Thine is the Kingdom

by Abilio Estevez

  Eleusis is Uncle Rolos bookstore. You can visit it by going out to the street and turning toward the south corner of the building. There, very near the stables, where Linea Street almost dead-ends at the train station, you will see the sign with hard-to-read gothic lettering and an arrow. Just a matter of turning a bit to the right and you’ll see the bookstore, and you’ll know it’s a bookstore because it says so, otherwise anyone would just keep on walking, thinking that it’s an outpost of Headquarters. Uncle has made the shop out of three walls and a wooden roof, and since it backs up to his own room, he has opened a door that communicates with the house, so that the house has become an extension of the shop. And since Uncle Rolo wasn’t born yesterday and he knows that the bookstore doesn’t look like one, he’s seen to writing in black letters on all sides of it: ELEUSIS,THE BEST IN CULTURE FROM EVERY ERA, and he has opened a small shop window (there wasn’t money for more) and has astutely placed several editions of the Bible. And he has lots of sales, because you can’t deny that Uncle knew how to pick a good spot. Everybody comes here if they’re on their way to Bauta, Caimito, Guanajay, Artemisa, and they want to buy themselves a paperback or magazine for the trip. And plenty of soldiers come here, too, officials from Headquarters going to and from Marianao to join in the monotony of the military camp, because what better way to kill time than with an Ellery Queen novel. And, of course, it isn’t just the people passing through: Uncle has his regular clientele; professors and students at the Institute, the teachers from the Kindergarten and Home Economics normal schools, the English teachers from the night school (such as Professor Kingston), and the odd musician or intellectual now and then. Uncle does the selling: his business is not big enough to give himself the luxury of an employee. And Uncle Rolo doesn’t complain, he feels good at his business and every single day (even on national holidays) he opens shop at eight A.M. on the dot and closes it at eight in the evening, with just a two-hour break at midday, because of course, however pleasant it would be to stay in the bookstore, lunchtime and siestas are sacred.

  Several times he has thought that the rain was starting and he has come out to the Island to see it. It is always, however, the same image of a reddish sky, agitated trees, and everything dry, dry as a bone, as if it’s been thousands of years since the last drop of water fell. You think you hear one thing and you hear something else and it’s impossible to tell what you’re really listening to. He lights an H-Upmann cigar (the only luxury he likes to allow himself) with the illusion that the smoke will scare away dark ideas. He lights the cigar well, turning it around and around, then he takes it from his lips, holds it a bit away, observes it. Good cigar, I swear. And there’s nothing like smoking a good cigar after a long day’s work. It’s the only moment in the day you come close to Julio Lobo or that sonofabitch Sarrá. He listens to the rain falling. Deafening, ferocious, that rain. This time it can’t be a mirage, because this time it’s too obvious that it’s raining at last, full force, to make up for all the rain that hasn’t fallen all these months. He goes out to the Island to see the fury of the gods made manifest in this first October downpour. Ah, an illusion. The first drops are yet to fall.

  And Merengue has brought out the rocking chair because he figures it’s all the same whether it rains or not. He adjusts the cushion that Irene made to cover the broken cane, and he sits down to enjoy the cigar. It seems like it’s raining and it’s not raining: it’ll be raining when it seems like it isn’t. That’s the way it is. He rocks. Softly. Last night he sat there, too, after everyone else went in to eat, to smoke his H-Upmann peacefully, in silence. And, of course, he recalls that last night he got home late, sales had gone better than expected. Chavito wasn’t there. Nevertheless, that wasn’t it. No, that wasn’t it. He was actually hardly ever there when Merengue got back from his exhausting tour of Marianao, pushing his pastry cart. What had troubled Merengue last night was discovering that Chavito had apparently not been there all day, that the room had stayed just the way he (Merengue) had left it. His son couldn’t hide it when he passed through a room. If there was anyone unruly in this world it was Chavito, a hurricane who could turn a house upside down, as if he had been raised without a mother. Merengue, who was always fighting about having to pick up the scattered shoes, the shirts tossed on the bed and the dirty underwear on the table, felt despondent because the room was all order and cleanliness, and you could see plain as day that his son had never been through there. As he rocked in the chair with the broken wickerwork, he thought that Chavito had become a different person. It wasn’t (Merengue had given this idea a lot of thought) that he had become more serious, more responsible; not that he had become more thing she does, very early, after bathing and before preparing for her classes, is to boil a great jar of linden tea that she later sets out to cool and puts in the refrigerator. The linden calms her, helps her to think clearly And at night it helps her to sleep. Also, while she reads, she has the habit of marking the words with her lips. Something she does not permit her students but that she has never been able to eliminate. Also, she likes to pick her nose and take her feet out of her slippers and place her tired, calloused soles on the floor. These more or less are the habits of Miss Berta when she reads. She has others; they are not as persistent as these, acquired more than fifty years ago. Though perhaps one other custom should be added: getting up every now and then to observe the sleep of Doña Juana.

