by Achy Obejas
“Usnavy!” a woman shouted, but with an unmistakable tone of annoyance. “For god’s sake, you’re in the way!”
It was, he noticed, his upstairs neighbor, shamelessly reaping construction materials from the ruins of the building next to him—a derrumbe that had suddenly come in to view. The building lay like a crushed egg, parts of its white walls piercing the exposed insides: a smashed mirror, a stained mattress ripped open like a vital organ, its yellow foam guts growing grotesquely in the rain.
“Yamilet, what’s going on?” Usnavy called out to her. “What are you doing?”
She rushed by him with doorknobs and light switches dangling from her hands like viscera. “What does it look like?”
It looked, Usnavy thought, like a scourge of locusts. His neighbors swarmed the body of the place, each tearing off bits that seemed two or three times their size and weight. They worked like the rafters at Cojímar, in utter silence. The only sound came from rocks groaning as they were moved, the hard human breathing of such extraordinary effort, and the occasional mumbled courtesy or warning extended a bystander such as himself.
In a moment, Usnavy realized he was drip-drying, the rain having stopped abruptly, the warmth slowly returning to his face and shoulders. He felt the water still on him running down, inexorably pulled by the magic of gravity. It clung to the bottom edges of his T-shirt, the rim of his short sleeves, and the seams of his pants. The rest of his clothing stiffened a bit as if touched by a natural starch.
Usnavy looked up—it was only mid-morning and the sun, though rising, wasn’t quite high enough to hide the beauty of a western rainbow, its red arch sweeping across the colonial rooftops. He located the orange, yellow, and green layers that dropped down—like on his own lamp at home—and then just below the first rainbow, a second, paler one, barely visible, like the reflection in his own amazed eyes.
To his surprise, Usnavy spotted a glint of the same swatch of colors in the earthly rubble before him, now stripped clean of every usable element. He leaned forward and squinted, holding onto the handlebars of the bikes on either side of him, trying to make out exactly what it was. Everyone seemed to be walking away now; no one else appeared to care or even notice the tiny fountain of colors. Yet the beams danced and danced: ruby, gold, emerald.
With the bikes at his sides, Usnavy pulled up as close as he could to the edge of the wreckage, but he was still too far to decipher the precise secret of the light in the ruins. With luck, he thought, he might be able to maneuver the bikes over there. But after venturing a bit in to the destruction site, it became clear that was impossible: There were rusted nails poking out everywhere, broken cement, sharp rocks, slippery puddles of rain. The tires wouldn’t make it; the chains might get caught on something. And the bikes were so heavy.
Again Usnavy leaned on the bikes and stretched forward for a closer look, but the shards of color sparkled obliquely. He wondered if perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. He’d heard on the streets how the food shortages had begun taking their toll on people, how the new spartan diets had started to eat at some, making their bones mushy, causing paralysis and blindness in others.
Usnavy rubbed his eyes, looked again. Then, to be sure he wasn’t imagining anything, he pulled a coin—a hollow Cuban coin—out of his pocket and pitched it in the direction of the shiny treasure. The coin struck something, producing a little geyser of what looked like red mist or powder.
Usnavy was taken aback. He put the bikes down in a pile, Obdulio’s newer one on top so it wouldn’t get scratched, and rather than undo the chain around his waist and deal with that complication, he snapped the American U-shaped lock on the necks of both bikes so that they seemed to be embracing. He dashed to the lights, skipping over chunks of broken walls, rusted steel spokes, shredded paperback books, and the inevitable orange slush from the old building’s life fluids.
The lights! Usnavy got down on his knees. The lights came from a lamp like his, only small, injured, its stained-glass panels fractured, strings of soft mucilage barely holding onto a piece of glass here, a loose wire there. Usnavy unearthed the heavy brass base, shoved aside the pieces of cement that pinned it, and held the lamp, letting light filter through its surviving color insets, the rainbow passing through to his face and chest.
Instantly, he felt the light waves oscillating somewhere deep inside him. At that moment, Usnavy could surrender to the splendor; he could believe, like Pythagoras, that everything could become bright by its own force of nature.
