The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  “Support for Cuba is support for the regime. You know thi—” Luis himself delivers the blow this time, and it’s not gentle. Pancho shakes off the shock and spits out a tooth.

  “Don’t tell me what I know, traitor.”

  Things just got serious. Traitor is not a word that people who’ve lived through a revolution use lightly. It’s a life-and-death word. And there’s fire in Luis’s eyes. “You don’t get to tell me”—he steps in, raising a fist, and Pancho cringes—“what I know!” Before he can hit, Ramón puts a hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  “Luis,” Ramón says softly. “Wait.” The veil of rage lifts some from Luis’s eyes. He steps back, visibly struggling to control himself. “Wait,” Ramón says again. He steps in front of Luis, looking down directly into Pancho’s eyes. “How did you know?”

  “What?”

  “How did you know I was playing the song tonight?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Now it’s Ramón’s turn to get all up in the guy’s face, a whole other righteous fury burning through him. “I mean, I only told two, maybe three people I was going to play this song, and you don’t know any of them. I’ve been working on it all day. The only … way…” Ramón straightens back up, towering over Pancho. “… you could know…” He’s looking up now, putting all the pieces together. Then he looks back down. “You hacked me.”

  Cadiz sees what’s about to happen before anyone else. He’s been standing behind Pancho, watching silently, and now he stares at Ramón’s face, watches that flicker of rage dance across his eyes and he moves fast, toppling Pancho out of the way and throwing himself forward, catching Ramón just as he explodes. “You fucking hacked into my computer, you piece of shit! You…” Ramón is swinging, flailing, gasping, and finally panting and stepping away, getting himself together.

  When he’s calmed he looks at Cadiz and they exchange a nod. Ramón, catching his breath, turns back to Pancho, who’s gotten up and sat back in his chair without having to be told to. “How?”

  Pancho opens his mouth, closes it again.

  “Don’t answer. I want to … I want to talk to Gutierrez.”

  “He’s with the car, a few blocks away.”

  “No. Not the pipsqueak irrelevant nieto Gutierrez. I want to talk to the elder Gutierrez. You’ll bring me to him.”

  “Wait.” It’s Luis. He’s been simmering by the wall, watching and listening. Plotting, I imagine. When Ramón looks back at him he nods to the door and they step out into the corridor. “I think we might have a play here, if we move cautiously.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t know this Pancho character, but from what I gather of him, he’s not particularly dedicated to any cause but himself.”

  Ramón peers back into the room. Pancho is sweating and blabbing to Cadiz about baseball. Cadiz just frowns at him. “I could see that.”

  “He’s not a radical or revolutionary. He’s just some poor comemierda trying to get paid and not killed.”

  “So?”

  “So, clearly Gutierrez is coming for you. Or me. Us, most likely, for one reason or another. If we go and try to knock heads tonight, first of all, we lose the battle, because he outnumbers us in strength and political pull, not to mention dollar for dollar. Second of all, we lose the war because here we have what could possibly be our one advantage in this entire situation.”

  “Pancho?”

  “Eso mismo.” Luis is excited, alive with the joy of some espionage and strategy in what must be something of a dull existence compared to whatever chapter of the war he lived through in Cuba. “We make Pancho our own and así they don’t suspect you know you are being watched and they don’t estop watching you.”

  “You mean let them keep hacking my computer, reading my emails, all that?”

  “Jus’ for a little while, Ramón. Jus’ long enough for us to set a trap and flush them out.”

  Ramón frowns. “What I should really do is call in an ass-whupping from my mom, but I would never do that.”

  Luis arches an eyebrow. “Who’s your mom?”

  “Alberto’s godmother. He can’t say no to her. But I’m not bringing my mom into this. I was just kidding. Keep going.”

  “Look, I know not doing anything for now isn’t a fun prospect from your end. But really, how many emails do you send? Who do you really talk to on the email, Ramón?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I know. But I want to know what kind of plot is afoot and this is our one and only way to find out.”

  Ramón grumbles a little and finally nods. “But you keep me informed every step of the way.”

  “Claro que sí.”

  “You gonna rough him up anymore?”

  “No.” Luis wiggles his big eyebrows. “We need him to be our friend now. Change in estrategy.”

  “I see.”

  He winks and pats Ramón on the back a little too hard. “Go home, chico. Get some rest. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  * * *

  Ramón walks back into the club amidst an unexpected swirl of music. Corinna has taken the stage. She looks radiant in the spotlight with a silky scarf around her neck and a flimsy sleeveless top. And she’s singing. Marcos is laying down another smooth bolero beat and some old cat from the back room brought up his guitar and Corinna is belting out “Stormy Monday” in a raspy, unafraid voice that makes you want to just sit down and sulk about something. The audience is mesmerized.

  Ramón finds Adina, who’s dabbing away tears again, and stands beside her while the song unfolds, rises, and gathers momentum around them and then crashes down into a perfect bluesy finale. “I’m such a mess,” Adina whimpers when it’s over. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

  Ramón puts an arm around her. “Can’t really blame you. That girl got magic in her mouth.”

  “You have no idea.”

