In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

by Ana Menéndez

  By the calendar, it’s been almost a week since I talked to his parents. It was well after midnight and I was dreaming of tiny fingers that held me fast to the sheets, a distant bell that warned me of never waking again. When the phone finally tore me from sleep, I picked it up with sweating hands. I heard the crackle of a terrible connection and knew. And then there I was, screaming into the phone the way we all end up talking to Cuba. His mother cried so much that I couldn’t understand and I screamed louder for her to calm down. Then there was a crash and I thought I had lost the call and I began to scream, OYE OYE. That’s when his father came on. He was trying to be calm even though he was yelling too. Listen, he said, and there was more static. And then I heard him say Orlandito. And I screamed QUE PASA. “Orlandito,” he said raising his voice again, “left this morning.”

  I dropped the phone. Dropped it with a clack on the floor and I could still hear his father’s faraway voice calling Clarita, Clarita. And all that static cutting in like metal in his throat.

  I begged him not to do it. Begged him. I sent him more than a dozen letters. I don’t even know if he can swim. And this makes me want to pull down the sky. I don’t even know if my own husband can swim.

  The next morning, I called Máximo at the restaurant and said I couldn’t go in and when he started asking questions, I hung up. When the phone rang again, I didn’t answer. Then I worried that it had been Orlandito and I called the restaurant and asked for Máximo. “Did you just try to call?” “Yes,” he said, and I hung up again. I lay in bed and looked out the window at the wide blue of the sky. A flock of white birds flew by around noon and then they were gone and the sky was blue and hot again. I put the phone next to my pillow and waited. I thought of calling my mother, but I worried that I would miss his call. So I lay very still, my fingers dead, my arms dead, a weakness so complete that I imagined my breath turning to stone. I thought of Orlandito breathing, his lungs alive beneath his chest. And I was filled then with a certainty that he lived. That it was his voice I heard inside my thoughts. I got up and walked around the room. I felt the blood back in my fingers. I leaned out the window. The sky was bare and dry, its blue happiness drowning every memory of rain. Below, a paper cup floated on a small wind. I followed it with my eyes as it slid along the gutter and lifted into the street. It turned in circles and then rolled beneath a car, falling under its own shadow.

  When I was a child and something was lost, my grandmother prayed to Santa Gema. Money, jewelry, papers. If she could, Santa Gema returned them. When my mother lost a pair of emerald earrings she had smuggled out of Cuba, the whole family held hands around the lemon tree in the backyard while my grandmother prayed to Santa Gema. Weeks went by. At the beginning of the summer, my father went out to trim the lemon tree and as he climbed up into the branches, he saw something reflecting the sunlight. My mother’s earrings sat in a crook, a tiptoe beyond arm’s reach. They were as shiny as the day she had reached up and set them there before gardening or as the day Santa Gema plucked them from oblivion and saw fit to return them.

  “Santa Gema, blessed Santa Gema,” I whisper. But then I am tired and want to dream a long dream of lightning and rain.

  I sit at the counter telling Felipe the same story over and over. Felipe bends his long fingers around a rag and listens, quiet, his face long and gray.

  Orlandito’s parents woke to find his note—“Mami, Papi: Los quiero, pero este lugar no sirve pa’ nada.” That’s it. He didn’t sign it, but his parents burned it in the ashtray, afraid of where such papers can travel on their own. I tell Felipe that it doesn’t bother me that Orlandito didn’t mention me. I know he was tired sore of his country and of course that’s what would be on his mind when he got the courage to leave. Still, I think he could have said something about me, about being reunited with his wife.

  He doesn’t regret marrying me, does he?

  Felipe shakes his head and smooths the rag on his lap. He reaches out to touch my hair.

  “Don’t say those things,” he says. “The saints punish that kind of talk.”

  But one month has gone without rain. Almost two weeks without my husband. And my fears pursue me. I abandon them for sleep and in the morning they return, bald-headed and rested as if night had restored them instead of me. They whisper that maybe Orlandito just wanted to disappear, erase the idea of knowing me. They look me up and down and snicker at one another. Poor thing, they say, he married her just to get out and she can’t even see it.

