Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  For Haydée Santamaría, the loss at the Moneada was immeasurable—both her brother and her lover were tortured in the aftermath by Batista’s thugs and lost their lives. Tío Raúl swore that, no matter that the revolution eventually triumphed, she was never the same. For him, there was a clear, straight line between the Moneada and Haydée’s suicide many years later.

  “Something went out of her,” he said. “The light in her eyes became more of a glaze, it blurred more than illuminated.” For Tío Raúl, the need to avenge Haydée’s pain and suffering became paramount.

  Amazingly, Tío Raúl wasn’t captured at the Moneada. Instead, he ran and ran and disappeared into the countryside with a handful of others, surviving by hiding in the cane fields, begging meals from sympathetic and often bemused campesinos, and just plain stealing when necessary.

  There were times, Tío Raúl told us, when they couldn’t move for days for fear of being caught by Batista’s soldiers. He said they once spent about a week in a cane field, licking the dew off the stalks at dawn for fresh water, burrowing down at noon, lying flat on their stomachs to avoid the unbearable and relentiess tropical sun. They couldn’t take their boots off—even for a second—for fear they’d have to run and leave them behind, which was surely a death sentence in the fields, where cane stalks poked through the dirt like razor blades. All the while, they fed off the sugar cane, chewing and sucking, getting high from the rush of so much sweet stuff in their veins.

  Patricia says that the heat and suffocation of the cane fields after the Moneada attack are the origins of Tío Raúl’s artistic inspiration. She says that, once, delirious from the heat and humidity, his flat pancake-like feet trapped, swollen and blistering in his boots, Tío Raúl imagined his toes had been eaten by worms—had, in fact, turned to worms. He was sure he could see them crawling out between the laces, between the cracking leather and worn soles. He wanted to scream but nothing would come out of his mouth but air. And then, just as he was about to find his voice, a compañero silently threw himself on him, covered his mouth with his hand and held him there until the terror passed. Tío Raúl tasted the dirt on the man’s hand, felt his breath like steam on his neck, and quietly cried.

  Patricia says it was the wild hallucinations while crawling around in the dirt, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the ghastly, imaginary worms, that prompted Tío Raúl to change his art from the sunny tropical vistas that Zenaida had been hawking to the dark, surrealistic impressionism that first hurled him to fame.

  “That much sugar, that much sweat, caused him nightmares for years,” Patricia says, always adding that these are not just stories—she has her own memories of her father, walking like a zombie at night through their house, afraid to fall asleep and have to relive the Moneada all over again.

  I don’t know the rest of the story too well. I have always been impressed by the bad driving that caused the revolution but I have no handle at all on the chronology of events from there, no matter how often I’ve heard the tales—first hand from Tío Raúl, second from Patricia, the ever-hostile Manolito, Tía Zenaida, and later, interpreted by my mother, my father and the rest of the relatives.

  I know that Tío Raúl got to Costa Rica somehow and that, to raise money to meet Fidel in Mexico after he got out of prison, Tío Raúl wound up making chancletas out of old tires and selling them to tourists at the few beach resorts Costa Rica had then. I know that he also made hats from palm fronds, necklaces from seeds and sand pebbles, and eleguás from coconuts that he’d carve with his combat knife. He put all of his knowledge to work and let his art save him.

  When Tío Raúl finally met up with Fidel again in Mexico two years later, he was more than ready to get in a boat with him and invade Cuba. It’s not that he believed Fidel was so great but that he had a sense that his own mission wasn’t completed—that he hadn’t survived all that, in all those crazy ways, just to stop there. He had to avenge Haydée, contribute to the defeat of Batista (whom he now utterly despised), and prove, at least to himself, that his life had been spared for good reason.

