“Vámonos, vámonos!” a petite mulatta roars ten yards ahead of Felicia. Lieutenant Xiomara Rojas has an undershot jaw, and her jumble of yellowish teeth is visible when she shouts. “El Líder never slowed down in these mountains! For him it was a matter of life and death, not a Sunday outing! Keep moving!”
Felicia looks down at the trail of moist trampled grasses. Her face is flushed and sweaty, and she can’t tell whether the salt in her eyes is from perspiration or involuntary tears. Lieutenant Rojas is from these parts, Felicia thinks, that’s why she doesn’t sweat. Nobody from Santiago de Cuba ever sweated. It’s a known fact.
“Compañera del Pino, you must keep up the rear! It’s the most vulnerable position after the leader!” Lieutenant Rojas bellows, not unkindly.
Felicia’s calves feel like baseballs below her knees. The earth, muddy and pliable, sucks at her feet. Every tendon is straining, stretched taut like the muscles of cows at the butcher shop that had died in fear. Their meat was never as tender as the flesh of the animals that hadn’t anticipated death. Felicia fumbles for her canteen. She twists off the cap, attached by a chain to its neck. Her hands are a stranger’s, swollen and coarse, her fingernails dirty.
“Fatherland or death!” Lieutenant Rojas shouts, as Felicia tips the water toward her mouth.
“Fatherland or death!” the guerrillas echo, all except Felicia, who wonders whether all this shouting wouldn’t alert the enemy in a real war.
At the makeshift camp, the guerrillas set up their tents and open cans of pinto beans and pressed meat the color of dung. It’s their fifth day of this food and it’s given some of the soldiers diarrhea, others constipation, and all of them gas. Only Lieutenant Rojas seems unaffected and eats with enthusiasm. Felicia looks around at the others in her mostly middle-aged brigade. Everyone is there for the same reason, whether they admit it or not. They are a unit of malcontents, a troop of social misfits. It is Lieutenant Rojas’s mission to reshape them into revolutionaries.
Felicia is there because she nearly killed herself and her son. She doesn’t remember this but everyone has told her it is so. “Why did you do it?” her mother asked her sadly, stretching her hands on the starched white bed. “Why did you do it?” the psychiatrist with the severe pageboy questioned her, as if Felicia were a willful child. “Why, Felicia?” her best friend, Herminia, beseeched her, all the while rubbing Felicia’s forehead with herbs behind the nurse’s back.
But each time Felicia reached for the memory, a white light burned in its place.
The doctors deemed Felicia an “unfit mother,” and accused her of irreparably damaging her son that summer on Palmas Street. Nobody knows if Ivanito understands what happened to him. The boy never speaks of it. But the doctors, her mother, even her coworkers at the beauty parlor finally persuaded Felicia to send Ivanito to boarding school. To toughen him up, to catch up with boys his own age, to integrate him. That was the word everyone used. Integrate.
“Don’t you love me anymore?” Ivanito called to her from the bus window with eyes that strafed her with grief.
Felicia visits her son the first Sunday of each month at his school in the potato fields outside San Antonio de los Baños. They say little in the hours allotted them. The emotion of their reunions exhausts them so that they often nap together under a tree, or in Ivanito’s narrow bunk bed. They speak mainly with their eyes and with their hands, which never stop touching.
Everyone tells Felicia that she must find meaning in her life outside of her son, that she should give the revolution another try, become a New Socialist Woman. After all, as her mother points out, the only thing Felicia ever did for the revolution was pull a few dandelions during the weed-eradication campaign in 1962, and then only reluctantly. Her lack of commitment is a source of great rancor between them.
Felicia tries to shake off her doubts, but all she sees is a country living on slogans and agitation, a people always on the brink of war. She scorns the militant words blaring on billboards everywhere, WE SHALL OVERCOME … AS IN VIETNAM … CHANGE DEFEAT INTO VICTORY … Even the lowly weed pullers had boasted a belligerent name: The Mechanized Offensive Brigade. Young teachers are Fighters for Learning. Students working in the fields are the Juvenile Column of the Centenary. Literacy volunteers are The Fatherland or Death Brigade. It goes on and on, numbing her, undermining her willingness to fight for the future, hers or anybody else’s. If only her son could be with her.
