Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  I know about Titi only through stories, most of them told by Tomás Joaquín, who travels fairly frequently to the U.S., and re-told by relatives. I’ve seen photographs. I’ve seen her crazy hair, her crazy eyes. I’ve seen the way she leans into a doorframe, wearing only a loose print housedress, and the desperation etched into her brave and weary face. I know just from the pictures—Titi at the beach grinning and straddling a raft, Titi with her arms around her friends at work, Titi smoking like Bogart and staring intently at the sea from the gray and crumbling malecón—that Titi’s a lesbian. There’s no androgyny, no fashion statement, no political button or secret hand signal to give her away. There is nothing other than her particular madness.

  I know everything just by gazing at her; I know it in my heart, which reads and decodes her every gesture and look. More importantly, I also know that the damage in Titi’s soul—and it’s there, clear as the blue skies in every one of those photographs—is connected to how she loves, or more precisely, how she’s not allowed to love. Her face, with its thin lines and bloody red lips, is a map of a sealed island, surrounded not by water but by an invisible, electrified barbed wire.

  I also know how dangerous all this is to say—how suggesting a correlation between being queer and being nuts throws out more than thirty years of civil rights and all the goodwill built up by Martina Navratilova’s Wimbledon records and Pedro Zamora’s MTV love affair.

  Titi’s problem is not, of course, that there aren’t other queers in Cuba—there are, and always have been, plenty. It’s not that there isn’t a gay society within all the political sloganeering and the official silences about homosexuality, because there is. There are long-term, happy couples all over Havana—many of whom live openly but wordlessly about their love. It’s not that Titi hasn’t had lovers, because between the lines of Tomás Joaquin’s stories—in which Titi’s “best friend” changes from time to time—I know from the shadings, omissions and insinuations, that she’s been loved and has loved, powerfully and jealously. But what none of the women who wrapped themselves around her body during those sticky nights could satisfy, what love could not erase, is what’s evident only on my radar: My cousin Titi’s need to be loved in daylight—to walk down the street arm in arm with her lover without the pretense of a mere friendship, to be utterly and ordinarily in love.

  When I hear the stories about Titi—about her wild escape attempts, about the way she gets into deeper and deeper trouble because she can’t keep quiet—I’m always fascinated by how the family has imbued Titi’s persona with a great craving for a near mystical freedom and democracy. “She wants to be free,” my mother exclaims, “who could blame her?” But free to do what? No one says.

  What my relatives see in Titi’s relentless unhappiness is the archetypal would-be exile, the heroism alive in her because of her great heart, and because of her insanity. “She says what she thinks,” my mother tells us, “because she doesn’t know any better, because communism has made her crazy.”

  What no one will say—not even Patricia, who can say almost anything at this point without shocking anyone in the family—is that Titi’s addiction to the notion of escape, her desire to come to the U.S., has nothing whatsoever to do with any of that patriotic crap, but with a whole other, perhaps even crazier idea—that once here, she might be free to be queer.

  I’m the only one—the only one—who knows it’s that unquenchable romantic desire—and not Fidel, not communism, not shortages of rice or limited hours of electricity—which has her twisted.

  Even though I’m here, in what is supposed to be the land of the free, I share this desire with my cousin Titi. Every lover I’ve ever had has been closeted, has always instantly looked over her shoulder when we’ve kissed on a street corner or train station platform. This was especially, and most painfully, true of Gina.

  It wasn’t as if she pretended to be heterosexual. There were no boyfriends, no allusions to men, in anything she did. And she certainly determined that some places—mostly bars, some restaurants and parks on the north side of the city—were safe enough for her so we could hold hands, or so I could put my head on her lap while sitting on the beach on a sunny day, or so she could sit me on her knee and nuzzle my neck.

  But Gina created a fog that got thicker the closer to home we were. Whenever she introduced me to anybody, she had no word for me, not friend or lover, just Juani. She’d greet me with a kiss, but always on the cheek, and squeeze my hand, then always let go. I tried hard to understand and to respect her boundaries, but they were so different from mine—and to make things worse, Gina refused to talk about any of this.

  “It’s nobody’s business,” she’d say. “Why should my life be an open book to complete strangers?”

  “Yeah, but why deny your life in the process?” I’d ask, except that I’m not good at political discussions, and she always was, so I’d inevitably lose these arguments.

  For money, Gina usually works as a strategist for community-based political candidates, not exactly what one would expect from a Puerto Rican independentista but she isn’t like anybody else. That her socialist and communist buddies think elections are a farce, a pillar of the oppressive colonial system that keeps Puerto Rico enslaved, doesn’t faze her. Gina contends that by working local campaigns she is in the belly of the beast, learning all of the enemy’s tricks. When we argued, no matter the topic, I always felt her expertise.

  “Look, I’m not interested in being a lesbian, in separating politically from my people,” she’d say to me, her face hard and dark. “What are we talking about? Issues of sexual identity? While Puerto Rico is a colony? While Puerto Rican apologists are trying to ram statehood down our throats with legislative tricks and sleights of hand? You think I’m going to sit around and discuss sexual identity? Nah, Juani, you can do that—you can have that navel-gazing discussion.”

