Revolution Sunday

by Wendy Guerra

  He resisted, demanded I get him another drink, then another. I finally convinced him to leave, that I was exhausted and a little worried. I escorted him to the living room to make sure he’d go but when I tried to push him out, he cornered me against the wall and tried to kiss me. I pushed him back forcefully and managed to land him right at the door. He stopped it from shutting by sticking his foot right between the door and the frame.

  “Cleo, c’mon. Open up, open the door,” he whispered carefully.

  “Please go.”

  “I have something important to tell you,” he said, his hands on the lock, not giving up the little space between us.

  “Tell me,” I said, opening the door, stepping out.

  Alberto grabbed my face with both hands and kissed my mouth. I remained still, breathed deeply, and when he was most relaxed, I gestured as if to let him back in, but then pulled back, closed the door, double-locked it, and quickly walked down the hall until I reached the bathroom.

  “Cleo…Cleo…open the door,” yelled Alberto from outside.

  I knew all this would happen, Márgara had warned me. I was alone, it was deep in the wee hours and I could hear him shouting even from the farthest part of the house.

  I shut myself in the bathroom to take a hot shower and relax my nerves a bit. I needed to sleep. When I stopped hearing his voice, I walked naked out of the shower; it seemed the commotion had passed. I’ll talk to him tomorrow, I thought, and maybe if I’m careful, and without alcohol between us, he’ll understand.

  I fixed the bed to get in it, stretched my toes, turned off the light, and, just as I was about to close my eyes, I heard two gunshots from the terrace.

  In less than five minutes, the street was filled with police.

  December 17 is a very important day for religious Cubans. St. Lazarus is celebrated and venerated; in the Yoruba religion, he’s known as Orula. Many people travel to El Rincón, bringing offerings or dragging their sickly legs, kneeling, walking backward, or simply struggling through each kilometer on foot to revere the miraculous saint encircled by dogs, healer of the sick, guide on the darkest of paths.

  Márgara is a devotee of St. Lazarus, that’s why she hadn’t come to work. My plan had been to meet up with her and get lost in the multitude of pilgrims but I thought better of it. It’s much too far and to arrive on the seventeenth itself would be complicated.

  There was a knock on the front door while I was in the shower. I tried to hurry but when I opened it there was no one there. I searched the terrace and the garden while still soaped up, wrapped in Gerónimo’s gigantic robe. On the sidewalk, I saw a slender young man walking away, slowly, as if he was just strolling by. He was headed toward 23rd Street. He was tall, dressed in blue, and had a package in his hands. I don’t know why, even though I was so suspicious, something made me run and catch up to him.

  I moved quickly and cut him off, barefoot and dripping. “Hi, good morning, was it you who just knocked on my door?”

  “Cleo?” the young man asked, but he was pretty sure it was me, and he looked delighted. “I’m Rubén Gallo. A pleasure to meet you,” he said as he shook my hand and spun me, happily, transforming my slovenly robe into a queen’s cloak.

  “I didn’t know you were coming. You’ve come on behalf of…?” I asked anxiously, wanting to trust him.

  “Gerónimo,” he said with aplomb.

  “Oh yes, then, well, come in, come in. Would you like some coffee?” I asked, urgently wanting to get back in the house.

  Rubén is a professor at Princeton and would be coming back to Havana in February, but with his students, who are interested in contemporary literature that distills life in Cuba. When he talked, he seemed completely clean, like nothing bad had ever happened to him. He skillfully hid his intelligence; he struck me as one of those people who doesn’t like to show off what he knows.

  “You’re a friend of Gerónimo’s?”

  “I met him three weeks ago in New York because he’s going to play Proust in a movie and I wrote a book about Proust’s Latino connections. We’ve seen a lot of each other in the last few days. He asked me to bring you this,” he explained, extending the package to me. “Please don’t put sugar in my coffee.”

