by Achy Obejas
I touched my finger to Mahler’s door and gently pushed. The hinges whined. I pulled away, but not before I caught a glimpse of a fully dressed Mahler on the bed, his eyes and mouth open.
“Tom…”
“Malía!” It was a frightened Rocky, with Dionisio right behind her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, grabbing me and pushing us out of the room. I felt his fingers hot on my flesh. His Spanish was so furious I barely understood.
“What…?” Mahler hadn’t stirred. “Hey, I think there’s something wrong.”
“He’s a very sound sleeper,” Dionisio insisted, closing the door to Tom’s room behind us.
I looked to Rocky but she avoided my gaze. “Dionisio, his eyes are open.” I couldn’t conjure anything in Spanish.
“You will wake him,” Dionisio said in English, his voice steely and cold like Raúl’s the night before.
“Malía, let it go, let it go,” Rocky whispered, pulling on my arm, trying to drag me back to the kitchen.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked, angrily yanking myself free from them. “Mahler’s in there, and something’s not right.”
“Malía, calm down,” Rocky said, but she was unsteady, glancing over at Dionisio for reassurance.
I suddenly remembered the noises from the night before, the scuffie. “Tom!” I yelled toward Mahler’s room. “Tom, can you—”
Dionisio grabbed me, his hand over my mouth as we struggled, all the while whispering fiercely in Spanish at Rocky, who didn’t seem to know whether to help him or me.
“Qué pasa aquí?” a voice rumbled behind us. Raúl pulled Dionisio off me. “What are you doing?” he demanded. He was wearing his uniform, his hand on the service revolver tucked into his holster.
“She went inside,” Dionisio said defensively, and in Spanish, all the while pointing at me. “She was disturbing Tom.”
I started to say something but Raúl put up his official policeman’s hand. “Enough,” he commanded. He turned to me. “Tom is a deep sleeper, and a monster when he’s awakened by noise.”
“But—” In a month, I’d seen and heard many things about Mahler but this was not one of them.
“Malía, shut up!” Rocky interrupted. She’d made fists and was holding them out in front of her now, her eyes shut hard, no longer able to keep back tears.
“For God’s sake—something is wrong in there,” I insisted. “Don’t you think it’s weird he hasn’t reacted to all this noise? And his eyes were wide open!”
“I will take care of this,” the policeman cousin said, pushing me aside.
He strode purposefully toward Mahler’s door, then stepped inside. We heard him make his way to the bed and back but I noted that he did not call out to Tom or make any kind of attempt to wake him. He emerged from the room in seconds, closing the door behind him.
“He is dead,” he said conclusively.
I gasped. “How do you know?” All three of them were staring at me, their reactions seemingly dependent on mine. I swallowed. “I mean, try waking him,” I persisted. “I thought I heard something last night…”
Raúl, who hadn’t understood a word I said, dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Dionisio, as a doctor”—he underscored the word doctor—“I need you to determine the preliminary cause of death,” he instructed. “I will call the station to file a report and the coroner. You two”—he meant us, Rocky and me—“you will stay out of the way. Do you understand me?”
Rocky nodded but I must have made some other movement because Raúl turned on me with a barely contained rage. “Do you understand?”
* * *
Soon the house was filled with cops, paramedics, and gravelooking men and women who talked almost exclusively to Dionisio and Raúl. They glanced now and again at me and Rocky, who paced in the kitchen, her eyes watery (but not crying). Dionisio’s mother wrung her hands, worried about bearing the curse of an American dying under her roof.
“Every foreign journalist in Havana is going to be at the door wanting to know what happened,” she complained, then looked pointedly at me. “Malía, you must remember, if someone—if anyone—asks, nothing happened.”
I nodded, not because I intended to keep that promise (I honestly had no idea what I’d do if anyone asked), but because it was clear that’s what was expected of me. Rocky looked at me approvingly but I wondered, with dread flooding me, how I fit into all this, how I was supposed to deal with it all.
