‘I yawned because I was tired! I have manners,’ I protest. ‘Anyway, Mami –’
‘Chabella,’ said Papi, ‘would never in a million years have yawned. In fact she was too focused. She looked at me and I spoke rubbish. She was . . . I mean . . . all of those years I spent building my intellect and here comes this woman and throws it all away. Why did she have to wait until I’m retired and settled and, and . . . satisfecho de mi mismo before poisoning me?’
We study each other. I know that he forgave Chabella approximately two seconds after he realised what had happened.
‘How is your body now?’ I ask.
Papi nods, waves me off, fumbles down the back of the sofa and pulls out a pouch of Cohiba cigars. He lights one with a match. Chabella is desperate to know where Papi hides his cigars so that she can throw them away and save his life, but he changes his hiding place every week or so.
Papi used to smoke pipes. Ages ago Amy Eleni and I smoked his pipes too, when he and Chabella were out; we stuck our heads out of my bedroom window to send away the clotted scent of apple tobacco. We wore chequered flat caps and grumbled about immigrants while we smoked. ‘Bloody Africans, Pakis, bloody Cubans, soap dodgers,’ Amy Eleni muttered in a maniacally off-kilter Cockney accent. ‘Send ‘em away, or they’ll have the whip hand over us, mate. There’ll be rivers of mud. Yeah, that’s right, that’s what I said, rivers of mud. You cut one of those darkies and you’ll see; they bleed stinkin’ river water.’
For my part, I puffed out smoke spirals and said in sly reference, ‘Damned Cypriots. Dark as sin, what. Wrong colour, aren’t they? Taking our jobs and marrying our gentlemen. They didn’t fight any of our battles, what.’ It was 1987 – in Poplar, people were still calling out things like ‘Soap dodger!’ in the streets.
‘Are you hungry?’ I ask Papi. I have brought some leftovers in plastic tubs, and I point to the bag of them at my feet, but Papi shakes his head.
‘I could cook something else,’ I tell him, standing. With a simple touch to my forearm, Papi brings me back down beside him.
‘So she’s really serious about this altar,’ he says.
‘Pero por supuesto – but of course, Papi.’
‘Because you know how you Cuban women can be sometimes. Dramáticas, siempre el drama.’ He gingerly flexes his hands, examines his inflamed finger joints.
I say, ‘No, she’s . . . it’s real.’
‘But I need to think about this. If I have that thing moved back here, it is like saying that it’s OK that she is going to consult with these people, these poor, ill people who are looking for something that has meaning and don’t know what it is they’re looking for and call it Santeria. As for my wife being one of them, it makes me think, What is it that she wants that I haven’t given her?’
Papi wouldn’t be asking me this if I were Tomás. I am slow to reply because if I am to be Mami’s voice in this argument I need to think of what she’d say, and I don’t know.
Papi shifts the cigar to the other side of his mouth and says, ‘Santeria is a garbled religion. So it draws on Catholicism, and it draws on Yoruba religion. It’s like throwing a rosary in the air and saying it’s magic because it fell from a slave’s hand. Suffering isn’t transformative.’
I say, ‘True, but that doesn’t mean that suffering can’t be religious.’
He doesn’t hear me.
‘I mean, Maja, these gods or whatever, these beliefs don’t transcend time and space; they stretch them unnecessarily, stretch the geography of the world like an elastic band. And you can’t do that. You can’t erase borders and stride over Spanish into Yoruba like that. You can only pretend that you have.’
I would hate to be in a lecture of his and ask him a question. He just doesn’t hear you. He closes his eyes, sucks in smoke, streams it out, just breathes and breathes. The Holy Child of Atocha is looking him full in the face; the aguardiente has evaporated from its dish. The Holy Child of Atocha is staring at Papi and Papi does not care.
‘I’m going to bring the altar back downstairs,’ I tell him. ‘And then we can fix whatever parts of it are broken.’
Papi reaches for his ashtray, knocks ash off his Cohiba without opening his eyes.
‘Papi?’
‘Yes, Maja, let’s do that,’ he says finally, in quiet, good-humoured obedience. As I go upstairs, he calls, ‘Please bring some air freshener down.’
