Flight from a Firing Wall

by Baynard Kendrick

  “Fifteen years ago,” he said wistfully, “if I’d had the money I might have studied Spanish and gone down to Cuba. That’s a joke, isn’t it? We might have been classmates in the University of Havana medical school. Then instead of clanking bedpans for a living and quoting wisecracks out of Merck, I might have had an M.D. tacked on to me like you.”

  I didn’t disillusion him by telling him that although our beloved ex-President, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar, was a mulatto himself the Cuban Negroes had known some problems too. The fact was that in Cuba it might have been easier for his dream to come true. Colored people are everywhere, varying from coal black to very white with certain African features that only a professional Southerner in the USA could, or would bother to, recognize. While they attended the public schools, and many occupied responsible positions with the government and in private industry, far too few advanced as far as the University, although the record of those who had made the grade was tops. At the same time far too many still lived in the worst slums and produced the most problem children. Yes, there was a color line in Cuba without a doubt, but it followed social rather than political lines and was happily free of the sadism that bitter economic struggle had created in the deep South of the USA.

  I crossed off the questioned malaria that I had marked on Ernesto’s chart the night before. That was out. The absolute diagnosis of malaria depends on demonstration of the parasite in the stained smear. The lab report on the thick and thin smears showed none. But Samson had certainly turned up something new.

  He had noted down vomiting and muscle pains particularly in the calves of the legs, and that during the night the Comandante had complained of severe abdominal pains too. A bad cough had set in, with blood-streaked sputum. The patient had passed one dark black stool. (That could indicate hemorrhaging into the intestinal tract!)

  Then Witch Doctor Samson had dug down into his medical grab-bag of rattles and bones and come up with a single word that it is doubtful one orderly in a thousand ever knew: oliguria.

  Who hasn’t heard the expression for something that can’t be understood: “That’s Greek to me?” It is odd how often in practicing bilingual medicine, or multilingual medicine for that matter, that doctors fall back on Greek just to make things clear. The prefix “oligo-” or “olig-” is a combining form meaning: few, but a little, or scant, and in medical English: deficiency or an insufficiency. Combine it with “uria,” also from the Greek “ouria,” and you come up with “oliguria.” That means simply: passing very little urine.

  Samson had not only noticed this deficiency, but he had sent a specimen down to the lab for analysis the very first thing when it had opened that morning. The report on that urinalysis was back, clipped to the chart, together with the one on my parasite-free smears. I had never forgotten that Dr. Jorge Villaverde had claimed that the elements of any final diagnosis were just: “a little bit of luck and a little bit of witchcraft, plus the ability to watch for signal lights on a road map of knowledge, which you had to have before you could find your way.”

  A flashing red light had stopped me cold when I learned that the urine specimen contained: albumin, casts, red cells, and bile.

  Tying up everything together, I was almost certain what I was going to find when I opened the door and went into A-3. If I was proved right, Señora Suerte, or Lady Luck if you prefer, was certainly with me. If I had happened to put Ernesto in a ward instead of isolation, I trembled to think of the nuclear explosion that would have occurred in the placid Dr. Chris Shaw. I’d have probably drawn thirty years’ leave, instead of three months, but I doubt that it would have been with pay.

  13

  Even with the blinds down and the slats almost closed there was a hard glare in the room from the noonday sun. Ernesto lay with his knees drawn up and his face turned toward the wall. His left hand was tucked under the pillows. His right arm lay straight along his body outside of the covers. Someone, at sometime during the night, had gotten him out of Orvie’s pajamas and into a hospital gown. Probably Samson, or Miss Langley, or maybe both who were having trouble trying to find him in his wrappings.

  His breathing proved that he wasn’t dead, but he could have been asleep or playing possum. He gave no sign of being aware of my entrance or the click of the closing door. He was a man who had lived by automatic reactions and sheer alertness, but he was also a master at keeping his reflexes under control.

  I could remember a quail hunt with him and my father, on the palm-dotted flatlands of Guanahacabibes, when I was just a boy treasuring my first shotgun. Ernesto walked and fired with the easy fluidity of an oiled machine, and rested with the same efficiency, statue still.

