The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

“Um … won’t they hear the music?”

  “They had an early show and already finished up for the day, Ramón. Anyway they’re doing María! La! Fucking! O! again.” He punctuates each word of the zarzuela’s name with an angry pelvic thrust. “¡Basura! Anyone would be pleased to hear your music over that comemierdería anyway, but that’s not the point. The only people around will be security, and they … let’s just say they don’t mind, yes?”

  “So we don’t have a permit? Doesn’t everything need to ha—”

  “Ramón. Be quiet. There are other ways of doing things than the right way, and believe me when I tell you, if they don’t want you to do something they won’t give a … what’s the expression in English? They give a dick? They don’t give dick?”

  “It’s fuck in English.”

  “Whatever, the permit, it doesn’t matter. Not at all. They want to shut you down, they shut you down. Se acabó. The permit is designed to further tie down people who are already by the book with bureaucratic knots. ¿Comprendes?”

  “I guess. It’s just … I’ve always wanted to play here.”

  “Here? In the Gran Teatro?”

  “No. Not exactly. Yes? I don’t know. Cuba, I mean. We’re not even supposed to consider coming here, you know, us … gusanos. It’s not an option on the pull-down menu. But … yes. I’ve thought about it many times. Many, many times.”

  “Well…” Kacique lunges slowly into some kind of yoga position on the stage, his muscular arms wrapped impossibly behind his back and underneath one leg, his chest bulging out. “Ahhhh! Here you are!”

  “You okay, man?”

  “Yes, just stretching. You know, Ramón, that this party tonight is special, yes?”

  Ramón cocks an eyebrow, then wiggles it. “Because DJ Taza has finally made it to la patria?”

  “Ha, of course,” Kacique guffaws. “But also because it’s rare we, mi gente”—he makes a gesture Ramón doesn’t understand and I don’t quite catch—“get to have a fiesta just for us. You understand?”

  The gay community of Havana is throwing itself a ball, and Ramón gets to DJ. Excellent.

  Ramón nods slowly. “The Gran Teatro dance floor is gonna be a whole other world from Jersey, huh?”

  “Oh yes,” Kacique says slyly. “Anyway, we’re also borrowing something from the Teatro they might be even more upset about than their basement.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.” Kacique opens up his winning grin, great big teeth reflecting the dancing lights of the stage.

  “That’s where you got the—”

  “¡Hola, Kacique! ¿Cómo andas?” A triangle of light opens from somewhere along the wall and a dark-skinned bald man in a tuxedo walks in. A tall slender woman and two more tuxedoed, middle-aged men enter behind him. And three more behind them. They’re carrying instruments: violins, a cello, a French horn. They’re all chatting amiably about some celebrity who’s in town and might be coming tonight.

  “Jesus, man,” Ramón gasps. “You work miracles.”

  “Eh, minor miracles, but I’ll take it. Anyway, there are some drummers coming as well, Orisha people. For the last track we worked on.”

  The orchestra musicians are setting up folding chairs around the stage, talking quietly to each other. “Cinco,” the first orchestra man says, extending a hand to Ramón.

  “Ramón.”

  “I know. We have been working on your tracks for the past month. I believe you’ll be pleased with what we’ve come up with for the orchestration.”

  “I’m … I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then shut the fuck up!” Kacique chuckles.

  “Shall we run through them?” Cinco says.

  Until this, Cuba has been a series of quiet suburbs, bureaucracies, and passing street scenes, tangled with the many myths passed along throughout his life. Ramón has barely had time to catch his breath, he’s been so busy trying to find … me.

  I’m flushed with shame.

  This, though—this is his. This belongs to Ramón: the music, the space. The people. I’ve occupied his dreams, replaced his aspirations with nightmares, insinuated myself into all of his most intimate inner shrines. And why? To goad him into finding my own corpse? To close some absurd, meaningless loop, end an already closed chapter … What right have I?