I stop in the doorway of Tomás’s bedroom, unwilling to test the borders of his wild order of Cuban flags and Union Jacks and WWF relics. They jostle with collaged images of Rogue and Wolverine from Marvel’s X-Men.
Tomás has a teddy bear now; it sits on his pillow, by his head. The bear has one club foot and one normal foot. He is a production line reject; his fur is too black, as dark as despair must be. The bear’s name is Henry S. Foote. Amy Eleni found him in a charity shop last month. A few days before her discovery, she, Tomás and I had watched a TV programme about the US Civil War.
The presenter mentioned, very briefly, a Mississippi senator called Henry S. Foote who got so het up about the question of the South’s secession from the North that, right in the middle of the Congress building, he threatened the Congressman next to him with a loaded revolver. The presenter was just talking about how feelings were running high in the mid nineteenth century, and Henry S. Foote only came up for a second, Henry S. Foote was only an example he was using. But because of Tomás, we ended up talking about Henry S. Foote for the rest of the programme.
Tomás was upset by him. He kept saying, ‘What was Henry S. Foote carrying that gun around for?’
I said, ‘Maybe he just really wanted to keep his slaves or whatever.’
Amy Eleni offered the opinion that politics were different in those days. Or that Henry S. Foote was toying with the idea of killing himself. I suggested that Henry S. Foote had gout and was irritable. Together Amy Eleni and I proffered a theory that Henry S. Foote suffered from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and had this compulsion to protect himself with terminal intensity. Or that Henry S. Foote was so rabidly anti-abolition because he had black ancestors and was terrified that someone might find out.
Tomás didn’t accept anything we said. He said, No, Henry S. Foote was fucked up. Chabella popped out of nowhere and nearly chewed Tomás’s ear off about his language. Then, while clothes shopping, Amy Eleni saw the bear. She brought the ugly thing over to the house, pointed at the club foot and raised her eyebrows at Tomás, who immediately remembered and said, ‘Henry S. Foote.’ Then they both nodded, as if something was confirmed.
Tubes of face paint form a deliberate circle on Tomás’s dresser. His paintbrushes are gelled stiff and white.
Next door is my old room, where Mami’s altar stands concertinaed on unsteady legs against my wardrobe. I touch the altar and rickety bells ring from somewhere inside. My room is exactly the same as it was when I was still at university; completely and obsessively black and white. Mami has not allowed any changes, and she has not allowed any of Tomás’s friends to sleep in my bed for fear of bad luck. The black ceiling was laboriously painted, with Amy Eleni’s unquestioning help, over a long weekend. The floorboards are white, but the rug is black and so are the bedcovers. The wardrobe is white, the bookshelves are white, and every book on them is covered in black paper and laminate.
I did all of this at the end of my first year of an English Literature degree, when note-taking had worn me down and I realised how I hated books and would kill the spirit of all novels if that power was mine. I believed that God must and would in his mercy kill me rather than let me survive the summer and start the next term. I didn’t think about switching courses; I didn’t want to. Papi is not so badly wrong when he says of Cuban women, ‘Siempre el drama.’
Papi and Tomás were at the library when I took out a pot of black paint and started for my bedroom windows. But Mami had been lurking and watching me and had decided, Not in my house. She ran into the room to wrestle me for the paint pot, shouting, ‘Loc
a, tu estás loca!’
At the foot of the altar, Papi has set down debris removed from his and Mami’s bedroom – a framed picture of the Holy Child of Atocha, smaller than the one on the sitting-room wall, and Mami’s silk-lined, gold-painted incense box. I open the box to make sure that her Santería beads – devotional chains in Elegua’s colours – are still there; they lie intact at the bottom of the case, beneath a bed of folded rice-paper flowers. The collar is a rope of heavy black and red, strands of beads coiled like a sated snake. I close the box and catch Brigitte’s photo in the act of fluttering from altar to floor, return it to its place beside the photo of my Bisabuela.
