by Pablo Medina
When Julia reached him, he told her to wait there, and he entered a bodega where a group of stevedores were gathered having their morning brandy. Julia had the two oldest boys move the trunk under the tree at the corner. She sat on it, pulled the knife from the burlap sack and cut up the rest of the tasajo, placing the pieces on the lard crackers and handing them to the children. Only Rubén, the oldest, refused to eat the dry meat, claiming his stomach hurt, and Julia offered him a banana. The other boys, too young to name their fears, had been trained by their father not to linger over their food, and so they ate their share without speaking. Finally, when the children were fed, Julia took out her rosary from her dress pocket and began to say it, more out of habit than religious conviction. It was one of the many practices she had acquired when she had almost miscarried her firstborn and had been ordered to stay in bed for the duration of the pregnancy. She had also learned embroidery and had read many books, but the only habit she retained, being the most portable, was the rosary. She had heard a priest say that she didn’t need beads, if she could only keep the count of prayers in her head, and that seven rosaries in seven days for seven weeks would buy her a plenary indulgence in perpetuity, but when the priest warned that if she miscounted she would have to start over, she decided she would do it rosary in hand. The rosary she used had also belonged to her grandmother, a saintly but morose woman who had died of tuberculosis when Julia was eleven and had imprinted in the girl a number of indelible phobias, among them the fear of the open ocean, that would dominate her actions for the remainder of her life. Amadeo mocked her, saying that with so much praying she wouldn’t have time to commit any sins, but she persisted, carrying the rosary everywhere she went—the market, the Chinese laundry, the butcher shop—saying the prayers under her breath, and accomplished the monumental feat of devotion six months before leaving the island.
Julia finished two rosaries and was considering starting a third when Amadeo came out of the bodega accompanied by a short, energetic man with a spring to his step and a Castilian lisp to his voice. The man had a gold front tooth which glinted in the sun and when Amadeo introduced him to Julia, he bent over and kissed her hand like a gentleman, a perfect gentleman as the phrase goes, which she could tell from the white linen suit with silk-lined lapels, the diamond pinky ring, and the precious way he held out his hand, that he was not. He took her hand with three fingers, then bent over at the waist in a deep bow, taking off his bowler with his free hand and bringing it to his chest in a sweeping arc. He said his name was Sergio Reinaldo Ramos but most people called him Chano. As he talked she could smell the alcohol on his breath and, with her empty stomach and the fatigue from the long sea voyage, she felt nauseated and faint and had to cover her nose with her handkerchief to keep from gagging. The action could not have been lost on the dandy.
Chano here, Amadeo said, is recommending me for a job at the Príncipe de Gales factory. Chano squared his shoulders and smiled down at her. As a roller? asked Julia. She may have loved Amadeo unconditionally but she was not above doubting him. She had told him in Havana, when he first brought up the idea after being threatened by the Spanish soldiers, that the trip to el Norte was going to be a travail, una faena. That seemed absolutely clear to her now, sitting on the trunk in public, her children without a roof over their heads, and her husband brimming with drink. As a leaf stripper, Amadeo said. Chano added that as soon as there was an opening, he could move up. He had to wait his turn like everyone else. Julia wanted to say that her husband was not like everyone else, but before she could speak Amadeo said he and Chano had to go somewhere. He motioned to Chano to help him move the trunk to the sidewalk under the awning of a dry goods store and asked the proprietor for a chair for her to sit. Chano bought the boys some pastries and the store owner brought her some cool water and a demitasse of coffee, which she gladly accepted. She had not eaten anything and her empty stomach had made her light-headed. At least she could rest in the proper manner and her children would not be running around in the sun. Later on while they were waiting for Amadeo and Chano to return, the store owner, a Puerto Rican named Eusebio, brought them a pitcher of lemonade and allowed the boys to go into the side yard and play out of the street, which was now filling with wagon traffic.
