by Amanda Hale
She leans back in her rocking hair, setting it in motion. ‘My name is Gertrudis and this is my testimony.’
Sunlight spills through the open door, changing the hue of the polished cement floor, shooting it through with all the brilliant colour of crushed stone. ‘Three generations of entries and exits have touched this spot,’ she says with a smile. ‘I was born in this house and I’m going to be eighty-two — four years younger than Fidel. He was almost twenty-six years old on that day — 26th of July, 1953, the first assault in a revolution that took six and a half years to triumph. He’s an old war horse, and I have my memories too, though I have lost them with this constant repetition. Why don’t you leave me in peace?’
The man tenses, ready to rise.
‘No, no.’ Gertrudis shakes her finger at him. ‘I will tell you. Otherwise how will you know the truth of it.’
He nods and leans back, hands resting on his thighs.
‘I didn’t see any of them again after the soldiers dragged them away. But of course I did, because what happened to them has played over and over in my head, screams spinning around my skull clamouring for escape. Did Abel scream as they gouged out his eyes? Did Boris scream when they cut off his testicles? They say that Haydee would not give them the satisfaction of her tears when they brought her brother’s eyes on a plate, when they rubbed her fiancé’s warm testicles on her face. I am numb as I speak these words. It was all so long ago and now indeed we have a different world, but is it better? We lived well under the Russians, with enough food, everything cheap and plentiful. People say it was fine until that bitter period when the Soviet Union fell and we were starving, scraping the skins of platanos and grinding them down to make gruel for our children, washing our clothes with stones, rubbing them threadbare. Now my life is easier. I am old and hunger does not plague me in the same way. I appreciate every mouthful.
‘The real change began in 1980 when Celia Sánchez died and Fidel was left to govern alone. Celia was our Queen. Fidel would not move on anything without her approval. It was she who prepared the way for the triumph of the Revolution. Celia was enraged when a child she had known from birth was raped to death by American gangsters in La Habana. It was her anger that was the true seed of our Revolution.’
Gertrudis pauses and leans forward again, her voice dropping as her brown eyes sparkle through their cloudiness. ‘The Moncada fortress was only 850 metres from the Colegio de Dolores, the Jesuit-run school attended by the Castro boys. They knew every alley, while the young rebels,’ she shrugs, ‘they were orphans and campesinos who didn’t know the city. It was easy for Batista’s men to chase them down. But Fidel ducked into a safe house, then he was transferred to another and by afternoon he was in the countryside. Raúl remained hidden in the city.’ Gertrudis smooths her skirt over ample thighs, her head nodding sideways as though weighing the odds. ‘Not many people know this. It will be our secret,’ she cautions with a direct look at her visitor before she continues. ‘Fidel’s time among the elite served him well. The Colegio de Dolores was patronized by rich Catholic families, and Fidel’s older brother persuaded the Rector of the college to pressure the authorities with strict instructions to take Fidel alive. As you know, he was arrested, tried, and sent to prison. That’s when Celia began an exchange of letters with Fidel in his prison cell on Isla de Pinos. Together they plotted, but she did it all, she assembled an army of women in the Sierra Maestra and laid the groundwork while Fidel was released and exiled to Mexico where he met Che Guevara and gathered his band of men to voyage home to Cuba in the Granma, a yacht purchased in Mexico through a rich contact. When Fidel and Che arrived Celia was ready with everything they needed.’
The visitor is desperate to write it all down, but he dares not break the spell. His eyes are riveted on Gertrudis’ face as he tries to remember her every word.
‘Celia is our well-kept secret. Fidel will not speak of her. He harbours her memory jealously, and if you ask him he will raise his hands, palms out, like a man surrendering to a firing squad, his long fingers bent and tremulous, filled with the memory of her hands, her face, her sweet smile.’
