Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  “It took Pauli nine months to have this baby,” Tía Celia would say in Pauli’s defense. “The father? It took him nine minutes. Who cares who he is? Right now, he will only complicate our lives. Besides, it is Pauli’s business, that is all.”

  Because of Pauli’s stubbornness, it was impossible to tell just what new blood had been injected into the family. Rosa, with her round black eyes and lashes like arching spider legs, had the thickest, blackest and straightest hair. Mami thought Rosa’s father was un indio, a Mexican or Guatemalan perhaps, with a heavy indigenous heritage, but Patricia and I thought Rosa had a whole other look about her, something even more ancient than Aztec or Mayan, something both serene and cruel that was new to us as a family. Nena was sure Rosa looked like a man she’d seen Pauli talk to once at a Middle Eastern restaurant but nobody else could remember him so we weren’t sure if it meant anything.

  When Pauli came home, I asked her about Rosa’s father. She shrugged, telling me I’d probably seen him, but that she had no intention of telling me who he was. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Juani, because you know I do,” she explained. “It’s just that I’m not ready to talk about it with anybody, and I’m afraid if I told you who it was, eventually the whole family would figure out you knew—you know how these things just get out sometimes—and then I would have put you in a terrible position, trying to figure out who you should be loyal to, them or me.”

  I wanted to tell her I was pretty sure I could withstand the pressure and, more importantly, that I had no conflict about my loyalties when it came to her, but the truth is that I wasn’t certain what I’d do if Gina asked me. I could resist telling my parents without effort, but I knew withholding from Gina would be critical. How could I ask her anything then? How could I expect her to tell me things en confianza?

  Curiously, Tía Celia’s new embracing attitudes did not extend to Caridad. Or rather, they seemed to recast Caridad, especially in her marriage to Jimmy. Where once Tía Celia would shrug her shoulders about Caridad and Jimmy’s tempestuous relationship, she now rolled her eyes and openly disapproved. It was as if she’d taken on Tío Pepe’s disapproval, but where he had surrendered, she had a harder, more judgmental edge.

  “Being loyal to your husband does not mean letting him hit you,” she said to us one day at the laundromat.

  Mami and I glanced at each other. Tía Celia’s pronouncement seemed to come out of nowhere.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said. She stopped folding clothes. “Where does it say that a woman has to be a punching bag for her husband? I don’t know where she got the idea that was all right.”

  “Well, Celia, I think Caridad and Jimmy have had their troubles but they’re trying to work things out,” Mami offered.

  “How is that?” Tía Celia asked. “They’re not going to counseling, they’re not going to see the priest. They’re not even talking about the problem, okay? They’re just taking a break. I ask Cari about it and she tells me to mind my own business. I say, okay. But you’d think she’d understand what killed her father, you’d think she’d throw Jimmy out in the streets by now—if nothing else, to honor her father’s memory.”

  “Celia, Celia,” Mami said as she tried to hug her. “Cari has to live her own life, make her own decisions.”

  “Of course!” Tía Celia exclaimed, pushing Mami away from her. “But that is not what she is doing. She is living Jimmy’s life, being his slave. He is really Jimmy Frankenstein, just like Pauli says.” She grabbed a pair of pants from the folding table and began to crease them. “You know who’s leading her own life? Pauli. I don’t say I approve, but I admire. Everything she does is her decision, good or bad. How many of us can say that, huh?”

  As Tía Celia talked, I looked around the Wash-N-Dry, with its immaculate whiteness and shiny features. For how much longer would this be my life? I loved running the business, making decisions, having the respect of my family. But in my heart, I could not see myself here, doing the books, refilling the Very Fine machine and picking out new video games, for too many more years. It’d get old, it’d become a trap I could never undo if I overstayed. The problem was, unlike Nena, who’d always wanted that PR career she was now off to in Miami, I had no clue what I could, or wanted, to do.

  “Not many people are that independent, it’s true,” Mami said, “but I’m not sure, Celia. Pauli is happy about the baby, yes, but I don’t know how happy she is about being here, about being back.”