You will get to like Tampa, Eusebio said to her. When I first got here, longing almost broke my heart. He used the word añoranza for longing, which islanders intone so effectively when referring to their native land. Every moment of every day for three years I had Puerto Rico on my mind. What happened after three years, Julia asked. Curious thing, Eusebio said. One night I went to bed with my heart heavy, my thoughts far away in the hills of my island. When I woke the next morning my añoranza simply lifted and vanished. I don’t have a choice but to like it here, Julia said. Yes, you do, the Puerto Rican said. I have known people who give up hope, shut themselves in their houses, and wait to die. Some wait a long time. Look to the future, señora. That is all there is here. The past is on the other side of the moon. Eusebio said that he had come to Tampa because of guavas. Guavas, Julia asked. Yes, he said. The news reached Santurce, where I was living, that there was a lot of guava around here. I had a vision of starting a guava processing plant—paste, marmalade, shells. But when I got to Tampa I discovered there were fewer guava trees here than back home. It was all a rumor the Tampeños started to bring people to their sorry town.
The rumor had spread all over the Caribbean and attracted dreamers of every caste and color to a sleepy mosquito-ridden village of seven hundred souls. There were Dominican farmers, Yucatecan jute workers, Spanish infantrymen, Panamanian musicians, and freed slaves from every corner of the sea alongside the native population they called crackers in those days, lanky Scotch Irishmen and pale-skinned Englishmen who had been driven out of the Confederate states after the war. The people of Tampa sat around staring at each other, wondering how to keep from starving in the desolation and heat of western Florida, when the cigar workers came up from Key West and Cuba in ’85 and ’86 and built their factories in that part of town they call Ibor City, stress on the or. Cigar workers, mostly Cuban, spent their money as if tomorrow the world would end, or as if it never would. They liked good clothes, good houses, good liquor, good women, and good food. Soon all the residents of Tampa were scrambling around trying to satisfy the cigar workers’ tastes and unburden them of their freshly earned money. If it were not for the cigar industry, señora, Eusebio told her, Tampa would be a graveyard.
Amadeo and Chano were back when the sun reached its apex and the air was thick and slow, difficult to breathe. The conversation between Julia and the Puerto Rican store owner had long before run itself out and the boys were lying around the porch, swatting flies and trying to doze. Amadeo, sober now, told Julia in a tone much more like himself, to gather up the children. He had found them a house.
Amadeo Terra is thinking. In late afternoon the sun slants through the blinds and the slatted light lands on his face. Then he cannot see the sea or the birds or the motorboats crossing the bay. As the sun descends, the layers of light and shade move across his eyes in a kind of slow agonizing strobe: the brilliant light followed by shadowy relief, followed by brilliant light. Is he alive or dead? He cannot move, he cannot tell Nurse to move him—he doubts she would oblige. He simply accepts the fact that, unless it rains and the clouds cover the sun, all afternoon he will be subjected to burning light and cooling shade intermittently until night puts a stop to the punishment. At this point Nurse appears with Orderly. They unbuckle him, lift him out of the chair, and put him on the bed. The first time they performed this action many years ago Amadeo was not expecting it and he felt he was lifted into the heavens by two angels; for an instant he abandoned his atheism and rejoiced, but as he waited for a fanfare announcing his entrance into heaven, he descended again and saw their faces (hers strained with the effort of lifting him, his tired and indifferent) as they set him down on the bed. If that is the way angels looked, he was glad he was a nonbeli
ever. They changed his diaper, fed him his medicines, and tucked him in for the night. He was left alone to sleep or not to sleep, to curse, to ask what he was doing here, was he alive or dead, but no words came out of him, and he understood then, for the first time, that he could not speak. That routine would be repeated, with little variation, every night for the rest of his life until now. Nurse and Orderly turned out not to be angels, not even demons, just people going through the routine of a job, waiting for their shift to be over so they could go home, have a drink, eat dinner, go to sleep. Amadeo’s home is the room with the window looking out over the sea, the bed where he sleeps, chair where he sits, day in and day out, in cold and heat, in light and dark, in isolation and unbreachable solitude.
