by Amanda Hale
Walter felt as though he was in a movie. The shock of it, the surprise! It couldn’t be for real, there must be some mistake, it had all happened so fast, as though everyone in Baracoa had known that Ron’s days were numbered and had been on alert for his collapse. The way they come out of the woodwork, Walter thought, like so many ants intent on carrying the body back to their den. All he wanted was to get out of that hospital room, and when Clara arrived he babbled the story to her unbelieving face and made his escape, refusing the bicitaxi boys outside the hospital, lumbering instead towards Parque Central like a lost buffalo. In the hurry he’d forgotten to pay his bar bill, and Ronald’s — that was the least he could do. And he must knock back a final shot for poor old Ron.
It was determined by a couple of immigration officials that the cadaver must be removed to Santiago where it would await transfer to Havana for a post-mortem. ‘This is the procedure which must follow the death of a foreigner on Cuban soil,’ the stiffer of the two men explained to Clara. After searching through her house they found Ronald’s health insurance certificate amongst his papers, and the wheels were put in motion for funds to be sent to cover the cost of transportation and post-mortem. The General Electric toaster, shining on the counter, was duly noted by the officials, with an almost imperceptible narrowing of their eyes — a Canadian brand unavailable in Cuba — but in the cause of compassion nothing was said. For the moment.
There was a brief gathering at the funeraria between six and seven-thirty PM, for Clara’s friends and neighbours to pay their respects. Most were genuine, but there was a handful that came only because they suspected Clara would be receiving a widow’s pension from Canada and thought it well to curry favour now in this important time. Tarabel came alone because Ulyses was too upset by the news. He was a sick man himself, about Ronald’s age, and did not like to dwell on the topic of mortality. Several members of Clara’s family came, including her brother Teo who was a drummer with Cubarumba. They would perform without him that night as he accompanied his sister on the road to Santiago de Cuba. At exactly seven-forty-five PM the funeral car departed, Clara hunched puffy-eyed in the front seat while Teo sat behind her with his firm hand on her shoulder.
It was well after midnight when they arrived on the outskirts of Santiago and began to cruise the streets, asking directions to the nearest hospital. They were sent first to the Provincial Hospital Saturnino Lora, named for one of the heroes of the War of Independence against the Spanish. After many wrong turns they arrived at Saturnino Lora and waited almost an hour before being shunted on to the Hospital Clínico Quirúrgico which dealt with international patients. After another long wait they were informed by the sleepy receptionist that the cadaver must first be registered with a Santiago funeral parlor. Having roused the night watchman of a nearby funeraria and filled out the necessary papers, they returned to Clínico Quirúrgico just as dawn was breaking. Clara was by now numb with exhaustion and readily agreed to have her husband’s remains placed in cold storage while they waited for his insurance money to arrive by Global Excel so that they could proceed with his body to Havana — a journey of at least fifteen hours.
‘Why can’t the autopsy be performed here in Santiago?’ Teo inquired.
The receptionist’s heavily outlined eyelids widened very slightly in her stony face as her shoulders expressed the hint of a shrug.
Clara and her brother retreated to their aunt’s house in the suburb of Abel Santa Maria, and there they waited for three days, by which time the insurance money had still not arrived, and Clara was persuaded to return to Baracoa in the safe embrace of her brother.
‘It was Ronald’s last wish to be buried in the cemetery in Baracoa,’ she impressed upon the hospital officials before leaving Santiago. ‘And he wanted to donate his heart to a Cuban,’ she added.
‘Too late for that,’ Teo said.
‘But his pacemaker,’ she insisted, ‘They must remove his pacemaker and donate it.’
Clara repeated Ronald’s requests to the immigration officials in Baracoa. So long as they waited for the insurance money to come she felt his spirit hovering over her. She pictured him all around her, ephemeral as his cigar smoke, but just as persistent and aromatic. She smelled his after-shave cologne on their pillow when she buried her face in it each night and wept.
