In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

by Ana Menéndez

  “Those things are full of diseases,” Hortencia said. She watched as the bird settled itself on the edge of a white lamp shade and began to wobble—with short hopping steps—around the rim of light.

  Hortencia stood with her hands on her hips looking from Felipe to the bird. All day she had been resting on her lounger, one arm dangling to the ground, the other occasionally bringing a rum and lime to her mouth. She had not planned on this parrot.

  She turned to Felipe, still with her hands on her hips. “Do something before it kills us!”

  The bird pranced up and down and finally stood, its back to the window, and began to clean itself, rubbing its black beak through its feathers.

  “What do you want me to do?” Felipe asked. “It looks harmless enough.”

  “Oh Jesus, Felipe,” Hortencia said. “Looks don’t mean anything in parrots. It’s a ball of microbes and wormy ugliness under all that fancy plumage.”

  Felipe looked up at the bird. “Look at that. I think you offended it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The bird stopped and stared at them.

  “I think he wants to say something,” Felipe said.

  “You’re an insane man,” Hortencia said. “Everyone always said so.”

  “On the other hand, it is a wild bird,” Felipe said and stared up at the parrot.

  “Oooh, look at it spreading its germs,” Hortencia cried.

  The bird stopped preening and tilted its head to one side. It stared at Hortencia with first the left eye and then the right.

  “Felipe, make it stop!” Hortencia said, projecting her voice though they were the only ones in the house, the only ones ever in the house. “Please, Felipe.”

  Felipe looked at Hortencia. Then walked slowly around the room, giving the bird a wide berth. He looked back at Hortencia, who stood in a corner with her hands clasped to her chest. He raised a finger to his lips. He slowly opened the window behind the bird. The glass let out a puff of dust and slid up without resistance. He tapped the screen and it popped out. But when Felipe turned to the bird, it suddenly flapped its great green wings and the house was again a commotion of beaten air and feathers.

  Hortencia dropped her hands to her lap with a crack and cried, “Felipe, do something right for once!”

  She waved him away and ran after the bird.

  “It doesn’t understand windows,” she cried, shaking a red velvet pillow after the parrot. “Can’t you see it came in through the door?”

  Hortencia chased the parrot into a corner of the living room. The bird hovered in midair with a great flapping effort as Hortencia panted just below it.

  “Go!” she said and pointed toward the open door.

  The bird responded with a tremendous flap that sent it higher in the air. Its head almost grazed the roof.

  “Go! Now!” She shook the red pillow.

  Her round face was pink from the effort and two thin lines of sweat were working their way down her jugular. Felipe crossed his arms over his chest and watched. Hortencia swung the red pillow at the bird. Felipe crouched. The bird bolted out of the corner and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Felipe and Hortencia ran after it, bumping each other through the narrow door.

  The bird hopped onto the kitchen sink, took a sip from the drip in the faucet, and then with one flap of its wings came to rest on the dish rack, one spiny leg delicately curled around the edge of a white dinner plate.

  “It’s so big,” Hortencia whispered, and the bird shifted position. “I had no idea they were that big.”

  Felipe let out a little chuckle.

  “Felipe, grow up and get this bird out of here!” Hortencia was waving her hands up and down now as if she had touched something hot.

  Felipe slipped off his shoes and crept toward the bird in his sock feet. Suddenly, he lunged, but the parrot hopped up to the top of the china cabinet and out of reach. The plate on the dish rack vibrated slightly. With its strange hopping motion, the bird began to pace the rim of the cabinet.

  “Oh,” Hortencia said and moaned.

  Felipe stood staring at the china cabinet, as if it reminded him of all he had yet to do. “Just leave it there—it will get bored soon and fly away on its own,” he said.

  Suddenly, Hortencia began to jump up and down in front of the china cabinet, her falls resonating through the floor.

  “Shoo! Shoo!”

  The bird stared impassively.

  “Shoo!” Hortencia shouted, still jumping, each fall bouncing the glasses in the china cabinet.

  “Please,” Hortencia said, clasping again her hands to her chest. “Please, I beg you.” She bent one knee in front of the bird. “Leave this house!”

  She waved her arms in an arc. Then she brought one hand to her forehead and collapsed onto the linoleum floor.

  Felipe stood staring from Hortencia to the bird.

  The three of them remained motionless for several moments, frozen into their essential shapes. Man, woman, bird: a modern allegory in feather and flesh. Then Hortencia began to cry, short little sobs that cracked the edge of silence, and the picture came to life again. Felipe walked to her and held out his hand. Hortencia hoisted her own self up. At this, the big parrot sent up such a riot of flapping that Felipe took a leap back. The bird shook itself in midair, loosening one long green feather that floated gently to Hortencia’s feet.

  “CAWK!” it screamed and flew out the back door.

  For three nights after the parrot’s visit, Hortencia lay awake in bed, unable to shut her eyes. She could feel her heart pumping in her temples. It was as if she’d woken up from a long sleep and found her real life brighter and rounder than her imaginings. In the mornings, she rose and it seemed even the light coming through the eastern window wanted to speak to her. She noticed things she had forgotten: the texture of dried bark, the scent of gardenias through the open door. She felt she was on the verge of some kind of greatness.

