, she told herself. He wasn’t old. He was only fifty-five.

  But he had become weaker and finally took to the pallet. She fed him as well as she could, but now he didn’t seem to care whether he ate or not. He complained of pain in his legs and couldn’t bear to have a blanket over them. Then he’d say he was cold, although she was sweating in the closed hut. Sometimes she got angry, but then she’d catch herself. As long as he complained, he was alive.

  The light flickered and a second later she heard the falter in the far-off drone of the generator. Then it stopped. The filament faded to orange and then red and then the darkness flooded in all at once through the door and window, and the silence echoed out over the land.

  A tap on the door made her sit up from her drowsing, catch her breath. The hinge creaked. She half-rose, reaching above her head, then dropped her arm as a voice whispered, “Mamá. Mamá?”

  “Coralía. What are you doing here?”

  “Uncle Tomás wrote me that Papa was sick. Oh, poor Papi.”

  “Close the door, child,” said Graciela in a low voice, feeling her way to the table.

  A match scratched and a candle sketched the interior in flickering shadow. The girl hesitated, then came into the light. She smiled uncertainly at her mother, then knelt by the bed. When she looked up again, her expression was frightened. “Oh, Mama. Was he really released?”

  “What do you mean? He’s here. Of course he was released. How other?”

  “But are his papers stamped? If he escaped—”

  “The police would have come days ago. You know that.” Graciela slumped back into the rawhide lacing, looking at the daughter she’d borne seventeen years ago.

  Her firstborn was lighter than her mother but unmistakably mestizo. Coralia wore a uniform; blue trousers, blue shirt, blue cap with a little red star.

  “I’m surprised you came.”

  “Why should you be surprised?”

  “You never write.”

  “I have to study, Mama. All the time.”

  “How are you doing at school?”

  “It’s tough … very difficult.”

  “You look thin. Are the studies hard?”

  “I don’t mean that. I can learn anything they put in front of me. You know that. But to know your father’s a criminal, a plantado —”

  “He accepted the revolution long ago.”

  “Not if he stole from it. You don’t know how humiliating that was, when they called me in to tell me. I had to stand before the others and confess my father was in error.” She raised her head in the candlelight. “Mother, there is something I must tell you. I had to renounce him.”

  “You renounced your father? Then what are you doing here?” Graciela got up suddenly, and her arm went up into the thatching. With a hiss, the machete slid out.

  “Put it away, Mamá,” said the girl, sighing. “You always have to make everything so dramatic. It doesn’t mean anything, only words. It wasn’t easy to get here. You don’t know.”

  “I know you put on airs, but you’re a negrita like me.”

  “How old-fashioned you are. Why do you say things like that about yourself?”

  “Because they’re true.”

  “And you reject the revolution, even though it’s all for you.”

  “For me? All for me? Oh my God! What have they given me?” Graciela waved the blade wildly around the hut. “¡No hay nada!

  What do you see that we have but hunger, work, fear? It was bad under the old regime, but there was always something to eat—even if it was nothing but sugarcane during the tiempo muerto.”

  “Put the machete down, Mamá. You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I’ll hurt someone else first!”

  “And don’t make threats. I would give my life for the revolution tonight if they asked me.”

  “Why not? You’ve alre
ady betrayed your family. Why not give them your life, as well.”

  “You sound so bitter. You don’t love me anymore, Mamá?” She looked at her daughter for a long time, then sighed. She sat down at the table and put her face in her hands.

  Coralía stood above her, fists on her hips.

  “You see, you have it backward. You wanted me to stay here and swing a machete with you and Father’s relatives, live in huts, and never go anywhere and never see anything. I can’t live like that, Mama. I can’t live like a campesino.”

  “And your father, what of him?”

  “He made his choice. If the camps couldn’t reform him, what can I do? As a person, I feel sorry for him, but I won’t throw away my life for some futile gesture. It’s not good that I come here again. My home’s in Havana now; that’s where I’ll live when I graduate.”

