The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  “And then,” Luis said to me one day long, long ago, and both his hands slapped the bedsheets. “Well, you already know.” He looked away, went inside himself for a few moments, and we sat there in the wavering light coming in from the kitchen and took stock of the dead we’d brought with us. There were so many, so many lost saints, but Padre Sebastián was always the first, because the hole he left in my heart is wider than all the rest. Even Isabel had become the faraway kind of ghost by the time I lost Sebastián. Isabel came second, then Gómez, with clandestine meat packages and the bloodstained wall. My parents. Altagracia, a sad, obese woman I used to sit quietly with in the courtyard beneath the tower; they blew her head off. Santos, starved to death. Echeverria flung himself from the wall, landed on the other side with a wet thud. Miguelito from Camagüey, vanished one day without a trace, but we all knew. Juan-Pedro whose brains scattered across the gravel and left a sopping, chunky stain for months.

  “¿Nena?” I had gone deeper than Luis, buried myself beneath the mountain of dead that I carried. “¿Adónde fuiste?”

  He didn’t touch me. This was early still; he’d learned the hard way not to touch me without asking. But his eyes wouldn’t let me go, that harsh glare, furrowed brow. “Come back, nena.”

  Bartolo died so slowly; became skin and bones and then every week we thought would be his last, but he kept going, torturing all of us with that rattly cough that sounded like Death laughing through his ribs. “¡Nena! Oye.” Daniyana’s little cousin smuggled in some powder that she used to make an explosive. They shot her as she approached the tower and she lay there, sprawled out and alone on that great empty stage, a hundred eyes on her, the growing stain on her shirt. And then she detonated: a clap that snapped across all our skulls, burned the flash of that day into our eye sockets. We kept finding pieces of her in the crevices and imperfections of the building, and in the yard they said she’d won, in her own way, she’d won. And we shook our heads.

  “Coño carajo, mujer.” Luis’s voice, a hundred miles away.

  Once I’d cycled through the saints, the demons would come: David the prison guard and all his faceless friends. That great big yammering skull with a beard and dark green cap whose voice boomed across the whole island, the world. And of course, Nilda. Nilda’s final, shivering hug and whispered excuse. Nilda with her satchel of music paper and places to be. Nilda with her lies, her betrayal. She went up out of her way to find those soldiers, to destroy me. It wasn’t just a passive thing. She made the choice, followed through, broke me.

  My hands would one day find her neck, I decided, and close around it. I won’t look away either. Won’t flinch. I’ll make the choice and follow through, and close this hateful loop.

  “MARISOL!”

  I looked up. Luis sat on the edge of the bed, panting from his own battle against his own ghosts. He shook his head and lowered it into his waiting hands. Selfish, I’d gotten lost in my own trauma just as he was letting out some of his. Stupid. Two damaged people cobbling together a life out of what? The shrapnel of their old ones? It was like trying to glue a smashed bottle back together. And all these ghosts vying for attention. The urge to simply no longer exist roared up, filled the room. I’d come all this way. We’d come all this way. Separately. Found outrage and the insurmountable will to live amidst so much death. We’d made it. And now we were broken, couldn’t even find solace in each other’s sorrows.

  I want to die, I almost said. The words remained in the space just behind my teeth. The truth, but not the whole truth. I kept it back, sealed my jaw tight, waited. I want to die. Softer this time. Luis’s head still in his hands, not crying, not moving. I want to die. A whisper. I swallowed some saliva and took the words down with it. Opened my mouth to see if they had really gone. Nothing came out. A metallic taste in my gums. Luis’s back was big, speckled with hairs and a few zits, a long red frown stretched across it from when they beat him with the electric cord.

  I reached out my hand. The room was so still. The light from the kitchen buzzed and flickered, buzzed and flickered, made a line of brightness along the brown skin of my arm, my hand as it touched Luis’s back. I want to die. But still just a whisper, and then gone again. A cackling reminder that it will return.

