Ruins

by Achy Obejas

  After inquiring about hospital records and waiting for what seemed an infinity, yet another nurse—she barely looked at him—led Usnavy down an even blurrier hall to a room full of books with yellowed pages. She deposited him there, turned, and closed the door behind her, leaving Usnavy and his broken lamp all alone. Here, even the floor had stacks of dusty books everywhere, the result of prior visitors too lazy or in too much of a hurry to put them back in any kind of order. It occurred to Usnavy that, alone, he could embed secret messages in them, tear the books to pieces, pee on their pages, or set the room on fire. If only he were capable of any of it, he thought, if only …

  He sat down at the only table under the nervous flickering of yet another long fluorescent tube. He placed the broken lamp carefully on the floor beside him, then ran his hand through his hair and sighed.

  “Okay,” he said aloud, “okay.”

  Then he pulled the first heavy tome toward him and began to strip the flimsy pages one from the other, searching for names corresponding to 1980, Nena’s birth year and the last time Cuba had experienced a mass exodus. He remembered thinking at the time that it would never happen again, that this tide of people leaving couldn’t be more than this one explosion, and that Nena’s arrival was not just replenishment but also a rebirth, a new dawn, with its subtle rainbows, its dignity and glory. He wanted to return to Cojímar, to call everyone back from the lure of the lights on the other side.

  Our fate, he thought as he turned the pages, can’t be to suffer these constant losses.

  Usnavy stared at the scores and scores of names, at the hundreds of Cuban births on the page in front of him. And in a second, he saw them all: Cubans on the bounding sea, Cubans at sunrise and dusk; multitudes of Cubans before Che’s visage, wandering Fifth Avenue or the Thames, the shores of the Bosphorous or the sands outside the pyramids; mirrors and mirrors, mercury and water; a family portrait in Hialeah that he recognized from years before in Caimanera; the thick green leaves of tobacco and forgotten stalks of cane flowering in the fields; his mother with her tangled hair, his father tilting his hat like Jacinto’s father but in New Orleans or Galveston; the shadows of birds of paradise against a stucco wall; ivory dominos; a shallow and watery grave, then another longer passage, a trail of bones back to Badagry; bison and cheetahs.

  As he went from page to page, Usnavy fingered the lamp in the bag and realized Virgilio was right: He was engaged not by the reality of light, by its brilliance or heat, but by the universe of colors in his magnificent lamp—the one in his room, the spectacular one with no signature—by the bubbles and ripples that marred certain panels but which he had grown to think of as particularities, not imperfections; all parts of the greater and more beautiful whole.

  He knew his great lamp by heart: the panel with a wave, the one with effervescence; one for sure had a hairline—or a hair itself, perhaps. Some were thicker, bolder than all the others. He knew each curve and slope, each flat surface, each sharp grain. They were flawed but steady, genuine, his.

  The reality of light for him was precisely this: The surfaces on which it glittered, the scenes it illuminated. Light alone was air, nothingness.

  And glass, he knew, was not what it seemed. It was solid to the unknowing eye, but Usnavy understood the atomic structure belied its true identity, indeed, its DNA. Glass was liquid, just like rain, like the ocean, like the water embracing his beloved island.

  For hours, Usnavy searched through tome after tome for Nena’s number. In all of that time, no one came looking for him; no one even peeked inside the room. It was all silence and stillness, a place without time or day of the week, a room as empty or full as he wanted it to be: the hull of a ship, the cabin on a space rocket, a womb. What could the Leakeys find here?

  There are no wild animals in Cuba, Usnavy thought as he hunted, none. “No wild animals here,” he muttered to himself, “only anteaters, transparent frogs, and tiny, tiny birds. No bears, no lions, no tigers, not even a sighting, a description of one.”

  Horses came with the conquerors, cats with the slaves, and the Taínos and Siboneys, he continued to himself, died from too much smoke. The Jews came to Cuba in disguise looking for salvation, the Chinese for gold mountains and silver fish, and the Africans—dragged here against their will—prayed that the island was at least less savage than those beasts that pretended to own them.

