The Tower of the Antilles

by Achy Obejas

  After a while the husband says, Well, there was always jumping up and down, yes, but forced jumping up and down, no, that came later.

  But your father refused, the cousin whispers through her teeth.

  And frankly, that’s why he had to be expelled and separated. What could we do?

  He refused to jump, says the daughter with a certainty she can’t possibly have. Do you understand? The daughter stares at the visitor, who nods, not out of agreement, but like a flagman waving runners at the end of a race.

  This steak is delicious.

  I want to jump up and down about this chicken, that’s what I want to do right now.

  If they came and asked me, I would jump up and down about this.

  Not that they ask, because they don’t.

  They just assume you’ll do it.

  And, of course, you do.

  Because even though they don’t ask you, they make you.

  Well, sometimes they ask.

  But not me, says the husband, I was never asked. I just did it, because why go through all that pretense about it?

  Instead of inhaling the food like they do—the mustard chicken on her mother’s plate, the rare steak on her father’s—the daughter hums and pushes a pair of creamy shrimp around on her dish. The ice cream bowl is empty. The salad plate too.

  My daughter has never had shrimp, the cousin says by way of explanation, so she doesn’t know what to do with them. She picks them off her daughter’s plate and pops them in her own mouth.

  Anyway, says the husband, it’s not who we really are, those pictures.

  Which is why you have to help us, says the cousin. Marry my husband, she proposes. I’ll divorce him, you marry him, take him with you. He won’t be in your way; I guarantee he won’t be in your way. Later, he can reclaim our daughter. Once there, she can reclaim me. And when I get there, you can divorce him and we’ll never ask anything else from you for the rest of our lives.

  It’s the least you can do for us, says the husband.

  Your mother never sent a single vitamin, says the daughter, not a single can of meat or iPod, not a single anything.

  Drank the cola, says the cousin, that terrible cola.

  Waters

  The moon simmers. I had imagined it would dance across the water in Cuba, swing gently from one wave to the other, but instead it burns, pale yellow flames blistering on the water.

  I pull the black cotton T-shirt I have on away from my body. It’s still dry. I can feel the soothing talc on my skin after my shower, but I know this feeling of release will be short-lived. In an hour or so, I will be damp and glowing. Unlike some other travelers—who wring the sweat out of their shirts after an afternoon walk and wheeze and worry about their hearts—I am comfortable in this state of humidity, as at home in it as if it were amniotic fluid.

  It’s steaming here but I still welcomed the hot water for my shower—my first in Cuba. Until I got to Isabel’s house in Varadero, every shower had been more of the theoretical sort: little bursts of icy liquid from rusty showerheads in tourist hotels in Havana, or cupfuls of cold water drawn from a bucket while standing chicken-skinned in otherwise dry tubs. These experiences only added to my admiration for the Cubans who live on the island; when I rub against them on the old, tired buses or in crowded streets, they always smell sweet and fresh.

  Here at Isabel’s, as soon as I saw the tiny water heater in the bathroom, I begged her to light it for me. She shook her head but smiled. “All right,” she said, telling me without words how unnecessary and excessive it is to take a hot shower in Cuba. “But it won’t last very long,” she warned, a precious match trying to catch the heater’s hissing gas. Its flickering seemed to pump up the temperature. Even Isabel’s brow grew moist.

  In the shower, I exercised my privilege: I luxuriated under a mass of lather on my hair, felt the streams of soap running between and down my shaved and newly browned legs. I imagined the salt of the ocean from the afternoon’s playful bath on the shore racing alongside the salt of my own sweat as it drained through flaky pipes and back into the land of my birth.

  * * *

  The day before the hot shower at Isabel’s, I was invited to coffee at the home of one of Cuba’s leading poets, a large, impressively built man with a long, thin, and perfectly manicured mustache in the style of the patriots from the early twentieth century. As he talked to me in his Havana home—a magnificent place with a single window offering a view of the broad boulevards that make Havana seem so French sometimes—I imagined him a man in a time warp, caught between his real existence, in which he whispered profundities with artists in open-air cafés, and ours, silently looking out at the crumbling revolutionary city, its baroque facades raked by the wind and the constant onslaught of sea salt.

