The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  And the silence brings me gradually back to myself. As it stretches longer, I return to this slender nothingness lingering above their heads. After a tantalizing few moments, Ramón lets out a scratchy saxophone phrase from his turntable, cuts it out, and zips it back in again, letting it play almost to the end and then shutting it off suddenly. We’re all of us glued to the sound, eyes closed, hanging on to what’ll happen next like the reveal at the end of one of those detective movies they used to play at the Royal. No one even yells out, we just wait, breath bated. He lets the saxophone moan again, all the way through this time, and a single violin comes in beneath it. On the far corner of the stage a group of men all in white, the santeros Kacique had mentioned, bring in a gentle guaguancó on their congas. It starts down deep, raises up like two questioning eyebrows, and then drops again. Repeats to infinity. Ramón waits a few measures, then drops his beat around them. Another violin joins the first as the saxophone phrase scratches back in, almost finishes, and starts again from the beginning.

  Something is happening to me. Each gathering element of this musical storm brings a new weight to my spinning facade. I am buffeted on the currents of it, but more than that I find I can hold it inside of me. Just glimpses at first: a note. A short stanza. Moments. But they stay. They build and then, like a net, they draw more. I concentrate. It’s easy to stay focused on the swirl of hundreds of years of culture connecting in the air around me. I inhale and bring in the notes, the rhythm, everything; I don’t release it. And then, I am. More than a desperate glint of something, more than a mourning specter, a pathetic hallucination: I am. A thing. Real, I have breached through and I linger above the crowd: a woman described in light and color, buoyed by the music.

  The guitar player is the first to see me. I’m slow-motion spinning directly in his sight line, reveling at my sudden entrance into this world. He looks up from his fingers that dance across the fretboard, sees me, stops. It’s just a momentary pause. He squints, as if to confirm, then smiles just so. His fingers find the strings again, dance. His eyes stay on me, my spin. Some of the other musicians notice his gaze and follow it. The orchestra stumbles, but Ramón keeps the beat thrashing along beneath, effortlessly covering up their fallout. Soon the crowd starts looking up, pointing, mouths open, eyes wide.

  The music doesn’t stop though; it swells. This is Cuba; apparitions come with the territory. Ramón is the only one not gaping at me. I focus all of myself, all my light, my whole tiny universe of concentration converges on the man standing on the raised platform behind his record decks. He looks up, freezes, mouth hanging open. His expression barely changes, but there’s a tiny loosening as shock becomes acceptance and then, beautifully, recognition.

  To the crowd, I am a miracle, the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre perhaps. To Ramón and Ramón alone though, I am Luz Marisol. An entirely different, personal miracle. I watch it all travel across his startled face: the incredulousness, understanding, and relief. He is no less crazy than the three hundred other people there and much, much less crazy than he’d been thinking he might be. He smiles.

  And I smile. It feels strange, to do this thing. This sacred act I hid away like an illegal prayer for so many years. We smile at each other, and then all the amplifiers cut off with a sharp crackle and the orchestra falters. Only the guaguancó keeps churning for a few more measures, the santeros far away in their circling rhythms. As the last couple beats tap out I feel like I’m being torn out of my own skin, my brand-new skin. This sudden solidness—I was something. Something physical—pieced together and filled by the organization of all that perfect sound and now I’m scattered in this new silence.

  There’s a general groan from the crowd, some worried muttering, and then a man yells, “¿Qué carajo pasó, coño?” and everyone laughs. The overheads flick on, cruel fluorescents after all that darkness. I’m everywhere, a pathetic scattering of shards that will never make a whole. Watching from the corners, the doorway, ceiling pipes: I’m broken, dizzy. When the plainclothes cops come crashing through the door, the shock almost ends me completely.

  They’re so young. They have new sideburns and their first mustaches and they have curly black hair and angry, scared eyes. The first few carve straight into the crowd, lashing out with their fists and wooden sticks, yelling maricón and pájaro as they go. I see a tall black man cracked across the face; he falls forward, blood pouring out of his mouth, and gets trampled beneath the sudden rush of bodies.

  They’re laughing. It’s from fear or excitement, it’s from adrenaline and the freedom of being turned loose on a helpless crowd. All that young rage just bursting out, a simple matter of aim and release. They fall in packs on stragglers, pin them down, cuff them, and toss them into corners like crumpled-up scraps of paper.