  Usnavy couldn’t believe it. He’d found the right book, found the right page, except Nena’s number wasn’t there. The page followed its sick linear logic, one little numeral after another, but there, where Nena’s number should have been, next to her name, next to his and Lidia’s, was instead a gap, a tear, a hole in the page, as round as a pen, as charred at the edges as a bullet wound.

  Usnavy grabbed his lamp from the floor littered with dusty books and explained this all to the nurse who’d just reappeared. She sighed as if she’d accompanied her widowed mother to those Tai Chi exercises and had learned to hold all the air of the world in her lungs and to let it out so slowly that hours would pass and she’d still be standing there, in the perfectly tranquil garden of her mind, her lips slightly puckered, the air hissing its last.

  “No lions,” Usnavy grumbled as he waited for her to take it all in and decide what, if anything, to do next. He wanted the invisible giants to take him away to a cozy and quiet place where he could go to sleep, a deep, deep sleep.

  The nurse gave him a quick glance, as if she wasn’t sure what she’d heard—lions?—then led him down another infinite abyss of a hallway to yet another room, a vault full of mildew and silence. Usnavy shivered. She didn’t turn on the light but sauntered to the center, as if it was a temple and this was the bima or sacrificial rock. After a flick of her wrist Usnavy saw a tiny point of light explode in the middle of the blackness: a star burst, an official form—another form!—taking shape on the blue screen.

  “Her name?” the nurse said.

  He gave her the information all over again, this time noticing that, as he waited, his feet made a squishy sound, a wet smacking sound like kisses. He looked down at the impossible blackness around his shoes, then up at the nurse, who was nothing more than a perfect silhouette bent over the computer keyboard.

  “The floor’s wet,” he said.

  She nodded, maybe—he couldn’t really tell—and kept typing.

  “With the computer … I mean, you could get electrocuted,” he went on. He had the injured lamp in the dry paper bag under his arm.

  “There’s a leak,” she said, ignoring him.

  A leak? There was water everywhere. Usnavy felt his heart split open like a fleshy green coconut.

  By the time he got to Tejadillo, Usnavy had not only skipped the morning shift at the bodega but was on his way to blowing off the afternoon too. He knew this would be the second time in so many days that he’d missed work and, undoubtedly, there would be worry enough to send someone to his house to see what was wrong. But for the first time in his life, he didn’t care. What could they say to him? That he was like everyone else? What could they do?

  Usnavy pushed his way through the courtyard where his neighbors were brazenly preparing to flee the country, their ropes, plastic jugs, and junk collecting in the middle like the stuff for a bonfire. Instead of the clanging cymbals and braying trumpets of timba, now the courtyard echoed with the wail of recorded electric guitars and their promises.

  Usnavy elbowed past the kids who ran around handing the adults bags and knapsacks and pieces of wood, metal hangers like the one Chachi had used to unstuff the drain, and belts and ropes to hold things together. (Instinctively, he looked around for Nena, relieved to not find her among those preparing to leave.) The mood was festive, like a balloon, and as fragile: This could turn into shreds of meaningless rubber, into nothing, if anybody took it that wee bit too far. No one was playing dominos or marbles or Parcheesi now. A frayed poster from a previous holiday march flapped from a balcony above, its red letters quoting Che: We cannot be sure of having somethin
g to live for unless we’re willing to die for it.

  Usnavy threw open the door to his family’s room in time to catch a startled Lidia and Rosita in the very throes of their own crime: The aroma of tender meat filled the room. Usnavy gasped. Sitting on the floor, the women were holding above an iron pot various blankets, all brown with spices, cutting them into strips that resembled beef. High above them the magnificent lamp shone like the arrival of fair-haired Columbus before the island’s natives: effulgent, imperial.

  “Where have you been?” Lidia demanded, leaping from the floor but not even pretending to cover up her activities.

  “Where have I …? What are you doing?” he cried.

  Lidia stiffened. “We’re earning some dollars,” she said defiantly. From the floor, Rosita smirked, her hands stained gold from their labor.

  “You fed this to our daughter!” he exclaimed, his teeth clenched, pointing with his nose like a hunting dog at the strips coiling in the cauldron. They swarmed around like intestines, like worms.

  “No, no, no, Usnavy, it’s not what you think,” Rosita rose to his wife’s defense, all the while wiping her hands on a rag.

