The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  A twenty-foot concrete wall surrounds the little cluster of houses where Tío Pepe whiles away the last years of his life. It’s tall enough to prevent any invading communist hordes, I’m sure, and gives the sense that you’ve somehow stumbled onto the first Cuban-American moon colony.

  Inside, cookie-cutter one-story houses huddle close together, their front doorways turned in toward the narrow corridors that separate them. Gnomes and flamingos populate the azalea and orange blossom gardens. There’s a family of cats, an occasional passing opossum or squirrel for them to eat or get thrashed by. A few brown chirpy birds do battle around a feeder someone has dangled from an evergreen. It’s all very quaint.

  “This is creepy,” Adina says as she directs her beat-up Volkswagen past the guardhouse and onto the main road of Miramar Villas.

  Ramón scowls out the window. “It really is. Thanks for driving, Adi.”

  “Bah, it’s nothing. I needed a break from the city anyway.”

  The about-to-be-sunset sky’s streaked with bright orange and barely there blue. Dirty snow splotches the edges of some of the lawns and a lonely wind chime is tinkling away in the January early evening breeze. “You been alright, Adi?”

  Adina scrunches up her nose. “Not exactly.”

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  “You wait till we roll up on your great-uncle’s united suburban military compound to ask me if I want to talk about it?”

  “So that’s a no, okay.”

  “Obviously I haven’t been alright, Ramón, since I don’t normally stand perfectly still like a zombie because you put on some old song and you don’t usually come home to find me with puffy, red eyes because I was crying for three hours straight in a little huddle on the floor.”

  “I … I didn’t realize.”

  “Of course you didn’t. I’m not trying to snap at you. I mean, a little, but whatever. It’s this one?”

  “One-eight-seven? Yeah.”

  Adina parks and turns off the engine. Some crooning Spanish ballad gurgles along quietly on the radio, all synthesizers and drum machines. For a few moments, neither of them says anything. Slowly, it dawns on Ramón that he needs to take the initiative.

  He throws his hands up. “I’m sorry.”

  Adina blinks at him.

  “Wait,” Ramón says. “That sounded angry. Or sarcastic. It wasn’t meant to. I was frustrated at myself for being so obtuse and I made it sound like I was frustrated at you for making me apologize. Let me, uh, let me try again.”

  Adina bites her lips and nods.

  Ramón takes a deep breath. “I’m really sorry I haven’t been there for you or a good friend to you. I’ve been caught up in my own shit, which is an explanation not an excuse, and…” All of it, all of me, is right there, waiting to come out. I’ve been seeing my dead aunt’s life every time I go to sleep and what a fucked-up life it was … but instead he just shakes his head. “I’ve just been going through a lot of stuff too and I don’t even know how to talk about it.”

  Adina blinks a few times, nods again. “Thank you. And I’m sorry you’re going through stuff. I’m here if you need to talk. Like about whatever weird family mission you’ve got me driving you around for.”

  Ramón almost laughs—what would he even say?—but catches himself. Shakes his head instead. “Just following up on some stuff for … you know, the family.”

  “Look at you being proactive! How does it feel?”

  He snorts. “Weren’t we talking about your messed-up family, not mine?”

  She concedes the point with a shrug. “Yeah, yeah, I just … I miss them,” Adina says. “I hate them for kicking me out and I miss them at the same time. It’ll be three years on Monday and all I get’s an email every now and then from my sister and the sad feeling that my mom misses me almost as much or more than I miss her but is too proud to reach out and it just sucks is all.”

  “You reach out?”

  “I send a card at Christmas and sometimes I email. At first I’d call but I’d always hang up after a ring or two. Not because I was afraid of rejection; I was afraid of what I’d say. You’re already familiar with the fire this mouth can spit.”

  Ramón nods, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, but Adina lets it go.

  “I didn’t want to make things worse. If my dad picked up I’d … I wouldn’t hold back. But they’re attached at the hip. She doesn’t even have a cell phone, so there’s no way to reach her without maybe reaching him and … Yeah, I just gave up. What’s the point anyway? They made their decision. I’m living my life.”

  “Your awesome life full of beautiful women that want to fuck your brains out.”

