by Ana Menéndez
He turns to Ernesto. “See,” he says, “even Ernesto is laughing.”
“Well,” Ernesto says, holding up his hands, “I’m not sure he was much of a romantic hero either. I think most of his conquests were in his own mind.”
Ernesto catches Matilde’s smile and wishes he could squeeze her hand.
“Well, none of it sounds like the man my mother described,” Mirta says. “I imagined him serious and troubled by-”
Raúl interrupts her. “Nah, nah, troubled!” he says and begins to talk again, fast and nervous. But Ernesto stops hearing. He sees the old woman by the areca and the way she is standing alone and fragile makes Ernesto think of his own mother. He knows the day has been too long for him and he is a little sorry he came, sorry he has let himself get too tired to hold back the images in his mind.
He tells his mother to go away, but she won’t move. After all these years, she’s still sitting by the window at the farm, the light washing her face until it glows against a backdrop of stars. The island is rotten from before the time of the Spanish, she says. The murdered Siboney go on breathing beneath the Sierras, stirring up winds, spawning the hurricane men.
It all happened so long ago, Ernesto says. You have to forget it now. But his mother shakes her head, goes on spinning stories from the night breezes, her bare fingers working an invisible thread. Your brother is only away on a trip to the capital, she tells him. He will return thin and hungry and I will feed him. In a few weeks we’ll get a postcard. You’ll see.
The old woman sees him staring and shouts across the room. “There are no dissidents left anywhere, not even here,” she says. “Don’t you see how all the radio stations have gone to cooking and religion? No one talks about politics anymore.”
The woman pauses and comes closer so she can lower her voice. Ernesto stands for what seems like hours waiting for her to reach his side.
“I think Castro came to Miami dressed as a banker and bought them all up,” she whispers. “That’s what I think.”
Raúl is still talking when Ernesto turns to Matilde and says, “Do you think that people change?”
Matilde looks at him in surprise and, after a moment, she shrugs. “You worry about different things,” she says. “The things that always bothered you, one day you wake up and they don’t bother you anymore.”
Ernesto nods. “Or you become so comfortable with them that you stop noticing.”
Raúl stops talking and frowns. “What are you two talking about?”
“I think Joaquin,” Matilde says. “Am I right, Ernesto?” Mirta touches Ernesto’s arm. “How did you know Joaquin?”
Ernesto watches as Mirta brushes her hair off her shoulders. He sees now that she is not very much like her mother. Her hair is lighter and her nose is thin and upturned. Her question is full of the empty politeness the young show the old. It sits like candy in a pretty bowl.
“Not very well,” Ernesto says and tries a smile. The others look at him and then into their hands. Ernesto guesses it is almost midnight.
“He was a big man; we called him El Alemán,” he says. He wonders about the stories the others told and looks around the room.
“We had a friend in common back from the time we were students.” Ernesto pauses to put his hands in his pockets. “Both of them were—well, both of them opposed the dictator.”
He speaks slowly, as if a younger self were dictating the story to him. “And these two young men were very strident about what they believed because they were young and frustrated and Cuba was Cuba, slow and languid in everything but politics, you see.”
The paper lanterns lengthen Raúl’s shadow along the floor and Ernesto wonders what the light is doing to the figure of himself. Could people warp under the lights like shadows?
“This friend we had,” Ernesto says, “he’s dead now. He died very young.
“But as a young man, he was very involved in the movement. So much so that when his own brother began typing up leaflets that he didn’t like, this friend—well, this friend called on Joaquin, you see. Joaquin was rising in the system pretty quickly—he was tall, as I said, and pink and handsome and everyone is seduced by those things.”
Ernesto gives a smile. “Even revolutionaries are seduced by those things.” He takes his hands out of his pockets and looks at them. “This friend only went to Joaquin for advice. Joaquin went to another friend for advice. And so on. No one blamed Joaquin, especially since a few months later, the revolution came for him as well.”
Ernesto looks at Mirta. “You will see. The bad that happens, happens suddenly.”
He remembers how his mother held conversations with his brother through the night. Sometimes laughing, looking down at her lap. Other times she stood and screamed at the slanting light, the flat door. And Ernesto sat on the floor looking back at her. This is how it is in his memory, him sitting at his mother’s feet for days, without food or water, fed by their waiting. And Ernesto waiting with her, though he knew. Wondering if someday he would see his mother again and tell her the truth and kill both her sons for her at once.
Through his old thoughts, Ernesto hears Raúl connecting words without meaning: tough times, idealism, the struggle, disappointment. And Matilde with the aggressive empathy of powerless women following right behind him, scattering pretty words like rice at a wedding. All around him, the party swells with phrases and pieces of words, snatches of breath and insults and declarations of love.
Suddenly, Ernesto is weary of language, weary of words and the memories they try to trap and kill for viewing. He is tired of all the layers in a sentence, the phrases that live only to conceal.
“Talk, talk, talk,” he says. “No more talk.”
The others don’t seem to notice him.
He thinks now, old as he’s become, that he would like to welcome blankness, to live in a white house with white walls and white floors. He would banish films and photographs, everything that dulls the moment with yesterday’s thin light.