  “Luis.” His name a tiny prayer, just like mine. It was the first time I’d said it out loud. He looked up. “Luis.” I reached my other hand through the dimness, across all those miles of pain, the tiny bedroom, the flickering, buzzing kitchen light, and then wrapped my whole self around him. “Luis.”

  I tugged him, the gentlest of tugs, like when you’re dancing and the man lets you know it’s time to switch it up, that tug. It’s time to lie down, my tug said. Come. It’s safe now. I’ve put away my ghosts, now you can put away yours. We lay back, and his face became a fist, his breath heavy as he fought and fought and fought and then released, in a low, scratchy wail, just a tiny bit of all that was inside of him.

  It’s his sleeping face I see behind all those pictures of him though. The face he made that night, after the release, after holding me, the face that meant he’d found a little scrap of peace. In these photos he’s tensed up, always ready for a throwdown. I remember that Luis, the public Luis, but no matter how tough he mugs for the camera, what I see beneath it is the sleeping man beside me who knew how to be so exquisitely patient even while fighting his own living nightmares.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Ramón’s bags still lie by the door. Empty bottles and full ashtrays on the coffee table suggest a long night recapping the trip for Marcos. The beginning of day creeps over the building-lined horizon and into Ramón’s open window. He knocked out without even shutting the curtains, clothes still on, face plastered into the pillow like he was trying to burrow through it.

  Hovering just above him, I watch his body rise and fall, match my own breath to his. Luis holds the key to whatever happens next. All I need to do is paint the full picture, let the memories unravel through Ramón’s dream state like I always do. But which ones? Where to begin? Suddenly back and now armed with the knowledge that I’ve been here before, that I lived beyond the prison walls, beyond the ninety miles of water, beyond even the treachery of entrances and exits—I feel like I’m drowning.

  There were years here, I now realize. Years of my life that I settled into the way normal people do; the cracks in the pavement and particularities of the trees, the smell of hair salons, the corner stores: They became my friends. At some point they ceased to jump out at me, rude, each time a surprise, and became simply true.

  Still, I pulsed with memories. Still the urge to hunt down Nilda and make her pay for what she’d done burned through me over and over like the ever-circling ray of a lighthouse. Still I thought about the life I left behind me that day I stood outside my own window in Las Colinas.

  But I was fully alive. I was present.

  One night I reached my hands over my head and let Luis pull my T-shirt over them and stood before him with all my scars showing and let him slowly, gently, hold me. One night I waited until he fell asleep and then took off all my clothes; slipped beneath the covers, and nuzzled into his heavy grasp.

  And when I asked him to, he uncoiled those tightly wound muscles and, tears sliding down his face, told me. It took him forever to actually start, because he kept being afraid his words would erupt inside of me and send me off, away and away and never to return again. But finally I convinced him I was strong enough now, I was ready, so he told me about growing up in that far eastern corner of the island, a town not far from Santiago, and those heady adolescent days he’d spent dodging bullets in the Sierra Maestra, the gradual disassembling of his trust in the world he himself had helped create, the quiet feeling of madness that followed and his arrest in the run up to the Playa Girón invasion, the same roundup that sent Isabel plummeting from the top of the trampoline of the dead. He told me about the torture, a hunger strike, his eventual release and exile and how he fell in with a militant Miami group that terrified an
d excited him at the same time, and led him to the doomed rescue mission that saved my life.

  And when I asked him to, he lay quietly with me in that hot dingy apartment, and we listened to songs we knew we’d never hear the same way again from an island we swore we’d never see again.

  And when I asked him to he took my clothes off, slowly, lovingly, carefully, and lay back so I could ride him. And when we asked them to, sometimes our ghosts and night terrors would stay away for a few hours and let us have some privacy and unbroken sex.

  I should give one of these to Ramón. Lord knows I’ve invaded his privacy plenty, but I can’t. I need to build a shrine inside myself of things that are mine and only mine. Even if it’s unfair; I know. The boy has had no such opportunity since I’ve been around, but what really matters is the simple, clear arrow pointing directly at Luis.

