by Alex Abella
The little nondescript woman was the first to speak. Almost as if she wanted to be delivered of a particularly heavy load, just minutes after we sat and shared the rum and smoke, as the pounding of the drum by Albertico wove a tapestry of ancient sounds, her face began to contort itself into the strange faces children make when trying to scare their playmates. Eyebrows would fly, then swoop down, her mouth would open into the O of a fishmouth and close with lips bent inward, nostrils would flare and wiggle, facial muscles would twitch, then her whole body would sweat and shake as in a bout of malaria.
She put her hands forward, pushing some weight off and pumped her arms in the air. The others were expectant, looking on as Albertico pounded his drum to the echoing beats of the Yorubas. Lucinda was particularly ecstatic, her smile wide and her eyes flashing, high cheekbones sculpted by a dew of perspiration and the flush of excitement. The woman stood up and jerked spasmodically in the semicircle in front of the altar as the others clapped and shouted words of encouragement in an unknown language. Then the woman became rigid, stiff as a pole, and spun around like a top, whirling at higher and higher speeds until it seemed she floated off the ground, propelled into the air by the centrifugal force. She came down and hit the floor facedown with such noise I was certain she'd broken a bone, but then she turned and smiled and leaped up and shimmied, waving her arms.
"Shangó, Shangó, aché, awó, aché," shouted Juan Alfonso.
"What is it?" I whispered to Lucinda.
"It's the god Shangó, that's his dance. He's come down tonight and he's going to speak."
The woman danced around the room, taking swigs from the bottle and spraying us with rum. She came up next to me and I was preparing myself for the spritzing when she swallowed, fixed round possessed eyes on me, then rolled them upward, so that only the white showed. She cackled with enormous untapped malice.
"Here you are, Carlitos," she said, in a voice ten times as masculine as I would have expected from her.
I didn't know what to say, whether by speaking I'd be addressing the woman or the so-called god in whose power she seemed to be. I kept quiet.
"Tell the people here why you've come, Carlitos, why you really came. Tell them who you are."
Albertico stopped pounding his drum. I could feel all their eyes on me.
"What do you mean? I am me, who else could I be?"
She cackled again. "Spoken just like the dissembler you are. I am Shangó and I know your artifice. You have come here for the key to spring el negro Ramón and that marica vermin, José, from the dungeon. Hah!"
She danced around a little, flailing her arms in the air, shouted, "The music, the music!"
Albertico pounded his drum again. I felt oppressively hot and cold at the same time, my breath coming out in sharp gasps, as though I were running up a very steep and dangerous hill.
She planted herself in front of me, her hands on her waist.
"Don't you know they are the followers of my enemy, Oggún? That lame blacksmith, hah, I fucked his wife up the ass. But you, you want to help those two. How can you help them, Carlitos, when you can't help yourself?"
Words would not come out, they stuck to the ceiling of my mouth.
"Don't be shy, Carlitos. Tell these people where you're from!"
I snapped, stood up. "You're full of shit, you little tramp, you stupid people with your stupid dancing, thinking you can fool everybody. You can't fool me! You're just little monkeys dreaming of big things, wishing you were somebody else instead of who you are."
The woman smiled knowingly. "Then why are you ashamed, Carlitos?"
"Ashamed of what? Oh, what's the use, I refuse to argue with a madwoman."
I took one step; then her words stopped me. She pressed her face against mine. "Tell them how you were born in Havana. Tell them how ashamed you are of being Cuban. Tell them how you killed your father."
I looked with disgust at the dark, drooling, contorted face in front of me, a mocking, leering chimp. I heaved her to the floor and raced out of the room, the woman's cackling following me up the creaky stairs, into the now moonlit night outside the house. I ran to my car, collapsed on the hood. I cried.
6
"come quick! She's having a heart attack!"
Doreen, the substitute clerk, stomped her feet like a child whose toy has been snatched away. Deputy Smith, a baby D.A. and I rushed to the back.
