by Achy Obejas
I had an idea. “Hey, call up Tío Raúl,” I said.
Bernie played on the keys. And there it was: Fonseca, Raúl (born 1930). Raúl Fonseca created his trademark pieces by using only black and white paint. Raúl Sigfredo Fonseca Torres was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and came to the United States in 1960, an exile from Fidel Castro’s revolution. He studied under Thomas Bentram, whose realistic style of painting he later rejected. During his early years, he drove taxicabs and did maintenance work in New York City. Fonseca’s early paintings rely on the use of bright colors and reflect the influence of his upbringing in the tropics. After encountering his first northern winter, he began to paint exclusively in black and white. His first one-man show was in 1962. Since then, Fonseca has held shows of new works nearly every year, including exhibitions in Venice, Milan, and Paris. In his later work, faces and shapes are recognizable behind the mass of shadows. Among his best-known works are Gusano Ghosts, Winter Rhythms, La Cafetera/Christmas Morning and Blue Boots. Havana Mist, which the artist sold for fifteen hundred dollars when he painted it in 1962, was purchased by the National Gallery of Art for more than two million dollars in 1986.
I couldn’t believe it. “That’s not right,” I said. “Tío Raúl isn’t an exile. He was here long before the revolution. Heck, he went back after the revolution.”
“See? It’s what I was telling you,” Bernie said. “You have to read between the lines.”
“And it wasn’t the winters here that changed his style, it was being in Cuba and Costa Rica and almost dying a couple of times,” I continued, aghast.
“Yep,” Bernie said, like this was just the way things were supposed to be.
Then the real light bulb went off: “Bernie,” I said, “let’s look up duct tape.” I don’t know why this occurred to me—clearly everything was unreliable. The whole world was one big liar’s club. What the hell was I thinking? But Bernie just giggled and made the right strokes. A run of lines popped up on the screen.
“Oh, great, alt.sex.duct-tape.hamster,” Bernie said, laughing heartily.
I glanced over his shoulder. “Here’s something,” I said, using my finger to point at an entry about adhesives in the tropics.
From there on, I was a goner: Natural gums are the solidified juice, or sap, of certain plants. Many gums are soluble in water, swell up in water, or form a mucilage in water but do not dissolve in alcohol or ether. The word gum, however, is sometimes applied to resins or mixtures of gums and resins. And there was Papi dancing in my head: stirring his stinking buckets, Cheo and Felo and Cuco churning stalks of god-knows-what in those silly hand-held machines used to make guarapo, and Mami standing at the door to the patio, her hands on her hips, eyes in shadows, doubtful and disgusted.
I closed my eyes. A number of different gums have industrial uses. They go into adhesives, sizing (glazing) for silk and cotton fabrics, calico printing, and candy. Medically they are soothing to mucous membranes and are also used to suspend insoluble substances. And there he was again: Papi, glossy with sweat, standing in our patio in Havana, gulping down a cool drink Mami brought out on a tray for him, talking about plant gums, complex compounds, neutral salts, potassium, magnesium, acidic polysaccharides and Cuban tree frogs, their tiny, sticky feet like suckers to help them up and down plant stems.
And it was as if I were at the beginning all over again, the beginning of all my doubts, the beginning of my very existence. Because how could I remember any of this? I was just a kid when the whole duct tape episode occurred—a five, six year old, running around between the buckets of bubbling mystery soup, between the legs of Felo and Cuco and Cheo as they rolled the cinta magnética into messy balls that we—me and my little friends from the neighborhood—would later throw against the wall in a game to see if they would stick.
“Who invented duct tape?” I asked Bernie.
He looked at me askance. “Well, I guess it depends who you believe,” he said, but he was uneasy now. I could feel myself glazing over; I knew he saw something was wrong.
I made him punch in Papi’s name but there was nothing, absolutely nothing.
“Juani, this doesn’t mean shit,” he said. “Remember my mom’s bio, Raúl’s bio.”
