Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  A year later, they were divorced. Tío Raúl stayed in New York making art and Tía Zenaida and the kids moved to Miami with Abuela Olga. Eventually, Patricia and Manolito left home for college, American-style. After Abuela Olga died, Tía Zenaida moved to Chicago to help us run the laundromat. Not that she needed to work. Tío Raúl made insane amounts of money with his paintings, and long after Patricia and Manolito were grown and out of the house, generous checks continued to arrive for her on a monthly basis.

  Neither of them ever re-married. At family gatherings, such as Caridad’s wedding, they sit together. Tío Raúl holds out Tía Zenaida’s chair for her at the table. When they dance together, he holds her a little bit away but they always gaze at each other.

  Gina always claimed to like the story of Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida. When we first got together, she’d try to pry a morsel or two more from Tío Raúl or Tía Zenaida about the early days of the revolution, but she eventually gave up. My Tía Zenaida has forgiven Tío Raúl, but not Fidel. She’s convinced without Fidel her life would have been very different, that perhaps she and Raúl would have stayed together. Without Fidel, Patricia might not have ever rebelled, and Manolito might have grown up less hostile and more secure about his father’s love.

  What Gina found was that, like my mother, Tía Zenaida’s a master at the counterrevolutionary comeback, the rhetoric about Fidel as a tyrant and all things in Cuba since his arrival being awful. Every time Gina asked Tía Zenaida anything, what she got back was a barrage of anti-communist propaganda that usually left her speechless. On the few occasions when Gina had an opportunity to talk to Tío Raúl, he just shrugged and smiled at her, refusing to trip himself up with those memories again.

  I worried then, and understand now, that Gina never quite got the moral of the story about Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida. The way I see it, it really has nothing to do with Fidel or the revolution, who was right and who was wrong. Whatever his imperfections, whatever her intentions, the message of Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida is that lies destroy everything, but especially love.

  CHAPTER 11

  NATURALLY, GINA’S POLITICS mattered very much—not just to Gina, but to me too. They determined everything—what music we listened to, what food we ate, what clubs we went to, even what clothes we wore. It’s not that I didn’t have my own opinions about these things, but I usually didn’t feel as strongly as she did. And although I’m not political, because it made life easier when we were together, I went along with most of her causes and decisions about things.

  For example, I know Hall & Oates’ “Maneater” is just plain misogynistic, but I can’t help but feel like dancing whenever it comes on the radio. Gina argued that that is precisely the problem—that “Maneater” is so damn effective and subversive because it seduces with the music then pumps all these women-hating thoughts through the lyrics into our brains without our even realizing it.

  I explained over and over that the first time I heard “Maneater” I hardly even spoke English, so the words had no effect on me whatsoever, and that what I’m responding to is simply the beat and, perhaps, the memory of Caridad, always the dancer, teaching Patricia how to move more soulfully. Gina didn’t buy it though; she insisted that language in and of itself is irrelevant, that it’s the message that’s being drummed in that matters, whether it’s in Hebrew or Swahili or pig Latin.

  Because of Gina’s politics, I didn’t listen to most rock ‘n’ roll during our relationship, put away a lot of old salsa and malesung boleros (because they encouraged women to romanticize instead of working on real relationships) and replaced them with Nueva Trova and Nueva Canción (they’re okay most of the time), Lucecita Benítez, Haciendo Punto en Otro Son, and lots of instrumental jazz, especially by African-Americans. I was just grateful that Conjunto Céspedes passed her litmus test, and that it was somehow forgivable to listen to Celia Cruz (especially the early santería songs). I never asked why, quite frankly, for fear of giving Celia—a Cuban exile—too much analysis and having to take her off the list too.

  During my time with Gina, I ate less red meat (I refused to give it up entirely, in spite of her health and political warnings, because it also meant I would eat less Cuban food, which I love and refuse to give up for anything or anyone, including her), no California grapes or lettuce (because of the boycotts), nothing with artificial sweeteners, and no mass-produced eggs. I ate a lot more soy (which I actually like), brown rice (which I think ruins every Cuban rice dish in Cocina Al Minuto), tortillas, plátanos, and oatmeal (a source of protein, she told me). Mercifully, I was spared cabrito except for special occasions, and I eventually developed a taste for arroz y gandules.