Felicia pulls a rusted nail file and a small plastic bottle of hand cream from her knapsack, and gets to work. She pushes back her cuticles with the rounded edge of the file, then expertly picks and scrapes under her nails until they are spotless. With short, brisk strokes she evens the broken nail on her left thumb. Then she squirts the pink lotion onto the backs of her hands, massages it in with a circular motion, and rubs her palms together until her hands are soft and slightly greasy again.
The other members of the troop, except for Lieutenant Rojas, who is listening to a crackling radio in her tent, watch Felicia attentively, as if witnessing an intricate ritual they’ll be required to duplicate, like the dismantling and reassembling of their rifles. When Felicia finishes, they turn away, clumping together in twos or threes to talk.
“It was my daughter who turned me in for insisting we say grace at the dinner table,” Silvia Lores complains. “That’s what they teach her at school, to betray her parents. Now I’m considered an ‘antisocial.’ ”
“It could be worse,” a genial man named Paco consoles her. “My neighbor’s son was sent off to the marble quarries on the Isle of Pines because he listened to American jazz and wore his hair too long. Now I’m not in favor of long hair, mind you, but hard labor? In that sun?”
“They send the seminarians there, too. They say the church is reactionary,” Silvia Lores says.
“The leaders forget what they looked like themselves fifteen years ago,” the only young man in the group pronounces. “Today, they’d be thrown in a Social Disgrace Unit with drug addicts and maricones. Look at me. They say I’m rebellious, but it was rebels who made the revolution!”
“Calm down, chico, calm down. She might hear you,” Paco cautions, gesturing toward Lieutenant Rojas’s tent.
“Chances are, one of us is a spy anyway,” the young man says contemptuously. “It’s impossible to hide here.”
Felicia listens to the conversation as she rolls a cigarette of strong black tobacco. She took up smoking again in the psychiatric hospital. It gave her something to do with her hands. Now she longs for the satisfying burning it produces deep in her lungs.
The others in her troop tried to draw her out during their first days in the mountains, but Felicia refused to say anything. She doesn’t know these people and has no reason to trust them. Perhaps they think she is the spy.
Felicia volunteers again for night duty. In the dark, in the moonless jungle, the fissures are not so visible, the hypocrisies and lies less disturbing. Her eyes, she decides, could get accustomed to this darkness. Perhaps she should have lived in the night all along, with the owls and bats and other nocturnal creatures. Herminia told her once of the gods that rule the night, but Felicia cannot remember their names. It was to these gods that the slaves had prayed to preserve a shred of their souls. It had strengthened them for the indignities of their days.
Celia, too, once prayed in the night, rocking in her wicker swing until dawn. Sometimes, when Felicia was a child and couldn’t sleep, she’d join her mother on the porch. They’d sit together for hours listening to the rhythm of the sea and the poems her mother recited as if in a dream.
Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas oscuras.
La una era el sol,
la otra la luna.
Felicia learned her florid language on those nights. She would borrow freely from the poems she’d heard, stringing words together like laundry on a line, connecting ideas and descriptions she couldn’t have planned. The words sounded precisely right when she said them, th
ough often people told her she didn’t make any sense at all. Felicia misses those peaceful nights with her mother, when the sea had metered their intertwined thoughts. Now they fight constantly, especially about El Líder. How her mother worships him! She keeps a framed photograph of him by her bed, where her husband’s picture used to be. But to Felicia, El Líder is just a common tyrant. No better, no worse than any other in the world.