Judge Chambers was laid out flat on the floor, barely moving. Her usually flushed face was sheer white, her breath shallow and spasmodic. A green suede pump, shaken loose, lay upturned on the Tabriz Persian rug. For some reason I told myself to remind the judge her shoe's heel cap needed replacing.
Bill knelt down by the judge and took her pulse, right underneath her ear. He shook his head.
"She said she thought she had heartburn, then she just keeled over!" shrieked Doreen, hovering over us. I looked up and saw the baby D.A., just two months out of law school, playing nervously with a lock of her curly black hair.
"Hey, Charlie, I need you!" said Bill.
Don't let it happen again, Charlie, pay attention, Don't slip. One life gone is enough.
"Call an ambulance, don't just stand there!" I hollered. On my knees, I put my ear to her nose and tried to detect her breath. None. I looked at Bill, shook my head.
"OK, together," he said.
I nodded. I'd been through this routine before. He put both hands on the judge's chest and pumped while I opened her mouth, moved her tongue out of the windpipe, pinched her nose and started to breathe air into her lungs. Her thin lips felt cold and squishy, like a plastic doll's.
The minutes dragged on without response. Other people came into the room, but none was the white-coated attendant who could relieve me of my painful duty. For a moment I was back in Miami and the figure into whose lips I was breathing life, too little too late, was my father Adriano, rigid and cold.
The judge jerked, gave a short moan and vomited into my mouth. I spit out the green and white swill, my stomach turning.
"That's good, she's alive!" said Bill.
With my tie I wiped her mouth and continued blowing, my tongue tasting the acid bile of life.
Bill took her pulse again.
"It's pumping." he said. "Don't stop now!"
I breathed in and out rhythmically. She felt warmer, little pinheads of blood returning to her alabaster skin. She opened her washed-out blue eyes once, looked bluntly at me, then closed them again. Suddenly:
"Move it, move it!"
A black man in white shirt and black pants shoved me out of the way, placed an oxygen mask on her face. The second paramedic jostled Bill away, ripped the judge's silk blouse, unhooked her small cloth bra and placed two fibrillators over her tiny left breast. The noise rang out like a gunshot in the room. The paramedic looked at his colleague, who nodded. The fibrillator jolted the judge back to life, her body arching on the beige carpeted floor.
"She OK now, she's back," said the man with the oxygen mask, who was taking her pulse with an instrument attached to his wrist.
"Let's go!"
The two young men put her on a gurney and broke their way through the crowd of bailiffs, attorneys and clerks who had witnessed the unexpected brush with death.
"Good job, Charlie," said Bill, pumping my hand.
I went to the bathroom to rinse my mouth. I looked out the window at the swirling smog of Civic Center garlanding poisonous wreaths on the clock tower of the Times building across Mirror Square. I heard my sister calling out for me that day in Kendall, by the canal where the alligator had once crawled up. "Carlitos, Carlitos, come, come!"
I was sixteen then, with the cruelty that teenagers possess in equal measure to their altruism. My sister Celia was crying, her thirteen- year-old's garish makeup streaked by the frightened tears running down her chubby cheeks.
"What's wrong?" I asked, kicking on my motorbike, the little Peugeot I had to buy with my own money because my father would not get it for me.
"Papá is dying, he was talking on the phone and he had a fit! Mamá is out, visiting Aunt Julia and I don't know what to do!"
I got on my bike, revved the engine under the heartless Dade County sun. The air smelled of weeds and brine. I looked up. Two lofty clouds held up a turreted castle in the sky.
"I'll go get some help," I said and drove away.
"What should I do?" screamed Celia.
"Think of something! Use your brain, for a change."
To this day I don't remember the reason why I was upset at my father, what minor argument or quarrel we'd had in the continuing warfare we'd engaged in since I was thirteen. From the time we'd come from Havana when I was ten, our life had been a constant butting of heads, my mother and my sister acting as soothing and unavailing intermediaries. Perhaps it was all due to our opposite reactions to coming to the United States, the predictable clash between old exiles who never forget the glory of the life stolen from them, and young immigrants who must urgently attend to the fleeting pleasures of the moment before they become shadows in someone else's dream.
