Angela of the Stones

by Amanda Hale

  Godofredo is not a man to be brought down by a thing of the moment. He has endured too much for this and his suffering has given him resilience. By the end of the week, though not forgotten, Heike’s departure has been accepted and forgiven, even though it is unlikely he will ever see her again. Godo turns his attention back to the streets and to his many loyal customers. He watches Osiris Rivero walk by on his way to el Museo Matachín with a new spring in his step. He sees Aragón being wheeled down the boulevard by his faithful wife, his arms too weak to manage the rolling of the large wheels himself. Far from looking down in the mouth about his situation, Aragón bears a beatific smile as he removes his sombrero and gazes up into a clear blue sky. As always, he purchases three cones and enters into conversation with Godo, informing him that Yoendri Romero has this very day, a Sunday, left for La Habana for his journey onward to Brussels. ‘By the skin of his teeth,’ says Aragón. ‘His passport and visa were issued at the very last minute. I hope to be travelling again myself as soon as I get out of this chair,’ he says, munching on the fresh, salty maní.

  At day’s end Godo finds himself staring up at the new clock in the Church bell tower and he remembers Padre Luigi who sent to his hometown of Bergamo for the clock, and who was then sent home to Italy himself, as though in exchange. Now the clock speaks for you, reminding us, Godo thinks with a wry smile. A few stragglers are emerging after Padre Mauricio’s evening mass. Godo sits on one of the new benches in Parque Central between Ángela, who is delving into her plastic sack of bottles and cans, and Eugenia who wears, as always, her red blouse, and is leaning back smiling with contentment. Suddenly there is a swish in the air as Pablito lands at Godo’s feet. ‘Aha manisero!’ he croaks, ‘I’ve found you. How are your new shoes fitting?’

  ‘Well enough, well enough,’ nods Godo, and he gives the boy a cone of peanuts and pats his close-cropped head. Pablito skitters away, hopping in his big shoes across the paving stones to the fountain, leaving Godo staring wistfully as he remembers that feeling from long ago, that old feeling of complete freedom when he’d been able to move without thinking, to arrive in a place as though by magic, transported by the angels. The big hand of the clock clicks into place, perfectly aligned, and the hours begin to ring, deep rich sounds resonating through the town, informing everyone that it is time to head home.

  ANOTHER WORLD

  April 2016.

  ‘I don’t know how my daughters grew up so fast!’ Sonia exclaims to her mother. ‘Only the other day we were looking at their baby pictures.’

  ‘Sí, sí,’ says Tamara, fiddling with her hearing aid as it whistles and screams in her deaf ear.

  ‘Remember our little Mumu at three years old with that gappy smile, her front teeth just coming in?’

  Tamara, with her good ear angled at Sonia now, nods enthusiastically. ‘And Marielena such a big girl at five years old, dressed in her uniform for the José Martí birthday parade,’ she says.

  ‘Twirling her baton and stamping her white boots,’ says Sonia nostalgically. ‘Ah, how innocent they were. We were the centre of their universe, Mami. Where did they learn all this?’ she asks with furrowed brow, ‘How to use cell phones and computers, how to take photos with a cellular?’

  Mother and daughter are sitting by the open door of their little house on calle Ruber López. Sonia has a cup of home-made crema in her hand — a mixture of milk, egg and crushed peanuts with a tiny dash of rum. Usually it’s a strong drink, but Sonia feels cautious with so many young girls in her house. It was only at Marielena’s insistence that she added un tingüaro from the rum bottle which had been purchased for the men — Nector and Elio, compañeros from work, who have helped to carry the borrowed tables and chairs from the school in front of Parque Central — and for the father and grandfather of Marielena’s boyfriend Javier, a shy fifteen-year-old who can barely make eye contact with anyone except his beloved novia. It’s a new thing, only three months, and Marielena still a week short of her quinceanera, but they’re having the party early because Javier’s grandparents will be away in La Habana next week.

