Thine is the Kingdom

by Abilio Estevez

  How nice the Island looks after the rainstorm. It’s dark green, shining, and the breeze that blows across it is so humid it’s almost cool, with a smell of earth. Mercedes dresses in white. A linen dress with embroidered orange blossoms that go with her leather flats. She pulls her hair back into a well-formed bun that she fastens with tortoise-shell combs. She can’t decide whether to wear the imitation pearl necklace or the silver chain with the medallion of Our Lady of Mercy. She tries each one on before the mirror; it’s true, the chain looks better with her clean face, on which the makeup is imperceptible; on the other hand, it’s already crazy enough to dress in white on such a bad afternoon, if it weren’t that the Wounded Boy is young, so young, and that she feels like dressing in white (a color that goes well with her attractively pale skin). She looks at herself in the mirror for a few seconds, I’m pretty and besides that: I look distinguished, of good family, I know how to move, I know how to look. She smiles. She smiles ingenuously; she has one tooth that slightly overlaps another, that’s attractive, I think. She puts perfume on her neck, the Bridal Bouquet she herself bought at Sears and then said it had been given to her by an admirer to whom she never paid attention, he never leaves me alone, he bothers me so much. She stands up from the dressing table, turns off the light. Marta is smiling in the rocking chair. Mercedes looks at her for one instant and feels despondent. She sighs, goes out to the gallery, it’s true, the Island looks nice after a rainstorm, and her despondence gives way to a melancholy cheerfulness. At least this afternoon you can breathe, autumn has begun; in Cuba, this is autumn: cloudy, stifling days, rainy afternoons, a humid breeze at night, just for dawn to rise again on cloudy, stifling days, and so on until the first norther, which will be a poor grey bit of cold, a pretext for dressing better, a month of license for getting up your hopes of being able to wear a coat.

  Nastasia Filipovna. Instead of Mercedes, she would have liked to be named Nastasia Filipovna. To have not only beauty but also Nastasia s force, her power to impose her will on others. She knows she came to a tragic end. She’s been a long-suffering woman, too, but without the consolation of looking forward to a grand, unforgettable death of tragic dimensions, like Nastasia. It would be magnificent, she thinks, to awaken the love of men like Rogochin, and to awaken the tenderness of men like Prince Myshkin. To be tall and dark, with olive skin, slightly Oriental features, long, pure black hair, dark eyebrows well defined on either side of a proud nose, her red lips smiling, scornful. (I don’t know if that s how she was described, I don’t remember.) So she imagines her. That’s better. Well dressed. Princess dresses. Long and murmuring, so that when she walks you can hear the swish-swish of it. God, how she would like to be a character in a novel! And to scoff at all the rest, yes, and not love any of them, or love only one. To be given a considerable amount of money and throw it into the fire in full view of them all, and they’ll be fascinated, they won’t be able to believe it, and to laugh, turn around with an elegant, graceful swoosh of her great skirt, to leave like a queen while the men who admire her, who worship her, remain there, almost dead, they don’t know what to do without her. Nastasia Filipovna has knocked on Irene’s door. When the latter opens, however, it isn’t Nastasia Filipovna but Mercedes in a white dress who appears. Irene smiles calmly. To be honest, she wasn’t expecting (couldn’t have been expecting) Nastasia Filipovna. She wasn’t expecting Mercedes either, but at least Mercedes belongs to her world and Irene isn’t surprised to see her there, asking, How are you, my dear, explaining to her I’ve come to see how the Wounded Boy is doing. And since Irene is happy to see her, she asks her to come in, Please come on in, make yourself at home. And at the very moment when Mercedes crosses the threshold, the little silver chain with the medallion of Our Lady of Mercy falls from her neck. She feels the chain slip from her neck, feels it fall down her breast. Sees it hit the floor. She must wonder, I suppose, how a necklace she had closed so well had fallen so easily. She doesn’t know that this incident has nothing to do with how well she fastened or didn’t fasten the necklace, but with my desire to interrupt her visit to Irene’s house and to put off her meeting with the Wounded Boy The two women are standing a pace away from the door, looking at the silver chain that has fallen to the floor. There we may leave them.