  But, again, things didn’t quite happen the way he planned. When Tío Raúl got to Mexico—prematurely gray, thinner than ever, his skin brown and hard like a macadamia nut—Fidel himself gave him the telegram which read: Come home immediately. Zenaida in terrible accident. Only a few days left. They didn’t have a phone back in New York so a frantic Tío Raúl called all the neighbors to try to find out what had happened. They told him Zenaida had been hit by a car and was in the intensive care unit of a local hospital, although no one could quite remember the name of the hospital and everybody either misplaced the number or gave him the wrong one.

  It was Haydée who, through a bunch of personal connections, got Tío Raúl a plane ticket back to New York to see his dying wife. A Mexican friend loaned him some oversized clean clothes and Tío Raúl, bathed but not shaven, flew back to the U.S. in a state of panic. When he arrived at LaGuardia, he raced through customs because he didn’t have any baggage, then flew out of the terminal to grab a cab—an expense anticipated by Haydée who’d made sure he was also given money for that purpose.

  But as soon as he started running, Tío Raúl heard voices. They were shrieking female voices calling his name. Frightened, convinced that the whole experience of survival, and what now appeared to be the imminent loss of his wife, had rattled his senses. Tío Raúl ran even faster. He felt his big clothes flapping about him like a loose sail on a boat. People stared at him as if he were insane. He gasped for air and pushed his long, tired limbs faster and faster through the airport—until a huge hand gripped his shoulder and threw him to the ground like a stringless marionette.

  When he looked up, scared and winded, my Abuela Olga was standing triumphantly above him. “Raúl Fonseca, qué carajo do you think you’re doing?” she asked, hands on hips, a sardonic lift of the eyebrows punctuating her words. “Running away, eh?”

  “Olga,” Tío Raúl said, getting up and dusting off his clothes, “I am so worried.”

  He tried to hug my grandmother but she pushed him away, still disgusted by what she perceived as an attempt to escape. “That beard—what a disgrace,” my grandmother said to him.

  He ignored her. “I came right away. How is Zenaida?”

  Abuela Olga laughed right in his face. “She’s fine,” she said, “look for yourself.” Then she pointed with her finger down the terminal where they’d just run from and there, among the bobbing sea of travelers, Tío Raúl spied his plumb young wife and my mother, who was just a kid then, waddling toward them.

  “But…but…”

  “She just wanted you to come home,” Abuela told him. “She knew this was the only way. Forgive her, Raúl, and she’ll forgive you too.”

  But Tío Raúl couldn’t. Even after he found out that the whole scheme had been my grandmother’s idea, he still couldn’t forgive Tía Zenaida, whom he felt should have known better and without whose cooperation nothing could have happened. What killed him wasn’t just that he was denied an active role in history, or his need for resolution, but that he was lied to, that he was manipulated in such an awful way.

  “You were selfish,” he told Tía Zenaida, who cried and cried and begged for forgiveness. “You played with my feelings, with my principles, just to satisfy yourself—and for what, eh?”

  Abuela, who was mulata, told him over and over that they’d been trying to save his life. She explained that Fidel was no good—didn’t he see all the Negroes he’d surrounded himself with?—and that the revolution would come to a bad end very soon, everybody knew that.

  Tía Zenaida didn’t want to argue politics but between Abuela Olga and Tío Raúl, she really had no choice. There was never a moment, a break in the awful screaming between them, to simply say she loved him and missed him and was worried sick about him. His inability to see any of her feelings, his complete focus on Fidel and Cuba, eventually pushed her to join sides with Abuela Olga. In the end, Tía Zenaida became so well primed in anti
-Castro rhetoric that Tío Raúl refused to talk to her. Their relationship became a series of silences interrupted with short bursts of machine-gun-like hostility.

  In spite of the tensions with Tía Zenaida, Tío Raúl stayed in New York, reading the Times every day for articles by Herbert Matthews about Fidel and his rebels. He got another cab and a job delivering packages for an architectural firm, and continued to paint. He wanted desperately to be in Cuba, with Haydée, and Fidel and Ché Guevara, whom he had met briefly in Mexico and thought of as the coolest guy he’d ever known. But he felt utterly trapped—in part by Zenaida’s fear of abandonment, and in part by his own guilt and shame. How could he ever explain to his guerrilla friends that his wife had lied in such a reckless way? How could he ever show his face to them—whom he considered to be so selfless? What would they think? He spent several years in a state of melancholia, nostalgic for his Cuba, lonely and alienated, boring every passenger he got in his cab with tales of his adventures with Fidel.

