by Amanda Hale
Tito throws back his head and sighs. The sky is already a deeper blue, battling with the intensity of the sun as it rises towards its midday climax. How the elements mirror us, he thinks. Soon it will be evening and everything will darken and disappear into the night, except for the crescent of a new moon and the stars so very far away. We’ll have to sit it out, he thinks, our time will come. But his next thought, rising like an alligator from the Zapata swamp, is that time is running out. Will I go home? he asks himself. Will I go back to Matanzas one more time?
NANDO AND ERMINDA
Nando goes twice a day to the panadería, plastic bag in hand, dawdling on the street to greet his neighbours, then stopping for a full minute to gaze up into a perfectly clear blue sky. Ah, the rains have washed the clouds away yet again. He inhales the freshness of the morning. An aroma of warm bread spurs him on to join the lineup in front of the bakery.
When he returns with his fresh bread, and a handful of ripe red tomatoes he encountered along the way, he closes the portál gate carefully behind him and turns to find Erminda anxiously waiting. ‘Your coffee is ready. Where have you been? ¡Bandolero sin verguenza!’ she quips, remembering how they had carried on in their youth, a scrim of memory through which she still sees him, her handsome thirty-year-old bridegroom, and she a shy seventeen-year-old unable to believe her good fortune.
Nando was one of the men who built La Farola, sitting atop a giant excavator that cut through the jungle, dividing the mountains, tumbling the red earth into huge piles, crushing it, flattening it, shaping it to Fidel’s wishes, all the while breathing thin air, perched high above a shifting landscape backed by Biblical banks of cloud lit in the late afternoon by the golden ball of a sinking sun. Now he sits in front of his postage stamp TV watching a snowstorm of bad reception — las noticias three times a day, la novela — the soap opera — foreign films with Spanish subtitles, but most often, as Erminda scurries by in her chancletas, heading to the portál to gossip with her neighbours, Nando’s eyelids are closed in a gentle sleep, his head erect, as though he were merely resting his cloudy eyes.
Beside the TV is a photo of their wedding — Erminda in first blossom, wearing a white dress, holding onto a man whose rakish looks and pencil-thin mustache are reminiscent of Clarke Gable. There is a belying cruelty to Fernando’s thin-lipped grin, for he is in fact the gentlest of men. Inside his mottled skin lives yet that young man, his hand, now twisted with arthritis, resting on his bride’s shoulder, claiming her. Erminda is more than a decade younger and can still dance circles around him, then she will stop suddenly and lay her head on his chest in a gesture beyond words. For almost sixty years they have been inseparable, retiring together each night to their marriage bed, Erminda’s small body curved around Nando’s back, shaping itself to him as though they were indeed the one flesh of which the Bible speaks. And they were joined psychically even when physically apart, for there had been times in the early days, the 1960s, when they had not seen each other for weeks on end because Nando was working on the construction of La Farola. Fidel Castro himself had authorized construction of the highway soon after the triumph of the Revolution, to join Baracoa to the rest of Cuba. La Farola had a life of its own, like a mythical serpent winding its way through the mountainous jungle above a tiny but powerfully historic town perched on the edge of the sea, divided and held and irrigated by a torrent of rivers that eventually, after all their flowing, gave themselves to the ocean.
It has been a long retirement and even after Nando turns ninety he continues puttering between his chair and the front portál where he leans against the balcony rail to observe the comings and goings on the street. He is La Guardia — a job he did throughout his long career as a construction worker and driver of heavy machinery, taking his night duty in stride when his turn came around, guarding the huge tractors with their mud-encrusted wheels. Pacing the portál, Nando thinks more and more on this, and on the many hours of his life that have passed in duty and in bone-shaking labour. He feels exhausted with it. ‘Trabajando, trabajando,’ he mutters to himself, indicating the eternal nature of the work with a gesture of his hand, like a man scything grass in a field. He sits more and more in front of the television with its flashing pictures, but he has turned down the volume so that he can meditate more peacefully. Erminda fails to notice this because, being thirteen years younger than Nando, she is still on the move and is in any case a person of a quite different temperament. Sometimes Nando simply sits with his hands over his mouth and his eyes closed, like two in one of the three monkeys — no ver el mal, no hablar mal — though he hears everything that goes on in the house with its succession of comings and goings — the tourists who lodge in the back room with a door onto a patio bedecked with plants, his daughter and son and the grandchildren and great grandchildren who visit daily and sometimes several times a day, Erminda’s many sisters and friends, and the vendors with eggs or bags of guavas or slices of cheese arrived fresh from Camagüey on the bus. There is a lot of traffic.
