The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera

by J. Joaquin Fraxedas

  Raúl sensed his distress.

  “How long has it been since Carmen escaped?” he asked.

  “A year,” said Juan in a low voice.

  “You never told me the full story,” Raúl said.

  “Don’t know it myself. I didn’t want her to talk about it when we spoke on the phone. I was afraid of losing my position teaching at the university,” said Juan. “You never know who’s listening.”

  “That’s for sure,” Raúl said. “Didn’t she go somewhere to show off her paintings?”

  “She went to an exhibition in East Berlin with people from the Ministry of Culture. Somehow she got away from them during the confusion when they tore down the wall,” Juan said.

  “Did you know she was going to escape?”

  “No, I couldn’t believe her guts when I heard,” said Juan.

  “Did she run into an embassy?” Raúl asked.

  “She didn’t tell me. I didn’t want to compromise my position at the university, so I didn’t let her go into it—didn’t even want her to use my name when we talked. And we always used the phone at Rogelio’s house,” said Juan, and wondered when he had started being so afraid. Was it from the very beginning, when they took his father away, or had it come on slowly? It was hard to say. But he did not want to think about it now. He did not want to feel the vergüenza, the shame, that overwhelmed him whenever he thought about the things that he had done because of his fear. It was better not to think about that now.

  “Who will you stay with in Miami?” he asked Raúl, pushing those thoughts out of his mind.

  “My brother, I imagine,” said Raúl.

  “Does José Antonio know you’re coming?”

  “No. I never told him. I didn’t want him to worry, and the last time we talked on the phone, I was still in the army—it was hard to speak openly.”

  “Yes, you never know who’s listening.”

  “He was trying to get me out through Panama—always thinking of some new scheme.”

  “When did José Antonio leave?”

  “Long time ago, before he was military age. I wouldn’t know him now,” said Raúl. “He’s doing real well,” he continued. “He owns a gas station. What about you, do you have anybody besides Carmen?”

  “No. She’s the only one.”

  “Does she know you’re coming?”

  “I hope so. Last time we talked, I hinted that we might try the crossing in September. Then, yesterday in Cojímar, I asked Rogelio to call her after we were gone,” he said. “I also asked him to tell Carmen to call Andrés’s daughter, Margarita,” he added, looking down at the water.

  “What are you going to do for work when you get there?” Raúl asked.

  “I don’t know. I expect I’ll just get whatever job I can at first, then see what happens. But I hope to teach physics and astronomy again at some university. My English is good, and I packed my diplomas and certificates,” said Juan. “What will you do?”

  “I guess I’ll go to work for my brother. He’s thinking of buying another gas station.”

  “Maybe he’ll put you in charge of it.”

  “Yes. Maybe he will.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No. I don’t feel like eating. Do you?”

  “No.”

  At sunset, the high, feathery clouds that had been coming in bands from the southeast all day turned delicate shades of pink and purple, but they kept their plume shape and did not change their speed or direction.

  The current felt stronger now and carried them steadily toward the northeast. The speed of the wind decreased after sunset and came only in weak gusts. But Juan thought the swells seemed greater in the dying light, and the raft rose and fell with the sea.

  Juan turned his eyes to the west and looked at a group of stars that were beginning to flicker dimly near the horizon. He knew the constellation well. It was Boötes, the Herdsman. He then looked for other familiar stars and got his bearings. Since he was a boy he had loved to study the heavens. It was one of the few constant things, one of the few comforts in his life. And the perfect regularity of the constellations, each one always at its appointed place in its own season, was the only thing now that reminded him of his childhood.

  He showed Raúl the dim North Star, Polaris, dangling at the end of the tail of the Little Bear, and they paddled toward it as best they could, riding the rising swells.

  Later the air grew cooler and a heavy fog enveloped them. Juan lost sight of the stars, and he was not sure they hadn’t turned around, going over one of the swells. So they decided it would be more prudent to stop paddling and just drift with the current.

