Havana Year Zero

by Karla Suárez

  As we’d agreed, after the group meeting Euclid and I walked to the ice cream parlour to meet Barbara. On our way, I briefly told him about her: she was an Italian journalist, working on Cuban literature, whom I’d met through Leonardo. The moment I uttered that name, my friend’s eyebrows shot up. I attempted to calm him, told him not to worry, said that the world was full of Italian women and authors, what had brought Leo and Barbara together was undoubtedly literature, and that was exactly why we were going to meet her: she wanted to get to know Chichí. Since the crisis had reduced publications to the absolute minimum, it was impossible to discover new writers through their books, so Barbara had set out to meet them in person. She could explain her project better than me, but I thought it would be interesting for Chichí to be in contact with her and... who knows... it might even lead to a publication in Italy. Euclid nodded at that. And in any case, he’d prefer his son to earn money from an honourable profession rather than by selling food on the black market.

  Barbara was waiting for us outside Coppelia and – why change the habit of a lifetime? – the moment she spotted us her whole body broke into a smile, she kissed me on both cheeks, pointed a finger at my friend, saying Euclid, and moved closer to kiss his cheeks too. My friend received this welcome with pleasure, and I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes rather obviously lingered for a few seconds on her cleavage.

  I know I had ulterior motives in bringing about this meeting, but I also know that there are meetings and meetings; for Euclid, that one was like a ray of sunshine entering the boring routine of his life. That’s why I’m certain I did the right thing, and that knowledge was a comfort.

  Euclid’s mum made coffee for us and we sat chatting for a good while, waiting for Chichí’s arrival. Barbara explained her project, said she had contacts in a number of publishing houses in Italy that were interested in Cuban literature. European publishers, she added, were well aware that this island had its own cultural life, and they were curious to get to know the post-’59 generations, particularly those who were writing during the difficult period we were going through. And that was why it would be a good moment to open the market to Cuban authors. Euclid evidently wasn’t so keen on her way of presenting things, because he commented that there had always been people who saw the suffering of others as a way to line their pockets. But Barbara didn’t take the hint and, leaning towards my friend, said it was quid pro quo; the authors she’d spoken to were crazy to get their work published, whatever the country, and she was merely an intermediary, the woman who, on discovering them, could offer that possibility. With a broad smile, she rounded her speech off: I’m Columbus, not the Kingdom of Spain. Euclid returned her smile, I’m not sure if that was because, as she bent over, he had a perfect view of her cleavage or because he was admitting the validity of her point. Whatever, the two of them did a lot of smiling that evening, and when – without Chichí having made an appearance – we decided it was time to leave, Barbara announced that she would call by to visit Euclid another day. Magnificent. The occasion had exceeded all my expectations, everything was moving along at full sail, just like Columbus’s ships.

  When we’d left, Barbara said that if I had no other plans, she’d like to invite me to dinner in a paladar. I accepted: as if I’d do otherwise! I remember thinking that she must have got to know the city well because she took me to a very good place, and after the first beer I almost got a fit of the giggles: imagine, there I was, sitting across a table from the woman who’d been sleeping with the man I loved. Crazy, right? But, well, it was necessary. I was ensuring that Ángel was at home with Dayani, that Barbara wasn’t going to turn up there and, to top it all, I was nourishing my body with delicious food.

  Our conversation in the paladar was like an unexpected gift because, among other things, I learned the date of her departure: a very important piece of information in relation to the plan Leo and I had hatched. Barbara had little time left on the island, and don’t get the idea that I wasn’t thinking what you’re thinking right now. The simplest thing would have been to come to an agreement with Ángel, allow him a few days with her so he could sell her the document, and then afterwards live together on the proceeds of the sale. Aren’t I right? That would, perhaps, have been the most logical course of action, but it would have involved breaking my pact with Leonardo, allowing Ángel to go unpunished and, above all, would have been a betrayal of Antonio Meucci. Look, if I broke all those pacts – first with Euclid and then with Ángel – it was because they forced me into it. I’m loyal, but they had lied and so they deserved a dose of their own medicine. Don’t you agree? Selling the document to that Italian woman would have been a mistake because it wasn’t really the money that mattered to me – even though I did need it – but getting justice for a scientist whom history had forgotten. And the only person who could do that was the author. No one but him could bring that genius to life and ensure that Meucci’s discovery wouldn’t be lost in the mists of oblivion, certainly not a bunch of opportunistic journalists who’d just squeeze all they could out of the news for a few days until the tide of current events carried Meucci and his manuscript back to where they had lain unacknowledged.

