A PNR investigator asks my name. I tell him, “I was two blocks away at the time of the blast,” and he takes a photograph of my ID card. When he asks me to clear the area, I tell him that I am a doctor; when he says the ambulances have all gone and the injured are on their way to the hospital, the fog lifts and I see he is right. “This is a crime scene, and we have to start collecting evidence. We will be in touch if any more information is needed from you.” And so the site of an inhumane slaughter turns into a job for forensics experts. I do not know if it has been ten minutes or an hour.
When I leave the hotel, I am crossing the turnaround circle in front when a black Toyota pulls up to the lobby entrance and Pérez gets out; I do not stop to talk to him.
I walk home in a daze. I am too shaken up to return to the pediátrico, so I go home to lie in my bed, but I cannot sleep. There is no turning off the replay of what I saw, or my abiding horror at the inhumanity of the scene. I keep seeing the victim’s eyes and his last gasps for breath. It is awful to live in a time when any butcher can leave a bomb in a backpack so it will go off where a family eats their lunch around a table.
This is when I understand something about terrorism. Along with the violence and destruction, there is another brutal level to suffer: arbitrariness. It is dehumanizing, knowing that this young man, bleeding to death, was not selected for revenge, enemy conspiracy, or complicity with evil. This victim was not accounted for whatsoever, he was completely collateral. These and other bitter ruminations keep me awake far into the night.
AGOSTO 1979
Manolo
While my mother was bedridden and clinically depressed, Aurora was the light of my life. I spent my happiest hours upstairs, gazing out the Florida doors with Machado on my lap and Aurora in her rocking chair. She had lived up there since before I was born, and she remained with us, Revolution or no Revolution, raising me until I was ten. “¿Por qué voy a irme, si tú eres la única familia que yo tengo?” I was Aurora’s only family, and she worried about leaving me alone with my mother, who rarely left her room.
There had been talk, from the time I could talk, of my father trying to send for us once he could start his own practice. But he had made one tragic error: he initiated the petition to leave before quietly arranging to get the official transcripts of his medical school records. Without these, he was not eligible to take the Florida medical board exams, and without passing them he could not practice medicine.
The functionaries at the medical school stonewalled him, something not uncommon to this day. It has happened to hundreds of doctor-defectors. The State of Florida obstructs them by requiring proof of schooling in order to qualify for the medical boards, and the medical school in Havana frustrates them by refusing to send the official transcripts needed to prove it: no transcript, no board exam; and no board exam, no permission to practice medicine.
It went on for years with no good news. He started conducting exams on the side, doing consultations for other Cuban exiles who, for whatever reason, did not qualify for Medicare. By the time I was nine, Doctor Juan Rodriguez had taken a job as a pharmacist’s assistant that paid about a tenth of what he would have made as a physician, with no family medical coverage. That was the same year my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
I was not allowed to disturb Mamá unless Aurora first determined it was a good day and got her ready, but on the morning of my tenth birthday, Machado followed me down to the basement where Aurora had recently scrubbed the sheets and I found the laundry chute at its terminus above the folding table. The little chamber looked so cozy that I told Machado to stay quiet and decided to crawl up inside. This is how I learned that they build passages into walls that fit only the innocent.
The laundry chute was perfectly constructed with no ridges in the finish, but it was just the right dimensions for me to brace myself on all fours. It made it possible to lift myself up in space. When I looked up, I saw a dim glow from my mother’s bathroom, and I started climbing.
The bathroom opened onto my mamá’s room, and even the blackout curtains could not keep Havana’s blinding sun from trickling in. Her eyes were closed but her chest slowly rose and fell. The bottle of chemotherapy pills stood on the night table. Undetected, I looked at my mother for a long time. She lay beneath the sheet perfectly still with her arms at her sides. It haunted me, the way she did not move. I did not move either because I feared that if I tried, I might find that I, too, was paralyzed. There is a tongue twister I learned when I was young: deprimida clinicamente—clinically depressed.
When I heard Aurora below me hiss, “¡Qué cóño pasó con esto!” I panicked and descended too quickly. I hit the bottom hard, crying more out of surprise than pain, although my butt did smart from the shock. Machado started barking and Aurora was more frightened than I was. When she saw I had no cuts or broken bones, she smothered me with kisses on her folding table while theatrically declaiming that I was in trouble, and that I would not get any of the birthday cake my mother planned to bake unless I promised I would never do that again—all for the benefit of my mother’s hearing up the chute.
I emerged no wiser to the causes of my mother’s affliction, but older for understanding I had been wrong about something that I was not fully conscious I had been thinking: She is faking it. The way I saw her laid out there, it was clear that this depresión clínica must be a condition with great determination to be able to incapacitate her so. It shut her system down like venom and left her entire body in a trance. She was not faking it.
It was Aurora’s night off and she put me to bed first, but after she went out I heard Mamá emerge from her room. I called out and asked her what was wrong. “Nothing. I’m going to bake a cake.” She found eggs, flour, sugar, and powdered chocolate, and when the batter was almost ready she used a pestle to grind up a special ingredient.
