by Achy Obejas
Usnavy had a memory of his mother as a charming presence, young and tender in the glow. When she moved to Havana many years later, he was comforted to see the lamp in her possession. The luminescence kept her youthful somehow, so that Usnavy never had a memory of her as old, as if the crone whose features served as the only model for his own was a neighbor instead of his mother. She hovered in his peripheral vision, as tantalizingly close and out of reach as a promise. Her burial was a favor he executed for someone he was only remotely connected to, an act of charity meant to ameliorate her aloneness and prove that, in Cuba anyway, no one died without the benefit of community. At his mother’s passing, the lamp was Usnavy’s only inheritance, which he accepted like a reward for exemplary revolutionary work.
In the damp and acrid tenement, the lamp was a vibrant African moon in a room that was by nature s pectral. It was delicate and oversized in a place that demanded discretion and toughness—if it swayed, it might shatter against the concrete. But Usnavy insisted on displaying it.
“What good does it do packed away?” he’d asked Lidia (as if storing it somewhere else were an actual option). “Let’s just enjoy it, it’s so lovely.”
Lately, he knew Lidia fretted because their upstairs neighbors—in violation of both the law and logic—had built up from their second floor room, adding another whole tier for themselves on the roof. Using bricks scavenged from the many edifices that had crumbled in recent times, the neighbors had nearly doubled their space, but the weight of the new construction was taking its toll. In Usnavy’s room, the ceiling already had small cracks, and Lidia had spotted a line of water yellowing the plaster, circling the spot where the lamp was attached. She had tried talking to the neighbors but they dismissed her worries. And when she mentioned it to her husband, he just nodded, never quite registering her concern.
“I’ll talk to them, I promise,” he’d tell her, but he seemed to regard his lamp as invulnerable, and the talk with the neighbors kept dropping on his list of things to do until Lidia became resigned to the problem and the peril.
In the meantime, Usnavy’s only preoccupation seemed to be, as always, maintaining the lamp’s cleanliness and shine, polishing it as if it were a piece of treasure dug up from the sea.
Lidia would stare up at him, as if about to ask something: Her lips would part slightly, quiver, then close again.
Usnavy would stand barefoot on the bed where Lidia and Nena slept and reach up and rub each of the little glass panels with a silk cloth guaranteed not to streak or scratch. A couple of the panels had hairline fractures; Usnavy knew they could pop with the slightest push and he was especially gentle around them.
At night, he kept the light on until the last possible second, engaged in a never-ending staring contest with the lamp’s feline eyes. Sometimes, especially when she was younger, his daughter Nena would curl into the curve under his arm and join him, imagining all the possibilities within the lamp’s vast offerings. That, she’d say, aiming a finger at a green slice of light, was the fertile Nile traversing the continent, and that, he’d point out in the opaqueness of a tiny triangle, the whirling sands on the beaches of Madagascar.
But these days Usnavy was on his own. Now Nena would bury her head under the sheet, ignoring Africa—ignoring him—and sigh loudly and repeatedly until Usnavy finally pulled the lamp’s cord and darkness imploded.
Outside the door of their room in the tenement, Usnavy and his family had a big metal barrel of water which he guarded zealously with a lock and chain, and which they used by filling a plastic bottle or bucket and carrying that to the bathroom in the middle of the courtyard, a swirling funnel of flies shared with the rest of the tenants (now too numerous to count). The water was hard, almost metallic, swimming with so many invisible parasites that it was imperative not to swallow even when brushing one’s teeth. Everything had to be boiled, the steam rising in the tropical heat like a malevolent and cruel ghost.
There was no light in the bathroom except what came in through a broken window where the local boys would lurk and peek, so that at night it was essential to carry the fortitude for argument and a torch made from rolled-up newspapers. (Flashlights and candles had long disappeared from Havana.) Sometimes in the dark, Usnavy would imagine breaking off a part of the lamp—a lump of fiery orange and red, one of those brilliant eyes—and using it to light his way instead.