  To my surprise, we hardly mentioned Ángel. Maybe the conversation with Euclid had given her food for thought, but what happened was that Barbara took the reins and began talking about Cuba. She told me that what she liked about the country was that things smelled differently: smelled of earth, rain or something she couldn’t put her finger on, something that definitely wasn’t to be found in Europe. Even the bad smells were unique. I was somewhere between laughing and throwing up, thinking of the open sewers flowing through certain neighbourhoods, the guaguas crammed with passengers sweating in the Caribbean heat, our shortage of cleaning products, but Barbara just went on and on about the smells being unique. Armpits, for instance, were pure stink and not a disgusting mix of body odour and perfume; even libido had its own smell, and no one tried to hide it. People here, she said, touch each other, look each other in the eyes, tell you their life stories the first time you meet and aren’t ashamed to laugh or cry. All that was getting so much harder in Europe; there were too many artificial smells to hide behind, too many creams and clothes. Too much makeup. How curious that Barbara had too much of exactly what I lacked, but no doubt she lacked the only thing I could have: human warmth. I became aware of that because she went on talking, praising our ability to survive on so little, admiring things I detested, musing on laughter and physical contact until she became slightly maudlin. I placed my hand on hers and asked her not to be so stupid: if she had too much perfume, she could give me a bottle or two, plus a jar of face cream and another beer. Why not? She burst out laughing and to my mind, at that moment, we unconsciously started to become friends. I know you think it’s weird, but that’s how it was. I still knew very little about her besides the fact that she’d been sleeping with my angel, and what I did know made me want to wring her Italian neck. Yet that night I felt sorry for her; somehow, for a moment, the image she’d initially projected of a strong, decisive woman slipped to reveal a person filled with uncertainties who said that Cuba was turning everything, all her certainties, upside down. This country is turning us all upside down; take my word for it, I told her. And she smiled and said: But there are people who’ll never get back on their feet. It wasn’t until later that I understood what she meant by that.

  19

  I went back to Leonardo’s on Sunday afternoon. He opened the door with his habitual smile, bent and kissed me on the lips. All I could think to say was: Ángel and I are engaged. He raised his eyebrows. Tell me all, he said. And to my surprise, he kissed me on the lips again before adding: Here’s to the happy couple. Leo was incorrigible, but one thing I can tell you is that he had really soft lips. After I’d told him all, he took out a bottle and said we ought to celebrate; but since the alcohol he drank was crap, I decided to wait for a lemongrass tea.

  Leo thought
it wonderful that Barbara was already in touch with Euclid. That Italian woman certainly knew what she wanted and she wasn’t the sort to overthink things, she went straight for her objective, and there was no doubt that she was going to throw herself at my professor friend and forget about my husband-to-be, he said, before we made the toast: I with tea and he with his homebrew. Then he gazed at me seriously over his glasses. Now that everything was sorted for me, he asked, now Ángel wanted to get married and Barbara had met Euclid, did we still have a pact? I grinned, kissed his lips the way he’d done mine on my arrival and said exactly what I’ve just told you: All I want is justice for Meucci. So our deal was still on, with the only modification that I’d shortly be moving in with Ángel, which would make everything much simpler. Leonardo smiled, pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger and told me that he had fresh news about our friend Meucci.

  In the Museo de la Ciudad, Leo had met the young man who had assisted the Italian researcher Basilio Catania during his visit to Cuba and, among other things, he’d photocopied an article by José Martí for him. I have a friend who says that Cubans are a ‘martyred race’ because, whatever the subject, Martí’s written an article about it; joking aside, though, he really did write about everything. In the text Leo showed me, published in 1886, Martí claimed that there were good reasons to believe that Bell’s patent had been fraudulently obtained; this being the case, the United States government was under an obligation to investigate the matter.

  In 1886, José Martí was thirty-three and Antonio Meucci seventy-eight. They were both living in New York. Leonardo wondered if the young journalist’s curiosity had ever taken him to the house on Staten Island to meet the inventor friend of Garibaldi, whom Martí also greatly admired. This possible encounter was a mystery that he hoped to unravel in the future. But in any case, he did know of one slender thread linking Martí and Meucci: Margarita. One of her ancestors had worked in the Teatro Tacón, and that was the same person who ultimately came into possession of his designs. But that gentleman, together with his wife and daughter, had had their first family photograph taken in Esteban Mestre’s studio, where the boy Martí later had his portrait taken. Things are often connected in strange ways, aren’t they? History with a capital H is always overtaking us, it’s always there, brushing up against us, only sometimes we can’t see it.

  That day, Leonardo and I turned this idea over and over, fascinated to think that our national hero had written about the patent for the telephone. At that point, as you know, we still lacked many details; Leo had only a vague notion of some of the story, so it wasn’t easy to get a clear idea of the events and exactly what Martí was referring to. It was Basilio Catana’s thorough research in the nineties that brought the mislaid details of the story to light, and that’s how we learned more about Meucci’s calamitous life, which is close to being a soap opera. I’ll make it short.

  When Bell was granted the patent in 1876, he decided to set up his own company. He had a major clash with Western Union Telegraph, which owned the greater part of the telegraph network in the United States and had founded a subsidiary to deal with telephony. There was a court case, which Western Union lost, but a compromise was reached in which they agreed to share the market: the telephone went to American Bell Telephone and the telegraph to Western Union. Not so bad, right? Just one thing: there are suspicions that Western Union was already aware of Meucci’s work thanks to Mr Grant. Remember him? The guy Antonio had provided with the paperwork for the ‘speaking telegraph’ years before, and who claimed to have lost it. That’s the black cloud that was floating over our man.

