I don’t have time and now I am weakened again from expelling another shard of who I was into Ramón. These expensive gifts. I don’t know how many I have left. What’s worse: The past is mostly a phantom haze with occasional bursts of clarity slitting through like lightning against a dark sky.
Each moment unlocks itself as it arrives. Sometimes I can choose, and sometimes the memory just shows up, unbidden, and all I can do is bear witness as it ekes forth, through me and into him.
As they roll deeper and deeper into the elite Cuban Jersey suburbs, the houses become more grandiose and obnoxious. Do my countrymen realize that no amount of gaudiness can heal a broken heart? Surely by now they do, but it’s much too late for all that. Luxury is a drug as foul and taxing as heroin, and it sucks you into its very heart and spits you back out emptied of all your insides, all you hold sacred. And then you either climb back up into the ranks of the living or suffer in silence till you fade away, long-lost loved ones looking on blankly from the foot of your fancy deathbed.
Well. Maybe it’s not all that bad. I wouldn’t know. Just how I imagine it all. Anyway, the mansions come complete with spiraling cupolas and high walls with guard posts, something out of the embassy-lined avenidas of Miramar.
“He awake?” Alberto asks from the passenger seat.
Alfonse, the well-dressed thug sitting in the back, peers over at my nephew. Ramón is staring glumly out the window. Alfonse nods at Alberto and Alberto turns back around, shaking his head.
The SUV brings us up a hill, down a tree-lined driveway, and through an impressive perimeter fence. I’m still trembling from the flash of that memory-dream, and it takes some effort to wrench myself back into the present.
Ramón is trembling too, trapped in the uncertainty of the moment, the frustration of confinement. He gets out of the SUV without a fuss, exchanges some glares with Alberto’s men, and then follows them inside the mansion. It’s obscenely decadent, from the chandeliers to the marble pillars. Blood money, all of it. Birthed from and bound for blood. We parade through an elegant front hall, past a stairwell, through the kitchen—slightly less over-the-top now that it’s officially out of guest view—and down a darkened corridor. Alberto taps three times on a door, says “¿Abuelo?” and then opens it.
Enrique Raul Gutierrez is ill. He wears a perfectly pressed light blue guayabera and creased maroon slacks. His hair is coifed just so, his gray mustache trimmed with precision. But there’s something wrong with him, I tell you. The lean he has isn’t just from his age. His belly sticks out like any self-respecting Cuban man over thirty-five, but there’s a gauntness to his face; his eyes are sunken in and glassy behind the shaded lenses. What little hair he has left is quickly on the out and out.
Briefly, I merge with him, feel that fragile warmth of his core surround me—his pulse doesn’t call me like Ramón’s does, and it’s an uncomfortable place for me, like I’m not supposed to be here. It is a grim, collapsing world inside Enrique. Vital organs droop, gray and rancid, like abandoned cobwebs from the corners of his carapace. His life force flickers, faltering toward oblivion with each rattly breath. His heart keeps shivering with useless fibrillations between every couple of beats.
It was probably a mistake, getting this close to him. I’m startled to find myself feeling sorry for the man. He has, after all, just kidnapped my nephew, to top off a list of general ugliness and federal crimes. But, he is dying. And once, a very long time ago, he was my friend. He doted on Nilda, but then, when we were thrown together by war, it was me he held tightly while I came, and then cried to when it was his turn; he fell asleep while I lay beside him and listened to the forest breathe, and he woke up groggy and demanding but still with a certain sweetness.
How Nilda ended up being the godmother to his only grandson, well, I’d rather not know, honestly. But I can only imagine it involved an amorous advance gone sour and a guilt trip.
“Ramón.” The old man plants a hand on either arm of his chair and stands with some effort. Around him, framed pictures adorn the wood-paneled wall: laughing soldiers with their arms around each other in the forest; Donald Trump and George Bush, all dignity and rehearsed smiles beneath their scribbled signatures; Henry Kissinger, not smiling; a family photo from the mid-eighties, terrible hair and gigantic glasses. Awards from various social clubs and affinity societies. A framed picture of the two towers, a faded American flag behind them and the words Never Forget in horrific, illuminated script across the sky. Enrique makes a grand gesture of hugging Ramón and kissing his cheek, sits again with a loud groan and a sigh, and orders coffee to be brought.