  Ramón is gone. The stage is empty. There must’ve been a back exit somewhere.

  I know what has to happen: I have to collect myself, find some wholeness in all these scattered fragments, and I have to find Ramón.

  The shards of me culminate in my uneasy sojourn. By the time I’m three quarters of the way across, I’m almost a whole spirit again. I have to find Ramón. I have to make sure he’s safe, but what can I even do if he’s not? I’m even more barely there than usual.

  I bring back the room around me; it’s in shambles. Trash and broken bodies scatter around. The cops have flanked out to all the exits; they confer while keeping edges of their eyes on the prisoners. Memories reach out to me, demons. What will prison be like for these young people? They’re curled up and crying; they’re stony faced and some are unconscious, blood-crusted hair on the floor. I can’t. I can’t free them I can’t dwell in their future misery I can’t get caught. I can’t lose myself, not now. Not after all I’ve seen, how far I’ve come.

  The curtains waver slightly as I pass through them: a good sign. I’m down a little corridor, up some stairs. Out into the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The streets of Havana are empty.

  Everyone must’ve scattered to their own predetermined hideaways as soon as they got out—it’s only been a few minutes. The Gran Teatro looms over a park. The ancient crumbling alleyways of the old city stretch out around me. There are no cars, no tourists, just an old blind man sitting on a bench across the street, tapping his cane against the cobblestones. And a stray dog sniffing through some trash.

  I’ve lost Ramón.

  Somehow, he’s just gone—untraceable.

  And without Ramón … all of that hope that rose in me begins to crumble as I flush forward through the dark streets.

  But he is part of me. I found him once in this giant, fucked-up world. I don’t know how, but I did. And I will again. Surely our connected spirits can call out to each other in the night. I rise above the musty statues adorning the theater, gaze down from the starless sky at the wild labyrinth of La Habana Vieja.

  My call pulses into the night. Ramón. It blasts down alleyways and around corners, pauses in doorways, peers through windows. Ramón. My call sweeps along rooftops, skirting around illegal satellite hookups and corroded water tanks, dips into hot cluttered apartments where fevered bodies clutch each other against the night.

  My call pauses at the ocean and whirls back again through the streets, now frantic, a wailing terror, harsh night zephyr, catching in the tobacco-stained throats of old watchmen and upsetting wind chimes into a senseless jangle.

  Ramón.

  And then it stops.

  Somewhere, not far away, it stops.

  I flash along the path of that racing heart, its call pulsing through me. I cross rooftops, flood forward into the streets, breeze past a window display of photography books for tourists, around a corner, and there’s Aliceana. She has her back against a wall, it’s a closed-up tobacco shop. Cartoon Indians turn their gloating smiles out from the window display. Her breath comes quick and unsteady, eyes dart back and forth.

  Ramón must be close. His pulse is a frantic beacon, bleating along much f
aster than it should be. He’s so close. But someone else is close too; their boots clomp through the streets toward us. Aliceana catches her breath, her eyes scan the walls for a window to crawl in, an alley to disappear into. But the old city is shuttered. She looks like she’s about to crumble, so I enter along her spine and allow our selves to intermingle. It’s startling at first—what are soft edges to Ramón appear to Aliceana as jagged lines. Her emotions and fears tumble through in free open spirals; even her darkest thoughts flow, whereas Ramón’s tiny inner ecosystem trips over itself, gets clogged up on a whim, shudders in the unsteady gait of uncertainty.

  Ramón. My call answered, but still no Ramón. I thought maybe he was hidden nearby, wounded perhaps or just terrified; his racing heart still thunders in my ears, but we are alone. For the moment anyway. I doubt whatever would happen to Aliceana in the hands of these child cops would be worse than what’ll happen to the Cubans picked up at the Teatro. Aliceana has her American passport with her, and international incidents can’t be good for anybody’s agenda these days. Still, the frenzy of this sudden burst of power, these long-fingered power mongers with wily eyes and a thirst to subdue the world to their will—there’s no telling what could happen.

  The echoing clatter of boots and yelling gets louder.