  The poet leaned against the windowsill. “I believe that you, of course, are a Cuban poet, a poet of the nation,” he assured me, “although I do think the issue of language is very important.”

  We were talking in Spanish. He handed me a recent edition of one of the periodicals put out by a writers group. Like all the other publications on the island, its pages were thin and limp, as if wilted by the heat and humidity. The front page featured an essay in which the poet, contrary to everything he was saying now, drew a definitive line between Cuban writers on the island and those living abroad, regardless of whatever language they used. I thought immediately of José Martí, who wrote in a New York tenement not far from my own home.

  “We must create a place for poets like you, who write in English,” he said. “A Cuban place, of course, yet different.”

  “But,” I said, “sometimes I write in Spanish as well.”

  He smiled indulgently. “Yes, I’ve seen what you bilingual poets do. It started with the Chicanos, didn’t it?” He paused. “Chicanos is right, no? Or should I say Mexican Americans?” He looked about and giggled, as if we were sharing a terribly mischievous secret. Then he sipped noisily on his coffee.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not that type of bilingual poet. I write in English and Spanish, but not in the same poem.”

  He smiled, his fingers twisting the thin ends of his long mustache. The wind, whipping up from the streets and the ocean through the open window, ignored his work and ruffled the hair above his lip, making him look like a ferret or a mouse. “You mean, of course, that you translate into Spanish what you write in English.”

  I squinted and shook my head. “No, no,” I said. The light was falling. “Some things come to me in English, others in Spanish. I write in whatever language it comes to me.”

  He nodded as if he understood. “Yes, I write some things in English too. I even have a few things in Russian, from my youth, when I spent some time studying in Moscow. That was a beautiful time.”

  I looked out the window and down to the street. I spied Isabel, who had refused to come up to see the poet. “He’s overrated,” she’d said. “I am tired of him. But he is well connected. You should see him.” She was waiting for me, her body spread out on the hood of her gray Lada, looking like someone who’d thrown herself down in an attempt at suicide. The street was deserted, otherwise she’d have drawn a crowd. The wind made her long, golden hair dance on the windshield.

  “The poet’s true language is the one in which he thinks,” my host announced abruptly. “And you? In what language do you think?”

  “It depends,” I said. “Right now, I was thinking in Spanish, maybe because we’re talking in Spanish. I don’t know. I go back and forth, depending on who I’m with, what I’m doing.”

  The poet’s eyebrows, pencil-thin black lines above his eyes, squiggled like an electrocardiogram. “Yes, yes, but what language do you dream in?” he demanded.

  “Well,” I said, “it depends. I don’t always recognize the language in my dreams.”

  * * *

  After my shower, I sit on the porch at Isabel’s house trying to compose my thoughts into something coherent on the page. I’ve told myself I need to write ev
ery day I’m in Cuba, no matter how tired I am, how much activity there is around me. Above my head, shirts and towels flutter on a clothesline.

  In the United States, I’d heard about Isabel’s house mostly from friends. They told me it was on the beach, on the water at Varadero, and I had imagined something pastoral and pleasing, where I might feel the breeze off the ocean and smell the salt in the air. What no one mentioned was that there is a great expanse, a vacant lot really, between Isabel’s house and the sea, and that between the lot and the water there is a highway with trucks and buses and rented cars coughing fumes, full of Argentinean and Spanish tourists throwing litter out the windows. The lot, which is apparently no one’s concern, is thick with aloe, brambles, and garbage, impassable unless you’re wearing long pants and hiking boots.

  In the morning, we’d gone to the beach. We drove there in the Lada, fifteen minutes of maneuvering through narrow streets lined with prostitutes and illegal vendors.

  “I always thought you lived on the beach,” I said to Isabel.

  She seemed confused. “I do,” she said, her head nodding, as if I had somehow missed the fact that, yes, her house is right there, only a matter of yards from sand and sea.

