Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  “These are very beautiful, Pilar. But do I really look so unhappy?”

  Abuela talks to me as I paint. She tells me that before the revolution Cuba was a pathetic place, a parody of a country. There was one product, sugar, and all the profits went to a few Cubans, and, of course, to the Americans. Many people worked only in winter, harvesting the sugarcane. In the summer it was the tiempo muerto, the dead time, and the campesinos barely escaped starvation. Abuela says she was saved because her parents sent her to live with her great-aunt in Havana, who raised her with progressive ideas. Freedom, Abuela tells me, is nothing more than the right to a decent life.

  Mom eavesdrops on Abuela and me then lambastes us with one of her sixty-odd diatribes when she doesn’t like what she hears. Her favorite is the plight of the plantados, the political prisoners who’ve been in jail here almost twenty years. “What were their crimes?” she shouts at us, pushing her face close to ours. Or the question of retribution. “Who will repay us for our homes, for the lands the Communists stole from us?” And religion. “Catholics are persecuted, treated like dogs!” But Abuela doesn’t argue with Mom. She just lets her talk and talk. When Mom starts to go too haywire, Abuela gets up from her swing and walks away.

  We’ve been in Cuba four days and Mom has done nothing but complain and chain-smoke her cigars late at night. She argues with Abuela’s neighbors, picks fights with waiters, berates the man who sells ice cones on the beach. She asks everyone how much they earn, and no matter what they tell her, she says, “You can make ten times as much in Miami!” With her, money is the bottom line. Mom also tries to catch workers stealing so she can say, “See! That’s their loyalty to the revolution!”

  The Committee for the Defense of the Revolution has started hassling Abuela about Mom, but Abuela tells them to be patient, that she’ll only be here a week. I want to stay longer, but Mom refuses because she doesn’t want to give Cuba any more hard currency, as if our contributions will make or break the economy. (Mom is apoplectic because she has to pay for a hotel room and three meals a day even though we’re staying with relatives.) “Their pesos are worthless! They let us visit because they need us, not the other way around!” Why did they let my mother in here, anyway? Don’t these Cubans do their homework?

  I keep thinking Mom is going to have a heart attack any minute. Abuela tells me it’s been unusually hot for April. Mom is taking several showers a day, then rinsing her clothes in the sink and putting them on damp to cool herself off. Abuela doesn’t get any hot water at her house. The ocean is warmer than what comes out of her pipes, but I’m getting used to cold showers. The food is another story, though, greasy as hell. If I stay much longer, I’ll need to get a pair of those neon stretch pants all the Cuban women wear. I have to admit it’s much tougher here than I expected, but at least everyone seems to have the bare necessities.

  I wonder how different my life would have been if I’d stayed with my grandmother. I think about how I’m probably the only ex-punk on the island, how no one else has their ears pierced in three places. It’s hard to imagine existing without Lou Reed. I ask Abuela if I can paint whatever I want in Cuba and she says yes, as long as I don’t attack the state. Cuba is still developing, she tells me, and can’t afford the luxury of dissent. Then she quotes me something El Líder said in the early years, before they started arresting poets. “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.” I wonder what El Líder would think of my paintings. Art, I’d tell him, is the ultimate revolution.

  Abuela gives me a box of letters she wrote to her onetime lover in Spain, but never sent. She shows me his photograph, too. It’s very well preserved. He’d be good-looking by today’s standards, well built with a full beard and kind eyes, almost professorial. He wore a crisp linen suit and a boater tilted slightly to the left. Abuela tells me she took the picture herself one Sunday on the Malecón.

  She also gives me a book of poems she’s had since 1930, when she heard Garcia Lorca read at the Principal de la Comedia Theater. Abuela knows each poem by heart, and recites them quite dramatically.

  I’ve started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There’s a magic here working its way through my veins. There’s something about the vegetation, too, that I respond to instinctively—the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees. And I love Havana, its noise and decay and painted ladyness. I could happily sit on one of those wrought-iron balconies for days, or keep my grandmother company on her porch, with its ringside view of the sea. I’m afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I’d have to return to New York. I know now it’s where I belong—not instead of here, but more than here. How can I tell my grandmother this?

