by Ana Menéndez
“On the earth, the clouds evaporated before day. The morning arrived dry and blue and at first the orishas celebrated the new light. For seven weeks they danced under the sun. But as they danced, the rivers slowly disappeared back into the earth. The green crops dried to brown. Until the whole world rose in lament, hungry and dry and mournful of all the rain they had forsaken.”
The woman puts her cup down and closes her eyes, as if a great fatigue had overtaken her. After a while she begins again.
“The empty sky now seemed sinister, an eye into the wide possibilities of a world they didn’t really know. Both the mortal and the immortal felt alone and exposed. They hid in the light of day. And then the orishas began to fight among themselves, each assigning blame to the other.”
The woman stops and opens her eyes. She leans back in her chair. Her face is pale above the dark hollows.
“You see,” she says. “It has always been the same.”
She drinks from her cup and sits for a long while before continuing.
“Only one orisha, the beautiful Oshun who had taken the form of a peacock, rose to offer a solution. She would fly to heaven herself and plead with the All-Mighty for mercy. The others laughed at her, a vain and worthless bird. But Oshun didn’t listen. Oshun flew to heaven, the sun burning her feathers, she flew to heaven.”
She stops and waits for me to answer.
“Suffering is very old,” the herb woman says when I stand to go. “Older than man.”
I walk out of the herb woman’s house and curse the blue, tell it to explode in flames, go black with smoke, collapse onto the world. I shout to the sky, He’s not dead! He’s not dead! All you unbelievers will see.
I lie in bed and try to sleep. All suffering is not the same. Mine is the first suffering. Orlandito is the only man like himself, the first with three freckles on his back and long arms and big hands for sculpting.
I pray to Santa Gema to find my lost husband, I pray to Santa Barbara of the lost thunder, and I pray to the Virgin of Charity, reminding her of the fishermen she saved once, reminding her of her duty to Cuba.
And then I pray to the All-Mighty for rain that darkens the sky and brings night and with it the sweet sleep that suspends memory.
We drove to Cojimar on a Tuesday. I remember passing through the countryside as through water, the car heavy, the air heavy, the slow ramble past liquid landscapes. And in me, the weightlessness of happiness. Feeling that this was the reason people continued to live past disappointments and tragedies, for moments when the body floats on its own joy.
Images return to me now in fragments. Orlandito’s thick hands on the wheel, his fingers tapping out a tune he carries in his head. His hair tumbling in the wind. Orlandito turning to me, putting out his arm and drawing me closer so that I could inhale the warm scent of him, like the earth after a rain.
The fisherman had been a priest before the revolution and now lived in a wood house he’d built for himself and the woman who had called him into his new life. They were both old and thin, slow to gesture with their hands. They stood in the open door together without speaking, just looking at us. And then the old fisherman clapped Orlandito on the back and said, “Well, congratulations, young man.”
He married us on the sand, with the sea to our backs. His wife stood by his side, holding open a book of poetry that the fisherman read through half-closed lips. The wind batted the sand on my bare legs and, behind me, the ocean told story after story.
We spent the night in a room with bare windows open to the black sky. We lay close and listened to the wind in the stars. He warmed my hands in his. After a while I felt him move and then he sat and I asked him what he thought.
“You leave in two days,” he said.
I told him we had agreed not to say it.
“But you do and then I’ll be alone again.”
I told him I would bring him back with me. He was my husband. I was Mrs. Alarcon. He shook his head and turned his face away from me. Not an official ceremony, no papers. Don’t worry about the papers, I said. It was a real wedding. I would talk with a lawyer. I would bring him back.
He lay down and looked up at me. His face was dark in the shadow and I could see just his hands in the starlight.
“You are beautiful,” he said after a moment. “You don’t know this. But you are so beautiful and you will forget about me one day.”
I made promises as the night shivered through the open window.
A wet wind has come up. I call in sick and hear Felipe’s tired voice like bubbles on the line. I feel nothing. I’m thinking this wind that’s come up, the ocean, the ocean and drowning.
I start to think it’s going to be fine because these things don’t happen to women like me. What was I? A waitress in Little Havana. I cared that I had frizzy hair and what a lifetime of platanitos had done to my figure.
To be that woman again! To worry about those things. Not the ocean that gets into my dreams now, the waves dampening the sheets. How can I say that I still have heard nothing. That I pray every night into a black space that waits to strangle me in the dark.
The sun today, bright in a deep sky. Orlandito, did you see it?
And then, like waking, comes the herb woman with the story of Oshun. Who turned to me and said, “Already you know your husband is dead.”
Today, I prayed only for rain, rain that falls in blue drops, that restores the ocean, that blocks the sun. If it would rain, we could breathe again. But there is too much light and a month has gone by without word.
I am learning again to fly. The silence is like the open sky I carry on my back. And there is so much I’ve forgotten. How quiet it is up here and clear. The sun is hot through my feathers, and at first I am afraid that my colors will bleed. Below, a white basin where the ocean used to be, its ribs glistening in the light.