Ramón, struggling to walk the line between unimpressed and polite, makes a half-smile and rubs the sizable lump on the back of his head. “Don Enrique, you have an elaborate way of inviting someone up to your beautiful house.”
“Did those little motherfuckers hurt you?” Enrique opens his mouth with shock, and I’ll say this about the old warrior: He’s a terrible liar. “Alberto!”
Alberto emerges from some dark corner he’d been lurking in and they exchange a quick tiroteo in rapid-fire Spanish. Alberto withdraws, looking surly, and Enrique turns back to Ramón. “You have my most sincere apologies, Ramón. I promise you that I will keep my grandson on a shorter leash when it comes to his dealings with you.”
“Thank you,” Ramón mumbles. “May I ask what is so important that you’ve demanded I come up here?”
Enrique lets out a rhonchal laugh and I flood with memories. It’s more cluttered with decades of shit building up in his lungs, but the man’s laugh is still what it once was: fierce, unrestrained, genuine. He couldn’t lie worth a damn, but Enrique was nothing if not a charmer.
Ramón doesn’t really see what’s funny and he says so. Adina’s words of warning are still hot on his forehead.
Enrique gets solemn, weary of overplaying his jaunty old man routine. “You know I care deeply for your family, right, Ramón?”
Hmph. Indeed.
“Uh,” Ramón says. “I guess?”
“How’s your mom, by the way?”
“She’s fine.”
“She is … has she been…?” Leaving the house. The words sit between them, unsaid but loud anyway.
Ramón shrugs a no.
“I’ve always carried an especial place in my heart for Nilda. She is a beautiful woman, your mother.” We know, Enrique, we know.
“Uh…”
“And I’ve always told my comemierda of a grandson that if he ever disrespects his godmother, I will strangle him myself.” He holds up two trembling hands. “With my own hands, ahahaha!” More coughing.
“That’s really sweet, thanks.”
“Well, anyway, stories for another time. I’ll get to the point. I’m old now, but I have one more term in me, you know. There’s still so much work to be done before we see a free Cuba and I know I may not see it in my lifetime, but I do want to do everything in my power to make it happen. I want to die knowing I have given it my all, Ramón. And the best way I know to do that is to keep doing what I do now.”
Running guns and passing outrageous laws in the state senate that mean nothing? Ramón is clearly thinking but doesn’t say.
“Used to be,” Enrique continues after a small coughing fit, “no corner of this county didn’t know my name. Used to be my influence reached into every bakery, club, and corner store within a hundred miles. But this is a new era, I know it as well as any. And my beloved Consuela isn’t with me anymore.” He nods at a picture of an enormous woman with purple hair and an unfortunate smile. “What I’m saying is, I need your help.”
Ramón makes a noise; something between a laugh and cough. “I have no idea what I could possibly do to help you, Don Enrique.”
“Of course not,” the old man laughs. “How could you? That’s why I invited you here: to tell you! I have no pull with this new generation of Cubans, Ramón. First of all, we’ve got a whole influx of recién llegados, an unknown quantity, of course, so there’s
that, and then we’ve got dominicanos, colombianos, ecuatorianos. All of them, coming in droves. And of course, they’ve heard of me…”
“Of course.”
“But it’s not the same. But you, Ramón, you have something I don’t have.”
“Oh?”
“Access. You have access to the youth, Ramón. I had my people do a Google on you.”
I don’t know what this means, but from Ramón’s blank stare, I can tell Enrique barely does either. “How’d that work out?”
“You have quite a following, it seems, Ramón.”
Ramón is getting a sense of where this is going and he doesn’t like it. He shifts his weight in the vinyl chair, remembers he has a coffee waiting, and sips at it, frowning. “I got some people.”
“You are … alarmed maybe? That I was checking up on you so extensively?”