  The orchestra begins setting up, the first strains of their instruments filling the hall. I’ve seen enough. Blistering with an unnamable mix of shame and pride, I disappear into the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The ocean swells beneath me.

  A few minutes earlier I swept south over vast stretches of campo and then out across the water. The sky is blue gray and the sea is dark. Off to the west, a dim yellow haze marks where the sun dipped below the horizon. A few clouds linger just above the water, their light purple cut with a dramatic crimson.

  And I am free.

  Doomed, perhaps—I can already feel myself coming undone, the immediate result of pulling that invisible thread to my nephew to breaking point. It happens faster now, but it’s not just being away from him physically—it’s something else. I had always planned on returning to him the other times I’d left. I had seen our fates and struggles as one, somehow. But maybe only because it was easier to see it that way than the truth: That I am a parasite.

  I speed faster across the ocean, pass snarling waves, some fish burst up into the air near me and collapse back down; seagulls dive. A few fishermen smoke and chat with each other, gaze at the dancing lights marking the edge of water, and begin turning their rickety boats around for the journey home.

  Parasite. Been so caught up in maintaining my own life force I hadn’t realized I was draining his. Or had I, and just not cared? I thought somehow the truth would be a blessing to him, after all that caustic silence my sister raised him with. Thought even the horror story of my life would somehow set him free. But I was wrong. All it’s brought him is family drama and diarrhea. And for what? An off chance at finding some truth.

  It’s not enough.

  I see the wall of pines rise over the horizon and speed forward. I am close.

  * * *

  I am a gust of wind through the towering trees. Darkness envelops me, branches shudder as I breeze past. They blot out the empty sky, go on forever in every direction until I’m past them, flushing fast along a dirt road, past a row of quiet buildings out into an empty field.

  The towers loom ahead of me, shadows on the dark blue sky. I am … back. Somewhere I never imagined I’d return, a place I emptied all my prayers into wishing myself away from.

  It’s empty now: a museum and mostly in disrepair. The buildings are shabby, rusted; the streetlights shed a pale, deadish glare on the walls that once kept me in. I don’t know what I thought I’d find here. Maybe a final resting place. An answer? It’s just a skeleton now. I open myself wide in the night, disperse, and then enter the wall, feel the angry prickle of concrete and steel pipe passing through me, and then I’m inside.

  The whole world is very, very still.

  Immediately, I know where I am. I haunted these corridors for years, with only slightly more flesh and bone than I have now. I am home. This hall wraps around the center atrium, where we played, chatted, and died, where the tower always watched. But the moon is the only all-seeing eye left, and the moon doesn’t care.

  With a flicker I’m out in the courtyard, surrounded by myself, a hundred thousand aching memories and all those faces staring back from each room. Here I stood beside Padre Sebastián while he delivered a sermon made for one on whichever the saint-of-the-day was, here I watched Paco bleed to death, here it was Simón. Here I stood for hours on end one day, refusing to work, refusing to eat. It was after Constancia died, a guard had raped her and she’d gotten pregnant, then paler and paler as her body burned and finally she was gone and I couldn’t move. I memorized all the angles of the walls across the sky, the tower against the sky, and the shifting shadows as night fell. They came to beat me but
something in my eyes warded them off; they knew to stay back and anyway, a riot was already brewing over what had happened with Constancia.

  And then, without having meant to come here, I’m back in my cell. I know it’s mine because I etched each crack and imperfection into the inside of my brain. I know it better than I know myself. I am in my cell, as if the all-seeing eye were still there somehow, implanted forever deep inside me and this is where I will always land, back here, in this impossible little box. Padre Sebastián is with me. He’s dying. I remember this. I am still so young here, so damaged and broken, but I am flesh and blood and this man, this man who saved my life so many times is a quickly emptying shell in my arms. He’s barely there.

  This is a memory I want so badly to turn away from, but I remain, splayed like a spotlight over my younger self. She runs a finger down the broken priest’s face. He’s soaked in sweat, eyes far away. There’s a wound in his leg and it festers. I don’t remember how he got it; there are so many ways to die here. She, we, wants to die too. It would be so simple, she thinks, eyeing the sunlit atrium outside the cell window, the tower.

