by Karla Suárez
In terms of his pet project, 1876 must have been a tough year, because various factors came into play. Four years earlier, Meucci had shown his telephone design to a certain Edward B. Grant, vice-president of the American District Telegraph Company of New York, in the hope of persuading him to test the prototype on the company’s lines. Mr Grant promised to help him but, after two years of excuses, he eventually confessed that all the papers Meucci had handed over to him had gone missing, so that there would be no tests. Leo didn’t want to make rash judgements, but in Mr Grant’s supposed loss of the documentation there was a small, dark cloud that floated back into the picture years afterwards. We’ll get to that later, he promised. Antonio had also been turned down by Western Union Telegraph, whose directors were all so busy that they couldn’t find time to witness the demonstration of his ‘speaking telegraph’. The last straw was that the provisional patent, or caveat, for the telephone that he’d obtained in 1871 had to be renewed annually, and in 1874 he didn’t have the funds for that, so the caveat expired. It was only a question of ten dollars, but that was ten dollars more than he possessed.
And that was how matters stood when, one fine day in 1876, Antonio woke to the news that someone had succeeded in patenting the telephone. The situation was strange because on the same day (February 14th), two different requests for the patent of the invention were submitted in separate patent offices. One of the applicants was Alexander Graham Bell, a Scot, and the other, a few hours later, was an American called Elisha Gray. This forced the patent office to study both applications until it was decided to award the patent to Bell. As you might expect, Gray wasn’t happy about this and filed a lawsuit that ended in confirmation of Bell’s precedence, thus making him the official inventor of the telephone.
Poor Antonio. As soon as he heard the news, he set about regaining authorship of the invention. Since he could no longer base his claim on the provisional patent, which of course had expired by then, he was forced to plead that his invention had been in the public domain. That was when his torments really began: the race to achieve recognition and, I imagine, the despair of knowing that he’d got there long before the others and with a more advanced product. Poor Antonio. I was the last person to join the hunt for his document, and there I was in mid-torment, trying to do something – maybe to rearrange the variables one more time, clear away a few unknowns – already fairly desperate, although, unlike Antonio, as yet with no success.
16
Just as we’d suspected, Barbara had told Ángel about my visit. So the day after my adventure with the author, I found him waiting for me outside the Tech. I was dead beat, but I swear that seeing Ángel was like the sun coming out... I don’t know, as if the colours had returned to the black and white city. And what’s more, I remember that he was looking lovely: he was wearing sandals, jeans and a white shirt with the top buttons undone, leaving a view of his scant chest hair crowned by the choker he often wore.
The moment he spotted me, he began to walk in my direction. If I hadn’t slept with Leonardo, I think I’d have burst into tears there and then; you have to believe me, I can be quite the drama queen. Thankfully, my literary escapade gave me strength, so I stopped, took a deep breath and waited for him to reach me. He said hello, and I helloed him back, feeling the full heat of his gaze on mine. He commented that he’d come to meet me the day before, but I hadn’t been at work. I nodded. Then he added that we had to talk and, you know, at that moment I had a very strange feeling. The words ‘We have to talk’ have always terrified me; they sound like ‘I don’t know how to tell you’ or ‘maybe you should sit down first’. They are words that nearly always precede bad news, break-ups, employment contracts ending; in short, problems, and in that nanosecond before I replied, my body went into petrified mode. In all my conversations with Leonardo, we’d taken it for granted that Ángel had feelings for me, yet in that short time the possibility passed through my mind that he’d decided to break things off in order to dedicate himself to that Italian woman. It was like the pavement under my feet turned to jelly. You can’t imagine how bad I felt, and the only response that came into my head was: Let’s go to the park. I needed to be in a public place, a neutral territory where the presence of others would force me not to create a scene. Believe me, I really can be a drama queen. Moreover, I needed Ángel to be outside his home turf so that he wouldn’t feel too comfortable. Plus I didn’t want to go to his apartment because I could still picture Barbara moving around there like she owned the place. In addition to being a bitch, she had a lot of nerve.