  “Well, yes.” I was going to go on, to explain what I meant, when someone tapped my arm through the car window. I turned to see a young man holding a lightbulb. He looked newly scrubbed, his hair combed back and still wet, his clothing perfectly pressed.

  “Oh, we need one of those,” Isabel said, reaching into the pockets of her shorts for some money.

  “Here, I’ll get it,” I said, beating her to my bills.

  I handed the young man a damp American dollar, and though all he’d heard us speak was Spanish, he responded in English. “Thank you,” he said, with just the slightest accent, and dropped the lightbulb in my hand. He smiled broadly, showing a pair of missing teeth, and backed away from us and into the crowds. Isabel took the lightbulb and shook it, seemingly satisfied. The whole exchange felt odd to me, out of sync.

  We piloted the Lada through the streets and into a driveway leading up to one of the newer tourist hotels. It sat on a hill, its architecture hinting of the Bahamas, with sparkling whitewashed walls, red-tiled roofs, and cozy verandas. As we drove through the resort, I noticed a sign in English that read, Mini-market. There was no Spanish translation. Another, in the shape of a small arrow pointed to a glistening lawn and read (also in English and without translation), Golf Course.

  “It’s not completed yet,” Isabel said, as if reading my mind. In contrast to the jammed, sweaty streets of Varadero, it was cool and empty up there.

  Isabel pulled up to a designated parking space. A uniformed security guard gestured at her from a distance. “He’s a friend,” she said, gathering her beach towel and a pair of goggles from the backseat, explaining not just the greeting but our entry into this otherwise restricted area. “He and I went to school together.”

  We entered the ocean slowly, almost cautiously. Isabel had removed her shorts at the shore, but she kept her T-shirt on and now it expanded and became transparent. She wore a bathing suit with brilliant tropical colors underneath. It was low tide so I dropped to my knees to immerse myself in the water. There was nothing refreshing about it, though. It was as warm as bathwater, thick with salt and something vaguely oily on the surface. When I asked Isabel about it, she shrugged, put her goggles on, and dove in. She swam about for a minute or so, emerging with a small rock in her hand. She examined it carefully then tossed it back. I watched as she glided underwater, a ribbon of color against the sandy bottom. As she explored, I hovered, my arms outstretched, sitting in the shallow water, searching the shore for signs that this was, in fact, Varadero, and not an abandoned St. Croix.

  “Hey,” Isabel said, coming from behind me and putting her arms around my neck, “I’m glad you’re here.” She kissed me, her lips barely grazing my cheek.

  “Me too,” I said, holding hands with her underwater.

  We are just friends but, at different times, we have been involved with the same woman, a rather reckless Don Juanita who now lives in the US and who recently dumped Isabel in favor of a former Olympic swimmer. Isabel knows about her own breakup with Don Juanita mostly through letters and friends; our mutual ex has managed to communicate only indirectly.

  “I’m not angry at her,” she said, “but the Olympian, yes, I’m mad at her.” She shrugged, took her goggles off, and dunked them in the oily water. She rubbed the lenses as if it mattered.

  * * *

  “You ready?” Isabel asks. She pokes her head out from the house, car keys in hand.

  “Absolutely,” I say, and close my journal. I keep starting poems I can’t finish; they keep veering off, from one language to another . . .

  She turns off the porch light, bright with its new bulb. A truck drives by on the highway, its groaning muffled somewhat by the ocean. Smoke rises from its exhaust pipe and trails up to the low-hanging moon, a big yellow ball rising on the horizon.

  We are on our way back to Havana for a party. I am well aware that if it weren’t for me, Isabel would probably not go. She’d stay at home and read or watch American movies with Spanish subtitles on TV. But she wants me to see Havana, her city even though she lives close by in Varadero, and she wants me to have a few good stories to tell when I return to the States.

  In the car, we listen to Marta Valdés and Sara Gonzáles on an MP3 player I got her for her birthday last year. The music is soft and sad, the lyrics remarkably gender-free. The car rattles but it’s soothing in its own way. As we drive along, we pass a handful of other noisy cars, a couple of closed roadside snack shops, and the huge, avian shadows of oil cranes on the shores. They slowly dip and rise in silence, one after the other, for miles and miles. The car window’s wide open, my elbow sticking out Cuban style, and my black T-shirt flaps like wings on my shoulders as we enter the city. The moon floats over the sea on a bed of softly percolating amber clouds.

