The siren of a police cruiser drowned out his words.
By twelve-thirty, Sharon was tired of people watching, waiting for Juan and stewing in her own fury. She didn’t believe for a minute he had gone to visit his grandmother, who could have been dead for all she knew. But she had memorized the address of his “friend” and how to get there from the hotel. She slathered on sunscreen and set out walking, her face flushed and her hands rolled into fists. She was ready to confront Juan and didn’t stop cursing him, his trip and herself all the way to Victoria’s place.
A small crowd had gathered in front of the building. A police car was outside with its lights flashing. Sharon stopped in the park, as she had the day before, and saw two men in handcuffs being led to the cruiser. One was the guy in overalls she had seen arguing with the blonde the day before. The other was Juan.
As she stood there in shock, a Lexus parked down the block. The driver got out and watched the scene from a distance as well. Sharon looked over and felt a shock of recognition: it was the same woman, just a few years older, who had been smiling in the scanned picture Juan kept on his laptop.
11
Broken Air
Elsa’s throat closed. The air seemed to change from a gas to a liquid substance, threatening to drown her.
“A ghost from your past has returned . . . Why don’t you come by so we can chat about all this?”
Well, Vic hadn’t lied about Juan. There he was, being ushered into a police car. Vic had said he’d visited her the day before—why had he come back?
Elsa continued to watch the building. A crowd had gathered outside, gossiping and snooping. She thought she’d better wait until they dispersed to drive back. She still wasn’t breathing normally. She didn’t want to risk running over some rubbernecking comemierda.
As she headed back to her car to catch her breath, she noticed a foreign woman staring at her. It wasn’t uncommon for Elsa to attract attention, even in El Vedado. There weren’t many Lexuses in Cuba for one thing. But her wealth usually provoked the resentment or curiosity of locals, not tourists. None of them knew she’d once gone around Havana on a cheap bicycle like most of her friends, rather than having her father drive her around in his Jeep, which he’d eventually had to sell during the Special Period.
She blinked away the tears that stung her eyes. How distant those ISA days seemed now! She had adored Juan. He’d never found out how much she had cried for him after he’d left with Camilo. Then there was Rosita. And Elsa’s own pregnancy, which she’d discovered shortly after Juan had arrived in Miami. She had wanted to contact him, but how? Abuela hated her. Víctor and Juan had had a falling out. And then the Spaniard had appeared, as if sent by the orishas in which she’d never believed.
She got in the car and locked the door. Nobody, not even her parents, knew how much she had suffered during those first years in Seville, struggling to understand a new culture, please the old man and raise her son at the same time. She had given up her dreams of acting to become a mother and eventually, after Emilio’s health declined so much he had to entrust Savarria and Co. to her, an entrepreneur. He couldn’t complain with the way she’d expanded the business. She knew how to deal with Cubans better than he did and ruled Savarria and Co. with an iron fist—the employees called her the commander in bitch behind her back. She didn’t care. The company was growing, and when the time came, when things really changed in a year or two or ten, they would be well positioned to take over the tech market in Cuba.
She had taken care of Emilio too. Old Savarria should have been grateful that he’d married her and not some jinetera who’d stolen his money and left him high and dry, as had happened to several of his friends. Still, she hadn’t really ever been happy. Had marrying him been a mistake? Ah, she had made so many mistakes in her life. Why couldn’t she stop?
She tried to breathe again. Sometimes she felt as if she was crazy, especially when she went into her fits of rage. Few things set her off, but even Savarria, after a couple of fights where she’d kicked and scratched him, had learned not to trigger her temper. This had made married life easier. But things didn’t always turn out so well.
She felt a chill. Her coat was wet. She took it off and placed it on the passenger seat.
“Don’t let anyone mess with you.”
She saw her father drunk, threatening to kill whoever challenged him or stood in his way. The sickening sound of bullets going through the ceiling. A rococo crystal chandelier, which had been in the house when it was given to Elsa’s family, falling, its delicate pieces exploding on the floor. El pincho barking threats and curses. A miracle he hadn’t killed his wife or Elsa. He was a bit unhinged. She must have inherited the crazy genes.
