His excitement was such that he hurried on his son Elias and his wife Marta several times. Twenty minutes before their agreed-upon departure time, he was even sitting in the passenger seat of the 1986 Ford that he had gifted his son two years earlier when he finished his graphic design degree at Florida International University. From his position in the car, parked on one side of the garden, he looked at the two-story house, its portal with Spanish arches and art deco friezes always standing out in white against the darker background, a building with a certain air of being related to the house in the Havana neighborhood of Santos Suárez where he had lived what he always considered to be the best years of his life. Daniel Kaminsky had lived in that same house on Fourteenth Street and West Avenue since leaving Cuba in April of 1958 and deciding to establish himself in Miami Beach, led by his premonitions and sensibilities in the footsteps of the old Jews who came, especially, from the northern states of the Union in search of Florida’s sunshine and lower rents and home prices. That was the house where his son was born in 1963 and the place in which he had suffered all of the anxieties plaguing him as he rebuilt his life after he had been so inopportunely taken out of his world. From that house, many times he had left for walks along the promenade of the nearby and, at the time, nearly deserted West Avenue, dragging along the certainty of his solitude and feeling more bereft than ever, to ponder the possible ways he could place himself in a city that seemed like a makeshift settlement, and where his gregarious spirit couldn’t, for months, even count on the consolation of a single friend. And never again on the warmth and complicity of friends like the ones he had in Cuba. It had also been inside that house, seated in front of Marta Arnáez, that he had weighed his limited options and made the third most transcendental decision of his life: that of returning to the fold and living again as a Jew, seeking to return to that which he had given up twenty years prior: a way of finding a solution not to the conflicts of his soul but to the pressing needs of his body. Daniel Kaminsky needed to guarantee his family and himself a roof over their heads, a bed in which to rest, and two meals per day to keep going. And the proximity to his tribe seemed like the most cunning, but natural and best, of his options.
Of course, it had also been in that house, built in 1950 with many of the attributes of the style appropriated by the architecture of Miami Beach, where he had most immersed himself in the invincible dream born in Cuba more than thirty years before and that would finally turn into reality that afternoon: that of shaking the hand of the great Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso and asking him to sign a baseball card with his photo, printed by the Chicago White Sox for what would be the fabulous 1957 season for the Cuban Comet (twenty-one home runs, eighty-eight runs batted in), and the ball that in its younger days, when its leather was smooth and shiny, had soared beyond the limits of the Grand Stadium of Havana by one of the baseball player’s hits during a game between the Marianao club and the Leones de la Habana in the winter of 1958: the ball that Daniel had the luck of being able to buy that very same day for two pesos from the kid with the most determination who had chased it and managed to catch it.
Young Elias Kaminsky, who had decided to try his luck as a student at an art school in New York where he would complete his technical and intellectual education, felt rewarded by the twist of fate that would allow him to witness that memorable event. Ever since he heard of the tribute to Orestes Miñoso—who had announced the end of his long sports career, begun so illustriously in Cuba, continued in the United States, and closed out in Mexico at an age that was beyond reasonable—which would take place in Miami, the young man had decided that it would be the best occasion for his father to live the dream that he had talked to him about so many times. Immediately, Elias purchased three tickets that guaranteed them a place at the tribute dinner and ran to tell his father the good news.
When the Kaminskys arrived at the restaurant hall of the Big Five Club, the preferred place of Miami’s increasingly successful Cubans for their social events, the mythical Miñoso still hadn’t made his appearance. “Good,” Daniel murmured, and posted himself by the door after making sure for the nth time that his black Marianao cap was on right, that the baseball card was in his guayabera, and that the valuable ball was in his pants pocket.