Ángel said that we could talk wherever I wanted, and we set off without exchanging another word. He looked pretty edgy and glanced at me from time to time, like someone waiting for a word from me to start the conversation, but I couldn’t give that word; it was up to him. In the park, out of sheer spite, I chose a bench right opposite the artisan’s building, where the infamous party had been held. I asked him if the place was all right, and he said it was my decision. So we sat down next to each other, me looking straight ahead, again feeling the heat of his gaze. I was frozen with fear until my angel said that he loved me; that’s right, he said that he loved me very deeply, like he hadn’t loved anyone for a long time, and that I was right to be angry with him, but he could explain, and I had to understand because, Julia, I really do love you like crazy. I looked at him and couldn’t help myself; tears welled up in my eyes, more or less the way they had welled up in Barbara’s when I told her Ángel was in love with someone else. Thank goodness we were in the park, with other people around; that prevented me from making a fool of myself. I sighed and gazed straight ahead again. Ángel also heaved a sigh and said it must be hard for me to believe him after finding Barbara in his apartment. Just the sound of her name was like a knife turning in my guts. I closed my eyes but was unable to stop a tear trickling disobediently down my cheek. He kneeled at my feet, asking forgiveness, he’d been going to tell me everything, lord only knows what she’d said, but I had to listen to him because things weren’t as simple as they seemed. You lied, Ángel. You lied to me... I hissed, with a fury that had its source in the same place I’d felt the knife turning. Then I opened my eyes and saw the look of desperation on his face, his eyes as damp as mine. In a barely audible voice, he begged me to listen. Ángel was in a park, on his knees at the feet of a woman, close to tears. Can you visualise it? He apparently wasn’t worried what anyone else thought, but it occurred to me that if any of my students happened to pass, I wouldn’t want them to witness the scene. Best to keep calm, I said, so I could hear him out. He nodded, sat down on the bench and began.
After their first meeting, Barbara had started calling him all the time. She phoned to say hello, to ask silly questions, and had even invited him to that tertulia at the author’s place. He hadn’t intended to go; however, when he heard that the author had invited me, he decided that his presence was required but, much to his disappointment, I’d spent the night playing dominoes while he had to put up with Barbara droning on. Poor him. Right? It felt like I was pushing him into her arms. That was when it had occurred to him that he could earn a little money by renting her a room, but when he’d proposed it, she’d turned him down. And I knew how short of money he and his sister were. I’d have preferred not to have to interrupt him, but Leo’s tertulia had happened after May Day, so I reminded him that he’d already had a date with Barbara by then. He didn’t seem surprised by my remark, it was as if he’d seen it coming and had an answer ready to hand, or as if he wasn’t trying to predict anything and was just telling the truth. He agreed that he’d gone to the parade with her on May 1st. What happened was that, as I knew, Dayani had been staying with him that week, having her crisis, and he’d decided to take her back to discuss things with their father. The trouble was that their dad never got home until late in the evening. Dayani had spent the whole day in her room and, despite Ángel’s insistence, wouldn’t even come out for lunch. When his tolerance was wearin
g thin, Barbara called to say she’d never seen a May Day parade and really wanted to go. Would he accompany her? If he wanted, they could have a beer together afterwards. Since he was expecting a fairly unpleasant evening thanks to his sister’s messed-up life, a refreshing beer didn’t seem so bad an idea, even if it did mean joining the parade in the heat of the day, and, to make matters worse, having to act as a tourist guide. He said he didn’t know why he hadn’t told me about it before, he’d been so immersed in his own family problems that it had initially slipped his mind and then there was no point: it was a trivial detail. He’d just forgotten, that was all, because he wasn’t the least interested in Barbara. There were other reasons, he said, for what happened later.