Even if I tire, I will fly. Climb the air like a bridge. The sun that grows bigger will burn my beautiful feathers black. I will arrive in heaven bald and hunchbacked, my face a shriveled countenance for the Lord. And he will take pity on me.
And the rain fell in heavy sheets that touched the earth again with green, a blue restoring rain. It washed out the dust of summer, crowded the sky with clouds. The green hills rose again like the first time, the world warmed at their feet, the thin new trees straightened in the moist wind.
And the rain fell over mountains where yellow flowers grew and over plains of tall grass. It taught the young crops to breathe again and filled the white basin of the sea. The rain restored the blue oceans. And everything was as it should be and the new waters rippled gently away from Cuba as if the island itself were a stone dropped by God above.
Baseball Dreams
I. THE BOY
I have a portrait of my father from before Cuba knew him. He is three years old and wearing pants that come to his knees. It is a black-and-white photo and I pretend that the pants are blue. His jacket has a round collar that drapes his little shoulders like a fallen halo. His hair is slick and thick and he’s parted it himself on the right. Behind him, to his left and propped against a coconut tree, is a baseball bat. It’s shiny and smooth like a new idea.
His window, like most windows in the house he was born in, faced south to the Sierras. I see him in the summertime; the green mountains become flesh and my father longs to caress them, hold them tight against his cheek. My father loved the mountains. He got up early to catch the first white shreds of morning as they came over the crest. Afternoon burnished the clouds until, black and heavy, they poured over my father’s mountains and raced into Biran on long legs of lightning. My father opened his window wide to the rain.
He wasn’t baptized and they called him The Jew, and he thought of the black-beaked birds that came to his window to shake off the rain. He imagined himself flying over the battlefields of Troy, the blood running like veins down the hills as he soared above the dead.
He tells lies about those early days. He is ashamed of their ordinary curves now
, afraid that the rainy afternoons could have belonged to anyone. He hunted wild doves in the mass of woods that collected at the base of the mountains like runoff. He cursed his teachers. He balled up pieces of paper and marched armies across the rough pine floor of his bedroom. But he wanted, more than anything, to be a baseball player.
To be a baseball player! Like Ty Cobb or the man DiMaggio, who could have been Cuban, a magician from Guanabacoa. My father thought he would make a fine Yankee. Mornings in the hot classroom where the desk splinters got under his skin, my father dreamt of fields of orange sand and white diamonds like life rafts under his footprints.
He practiced by pitching fastballs into the wood stilts of his house. After school, still in the white shirt with buttons, he hurled himself into the clean physics of his dream. Lifting first the left leg, then arching back, hanging in the air, letting loose.
The first time he missed, he stomped his feet in anger and walked away. But the next day, he came back and crawled under the house through the slop, the wild alarm of the chickens. He wiped the shit and feathers from the ball and started again. He missed and missed. But he was destined to be a pitcher and not even an erratic arm would stop him. Each time, the ball rolled under the house, scattering birds. Each time, he went in after it. The slop no longer bothered him. He crawled in on all fours like the animals, inhaling the life stew of the finca, the smell that lifted all of them into polite society.
Sometimes my father would linger beneath the house, listening to the wood crack under his mother’s footsteps. Each footfall loosened a puff of white dust that fell lightly onto the animals. Like snow, my father imagined. And then he was in New York, lifting his left leg, about to hurl the first pitch in the World Series. He was Zhukov on the Russian front, men dying all around. Push on! Push on! The landscape gone to black and white, the gray conifers propped against the horizon. He crawled through the ice, to the edge of the hill until the Oriente landscape broke through again, wet and heavy, the tall palms wrapped in blue sky.
The first game took place on the hottest afternoon in the hottest summer anyone in Biran could remember. The boys took off their shirts to the sun. My father had chosen the fastest, biggest boys for his team, but, of course, the pitcher’s slot he reserved for himself. He was El Lider, even then.
Without an umpire, the boys had only honor to call the plays. And the first pitch my father threw was decreed a ball. He slumped his shoulders and worked the mound with his toe. He said a fast prayer to San Cristobal and pulled on his pitching arm for a stretch. The next pitch was a ball. And the next. My father caught Manuel glancing at the catcher. It was a quick look, a flutter of the eyes underneath the baseball cap. The boy at bat looked back at his teammates sitting now cross-legged behind home. A few of them laughed and touched the tips of their baseball caps to pull them down over their faces. The sun was high in the sky and the boys cast insignificant miniature shadows in the grass.
My father leaned back, raised his left leg, let it hang, released the ball. He walked his first batter; it still makes me cry.
The boys sitting cross-legged behind the plate suddenly jumped up and began to clap. My father felt heat in the soft tips of his ears. History would record him as a man of many words. But that day, my father kept quiet. He wound up the same for the second batter and when he threw the first ball, he didn’t even flinch. He wound up again, without resting, let his foot come down hard on the mound and struck out Bernardo El Bruto. He was no longer hearing the calls of the boys. Or seeing Manuel jump in the air. Only the thump of his leg on the mound, the echo through his hip. Bernardo swinging, slowly swinging, into my father’s first victory. It was the late summer of 1935. My father was nine years old. He was already thinking about the man he was going to be. He was already thinking, I like to think, about me.