  But on the fourth night, Hortencia finally slept and dreamed. She awoke with an unsettled feeling, as if she’d been through a nightmare so terrible that memory, too, had rejected it. She was in the middle of her life, in the middle of Miami, and halfway through a story whose ending she could almost touch. From the bed, Hortencia could hear the click-clack clatter of Felipe’s typewriter on the wood table in the kitchen and knew he was already in from the night shift. She threw off the covers and ran to the kitchen in her underwear. This reminded her of how her thighs had gone soft and dimpled with the years, and the way they jiggled as she ran made her angry. Felipe looked up, raised his eyebrows ever so slightly, and went back to his keyboard.

  Hortencia let out a loud sigh.

  “Forty years at that goddamn keyboard,” she began. She moved in close until she could smell the old grease Máximo used for his plantains. “You and Fidel should have a contest for the longest-running pointless endeavor in world history.”

  Felipe gave the smallest of smiles.

  “Why did you chase the parrot away!” Hortencia snapped. “Why?”

  Felipe looked up at his wife. Her knuckles were white caps on her fists. Hortencia stood across from him. The red slowly drained from her face like a curtain going down.

  “You chased away that beautiful parrot,” she said in a whisper. “I’ll never forgive you.”

  For the next month, Hortencia unlatched the back door every morning while she waited for her coffee to brew and then shut it slowly every night after the dinner dishes were done. One night, she walked outside onto the steep little porch that led to the backyard and watched the sky darken, hoping to catch a blur of sudden green and yellow before night blotted the colors. The next, she stayed to watch the stars come out, the details darkening below. She thought, The stars are like a spotlight on the stage when everything else has gone to black. She searched again for the bird. And thinking that its absence sounded like music in the dark, Hortencia opened her mouth and began to sing. It was a song she had not heard in many years a
nd she was surprised when the words came.

  Mueren ya las ilusiones del ayer

  She sang it tentatively at first, but then her shyness turned to short vowels that were almost happy and the blue-eyed boy from La Concha smiled at her, her in the pink tulle, the stars out and she without a moment to ask who had put this memory here for her to pluck.

  Que sacié con lujurioso amor

  The young men stormed the barracks as she sang, stumbling over her notes as if they were stones sent down from history. Moncada blazed that first night long, the young men alight in desire for her, all their plans dashing against her stage and Hortencia standing tall, embraced by the stars, night just another name for the black armband of revolution.

  “What are you writing?” Hortencia leaned over Felipe to see the words on the paper. Felipe snatched the sheet out and turned off the typewriter.

  “What were you singing last night?”

  “Last night?”

  “I’ve never heard you sing that before.”

  Hortencia shrugged. “An old song.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “It was nice,” Felipe said.

  “It just came to me,” Hortencia said. “It must have been thirty-five years since I’ve heard it.”

  Hortencia looked at her husband. She touched his shoulder and he hunched back over his typewriter.

  Without looking up, Felipe nodded. “To think all these years it lay knocking about somewhere in your head.”

  Hortencia let out a sigh.

  “You’re writing in the wrong age,” she said.

  Felipe sank back in his chair.

  “You’re a romantic,” she said before turning away. “All that stuff has gone out of style.”

  Hortencia sat down on her lounger. She tried to let her arm dangle as before, but couldn’t find the old comfortable angle.

  That night, Hortencia sang the song again, this time slower, altering the carnival rhythm of the original.

  Y muere también con sus promesas crueles

  La inspiración que un día le brinde.

  Between verses she could hear the click-clack of Felipe’s typewriter. Before she could think about it, the noise made her smile. She began to pick up her tempo, singing faster and faster as Felipe worked.

  Con candor el alma entera yo le dí

  Pensando nuestro idilio consagrar

  Sin pensar que él lo que buscaba en mí

  Era el amor de loca juventud.

  The boy stares. Ah Hortencia, que belleza. She twirls in her pink tulle. You I will always remember, she tells him. She sways in the spotlight they’ve brought out just for her. It floods the wood floor underneath her new pink satin shoes and the straps are on ever so tight. She looks up and the boy is backing out the door, into the night. The trees come alive again. You are outside, Hortencia. It was all a dream.

  Mueren ya las ilusiones del ayer

  Your boy is going.

  Hortencia sings and she sings. And in one window across the way a light comes on and someone leans out. Hortencia stands on the narrow porch, perched high above the steep steps, and thinks the night is like applause in an empty theater, and then she thinks the night is like nothing at all.

  “I don’t think the parrot is coming back,” Hortencia said. She had finished her coffee and opened the back door. It had been two months, already April, and the smell of orange blossoms held her transfixed on the landing.

  Felipe typed.

  “No, I don’t think it’s coming back,” she said. Felipe stopped typing.

  “Why’d you chase it away if you liked it so much?” he said.

  “Me? I wasn’t the one,” Hortencia said. She paused. Outside, a lawn mower started and she could hear the shouts of the Martinez children. Sometimes, when the wind blew the wrong way, it was as if the children were in her own backyard. Little children, their faces sticky with red Popsicle paint. Shouting and darting through her gardenias. Hortencia closed the door.