  Another night, the fear roared up inside of me as I lay awake in his arms; I was going back to prison, filth seeped from my cells and fouled up the fabric of everything I touched. Everything I touched became a prison.

  “Breathe, nena,” Luis said, waking up to my gasps. “You’re not breathing.”

  I exhaled, sent the shit out with it; waited for it to rise again; fell asleep waiting.

  I can’t give Ramón these memories either. They’re mine, and so very few things are. Having invaded the darkest corners of my nephew’s life, I become greedy over my own. Mine. I have shared myself too; placed so many hideous intimacies on his mind. These I will keep.

  Big Maceo, Benigno, and Luis in Serrano’s. José José in the chair; Serrano leaning over him with the razor, eyes sharp but mouth wide open. “Because, comemierda, you don’t get to demand one standard of freedom in one place and not another.”

  “But it’s not that simple, primo,” Benigno said. “You’re not taking a global perspective.”

  “Fuck a global perspective.”

  General shouts and curses erupted. No one noticed me standing in the doorway until Luis looked up from his newspaper, crossed the room at a bound.

  “This is the mysterious Marisol you keep telling us about?” Serrano said. José José turned to see me, and Serrano manhandled him back into place.

  “La una y unica,” Luis said. “What’s up, nena?”

  I couldn’t stay in the apartment for another second because the walls close in on me unless I keep turning around fast enough to hold them back. And my brain had caught on fire from thinking too hard, from fighting demons and waking myself up out of recycled nightmares about pig-faced men dressed as prison guards shredding my naked body with their talons. And my body crumbles every time I wake up too suddenly; my muscles become shards of granite and I am a landslide, then dust.

  “Nada, Luis. Everything’s fine.”

  “You look sad.” A whisper, away from the prying ears of his homeboys.

  I look sad because disappointment has become a spider in my gut and it lays eggs, hundreds of thousands of them and when it died, instead of fading it calcified into a cobalt fist, has me shitting rivers for weeks. “No, Luis, I’m okay.”

  “Alright.”

  “You are from La Habana, Marisol?” Serrano asked. His gentle way of fishing me out of my hole and inviting me into the fold.

  “Las Colinas.” I managed a smile.

  “Ah, my cousin Ediberto was from there. He went to Santa María’s.”

  “I went to Santa María’s.”

  “Ah, you see? Come sit. You must’ve known Padre Sebastián, then.”

  The smile hardened against my face and then shattered.

  Serrano saw it all. Luis put a hand on my shoulder and I shrugged it off.

  “He was a good man. A hero.”

  I nodded. Fought off the scream that rose up inside me. Found a seat next to Big Maceo. Nodded at Luis to sit beside me. “He was a good man,” I said.

  There. Ramón can have that one. That should do it. I’m still hovering just above his sleeping body. Memories stream through me like I’m an open wound, a flickering, hemorrhaging catastrophe. I try to stem the tide and finally do, barely, barely.

  I hold the barbershop and their banter in my mind, let it seep through me and then, lovingly, release.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  I’m going to kill my sister.

  I decide this as we wind through the Jersey suburbs toward her house. Ramón, headphones on, gazes out the window. It’s midday—pale frosty sky above and manicured gardens all around.

  Once there was a young woman who made it to freedom, and she had one wish in the world: to make her sister see what she’d done to her. To make her pay. That, if nothing else, requires honoring. Perhaps that’s why they sent me back.

  I was mad before and didn’t know why. Then I found out but didn’t know the depths of that betrayal, what I had lived through.

  Now I know.

  Now I know, and what’s more, somehow, I survived. I survived prison, and the island and who knows what else, and even if I’m dead now, I am armed with the truth of her betrayal. I’ve seen it, felt it, all over again, and all the terror that followed.

  I’m not sure how to do it, though. When I took out Gutierrez it was more like helping him along than anything else. That train wreck old heart already careened toward collapse; the sudden rush of memory, the jolt of sex in loins long useless: I devised a perfect storm for my old lover and as he rattled toward his climax, I waited, watched, and then reached in, ever so slowly and in the perfect stillness before explosion, I pushed.

