The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  Entonces, Isabel says, a placeholder with no place to hold, and I can see there’s no hope left in her. And so. She lifts the cigarette to her lips, still looking out the window, then she looks at me, right at me. Entonces, she says again, and the rest goes unspoken, because it’s all around us, it’s written on her face. And so: Here I am, a broken woman in a broken country, barely alive with rage for the broken revolution I helped to birth. And not a hope or dream of making it right, a hundred canned goods and ten thousand rounds of ammo around me in this cluttered apartment, a shotgun under the bed and a pistol on the counter so when they come the end will be quick.

  She sighs. And so.

  And then I leave, making my way through the crowded Vedado streets with tears in my eyes and only half an idea why and already I’m so completely thoroughly alone in the world, in this city that is mine and no one’s, that was ours and now is his, that once embraced me and now frowns, cautious, and speaks in code and holds its secrets close.

  It’s cold, the wind blowing in from the ocean wraps around me and I pull my shawl close and a week later, one year and four months after the triumph of the glorious revolution, in preparation for an imminent invasion at Playa Girón from the yanqui imperialists and their exile army, police go door to door, sweeping up anyone and everyone that has even the slightest hint of subversion in their record so that no uprising will take root. And when they get to my sister’s 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.

  * * *

  She’s dressing when Ramón wakes up. He’s bleary eyed and heavy with the dream and the joy of sudden sex and the dueling memories of a dead sister and the dead child. Aliceana kisses him on the forehead and smiles at him and is gone and Ramón shudders, alone with his memories and mine too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  There’s paperwork to fill out. Boxes to check and straight lines to scribble over. Human tragedies to condense into sweet coded nothings. Ramón walks into the cluttered closet that someone has shoved a desk into and calls the security office. He ignores Derringer’s snickers and raised eyebrows and gets right down to it, because he doesn’t want to be late to dinner at his parents’ house and he’s not in the mood for the banter.

  “You were gone for a little while.”

  “Indeed I was.”

  “You alright? Get shook up?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “Okie-dokie.”

  Derringer stands there, pretending to read the clutter of bulletin board tirades for and against the union. When he starts whistling, Ramón sighs and looks up. “Are you okay, Derringer? Do you wanna talk about anything or you just lingering?”

  “Did you fuck?”

  “What?”

  “The doctor.”

  “Which doctor?”

  Derringer just shakes his head. “Okay. I can play that game.” He resumes whistling and Ramón looks back at his paperwork. The powers that be want to know the exact nature of the incident in question. Describe, they insist, using all possible details and in chronological order, the events as they happened. And because that might not be explicit enough, they add: Be specific.

  And all the while, the curtains keep dancing in the wind that swirls through the open window my sister just plunged out of. “Right,” Ramón mutters. “Specific.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you know Hortense’s kid had leukemia?”

  “We work with someone named Hortense?”

  “Yeah, man, the slim one who only wants to work on the eighth floor? With all the makeup? Anyway, yeah, she’s doing a fund-raiser.”

  “I see.”

  “So, did you fuck?”

  “Hortense? No.”

  “Goddammit, Ramón!”

  “What time is it?”

  “Six thirty. Why?”

  The paperwork will wait. “’Cuz I have to go.”

  “Ramón!”

  But he’s already out the door, half-filled sheets of bureaucratic nonsense shoved deep in his pockets.

  “Ramón!” Derringer sighs, turns back to the bulletin board, and starts up his melancholy whistle again.

  * * *

  My sister’s suicide is all over Ramón when he walks up the paved path past his parents’ manicured lawn. I guess it’s one of those things you always wonder about—la tía perdida. A child’s imagination can do wild things with death and then all that hush-hush around it. An enigma, and now an enigma with an answer, an image to accompany it. And the image stays with him: Isabel at the table, pulling on her cigarette, looking out the window she would soon jump through. It’s me watching her, and then she turns and looks at me, and there’s love in her eyes; love and pity, because I’ll still have to be here, struggling long after she’s a stain on the sidewalk twenty stories below.