  Sebastián was the pillar of peace after the endless nightmare of solitude. He was the antidote.

  There’s not much left in him now. He’d been burning with fever for days, but now his skin shines with a shivering, clammy chill. He writhes as the festering leg sends throb after throb of dull pain through him. Listen, the priest says in a voice so harrowed and raspy it still shudders inside me all these decades later. Listen.

  The girl that I once was leans close to him, her face so near his, doesn’t flinch from the death that decorates him. I close around the memory, a cloak keeping out the world; it’s crisp before me, realer than the prison walls that kept us in. It happened right here, right here.

  You don’t have to be confined. Remember what I taught you, mariposa. Remember everything I taught you, eh?

  She shakes her head. Her long hair hangs in curtains, makes a tunnel between her face and Sebastián’s, blocks out the world. No, she whispers.

  Remember you are never alone, you never have to be alone. Not if they put you back in the hole, not if you escape and live in the woods, not in a room full of strangers; never alone, mariposa.

  That’s not true. When you go … Tears slide down her nose and land on his face.

  Shhh … the priest murmurs. You have to understand what I’m saying to you. Listen to me. Sebastián rallies, lifting himself onto his elbows. Stop crying and listen to me.

  Marisol sniffles a few times. Tears still tease the edge of her eyes and she won’t look the man in his face, but she shut up at least.

  I need you to understand this before … what happens next. He coughs; it’s wet and thick. I have given you what you need to survive. To escape. These walls cannot confine you, Marisol. Marisol.

  She looks at him. Her name, my name, a prayer.

  These walls cannot confine you. He touches her face, his hand cool but no longer trembling. These walls. His finger sliding along her cheekbone, her jaw. Cannot confine you. Marisol. Do you understand me?

  She nods.

  Does she?

  My god.

  Herein lies a tiny miracle. The secret, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, to my escape.

  And then, for just a flickering moment, I know: She will. She will understand him. She will find a way out of the walls that are her skin and then the walls that are this prison and then, somehow, get free.

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, this is how I became me. Which means … You decide, when you’re ready to move beyond them. He searches her face for understanding.

  She shakes her head, lets out a snot-laced laugh. Wipes her nose.

  Are you just agreeing so I shut up and die already without bothering you anymore?

  “No,” she laughs, crying again. Stop it.

  Satisfied, Sebastián lies back down. The pallor overtakes him again.

  Which means.

  One more saint? the girl asks. I want to shake this young me. I know it’s not fair; she’s living in a world of pain and about to lose her one ally through it all. She’s in the mud. But I want her to know there’s more, there’s so much even in what she has. She has bones and skin, muscles that do what she tells them to. She is of the world, whole. And she has the secret of my existence dying in her arms; I need more information. I need to know. But she wants to hear another fairy tale from the doomed.

  Sebastián shakes his head. No more saints. Each rattly breath gets further and further apart.

  You said there were thousands, Padre!

  No.

  But …

  There are millions. Sometimes you have to squint to see them, but they are everywhere. Scattered. You make up your own, eh? It’ll keep you busy for a while, if you stop and think about it.

  I can’t see any more. Padre Sebastián closes his eyes as I release the vision into the cool night air. I am surrounded by these same walls.

  … which means, which means, which means, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps …

  Out in the yard, I glide in steady, solemn circles. Gradually I realize there’s a noise coming from me. I don’t know if it’s real or not, or audible to anyone besides myself, but there’s no one here, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s a low hum I discover as I circle another time around the tower. A quiet melody, something familiar and so far away. It is beautiful, to make a noise after so much silence; I hadn’t even realized. It is a reckoning, a song of hope—three tiny, tinkling phrases, each starting with one note and then leaping to an even higher one. Quizás, quizás, quizás. Because it is all real. Not that there’d ever been doubt, but to be here, to witness it, this most physical of reminders, this hard concrete world I inhabited.

