Revolution Sunday

by Wendy Guerra

  Gerónimo is asleep between my legs. I’m in that lethargic state between sleep and bliss. Today, the room is like a baseball stadium. We’ve been blindfolded, the bed is in the middle of a field. Completely exposed in the box, we possess each other. And from there, the public watches the game without scruples. We are blindfolded and they see it as a drill, emotionless, which is why, in the pocket created by our bodies, everything is happening as if we were alone.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn, I get up and head straight to the shower. Although Cuban women usually shower at night, my mother taught me to shower twice a day. Gerónimo and I have very different habits. He shuts himself in my parents’ bathroom for hours while I poop and pee, and, in fact, take a shower with the door open. I walk through the house dripping water, thinking about what I’m going to write, and in every corner where I see a camera, I stick my tongue out and mutter a good morning to whoever is spying on us.

  When I open my computer to read over my Word docs, I realize nothing of what I’ve written this week is there; everything’s disappeared. Shaking, I check each and every file. I need to know how far back the disappearances go. There’s nothing in my computer. I slam it shut. I watch Gerónimo making coffee in the kitchen, his hair wet, his body relaxed. He’s singing in English and his serenity doesn’t deserve to be interrupted by my misfortune. I think maybe this is a mistake, a nightmare, and I go back to my laptop, open it, stick my face in the screen. I’m looking for just one verse, one note, but there’s nothing, nothing.

  I try to cry but I can’t. I try to run but my legs won’t respond. Everything has been erased from my computer. I try to recall my poems but I don’t usually memorize my texts. To recall them strikes me as atrocious and ridiculous as losing them.

  “I don’t remember my poems,” I tell Gerónimo, annoyed as I take the warm mug he offers me.

  “Very few writers remember their work.”

  “They’ve disappeared. There’s nothing here,” I say as I open my laptop, showing him the empty blue of the screen. I’m terrified and drink my coffee quickly, still hoping to find something.

  Incredulous, Gerónimo looks at the computer while I dedicate some time to staring at the dregs at the bottom of my cup. There are people who say they can read the future in what’s left there; they say that in the morphology of that mud, of that chipped surface, your destiny is written. The weird thing about mine is that there isn’t much except some scattered powder, and at the very bottom, a few illegible coffee shavings and nothing more.

  “Cleo, there’s nothing. The computer’s as empty as if it were brand new. Are you sure this is where we downloaded my files?”

  I just look at him, seriously, shooting off a pair of flames from my eyes to his.

  “It can’t be,” he says, searching all over the machine, looking at me resentfully, but admitting, for the first time, that it might be worthwhile to believe my exaggerations.

  * * *

  —

  Márgara arrived early, saying good morning from the door so as to announce her presence. She found me in bed, in a deep depression, unlike any since the death of my parents. She picked up around the bed as if I wasn’t in it. She got me up just to change the sheets, then laid me back down, arranging me on the pillow, and tucked me in.

  She got the pressure cooker going and soon the house was filled with an intense haze of red beans. The sound of the pressure cooker is the sound of Cubanness. It’s the soundtrack against hunger in every home in this country. It’s an asthmatic tone, intermittent and eternal, and it sounds like real life.

  She made café con leche with a little bit of sugar and a dash of salt, the way my father used to make it. She fried up some green plantains with garlic, then smashed them—called “magolla”—that’s what’s for breakfast in certain parts of Oriente. She’s from there and, from what I can see, so is my alleged father.

  Then she looked for all the printed poems dispersed throughout the house, including the ones she’d blotted out to fool the censors, and, once the table was set with a linen tablecloth and silver utensils, Czech beer mugs to drink Cristal, and little dessert spoons for no dessert, she set them down.

  When Gerónimo arrived, sweaty and starved, we sat down to eat. Everything seemed normal, as if he and I had lived together in that house for decades, but no, he’d just recently moved in because there’s no privacy in Cuban hotels. And is there any in this house? Privacy on this island is like winter or snow, an illusion.