In fact, Felicia can’t help feeling that there is something unnatural in her mother’s attraction to him, something sexual. She has heard of women offering themselves to El Líder, drawn by his power, by his unfathomable eyes, and it is said he has fathered many children on the island. But there is a coldness to El Líder, a bitterness she doesn’t trust. They say his first wife, his one great love, betrayed him while he was imprisoned on the Isle of Pines, after his ill-fated attack on the Moncada barracks. She accepted money from the government, the government he was trying to overthrow. El Líder never forgave her, and they divorced. There’s been another woman in his life since his days in these very mountains, but everyone knows she’s only a companion—a mother, a sister, not a true lover. El Líder, it seems, saves his most ardent passions for the revolution.
Still, Felicia muses, what would he be like in bed? Would he remove his cap and boots? Leave his pistol on the table? Would guards wait outside the door, listening for the sharp pleasure that signaled his departure? What would his hands be like? His mouth, the hardness between his thighs? Would he churn inside her slowly as she liked? Trail his tongue along her belly and lick her there? Felicia slips her hand down the front of her army fatigue pants. She feels his tongue moving faster, his beard against her thighs. “We need you, Compañera del Pino,” she hears him murmur sternly as she comes.
(1975)
It is the first Thursday in December. Nearly three hundred people squeeze into Santa Teresa del Mar’s only movie theater, sharing seats, cigarettes, and soft drinks. The town has arrived for what promises to be a lively fight: Ester Ugarte, the postmaster’s wife, has accused Loli Regalado of seducing her husband, a charge that Loli vehemently denies. On nights like these, nobody minds missing the theater’s ordinary fare of grainy Cuban films.
Celia del Pino settles on a folding chair behind a card table facing the audience. It is her third year as a civilian judge. Celia is pleased. What she decides makes a difference in others’ lives, and she feels part of a great historical unfolding. What would have been expected of her twenty years ago? To sway endlessly on her wicker swing, old before her time? To baby-sit her grandchildren and wait for death? She remembers the gloomy letters she used to write to Gustavo before the revolution, and thinks of how different the letters would be if she were writing today.
Since her husband’s death, Celia has devoted herself completely to the revolution. When El Líder needed volunteers to build nurseries in Villa Clara province, Celia joined a microbrigade, setting tiles and operating a construction lift. When he launched a crusade against an outbreak of malaria, Celia inoculated schoolchildren. And every harvest, Celia cut the sugarcane that El Líder promised would bring prosperity. Three nights per month, too, Celia continues to protect her stretch of shore from foreign invaders. She still dresses up for these all-night vigils, putting on red lipstick and darkening the mole on her cheek, and imagines that El Líder is watching her, whispering in her ear with his warm cigar breath. She would gladly do anything he asked.
Celia has judged 193 cases since she was elected to the People’s Court, from petty thievery and family disputes to more serious crimes of medical malpractice, arson, and counterrevolutionary activities. But she delights in judging juvenile cases most of all. Reform, not punishment, is her modus operandi, and Celia has succeeded in converting many young delinquents into productive revolutionaries. One girl, Magdalena Nogueras, who at sixteen was caught stealing a pig and a wrench from her neighbor, went on to become a principal actress with the National Theater Company of Cuba. Later, Celia would learn with sadness that the girl had defected while on tour in Oaxaca and was playing a psychotic housewife on a popular Mexican novela.
Celia signals the opening of tonight’s case with four taps of her hammer, wobbly on its handle. It is her make-do gavel. She senses the audience is evenly split in its support of one woman or the other. Everyone, it seems, has a stake in the outcome.
Since the Family Code passed earlier this year, more and more people are turning to the courts with their problems. Women who claim their husbands are not doing their share of their housework or who want to put a stop to an extramarital affair bring the matter before a judge. Very few men, however, take their complaints to the People’s Court for fear of appearing weak or, unthinkably, as cuckolds. Celia dislikes these cases. To her, such matters are private and should not be settled before a public hungry for entertainment. Besides, after all the negotiating, divorce is nearly always the solution. Perhaps if she had to choose again, she herself would have followed her Tía Alicia’s example and never married at all.
