I Was Never the First Lady

by Wendy Guerra

  LUJO: First you and then me—c’mon . . .

  NADIA: I remember her hand on my head, treating me for lice before I left for school. I was never early because my mother slept in. I would show up at recess. It was so embarrassing!

  On the first of September they punished a group of six of us, and because I was the leader of the group, they demanded I come in with her the next day for a meeting. But she didn’t want to. She hated listening to complaints. Especially about her daughter. Then she said, “Tell your teacher your mom says you’re an orphan.” I’ll never forget the principal’s face; that just made no sense. Nobody got it.

  LUJO: What I remember is when an announcer didn’t come in and your mother stayed to do his shift with me on Radio Reloj. She and I were so serious, reading those crazy news stories, one after the other. Then, half asleep, she said, “Today’s Wednesday, March 20, 1978, and it’s six thirty in the morning. Damn it, today’s my birthday!” She cracked up laughing. They sent us both to hell.

  NADIA: But, Lujo, my mom is my mother, right? Don’t tell me I was picked up from a garbage can or some charity.

  LUJO: You’re so bad! Of course she’s your mother.

  NADIA: I remember the day your crazy announcer, Alina, said on the air, “María la Negra attacked the coasts of Angola,” instead of “Black Tide attacked the coasts of Angola.”

  LUJO: The best was when Alina showed up at the studio saying, “Hey, folks, I have the record of the Concierto de Aranjuez played by Aranjuez himself.” Your mother didn’t know whether to laugh or kick her off the show. In a very serious tone, she asked her, “And what does he play?” And, as if out of her mind, Alina replied, “What’s he going to play, sweetheart? The piano.” (They both laugh.)

  NADIA: Alina was as dumb as a rock, but Mami was clueless. She read and forgot commas, skipped letters. Once we were both hosting a children’s program, and it was her turn to tell the story of Snow White. Mami tried to read it but didn’t have her glasses and said, “Once upon a time there was a marriage without eyes.” She was supposed to say “without hijos, without children.” (They both laugh.)

  LUJO: Do you remember “The girls from Havana are more than five hundred years old,” instead of “The Walls of Havana”? She was so crazy! Nadia, the last time I saw you was in a cafeteria-bar called La Cibeles—you were dressed as a Pioneer. You were very small. It was daybreak and none of us had slept. We’d spent the night at a wake with some improv musicians. Then we went to drink at a bar. Your mother, who was a fan of their music, would not abandon the improvisers. One of the great Cuban improvisers had died.

  NADIA: From the Buena Vista Social Club?

  LUJO: Back then it was Mala Vista . . . The hungry old men who peed all over themselves and came drunk to the studio, asking for money, for cheap rum or moonshine. Your desperate mother would make coffee in the station’s pantry so they could hold on and she could get them to sing one at a time. She was always so nervous, with her Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Maggoo? hair. It was around that time when Words Against Forgetting began to air. People would call it “Words Against Our Ears” because no one could stand those old songs. Now the whole world has discovered the “martyrs of the son.” But she’s who left recordings of them. Really important stuff for the Cuban music history archive. Did you get a consultant fee when they came to talk to you?

  NADIA: Imagine, my mother left all that with the station. You know she was obsessed with “posterity.” Never mind the vulgarity of the day-to-day. If I’d ever collected a fee, I would’ve been going against her will, and the weight on my conscience wouldn’t have let me sleep. In any case, she and my father were a couple of fools. They worked for others. She did it because she believed in that music, not for profit. Neither of them wanted money.

  LUJO: Do you remember the day I saved you at the Pasacaballos Hotel?

  NADIA: No, but I remember seeing you at the gymnastics competitions, cheering me on. What happened at the Pasacaballos?