  Aliceana and I move as one. We hurl out from the tobacco storefront into the street. It feels like being suddenly naked—the shadows of the wall gave at least an illusion of protection. I spin my vision in a wide arc as we cross. It’s unsteady—I’m still getting used to Aliceana’s small, easy-moving body—but it seems the police haven’t broken into our crossroads yet.

  We’re charging down a narrow, dusty side street. Balconies with dangling plants and barred windows frame the sky. Aliceana’s furious pulse mingles with Ramón’s now. I want to stop, cast my Ramón net again, but there’s no time. Everything now is escape.

  We turn onto a wider avenue. The ocean is close now, I can feel its impossible hugeness infringing on the edges of the city. Lion statues snarl from a dark pillared building next to a dilapidated solar. I’ve been here, came as a child once with Papi. His hand was warm and huge around mine, guiding me through the crowds and into a market, a thousand crashing smells of life and death, the pungent tang of still-alive fish, fresh vegetables, soil, body odor, perfume, the crush of bodies haggling for the right price.

  But now the plaza is dead. The ocean wind tumbles crumpled paper plates and a few leaves through it. Maybe in the morning, that same market will open up again, all these years later. Aliceana’s foot slides on a rotten red pepper, painting the street with an icky stain. When we turn down another alley I realize the doctor actually has a plan. Here I’d been throwing myself into the singular project of Away, but Aliceana was following an internal compass. I hadn’t even realized. I burrow deeper, try to block out the still urgent SOS call of Ramón’s tachycardia.

  Aliceana has her passport and wallet nestled in a pouch slung beneath her T-shirt. Its gentle irritation against her skin whenever she moves gives a comfortable reminder that it’s still there. She’s got a shimmering image of Ramón painted against the back of her chest; flickering in and out with her worry. An illustrated encyclopedia of numbers, ratios, normalities, and monstrosities, angles of approach, pathologies, ways to die—it’s all wallpapered behind the visage of Ramón, it’s all over her, coloring each tiny move and decision. It’s a miracle anyone carrying around this much knowledge can move with such ease.

  Beyond all that, there is a destination and map. We’re moving still, darting along the shadows past a closed-up bar, now a spiraling hotel, now a school. We’re turning, hurrying up some stairs, and finally I understand: Aliceana has brought us back to Catabalas’s place.

  * * *

  Kacique’s face is pulled tight when he answers, like he’s bracing for a blow. Aliceana had whispered her name over and over while she knocked, tiny sobs escaping with each breath, but all trust has evaporated in the wake of the attack. Still, once he sees she’s alone he reaches those long, sculpted arms out and envelops her in them, lifts her body off the ground, and slams the door against the ever-watching street.

  “What happened?” Aliceana gasps when Kacique finally puts her down.

  “Come.” He takes her hand, brings her through the front room. We were all here just hours ago. Everyone was cracking jokes and getting to know each other; a brilliant night was in the works. Aliceana trembles as we enter Adriana’s room. The old woman is sitting up in bed, scribbling something on a yellow notepad in the flickering light of a seven-day candle. She looks up, her face mostly in shadows, and hits Aliceana with such a penetrating stare—those sunken eyes—that I’m sure she sees straight through all that Aliceana and into me. Me, Marisol. Yes, she sees me. Death is so close to this woman.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  Before Aliceana can ask why, Kacique says something sharp under his breath and herds us into the next room. Catabalas’s place is treacherous to navigate with the lights on. Unruly piles of magazines, crumpled clothes, and assorted post-adolescent detritus dominate the place. And now they’re keeping all the lights in the place off except Adriana’s candle. Aliceana trips, catches Kacique’s shoulder before crashing into the nerd vortex of Catabalas’s den. Kacique holds her up with one hand and clutters through the darkness with the other. Something grinds—gears? And then a terrible whine breaks the quiet. It’s just an old door hinge creaking, but we’re all so on edge it might as well’ve been a child screaming. Kacique’s shadow disappears into something, a stairwell, and Aliceana tiptoes after him, feeling along the wall to keep balance.