Nando has noticed that, since their return, the Heroes have become television stars, appearing on shows with scantily clad girls dancing around them, and singers at their side bellowing into microphones. Everyone wears a smile. Oh, how their faces must ache, he thinks. You can get un dolor de cabeza from smiling too much. It happened to him on his ninetieth birthday and Erminda had to massage the back of his neck and give him one of her Ibuprofen pills. Gerardo, Antonio, Ramón — they look much older now, but they are gordos — how can that be after so many years on a prison diet? The Yanqui spy, after only five years in a Havana jail, looks old and wasted, Nando observes, and he’s lost a lot of teeth. Erminda has told him that Gerardo’s wife is to have their baby early in the new year.’ Pero es imposible,’ he said, ‘He’s only been home since mid-December.’ Erminda explained to him about artificial insemination, but Nando is troubled by such things and finds it better to simply mute the sound and close his eyes.
One day, after a particularly heavy meal, served to him in the heat of midday, Nando feels horribly nauseous. He retires to the bathroom and tries to hawk up his lunch, without success. He sits on the edge of the toilet with his head in his hands for so long that Erminda raps at the door — ‘Nando, are you all right? ¿Qué está pasando allí?’ The sounds have alarmed her because Nando has never been a man to make such a rumpus in the bathroom. Admittedly in recent years he has begun to snore and fart in his sleep like an old dog and Erminda has to nudge him hard and sometimes even take an extra sleeping pill, but these noises behind the closed door sound more serious. She helps him to the bedroom and lays him down with a couple of lumpy pillows to support his head. She presses liquids on him — orange juice, milk with sugar and chocolate powder, tea brewed with manzanilla leaves from her plant on the back patio. He wants none of it. He has to vomit. There is no alternative.
Laura arrives from her house around the corner. ‘Papi, you have to drink,’ she insists, echoing her mother as they hover above him. Finally he manages to stagger to the bathroom and vomit, and then he lies down again, feeling better, but he continues his rebellious fast for two days in which time his left leg swells up, and an old hernia in his groin revives, causing a painful and embarrassing swelling. ‘You have to keep your leg up,’ Erminda says. ‘Vamos, Nando. Levántate de la cama. Sit in the balánce.’ She drags another chair from the sala to elevate his leg, and hurries to the kitchen for an ice pack.
Nando discovers the rocking chair to be surprisingly soothing once he is settled in it. From the corner of the bedroom he has shared with Erminda for so many years he gains a new perspective. He has never sat in this room before, except briefly on the edge of the bed to put on his socks and shoes, bending to tie them, more and more slowly with the years in order to avoid that dizziness that comes when he lifts his head too quickly. He forgives Erminda for her strident demands. Behind the urge to eat the food she has so painstakingly prepared for him he detects an edge of hysteria. She’s worried about him, ju
st as he had worried about her when her sister died suddenly in the summer and Erminda had taken to her bed with a dizzy spell and refused to consume anything but water. The other sisters had been tending her when Nando had opened the door a crack to plead with her — ‘No te vayas, Erminda’ — Don’t go. Don’t leave me. No te vayas. What a prize she was, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. And still when he looks at her this is who he sees — a seventeen-year-old with an air of mixed docility and wildness, her heart-shaped face framed with dark hair, her deep brown eyes so full of passion. He had tamed her and elicited from her all the joys and promises of her beauty.