  LUJO: Taking advantage of a short break, she’d come from interviewing East German leader Erich Honecker and went to the hotel to pick up Ernesto Cardenal. This happened the same day and two hours apart. Nothing ever happens in this country, but when it happens, hold on, because it all happens at the same time. Taking advantage of a short break, your mother left you at the pool. When she got to the Cienfuegos station she called me: “Taking advantage of a short break—Oh, Lujo, for Marx’s sake, for your mother’s sake, I left the girl at the Pasacaballos.” You can imagine, the Pasacaballos is a little far. But there went Uncle Lujo to rescue the girl. You were at peace, swimming alone in the middle of the night, floating in black waters. You looked like a jasmine flower carried by the current, from one side of the pool to the other, safe and floating like a tug in a port, waiting for someone who would never come back for you. Don’t you remember me arguing with her about these things?

  NADIA: No, what I remember is that she forgot to pick me up from school, so I spent hours with my teachers at their homes, waiting for her to come get me so I could shower, do my homework, and sleep. Never mind eating. It was just coffee with milk and bread and butter. She didn’t know how to cook.

  LUJO: She’d been troubled since that blow to the head at the coffee plantation, and then she got obsessed with work, which always came first for her.

  NADIA: Yeah, we were secondary characters as far as our parents were concerned. That was back when a slogan was much more powerful than any emotion.

  LUJO: Don’t say that, Nadia, don’t even kid about it.

  NADIA: Look who’s talking, the guy who didn’t even try to have children.

  LUJO: But I’m gay, girl.

  NADIA: Like that means anything these days? How times change, Lujo Rojas!

  LUJO: It’s obvious they’re never going to air these programs, Nadia Guerra!

  NADIA: Before, you and my father were closeted about being a couple, and now see how you rationalize everything with your sexuality. And . . . now don’t say anything. We’re going to listen to Rubén González, to these danzónes my mom recorded for the program. Tell me, tell me if “El Cadete Constitucional” isn’t something else when played by Rubén González’s fabulous hands. Be quiet. Let’s listen to this danzón for a while.

  LUJO: If when walking someday through this or any other city in the world these sounds and words come back to you, remember you heard it here on a day like today, on this same station. Remember that these are words expressly pronounced “against oblivion.”

  The Black Box

  Lujo and I have been standing at the exit door for two hours. Air France, the airline they were letting Mami fly, was late. She was in very poor health, fragile, whiny. It was the same state she was in when the Russian had sent her off from Moscow. With the airline’s help, she made the connecting flight in Paris. She’d been stumbling for a long time. It’s curious—she entered the country as a tourist and wasn’t detained in immigration, but customs stopped her. The problem was ongoing. They let us in, and I see my mother in a wheelchair, tiny, nervous, crying. It hardly seems possible she’s in Cuba with us now. The customs officer tries to explain something to me, but I’m not listening. I kiss my mother. She smells bad. There’s food stuck to her face. She’s peed herself. Her left hand trembles, her Parkinson’s. God, what a state in which to come back. It’s a very big deal to come back. What do I feel? Mostly anger, sick of so many absences. With me, with the sun here, the beach, with my father, maybe things would have been different. There are people who live in flight, who must leave where they’re born. But there are beings so fragile that when they leave, the world swallows them whole. They get eaten up by the abstraction of traffic lights and accounts payable. Was that her case? I don’t know; I don’t know her.

  The customs officer tells Lujo she refuses to open a cardboard box she’s brought as her only luggage. She won’t let them look at her papers either. I try to lift her from the wheelchair.

  LUJO: Please give me your papers, your purse.


  MAMI: My purse? What for? I don’t have any money.

  LUJO: Let’s start with your papers.

  MAMI: Take the papers, my purse, but not the box. Cuba took what’s missing from that box. I never open it, never.

  Lujo went pale. You don’t mess around with customs; otherwise you can spend hours waiting for them to decide your fate and whether you get to leave the airport. The customs officer has his suspicions about this dirty, wheelchair-bound woman with a groggy face. They have suspicions about the box. They are suspicious because their job is to suspect, but the box holds only books with dust jackets that they don’t even look at, some medicines, and documents. No money, no jewelry, no poison, no bombs. Nothing.

  I ask them to run the box through the x-ray machine. They agree. The box is full of documents they want to read.

  My mother is very ill. She trembles. They ask why she’s trembling.

  “It’s Parkinson’s,” I tell them.