  Sonia watches her girls in amazement as they sit with their friends along the wall behind two long tables set up for dinner. They’re snapping photos of each other with the cell phones they all seem to own except for her Mumu and Marielena who have no prospect of owning cellulars, and yet they know exactly how to use them. Mumu, barely thirteen, and still skinny despite her budding breasts, tosses her head and poses for a selfie, holding the phone at arm’s length. She’s known affectionately within the family as La Doctora, for her ambition to become a doctor or, at the very least, a lawyer. She is the leader of her school group, the winner of many awards for academic excellence, and for public speaking, dancing and singing. Sonia feels enormously proud of her little Mumu. But how did this baby of mine learn how to act like a television star? she asks herself. Marielena, her firstborn, has always held the promise of beauty, but now, with her lush hair and honey-coloured skin, her green eyes and plushy lips, she has become something of a liability Sonia fears. Just look at her! In this past year Marielena has developed an amazing body, her hips broadening, breasts and buttocks blooming, legs stretching and curving down to her dainty feet which are now encased in a pair of very high heels. What happened? Sonia asks herself. I see her day by day but suddenly she has become a stranger to me, Mumu too, as though they have entered another world.

  But the girls still inhabit the world of their family, in a humble wooden dwelling in the centre of Baracoa where they’ve grown up with Sonia, Tamara, and great grandmother Doña Flora who died quietly in the middle of the night eight years ago, after enduring two amputations due to diabetes. Unlike so many of their friends, Marielena and Mumu share the same father, though his appearance at their house is rare. Carlos has another family, and a wife who rules the roost, so he has to sneak away when he can and rarely contributes anything material to his daughters’ household, though this afternoon he has stopped by briefly on his motorbike to deliver two cartons of sangría for the fiesta. ‘Hay problemitas en mi casa, chica,’ he told Marielena, ‘But I promise I will come later to toast you, mi amor.’

  Sonia steps out onto the darkened street and looks up into the sky. All day rain has threatened in billowing dark clouds but has not so far fulfilled its promise. As she re-enters her house she sees it anew and is filled with pride. They have scoured and scrubbed, dusted and polished. A pair of white net curtains have been lent by a neighbour and have been hung over the broken wooden planks on the wall where the girls are sitting. Those curtains make a good background for the photos they’re snapping with their phones, Sonia thinks. All those little girls suddenly transformed, tossing and fondling their hair with long manicured nails. Mumu and her best friend Violeta are the only ones who don’t wear false nails, though they too have painted their fingers and toes, Mumu’s in green, Violeta’s in purple. Some of the girls wear dresses with plunging necklines. Look at Yanelis! Sonia remembers her as a toddler, same age as Marielena, and here she is with her breasts spilling out of a shocking pink dress which is way too tight for her. Sonia makes a mental note to speak with Esther. Perhaps she doesn’t know the life her daughter is leading. After all, she’s been away on a mission in Venezuela, she’s out of touch. Some of the girls are more modestly attired, though they all have red-red lips, shiny with gloss. Sonia watches them plumping and preening for the camera, so absorbed with themselves, looking just like all those girls they’ve seen on television and on the streets, coming out of bars and nightclubs.

  A mixture of regatón and romantic bolero blares at top volume from the ghetto blaster lent by Nector, the mathematics prof at the school where Sonia teaches history to pre-university students. The very month she had graduated with her master’s degree in social work Raúl Castro had cut the services so that only a handful of trabajadores sociales could continue with their careers. After some floundering Sonia had picked herself up and got hired as a teacher. She already had years of expe
rience coaching her own girls in Cuban history and literature, trying to instill in them the values embedded in the words of José Martí. “To educate is to free . . . Books console us, calm us, prepare us, enrich us and redeem us . . . Encendemos el horno para que todos puedan hornear pan — We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread . . . The first duty of a man is to think for himself . . . ” She is paying for the girls to be coached in English, though they are shy to speak in a foreign language.