“So you believe my father invented duct tape?” I asked him. “Are you gonna tell me that, huh? Seriously? I mean, Bernie, we don’t believe he invented duct tape, okay?”
“Okay,” he said with a shrug, “then what are we doing? Why are we trying to look him up?”
“Because,” I said, gritting my teeth, muscles spasming all over my chest and arm, “…you never know. With my family, you just fuckin’ never know.”
CHAPTER 18
THE DAY AFTER MY HORRIBLE OUTBURST, I Woke Up on the couch, where I’d been sleeping during my visit, and found Nena bent over the newspaper at the kitchen table. A café con leche steamed near her hand. She was still in her nightgown, her face weary, eyes puffy. Bernie was nowhere in sight and the loft was so quiet I could hear the birds outside. The place felt cool and still.
“Buenos días,” Nena said, looking over as I tossed my legs down to the floor. I grunted something back, scratched my calves and stretched but everything hurt. My breast pulled, causing that blunt pain I’d become so familiar with since “the incident.”
“You want some coffee?” Nena asked, not waiting for an answer. She pushed her chair back, got up and poured me a cup. As she walked over to the couch, she made a scratchy, shuffling sound with her slippers on the floor. “Here,” she said, handing me my cafesito.
“Gracias,” I muttered back, my head down, refusing eye contact. Had yesterday really happened? Was that really me yelling and screaming at Mami on the phone? Crying in Nena’s arms?
“How are you feeling?” she asked, dropping into the chair opposite the couch.
I nodded, eyes still down. I gulped down some coffee, which was strong and black and bitter. My head hurt. “Where’s Bernie?” I asked.
“Running some errands,” Nena said. “I thought maybe you and I should talk, you know, by ourselves.”
I cupped my cafesito in both hands. I’d drank it all, leaving just a few grounds at the bottom of the porcelain cup. “Didn’t Mami tell us you could read the future in the coffee dregs?” I asked, glancing up for an instant.
I could see Nena nodding somewhere through the hair hanging in my face. “Yeah,” she said.
Then I looked down at us, as if I were perched on one of the loft’s beams: We were like survivors in the hushed morning light of a battlefield—limbs worn and tired, skin pale.
“Do you want to tell me what really happened with you and Gina?” Nena asked. “What’s going on with you, huh?”
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said, but I wasn’t even trying to be convincing.
Nena leaned up, her elbows poised on her thighs like Jimmy staring at his clothes whirling in the washing machine. “Well, something’s gotta be up,” she said. “Something’s wrong, I can tell, something’s really wrong.”
I didn’t say anything, didn’t move.
“Have you talked to anybody else?” she asked.
I shook my head, then dropped back, my remains slumped on the couch.
“If you don’t want to talk to me, fine, but you should talk to somebody, Juani,” she said. “Keeping stuff like that inside isn’t good for you.”
I snickered at that: I mean, really, what moral room did she have to say anything to me about keeping secrets?
Nena stared at me. “What?” she asked, surprised by my change in attitude.
“So why didn’t you tell me about you and Bernie?” I asked, smirking.
She rolled her eyes and sat back on the chair. “Please,” she said, disgusted.
“No, really,” I insisted. I put the cafesito down and crossed my arms on my chest. My breast twinged with pain when my hand unexpectedly fell on it.
“For starters, I thought you knew,” she said.
I let out a sarcastic little laugh. “Oh, rea
lly?”
“Yeah, really.”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Well, because Bernie’s father is a friend of Ira’s from New York and I’m pretty sure Patricia knows, so I thought, since you two talk so much these days, that you at least suspected something,” she said.
“Small world,” I said. I picked at my lip, like Bernie had done the day before.
“Are you upset because I didn’t tell you?” Nena asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t care, really,” I said, though it was obvious I cared very much. “I was just surprised, that’s all. I thought we told each other everything.”
“Probably not everything,” Nena said, trying on a little smile.
“Everything important,” I said.
She nodded.
“Bernie seems kind of important.”
Nena’s smile became easier. She looked over at me like maybe we were back to being our old selves. “He is important, very important,” she said. “I think he’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I didn’t need to hear this. I knew it already. “So why didn’t you tell me about him?” I pressed.