  During that time, I only went to lesbian bars with mixed race clienteles, or on salsa nights, and only wore clothes made with natural fibers—although, whatever their fabric content, absolutely no clothes from Asia which could have been made with child labor.

  Gina’s politics also mattered to my parents. They didn’t say much because the whole situation was so loaded for them, but they were both dismayed. In many ways, particularly for my mother, the concern was practical. Gina often visited prisoners at Menard who’d been involved in what Mami, and a lot of others, I suppose, would label as terrorist activities. Gina’s friends were often arrested and sent to prison; at the very least, many of them had contentious relations with the police, who constantly harassed and provoked them. My mother worried about my association with Gina, whether the cops would start looking at me differently in the neighborhood, or that maybe it would affect the laundromat.

  “You know,” Mami would say, “not all Puerto Ricans have Gina’s politics. Some of them are for statehood. A lot of them don’t like Fidel.”

  “Ay, Mami, I know,” I’d say.

  “Not everybody’s so…radical, okay?”

  “Well, no, but obviously, not everybody’s for statehood either,” I’d say. “I mean, look at the referendums in Puerto Rico. They always come down for staying a commonwealth, right in the middle between statehood and independence.”

  My mother would shake her head. “I just don’t think they know what they want,” she’d say.

  But I thought, Maybe they do—maybe they like not having to make a choice. Maybe no choice is their choice. Of course, I kept this notion to myself—my mother would have been confused by it, and Gina, I knew, would have been furious.

  Like my mother, my father was also wary of Gina’s activities but not so much because they were on opposite sides of most issues. Mostly, I think, his concern was less about losing any kind of argument with her than about having to take a stand—if she really pushed him, challenged him in any way, he might have to kick her out of his house or have a meaningful talk with me about the conflict. Naturally, these kinds of things terrify my father. He’d much rather tell stories about himself as a hero and bemoan his lost duct tape fortune.

  I’d have thought my cousin Patricia, with her own past revolutionary fervor, would have bonded pretty fast with Gina. But, in fact, of all my relatives she was the one who clearly liked Gina least. It wasn’t just competition (as Jimmy, who can’t stand either of them, suggested) but that Patricia found Gina’s politics confusing.

  “She’s like a combination Fidelista and lesbian separatist,” Patricia would say with a laugh. “And the best part is she’s not even out! What a hoot! I mean, all this ecological and feminist posturing has little to do with leftist ideology or Cuba. What does she think about the nuclear plant in Cienfuegos, huh?”

  I didn’t have an answer. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the contradictions between her politics and her closet, the great irony of Gina spouting stuff that would have seemed more at home in a song by a separatist such as Alix Dobkin than in a treatise about Cuba or Puerto Rican liberation. It’s just that, plain and simple, I loved her. I was crazy, head-over-heels wild about her. I would have accommodated everything, forgiven anything.

  It doesn’t matter how much time goes by: Some of my memories about
my time with Gina remain crystalline. For example, waking up in the mornings wrapped up with her. I remember when the alarm would go off, I’d press up against Gina’s back, putting my arms around her so as to cup her breasts in my hands. I remember distinctly that her skin was soft, musky, and rare—I loved the smell of her, whether she was newly showered, still prying her eyes open in the morning, or wet from sweat after exercise.

  Waking up with Gina meant I had slept well. It meant I had dreams and could wake up worthy of love, ready for anything. If I could smell Gina on my skin as I headed out the door to start my day, I was in glory. I never, ever, showered in the mornings when I slept with her, only at night, knowing that I’d absorb her, digest her overnight.