Ángel had already decided to take Dayani to Cienfuegos, and when he mentioned this to his father, he offered to arrange the journey. As you know, travelling around here has always been a little complicated, you have to queue for days to buy tickets, but in 1993 going anywhere was like journeying to the centre of the earth or undertaking an odyssey. A horror story. What people usually did was to go to the highway and wait for a truck to take you somewhere. Like I used to do to get home to Alamar; only Cienfuegos was just over two hundred kilometres away. With his father’s help, Ángel would be able to avoid those inconveniences. But he wasn’t keen on letting Daddy solve all his problems; he wanted to play the older brother to Dayani, give her confidence and show her that they could make lives for themselves without anyone’s help. Do you see? That’s why he decided to find another way to take his sister to Cienfuegos, even if he had to carry her on his back. He’d been thinking about how to achieve that aim when the telephone rang: it was Barbara again. Ángel was clearly at the end of his tether with all the complications of the trip and when he told her about it she, kind soul, suggested the following: as she hadn’t been to Cienfuegos yet, and since foreigners could hire cars – something that was in those days prohibited to the indigenous population of this land – she’d take care of the rental and drive Ángel and Dayani there if he’d show her around the city in exchange. What you might call the perfect solution. Ángel accepted the offer without hesitation. But he made one mistake, he said. He knew now that he should have told me it was Barbara who had taken them, but at the time it had suddenly occurred to him that I might not have liked the idea. He couldn’t quite say why, but he’d had a kind of premonition. I made no response because he was right: Barbara’s presence would have seemed odd to me, although I couldn’t quite explain why either.
So he made it to Cienfuegos. The visit had been, in many senses, very difficult. His paternal grandmother had always had a soft spot for Dayani, and while he was used to that, going back to her house was like returning to his childhood in a family where he wasn’t really wanted, a situation that made him remember his other grandmother, who had been an emotional support for him. And then there were the conversations with Dayani that turned his stomach because, in his attempts to help his sister recover her strength, he discovered that he was feeling increasingly fragile, that his life had no meaning, Cuba was a disaster, he had nothing and wasn’t even capable of taking his sister on a trip without help.
Ángel spoke with deep sadness, and I can tell you that I really wanted to hug him, right there, in front of everyone, but that wasn’t possible. I had to go on listening because we still hadn’t got to the crux of the matter. Ángel was feeling bad about it all, and that was when he found out what Barbara was really interested in and so understood her behaviour. The thing was that, as promised, he’d taken her for a walk through the city and they had chatted about this and that until Barbara said she’d been wanting to tell him something for a while but hadn’t had the courage, and given that they were kind of friendly by then, she thought the time had come to speak. So she explained that she was very interested in Meucci; she knew of the existence of a document related to his experiments, written by the inventor here in Havana, and was ready to pay for it. What’s more, she knew that Ángel had something to do with that document. He was dumbstruck, he said, because that Italian woman was referring to Margarita’s legacy. Do you see, Julia? he asked in astonishment. And I replicated his surprise. Naturally, he quickly realised that her information must have come from her friend Leonardo. Who else could it have been? And maybe it was Leonardo himself who had set her on his trail, since the writer believed that he had the blessed scrap of paper and had asked him for it hundreds of times for his pathetic novel.
At first Ángel had been very annoyed because, as he told me, no one had a right to touch anything belonging to Margarita, much less an Italian woman who’d turned up out of the blue, but then, alone that night in the silence of his grandmother’s patio, he’d begun to think that the whole situation – every single part of it – was a huge heap of shit. Euclid had stolen the document from his daughter, Leonardo was trying to use it to write a novel, Barbara intended to buy it, while he wanted to send it to Margarita. And why the hell do I have to send anything to Margarita? he’d asked himself. No reason at all, he’d answered. Absolutely no reason, he repeated. So that night, sitting in the patio, he’d come to the conclusion that if Barbara wanted the document to give to that writer or whatever, he couldn’t care less. Margarita could go to hell, we could recover the document and sell it to Barbara. Life is short and things are tough.
We. Ángel said ‘we’, but then I had to interrupt again, because we is plural and, in that case, included me; except that I hadn’t been informed of his plans. As far as I was concerned, it was still the romantic story of returning the legacy, the letter sent to Brazil with the word ‘goodbye’, and that whole rigmarole. Ángel smiled and, ducking his head, said that I was right, he hadn’t told me anything, but this time it wasn’t a matter of forgetting or a presentiment, but his own decision. He hadn’t wanted to tell me anything because he was trying to repair the damage, which luckily hadn’t got as far as damage, but even so he believed that it had to be repaired. Because there’s something else you need to know, Julia. A shiver ran down my spine.