Nena sighed, slouched. The light was coming in through the warehouse windows in strong shafts of shimmering yellow. Bernie’s surfboards sat darkly, in contrast to everything, like a black fortress in the corner. My headache kept pounding. When I closed and opened my eyes, I could see starbursts, just like at the hospital when I was still on the gurney.
“I was going to tell you,” she said, gathering her legs under her body on the chair, pulling down her nightgown. “There was never any question of that. But I needed time, Juani—it’s my first real relationship, the first time I’ve ever really been in love. I mean, I’m twenty-seven and a little behind everybody else in this way—even you, my little sister—and I’m still getting to know who I am when I’m in love and intimate with a man.”
And with that, we finally relaxed a little, the two of us, wearied but real for what was probably the first time during my visit. Nena told me about her and Bernie, little things and big things, but mostly how she was, at first, afraid of having a relationship with him because he was so different from us, from her, and so unlike anything she’d ever imagined for herself.
“I couldn’t figure out what he saw in me, either,” she said. “I mean, I know I’m attractive—that’s not it—but I’m not very exciting, and he is—he’s been all over, met everyone, read everything. Done everything too—traveled, surfed, skied, gotten high, meditated with swamis. I’ve just been sitting in that laundromat, you know?”
And, of course, I knew, because that was me too: waiting and waiting there, whirling in a space as small and suffocating as the inside of one of those dryers.
“And there’s Mami,” Nena continued. “I was so incredibly attracted to Bernie from the first minute I saw him, and yet, even though I know her whole thing about skin color is bullshit, it kept haunting me. You see, I know I would never give Bernie up because she won’t approve, but I also know that my being with him is going to torture her, even though her reasons are totally fucked up. And I’m my mother’s daughter, I don’t want to hurt her.” She paused and looked my way. “I wasn’t keeping the secret from you as much as from her. I just don’t want to fight with her, not now, not while everything is so wonderful with Bernie. Later—if we break up, then it won’t matter that I never told her.”
“You’re already planning on breaking up?” I asked, stunned.
“No, no,” Nena said, dropping her legs back to the floor and squirming her feet into her slippers. “But I’m being realistic. I’m just giving us some time, and I’m giving me some time.”
“You could have told me.”
Nena shook her head. “No, I couldn’t,” she said. “You’d go to lunch at Tía Celia’s with some shit-eating grin on your face and give away that you knew something, even if you didn’t tell the actual story. And then they’d be all over both you and me, and one of us—probably me—would crack and tell, and everything that I was hoping to avoid would happen.”
She got up and went shuffling into the kitchen area. I sauntered over to the CD player and popped on some Pérez Prado. The hyper-happy sound filled the room. Trumpets struggled against saxes, saxes against trombones. “Unnngh!” grunted Prado. I couldn’t take it. I turned it off and flipped on some Beny Moré, with his smooth as brandy voice, singing, “Viiiiiidaaa…” Now I could see dancers in the open space. I could see myself effortlessly moving, stepping this way, then that, propelled by an inner ecstasy—ranting smoothly, going down—suspended for a moment in the arch of a lover’s arms, then returning to earth again, graceful, sweet.
God, I thought, would I ever feel that way again?
I walked over to the kitchen and dropped down at the table while Nena, in what seemed like an imitation of Bernie, or maybe Caridad or even Tía Celia, sliced and chopped some fruit into a bowl.
“Pauli said the same thing,” I said.
Nena placed the bowl of fruit on the table. There was banana and apple, kiwi and strawberries, tangerine slices and green grapes, and bits of mamey scooped out of the shell with a spoon which made them look like little ice cream balls. I thought of Tía Celia and the way she gorges on fruit now that Tío Pepe’s gone.
“What do you mean?” Nena asked, placing a couple of smaller bowls in front of us. She folded a napkin and tossed it to me, then handed me a spoon.
“Pauli said the same thing you did, about why she wasn’t gonna tell me stuff.”