To add to the sought-after, but obvious, air of nostalgia, over the hall’s speakers blared an extraordinary selection of cha-cha-chas, mambos, sons, boleros, and danzóns that were popular in Cuba in the 1950s. Occasionally, Miñoso’s cha-cha-cha came on (“When Miñoso swings the bat, the ball goes cha-cha-cha like that”), sung since the beginning of time by the Orquesta América, but each new piece he heard was immediately identified by the aggressive longing of Daniel Kaminsky, who whispered the name of each artist to his son: Benny Moré and his band, Pérez Prado, Arcaño y sus Maravillas, el Conjunto de Arsenio, Barbarito Díez, la Aragón, the old La Sonora Matancera, the real one, with Daniel Santos or Celia Cruz at the mic …
Fifteen minutes after the event’s appointed start time, the unstoppable black 1959 Impala in which the baseball player traveled stopped in front of the place full of old Cubans brimming over with memories, both pleasant and cruel, of a lost life that seemed better to all (despite many of the émigrés’ economic success) and had never stopped stirring up their longings or fueling their bitterness. Without thinking twice about it, Daniel Kaminsky put on his black cap again, took the baseball card out with one hand, the ball out with the other, and, as it later seemed, with a third hand took out a silver Paper Mate pen and went head-on into his dream come true.
Mere days later, the picture taken by Elias Kaminsky’s Minolta was printed on an eight-by-ten sheet and framed. The image selected captured that moment at which Orestes Miñoso, with a smile displaying the very white teeth he inherited from his African ancestors, was shaking the hand of a nearly bald Polish Jew with quite a belly and a hooked nose, while the latter swore he was his oldest and most fervent admirer. Just like the signed card and the baseball, which Daniel had asked him to dedicate to José Manuel Bermúdez, both kept in small glass cases made especially for that purpose, the photo would remain on Daniel Kaminsky’s night table from then on. First, next to his bed at the Miami Beach house, later in the apartment of the Coral Gables geriatric home, always keeping him company, making his guilt and nostalgia and his fear of death more bearable until the day in the spring of 2006 on which the old man left this world on a direct flight to hell. Because, he well knew and would say as much to his son several times: even though he had not carried out the execution of a man whom he had been ready to kill, for his heretic’s soul, there wasn’t even the consolation of spending some time in Sheol, where, they said, the spirits of pious Jews, observant of the Law, went.
* * *
It couldn’t have been any other way: when they got to Miami, after moving into a modest little hotel on the beach, the first visit Daniel Kaminsky and Marta, who was still named Arnáez, made was to the Catholic cemetery on Flagler and Fifty-third Street, where just one month before, the corpse of his friend José Manuel Bermúdez had been buried.
On the journey to Miami’s northwest, Marta had asked their Venezuelan taxi driver to make a stop at a florist, where she bought a large bouquet of red roses. At the burial grounds, the couple found that, behind the walls, there were only marble and granite slabs placed directly over the holes dug in the ground, identified by name and sometimes a cross. When they found the parcel where their friend rested, the scarcity of funds of Pepe Manuel’s comrades-in-arms, who were charged with paying for the plot where the young man was buried, became clear to them. They must have had only enough to buy the space and a small, almost vulgar slab of molten granite with his name, birth and death dates, and a Christian cross drawn in black paint. The tomb of a forgotten man in a foreign land. Marta, who couldn’t contain her tears, placed the red roses over the slab and stepped back a few feet, as if fleeing the perverse absurdity of that inconceivable death. Daniel Kaminsky, alone before the sandy earth that st
ill showed the marks of his recent movements, was then hit with the most overwhelming feeling of helplessness he’d experienced in his complicated existence. The void left by that good man’s death had fallen on the state of disorientation and the heavy sadness accompanying him and revealed to him the exact measure of all the losses he’d accumulated at that moment and in that place, and also of the effort required to redesign his life. In José Manuel Bermúdez, or Pepe Manuel, or Scatterbrain, the re-exiled Pole had lost not just a friend: that premature death served as a lobotomy of the best part of his memories since the witness and co-narrator of thousands of shared memories had disappeared, twists of recollections in common going up in smoke. Or, in the best of cases, they would never again be the same memories if he couldn’t ask Pepe Manuel if he remembered some detail so that, with an affirmative answer, he could once again enter the pleasant domain of complicity and shared experience. Because of that, without knowing how or when he would do so, at that moment he promised the renewed image of his dead friend to buy him a decent tombstone, under which he could await the resurrection of the just, which, without a doubt, that upright man deserved.