  I stared down at his slender, brown, muscular hand with its blue-veined back and thought of all the death it had brought in its day, both to game and to people with a trigger pulled lightly and a signature impeccably scrawled on orders to kill.

  It was the pitiless hand of a conquistador, an aristocratic hand that might in fancy be traced directly back to that redheaded fiend in human form, Nicholas de Ovando. Brutal, selfish, avaricious and coldly calculating, Ovando set out as the chief aide of Juan Ponce de León on the thirteenth day of February, 1502. He so thoroughly bathed Cuba with blood that every native was exterminated, and no one living on the island today can remotely trace his ancestry back to one of the original inhabitants. In seventeen years as Governor of Hispaniola, now Haiti and Santo Domingo, Ovando exterminated more than a million natives there, in Cuba, and in Puerto Rico. This was all done in a spirit of good clean moral uplift, to found Christian states and diffuse the blessings of civilization. Still, even when stacked up against the acts of those early settlers who brought peace and prosperity to the red men in what we now call the United States, or measured against the godly reforms of such gentle zealots as Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and Menéndez in Florida, Nicholas de Ovando as the manufacturer of the first long-term mercy mass massacres has always held top score.

  Ernesto had been a redhead, too. It didn’t help much to see that in nearly sixty years his hair had turned to sandy gray. I pulled myself together and said in Spanish, “Welcome, Comrade Com andante! It has been a great pleasure to meet you again—especially in a hospital.”

  He heard me then all right, and he wasn’t so ill that he had forgotten how to needle me. He turned over painfully, straightened out his legs, and without raising his head from the pillow lifted his eyelids in stages as though they were being hoisted up by the cord of a Venetian blind.

  Now, Cubans not only talk fast but they have telescoped Spanish into a sort of shorthand speech with all the consonants left out, and any amount of slangy short cuts, often depending on prevailing jokes. Anyone who thinks this sounds like American English is perfectly right. After all, Cuba is closer to the USA than any other Latin country even Mexico—less than a hundred miles away. Is it any wonder that many of America’s characteristics have been taken on?

  But not by Ernesto García. Mockingly and deliberately he repeated each word of my Cuban Spanish, touching it up with the pure Castilian accent which he affected, rolling it with slow disgust about on his tongue like one of those soft-spoken, slow-moving Latins of some tourist’s dreams. I had all the sensations of Eliza Doolittle having her cockney smoothed out by Henry Higgins: “¡Bienvenido, Camarada Comandante! He tenido un gran placer encontrarle de nuevo—especialmente en el hospital.”

  Finished with correcting the dunce in school, he snapped out, “Dígalo en inglés. Say it in English—which you speak with such fluency that I have always considered it your native tongue. At least it doesn’t offend my ear like the Yankee Tourist Spanish you chatter with the accent of an ignorant peón.”

  I said, “Inasmuch as you’ve insisted on English, the pronunciation of that last word is ‘pee-on’! If I weren’t a doctor and a gentleman, it could vulgarly describe the type of treatment I would consider most fitting for a father-in-law such as you.”

  Ernesto raised himself on an elb
ow, took a sputum cup from the bedside locker and used it by way of reply. I was far outclassed. His arrogance had remained undented after crossing verbal swords with some of the most insolent, blustering hecklers of all time.

  For the briefest instant his thin lips quivered with a spasm of pain. He pressed a hand to his belly and lapsed back on his pillows, stifling a groan. He said, “I understood not only your so-called Spanish and English, Tony, but I noted the camarada and the Comandante following your welcome. I was not unaware of the heavy-handed sarcasm which showed through. Sarcasm, coupled with jumping to conclusions, has always been a weapon of fools and weaklings. Now, by your own admission you have stooped to gutter vulgarity. Frankly, I thought better of you.”