  Toward the end of the night, after Raúl was asleep, Juan felt something big and heavy bump the inner tubes. It frightened him, and to allay his fear, he tried to imagine it was a passing dolphin, playing with the raft. But the bump came again; then he felt it through the inner tubes, long and sleek, slipping under the raft, and he never heard blowing sounds.

  The morning was gray, and there was a soft mist over the water. On the southern horizon there were towering buildups of purple cumulus clouds. Juan felt cold. The moist air raised goosebumps on his skin, which was already sore in places from the sun and the salt water.

  Raúl took out a can of condensed milk and some crackers wrapped in a plastic bag and shared them with him. They dipped the crackers into the can and scooped up globs of the thick, sweet milk.

  Late in the morning, Juan saw the disk of the sun for the first time that day. It was obscured by a thin veil of clouds and he could look at it without hurting his eyes, as if through a smoked lens filter. But after a while the sun disappeared behind a thick overcast, and he did not see it again until just before sunset. The rain came in spurts throughout the day, and the moving squalls concealed the horizon.

  “I haven’t been this wet since I was in Africa,” said Raúl. “Remember Pepito García, the one we called Orejas, ‘Ears’?”

  “Yes, I remember him. Didn’t he play third base on our team?” asked Juan.

  “Yes. Yes, he did. Anyway, he was killed in Angola, near Matale,” said Raúl. “We were on patrol, making our way through the underbrush. It had been raining all day and we were drenched. Pepito was out front when the ambush came. Part of his right leg was blown off by a mortar shell.”

  “Was he killed instantly?” Juan asked, feeling that strange combination of guilt, embarrassment, and curiosity that men who have not been in combat feel when they speak about war with men who have.

  “No, he died on the way. I carried him back to the base on my shoulders. He was such a little guy, hardly weighed anything. He kept telling me to put him down and leave him there. He was worried about me; he thought he was slowing me down. But of course he really wasn’t slowing me down at all because he was such a little guy, didn’t weigh a thing. He didn’t cry or complain about the pain, not even once,” Raúl said. “The worst part is they never brought him home, never brought him back to his family. They just opened a hole and dumped him in it, like he was garbage.”

  “They never brought anybody home,” he continued. “Not Pepito, not Armando—El Flaco, the skinny one—nobody. And for what? I’ll tell you for what,” said Raúl, answering his own question. “For nada, for mierda.”

  The wind was fitful and strange through the afternoon. It came in sudden, powerful gusts that raised fine spray from the crests of the swells, and then died as quickly as they came. Once, during a gust, a flying fish struck Juan on his back and fell behind him on the raft. He turned around and watched it for a moment, its wings quivering on the canvas. Then he saw Raúl pick it up, his large hands gently avoiding the wings, and place it back into the sea.

  At sunset the overcast began to break. Juan looked at a clear patch of sky that was now a haunting shade of luminous blue that sometimes shows between dark clouds toward the end of a September afternoon. Through the opening he could see the same delicate, plume-shaped clouds they had seen in the morning, still racing to t
he northwest, dressed in the soft pastels of the evening.

  In the twilight, great flocks of terns appeared from the south, flying low over the water. They passed over the raft in endless waves and filled the air with their strange mournful cries. Juan and Raúl watched each wave as it vanished over the northern horizon, only to be replaced by another and yet another noisy wave of countless little dark birds.

  Chapter Five

  The ancient tribes that lived in Cuba before the Spaniards had a name for the spirit that uprooted the great ceiba trees in their verdant forests, demolished their thatch-roofed huts, and devastated their crops. Days before the spirit arrived, their wise men, the behiques, could see the signs of his coming in the shape of the clouds and in the waves of the sea.

  When the behiques uttered his name, the native Cubans left their villages in the coastal plains and fled to the purple hills, carrying their children. There they sought refuge in the caves and cowered in terror until the awesome roar of his fury passed.