  Graciela sat at the table. Bitterness like a wall was rising in her heart. She hadn’t wanted this wall. She didn’t think she was the one who’d built it, but it was there.

  A mutter from the bed interrupted their whispers. Coralia knelt again. “Yes, Papi? It is I; I am here!”

  “I remember the day Raimondo died,” Armando murmured in a voice scarcely louder than the scorpions rustling overhead. “Do you remember Raimondo?”

  “No, Papi. Papi, it’s Coralia … . Does he know me, Mamá?”

  “He’s confused,” said Graciela. “He speaks to his brother, his grandmother. His mind goes back to the past. Yes, mi vida, I remember him, your brother.”

  The man on the pallet murmured, “The Batistiano soldiers surrounded the village. The officer announced that they were looking for enemies of the regime. Then they began going from house to house. They pulled the people out and lined them up on the street. They shot into the air. Then some of the people, they began setting their houses on fire.

  “Now the village echoed with shouts and screaming. They shot the pigs, the chickens, burned the houses. It was then we realized they were not looking for enemies of the regime. This was to terrify us.

  “But Raimondo was one of the revolutionaries. He had been with Fidel in the mountains and was back home trying to persuade the young men to go back with him, to join Che in the Sierra Maestra. So he knew that they would kill him, and he tried to hide. We wanted him to hide in our house, but he said no, they would kill us, too, if they found him there. So he ran into the house of a neighbor.

  “Yes, my brother tried to hide, but the soldiers saw him running. And they came and looked, and when they did not see him, they set the house on fire and waited outside with their guns. And finally the heat was too great and he ran out.

  “When they saw him, they seized him and dragged him out into the square so all the village could see. They beat him with the whip they call the ox’s prick. They broke his joints with the butts of their guns, then drove over him with their jeep. They killed Raimondo in the street like a dog. Then again they shot their guns, and I heard the bullets go whick, whick through the walls.

  “After the soldiers left, we all came out and looked around. I, too, came out, and I sat down beside Raimondo, who was still alive, but not for long.

  “‘Armando,’ he said to me, his mouth crushed from where they beat him, ‘it’s no good. We’ve got to make a change here. Everybody together, we’ve got to make a change.’

  “Then he died. And that night, I went into the mountains to take his place.”

  Graciela passed her hand over his face again and again. She thought she should be afraid, but she wasn’t. Her heart didn’t know what to feel—just as it had been when the children had died, the children after Coralia.

  “His brother gave his life for the revolution,” Coralia said. “You see, Mamá?”

  Armando muttered, “It’s true. And because of him, I believed. But the bearded one betrayed us. People said he was going to bring democracy, but Fidel, he’s just the same as Batista. And the prisons … decent people cannot imagine such things. It’s not for this my brother died.”

  “Things will change, Papi.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard for twenty years. And they don’t. They only get worse.”

  “I can’t listen to this,” said Coralia. Her face was hard in the candlelight. The door clacked behind her, and they were alone.

  “We lost her,” he said, and his voice was so sad, it made her feel like crying now at last.

  “She’ll always be ours, Armando.”

  “No, her soul belongs to them now.” He sighed, glanced around with his sightless eyes, then gestured her closer with a little motion of his fingers. “Do you remember when you tried to kill me with grandfather’s machete—”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “Are you glad you missed?”

  “Yes.”

  He’d been smiling, but gradually it faded. “There’s something I have to tell you. You remember when I was in the camp—not this time, the first time, on the Isle of Pines—”

  “You never talked about it.”

  “I know, because I was ashamed. I was afraid; they beat and threatened us.” He paused. “They released me because I gave in.”

  “Armando—”

  “Three years was long enough. I surrendered. I went to their indoctrination. I memorized Marx and Che; I signed petitions against the Yankees. Who cares, right? What did they do for us at the Playa Girón? But there were others who held out till they died. For giving up, I was ashamed … but in my heart, I never was one of them.”

  “I know, Armando. You don’t need to tell me that.”