When Ángel went to São Paulo, his idea had been to win Margarita back and stay there with her. But, as you already know, she had other plans. Margarita was very upset about some of the things that had happened, silly couple stuff, according to him, and that led to another argument during which the subject of the legacy arose. Logically, Ángel knew about the legacy, but he hadn’t realised how valuable the document was until he read an article in Granma about Meucci’s invention. He remembered his wife’s manuscript and had the brilliant idea of suggesting that they sell it. Of the whole legacy, that piece of paper was the only thing that wasn’t really part of the family history. Why not make some money from it? Margarita had taken his suggestion as an insult and from then on constantly accused him of wanting to sell her legacy. That was why, when the topic came up in São Paulo, she repeated her accusation and told him that her father, a man who was just as contemptible and selfish as Ángel, had stolen the legacy. Then Ángel, who was more concerned with demonstrating that he wasn’t some form of monster than with the few pesos they could make from the document, said that he’d get the legacy back and send it to her. Naturally, Margarita hadn’t believed him, but he returned to Havana with that aim in mind. Of course, once he was here, he had no way of getting to Euclid, since they scarcely knew each other, so time went by and one day... One fine day he met me by chance and then saw me again in the street with Euclid, and it occurred to him that I might be the connection he needed. That’s why he’d come to see me at the Tech that first time, why it had all started. And that’s why I also felt pretty confused at that moment; grey, uneasy, back in black and white, back in a movie, with the plot changing before my eyes, and once again with the urge to wring his neck, although I didn’t actually do it. I closed my eyes without turning to look at him and sensed his breathing and his faltering voice saying it was thanks to that initial impulse of his that we’d come to know each other. But later, everything was completely di
fferent because, without quite realising it, I went from being the connection he needed to achieve his aim to the aim itself. He loved me and was feeling ashamed that his first contact with me had been out of self-interest. The damage, even if it hadn’t really caused any harm in the long run, had to be repaired, and that was why he hadn’t told me about his relationship with Margarita and sell the document to Barbara. Deep down, he added, it pained him that his relationship to Margarita hadn’t ended as he’d have liked, with the return of the legacy to its owner and the closing of a cycle. It pained him that she’d had to leave the country because of the economic catastrophe, it pained him that his mother had left because she found the political situation asphyxiating, it pained him that his sister now wanted to leave too, it pained him that a piece of paper which had been carefully preserved for so many years would go from having sentimental to financial value; but that’s how it had to be, because we were in the Havana of 1993 and he needed to turn his life around, he needed to be able to offer me something, because he didn’t want to lose me. You’re not going anywhere, Julia, he said, looking at me, his eyes again shining with tears. I swallowed, attempted to speak, but he asked me to let him finish. That night in his grandmother’s patio, he’d decided that with my help he could recover the document, sell it to Barbara, give part of the money to Dayani, and then the rest would be for us; I’d move in with him – if that’s what I wanted, of course – and he’d hang on to the idea that the legacy had actually been returned to Margarita. That was the plan. But then came the major error.
When he told Barbara he was willing to get hold of the document and sell it to her, she was so pleased that she proposed sealing the pact with a celebration. There was rum, a lot of rum, an awful lot of rum, way too much rum, and they ended up in bed. That was an error, he repeated, because from then on things moved into another dimension. Barbara wasn’t only interested in the document and he was afraid that an abrupt brush-off on his part might make her change her mind about the future purchase. It was an error, he knew, but he had no idea how to get out of the mess, only the sale of the document could resolve the conflict of interests. Only that wretched scrap of paper could get his life back on track, because he loved me, he swore on all he held dear that he loved me heart and soul, he didn’t know what Barbara had told me, but I had to believe him, not her. I’m telling you the truth, Julia. If someone’s lying, it’s the others: that Italian woman, the government, they’re all lying, he said with a feverish look in his eyes, his hand on my arm.