  I know how to push. And I know how to wait.

  Nilda’s heart isn’t feeble the way Gutierrez’s was, but she trembles like a dry leaf that will easily crumble to dust if disturbed. I know how to disturb. And I know how to wait.

  Ramón adjusts in his seat, frowns at his phone, changes the track on his little music player, turns his frown out the window to the passing lawns. He’s preparing himself for a confrontation too. I was alive, at some point anyway, and forgotten. If this woman had found it inside herself to do something, to look for me, maybe … maybe.

  His fists have been clenched since he woke up. The revelation of Luis, my presence in Jersey, the truth of my disappearance and rescue: It all jostles the burning embers of his rage. I, whom he never knew, live so bright in his mind he’s ready to fight for me.

  And I’m ready to kill.

  * * *

  I’m practicing a series of motions, swooping appendages through the air in some vague cutting gesture, imagining Nilda’s frail body split in half around my arms, which have become machetes.

  But then I stop.

  Very suddenly I stop, because we’ve exited the bus and approached the house and something is different. No. Something is the same. How did I not see this before? Ramón walks ahead, up the path to the front door. I linger beside a tall bush. Frost sprinkles the top of the grass on their front lawn. A few weeks ago, Juan-Carlo mounted a ladder and fastened a rainbow of blinking lights across the roof. Today, the air smells of snow and when it snows, it will cover the lawn and the lights will reflect in it, winking colorful shadows of themselves, and the world will seem both perfect and perfectly still, for however long you stand there in the night, watching each breath become a ghostly shroud and then vanish.

  I know because I saw it, however many years ago, as I stood right here. My fingers, seeking warmth inside flimsy jacket pockets, wrapped around the switchblade I’d stolen from Luis. The steel burned in my hand; I massaged the indentation where you could press just so and make the blade appear. I had practiced in front of the mirror many times while Luis was at work. I had become an expert.

  It would be simple. Here no record contained me, my fingerprints, my hair, my life. I had never arrived. And in Cuba? Dead. Drowned. Even Luis didn’t know my full name; I was simply Marisol: a phantom. I could murder and leave no trace and vanish and then I could stop hating and hating this woman, this last shard of family I had left. I could move on.

  The front door swung open and I almost y
elled. A boy ran out, ten or maybe a tall eight. He burst down the steps and went crashing into the snow like he was on fire and then lay on his back, staring up at the night, watching each breath become a ghost and then vanish, become a ghost and then vanish. Snow had started to fall—I hadn’t noticed, so deep in my plots—it cascaded and spiraled slow, carelessly, and wherever it landed it landed gently, with grace.

  “¡Ramón!” Her voice quivered even when shouting. The boy’s head perked up from the snow. “¿Dónde estás, m’ijo?”

  Ramón flattened again, watched each breath become a ghost and then vanish. The door opened, slowly this time. My fingers tightened on the knife handle, teased the release button. She stared out into the night, silhouetted by the warm glow from the house. The snow picked up, swirled into a frenzy, and spun out across the sky. Nilda watched her son, smiled. “Come inside, m’ijo, you’ll get sick.”

  I can’t take this boy’s mother from him.

  That’s how it started. A very simple thought. A true one. I didn’t have to look for it; it was right there.

  Nilda had betrayed me, sent me to my doom. And I had betrayed her too, by coming back, by leaving in the first place maybe. Betrayed them all. To exist in a regime with its foot pressed against your throat is to constantly be in a state of betrayal. If I had not left, I would’ve been betraying myself, Isabel, what I knew must be done.

  There was no right answer back in those hazy, hot days of the revolution. There was only despair and betrayal, which led into each other in a never-ending loop. Nilda chose one and I the other and we both ended up in the same place: fucked. But Nilda got out, somehow, and so did I, and here we are.

  But her son had done nothing, knew nothing of our crimes.

  A strange feeling washed over my body; my muscles unclenched. The hand around the knife felt like it was on fire until I let go, the last part of me to release, and I did.