by Amanda Hale
‘Nobody plays now except my cousin Melva,’ Mári says, ‘But I have plans.’
She recalls last year’s Baptist convention when Melvita, who shared the old family home in Santiago with cousin Gertrudis, had travelled all alone to Baracoa, because Gertrudis had to give her testimony yet again. How straight-backed had been Melvita’s comportment as she’d sat at the piano plunking out her hymns while Mári stood beside her, puffed like a songbird, rendering love songs to the Lord in her vibrato soprano. Alegra had tinkered for a while, but she was working at the hospital all day and in the evenings she had to study for exams, so the piano has been largely neglected while Mári has scrimped to gather sufficient funds to pay the piano-tuner’s bus fare and accommodation for a night at her friend Erminda’s casa particular down the street.
Oriol refuses Marí’s offer of coffee, but his son drinks a small cup of the dark sweet liquid to fortify himself after the journey — three hours, much of it on La Farola, a winding road carved out of the dense jungle that hides Baracoa from the eyes of the world. Until the construction of the highway the town had been accessible only by the ocean which has lapped its shores since the beginning of time, worrying away the land in grains of sand, then sucking it up and throwing it back onshore.
Mári returns to the kitchen with the empty cup, not wanting to disturb the men while they work, but when strange sounds reach her ears she hovers in the central courtyard of the house, peeping around the corner to watch. She sees the piano laid bare like a patient undergoing surgery, and the tuner sitting erect, chin tilted with an air of absolute concentration as his fingers rest on the keyboard, pecking persistently at each note while his son adjusts the strings. Mári can barely hear the old man’s voice. All the energy is in his listening, followed by the intimacy of a few whispered words. Osvaldo follows his father’s instructions silently, tightening with un martillo de afinación held between thumb and forefinger, pinging with el diapasón to fine-tune the strings.
After a while Mári tip-toes to the back of the house and sits on her bed to read the Bible, but there is a persistent ringing in her ears, a presaging of something wonderful as she imagines the lively sounds that might emerge from the old piano, as though they had been crouching there inside awaiting their chance, just as in the days of Reymundo’s spontaneous concerts when he would sit with a glass of rum in his left hand — though when their mother was in the house he would hide that glass in the corner between piano and wall. Reymundo drew such sweet inspiration from the fiery alcohol that Mári wondered if it really was a sin to drink, as her Baptist minister preached. She had loved her brother fiercely until the end, even though he had caused his family great suffering with his drinking and womanizing. He had been a mujeriego of the first order! It was his infidelity that had pained Reymundo’s wife — even more than the violence that had left her children timid and silent.
Mári has just reached the verse where Job declares to God, ‘My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you,’ when she hears the cascading notes of a classical masterpiece! It is the tuner who plays and he is a wonder to hear with his fingers flying across the freshly tuned keys, reminding her of the waterfall she saw on a school trip to Parque Alejandro Humboldt so many years ago, but that she has never forgotten.
Osvaldo stands by patiently, and when the Schubert Impromptu is done he says, ‘We must move on now, Papi, to Casa Yánis.’
‘You must cross Moncada,’ says Marí, ‘and walk two blocks towards Parque Central. Yánis lives in the blue house on the right, beside la panadería.’ She delves into the pocket of her apron where a fold of crumpled notes nestle, and hands them to Osvaldo who pockets the bills without counting them. The money has passed through too many anxious hands and has the sour grey smell of accumulation. Oriol, his left arm resting on his son’s shoulder, offers his own cool hand to Mári who clasps it and thanks him, bestowing the Lord’s blessing upon him as he departs from her house.