  Tamara bustles into the kitchen to prepare the salad, lowering the volume on the ghetto blaster as she passes by, because it makes her hearing aid scream. ‘¡Abuela!’ Marielena protests, ‘¡Por favor!’ and immediately turns it up again. Tamara shrugs and removes her earpiece, placing it for safety in the freezer compartment of the fridge. She has heard that batteries will last longer if kept in the fridge, the colder the better. She washes her hands and begins to slice cucumbers and tomatoes very thinly, arranging them around the rims of two large platters. She chops and shreds a big cabbage, scatters a pile of it in the centre of each platter, and spreads cloths over both dishes to keep the flies off. Nector and Elio help with the cutlery, placing the borrowed knives, forks and spoons wrapped in paper napkins at each place setting on the two long tables. Plates are stacked on the counter ready for the slicing of a giant pork leg accompanied by generous servings of rice and black bean congrí. The borrowed glasses are lined up on the kitchen counter, polished and shining, with a backup of plastic cups. Tamara checks the pot of boiled plátanos, which are just right — cooked but still firm.

  Finally the much-awaited boyfriend and his family arrive. Grandma enters the house like a beauty queen, in a pair of skin-tight red pants, platform heels, and a revealing white top glistening with gold sparkles. Like all Cuban women she is proud of her body, even as her well suckled breasts succumb to gravity and her voluptuous curves expand into the salva vidas bulging under her tight sparkly top. Behind her lurks her grandson Javier, accompanied by his smiling mamá and a handsome papá who wastes no time in kissing all the girls and downing a shot of rum before tackling the pork leg, first removing the crackly skin with a well-sharpened knife.

  Sonia is in her element. She takes the mother and the grandma into the kitchen and gives them little cups of crema, chatting all the while. Grandpa downs a trago of rum and gives instructions to his son who is now sweating from the hard work of carving.

  ‘What will you do in La Habana? Visit family?’ Sonia asks the grandma.

  ‘I’m going for a medical appointment,’ she says curtly. ‘What else could take us away from Baracoa to make the long journey to the capital where we feel lost?’

  ‘Somos Palestinos,’ her husband says gruffly. ‘They treat us like peónes just because we’re from Oriente.’

  ‘As though we have no rights in this country,’ his wife chimes in.

  ‘But maybe our lives will improve now that Obama has shaken hands with Raúl,’ Tamara says, delighted to be able to join in the conversation. Her hearing aid is working much better since its spell in the freezer.

  ‘Agh, the only difference will be more American tourists,’ the grandpa says with a dismissive wave of his hand, almost knocking over the rum bottle. ‘And the reality is that very few tourists travel south of La Habana. Most of them land in Varadero and are so enchanted with the white sandy beaches, their luxury hotels, the free drinks, and the hotel staff who speak English, that they collapse and never get up until it’s time for the flight home! I know. I have a cousin who works over there. No, we got our Heroes back which was what we wanted. But for the rest, we can make our own changes, thank you very much!’

  ‘I’m with Fidel,’ his son cuts in, brandishing the carving knife, ‘We don’t need any favours from the American Empire!’

  ‘And they won’t give us any!’ the grandpa shouts. ‘They won’t end the embargo, and what if they did? It means nothing.’ He drops his voice and hunches over wagging his finger. ‘Who would we blame for the government’s shortcomings if there was no official embargo? Raúl doesn’t want relations with the U. S. any more than the Miami gang want to be friends with us.’

