The Tower of the Antilles

by Achy Obejas

  But after going to a few events—a cold picnic on Lake Michigan where she and her Cuban ex-lover almost froze and a poetry reading neither of them cared for—her Cuban ex-lover declared she was bored by the Latina lesbians. What do I have in common with them? she asked.

  Well, I liked the linguistics professor. And the restaurant owner, Dulce said.

  I can’t understand the restaurant owner. If that’s Spanish she’s speaking, I’m Jennifer López. And the linguistics professor’s Bosnian partner is too post-Soviet for my taste.

  Too post-Soviet for your taste?

  I just mean we don’t have anything in common with them, her Cuban ex-lover said. They never had to stand in line for food because of a blockade.

  Please, those people had bombs raining down on them.

  See? I just don’t want to have these conversations. I thought we came here to avoid all that.

  Dulce zipped up her coat, zipped up her boots and gloves, and stared at her. In a moment, she was surrounded by the cold comfort of snow all around her.

  * * *

  The announcement over the PA system at the grocery store.

  Dulce thought she was done with Cuban politics when they left the island. She thought being in Chicago, away from Miami’s expat intrigue, confirmed it. They could, she thought, pretend they’d never had anything to do with any of it. Because, as much as Dulce missed her girlfriend’s family, her neighbors and friends, as much as she longed for the easy rhythm of life in her neighborhood and the sweet gossip and predictability of her work as a receptionist at a local beauty salon, there were many more things she was glad to be rid of: the almost daily shock of finding someone she knew had emigrated, the effort of decoding government language about things as simple as the availability of services at a clinic or gas station, the still-potent power of political proximity to decision-makers. She begrudged no one their good luck in being born to a revolutionary family, but she found it depressing and paralyzing that it was nearly impossible to rise to the same level through study or work. Besides, she liked the frivolity of American life: she liked what seemed like infinite choices for TV watching; she loved that the privacy of her home was, if not absolute, at least fairly convincing; she loved that there were thirty different kinds of soy sauce at the grocery store.

  Her Cuban ex-lover, by contrast, hated that there was so little to do (unless you had money) and so much trash on TV, and she found the thirty different kinds of soy sauce overwhelming: I just want normal soy sauce, normal soy sauce! she cried at the top of her lungs in the international foods aisle as the PA blared overhead and the store’s security guard ran toward them, gun drawn, to find out what was going on.

  * * *

  A thousand katydids.

  The first day of beauty school, the teacher had all the students design a vision board. Dulce listened intently; she wasn’t sure she’d heard right. But by the time that first class period ended, Dulce had constructed the best vision board of all the cosmotology students; naturally, the esthetic students had more complex and colorful boards. The lone guy in the class—an esti, of course—even included a pop-up cruise ship in his. Dulce had watched as he began to construct it, coming close and asking questions until she realized what the assignment was really about. The guy was so pleased with her interest in his that he helped with hers: drawing a sunny and light-filled salon with happy clients getting their hair cut, their nails done, and their pores scrubbed. Meaning that Dulce’s vision board was pretty damn good: her own salon, with six chairs for hair, four for mani/pedis, and two for facials. Then the instructor suggested there might be too many resources focused on non-hair client services. Dulce dropped the facials and two of the mani/pedi chairs but only to please the teacher. She knew exactly where she wanted to set up, and who her clientele would be—young Latina professionals and older women like her mother, all anxious and hardworking—so she needed the mani/pedi and facial stations for when they wanted to reward themselves.

  Her Cuban ex-lover had not been at all pleased with Dulce’s beauty school plans. Twenty thousand dollars in tuition? she asked. She was waiting tables at a restaurant owned by a Cuban friend of Dulce’s family and making a boatload on Saturday-night tips (most of which she sent back to her parents in Cuba, and the rest she saved for a ticket to visit as soon as possible, so that she and Dulce were always on a tight budget and Dulce’s tuition depended on loans). Why can’t you just keep cutting hair at home? That way we don’t need to get a license or rent a place.