  As you already know, or should know, Mercedes and Marta are twins. They were born in the middle of summer (Marta first). They grew up in the cemetery. City Hall had appointed the two girls’ father to be the administrator of the Cemetery of La Lisa, giving him the right to live in the spacious and cool house that stood (and stands) inside the cemetery, between the mausoleum of the Veterans of the War of Independence and that of the Knights of the Lodge of Light. There they learned to walk, to run, to play There they discovered one part of the world. They named the streets. They planted rosebushes. They painted images of saints on the walls. They played house and hide-and-seek in the vaults. They lay their dolls to sleep on top of the tombs. They took their dolls’ names from the marble headstones (the same ones they learned to read from). In the shade of the poplar trees, reclining against the vaults, they sat down to eat mangos on stifling afternoons. There too they often slept the siesta. They devoted themselves to keeping the tombs swept clean and changing the water in the vases, which they filled with fresh flowers without drawing distinctions. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they had no friends or predilections. Their friends were the ones with the nicest names on their headstones. Above all the rest, they had their favorite. Her name was Melania. She had been born in Santiago de Cuba and had died in Havana fifteen years later. They made up a history for her, invented a suicide for love on the very day she entered adulthood, the day of her grand debut. They didn’t make her the daughter of an opulent family because the poor tomb in which she was buried (a rectangle of blue tiles with ajar for a vase and a plain wooden cross with her name and dates) did not leave room for many fantasies. They visited her every day They dedicated the prettiest flowers to her. They brought her candies and caramels. For Epiphany gifts they would give her rag dolls and necklaces they made from sequins and beads that they bought for pennies in the Variety Store. One fine day they made her a crown of golden straw and decided to call her Queen of the Cemetery They appointed themselves princesses. So when some funeral procession would enter, they would rejoice, jumping with happiness, and say that a king was coming for Melania. Then it was a matter of preparing for the betrothal, decorating the tomb with wreaths of miniature palms and fronds of royal palms, into which they wove a variety of flowers, bedspreads in festive colors that they took secretly from the house. The marriages, in any case, must have all come to bad ends: Melania would remarry every day: every day a new funeral procession would enter. Soon they realized that, if Melania reigned over the cemetery, the cemetery must have the rank of a kingdom. They gave it a name. Since La Lisa sounded too common, they called it Lalisia. They drew its coat of arms with two angels bearing trumpets, after an illustration they had seen in the missal, and they created a flag from some odd piece of green silk their mother gave them. On the other hand, any respectable kingdom must have, besides a queen and princesses, dukes, counts, marquises, and a cardinal… They sought out the finest tombs and created their nobility Around that time (they would have just turned ten) they discovered the Common Grave. Toward the back, when La Lisa was about to turn to open countryside and you could already see the corrals and pastures and baseball fields, they found an enormous hole in the ground into which the gravediggers threw the bones of those who had no ossuary. As in every kingdom, there were both nobles and plebeians. As in every kingdom, the latter were more likable. Mercedes and Marta spent whole days among the confusion of bones, trying to put them back together, trying to return them to the bodies they had belonged to, as if they were caught up in a giant jigsaw puzzle. That was how they created the town. One afternoon, Mercedes found the bones of a hand the same size as her own. In this way they discovered that children also die. They wandered about sadly for several d
ays, especially Marta (no one ever knew why, but she was the most deeply affected by the discovery). On another occasion when they were forming bodies with the scattered bones, Mercedes touched a skull and felt a chill breeze run through her body, and her skin reacted very strangely. She couldn’t touch the skull; every time she tried, she would once more feel odd sensations in her skin. It was Marta who expressed what she, Mercedes, was thinking: This skull belongs to a man who has some connection with you. They kept the skull in a chest, which they secretly brought into the house. They baptized it, christened it Hylas. Mercedes imagined the young man to whom the skull must have belonged, she imagined him blond, golden-haired, and emerald-eyed, with a straight nose, not too large, and strongly defined lips, and she had an obscure intuition that a relationship was being established between herself and the skull that would last the rest of her life. Since the twins were getting big, they were allowed to go out at night. The cemetery at night was nothing like the cemetery in daylight. Night itself had almost nothing in common with day. At night you wouldn’t sweat from the sun, a cooler breeze blew, the flowers were more intensely scented, shadows seemed more elegant, the most ordinary object acquired dignity, you could look up at the sky without fear of the glare and in the certainty that it would be more entertaining, for the sky at night would show you thousands and thousands of little lights called stars. There were other lights, of course. They came from the ground, especially from the direction of the Common Grave. Yellowish-greenish lights, lights that escaped from below, in no hurry, moving upward, perhaps aspiring to become stars. Will-o-the-wisps, Uncle Leandro said they were called. Their mother s brother, Uncle Leandro, would come on Sundays. He was taller than the average man and his athletic complexion contradicted his sweet ascetic face. He lived from the practice of law; his hobbies were swimming as well as asceticism. Though he was not yet thirty, he was spoken of as a confirmed bachelor. According to what they had heard (Mercedes and Marta had never gone), he lived in a bare little house on the beach at Jaimanitas, by the seashore, accompanied only by books. What was remarkable about Uncle Leandro, however, was the fact (especially important to Marta) that he had visited India. The Sundays that their