What struck Usnavy most these days was how many strangers suddenly surrounded him. Not that long ago, he knew everyone who lived on Tejadillo. But in the last year, at least thirty people had left, mostly young men, a few young women—all of them by boat or balsa, wobbly and dangerous. Their rooms were instantly taken over by supposed relatives from the provinces—large, overflowing families, with dozens of kids and so many cousins. They sometimes brought roosters with them, small pigs, a goat once.
For Usnavy, the relatives were a blur, a vague echo of his original neighbors. He couldn’t keep all their names straight. He could barely tell them apart. Worst of all, what had once seemed to him like a safe harbor, now struck him as alien and claustrophobic, a pirate’s cove.
By early evening, when everyone in the tenement sat on the stoop playing Parcheesi and chess (using beans, shells, and pebbles for game pieces), or milled about the courtyard, Usnavy would wash up in the communal bathroom, and then ride his bike down to the docks, enjoying the moist breeze but also wistful about the now empty harbor: Gone were the Soviet vessels and those of their former friends from the socialist bloc. The Russians, with their cryptic lettering, would leave no sons named after powerful ships or armed forces in Cuba, only a pedestrian Pavel here and there and the predictable Ivans and Vladimirs.
Most nights after a meager dinner of rice—that’s about all there was these days, occasionally accompanied by a dollop of beans or the fried remains of a grapefruit rind—Usnavy would seek relief in a game of dominos under the trees at a tiny park down narrow Montserrate, playing with a few other men his age who’d sit on boxes and strategize, slapping the thick pieces down with grunts and puffs of blue cigar smoke.
“Guapo!” a cocky-looking character called out when he saw Usnavy approaching. That could mean Handsome or Gutsy but it was hard to say what was intended in this case, since the fellow shouting was Frank, one of Usnavy’s oldest friends, but a guy known as a wiseass, even a little cruel sometimes.
Usnavy’s stomach made a screeching noise. He was late because he’d gone with Nena to get a copy of her birth certificate at the civil registry in Playa district, only to be told they only had documents through 1976—before Nena’s 1980 birth—so she’d have to go back to the one in Old Havana.
Recently, Nena had lost her identification card, which had turned into a bureaucratic nightmare that now had him mortified and her seething. Discovering the initial loss, Nena had gone immediately to the Old Havana office that issued the ID cards all Cubans needed to carry with them. But there she was told they had no record at all of her, that her documents must be in Playa, where they had lived with Lidia’s parents when Nena was born.
“But they’re the ones who sent us here,” Usnavy pleaded.
The clerk shrugged. “What do you want me to do?” he asked blandly.
Overhead a fan whipped the hot air about, the rusty blades squeaking as they turned. Nena sighed, wiping a line of moisture from her lip, waving her father away as he tried to explain that these things can happen anywhere in the world.
He hated that, these days, every little detail had other meanings. A casual stumble could be turned into an essay on ineptness—if not by Nena, then by any of her friends or schoolmates; nowadays, Usnavy thought, anyone at all could twist things around, make things look worse than they really were. He lived in fear of how that dynamic could affect Nena, how it could drive her someday to the shores, like all those crazy rafters and windsurfers, to look for relief on the horizon.
Days later, at the Old Havana office, when Nena’s papers were pronounced missing one more time and another c
lerk instructed them to go back again to the civil registry in Playa to get a new birth certificate, Nena declared herself lost to society.
“If you want me to carry my own ID, Papi, then you get it,” she said, not in a spoiled way, not out of defiance, but out of exasperation. This was exactly what Usnavy was afraid of, that frustration over something so minor would throw her off the righteous path. He glared at the clerk, wanting to kill the messenger right there and then.
“We have a copy of your birth certificate at home, under the bed,” Usnavy told his daughter, not keen at all on her being lost to society. “Don’t worry.”
But when they got to Tejadillo, he discovered that their photostatic copy of her birth certificate had been ruined by dampness and age. A green circle of mildew pretended to officialize it with its own seal.