What with the distance between Baracoa, Santiago, and Havana, the difficulty with the telephones and the problems with computers, they lost track during the following weeks of the cadaver’s whereabouts. With this news Clara’s vision changed. She began to see her Ronald lying regally in cold storage, although she did not know exactly where, as he waited with dignity for his final resting place. He had always hated waiting — the endless queues for toilet paper, chicken legs, laundry soap, his favourite queso that arrived intermittently and mysteriously from Camagüey or Holguín, vegetables that came in from the countryside when there was sufficient fuel for los camiónes. Clara sat in her library and ran her hands over the smooth wood of her bookcase, recalling the perfection of her dream, and she wept to think that Ronald would never see the finished library, its shelves weighted down with literary masterpieces.
Walter had returned to Canada and once he was surrounded by everything familiar — his own language, his friends, his favourite foods — where could you ever find a good plate of fish-and-brewis in Baracoa? — even the doughy backsides of overweight women gave him more comfort than the magnificently formed orbs of those proud Cuban chicas — yes, when Walter found himself back in the bosom of his family the incident of Ron’s death seemed like a dream. Though he couldn’t banish it entirely from his mind, it did assume a comfortably fictional tone. Walter felt more than ever that he had been an extra in a Cuban film.
Ulyses regained his equilibrium and his skin took on a healthier tone as he began again to bounce Quito on his knee, and to laugh with his customary belly-shaking vigour at Tarabel’s bawdy jokes. They saw Clara each day as she passed their door on her way to the high school and so they learned that she had been to the immigration office and had been informed by the secretary that the officials were working on her case but that there was no news as yet. One month to the day after Ronald’s passing Clara took the initiative and phoned the Clinic in Santiago. She received the same message. They couldn’t comment on the whereabouts of the cadaver at that time. The officials were working on her case. She would be informed when a decision had been made. Three weeks later, at the close of the school year, Clara travelled alone to Santiago. The cadaver was gone, they said, to Havana. It had left the previous week. When she phoned Hospital Cira García in Havana they knew nothing of it, nor did any on the exhaustive list of hospitals and clinics she phoned. Clara didn’t have the money to travel to Havana and so she gave up her vigil. She sensed with the passage of time that her late husband had receded further and further from her until he had in fact returned to Canada where she had never been and now had no hope of going. This was not the case though, for Ronald’s two sons knew nothing of his whereabouts. The Jenkins boys travelled to Cuba to inquire, at first politely, and then angrily, as to the exact location of their dad’s remains. How could a military man, always so precise and orderly, simply disappear? It was ridiculous!
‘Of course,’ said Clara with a patient smile, ‘Pero no entienden cómo es en Cuba.’ You don’t understand how it is in Cuba.’
Ronald’s remains were never laid to rest in the cemetery high above Baracoa, where stone angels watch over the dead, their wings spread protectively, and where the sparkling ocean is visible in all her moods, evoked nightly by the dancers of Cubarumba as the Goddess Yemayá, the great mother who lives and rules over the seas in her swirling blue dress. Clara comforted herself with the thought that her Ronaldo was on a long adventure after his limited engagement with life. He had not liked travelling, preferring to move from A to B in the most efficient and familiar manner. He had always taken the bus from Havana to Baracoa rather than the plane because the bus was more predictab
le. Ronald had liked repetition. It had comforted him. He’d had no capacity for boredom. Perhaps, she mused, he has found in himself finally a sense of freedom and a love of travel. In her mind she created an epitaph for him that unwittingly captured the contradiction between his precarious existence and his desire for predictability.
Ronald murió como vivió, intensamente.
Ronald died as he lived, intensely.