Light! Light!—marveled Usnavy, there on his knees, the lamp lifted to the heavens—the closest thing to infinite speed, a mystery to Plato and Euclid, Alhazen and even Einstein.
There was a commotion somewhere behind him but Usnavy was enraptured: The light swarmed around him, lapped at his face and shoulders.
“Usnavy! Usnavy!” came the screams.
He turned around in time to see his neighbor Yamilet running wildly after the two bikes, miraculously unhinged from the theft-proof American lock and whirling down the narrow streets. The bandits were two young men, their long hair tousled like action movie stars, one of them wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey. They laughed and disappeared into the maze of Old Havana, while Yamilet and a gaggle of kids trailed behind them yelling insults and profanities in their direction.
“Shame on you, you bastards, you’re stealing from a harmless old man!” she shouted at them.
A flabbergasted Usnavy stood alone in the middle of the collapse, the broken lamp in his hands while the American lock mocked him from a muddy puddle, gleaming like new, its tiny key still embedded in the slot. Had the simplicity of it confused him? Had he been so distracted …?
“Of all the rotten …!” Usnavy burst, kicking the lock against a shattered wall, stomping through the building’s remnants and accidentally ripping and loosening the sole of his right shoe. The lock bounced away, unharmed, the key like a bell’s clapper.
“Salao! Salao! Salao!” he ranted, hitting the air, booting rocks and debris all about the ruins.
Yamilet watched, stunned, as an exhausted Usnavy finally dropped to the ground, folding himself into a filthy fetus, a kaleidoscope of light in his bloody hands.
II.
For days afterward, Usnavy strolled like a tourist through Old Havana—looking up at the buildings as if for the first time—his eyes searching for the dazzle of color he’d found in the lamp in the ruins. He’d peek between the arms and legs of the invisible giants that held up the city; through the unlit frames of balconies, the tall bars on the windows, the iron balustrades, searching for the spark that indicated the possibility that, somewhere inside, there was another nugget of color—a flame, a spark, a rainbow burst.
In the library he looked in dusty magazines and catalogues from before the Revolution and studied the lamps: avatars of modernism, designed for electricity, so popular in Cuba precisely for those reasons. After all, the Cubans—in this case blessed instead of cursed by U.S. intervention—had electricity before most of the American South and other rural areas. But, to Usnavy’s chagrin, there was that constant confusion of the U.S. and modernity, as if living in the twentieth century were inextricably tied to the island’s northern neighbor, an undercurrent more powerful than any storm. To have an electric lamp in Cuba in the Republic’s early years didn’t just mean comfort or affluence, it meant an implied intimacy with the colossus of the north.
Usnavy closed a catalogue he had been examining and flipped through some old issues of Bohemia magazine instead. There were stained-glass lamps in those too, depicted in ads and illustrations, dropping from the ceilings of mansions, at the elbow of a banker at his desk, or with the banker’s wife, posed with a floor model for the society pages. Usnavy set the magazine down and ran his fingers through his hair. There was only so much he could absorb, only so much he could take in without feeling his stomach grow queasy and his hands begin to tremble.
After a few hours of trying to understand the lamp—the little lamp, the
injured one he’d brought home from the derrumbe—he set himself on a route through Old Havana, scoping out the possibilities of finding another small and simple thing. If he could get some glass to match that of his find, he could figure out later how to cut it and work it into the frame (which needed to be straightened out and reinforced).
Often, though, what he spied instead were vitrales—those stainedglass portals above doors or windows—usually drawn like petals or blossoms, but in primary reds and blues, yellows and nebulous white. They were very pretty, he thought, but a little vulgar, certainly not gorgeous like his magnificent lamp, or even the injured one, with their tight, meticulous designs, their colors like dawn or the many shades the sea boasts when it nestles against the coast.