  The Spanish conquerors paid no heed to the legends of the native Cubans. They enslaved the island tribes and forced them to mine gold. Those who would not yield to their yoke, like the proud Siboneys, were slaughtered. Finding little gold in the islands, the Spaniards moved on and pillaged the gold of the tribes on the mainland. Every year, great fleets laden with treasure gathered at the port of Havana and took on provisions before starting their passage back to Spain across the Atlantic, protected by powerful war galleons.

  Sometimes, after the ships’ lookouts lost sight of the fort of El Morro guarding the entrance to the harbor, the wind would rise over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and dark clouds would envelop the ships. Giant foamy waves would wash over the planked decks, and the massive masts of Spanish oak would snap like matchsticks. The timbers would creak and strain with the violence of the sea. And, just before the hulls tore open and disgorged them into the black water, the Spaniards would be haunted by the sound of the name they had heard only in whispers from the lips of their slaves while they loaded the ships, the fearsome name of Huracán, the spirit that brought the big wind.

  Four centuries later, on the night that Juan and Raúl met Andrés in the darkness of Guanabo Beach, this same primeval force was beginning to stir, once more, over the balmy waters of the Caribbean.

  As they pumped air into the inner tubes spread on the sand, nine hundred miles away a heavy, steady rain was falling on the sea south of Jamaica. The air, warmed by the tropic sea, began to rise, slowly at first, into the jumbled mass of rain clouds.

  North of them, at the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Florida, expert eyes studied satellite photographs, and a weather reconnaissance airplane, bristling with exotic instruments, had just left the runway and was banking south over the brightly lit skyline of Miami.

  Reports from ships in the central Caribbean, warning of rising winds and swelling seas, poured into the Hurricane Center throughout the night. By the morning of the first day the three of them were at sea, the probing aircraft had confirmed cyclonic wind circulation and exceedingly low air pressure at the center. The latest satellite photographs now clearly showed the eye, a circular area of eerie calm and light at the center of the whirling wind. The storm, driven by steering currents of air, moved north and gathered strength from the nurturing water.

  Late on the night of the first day, violent gales tore through the forests of western Jamaica, ripping up trees in their path. Ugly, oozing walls of mud, loosened by torrential rains, came down the hills, burying cars and sweeping away shacks on the outskirts of Montego Bay.

  Jamaica presented little hindrance to the passage of the winds. Leaving the devastated island behind, the hurricane quickly regained its fury and moved on inexorably toward the southern coast of Cuba.

  The seabirds that make their nests in the mangroves covering the cays and islets south of Cuba had left long before the sea started to rise. Something in them sensed the coming storm. In the coastal swamps, bullfrogs buried themselves deep in the mud, and farther north, in the rolling pastures of central Cuba, cattle huddled close together on the lee side of hills.

  Early in the afternoon of the second day, the hurricane skirted the colonial town of Trinidad, lying in a coastal plain that extends between the dark green, curvaceous mountain range called Escambray and the blue Caribbean. The storm surge flooded the beach communities and pushed the raging sea deep into the sweet, clear waters of the Manatí River, which spilled beyond its banks and inundated the fertile flood plain.

  It then moved westward along the coast and turned sharply to the north at the Bay of Cienfuegos. Soviet warships lying at anchor in the protected waters of the harbor strained at their massive anchor chains as they swung ponderously, like giant weathercocks, to face the screaming wind.

  The great whirlwind passed over the harbor, lifting and tossing small boats, like toys, over seawalls and onto the streets and alleys of the city. Violent, wind-driven rains battered the lush sugarcane fields as the hurricane cut a path of destruction across the center of the island on its way toward the north coast of Cuba and the Straits of Florida.

  Over the Straits, the stars covered the night in a vast, shining blanket. The air was crisp and the wind came stronger now. It felt cool on Juan’s skin as it blew them to the northwest across the Gulf Stream. In the darkness, a few stragglers from the flocks of terns flew over the raft. Juan could not see them, but he heard their small, sad voices calling the others, and then, later in the night, he heard no more birds.