  “You were the one who said it had diseases,” Hortencia said.

  “I never said anything like that,” Felipe said.

  He had gotten thinner with the years as she’d gotten fatter. His eyes had sunk back into his face, leaving two dark circles behind. It was as if he’d poured his own marrow onto the page and it had left him gaunt, only half human. Hortencia sucked in her stomach and stood straighter.

  “Oh that beak was so shiny and black, I’ll never forget that,” she said. “Those blue feathers.”

  “It did not have blue feathers,” Felipe said.

  “You’re not very observant for a writer,” Hortencia said.

  Felipe shrugged and continued typing.

  “And that beautiful song it had,” Hortencia said. “I’ll never forget it.”

  Felipe did not look up from his keyboard. Hortencia watched him. His back rounded over the typewriter. His fingers gentle and soft on the keys. Felipe had long fingers, like a piano player, made longer still by the thin line of his body. He was plain and narrow like the thoughts of early morning when you can imagine your life as a long line of consequences, a simple fact.

  Watching Felipe, Hortencia thought of how she stood for audition all those years ago. She had painted her eyebrows thick and black and lowered her voice, saying Darling, just like Marlene Dietrich. She would have whirled onstage in her pink tulle and afterward, in the dark, when everyone had gone home, she would have fallen into the arms of that beautiful boy and caressed his white doll cheeks and whispered Darling.

  “Your problem,” Hortencia said, still half caught in her dream, “is you can’t stand to be surrounded by beautiful things.”

  Felipe stopped his clicking and the house was suspended in silence for a few seconds. Hortencia could hear her own breath in her lungs. Felipe resumed the simple beat of his typing.

  “Why do you ignore me?” Hortencia said. She walked up to Felipe, standing over him, watching his fingers move on the keyboard, slowly, as if he were only composing music that someone else would play much later and better than he.

  She felt suddenly as if she’d woken and found herself in a new place. She wondered if Felipe knew how lonely he had made her all these years.

  “Why don’t you answer me?” she asked quietly, asking not to be heard.

  She waited.

  “I’ll tell you why,” she said. “I know why. You’ve poured all your passions into that stupid story.”

  Felipe continued typing, but looked up at her, his eyes soft. He looked down again and let several minutes pass.

  “At least I’m doing something,” Felipe said finally, his voice a bare whisper above the typing of the keys, which continued their steady clapping, as if they lived independently of him now.

  Hortencia turned away. Not even she knew her thoughts.

  “And the parrot,” she said after a while.

  “It’s not coming back,” he said.

  She waited a long time before answering.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not.”

  Her heart pounds as she stands on the narrow porch. The leaves move in a light breeze. And the rustling and the faint call of the keyboard swell like a great orchestra and Hortencia reaches for her song, the notes now afloat, light and impossible to hold. They run away from her, though she tries to think only of Moncada, of the young men fighting through the music.

  Y muere tambi én con sus promesas crueles.

  Oh Hortencia, the quiver in your voice makes me weep. The boy in the front row wants to love you. The tables are gathered in circles and the candlelight is like a flood where you will drown. There’s something I want to tell you, Hortencia. Step closer. See how the night shines.

  You could have joined the church choir, Hortencia. When you got to Miami, Mirta asked you to join and you said no. And what of the theater on Eighth Street? The young kids full of dreams they still wore like golden armbands? The lights outside bulbous and red like a bordello’s.

&nb
sp; You were waiting for bigger things. You deserved bigger things.

  Sing, Hortencia. The lights are out all over Miami. The boy in the front row adores you, see how he stares. You are beautiful and you are soaring out of reach, over the night on your own voice and all the men weep for you.

  Felipe imagines how she begins to run before she leaps, flying into her night stage. In his mind, on the tattered canvas of the past he still carries, he paints a bird with great wings moving to embrace him. He hears the beating of blue feathers in his chest and turns from the window and the moon shadow that is already gliding away from him.

  The typewriter is music. His long fingers find the keys like a lover in the dark.

  Hortencia de la Cruz was an imposing, beautiful woman.

  Confusing the Saints

  Long ago, before this story began, the orishas took a look at the warm new world forming at their feet, the green hills and the sky filling with blue, and decided it should be theirs alone. The thin new trees, the boiling new sea—why share it with the All-Powerful, who was too far away to enjoy it anyway? And so they entered into a quarrel with Him. Night meetings, cells, plots, the diagram of a coup written on a grain of sand.

  And that grain of sandflew to heaven. Or an informant sold the plans for a single blade of grass. And the All-Powerful shook the back of the clouds with his anger and cursed the orishas. He ordered the rain to stop. He held back the water. In Miami, the palm trees shriveled and the ocean receded to Havana.

  Felipe at the restaurant says to make an offering to Santa Barbara. He says Santa Barbara protects travelers and sailors. But I think Felipe has it wrong. It’s someone else who protects men lost in dark waters. Santa Barbara you only think about when it thunders. And who’s thinking about thunder when it hasn’t rained for weeks and every day we get a new group of rafters, red and dry from the sun, and not one of them is Orlandito.