“Do you know what happened?” Dionisio’s mother asked when he came back to the kitchen.
He shook his head. “Probably an embolia,” he said solemnly.
“How old was Tom?” I asked, regaining some of my Spanish.
“I don’t know, in his forties,” Dionisio said. “He was young.”
I stood up from the kitchen table, pushing my feet into my slippahs, and made my way to the courtyard.
I saw the panicked look on Dionisio’s face. “Where are you going?” Rocky asked in English, articulating his fears.
“To get some air,” I said. “I’m not leaving, I’ll be right here.”
Outside, the yellow streetlights poured into the courtyard and obscured the night sky again. I ambled until I found a dark patch, somewhere to stand where I could merge into the shadows and disappear. I leaned against the wall and let my body drop into a squat. All I could think was how very zenzizenzic, how ironic this was: Tom had had a Cuban death, except that his last meal had been our Hawaiian extravaganza. The neighborhood soundtrack of yelling, music, and cars continued unabated. I could see Rocky fidgeting through the kitchen window. I really wasn’t sure I could ever tell my parents about this.
In a moment, there were sounds coming from Mahler’s room. A man and a woman emerged with Tom’s body on a stretcher, wrapped from head to toe in a white sheet that made him look like a cocoon. Dionisio followed with a police officer I hadn’t seen before, while his mother peered from the door to the courtyard, tracing their route.
I waited a bit, just watching the goings-on in the kitchen as if the window were a TV screen. Everyone seemed appropriately sad and worried except Raúl, who I could see was relaxed enough for an occasional laugh. I finally surrendered to the inevitability of going back inside for my last night in Cuba, rappelled up the wall like a crab, and strolled over, the direct light making my vision fuzzy for an instant.
“Malía, there you are,” Dionisio’s mother said.
“Sit down,” suggested Dionisio, leading me to the table.
As my eyes began to clear, I looked for Rocky but saw only Raúl, his cheeks moving as he chewed on something, his arms outstretched in my direction. I redirected my vision to his offering: a plate brimming with garlicky pork chops, shimmering black beans poured over rice, and toasty plantain coasters.
“Eat, Malía,” he ordered.
I nodded but slowly stepped back and away.
VIRGINS OF REGLA
BY MABEL CUESTA
Regla
for Yemayá
for Raquel Pollo
The emptiness by the wall. Her and her shadow, both escapees, in a panic. Lost now in a place unknown, far from their home in the provinces.
They always knew that Regla, ultramarine, was a place for fishermen and stevedores. Whenever they went there to see the Virgin, they were surprised by the black men who walked past them on their way from the docks, stinking from the dirty sacks.
That dawn, after running from the bitter scene (that’s how she’d remember it for years to come), she feared one of those men from the docks would show up to continue the violation. Afraid they’d confuse her for one of the sacks they hauled, possessed, dragged from the ships to the docks, trucks, roads, or warehouses anywhere on the island. She feared being mistaken for one of those inanimate sacks, prime for theft, expropriation, sale, or scrap.
She had no way of getting home at that hour. She was broke. She had no map with which to orient herself, and worse, she had no idea where exactly she was in th
e neighborhood. All she wanted to do was go home.
To leave Regla there were always the ferries, with their eternal and tired run all day long and a good part of the night across Havana’s oily, filthy bay. But not at dawn. Dawn in Regla was all silence and fear.
She and her shadow rested against the wall. They became one to try and figure out a way through the terror—the terror provoked by her trembling legs, smeared with a substance that she could not identify. She remembered what she read somewhere—probably Margarite Yourcenar: love’s white blood…could that be it? The viscous substance that drenched her underpants—could that be the blood that Yourcenar talked about in one of her novels? Impossible. The writer had placed the word love next to the image of the white blood. Neither she nor her shadow would confuse the two concepts; they were both excellent readers.
