by Wendy Guerra
Enzo felt abandoned by his friends, who no longer wanted to hang out with me. I had changed him. He didn’t want to continue with his political causes and preferred teaching and working as an editor. We planned to move to a beach so we could swim together like before and return to the waters of the past. His friends were unhappy and began using totalitarian tactics: planting doubts, creating divisions with false clues, using rumors to win. There’s nothing worse than a communist who’s been let down by communism. Who were they and how had they come to be here? If we were to read their real bios, we’d realize how trained they were in these arts. An intellectual exile in dangerous cities without access to the sea can suffocate you. It’s not the same as exile in Paris or Barcelona, where you can wander freely. This is a somber exile, seeded with risk and death. How many celebrated Cubans have died here? The list is so long.
I had to put up with it because of Enzo, but I wasn’t sure Enzo would put up with it by my side, amid so many conflicting opinions. No matter what, they’d been his family; they’d quelled his fevers; they’d brought him home safely in the wee hours during his nostalgic drunken bouts; they were with him when he found out the horrible news of his father’s suicide; they’d toasted when he got his doctorate in history; and they’d never abandoned him on a single Sunday at seven in the evening, when everything seems to cease making sense. And me. Where was I? I’m someone who had died and was now rising through the ashes, the past that has come to unhinge him from the present. As if by magic, suddenly his ex showed up. Horrendous stories about me began to circulate, truths diluted by lies or assumptions to see what kind of effect they’d have on Enzo. While they whispered, I continued working on my book Dissident Apprentice, a collection of short essays, written very much in my style, about the Cuba I experienced on a day-to-day basis. I thought it would clear up my position for my boyfriend’s friends and neighbors. Writing was the only thing to do here, because no one could argue with work.
The heat in Mexico City is insufferable. You feel a kind of suffocation at that altitude and the temperature increases the desperation, which keeps you trapped in an unspeakable ardor. I prefer raw winter here; summer doesn’t suit this city. We’d go out to the supermarket for groceries and I couldn’t help but think about Cuba. I’d been infected with his friends’ Cuban illness, which wanted to insert the reality back on the island into this one. At the supermarket, there was everything I’d never had in Cuba, everything we lacked, and everything no one ever needs but is still for sale. I’d look at bathing suits in an attempt to speed up our transfer to the seaside. I’d compile notebooks I’d never fill and bought coconut water so I could taste all my summers in my throat. That’s how I endured the heat in Mexico City, and three months later, amid the rains, I had finished my book. The essays laid out a formula, from being a writer who doesn’t want to be a dissident, to dissidence itself, all by accident, and described the sociological aspects that might compel someone onto such a path. How a simple writer becomes a political animal, that was the subject of my studies. The process undergone by a naïve writer covered in guilt. What to do after a social miscue about a crazy country aimlessly looking for those guilty of its failures. I think, in some way, that became a kind of guide to my readers, a way of being understood by the rest of the world.
I was happy with the results and I think Enzo was enthusiastic about my new book too. I was ready to read from it for my Cuban neighbors.
But something wasn’t right for me in Mexico, in my relationships with Mexicans. I never knew what they were thinking or what they really wanted from us. When I was at a restaurant and looked around, I could see a great gap between them and me. I felt truly distanced from everything in my old life and I held tight to Enzo, trying to understand how he had endured all those years living in a culture so different from ours. Did the Mexicans say how they felt about us? Did they like that we were occupying and invading Mexican space? I don’t think so. What would it be like if Cubans had to welcome thousands of Mexicans on the island? And then, when Enzo’s friends arrived, I felt a healing proximity, and although they had a certain contempt for this unruly woman who’d come between them, I felt safe in their gestures, their accents, in our similarities, even their intolerance. All of that tied us together, haunted us. Our defects are part of our idiosyncrasies, what we take with us wherever we go.
Finally, the day arrived. Enzo asked his friends to get together, as a birthday wish, so they could listen to selections from my book. We sat in a circle after dinner out on the terrace where we could see the whole neighborhood. Slowly, I explained the basis of my work: a first-person narrative to define the revolutionary context and also to expose myself as part of the experiment, revealing my character and my bad habits, my political ignorance and my fears. To be unmasked was part and parcel of the essay. But as I spelled out my words, I saw myself projected onto a range of experiences, from the little socialist girl to the woman they needed to turn into a spy in order to feel themselves important in the diaspora.
Enzo’s friends looked me over as I read, not missing a single detail. They were curious, so I was able to shed the structure and just read the most accessible of the three parts of the book. At midnight, we had drinks and ceased talking about literature.