  Juan-Carlo opens the door. “Ramón.” Javier Peña skitters around the corner, yelping and growling and then slides to a halt when he sees there’s no invader to fend off.

  “Papi.” They hug. It’s more like a half hug, whatever men have to do to fulfill the cultural requirements and maintain a safe distance, and Ramón shuffles in after his father. “Sorry I’m late. Mess at the hospital.”

  Juan-Carlo shrugs. “Ya estamos comiendo.”

  “Smells delicious.” And it does. Nilda has outdone herself once again. A magnificent feast is spread out on the dining room table: the lechón glistens, the yucca clumps wallow half submerged in a thick garlicky mojo, the platanos are obviously just crispy enough but still soft and perfect in the middle. It doesn’t ingratiate me toward my sister, it just makes me ornery. Nilda stands when Ramón enters. “Ay, m’ijo,” she croons. Tío Pepe is here, and Teresa, who shoots a knowing smile at Ramón. There’s also a middle-aged couple, someone’s cousins, I guess, hopefully from Juan-Carlo’s side, because they’re unrecognizable to me. They brought their eight-year-old, a squirming, chubby little fellow, and a glowering teenage girl who looks like she’d pay good money to be anywhere else on the planet.

  “Sorry, everyone.” Ramón puts his bag down, cheek kisses his mom, and waves at the table. “There was a … fire. A bad one.” He reminds himself this isn’t the place for all that messiness and when Nilda gasps her obligatory “Ay Dios mío,” he doesn’t take the opportunity to elaborate.

  “We were just discussing the national tragedy that is contemporary American cinema,” Juan-Carlo says, helping himself to more pork.

  “Oh, good,” Ramón mutters.

  Nilda rolls her eyes. “Ay, mi vida, do we have to?”

  “Actually,” Teresa chimes in, “I think you will find that in a few years, television will surpass the cinema when it comes to producing quality material. I mean look at—”

  “¡Qué mierda!” Juan-Carlo thunders. “Have you turned on the TV in the past six years, woman? It’s this thing they have, what’s it called? Reality TV?” He turns to Nilda as if she’d have never heard of such a concept. “Oyeme, esa cosa, they film people, in their homes, no? And they argue and carry on, every single episode—every single one, mi vida—someone either has sex or gets into a fight. No, no, no. How is that reality? What reality is this?”

  Nilda shakes her head. “Juan-Carlo, por favor…”

  “I’m not talking about reality TV,” Teresa says coolly. “I don’t know why you watch that stuff. I’m talking about cable.”

  “But the children are not watching the cable. They are watching basura! Ask them. Cecilia?”

  The teen looks up from her cell phone. A jet-black lock of perfectly straight hair veils half her face and her frown is so intense it stops Juan-Carlo mid-rampage. “What?”

  “Juan-Carlo was just wondering what you watch on TV, dear,” one of her parents chimes in.

  Cecilia looks around the table slowly. Tío Pep
e is the only one not staring at her; he’s fully engaged with the slab of pork on his plate, chewing loudly. “I don’t watch TV,” the girl says before disappearing back into her cell phone.

  “¿Tú ves?” Juan-Carlo demands as if she’d just proved his point.

  “I have a question,” Ramón says. Javier Peña’s under-the-table snores fill the sudden silence. “Why will no one tell me what happened to Tía Marisol?”

  A few things happen at once: Juan-Carlo groans and becomes very interested in his food. Nilda lets out an exasperated sigh and tries to put some beans in her mouth but her hands are trembling too much, so she lets her fork clatter down on the porcelain plate and then jumps in fright at the commotion. Tío Pepe looks up, suddenly interested. The chubby eight-year-old defeats some digitized bad guy and the little machine he’s holding emits an exalted series of beeps and jingles. Cecilia rolls her eyes.

  “Ramón,” Nilda says quietly.