‘Dad must be rolling in his grave,’ Wayne whispers to his wife Sandy as yet another plate piled high with ham and cheese sandwiches is passed around. The house is unrecognizable from his previous visit when he and brother Pete had tried unsuccessfully to track down their father’s remains. There are new floor tiles, new kitchen cupboards and counters, freshly painted bedrooms for Clara and her daughter Yuli, an extension on the back patio where the old garage used to be, a second bathroom, and now they’re starting construction on the roof, to build a separate rental apartment. ‘Well, good for her!’ Sandy exclaims. ‘Why not spend his money? The old skinflint!’ It is Sandy’s first trip to Cuba and she’s quite taken with it all, especially with Clara and her Pentecostal friends, who are apparently responsible for the renovations. Wayne and Sandy haven’t had a moment’s peace since they arrived. The house is filled with workers who arrive at seven in the morning, and who hammer and saw all day, accompanying their noise with hymn singing. They are odd-looking people, Wayne thinks. He remembers his father’s reluctance to become involved with the Pentecostals, always complaining about their presence in his house, though Dad’s own friends are no prize — fat, beefy looking fellows of a certain age, all from Canada — and his Cuban friends, their number limited by Ronald’s inability to speak Spanish, are alcoholics as he was. Rum perhaps has its own language, thinks Wayne, like the Pentecostal gift of tongues. There’s a level of intoxication that carries one beyond language. He remembers falling victim to alcohol poisoning on his last visit and the strange altered state he had achieved, that had carried him through the nightmare of his dad’s disappearance. ‘Only in Cuba could this happen!’ his brother Pete had ranted, while Wayne had maintained his cool throughout the misadventure. Now he has returned to Baracoa to celebrate his birthday with his stepmother and to help her with the bureaucratic rat’s nest surrounding her Canadian widow’s pension. Just as well Pete has stayed home in Calgary. ‘You go,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve had it with Cuba!’ After much finagling with both the Cuban and Canadian authorities they are down to the problem of Clara’s name. She has four names, as is the Spanish style — Clara Isabela Montoya Velasquez — Montoya being her father’s surname, Velasquez her mother’s, and Clara Isabela her given names. Most Canadians have at most three names, reflected by the space allotted on the government forms. The length of Clara’s name has become the sticking point in the approval of her widow’s pension — there are not sufficient boxes for it — but Wayne is determined to find a way through. His philosophy is, “Barrel through with a smile till you get what you want.” He’s inherited his dad’s steady dedication to routine but without Ronald’s tendency to fluster and bluster, trying to cut economic corners. Wayne is determined to do right by his dad’s widow.
‘Where’s the rum?’ booms Walter, Ronald’s Newfie friend who was with him at the moment of his fatal heart attack, and who has now returned to Baracoa for his annual visit.
‘There is coconut water,’ says Clara in her heavily accented English. She had known just enough English to hold her own in the endless squabbles with Ronald, usually about money and her desire for extensive home renovation. She has grown plump since his death, and is blooming, Wayne thinks, like a winter rose. She has a broad smile on her face, as does her daughter Yuli, also a devotee of the Pentecostal Church. They are obviously in their element with all these like-spirited folk in their home, transforming it according to Clara’s long-held vision and nightly prayers. She received only a small amount of money immediately following Ronald’s demise but, because of her faith in the rewards of prayer, she is going out on a limb with expensive renovations in the belief that the promised widow’s pension will indeed come through. Wayne, the best chip off the old block of Ronald’s essentially generous heart, layered though it was with miserly plaque and other constricting materials, is doing his best to see that she gets her due, especially now that she’s pulling out all the stops for his birthday party.
Walter declines the coconut drink and instead plants a meaty hand upon his Cubanita’s right breast. This is the only Cuban custom he follows, a gesture of ownership. Cuban women think nothing of it generally, but Walt’s girl shifts uncomfortably in her seat, clearly embarrassed by the staring of the Pentecostal ladies in their sensible dresses and rubber sandals. La Cubanita wears strappy high-heeled platform shoes which accentuate the length of her shapely legs, and a skin-tight sheath of a dress which makes her feel naked in this particular setting. She grabs a sandwich as the plate passes by and gulps it down with a chaser of coconut water.
The band is just arriving, jostled by a constant stream of Pentecostal folk and neighbours dropping by to see what’s on offer, leaving with plates of food to feed their entire families — sandwiches, bocaditos filled with ham paste, plastic cups of sweet coconut water with chunks of coconut meat floating in it, ensalada fria with cheese and pineapple, and tasty croquetas. Clara’s brother Teo leads the band, setting the rhythm with his maracas, followed by two guitarists and a grinning percussionist who sits on his wooden box drum and coaxes a magical beat out of it. Cuban music is infectious, Wayne thinks, his usually unresponsive body beginning to pulse with the salsa rhythm. But the Pentecostals remain still as statues. Even though their church services include copious amounts of music and singing in which they join as one, they are not permitted to dance (and certainly not to drink), so the rhythm remains outside of them, keeping their souls free from the taint of it.