  They bundle into Adina’s Volkswagen, bracing against the cold. Corinna rides shotgun and Ramón and Marcos huddle in the back with the congas. At home, they drift off to their respective bedrooms after some quiet simmering over beers and anecdotes, the strangeness of all that just went down at the club. Ramón crawls into bed, curls up, and tries not to let Aliceana be the last thought he has before he passes out.

  And me? I take in the length of this strange day and night, the strange thrill of recognizing someone who I don’t recognize, and the echoes of that squirming madness—the feeling of being watched, listened to, surveilled. That dirtiness that overtakes you, that sense of violation. I remember it.

  I try to shake it off and then begin to unspool a moment of my own life as I slide into place within Ramón’s rising and falling chest.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Isabel, in the flesh.

  But only barely. They got Gómez, she says as soon as she opens the door to her new hideaway, which looks remarkably like her old one: an apartment high up in one of those Vedado towers, somehow empty feeling even while it’s cluttered with supplies, boxes, nightmares. I’m still shook up from our encounter at the checkpoint a few hours earlier, still feeling like the sky might collapse around me at any moment. The old Isabel would’ve seen the whole thing spilled across my face immediately and forced me to tell her all about it till I felt better. This Isabel doesn’t hug me or even seem surprised to see me. Doesn’t even register Sebastián, which either means he’s been coming around a lot or she’s just too far gone to care.

  They showed up at his house and just snatched him up, she tells us, ushering us in with a nervous glance down the dusty corridor. Gómez the butcher. Gómez, who handed me the too-heavy chicken. Gómez, who gave up everything he had for the revolution, Isabel explains without even offering coffee or cold ration food or a seat or anything. Gómez, who risked his life, left his family’s house in Las Colinas to go fight in the Sierra Maestra and then the Escambray. Who took three bullets during an ambush against the guardia and then limped along, watching in horror as the holes in him became gray an
d then black with gangrene, gulped back antibiotics until there weren’t any, and then suffered in silence in the rebel campamientos because if he returned to his home he’d be killed. Gómez, whose sister they killed when they found out he’d joined the rebels. Gómez, who’d gone nearly insane with grief when he found out, who they had to restrain to keep him from rushing straight into La Habana all by himself on some crazed suicide revenge mission.

  Gómez.

  He’d brought Isabel in, talking to her about the revolution every day when she came to pick up the meat and then when she’d started asking her own questions about it, giving her pamphlets and eventually linking her up with contacts in the La Habana resistance groups. Las Colinas had become a safe transfer point for weapons and information between the guerrillas in the mountains and the Student Directorate in the city, thanks mostly to Gómez and his network of rebel sympathizers.

  And now he is a prisoner of the very regime he’d helped sweep to power. Probably dead. And maybe that’s for the best. Isabel finally looks up from her monologue, sees me. I think maybe she’ll cry again, like she did that day just a few months ago in this same apartment, when the whole world was different and so much the same, on the brink of that great sea change that we’re all still reeling from. But she doesn’t. She’s past all that. She only holds my eye contact for a few precious seconds, this beautiful woman that I will always want to be like, and then she’s off and pacing again, as Sebastián and I watch helplessly from the doorway.

  She’s mumbling about responsibility and guilt. Guilt and responsibility. She won’t stop. Sebastián just shakes his head and I walk to the balcony and look out over Vedado. The city is a rippling splatter of pastiche and crumble around and below me, and the unforgiving sea around that. The Malecón will never look the same again, now that I’ve seen it in the thralls of victory and overrun with a hundred thousand people listening to that man speak for hours on end. It was like he was competing with the ocean itself, who could last longer, and even when he finished he was still never done, it was just a temporary break to catch his breath. The ocean always wins, of course, but still, we’re all living in fear and Gómez has been captured. And who knows who else?

  It dawns on me, as my own heart fractures at this betrayal, that whatever disappointment and terror I’m feeling must be a hundred times worse for my sister, who fought so hard to make this terrible moment possible. I’m still grasping it all, but she’s seen it rot from the inside out.

  What do you do when you’ve already torn down the world to make a better one and the better one turns out to be just as rotten as the one you shattered?

  I ask her what she’s going to do, mostly because I can’t stand the constant muttering. She looks at Sebastián and he shakes his head. Luchar.

  You shatter the world all over again, I suppose. And keep breaking it until you get one you can name Freedom.

  She says it so simply and even with that one word some of the color returns to her face, she stands up a little straighter. Seguir luchando. Keep fighting.

  * * *

  Ramón sits up in bed and frowns at his computer. It’s catching up to him, the dreams, Old Gutierrez’s tightening noose, Aliceana. It’s catching up to me too, in a whole other way. In the corner, I fortify myself from the toll the night and its dreams have taken, and brace myself for what the day will bring.

  Before Ramón had left the club last night, Luis took him aside and told him not to do anything differently than he normally would. The key to successful counterespionage, Luis said with a twinkle in his eyes, is to not let the other team know you know what they’re up to—so you can then reverse it and use it to annihilate them. Ramón had nodded, furrowing his brow.