  “Everybody drinks very sweet coffee here, but I don’t,” I said, serving the coffee in cups that used to belong to my grandparents in Varadero, with the family’s initials and a marina in the background. As I poured, I realized how much Cubans (and certainly this Cuban) enjoy showing the leftovers of their ancestry.

  “I love your house. What year was it built?”

  “It was built in 1935. I adore it.”

  “Were you born here?”

  “I think so,” I said, laughing, and infecting him a little with the kind of laugh that has a good share of information…

  “I understand. This city is incredible, interminable. You get lost…Can I see the backyard?” he asked very carefully.

  “Yes, of course. Please, make yourself at home.”

  As I said this, I wondered, How can I open my house to a complete stranger when I don’t trust eighty percent of the people I see on a daily basis?

  I took a knife and opened the package. Inside were two bars of white chocolate, a can of foie gras, and a sealed envelope. I tore open the envelope and inside it was a certified copy of my birth certificate, saying I’d been born in Washington, D.C. There was my name, and my date of birth, but I appeared as the daughter of Aurora de la Caridad Mirabal Álvarez and Mauricio Antonio Rodríguez.

  “What I love about the yard are the tiny sculptural ruins that get lost amid the trees. Have you tried to restore them?” Rubén asked from the kitchen.

  “Restore them? I don’t even remember them anymore…”

  I broke into sobs, inconsolable now that I was faced with that piece of paper. Rubén came running. I handed him the document and he read it but couldn’t say much.

  “Well, Cleo, what a moment to meet you, no?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to brighten up and even laugh. “It’s a strange beginning.”

  “No, it’s excellent. Let’s go out for a bit. Do you want to change or do you usually go out barefoot?”

  I know it may seem absurd but we hugged like old friends and, of course, decided to go for a stroll through Havana. At this point, there wasn’t much to do in the house and I liked the idea of showing Rubén the city.

  Before we left, we looked for a good place in the house to hide my birth certificate, which ended up being the refrigerator, between the greens Márgara had washed.

  We went on foot from Vedado to Centro Habana. On cool days, it’s very pleasant to walk, to saunter around the neighborhoods, to glance inside the houses. Here, the front doors are almost always open and every time you turn a corner, you see the sea. I think of it as a really good joke on the part of the urban planners. I’m of the opinion Centro Habana has been completely forgotten, and won’t be restored because they don’t think it’s as valuable as other parts of the city. But if you look at the art deco buildings, you realize the regular collapsing of buildings around here is a real crime.

  “I go out so rarely.”

  “How can you live here and miss out on all this?”

  “Believe me, it’s more than enough with what happens just between my four walls.”

  Rubén and I let bodies pass between us, people who separated us coming and going like automatons on the sidewalk: bare torsos, backs decorated with scandalous colors, loose hair, sensual faces who gazed at us penetratingly, defying us, stomping as we passed by, roughly grazing our hands, rattling us with their voices, imposing themselves on us in the crowd, popping out of Old Havana’s interminable alleys, bathing us in a reality that possessed us from head to toe. Drums, babies’ cries, laughter, a school choir, bad words and good words, cars trying to start, motors whose growls vanished in the distance, reggae-ton, news blaring at full volume, a phone ringing incessantly. Somebody asking for directions with a different accent, and str
eet criers, because now we have street criers again in Havana.

  It smells of urban gas here, of fried foods and petroleum, of creolin for mopping, of a whore’s perfume blended with the waft of guava pastries; it stinks of sewage, tar, swampland, like the north coast, all stirred up.

  It tastes of salt, of a bruised lip.

  Rubén and I discovered they were hauling out TVs on several corners. Businesses, bodegas, auto shops would turn up the volume and open the doors so everyone could come in and watch. Somebody was going to talk to the people because, obviously, something serious had happened. The crowds gathered before the screens. The silence was a contrast to the typical rabble of the city. It was almost noon and Cuban TV’s theme echoed in the buildings, off the balconies, and down the alleys to the sea.