Her shadow could, in fact, tell jokes, recall, for example, the famous Arab telenovela in which, during an unusual dialogue between the barbarous and the civilized worlds, the Muslim man asked the beautiful, kidnapped North American lady in a subordinate tone, And who has asked you for love, Diana Mayo?
She and her shadow relished that scene from the telenovela, which made them and their friends laugh so much because of its kitschy language and its singularly disturbing and maladjusted hero…but this was no time for jokes. Now they needed to understand if that stuff that made her feel wet and broken was in fact the white blood of love. Leaning against the wall, they wanted to determine how the unknown substance had been deposited inside her. They wanted to determine who had extradited her from her peaceful world in the provinces to bring her to this place, and especially to this corner where it was impossible to see the small turret of the chapel in which resided the city’s most loved virgin—her patron.
If we could at least see the steeple, she thought, we’d know which way to walk. If, at the very least, they could reach a small fragment, a miniscule piece of the compound around the Virgin, they’d be saved. The Virgin would protect her shadow and would bring back all that had been taken.
But here at the wall the only things in sight were her and her shadow. They looked at each other with shame because of the twisted projections on the wall, still in the thrall of recent events.
She let herself fall. With her back against the wall, she eased her way down it, and once on the ground, she opened her legs. The substance was still there, lingering. The substance took her back to the memory of a drunk Horacio, his tongue in her ear, saying, Let me suck your tits… Horacio squeezing her against the bed while Michelle brushed her teeth at the bathroom sink. Horacio saying over and over how he wanted to tangle them both with his body, to join them in an infinite night. She was going to say in an infinite night of love, but the words got stuck in her throat and she left it at that.
Michelle, an innocent, would talk to him from the bathroom: My love, let the girl rest…Get her ready for bed and come to our room, I’m waiting.
The girl kicked. The girl had no shadow to defend her then because the house was full of light. The girl cried and hit Horacio so that he’d leave her in peace, so that he’d get off her, so that he would not stick his hard fiesh into her flesh…and Horacio just laughed…Horacio never answered Michelle but rather bit the girl’s mouth. A girl almost as small as Michelle, but more lost, more alone in the storybook wilderness of his mouth and then the neighborhood to which Horacio had brought them.
That’s when she stopped fighting and just let things happen…She decided to pray, but she didn’t know any prayer in its entirety, didn’t know any potent psalms, but she prayed nonetheless—so that Michelle wouldn’t step out of the bathroom and surprise them, so that she wouldn’t have to offer explanations, so that she wouldn’t have to ask forgiveness, that’s what she prayed for.
The only thing left was Horacio whimpering, his continued delirium: Gimme your tits, gimme the milk from your tits, lemme drink it, lemme… and then silence. Silence and an acute pain in her vagina. A sharp pain that hours later was still present. A pain that made her shadow bend over while the two of them ran through the blackness of the night in Regla, looking for the Virgin. A lacerating pain, acidic and nauseous. A pain that made her breathing short, a pain that made it impossible to shake off her worsening, perpetual tremors.
Michelle didn’t come out of the bathroom. Michelle never knew what Horacio did to her. Michelle found him on the floor, without his pants but with his underwear undeniably on. Michelle was so determined that he be a part of things that she refused to look at the condition of the girl’s bed. Michelle did not see the disoriented eyes of her friend, nor did she feel her tremors or the sharpness in her lower abdomen. She only had eyes for him: Sweetness, you’re so drunk.
Nor did Michelle ever understand why the girl used the pretext of getting some fresh air to go out the door and never come back. Years later, they would talk about these things. Years later, the girl would say she had a panic attack and decided that the best time to visit the Virgin on the shores of the bay would always be right then, at dawn. Years later, Michelle would feign belief in this excuse, as if she was actually convinced, then change the subject.
But in those wee hours, she and her shadow were not thinking about Michelle. They imagined as they wailed against the wall that Michelle had been devoured by Horacio, swallowed by his dark mouth. His mouth and the streets were part of the same image. Horacio’s mouth extended the length of the neighborhood, through all of Regla. He couldn’t live anywhere else in Havana. He and Regla belonged to each other. His mouth and this ultramarine district, black lines on the same color strip. Black like the sea and the Virgin; the only black woman adored on this island.