  “Yeah.” Adina looks out the window. “All except one.”

  “Oh. Corinna? Thought that was over.”

  “It is.”

  “Oh.”

  “Again.”

  “Ah.”

  “C’mon.” She shuts down the car and steps out into the chilly evening air. “Let’s go talk to your weirdo tío.”

  * * *

  A pretty middle-aged woman opens the door. She’s wearing scrubs and has on rubber gloves and a lot of makeup and a huge smile. “Ramón!” she squeals, and hugs him, careful not to touch the gloves against his shirt.

  “Hey, Teresa.” Ramón smiles, leaning down so she can plant her cheek kisses, and steps inside.

  “And this is?” Teresa takes a good hard look at Adina. “¡Pero qué bonita!”

  Adina blushes and goes in for her kiss. “That’s my friend Adina,” Ramón says. Teresa wraps around Adina and holds her tight. For a second, I think Adina might break down, she looks so startled to be embraced like that. Then she eases into it, a serene smile crosses her face, and she lets her head rest on Teresa’s shoulder.

  “Y qué buen espíritu,” Teresa murmurs quietly. “You’ll be alright, mi corazón. Don’t worry.” Adina nods her head and they release their hug as Ramón looks back to see what the holdup is.

  “Your uncle is so excited you’re coming, Ramón.” Teresa bustles past him, into the kitchen, and starts taking down plates and cups. “Can you reach that for me? The bowl with the little bananas and flowers painted on it? Esa, sí. Gracias. Yes, he’s putting on his nice clothes now and he’ll come out in a minute. Sit, sit, sit.”

  From the look of the place, Teresa must wage constant war to beat back the masses of collected junk. Hundreds of magazines, videos, and books are squished into a series of bookcases lining the walls. Antique lamps cast scant light on a huge multimedia system that takes up a full quarter of the little front room. Towering speakers stand guard on either side and a flat-screen TV sits on a whole blinking mess of devices.

  Ramón is halfway into an ancient easy chair when Teresa calls out from the kitchen: “Ramón, mi amor, would you bring me the sugar from the cupboard, por favor?”

  “Of course.” He sidesteps around the velvet couch, dodges Adina’s sweep kick at his knees, and walks around the counter into the kitchen.

  “¡Coño, mi sobrino! ¿Cómo tú estás, chico?” a voice blurts out from the bedroom. I remember him as a giant, Pepe. Of course, I was a kid and he was in his heyday; he was like a clock tower above me; I thought he could see the whole world from all the way up there. But this little man? He’s all crinkled over like he was some piece of paper that life was discarding. A gnome. If I’da met him back then I would’ve thought he was one of the little forest people.

  “Bien, Tío. ¿Y tú?”

  “Okay, ya tú sabes.” He’s wearing a slick little button-down shirt, military style with a pocket on each side of the chest, and gray slacks. He hobbles forward, cane first, and wraps a trembling little arm around Ramón. “Ay, chico. Hace rato.”

  “It’s true, more than a year, no?”

  “No, ¿ju know the last time I saw ju? At Ysenia’s quinceañera ¿no?”

  “Yes! I think so. That was a beautiful party.”

  “¡Bah!” Pepe swipes the very idea away from him with disg
ust and hobbles into the sitting room. “It was freezing cold that day! ¿Ju don’t remember? Coño, pero qué frío…”

  “I mean, yeah, it was February, Tío, but the party itself was—”

  “Hello, mujer bonita de mis sueños más profundos!”

  “Hello, sir.” Adina stands, straightens her dress, and kisses Pepe on the cheek. “Adina. Amiga de Ramón.”

  “So I see.” Pepe shoots a wicked wink at Ramón, who just shakes his head. “¿Teresa, café?”

  “Ya está hecho,” Teresa hums from the kitchen. “Siéntate.”

  Pepe eases himself onto the couch next to Adina, and Ramón helps Teresa bring in the tray with coffee and snacks. They banter back and forth through the required pleasantries, slipping easily between languages, Ramón never quite sure which to use and Adina or Teresa occasionally interpreting Pepe’s more obscure Cubanismos. Finally, Pepe signals he’s ready to get down to it by settling back into the couch and lighting a massive cigar. “Cubano,” he points out, grinning. “I know we are not supposed to, but at this point, I am old. And jus’ don’t give a fuck anymore, ¿ju know?”