For five days Nando does not venture from the bedroom, then one evening he surprises his wife by shuffling across the living room to watch the Heroes with her. Little by little he resumes his old habits until he is once more posted in front of the silent television at seven in the morning drinking his café con leche and chewing on a piece of fresh bread. Not so very long ago, it seems to him, he was out on the street early each morning to fetch bread from the bakery, to look for some meat for the midday meal, to greet his neighbours who were out on similar quests. But something is different now. It is like a dance, Nando thinks, this slow change that is claiming him. He is captive now to a force much stronger than any he has known during his long life. Erminda is constantly at his side, tending his still-swollen leg, smoothing the few hairs left on his head. He feels like an old rooster in a chicken coop with all the hens gone but one, and she is his queen.
‘No te vayas,’ she says, teasing him. ‘¡Bandolero sin verguenza!’ And she swipes him on the side of his head in that rough way she has that hides her caring when it is too much for her.
‘What has become of Fidel?’ Nando asks as he chuckles and closes his eyes. He never sees him on the television screen these days, only the three gordos with their shining white teeth. Fidel has been silent a long time, Nando thinks. Perhaps he has died and no-one has told me.
GODOFREDO
No-one ever forgot Godofredo’s birthday. He was born on January 8th 1959, the day that Fidel Castro rolled into Havana atop a tank when his Revolutionaries had taken the entire country and Fulgencio Batista had fled to the Dominican Republic, en route to Portugal. Godo was fêted annually with cake and refrescos and with the congratulations of friends and neighbours filled with national pride as well as good wishes for the boy’s birthday. Their felicitations were expressed more fervently with each passing year as their hopes for the Revolution grew until, in 1977, the sixteenth year of the American embargo, with Cuba’s economic relationship to Russia still firmly in place, two incidents changed forever the course of Godo’s life.
He was an unusually intelligent student, and had been encouraged early in his schooldays to pursue a career in the sciences. In fact he could have pursued any career he wished, because he was talented in almost everything, from mathematics and science, to languages, the arts, and the social sciences. His mother Liliana, a fervent though necessarily clandestine Catholic after the Revolution, harboured a desire for her only son to become a priest, but her husband Alfredo persuaded her that this would be a criminal waste of the boy’s intelligence, even if religious practices were to become legal in time. Alfredo had in any case no time for the church. He’d never had much time for the Revolution either after he’d seen what followed the triumph. He harboured his anti-revolutionary feelings secretly, keeping a low profile with his neighbours, and with colleagues at the bank where he measured out his days in deposit slips. His greatest desire was to give voice to his opinions and to gather a following as a dissident leader but, though he found it easy to criticize, Alfredo was not an original thinker and could conjure up no fresh ideas on national governance. Instead of speaking out, which would have taken him straight to prison, he began to accumulate a nest egg of American dollars, slowly and carefully garnered in the course of his daily work. After hours, in the privacy of his teller’s cage, he would handle the sensuous green papers and think of all the hands they had passed through on the streets of Miami where dollars travelled from one store to another, from bank to bar to restaurant, perhaps even passing briefly through the hands of John F. Kennedy himself, or Lyndon B. Johnson who had succeeded him. Alfredo would not have called his practice embezzlement; he felt on the contrary that it was essential to his self-esteem and was the only thing that prevented him from drowning in the despair of the daily tedium that was his life.
Godofredo had just turned eighteen and was to enter university in Guantánamo when the catastrophe occurred. He was in Mayajara, at his uncle’s finca with big sister Marisel. It was from there, high in the jungle, his uncle had told him, that the Taíno Indians had first sighted the galleons that signalled the arrival of the tall white strangers — Columbus and his conquistadors, who thought they had arrived in Paradise, and planted their cross firmly in the sands of Baracoa. That cross had survived and had been authenticated by European carbon dating experts as the original Cruz de la Parra. Later, much later, Godo would see it for himself, displayed behind glass in the Catholic Church, and he would stand staring at it, wondering at its perfect preservation after five centuries.