Brigitte, expert escapee. Brigitte got out of East Germany, got out of Cuba, left Chabella behind. Brigitte is a white-gold blaze, and it’s not just that the photo of her was developed badly. Her platinum-blonde bob flicks over her face and half hides her sharp smile. A brown hand is on Brigitte’s shoulder, but Chabella has cut the rest of herself out of that picture because it is the only one that she has of Brigitte. Mami remembers that maybe it was a problem with her Spanish, or maybe it was the thin drama of her red-lipsticked mouth, but Brigitte spoke and smiled with a great deal of tension. She measured out her murmur as if she didn’t have much time to say what she needed to say, but understood the importance of clarity. When she said, ‘Please . . . I need some more soap,’ it was an event.
My grandmother, Abuela Laline, didn’t understand or trust Brigitte’s knife-edge stability. But Chabella did. Of Brigitte, Chabella has said, ‘People like Brigitte are made for guarding the world from harm. They stay in a room with whatever is bad and they hold the door closed from the inside.’
Laline spoke stiffly to Brigitte, always formal. Laline had to tolerate Brigitte because Brigitte was her husband’s guest. I suggested that maybe Abuela Laline didn’t like Brigitte because she thought that Abuelo Damason was carrying on another affair right under her nose. Chabella shook her head. She said, ‘No, everyone could see it wasn’t like that with them. Brigitte was . . . I mean, the way she looked at my Papi, the way she spoke to him, it was man to man. Yes, she was clever, but my Mami was very clever too, and yet when she met eyes with my Papi her cleverness didn’t stop her will from sort of stepping back. So I don’t know what it was with Brigitte. When I say “man to man” I don’t mean that Papi and Brigitte sat up smoking and drinking together or anything. Because she was . . . I mean, you never saw her without lipstick, you never smelt her, you only smelt perfume. She re-dyed her hair as soon as a little darkness came through at the roots. When she arrived, she couldn’t even lift her own suitcase out of Papi’s car; I had to do it because your aunts and your abuela had gone into hiding upstairs so that they could watch Brigitte from the windows. But my Papi kept saying to her, “When you came towards me at the train station, more than anything else I wondered whether I would be able to beat you in a fight.” ’
Brigitte didn’t laugh or seem annoyed when Chabella kept asking her her age; she just calmly gave my Mami variations on the theme of: ‘As you can see, I’m much older than you, nicht wahr?’
To fifteen-year-old Mami, Brigitte maintained – in ‘take it or leave it’ tones – that she had been shot by a jealous boyfriend while at university.
‘I don’t want you to make any generalisations about German men,’ she said, ‘but every single German man that I have been involved with has been too . . . obvious. This boyfriend, I knew he was a very jealous man, and I knew that he thought you have rights to something as long as you want it more than anyone else. On top of all this he believed that the largest acts speak in a new and transcendent tongue. And so yes, very boringly, when I wanted to leave him he did try something – a large and wilful act.’
Chabella rebuked her: ‘Ay Brigitte, he shot you, you know! How can you say “boringly”?’
Abuelo Damason brought Brigitte home because he was good friends with someone in Santa Clara who cared about her. The someone was a man who knew she needed to get across into America before he could breathe out and believe that all was well with her. But Brigitte needed some time before she would try to leave from Jose Marti airport; she shared Chabella’s bedroom for five months. Brigitte swished around in tweed skirts with flipped hems, nylons with black diamond seams and open-toed pumps, and she let Chabella use her make-up without asking. Without saying a word, Brigitte managed to convince Chabella and her Papi that Chabella should have stopped wearing knee socks and strapped shoes at thirteen. Brigitte needed it to be completely dark when she slept. She didn’t like to wake up all at once, so she wore a black eye-mask at night and had grown expert at finding her way around without taking it off. Chabella grew used to seeing her flitting about the house with only the light pressure of her right hand on the wall to show her uncertainty.
Brigitte called Chabella moquenquen, made her the universal child just as their housemaid Maria did. Moquenquen said in Brigitte’s accent sounded cold at first, almost sarcastic. When Chabella tied on her white headscarf to go to Santeria Mass, Brigitte didn’t ask her where she was going but said, ‘Please, say a prayer for me. I, too, like to fight on every level. I am also the type to throw coins into wishing wells.’