  Crawling in bed with Gina, feeling her arms envelop me in that snug, warm vise, I felt as if nothing could ever hurt me. I remember the first time we were naked, all tied up like that just for sleeping, how I suddenly realized I had never known how exposed I’d been, how at risk and fragile. I wanted to be with Gina—in Gina, on Gina—all the time. I was sick with love, sick with yearning, up to my neck with it. To me, she was like the purest, blackest earth—that rich, sweet soil in which sugarcane grows. I always imagined her as hills in which I would roll around, happy and dirty, as if I were back in Cuba, or perhaps in Puerto Rico. When I was going through these reveries, I always forgot how sugarcane sucks the earth, makes it barren and dry, how it made my Tío Raúl rich but drove him insane first.

  Not sleeping with Gina meant headaches, maybe leg cramps. It meant I’d probably stayed up until two or three in the morning, trying to knock myself out with meaningless TV or cheap novels. Sometimes, when I got insomnia because of Gina’s absence, I’d play video games at the laundromat, make huge vats of soup that would last for weeks, or masturbate to sleazy heterosexual stories I found in Penthouse Letters. I remember every moment with her, and every anxious moment in between those.

  When Gina and I were together, we’d dance merengue on weekends, grinding and twirling so that my knees would crack the next day. I’d be working at the laundromat, hear my bones pop as I bent down to pick up a piece of trash and get this feeling of immense satisfaction. My joints had never snapped like that before, had never felt so useful.

  Before I met Gina, I was content. My family gave me a baseline love that let me know I mattered. My cousins provided an irresistible, joyful core to my life. I had friends in the neighborhood. But after I met Gina, I was delirious. I couldn’t concentrate, I could barely keep food in my stomach. If she wasn’t there to hold me—if I couldn’t feel that she was real, and that we were real—I was a mess. After Gina, I could never remember my dreams; it was as if suddenly I didn’t have dreams, or could only recall snatches of them, tiny scenes that would torment me all day long.

  Of course, I could never tell Gina about any of this. I couldn’t tell her about my love for her, about the way my veins felt like bursting from just being around her. It’s not that she didn’t reciprocate me in some way; I understood—from her breathing, from the way her whole body softened just at the sight of me, from the sheer relief I knew she found in my arms when we went to bed at night—that we were connected, that we were in this thing together.

  Before Gina, I’d never wanted to tell anyone outside my family I loved them, and that leap was overwhelming for me. Whenever I thought about it, whenever I felt the words like a big fatty ball welling up in my throat, I’d choke. If I said them aloud, what would it mean?

  “You gonna marry Gina?” Jimmy asked me one day. His voice dripped with mockery. He knew—in some ways better than anybody else—that I was upside down, shaking in my skin about Gina, and he loved to torture me with it.

  “Juani and Gina sitting in a tree,” he singsonged while hanging out at the Wash-N-Dry.

  I shot him a dirty look. “Shut the fuck up,” I whispered between clenched teeth. Jimmy laughed and laughed. I hated the way he assumed he had anything on us.

  I tried to be cool. It was important. She was the biggest reason for my silence about my love for her, she was my biggest ache. Because it didn’t matter if we were regulars at Tania’s or the Red Dog or Paris Dance, dancing until dawn with our pelvises up against each other; it didn’t matter that we were together four, five nights a week, breathing heavily on my living room floor, Gina pulling on my hair and writhing across the rug; it didn’t matter at all that our friends, and eventually my family, said our names together, Juani and Gina, as if it were one word—juanigina—because the bottom line was simple: Gina wasn’t out, didn’t have any plans to come out, and wasn’t in a hurry to even consider it. For Gina, what we had was wonderful, but passing; thrilling, but temporary; an adventure, but only for memory’s sake.

  I thought a lot about Pauli back then, and about Mike, the old man who had died so happy to have enjoyed her for even a brief moment. But when I mentioned this to Patricia, she looked at me funny.

  “Mike was in his eighties,” she said. “Pauli was a reminder of something he didn’t know he was still capable of—she wasn’t the beginning, but an end. For god’s sake, Juani, you’re only twenty-four, you haven’t lost anything yet.”

  CHAPTER 12

  NENA HAD ALREADY MOVED TO MIAMI and Pauli and Rosa had gone back to Mexico to pick up their things when, one night, Gina told me she wasn’t very happy with our relationship anymore. We’d been together for about a year then and I’d been looking forward to the beginning of our second, thinking that as we did the same things from one year to the next, we’d develop real routines, maybe even traditions.

