I Was Never the First Lady

by Wendy Guerra

  In fifteen minutes we are having breakfast. Mami stays in bed, as usual, after her morning bath.

  NOTES FROM MY DIALOGUE WITH JOSÉ RAMÓN

  “I ASKED about your mother’s book because I’ve always felt guilty about what happened to her. Of all of us, the only one who could have done something was me. I was, let’s say, the most reliable. If I’d kept the original, like she asked me, it’d be a published book. Things have changed a lot; the pyramid has been inverted. My two sons are in Spain and now I find myself offering them explanations, arguments, about why I continue to be a member of the Party. Can you imagine the madness of it all? My children don’t understand my position. But that’s how I’m going to die, Nadia.

  “Lujo told me you plan to rewrite the book. I want to help you. You led a different life. We neither attacked the Moncada nor enjoyed a brief breath of freedom. Our fate has been to be stuck between two streams. But if I can help, let me know.

  “Do you remember Pucha? That is, Ana Irma. (Your mother gave everybody nicknames.) We’re neighbors; we do the nightly watch together on our block. We’ve been friends for more than twenty years. I’ll bring you the interview I did a few months ago, when I found out from Lujo that your mother was coming back. I asked if she’d finally published the novel about Celia, although I was referring to a different version, because the original never left Cuba. Here are my notes on the conversation with the person who was closest to Celia in her last years. Use it for that book—that’s why I’m giving these to you. Rewrite it from your perspective. Don’t let this get lost. Investigate.”

  “What my mother brought with her are pieces, delusions, fragments of what could have been and isn’t,” I tell him. “I’d have to do so much research. I don’t know if they’d let me publish that here; they might ask me why I’m interviewing people, and then history would repeat itself.”

  “It’s not the same as before, Nadia. Everything’s changing. It’s why I believe in this country. You think that if something could happen to you I’d push you to write about Celia?”

  “I’m grateful to you, José Ramón, but right now all my mother’s fears have spilled into me.”

  “Well, no, that’s the one thing about her you have to discard. I’m asking you as if you were my daughter.”

  “Why did you guys show up so late?”

  “Some because of fear and others because of your father, who terrorized anyone who brought up your mother’s name. I listened to your programs, I followed you every night on the radio and warned you about the crazy things you were doing; I was the listener who sent you letters: Eduardo and family, remember . . . ?”

  At the Malecón a group of people are shouting. We try to continue our conversation, but suddenly a fire truck pulls up. Lujo sits down to have breakfast with us. The tumult is strange. We try to talk about the interview with Pucha, but each time the screams get louder.

  Lujo says my mother wanted to name me Celia but that it didn’t go well with my father’s battle cry of a surname (Guerra means war). I’m surprised. We try to ignore the rabble so as not to get involved in what’s happening across the street. We have no questions and are just trying to go on . . . but it’s too much. I get up and go to the gate. I lean over to watch although there’s nothing in particular to see, only that the crowd’s growing larger. We don’t want to cross the street; everything suggests a tragedy. We stay quiet, watching the spectacle from our balcony. The drama intensifies as more onlookers gather. Apparently the firefighters can’t do anything. We only hear: “Someone’s drowned,” “Someone’s drowned.” Someone’s always drowning on the Malecón. Lujo wants to cross the street, but we tell him to have his breakfast in peace.

  Suddenly a neighbor comes running, yanks open the gate, and screams: “It’s her, Lujo, run.”

  I knew it. I knew it. It is my mother. She launched herself into the sea. Like a fish stuck between rocks, like a rafter who’s surrendered, like one of many suicidal poets, guided by the broken compass of her madness. All this tumult is for my mother. Lujo screams like a woman in the delivery room; José Ramón leaps to the opposite side of the sidewalk and runs away without a glance back. I reach out to touch her.

  She threw herself into the water because the sea is a steaming bowl of soup, just as I noticed before breakfast. Or she came to die and, in a moment of lucidity, regained her self-confidence and decided to end her tragedy in a big way. She died like an old Eskimo woman, preferring not to walk back and have to step on the waters; she never looked back.