The purpose of the vitrales, he realized, was exactly the opposite of that of the lamps. Instead of delivering light, the vitrales were designed to temper its intensity. They were part of the eighteenth-century criollo architects’ scheme—with impossibly high ceilings, top-to-bottom windows, fluttering shutters—to create dark little rooms, cool and dry, a refuge from the heat and daze of the tropics. Instead of cradling its inhabitants in a homey shade, criollo architecture obliterated any notion of privacy and left them as exposed as nomads on the Sahel, victims to every climatic extreme. The floor-to-ceiling windows were essentially doors with bars, allowing anyone on the streets to put a spotlight on life inside at any time: a young woman doing the wash in a metal tub, kids reading imported comic books, a circle of seniors playing mah-jongg.
The tall rooms usually opened up to a central patio ringed by a balcony that served as both perch and thoroughfare. Without hallways, the tenants used these terraces to navigate from room to room. But when it rained or stormed, they became wet and slippery, forcing the residents inside, knocking from bedroom door to bedroom door, tiptoeing around weeping widows in moments of prayer, embarrassed young lovers, or harried mothers hoping for a moment of quiet.
Now here he was, suddenly a voyeur, contributing to the spectacle: eyeing every flash of light in each humble home, sticking his nose between the window bars to see if he could spy a lamp inside, even talking up old women (and some young ones too, who surely thought him an amusing old man, not lecherous but eccentric), just to find out if there were more of these lamps somewhere out there and what he could learn from them. Instinctively, Usnavy refrained from talking to men—the few who might hang out at home during the thermal afternoons—afraid they might see through him, all the way to his newly emerging and embarrassing cupidity.
“Oh, yes, they’re American, the lamps you’re talking about,” said an elderly woman with a kindly grandmother’s face. They were talking through the bars on her window, like courting teenagers. She was jittery in all her extremities, mahogany-colored. Usnavy imagined her ancestors tender and sweet, among the thousands of outwitted, unwilling seafarers at Badagry or Gorée more than a century ago.
“Excellent lamps, excellent—as only Americans can make them,” she continued.
She lived only blocks from Usnavy, though it seemed a universe away. He was sure he’d spotted a large auspicious shape above her shoulder, a muted aurora. “They’re for kings and presidents, you know, for kings and presidents …”
“Kings and presidents?” Usnavy asked with a laugh as he tried to focus on what appeared to be an extraordinary shade draped in shadow above a table in a back room. One of the rear walls seemed to be tilting.
“Yes, every palace has one—every palace in every country. Somebody told me that. I mean, in civilized countries,” the old woman went on.
“Every one?” he asked, making time, wondering why he’d never noticed that before, curious as to how it might look blazing with light: Would it be like his? Would it shout out its colors? Was it even more resplendent?
“Well, maybe they’re not for kings and presidents anymore,” the elderly woman said, distracted by Usnavy’s fixed look over her shoulder. There seemed to be a quiet, powdery burst now and again from her ceiling, a little shower of dust that rained down on her. “But they’re very nice, very elegant, don’t you think?”
Usnavy nodded, then swabbed his sweaty face with his forearm. It was so hot his feet were swelling.
“We have … I mean, we had one once, a very big one, massive, but then it broke, and—” She stopped; to Usnavy she was clearly reconsidering what she was about to say. “You know, I think my grandson took it …”
She said she didn’t know what he’d done with the lamp, of course, and it had been so many years … In fact, her grandson was now in Miami, the prosperous owner of a Ford dealership, selling updated versions of those rumpling metal hulks that somehow managed to get gasoline in spite of the shortages and then slowly paraded down the Malecón.
“See them? They’re forty, fifty years old and they’re still going,” she said about the old Fords, successfully changing the subject, “unlike all those other ones …” She didn’t finish her sentence but Usnavy understood: She meant the Ladas, the Volgas, far newer but lying like clubbed seals on the sides of the roads.
“You know my washing machine?” she asked. “It’s prehistoric, a crocodile, but it works. It’s a Kenmore, a Sears. See what I mean?”