  But Dulce knew, watching the stylists at Paul Mitchell’s school through the glass windows downtown, a Starbucks chai in hand, that whatever else leaving Cuba meant, it was a chance for reinvention. And part of that meant no standing on the sidelines. Besides, she was clear she wasn’t a great stylist. Her hope rested on being good enough to get licensed and saving enough money to set up a business where she could hire people who cut like those at Paul Mitchell: snips of hair flying around their chairs, scissors clicking like a thousand katydids.

  * * *

  The Cuban national anthem.

  Having failed to find community with lesbians, Dulce and her Cuban ex-lover began to hang out with other Cubans. In Chicago, this meant small groups, usually populated by people who’d come decades before them and were much better off, but who appreciated their recent arrival as a confirmation of their decision to leave all those years before. Dulce didn’t mind their gatherings too much. There was Cuban food, much of it new to her (she’d had plenty of ham sandwiches on the island but she’d never had a Cuban sandwich, per se, until she left Cuba), and old-school Cuban music (not the Buena Vista Social Club, of which she was so tired, but singers who predated many of their new friends’ own youth). She didn’t recognize the Cuba they longed for but she enjoyed speaking Spanish—her easy, casual Spanish—and loved that everyone told the same jokes over and over.

  Her Cuban ex-lover seemed at home too. She got involved with putting together a community directory and quickly learned everyone’s names and stories; she helped bring one of the Ladies in White over for a tour of the US and raised funds for the group. Eventually, she got herself elected as secretary of the Cuban American Chamber of Commerce even though she wasn’t a business owner, but in anticipation of Dulce’s soon-to-open beauty salon. When the time came, some of the old Cuban guys from Goya Foods helped Dulce get a Small Business Administration loan.

  At all the formal Cuban events, they played the national anthem: Morir por la patria es viviiiiiiiiiiiir! A new Cuban friend told them that the man who wrote the lyrics shouted that very line just before he was killed by a firing squad. And it’s so true, he said, to die for your country is to live! Her Cuban ex-lover enthusiastically agreed, and the two of them—their new friend and her Cuban ex-lover—talked for a very long time about the meaning of patriotism and martyrdom.

  Dulce hadn’t heard most of the conversation but when they turned to their own suffering as exiles, she decided to go help clean up in the kitchen. It was tiring to try to keep up, to decipher whole sentences from two or three words. As she was tying a knot on a garbage bag, she felt someone grab her elbow. She turned. C’mon, a woman she’d seen a couple of times before said to her. What’s going on? she asked. Can’t you hear, there’s a fight. When Dulce stepped back in the dining hall, she saw her Cuban ex-lover being held back by the Goya guys who’d cosigned her business loans. Her Cuban ex-lover’s chin was out, her screaming as high as a police whistle. Her hands reached out to slap their new friend, who was facing her and holding a fork like a weapon. You fucking communist! he shrieked at her.

  * * *

  Gunshots.

  The drive home, punctuated by gunshots crackling just off Western and North avenues, was paused when they were forced to pull over to let a fleet of squad cars go by, lights flashing. Dulce barely heard her Cuban ex-lover’s explanation: her ears felt full and the lights of the police cars, now blinking white, had given her a headache. But she knew what had happened because it w
asn’t the first time. The argument had already been rehearsed with her brother, who’d been too anesthetized to push back in any way. The reasons for the two of them coming over were in a process of transformation, and there were no sides to take yet. Dulce had come to her own understanding, but her Cuban ex-lover was still bitterly pushing and pulling, trying to find a rationalization that fit.

  You know I’m right, she finally said. And when Dulce didn’t respond, concentrating instead on the police barricade, her Cuban ex-lover punched her shoulder. Did you hear me? Are you really deaf or are you just pretending so you don’t have to say anything to me? I’m not sure I can live like this, not knowing if you’re pretending.

  Do you see this? Dulce said, her finger making circles in the air to indicate the police encirclement.

  Do you hear me? Do you hear me at all? Do you hear me anymore?

  * * *

  Breathing.

