by Pablo Medina
And she felt guilty for not realizing that with some individuals, Elvis being a prime example, you had to let things be, nod and say, Yes, yes, that is a suitable poem, that is a poem that speaks your truth, and no one else can speak the way you can. She gathered her purse, her canvas bag containing her notebook and a tin container in which she’d brought her lunch; said a quick goodbye; and left Elvis marooned by the desk, head slung low on his chest, eyes flattened into turbulent pools, and a smile that resembled a bird about to fly into the sun.
Her home was a walk-up apartment four stories up in a building across the street from Mirta and Juan. The balcony looked out onto a courtyard of what had once been a convent built in the seventeenth century and inhabited by cloistered nuns until the new government forbade those practices. It was in ruins, though it was rumored that a group of homosexuals had wild gatherings inside. The courtyard was covered with weeds that grew thickly around the stone walls. A cool moisture rose up from the plants and entered her apartment when the breeze came off the ocean. As a result her home was redolent of damp masonry and leafy vegetation.
The neighbors had all contributed to the furnishings. Juan and Mirta gave her a lamp and two chairs they no longer used. Delia Müller, that wilted German flower, offered a table, and members of the Neighborhood Defense Committee got together a welcoming subcommittee and presented her with silverware, a few chipped but still usable plates, and some pots and pans for cooking. Even Capanegra, the chess player, brought her a chess set so she could practice. Perhaps the day would come when she could beat him, just as her father had done. A great surprise came when Elvis showed up with his typewriter, saying she could use it now that he’d given up writing poetry.
“Are you sure?” Elena said.
“Yes,” he said. “My brain is cosmic, not lyrical. I will send messages of concordance to the universe via the electric currents running through my heart and the orishas will answer back from Africa.”
One of the members of the Neighborhood Defense Committee, who was helping Elena organize things, said, “That guy’s flown off the coop. If you want to contact the orishas, I know who to talk to, and he doesn’t use electric currents but sea shells and cigar smoke.”
Juan, who had ears like radars, overheard the woman’s comment and said he was not one to rely on any religion, African, European, or Asian. “What Elvis says is every bit as valid as your talk about orishas and saints. Besides, he is a poet, or was until the day before yesterday, and thus he speaks in metaphors.”
“What the hell is a metaphor?” said the Neighborhood Defense Committee member. She’d come ready for a fight and jutted her chin at Juan in a challenging way.
“Do you know the song ‘Dos gardenias’?” Juan said. “A gardenia is a metaphor.”
“A gardenia is a flower. Don’t tell me a Chinese story, as if you know everything there is to know in the world.”
“Actually, Juan,” Elena interrupted, “the gardenias in that song are symbols.”
“Metaphors, my child. You should know the difference.”
Seeing that Juan’s forehead turned crimson, a sure sign that he was readying himself for a serious argument over nothing, Capanegra produced a bottle of firewater, the one called chispa de tren, which was cruder and more potent than the one from Piedra Negra. Someone else brought a guitar and conga drums and a set of clave sticks, and a party developed spontaneously that drew many more neighbors and lasted until well after midnight. When the last guest left, Elena was able to survey her apartment and found a chicken stew in the refrigerator, as well as a large bowl of fruit of all kinds—bananas, mamey, star apple, pineapple, and papaya (called bomb fruit in the capital to avoid any reference to the female genitalia)—which were next to impossible to find in the government-run stores since the imposition of the rationing system.
Unable to sleep, she opened Elvis’s typewriter and found the following poem on the roller:
Farewell
How not to leave this land
of lizards and skeleton cushions?
How not to turn my back on the sea urchins
that puncture my flaming heart?
I’m going, as I said some days ago,
to a field where the clouds are molting
and the lilies whistle an ancient tune
of obscure origin.
On that field the ragged cows are grazing,
interpreting one another and coming out the same,
and there are swans
wing-to-elbow with a lame lion
and an old dog howls
and bites its rump all day.