  “I couldn’t care less what you think,” I told him. “Let’s turn our attention to you. My sarcastic use of the term ‘comrade’ seems to go hand in hand with that star on your uniform, a fancy-dress costume which I have concealed in the trunk of my car. Now you’re here on sufferance, and at some risk to me. I know exactly how you got here, so you can save yourself the effort of lying about that. Later on today if I think you’re able, you may have to answer some questions to an expert, although he’s not a member of those ‘imperialistic Cossacks’ as you probably presume.”

  “What could be more imperialistic than a combined doctor and son-in-law?” he muttered.

  Maybe he had a point, but I let it go by. “Right now, for my own satisfaction, I want a few truthful answers to just a few questions. If there is such a thing as truthfulness left in you. Your answers won’t make any difference in the care you get, and I’ll tell you frankly you’re pretty ill, but they will make an awful lot of difference in my feelings while I’m treating you.”

  He said, “You persist in being stupid. How can you distinguish true from false when you’ve already convinced yourself that everything I tell you is untrue?”

  “Defectors are usually very eager to tell the truth, although I’m not sure that the term ‘defector’ applies to you,” I told him with cool distaste. “Don’t think I underrate you, Comandante. You’re far too adroit to lie, when you find yourself in a situation where the truth might be of advantage to you.”

  “Ud. no conseguirá nada con adularme.” His thin lips slit narrowly over his fine white teeth in a grin that was more like a snarl. “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot we had abandoned Spanish. What I meant to say was, ‘You won’t get ahead by flattering me.’” He knew that would be the last thing on earth I would try.

  I said, “I heard last night quite unexpectedly that Milagros was alive. Is that true?”

  “Yes, quite true.”

  “And both of you let me go through five years of hell without a word, believing her dead—believing that she had been killed at the very same time that I was shot down by your militiamen near the docks while you stood idly by. Batistiano, Fidelista, and a traitor to both! What sort of a monster are you? What have your foul philosophies turned your daughter into? You found me quickly enough yesterday when it suited your ends. Then why have you kept us separated for five long years?” I found I was shouting, “Why? Why? Why?”

  “I am ill and in pain. What sort of a monster are you?” He closed his eyes tightly and opened them with an effort. I suddenly came to my senses and saw how weak he really was. I offered him some water, but he brushed it away.

  “I am not a very good subject for an inquisition,” he went on haltingly. “I only got out of Cuba because they thought I was going to die. Maybe I am, but that doesn’t matter. Even in security we feel that a man’s words carry more weight if he thinks he is going to die.”

  “I didn’t say you were going to die.”

  “Then just quit screaming at me. Give me a chance to explain my side while my strength holds out. I realize that all my efforts are probably futile, but nevertheless I’ll try.”

  I pulled up a chair beside the bed where my body shielded his eyes from the glare. It was evident now that the whites of his piercing eyes had turned yellower than his skin. The conjunctival injection of jaundice had set in. I said more gently, “Go ahead and try.”

  He coughed, took a swallow of water, and said, “First, I’ll try to make one thing clear. You don’t survive fifty years of Cuban upheavals, nor attain the positions I have attained, where you can save the life of your only daughter, and possibly the lives of some others you care for, by openly voicing your opposition to brutal dictatorships. Speak out carelessly and it leaves you just three courses open: to die somewhere in a mountain cave as Jorge Villaverde is doing; flee into exile as you have done, and two hundred thousand others, and gnash your teeth over impotent plans in a foreign country; or to end your career with the kiss of Madame Guillotine, which in Cuba we know as El Paredón—the execution wall.”

  I started to speak but he raised his hand. “I examined all of those three courses with care—underground, flight, or destruction—even before you, or Milagros, were born. I rejected them all as leading to failure. I was active in the Barracks Revolution that forced Machado into exile in 1933. I was one of the noncommissioned officers led by Sargento Batista, who ousted Céspedes one month later, turning over the presidency to Dr. Ramón Grau San Martin, an honest upstanding gentleman who was always bewildered by the political rogues surrounding him.