  “Stay out of it!” he screamed.

  “Stay out of it? Thanks to her our daughter has vitamins, Usnavy!” Lidia hissed. She grabbed a white medicinal bottle from on top of the fridge and shook it in his face, its pills like seeds in a maraca or chekeré.

  “You fed our daughter a blanket, Lidia, how can you even talk about vitamins?”

  As he fretted, Rosita maneuvered behind him and closed the door, where a few of the courtyard kids had begun to peer in, drawn by the spectacle of an argument between a couple that wasn’t known to fight. The neighbors’ eyes were larger, more intense, and precarious than the cats’ above.

  “What about that, huh?” Usnavy ranted.

  “I tell you, she didn’t know!” Rosita hissed. “I sold her the damn sandwich without her knowing what it was.”

  “But when I found out, I asked in,” Lidia continued, without apology. “I mean, somebody here has to earn some dollars, Usnavy, and it wasn’t going to be you!”

  “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” Usnavy tossed the injured lamp down on the bed, its brittle pieces rattling and clanging in protest, and pushed his fists into his pants pocket. “You’ll see, you’ll see!” he railed, pulling both his pocket linings into the light, fuzzy sock puppets that dangled from his waist, flaccid and empty. “What …?”

  He thrust his palms into his back pockets, pulling those free as well, the twenty-dollar bill nowhere to be found, while Rosita and Lidia gave each other worried looks. “It’s here, hold on—I had a twenty-dollar bill—dollars—I had them just two minutes ago,” he protested as he frantically patted himself on his chest and thighs. “Maybe that nurse … that fucking nurse …”

  The scrap of paper on which Nena’s temporary birth certificate number was written rolled from a fold in one of his back pockets and he scrambled to the floor eagerly, then, realizing what it was, tossed it on the bed. “Your daughter’s birth certificate number … well, this one’s just until they find the real one … see? It’s here, I’m placing it right here,” he said deliberately, theatrically, his hair tossed all about, as he tore at Nena’s Michael Jackson poster—Lidia and Rosita cringed at the sound—leaving one gigantic jagged scar of white across it. He fumbled with the piece of tape on the poster’s back, then pulled it from the paper. The gumminess glued his fingers together unexpectedly and he jerked his hand for an instant, sticking the tape on the wall, the birth certificate number clinging to it.

  Usnavy was panting. Perspiration trickled down his face, cold and clear. “Somebody stole my money,” he said, thoroughly defeated. “I had twenty dollars—I drove a Canadian around and made twenty dollars—”

  “You drove …?” Lidia said, amazed. “A foreigner …?”

  “You can ask Diosdado—you can ask Jacinto, he saw my money—goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it!” He was pulling his hair.

  Rosita shook her head. “Salao,” she whispered, grabbing her pot of fake meat and trying to slip out the door. “I’ve got to run,” she said to Lidia, “before no one can get out.”

  “Salao, huh?” screamed Usnavy. But his voice squeaked and cracked—in the chaos, he remembered a verse from the Book of Amos: Does a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey? “I’m so goddamn sick of being salao!” he yelped.

  And with that he shoved Lidia against the door, making it impossible for Rosita to escape. He leapt on the bed, taking hold of his magnificent lamp with his two flinty hands. The lamp groaned and dropped another inch from the ceiling, raining down its wheezy white meal on Usnavy, who seemed not to notice that his prize now hung by the miracle of a thin knot of red and blue wires intertwined like cardiac arteries. As the two women watched dumbfounded, Usnavy snapped a red glass panel out of the lamp, then another.

  “See these? See these?” he shouted at them, one panel like a fiery flame in each fist. “I’ll show you who will bring the dollars to this house! I’ll show you who’s salao!”

  Then he hopped from the bed, his right shoe inexplicably flipping open, and ran out of the room, out to the courtyard where Chachi and Yamilet and the boy with the bike tires were tying together the handles of bulging plastic bags to take on their journey. Usnavy rushed past the swarming flies by the deserted bathroom, past Jacinto’s clean and varnished door and the noise of radio and TV broadcasts in a babel of languages he couldn’t understand, out to Tejadillo, now as rude and jammed as if it were market day in Dakar or Lagos.