“I was borrowing a cup of corn flour when her husband threw off his bathrobe and pushed himself on me.” Loli Regalado is a curvaceous woman in her early thirties. Her dyed blond hair is pulled back in a high ponytail.
“That’s not true!” Ester Ugarte shrieks. “She was seducing my Rogelio! She had on a tight dress that came up to here, with a neckline to there!” Ester indicates her navel both times.
“That wouldn’t leave much of a dress, now would it, Compañera Ugarte?” Celia asks, and the audience erupts with laughter.
Loli then recounts how Ester rushed at her with an ironing board and chased her into the stairwell of their building, knocking her against the wall and holding her there like a prisoner.
“She called me a puta,” Loli complains angrily.
“I never called her a puta! Though God knows she deserves it!”
“Everyone knows your husband doesn’t love you because you’re so jealous,” Loli taunts. “He puts the moves on every woman in the neighborhood.”
“Liar!”
Celia pounds her hammer on the card table to quiet the spectators, who are hissing and hollering as if it were a boxing match. But Celia knows, as everyone does in Santa Teresa del Mar, that what Loli says is true. Rogelio Ugarte, like his father and his father before him, cannot keep his ungual hands to himself. It’s a genetic trait, like his widow’s peak and his slow brown eyes and the job he inherited at the post office. Celia remembers the rumors about Rogelio, how he sent off to Chicago for a carton of little rubber tips for his penis that made women crazy with pleasure. That was before the blockade. Celia always wondered how those tips stayed in place.
Several witnesses give their statements, but their information is so contradictory that it proves almost useless. Celia’s arm tires from banging her hammer and her voice is hoarse from calling for order. Incredibly, she hears some desgraciado selling peanuts in the back of the theater. Before she can throw him out, another voice breaks through the commotion.
“Let’s try that sonofabitch postmaster! He’s the one that should be here!” Nélida Grau yells from the third row, and in an instant the spectators are on their feet, arguing in every direction.
By the time Celia restores a tenuous calm, she has come to a decision.
“Compañera Grau has a point,” Celia begins, silencing a heckler, a cousin of Rogelio’s, with a harsh look. “It seems to me, compañeras, that your problem is not with each other, but with Rogelio.”
“What do you expect with someone like her coming around to tempt him? He’s only human!” Ester protests.
“Ha!” Loli sneers. “He should be licking his stamps instead of his chops! Maybe then we’d get some mail around here!”
“I’m not going to pass judgment on someone who isn’t here,” Celia announces over a fresh round of bickering. “You!” She points a finger at Rogelio’s cousin, Ambrosio Ugarte, who is surrounded by a circle of angry women. “Bring Rogelio here. You have five minutes.”
Celia looks out at the unrest that is Santa Teresa del Mar. She is disheartened. It seems to her that so much of Cuba’s success will depend on what doesn’t exist, or exists only rarely. A spirit of generosity. Commitments without strings. Are these so against human nature?
Suddenly, all eyes turn to the back door. Rogelio Ugarte has arrived. He stands in the doorway, hesitant to enter. His slow brown eyes search the audience for friends.
“Please come to the front, compañero,” Celia orders.
There is none of Rogelio’s easy manner, none of his usual bantering or joking. He looks like a forlorn puppet jerking woodenly down the aisle.
“Now we’ll get to the bottom of this!” Ester crows, and pandemonium breaks out anew.
As Celia pounds the card table, the head of her hammer finally gives way and flies backward, tearing a hole the size of a fist in the movie screen. It is most effective in securing the audience’s attention.
“Compañero Ugarte, you are responsible for causing a great deal of division among your neighbors,” Celia resumes loudly. “It has become clear to the court that it is you—not your wife or Compañera Regalado—who must stand before us with an explanation. Now please answer truthfully. Did you or did you not attempt to seduce Compañera Regalado against her will on the afternoon of October twenty-third?”
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