Mári closes the door, walks over to the piano, and reaches with her hand to touch the keys. As she presses middle C a rich tone rings out and she gasps at the piano-tuner’s skill. She’s never had time to play the piano herself — it had seemed exclusively her brother’s domain, while she had been busy helping her mother in the house. And then she’d married and given birth to four children in quick succession, and so it went, her life so full that she’d hardly noticed the passage of time until that day when the news came that Daniél, her firstborn, had been stabbed by his jealous wife. Daniél had been tall and handsome like his father, a boy beyond reproach, too good perhaps for this world. Mári carries his portrait in a locket between her breasts. Just as he had been laid on her belly moments after his birth, taking his first shuddering breath, he now lies eternally over her heart. It was God’s mercy that her husband Hector had died first; he would not have been able to bear it.
She sits on the piano stool, smooths her skirt, and lays both hands on the keys, blessing them. With her left hand she touches the locket while with her right she ventures into a scale. Gabriela says it is too late for her mother to start messing with the piano, but Mári knows that it is never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” she has read in Romans 12:2. In three days her teacher will come and she will take her first piano lesson. An unaccountable feeling of excitement rises in her breast until she can no longer suppress a burst of laughter.
Oriol and Osvaldo pass the night at Erminda’s house where they sleep peacefully in una cama matrimonial covered with a flowered sheet and a ruffled counterpane. At breakfast they are instructed by Erminda’s husband Nando who has already been to la panadería to buy fresh bread, and tells them once more how to find la casa azul de Yánis.
As they leave Erminda’s house the rain begins. In Baracoa it can rain for days: torrential rain gushing from the mountains, swelling the rivers that clasp the town until they burst their banks, splashing down and down, sluicing the gutters, overflowing into every crack and corner, pooling around trunks and roots until all the vegetation is drenched, drunken, dizzy with excess. After tuning Yánis’ piano in the front room of her blue house, as well as a third piano at a neighbour’s house, they arrive at the bus terminal just in time to purchase tickets for their return trip to Guantánamo. Their clothes are dripping wet. Osvaldo takes his father’s slippery hand and guides him up the steps of the bus. Oriol stands behind Osvaldo, places one hand on his sodden shoulder, and follows him down the aisle to their seats in the very back. The motor is already running, driving the air conditioning at full force and the old man begins to shiver in his thin shirt. There’s nothing to be done. He must endure a frigid three-hour journey along the winding highway. As the huge wheels thrum and vibrate under him Oriol hears inside his head, though distantly, a swollen sound like rushing water which carries him out of his shivering body. He had the gift of sight for almost thirty-five years and has an archive of visual memory stored within. He conjures up the jungle landscape through which they travel, and when he tires of those lush vistas he turns to the movies playing in the darkness of his private cinema, old familiar scenes that Oriol never tires of watching, new stories that he creates from his own imagination, and sometimes disturbingly prescient images coming out of nowhere, unbidden and mysterious. But his senses are dominated by the soundtrack he composes to frame his visual memory. Sometimes it swells and envelopes him, carrying him over rapids on a turbulent river spilling into a whirlpool, dragging him under and spitting him out into the gasping air. At other times it is gentle, teasing, luring him deep into the jungle where each sound is so subtle that he has to strain to hear it. Oriol does not hear Osvaldo when he warns of their arrival. The return from his sovereign realm is always slow, leaving him as disoriented as one woken from a deep sleep, so he is surprised at being so suddenly summoned to walk once again down the aisle of the bus. But the warm touch and the smell of his son’s skin brings him back to
the present. Osvaldo takes his father’s hand and places it upon his strong young shoulder. The old man could travel anywhere with his boy to guide him. They step down from the bus into shadow and enter the terminal, but when they emerge onto the main street he feels the comfort of warm sun on his face.
The rain hammers, driving Mári’s little dog down from his rooftop patrol into the body of the house, where he crouches with ears laid back while Mári reads from Genesis about the Biblical flood that raged for forty days and forty nights. In Baracoa it rains only twenty-one days, but a relentless driving rain that leaves the town drenched and gurgling. On the twenty-second day the rain stops like a tap turned off and the sun comes out, causing the whole town to sparkle. But the damage is done. On the nineteenth day of the rains the ceiling over Mári’s front room had begun to crack and crumble. She had immediately covered the piano with a large dust cloth which had somewhat protected the newly-tuned instrument from the plaster dust and falling debris when the final collapse had occurred, but could not prevent the soaking of the dust cloth and the inevitable entry of dampness into the old upright. She’d had no plastic sheet. Such things were hard to come by.