  Gerónimo, so Americanized, didn’t quite understand the ritual of dining with Márgara, who’d already displaced me from the head of the table to accommodate the actor. This machismo-Leninism is incomprehensible to a man who’s used to living with the deep feminism of his colleagues. But none of that seemed important in the moment because his efforts to try and access the national history archives via an official request had been denied by the authorities. The response had been a resounding “no” without any diplomacy or courtesy.

  “You might have two Oscars and the support of the public, the press, and international media at your feet, but here, Compañero Gerónimo, we are not interested. And, no, my friend, you’re not getting into the history archive and that’s that,” I said, imitating a growling military officer, curt and disagreeable.

  “How can I make a film about that man without doing research in those archives? It wouldn’t be a serious project.”

  In Cuba, when things go wrong, people usually get drunk, go to sleep, or make love. Gerónimo went to bed immediately to wait for me but I stayed behind looking over the copies Márgara had recovered for me.

  “Thank you, Márgara,” I said, on the verge of tears. “But this is nothing. I’ve lost two years’ worth of work.”

  I opened my computer, as if to copy them, but my own laptop no longer seemed trustworthy. I stared at the blank bluish white file as if my poems could just appear there. Like a child, I was determined to change the ending of the story. Two big tears dropped from my eyes just as Márgara came and stood in front of me.

  “Copy this, miss, copy this.”

  A CAGE WITHIN

  And she who is I wants to open the cage

  cage that separates me from the living

  But we were already  yes  a bit dead what

  with everything and birds hungry for light

  Dead from all the words silenced in the

  darkness  you have reached us

  Ready to predict from the learned confinement

  I strive to translate with vigor my letters engraved on

  the body.

  TOY CAGE

  I see traps along the way

  but they look like flowers  compasses or mirrors

  The collection of cages I inherited from my mother

  made me female

  I fell as low as the deep sound of my orchestra

  That’s where I’m going  arrogant and enslaved

  The onslaught promises the worst

  Girl  toy cage

  My virgin heart flushed doesn’t

  inherit insult or pain

  And it’s just that there are no cages inside the body

  of a girl.

  At six-thirty in the evening, when Gerónimo awoke from his nap, Márgara was still standing at attention in front of me, dictating my lost poems from memory. She’d recite my version and then the one she’d deemed respectable for the authorities; out of respect, I copied both. I’d rarely heard her voice so clearly but this time her tone was firm, like a pionera with her morning pledge in elementary school. She declaimed them with meaning, her meaning on my words, even though she knew all those phrases were implicating her.

  The image of that tall, muscular black woman, ramrod straight while reciting texts at dusk, impressed Gerónimo, who decided to open one of his whiskey bottles, the ones he had brought from L.A. so he could toast to everything he found surreal and fascinating.

  Márgara finally left at eight in th
e evening. She closed the door with a whisper I thought I could make out.

  “Take care of yourself, because I won’t live forever.”

  Gerónimo and I lay down on the fresh tiles and, without a word, we made love with our clothes on under the eyes of the cameras. We didn’t turn on the light, which was slowly ebbing, like the day from our bodies.

  * * *

  —

  “FUMIGATION! Public Health. FUMIGATION!”

  That was the first thing I heard when I opened my eyes. The sound of an engine, a penetrating smell of kerosene, and a sense that the smoke would swallow us at any moment if we didn’t flee the house immediately. Gerónimo threw his bathrobe on and I pulled on a pair of shorts and one of his shirts. We ran to open the door but the cannons were already shooting out all over the lateral hallways and the smoke wouldn’t let us breathe. We were under siege.

  The armed group entered the house. Somebody needed to guide them through the labyrinth but breathing in that smoke was worse than watching to make sure they didn’t steal from us or shoot poison at our belongings. It didn’t matter anyway. We’ve been vulnerable so many times before…We sat down on the sidewalk, right across the street from the house, to watch, from the first terrace on, the penetration into our intimate space.