  Tía Celia shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Pauli is a very different creature. She is doing exactly what she wants, all the time.”

  I pictured Pauli at Tío Pepe’s funeral, pale and exhausted. Everyone had said it was because she was overwhelmed by grief, but I wondered if that could be true. Pauli had never been close to Tío Pepe—could barely even look at him, she disliked him so much. At the funeral, she cried and cried until her eyes became red-ringed and puffy. Could she really have been that traumatized by her father’s death?

  I remembered a few days ago, her thin frame bent over a stuffed garbage can in the alley behind her mother’s house. She was trying to cram yet one more bag in it and the weight and force of her pushing finally caused the bag to break, spilling trash all over her feet. I was on my way to the Wash-N-Dry when I saw her, standing over the mess and shaking her head. When I ran over to help her, Pauli seemed embarrassed, frustrated.

  “Don’t,” she said without even looking at me. Her shoulder was half turned away as she bent over to pick up diapers and rotting food. I stopped in my tracks. “I can do this,” she said. “Go back to work, okay?”

  Ordinarily, I would have brushed aside her comments, rushed to my knees and picked up every last grain of rice for her, but this time, I stepped back. Pauli, her hair falling in her face, her lips trembling as she grabbed handfuls of garbage from the ground, looked doomed.

  While Mami and Tía Celia continued their discussion about Pauli and Caridad, I wandered up to Cari and Jimmy’s apartment. It was time for a break anyway and I thought it might be good to check in with Cari. She’d been a mess in the weeks since her father’s death, but in a totally different way than Pauli. After the funeral, Caridad had remained a zombie. She sat in front of the TV all day, staring aimlessly while the remote idled on the coffee table, untouched. Cari’s only movements were to get a cigarette, light it and then sit back. Other than that, she just sat there, eyes wide open, her mouth slightly open, as if she were a corpse propped up for a macabre joke.

  When I knocked on their door, Jimmy answered. He was wearing his hospital janitor uniform and his hair was wet from a shower. “Hey,” he grunted, letting me in. His face was worried, wrinkles all over his forehead. “God, I don’t know what to do.” His voice cracked a little bit as he nodded in the direction of the living room.

  I noticed Caridad’s head bobbing above the couch like a target at a carnival. She was going for a cigarette. The room had a blue haze.

  “I’ve tried everything, Juani, I’m not kidding. I’m so fucking worried, and I can’t take any more time off work,” Jimmy said, pacing in the vestibule.

  “I can stay for a little while,” I offered, hesitantly, knowing he wasn’t fond of me being alone with Caridad, “but not for long. I mean, I’ve gotta get back to work.”

  “Nah, that’s not so good,” he said. “But I swear she’s going to light the place on fire. All she does is sit there and smoke and smoke and smoke. And she doesn’t care where the ashes land. She’s burned holes all over the couch and the rug. I don’t know what to do, man, it’s just crazy.”

  “Maybe she needs a change of scenery,” I suggested. “Maybe being here, with the family and everything, isn’t so good.”

  Jimmy shook his head, smirked. “Don’t get any ideas,” he said, grinning malevolently. “If she goes anywhere, it’ll be with me.”

  I ignored him. “Maybe she could go to Mexico with Pauli,” I said. “Pauli’s gotta go back and get her stuff if
she’s staying here, and maybe the trip would be good for Cari—you know, time with her sister to talk about their father and everything. It might be good for Pauli too, I think she’s kind of fucked up about Tío Pepe’s dying,” I added.

  “The only way Pauli’s taking Caridad from here is if she leaves Rosa as ransom,” Jimmy said, laughing now. “And you know she ain’t gonna do that.”

  With that he spun into the living room, kissed Caridad on top of her head, said good-bye and pushed me out the door with him.

  “Hey asshole, I didn’t even get to say hello,” I said as he pulled on my arm and tried to take me down the stairs with him.

  “Missed your chance,” he said, grinning, triumphant as usual.