  Eventually, Zenaida got pregnant and Patricia was born. Any thoughts Tío Raúl may have entertained about leaving evaporated. He was crazy about Patricia (Patricia Haydée, actually—the men in our family seem to like to name their daughters for past loves, consummated or not). She was a fat brown baby, which astounds us because Patricia is now a slender, middleaged woman who could pass as a New England native.

  In the meantime, Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida continued their war, arguing day in and day out about Fidel and the revolution. He justified having left by claiming he was fighting for ideals and freedom—didn’t Tía Zenaida have any ideals? She claimed he was a jerk who got his male ego challenged and went off to prove he was a real man—didn’t he realize real men didn’t need to prove anything? They argued over every Matthews article—Tío Raúl convinced, because they were published in the New York Times, that they had to be true. Tía Zenaida was just as sure that Matthews was an American fool taken for a ride by a gang of wily Cubans.

  By the time Manolito was born, Tío Raúl was passing out revolutionary literature in his cab, giving speeches to help raise funds and support for the revolution. Tía Zenaida spent the last few days of her pregnancy laboring over a Spanish/English dictionary and writing letters to the editor of the New York Times. She may have been the first in the family—perhaps the first in the world—to publicly label Fidel a communist but the Times never published a single one of her missives.

  According to Patricia, when the revolution triumphed, Tío Raúl rushed down to Havana just in time to climb on a tank for the victory celebration. There are pictures of him waving a black and red Twenty-Sixth of July flag, dancing arm in arm with other rebels. Because he’d just arrived from New York instead of the mountains, Tío Raúl is the only one with a decent haircut and a neatly trimmed beard. In one picture, you can see his uniform was recently ironed, with a perfect crease down his pants.

  Zenaida, of course, stayed in New York, furious, monitoring it all on radio and in the Times. She feared that Raúl would move them back to Cuba now, when things were so tense and everything so unstable. As a safeguard to any crazy scheme of his, she packed Patricia and Manolito off to Miami with my grandmother, knowing he’d never move without them, and knowing too that she could buy some time this way to reason with him. Within weeks of the triumph of the revolution, there were already stories of firing squads and fraudulent trials on the island.

  When Tío Raúl returned to New York, Patricia says her mother, who’d spent the night before getting a pep talk from Abuela Olga, was all pumped up for her confrontation with him. But when Tío Raúl finally showed up, his clothes tattered and his eyes a blur, she realized immediately something awful must have occurred because he had come back looking like a ghost. Shortly thereafter, he dropped all his Cuban organizations, stopped talking about his days with Fidel or wanting to return to Cuba, and, one day, quit arguing with Zenaida.

  At first, she couldn’t tell he wasn’t responding—she was so used to talking over him and then him talking over her, each voice booming over the other until they were both unintelligible. Then she asked him what was wrong. Tío Raúl shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know if you are right,” he said, “but I was wrong. I hope not, but I think so.”

  Patricia, who’d come back to New York with her brother and our grandmother, remembers her father, sitting on the couch and watching the TV news. Her mother asked him to repeat what he’d said because she wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “You might think she would have jumped for joy at that point, but she just stared at him, all flat and airless on the couch,” she says. “He was dry-eyed, dry-mouthed. You could see the cracked skin on his lips.”