  V.

  In the north of Africa—in Egypt—a sculptured tomb found in Memphis features carved yellow-brown human figures blowing glass, the crystalline globes at the end of their long pipes dangling delicately in the air. Scattered about are 4,000-year-old glass beads, glass scarabs, glass amulets, glass pieces for games no one’s been able to decipher and play.

  In Sidar, the capital of Phoenicia, the rulers had special sand brought in from Mount Carmel just for glassmaking. But the first manufacture ever of colored glass—the kind that would lead to Usnavy’s magnificent lamp nearly a millennium and a half later—occurred in China, the birthplace of dominos, when the Emperor Ou-Ti established a factory to make rods of tinted beads and other glassware.

  That’s all gone now, their existence as things of beauty in ruins, alive only in the collective imagination, in the same way that fossilized teeth from Aramis and Kanapoi evoke primitive man/monkeys with their sloping foreheads, inculpable and extraordinary, the unlikely progenitors of Mandela and Madame Curie, Lenin and Lennon, José Martí and Celia Cruz.

  But when Usnavy burst through the door at Virgilio’s, he wasn’t thinking about any of this. He had run—sprinted, each leg bending and stretching, sinews expanding and contracting—through the streets of Havana with his two red panels like lumps of burning coal fused into the very fiber of his fingers.

  “What the …?” Virgilio leapt from his work bench, surprised and frightened, his eyeglasses slipping from his flat upside-down T-shaped nose, not shattering on impact with the concrete floor only because of the many layers of newspapers and cardboard that cushioned the dozens of lamps all around him, each one staring unabashedly at Usnavy.

  “Armstrong? Are these Armstrong? Are these American glass?” a winded, spent Usnavy asked, his arms outstretched and shaking.

  A concerned Virgilio pried the panels from Usnavy’s hands—searing red, they looked like bloody blades, like something criminal. The minute his fingers were loose, a sweaty, dizzy Usnavy spasmed.

  “Let me see,” Virgilio said, turning away in a slow, deliberate manner, making sure there were no sudden moves, no causes for alarm. But Usnavy followed him up close anyway, placing his damp, anxious face above Virgilio’s shoulder as soon as the artisan sat back down. “Give me some room.” Virgilio gently pushed Usnavy away. “You can watch from there but I need to see these in the light.” There was no one in the studio but them, the barrel of fire
in the back just a can of embers now, the heat simmering, tolerable.

  Usnavy moved a bit, rattling a lamp on the floor next to him, startling the snow-white cat, which disappeared like a jolt of light, like the tracers Usnavy saw when he was overwhelmed by hunger.

  “I appreciate you bringing these to me,” Virgilio said as he picked up his glasses from the floor and fumbled to put them on his flat, whirlyknot face. “But I don’t want you to get too excited. Armstrong is hard to find in Cuba. And in the end, you know, I can work with anything—stained glass is just regular glass colored with oxides and chlorides, then ground up with the right fluxes and fused into the surface. We blow a lot of glass ourselves right here, we recycle a lot—Armstrong would be nice but we don’t really need it, you know what I mean?” He adjusted his glasses, settling in to examine Usnavy’s treasures. Virgilio was, as always, sparkling, twinkling all over, like a comet or a falling star. “It’s the design, the artistry, which makes a difference. Sometimes when we’re lacking in imagination we blame the materials—our egos are too big, I think—but a true artist works with anything.” He coughed, looked around as if searching for the gaffers, anyone. “And anyway, let’s be realistic: This isn’t really art, this is more like an auto shop. I fix these things the same way some other guy fixes a DeSoto or a Ford. Except that he’s doing something for his compatriot, and me, I’m mostly working for the English, you know what I mean?”

  Usnavy leaned against the door, his leg trembling like Yoandry’s that day at Lámparas Cubanas. He hated that expression—working for the English, working for the Man—the English had been in Cuba for only a blink of time and, in his mind, they’d done more good than bad. Who else could they say that about? The Spanish? The Soviets? The Americans who were everywhere but pretended to be nowhere, always igniting fires they then came rushing to put out, demanding payment for service or, worse, hero’s medals?