The Tower of the Antilles

by Achy Obejas

  He lay back down on the counter and felt a chill. The radio was off. Her call finished, the Beauty Queen turned to him and unleashed a stream of admonishments about jumping on her fence; it was not the first time. He stared at her, at the thick mascara outlining her eyes in a manner long out of style. A fly the size of a peanut buzzed into his line of vision, obscuring and replacing the Beauty Queen’s face.

  Are you listening to me? she demanded, and poked him hard in the stomach so the first knuckle of her index finger sank into his flesh. He yelped, sprang up as if the skin on his belly had been pierced.

  You hear me? she said, cupping his chin with her other hand. Such melodrama, such an actor, she said, bringing his face millimeters from hers, jutting her chin out at him.

  She let him go with a push. He dropped back, breathless now, mouth open and loose, the Saint Christopher medal on his cheek.

  3.

  Her daughter Mari is talking about sewing fireflies, red and green, on her dress. This, Mari says, is what she wants to wear on her birthday. There’s a tribe of cousins between the ages of four and twelve collecting them in soda bottles. (It’s hard with such a narrow opening.)

  It’ll be so beautiful! the girl exults.

  She listens as her daughter tells her she doesn’t need or want a party, though it’s already started: uncles sitting on the front porch drinking and arguing while a tempest rolls slowly up the beach; aunts in the kitchen, as if all the food they’ve spent the last few days preparing is still destined for the festively decorated tables in front of the house, their legs embedded in sand. The water is low here, cut off by a sandbar not too far out.

  The rain begins, big heavy drops that pierce the shore break. The sea foam reminds her of snow: the snow they’ve temporarily fled, the snow they’ll return to for reassurance. When the water pulls back and the lather breaks into spidery threads, she thinks of the intricacy of snowflakes, how the twinkling lace thins to vanish.

  The night before, there had been dancing and tripping on beach chairs. A local boy played bongos, another strummed a guitar. Her husband put a pair of maracas in her hands and then wrapped them in his and moved them up and down, a stiff shake that produced more of a thud than the usual ch-ch-che.

  You don’t have to be an island girl to know how to do this, he’d said.

  Except she is, but from a different island. The one they never have enough money to visit, the one with its own fireflies: Alecton discoidalis, yellow, with black tips on the antennae, a yellow border along the wing casings. They flash yellow, not red, a bright and cautionary yellow.

  Are you telling me I’m drunk? he’d leaned in to whisper. Is that it? He’d stepped back, his mouth lopsided, and shook the maracas in her grip, this time sliding his hands back so he held only the bulbs with his fingertips. You should try it sometime, he’d said, meaning drunkenness. It releases the pain, he’d added with a sick grin.

  This was before the argument with the other vacationers—Americans who he and the uncles had determined were enjoying the island and the islanders too much, and for all the wrong reasons. We are from here! the uncles had shouted. From here! he’d chorused, though he only came for two or three weeks every year now, and there was a time when he hadn’t even come that often—first because he couldn’t afford it, and then because he couldn’t take it, as there was too much evidence of his previous absences.

  We are from here!

  She’d had to pull him away, rescue him from the weaving cars on the access road to the beach, and lift him onto a kitchen chair after he’d slipped coming into the cabin. His balance had been off since he’d lost two toes to frostbite months ago. It was a miracle he hadn’t upset the pots of food the aunts were preparing: fish marinading in orange and lime juice, sliced red onions pickling in vinegar.

  Later, after he’d passed out on a plate smeared with black beans, she and Mari had had to push and shove him into bed. She had been taking his pants off, barely remembering a time when they’d sighed into each other, when he suddenly opened his eyes and said, My pain is greater, it’s always greater, it is the greatest pain of all.

  Now, as the rain picks up and the ocean swirls, her attention is drawn to the shore. One of the uncles has written a love poem, not necessarily to his wife—he won’t say—and has rolled it up, tucked it inside a bottle, and cast it into the stormy sea. When he arches his arm, the bottle shoots out at a short, sharp angle and hits the waves right on the shore.