Bobby Darin, Sandra Dee, the Beatles, John F. Kennedy, long hair, all were abominations to someone who longed day and night for his triumphant return to the land of dominoes, cigars and guarachas. I was not the son he'd expected, the fearless freedom fighter who with youthful vigor would carry aloft the banner of democracy and bring liberty to the tyrannized land. He was not the father I wanted, a calm provider who would take us to Little League games, teach us to swim and drive and give me pointers on how to pick up girls. Sadly, we were distanced from each other by our failure to live up to the vacuities expected of us. He didn't see I was a confused, driftless kid with too much intelligence and too little cunning. I didn't realize he was a burdened man, working at a gas station and speaking Spanish in a land where being a spic was only a shade better than being a nigger, no matter how white your skin or blue your eyes. We were "Our Cuban brothers with their vivacious personality, sparkling eyes and love of song and dance who yearn for the day when their homeland will again be free from Communist oppression." We were a cause, not a people. He adopted that cause as his own and lived it. I turned my back on it, knowing that way lay sterility and death. I had no past to speak of, my life a vista of ever expanding horizons. My father felt he had no future to claim, that the very signs and markers where he lived were mocking reminders of his foreignness, of his self-willed but no less terrible alienation.
I wasn't gone long, maybe three or four minutes, enough to realize that I had to face the situation and not just run away, that even if I made it to the hospital a couple of miles down the road, that Papá could be dead by the time the ambulance finally arrived. I turned around in midtraffic and headed back.
When I came in Celia was weeping over his still body. I look back now and I cannot understand the cold rage that possessed me then, my total disregard for other people's feelings. I saw them as weaknesses and, wrathful Savonarola, took their plight to be the result of their own incapacity to measure up to the demanding standards of life.
"Quit bawling," I said. "Have you called anyone?"
"I tried to reach Aunt Julia but the line is busy. What do we do?"
Her face was contorted by a grieving love I'd never known she felt. I grabbed the phone and called the operator. The woman who answered had been a nurse's assistant in the Second World War and after telling another worker to send an ambulance, she gave me detailed instructions on how to breathe life into my father. As I put my lips against his, I felt like the Iscariot taking leave of the Master and trembled, finally, at the monstrosity of my departure. His prickly beard felt like a wire brush on my chin. He had come to when the ambulance arrived. His bloodshot blue eyes were fixed
on me as they lifted him onto the stretcher. He knew.
"He'll be OK, right, Charlie?" asked Celia.
"Sure. Of course. Everybody has heart attacks. He's OK, you'll see."
Wires sprouted from my father's body, tentacles of pressing life, when I saw him in his hospital room. Celia, uncertain whether to cheer or cry, babbled away the story with a smile through a cascade of tears.
"Dale un beso a tu padre," said Mamá, stern faced and accusatory, a small woman with white streaks in her hair steeling herself for the years ahead. Her sheltered life as the daughter of a cattle rancher in Camagüey province must have seemed as remote to her at that moment as the silent "Gunsmoke" episode playing on the overhead TV.
I kissed my father as my mother told me.
"Hi, Dad," I said, blankly. He blinked hard several times, the muscles in his jaw knotting from the effort to speak. I turned to Mamá.
"What's wrong with him?"
"Lo que has hecho, mi hijo," she said, sighing. As always, we spoke in two languages, two worlds, neither of us admitting the existence of the other although understanding its every element. Words as barriers, words as weapons.
"I didn't do anything," I replied. My denial fell flat in the room, my mother sinking her cold gaze into my frightened face, thinking where did this strange creature who calls himself my son come from.
"You have done nothing," she repeated in Spanish.