Such are the trials of paradise.
I promise to leave you all behind
dozing in your cave of shadows. The sun
is an owl’s yawn and the stars
the roe of a prehistoric bird.
Let me shake off the crud of the land,
let me sink in the waters that swallow snow
and make foam that no one understands.
She spent the rest of the night rereading the poem, fighting the temptation to correct it, delete its excesses, shape its figure into form. But she let it be—at times brilliant, at times thumping like a flat tire—until she became one with it and came to the conclusion that the truth is never as neat and lean as editors would have it.
She was barely able to function at work the next day, despite a stack of manuscripts that was double the normal size, as the magazine was publishing a group of socially engaged poets from the African continent. Roberto Ferrante told her that it was okay to call in sick after a late-night party, but since she was at her desk, she would have to perform her duties to the fullest. “Our solidarity with our African brothers and sisters demands it,” he said, and then he asked why he wasn’t invited.
“The party just happened,” Elena said.
“My dear,” he said, “in this city everything just happens. Next time you have an impromptu party you must call me.”
And then he did a most unexpected thing. He took half the pile of manuscripts lying on her desk and carried them into his office.
She heard occasionally from Daniel. His letters described in detail the difficulties of a revolutionary journalist trying to work through the calcified Soviet system, which controlled all news coming in and out of Moscow as it controlled everything else, even the water filling the city’s toilets. He loved the Russians, he wrote, their struggles with history and the literature that came out of those struggles, but there was no mention in his letters of his personal life, whether he missed the island or missed her, and no apparent interest in how she was doing in her new apartment and job. Elena began to wonder whether their budding relationship had died before blossoming, but she kept those doubts to herself and wrote letters back filled with hope and expectation.
Time flattens love, someone said or ought to have said. In the case of Elena and Daniel, it wasn’t love that flattened but its passion, which needed to be nurtured and enhanced by frequent contact, frequent touch. She’d wait for him without illusion but with the certainty that he’d come back to her and the island. Meanwhile she had her work, the neighborhood, the friends she made, and her newly acquired practice of doing paintings based on the characters in Las Meninas. The copies were awkward at first but soon gained in color and life and were good enough to give to the friends and neighbors who had helped her with the apartment and provided the first meals, before she could feed herself, never having learned the simplest recipes from Cándida, other than the dreadful cornmeal and okra. To Juan and Mirta she gave a copy of Velázquez himself at his easel, only instead of having him dressed in black, she colored him in magenta and green and gave him blue hair and a red mustache. To Roberto Ferrante she gave Doña María Agustina Sarmiento de Sotomayor with a pink bodice and a polka-dot kerchief round her head. The king and queen, emblems of chess she painted in blazing orange before a yellow background, she presented to Capanegra, and the Infanta Margarita she sent to her daughter, Soledad, via Tom�
�s Gutiérrez, who became a good friend and courier to whom she entrusted the care packages bound for Piedra Negra. Delia Müller received the dwarf Mari Bárbola, with a burst of peacock feathers in her hair, red lipstick and flaming rouge; to Edmundo she gave Nicolasito Pertusato, the midget kicking the dog—her favorite, and because of that she painted him with spiked hair, a basketball jersey, and black high-top sneakers of the sort she’d seen in American magazines in the Writers’ Union library.
The boy became her guide. He knew the city as only a boy his age could and led her through the best and worst parts of it, singing the boleros he’d learned from his grandmother. In return she gave him books to read, which he devoured and wanted to discuss during his visits.
“I’ll never go to New York,” Edmundo said after reading Poet in New York by García Lorca.
“Why not?” Elena said. “New York is the greatest city in the world.”
“It’s also the scariest. That book kept me up at night,” he said. “All those crocodiles and African kings and octopuses inside out.
“And I’m not going to Troy. The Iliad is filled with blood and guts,” Edmundo continued, and she thought back to the war where her brothers had died and her husband had lost his leg.