  And though she never quite said it, I felt the sting: I knew part of the reason why I was pinned with this topic as personally important was not because it was valid, but because I’m Cuban, and in Gina’s eyes, automatically more privileged—as if my family had ever been privileged, as if we were doing anything except trying desperately to stay afloat.

  Later, after the fight was long over, I’d come up with all the snappy answers: Lesbians weren’t her people too? And all this about sexual identity—if it was that meaningless then why did it have to be such a big secret? Weren’t a lot of these things inherently contradictory?

  It’s not like I’m an activist. It’s not as though I’m out there carrying signs and smashing windows for gay rights, or any other cause, for that matter. For me, being out is a simple matter of convenience: I just don’t have the patience, or maybe the brains, to lie, to dodge the truth, to try to make people think I’m something else. But for Gina, being a public lesbian somehow distracted from her puertorriqueñismo.

  “That’s so white, this whole business of sexual identity” she’d say, while practically undoing my pants. “But you Cubans, you think you’re white…”

  And was I going to argue? No, not at all, at least not then. At moments like that, when she was fiddling with my belt or running her hands up and down my thighs, I didn’t care if we had wildly different views on the world because what I wanted was to be smashed against the wall, pinned by her fingers inside me. What I wanted was to taste her, to smell her, to rub her all over my body. I really didn’t care if she was a raving communist or a self-hating queer. Nothing mattered, nothing except the urgent, slippery sweetness between us.

  Knowing what my family says about Titi, the way their words coast around the truth to project and protect their own fears, their own yearnings, I have often wondered what my name turns up when I’m not in the room. I know I’m the mystery child, the one born premature (just six and a half months in the womb), who should, by all rights, have had balsa bones, a heart of chalk. I’m not the proud success that Nena has become, or a genius like Patricia, but neither am I the trouble baby that is the
sinewy Pauli, nor as helpless as Caridad. I’m something else entirely: my own island, with my own practical borders, seemingly ordinary on any map but, for all the burnt earth and barren mines, the least likely to be swallowed and disappeared by the waters.

  What I mean is this: I am as marked by genetics and exile as everyone else, as comfortably a part of any family portrait as the others. But though nobody much notices, I’m also a stranger in my own family, whether my connection is by blood or experience. I run about ten degrees hotter than they do—not to a boiling point, but to a simmer. Unlike Nena, I don’t fight to get my way. Unlike Patricia, I don’t prosletize. Unlike Pauli, I don’t shock. And unlike Caridad, there’s a real weight about me.

  What does my family want for me? My mother would say happiness, but she couldn’t tell you what that means, not really. My father would say, “Whatever she wants”—because he has no idea whatsoever what that might be, and it would shock him to realize that. If asked, Nena and Pucho would look at each other nervously, dismayed by their own lack of knowledge.

  Right now, I hold on to myself, sometimes literally. I hold on to my sides, my arms, my stubborn ankles, because in this house of nostalgia and fear, of time warps and trivia, I’m the only one I know about for sure. I keep my own space, a journal with the right dates, photographs with names and places written on the back.

  My lesbianism is not the cause of my alienation, but it’s part of it. My mother knows about me; we’ve talked about it. These are unsteady, clumsy conversations. Her basic reaction is Catholic: she is mystified but defers, both to her vague knowledge of the church’s condemnation, and to the fact of my existence. I think in her heart of hearts she wonders, if this is supposed to be so morally disfiguring, why do I seem so clear and reliable? My mother meets my friends and lovers and can not hide her confusion: She wants to dislike them but can’t. Even Gina, the communist independentista, won her admiration, her love even, for the time that we were together. My mother wants to warn me about something, but she knows—and in a way, hates—that I might know the way better than she does. Embarrassment is part of our tension, and of our ever increasing silences.

  My father knows too but we don’t talk about it. This doesn’t mean there are any pretenses between us. To the contrary: My father is as aware as anyone could ever be. He avoids not just the topic of my sexuality, but any subject that could inadvertently lead us there. My father’s worst fear, I think, is that’ll I’ll say something to him about it. Because he can think of nothing worse than having to look me in the eye and make a decision about whether to accept or reject me, my father creates an illusion of normalcy about the emptiness of our interactions, our meaningless chats. If anyone at a family gathering or party starts in on when I’m going to find the right man and get married, I can always count on my father to rescue me with a quick comment about women’s liberation, or there being no man alive good enough for his daughter. His motivation isn’t to spare me discomfort but to save himself. Because he’s afraid I won’t lie, it’s vital to him that I not be provoked into the truth.

  In my family, this is always the most important thing.

  The very first time I was inside a woman, I was confused. I didn’t recognize her, or myself. I didn’t know what flesh was hers, what was mine. I thought I was swimming, but in air. Maybe flying, underwater. I opened my eyes in a flash, sure I was drowning.

  The very first time I pulled my fingers out from inside a woman, I watched the tendrils of cum catch the light. They seemed as strong as spider’s silk, as impossible as morning. I took the string of her wetness and laid its end on my nipple. We toppled, folding onto ourselves, smearing it all over us.