  ‘Ah Cuba, un nudo de contradicciones,’ Sonia says diplomatically as she watches from the corner of her eye the girls clustering around Javier and a couple more boys who have arrived to give him moral support. She notes how smoothly Marielena handles her boyfriend, seating him next to her at the head of the table, engaging him in conversation. What does she see in him? Sonia wonders. He can barely make eye contact with the adults, though he seems comfortable enough with the kids. It’s not so long since Marielena herself was shy and inarticulate, so perhaps she remembers how it feels and has compassion for the boy. They’re the same age, but Marielena has matured faster, her magnificent body burgeoning and carrying her on a wave of confidence into adulthood. Sonia feels a swell of pride in her daughter, in both of them. People tell her that she is a good mother, struggling to raise the girls alone, with only her own deaf mother for help. Of course, she’d had no choice. Carlos hadn’t even bothered to respond to her final ultimatum. And where was he now? After promising Marielena he’d come by. It used to hurt, the way he’d used her and abandoned her, not once, but twice! She’d felt so foolish, falling for him again after he’d gone back to his other woman, getting pregnant, doing it all alone, with only her mother and grandmother to help her. She would lie awake weeping quietly so as not to wake the girls and her mother — they all slept together in the little loft above the sala. But now she feels nothing for him. Her heart is cleared of emotional pain and she feels only pride and satisfaction in overcoming all those evenings of hunger when there was no money for dinner, when rain was leaking through the roof, when there were no costumes for the girls’ school activities and she’d had to invent or borrow. No dancing shoes, no money for school notebooks, no money even for an ice-cream at Casa Chocolate. ‘And look at them! They’ve turned into beautiful señoritas in spite of it all,’ she exclaims aloud. Marielena wags a cautionary finger at her mother, embarrassed by her outburst, though Mumu takes it in stride, snapping another selfie of herself and Violeta.

  Sonia realizes that good fortune is smiling on her family now, because Javier’s family is as much enamoured with Marielena as he is, and they are prosperous. They run a casa particular for tourists, and have access to convertible currency. They have provided the pork leg for the fiesta. Marielena is always over at their house and is growing plump with the good food she consumes there. At least my daughter is safe with this timid fifteen-year-old, she thinks. Most of the girls are running around with older boys, or even with extranjeros — like Yanelis, with her Greek boyfriend at least thirty years old, Marielena says. What must it be like to be confronted at fifteen by the urgent desires and insistent manners of a foreigner? Sonia wants a future for Marielena, not to see her saddled with a child before she turns twenty, and then abandoned by the father.

  ‘Time to eat!’ Tamara shouts. She’s turned down the music so that she can be heard. There will be two sittings. ‘First the muchachos,’ she says. ‘Come on Nector, bring the drinks from the refrigerator.’ The adults set to and serve plate after plate piled high with congrí, plátanos, sliced pork and salad, while Nector pours glasses of cola from tall plastic bottles. When they are done the plates are gathered and the remains shovelled into a bucket for the neighbour’s pig, then Sonia washes the dishes ready for the adults to eat. Meanwhile the kids drift out onto the street to dance — music at top volume once again. There is no cake. Sonia could not afford both cake and ice cream, so Marielena and Mumu had decided on the latter. The ice cream parlour serves one flavor — chocolate — and no-one ever tires of it. Baracoa is famous for the growth of cacao, and for the chocolate produced at the Che Guevara factory on the road out of town.

  After the final goodbyes on the street, the return of chairs and tables, the folding of the white curtains, and careful collection of all the borrowed items to be returned next day, Sonia, Tamara, Marielena and M
umu climb the wooden staircase to their sleeping loft. Tomorrow is Sunday, the girls can sleep in till 8.55 and dash out the door just in time for church at nine because Nuestra Señora de la Asunción is on Parque Central, only half a block away.

  No-one is tired. The girls sit cross-legged while Sonia and Tamara lie down on the big double bed under the window, which is a rough wooden casement opening onto a partial view of Poder Popular, the Municipal Government offices on the main square. They chatter about the party, about what a marvellous time everyone has had, how delicious the food was, the music, the dancing, how wonderful Javier’s family is, how much they love Marielena, how good they are to her. Then Mumu reaches under the bed for the laptop and the girls begin to work on their school project — a power point presentation about environmental issues for Earth Day. The laptop is a gift to Marielena for her quinceanera, not from her father who also runs a casa particular and could well afford it, but from Javier’s papá who got it second hand from a friend who picked it up in La Habana. Immediately the sisters had begun to load it with programs, documents, power point presentations, photo albums and files of games. Sonia watches as Mumu’s fingers fly back and forth over the keys — tacketytack — letters appearing magically, tumbling into a patterned order like a Disney cartoon. Then Marielena takes over and demonstrates a similar skill.