Nena sighed long and deep and shook her head before leaving the family’s room to go hang out with her friends, which made Usnavy anxious. He knew he couldn’t lock her up but how he wished he could; how he wished he could keep her from telling this story, in which so much lent itself to misreading and manipulation.
A few days later, though it had taken quite a bit of coaxing to get her to come along yet again to the Old Havana office, Usnavy tried to squelch his irritation and concern as they strolled together through the office doors. But when they entered this time—sweaty, covered with grime after the long bike ride with Nena balanced on the handlebars—they discovered it was being painted and they’d have to come back yet again in a few days. The office smelled fresh, implied a future.
The same clerk they’d seen before was busy pouring paint from one can into another. On the way out, he offered to sell some to Usnavy. It was an institutional ivory color, which Usnavy declined instinctively.
I will maintain my integrity, I will be free of reproach, he swore to himself. As he turned away from the temptation, he glimpsed Nena’s expression—a mix of resignation and disbelief. It was true their room needed painting. But there was no way he was going to buy that paint illegally. They would do what they’d always done: wait their turn, wait until their request was formally and legally approved.
Nena sighed again—a long and quiet breath. This time Usnavy joined her, inadvertently catching himself exhaling as if coming out of some Zen exercise, trying to keep his mind clear.
The domino players on Montserrate were Usnavy’s childhood pals, men who’d enjoyed and endured together. But Usnavy, though he knew he was appreciated as much as any of the others, also knew he stood apart from them. They were criollos—Cuban-born, all of them—and they were well aware that Usnavy had been birthed right there too, in Caimanera, amidst the bloody sheets that covered a bed at a rooming house called Indiana (before he and his mother moved up to The Brooklyn), but they insisted, now and again, on calling him El Yanqui, even though he’d explained over and over that his father was Jamaican, a worker at the U.S. base, who ate salt pork and spoke English with a lilt (though, truth be told, he had no memory of him at all, just his mother’s brief stories, prompted only when a young Usnavy would ask).
But Frank and the other boys didn’t care. They looked at Usnavy’s fair skin and reddish-blond hair as a boy and laughed, called him Tom Sawyer, called him Mickey (after the American actor Mickey Rooney), but mostly El Yanqui, which irked Usnavy always, even long before the Revolution. That’s about when they backed off, after years of taunting him with that, because they knew—they were friends, after all—that calling somebody El Yanqui might have other meaning or consequences then.
They had all celebrated the triumph of the Revolution together. They’d been warriors in the rebel army’s largest battalion, the Sixth Column, composed entirely of boys from Oriente just like them: poor boys, orphaned boys, boys who—with the exception of Frank and, to a lesser extent, Diosdado—couldn’t read or write much beyond their names; young men who waved the black-and-red 26th of July flag and saw Che as a kind of real-life Errol Flynn.
It was because of that fortuitous affiliation (a lark for most of them, actually) that they all wound up in Havana together, when the Sixth Column was turned into the capital’s first revolutionary police force. Now products of the literacy campaign, the Sixth Column also founded the Revolution’s first magazine, Rebelde Seis, but only Frank participated in that, and only Usnavy kept copies, right there under the bed next to the now classic—and somewhat problematic—back issues of Lunes de Revolución and a thin little volume of stories by Calvert Casey, published on faint, splotchy paper.
As the years passed, things changed for each of the friends, like for so many others: Frank—the smart one, he’d been educated before the Revolution in Quaker and Baptist schools in Holguín—found his opportunities limited and lost his badge because he refused to abandon his faith (although later he became an atheist on his own; a logical evolution, he claimed, resulting from experience). At one point, Obdulio’s brother left the country by jumping the fence from Caimanera to the U.S. base, and then Obdulio began getting pressure from his sergeant to stop writing to his exiled kin. Years later, Diosdado’s effeminate son, Reynaldo, was arrested because he wore lipstick in public or some such stupidity (as far as Usnavy was concerned, both the lipstick and the arrest were ranked at the same level of inanity), and that was that—everyone knew the boy would be on the first raft he could get on. Finally, Mayito—his wife and children in New York thanks to an American relative Mayito had never known she had—had resigned from the force, embarrassed by his wife’s antirevolutionary stands, before he was isolated by his peers. After biding his time for years, expecting her to return admonished by the horrors of capitalism, now he waited instead for her claims to go through immigration and for his U.S. visa to arrive.