But she wasn’t crazy! Just impulsive. Juan used to say she was hotheaded and cold handed, calentona and friolenta. So many of the decisions she had made in life had been on a whim, like marrying Savarria. The marriage had provided her with so much, despite all the pain she had gone through. Emilio was a cantankerous old man. Not an ogre but not easy to live with either, always driving her crazy with his jealousy. Even now that she was forty and not the young beauty she had once been, he became agitated when she spoke to other men in his presence. An insecure old man, that was what he was, despite all his business acumen. He probably suspected she didn’t love him. She was grateful to him but could never be attracted to him physically. Thank God for that heart attack, she thought sometimes, and then felt a wave of guilt for having the thought.
Had it been worth it, in the end? She had traveled the world with Savarria. He had provided everything for her and Emilito. They had a nice home in Seville, another in Havana and a smaller beach house in Tarragona. When Emilio died, she would inherit everything. But would she have been happier with Juan in a small Miami apartment or her parents’ house in El Naútico if they had stayed in Cuba?
Well, no use thinking about that now.
The police car, with Juan and the other guy inside, sped toward Línea Street. The onlookers left one by one, and Elsa could breathe normally again, the liquid air finally dissolving around her. She started the Lexus and drove off.
12
Dear Juan
Each plant contains the virtue of a santo, a supernatural force.
—El Monte
Dear Juan,
I haven’t heard from you in many years (twenty, to be exact), but I’ve never stopped thinking of you and wondering what was going on in your life. Abuela kept me in the loop while she could. She told me you had left Miami but didn’t remember, or wouldn’t tell me, where you’re living now.
Sadly, you haven’t cared to find out about me. But that’s fine. I’ve been told that you are back, and I want to fill you in on my life, in the very improbable case that you are interested. Hope springs eternal, as the saying goes.
There are some things that you don’t know.
Until I met you at the ISA, I was invisible, my Juan. Since high school, and even before that, I had felt like I had on Frodo and Bilbo’s ring. All the time. Guys never catcalled me in the street. Boys never picked me as their partner for school projects. They didn’t take me on dates. They didn’t suggest we go to a movie together so they could kiss me in the dark, as my friends complained happened to them. If I wanted to see a movie, I went by myself. I spent many evenings in the Yara on my own, with happy couples snuggled all around me.
It was during a movie marathon—the Latin American Film Festival at the Yara—that I realized I could be an actor too. I was plain, but not unbearably ugly. My main issue was that I didn’t have a big butt, but in fact, most actresses were skinny and butt-less. I had a good memory and was quiet, but not shy. I was taller than average, which most guys didn’t like, but maybe it would be an asset on-screen. Why not give it a try?
My high school grades were excellent. (I didn’t have many distractions.) But I’m sure you remember that aspiring ISA theat
er students needed to pass an acting test to get into the school’s performing arts program. An “attitude test,” it was called. I heard Elsa failed it, though she got in anyway. I’m still proud that I passed with flying colors.
I always wanted to tell you how I did it, to brag a little . . . I’d been learning about the alienation effect and the theater of the absurd. I had memorized Mother Courage and Her Children, which people said was mandatory reading. I was going to name Brecht if they asked who my favorite playwright was. It was actually Tennessee Williams, but I wouldn’t have dared to say that.
The admissions committee was composed of Teatro Estudio actors and ISA instructors. They all looked at me as if I didn’t hold much promise. “You’re alone in an elevator,” a Teatro Estudio woman said. “Suddenly, there’s a blackout, and you find yourself trapped. Show us what you would do.”
They were probably expecting hysterics, screams, the take-me-out-of-here scene. I just opened my backpack, retrieved Mother Courage and Her Children, sat on the floor and began to read silently.
I was accepted. And that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Not because I became an actress but because I met you.
This is turning into a shaggy-dog tale, and I haven’t even said anything of substance yet.