Her eyes close for a few seconds and she rocks, a calmness coming over her. ‘The hospital is a museum now,’ she declaims, ‘And here we stand for our annual memorial, in this front hall where photographs of Abel and his compañeros hang, reminding us of their terrible deaths. This is what I usually say, my friend,’ she drops her voice in an aside. ‘Haydee and Melba were spared. They served only a short term in prison, because it couldn’t be proven that they had carried weapons. Haydee remained loyal to Fidel until her suicide on July 26, 1980, the same year that Celia died. Was she unable to deny any longer that the Moncada attack had been the foolish idea of a privileged young man playing terrorist, and that Celia’s battle, fought from a well-organized base in the mountains, had been better thought out? No, you don’t want to hear that either. And your compañeros, they definitely don’t want to hear it.’ She laughs so heartily and so long that he has to join her, although he is uncomfortable with his own laughter. It has a false ring in his ears.
Gertrudis dabs her eyes with a handkerchief and nods to the visitor before she resumes. ‘All of Cuba is a museum now. That’s what the tourists want, to see the relics of our Revolution — the tanks put out to grass behind the Museum in La Habana, the yacht that brought our exiled revolutionaries back from Mexico listing as they file past, peering in the windows, looking for the ghosts of men who died in an ambush trying to reach the place where Celia was waiting with jeeps, guns, gasoline. We live off our old Revolution, but how much longer can it continue? Soon there will be no-one alive who remembers it. I will be eighty-two, Fidel will be eighty-six. My son lives in Miami, my daughter in Spain, two of my grandchildren have gone to Ecuador. My story has lost its meaning and in the annual repetition of it I have lost my true memories. Sometimes I catch myself in a moment of reawakening to the true horror of what happened. And that I, Gertrudis Moreno Escobar, an ordinary girl, a young nurse, should brush up against people like them. Who were they? I remember Frank País, twenty-two years old like me, his mami telling him to be careful as he left her house for the last time. She had no idea what he was doing, how dangerous it was, and what would happen to him, her young son, her baby, his life cut short. Fidel surrounded himself with young people, many of them fatherless and poor, and very few negroes. They were loyal to Batista because of his mixed blood.’
Gertrudis heaves herself up from the rocking chair, surprisingly agile for a large old woman, and shuffles towards the kitchen, but when she reaches it she merely plunks her cup down on the counter, turns again and stares at the wall as though she’s forgotten what she came for. Ah, she’s forgotten to remove his cup.
‘I go off down blind alleys,’ she mumbles to herself, plodding back to the sala. ‘As I tell my story unseen roads open,’ she says firmly, ‘Like newly formed coronary arteries developing with exercise. The body and mind have great abilities to heal and grow in the most unexpected directions, you know. I, Gertrudis tell my story from a distance of fifty-nine years, and it is just that, a story, but in the telling I begin to understand what it has meant, and how it has led us to where we are now — trapped in our own blind alley — but at least I can look back and see how I got here.’
She sits heavily, setting the balánce in such vigorous motion that her feet are lifted off the ground with the first couple of swings.
‘No, no,’ she cautions herself. ‘You will want me to repeat what I’ve always said. But I tell you, compañero, I am afraid of what I might say this year, because when the truth comes it is irresistible. I am afraid of falling away, lulled by the heat and the midday sun, seduced by my own body into a dream world where Ramón awaits me, and where it all becomes clear finally. How will I resist that? Abel smiling with shining eyes, Boris cupping his testicles, heavy and full between his legs, and Haydee with him finally, by his side. No, you don’t want to hear this. You want me to listen, to si
t upright and nod in agreement. You want us all to listen to your speeches, give our testimony, and then march. When I was a child I had trouble distinguishing between the meaning of compulsory and voluntary — I would define those words for myself each time I used them, to check that I was correct. But I have learned the meaning of compulsory in a most visceral manner, for it has been our life here in Cuba. Voluntary is for me only a word. My body does not understand it, but oh how my soul clamours for it.’