  This is not the uncle who once worked in a steel mill hauling sheets, but the one who owns a beauty shop where Taffa’s Grocery & Messenger Service used to be. (No one can believe he has the nerve to rent out that place.)

  They both notice, she and her husband, the moment their daughter gives up the hunt for fireflies. How Mari’s head turns, almost robotically, and lasers in on the spot where the uncle’s bottle has disappeared in the bubbling waters like a satellite fallen out of orbit.

  There’s thunder as the girl pivots and sprints. A flash of lightning. The cousins follow in a train, one attached to the other, from tallest to smallest, each holding a bottle of fireflies like a red-hot torch, each intent on the sunken treasure in the surf.

  The aunts come next, chasing the children into the choppy waves, seaweed and debris tangling their limbs. The children bop under the surface like slow-motion dancers, their muffled torches blinking while the aunts splash and scream, pulling up bunches of sea grapes and fistfuls of sand. One by one, the aunts fall into a crease of white foam curling seaward.

  Suddenly she and her husband are in the heat of the moment: singers in a choir unconsciously coordinating their breathing and synchronizing their heartbeats. They dive toward the shore, toward the darkest shadows below the surface, shouting in harmony: Don’t fight the currents! Don’t fight the currents!

  4.

  Years later, Mari listens as her half-sister explains why they have never met before.

  I could not travel, she says. I had to stay, to preserve the flowers on my brother’s altar, so they never withered.

  Mari leans in, fingers the silky petals of the celestinas, blue beauties from another world. The room smells sweet and sultry. It’s snowing back home, the tail end of a clean white storm that delayed her trip by more than a week. She’ll have to excavate her car when she returns to it, parked on the roofless deck of an airport lot.

  Please, her half-sister says, don’t touch these. She means the bayahibes, pink cactus roses as delicate as an infant’s face.

  Mari drops her hand to the edge of the altar, a side table set in a corner of her host’s simple living room. There’s a love seat and a rocking chair, a cocktail table on which no glass can be set because every inch is covered with family pictures in standing frames.

  Outside there’s traffic and reggaeton: Que yo tengo de todo, no me falta na’ / Tengo la noche que me sirve de sábana. A thick cloud of grease and nicotine, garlic and meat, seems to hover just outside the open door where the neighbors, young and old, sit and observe them without shame. The sun is setting and their profiles blend together, the red tips of their cigarettes floating like fireflies.

  Mari keeps her eyes on the altar covered with vases, candles, and a ceramic Virgin she can’t identify. The boy grins back from a framed color photograph, shirtless and barefoot, sitting on the counter at Taffa’s Grocery & Messenger Service. He is in his early teens, toothy and thin, and you can tell his heels are kicking the counter. All of his features are alien to her—his eyes, the knob on the nose—but there is something in the way he holds his head that feels too familiar for comfort. There are other pictures on the altar—the boy as an infant, with her half-sister at various ages, with a woman whose face Mari can’t place. None of these are framed but instead curl in on themselves. Several have turned into scrolls Mari doesn’t dare unfurl.

  I saw you once, her half-sister says. It was your birthday and there was a party but it was raining. When I got there, to the beach, there was a minefield of broken brown beer b
ottles on the access road, and then so much screaming and confusion. My mother hadn’t wanted me to go.

  The neighbors take a breath, as audible and ghastly as an iron lung, and Mari feels her chest tighten. You must have come the year we all got caught in the riptide, she says. She remembers it only in slow motion: white water slamming her to the bottom of the ocean, burial under an avalanche so cold she thought she’d be preserved in ice forever.

  My mother didn’t want me to go, her half-sister says again.

  Mari nods but she feels a sting of accusation.

  I saw him heave you over his shoulder—it must have been you.

  No, says Mari. I mean, it was quite shallow. And besides, I knew how to surrender to the tide, to stay calm, to catch a breath at every opportunity.