It didn’t take long to bake, and she sang “Las Mañanitas” and gave me hugs for the first time in as long as I could remember, and she almost seemed to smile. I wondered, Is this just a good day, or does this mean Mamá is better? When it came out of the oven she cut it in two and we ate off the same plate. The kitchen smelled good, but I cringed at the first taste. While she consumed her half, I snuck most of mine beneath the table to Machado.
* * *
Two hours later, the doctors identified the poison by dissecting the dog. The smallest had died first, and Mamá did not make it through the night, but I had ingested very little and the doctors were able to pump my stomach in time. I survived the overdose of my mother’s chemotherapy pills with the side effect of a small but noticeable hematoma beneath my right eye, an infarctus incubatus that came to be known by Communist doctors from Venezuela to Angola by the name Havana Lunar.
VIERNES, 5 SEPTIEMBRE
Manolo
I am awakened by a shout on the stairs: “¡MaNOlo! ¡TeLÉfono!” My back, my neck, my arms and legs—every centimeter aches with the same penetrating agony; I have been holding my body tense all night. I hate what I have to remember.
It satisfies my cynicism to have to go down to the demon Beatrice to get my calls. I walk past the open door to her bedroom, once my mother’s bedroom. Another door opens onto her bathroom, my mother’s bathroom, and the laundry chute. Beatrice hands me the receiver and reliably, if rudely, relays messages.
Although I did not ask, when I enter her kitchen Beatrice announces, “El pediátrico,” meaning that she has been nosy, because the hospital dispatcher never identifies herself when she calls for me.
The phone is in the old pantry off the kitchen. I take the handset and say, “Rodriguez. ¿Oigo?”
A woman’s voice: “Un minuto.” And then another voice is on the line. Pérez says, “Repeat after me: I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Can you give me more information on the patient?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Give me some more information on the patient.”
“Listen to me, Doctor Rodriguez: if you knew that you could pre
vent more random bloodshed like the kind you saw yesterday, would you do something to stop it?”
My heart feels heavy in my chest. The obvious answer is yes, I would do anything to stop it. “Why me? What do you think I can do about it?” I cannot say more with Beatrice eavesdropping.
Pérez says, “Because it involves another doctor. If you wish to know more, it will have to wait until we can meet again in person.”
“When?”
“Tonight, in the apagón. Now say, Thank you for letting me know. I will check in on my rounds.”
“Thank you for letting me know. I will check in on my rounds.”
Pérez concludes, “You know she has a peephole up to your bathroom, don’t you?” I look over at Beatrice in the kitchen with her towel, conspicuously rubbing some already-dry dishes. He hangs up.
Immediately the line makes the weak buzzing sound that reminds me, There is no connection. And there never will be. This is Cuba. Communism has failed, and so has communication. I tell the dead line, “Adiós.”
Beatrice says, “Cierra la puerta,” so I close the door on my way out.
Back up in my apartment, I find a knothole in the floorboard beside the toilet. When I push it, it drops through the floor of the bathroom, followed by the sound of frenzied shuffling down in Beatrice’s pantry. I plug the hole with a wad of toilet paper and several layers of surgical tape.
I sit on the edge of my bed and think about calling in sick to work—I do not want to walk across Vedado to the pediátrico.
I remember something I read in Granma about terrorism, an interview with a psychiatrist that resonated for me. When they terrorize you to the point that you do not wish to go outside, and then you don’t go outside, that is when they have won. If you do not wish to show up at work, you have handed them the victory. Is this what I have been doing, ignoring the terrorism as abstract until it was laid bare to me materially? The ostrich burying his head? I do not want to get out of bed, but neither do I want to be absent when something happens that I could help cure or heal. I have to hold onto this plain certainty that I do not want to be gone if something bad happens that I could have prevented.
I swing my feet over the side of the bed and arrive at a decision, although in reality I have no choice.
* * *
At the pediátrico, Hernández greets me with: “Is this what’s known as a few minutes late after lunch?”
“I’m sorry I never came back yesterday.”
“Packing for Tampa?”
In a daze, I hear myself say, “There was a bombing at the Copacabana.”
“I head about it from the director. They treated the injured at Calixto Garcia.”
“A man was killed, a tourist. I witnessed it.”
“Carajo, Mano.” When she calls me Mano, I sense a human beneath her usual sarcasm.
“I was outside at the time of the explosion. There was little I could do before the first responders arrived.”
“How are you feeling?”
I have to choke back a bitter laugh. “Don’t try your psychiatric tricks on me.” I change the subject: “Doctora Hernández, may I ask your professional opinion? As long as you give all your patients the best treatment possible in the clinic, is it wrong to give one patient special treatment by helping with problems in the outside world?”
“Well, it would depend on the circumstances. For example, if it contributes to the overall sanitary environment.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have a moral obligation to protect at-risk populations from domestic violence, for instance.”
“And if I happen to have personal contact in an area that could be of use to a patient, but it is also because I am especially motivated in this case? I feel more empathy than I have in any other situation for some time.”
“It sounds like you are becoming susceptible to one of the oldest distractions ever to blind the physician to his duty.”