  “I told you she probably jumped, just like Isabel,” Tío Pepe says, shaking his old head.

  “But … nobody knows? Did anybody look?” Ramón is trembling too now, an inherited gift, I suppose. “Two sisters disappear and nobody tried to find out why? I don’t understand.”

  “It was not so easy, you know,” Tío Pepe says. “You couldn’t just go poking your nose into people’s culos trying to find out things.”

  Cecilia lets out a stifled laugh and her parents glare at her.

  “Did anybody try?”

  Tío Pepe frowns. “Ramón, you don’t understand.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m asking, Tío. I don’t understand. Why did no one look?”

  “Because she didn’t jump off the building.” It’s just a whisper. The whole table, even Cecilia, turns to face Nilda. “She didn’t jump off the building.”

  “Nilda,” Juan-Carlo whispers. She shushes him and for maybe the first time in their marriage, he listens.

  “How did she die?” Ramón asks.

  Teresa is shaking her head, her eyes closed.

  “She died in prison,” Nilda says, looking down at her plate.

  Ramón is about to stand. If he does it too fast, if he lets the fury that he, that I, that we feel carry him upward, the momentum will shatter the whole room, send the feast exploding in every direction; it will break the suburban quiet. I soothe him. I don’t know why, but I do. It’s easier to digest shock when I’m taking care of someone else. I coo a soft lullaby inside him and he doesn’t stand, doesn’t rage across the house; he simmers. We all simmer. “What do you mean?” he says very quietly but in a voice that brokers no peace.

  Nilda looks up. Then at the paintings on the wall behind her guests. They are hideous, rigid off-pink slices across a yellowish cloud. She blinks a few tears away. “They caught her.”

  “Ju don’ know that!” Tío Pepe says, and then he erupts into a fit of coughing. Teresa pats his back, frowning.

  Here it comes.

  “I do. I … they took her away. I couldn’t … I didn’t stop them. And I … I thought they would kill me.” And? There’s more. It’s hanging in the air all around her. I can feel it clouding up the room. Its stench forces out the smell of cooling food, eats into us all. It is everywhere.

  “I was so afraid,” Nilda moans.

  What else, my sister? What else happened that day? It’s coming back so clear to me now. I can see it all. I remember.

  I remember.

  “She came back to Las Colinas. She’d been gone such a long time. We’d thought she was dead. Or underground, of course. And the soldiers kept coming back again and again, telling us we had to turn her in, we had to tell them where she was.”

  Nobody moves except Tío Pepe, whose head is dropped down to his chin, shaking back and forth. “Ay, Nilda,” he whispers. “Nilda…”

  “They were going to take away Mami and Papi,” Nilda moans. “If you did not live through it, you don’t understand. You can’t understand. They said the most horrible things to us, to me. When no one else was home they’d come back, they’d threaten us. That they’d burn down the house, they said, destroy everything we owned. Throw us all in prison. And of course they could do that. They could do whatever they wanted.”

  “So you … she…” Ramón doesn’t have words. I’m still cooing, but now it’s more for myself than him. The way a cat will purr when it’s close to death—the innate part of itself lulling the wretched conscious part into a sweet stupor. That’s me, because if I don’t, someone will get hurt.

  Nilda nods her head, tears flowing freely down her face now. “When she came home, I slipped out. Because I didn’t know if they were watching or not, and if they were, and she came and no one told them, we all would’ve been killed. Or worse. Or worse…”

  “But…” Ramón says.

  “There’s no but. That’s what happened. She came in and I slipped out and all it took was a look. I saw one of the young men that came to bother us walking down Calle Septiembre and I nodded. That’s all. I nodded. And then I turned around and walked back to the house. And my stomach turned in circles and I couldn’t speak or breathe and I went right into the bathroom and vomited everything I had inside me and while I vomited I prayed with all my heart that Jesus Christ forgive me for what I did and that…”

  Say my name.

