The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  Ramón’s voice comes through muffled from behind the wooden bathroom door. “You guys know I can hear everything you’re saying, right?”

  “Good,” Adina yells. “Then you can tell us what the fuck is wrong with you.”

  The two women watch the door for a few moments and then make faces and shrug.

  Should I feel bad for torturing my nephew’s nights with the shards of my imprisonment? Does it matter if I know I have to? It’s another endless ripple of trauma, I know, poisoning a whole new generation, but he needs to understand. Not just see or hear but understand.

  This is the truth and Adina is right: We all bury the worst parts so deep inside, praying we’ll never be found out, praying it’ll just evaporate. But I am that truth, whoever, whatever my life or death has become, I’m the one buried. And the only way to unearth myself in body and mind is through this oversized music wizard fellow that I have come to care about and hurt so much. His stomach is torn up, it’s true, but not from the bad Miramar water or ration coffee.

  “Can you pass me another roll of toilet paper?” Ramón calls from the bathroom.

  Aliceana gets one from their luggage and tosses it to Adina, who places it in front of the door, knocks twice, and then scurries away.

  “I’m fine,” Ramón says when the door shuts again. “It’s just the water or whatever.”

  “Babe, you’ve been like this for two weeks.” Babe. That’s cute, how fast they’ve fallen into each other. The whirlwind of travel documents and family chaos and hospital bureaucracies threw Aliceana and Ramón into a frenzy of late-night cuddling, fucking, and storytelling as they unraveled themselves before each other. But he won’t talk about the tiny room that enclosed me, the guard named David. Each time he tries, he just ends up shaking his head instead and getting choked up.

  Aliceana and Adina frown at each other as Ramón lets out another grunt. “I’m fine!”

  “Adina, would you ask your”—Aliceana makes exaggerated bunny-ear quotation marks in the air—“tíos if they have anything that’ll settle his tummy?”

  “You know if you do that out in the street it’ll defeat the whole purpose of the—”

  “I know, I know, I know,” Aliceana grumbles. “I’m still just getting the hang of things. I’m no good at lying. Especially with my crappy Spanish.”

  “Better get used to it.” Adina flashes a smile as she retreats down the hall but the edginess in her voice is unmissable.

  Her “tíos,” a middle-aged couple in matching YO AMO A CUBA baseball caps that clashed miserably with the floral dress and tucked-in guayabera, welcomed them with wide open arms and laughing embraces. They carried on amiably all through the cab ride to their little apartment in the Miramar suburbs and once they were all safely inside, Florio, an old work buddy of Adina’s cousin, explained the situation in the best English he could muster. “If anybody asks, okay? We are your tíos. Okay? Anybody. Doesn’t matter who. Somebody ask who you estay with? Tíos. Okay?”

  “Okay, all of us?” Ramón asked, trying not to avoid having to say that Aliceana might have a harder time claiming the very non-Filipino-looking Espadas as family.

  Florio was unconcerned. “All of you, sí. Tíos. Even if it is children or abuelas that are asking you: tíos.” He looked at Aliceana. “¿Comprendes?”

  Aliceana nodded. “Tíos. Got it. Comprendo.”

  Florio opened up a wide smile. “Okay. ¡Entonces! ¡A comer! To eat!”

  * * *

  “You really not gonna talk about it, Ramón?” Aliceana, at her own peril, stands by the bathroom door. “It’ll help, you know.”

  “Maybe it will. I dunno. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll make it worse.”

  Neither of them says anything for a few minutes. “It’s just…” Ramón says. Adina walks in carrying an ancient glass bottle of something bright red with a peeling label written in excited Cyrillic. She immediately grasps what she’s walked into. She places the bottle gingerly on a counter and waits.

  “It’s just these dreams.”

  “Your aunt,” Aliceana says.

  “Marisol. Yeah. It’s … I see what she saw. I don’t know how. I can’t explain it. There’s no explaining it, I just … It’s…” The toilet flushes and then the sink sputters to life. When Ramón appears in the doorway tears are streaming down his face and his shirt is damp because he used the one towel to scrape his tongue.