Tío Ernesto’s finca was rich with coconut palms and mango trees. It was August and the ground was covered with fallen fruit. Even the ants staggered drunkenly over sticky mango skins, supping from their sweet wounds. Godo shinned up a coconut palm with a machete swinging from his belt, and as he climbed he imagined how the coconuts would go tumbling to the ground and how they would spurt like pop bottles as he chopped into them, slicing their heads off, handing them to Marisel and Tío Ernesto to drink the sweet water that would drizzle down their chins and onto their necks, cooling them. As he reached the top he was temporarily blinded by a ray of sun which pierced the leaves, so that he had to switch his angle and find a firm foothold a few inches to the left. Securing his position, he reached with his machete and aimed it carefully at the cord that held the coconuts, with exactly the right amount of force, as his uncle had taught him. But his left hand slithered and he lost his grip just as the machete struck home. Suddenly he was tumbling — turning and circling in the green air — his breath suspended until he hit the ground. There was a moment of complete silence before he heard Marisel’s scream and with it came an excruciating pain. When he looked down he saw no blood, only the protrusions of several splintered bones in his right ankle and, when they lifted him, the useless dangling of his foot as though it were separate from his body, a puppet suspended by wormlike tendons. He heard a scream, like a pig being slaughtered, before he passed out.
He awoke in a strange bed struggling to return from a dark place he could not remember. There was a strong antiseptic smell. As soon as he tried to move sweat broke out on his upper lip where a soft moustache was beginning to grow, and when he tried to get out of bed he realized that he was hobbled. His right leg was encased in plaster from his toes to his knee. He fell back and sank again into a deep sleep.
Godofredo remained in the Guantánamo General Hospital for many months, enduring multiple operations on his shattered ankle. When he was eventually transferred to Baracoa, bouncing along the newly built La Farola highway in an ambulance, there was a tearful reunion with his mother who had been unable to visit him for lack of funds. ‘No te preocupes, mi hijo,’ she said. ‘You will have your career. I will find a wheelchair and you will attend classes at the university.’ But it would be two more years before Godo could even stand, let alone think of resuming a normal life. And in that time his father made a fatal error. Distraught over his son’s accident, Alfredo began to accelerate his operation, branching out into the illegal sale of American dollars. It seemed safe enough. There was any number of currency sales on the street, negotiated by men with little to lose. But Alfredo had much to lose. He was a man of reputation. He had never caused any trouble. He never complained. He was completely trustworthy as far as the Bank was concerned. So, when the news came that Alfredo had been caught by the police everyone felt betraye
d.
‘There’s little enough in life that we can trust these days,’ said a fellow teller, flashing her manicured nails in the air. ‘But Alfredo? Who would ever have suspected him?’ She was outraged. The neighbours were outraged. The entire town of Baracoa was up in arms.
Alfredo received a quick sentence of ten years imprisonment with the additional punishment of not being able to see his family, because he was to be transported far away to Matanzas, almost the entire length of the island. But worst of all was the shame. The family was shunned. Only a few faithful neighbours visited with Liliana late at night, commiserating in low voices. ‘Ay Chica, que cosa,’ Pucha whispered as she leaned across from the next-door balcony. ‘What will happen now to Godofredo? Que lastima, such an intelligent boy. Que vergüenza. He won’t be accepted now at the university,’ she said, shaking her head sadly.
Godo’s career began by coincidence. Pucha happened to have a cousin who brought freshly roasted peanuts from Guantánamo twice a week to sell on the street, and he needed someone to fashion twist cones from old newspaper pages and fill them with nuts. ‘The muchacho who used to do it has got himself a job in the chocolate factory,’ Pucha explained. ‘I asked my cousin and he wouldn’t mind if Godo did the job. It’s easy work, he can sit at the table in his wheelchair no problem. One peso for one hundred cones.’
Liliana swallowed the last fragment of her pride and accepted on behalf of her son. While Godo worked she sat by his side and read the Bible to him in a low voice so as not to attract attention. But she need not have worried. One of the benefits of banishment, they learned, is that it makes you invisible.