The Tower of the Antilles

by Achy Obejas

  They found the tumor when they did an MRI of my brain. It sat dead center in my skull, shaped like a two-inch comma and leaning heavily to the left. It had wrapped itself around my auditory nerve so as to practically strangle it. It was also big enough to damage both cranial nerves four and five, which explained why I’d had double vision and wasn’t able to tear up. What they couldn’t tell me was why I had hearing loss in both ears. They needed to run more tests. Unless I did something, they said via notes the Panamanian wrote out in his boxy script, both my hearing and vision would slowly deteriorate. They talked about surgery and radiation, experimental medicines and treatments like the cyber knife and auditory brain implants, all of which I could never afford. The restaurant didn’t offer health insurance and I wouldn’t have been eligible anyway, since I had to wait a year and a day before I could get my US residence and work permit. I wouldn’t die from this tumor, they told me, but left alone it would eventually leave me trapped in my own body.

  After the Panamanian took me home, I sat in Laura’s expansive living room and thought about my predicament. My father would tell me this was a punishment from God for all my sins, for all the women I’d briefly loved. My mother would tell me it was destiny, that there are forces in the universe greater than us that we simply must obey. Was there anything to learn, for anyone, from my situation? Who would take responsibility for me?

  I got myself a beer from Laura’s fridge and counted my money. I had saved about eight thousand dollars. I was considering buying a ticket back to Havana, knowing that with that money my family could probably take care of me for a very long time. I had no illusions about my condition being relieved in Havana. Certainly, I would get medical attention, I would be visited by doctors. But I knew Cuba simply didn’t have the equipment or expertise to help me. And I didn’t want to have brain surgery at a hospital where the power went off and on without regard to what was happening on the operating table.

  I opened my laptop to send an e-mail to an acquaintance from the museum who had agreed to relay messages to my mother in case of emergency. When I saw my wallpaper, that blue-white constellation across the coastline in the Maldives, I knew time was of the essence. I might not ever hear the waves lapping the shore, but my vision, at least at that moment, was again as good as a high-power Leica lens. When I searched for one-way tickets to Male, I found they were within my reach.

  In the weeks following my arrival, I got a job washing dishes. I figure I can do that, or maybe gardening, until my eyes fail. Then I will sail to one of those islands where no one goes and lay myself down in all that phosphorescence. I will sink into the firmament of the Maldives one centimeter at a time and let the waters rise, lifting me, guiding me through the silent dark to my own Atlantis.

  The Tower of the Antilles

  with thanks to Kcho,

  for Archipiélago en mi pensamiento

  1.

  What is your name?

  You already know my name.

  What is your name?

  You already know my name.

  They went on like this, one with his line, the other with hers.

  What . . .

  You already know . . .

  . . .

  They coincided, not exactly in harmony: one voice was a little reedy, though steady, the other flat.

  The room was black and moist. Things may have been slithering about, small harmless things. The faint cataphonics of carpentry whispered from the solitary window.

  What is your name?

  This time, silence.

  What is your name?

  His chair bumped along on the sandy floor. When he stretched, his body distracted the lightest breeze from her face. The wooden beat from outside continued, still dim.

  A door opened, shut. In between, a vague rustle.

  2.

  In truth, there’s only speculation about the formation of the island, carved by lava and tides, how the tips of peaks became mountains, and islet after islet merged, thousands of them, until they became an archipelago shaped like a curved cicatrix.

  The island’s natives did not know how to cultivate land or use tools. They picked fruit, chased crabs out of their sandy wells. They grew root vegetables, usually in mounds of soil designed to retard erosion and lengthen storage, and knew how to make bread from an otherwise poisonous tuber. They fished, hunted rats and iguanas, and ate both turtles and dogs.

  The men went naked for the most part, the women frequently wore short skirts but breasts were generally bared. They flattened their foreheads by binding them with a hard plate before they were fully formed. This way their heads slanted, reflecting light back to the heavens.