  We stayed there for half an hour, waiting for the insecticide to dry and for the air to clear inside the house. Amid the fog, we saw Márgara go in. The dark of her body pushed into the snowy smoke until she disappeared, like nothing, into the scattering clouds. Márgara is so well trained; she’s bulletproof.

  “There’s a new battle here every day, right? How funny! They keep you on your toes, alert, entertained, figuring out a new complication every hour…What if we looked for one of those cameras? What do you think?”

  “But we already know where the cameras are,” I said, mortified.

  Márgara appeared on the terrace with two mugs of café con leche. I crossed the street to get the tray, gave her a grateful kiss, and asked her to please get out of the house and breathe for a while. She refused because there was too much work to do in the house and she was already behind. When I got back to the sidewalk, I discovered Alberto talking to Gerónimo as if they were old friends. The “family spy” was reclaiming our lives again. I wanted to warn Gerónimo but it seemed I was too late.

  We forgive our kidnapper time and again, we rationalize him, take him back again into our lives. We even celebrate his birthday, as if that date wasn’t, in a way, the anniversary of our own burial. So there we were, opening a bottle of Chivas with Alberto. Why? Because he turned fifty today; because he deceived Gerónimo by telling him that when it came to the archives, where he’d spent two years of his social service duty, and where they’d told Gerónimo he couldn’t access the information no matter how important a Hollywood actor he might be, he was the person who’d solve the dilemma, “underground” style. This is the same Alberto who, today, coincidentally happens to turn fifty, and in case I don’t believe him, he shows me his ID, and just in case I want to add one more sentimental element to the narrative…

  “What’s today, Cleopatra Alejandra?”

  “August ninth.”

  “So what happened on a day like today?”

  “You were born,” I said with disgust.

  “And what else, pretty girl? Guess!” he said, pinching my cheeks.

  “I don’t know,” I said, brusquely pushing him away.

  “On a day like today, your parents got married. We have to celebrate. Don’t you think, Gerónimo?” he said, proudly showing him a photograph of my parents’ wedding; that is, my mother and the man they claim is my father.

  Gerónimo couldn’t tell this was all a prepared performance, that the photo was the sign of entrapment, since no one ever remembers someone else’s anniversary, much less walks around with their wedding picture.

  “I brought it, precisely, to celebrate…”

  Gerónimo was delighted and he continued to toast and listen to Alberto’s bluffing about my parents. He was taking notes, asking him questions I could have answered without the histrionics. It’s one of the characteristics of those who attend to us to make themselves useful, to arrive in the nick of time, to be with us during our difficult periods and encourage us when all seems lost. Alberto is very charismatic, and I only really realized it when I saw a great actor fall completely under his spell.

  Isn’t Cuba an excessively hallucinatory place, with its hidden and visible demons; its mangos dripping in the sun; the smell of picadillo a la habanera made with something that looks like meat and that Márgara prepares in our kitchen; the avocados perspiring on a shelf; boiled corn; blackened plantains, almost rotted and hanging in the patio; the ravings about the sea that rum provokes and our heads imagine, imagine leaving by sea?

  Isn’t this unreality and what it exudes crazy enough for Gerónimo, surrounded by cameras and awkward and unprecedented circumstances, to accept a joint from our beloved and unpredictable, infinite Alberto?

  “In socialism, no one knows the past that awaits them,” and I know perfectly well this smoke will turn to tragedy.

  I’ve been sitting on this marble bench for more than three hours. This feels like a mausoleum. How can our highest leaders contemplate the political panorama from here? This height is uncomfortable. You have to be careful not to fall from the vertigo, and to hold yourself up is painful.

  Gerónimo was authorized to meet with the history archive’s new director. He’s waited months for this meeting; he’s come to visit month after month but they’ve refused to see him. Finally, they let him in the doors today.

  How long will this take? Will they let him look through the archive? Do documents about that man exist? Did that man exist?