  “Because the United States refused to recognize his government, Dr. Grau was forced out by Batista in 1934. I switched my allegiance to Colonel Carlos Mendieta, the new provisional president and a liberal recognized by the United States. He became a tyrant, and was succeeded by Dr. José A. Barnet in December 1935. Eight months of Gómez. Four years of Batista, who backed by the Communists defeated Dr. Grau, his former associate, in 1940. Dr. Grau again in 1944. He failed to run again in 1948 and was succeeded by Dr. Carlos Prío Socarrás in June.”

  He drew a long breath, paused, and coughed again. “And Batista?” I asked him softly.

  “Batista returned to Cuba in 1949. With the support of the army, he seized control of the government in 1952. Now, for better or worse, we have Fidel—Fidel Castro—the Great Deceiver of us all….”

  His voice trailed off and his eyelids fell. He had been talking to the past and not to me. But that razor-sharp mind wasn’t wandering. He had given too many names and dates for it not to have been a complete recall. I had decided to give him ten-minutes rest before prodding him back into wakefulness, when someone quietly opened the door.

  14

  Once again I was back in Miami and my past had caught up with me. The white-haired Great Mouthpiece, Friend of Cuba, had escaped from his cell in the Ainsley Building. Counselor Albert Clooney was standing there, in person, silently beckoning me into the hall.

  I put my lips close to Ernesto’s ear and said in my best gutter accent: “Estaré de vuelta ahora mismo.”— “I’ll be back right away.” Either he didn’t hear me or didn’t care, so I went to answer the semaphores signaling from the doorway. Outside, I carefully closed the door.

  I said, “Look Counselor Clooney, or Operator X, or whoever you arc, somehow we’ve got our signals crossed. According to Luis Martínez, you’ve got reasons for wanting to question the man in this room. I passed the word to you through the maze of this Miami organization of Maquis that when I considered him in fit condition to be questioned, I’d give you a telephone call. Now, I need friends, and Cuba needs friends, but I don’t need one attached to my behind for the rest of my life like a police dog’s tail. So, Pórtate bien, chico—as you told me last night. Blow! Go tuck yourself in in your Ainsley control and wait for my call.”

  “I’m sorry, doctor. I got your message, even as I’m getting it right now. I also got another message which I couldn’t ignore, calling me out of town tonight. Then I heard that you were also planning to leave. So I jumped the gun on your telephone call, and here I am, with the kind permission of Dr. Shaw.” His voice was as gentle as his face. Only the assurance in those smiling blue eyes informed me what an idiot I was to question any of his antics. Singlehande
d I knew I was trying to fight some outfit twice as powerful as any City Hall.

  I folded. “What do you want to do?”

  He knew already. “García is the most important defector—if he is a defector—to come out of Cuba. I brought a small tape recorder with me, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “It’s a pleasure. I grow tongue-tied unless I think I can peek in somebody’s pocket and watch a little tape uncrawl.”

  He skipped that. “A record of what he has to say to you, particularly as his son-in-law, might be most helpful to us all.”

  I didn’t ask him who was “us all.” Instead, I said, “You’re a little late for the curtain raiser, but since you seem to be briefed on the family tree, he’s admitted so far that my wife, Milagros, his daughter, is still alive. He followed that with a thumbnail sketch of thirty years of Cuba’s tranquil history of chicanery, including names and dates of our glorious leaders, who were booted out of office, many only to return.”

  “Did he volunteer where he fit in to all this turmoil?”

  “He’s the friend of the people, Counselor, the fighter for the rights of the little man. He has lived a life of dangerous deception. By keeping his mouth shut and boring from within, always on the side of the Angels, he has managed to survive while at the same time playing footsie with them all.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “¡Sin comentario!” I said. “But his conscience seems to be clear enough for him to take a nap. You’re just in time for the second act. If you’ll promise not to ask any questions, you can come on in. Just stand at the foot of the bed and listen with your machine and your wise smile.”

  “Do you think he will talk with me there?”

  “It’s worth a try. He’s justifying himself to me and might appreciate what looks like a sympathetic listener, but I’m afraid one single question from another person might spook him and clam him up completely.”