She drops her head and ruminates a few moments, then looks up at him laughing softly to herself. ‘Yes, of course. My daughter Darvis is coming with the grandchildren and we will sit and rock and talk, though I have less and less to say these days. It is all inside,’ she taps her head with an arthritic finger, ‘echoing through me in this house, the house of my family. I do not want to listen to the screaming of the past. I want silence. I am an old woman and I deserve some peace finally. I will live perhaps a few more years, or I will go suddenly in my sleep while I’m dreaming of that wide-open space where I see Ramón beckoning to me from a distance.’
A LIMITED ENGAGEMENT
Ronald Jenkins was in the habit of leaving his house on Calle López Peña at exactly one PM each day, Saturdays and Sundays excepted because Clara was home on weekends. He rose late, at approximately ten AM and had a breakfast of fruit, bread, and a nice piece of queso when it was available, with a cup of coffee. He usually finished his meal at about eleven AM then tackled a few chores. There was always shopping to do — that was his department since Clara was still working, as a teacher. Ronald had been in the military and when he’d retired with a good pension he’d begun travelling to Cuba, where he’d met Clara in the small town of Baracoa and soon moved in with her. There wasn’t much available in the stores, so Ronald shopped on the black market, his purchases made around corners in darkened doorways. He managed to negotiate remarkably well considering he spoke hardly a word of Spanish, but he had mastered the bare essentials, after a fashion, and for the rest got by with a blustering kind of body language.
Today he’d risen later than usual and had decided to forego his shopping expedition because for once there was sufficient food in the refrigerator to hold them for a couple of days. He had lingered over breakfast and had even added a boiled egg to his usual repast, and then sat in his rocking chair on the front patio and read one of his mystery novels for exactly an hour. By twelve-fifty PM, with his face freshly shaven and splashed with cologne, he was ready to leave. As he passed Tarabel’s house at the corner of Calle Ruber López he waved and stopped to exchange a few words with her little grandson, Quito, who was sprawled on his belly on the front step playing with a plastic Spiderman.
‘¿Ronaldo, porque tu no sabes hablar español?’ the three-year-old asked in response to Ronald’s fumbled attempt at play.
‘Sí, sí, bueno!’ Ronald replied enthusiastically, having no idea that the boy was asking him why he didn’t speak Spanish. Tarabel waved her plump brown arm and Ronald carried on, protected from the hot sun by a hat, sunshades, and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. It was the one Clara had given him for his birthday last year and he prized it greatly, even though she had shortly thereafter turned him out of the house, which at first had been a relief from their constant bickering and his almost total inability to understand her. He had returned to his own home in Western Canada where he’d soon fallen into the same trough of loneliness that had followed the collapse of his first marriage. When he could bear it no longer he returned to Baracoa on the pretext of attending the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the town, famous in Cuba as La Ciudad Primada, though the Baracoans always complained of being last when it came to receiving government perks. After a couple of weeks in a rental, Ronald had gingerly approached Clara in a gesture of penitence and she had opened her arms wide for him. Lately they had been getting along better, though her nightly excursions to the Pentecostal church were still a bone of contention, as were his afternoon excursions to Rumbo, his favourite bar, and to Parque Central in the evenings where he sat on a park bench with a mickey of home-brewed street rum in his pocket. He never got drunk. He was a disciplined man who limited himself to a certain number of drinks per day. Though that number was high, Ronald managed to maintain his equilibrium by pacing himself, keeping at it steadily, thus maintaining the conviction that he was drinking moderately.
He arrived at Rumbo at exactly one-fifteen PM and was just settling down at his usual table near the bar when Walter arrived. Walter was a bear of a man from the Maritimes, also retired from a career in the military, though in active service which Ronald had never seen — he’d been in accounting — so they had information to exchange on their differing experience. But, because Cuba has a way of pulling you into the moment, the major theme of their discourse was the scene playing out around them as they sat with their glasses of rum, and Ronald with his cigar balanced precariously on the edge of an ashtray. They watched the clientele come and go, commenting on the familiar faces of the locals mixed with new arrivals whenever a bus full of tourists arrived from Santiago. There were always some beautiful Cuban chicas for Walter to ogle, and occasionally they managed to persuade a couple of girls to sit with them. It was nothing to Ronald who was already married to a beautiful woman and whose only jealousy was of the Pentecostal church, but Walter was always on the lookout. Like Ronald, he spoke no Spanish, but he figured if his friend could catch a young Cuban wife, why not him too.
