by Kent Wascom
Below, the servants were lighting the lanterns, little blooms of fire in orange paper globes. Fragile houses, she thought, for something as strong as fire. She heard her parents’ voices from downstairs, then her brothers’. The gulls were gone, too dark to see, and she stepped back from the window, feeling suddenly dizzy, the walls of the house seeming very much like paper themselves. And she a ball of flame.
—Where are you? Isaac says.
—Right here. With you.
Which is not entirely true. She is shaking off the past, her memories, as you might shake off sleep.
They are standing together in the kitchen of the house on Deer Island, a lamp burning between them against the early morning dark. Her gaze has drifted off, waiting for the kettle to boil. When it shrieks she lifts the kettle from the red disc, pours a fall of steaming water between them soaking coffee grounds, clove, peels of cinnamon. While the coffee steeps she unwraps a loaf of sugar and with a kitchen knife chips off white arrowheads that glitter dully in the lamplight. She picks the last of the blood oranges from the crate and tells him to take the bell from the lamp. When he’s done this Kemper passes the orange through the naked flame, rolling the bruised-looking skin around the fire, humming.
—What are you doing?
—Waking the peel, she says.
The orange smoking in her hand, first she rubs its skin with one arrowhead of sugar, then the other, moving to a private music as her fingers travel from the indent of the stem to the pursed tip. Setting the burnt orange aside, she drops the arrowheads into their cups and fills them with the spiced coffee.
He leans into her, head swimming. He has drifted into his own past, all of which seems to lead up to this, to her.
—It’s perfect, he says.
Once she would’ve written Angel, her brother, and told him everything. She’d done this, written him her secrets, from the time she was a girl (when she had no real secrets at all) and had kept on writing him for a time even after the night in Havana when he left them all forever.
His secrets, his life, were another matter. They required complete circumspection in person and in print. By his mid-thirties Angel Woolsack had mastered lies and truth and the pregnant gap between them. He lied for the family business, the lines of ships and rail and the gold fruit that grew along the railways hanging in hands from trees which are not trees at all, he’d told her once, but the tallest grasses in the world. And Angel did worse things than that, she knew, for Americans’ fruit was bought with quite a lot of other peoples’ blood. But more than anything, he lied in order to survive. It was his air and language, the avoidance of truth, so he seemed always on the verge of a revelation, which gave him a kind of gravity that drew her unerringly to him, the little sister who envied what she imagined to be the freedom of his life in Nicaragua, before she understood—if not accepted—what he was. He never told her outright, but there came a time when she realized what lay behind how he politely deflected her questions about marriage, women. For a time in her teenage years she’d thought him sexless, the force of her own desires so urgent and evident, like rashes on the surface of her skin, that his silence, the absent pronouns, seemed bizarre. But by that Christmas, their last together, after Midnight Mass, while the rest of the family rode and she walked with Angel back to the house in the Vedado, she knew enough and he trusted her enough that she could ask about his friend in León.
—Doing very well, Angel said. We saw each other last week.
She took his arm and said that was good. You might say she managed to say it, because no matter how hard she tried, the thought of one man loving another disturbed some small fixed part of her. Sent her into little spirals of denial. But if she couldn’t bring herself to say this, any more than he could bring himself to say his lover’s name, she could and did say that she hoped they were happy.
Angel squeezed her arm and then changed the subject to a poem he said reminded him of her. Promised he would read it to her, to them all, that night at dinner. But he did say, as they walked, that what she had said was kind, really kind.
There was no kind word then, nor are there many now, for what Angel Woolsack was. Which state of being still carried the death penalty in much of the world that considered itself civilized, the world for whom he broke governments and manned machine guns from Nicaragua to the borders of British Honduras. Among the men he knew, friends and lovers, men of property who met under the auspices of literary clubs and salons and leftist groups, the term “modern” was common. They had wives, many of them, these elites who’d gone to military schools and read more Verlaine than von Clausewitz, and some enjoyed women as much as they did men, or they constructed elaborate systems and excuses, but he didn’t feel much like this kind of modern man. More that he was displaced, stateless, out of time, which was still preferable to how he’d felt as a boy: cursed, malformed, but never, as another popular euphemism went, confused. Of course he’d tried to rid himself of wanting who and what he wanted, took himself apart as he would a Maxim or a Hotchkiss gun, but when the pieces were reassembled he was the same. He loved who he loved and was hopelessly, helplessly bound to it.
And at this time he had a shifting cast of lovers, was open to fate-fraught encounters that happened sometimes at hotel baths or on long journeys by ship or train, the met glance that says I want what you want, the electric thrill of being chosen (though these often ended poorly, which meant at worst violence, or at best sadness hard on the trail of pleasure). But all that was changing. In the past year he’d met the man he would always return to: Eduard Chamorro de Aviles, son of a prominent Nicaraguan family, landowners whose holdings you could walk from the Pacific coast and across the volcanic ranges to the shores of the Caribbean with little interruption. Eduard kept his wife and children in Managua, where his uncles held positions in government. He and Angel had met at a flat in León, saw each other from opposite sides of a room filled with would-be poets and other such fortunate sons. He was literate and warm, Eduard, his features round and smooth as his voice; small about the hips and shoulders, he had a dark tuft of hair at his chest that tightened into curls when he sweat. He could laugh, easily, freely, and this was what Angel loved more than anything.