  The half-sister’s eyes narrow. What do you mean?

  You know, to recognize the feel of air on my skin, to stay alive. Mari looks at the door, blocked from top to bottom by eyes and limbs and little red flares.

  But it was raining that day, there was water everywhere, the half-sister says. Air and water must have been one. He dragged you out of the ocean.

  Mari shrugs. She feels embarrassed. She wonders if her half-sister even knows how to swim. If any of the neighbors can float. Over the years, she’s met so many islanders who rarely see the coasts. She wants to explain what it’s like to know exactly what the skin of the water is like, how to rise to it with a confidence that exceeds intelligence, but the pained look on her half-sister’s face silences her.

  The candles on the altar flicker, black and red waves rolling and snapping on the walls. Mari hears a crackling, maybe someone opening a bag of chips outside on the stoop.

  He saved you, says her half-sister. He absolutely saved you.

  5.

  Mari drives north through a blizzard, away from the airport. The little funeral flag she forgot to take off the antenna before her trip has frozen into a black cocoon. The window is down so the frigid air stings her skin. She takes a cold breath.

  The GPS illustrates her trajectory—a fine burgundy line on a color screen attached to the moist inside of the windshield—but the satellite isn’t working. It’s a slow drive. She’s maneuvering down a state route that hasn’t been plowed yet, a blue highway erased from the map by the storm. On the side of the road, warning lights flash red, muffled by blankets of snow. She imagines herself traversing a tundra and that each stalled car and upturned truck is a downed mastodon or mammoth. She sees a man hacking at something. When he looks up, he yells out to her but his voice is lost in the storm.

  And then she feels a current drawing her down, a familiar weight on her chest, and she remembers how she once willed herself to reach around and roll and roll and roll, pressing against the rocky bottom, twisting one arm free until she turned her hips, flipped on her belly and up to her knees, so that her head shot out of the water through a glittering, lonely plain of ice to see white lights on the horizon. She knows this is her inheritance.

  The Cola of Oblivion

  The cousin’s freckled arms reach out to the visitor. The cousin says she recognized her instantly from old family photos. There is glee and awkwardness, memories of what cannot possibly be remembered: playing as cherubs in the park across the street from their grandmother’s house, catfish caught with handheld lines in the river behind the house.

  They fill in what cannot be talked about. It’s been fine, yes, except for the house (now a home for hooligans). Trouble getting meat. Fear of going to church. Secret lessons to undo the official teachings at school. And the contentment that never materialized. The cousin’s husband taps his shoulder where invisible epaulets would be and pulls on an invisible beard.

  They’re at a tourist restaurant where the visitor will pay the bill: the cousin, the husband, their teenage daughter (the girl is the age the visitor was when she left and has a tiresome air about her), the prices in dollars, the waiter barely keeping his resentment in check.

  The cousin hardly glances at the menu while her husband and daughter hide their faces behind it. The cousin says she remembers the bill of fare down to the grammatical errors, that she used to come here all the time before she got married. The husband peeks out from behind the menu. The cousin orders for her husband and their daughter: appetizers and entrees and dessert in advance. The visitor discreetly asks for a salad, for which she is teased. The waiter mumbles. The restaurant is empty but for them.

  The husband orders whiskey—the enemy’s drink, he says with a wink—and tells the visitor that, though she may have seen pictures of him enthusiastically jumping up and down at rallies, clapping and grinning on cue—he waits for the waiter to leave—that is not how he really feels. (The visitor has no idea what pictures he’s talking about.) You get caught up in it, he says, you don’t know what you’re doing.

  The husband makes much of the whiskey when the waiter brings it. He sniffs it, cradles it, finally sips it, then ahhhhhs loudly.

  The daughter wants a cola—the black waters of imperialism, her father says with yet another wink as the waiter taps his foot.