  Now his laptop seems to be staring back at him, an open window. He leaps out of bed and slams the screen closed, grumbles something about Luis, and crawls back into bed. The journal’s on his bedside table and he picks it up and idles through the pages till he gets to a blank one and begins to write. Someone’s clinking around in the kitchen by the time he finishes, dishes are being put away, and butter is frying on the skillet. Ramón sits up a little more, thumbs back a few pages, humming to himself. I don’t think he’d ever read any of the entries up till now, just scribbled them out quickly as he remembered and then gone about his business. But something now has his attention.

  Still staring at the book, Ramón fumbles for a cigarette from his bedside table. When there isn’t one to be found he looks up, irritated, and picks up his phone instead.

  “Ramón?” Adina’s voice comes from the other side of his door.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re cooking breakfast, you want?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He pushes a button on his phone and holds it up to his ear.

  “¿Diga?” says a voice that still makes me cringe inside. I’ll make sense of this rage one day. I know I will.

  “Hola, Mami.”

  “Ay, cariño. ¿Cómo andas, mi amor?”

  “Fine, Mami. Listen, do you remember any of the priests from back in Las Colinas?”

  “Of course, there was Padre Eugenio, he always did the Sunday Mass when we were little and…”

  “Any others?”

  A pause, in which I imagine my sister taking off her glasses, rubbing her eyes, and then putting them back on, leaning her elbow on the immaculate kitchen table and massaging one of her temples, noticing a stain, getting up for some cleanser spray and a paper towel.

  “Mami?”

  “¿Qué, mi vida?”

  “I asked you something?”

  “Oh, just a minute, Ramón.” She’s wiping down the table, I’m sure, and then spraying some more, wiping in concentric circles, watching the horrible stain become shiny pure tabletop again, and then making the circles wider and wider till the whole table is shiny and perfect, untouched, immaculate. “Okay, what did you want to know again?”

  “Other priests. From Las Colinas?”

  “Oh, there was the young one. ¿Cómo se llamaba? Ay, no me acuerdo.”

  “Sebastián?”

  “Yes! That’s right. Why do you ask, cariño?”

  “Was wondering. I saw Tío Pepe the other day, we were talking about it, is all.”

  “Ramón, please don’t go stirring up trouble with the family.”

  “He said he misses you—he wants to see you.”

  “Ay pero vive allá en casa del carajo, m’ijo … imagínate.” Nilda says this as if him living any closer to what she considers civilization would make a damn difference. She’s not leaving the house and she knows it.

  Ramón sighs.

  “You know, I’ve told you that people and their memories can be delicate things,” Nilda says. “Are you coming over for dinner tonight? Your father wants to see you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Pernil and arroz con frijoles, okay? Okay. Besos.”

  Click.

  Ramón looks at his phone, probably wondering if it’s bugged. He growls, puts it on the bedside table, and shuffles into the kitchen for breakfast.

  * * *

  There’s a Mexican girl causing something of an uproar in the psych ER. It’s odd because she herself is barely moving, has barely said three words since they wheeled her in, but she’s sixteen and just shy of three hundred and fifty pounds and covered in blood from a half-assed cry for help. Ramón watches from his post while a battalion of doctors and orderlies stands around her, asking useless questions. Most of them have that bored and skeptical look, but one, a white guy with a fading head of hair and too many pens in his lab coat pockets, is really pushing the we feel for you routine.

  “Do you want to talk about it, Catalina?” he asks. “Such a pretty name: Catalina.”

  She shakes her head, looks like she’s considering stabbing him with one of those many pens of his, and then she just shuts her eyes and pouts her lips. “The cuts on your arm aren’t very deep, Catalina. Maybe you didn’t want to kill yourself, is that possible? That
you just wanted to maybe hurt yourself a little, or maybe that you felt like you needed to send a message, that that was the only way you know how? Is that what happened, Catalina?”

  “Catalina, do you want to hurt yourself or anybody else?” an older doctor demands. He’s projecting how unimpressed he is as loud as possible so there’s no misunderstandings: I am not impressed, his whole slouched body screams. Don’t think I will be either. Seen it all before.

  Catalina stays quiet, frowning, her eyes squeezed shut.

  “Do you want to talk to a counselor?” the first doctor says. “Everybody from school is really worried about you, Catalina.”

  “Alright, we’re done here,” Unimpressed says. With a sweep of his head he’s called off the team and they clamor away leaving only the concerned one with the fwoompy hair behind.

  “No, they’re not,” Catalina says, very very quietly.

  Dr. Concerned gets all close, triumphant now that he’s had such a quick breakthrough just by lingering behind. “What’d you say?”

  “People from my school. They’re not worried about me.”

  “Oh, that’s not true. They are. They’re very worried.”

  “No. They hate me.”

  It’s stated so plainly it becomes a fact. Dr. Concerned knows any way he tries to refute it will be shut down immediately. But that doesn’t stop him. “I’m sure they don’t hate you, Catalina. I know kids can be cruel sometimes, can tease people that they don’t understand or that don’t look like them. Is that what happens at school?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you know why a lot of them do that? Because they’re afraid. Yeah. Or because they don’t understand things, you know?”