  “I kinda do, actually,” Ramón admits.

  “Ahora, ¿what is it ju wanted to ask me?”

  I swing down in a long arc through the stale air of Tío Pepe’s cramped apartment, center myself, and listen.

  “My tías…”

  “Isabel and Marisol.” At the mention of my name, I shudder. Pepe says it correctly: a poem. Mar y sol, the ee sound extended just ever so slightly for maximum effect and then resolving into that gentle el ending. Marisol. My name. Me. “Teresa, el libro.”

  Clearly, he’d been preparing for this moment. Perhaps for a while. He opens the photo album that Teresa passed him and beckons Ramón over. “Allí están, las tres.”

  Ramón stands and peers over Pepe’s shoulder. Adina looks. Teresa looks even though she’s seen the picture before, I’m sure. Me? I don’t. I can’t. My heart is already shattered across the world. Why would I pound another nail into it? What could that picture show me except a fantasy of what might’ve been but wasn’t. A tantalizing quizás, if only, but alas. No thank you. No indeed.

  “Wow,” Ramón says. “That’s Mami in the middle.”

  “Claro, those eyes. Always had very beautiful eyes, your mother.”

  “And Isabel, the oldest. And that’s Marisol.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  I want to look. I do. It is me after all. Besides that one photo from my childhood, I haven’t seen me in … decades probably. Me with a body, a face. Me: more than just this ethereal nonsense, where it takes all of my concentration just to be, just to have some feeling at the tips of my not-there fingers. Mierda. To have a body. The me in that picture is before all the terribleness came tumbling down. Maybe just before. Maybe after Gómez gave me the package but before Isabel disappeared. A hundred paths lead out of that image but only one is what happened, and here I am: gone.

  “Eran tan bonitas, ¿no?”

  “Claro que sí,” Teresa says, leaning over from the back of the couch.

  I don’t believe in regrets. Even after so much, after everything. I don’t believe in regrets. I don’t. I detach myself from the shadows, move across the room. To see myself. Avoid the bodies—they’re so warm and full, so heavy and solid, so different from me. I don’t want to send a shiver down anyone’s spine, don’t want to complicate the moment by having to cringe and disperse myself until their uneasiness passes. I just want this to be simple. So I glide in between the warm, pulsing bodies, sweep over the surface of the couch, and peer over Pepe’s crumpled old shoulder. And there I am, staring right back at me through the long veil of history, wide, serious eyes, dark and earnest and oddly defiant.

  Dios mío, I was so young once. My skin was smooth except for a few pimples I couldn’t seem to get rid of. My fingers so slender wrapped around that copy of A Thousand and One Nights that I used to covet like a Bible, my face wide open to the world. I’m trying to look tough. The other two are trying to look sweet, but my chin is up, my mouth forced into a frown, my eyes ever so slightly narrowed just to prove I don’t care. The hand not holding the book rests on Nilda’s shoulder, which is odd because I’m quite sure by that time I already couldn’t stand her, but I probably just did it to cause trouble in one way or another.

  I am beautiful, back then. So young and pulsing with the certainty of God’s love and all my tiny inventions, my ever-unwinding imagination of how things will turn out, all lies, broken fantasies ripped from all those books I kept my nose in. I think this was the year I began to realize how hard things could be; the shadows had started tiptoeing around the edges of our house, but they hadn’t taken over yet.

  “How did they die?” Ramón asks. I don’t know if I want to hear Pepe’s answer.

  “Ay, chico,” he sighs. Teresa retreats back to the kitchen. The question threw a shroud over the room. Adina looks into her little coffee cup, then closes her eyes.

  “There is a building in Vedado,” Pepe says. “They call it el trampolín de los muertos.”

  “The trampoline of the dead?”

  “Eso. De allí, se tiró Isabel.”