  At one of the first stoplights in Havana, we’re examined from a distance by a small crowd of male and female prostitutes. The Lada, with its fading paint, is clearly local, but both Isabel and I mystify them: though her clothes and body language correspond to the languorous way of the island, she is blond and wears glasses with yellow and black frames (a gift from another New York friend, and too fashionable for Cuba); there’s too much burnt red under my tanned skin, and my clothes—all dark colors—do not suit Cuba’s heat and humidity.

  At the stoplight, I lift my camera to my eye and focus and, as if on cue, the prostitutes descend. The first is a sinewy boy in his late teens, henna-skinned and perfect but for the gold tooth that appears when he smiles.

  “Señorita,” he says, doing his best Latin Romeo imitation, “perhaps you would like a little company tonight, no?” He affects an Iberian accent, taking a chance that I’m a Spanish tourist and might be amused by his attempt at sounding like a compatriot. He leans into the car window and with him comes a waft of soap and cologne.

  “She’s already got company for tonight,” Isabel says a bit too quickly, too protectively, in her own open-mouthed Cuban Spanish.

  “Ah,” he says, still holding on to the car, but waving over two young girls with his other arm. “Then perhaps you’d like to make it a party, eh?” He’s looking at me but talking to Isabel, unsure where I’m from or whether I understand. His gold tooth sparkles. “This is Nancy,” he says, pushing one of the girls up to the window. She’s no more than eighteen, her eyes encircled with heavy black liner and fatigue. “And this is Mayra,” he says, grabbing the other girl by the arm. This one is golden and resentful, her lips curling.

  “Encantada,” I say.

  Isabel rolls her eyes. The light has changed. The other cars are involved in their own transactions or going around us, the drivers indifferent to the scene.

  “Ah, you’re from Miami,” says the boy, understanding my accent as native but my demeanor as foreign.

  “No, from New Y
ork,” I say, smiling at them.

  “Mayra has a cousin in New York,” he says, yanking her up closer.

  She shakes him off. “Ya, coño,” she says, resisting. She’s not much older than Nancy, her face still round and babyish under all the makeup.

  “We can show you Havana,” the boy says, “a private Havana, a Havana especially for you.”

  An exasperated Isabel shakes her head, tells him no. He leans in, his whole head inside the Lada now. I’m blinded by his gold tooth so I push myself back, giving him room to continue his sales pitch to Isabel, who I know won’t be moved.

  I look out the car window to Mayra, who’s standing out on the street, her arms folded stubbornly across her chest. She stares back at me, full of pride and hate.

  * * *

  The party’s in an old, majestic but dilapidated mansion in the Vedado neighborhood. It’s a colorless, muddy shade but I can see its former elegance in the chipped columns at the front, the scalloped borders on the doors. A young girl sits in front with a metal cashbox on her lap. She asks for ten pesos—not even a dollar. I give her a few American bills and Isabel and I enter through the large wooden doors that seem to open just for us.

  Inside there are a crush of bodies, revolving disco balls, and a suffocating humidity. It’s wall to wall flesh, all of it drenched and yearning. I smell talcum and sex, perfume and menstrual blood. It takes a minute for me to adjust my senses. There is a dizzying disco song blasting from the speakers—coffin-sized boxes hang from chains on the ceiling; paint flakes down like confetti.

  As the partygoers come into view, I see men and women pressed up against each other, men rubbing naked nipples against other men, women gyrating between pairs of men who encourage them with grins and long, snaky tongues that dart in and out of their purple mouths. Shirts and blouses are translucent, second skins sticking to breasts and bones.

  In one corner, I see a black figure separate into two silhouettes, long dark hair soaked and fused to their naked shoulders. “I want their picture!” I shout to Isabel above the noise, pointing. She has her finger around a loop in my jeans, making sure we don’t lose each other. She follows me as I approach the lovers.