The idea was to discuss the voice of the essay’s narrator. A person who has no interest in being brave but who sees herself forced to confront her fears when she has to defend herself as she contends with the reality inside Cuba. But they thought all that was pathetic and contemptible. Enzo’s friends wanted a new hero for Cuba in my essay or, to be frank, in the real world. Wasn’t the essay a view from the inside? They wanted a pamphlet to give them hope, something that said: It’s possible to be brave and clean without compromise, without duplicity. It’s possible that there’s a nurturing formula for new leaders in Cuba. That should be possible even in the ravings of a writer like me. They wanted an epic ending, because they were so embedded in the Soviet model even as they rejected it—they denied it and destroyed it in their daily gestures, but that was their foundation: Soviet. Was their Havana my real Havana? This is a very painful and delicate subject. The concept of a hero who doesn’t want to be a hero inside Cuba is as real a theme as it is complex. A little bit of fiction in the narrative keeps it from getting too deep. We’re in prehistoric times when it comes to genres, and fusing them gives me a great deal of pleasure.
My work was completed and now, on the verge of publication, as I looked at their faces and saw their reactions, I had no doubt: I’d hit a nerve, and that was exactly what I’d wanted to do.
Enzo’s friends didn’t like my work at all; in fact, it inspired them to do harm. Every sincere act has consequences and, as a result, I spent several days responding to my boyfriend’s extensive interrogation. We woke up talking about all that was lost. Depression won out. It was obvious he didn’t want to move with me anymore. He killed off his desire to go to the shore; he was suspicious about everything I did. He listened in on my phone conversations. He followed me everywhere. He reread my texts and even opened my emails, both what I sent and what I received.
* * *
—
One afternoon, I went out to buy winter wear. Cold weather had reached the city and all I had were summer clothes—if you can even call my linen and cotton rags clothes. I got out of a legal taxi, the safe kind, and when I went to cross the street to the Palacio de Hierro, two men grabbed me. Without a moment’s hesitation, they threw me in the back of a pickup truck like a sack of potatoes. I spent hours and hours riding around the city with those thugs. They’d let me out at an ATM, then at another ATM, then another, until I emptied my checking account. At each stop, they’d threaten to kill me if I moved a muscle to try and escape. They insisted on asking for password after password I didn’t know and about Mexican bank matters a Cuban like me couldn’t understand. All my credit cards are from Spain and I don’t use checks. I have only one password, and the desire to shop, and at that point everything
I had to my name had completely vanished. At dawn, they took me to a horrible place: a slaughterhouse for dogs, where they quartered and cremated them. The heap of ashes and the smoke made me falter, the fear of being burned alongside the mountains of hides, bones, and teeth weakened my resolve. When I sat up, I knew I’d fainted, and only being smacked by a pistol and kicked in the back had woken me up. I’d been abandoned on a sidewalk and there I stayed until someone came up to me and asked my phone number and where I lived. I was bleeding, though it felt as if I were washing my hair and the shampoo was running down my back. Somehow, that man found Enzo and we were back in the apartment by daybreak. Frightened, his two Cuban neighbors wouldn’t stop interrogating me. They kept asking me if it hadn’t been the Cuban Embassy that had kidnapped me. I told them no, that it had been Mexicans, and that they only wanted money. But Enzo had been overcome by suspicion and, when we were alone, he told me nothing like that had ever happened to any of them in that city in more than twenty years.
After what I’d just been through, I thought it was absurd to talk about Cuban foreign policy, about State Security, and about all the foolishness which they wanted to tie to my kidnapping. The ongoing nightmare was feeding Enzo’s delirium and his friends’ obsession.
“Why do they think the government has anything to do with this?” I asked Enzo. I had a headache so intense I couldn’t even close my eyes.
“Because the description of the spy in your book is so impressive, so precise, and nobody can write a diary like that about an experience they haven’t lived through.”
Where was all this coming from? Didn’t it seem a little pretentious? “My God, that’s nuts!” I said aloud, trying to sleep unsuccessfully.
* * *
—
I called Barcelona and spoke with my agent and my editor. They were pleased with the first reviews for Dissident Apprentice. I told them I’d be returning to Havana. It was clear Enzo didn’t trust me. His neurosis had blinded him and I preferred to think that, if I left, he’d miss me and try to rescue me, pushing back his fear and coming home again, to our first shore. I arranged things with my publisher. We agreed I wouldn’t attend any of the launch events in Spain but would deal with the press by phone from Havana; given the book, this was better anyway. I packed my few belongings and said goodbye to our friends, who were suspiciously kind during our final meal together (suspicion had become embedded in everything). Cristina, the one who’d been in Mexico City the longest, asked me to carry a letter for her older sister that no one should read, something about a high Cuban official who was deserting. I was stunned. Why would they ask me to take such a thing if they didn’t trust me?
It must have been very urgent, or maybe their suspicion wasn’t so great after all and they felt they could use me as a mail courier. Maybe it had been just a passing and silly suspicion, though they’d infected Enzo with it, and he’d become the sailor who fell from grace with the sea. He’d been pulling back so much he’d lost himself among the others. Where was his indomitable spirit? Where was the vehemence with which he had once defended his ideas? Now that he was finally in free territory, I found him more imprisoned than ever.
The Cuba they want needs to be made real, but Mexico City is too far to make it happen between sophisticated cocktails, fights, and past resentments.