  Tirar is a powerful word. She didn’t just jump, she hurled herself, she shot, projectiled, from the building. You tirar una pistola. And, if you’re Isabel, you tirar yourself. My sister could never do anything halfway. This was a truth I have carried with me, somehow. The knowledge doesn’t land with any surprise; it is simply a fact about Isabel I’ve always known. Se tiró.

  Gulping back a sob, Pepe uses one hand to demonstrate a body falling, watches it, and then, instead of smacking it into his other hand the way things probably happened, he makes it flutter up and away. Then he sits there frowning for a few seconds in silence.

  Then: “They never tell ju, Ramón?”

  Ramón shakes his head, looking broken. “I kind of knew. But never how. They don’t talk about it. Ever. What about Marisol, Tío?”

  “Ay, esa se mató.” The hand gesture is different, a wrist-flick and then another one, his old head nodding back and forth, eyebrows raised. A deep frown.

  This is a complicated answer. Se mató can either mean she killed herself or she was killed. That se is a question mark, but I doubt Ramón has the capacity to get at that nuance.

  “¿Se mató?” Adina asks, slicing one hand across her wrist.

  Pepe half shrugs. “She loved her sister though, Marisol. Even when they were little, Marisol always chased after Isabel, always looked up to her, followed her everywhere, never left her side. She loved her sister. Entonces…”

  I see. That’s what they all think: I loved my troubled sister, chased her lost soul over the top of some other building, somewhere where I wouldn’t be recognized, or the ocean perhaps. Desaparecida. Gone.

  Makes sense, I suppose, as much as any tragedy can. I’m Tío Pepe’s fluttering hand, all my parts dispersed in the wind. And really, just one of so many, so so many souls lost in those first terrible years.

  “Nobody knows?”

  Pepe makes a noncommittal grunt. “I was already gone, by then. Everything … fell apart. So quickly.”

  “Poor Mami,” Ramón says. “Two sisters gone … like that.”

  Again that recoil. Nilda … a ferocity rises in me that I don’t even have a name for. Hatred, maybe, but it feels thicker, more intimate. But of course Ramón would think of his mom. He can’t see the past, doesn’t know how far apart the world flung us, even before Isabel se tiró and Nilda se fue.

  “Sí,” Pepe says with a sad nod. Then he grimaces and makes another fluttering gesture near his head. “She is, ya … no.” She’s never been the same, he means, and the whole of Nilda deteriorating self is somehow encapsulated in that shaking hand. She’s barely there, he means, conjuring images of my sister sitting in the darkness of her perfectly maintained house, barely leaving, collapsing within, forever collapsing in slow motion within.

  And she might be barely there, but I�
��m the one who’s gone. Isabel is gone. Poor Nilda, but she’s the one who made it out.

  No one knows what to say for a couple of moments. The possibilities of what was just said playing over and over in all of our imaginations, I’m sure. I think Pepe’s teetering on the edge of bursting into tears. He rallies though, finds a smile for Ramón. “¿Algo más?”

  “What?”

  “Something else. ¿Ju had another question? ¿La Santería?”

  “Ah yes, I wanted to ask…”

  “Ay, pero ya estoy cansado, chico.” The old man stands and everyone else stands around him.

  “I’m sorry, Tío, I wore you out. Bringing up all those memories. We should be going.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I am going to bed. It’s past an old man’s bedtime. But you have questions about la Santería, you can speak to the expert.” He quickly embraces Adina and Ramón and then disappears into his bedroom, chuckling.

  “Who…?” Ramón asks.

  Teresa, standing in the kitchen, coughs into her hand.

  “Oh. You?”

  “Mhm. Come, jovenes, estep into my office so we can talk.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  This, then, is how I died: It’s cold, the wind blowing in from the ocean wraps around me and I pull my shawl close and the city is a rippling splatter of pastiche and crumble around me. Down on the street uniformed men swarm like ants, building to building, and when they get to my apartment and bash in the door they just find a cup of coffee on the table, still warm, and a cigarette half smoked in the ashtray and the screen door leading to the balcony open, wide open, and the cool ocean breeze making the curtains dance like spirits in the empty room.

  I can see it all like it happened right in front of me; it’s all right there: crisp and achingly true.