uncle visited were charming in several ways. Their mother grew contented, professed admiration for her brother, and awaiting his arrival drew her out of the horror of her life. She went to great pains to get the house very tidy then and to prepare their lunch. During the week she was busy ordering the tender goat from which she would elaborate the dish of chilindrón her brother liked so much. Though he spoke little, Uncle Leandro enjoyed a rare charm that made you like him even in his silence. As a gift he always brought a box of candy from El Bilbao, an assortment of Little Crosses and Vanilla Temptations, Lemon Kisses, Heavenly Rolls, Chocolate Caresses, and Coconut Creams. After lunch, he went with his nieces for a walk around the cemetery. They would talk nonstop, telling him about the kingdom of Lalisia, Queen Melania, the counts, dukes, and marquises they lived with. He would listen to them, smiling, silent, pensive. Once Marta dared to ask him, Uncle, tell us about India, and you’d say his eyes shone with rays of gold and green, like the ones put out by the will-o-the-wisps. In those years disastrous events took place. One was that their parents, always belligerent toward each other, decided to stop hiding their disagreements. They argued at any time, over any triviality. Embittered, with a tragic air, their mother talked to herself, uttering curses. Irascible, like a caged beast, their father uttered curses and refused to talk. The situation became unbearable; the girls preferred to spend the day playing, wandering among the tombs. Another disastrous event was that a doctor attending the burial of a patient, as a casual or a causal guest (you can never tell), saw Martas beautiful ruddy cheeks and approached her mother to tell her he was almost certain the girl was or would become diabetic. Her mother got angry and pelted the poor doctor with insults without respecting either mourners or funeral (it must be recorded that, like many people, the mother believed in anathema as a form of exorcism).Whether their mother liked it or not, the fact is that after that day it was possible to understand the fainting spells Marta suffered when she played, as well as the desperate thirst that assailed her at every turn. One night when it was pouring rain, their father and mother had a very loud argument over money. Their father grew enraged and got dressed to go out. Go on! their mother yelled, you’re a bad father, a bad husband, go on out and I hope lightning strikes you! Although the curse did not come about exactly, half an hour after leaving the house their father was run over by a truck that had left the road when it skidded on the wet pavement. Despite the fact that his death brought the relief of a few days of silence to the house, happy days when their mother limited herself to moaning quietly in the corners (disoriented perhaps from having no one to attack), despite the fact that their father’s death took who knows how much weight off their shoulders, they were soon to mourn the loss of the house. In effect, when the administrator disappeared, there was no more reason for them to stay there. The new functionary assigned by City Hall demanded his space. That meant saying good-bye to Queen Melania and the kingdom of Lalisia, good-bye to the nobles and plebeians and, despite the fact that they weren’t mature enough yet to notice this (transcendent) part of it, good-bye to childhood. Mercedes and Marta turned eleven a few days before they gave up the cemetery, to which they would only return when they had reached a different and perhaps superior stature. Uncle Leandro carne in his ramshackle Ford to pick them up one morning when the sun was carrying out its patient and habitual labor of turning the city into an immense lake of shimmering water. He moved them, with their few suitcases of clothes, into his house on the beach at Jaimanitas. It was an old wood-frame house that stood, the worse for wear, alone among casuarinas and sea grapes, shortly before Soldiers’ Circle. To get there you had to take the sandy, hidden little road, half covered by weeds, that led down to the sea. When you thought you were already at the seashore, you found the house, raised on pilings, painted green-blue in some remote era (which is why it was lost against the sea, appearing to form part of it). The back terrace had a wooden floor, nearly in ruins, and a clumsy staircase that almost entered the water. The sea there had an emerald hue, and the white sand gave the union of the two a kind of deceptive, postcard feel. Inside the house there was little furniture and many books, an infinity of books, overwhelming quantities of books that filled up every corner. There’s no denying that the books inside the house, together with the incredible sea that was visible through the ever open windows, created an odd contrast, symbolic of some mysterious wisdom. For Mercedes and Marta, after eleven years enclosed in the cemetery, arriving at Uncle Leandro?s house was like discovering the world, or rather like arriving at another world, another island; the one-hour journey from the cemetery to the beach at Jaimanitas became a long journey of several days through marvelous oceans inhabited by deities. For this reason, they always knew Uncle Leandro s house as Typee. As for their uncle, you could call him a man worthy of living in Typee. Every morning, just before dawn, you could see him swimming; then he had a few fruits for breakfast, put on his collar and tie, took his ramshackle neolithic Ford and went to work in the law firm of Doctor Chili, facing the plaza of Marianao; he returned around midday, as contented as he had left; he stripped himself once more of the bothersome clothes, swam for another hour, ate more fruits, sat on the ground (he would later say, This is called the lotus position) with his legs crossed and hands turned upward, index fingers and thumbs together. Uncle Leandro practiced Buddhism. He spoke little, was never seen upset, always smiled. Mercedes began to notice that she liked being with him, that she felt protected in his presence. When, in the afternoon, between meditation and more meditation, her uncle took the trouble to teach them how to swim, Mercedes found herself flooded by a new enchantment. It had nothing to do with anything physical, concrete; it was a state of inexplicable happiness (isn’t happiness always inexplicable?), rather as if a god had taken her under his wing. So that at the beginning, life w
as even happier in Taipi than in the cemetery. And it would have been much more so if one fine day the beggars had not appeared.