They adored her too. Ever since Emilio, right smack in the middle of a trance, had told them that the Virgin was their mother too, she and the shadow had made intermittent pilgrimages to the chapel just to leave white flowers at her altar. Trips made on the mythic ferry, each one to view the appearance of the black mother in the midst of the stench, in that bay saturated by oil; so many journeys to Horacio’s neighborhood without ever going as far as his house out of sheer terror that that night could be repeated; so many restrictions; so many pleas to the mother-virgin-black-woman-Yemayá-patron-of-Havanaguardian-of-fishermen-docks-stevedores-seas-pregnanciesfury-storms-peace-and-pools-of-water. So much begging: Please don’t abandon me, please don’t leave me, don’t leave me, oh Virgin, men’s anger is aimed at my sex; liberate me from heartlessness and wildness; liberate me from lack of affection; be my mother; make me virginal always, before and after each birth, so that each one leaves my womb untouched.
There was so much supplication to the small black woman dressed in that intense blue, to the talismanic stone that Emilio had given them the day of the baptism—deadline day to name guardian angels—only to falter in the end, to let Horacio drag her along with Michelle; to leave a celebration that could not be postponed, and the long list of acquaintances who kept leaving, finally abandoning her in the vestibule full of fear, knowing that once Michelle went off to the bathroom there was no going back, that the only relief would be exposure to that darkened place, chock full of thieves from the docks, workers, traffickers in whatever merchandise filled their hands or their bellies; all that praying, for this. It wasn’t fair.
Emilio said the black mother was obsessed with justice. Emilio, godfather-father-big-brother-blood-of-her-blood poisoned against other men, said their mother would never abandon them, especially if they were in Regla, her home, the ultramarine. But on this airless night, as dawn neared, the only thing she and her shadow had to hold onto was a wall that left them exposed. It was so high they couldn’t possibly climb it and try to guess the way to the chapel.
If only we could hear a siren, they thought, any kind of sound from the boats, a sign from their mother that would allow them to slow the infinite tremors in their legs, in their belly, in the head that could barely sustain itself. Her body continued to lean against the white wall, the screen on which her disharmony w
as amply projected. Her shell of a girl, broken, deflowered, stained…This wall that took in her shadow just to show her how naked she was under the only streetlight in the area. If only we could hear a siren, they thought again.
But the silence insisted on swallowing all hope. Silence crowned her, covered her, enclosed her, surrounded and embraced her; the silence whispered to her: I am as divine as you’ll ever get, only to me should you direct your prayers; only I will be your guide in this city that has never wanted you, little provincial girl, simple, simple country girl, backwards girl, so backwards, adorer of false gods, lover of women who will not save you. I am Almighty Silence, I’m the man you cannot hurt, now you see me, now you don’t, but I’m always here…Let me caress you and your terror will be different…
Silence overwhelmed them. Silence like a million voices circled them. Silence through their viscera; silence through their body in a long loop. Long and sonorous, like the siren they so wanted to hear. More and more voices accumulating.
The voices took them to the very edge of consciousness, a total disconnection between flesh and the senses. The silence screamed its insults and they closed their eyes. They allowed themselves to be dragged under by the perpetual noise of the absolute silence coming from the place where they’d lost track of the Virgin. They were going to drop to the sidewalk forever, remain stuck to the asphalt; they wanted a small death, definitive; their own screams stuck in their throat; they wanted to ask the silence to stop, wanted a blue cape to rescue them, to lift them above the houses with red-tiled roofs, the ruined edifices; a blue maternal cape, a refuge that enveloped them together, that transformed them in mid-fiight, so that when she finally opened her eyes, she would find herself at the edge of the docks, ready to traverse the bay on the morning’s very first ferry.