In the initial days spent at the little Miami Beach hotel where they had taken a room, Marta and Daniel went over their prospects many times. The money they had, almost all of it extended by old Arnáez, would be enough to pay for a few months’ rent and to support them while they looked for work, or until their Santos Suárez house and the Chevy were sold. The biggest problem, however, lay in the possible ways to relate to that world that was unknown to them, and as such, they started to reach out for the closest points of visible support on their horizon: Cubans and, due to Daniel’s genetic predisposition, the numerous Jews established in Miami.
They soon discovered, much to their chagrin, that neither of those paths offered promising prospects. The small community of Cubans that had ended up in that young, scattered city was mainly made up of people who had preferred to or seen themselves forced to leave the island due to the police repression unleashed by Batista and his front men. Many of those pariahs lived in a precarious state of transiency, simply waiting for some regime change that they, from exile, supported and desired. The Jewish community, meanwhile, made up a kind of geriatric home of retired seniors on a beach vacation. They came from northern states, attracted by the heat and low real estate prices in that remote city, and had dressed themselves up in shirts in tropical colors and vegetable fiber hats, since all they aspired to was to peacefully live out, away from the cold and without too many expenses, the last years of their lives. Nonetheless, to get a better idea of the landscape, Daniel and Marta started to frequent the social places where Jews and Cubans got together, despite the scarce hope that those people inspired in them with their concerns governed only by politics or by the state of their bank accounts.
Working against a quick and satisfying relocation was, besides the financial precariousness and the lack of useful connections, the limited knowledge each had of the English language, which made it impossible to find a job in their respective professions of accountant and teacher. But Daniel Kaminsky was a stubborn fighter and knew all the survival strategies. And the first of these lay in the ability and willingness to adapt to one’s surroundings, to study them to then find a way in. As such, following the weeks of initial stupor, he decided that both of them would enroll in a class to deepen and perfect their command of English. At the same time, when they received the money from the sale of the Chevy, they left the hotel and rented a house at Fourteenth Street and West Avenue, the property of a New York Jew who, he said, was even willing to sell the building if they paid fifty percent of the going price off the bat.
It was during an act of remembrance for Holocaust victims and thanks to the opportune invocation of the last name Brandon, mentioned to the old Ukrainian Jew Bronstein, owner of the beach’s biggest grocery store, that Daniel and Marta would get the first jobs either of them would have in the city: Marta bagging groceries while Daniel worked as an assistant at the warehouse. For Daniel, that work, almost the same as what he did twenty years prior in Sozna’s Havana pastry shop, signified a dramatic step back; for Marta Arnáez, born with a silver spoon in her mouth, thanks to the nearly backbreaking work of her Galician father, that option constituted a painful degradation that she faced head-on, determined to bear it, but with her dignity damaged. The worst part wasn’t the fact of seeing themselves forced to resort to basic, poorly paid jobs to make a living. They were convinced that that first step would be temporary and that they would overcome it at some point, especially in that country, which was growing and so full of possibilities. The drama, especially for Marta, was processing that, from one day to another, she had become a second- or third-class citizen because of her tangible and never-before-imagined condition as an immigrant, a Latina, a poor and Catholic worker. She saw herself forced to feel like a servant, under orders, sentenced to spend many of her hours at the behest of some bourgeois Jews who enjoyed highlighting the beautiful Cuban woman’s social and economic inferiority. For Daniel, meanwhile, the main difficulty was trying to find himself in a hostile land in which it was impossible to find an outlet for his gregarious spirit, shaped and fed by the air of Havana. In Miami, the people lived locked up in their houses, everyone traveled in cars; they thought only about work or their lawns, and there wasn’t a stadium like the one in Havana where he could go have a good time and yell; there was no street overflowing with lights, people, music, and lust like the Paseo del Prado; there weren’t even buses circulating on the streets. And the most painful thing was that he didn’t have a single friend there. It was, besides, a city where a silence reigned devoid of connotations and where fear came from the terrible circumstance of not having money to pay the bills.