  They were terrible, unambitious mariners, with no sense at all for navigation. For a while, in fact, many believed the island was no island at all, but a monstrous raft made of packed dirt and clay, impossible to pilot.

  They had two supreme gods, each with a particular allegiance to water: a lord of the sea and a goddess of rivers and abundance. These accepted prayer and platefuls of food as reverence: plump marlin filets, papayas bursting with pockets of gooey black seeds, buckets of coconut milk.

  Before making offerings, devotees had to cleanse themselves through absolution, fasting, and ritualized vomiting. Hungrily, they put wooden spades down their throats, liturgical implements they lazily let slide from their lips.

  Afterward, they used a long, straw-like tube to sniff the pulverized bark of a local tree, which caused extreme hallucinations.

  3.

  What is your name? he asked.

  Pinewood is best, easy to whittle, she thought to herself. The island was dense with mahogany, cedar, and palm trees with feathery leaf bouquets.

  You already know my name, she said through lips that were a little sore.

  She coughed. She knew even then how important it was to choose wood without knots, blemishes, or cracks. She thought of nothing but the pulpy inner flesh of trees, of Madras muslin and hemp.

  What is your name?

  Her boat needed a brace. About five centimeters thick, a meter wide, and two and a quarter meters long. In her head, she measured roughly thirty centimeters from one edge toward the center. She marked the points, then drew diagonal lines across it.

  What is your name?

  She continued counting off intimate distances, her fingers designing on the tender canvas of her thighs.

  4.

  One day, a very large brown woman with slanted eyes set a tiny boat on the island’s shore. It was made from the languid leaves of a local flower, folded over this way and that until the triangle in the middle signaled completion. Only a few of the natives noticed, or cared, and when the tiny boat was found missing among the usual debris at dawn, everyone presumed the tide’s eager tendrils were to blame.

  That afternoon, the large brown woman with slanted eyes returned, this time with a boat of balsa wood. Its skin was as smooth as a baby’s, pink and sweet. Again, it vanished overnight.

  During that week, boats began to appear—canoes and kayaks, floats made of driftwood, hollowed tree trunks, discarded refrigerators made buoyant with inflated tubes, car chassis with water wings. They piled one on top of the other, each seeming to decrease in size as the structure ascended, so that they began to form separate stories. Each level had its own peculiar color, usually a variation of whitewashed blue, or a smear of dense aquamarine.

  Later, the boats began to pivot, a little each, so that soon there were prows of a sort directed to the four points of the compass. There was nothing between the vessels, each one perfectly balanced on top of the other, so that they swayed with the trade winds, waved to the waters, but did not fall.

  5.

  Eventually, he stopped asking her name. He would just come in and sit across from her for a while in the darkness. She’d grown accustomed to the visits. Her thighs were covered with ghostly designs for boats. After a time, he’d scrape the chair backward, get up, and disappear.

  Then her lips would s
oundlessly form the words that followed him: You already know my name.

  6.

  On the island’s coast, a few mangy dogs, bats, and a tempest or two of wild bees came to rest on the column of boats. It swelled with frogs in its crevices, snails crawled the walls. Birds with feathers frazzled like uncombed hair perched and called. There were clear days and days of fog, nights when the stars flashed across the sky and others when they refused to shine.

  That was usually when the boats would moan from the weight of the natives scaling the tower.

  E-Book Extras

  Excerpt: Ruins

  About Achy Obejas

  I.

  Usnavy was an old man. Not in age so much—he had turned fifty-four that year—but he was born old, his childhood brow prematurely molded into an expression of permanent concern, his gait, even as a youngster, as labored as if he’d been instantly injured on the job, both in spirit and in fact. His pale gray eyes sat in his mushroom-brown face, common and faded, even in boyhood, as if they’d never twinkled or delighted with wonder or awe.