  From the time I was little, I’ve walked, danced, paraded through, in cars and with my gaze, the Plaza of the Revolution. But it looks different today, because winter in Havana softens the character of the drama we interpret. Everything is clear. Today, I find a kind of cynical lyricism in these symbols. The guards watch me from a distance as a copy of yesterday’s newspaper and a yellow butterfly float by. This silence is so heavy that I can see the traces of the parades on the ground. I see our entire lives being swept away, dragged along, tossed into a rolling trash can.

  Our existence has been one grand parade that, in the end, transforms into a frenetic conga line. Just as it seems we’re going to shatter, to rebel against the effrontery, against the lies projected on the buildings around this plaza, we end up dancing, drunk on politics and dazzled by fear.

  First there’s the parade, then the party—bread and circus—beer and live music, and then later, bending bodies under the stream of water, letting those cold needles prick, pierce, and pin your back to the wall.

  Moonshine, doubt, and rum’s devilish spirit come to interrogate you. Memories, perpetual flight, and the fear of escaping, or not, of not knowing what’s right—these bring you to a standstill. The water purifies your tears and a whimper swallows your guilt at being both spectator and participant in this circus. The speech and the conga line go down the drain. You fall, fall, fall knowing one day you won’t be able to get up and away from the danger. You know your parents couldn’t either because it was too late to cure the sickness we all suffer.

  We live one on top of the other, and this overcrowding, this need for our neighbors in order to survive is both contagious and debilitating; we end up fighting; we divide until we fall into a deep loneliness, surrounded by witnesses.

  I’m sitting on the bench, looking out at the panorama before me, an empty Plaza of the Revolution. José Martí’s gaze is aimed somewhere else, maybe out to sea—it rises above the disaster, beyond this. I feel very small here, beneath the grayness and its shadows, waiting for them to let Gerónimo have a handful of crumbs of our historic memory.

  Gerónimo finally crosses the esplanade in the company of a military officer. First post, second post, third post, a leap to the sidewalk, and then he finally hug
s me.

  It’s so hard to experience anything on a human scale in this plaza…under siege?

  Before, it was the Civic Plaza, today the Plaza of the Revolution…and tomorrow?

  We’re tomorrow. Nobody is in charge of today, no one prepares for the transition. Tomorrow is today and the future doesn’t exist because those who govern us know they’re living their own futures now.

  Gerónimo kisses me and, slowly, as if he’s caressing my ear with his voice, tells me we have to fly to Mexico. There’s nothing here. The information has disappeared. Off the record, they say everything’s with Gabriel García Márquez, because he wanted to write a book about this same man and the information was given to him. It’s not certain but we have to ascertain if that’s true.

  “But who can get to García Márquez?”

  “I can,” says Gerónimo, resolute, looking me right in the eye, reminding me that he received several awards and nominations for his interpretation of Aureliano Buendía in the movies.

  “Will I get to meet García Márquez?”

  “Of course. Do you think he’ll have the information, or do you think they’re trying to distract me with something they consider impossible?”

  “I think García Márquez works in a different kind of writing. I don’t think any of this is true but…”

  “But you’ll meet García Márquez…and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  * * *

  —

  A car with mounted loudspeakers runs a sound check as it circles around the well-guarded ministries. A hymn plays over the plaza as several Japanese tourists film Che, strewn on a gloomy polished granite wall where, ever since I learned to read, it says, “Until Victory Always.” Then one of the Japanese tourists’ telephoto lenses discovers Gerónimo. The tourist group approaches us like a threat, armed with cameras of all sizes. They come toward us as the rain intensifies, blurring their vision, which allows us to escape to the Teatro Nacional’s terrace. This January storm has overwhelmed the bodies on the plaza. We kiss under the almond trees. The cold is dangerous in Cuba. The water soaks through to your bones, the humidity sneaks into your body until you’re sick. The tropical salt will also make you ill. Havana looks like a movie set now, and I realize that’s what it’s been ever since I can remember: a big black-and-white set, the stage on which we Cubans pose as extras. Now, and only now, do we feel a little like lead players.