Alegra helps her grandmother with the paperwork necessary for the purchase of construction materials to repair the roof, and Yorki runs with the completed forms to Poder Popular. Various permits are required in the coming weeks, and Mári comforts herself with the thought that all that running will help to build Yorki’s athletic muscles. Perhaps he will even travel outside Cuba someday to run for his country in the Olympic Games.
It is fortunate for Mári that she is well acquainted with the Bible and with the patience of Job, which to her is not a cliché but a lived experience, as it is to all Cubans of her generation who have been waiting more than fifty years for the Revolution’s promise to bloom. Now she is to be tested in the cruellest way. Eight months after the collapse she still has not received her permits, though she has received advice from everyone on her street, some of whom have suffered similar damage and are caught in their own bureaucratic tangles. Mári has learned that even when permission comes the chances are slim of actually getting the cement, sand and gravel she has requested. Nor would it be much better to rebuild with corrugated roofing, as some have recommended, because the material would have to be ordered from La Habana which meant waiting a year or more. Prima Melvita has waited a year and a half to get batteries for her hearing aid and has in that time lost interest in what people are saying — even in the minister’s sermons.
Alegra comes home with a new set of forms. ‘The regulations have changed, Abuela. We must start over.’
Mári has already paid 357 pesos in registration fees, so her savings are severely depleted. She had hoped to accumulate a little for building materials but she’s down to fifty pesos now, which will hardly buy a bag of cement. How will she afford another set of fees, and another visit from the piano-tuner when the renovations are complete? For she has not yet given up on her plan, though time is passing. She shuffles across the courtyard in her old house slippers, intending to sit on her bed at the back of the house and read her Bible quietly, but in mid-step something turns her abruptly towards the wreckage of the front room, as though she were a puppet. She surrenders to that force and finds herself standing before the shrouded piano. Someone guides her hand and lifts the dustsheet. The discoloured keys, with a gap between each, seem to smile up at her. Reymundo grinned like a demon, some had said, when he was under the influence of the rum bottle, but Mári had always seen the little boy behind that grin, the adventurous child who had taken refuge in his father’s piano. She ventures once again to touch the keys and finds that the slightest pressure produces a rich sound that travels through her body, awakening the memory of Reymundo’s playing. Her throat thickens. Sudden tears prick her eyes and fall between the keys, causing perhaps more damage to the instrument.
‘An act of God,’ she murmurs, pondering on the inundation that has changed her life as she realizes that the ceiling will perhaps never be restored in her lifetime, and that Alegra might go on a medical mission to Venezuela, and Yorki could become an international athlete. Then there would be no-one left to preserve the crumbling house. Mári begins to sing, a warbling hymn from their childhood — ‘¡Despierta mi alma! Levanta tus ojos’ — to the force that guides her hand as she raises her unseeing eyes to the damage above her.
THE UNWELCOME GUEST
Onaldo had often talked about Rafael. They’d been schoolboys together in that same neighbourhood of La Playa, and Rafaelito had protected him from the school bullies, he’d said, so Karina was surprised to be greeted at the door by a small man — a bantam, though tough and wiry.
‘¡Feliz cumpleaños!’ she said, exchanging kisses with him, as was the custom. ‘Sixty-five! Un cumpleaños muy importante. Now you will retire, no?’
‘In Cuba there is no such thing as retirement,’ he said, his blue eyes fixing on hers intensely. ‘How can I survive on a government pension? No, no, no,’ he wagged his finger at her, ‘I must find more work — part-time jobs that will keep me running in all directions. It’s not easy.’ He gave Karina a knowing smile as he turned to embrace Onaldo, slapping him on the shoulder.