He thinks he could pin a single truth to the wall and force himself to memorize it.
He looks at the others, their faces as unchanged as a canvas, their mouths moving up and down, chewing or talking, Ernesto can’t be sure.
“My brother died in jail,” he says.
He sees Mirta make a move toward him and he stops her.
Twenty years from now she will remember this moment and think of the right words and be sorry that she didn’t say them. Only much later will she know it was best to say nothing at all.
Máximo walks to the middle of the restaurant and holds his hands up for silence. “The plane was late coming in,” he says. “It won’t be long now.”
There is a sprinkling of applause and then silence. The door is locked against the night, Eighth Street not being what it was. The waiters are up again, straightening aprons, restacking the silverware. Their faces in the long mirror are smudged with fingerprints.
Ernesto moves to the door, watches the quiet street.
The old woman who follows him everywhere is at his ear again, pulling the edge of his sleeve as she whispers, “Tell me again why I’m here?”
The light up the block turns to red and a row of cars collects behind it. Maybe Joaquin is in one of them. Maybe he has moved the seat back because his big heavy legs are folded uncomfortably. Or maybe he has already walked through the door so thin and small that no one has recognized him and he is roaming the room even now, listening to familiar lies, remembering faces by the stories they tell.
Ernesto turns to the old woman.
“You see, Señora,” he says. “We’ve been in this country for almost forty years.”
Her Mother’s House
The road to her mother’s house crossed a wooden bridge into a field of sugarcane that bent green and wide to the horizon before it narrowed into a path flanked on both sides by proud stands of royal palms. It was a late afternoon in summer and the men were coming in from the fields, hauling their machetes behind them. They
stepped aside with their backs against the palms to let her pass and then stood waiting for the dust to settle, their hats flopping softly in the breeze. Lisette watched the men in the mirror until they retook the road and then her eyes were on the green fields ahead of her, the blue hills that dipped over the edge of sky. The thick warm air curled through the open window and the uneven road bumped her along in a seamless and predictable rhythm. She hummed a tune she had heard last night in the hotel and then she was silent, listening to the palm wind, the road beneath the wheels. It was the first time she had been alone in years and the new quiet seemed something she could touch, an opening in her chest that was as real as her childhood faith.
She was born in Miami, two years after the revolution. Her parents had met waiting in line at the Freedom Tower and married just two months later. He was a young student from Oriente, who’d come fleeing Batista. She was from a wealthy landowning family outside Varadero, who’d come fleeing Castro. For years, Lisette thought Batista Castro was one man, the all-powerful tyrant of the Caribbean, the bearded mulato who shot poor workers in the fields and stole her mother’s house with all her photographs in it.
That house. Always in the air, behind every reproach. Her mother half mad with longing. And that winter morning when Lisette thought she began to know her mother. Twelve years old. Reading alone in her room, she heard the sobbing before she saw that her mother had crawled in on her knees, a long end of toilet paper in her hands.
“Look at this, feel how soft this is,” she cried, holding out the paper to Lisette. “In Cuba today the little children have to use whatever scraps of paper they can find in the trash, bits of newspaper, cardboard. Oh, feel how soft this is.”
Her mother had let her body drop to the floor and she lay there for a long time, shredding the paper into smaller and smaller pieces. Lisette sat at the edge of her bed, watching and waiting for her father to come in the room and gently lift her mother. She had turned to Lisette, her eyes open wide.
“When the soldiers came for the house, I walked straight, not turning once to look at the stained-glass windows,” she cried softly now. “Not even the white columns that climbed to the second floor.”
And the iron railing on the balcony where the rattan furniture was laid out for company, the clink of glasses. Lisette began to remember all of it too.
Lisette married a round-faced boy whose parents were from Varadero, a short drive from her mother’s hometown. They each needed someone to agree with. After everything, she still kept the photo that made it into the society pages, Lisette smooth-faced and skinny in the billowy dress, Erminio’s arm wrapped tight around her waist, as if already he worried she was a wisp of smoke, a thin memory of herself.
She was a new reporter, covering city hall and trying to find a world within the small concerns of small towns, the wider life in berms and set-asides. He was a young lawyer who hated the law and preferred to make poems out of her stories. Every Sunday, he recited his creations in a deep sleepy voice:
The
Sweetwater city council
today
approved preliminary
plans for a new
shopping center on
the
corner
of
Eighth Street and
107th Avenue.
The first months, he waited for her to wake. He poured her the orange juice and the coffee and read her his newspaper poems. Some mornings, when the night’s images had vanished, she would kiss him. And they would return to the bedroom and he would whisper her breath back to her.
Later, she began to linger in bed alone, waiting for him to go. Even after they stopped talking, he’d leave a poem by the toast. Paint a heart. Some mornings she could still smell him in the kitchen and her heart would turn.
At lunch she would take a sandwich and sit alone by the bay, imagining the stories in each ripple of water, each cloud that had the strength to push across the sky.