This was a special day — March 8th, International Women’s Day. Walter was unaware of it, but Ronald had had it drummed into him by Clara that Women’s Day was a big deal in Cuba, almost as big as Valentine’s. He planned to buy a card for her at the kiosk outside Rumbo, and would pick a few flowers on the way home — he’d noticed a hedge full of red hibiscus behind the Catholic Church.
As he walked the short distance to the bar to order a second trago of Mulata, Clara was just beginning her lecture on Alejo Carpentier’s Cuban classic El reino de este mundo. The members of Cubarumba were beginning their rehearsal for the evening’s IWD performance, Tarabel was laughing with her husband Ulyses about Ronaldo’s comical exchange with their grandson Quito, and Walter was eyeing the bounteous backside of a tightly packed Cubanita prancing up to the bar. When Ronald returned with his Mulata — a special treat on this day — Walter noticed that he was a little wobbly. And he saw a slight pulsing in the raised area over Ronald’s heart, quite visible through the thin material of his shirt. ‘How’s the old ticker going, Ron?’ he inquired.
‘Can’t complain.’ Ronald patted his left breast. ‘Did I tell you I’m planning to donate it to a Cuban?’ It was a rhetorical question. He had mentioned it innumerable times.
As the adolescents settled to their writing exercise, Clara perused the pages of Carpentier’s famous novel, her thoughts soon turning to her own library. It shone in her imagination like the Library of Alexandria, a massive enterprise stacked with all the wisdom and inspiration of the world’s greatest writers. Ronald had recently presented her with a bookcase he’d had specially made by a craftsman carpenter who lived in the neighbourhood of El Paraíso where he went to buy his cheap homemade rum. They had placed the bookcase in the old garage out back, leaning it against the wall while the wood cured, and Clara had begun to plan the renovation of the garage and its transformation into a library. She would paint the concrete floor a deep red. She would look for a comfortable chair to sit in while she read, taking books down from her shelves one by one, sampling them, placing them aside on a small table which would match the chair. And of course, she would have a reading lamp — a free standing lamp — tall with an overhanging shade to cut the glare. Books were the stuff of Clara’s dreams, principally of course the Bible, but always flanked and embellished by a world of literature — Martí, Shakespeare, Guillén, Ortiz, Loynaz, Barnet, Marquéz, Hemingway, Morejón, Villaverde . . .
She was startled out of her reverie by a voice from the open door. ‘Clara, ¿podría venir a la oficina por fav
or?’ Could you come to the office please?’
Exactly five minutes after his second trip to the bar, Ronald doubled over in mid-sentence. His forehead hit the table causing it to tremble and topple his cigar, which rolled towards him, singeing his hair. He had been telling Walter about the time he’d fooled Cuban Customs, bringing in an electric toaster in his suitcase. He had been chuckling, his face reddened with merriment and then, as though something inside him had exploded, he was gone, drawn inside himself by something above and beyond his personal will.
They were immediately surrounded. Cubans are nothing if not vigilant. Who would have known that they were being so closely monitored? As though by magic Ronald was lifted and carried across the patio and down the steps to the open door of a car at the entrance to Rumbo. Walter stumbled behind him and crowded into the car with the others. In five minutes they were at the hospital, but Ronald was already gone, there was no reviving him. There were no heroic measures, no thumping of the chest as Walter had seen on hospital sitcoms — no isolation of the patient — just a cursory examination, right under his nose, in a side-room off the entrance to Emergency, and a matter-of-fact pronouncement of Ronald’s death. The police arrived almost immediately, with a couple of stiff-faced immigration officials. The cops were young lads with stylishly shaven, perfectly shaped heads, but the officials seemed ageless. They’d never had a foreigner die in Baracoa, they said. There was no precedent for dealing with this. A careful procedure would have to be agreed upon.