Wayne notices beads of sweat breaking out on Walter’s brow. He won’t be able to last much longer without a drink, Wayne thinks, and sure enough Walt stands suddenly, yanking his Cubanita to her feet. ‘C’mon, let’s go down to Rumbo and get a drink. ¡Una cerveza!’ he articulates carefully, lifting his hand to his mouth like a bullhorn to make sure everyone understands. He slaps Wayne on the back, nods to Sandy and Clara, and heads out the door, his girlfriend tottering behind him on her platform heels.
‘But the cake,’ Clara calls after them, ‘We haven’t had the cake!’
A huge circular confection rests on her bedspread in the cool air of a whirring fan. It has been iced in an array of unnatural colours and is covered with blue sugar roses. Yuli and Clara carry in the cake between musical sets and present it to Wayne with a chorus of ¡Feliz Cumpleaños! sung by the entire Pentecostal contingent and accompanied by the lead guitar. Teo sings ‘happy birthday to you!’ in his best English, learned during his one and only trip out of Cuba, when he toured Canada with his folkloric group Cubarumba. Though it is now thirteen years ago, the memory of that trip is as fresh in his mind as though he had returned only yesterday, because he relives it nightly as he lies beside his discontented wife waiting for sleep to come. He still has his treasured maple leaf sweater, a pair of worn-down runners, and a cracked mug from Niagara Falls.
Wayne receives the first piece of cake, complete with a swirling blue rose plunked atop the centre point of a big red W. The neighbours are already returning with empty sandwich plates held out for their share of cake. Clara beams, her new plumpness puffing her up like a prize chicken as she doles out mushy slices of cake beside the remains of macaroni salad. She is sharing her wealth finally, unfettered by Ronald’s miserly ways. And if he did indeed roll over in his grave, what the hell! Wayne thought. He had loved his father but like all children had seen him clearly and somewhat critically, though it was his brother who had rebelled and argued with Dad while Wayne had been the peace-maker.
The cake is followed by pink ice cream cones, not exactly strawberry-flavoured, the fruit being suggested only by the pinkness of the froz
en dairy product. The cones are cold and sweet, of no particular flavor, and they soon begin to drip onto the new flooring, making the tiles slippery and sticky. A strange elfin child appears, squeezing her way between the guitarists, and runs to her father who stands in the doorway. She looks like a stunted adult with a very old face, standing barely three feet high, brandishing her cone dangerously until her father takes it from her and holds the cone for her to lick. After a couple of slurps the child spots a woman across the room and lunges towards her, making odd keening sounds, unintelligible to Wayne and Sandy until they realize that the woman, who scoops up the little girl without a sound, is her mother — the likeness undeniable — and that she is deaf and speechless, as perhaps is her child, because when Yuli, who is a signer at the Pentecostal Church, begins to speak with her hands, the woman nods, her face suddenly animated as she signs back with one hand, holding the child balanced on her hip with the other.
Touched though he is by Clara’s efforts on his behalf Wayne would like nothing better than to follow Walter to the bar.
‘She’s clearly doing it for her own benefit,’ Sandy said, ‘To impress her neighbours.’
‘It’s Cuban generosity,’ Wayne protests.
‘At your dad’s expense?’ Sandy retorts with raised eyebrows.
Wayne knows that Sandy is enjoying being fêted by the Cubans. It’s just that this is her first visit and she has that edge of suspicion, not wanting to be taken for a sucker, which of course all tourists are. Wayne knows that the Cubans more or less starved after the collapse of the USSR, until the country opened up to tourism, and has lived off it ever since. He also knows that his dad had maintained a healthy sense of paranoia, which was the reason for his tight-fisted reaction to Clara’s desires for home improvement. ‘But Dad, just think what a good life we live here in Canada,’ he’d said in a rare moment of disagreement, ‘Anything you contribute to Cuba is a drop in the ocean of redress for an unjust and historically driven imbalance.’ ‘Don’t try your fancy pants ideas on me, Bud,’ Ronald had warned.