  I recognize her beautiful body, drowned, wasted, but hers. There is no doubt. This is my mother.

  Everything happened while we had breakfast. While life went on, quietly. This is the fishbowl of death, and I’m constantly in this fishbowl. I could have kept this from happening, and yet I considered it, at first, just a spectacle intruding on my life. This time it was someone of mine who drowned; I should have been paying attention.

  How the simplest things happen in this world. That’s how alien life was with my mother, always through third parties, even her death. Why should I have expected any other ending? It was like a film being shown to me—and that involves me—but without my having the right to challenge the narrative. My God, if you can, give me a better role in this plot; let me decide something, however minimal. I just want to act for myself sometime.

  Farewell and Mourning, for My Mother

  My mother’s friends gather in Lenin Park. This park was one of Celia’s projects. My mother brought me here several times while it was being built. She would lie on the grass and smoke for hours. I’d run around and hide in the trees. This is where I decided to spread her ashes, on the grass.

  Where were we when she forgot the first word? And is there anyone who can give me any information about her? Who said running away would dispel her fears? Who were the accessories to that fear? When did she first fail to recognize me?

  Even here, Cuba continues to be a lost shore, unreachable.

  She was a Protestant and a Marxist, a Cuban and an American, a literacy teacher and a painter, addicted to Led Zeppelin and Los Compadres. She was the muse for certain songs from the ’70s. She’s portrayed in paintings and photos that immortalize her.

  Her poems, letters, and notes speak of a talent dispersed in anonymity.

  Who can say an official farewell to a hippie like her, a stranger to me, an old friend to so many of you? I didn’t have time to get to know her as I would have liked.

  We aren’t able to thank her or apologize to her. Let’s quote a friend: “Silence, a bird has died.”

  I’m going to read this poem by my mother, the one that’s most her. This is how I want to remember her.

  Science Fiction

  And if a green man came

  and if a green or blue man came

  in a spaceship.

  And if he came.

  What would he say about me, so disheveled,

  without frills or grace.

  What would he say about everyone because of me.

  We’ve Grown

  Diego’s letter in my red diary.

  Nadia:

  Your letter has left me speechless. Nothing I could write will bring you comfort. I don’t want to mourn her death; crying would drain me of the strength to get to you. I’m farther away than I’d like, but I’m going to stop everything to be with you. You can’t continue locked up like your mother or you’ll end up going crazy. C’mon, get out, walk to the beach. Get some sun and rest that salty body until I can get there and love you a little.

  I want to call you, but I know you don’t like hearing me from far away. It’s very early; I’m sure you’re asleep. I’m wandering around Europe; I’ve been working and trying to get ahead. I want to be there. To stop everything and take you away.

  For the moment: I’ll bring you mint tea with orange blossom in bed, caress your bare feet. There’s fresh bread. You can sit up a little, let your neck show. Butter, blackberry jam, a kiss on your navel to start the
day. You wake up, the light is on . . . Go to the sea and wait for me there.

  Your Diego

  Dear Diego:

  I only turn on the computer to write to you. The only thing left for me is to talk to you. I don’t know if I can still float. It’s dangerous for me to get close to the water. Sometimes I want to sink; I weigh too much to stay on the surface. I want to be anchored. I can’t take it anymore. So many deaths make me weak.

  I’m not a fictional character.

  I need you. Come.

  Nadia

  P.S. I’m listening to your advice. Starting tomorrow, I’ll go to the beach near here, because I’m waiting for you.

  Nadia:

  Yesterday I called your house and Lujo told me you don’t want to eat. I’m already in Mexico; when you least expect it, I’ll be in Havana. I don’t want a woman torn apart by tears; when I get there, I want to love you in all your beauty.

  I beg you to listen to me. Take a deep breath, chew, swallow, sleep, swim, live. I’d do anything to get you to eat dinner, at least tonight.