Across the way he hears a woman screaming, Mari, ven acá. Come here, Mariii, followed by a loud wheeze and a fit of coughing and then more screaming. No one comes. No one answers, not even Nurse II, who is probably asleep at her station. The screaming goes on for hours. He would like to yell back to shut her mouth and stick Mari up her ass. Beyond his desperation—he cannot sleep, he cannot respond, he cannot, even if that were his disposition, walk across the hall and say, Madam, Mari is not here. Is there anything I can do for you?—there is a corresponding sense of relief that he is not alone and that, therefore, this is not hell, or a kind of earthly version of it, but purgatory, where souls suffer their cleansing punishments in unison. It is the same sense of relief he feels when he hears Garrido shuffling down the hall in the direction of his door. Garrido peeks his head in and asks, Have you seen my shoelaces? It is always the same question, nothing more. Garrido, who has sunk so deep into his obsession that it has become his personality—there is nothing in this life but his shoelaces—does not realize that Amadeo cannot answer him. Garrido waits a few moments by the door smiling blankly and then moves on. Amadeo can hear his shuffle getting dimmer as he moves away.
And then Amadeo remembers Chinese Lady. She came in the darkness one night two weeks after he arrived at the home. The following night the same thing happened, but the room was not as dark (there may have been a full moon or the blinds of his room may have been left open and the light from the driveway below reflected up through the window) and he could see a small, hunched woman enter his bed, slip under the covers, and speak an incomprehensible gibberish. She was made of toothpicks and skin and he could hear her rustling under the sheets. On the third night, he saw that she had no clothes on. Her hair was short and straight and she had a round face creased with wrinkles. This time, when she started babbling, the language was no different from what he had heard the Chinese people speak in the restaurants of Zanja Street, words that came out flat as pancakes from the mouth and blew up like balloons in midair. He had the urge, excruciating because it was unsatisfied and would always be, to rip off his diaper, turn over on her, and show her the man he really was. Chinese Lady came for many nights and became for Amadeo a welcomed companion who allowed him to tolerate his newly acquired isolation with her talk under the sheets and her tiny curled-up body like a small mammal’s providing a warmth he could only imagine. He imagined, too, how she put her hands on him and played with him, all the while speaking in the impenetrable language of the Orient. He cannot imagine any of this now, he can only remember imagining it. One night Chinese Lady stopped coming and her absence was to him as devastating as the knowledge that he would never speak or walk or move again. Chinese Lady in another wing, strapped to her bed so she cannot visit male patients and talk to their bodies? Chinese Lady home taking care of Chinese man and Chinese children? Chinese Lady sparrow singing outside window? Chinese Lady dead? Amadeo Terra feels nothing; he remembers everything.
They walked six blocks into the city away from the port, the two men in front carrying the trunk, Julia behind them with the children. A woman sweeping the sidewalk in front of a store stopped working when they passed, raised her head slowly and stared at them with eyes like sinkholes. Down the street a man with a thick mustache spat behind them and another with his hair disheveled made an evil sign with his hand. That was the welcome: vulgarity and a brutal sun that threatened to consume them. Hey, look, an Andalusian with the thick neck and short arms of a peasant said to his partner as Amadeo and his family passed by. More grist for the mill.
They turned right on the second street and entered a neighborhood in which all the houses looked alike. Rubén the oldest asked how they could tell which was theirs and Chano said by the number. Yours is number 27, a good number, bound to bring luck, and it would be wise for your father to play it as soon as he can. Luck? Amadeo asks. Most of his life he thought he was lucky. Amadeo took Chano’s advice, despite his wife’s protests, and played the number every week for over twenty years, investing over ten thousand dollars in a venture from which he earned once, when the number hit, a sum of $2,780. In truth, they would not need a number to tell their house from all the others. Theirs was the one apart: ramshackle, abused by the wind and the rain and blanched by the sun. The floorboards on the porch were warped, the front door was off its hinges. Inside was a dank gloom and the smell of animals. It was the house of a leaf stripper, nothing better.