  I met him in Havana, in my grandmother’s house where photographs of serious people covered the pits in the concrete walls. All night, the old women had been holding their hands to my face, telling me stories about myself that I couldn’t remember. I saw him walk in with a small bag that he handed to my grandmother. And then I watched him greet the others, each with a hug, the tiny old women disappearing for a moment in his arms. My grandmother walked to where I stood watching and whispered, “The eyes don’t age.”

  I thought, What a hard thing to have to wait until old age to receive a hug from a man like Orlandito. To have to wait until the years have chastened me, deemed me safe. I wondered who he loved. I’d lived as myself long enough to know that men like Orlandito don’t love women like me. Sometimes I’ll go days without looking in a mirror for longer than it takes to brush my teeth. And then I’ll pass a long shiny window and wonder about the plump girl with frizzy brown hair looking back. And then it’s impossible not to believe that Orlandito didn’t marry me just to get out of Cuba.

  He had that easy way that beautiful people have around the rest of us. Trying hard to pretend they don’t notice how conversation slows around them. When, after the cake and wine, he finally walked up to me, the first thing he said was that my hands were cold. I thought he would take them in his and warm them. So what if that is what I wished? But he didn’t. Instead, Orlandito patted me on the back. He smiled and bowed. He said that he was pleased to meet me and he shook my hand. At the end of the evening, he gave me a kiss on the cheek, no more tender than the one he gave my grandmother. That night I lay in bed listening to the drip of a faucet and willed myself to forget him.

  Today, Wednesday, the Coast Guard rescued twenty-three Cuban refugees, two made it to South Beach on their own, attracting a crowd of beachgoers, and one died on the way to the hospital. Fifty-five Haitian refugees were rescued near the Bahamas and returned before evening. On television, the weatherman said it hadn’t rained for thirty-five days straight because of a high-pressure system over the Atlantic. It’s one of the worst droughts in Miami’s history and we’ve been told to not waste water. The earth has started to crack.

  The day after the party, Orlandito returned during the noontime meal. My grandmother rolled her eyes. This boy has perfect timing, she said so only I could hear. Then she turned to him. “Clarita ate the last of the picadillo, so you’ll have to content yourself with plain rice today.”

  Orlandito put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Gracias, Señora,” he said. “But I’ve already eaten.”

  He’d come by, he said, to show me something. First I thought he was playing a game, working out an old joke between them. But my grandmother stood in the kitchen with one plate aloft and looked at him. Finally she gave out a breath halfway between a sigh and a laugh. She walked back to the sink without saying a word. And then I didn’t think of why he came. I stood and followed him out the door.

  We walked through the narrow streets of Old Havana, all the city in the streets, old men with their skinny dogs, beautiful mulatas in tight red pants, young men in shirtsleeves, their feet bare on the cobblestone. A woman sang a song I didn’t recognize and Orlandito stopped, listened, and then sang it back. It was late afternoon, the streets washed in shadow, when we arrived at a narrow door, painted yellow. It was like a happy secret in the middle of that gray block. I saw how different it was, how hopeful, and it made me sad, looking up at him, because I had been dreaming this whole time, pretending we had known each other all al
ong. I was the woman he loved, walking through the streets with him. And now standing at the yellow door, I knew that he was an entire world I knew nothing about.

  He pushed the door open. The light fell in dusty ribbons from the top windows, resting like a caress on the figures below. Small wooden birds stood next to gigantic apples. Carved shoes dwarfed tiny houses, rendered to the last blind in the window. I walked over sawdust to the desk where his tools lay. In a corner, a carving sat apart, light and speckled, its skin translucent. I picked it up.

  “That one,” he said, “is real.”

  I looked at him and then at the pear in my hands. I held it up and took a bite. It was dry and gritty like sand in my mouth.