  For starters, I’d serve you tortilla soup with avocado, pasilla chili, pork rinds, cream, and fresh cheese, then mole (it can be the traditional poblano mole or a very good melon one), and we can conclude with chongos zamoranos while we toast with an excellent Mexican stone wine. I’ll bite your bare shoulder (because you have to be bare shouldered).

  Although, on second thought, I want to taste all your spices. Lujo tells me you’re a very good cook. I’ll rid myself of everything and go find you in Cuba, you, only you, only for you . . .

  Yours,

  Diego

  July 28

  I’m going to La Concha, a completely run-down club on the coast, an empty shell of what it was once: our happiness ten summers ago.

  Still standing is the old diving board the lifeguards used to paint aqua blue. There’s the old chaise, sitting in the sun, where I used to surrender to teenage boys swollen with desire. My body opened the dam to let their hot sperm pass, the colossal fighters: “the golden masks . . .”

  None of that survives. I don’t know where those extras from my ’90s movie have gone. Everybody who laughed when they watched me compete, small and frail, against the handsome lifeguard doing triple somersaults until I felt faint, brushing against the breakwaters, victorious or defeated in that delirium that comes from trying to beat the biggest barbarian.

  This is all history, Nadia. Now we’re going to clear our minds and feel the currents between our legs. Cold currents, icy currents, warm currents, hot currents—the past never travels in these channels that sweep us along.

  Stop, Nadia. Stop, please, you tell yourself. Stop or you’ll die. You knowme-Iknowmyself-youknowyourself I’m an idea machine, me, myself, Nadia. This is how I’m (we’re) killing me.

  My right foot pushes to ease the tension on the board. My head imagines a ship labeled Mediterranean. I raise my chin until I can’t read anything. Standing straight, I hear the creaking of the rusty spring. I’m in the air, hovering over a mirror of salt. I measure the slimy algae at the bottom and breathe in, calculating the distance to a few yellow fish, and in a rush of clarity, I inhale the air I’ll need, sigh and rise as only my mother’s mad spirit could rise . . .

  I smile as I try to make a perfect arrow out of my spine. I can’t stop thinking, I’m always scheming, but when I’m already arched and up high, very high, tucking my knees, vaulting into the sky, I see Diego in a suit and tie standing in front of me. I fall into the water knowing that was no vision. Triple reverse somersault and Diego under the sea. Diego among urchins and rust. Diego saves me from being anchored. Diego has jumped into the water to rescue me.

  Women who live on islands always need a savior, thus so many great historical confusions. Choosing the right savior to free ourselves takes years; sometimes it’s best not to be rescued.

  I want to live here with him, under the sea. It’s unusual for a Cuban woman to really want a foreign body so much, but Diego has already lost his nationality; his body tastes like Cuba and his voice houses all accents.

  The best part of summer is feeling this man dressed and wet in my arms. Crazed, his neck hot, his tie floating alongside us, we rescue ourselves, together.

  He strips me of my fear of life, his gestures sanctify me, his sensuality makes death go away, and then a potent Diego enters me. In the water, we’re all the same, simple animals dripping with desire. We are my hips and his thighs, my neck and his bite. The hook of his erect sex is my bait. I bite and swallow its bittersweet milk along with the salt of this deranged Caribbean.

  Diego throws me up against the seawall, so only his strong knees support me in front of the diving board, now split apart. He penetrates me in a series of contractions of water and light. I only suffer and suffer until I laugh; he pushes the pain out of me. The surface doesn’t exist, only his sex and mine sending bubbles between the depths and the light, between the white end and the mighty turquoise. Mollusks, fish, creatures come as Diego arranges them on this slippery body tied to him by pain and lust.

  Diego cries as he comes, furiously, and we wave goodbye to our childhood. Diego takes me under as I finish my leap from the diving board to ecstasy. I jab and stretch, slip through the waters as if I could fill the sea with my fluids. The summer of my life is under the sea.

  Diego is here! Let the ships decapitate the waves. The only desire that satisfies me is here.