  In time, complaints began to be made about the poor quality of American Bell’s service and other companies, such as Globe Telephone in New York, sprang up in an attempt to market alternative telephone systems.

  Meucci knew perfectly well that it would be no easy task to demonstrate that his invention had preceded Bell’s. And, in fact, it took him several years to gather the proof of his precedence and borrow money to reconstruct several of the prototype telephones his wife had been forced to sell. He took all that documentation to the firm of Lemmi & Bertolini and signed a power of attorney, designating them as protectors of his rights. Things began to get more heated after Lemmi & Bertolini published a letter in which Meucci announced that he was the one true inventor of the telephone. They received a number of proposals and Meucci finally ceded his rights to Globe Telephone, who appointed him as their technical manager. On the one hand, he was happy because the articles written about him in the press had gained him a certain amount of public attention. On the other, he was in low spirits because just when things were beginning to improve, his wife Ester died.

  The chaos reached its bifurcation point in 1885. A number of companies began to make strategic moves to involve the government in their battle against the Bell monopoly. And the Department of the Interior eventually decided to investigate the claims of fraud in relation to the award of the telephone patent and the rumours of Meucci’s priority.

  The Bell Company clearly wasn’t going to take that lying down. It had already begun to prepare for the imminent attack and had even hired a detective agency to gather information on Meucci and Globe Telephone, accusing them of patent infringement. Attack is the best form of defence, right? But as this was going on, the government filed a suit against the Bell, with the aim of annulling its patent. It was around that time when José Martí wrote his article.

  Legal processes are inevitably complex affairs and Bell’s lawyers were so skilled that they succeeded in delaying the opening of the government case while working simultaneously to strengthen their own. In the latter, the judge refused to admit a large part of the evidence submitted by Meucci and, what’s more, the technical testimony was given by a physics professor who was a friend of Bell. So, on July 19th 1887, the judge pronounced against Globe Telephone, stating that Meucci’s transmission of the human voice had been produced by mechanical rather than electrical means. The Bell Company had won, the case was closed, a report was published and that is the documentation that went down in history.

  But there were two lawsuits. Remember? The government still hadn’t managed to open its case. Notwithstanding, Meucci and the Globe were so sure of victory that they didn’t appeal against the verdict of the case they had just lost. Major mistake. As Pablo Milanés puts it in his song, ‘Time passes and we’re getting older.’ On October 18th 1889, Antonio Meucci died in Clifton, Staten Island, at the age of eighty-one.

  All that remains is the froth.

  That same year, the government’s case finally came to court. The Bell Company’s patent expired in 1893 and they suggested that the case should be closed, but Whitman, the government representative, refused, claiming that a clear verdict was an important point of reference for the country. When Whitman died, the then Attorney General proposed discontinuing the proceedings to avoid further costs, and on November 30th 1893 his recommendation was implemented, leaving neither winners nor losers. And since nobody won and nobody lost, the report and the evidence that would have been presented were never published. Without the relevant paperwork, there’s no history. It’s shrouded in dust. And for over a century, Meucci was covered in that dust, until a new bifurcation point brought about a change in history.

  Whenever I think about all this, it saddens me. And when I think about us, I feel a sort of mix of mirth and tenderness. We had the dumb idea that the document Margarita’s family had guarded so carefully would be capable of changing history and making 1993 a bifurcation point in the story of Meucci’s life, and in ours. We were deluded.

  That night, Leonardo was so excited about Martí’s article and his conversation with the guy from the museum that he decided to read me parts of his novel. He put on music and sat on the floor, while I sipped my lemongrass tea on the bed. It’s strange the way we have of creating rituals; in his house, I drank lemongrass tea and listened to trova musicians: Frank Delgad
o, Santiago Feliú, Gerardo Alfonso, Carlos Varela and so many others. Believe me, I hadn’t intended to stay over, but he started reading and talking and it got very late. I also hadn’t intended to repeat our night of sex, but his words spun a web around me and by the time I became aware of what was happening, we were once again tangled up together. I know you must think it odd that a person who’s in love and planning to get married would fall into someone else’s arms for a second time, and you’d be right because it is odd. And what’s more, the following day I’d arranged to see Ángel, and I make it a rule never to go to bed with two men on the same day. Unless it’s at the same time, but that’s another matter. The thing is that I hadn’t planned for the night to end that way. It’s infuriating.

  I remember that I woke the next morning feeling a little uneasy and I mentioned this to Leo, but he joined his hands before his face and solemnly promised not to touch me again; although, he added, if I got the urge to touch him, I shouldn’t repress it. I burst out laughing, and it was probably thanks to his promise that I didn’t think about him at all during my working day.