Ramón shrugs off the question. “What is it you want, exactly?”
“A series of campaign events, parties really. You throw them, you set them up, use your mailing list, your Friendlier—”
“Friendster.”
“The Myspace, all these things. We do it at the club, but I come to you, Ramón, because your friend Luis and I … we have some bad blood, you know?”
“I don’t, actually.”
“Back in the ugly years. He was a mischief maker. We had him watched. He rabble-roused. It’s all here in my files, if you want to see.” The old warrior nods toward a cabinet beside his desk. “If you wonder what your friend was up to in the bad old days, all you have to do is ask.”
Ramón declines with a wave of his hand and a frown.
“But I didn’t bring you here to resuscitate old beef. No. I heard about what you did last year at the Mirabella Festival. I know you can bring the masses, get them excited. Because they haven’t heard anything like you before, have they? You espeak to them. I know.”
“I don’t know if I’d say all that really. I play music, people like my music, they come to see me perform.” A tiny image of Aliceana flickers around Ramón’s head and the memory of their conversation echoes through him. It’s over, he realizes again, and then she’s gone. I wonder, though. Within him, I wonder. He shakes his head. “That’s it. I’m not moving masses at my command.”
“Ah.” Enrique flicks his hand in the air. “Nonsense, Ramón, estop. Look…” He throws a weak, fat-addled arm toward some black-and-white photos in an upper corner of his wall. “Political prisoners, Ramón, all of them. Men and women that suffered for the cause of freedom.” And I know why we’re here. Not in the small way. In the small way it’s obviously to fulfill this small man’s big dreams. But in the larger, the Lord sent me type way, now I know how this all fits. “I know it’s a hard thing to understand,” Enrique goes on, laying it just thick enough to not sound canned but still get his point home. “This life we have now, these beautiful things we have. It’s hard, in the United States, to understand what it means to really struggle for something we believe in. Here, we have everything.”
The fuck you mean we? is written all across Ramón’s face, but he keeps it contained.
“There, he took it all away. He crushed our spirits, killed our families. He tortured us, Ramón. Raped our sisters and daughters, slaughtered our fathers and brothers, left us broken, enslaved, castrated.” He’s working himself up into a righteous, possibly rehearsed frenzy. He even rolled the r in castrated.
My picture’s not on the wall, thank God, but I can see the seed of the question germinate in Ramón’s mind. If only Enrique would calm down enough for him to ask. “And still, young people—your generation!—they go to Cuba on these vacations and school trips and to find their families, as if their families weren’t traitors and every dollar they spend doesn’t go toward propping up a murderous regime! Una locura.”
Ramón doesn’t mention it—wisely—but even as the old warrior rails on, a vista of old stucco buildings and the thundering sea opens up within my nephew, this child of exiles. He has no reference points except old pictures, family horror stories, and whatever lies the history books tell. The smell of the air, the way that Caribbean sun embraces your skin, seeps into each cell, the terror of soldiers coming down a block to uncover all your long-hidden secrets—none of that is available to him.
He wonders, not for the first time, what the music sounds like as it wafts along through curtains that rumba gently in the afternoon breeze, what it would feel like to fall in love with the reality of a place you’ve never been but always dreamed of.
“And then Elián,” Enrique snarls, oblivious, unable to read the room. “That was the final insult, no?”
“That was like four years ago,” Ramón says, but clearly there’s no stopping this train.
“They took that poor child away from us! To become who knows what in that pit of hell that man has created. And after that, now … what we need is a victory! A cultural victory, yes? That will be in the papers, that the world will see.”
“I don’t know, Enrique.”
“Look,” the old man says, suddenly comely, defeated even. He fumbles on the counter for a pill bottle and slides two into his mouth, swallows them with a gulp of warm water, and then sips his café. “I get excited, you know. What I am asking is simple, Ramón. This younger generation of Cubans, your generation, doesn’t know what we fought for, what many of us died for. They are concessionists. Easily accommodated by their cellular devices and social medias. They don’t understand yet that to even bend a little bit, to even deal with any of those traitors who remained behind, is an act of tyranny. That we cannot give up now that we’ve come so far. But I need to espeak directly to them. I need to make them understand.”