  All that summer of 1994, Usnavy had manned his post at the bodega—the one where people came with their ration books to have their monthly quotas of rice and beans and cooking oil doled out—and wordlessly shook his head when people pointed to a page for an item they should have received but which he didn’t have to give. His eyes darted over the void on his side of the counter: soap was scarce, coffee rare; no one could remember the last time there was meat. Sometimes all he had was rice or, worse, those detestable peas used to supplement beans or, when ground up, used as a coffee substitute.

  Now and then, when the shelves were particularly bare, he would find himself involuntarily thinking about Belgian chocolates, the kind his mother used to crave: in a box, each nugget tucked into a white paper nest. He imagined giving such a box to his wife, Lidia, and watching her and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Nena, laugh as they shared the sweets, their fingers dotted with cacao peaks. Nothing brought him greater joy than their pleasure; nothing affected him quite like his daughter walking beside him, her fingers laced with his.

  At the bodega, Usnavy knew he shouldn’t be partial with what was available. He needed to weigh it out and pour it into the bag for whomever got there first—but Usnavy tried to hoard the bulk of it, just in case, for the most needy: the solitary elderly and the young mothers with kids like kittens clawing at their hems, frantic and unaware that their fathers had hurled themselves into the sea on toothpicks, desperately trying to reach other shores for better luck. After a windsurfing instructor from Varadero had illegally managed the waves all the way to the Florida Keys in little more than nine hours, scores of young men were now seen erecting homemade sails on boards all over the coasts, feigning interest in things like barometric pressure and practicing their skills walking on water.

  Usnavy stared at those leaving in disbelief. He wanted to tell them that fate was not in a shoreline or a flag, but in a person’s character. Yet to confront the windsurfers and other mariners meant dealing with the fierceness of their desire—and even Usnavy understood that if the blinding light bouncing off the mirrored waves did not obscure their focus, there was nothing that would keep them from seeing what they wanted to see. They were, each and every one, like Christopher Columbus, insistent on a mainland filled with promise, no matter the truth of the island.

  * * *

  After the morning shift, when the sun was hottest and heaviest, Usnavy would shuffle back home to his family’s Old Havana apartment on Tejadillo street, a windowless high-ceilinged room, no bigger than one of those bloated American cars. Concrete on all six sides, Usnavy’s room in the tenement distorted daylight and time but remained relatively cool throughout the worst of days. A picture of a young Comandante hung in a frame, their only decoration but for a poster of the American singer Michael Jackson, which Nena had gotten as a gift from a friend down the street who’d left for the United States a few years before.

  Besides the bed, there was a folded cot, where Usnavy slept so Lidia and Nena could be more comfortable, and a tiny table with a Czechmade electric plate he’d received from the Prague-born wife of a Cuban friend when they had hurried back to her country after the communists tumbled. Next to the plate was a small, white, Soviet refrigerator. Usually, Lidia’s old American iron—much coveted, since irons of every lineage had virtually vanished in the last few years—rested on top, cushioned by a threadbare but very clean towel.

  There were books all over the room too, on homemade shelves, tucked under Nena and Lidia’s bed in neat rows, and usually in piles next to it as well. Not just Nena’s school books but also books about Africa, poetry books, books with ambiguous endings by Jorge Luis Borges and Chester Himes (beautifully translated into Spanish), and a young Cuban writer named Leonardo Padura, one of Usnavy’s recent favorites, whose work had been published in Spain and Mexico.

  On the wall behind the door, there were a pair of hooks on which Usnavy hinged his bike, his only means of transportation and one of the few things over which he and Nena had occasional arguments. About this, Usnavy was intractable, refusing to surrender his one chance at relief and escape. His official excuse for refusing to let her borrow it was that he couldn’t risk the bike being stolen from her. But in his thinking, she didn’t need a bike: Her school was only a few blocks up, by the capitol building. Of course, Nena was a teenager now and naturally restless. She wanted to be out, to go, anywhere. In his heart Usnavy understood it would be better if she had her own bike, but he simply couldn’t afford it. So as much as he hated to think about it, she’d have to continue walking to get around, hitchhiking like everyone else, and taking the bus, which he knew was often hours late, crowded, and a source of other kinds of dangers too.