  Stealthily, with the utmost care, Miss Berta enters the room and, without even turning on the light, stands in front of her mother s bed. She leans over not only to see but also to hear how the old woman is breathing. Doña Juana sleeps face up, hands crossed over her breast, holding the rosary, as if she wanted to anticipate death, as if this final position were the most natural one possible. At times Miss Berta even forgets about her pious reading and stays there in the room, and observes how her mother’s great breast rises and falls, and studies as best she can in the darkness the expression covering the visage of Doña Juana, no different from the one she wears when she is awake. Miss Berta waits. She has been waiting a long time. Doctor Orozco told her one afternoon that Doña Juana had at most six months to live. Thirty years have passed since that prophecy, and twenty-five since Doctor Orozco was laid to rest in the Iberian Union Lodge section of Colón Cemetery. This year Doña Juana had her ninetieth birthday Miss Berta has never called the doctor again. She waits. She studies, she prepares, and above all, she observes. There, in the darkness, she follows the not entirely steady rhythm of her mother’s breathing. She watches at great length, and studies the vast body inch by inch. Some nights the linden tea does not work and Berta loses patience, looks for the little flashlight she keeps in the drawer of the nightstand and shines it on the old woman’s body. Doña Juana, meanwhile, sleeps marvelously and never alters the rhythm of her breathing. Doña Juana gives herself over to sleep with the certainty of those who were born to be eternal.