  My circling song fills me up with moments of my captivity, my solitude, my torture, healing, friendships, losses, loves, rage, my slowly unwinding self. My song encompasses even the songs of others, the dead that linger, voiceless, in recesses of each other’s memories, and it keeps getting louder, fuller, fiercer with each building note. This night, this memory, has birthed something new in me. I am alive. I live. Even if my body is broken and buried, even if I’m dead, I live. Wherever I was, whatever I did, I decided it was time. I breached these walls, that body, cumbersome flesh. I moved beyond it. Yes. Yes, it’s worth it. Yes, I need to know.

  And if I can reach Ramón before I fade away for good, if I can get through to him, then just maybe …

  Quizás, quizás, quizás …

  I’m moving quickly back through the pine forest. Don’t know how much time has passed but I know I need to find Ramón; I don’t have much left in me. We are so close. Our destinies are entwined already; it’s no mistake.

  I flash out over the ocean.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  What is this music?

  The empty room is full: full of sweating, moving bodies, of course, but more than that, full of a sound so crisp, so layered and raw I can only hold still when I first glide in over all those jostling heads. It’s one of the songs Ramón had been working on, I know, but I barely recognize it. Cinco has taken what was a standard string arrangement, a staticky mess of a recording, held true to the melody, and orchestrated it into something much more grandiose, something alive. The violins dance up and down a dizzying, slightly off-balance scale, now falling quiet, now sheer with menace. Ramón works his beats across this ululating landscape, leaving long gaps of sudden, breathless space between each deep crash and bringing that clacking in suddenly with an echoey cackle of the snare.

  But it’s the guitar that pulls the whole thing together. Ramón and the orchestra have fallen into a steady vamp; the crowd pulses accordingly on the shuffle. The guitarist is an absurdly tall, slender fellow, cheekbones sunken in, graying hair pulled back into a ponytail, eyes closed and light brown brow furrowed. He lets loose a fury of flamenco-inflected riffs, pauses to let the music swell beneath him, and then unleashes again.

  The music is building, building
, growing around us, an angry, decadent creature inhaling and exhaling and expanding with each breath; each note, every new cycle of the beat brings us deeper inside.

  I have found Ramón now, so I’m fortified some and I take it in. The vision at Isla de Pinos is still with me, the flesh I escaped so near, the will to live and the hope that somehow, maybe … I did.

  And this music—it speaks my language. Without meaning to, without even realizing it’s happening, I disperse myself across the whole room in the space between the crowd and the ceiling. Así. Each note is reborn inside of me, the whole audience’s churning reaction, their presence, enthusiasm, all the wild emotions this song opens up with them—I take it all in, expand further, and release the whole mess of it into the ceiling, past the ceiling, and empty theater seats and past the plaster angels dancing across the upper echelons of the Gran Teatro, straight into the sky.

  There’s a celebrity of some kind in the crowd. His entourage parts a small berth around him. He’s short, with slicked back hair, sunglasses, and an impeccable white suit. Someone international; a Spaniard probably. The swirl of acoustic guitar and gathering storm from the orchestra has rendered him irrelevant though, for probably the first time in a while. All eyes stay with the miracle unfolding on stage. The clatter of strings, beats, and cackling guitar phrases reaches a manic peak, at once perfect and dissonant, it aches to resolve. Instead, everyone cuts out at once and in the sudden silence the crowd takes a collective breath.

  Down below, the audience is enthralled. In the dark corners, men suck each other’s faces as if gasping for air, and surely that’s not allowed in this state built on the myth of machismo. But then, this is an underground affair, and I imagine that foreign celebrity adds some bit of invincibility to the event. Now that I notice it, more than a few men in the audience are holding each other close, some grinding, some just looking into each other’s eyes, some arm in arm. Kacique has turned this space into a brief sanctuary from the world outside, a private concert for those who must live in the shadows.