—Sáquenlo! my father screamed. Get him out of there!
Baseball is not such a big game now, not even here in Miami, a city that considers itself too American to be Cuban and too Cuban to be American. Baseball here is for the old-timers, the politicians who still see a home run in each defection. The game is too slow, too tame, and too quiet for these times. But I can understand all it meant to my father, a bastard, an immigrant’s son. In the straight old lines of the game, he found a dynasty of players to belong to. Baseball gave him rules to master, a history to memorize. On his mound, facing the dark Sierras, my father could be anybody, do anything.
They went three innings without a run that first summer day. Then in the bottom of the fourth, Manuel swung and even before the ball had begun its path against the sky, the sound it made against the bat made my father look away. In his plan, his would have been the first home run of the day. Now he had to come to bat beneath the glory of the boy he himself had named The Horrible. My father wore nothing but his baseball cap and his denim shorts. His legs were already long and strong and burned brown by his afternoons of practice.
—Oye! Brazo de Espuma!
My father squinted in the sun. The boys guarding the bases broke out in laughter. My father swung and missed. He swung and missed. On the third swing, he connected and the ball sailed in a perfect arc through the blue sky and landed, as if providence herself had softly placed it there, in the new leather glove of the only outfielder.
Something happened after that and not even Manuel’s swing could save my father’s team. By the sixth inning, the sun had moved across the sky, but the air still burned under it. Some of the boys were bloodied by bare-kneed slides. My father’s chest was dusted gray with sand that darkened under thin rivulets of sweat. They were behind seven runs when my father took the mound. He looked around. Manuel stood slumped over third base. His catcher sat on the ground. My father believed he would win; that’s the kind of man he still is. For the next twenty minutes he became the sum of all the best and worst that was to come. He dazzled the boys with fastballs that seemed to trail in vacuums. Then, just as quickly, the ball left his hand and hurtled toward third base. Or into the line of waiting boys. A curveball that made the boys suck their breath. A renegade pitch that sent them running. Such was my father. And he refused to leave until he’d thrown the inning’s last pitch, watched it land squarely in the middle of the catcher’s glove, all of it too late, the score gone so woefully lopsided that most of the boys had stopped keeping count.
And then my father just walked away. Like that. Bottom of the sixth, their turn at bat, and my father walking toward the Sierras, the red savanna waving before him like the closing shot in the Westerns he loved. Manuel called after him. Someone ran behind him and pushed his shoulder.
—Cobarde.
—Cabrón.
My father faced the boy, who wore a torn white T-shirt. A cut on his elbow was already filling with blood and dirt. My father heard the shouts of the other boys but couldn’t make out what they were saying.
—Cobarde, the boy repeated.
For the second time that day, my father said nothing. He turned to walk. Then spun back and punched the boy in the jaw, quick as a breath. The boy fell onto the long grass. My father kept walking south, the Sierras dark and beautiful where they rose from the savanna.
Judío! Judío! My father walking. Judío! My father walking south, listening to his steps crack the tall grass. Then the fire through his arms, the black-beaked wonder of him soaring, rising, watching the lengths of grass retreat and reappear in bright squares of red and green. The battlefields below, the little men. The sun sinking behind Biran, the Sierras catching fire again.
If only … That’s how I always start the story. If only baseball had held him like a tender parent. How different it all would be. He would have come to see me on the beach that day. He would have married my mother. I am the little girl who wants a life of baseball rules: nine innings, pads on the catcher, may the best team win.
2. THE GIRL
She was walking with her mother where the water ended and looking down at the way the wet sand oozed up through her toes. The ocean was flat an
d green like a new lawn and two seagulls dipped and rose above it, casting shadows on the water.
They had come to meet her father, who was a big man now, standing before the crowds, tall and handsome in his black beard, no longer a little boy with a baseball dream. Mirta wore a white dress with three rows of pink lace at the hem and her mother carried her white patent-leather shoes in a straw bag, where the three sandwiches rested.
“He can only stay for a little while,” her mother said, and Mirta nodded.
From where they sat, they could see how the beach extended beyond the brush and then began to curve around the peninsula, the green palms fading in the distance to blue-white like the sky. Behind them lay the magnificent wood houses with the curved porches and Mirta saw that one of them, the round white one with even whiter trim, was boarded up, even though the heavy clouds of summer had almost all blown out to sea and the sky was preparing itself for the blue Caribbean autumn that brought high winds and spoonbills and—after Varadero deemed herself lovely enough to receive them—the Americans. The following summer, three more houses would be boarded, their owners gone to wait out the revolution across the straits. And after that, new families would come. And some would open restaurants years later, and new buildings would seem to grow out of the sand. But Mirta would be many years gone by then and the lonely brush that she remembered as it curved around the shore would be gone too and the spoonbills and all that remained would be the blue Caribbean autumn and the high winds.