  Tío Raúl never explained what he was wrong about, never again said another word about his role in the revolution to anyone outside of the family. He cut back on his cab time and sealed himself up in the little studio where he splashed black and white paint on huge canvasses, creating nightmarish swirls. Tía Zenaida had long ago given up on selling his work—it was too ugly, she said, and besides, she was busy with Patricia and Manolito—and she was infuriated with Tío Raúl’s absence from the family. She told him that Manolito had asked who his father was, and that Patricia wanted to know why he was always angry (back when she hated Tío Raúl, Patricia would confirm this but now that she’s reconciled she claims to have no memory of it).

  This went on for a few years. Tío Raúl working and painting, Tía Zenaida raising the kids and complaining. One day, Tío Raúl came home and announced he had a one-person show at a downtown gallery. Abuela Olga laughed in his face again. Tía Zenaida couldn’t believe anybody actually liked his paintings, much less thought they could sell them. She worried that the show might hurt more than help—that nothing would sell, that people would make fun of him, that he would die of embarrassment.

  Patricia remembers it all as bittersweet. It was a crisp October night. The gallery was a little place in SoHo, well lit and clean, with a huge window showing one of her father’s blacker canvasses. She remembers arriving late and seeing a gaggle of men in suits standing outside the gallery, smoking and talking. The opening was almost over and as she, Manolito and her mother went to the door, a man walked out with a canvas all wrapped up in brown paper. They all stopped and watched as the man opened a car trunk and carefully placed the painting inside. Tío Raúl stepped out from the gallery and saw his family but he merely nodded in their direction. He went straight to the man, hugged him and shook his hand many times.

  “Raúl Fonseca, it was my destiny to buy your art tonight,” said the pot-bellied man, now lighting a huge Cuban cigar. “My uncle assures me that this is a great investment, that you will be one of the great artists of our exile.”

  Just then the door popped open again, revealing a couple. Between the two of them they balanced an even bigger canvas wrapped in brown paper. They stopped and Tío Raúl turned to them, shaking their hands and making bowing gestures in their direction.

  “Señor Fonseca, we believe in you,” the woman said.

  “Her father has never been wrong, you know,” the man said, nodding in his wife’s direction. “He can foresee the future—and with this painting, so do we.”

  “You realize we cannot wait for the show to be over to have this piece in our home—it is too powerful!” said the woman.

  Tía Zenaida couldn’t believe what she was seeing, couldn’t believe that Raúl had a patron who had so much faith in him that he had actually talked people into buying the work. She grabbed Raúl’s arm.

  “My god, how much did we make tonight?” she asked.

  “We?” he asked, laughing. “We made about twenty thousand dollars.” Tía Zenaida was sure he was kidding. “Twenty thousand dollars?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And you know from whom?”

  Tío Raúl was laughing hysterically. Patricia says she was frightened when she saw this, that it reminded her of the way people laughed on television shows just before they were taken away by docto
rs or police. Tío Raúl was laughing so hard, tears were running down his face and he was choking in his effort to get the words out.

  “You know who these people are?” he finally managed, wiping his face with a handkerchief plucked from his vest pocket. Tía Zenaida just stared at him. “They’re Caviancito’s relatives.”

  “Caviancito—that fortune-telling idiot who talked you into going to fight with Fidel?” Tía Zenaida asked, horrified.

  “Well, no, he was trying to talk me out of it, remember?”

  “Yes, and he did such a good job that you disappeared for years.”

  Tío Raúl cleared his throat. “Well, remember—the reason he thought I shouldn’t go was because he thought I’d be a great artist someday—a rich artist. Well, he told all his friends and relatives about me, he told them that they should buy my work because it would be worth a lot someday. Can you believe that? The whole show sold out—everything!—his uncles and nieces and mistresses all bought my work. And they won’t wait—they’re just carting the canvasses off the wall! The dealer’s in a state of shock! Can you believe?”

  Patricia said that if she’d heard the story from anybody else, she wouldn’t have believed it. But she says she was there for all of it, that she saw the moment when Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida put their arms around each other tightly, tighter than at any other time, and held each other in silence as they both cried. Patricia says she held Manolito’s hand and tried to look away but couldn’t. She says they knew it was probably the last time their parents would ever be together.