  Lourdes

  When Lourdes learns that dozens of people have taken refuge in the Peruvian embassy, she rushes to Havana to investigate. It’s sweltering in the capital, and Lourdes wipes her brow repeatedly with a moist cloth she keeps on the seat beside her. A crowd is milling outside the embassy gates, but no one dares to enter. A Jeep rounds the corner and a knot of young men chase it, calling a familiar name. Others scatter, averting their faces or hiding behind their sleeves.

  The Jeep pulls up to the embassy and a barrel-chested man steps out. He’s wearing an olive cap and army fatigues, and his curly, graying beard floats below his chin, elongating his tired features. He looks much older than her mother’s photograph, the one that replaced her father’s face, the one Lourdes flung into the sea. He looks smaller, too, more vulnerable, a caricature of himself.

  Long ago, Lourdes had prepared a curse for him but today her tongue is flat and dry, an acre of desert. She follows El Líder inside the compound. The defectors in the courtyard are nervous in his presence. They run their fingers under their collars and scan the walls for cameras and rifles.

  Lourdes realizes she is close enough to kill him. She imagines seizing El Líder’s pistol, pressing it to his temple, squeezing the trigger until he hears the decisive click. She wants him to see her face, to remember her eyes and the hatred in them. Most of all, Lourdes wants him to be afraid.

  Suddenly she thinks of Francisco Mestre, a Cuban exile and freedom fighter who launched a commando raid on Cuba in 1966. He had fought until he had no ammunition left, and vowing that he’d never be taken alive, detonated a grenade that blinded and crippled him. He survived, and returned to Miami a hero. Lourdes wants to follow in his footsteps.

  She takes a deep breath and concentrates on extracting a phrase from the reeling in her brain.

  “Asesino!” she shouts abruptly, startling everyone in the courtyard.

  Several soldiers move toward her but El Líder waves them still. Then, ignoring her, he turns to the defectors and in the voice he reserves for his longest speeches declares: “You are free to emigrate to whatever country will accept you! We won’t hold you here against your will!” And before Lourdes or the soldiers or the unshaven defectors can respond, El Líder stalks to his Jeep and drives away.

  * * *

  The sea is at low tide and mournful as a bassoon. Celia is walking along the shore with Pilar and Ivanito. Lourdes removes her shoes and walks barefoot to the water’s edge. The sea recedes for a moment, exposing a family of silvery crabs. Ivanito lifts the smallest one and watches its claws dig the air. Its relatives flee recklessly into the surf.

  Lourdes returns to the little brick-and-cement house without saying anything. She removes her gold bracelets, her sheer stockings, her pink rayon dress with the faux-pearl buttons, and lies on her childhood bed. Old sentences lurk beneath the mattress, in the rusted coils beneath her back. She thinks of her father and his endless destinations, his suitcase filled with rag dolls and oranges, his voice soothing as leaves. Lourdes lights a cigar, and rolls the dry, tart smoke on her tongue. She knows that she cannot keep her
promise to her father, to tell her mother that he was sorry, sorry for sending her away, sorry for her silent hands. The words refuse to form in her mouth. Instead, like a brutal punishment, Lourdes feels the grip of her mother’s hand on her bare infant leg, hears her mother’s words before she left for the asylum: “I will not remember her name.”

  That night, Lourdes dreams of thousands of defectors fleeing Cuba. Their neighbors attack them with baseball bats and machetes. Many wear signs saying, SOY UN GUSANO, “I am a worm.” They board ferries and cabin cruisers, rafts and fishermen’s boats. The homes they leave behind are scrawled with obscenities. Rogelio Ugarte, the former postmaster of Santa Teresa del Mar, is beaten to death with chains on the corner of Calle Madrid, a visa in his pocket. Ilda Limón, too, is hoarse from screaming. She found a man face down in a pool of night rain in her yard and swears it’s Javier del Pino, although her eyesight is no longer so good. Her neighbors tell Ilda she’s crazy, that it’s not Javier but just a poor wretch who tripped on the roots of her gardenia tree and drowned.