* * *
—
They all stayed behind, surrendered at dawn, stretched out on the white couch in the living room, drunk, aged, distant, cold, and sad. The brave long-distance heroes who would save us from socialist anxiety. I grabbed my things and called a cab. I didn’t want anyone to see me off. As the sun was coming up and just before I closed the door behind me, I decided not to wake Enzo. I simply left.
At the airport, everything went as expected. The plane left on time, the cabin was jammed with packages, Cubans wandered uneasily up and down the aisle, talking loudly, telling jokes, worried about how much they’d be charged at customs for all they were bringing in. There’s practically nothing in Cuba, so we have to import everything. I brought my suitcase and a little briefcase, that’s all. I was trying to avoid problems with the authorities, to get through customs inconspicuously and rush home.
Just before disembarking, I remembered I had that letter with me. I thought about hiding it, in case I was searched. I got up to go the bathroom and, as I was about to hide it in my underwear, I decided to open it. Why should I take a risk coming into Cuba with that kind of information without knowing exactly what I was carrying? It was already half open, so I stuck my fingers in the envelope and undid the seal. I sat on the toilet to read its contents.
Pseudowriter:
We knew you’d open the letter. We never trusted you and we became more convinced after you read us selections from your book. That’s why you came, to find out about our ideas, our personal Cuba, the new nation we long for. You think you can fool us with your poetic airs but we know you’re nothing but a Cuban government agent, a woman who pretends to be what she’s not to take advantage of us. That’s what you portray in your book: that talent for sniffing around in other people’s lives with such naïveté. Our ideas never became clear to you because we were very careful with you from the very beginning.
Please, don’t come back. Neither Enzo nor any of us want further contact with you. If you insist, the rumors about you will become headlines, and neither you nor your government needs that.
Go sniff around somewhere else, traitor.
Their signatures were listed below, starting with Enzo’s.
I disembarked, leaving the letter in the noisy flush of the toilet, but I don’t remember when I touched Cuban soil and if I had everything with me; the commotion was too much. The questions got stuck on the answers, Enzo’s nude body, the songs, our happy moments and now this anguish because of a misunderstanding that won’t be resolved until we Cubans learn to live together without thinking we’re doing each other harm. I felt worse than the day I was kidnapped. I made my way through immigration, where my passport was quickly stamped and a kind official welcomed me. I felt at peace after finally having left that sorry, absurd place. I was home, I told myself as I tried to catch my breath between the cold light of the huge building and the slow spin of the luggage on the carousel. The drug-sniffing dogs walked along side the passengers but I wasn’t trying to find my bags. I wasn’t doing well. I felt like I was going to faint and fall to the airport’s sticky floor. The nurses surrounded me, like they always do, and made me sign a declaration of health that included my home address. Just another kind of control, this time physical. I finally saw my bag drop but when I went to reach for it, a compañero in a guayabera took it from me.
“Come, follow me, quietly,” he whispered, looking straight at me.
I walked slowly behind him. I didn’t know what was worse, to leave the Cubans in Mexico behind or to come face-to-face with the compañero in the guayabera. I was losing perspective. Everything was unreal, malevolent.
He left me sitting in a small room for about a half hour without anyone else entering. Finally, a woman came for me.
“What’s going on? Why have I been detained?” No one responded. “Why don’t you let me go home?” I asked two new officials who were staring at me.
A little later, a man dressed in green showed up with a book in his hands. I didn’t recognize the book until they put it in front of me.
“So, dissident apprentice, is it?” the man in green said in a sweet, ironic tone. “Apprentice?”
I asked him for my book. He gave it to me and I had it in my grasp for the first time. The cover was fantastic. A rare joy gave me the strength to ask what it was doing there.
“Does this book of essays really reflect your life?” asked the compañero in the guayabera as he neared my chair.
“These are reflections based on certain experiences,” I said. “In any case, first and foremost, I am a poet,” I said, to explain myself. I was nervous about being there but also happy to have my work printed and in my
hands. “Are they going to sell it in Cuba?” I asked.
A heavy silence overtook us.
“Sell it in Cuba?” the man said, laughing heartily now, and looking around for approval from the others in the room.
I interrupted them to explain my question.
“I’m a Cuban writer and all writers want…”
“What you’ve shown us is that you have too much information, and you’re a spy, and since you’ve shown us you’ve got guts, you’re going to work for us. Right, compañera?” the official said as he tore out page after page, ripping them up, destroying Dissident Apprentice, my first book of essays about Cuba.
I’m a model at an exhibition
I live in a human zoo where they medicate and watch us
Reality is curate-able, martial, muddled
And I’m just a spy in the art jungle.
I cross the vast garden. I can feel the wet recently dug dirt on my ankles. I pause to let a marvelous chill run up my body. My black dress seems to shatter when it comes in contact with the night. The full moon poses a threat from infinity and a shiver releases my desire to feel something new. Whatever happens now will be welcomed.
Two fireflies light up my hair, crown my head with brief fluorescent halos. I can see them when I look at my reflection in the windows of this huge house. Everything will be fine, I tell myself. I’m my own nurse, my own psychologist, my own healer. I might be calm, I might be agitated, but I need to take care of myself.