One Christmas Eve she sat apart from Erminio as she had for months and watched him with the women. He said something and they giggled, clapping their hands together like little girls playing at tea. How they loved him, his long frame and freckled skin. They sat in a circle around the pool, under the lights her father had strung from the second-floor balcony to the roof of the gazebo. It was one of those clear December nights that Lisette still loved about Miami, everything clean. One of her cousins produced a guitar and began to sing a bolero, a soft and sad contemplation behind the notes. The applause was slow. Her cousin’s father took the guitar away. “Playing sad songs on Christmas, what kind of musician are you?” and he began to strum out an old danzón. Erminio stood and walked to where she was. He sat next to her, took her hand. He squeezed it. She looked at the pool, at the ripples of light.
“It makes me afraid,” he said. “How much I need you.”
Lisette moved her head with the music.
“It’s true,” he said. He squeezed her hand. She looked at him and he squeezed harder.
“You’re hurting me,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?” She stood. The music stopped and the others looked up. Erminio sat staring down at the ground, his shoulders bent a little toward his chest. His right hand shook. “Can’t you leave me alone for one minute?” Lisette whispered at him. “One minute.”
It was terrible the way he kept believing that history would reignite the now. He really thought they could be like they were. Not just them. Everything. Everybody. It made Lisette want to scream. The past wasn’t something you could play again like an old song.
Erminio got up and walked to the far end of the yard, falling away from the gazebo lights. Fine, go, she said. And already Lisette was regretting the night.
There were moments that seemed, in their first rush of happiness, strong enough to outrun the inevitable. The night in Isla Mujeres, the wet breeze and the call of fishermen. They had lain skin to skin, remembering, Lisette watching the reflected water draw patterns on the wall. Later, when he went down to phone his parents in Miami, she had wrapped herself in the blanket and slipped away to the terrace off the hallway to smoke a cigarette. She saw him return to their room. She watched him shut the door. She waited until the door flung open again and she saw Erminio pause in the hallway, his face gray. He turned toward the next room, as if listening. He passed his hand over his face and then made a sudden run for the stairs. She stepped out and called after him. He looked up and saw her. He ran back and swept her in the air. She cried. She wanted so badly to love him.
And then Lisette was in the back roads of Cuba thinking it had been so long since she’d been alone.
The green fields turned yellow and then brown. Lisette had set out from Havana in the early morning, but now the day was stiffening, the light falling in heavy sheets that made the loose gravel shimmer in the distance. She had been driving for more than five hours and the feeling began to creep on her that she had made a wrong turn somewhere.
But she drove on, the road desolate except for the royal palms that were so much like the stories she remembered. Her mother had shut her eyes when Lisette told her she was going to Cuba. It was a simple reporting trip, a stroke of luck. She wasn’t going to explain to her mother things she could barely explain to herself. How every story needed a beginning. How her past had come to seem like a blank page, waiting for the truth to darken it.
Her mother had frowned. What kind of paper sends a young woman to Cuba alone, with the rafters churning more and more chaos. She had bent in closer and looked Lisette in the eyes. After a moment she had leaned back and put her hands in her lap. She wouldn’t find the answers to her failures there, if that’s what she thought. The remark had cut into Lisette. But she pretended not to understand. Maybe her mother could give her a map to the old house? Cuba’s changed, it’s not the Cuba I was born in, her mother had said. And then finally, It’s a mistake for you to go now. The now was deliberate. And Lisette recognized it as part of the sentence her mother left unsaid:
Now that you’re divorced. Her mother had taken it hardest. Her family weren’t failures. In the end, Lisette promised to go without the map or her mother’s blessing. She knew the house was outside Varadero, near Cardenas. She would find it on her own.
At the airport, her mother had parked and walked her to the terminal. Her face was puffy.
“So you’re going.”
Lisette nodded. Her mother hugged her and took her hand. She pressed a note.
In Havana, Lisette had worn her mother’s map smooth, like tissue paper. The names had changed, but the streets remained. The Malecón still faced toward Miami even after all these years. On every old street, the billboards insisted on the revolution. “We defend the right to happiness” and “The revolution is eternal.” Lisette thought back to her marriage. The reassurances built upon their own disintegration. The more they said I Love You, the more they knew it was an empty incantation. Still, she thought she had been right to come. The people had been kind. The police hadn’t followed. In the mornings, when everything was fresh and new, she had thought that they had something here that her parents’ generation had lost in exile. The feeling evaporated by the end of the day, replaced by a watery feeling that she would never understand herself, much less this country that seemed intent on killing itself slowly. And before she fell asleep each night, despair took her again.
The road curved and the fields were green again and the blue hills were visible to the south. A man approached on horseback, growing in relation to the hills with every step. She pulled to the side of the road and examined her mother’s map. On the lower right-hand side, her mother had painted a large box and labeled it simply, M. Lisette looked outside at the expanse of palms and orange trees. Her mother and her cryptics. She was probably afraid Lisette would be stopped with an incriminating document. Lisette got out of the car and sat on the bumper to wait for the man. The afternoon was hot, but the air smelled of oranges as if it were dawn. Now and then a weak breeze moved through and made a sound in the grass. The man got closer, filling up more and more of the sky, until he was upon her and Lisette sat waving her soft map like a small flag.