“Don’t worry, Edmundo,” she said. “Troy no longer exists.”
“But war does,” he said, a comment Elena couldn’t refute.
“Huckleberry Finn should have stayed with Jim. What was he going to find in the territories that he couldn’t find next to that nice man?”
Elena wanted to answer that stasis kills a story or would have killed that story, which was about constant movement as it was about anything. She refrained because that was not an answer you would give a reader, even a good reader such as Edmundo. Nor could she answer what was so mysterious about the mysterious island, or why the hunchback of Notre Dame was reviled by the people around him, ugliness and disfigurement themselves being no excuse. Why was Don Quixote insane? He was merely doing what he wanted to do. If Edmond Dantès was such a good fellow, why did he seek revenge on the people who wronged him? Good people forgive one another.
Edmundo would have found fault with her own story, made as it was of waiting for Daniel’s return and the undercurrent of guilt at having left her daughter behind, without swashbuckling or the elemental struggles between love and betrayal, war and peace, fear and courage, that marked the books she lent Edmundo. Time, the kind measured by clocks and calendars, passed outside of her, but her inner time, measured in heartbeats and troubled nights, stood still. It did not occur to her then that the world of literary heroes is made of waiting, for love, action, resolution, the end. They are stand-ins for us, those heroes and heroines, and so, like us, they wait and wait and then wait no more.
Six months after Daniel’s departure, her book was published under the title Ladies-in-Waiting. The title poem, a triumph of female assertion, dealt with how women are defrauded into a life of expectation for love, for husbands and children, for home—things that never come, or if they come they soon turn heavy, oppressive.
I wait for my husband to come from work,
I wait for my children to come from school.
My home is a painting suspended on the wall,
my hope is a look, a dress, a gesture.
Elena hoped her book would bring attention to the plight of women, their subservience to men in a prerevolutionary marriage model that was as demeaning as it was antiquated. The two reviews published in the official press made no mention of the ideas in the poems; instead the critics focused on the delicate language and the innocent provincial perspective they provided. One reviewer said the book “was a flaming bush bursting with anachronisms, a bowl of overripe fruit, ready for the flies of our enemies to nourish themselves.” Elena was irate and swore she would write letters to the journals in defense of her work, calling into question their male-centered views that undermined their revolutionary credentials. Mirta warned her that such letters would do more harm than good.
“Anything you write will be used against you,” she told Elena. “Quiet yourself. Your time will come.”
“What time?” Elena asked her, and her friend had no answer.
Tired of waiting, she had just about decided to go back to Piedra Negra, tail between her legs, when Daniel appeared at the Writers’ Union, a year and three weeks after he had left for Moscow. He was haggard from the long trip and lacking the magnetism that once marked his presence. He greeted her softly, and she, not knowing how to react, greeted him just as softly, containing the urge to fall on him and kiss every inch of his face. They held hands over the desk, smiling, worlds away from that first meeting outside the poetry bus.
Daniel’s eyes moistened and a single tear ran under his glasses and down his cheek.
“Where are you staying?” she asked him.
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he said. “Roberto has an extra bedroom in his house, but judging from the reception I’ve gotten so far, I doubt if he’ll be offering it.”
“Stay with me,” she said, impetuous as usual, then felt the need to qualify the offer. “At least until you find a more permanent arrangement.”
Daniel nodded. He had a meeting with the executive committee of the Writers’ Union and could see her after she got off work that day.
At six he was waiting at the curb, not in his Lada but in an old American car he borrowed from a relative. He explained that the Lada was an official car, now used by Ferrante, but they hadn’t supplied him with a driver.
“The minister doesn’t doubt his loyalty yet. He has an assistant, though. One pair of eyes on him is enough.”