  “Oh, Ramón.” Aliceana is wrapped around him in seconds. He leans over enough to find her shoulder with his face and sobs. Adina watches, teary eyed. “Shhhh, let it out.”

  “Jesus, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Ramón mutters after some heavy snorfling. “It feels good to let it out though, it’s true. Shit.” He chuckles through all the phlegm and tears and Aliceana squeezes him tighter.

  “It’s the prison, what you see?” Adina asks.

  Ramón nods, sniffles again. “She was in solitary. She was … tortured. It’s so awful.” He accepts a wad of tissues from her and immediately destroys it with a single hork.

  “What are you going to do?” Aliceana says quietly.

  “Do?” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Kacique said he’d take me by the Ministry of Records, but he says it’s a crap idea. Sounded like maybe he had a better idea, but I wanna at least try this first. It all seems impossible and ridiculous now that I’m here, but I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Maybe it’s not about what you can find, just that you came.” Adina is standing with her arms crossed over her chest, her face scrunched into a pout.

  “Maybe.” Ramón shrugs. “Still, the thought that she might have just died somewhere … alone in a prison cell or in front of some wall torn apart by bullets. It just … it’s tearing me up. After all she went through. In my dreams anyway. But even if that’s not the real story, even if it’s just some warped version of my subconscious messing with me: She was in prison. I mean, who knows how it happened, right?”

  The two women nod solemnly.

  In the corner, I weep.

  * * *

  Florio makes his presence known with a tentative rapping on the bedroom door. “¿Con permiso?”

  Ramón pulls out of Aliceana and fumbles on his jeans while she disappears beneath the covers. “¡Voy! Un momento…”

  “Hay una persona aquí pa’verte,” Florio says when Ramón finally peeks out the door. “He is … how do you say?” The middle-aged man makes a series of vague hand gestures.

  “A mime?” Ramón tries.

  “Especial,” is all Florio can come up with.

  “¡Ramóncito!” a voice calls from the living room. “You come all this way and you don’t even let me know when you get here? ¿Y eso? Coño ven pa’ca chico and give me a hug! Mi pen pal de tanto tiempo, ’chacho.”

  Kacique is a towering, perfectly shaped specimen of a man. His muscles peek out in shiny bulges from his wire mesh A-shirt, his chin line is sharp and outlined with the slightest of goatees. Grinning skulls and Taíno mosaics cover his immaculate brown arms. Kacique takes three long strides across the room and wraps around Ramón, who has to make an adjustment to keep his still fading erection out of the way and then hugs him back.

  “You’re shorter than I imagined!” Kacique grins, holding Ramón at arm’s length to get a good look at him. “But I can see that glint of surly genius lurking around your eyes, my friend.”

  “Surly, you say?”

  “This must be Aliceana.” He bends down to kiss her offered cheek. “Ramón composes wonderful email poetry about you, you know?”

  I would never have thought to call it poetry, but Ramón has been offloading sprawling torrents of thoughts about his new girlfriend into emails to Kacique. Kacique tends to respond with the smallest wink and nod of understanding, just enough for Ramón to release another spew into the next email, but never any information about his own life on the island.

  Aliceana squirms a little farther into the sheets. “I didn’t know that!”


  Ramón shrugs. “More like a teenager’s escaped journal entries than poetry, really.”

  “It’s true he’s very anti-grammarian,” Kacique affirms with a sly smile. “But in a majestic way!” His English is as impeccable as his body; he seems to pluck and pronounce each word out of the air in front of him with light-speed precision. “If you’re nice to me, maybe I will show you some of them.”

  Ramón growls but Kacique rumbles along without noticing. “Anyway!” He claps once and glides effortlessly into a gentle rumba. Then he stops suddenly. “There really is no correct translation for this word of yours, is there? We have entonces, but that’s not quite right somehow, yes?”

  “It’s just a pivot word, anyway,” Aliceana says, sliding into a T-shirt.

  “Ah! A lover of words! A woman after my own heart! Too bad you are taken…” That sly grin again. Then, almost inaudibly: “And a woman.”