  Before dawn, Lourdes wakes Ivanito, motioning him to stay quiet. “Come, I’ve packed you a bag.” Lourdes has laid out his new clothes from New York—jeans with cross-stitched pockets, a striped jersey, white canvas sneakers. She hands him a glass of watery lemonade. “This is all we have time for now. I don’t want to wake your grandmother.”

  Lourdes speeds along the highway to Havana. The earth is stained black from the morning rains. By the time they reach the embassy, hundreds of people are pushing their way through the gate. They’re carrying boxes and cardboard suitcases tied with rope and belts. Lourdes remembers her own exodus, the watercolor landscape she wrapped in brown paper, her wedding veil and riding crops and the sack of birdseed. Pilar had fled through the crowds in her crinoline dress, escaping, always escaping.

  Ivanito is silent as Lourdes hands him an envelope with two hundred dollars and a statement neatly printed in English: “MY NAME IS IVAN VILLAVERDE. I AM A POLITICAL REFUGEE FROM CUBA. MY AUNT, LOURDES PUENTE, OF 2212 LINDEN AVENUE, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, WILL SPONSOR ME. PLEASE CALL HER AT (212) 834-4071 OR (212) 63-CAKES.”

  “Try to get on the first plane out, Ivanito. Don’t leave the embassy no matter what. When you get to Peru or wherever they send you, call me. I’ll come pick you up, mi hijito. I’ll bring you back to Brooklyn. We’ll go to Disney World this summer.”

  “Y Abuela?” Ivanito asks.

  “Go, mi cielo, go!”

  Pilar

  Everyone in Santa Teresa del Mar has been talking about the trouble at the Peruvian embassy. The lady next door, Ilda Limon, came over last night and told us that she’d heard that El Líder announced that anyone who wished to leave the country was free to do so. She insisted that El Líder hasn’t been himself since his mistress died in January. “He’s depressed and it’s clouding his judgment,” she said. Mom was suspiciously restrained during the entire discussion and I should’ve known then that she was up to something. She’d been driving God knows where all day in that rented Oldsmobile of hers, and refused to say where she’d been. I knew it’d be only a matter of time before she pulled some crazy stunt.

  This morning, when Abuela came to my room and told me that Mom and Ivanito were missing, I assumed the worst. Abuela told me that Ilda had seen the two of them leave before dawn. She said Ivanito was dressed in new clothes and carried a flight bag with AIR FLORIDA in big letters. “Shit!” I thought. “Shit! I can’t believe this!” I ran to Herminia’s house and borrowed her new Russian Lada.

  Abuela Celia looks straight ahead as I drive. Her hands stretch like she’s doing piano exercises, but then they crumple in her lap like injured fans. I can see each twisted vein in her hands as if light flowed through them, rivers of light.

  “We have no loyalty to our origins,” Abuela tells me wearily. “Families used to stay in one village reliving the same disillusions. They buried their dead side by side.”

  I take Abuela’s hands in one of mine, feel the age in her stiffened fingers, the porous joints. She turns toward the ocean, a horizon of blue.

  “For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless. It exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores.” Then she sighs, waiting for her next words to form. “Ay, mi cielo, what do all the years and the separation mean except a more significant betrayal?”

  My thoughts feel like broken glass in my head. I can’t understand what my grandmother tells me. All I hear is her voice, thickened with pain.

  In Havana, the traffic is jammed in every direction. We leave the car in an alley and walk the rest of the way to the Peruvian embassy. Policemen have thrown a cordon around the compound to prevent new arrivals from entering. The defectors are perched in the trees like overgrown turkeys. They jeer at the police, cursing them violently, and shout encouragement to those trying to break in. Abuela and I search the branches, the roof, the high cement walls for a sign of Ivanito. But we don’t see him anywhere.

  A fight breaks out by the gate. A policeman swings his club and shatters someone’s skull. It spatters the mob with blood and bone. A rock slams into my forehead. I don’t feel anything at first, only the warm, sticky blood filling my eye. But then my head ignites with pain. Abuela is knocked aside when the crowd surges forward, but I’m carried high on the back of the beast as it forces its way through the gate. A moment later, it’s over. The gate closes behind us. The mob holds together another instant, reluctant to lose its power.