  The customs officer doesn’t care about the trembling madwoman in the wheelchair; she has to comply. Using his most courteous manners, he asks us to open the box. I open it. There’s a photo of my mother when she was young. An article from Bohemia magazine at the beginning of the Revolution. The customs officer reaches inside the box. He can see typed pages. My mother, more lost than ever, screams, shrieks.

  “My black box, my things! Leave them alone, damn it! Let go!”

  The customs officer explains that you can’t bring certain documents and books into Cuba. In her case, since she’s sick, he thinks there won’t be a problem. In any case, a specialist is coming to look over the books to be sure. Speaking slowly, he starts to tell her about the regulations . . . then my mother begins to sing in a powerful voice. It’s “Words (Palabras)” by Marta Valdés:

  Get away from me with your words,

  go find another heart that will welcome them.

  The tourists applaud; it is a hard spectacle to ignore. “This is Cuba, dude.” The applause doesn’t stop. The customs chief begs us to leave. My mother is rolled outside in her wheelchair. She kisses me although she doesn’t recognize me. She hands Lujo the black box.

  “And our husband, isn’t he coming to meet me?” she asks Lujo. “Miami is so beautiful—finally, the sun!”

  My mother doesn’t know where she is, but she sang Marta Valdés imitating Elena Burke. She’s here now, but now I don’t know where to begin.

  The House, My Mother, Memory, and the Body

  As soon as we got home, my mother began to ask about Lujo’s mother. It was incredible, but she recognized the house in front of the Malecón. She remembered and listed certain phrases and things from when people used to come here to dance and pass the time:

  The Beatles and other things were already banned.

  We had already married our husband.

  I was already pregnant with the girl.

  Lujo’s mother was on the couch.

  I didn’t paint anymore.

  Waldo had been killed.

  We weren’t hippies anymore.

  We didn’t go to the Funeraria Park.

  Nicolasito Guillén came over alone or with Dara, the Bulgarian.

  Lujo’s mother controlled who came and went.

  Lujo sat down to read the medical history Mami brought along with her books. The documents suggested a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Maybe Alzheimer’s. What kind of disease is this that retrieves then steals memories? The day we lose our memory is not the day memories are erased but only the day when we can’t put them in order anymore or tie them to our emotions. Your loved ones start to become strangers to you. The intimate becomes alien. The day we lose our memory we’re adrift.

  Anything can save us or push us toward disaster. The enemy moves into your head.

  The Bath

  I didn’t know where to start. I began to undress her while she hummed in unison with Lujo. She couldn’t finish a single song; she couldn’t remember the lyrics all the way to the end, then she’d fall to earth like a kite from the sky.

  I untangled some gauze on her thighs. I was trying to put her in the tub when I realized she had bedsores and scary bruises on her legs.

  “She must have been lying or sitting a long time,” said Lujo, appalled.

  Mami was defiant and I almost had to force her under the soapy water; the sour smell of her body made us dizzy. She was skinny, malnourished. Lujo left the bathroom; he couldn’t bear it. But my mother had no shame; she just went on singing, naked.

  After your memory goes, everything else follows: shame, modesty, fear. But candor comes back.

  I sponged her onion skin. She was no more than fifty-five years old but so fragile . . . She almost melted between the water and foam. She’d once had a beautiful body.

  In the bathtub, she played with the soaps and bottles, like a little girl. I couldn’t help a few tears; I don’t know why I couldn’t keep it together in these first few minutes alone with her. “Control, Nadia,” I tell myself, terrified. I ask her about the bruises.

  “The person who takes care of me in Russia is an animal. She beats me.”

  I wanted to run away, but I breathed, I kept calm.

  “But why, Mami? Were you left alone with her? What did you do?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t misbehave. I swear I’ve been good.”

  I didn’t cry again. I don’t know how I feel about my mother; it could be I haven’t had time to figure things out for myself yet. But the thing is, I didn’t cry again. I didn’t know if she was lying or if she actually remembered any of the things she said.