  A week before I was to leave for Miami, he came by my grandmother’s house with a bunch of white gardenias. We walked along the Malecón. He held my face as the old women had done. I tasted the salt on his lips. It was December, a tropical winter, dry and cool. The water was coming fast on the seawall, crashing in white sprays. He whispered something and I bent in closer, straining to hear above the waves.

  The rafter crisis—that’s what the newspapers call it—is almost a month old. Three hundred Cubans have already arrived. Today I saw a picture of a man wearing a new white T-shirt that said Coca-Cola. He wasn’t Orlandito and I couldn’t even be happy for his family.

  I light a candle and sit in my room. Where are you? Where are you? Damn you, Orlandito. I said I would get you over. I begged you to wait. How hard was that, idiot fool? I hate you! You deserve whatever happens to you now.

  Oh Lord Jesus and the blessed saints forgive me.

  I’m behind the counter thinking about the gray rag that I’m using to wipe up rings of coffee and thinking someone needs to wash it and how hopeless the whole thing is, how the rag will just get grayer and grayer. And then I hear my name being called. I stop and listen again. A boy’s voice saying he wants to speak to Clarita Fuentes. My lungs become small cold marbles in my chest. Messengers in the middle of the day are like vultures. I tell Felipe to tell the boy no such person exists and then I back into the kitchen, not feeling my feet on the linoleum. I push pots into the sink. I grab a sponge and start scouring. Felipe comes into the kitchen and shuts off the water.

  “It’s okay,” he says and takes my elbow. “Come.”

  The man is about Orlandito’s age. Or even younger, so thin and brown. He fidgets in place.

  “Señorita Clarita,” he says, looking into my eyes. He shakes his head. “Señora, pardon me. I recognized you from the photo he had.”

  I cannot speak, only nod by closing my eyes from his gaze. I think, Had, had? Just like that, the past tense? I feel someone take my hands.

  “I left before Orlandito,” he says. “From Cojimar. Orlandito said he was coming a day after me, maybe two.”

  I open my eyes and he looks away.

  “He asked me to find you here. He had a letter for you and a gift.”

  I look at the boy’s empty hands, his thin T-shirt. Had? Had? The boy opens his arms.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I tried to put it in my shoes, but my shoes. Something happened to them.”

  The restaurant is hot and moist like an animal breathing close to me. What kind of summer is this, the traffic going on as if nothing, the absurd desert sky?

  “Ha muerto,” I say suddenly, screaming and backing into the kitchen. “You’re using the past tense. You’re not looking me in the eye. He’s dead! You used my maiden name! He’s dead! I know he’s dead!”

  The boy takes a small step forward. His eyes open large in his thin face. Small drops of sweat hang on his forehead like a fever.

  “Oh no, no.” He looks to Felipe. “Please, you can’t believe that. I wouldn’t be the one to come. You must believe me. He just promised me to come and find you and give you the letter and the—the other thing. I’m sorry I lost it. A sculpture. I don’t know what happened. We were seven on the raft. I was thirsty.”

  The boy looks to Felipe.

  “Oh my God, what am I thinking,” Felipe says. “You poor boy.”

  He screams back into the kitchen, “Raúl, get me an order of picadillo and some Pepsi for this boy.”

  Felipe puts his hand on my shoulder and disappears into the kitchen.

  The boy turns to me. “He made me promise.” He looks to the floor.

  “Stop it, stop it!” I shout. “I’m the one who’s supposed to cry!”

  What kind of thing was happening? Time had a quality I barely recognized, a way of running over itself. The questions balled in my throat. Was he afraid? Why did he come? How many times did he say my name?

  “What kind of sculpture?” I finally ask.

  The boy shakes his head. His eyes and nose are red and they seem the only living things in his dry face.

  “Don’t cry, please.”

  The boy makes a small sound and nods. When Raúl puts the plate of food down before him, he bursts into tears.

  Now I know that he was thinking about me when he left. I thought this would make me happy—to know he was thinking about me. But that doesn’t matter anymore. I only want him to be here, I want him to be dry and warm. That’s all. I tell myself he couldn’t have the bad luck to marry an ugly woman and drown in the middle of nowhere, alone under the stars. I say it as a joke to myself, but even then it comes out wrong. Maybe the sculpture was of a pear. Maybe the boy on the raft tried to eat it.