  CHAPTER 10

  IN EVERY CUBAN FAMILY, there is also—no matter how much it may be denied—at least one person who at one time ardendy supported Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. My Tío Raúl, Patricia and Manolito’s father, was that person in our family. He fought alongside Fidel, or more precisely, drove with him to the Moneada attack.

  Previously married to Zenaida, my mother’s older sister, Tío Raúl was a struggling artist living in New York when he was approached at a fundraiser by Haydée Santamaría, one of the original rebels. Although he’s never admitted he fell in love with her, we have always suspected it. Since he had no money to give, and his paintings were not yet yielding enough for anyone to guess what an investment they would later turn out to be, Raúl offered the beautiful Haydée the only thing he had—his body. Haydée didn’t accept in the way Tío Raúl had hoped and signed him up to do battle alongside the barbudos. He would grow a beard too and fight, Tío Raúl announced after his recruitment, because that was all he could do. He returned to Cuba to plot Batista’s demise, leaving Tía Zenaida in New York.

  Curiously, Tío Raúl doesn’t talk much about his time with Fidel. Most of the time, he says, it was so long ago, he just doesn’t remember anymore. When he does tell stories about his years as a revolutionary, they are always comic and absurd, painted with a brush of youthful mischief and meant to be indulged that way. He is no doubt embarrassed by his part in the revolution. Because of that, he rarely even admits to strangers that he ever had anything to do with Fidel, even though, at one time, those tales were his greatest triumphs.

  We’ve heard other, varying versions of the stories from Patricia, who for years and years shared the same revolutionary zeal her father once had, and from her brother, Manolito, who has never believed a word his father has said, preferring to see all his stories as products of a supreme and despicable artistic imagination.

  Patricia, who has met Fidel on several occasions and, in spite of her current disillusionment, works feverishly to re-establish diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, originally saw her father as an idealistic but weak man who didn’t really understand the process of change and revolution.

  “He wanted everything to happen overnight,” she’d say. “He was selfish and had no patience for others and their revolutionary development.”

  Back when Patricia was enamored of the revolution, she’d tell the stories as glorious adventures, exempting her father from the heroism, as if his presence there was some sort of accident. Nena said she thought Patricia, who wanted so much to be heroic, probably envied the fact that he had so effortlessly taken part in something so historically vital. But later, as Patricia’s own disappointment with the revolution grew, and as her own patience began to dwindle, her take on Tío Raúl began to shift: Now an old man with a peppered beard and paintings in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tío Raúl has become sympathetic, sometimes even courageous in her eyes. He never reminds her of the times when she dismissed him because, I suspect, he’s too grateful for their new, more serene relationship, especially now that he’s an old man.

  Manolito has another view: Tío Raúl was a comemierda during and after the revolution, before and after his art made him rich. Manolito, who works like a mule on a chain with his American father-in-law rehabbing and selling urban properties, hates Raúl’s accent in English, his effete ways, and the dumb luck he has always had with everything, but especially with money.

  Nena and I have talked about all this, trying to sift through it all. We like Tío Raúl a great deal but the truth is that we just don’t know what to believe.

  The story goes that when my Tío Raúl returned to Cuba to join the revolution, prostitutes on Virtue Street in Havana called out to him but he refused them all—not only was he broke, but he was saving himself for Haydée Santamaría. Short of Haydée, there was always Zenaida, who wasn’t sure what she thought about Fidel and his cohorts, but was sure she didn’t like the idea of her husband, the delicate artist, running around in the mountains with a loaded gun and risking parasites.

  Unlike my father, whose greatest assets were his white skin and fancy surname, Tío Raúl was a plain joe, but my Tía Zenaida adored him anyway. He was skinny and doe-eyed, golden tanned and flat-footed. Tía Zenaida was plumb and pretty, with a spark in her eyes. When I look at the pictures of the two of them when they were young, they’re always laughing and beaming at each other. I just know they were great friends once.

  After they got married, Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida moved to New York to start a new life. He was going to be an artist, although I don’t know that Raúl ever thought of himself as museum material. He’s pretty modest and probably only imagined that he’d do well enough to live comfortably. Zenaida was going to be his agent and secretary.