  Her mouth touched mine. “Kissing,” she said, “is a happy accident between two women who have already exhausted all words.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I DIDN’T INVITE GINA TO CARIDAD and Jimmy’s wedding because we were still too new for such a family occasion, but by the time Tío Pepe died, she was in my life to the point that the family would have been surprised, and disappointed, if she hadn’t come to both the wake and the funeral.

  I met Gina at a political meeting for an aldermanic candidate. Nena and I had become increasingly worried about gang activity in our neighborhood and we thought that, as business-people, somebody might actually pay attention to us during an election season. We were sick of cleaning graffiti off the walls in the alley behind the laundromat and we’d gotten freaked out over a shooting just outside Polonia Furniture one afternoon a few weeks before.

  Gina, as it turned out, was running the campaign of one Rudy Canto, a former FALN sympathizer (in our neighborhood, nearly every Puerto Rican who runs for office has some kind of link to the FALN or some other Puerto Rican independence group) turned community activist, turned aldermanic candidate. Rudy was earnest and hardworking. Under Gina’s tutelage he opened up a campaign office two years before the election, which ended up serving the community as a kind of default ward services office. It was brilliant in a lot of ways: Some people actually thought Rudy had already been elected and seemed to accord him a quasi-incumbent status. But there were drawbacks to it too—after all, he really wasn’t in office and sometimes there was only so much he could do, so he inevitably let down a few people who sought out his help.

  I noticed Gina the minute Nena and I walked into Rudy’s office for the meeting. She’s hard to miss: mid-thirties, brown like Nena, muscular like Pauli, eyes so dark the pupils disappear, eyebrows that meet in the middle like Frida Kahlo’s, and the kind of style that lets her wear jeans with rips at the thighs and still look totally, and formally, in control. When Nena and I strolled into that community meeting and saw her for the first time, my knees turned to guava.

  “Juani, por dios, don’t be so obvious,” Nena said to me, but she was laughing and pretty amused; I’m usually cooler than that.

  We took seats up near the front to hear about Rudy Canto’s plans to fight crime in the area. During the presentation, I tried hard to concentrate on what he was saying, but at the end of it all I couldn’t have described a single proposal he made or any of the questions asked of him from the floor. I was just too busy trying to figure out how I was going to meet Gina, and what in heaven’s name I would say if I actually finagled an introduction.

  “My god,” Nena laughed, “look at you! You’re sweating! You’re nervous!”

  And, sure enough, I was a wreck. I couldn’t concentrate. I felt inadequate. I worried about the clothes I was wearing and whether I needed a haircut. I wondered if my upper lip was glistening, the way Jimmy’s does when he’s stressed out, or if there were any veins visibly vibrating on my head.

  I’d had lovers before Gina, of course. I’d had wild crushes and obsessive sexual trysts and I’d conquered and been conquered in a thousand ways. By the time I met Gina, I’d already enjoyed the sweet exhaustion that comes from satisfaction, and I’d endured the inevitable and tiny dramas of relationships that don’t work out: the phone hang-ups, the nasty letters, the jealousies and indifference too. Up until I first saw Gina, I’d felt quite experienced, quite a woman of the world, even if that world revolved mostly around Milwaukee Avenue, the north side, and a few brief and ecstatic forays to Miami. But the thing that was missing from my life at that point was plain and simple, and what I wanted most: love, rapture, and surrender.

  After Rudy Canto’s little talk, Gina went up to the front of the room and gave her own speech. It was much briefer, and much more direct—she was simply firing up the troops and trying to draw out some volunteers to stuff envelopes for a campaign mailing—but she was so serious, so ardent and so in the moment, that Nena and I immediately looked at each other, registering the same thought at once.

  “My god,” Nena said as she leaned over to me, “why isn’t she running instead?”

  Yet, even then, I could come up with a few reasons right away. For one, Gina is an out and out communist. Although the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe threw communism i
nto disrepute with most people, among some Latinos and Latin Americans it still seems to hold sway and it can still inspire or terrify. It’s Fidel, of course, and the fact that he hangs on against all odds, which makes it possible for so many people to continue believing in it, one way or another. In neighborhood politics, though, Marxism scares the gentrifiers and local businesses, the families that just want their garbage picked up and the cops to answer their 911 calls on time. And here was Gina, using the word proletariat and practically giving a power salute. I didn’t need Patricia’s political science education to know that wouldn’t have mass appeal on Milwaukee Avenue.

  But there is something else altogether about Gina which makes her totally unelectable in our neighborhood. With those long, strong strides across the room, Gina withers most men. As a campaign manager, that can be described as tough, but if she were ever a candidate, sexism would dismiss that same confidence as just plain bitchiness. Besides, she clearly prefers women. I don’t know how I knew but she registered that way immediately, just like my cousin Titi, clear as day on my personal radar. I also knew immediately that she’s closeted, and that that would never bode well for a political candidacy. I really believe people can tell when you’re lying or hiding something, even if they don’t know what it is. The fact of the secret can hurt as much, sometimes more, than whatever the secret may be.