  I light a candle and hold out the ring Orlandito carved for me: its surface crisscrossed in a diamond pattern, the inside engraved with an O and a C laced together. I try to pray. But I can’t look at this ring without feeling so tired sad I can’t move my lips. And I lie in bed looking out at the blue, blue sky, the sun that is drying me from the inside out, and think: watersharkswatersharksraftssunburnsharksdehydrationwaterwatersunsharksraftswater drowndrowndrown.

  Today, Felipe passed me the number of a woman who works with herbs. I haven’t decided whether I should go. I keep thinking the phone’s going to ring. The Coast Guard, saying “Mrs. Alarcon?” I’ve imagined it so many times, down to the timbre of the voice on the other line. “Mrs. Alarcon, we have good news.” And I seize on the Mrs. Because that’s what I am. “Mrs. Alarcon, we have your husband.” And I imagine how I let go of the phone, and the sound of it dropping. I imagine it so well that when I woke this morning, I thought it had already happened. And then how terrible to wake when sleep is the thin blanket you wrap yourself in against your thoughts.

  Felipe asks me every day if I pray. He says to pray to Santa Barbara of the lost sailors. I correct him, tell him he’s confusing the saints again.

  He opens his hands. I think of calling him an old fool, but stop when I see the calluses and scratches like lines in a book.

  “Some of those rafts come in empty and others don’t,” I say instead. “I wonder what saint can explain that.”

  Everyone is saying how if it doesn’t rain soon, the government is going to have to seed the clouds. They do that in some kind of special plane. I wonder why can’t they send the plane to look for my husband?

  Oh Orlandito, where are you right this moment, this second that I stare at the cloudless sky?

  The herb woman Felipe told me about lives in a house hidden by trees at the end of a street of big, quiet houses in Coral Gables. She opens the door in a red suit, a white handkerchief at her neck, and I tell her she doesn’t look like a Santera.

  She leads me to a room, empty except for a white rug and a circle of red chairs around a table piled with fresh leaves.

  “I’m not a Santera,” she says. “But I used to be a saint.”

  She smiles and motions me to sit. I wonder if I am meant to laugh.

  “Your husband is lost,” she says, and I don’t like the way her voice refuses to rise into a question.

  I shake my head to show that she is mistaken. “I’m here to see you about the rain.”

  “Then your husband has been found?”

  I close my eyes. “All I
want is for the drought to end.”

  The woman looks at me and then takes a small bunch of leaves in front of her and begins to weave them together.

  “Yes,” she says finally. “It hasn’t rained for a very long time.”

  She stops and turns toward the door. A man carries a tray of tea. He is so pale that his eyes are rimmed in red as if he’s been weeping since the beginning of the world.

  “Please drink,” the woman says.

  “I don’t need anything to calm me,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “No,” she says. “It will give you strength.”

  “I don’t want potions.”

  The woman motions to the man. With one hand, he pushes back the pile of leaves from the table and with the other, he sets the tray down. He bows and leaves the room.

  She pours a cup for me and one for herself. I wait for her and then hold the cup to my lips, but I don’t drink.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I say. I want to stand, but I cannot move; sitting is much easier. I am so tired.

  “You are trying to find the lost rain,” she says. “Please stay. I will tell you how.”

  She takes another sip of her tea and looks up at me. Her eyes are clear and big, like the sea.

  “Droughts are very old,” she says. “Even though we always think we are the first to suffer.”

  After a while she says she will tell me a story so that I understand the songs in the grass, the structure of leaves.

  She begins in her low voice.

  “In the beginning the orishas, the gods of the lesser world, rebelled against Olodumare and plotted to divide his powers among themselves. But nothing can be hidden from Olodumare. He sees even to the liquid center of the world and pulls back the dark cover on the thoughts of man. One night without moon, Olodumare discovered the plot. He took his pain and rage and molded them into revenge and that same night he held his hands out and stopped the rain.