That deep change in their lives would prompt a searing feeling of guilt in Daniel. The mere fact of seeing Marta arrive home around midnight, exhausted by a day of work and several hours devoted to studying English, forced him to remember the unforeseeable meetings and decisions that had led them to this suffocating circumstance. Then, according to what his son Elias would later think, with almost all certainty, Daniel Kaminsky must have felt that his story was even more regrettable because of the absurdity underlying it: he was fleeing something he had meant to do, not even something he had done.
In the long workdays at the warehouse, as he carried sacks that reminded him so much of the flour bags he had heaved in La Flor de Berlín, Daniel Kaminsky devoted days and weeks to thinking about the paths by which he could come to build a new life. It took so much for him to get used to the idea of having to live in a city and a country that revealed themselves as much more distant and foreign than warm Havana had been in his dramatic years as a recently arrived boy, when he felt how the absence—perhaps permanent—of his family had left him in sidereal solitude. The blows received and Havana’s own atmosphere had pushed him at that moment to make the decision to cease being Jewish and free himself of the weight of this condition and its laws. Now, as he thought and weighed the arduous possibilities for ascent and belonging, he started to seriously consider the previously unimaginable eventuality of going back to the fold: just like the mythical Judah Abravanel had done in his time, after allowing himself to be baptized to save his life and that of his people, he had reassumed the Law of Moses when he found it safe and convenient. At the end of the day, he, Daniel Kaminsky, had given up his religion of his own will: now, again, thanks to that will, he would choose to return. That was what man’s free will was for.
In January 1959, when General Batista was just barely defeated and set on the run by the revolutionaries fighting him in the mountains and in the island’s cities, Miami’s small Cuban community experienced a drastic transformation that complicated the Kaminskys’ adaptation even more. While the political exiles established there were returning to the country, the most nefarious characters from Batista’s inner circle were arriving at that South Florida city, almost all of them linked to acts of co
rruption, repression, torture, and death. Daniel and Marta, who had once had a cordial though not particularly close relationship with the Cuban exiles, didn’t make the slightest attempt to get close to the new refugees. On the contrary, they decided to keep a distance from them, even trusting that the country’s government would kick out some of those murderers, who, it was said, came to Miami for a spell, since before year’s end, they would take the rebels out of power and go back to the island.
The push Daniel Kaminsky needed to accelerate his rapprochement with the city’s Jews came from how radically the character of the Cuban exile had changed. In July 1959, before the rabbi who had traveled from Tampa to officiate in a Miami Beach hall improvising as a synagogue, Daniel Kaminsky recovered his kippah, his tallith, and, at least formally and publicly, the principles of his religion. Also, as he himself had done at a decisive moment in his life in which he accepted Christian baptism, he convinced the Catholic Marta Arnáez, now Kaminsky, to convert to Judaism. The November 1960 afternoon on which Daniel and Marta together crushed, with the stomping of their heels, the glass cups before a roll of the Torah, the reconverted man thought of how much his uncle Joseph Kaminsky would have liked to attend that ceremony. Would it have mattered too much to him that Marta was a Gentile and not one of the young, pureblood Jewesses with whom, had he married one, he would have conserved whole, in body and soul, the condition of his possible offspring? Or would it all be the same already to the old and beloved Pepe the Purseman, legally joined with a black Cuban woman and the legal father as well of a little Havana-born mulato who improvised poetry? Were they, all of them, heretics beyond salvation?
Heretics Page 18