  In my heart of hearts I know I was afraid—I’d hoped she wouldn’t notice the passage of time, that it would quietly consume us, and that once our passion passed, that she wouldn’t be able to imagine anything else but what we had. I know I was counting on habit to seal our bond, that I was hoping she’d have as little imagination as me. But it was all I had to hold on to then.

  What Gina said was that she was tired of coming over to my family’s house and having to put up with my relatives, especially the men, making Puerto Rican jokes all the time, acting like Cubans were god’s gift to the world. “You guys run a good laundromat but, you know, so what? It doesn’t make you better than the homeless guy outside your door,” she told me. She said we were racists and classists and that we only made fun of Puerto Ricans because most of them were darker and poorer than us.

  Here’s a joke Jimmy told once that really annoyed Gina: What’s the difference between a Cuban and a Puerto Rican? A Cuban’s a Puerto Rican with a job. When he told this one, everybody busted up, even Nena, who immediately looked down at the floor, totally embarrassed. Caridad tittered, unaware that there was much of anything wrong. I remember I was terrified that Gina would finally erupt. But she didn’t. She just shook her head in disgust and walked out of the room.

  I’ve got to admit I chuckled too. I mean, it was incredibly stupid, but kind of funny. I tried to explain to Gina that it was all meant in fun, but she reminded me that I thought “Maneater” was just for dancing, so that proved where my consciousness was at. I told her it was just a Cuban cultural thing, a generational thing, a Jimmy thing, but none of my words had any weight.

  It didn’t help matters when, unexpectedly, Patricia took Gina’s side by saying that she’d have dumped Ira long ago if he’d let his family treat her the way I let mine treat Gina.

  “You assume everybody should adapt to your family’s view,” said Patricia one night on our way home from dinner just the two of us. “But just because you do doesn’t mean everybody else should too. Gina puts up with a lot even before we get to the Puerto Rican jokes, which are idiotic and shouldn’t be tolerated, Gina or no Gina.”

  “I can’t change Mami or Papi, Jimmy or Pucho,” I said in my own defense.

  “No, but you can let them know you think that kind of thing is out of line,” Patricia said as we climbed into her VW. “I mean, I do—you don’t see them pulling that kind of crap around me.”

  I had to
admit she had a point. Everybody knows Patricia won’t tolerate certain racist or otherwise prejudiced behavior and so they do everything possible to avoid the inevitable confrontation if they falter in front of her. Patricia pretty much calls everybody on everything—which often means people think she’s humorless and try to avoid her, but which also means she’s spared a lot of grief.

  I know, for example, that—back when Nena was in charge of the laundromat and Tío Pepe was still alive—whenever he got mad over Nena’s strict business practices, he’d accuse her of being a Jew and trying to rip off his profits. But if Patricia was around, Tío Pepe found some other way to say the same thing. Because Patricia’s married to Ira, Tío Pepe knew whatever he said would be taken personally—even if what he said was meant in jest, or if he went out of his way to say he wasn’t talking about Ira. While he was willing to get down and dirty with Patricia about Fidel, he knew no one would back him if he was offensive to Patricia about Ira, whom everyone more or less liked.

  I thought for a minute about Nena, how she shrugged these things off, not because she agreed or disagreed with any of them, but because she was so damn focused on her own escape. I don’t think I can remember a time now when Nena wasn’t planning her way out of the Wash-N-Dry, to Miami and away from the family. These things may have bothered her back then, but she didn’t choose to argue about them. Most of the time, she seemed to just play along.

  I thought about Pauli too, how she behaved a lot like Gina, just walking away when the talk got ugly. I knew that ability to detach was part of why we called her the Fortress of Solitude, and why our parents often found her so distant and cold. If we didn’t always know Nena’s feelings about this kind of thing, Pauli was obvious—and disdainful. We resented it, so we rejected her, little by little.

  I didn’t have an escape, and I didn’t want to be rejected.