At least the doctors were more charitable than my mother. If not for my belated efforts, Papá would have definitely died. But the lack of oxygen in the early stages-those few minutes when I capered in my motorscooter in the sun-baked streets in search of a way out-had taken their toll. The stroke left Dad paralyzed on the left side and spastic on the right, his mental faculties apparently as acute as before but now encased in a carcass that drooled uncontrollably and only occasionally controlled its sphincter.
For the next two years the smell of human waste permeated my life. If at first Celia and I were heartbroken, disturbed by the tragedy, comforting Mamá and even taking turns helping her change the bedsheets, empty the pan, wheel the foul body out to the sunshine, after a while we turned against this servitude, this devotion to a wasting memory. Papá's insurance refused to cover anything but the hospital bills, so Mamá hired a lawyer to sue for the rest of the benefits. With little to live on, first Mamá sold the gas station, then the house and we moved back to the Cuban ghetto around S.W. Eighth Street, stucco boxes teeming with refugees lagging in the race for prosperity in the alien land.
I had never been much of a student before but now I became a prize pupil, making the honor roll and ultimately winning a scholarship to Brown University. In due time I went to law school and found my way out of the barrio for good. It would be good and heroic to say I turned to my books in an attempt to right the injustices perpetrated, that I became a lawyer so as to someday champion the cause of my family and wreak havoc on those who had assailed us and brought us to a lesser state. But these are the words that a son of my father would use. Not I. I am no hero or avenging angel. In my hands, the sword of righteousness would dwindle to a pallid sparkler. Books and learning were simply avenues to the main chance I knew would come by and by. If I picked law it was because I felt at a preconscious level that it would be easier to hide behind the pillars of justice than in any other profession. I wouldn't have to reveal myself, tear open my shirt to bare the gaping wound. I knew I was cold, repressed, dominating, calculating, manipulative, unprincipled, with no clear concept of right or wrong save what I could get away with. Yet I also, like all people, wanted the acclaim of my contemporaries, and what better way than to bask in the prestige attached to the foremost profession of our legalistic society? At one point I even toyed with the prospect of elevating my incompetence-personal, not professional, for I rarely lost a case-to the state and national level, to run for office and join the cabal of repressed, approval-seeking attorneys who have been running the country since its foundation, the first Cuban to blazon the American political firmament.
Celia, though, did not have a major fiend to whom to surrender. Instead she gave herself to a succession of minor Lucifers named Tony, Joey and Chulo, who only succeeded in getting Celia pregnant and in trouble in school
(in this, as in all other things, it pays to go all the way). First she started cutting classes to go to glue-sniffing parties where sessions of spin the bottle would wind up in hurried fucking in closets, bathrooms and rooftops. Then she started not going to school altogether, spending her time with her gang, her pandilla of misfits at Madison Junior High who pined for the freedom that turning sixteen and leaving school would mean. Three times I had to take her to the abortionist in Sweetwater, the old Cuban Jew who had known Emma Goldman when she was exiled from the U.S. and lectured in South America on women's rights. Abortion was still illegal and each time Celia would swear, ,with clenched fist and drawn face, that she would never get knocked up again, only to fall for yet another pair of pouty lips and slim hips a few months down the line.
Celia's absences from school made the rubicund face of the truant officer, Mr. Upham, a familiar sight in our family, always dropping by and counseling with Mamá for the never-to-be-reached solution. Mamá would speak to her and I would speak to her but nothing short of a chastity belt would have worked. Me she ignored, ordering me to mind my own business. But with Mamá Celia would burst forth in a tirade of accusations, all centering on the sordidness of our lives, our hand-to-mouth existence, the oppressive heat and confining futures of Little Havana, the shit-smeared monster who sat in his wheelchair and wouldn't just die so we could finally collect the rest of the insurance. Mamá would call Celia a whore, a lost soul, a daughter of the devil, while Celia would call her a harridan and cold-hearted bitch, who wouldn't even let her have her quinceañera party because we had no money.