  “I thought I’d outlive them … someday it would change … but now I don’t think I will.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and she looked away, understanding that he was weeping.

  “Then what do we do, mi vida?”

  “For me, it’s too late,” Armando whispered, staring into a darkness that must, she thought, be blacker than any night. “For me, the time has come to leave this place. But my son—” He put his hand out, and as if he could see, it came to rest lightly on her, right where the baby was. “My son—I want him to be free.”

  She watched his face in the guttering light of the candle, not believing for a long time that at last Armando Guzman Diéguez, cane cutter, son of a mechanic, and the man she had loved all her life, was dead.

  9

  Charleston

  THE next week, the next to the last in the yard, took them into July. A high-pressure area stalled over the coast and the temperature climbed into the high nineties. Right on schedule, the air conditioning in Barrett’s living spaces went down. Vysotsky kept driving them to get the remaining work done. Dan had to keep his guys late. When he did that, he stayed aboard, too, so the only time he left the ship was Wednesday evening, when he took Beverly to dinner. They didn’t talk much. She looked tired, and she complained about her remedial math students. It was late when they got back, and he stayed overnight.

  The next morning, a lieutenant and two first-class from the squadron staff came aboard for a surprise classified-material inspection. They fanned out, sealing all the safes and vaults. Then they disappeared with Harper, the classified materials custodian, for the inventory.

  The same morning, Dan and Norm Cash sat down in the supply office with a civilian auditor from the Supply Center to try again to figure out what Marion Sipple had done with $15,700 in cash, $22,786.80 in controlled equipage, $900 in silver bars, and $176,218 in maintenance components before stepping or slipping off Barrett ’s brow to his death. The auditor was young and good-looking, but he barely noticed her legs. When they finally wrapped, he was so soaked that he had to go back to his room for a quick shower and change before touring his spaces.

  He heard the shouting as he stepped into CIC. What now? he thought tiredly. He pushed the curtains aside and went into the little separate sonar room, ready to chew ass. He found Harper and Chief Fowler nose-to-nose and yelling.

  “Knock it off. I said, knock it off, you two!”

  “This son of a bitch
is telling me I can’t fix my fucking equipment.”

  “It’s not your fucking equipment—”

  “Okay, that’s enough. Chief Warrant, out of here. Chief Fowler, wait for me in my stateroom. Right now.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  Fowler, scowling, threw his clipboard against a safe behind the operators’ chairs and stormed out. Harper shrugged, then sauntered out. Dan asked one of the petty officers, “Pezdirtz, what was that all about?”

  “Not sure, sir. All I know, we were sitting around going over some sound spectra when the Super Goat come in and started pulling the access cover off number-one stack. Chief Fowler told him to get his hands off his gear. That’s when it started.”

  “Don’t call him ‘Super Goat.’ He’s Chief Warrant Officer Harper.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay … . Did you see the command master chief about your bonus?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m set. Thirteen thousand bucks in two increments for another four-year hitch.”

  “Good deal.” Dan slapped his back and left, thinking he had to cut Casey Kessler in on whatever the resolution was. Then he remembered the division officer wasn’t aboard. He’d taken a draft of guys over to damage control school; they’d lucked into twenty billets Aylwin had canceled out of.

  The chief warrant was out by the antisubmarine air controller’s station, glaring at the blank tote board. Dan said, “Outside.” He led the way up a deck and out onto the open air. The yard opened below them. A crane rumbled by; a helicopter sank toward a pad on the base. He said tightly, “How long have you been in the Navy, Jay?”

  “Since shrimp learned to whistle.”

  “Knock off the shit. How many years?”

  “Twenty-eight, why?”

  “You know why! That’s long enough to know not to settle your differences in front of the whole fucking crew. What is this with you and Fowler? I heard something before—”

  “Oh, the son of a bitch has a red hair up his ass about anybody else touchin’ his goddamn equipment. He’s a goddamn old maid is what it is. Just between you and me, I think he’s a little south of the line. I ain’t saying he’d suck a dick, but he’d hold it in his mouth.”