Ramón, mostly distracted by his dreams of Cuba, raises his eyebrows. “Well, it seems like you’ve really got a handle on that already.”
Enrique chortles. “You see? Sarcasm! That’s what I am talking about. You understand.”
Ramón scowls.
“You understand what I don’t understand. You speak this language, the language of these children. I need you to bring the message to them.”
“What message?”
“That we will never give in to these rat commie hijos de putas comemierdas que nos arrancó toda la libertad de nuestra querida isl—”
“¿Mi amor?” A woman’s voice calls from another room. “Tranquilo, mi amor. Tranquilo.”
Enrique cringes. “I get, you know, excited sometimes. Emotional. I want the children to know what we fought and died for. That after the first revolution went to hell because of that man, there was another revolution, a forgotten one, and it continues to this day.”
Revolution. A word so deeply perverted by men like Enrique it’s become meaningless. I know he once fought passionately for something he believed in, but now he’s just become a withered clown, funneling money to fund useless terror stunts by a dwindling group of paramilitary exiles, begging for more CIA cash and still trying to punish the Democrats for Kennedy pulling air support during Bay of Pigs.
“Did you know my tía?” Ramón says suddenly.
And there it is: Enrique’s face curls into itself like he’s about to cry. Instead he relaxes it, takes a breath. “Isabel? Ah, a brave, sad soul. Qué pena…” An artful dodge, but I doubt worth the trouble.
“No, I mean Marisol.”
“I knew her, of course,” Enrique admits with a shrug. “You know I’ve always loved your family, Ramón. Especially—”
“She disappeared? Marisol?”
“Another of his victims, Ramón. That is two of your family that he has their blood on his hands. This is why—”
“But I mean, how?”
“Ay, chico, you know an old man doesn’t remember every tragedy that has befallen our people.” Bullshit. He knows. He remembers. He won’t meet my nephew’s eyes. A beat or two of unpleasant silence passes as Enrique tries to let the unanswered question evaporate. I want to scream into the silence, but I don’t know that my rage won’t somehow disturb
the flow of air, cause a distraction that Enrique would then use to change the subject. I hold it in, that scream, and it churns. “You will do this thing I have asked, Ramón? For the political prisoners of Cuba, those who have died and been forgotten, for your family…”
I feel myself deflate some. He doesn’t need a distraction to change the subject. And how much can Ramón be expected to pursue him on this? The old man levels a long, hard stare at my nephew.
“I … I don’t know,” Ramón says. “I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long.” More groaning and sighing as Enrique lifts his tired, plump body up from the chair. “I need your help. They need your help.”
CHAPTER NINE
The dark New Jersey streets slide past. I see Ramón is as muddle-headed as I am, frowning out the window, wrapped in a carousel of thoughts, worries and fantasies that I wish I could strip away from him forever. But that is not our path. He’ll have to learn on his own how to quiet that raging mind.
I stay lost in my own imaginings all through the gasps of relief and asphyxiating hugs from Adina and Marcos. When they’ve talked it all out and moved on to other topics and slurped down several bowls of reheated rice and beans and more than a few Coronas, Ramón hugs them both and comes in the room. He keeps all the lights off, flips open his laptop, and scrolls mindlessly through some emails.
¡¡¡¡Asere!!!! begins one, and I see Ramón smile like he’s just bumped into an old friend. I’m sending a track for you to make into another absurdly fucking amazing work of art to post on your Myspace. Seriously. The people here are getting pirated CDs of your shit como nada. But are we getting paid? Ni un centavo chavo como dicen los pavos. But all my guys on the black-market routes keep selling more and asking me what else you got.
This one track I’m sending is old as the sun: a singer named María Teresa Vera, the godmother of Cuban music, my friend. “Veinte años.” Do what you feel with it: I’m positive it will be magic. My guy Catabalas digitized it just for you.
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