  “And I prayed that…” The word catches in her throat because if she says it she might choke and die, because that’s the curse that’s lingering on the edge of my existence, waiting to be hurled at her. I don’t care that she’s partly right, or that she’s lived a mostly miserable life because of that day or that she still hasn’t forgiven herself and probably never will. I don’t.

  “Marisol,” she finally says. “That Marisol would forgive me, one day. That she’d understand.” She sniffles and I think she might shatter at any second.

  Ramón breaks the silence. “You’re saying…” He stops because he’s trying to work his mouth and brain around the sentence at the same time and it’s getting jumbled.

  And then I see past my rage and my devastation and I understand what’s got Ramón so caught up.

  “Do you even know if she died?” he finally growls.

  Nilda nods pathetically, eyes squeezed shut.

  “How?”

  Nilda shakes her head. “I don’t know. A soldier came by and told one of our neighbors, Angelica. It was years later. I had already come here, along with Mami and Papi. He wouldn’t say more.” She stops to sniffle loudly and catch her breath.

  Little Cecilia, who has barely said a word this whole dinner, puts down her phone and stands. “You’re saying you were the one who sent your sister to rot in a Cuban prison?”

  Nilda just sniffles.

  Cecilia glares at her. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Jesus fucking Christ indeed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Ramón is typing away quickly on his phone while the suburbs whirr past the bus window. I’m trying to keep track of my own splash of emotions and be present in this world too.

  At least now I have my porque. A strange peace has come with it, although there is still rage and tumult aplenty. At least now I know.

  Aliceana, Ramón types, meet me at the club whenever you can. Gonna be there in a few. Need to talk to you. So much is happening I want to tell you about.

  Then he opens up another email and addresses it to Alberto and Old Enrique:

  Srs. Gutierrez: I regret to inform you I will not be able to perform at your hideous, sociopathic event nor will I rally the masses to your ludicrous cause.

  All my best,

  Ramón

  I suppose that settles that. Ramón hits send. He closes his eyes, smiles, and lets the rhythm of the bus slide him into a gentle nap.

  * * *

  Me.

  I.

  Yo, solo yo.

  Alone. Because Isabel is gone now, gone for good. And the truth of that is brand-new, keeps hammering down on me with every breath.

  And alone in
this moment, surrounded by a hundred acres of nothing and the entire sky pressing down on me. The sky completely pale and ugly on a grayish hideous Cuban afternoon and the sound of bugs and this empty lot in the middle of nowhere, a field on the outskirts of Las Colinas and my pounding heart and my caught breath and my breath won’t come and the tears won’t come and my words won’t come. And I know it’s not over, it’s not even nearly over, it’s nothing but the pure hideous beginning. The beginning. Of the terror. And the sky doesn’t care; I have no weapons to defend myself; no saints protect me. I am alone.

  It won’t rain or even shine the sky is just persistent, dull, unmoved, unshaken. The uncaring gravel digs at my knees. I’m peeling forward, wilted and unreachable, my face in my hands. Sobbing, I let out a moan.

  They didn’t have to tell me. I never would’ve known. I could’ve pretended, ignored the tickling sorrow, moved through my life. Wondered, maybe, where she’d gone off to. But this is Cuba. People disappear. They get lost, especially nowadays. They can come for you at any moment. They can come when you’re taking a shit, when you’re falling in love, when you’re all alone, in a field, outside Las Colinas, moaning. And then you run. Or you don’t. Maybe you fall. But there are options; the path has many turnoffs. I could’ve made up a whole story for her, how she made it to the Escambray, found like-minded hardheaded open-hearted revolutionaries outside the bitter daily politico, outside the bloodshed and backtalk. Away from it all.

  I guess she did, in her own way. Because wherever she is, Gómez is surely there with her.

  Either way, I’m paralyzed. All alone and immobile, facedown in this field and barely breathing, heaving in great wide gasps and then silent for too long at a time, eyes unfocused, sky bearing down on me; it won’t let me breathe.