  She can’t finish the page, can’t read, doesn’t understand what she’s reading, and she returns again and again to the same words and it’s no good, there’s no way to understand what’s happening to Barabbas in those vineyards he’s getting into. Miss Berta lifts her eyes to the windows. She turns her head toward the room, turns it toward the kitchen. Nobody there, of course. Who would be there? The sensation nevertheless persists that someone, stationed in some corner, is following each and every one of her movements with insidious curiosity, with loutish obstinacy. She drops the book, turns off the lamp, approaches the window and opens the shutters in the conviction that there she will meet with the eyes that are annoying her so. There is no one in the gallery, it seems. She sees only a disordered darkness of wind, trees, and leaves. Air blows in through the windows, humid and smelling of earth, smelling of rain. She closes them again. Walks about the living-dining room saying to herself that she’s a fool, she’s crazy, that’s enough stupidity for now, there’s no one, absolutely no one, watching her. At the same time, however, she finds herself adopting attitudes: Is
it that you are never yourself when you are in front of others, or that you are only yourself when you are in front of others? And where are those eyes? She doesn’t know, she cannot know where the eyes are, the most terrible thing about it is that the eyes are everywhere. And Miss Berta lets herself collapse into the moire easy chair and picks her nose. She recalls that a few months ago, around May or June (Pentecost Sunday), she first felt she was being observed. In the parish church. Very early No one was there. The six o’clock mass had ended and it wasn’t yet time for the next one, and no one had come in. She sat down in the first pew, and then she kneeled to pray and there, kneeling, she felt someone looking at her. The sensation she experienced was so vivid it startled her, she even stood up and looked behind her, searching among the columns, convinced someone had entered the church. No one was there, however. No one. Miss Berta returned to the pew, tried to pray, attempted to say the Credo, raised her eyes several times to the Christ on the main altar with the bloody wounds the color of sepia and the waxen skin, the sloe-colored hair, the sweetly closed eyes, and she could not say the Credo, the words escaped her mind, wiped out by the gaze that was stroking her body like a muddy hand. She thought way, without completely taking up the seat; it gives the impression she is ready to rise at any moment, to take off running, to disappear into the Island, among the rosebushes and plants. Miss Berta, who has also brought a glass of linden tea for herself, sits down in another chair, facing Irene, and she is happy because the eyes have disappeared, and no one is observing her, no insidious gaze is following her; she has only Irene’s eyes in front of her and those don’t bother her. Irene takes a brief sip of the cold concoction and sighs. Miss Berta sits there watching Irene for a good long time, waiting to hear what she has to say, and, perhaps to break the silence, perhaps because it is a question she’d like to ask each and every inhabitant of the globe, she comes out, just like that, completely off the subject, with, And you, do you believe in God? Irene looks at her for an instant; takes another brief sip of the concoction and says, I went out this afternoon, down to the plaza, to look for chayotes for Lucio, Lucio just can’t get enough chayóte soup, and he likes the salad a lot too, and I went out early, walking you know, cutting through back here, past the Cinema Alpha, and what do you know but I met an old friend of mine from Bauta and she looked completely changed, the years had really taken a toll on her, she’s a great old friend of mine, Adela, no, not Adela, Adela died of consumption a little after the hurricane of ‘44, her name is Carmita or Cachita, I’m not sure, and it doesn’t matter, it was a really nice day when I left for the plaza, and while I was standing there buying the chayotes and other things like corn on the cob, the tender kind to make tamales with, the weather started to change, but really change, just like night had suddenly fallen, I remember they had to turn on the lights in the plaza so they could count the money, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and I came running back, I had left some laundry hanging on the line and I didn’t want it to get wet, I came back in a taxicab with the nicest driver, Ramón something or-other was his name, Ramón Yendía, that’s it, and I got back in time to take in the laundry, though if I’d have known it wasn’t going to rain I wouldn’t have rushed so much, and what do you know but when I arrive I find a layer of dirt covering the floor and the furniture and some poplar branches embedded in the grillwork over the main window, and that’s not the worst of it, Berta, it just took me a minute to sweep up the dirt and throw the branches back into the Island, because my mother always said, Everything that dies should go back to the earth, and the most terrible thing happened when I went into the bedroom, and I swear that when I saw what I saw there the sky came crashing down on me, with angels and devils, the whole heavens, on top of me, what did you ask, do I believe in God?

  Irene had been praying to the little printed image of Christ that she keeps under glass on the nightstand. It actually isn’t an image of Christ. That fact, however, will be clarified in its own due time.

  If the reader has no objections, it can be five in the afternoon. The Island should be prematurely dark. Irene would be turning on the lights to sweep out the dirt and return to the Island the branches cut down by the wind and embedded in the grillwork over her main window. It’s also likely she’d organize the chayotes and corn in the vegetable bin and take in the laundry from the clothesline. She should drink a cup of cold coffee, have a look at the almanac, and see again, fleetingly, the face of Carmita or Cachita, her friend from Bauta, the old face, so changed, and she would say that Carmita or Cachita must be her age more or less, so she would already be at least fifty (she wouldn’t know exactly now). And she would reflect, The worst thing about time isn’t what it adds but what it takes away. And if she should enter her room to change clothes, on the floor, between the bed and the wardrobe, in front of the nightstand, she would find the broken porcelain pitcher (tall, in the form of an amphora, with two gilded handles and a pink rococo landscape on the belly). If the reader has no objections, Irene would lean over to pick up the pieces.

  You have to have a lot of courage not to believe, says Irene. You have to have a lot of courage not to believe, says Miss Berta.

  What time is it? Drink the linden, it’s good for you, it calms you down. What happened? I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell you. Excuse me one moment. Miss Berta disappears behind the bedroom door. Carefully she approaches Doña Juana, observes her, tries to listen to her breathing. And Doña Juana, as if she knew someone were monitoring her sleep, is the perfect image of the old woman sleeping in her white linen nightgown with tiny embroidered flowers and the rosary whose crucifix, they say, contains soil from the Holy Land and was consecrated by Pius XII. Miss Berta returns to the living-dining room and sits down again facing Irene and says, A pitcher breaks and memories appear. Irene shakes her head, no, no, let me explain, she straightens in her chair, closes her eyes.

  The pitcher meant a lot to me; the real drama, Berta, is that I have forgotten why.