He squeezed his sister’s arm, for he’d come to the point he never could quite cross. The point of saying outright what he knew she must already know. So they walked together into the old neighborhood, passing other people, couples, families, carrying within themselves the dread and happiness of grown children going to see the people who’d made them.
Angel’s life was one of consummate control broken up by intervals of discrete and shuttered joy. But even in his rawest moments, with Eduard, whom he loved, when they were in some shabby room rented by the hour in the worst parts of León and he could let his guard slip and was, for an hour or a night, the man he knew himself to be, there was yet at his core a dark, tight knot of untruths that had been there for so long he’d begun to believe some of them himself.
The worst of these lies stemmed from a scar he had on his left arm, just below the shoulder. A scythe-shaped mark that hadn’t been stitched and so showed a wide pink grin. The scar was visible only if he was shirtless and you were close to him, say between his arms. And such scars, little portals to our pasts, invite questions from those we’ve let close.
Eduard, mouth love-slack, asking —Where did you get that scar? Is it from a battle?
—From someone I loved, Angel said.
—Oh?
—He was angry. Jealous. We had an argument. He had a knife.
—Was he an American?
Angel said that he was, though we’re all Americans, aren’t we, love? And he told the story, the lie, that the boy had been a year behind him at school and they’d been lovers, a menacing secret kept between them, and when Angel was going to leave and broke off their affair, the boy in a jealous rage had grabbed a letter-opener from his table and slashed Angel across the arm, begging him to stay or take him along.
—And did you?
—I was bleeding, Edu.
And Eduard had sighed the way Angel had learned a man would when he told this version of the story. The sigh called up by the version of himself that was desired, wanted, wounded, strong. Eduard had pressed into him and fallen into a deep midday sleep but Angel lay awake with the lie like another presence in the bed. The truth was he’d been the one a year behind, in love with an older boy on the same dormitory floor; they’d written poetry together whose pronouns masked the truth of their feelings; spent nights up; jerked each other with unpracticed ferocity; and he had been the one who’d come apart when the older boy was poised to graduate and leave; he’d been the one in tears, begging to be taken along. And when the boy suddenly became another person, no longer the poet, no longer the love, and said to Angel that he was a pest, that he needed to get out, it had been Angel who took a glass from the sideboard and smashed it on the lip of the table and, pleading, raked the broken edge across his arm. This is how much I love you. See?
He might have never told the story at all, but he’d come to rely so much on the false version of himself that the truth and the pain were bound up in the lie that was his life.
Angel at the dinnertable, reading them the poem. He said it was political (their father gave a little groan) but not to worry about that. Just listen to the words. The poem was by the great Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío, and had been published in León a few years back. The lines he read spoke of Our America, a place of hurricanes and love, and was addressed to men with Saxon eyes and barbaric souls, to whom the poet insisted Our America (Whose? Red mumbled) lives …
—Y sueña. Y ama, y vibra; y es le hija del Sol.
Kemper saw her father looking to her mother.
—Daughter of the sun, her father said. Damn, that’s not half bad.
—Read it again, Angel, her mother said.
And he did, his voice so comfortable in Spanish, the tiredness about his eyes easing for a moment.
—Whose America? Red said. He keeps saying Ours.
—He means Spanish America, doesn’t he?
—Right, Angel said and tucked the clipping back into his coat pocket. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? What’s ours and what’s theirs isn’t the question. It’s who we are and what America is.
—Daughter of the sun, their father said, raising his glass.
Red sat back, arms folded. Kemper could see something working darkly in him.
—Well, I don’t know about Saxon eyes or what, Red said. But it’s ours one way or another.
At just past three on Christmas day Kemper rose from her seat in the president’s box at Almendares Park and left in the last minutes of the game. Left Red, who was howling along with the other Americans in the crowd, left her mildly embarrassed parents, and left Angel, who she hoped would come with her, but didn’t. As she made her way out of the stands she saw, coming to their level, the Louisiana players being borne out of the stadium and to parties that carried on through the night at taverns and barracks, hotels and the houses of diplomats and magnates, one of which Red would later attend and where he would get viciously drunk. She walked on, joining the streams of Cuban fans who went with clenched jaws past corners dotted with U.S. Marines, the people around her stricken with that dazed outrage that comes with losing. You wish for nothing more than to go and hide yourself away but your city is overrun with these people, veins throbbing in their square heads as they greet each other with the chant they’d kept up throughout the game: Lick the spics! Kill the spics! Rah! Rah! Rah! Louisiana!
Kemper hurrying back to the house, keeping her head down, hating everything as all around her went roaring Americans, recounting the plays and hits and the score—Sixty-six to goddamn nothing!—hearts bursting with the rightness of the outcome, reveling in the affirmation of everything they believed to be true about themselves.