  Dulce thought a lot about silence, about its formless, odorless existence. She thought of it as an ever-present gas or pollen. At first, it terrified her. At night or in the early hours of dawn, she would sometimes tap her thigh or shuffle her feet just to check that she could, in fact, still hear. She treasured the popping of fat in the frying pan, the clicking of her tongue. In summer, she tapped the radiator, remembering its hiss during the polar months. In winter, she would zip and unzip her coat, imprinting the soundtrack. She avoided salt and gluten—she couldn’t begin to imagine what her Cuban ex-lover would have to say about such a diet—and rattled the cutlery on her plate.

  But sometime after her Cuban ex-lover went for her visit to Cuba (from which, it turned out, she would never return), Dulce began to sense the arrival of the bus in her peripheral vision from blocks away. And to feel the footsteps of others in her own soles. When she felt a tingling in her ears, she would tap a clip from her auditory memory and know it was the brass braying in a favorite song.

  One winter day at the shop, she turned on the TV and watched the American president with incredulity. Weeks later, she found a video streaming live from the island in which officers from various ministries talked about what lay ahead. Behind them stood several attendants dressed in olive green. Dulce watched a familiar figure scribbling on a clipboard. She sipped her tea and turned off the TV. She didn’t need to wait for her to take a turn at the podium to imagine the high-frequency sound of her convictions.

  What do you think . . . a client asked as Dulce snipped her hair, but the last words faded into the colorless void.

  Dulce went through her sound catalog to fill in the blank, replayed the client’s lips moving in the mirror, and tried to decode their meaning. She took a long breath, felt it moving in her lungs and chest, then let it out, savoring its sweet emission.

  North/South

  1.

  Her boot bumped her husband’s foot. It had stopped snowing and he was slumbering on his left side by the frozen river. His body formed an S, a downy white S, and only when she pulled her boot back and aimed the flashlight did she see beyond the cover of snow. His hair, wet and sprinkled with flakes, coiled from under the folds of his black wool hat like a flat snake.

  Hey, she whispered. She brushed the snow from his face. She pulled off her glove, put her hand on his cool cheek, then pushed her way around his scarf and collar. His neck was cold too, but he was breathing, slow and shallow.

  Hey, she said again, this time not a whisper, though out here on the riverbank, with the netting of branches around her, her voice sounded trapped.

  His eyes were closed, a shiver on his lids.

  She jostled his elbow, sending a miniature snow cliff avalanching down his back. His skin was red where the shirt separated from his pants. This time she would not sit with him, would not rock him back to warmth, would not pray to be found when her cell refused to connect with a satellite.

  Come on, she said, smoke in the thin cold air.

  She stuck the flashlight in her coat sleeve, pushed it up almost to her elbow so it’d shine, while allowing her hands to be free. Then she pulled her arm up like a crane and directed the light to the river. She spied his coat half buried in the snow on the icy surface. She could hear a thrashing, but she wasn’t sure if it was ice breaking or sleeves flapping.

  She laid the blanket she’d brought with her on the ground behind her husband, then pushed him on his back. She undid the cuffs of his oversized shirt and pulled them together, tied them in a knot. She tucked his bare hands into his pants, even reached in and yanked the band of his underwear up and around his wrists. She knew she’d have to stop later and repeat it all when his hands slid out, blue and hard, or when the shirtsleeves ripped or came undone.

  She pried his legs apart, stepped between them with her back to him, and heaved them up, one in each hand. The first step was the toughest, and the flashlight in her sleeve slipped out and fell into the snow. She watched it sink headfirst as the hot bulb melted the snow. She decided she didn’t need the light, turned it off, and tucked it into her coat pocket. Then she picked up her husband’s legs again, gripped his ankles right at the boots.

  Bird bones, she thought once she took her second and third steps. She leaned into it, four, five, seven, twelve steps.

  She had lost count when the song came into her head: For the first quarter of a mile / He’ll only charge a pretty girl a smile / For every quarter after this / He’ll collect a kiss / When the moon is high and the ladies sigh / The rickety rickshaw comes a creakin’ . . .

  2.

