by Wendy Guerra
When I get to Once Street, I realize the traffic light has been removed. There is no one at the guard post at Celia’s house, no one watching the block.
I cross the stark avenue without fear. The truth is, I no longer care if anyone catches me. I was detained for three days when I tried to perform my book-play about Celia and her public persona. They took everything from my files, expelled Diego from Cuba for helping me reconstruct documents, and threatened Lujo with annulling his repatriation if he continued to help me search for the truth about this woman and her connection with Fidel.
Eight years have passed, and I haven’t made art since: I don’t write, I don’t do anything other than rent rooms to tourists at my house in front of the Malecón.
I could have escaped like the rest of my contemporaries, the people with whom I studied, I think as I climb the stairs to Celia’s building, but I don’t want to become an exile. I can endure a search or an arrest, but to be an exile—I could never do that. I never liked what my mother became.
It’s strange: this whole block was full of people Celia brought from Manzanillo or the Sierra to teach and live in Havana, people who were part of the revolutionary struggle but who now seem to have left the area. There’s so much silence. People are still locked in their homes. Who will really care about this death? Will silence be a way of escape or an homage? Is it respect or fear that keeps them from taking to the streets?
I go up the stairs to Celia’s house. There’s a light on and the door is ajar, inviting me in. I hear Radio Reloj in the distance.
There’s nothing left here, only the backdrop of what was once the archive of the Revolution.
I’m at peace. Nothing else can be taken from me, I say to myself so I can go in without fear. I have nothing, I expect nothing, I tell myself, breathing heavily.
I try to turn on more lights, but there really aren’t any working fixtures. I step into her room; the landscape on the wall seems to have been blurred by humidity. I don’t see the hammock or the acrylic armoire, nor her clothes or perfume bottles. The room with the gifts is empty; gone too are the boxes of documents she used to review on sleepless nights. In the kitchen it seems the stove hasn’t been lit in months. I imagine her sitting on the stairs drinking coffee, talking to my mother in code so I wouldn’t understand. There’s nothing and no one here. In the office, the drawers are empty except for paperclips and old pencils, a thick dust covering the desk’s glass top where Celia used to work. Maybe they transferred everything to the Council of State at the Plaza de la Revolucion.
When did Fidel stop coming to this house? Maybe when he had his first son with Dalia Soto del Valle? Did Dalia and Celia ever meet in person? Neither of them liked or were allowed the limelight. I think Celia was actually above all that. She was more than a woman to him; she was his conscience—he lost her too soon!
There’s a musty smell so intense it makes me dizzy. It’s the scent of ruins, waste, cat urine, and mold. I open a window and try to breathe, but everything’s dead outside too. It’s as if they’ve taken the guts out of the building and left only a shell floating in an anodyne block, its charm forsaken.
I climb up to the attic, where Fidel used to stay. I look down, and the swimming pool is empty. Everything seems to have been taken from his room. There are no sheets on the bed; the mattress leans against the wall, and its stains look like a map of Africa. A leak drips on some wild plants, and there’s Havana below, shivering, gagged by clouds and silence.
What’s happened here?
Who gave the order to loot everything? Maybe Raúl? Maybe Fidel himself?
How much of what was decided here could explain the puzzle behind this drama?
I go back the way I came. The ocher light from the stairway leads me straight to the kitchen. I find the rudimentary coffee strainer Celia used, that thin canvas sleeve through which the hot water drains the flavor from the ground beans. I take it with me, in exchange for everything that’s been taken from me. I want to keep it and make coffee with it, in her memory.
I return to the hallway, go down the stairs, and see there’s an old man dozing with the radio on behind the door. Radio Reloj tells the time and takes us back to the comandante en jefe’s heroics.
“Have a good evening,” says the only watchman alive, nodding between snores.
Once more I breathe in the salty air, and the damn wind pushes my body so that I barely manage to continue along the Malecón. I belong to that dynasty of women who go against the grain, trying to see things in a different way.
I close my eyes and I can see Celia and Mami going down the street that overlooks the FOCSA Building, the wind tossing their hair and nudging them so they can barely turn on M Street up to Twenty-Third, laughing like crazy, dead now. My silk gown seems to fly out from my body and toward the sea. I touch the silk and remember Celia’s robes and my mother’s very fine skin.
They say you never cry for just one reason; whether from anger or pain, tears flow for so many reasons. I want to cry, but not for Fidel, for them, for Mami and Celia. Why did they both die so young? Why has each and every writer I know who’s had the courage to speak about this died too?