  You can see it dawn on Ramón. His face opens wide for just a second and Kacique nods at him, meaning Yes, you fool and also, No, it’s still not a good idea to publicly declare yourself gay on the island of Cuba. “But, anyway, as you say: Tomorrow night is the show, yes? You ready?”

  “Of course. You got a crowd coming?”

  “Ay, Ramón.” Kacique massages his eyes, that smile hinting at the gleeful irony. “You have no idea.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Is it like you thought it would be?” Kacique asks.

  Ramón shrugs. “It’s not so different. You guys have your high-rises just like us.”

  “Mhm.”

  “Chain stores.”

  “True.”

  “Advertisements.”

  “For different things.” Kacique nods at a defiant bearded face looking skyward from a long dilapidated wall. “But yes, advertisements are everywhere.”

  HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE proclaims the wall. The paint is faded, but no one has graffitied penises or skulls over it like they would’ve in Jersey.

  “Are there security cameras everywhere?” Ramón asks quietly enough that the driver can’t hear.

  Kacique lets out a little snort. “No, man, that’s how you guys do it. We’re old-fashioned. Who needs security cameras when you got betrayal?”

  “Huh?”

  “Eyes and ears,” Kacique whispers with exaggerated hand motions. “Listening, watching. All the time.” Kacique suddenly reaches forward and pats the driver on the shoulder. “Right, Chano?” he says loudly.

  “Eh?” The old driver perks up. “Sí, cómo no. Lo que diga usted.”

  Kacique shrugs and sits back. “If you have to assume someone is always listening, watching, well, you don’t need anything more than that really. We have become our own secret police.”

  Without warning, the sky opens up and thick, angry raindrops splatter the windshield. The sun persists, shines straight through the sudden downpour and blasts a glorious ray of light over a squad of uniformed schoolkids running past an old cathedral. Their little hands reach over their heads, catching the big dollops, and the squabble of laughter and shrieking rises over the shush of rain and thump-thumping against the taxi roof.

  * * *

  Over a rusted metal bridge, beneath the ever-watchful gaze of a faded brick tower spray painted with revolutionary slogans, through a little field and around some crooked corners, there sits a little one-story stucco building. Palm trees stand guard around its entrance, protruding up from an impressive little city of dangling azaleas, lilies, and cacti. The garden is perfectly tended to, but the gate, once black and shiny perhaps, festers with crumbling light brown flakes. A sun-bleached sign declares this to be the Ministry of Records, Vedado Subdivision VII in the glorious name of the triumphant revolution, etc., etc.

  Inside, Ramón and Kacique strike an imposing image, both craning their necks a little to avoid being decapitated by the slow-moving ceiling fans. What Kacique lacks in girth he makes up for in muscles and Ramón is just huge. The tiny graying woman sitting behind the desk in her crisp beige uniform is undaunted though.

  She’s maybe four foot eight on her tiptoes, but the claustrophobia this woman emits is suffocating. When she gestures at the ugly wooden chairs and asks in a saccharine voice that Ramón and Kacique please be seated, they comply immediately. And me? I find myself once again diminished. It’s the barrage of memories, the newness and the oldness, the rising tide of nausea that I have become, here back in the firepit. It’s the sense that whatever happened to me, it was not pretty, not a fairy tale or a dashing rescue, not even a glorious, sudden flare-out like Isabel.

  The thought that maybe after a tiny life of tragedy and occasional glimpses of courage, I just rotted away, disappeared … it deepens my need to know, finally know and know for real what really happened. But I am weak, grow weaker every day.

  And I dread the truth.

  “Would you gentlemen care for a cafecito or refresco?” the desk maven asks. Her voice is gravelly from ration cigarettes and her hair is pulled so tightly into a bun, it pulls her eyebrows into severe little slants.

  Kacique prepared Ramón for this moment as they strolled over the metal bridge. “Take the coffee. If you take the soda she will rule you.”

  “But why?”

  “Ramón, trust me, okay? There is a methodology to even the maddest of madnesses, and communist bureaucracy most of all. The refresco is orange, mostly processed sugar and to accept it is a sign of weakness, understand?”