Julia said nothing. She opened the shutters to the front windows and walked past the two small bedrooms to the rear where the kitchen was located. The house was no larger than a country shack, a bohío where peasants squatted. Out in the backyard was an outhouse surrounded by tall weeds, which looked like it had not been used in months. Julia came back to the front room and looked at her husband, but Amadeo avoided her gaze. He said that they needed to clean things up, pull out the weeds and the cactuses growing around the sides, and get some vegetables growing. There was a bed in the front bedroom and in the living room two broken-down chairs that people called taburetes on the island. The kitchen had a coal stove and a small icebox but there was no space to sit down and eat in a proper manner. Julia said what she had to say by the tense way her hands gripped her skirt and by the tight-lipped silence she had imposed on herself. Her eyebrows arched over her glassy, indignant eyes. Then she surprised him.
We start over, she said.
The three boys stood blankly by her. Their father had pulled them out of bed two nights before and they had gone by oxcart to a place outside the city where they boarded the boat that brought them here. Julia explained vaguely to them that the Spaniards were after their father and they had no choice but to leave everything behind, but it is one thing to hear an explanation and another to understand it. Maybe Rubén sensed that they would not be going back, but he had no idea how close his father had come to having his neck snapped in the garrote chair. For their part the boys saw all of it as an adventure: a trip abroad on a ship, the first of their lives, their arrival in a strange town, bumbling about from street to street, trying to speak a language that turned mealy in their mouths.
Amadeo and Chano stepped outside and Julia could see the two men talking through the front window and could smell the smoke as they lit cigars. She had managed to keep the boys indoors but Rubén the oldest was becoming restless, shadowboxing with an imaginary opponent, while Pastor the middle one was sitting in a corner chewing his collar and looking off into space. From the day he was born she had to work doubly hard to do things for him—tie his shoelaces, wipe his nose, feed him even—that came naturally to the other two. If he ever got rid of that needy look in his eyes, he might be handsome some day, but caught in the cobwebs of his dreaming as he always was, he looked soft and foolish. Only Albertico seemed at ease. He was sitting on the trunk, leaning against his mother’s arm, smiling to himself. Julia thought of him as her special one, her gift, who calmed and pacified her. He was the youngest, he was her treat. While the other two were questions, Albertico was an answer.
Just then Amadeo stuck his head inside the door and said that he had to go and would be back soon. Behind him Chano spoke dimly to her that it was a grand pleasure to meet you, señora, and I will stop by soon to see if there is anything you may need. This is a fine
town, you will see, señora, the best in all of Florida, he said waiting to kiss her hand again and she burying it deeper in her pocket.
Amadeo Terra can smell himself. He is waiting for Nurse to change him. Sometimes he waits an hour, sometimes two. It used to be she came within minutes of his bowel movement. Now she goes to other patients first, the newer arrivals with relatives who still visit daily and watch over them with hawk eyes. If he could scream he would; if he could move, he would wipe himself. If he could hold it in, that would be best. Nurse enters after a time and gets to work. He follows her with his eyes, but he could just as well close them and imagine the routine. First, she flips off the sheets in one swooping movement, pulls up his robe, undoes the diaper, and folds it up carefully so that none of the mess spills on the mattress. Then she wipes him, moving his testicles out of the way. Useless as they are, they might as well get rid of them like they did his teeth. She puts on a fresh diaper and pulls the robe back down. All the while she is talking baby talk about how much he stinks today and how healthy his poo-poo looks. Poo-poo, that’s the term she uses. Ridiculous. If he were healthy he wouldn’t be here, if he were healthy, he’d be at his bench in the factory, rolling the best clear Havanas in Tampa.
His two surviving sons split the cost for his private room but don’t visit. They are waiting for him to die so they won’t have to pay any more to keep this piece of meat their father has become out of the way. They think his brain is as dead as the rest of him, but Amadeo knows it is sharper than it ever was, less cluttered with the daily demands they and their mother placed on him. He can remember things, he can think. He can compute, for example, the total amount of money he earned in his life: $1,400,000 and change. The week before he added up the number of cigars he rolled and the week before that the number of times he had sex. What would his sons think of that? Pastor married an American and went off to the northern suburbs. Rubén is a worthless poet in New York. Neither has visited him in years.