  Deep below them, in the silent blackness, giant marlin swam eastward with the current, chasing schools of ballyhoo toward the Great Bahama Bank. To the north, in the backcountry of Florida Bay, between the Everglades and the Florida Keys, bonefish and permit were on a feeding frenzy, churning the shallow littoral waters.

  Juan lay on his back, resting on the wet canvas, staring blankly at the sky, turning his head every once in a while to look at Raúl. In the starlight, Raúl’s face looked as pale as marble, and the wind blew his disheveled hair, giving him a ghostly appearance.

  Near dawn, after thick, rolling clouds spread across the sky, Juan drifted into an uneasy and fitful sleep. He dreamed Andrés was calling him from a dark beach. He could hear the sound of dry palm fronds shaken by a stiff wind blowing over the desolate sand. Then he heard Andrés’s deep voice rise above the howling wind and call his name from the shore. The voice had the mellow tone of an old mission bell, as it rose above the wind and called out to Juan, asking him to wait: “¡Espera, Juan! ¡Por favor, espera!”

  Juan awoke with a start and felt confused. Later, in his half-slumber, the voice returned. This time it was calling him from the sea, and he heard the sound of desperate thrashing on the water. Then Juan dreamed he saw Andrés’s hand reach out to him from the dark water next to the raft. He tried to grasp it before it sank back into the sea, but he could not move; his fear would not let him move. He wanted to scream, to ask Raúl for help. But there was no sound when he opened his mouth. It was as if he were not there at all, as if he did not exist: unable to move, unable to talk, everything in him paralyzed by his profound terror. And he saw Andrés’s hand, with the fingers outstretched, sink silently and vanish into the black, fathomless water.

  Chapter Six

  Hard rain stung Juan’s face. He opened his eyes and saw tumbling masses of clouds racing above him in the half-light of dawn. Solid gray curtains of rain came toward them from the southeast. As each curtain arrived over the raft, it enclosed them in a watery cocoon, cutting them off from the rest of the world. Cataracts of water poured on them, drenching their supplies.

  During one of the downpours, Raúl unfastened the bottle of water next to him and began to collect rainwater by wringing his soaked shirt into the bottle. He held the bottle between his legs and tried to keep his balance as the raft rode the rising sea. Before he could replace the cap on the bottle, a sudden gust of wind lifted the raft into the air and Juan saw the bottle Raúl was holding fly
away from him, tumbling madly, like an odd glass projectile shot from an invisible cannon. Raúl grabbed one of the lines with his left hand and wrapped his right arm around Juan’s waist as Juan tumbled backwards out of the raft.

  The blast pushed the raft across the water and they dragged behind it as if towed by a frenzied sea monster. Raúl clutched Juan tightly in one arm and held the raft with the other while they crashed through raging, gray-white walls of water. The spray choked and blinded Juan and turned his world into a gray, deafening roar. Salt water hit his face with such unrelenting violence that he felt as though his eyes were being wrenched out of their sockets. It pushed into his nose and ran down his throat, stinging and burning his throat and sinuses.

  The next moment they were airborne again, somersaulting through space and slamming into the side of a slate-colored, mountainous swell. In the rolling confusion of the crash, Raúl managed to pin Juan between himself and the raft and grab another line with his right hand. Juan then groped blindly for the lashings between the inner tubes, found them, and held on, at the same time wrapping his legs around one of the tubes.

  The raft was now in a deep, dark trough between the towering swells, and the wind spun it like a grotesque merry-go-round. White, shroudlike sheets of airborne foam hid the world above them.

  Juan felt strange to be dying with no one to mourn him except Carmen. He wondered if it would have felt different with children to leave behind. Is it more natural for people with children, he thought, or does everyone feel equally strange at the last moment, when there is no doubt that it is the last moment; or, he thought, is there always a doubt? Will I doubt even when the salt water fills my lungs, or will I say to myself then, Now. The time is now; there will never be another time like this; there will never be another time at all … and I will never be again. He was amazed at the strangeness and he was amazed at his own thoughts.