When she reached the house in the Vedado, Kemper shut herself away in her room. And she would be there when her parents and Angel trickled back, and throughout the rest of the evening, listening as their three voices pared to two, her mother heading off to bed, the rising scent of tobacco smoke like childhood itself both rank and remarkable. She was almost asleep when the soldier came knocking at their door.
The soldier, she would learn later, was not a soldier at all but a Marine assigned to consular duties, dispatched on the unenviable task of telling a very rich man that his son had gotten into some violent trouble at the consulate’s house and would his father, sir, please come and get him.
Now she was on the landing of the main stairway watching Angel and her father at the door. The Vs of sweat in their backs as they stood in the doorway, their shoulders dropping at something she couldn’t quite make out. Then they were gone and the house was silent again. Kemper listened for her mother’s stirring but heard nothing. Her mother had the habit of staying in bed regardless of the commotions of a night, which on the one hand was wonderful for children prone to sneaking out, but also made them question if she cared about them at all. Kemper went to her room and dressed, pinned up her hair, then back downstairs to the study, and she would be there an hour later when they returned, bearing Red between them.
Of all things, he was smiling. While their father cursed the door and Angel said Christ, Red, slurring, gleefully damned them both. When they hauled Red into the parlor where Kemper sat waiting, the faces of the two who held him went tense with embarrassment, and then Red caught sight of her too and what he did to his face put her heart in her throat.
Smiling had come hard for Red Woolsack, a mystery among the mysteries among the din of emotions of his childhood, the myriad expressions faces wore, the understanding of which was available to everyone, it seemed, but him. Poor Red, they said. Poor Georgie. Their faces bewildering signals. Another language. What others did without a second thought, Red acquired through effort. But even still there were times when his efforts couldn’t overcome what he lacked. He’d spent hours before the mirror on his dresser, training his face to smile, sometimes with a picture at hand or with the memory of how his brother or sister had done it. Kemper had caught him once, practicing at his mirror, and he would never forget the look of disgust on her face, hovering there behind him in the glass. That look he understood perfectly.
Now Red had shaken loose of them and was stalking about the parlor, calling everyone bastards, everyone on this lousy, shitting island. Angel saying to keep his voice down for Christ’s sake, holding his own to a low growl. His shoulders shaking. She’d seen her brothers fight more times than she could count, feeling in those encounters the vague sense that they were moving toward some dark height, something final, and whereas before they had never reached it, she saw that this time would be different.
Then they were on each other, grappling, their father trying to thrash and elbow his way between them. Upending reading lamps and furniture and the ashtray beside her, so that Kemper had to leap from the chair. A cloud of ash wafting now, though the only thing burning was them. A decanter cracked on the tile and her mother was behind her, screaming for them to stop, calling them boys. Her father’s hands in their faces now, finally able to pry them apart, howling,
—Enough!
The brothers, separate but moving with an awful grace that told her the pause would not last. Kemper reached out an arm to catch her mother, watching the rise and fall of her father’s chest, seeing his eyes flicker past her to the woman who had borne these children and the three dead who’d come between, the woman he’d known longer than anyone else alive and who loved them all with something greater than rage and greater than life. In what she would later think of as her first act as an adult, Kemper took her mother’s hands in hers and held them as long as she could.
Her brothers like dancers, on their toes.
—You through now, George?
—Hell no, you sonofabitch.
—Shut your mouth. Angel cut his eyes to their mother and back to Red. Don’t you care?
—You think plugging banana niggers makes you a man?
—You’re a child.
Red, lifting his chin, as though to see out of the depth he’d reached, said,
—You’re a faggot.
She saw Angel’s jaw go slack as Red, bouncing now, raked the word over his voice again. Spat. And to the side of them, falling back, their father, whose face was suddenly that of the old man he would soon become: all outraged confusion at these creatures he had held and hoped for and that could find no sole object or direction, as though the known world reared up and tore away its own face, a mask. He stared into it, where it hid behind his children’s eyes. His voice faint and lost.
—A what? he said.
The word dropped broken among them. It had not yet entered common usage and was known then only to portions of the young. Angel was partway across the floor when Red fixed on their father and told him what it meant.
As his brother spoke, Angel Woolsack in that moment lived the nightmare that had stalked the dark periphery of his life. Flooded with dread that might have been a kind of sick relief if the moment itself did not so completely resemble the nightmare. Everything he’d ever suspected, about what others thought, about what others would think of him, was there before him confirmed in all their faces as Red spoke. Spat. Saying, —He fucks boys, Dad. That’s what.
Joseph Woolsack, collapsing into himself, stared at his youngest son. Then with a speed that marked the last of his youth, he covered the distance between himself and Red and struck his son so hard that his long copper hair waved limp as he fell, stunned, to the floor.
—You’re disgusting, Joseph said once and then again. I won’t have it. I won’t have it said—
Red sitting up, glaring past his father, aiming for his brother’s face.—Go on. Say you don’t, faggot.