  It’s hard to explain, says the cousin. Once, I remember, at work, they came and told us this woman, Carmela, was a counterrevolutionary. And, you know, she had always been kind to me. She brought me crackers sometimes for the soup from the cafeteria at work because she knew I couldn’t stand it, it was so watery. But they told us so that when it came time to have a meeting to repudiate her, we’d vote against her.

  The waiter brings the cola, sets it down hard; it has one lonely cube floating in its center.

  And we did, we voted against her, says the cousin, because she was a counterrevolutionary.

  Because you get caught up in it, says the husband, so caught up you find yourself jumping up and down at the rally. You tell yourself later you did it because you were afraid someone would turn you in for not hopping on one foot . . . He laughs to himself.

  So when they come and say Carmela must be expelled, separated from her work unit, naturally you raise your hand. You may as well be waving goodbye, says the cousin. And in the end, Carmela’s better off anyway.

  Because she was expelled and separated and forced to not be caught up in it, says the husband.

  The waiter brings a basket of hard bread and the cousin and her husband leap to grab it before it settles on the table.

  After she’s expelled and separated, you realize you’ve done her a favor, says the cousin. By the way, the waiter forgot the butter. We need butter.

  Butter! screams the daughter—who hasn’t said anything at all until now. The waiter turns toward them but says nothing.

  Anyway, once she was expelled and separated, Carmela couldn’t do anything but leave, says the husband.

  Even though she had no way to leave, says the cousin. Where’s the butter?

  There were mobs outside her house shouting, Go! Go! Go! says the husband. He breaks a hard roll in his hands, fills his mouth.

  We did her the favor of freeing her from fear and shame, says the cousin.

  And to discover what she was capable of, says the husband as he chews, because she had to be very strong to put up with the mobs with their Go! Go! Go! and throwing things.

  Rotten tomatoes, says the cousin.

  Pamphlets, says the husband.

  Turds, says the daughter, her eyes twinkling with glee. They threw turds!

  Waiter! her parents shout.

  And then Carmela remembered she had a relative in Alicante and another in Zacatecas, another in Luanda, and another still in San Francisco, and a bunch in Montreal, says the cousin.

  And while you’re jumping up and down shouting slogans, shouting, Go! Go! Go! she’s already settled in Miami, says the husband.

  Actually, it was Madrid, that’s where her postcard came from, Madrid, says the cousin. The postcard in which she thanked me for voting to expel and separate her because it was the best thing that ever happened to her, which is why I don’t feel bad, because she’s b
etter off now than we are.

  Can you imagine that? Better off than we are, because we were never expelled and separated.

  We played by the rules.

  Although, of course, we didn’t want to.

  But we had to.

  Had to jump up and down.

  And expel and separate.

  Carmela abandoned us.

  Like so many others.

  As soon as she was settled in her new life, she forgot about us.

  Didn’t send us a single vitamin.

  Or a throat lozenge.

  Drank the cola of oblivion, says the husband.

  You understand, don’t you? Oh, how could you? You never lived here. They took you—have you thanked your parents for that, for taking you?

  They were prescient, your parents.

  But it really wasn’t fair of your mother to stop speaking to us.

  I understood she was Carmela’s friend, of course.

  But it wasn’t our fault we had to jump up and down and expel and separate.

  She turned her back on us, forgot about us in our hour of need.

  Sometimes I think your mother thought Carmela was more important than us, her blood family.

  Your mother never sent a single vitamin.

  Or an analgesic.

  Drank that cola.

  Although I understood, in a way, because of your father.

  He never got the jumping up and down.

  To tell you the truth—and we’re only telling you this now because you’re here, and we know that means you’re willing to defy him, because he can be quite the tyrant himself—he thought he was better than us because he never jumped up and down.

  But he never had to!

  He left before there was jumping up and down.

  The food arrives all at once, including the butter and the dessert—a ball of vanilla ice cream with a string of chocolate dribbled on top. There is silence, as if in prayer, an instant in which there are sharp intakes of breath. Then there’s a restrained but tense gathering of utensils and the soft hiss of a blade on meat.