  “They’re sending another plane to Lima,” I overhear a fleshy woman with a Mickey Mouse T-shirt say. “The ones who got here this morning already left.”

  I think about climbing a tree, but I can’t get close enough to one to hoist myself up. My head is aching and feels twice its normal size. My forehead sticks out like a ledge. I have to balance it carefully to walk. People look at me and turn away. They’ve got too many troubles of their own.

  “They’ll round us up and shoot us like pigs! They’ll send us to the work camps with the maricones!” a mule-faced man shouts. He’s got a chartreuse tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his forearm. Next to him, a wiry man in a tattered suit juggles two oranges and a grapefruit. He taps his foot to a rhythm in his knee.

  Nothing can record this, I think. Not words, not paintings, not photographs.

  I squeeze myself through the crowd, looking for Ivanito. For a minute, I can’t remember his face. He’s just a name, an impulse that keeps me moving, but then his image returns to me, his hazel eyes, his lanky body, his oversized hands and feet. At last I see him straight ahead, and then he turns and spots me, too. “Crraaaazzzzy!” Ivanito shouts at the sky, talking to a million people at once. I pull him toward me, hold him by the waist. I can feel my cousin’s heart through his back. I can feel a rapid uncoiling inside us both.

  * * *

  “I couldn’t find him,” I lie to Abuela. My grandmother, too, is bruised, her shins are scraped and bleeding. She’s been waiting for me for over an hour. “Somebody told me a plane left for Lima this morning. Ivanito must have been on it.”

  Abuela stares at the smooth-ringed trunk of a royal palm. I know what she is thinking: of upright men in homburg hats, of black silk umbrellas and the corrupting rains of northern latitudes. Jesus, what have I done? She turns to me once more.

  “You looked everywhere, mi hija? Are you sure?” she asks me sadly. “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “Sí, Abuela.” I press my face into my grandmother’s neck. But there’s no scent of salt or violet water hidden in its creases.

  Celia

  Celia del Pino descends the three front steps of her house as if from a great height. She walks past the pawpaw tree, past the rows of gangly bird of paradise, past the house of her neighbor, Ilda Limón, and down a sandy path skirting the beach. There is jasmine in the breeze, and the aroma of distant citrus trees. The sea beckons with its blue waves of light.

  I remember my first day in Havana. I arrived precisely at noon and the air rang
with a thousand church bells. My Tía Alicia was waiting for me in her wide skirt and petticoats, the peacock brooch at her throat. She comforted me after my long train ride from the countryside. She taught me how to play piano, to make each note distinct from the others yet part of the whole.

  Celia removes her leather pumps and walks toward the sea. The sand’s cool moisture astonishes her. She buries her feet in the sand until she is planted, rooted as the palms, rooted as the gnarled gardenia tree. Her stained housedress billows in the wind, then is still.

  The duende, her head thrown back in throaty seduction, called to me through the poet. Her black sounds charmed me, and she wove her black ribbons as the rain hammered assent.

  The field

  of olives

  opens and shuts

  like a fan.

  Over the olive grove

  in a sunken sky

  and a dark rain

  of cold evening stars.

  It occurs to Celia that she has never been farther than a hundred yards off the coast of Cuba. She considers her dream of sailing to Spain, to Granada, of striding through the night with nothing but a tambourine and too many carnations.

  Sing with me, the duende cries, sing for the black sea that awaits your voice.

  Celia steps into the ocean and imagines she’s a soldier on a mission—for the moon, or the palms, or El Líder. The water rises quickly around her. It submerges her throat and her nose, her open eyes that do not perceive salt. Her hair floats loosely from her skull and waves above her in the tide. She breathes through her skin, she breathes through her wounds.

  Sing Celia, sing …

  Celia reaches up to her left earlobe and releases her drop pearl earring to the sea. She feels its absence between her thumb and forefinger. Then she unfastens the tiny clasp in her right ear and surrenders the other pearl. Celia closes her eyes and imagines it drifting as a firefly through the darkened seas, imagines its slow extinguishing.