  Stealthily, Rubén and I leaned toward a set broadcasting a science program. And then minutes later, a brusque announcement declared there would be words from Raúl Castro and Barack Obama. Both presidents began to speak at the same time from their parallel realities. The TVs broadcast both versions. Obama was speaking directly, without intermediaries, to the Cuban people. It was the first time an American president looked us in the eye to talk to us.

  Raúl explained his reasons for such a step and people looked at each other warily, afraid none of this was real, that we were all delirious, or that it was a trap, another trap life was putting in front of us for us to overcome as Cubans. The bipolarity of the moment, after almost six decades of waiting, the fear of expressing an ecstasy buried for so many years, put us in a strange timeless place, incredulous and alienated. Then, in Cuban code, Obama said, No es fácil*1, and people clapped, recognizing our own words; they hugged, laughed, and started to consider it might be real after all, that things might really change this time.

  But in spite of the restrained, emotive, and delicious jubilation on the streets, everything remains exactly the same. The changes will come slowly, I know, but it’ll be decades before this reality, the one I’ve lived without missing a single chapter, will ever change colors.

  On the street, we ran into a blond and slender young man with light eyes, who, like us, was happily baffled by the mess of hugs, questions and answers, and so he joined our journey. He was a tailor. He was thinking about maybe opening up a shop in Havana, for suits. How beautiful that would be, we said, celebrating the stranger’s idea.

  We returned to Vedado and sat looking out at the sea so we could watch the sun go down between the cannons and the gardens at the Hotel Nacional. It was then we realized Cuba had already changed, because people had begun to think about leaders in a more expansive way. Someone else was saying, simultaneously, that there was an option other than immolating ourselves.

  Then Rubén started telling how he planned to bring his Princeton students. He told me about Reinaldo Arenas’s days there.

  “Would you like to give a lecture at Princeton?”

  I closed my eyes and went over the day’s definitive events. Change comes all at once, unexpectedly. I remembered a verse by Eliseo Alberto Diego that goes: “If a minute is enough to die, how can it not be enough to change your life?”

  Rubén walked me home. We went down 21st Street, stepping on the red bulbs fallen from the trees in Vedado. One of the effects of white wine is to fuse feelings with reality.

  A conga line coming from El Rincón, with people dressed in purple as a tribute to St. Lazarus, crossed in front of us. We got caught up in the euphoria and the lyrics of the song: “Obama, Obama, tú sí haces lo que a ti te da la gana.”*2

  When I was about to pull out my keys, I noticed the door was ajar. Rubén looked at me fearfully.

  “Don’t worry, that’s par for the course,” I told him. “Good night, Rubén.”

  “Will we see each other in New York?”

  *1 It’s not easy.

  *2 “Obama, Obama, you really do whatever you want to do.”

  I arrive in New York with a temporary exit permit on my Cuban passport, a new American passport, and no idea about what’s being said around me, because I’m part of the generation that learned Russian, not English. The words are part of the soundtrack of this new life I needed to start before I dissolved into nothingness, disappeared, died from inactivity while writing, thinking, enclosed, going crazy between my four walls, afraid of leaving the house and getting run over by a car.

  If I went out, they’d raid the house and take my travel documents. If I went out, I could have an accident like my parents.

  I declared myself sick. I was sick; I’m still sick; it’s very difficult to not get sick after all this.

  I spent the entire end of the year in bed, depressed, crying, and taking pills Márgara brought me, since she knows so much about psychotropic drugs. Most Cuban women take diazepam, nitrazepam, meprobamate because, as she says, “Life is too hard to go through it with a clear mind.”

  I resisted as best I could, until I managed to leave Cuba. Getting my American passport, because it had a different surname, became a long paper chase: getting all the documents to get the passport; being watched all the time; dealing with my doubts and my fears. The Interests Section is a difficult passage, a labyrinth you enter without your cell phone, your personal items. I’d been able to get around the long lines because, in the end, I was born in the United States and that gave me certain rights.