  His tears sparkle in the sun. My back bleeds, but for the first time, not a single red drop leaves my sex.

  The best thing about the tropics is feeling the ships passing over our heads while we anchor just off Cuba’s territorial waters, not seen or suspected, secret and silent like the Russian submarines slithering under the skirt of the socialist Caribbean. Diego is finally here, and his revolution in my body is the only thing that really matters.

  How We Got the News (II)

  JULY 31

  Everything was already dead.

  I didn’t want to save anything for the future; I was on edge. I was still afflicted with the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome, but my fear of poverty had managed to appease it with so many deaths. The dark under my eyes looked like a cursed black butterfly. I was also a little dead.

  The death foretold of someone close alienates you from ambition, from selfishness, even from the anxiety over what’s going to happen tomorrow. You live for now, today; you stay still, like someone waiting to hear the hunter fire his shot just before the hare bolts.

  Coming home from the beach that day, Diego told me the people who greeted him on the streets of Havana seemed like ghosts from the past. That every trip to Cuba was like being in a black-and-white movie. I want to live with Diego, but on that Cuba–Mexico route, could we keep our desire alive? Has anyone lived these last fifty years between countries without losing the thread of passion? I don’t know if it’s possible. Many families get lost trying. I can’t abandon Diego. And I don’t know how to live without Cuba.

  Everything was already dead for me, and that morning, while Lujo continued to inventory paintings and valuables I should keep for the future, I felt alien and disturbed. It’s just that none of these things belonged to me. They weren’t part of my childhood, or part of my family. I was listless, blank. My body and soul marched independent of each other. These deaths were also killing Diego. He told me so as he was leaving. Now it was just the two of us, Lujo and me, the house and the phone.

  My friend Fabián called, one of my former classmates waiting for his visa for the Guggenheim grant.

  “The good news is we got multiple entry visas, and we can go to the United States any time we want.”

  I wasn’t happy, nor was it clear to me that I wanted to go on with the project I’d prepared for the grant. I told Lujo.

  For him, it was sad news; so many months without me would be a nightmare. We were alone, and this time it was a deep loneliness, because we didn’t have expectations anymore about being saved from our isolation. Those who should
still be with us had left us too soon.

  “Why aren’t we happy? Any Cuban would jump with joy and toast that news. I don’t really feel anything. Not happiness, not sadness,” I said.

  Lujo was taking notes. He put the pencil over his ear and looked at me over his glasses.

  “I’ll tell you, as your mother would say, quoting Darío, the fatalist: ‘Blessed is the tree that’s barely sensitive / and even more blessed the hard stone because it no longer feels’.”

  At around five in the afternoon, while I was watering my plants and thinking of cooking something light, three vintage American cars drove up to the house. The passengers were former classmates. They asked me to go with them to Cojímar. They were celebrating our trip to New York. Lujo encouraged me to get out of the house. It was us, again: time had dispersed us after we left school, but now it’d brought us together after my mother’s death.

  I’m going with Fabián in a ’57 Chevrolet restored by his grandfather; Ana and Alejandro are in another car, a flamingo-pink color. The caboose is Julio, with his headphones on, at the wheel of a ’58 Buick.

  Every time I see Julio I get butterflies in my stomach. He’s the most sensual and troubled guy I’ve ever met, but I tell myself: “Don’t go back to the places where you were once happy.” We had an affair at school, something he doesn’t seem to remember, something I can’t forget but masterfully conceal. I smother the butterflies in my stomach; I kill them so I can be a woman of the world, who ignores everything other than listening to music, driving, and doing her work.

  We go through La Bahía Tunnel, which boasts origins in the ’50s—aqua-green tiles, the smells of shellfish and fermentation. We finally reach the terrace in Cojímar, where Hemingway always ended up drinking with the local fishermen after hunting their sea beasts. I said it felt like a trip to the past. I made them look at my skirt, and at Fabian’s shoes, as retro as his recycled car.