Usnavy nodded quietly. Why were these the only kinds of conversations he seemed to be having lately? He didn’t want to argue. Besides, what was there to argue about? He had never handled any of those appliances long enough to know anything about them, whether they were made in California or China. And what he knew about washing clothes, besides the necessary pressure to clean certain stains, was that—after thirty-five years of Revolution and scores of imported allied laundry detergent as well as the occasional domestic product—everybody still referred to the powdery stuff as Fab, as if they couldn’t shake the long northern shadow even in matters as simple as that.
Usnavy scowled without meaning to. His hands still stung from the cuts he’d gotten rescuing the injured lamp in the derrumbe. And now he had a burgeoning blister on his foot from so much walking. He realized that, even as they spoke, the woman’s grandson might well be selling a big whale of a Ford to Obdulio right then and there.
And here he was in the meantime, meandering through the old neighborhood in a stupor of afternoon light, the sole of his right shoe sewn back on by his neighbor, Jacinto, with fibers pulled from a piece of the rope he’d taken—he still couldn’t get over it: he’d stolen—for Obdulio’s fateful trip. What the hell was wrong with him?
As Usnavy turned home at the cathedral plaza, his mind still on the Badagry woman, a group of young people gathered to sing Christian songs.
“Let there be light!” one of them shouted with exaggerated glee. By his red singed nose and accent Usnavy knew right away he was an American missionary, there to save their sweltering souls.
“Genesis 1:3!” shouted a young Cuban convert, smiling with pride at his rudimentary knowledge. The others clapped approvingly, deferring.
“What light?” Usnavy said, suddenly angry.
He wasn’t usually one to inject himself into public discussions but these people were just steps from his home, and getting closer every day. Hanging out with Frank during his years of Quaker schooling and subsequent disillusionment, Usnavy had learned a few things. Later, when Frank joined a Baptist group that had Bible classes every Wednesday night, he brought Usnavy and the other boys those lessons too. Diosdado would read over the controversial passages so he could respond to Frank. Usnavy had learned much about the Bible by listening to them argue.
“God didn’t create the sun, the moon, or the stars until the fourth day!” Usnavy yelled at the missionaries. “Haven’t you gotten that far? So what light, huh? It defies logic, doesn’t it—even its own internal logic?” He smirked, he snarled.
The Cuban faces went blank and turned to the foreign teacher.
“Brother, don’t be so angry,” said the American, but in a conciliatory, calm tone. He had thin, stringy hair, eyes that seemed transparent. His Spanish
was a long slur but the Cubans sighed, so enraptured were they with him. “The answer is right in the Bible, in Isaiah 30:26: ‘The light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of the seven days.’ See, brother, the light of creation was seven times brighter than the sun!”
Usnavy was aghast. “What …?”
The light of creation was brighter than the sun? How could that be? (Why—why—did these people always have an answer? Why were they always so damn sure of themselves? At moments like these, he utterly loathed them—and felt justified in his disdain, leaning again on Che: “A people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”)
“This is an opiate,” a flustered Usnavy said, falling back on the quickest argument he could conjure, the only response in which he felt safe. “He’s brainwashing you!” he exclaimed to his fellow Cubans as he pointed at the foreigner and swiftly walked away. He could feel the pilgrims’ gaze burning beatifically on his fading figure, their prayers aimed like missiles at his savage soul.
The small, wounded lamp needed parts. It needed a few new glass inserts, some soldering; the neutered base, with its sculpted bronze, begged for polishing. Usnavy had used his silk cloth as best he could, but the lamp required more than elbow grease. He’d examined its skeleton and figured he could get any welding that might be necessary done somewhere, but he needed to find the colored glass pieces to fit into it first.
Like some of the lamps he’d seen that held glass between copper foil—one at a dollar-only restaurant, another long ago at the home of the poet Regino Boti, back in his youth in Guantánamo—the little injured one varied from the magnificent one at home, which was held together with a lead armature. Instead of feline eyes, the small one was dominated by a dragonfly motif. He figured there had to be others like it; indeed, he had a gut feeling that the Badagry woman was holding out or just plain lying to him: How would her grandson sneak such a lampout of the country? And why? The whole idea was preposterous. He’d have to question her about it further next time.