  Lujo shows me how to take care of the bedsores. First, you have to put on gloves, but I don’t have gloves. I disinfect my hands with alcohol, then clean the wounds with hydrogen peroxide. I put alcohol on them immediately and my mother jumps, slaps my hand. I kiss her to calm her down, then I put antibiotic cream on her, letting my fingers sink into the sores. I make the medicine penetrate to the bone; at the end, I blot them a bit. I blow on the wounds so there’s no burning, and then we’re done. It took a little bit of time for each one . . . and now the worst is over.

  Lujo shows me how to help her put on the disposable diapers she brought. My mother watches us from the bed. I use some Brisa talcum, which I’d forgotten about and left on the dresser since the ’80s. I dab a little of my perfume and deodorant on her and dress her in my pajamas. I comb her hair, and she’s ready to have dinner, to sleep, to be quiet at home. At whose house?

  “At home,” Lujo says, starting to fall apart.

  Lujo cries while looking for a Bola de Nieve LP. We hear “Goodbye Happiness” from the Hungarian record player that sits in a corner of the room. This is the place I’ll share with my mom until we know what to do in the future. Is there a future without memory?

  Lujo knows and loves my mother more than I do. The sobs startle her awake. I feel a lot of guilt, but now isn’t the time for blame. I can’t cry for her—that’s not what she expects from me. My mother has fallen asleep again, and Lujo has gone to make smoothies for the three of us. I want to take a shower; I’m exhausted. I look at myself in the mirror, naked. I have the same body as my mother’s.

  As I wash, I release a few hysterical tears. I turn off the water; I close my eyes. End of hysteria. Enough, enough, enough already. End of the day.

  I go to be by my mother, who’s like a little girl lost between the sheets; she breathes calmly. Everything is at peace except me: “A stranger has come / To share my room in the house not right in the head, / A girl mad as birds,” said Dylan Thomas.

  The Orwo Tape

  I find an Orwo tape (recorded in Havana, 1980) in my mother’s box. I listen to it on the Nagra tape recorder. This is like being in a museum, with a little of everything.

  SOUNDTRACK: Tap, tap, tap . . . on the open microphone. A hand taps again, three times.

  Do you hear me, skinny girl?

  It’s four in the morning. I’m at the station, in front of the RCA Vi
ctor in the green sound booth. You know I don’t like listening to my recorded voice—I feel like it sounds watered down—but this is the only chance I have to speak to you. There’s nobody here and the microphone’s visible, tangible, not hidden. I’m recording myself so I can be sure. I can’t leave you a letter, and a drawing wouldn’t let me fit in everything I’m thinking. I’m not a genius; I’m just your mom.

  I hope your father hands you this tape someday. It’s not urgent, and I’d rather he give it to you when you’re older. I won’t come back—I don’t think they’ll let me, and I don’t think I’ll let myself.

  Today, if they were to catch me recording this tape at the station, they would sanction me, fire me, interrogate me, send me far away until they’ve forgotten my mistakes. I could wind up at Topes de Collantes. But that’s the least of it right now. My head is spinning. I’m trying to say goodbye to you.

  When you grow up and hear this, maybe over there (coughs) . . . By the year 2000, this will be a different life. I hope scientific breakthroughs and the human condition will have overcome all the meanness of humankind. Then you can listen to this as a relic from the past and you won’t understand anything; you’ll listen from a distance, in the same way that today we listen to radio soap operas like The Right to Be Born. I’ll be history, or worse, I’ll be nothing at all, and nobody will forgive me for leaving you behind, for leaving without you; that’s the honest living truth—don’t think I’m ignoring it. I’m well aware of it.

  I’m in the sound booth where we spent so many hours together, me with my white glass and you with your chiseled silver spoon. Here we drank tea amidst all those ants. Here we ate what we could. Here we gossiped about men, about friends. We read poems we liked and laughed at a few with Aleida and Maricela as well. Here I answered what I could of your questions. Here you slept on the sofa, exhausted, still wearing your school uniform, waiting for my shift to end at dawn, during cyclones and political events. But I don’t want to start lying to you here. It’s time you know I don’t agree with everything that’s happening to us. It’s time for you to know I’m leaving.