  I decided I had to be one or the other Cleopatra, the one born in Washington, D.C., or the one who could have been born in Havana. I could contradict or betray my mother, and the path she left outlined for me. I had to stop and consider whether this exit was definitive for me. What has been definitive in my life?

  To go to New York to, at long last, jump into Gerónimo’s arms has been a suicidal act, embracing the void, like leaping into a chasm without a safety net, the down bed I was hoping to find at the end of my flight.

  I arrive in New York to discover this is an abstract place where no one is really waiting for me, where I’m not important, where I don’t exist; that’s terrifying.

  I perceive the distance, the incredible distance, between bodies here, the voices tuned to a different register, such overwhelming times, the curt indifference which freezes strangers when they collide by accident at the subway exit. Where is everyone going? Why are they running? Have they been ordered to be okay? Are they all really okay all the time? Great! Fine! Who are they smiling at if they don’t know me? Why do they leave me behind as thousands of other similar beings appear and disappear, pursued by the demons of their own objectives?

  A city isn’t a name, it’s not the idea of utopia that others have been able to conquer. It’s not an eternal promenade through rarely lit museums. A city, for me, is an exact address to go to, a body to embrace, a dinner to share, a wine to uncork, and a view that can be understood through eyes that translate the reality that the body has entered. You don’t live somewhere because it’s fashionable or because it sounds refined to live there. You live somewhere because that’s where you work, because you’ve found a piece of yourself you want to conquer and adapt to your image, your energy, your character.

  My spirit is still held captive in Havana. I hadn’t yet arrived with my entire being.

  You need distance to know yourself, distance to set a date and meet in order to coincide, distance to send a cautious text for that very purpose without expressing too much interest. Distance to love, to feign indifference in being with that person who’ll flee the minute you overcome the distance. A distance that is reinforced precisely when you try to look it straight in the eye and tame its remoteness.

  “Maybe it’s too late for me. Too late in Cuba and too late in New York; I’m finished. They’ve beaten me. People like me are so fragile, we break halfway down the path. We’re only good for writing. Reality kills us, turns us into ink and text, just like that,” I said when I met with Armando at Epistrophy, feeling his presence like oxygen reaching me at the bottom of the sea when it seemed like water would finally fill my lungs. At least I managed to h
ug him and cry.

  “You’re tragic and provincial, so weak it’s scary, but you’ll deal with this. I love you for who you are, because you’re authentic, not because of your talent. In fact, I don’t think you realize how talented you are. I don’t need to do a tarot reading to tell you what your professional future is going to be.”

  “Armando, listen, I don’t even…” I said, trying to explain.

  “No. Silence. You need to listen to me. I love Cleo, the one who lost her parents and almost seemed to lose herself, the one who changes surnames and feels hurt by it, the one who took a chance because she thought someone was waiting for her here and then discovered the hard truth. I admire you because you’re a naïve survivor, because, in essence, you’re a good person who doesn’t cease being a good person no matter how many trials are put before her. You fight to continue to believe all that you feel, you get in fistfights with reality, defending your own ideas about consistency and that, these days, is a tough thing to watch.”

  We paused to taste our coffees and sandwiches, but I could only drink my coffee: a knot between my throat and my belly made it impossible to swallow. The steam from the coffee touched my face. I hadn’t even noticed how cold I was.

  “I don’t like this city,” I said, looking out the window.

  “New York isn’t you; Havana is you, and, look, look how much it hurts you. You’re a part of it, don’t deny it,” he said, smiling with a sweet irony.

  “No, I don’t deny it. That’s why my departure isn’t set in stone. What’s strange is to realize no one there wants me, no one waits for me,” I said, starting to cry.

  “Except Havana itself,” Armando said, his brow furrowed.

  “But an abstract place doesn’t wait for anyone, and that’s what’s happening with New York. In Havana at least I have my—”

  “You don’t have anything in Havana either. You only have yourself,” he said, interrupting my speech and picking up the check.