“What’s that?”
“Love.”
“¡Que vá!”
“I didn’t say romantic love, necessarily.”
“What kind, then? Are you suggesting that I am becoming predisposed toward paternalismo?”
“Well,” she says, “both Jung and Freud would call it fine, so long as you keep your dirty-old-man hands off her.”
“Spoken like a true materialist.”
“It takes one to know one.”
I leave Hernández to start my rounds. I go by the lab for the results of Mercedes’s blood tests, but I do not look at them. Although I would not proceed any differently with my plan, to learn of a serious medical condition could alter this grand, happy feeling of helping her, a country girl with nothing who escaped to a new city where she has nobody, just the ghost of an aunt whose estate is already being reapportioned by the government. Looking at the lab report is not going to change this. But I wish to feel hopeful, even if it is just for a few more hours until the end of the day.
I walk straight home and take a quick, cold shower and put on clean scrubs. This way I will not smell of diesel and the street when my patient and I discuss her tests. I go down to open the clinic and clean the clutter from my desk for some semblance of order and efficiency. I want Mercedes to know that she is in good hands. At 5:25 I look at the lab report so I do not appear surprised when I tell her. Although I am relieved, I compose myself. I need to proceed carefully and monitor her reaction. Because most of my patients in this neighborhood are seniors or young children, I do not often get the chance in this clinic to be the one to tell someone. I am ready the moment she comes through the door.
Mercedes fidgets in her chair. She has been chewing at her fingernails, and they are a ragged mess. They have been blackened by something that may or may not be nail polish. Clearly and evenly I say, “You do not have HIV.”
She shudders lightly and exhales a great breath. “Qué alivio.”
She starts shaking and I put a hand on her shoulder. “I have more news for you. Please, sit down . . . You are pregnant.”
I took her blood. I ran the tests. I ran one more, although she did not ask me to. I wouldn’t have told her anything if the results had been negative, and there would have been no harm. You are pregnant. Mercifully, it is accompanied by a great, quivering smile that tells me I have confirmed her suspicion.
Tears come to her eyes and she glances around as if expecting to see someone she knows in the room. She looks directly down at her belly, and then up at me. In the absence of anyone else, she throws her arms around my neck and gives me a great squeeze.
She composes herself and I can see through the tears that she is pleased, but then a dark cloud of uncertainty passes over her expression, and she sobs, “No es fácil.”
“Mira, sobre lo de resolver un trabajo por ahí. I have a friend at the Havana Libre and you may be able to work and live there for a while.”
“You found me a job, and a place to stay too?”
“Drop by the Havana Libre tomorrow and ask for Yorki in the kitchen. I have to prepare for a conference en la Florida next week, but he will be expecting you. If anyone asks, you should tell people that you and I are cousins.”
“What if they find out?”
“No te preocupes. It won’t come up. Besides,” I decide to tell her, “my father’s family is from Pinar del Rio, you know.”
“¡No me diga!”
“He came to Havana for medical school and met my mother, but he left for la Yuma before I was born. I spent every summer in Pinar growing up, and I’ve always considered Viñales home.”
“I don’t know how to thank you, doctor.”
“No tienes que agradecerme.” I almost forgot that we are speaking as doctor and patient.
“Me da vergüenza.”
“No hay pena.”
Mercedes smiles, but it is not a self-satisfied smile. She is thinking of her baby. She is in love; she loves blindly, searchingly—and she makes me wonder what it would be like to be loved like that again
, just once.
I write down when and where she can find Yorki, and then Mercedes and I say good night.
* * *
Closing up the clinic, I grasp that years spent ruminating on the dead ends of my life have been disrupted by the grim reappearance of Pérez and the horror of the Copacabana bombing. I needed Mercedes to appear as much as she needs me. It reminds me of the families in Pinar del Rio, the old timers coming around before harvest, asking, You don’t think you can find me two pounds of frijoles? Because someone will always be able to help you. In the darkness of these days, for a couple of hours at least, here is a way to clear a new road for someone who really deserves it. Mercedes is becoming more than a patient. I did not wish for this; neither do I resist. It gives me a pleasant but queasy feeling, like a friend I have not seen in five years walking up and punching me in the gut.
The apagón comes before I get back upstairs to my apartment. Pérez is already there in Aurora’s old rocking chair. “I thought I would call first this time.”
“Qué bueno que llamaste antes,” I say. Like last time, he waits until I arrive to light up a smoke, and like last time I join him. It is my last Popular.
“The victim at the Copacabana was thirty-two years old.” Pérez pauses either out of respect or to let the victim’s age resonate for a moment. And it does: thirty-two, a life cut off less than halfway through. “He was a Canadian citizen of Italian origin on vacation with his father, who was upstairs at the time of the blast. At 11:35 a.m., while he was having lunch with friends at the hotel restaurant, a bomb concealed in a floor-standing ashtray nearby exploded, sending a shard of shrapnel deep into his neck and severing the carotid artery.”
I raise the cigarette to my lips and see that my hands are trembling. “Carniceros . . .”
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