  “Not really.”

  “You don’t have to. Just do what I say.”

  “How’s the coffee though?”

  Kacique stopped, put a firm hand on Ramón’s shoulder. Beneath them, a dirty little stream limped along between sloping metal panels and trash. “It is a disgrace to the nation of Cuba. But it’s not about the taste.”

  “It’s about power.”

  “¡Eso mismo! It means you won’t take her stupid microbrigada excuse for soda. That you have some integrity. That you are a man.”

  “But if it’s bullshit coffee, why not refuse altogether?”

  “Oh no!” Kacique laughed and kept walking. “This is Cuba, mi socio. You can’t do that.”

  The tiny woman places two foam cups of coffee in front of a polished brass nameplate that says LT. URRUTIA, stirs too much sugar into each one with a wicked smile, and then clack-clacks back behind her desk. She shuffles some papers while Ramón sips at the café, flinches, and puts it back down. He looks at Kacique, who shakes his head: Wait. Finally, Lt. Urrutia looks up, folds her hands in front of her, and smiles. “Now, what may I help you with today?”

  I tune Ramón’s fumbling explanation out, spend most of it shivering in a corner trying to keep myself from shattering under the crushing presence of this agent of Everything That Had Destroyed My Life.

  And then I snap back to some level of engagement when the lieutenant stands and barks a sharp “Entonces.” She is actually taller when sitting—apparently it was a big chair—but that doesn’t do anything to lessen the impact of her sudden action. “You have described to me a person who was an enemy of the revolución, an imperialist. You said she was what to you?”

  “My friend’s mom,” Ramón says, cringing at the one lie in his arsenal.

  “Now you have come to this country, to the patria, you say to find out what has happened to the person, and I’m telling you you are paying a great disrespect to the people of Cuba by doing this thing.”

  Ramón just stares at her, his mouth hanging slightly open. Kacique looks away so the lieutenant won’t see him roll his eyes. “Now, where did you say you were staying for the duration of your…”—a very wide grin—“… visita to Cuba?”

  “With my tíos, in Miramar.”

  “Is that so?” She leans forward. “How nice. Familia. Write their address down on this piece of paper for me, and then you may go.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, did you misunderstand me? I apologize, Señor Rodriguez. I know your education system is quite secondary. Perhaps i
f I speak slower?”

  “No, I understood you, I just … I don’t understand. You want me to write…”

  “Their address. On the paper. And then sign it. For our records, that is all.”

  Kacique’s face holds no answers for Ramón. There are no answers. Every formality is a trap, disaster awaits each step. You can’t fuck up because you fucked up by entering the game, period. Lives are at stake, families. A signature on a piece of paper won’t alter a single event; it will simply unnerve poor Ramón. And it has, clearly it has. He’s sweating and his hand trembles as he copies the Miramar address out of his phone and then scribbles a messy R beneath it.

  The lieutenant nods at him, opens her grin a fraction wider. “Thank you for your time.”

  * * *

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “Te jodió, compadre.”

  “I mean … what the fuck … was that?”

  The bridge again. Kacique is eating a fried doughy yucca relleno from one of the food carts scattered around Vedado. Ramón stares into the pathetic little piss-stream down below. He shakes his head. “I drank the damn coffee.”

  “I know, but it takes more than that. The coffee just gets you in the door. If she thinks you’re telling the truth, it’s all over.”

  “I was telling the truth! Partially!”

  “I know. So did she. That was the problem. The system isn’t set up to function properly when people come straight forward.”

  “But that’s insane!”

  “I tried to tell you, man. You knew this was a long shot.” Kacique tosses the grease-stained napkin over the bridge and passes Ramón a ration cigarette.

  “How did she get off telling us we can leave? We came to see her! She can’t dismiss us.”

  “Ramón.”

  Ramón takes a puff off his cigarette, looks at it in disgust, and then tosses it into the river. “Will they come for the Espadas?”

  “I don’t know. But that little piece of paper won’t mean a thing one way or the other. You think they don’t have all their information filed already? Their favorite flavor of ice cream and their kids’ secondario grades? They do.”