Why am I doing this? Because Oyá promised. But sometimes I think I dove into Santería to perform on the only stage still available to me. A thwarted actor, playing the role of an orisha on the saint’s feast day, wearing these psychedelic necklaces and long skirts that make me look like a more interesting version of myself.
Abuela was the one who initiated me into Santería. I met her by chance, because Juan never would have introduced me to his family. I showed up at his apartment on a Friday night to bring him my class notes (he had skipped a Scientific Communism lecture that morning), hoping against all odds that he was there. He wasn’t, but his grandmother was. We hit it off. She told me right away I was a daughter of Oyá. I didn’t believe in the orishas back then, didn’t know a thing about religion, but I pretended to be interested.
“Oyá is very possessive of her daughters,” Abuela said. “When she claims someone, she wants total ownership. What do you do, mijita?”
“I’m studying to be an actress.”
Most people were impressed by that, but Abuela shook her head.
“The daughters of Oyá aren’t actresses,” she stated plainly. “That’s more for Oshún’s girls. Oyá, queen of the cemeteries, is into deeper, darker things.”
I don’t remember what I answered. Most likely that I could change career paths if the orisha asked me to. I didn’t plan on following through on this, but I wanted Abuela’s approval. I asked her questions about Santería and put on such a good act that she invited me to visit her for personal instruction lessons. I accepted her offer. If we became friends, it would be easier for me to get closer to Juan. The pobrecita was delighted, thinking that she had found a fellow devotee.
“Kids nowadays are so rarely into religion,” she would say. “Even my own grandson. I’m happy you’re different.”
It wasn’t exactly true, but I didn’t tell her. My maternal grandmother, a practicing Catholic, had taken me a few times to Iglesia del Carmen in Centro Habana. The church smelled like incense and musk and was poorly lit. When I complained once, my grandma had said sternly, “It may be dark, but Jesus can see you anyway. Your parents and I may not know where you are, but he does. So does your guardian angel.” She proceeded to give me a lecture on sin and punishment that turned me off to religion for a long time. Her God struck me as harsh and vindictive. We had the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the Vigilance and Protection Committees watching us day and night. I didn’t need the spiritual militia keeping tabs on me too.
But the orishas, Abuela said, were not in the business of judging humans—not most of them, at least—because they were far from perfect themselves. Changó cheated on Obá, his legitimate wife, with Oshún and Yemayá. Oshún had “as many lovers as the sand of the sea.” Elegguá was a thief and a shameless liar. A rowdy crowd all in all. The most straitlaced was Oyá.
As the Santería lessons progressed, I became a frequent visitor at Abuela’s Chinatown house. It was bigger and nicer than my mom’s and had a spectacular backyard where Abuela grew chamomile, marjoram, cilantro, lavender and spearmint and left offerings to the deities that she called indistinctively orishas and santos. “You say ‘orisha’ when you are working with the African part, the strong part. That’s when you invoke Oyá and offer her a glass of wine,” she explained. “You say santo when you are dealing with the Catholic counterpart; then you pray to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and sprinkle holy water over your altar.”
The orishas were African and Spanish men and women, dark and light, right and wrong and sometimes all that in one. “Oshún is the Virgin of Charity,” Abuela told me. “She’s sweet, but undependable. Changó is Santa Bárbara. Brave in battle, but he doesn’t like to work and pimps out his women. Elegguá is El Niño de Atocha or Baby Jesus. Watch out! He’s a trickster and a troublemaker, but as the owner of all roads, he can open or close the paths of life.”
Abuela made all sorts of herbal teas, sweetened with honey, and had potions for every ailment. Chamomile for insomnia, peppermint for nausea, sage for memory loss, anise for menstrual cramps, valerian root for high blood pressure . . . “I cure myself with green stuff,” she would say. “I don’t trust doctors. I don’t like being poked and pawed.” What an irony that she’s ended up in an old folks’ home at the mercy of nurses and nuns!
She also told me that being Oyá’s daughter was a mixed blessing. Oyá watched over her children, but held them to higher standards than other orishas did. And one had to be careful because the orishas, when angry, sent not only diseases, but all kinds of calamities, she warned.