The front room was full of men, some seated on chairs arranged against the far wall while a couple were lounging against the door frame and still more were crowded into the back room where a ghetto blaster was pumping out salsa at top volume. Onaldo handed over the bottle of Havana Club that Karina had chosen. She didn’t want to drink street rum, she’d told Onaldo, which was what the men were accustomed to, and which they were pouring now from large plastic pop bottles. The Havana Club was splashed generously into the waiting cups, even though some of the guests were already quite far gone. It was four in the afternoon on another steamy hot Baracoa day.
‘This is our Canadian guest from Toronto,’ Rafaelito said proudly as Karina smiled and shook hands with Francisco, Victor, Ángel, Manolito, Nelson, Rodolfo, Ulyses, Bismar, Yoel, Yurubí . . . They blinked at her, their eyes like camera shutters. It seemed she was the only female guest. When she asked about the other women she was led to the kitchen and introduced to a trio of cooks, one of them balancing a baby on her hip as she sliced tomatoes. The kitchen was a dingy affair with dark walls and a deep cement sink, but the women grinned at her cheerfully, and the young mother handed her baby to Karina while she finished slicing the tomatoes and started on an onion. The baby immediately grabbed Karina’s necklace and tugged at it, gurgling with delight. She jiggled the child up and down, shifting from foot to foot, until the mother reclaimed him and thrust her plate of tomatoes into Karina’s empty hands. The red slices glistened with oil and salt, wafer-thin slices of transparent white onion nestled on top, and a bent fork balanced on the edge of the plate. Onaldo took her hand and led her into the front room where the men were making yet another toast to Rafaelito. ‘¡Feliz cumpleaños!’ they shouted in a slurred chorus. As soon as Karina entered the sala Rafael sprang forward and relieved her of the plate, insisting that she be the first to sample the bright tomatoes, so she picked up a slice with finger and thumb and dropped it into her mouth, raising her eyebrows as she savoured the red fruit. Rafaelito grinned and jogged his plastic cup against hers.
Onaldo took her hand again and led her forward. Immediately a skinny young man leapt up and offered his chair, hard and upright, in a row against the front wall. Bismar, a handsome old fellow, made his way across the room and sat next to her, leaning in to ask her opinion of Cuba.
‘I love Cuba. Your Revolution is an example to the whole world of how to resist American imperialism. I am impressed by the loyalty of Cubans, how you help each other, how you manage to celebrate every occasion despite your difficulties, how you maintain a sense of family in the face of all the problems, how you love your children and share with your wives in the care of . . . ’
From the corner of her eye she caught Onaldo’s smirk. She had visited Cuba often enough to understand the a
greed dialogue, reflecting back the clichés people liked to hear; a kind of non-dialogue, and one which Karina didn’t mind since she was still focused on the language more than its content. Only when you knew someone well could you bring out your honest opinions; the complexities that sit better on a foundation of intimacy. She noticed Bismar’s eyes glazing over as she told him about the time she’d heard Fidel and Chavez speaking in the Plaza de la Revolución in La Habana, then the rum bottle made a last round before it was drained, and all the men grinned and toasted Rafaelito as Onaldo snapped a couple of photographs.
It was at this point that Rafael’s speech began to slur. He grabbed Karina’s hand and repeated for the third time what a great friend Onaldo was, what a good man, how noble and intelligent, how admirable and honest. The word “honest” caused Onaldo to give Karina a sheepish grin. His lies and betrayals were legend — his attempts to extort money from her, his naivety in thinking she would fall for it because of her love for him. After several such incidents their relationship had ended and there’d been a period of bitterness and distrust before they’d arrived at a place of understanding which had ripened over time into genuine friendship as Karina had realized that Onaldo’s betrayals had enabled her to clear some old emotional issues of her own that far predated him. It was okay. But Rafael’s rambling repetition, his tugging at her arm as he spoke, not only irritated her but felt sentimental, even maudlin. Nothing more boring than a drunk, she thought. She raised a finger to Onaldo, with a slight lift of her eyebrows — their signal that she wanted to leave.