By the middle of the next morning news spread through the neighborhood that Daniel Arcilla, once revered as the Bard of the Revolution, was staying with Elena. Juan and Mirta came to the apartment that afternoon with a bottle of rum. Edmundo came with his grandmother Delia Müller, who claimed to have met Daniel when he was a young man. He pretended to remember and drank a toast to their reunion. The president of the Neighborhood Defense Committee showed up as well to inquire as to the nature of the gathering. Once she saw the bottle of rum, however, she forgot her duties and drank herself into fits of giggling that lasted until her husband, a dour, humorless party member, came looking for her.
Daniel never found another place to live. Once his divorce became final a month later, he brought the rest of his books and clothes and a sleek red Olivetti typewriter he’d bought in Rome that was his pride even though several keys didn’t work properly. He hoped to find someone in the city who could fix it.
That same day he asked Elena to marry him. She hesitated. He asked why.
“The future,” she said. “Two poets shouldn’t marry. The darkness will multiply.”
“Do you think marrying an accountant would make the future less shadowy?” he said. “Or an engineer or a doctor or a banker or a drunk veteran?”
She had told him about Pedrito and his dipsomania just before he left for Moscow.
“This country’s future is awash in shadows,” he said. “The old system is gone, and a new one is in place.”
“As it should be,” she said.
“Yes, as it should be. But the new is uncertain, unproven.”
“It’s been proven elsewhere,” she said. “Marxism has triumphed in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China.”
“Triumph is too final a word. So is proven. I have seen things in Russia that would make your hair stand on end. But what I asked you has nothing to do with politics.”
“Love,” she said, “casts the deepest shadow.”
He smiled. Of course he knew that.
“And the strongest light,” she said out of fairness.
Elena always felt she was a romantic, but now she was countering his doubts with realism, trying to see how far she could go before the offer of marriage was off the table.
“For there to be one, there has to be the other,” she added.
“Love and politics?”
he said, distracted.
“No, light and shadow.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” he said. He went to the kitchen and returned with a glass and a half bottle of vodka he’d left behind.
She took a deep breath and saw before her a difficult man. All men are difficult, she thought. No. All poets are difficult, men and women. No. That isn’t quite it either. People are. They’re difficult and they’re good. Or can be. Two possibilities existed simultaneously, and she eliminated one by saying yes, she would marry him. She could have just as well said no and continued living her life as a single woman in the light of the great Revolution. She was young and already a widow tested by circumstance. She had nothing to prove to herself and others except her talents as a poet.
The dark lines in Daniel’s face lifted and he was pleased.
“I fell in love with you the day I saw you,” he said.
“Was it my poetry?” she said.
“Before I read your poetry.”
“I was drawn to you,” she said, “like metal to a magnet, but I was afraid. By the time I came to claim my prize, I had lost my fear, and the attraction remained. Is that love?”
“Some version of it,” he said, pouring some vodka and toasting her.
She looked over his shoulder through the window. It had started raining, heavy drops that splashed on the windowsill. Happiness or joy or trepidation or whatever she was feeling at the moment flew about the room like a squawking bird wanting to land on her. When it did, all the doubt she had felt about coming to the capital dissipated.
The wedding, a small one, took place in their apartment several weeks later, after Daniel learned he’d been divested of all responsibilities as a journalist and was asked to surrender his credentials. Among the guests were friends who were still in the regime’s good graces, which meant they were informers, or could be, if pushed or convinced or blackmailed. In those days, when volatility was the rule rather than the exception, affection of the heartfelt sort did not keep friends from informing on one another. Your primary allegiance was to the state, and if you hesitated, State Security would dig up some dirt on you—an indiscretion in a men’s bathroom, perhaps, or a phone call to a relative in Miami where some unkind words were said about the leadership, or the purchase of an illegal television on the black market. Since informing was ubiquitous, it didn’t matter whether you stayed away from your friends or not. You had to mind what you said in front of them, but then you had to watch what you said in front of everyone, even members of your family, even Edmundo, the street urchin, who would soon be picked up for truancy and sent to a technical school on the eastern edge of the island, where no one, not even his grandmother, could visit him.