“A daughter of Oyá isn’t gossipy or racy,” Abuela said. “She is a woman of character. In return, she’s always protected, because Oyá destroys her enemies with the force of her seven winds. She is compassionate, but hates lies. See, if you are a daughter of Oshún, you can practically get away with murder. Oshún cheats on her men, flirts and steals other women’s partners, so she understands when her daughters misbehave. But Oyá has no patience with liars and swindlers. She crushes those who don’t honor their word.”
Elsa must be a daughter of Oshún, I thought. When I asked Abuela, she refused to confirm it—she wasn’t fond of Elsa, but being a daughter of Oyá herself, she didn’t like to gabble.
But Elsa . . . God, how I hated her. I didn’t understand why Juan was in love with that crazy, curly-haired chick everyone thought was so beautiful. She wasn’t that pretty, in my opinion. All she had was a strong personality, which made her different in a mean sort of way.
Little by little, I became truly interested in the religion. One could ask these powerful orishas for help with earthly matters. There were spells for good luck, love, success . . . I could certainly use a few.
I began to experiment. I stole one of Juan’s shirts from Abuela’s home. (She had been sewing a button on it when I came in, but I could swear that she left it on a table for me to take. By then, she wanted us to be together.) I made a rag doll out of the shirt. When the moon was full, I wrote, using my menstrual blood, his name on the doll. I pricked its heart with a silver pin. I cut a strand of my hair and placed it under the cover of the music theory textbook he carried everywhere. Ah, what didn’t I try?
I’d done something right, it seemed, because Juan asked me out. I don’t know if the spells worked or if he felt that he had to prove he was a true macho—I had been telling everybody, including his best friends, Víctor and Camilo, about my crush on him. Whatever his reasons were, I said yes, and from that day on, we were an item.
A secret item, that is. Contrabando. He made it clear that he wasn’t leaving Elsa for me. I promised not to tell anyone about our arrangem
ent and pretended that I was fine with it. But I kept looking for that perfect love spell. I even gave him a bonding potion—I boiled my pubic hair with rose petals in the water I used to make coffee for him. But the spell was no good. At least, it didn’t work for me, or I messed up somewhere along the way.
Ah, if only I could have found the book Abuela was always talking about! El Monte, the Santería bible, had been published in the fifties by Lydia Cabrera, a Cuban ethnographer who was an authority on the religion. It contains spells, tales of the orishas, a comprehensive list of plants and their healing properties, recipes and so much more in its six hundred pages. Abuela had once owned a copy, but she barely knew how to read and had given it away. She regretted not having kept it. “If you ever find that book,” she said, “buy it; borrow it; even steal it if you have to. Oyá will forgive you. Bring it to me, and we’ll read it together.”
I never found it, not even in Havana’s used bookstores. Back then, believing in Santería or any other religion was considered “ideological diversionism”; books like El Monte were banned and almost impossible to get. I heard not long ago that the book had been republished. What was prohibited twenty years ago will now become compulsory learning. That’s how things work on this God-forgotten island.
El Monte, soon to be mandatory reading. Just you wait and see.
Speaking of which, instead of a letter to Juan that he’ll never read, I should write my own book—an Oyá kind of book, shadowy and occult. Black Pearls of Wisdom by a Mortician, isn’t that a good title? I’ll take it to Letras Cubanas and have an editor I know look at it.
Part II
Unidad 15
Lieutenant Marlene Martínez brought a tape recorder to her office. She wanted to replay the conversations—she refused to call them “interrogations”—she’d had with the first witnesses in her new case. The recorder was an antique Sanyo. When would she upgrade to a more modern device? Oh, well. You work with what you have, as Comrade Instructor, her mentor at the Police Academy, used to say. She wondered where he was now. After retiring from the police force, he had become a santero. People had started calling him Padrino, but he also had an on-the-side business as a private eye. He was en la lucha, struggling to make ends meet like everybody else.
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