  It didn’t quite work out that way, though. Tío Raúl got himself a small studio but he also had to drive a cab and work as a dishwasher at a downtown hotel to keep up with all their living expenses. Tía Zenaida worked as a maid at another hotel and, with her faulty English, tried to sell Tío Raúl’s canvasses to galleries that would never consider his bright, tropical colors as serious work.

  For Tío Raúl, those experiences working side by side with American black people were good ones. He listened to new music, like gospel and bebop in Harlem, and heard horrible stories about segregation and lynchings in the South. Even though New York wasn’t officially segregated, Raúl learned about the invisible color line at the hotel’s front door, gritted his teeth when landlords told him to his face they didn’t rent to spiks, and quickly understood that it was his dark skin, not his lack of buying power, which prompted sales clerks at retail stores to follow him and Tía Zenaida around, relentíessly asking if they needed help. By the time Haydée Santamaría came along, Tío Raúl was pretty primed for a battle for justice.

  Tía Zenaida reacted differently to their new life. At the hotels where she scrubbed bathrooms and changed soiled linen, she did everything possible to separate herself from the other cleaning women, most of whom were African-American. She ate lunch by herself, refusing to sit at a table with them for fear that she’d be perceived as black herself, and wouldn’t accept rides from her co-workers and their husbands, even if they lived in the same little block in Brooklyn, because she didn’t want to be seen getting out of a car with black people.

  It was Patricia who told us about Caviancito, Tío Raúl’s final inspiration to join the front lines of the revolution. Caviancito was a faith healer who had a radio show in Havana. He was eventually banned by Batista because, in his own way, he was riling things up a bit too much. It seems that by healing people with insomnia, blindness and paralysis, Caviancito was giving the populace just a tad too much hope. At one time, Caviancito was so popular he had his own TV show too: Devotees would place a glass of clear water on their TVs as an offering to the spirits.

  Patricia says Tío Raúl saw Caviancito quite accidentally, sitting at a Havana diner having a cafesito, and that Caviancito told him the revolution would eventually win but that his riches would come from something else—in other words, that Raúl had no business leaving his wife to become a guerrilla. Tío Raúl was instantly offended, became even more radical, and ended up volunteering to drive one of the cars that would eventua
lly attack the Moneada barracks and give Fidel the chance to declare that history would absolve him.

  “It was my stupid ego,” Tío Raúl says mournfully, “which made me go, and which started the Cuban revolution.”

  Back when he would still talk about his exploits, Tío Raúl always said that the attack on the Moneada was not your typical military assault. The rebels drove up to the Moneada in about twenty-some cars, hoping to surprise the one thousand or so sleeping soldiers in the early hours of the day. They figured that because the soldiers had been partying the night before at the big annual carnaval in Santiago, they—the rebels—had some advantages by being sober. They also thought that, once word got out about their successful assault, folks would rise up all over the island and Batista would simply step down.

  “But it didn’t happen that way,” Raúl says. “For starters, about half the cars got lost in Santiago and never made it to the Moneada. The other thing is, I was very, very nervous, and when we got to the Moneada, I didn’t brake right—this was not my car and I was unfamiliar with it—and I hit a curb by the barracks building. It made a sound—a thud, actually—and it freaked everybody out, particularly Fidel, who was driving one of the other cars, and who fell on his horn by accident, waking up the whole goddamn regiment.”

  The rest, of course, is well-known: The soldiers slaughtered many of Fidel’s partisans, committing the kinds of atrocities that traumatize survivors for life.

  “If I hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have hit the curb and Fidel wouldn’t have honked his horn, and the soldiers would have been taken by surprise—and there would have been no dead, not one person, because we had no intention of killing anybody, just taking over the barracks and the government—and there wouldn’t have been a cause celebre and maybe, just maybe, the revolution wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground in the same way and would have stayed just what it was at first—a beautiful dream, that’s all,” Tío Raúl moaned.