Nena smiled. “What wasn’t she gonna tell you?” she asked, avoiding my invitation to talk about why they didn’t trust me to keep secrets.
“Who Rosa’s father is,” I said, deciding to go along with her for now.
“Oh,” Nena said, and the way she said it made me think she knew—and I looked up but Nena had just set me up, that’s all. She was grinning. “I was just kidding,” she said, and it was obvious. “I don’t know who Rosa’s father is, honest.” She laughed a little.
“Oh I know you don’t know,” I said, mamey oozing out of my mouth. I grabbed the napkin from my lap and wiped my face. “ButI know.”
“Really?” Nena’s eyes widened. “Who? Who is it?” she asked, excited. “And how do you know?”
I wagged my finger from side to side. “Uh uh,” I said, “I’m only gonna tell you if you tell me something I don’t know!”
Nena laughed. “This is bribery, extortion, blackmail!” she shouted, but she was hooked, she was into it—she was definitely going to spill the beans about somebody. “All right, what do you want to know?”
“Heck, Nena, you’re the one supplying the what—I don’t know what I don’t know,” I said. We were feeling good now, connected. I was pain free.
“All right, who?”
“Ah, let’s see…” I pondered. I leaned up on the table, my bowl of fruit emptied. “Caridad?”
“Nah, there’s really nothing about Caridad I know that you don’t.”
“Honest?”
Nena nodded. “Yeah, really, and I think we both have the same questions about her anyway.”
“Why the fuck she ever married Jimmy, you mean?”
Nena nodded again. “Exactly,” she said. “And why she puts up with him, and why she lets him beat her…all that.”
I could tell by the look on her face that just thinking about it made her immensely sad. I knew this was another opportunity to tell her the truth about me, about the ugly things I shared with Jimmy, but I just sat there, played with my lip and rolled the end of my napkin. Maybe I could keep some secrets after all.
Nena got up and poured some milk into a little pot then put it over a flame. Café con leche was coming. “Somebody else,” she said. I was relieved.
“Patricia?” I offered.
Nena wrinkled her face. “Let me think…”
“Tía Zenaida? Titi?”
“Oh, I know,” Nena said, her eyes bright again. “Patri
cia and Titi—consider it a two-for-one special.”
“Patricia and Titi?” I asked, surprised. “I didn’t even think they got along.”
“Well, I think that’s what you’re supposed to think,” Nena said as she poured us a couple of café con leches, “but, once upon a time, things were pretty intense between them.”
“You mean…?” I sat back, aghast. Titi I’d guessed, but Patricia? Hadn’t she always been married to Ira?
“Well, I don’t think anything ever happened,” Nena said, “but there was tremendous sexual tension between them when they first met and—”
“Patricia?” I asked, still in shock. “But she’s straight as an arrow!”
Nena shook her head. “God, no,” she said. “I mean, she loves Ira and is totally faithful and wouldn’t have it any other way, but I’ve picked up that Patricia was pretty sexually active in college, until Ira came along.”
“Yeah, but with women?” I couldn’t believe it: Patricia? The same cousin Patricia I knew and argued with and never picked up the slightest vibe from? “Nena, my radar for these things is pretty good and I gotta tell you, she just doesn’t register!”
“Well, no—I don’t think she’s very sexual at all anymore, even with Ira,” Nena said, “but according to Manolito—”
“Manolito?” Nena had always been closer to Manolito than the rest of us, but Patricia never confided in her brother, so what would he know?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Nena said. “Look, are you gonna let me finish or are you gonna keep interrupting?”
I agreed to shut up and sit still. And Nena told me how Patricia, on her first visit to Cuba, fell pretty hard for Titi and wanted desperately to be with her. But she’d already married Ira, who hadn’t a clue, and Titi wasn’t interested in being anybody’s mistress, nor was she interested in pagando los platos rotos of their relationship: Patricia, after all, could come and go from Cuba and never be harassed, but Titi would have to stay and endure the loneliness and isolation of their arrangement, so she refused.