Today every Cuban has a different reason to cry; the shot’s been fired into the sky and we don’t know where to run, who to run from.
The warden’s dead, the cage is open, but I don’t feel an urge to leave. Instead, I panic that a stranger will come through the door.
This silence is him slamming the door. How are we going to live now without someone telling us what to do?
Who will we ask for permission or forgiveness? How will we subsist without offering obedience?
A terrible idea crosses my mind as I put the key in the sea-rusted lock. Did they incinerate the memory of Celia?
I’m home and take off my coat, put down my wallet, and set some water on to boil.
I open the windows and look at the horizon, where, as always, no ship is coming to save us from what we’ve chosen. Who cares about Cuba? Only a few Cubans. I pour the coffee grounds into the small, thin canvas sleeve, press them down with a spoon, and slowly let the hot water filter through the soil, the coffee plantations.
It smells of Oriente province; it smells of Cuba. A crystal glass awaits the brew under the worn sleeve.
I believe at this time in this city I may be the only person concerned about memory; this is and will always be a country that prefers to forget.
I’m scared, I think, as I tip the glass of hot coffee into my mouth on my first daybreak without Fidel.
Translator’s Note
Let me tell you about Cuban Spanish. It’s a little different—and I don’t just mean that we use words like guagua (a really great word) instead of autobús. Cuban Spanish is different because, first, it’s pretty fast, especially in Havana. All that speed means things get left behind, like the s at the end of plurals; l’s might disappear in an inhalation, d’s can drop into deep, dark silent holes and are never heard from again.
Linguists talk about our weak pronunciation of consonants, about fricatives and the “debuccalization” of s in syllable coda. They rarely mention how Cubans end a lot of sentences with mouths open, or that a greater understanding of Cuban Spanish might come not just from the words themselves but from the gestures and presentation of the person who is speaking those words.
How, then, does this translate to the page? How do Cubans sound like Cubans when they’re not being actively voiced but left to the singularity of the page?
Well, they sound like Wendy Guerra. On the page, Wendy doesn’t necessarily drop the s’s or swallow the consonants, yet on the page, Wendy emblematizes cubanidad. Wendy is the voice of a generation of Cubans who came of age during the years of revolutionary glory and found themselves as adults in a world of dislocation and despair. The language Wendy uses harkens back to slogans and mantras, but she also infuses it with irony and bite. It’s often indirect, dreamy, chock-full of song lyrics not just from the revolution but from romantic b
oleros and peasant songs, quotes from Dylan Thomas and Mexican novelists, it’s cinematic and also incredibly intimate. It can be over the top. It can sometimes sound outrageous, especially when recalibrated into English.
Here’s the thing for me about Wendy: she speaks my language; she writes my language. We’re both Cuban-born but though she grew up in Cuba and I grew up in Indiana, both our families go back to a small village on the eastern side of the island called Banes and we share the particular inflections of that coastal area. She often reminds me that we’re both children of Banes, women of Banes. And although it sounds a little hokey, I know what she means.
I know exactly what she means: we speak the same language.
I came to the US old enough to hold on to my mother tongue but also young enough to learn English as a native language. Wendy is curiously immune to English, but if that ever changed, I hope this is the English she’d be mouthing.
This is the third book of Wendy’s I’ve translated, and in some ways the most challenging to translate. But as always, her Spanish puts me at ease—it feels like the most natural language in the world. I hope when you read it in English it feels that way to you as well.
Achy Obejas
Benicia, California
April 18, 2021
About the Author
WENDY GUERRA is a Cuban poet and novelist. Guerra has contributed to various magazines and newspapers, including the Spanish dailies El País and El Mundo, and the New York Times. She won the Bruguera Prize in 2006. Although her novels have been translated into several languages, only one of them has been published in Cuba. She has always lived in Havana.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
An imprint dedicated to publishing international voices, offering readers a chance to encounter other lives and other points of view via the language of the imagination.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
I WAS NEVER THE FIRST LADY. Copyright © 2008 Wendy Guerra. English translation copyright © 2021 Achy Obejas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as Nunca fui primera dama in Spain in 2008 by Ediciones B.
FIRST HARPERVIA EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2021
Cover art: Liset Castillo
Cover design: Stephen Brayda
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-299076-1
Version 08102021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-299074-7
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3
www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida
Uttar Pradesh 201 301
www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
* gusana/o—literally, “worm”; derogatory term used to describe those opposed to the Castro government.