Brigitte and Chabella would lie wounded by the heat on their bedroom floor some noontimes listening to Elvis Presley, then to The Platters with the volume turned low. Brigitte’s understanding of English was far better than Chabella’s, but She still refused to divulge which of the songs told the truth about love. She gave Chabella copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. Chabella still has the books; they are in German and were cherished, but not by Chabella. The books’ pages sprout hair-like shreds, rubbed bald by a finger running underneath each line again and again.
Brigitte said of the books, ‘Isabella, such thoughts! But . . . what had been made of them . . . ah. Zerrissen. I am . . . estoy en el conflicto.’
Often in her first month at my Abuelo Damason’s house, when Brigitte couldn’t find the Spanish for what she was thinking, she would fall to repeating the German word instead and very seriously miming its meaning with her long, smooth arms, which she shaved so that the dark hairs wouldn’t show. Mami squeaked ‘What, what?’ and made desperate guesses. But the more Brigitte mimed, the less Chabella understood, and they made their own comedies. Brigitte would constantly try to reach for those words most difficult for a foreigner to remember.
Brigitte was afraid that every place in the world was the site of a murder. She was afraid of Fidel because, above all, he asked for the people’s affection, and she didn’t see how justice could live alongside affection. She tried to describe a regime of love: lovers get jealous; they are petty and impetuous; they give you stupid gifts that you cannot use. When things become desperate, lovers may stalk you, and ultimately, if they saw a way to, they would tap your phone. So, love into hate.
Brigitte refused to show Chabella the bullet wound she’d been given by her jealous boyfriend. Instead she narrowed her eyes, hovered a finger above the soft bend of Chabella’s elbow and said, ‘There.’ She stabbed the air just above the spot and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. The pain of it crashed through all Chabella’s joints.
Brigitte was a Republiksflüchtling. She came to Chabella and Habana at the same time as there came a feeling of imminent change, a sense that the world had set an alarm and the trees and buildings and sky would tell the time before the people could. Nobody could give a date, but people gossiped and did not trust the stoic face of Habana, the mud-glued potholes and dull, scrolled balconies. Things would change completely – but when?
Chabella supposed that roof tiling would slip westwards like birds chasing warm weather, the clouds would let down a white drinking straw and someone above would suck up all the harbour water like it was ron. The trees would shake down a new kind of water, leaves as liquid sacrifice.
Brigitte’s escape circumstances were privileged, but for Chabella and my grandparents, Brigitte was evidence of a hushed statistic
of the time. She presented herself to the Montoyas as one of those East German citizens – one in every six – who managed to flee the country before the Wall went up. Brigitte was both lucky and clever; her parents had been long-time members of the Communist Party and had kept on believing even when Hitler and National Socialism had put them in danger. But when Germany was divided between the power blocs, police and Soviet tanks crushed the grass roots, the workers who demonstrated and raided food factories because they had already given of themselves according to their ability but were still hungry.
Brigitte heard about it on the radio, but she had already known it in her head and the knowledge translated into a great silence inside. In her views she was careful to toe the party line, and she took her well-chosen degree in political philosophy with its emphasis on Marxism. And she used that degree to disappear with permission. Brigitte took Spanish classes and bent her thoughts on Cuba, since Cuba was close to America and America was not Communist or Fascist or anything too strongly other than rich.
The temporary teaching post that Brigitte won at the University of Santa Clara was justified by the ‘rising levels of interest in political philosophy amongst students’, but really it was small-scale antagonism against the fading Batista dictatorship. Brigitte’s post was intended by the Faculty to help foster links between one nation on the path to Utopia and another. After a week’s classes, she finally did what was in her heart and disappeared.
Then, when Brigitte needed money, my Abuelo Damason said to her, ‘I’ll pay you to teach my daughters German. The German language is poetic – that is to say it is both vague and precise. Perhaps once my girls have learnt German they will all become men and go and fight for freedom and frustrated dreams.’
Apparently this grandfather of mine had a way of talking that made him sound as if he was never entirely sincere. Brigitte’s lips thinned.
The Opposite House Page 7