  The boy lay back on the counter, the wood warm against his already moist and sticky skin, and swatted at the flies insisting on crawling up his nose.

  Your nostrils are too big, his sister said, they’re like caverns. A fly could make a home there, hang off your boogers like a bat on a stalactite.

  He waved his hands, covered the lower half of his face. His eyes, enormous: trembling brown disks surrounded by red lightning. He looked sick, as if he might throw up any minute.

  Here, his sister said, handing him a green bandanna, use this. But you might look like a bandit.

  He shot up, ripping his skin off the wood. The medal around his neck had slipped and now hung off his back. He adjusted it, swinging it up front, just below the hollow of his clavicles.

  Como el mar espera al río, the radio sang. Así espero tu regreso / A la tierra del olvido.

  The phone rang: a squat black thing like a broad-shouldered Buddha with a wreath on its belly. A bulbous green fly alighted where the head might have been. For one split second, they both held their breath. It was the wrong time for their father to call: too early in the day, and the wrong day.

  It was his sister who grabbed the receiver, sending the fly wobbling into the humid air. Taffa’s Grocery & Messenger Service, she said into the mouthpiece, but before she’d even finished, the clarity on the other end indicated it was a local call. She hadn’t yet let her breath out when her brother snatched the phone, almost losing his balance on the counter as he pushed the bandanna into his pocket. There was a swath of red on his back, like a burn.

  This is my job, he hissed at her. Then, into the phone: Taffa’s Grocery & Messenger Service, how can I help you?

  Who is it?

  Uh-huh, he said, nodding into the receiver and swatting at the flies orbiting his head. He was tethered to the counter by the chewed-up phone cord. He put the phone down. It’s for the Beauty Queen.

  But who is it?

  I don’t know, he said as he turned around, but don’t hang up. His feet smacked the wooden slats of the grocery store then hit the dirt. He pumped his arms as he ran past the key chain vendor and Lalo’s father’s flower cart filled with celestinas and beautiful bayahibe roses, past the post office and the Western Union that everyone called the money store, down the road to the rusted chain-link fence surrounding the Beauty Queen’s house. He scaled the fence, already bent and wobbly, rather than try and undo the wiry mess the Beauty Queen used as a latch.

  Phone call! Phone call! he scream
ed, waving his arm for balance on the sloping chain link. It was then, at that precise moment, that the orange metal mesh gave him a boost, and his feet lifted off, first the heel, then the inner and outer arch, then the mounds of his soles, so he felt when his second and third toes grazed the links and his body shot upward, the medal around his neck now even with his mouth, the chain glancing off his cheek like a fat fly.

  Phone call! he screamed as gravity towed him down. Phone call! This time, when the balls of his feet hit the mesh, the fence bent, dipped lower, hurling him even higher so he could see beyond the roof of the Beauty Queen’s haggard home, right to the green of the ocean—a shallow tropical green—and the medal almost tipped into his mouth, so that, still rising, he could lean his head forward like a hungry baby and pull it to him with his tongue, his knees also rising as if he were climbing an invisible stairway . . . and then down, past the slope to a dip in the mesh, to an absence of fence, to the hard ground: a clatter, a triangle of rusty links jabbing at his belly.

  Do not jump on my fence! screamed the Beauty Queen, a blur of color unlatching the fence and running past him, splayed like a starfish. She was a dust storm down the road to Taffa’s Grocery & Messenger Service.

  He got up tentatively, the fence shaky beneath him. He wiped his face; the back of his hand smeared blood from his mouth—he hadn’t realized he’d cut his lip. He brushed the rust from the skin of his tight round belly.

  The medal—a Saint Christopher medal—had fallen from the chain. When he went to reach for it, it hurt to bend. He scooped it up, rose slowly, then searched for the broken link. He put the links together, then placed the broken one between his teeth to press it closed. It tasted like dirt.

  He walked back to Taffa’s, past the money store, the post office, Lalo’s father’s flower cart, and the key chain vendor. He noticed a man with tiny round glasses setting up by the key chains, sorting a dozen woven palm-leaf wallets on a mat on the ground.