  “Aliceana is here,” Kacique announces. In a dimly lit room, several people stand at once: Catabalas, Adina, Cinco the conductor, another tuxedoed dark-skinned man I don’t recognize, and Catabalas’s dreamgirl, Yaniris. Adina crosses the room first, wraps around Aliceana, and starts bawling. Rainbows and smiling clouds cavort along the walls. This place is or was a play area. There are still toys stuffed into shelves along the wall and construction paper animals dance across the plaster ceiling.

  “What…” Aliceana’s saying, wiping tears away. “What happened?”

  And I hear another heartbeat. It’s slow. And then I understand.

  Catabalas steps to one side so Aliceana can see the cot behind him. Ramón is laid out on it, his head swathed in a bloodstained bandage. He’s unconscious. I flush forward, am beside him and then within in seconds.

  It is a very deep sleep, this one. I can’t tell if he’ll wake, but everything else seems to be in working order. He’s not gone gone, but he’s very thoroughly knocked out.

  I release myself back into the room. Ramón’s heartbeat still plods along its slow march inside of me, an occasional gasping. But that other pulse, the one I’d thought was his, the one that led me to Aliceana, keeps racing along beneath it, a puppy running circles around its tired old owner.

  There is a new heir to this lineage now; she is tiny and her heart is strong. I flatten against Aliceana’s inner walls, slide down, and then pour all my love and strength into becoming a cocoon around this dot of new life that is my family.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  In a park in the teeming heart of Havana, there is a famous ice cream stand. You would wait in line for hours, a line that stretched all through the park and out onto the sidewalk, but you would feel lucky just to be in that line, because all around you are people who are going about their business and not even getting ice cream any time soon. You, though, you are baked by the sun, assailed by mosquitoes, annoyed by obnoxious older sisters who don’t know how to appreciate the glory of the day—and none of it matters, because every passing minute brings you closer to the guy who will ask what flavor and smile with missing teeth, sweating through his T-shirt, and reach his magic scoop into the bucket and carve out a perfect curl of ice cream. Sometimes, on the most inexplicably perfect days, he opens up a brand-new vat just for you; he’ll peel off the top and reveal the un
touched surface of all that goodness. In the moment he takes to put cream in cone and grab a napkin, you pause and notice the empty space he’s created in the middle of that smooth swirl. You almost feel bad, being the one to ruin that sweet unbroken ocean, but then he hands you the cone and nothing else matters except you and the ice cream in your mouth, on your face, dribbling down your neck.

  At some point, I must’ve been that smooth a surface. Even this far in, after all that had happened, I had managed to hold on to some bit of grace, some joy. But Sebastián’s death reopened all the wounds, the loss of one sister and betrayal of another, the impossibility of ever knowing freedom again. It tore open an irreparable gap in me, and soon I will be empty.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting in this same spot while the sun rises and sets through the wired window behind me. I don’t know how long it’s been since Padre Sebastián died. I only know I’ve had enough.

  I had taught myself to fight off the ghosts of the two guards. They came to trouble my last waking thoughts and then my dreams. First I sweated and writhed beneath the weight of them night after night—one my interrogator, the other believed himself my savior somehow, a more insidious kind of torment, a haunting. And then slowly I learned to tame them. Padre Sebastián taught me to take hold of my imagination and I did. I made them shriveled, pathetic pig-men, children, worms. The power terrified me at first: The visages became mutants and they were furious; in their fury they attacked harder. And then gradually they fumbled, their slippery hands slid from my skin. Still they returned, but feebler each time.

  Now my friend and protector is gone and all my nightmares are back. It’s not just the torturers. My family. I had become an expert on erasure. Wiped my brain clean of all of them. Until now.

  Now.

  I sit perfectly still, still in my own filth, still and devoured by insects, rot, my own starvation. Consumed. I sit perfectly still and endure wave after wave of these phantoms. Sometimes they are guards or other prisoners, come to poke and prod me so that I eat; I’ve lost track of which ghosts are real. I sink and sink closer and closer to the floor and hell beneath it. I burn with fever, then shiver inside my broken bones and then one day for no reason I can fathom, I stand. My legs are shaky, withered, but they hold me. I step out into the terrible sunlight, it’s mid-afternoon and burning hot and I’m a strange new animal, rebirthed from my own shit so many times I’ve lost count. I take a deep forlorn breath and accept this life that will not tear itself from me no matter how hard I pray for it to.