  Sometimes, he knew, the bus didn’t show up at all. Since the scarcity of fuel had forced the government to cut public transportation service down to bare bones, Lidia, a hospital taxi driver for more than twenty years—one of the first women to really excel at the job—had been laid off and now just shuffled around Tejadillo in a faded housedress most of the time, stunned if not bitter, not because she’d lost her job but because younger men with much less experience had been allowed to stay on.

  “They have family,” Usnavy had tried to explain to her.

  In the first few months of her layoff, the government had given Lidia a good chunk of her old salary in compensation, but after she’d taken a reeducation course in arts and crafts her take-home pay had been dramatically and embarrassingly reduced. Though she was licensed now as an artisan, there was no paper, no ink, no paint, nothing. The two or three practice prints she’d made in class of Che Guevara and views of dawn in the tropics were smears of color, indecipherable, and long since shredded for note taking and other more intimate uses.

  Now, whenever Usnavy tried to rationalize things for her, Lidia bit her trembling lip and looked away, refusing to make eye contact with him, leaving him frazzled and frail.

  * * *

  To relieve the gloom, the family’s room—a breadbox, a shoebox—was illuminated by a most extraordinary lamp. Were it not for the sheer size of it, Usnavy could have built a second floor—a barbacoa—like many of his neighbors. Made of multicolored stained glass and shaped like an oversized dome, the lamp was wild. Almost two meters across, the cupola dropped down with a mild green vine-and-leaf motif that flowered into luscious yellow and red blossoms, then became a crimson jungle with huge feline eyes. (In truth, they were peacock feathers, but Usnavy had never seen or dreamt of peacocks, so he imagined them as lions or, at least, cats.) The armature consisted of branches at the top, black and fat to resemble the density of tree bark. They narrowed as they neared the edge, until they were pencil thin and delicate. The borders were shaped with the unevenness of leaves and eyelids, petals and orbs, in a riotous yet precise design.

  Because Usnavy lived in the old colonial district, in a tenement carved out of a nineteenth-century mansion with twisted and enigmatic
electric wiring that refused to respond to a central command, while the rest of Havana—in fact, the rest of Cuba—suffered long, maddening power outages and blackouts, Usnavy and his family never lacked the glow of his majestic lamp.

  The lamp had traveled with Usnavy from his hometown of Caimanera, the closest Cuban town to the American military base at Guantánamo Bay and the reason for his unusual name: Gazing out her window at the gigantic military installation, Usnavy’s mother had spied the powerful U.S. ships, their sides emblazoned with the military trademark, which she then bestowed on her only son. She pronounced it according to Spanish grammar rules—Uss-nah-veee—and for a while caused something of a stir, which other young mothers soon imitated so that by the time the Revolution was upon them, there was a whole tribe of sturdy young Usnavys in Oriente. (In the 1980s, during the Soviet boom in Cuba, there was another inexplicable surge of English-inspired names, particularly Milaydy, Yusimí—You-see-me—and Norge, after the refrigerator company.) Usnavy—the original one: Usnavy Martín Leyva—was born in 1940, shortly before Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. might have been thrown off balance but instead sailed off to eager battle the way young people—ignorant of their mortality—recklessly throw themselves into love or revolution. Perhaps as a result of all that, Usnavy carried with him a kind of guilt: At one time, it was possible his mother had loved the enemy (in all fairness, they hadn’t been seen or understood, exactly, as the enemy then), had aspired to the enemy’s might, had tried to project onto him their sense of possibility and optimism.

  His father—as Usnavy had been told, a Jamaican laborer (a poor schmuck, he had surmised)—had disappeared into the sea, leaving his mother a widow shortly after he was born, free to rearrange the past at will and dream about the future.