One by one, Usnavy’s friends had begun to question, then doubt then snicker, then openly joke about the situation, sometimes goodnaturedly, often bitterly.
“It was good, it was right at the beginning,” Obdulio would say, “but you have to admit, Usnavy, it didn’t turn out exactly like we thought it would.”
“All this sacrificing for tomorrow,” Frank would chime in, “and tomorrow never comes.”
“One hundred years from now, will anyone remember what we did here?” asked Obdulio, but it was a rhetorical question; he was shaking his head.
“And whatever goes wrong is always somebody’s else’s fault!” added Diosdado. “After thirty-five years, don’t you think it’s time somebody else got a chance to see what they can do? After thirty-five years, haven’t we produced anybody who can step up?”
“What remains, huh?” asked Frank.
But Usnavy, the only one who’d been honorably discharged from the police force (flat feet and back pain), refused to join in. The Comandante’s picture wasn’t up in his home to keep away the president of his local Committee in Defense of the Revolution, but because Usnavy really admired him. Usnavy still volunteered for block-watch duties. He still went down to the Plaza de la Revolución to catch the Comandante’s marathon speeches and worked himself into a frenzy of joy, jumping up and down, shouting and waving his little paper flag.
During the Comandante’s out-of-town or foreign trips, Usnavy never failed to get to a neighbor’s house to watch him on TV. (Years earlier Usnavy had earned the right, through excellence in revolutionary work, to his own television, but to Lidia and Nena’s dismay, he’d given it—at the suggestion of a woman from the CDR—to an autistic boy who lived down the street and occasionally hung out at the domino games on Montserrate. “I can’t tell who’s stupider, you or him,” Frank chided him. “The boy’s retarded, for god’s sake—he can’t even tell if the damn thing is on or off.”)
In the last few years, Usnavy had served as treasurer of his CDR, making it his duty to gather dues and keep track of project accounts. Most people would have considered it a horrible job—cajoling neighbors and friends, being responsible for almost one hundred pesos a month (sometimes, when somebody was a little short, he’d even put in a few pesos of his own)
. Yet Usnavy viewed it as an honor, a vote of confidence in his character. It was because of the Revolution, he assured Nena, that he could participate as a responsible member of society, as good as anyone else. It was because of the Revolution, he believed, that he wasn’t dismissed as some hick from the hills. It was because of the Revolution that the lifeline on his hand had been rerouted, that he was born every day a New Man.
“We’re a nation of giants,” he’d proclaim, sure that he saw invisible titans marching down the streets, holding up the city, its bridges and towers, factories and monuments.
Which is why, as far as Usnavy was concerned, now that the government had legalized the American dollar in the last year, life had become something of an irony. Obdulio, Diosdado, and Mayito, until recently disillusioned and caustic, were suddenly the happy recipients of legal monthly remittances from their previously treasonous relatives in the U.S. This allowed them to purchase their own color TVs, fresh meat, and comfortable shoes on the black market where Frank was busy earning handsome profits from all sorts of unseemly wheeling and dealing. The rest of the populace verged on the edge of misery.
Usnavy—without relatives abroad to send him dollars, and defiantly refusing to invest or engage in illicit business—didn’t know exactly how it all worked, only that his friends were suddenly jovial and that the teasing about his moral rectitude and revolutionary fervor was also at an all-time high. None of their stomachs were churning; none of them lacked the means to buy butter while everyone else ate their bread with salt and vegetable oil.
