by Achy Obejas
Leah couldn’t invite Tatán inside—it wouldn’t have looked right under any circumstances—but she did ask him to come by the next day, to help her reopen the store. Because he worked for her— an arrangement that satisfied them both—they could see each other nearly every day, spend hours on end talking and laughing, without drawing too much suspicion.
Whatever actually happened between them, whether in fact they ever became lovers, is a mystery. I heard the story from Moisés. My father refused to discuss it, telling me he was not in Oriente at the time, that he was busy in Havana, unaware of his family’s daily lives.
But what Moisés told me is that at some point, Tatán became the object of Lucía’s affection. When he tried to rebuff her, Lucía told him about the Garazis’ rituals and accused him of having fallen under the devil’s spell, that Leah was in fact a bride of Satan. For proof, she suggested he look in the tiny canister tacked to the inside of her door, hidden behind the dried branches on the frame.
Though he dismissed Lucía’s taunts at first, eventually Tatán took notice of the mezuzah. One day when Leah was in Mayarí conducting business, he pried it from the door, emptying its contents. Tatán was illiterate, so the parchment was utterly meaningless to him but he ran with it to Lucía, who took him and the paper to one of the local santeros.
“You are very lucky, m’hijo,” the holy man told him. “You’ve arrived right in time, we can still save you.” He compared the Hebrew script with a page from a Cuban newspaper. “See? See the difference?”
A frightened, perspiring Tatán pressed the santero: “What does it mean?”
“It means you have been consorting with Lucifer himself,” the santero said, “and you need to cleanse your spirit or you will burn for all eternity in the fires of hell. Had you stayed any longer, Tatán, you would have been consumed by demons who taunt humans with their perversity.”
A wide-eyed Tatán never returned to Leah’s store. Indeed, when she went looking for him, thinking something awful had happened— an accident, an illness—he ran from her, making the same clattering and screaming sounds as the peddler that night on her front porch.
Leah was baffled and heartsick. “What did I do to you?” she called after him, but he just ran, fast and away from her. Her face turned frigid again, this time pale and veiny like marble itself.
When Leah vanished, Sima and Luis scoured the woods between her house and theirs. A frantic Luis went to Mayarí and asked a million questions, but no one had seen her. Days later, when Sima had begun to imagine her mother had gone to Havana to confront her father after all these years, Leah’s bloated body floated up on the shores of the river.
The official cause of death was drowning. But many people disagreed. In Mayarí, they said she was kidnapped by a güije, a spirit who lives in rivers, a mischievous male phantom who steals stray children and lonely women.
XVIII
Moisés’s first letter to me arrived on a cold December day in late 1987 in the trembling hand of a shivering Cuban standing at my door who spoke virtually no English. I wasn’t home when he knocked but a surprised and gentle Seth let him in, gave him some hot chocolate, and explained the theory of scarves and layers and contained body heat. The poor Cuban, his teeth rattling, was still barely able to speak when I arrived an hour or so later.
“My name is Félix García,” he said, gloveless and hatless, fishing the blue-lined envelope from the inside pocket of his worn wool jacket. He would later tell us the coat was inherited from his father, who had come to the United States once in the fifties and kept it with the sure knowledge that someone in his family would eventually need it again, even if it was thirty years later.
I was so worried by Félix’s icy condition that I barely glanced at the envelope, though I know now I must have been aware all along it was from Moisés. Who else, after all, would be writing to me from Cuba? It’s not as if I’d made friends with anyone. But with Félix wheezing and standing frigid in front of the fireplace in his soaked socks, I was totally distracted. He was thin and ill at ease, his sparse hair plastered against his hard little head.
As it turned out, Félix was the lighting technician for a Cuban theater group that was spending a week at the University of Illinois’s Chicago campus, part of a six-week tour through the United States that had also become a mail route. At every stop, Félix ran around the city delivering mail, most of the time unable to announce his visit because he didn’t have anybody’s phone number. When I asked him why he didn’t simply stamp and drop the letters in a mailbox now that he was in the United States, he seemed taken aback, as if to do so would somehow be a betrayal to his friends to make sure their messages arrived safely.
“I’m Celina’s brother,” he said, trying to explain to us who he was.
“Celina?” I asked, drawing an absolute blank.
“Yes, yes, Celina,” he said. “She was there when you were visiting the Menachs. The girl with very long hair, very wavy—like yours. Orlando’s friend.”
Celina! The girl I had tasted on Orlando’s mouth—that was her name! My god!
I instantly noted that Félix did not say Deborah or Yosemí or even Rafa’s friend, and I examined him for clues about how much he might know about his sister’s relationship with Orlando. But his expression was more expectant than complicit.
“You remember her now?” he asked, all hopeful.
“Yes, yes, of course,” I said. Then I immediately tried to change the subject. “The letter is from the Menachs, then?”
“Yes, from Moisés,” Félix said, still shivering in front of the fire. He was staring out the living room window, at the utter blackness of four o’clock in the afternoon during winter in Chicago. His shoes, leather loafers completely unsuitable for snow, were curling stiffly as they dried in front of the fire.
“Who’s Celina?” asked Seth, my amiable and boyish lover, having realized that she did not figure in any way in my Cuba stories. He was trying his unsteady but increasingly fluent Spanish on us.
“She’s a young girl—”
“Well, she’s fourteen, a young woman, really,” interrupted Félix, who—with his unshaven, nearly sunken cheeks, ashen skin, and brittle bones—didn’t seem at all related.
I smiled at him indulgently. “Yes. But here, in the States, that’s more of a girl, really.”
“¿Quíen es?” Seth persisted.
“She’s a neighbor of the Menachs, right?” I said, looking to Félix for confirmation.
“Yes, a friend of Orlando’s,” he said again without any guile whatsoever. “She lives next door, in your old building.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes, downstairs,” he added.
“Orlando is the teenage boy?” a confused Seth continued, trying to pull the family tree together.
“Orlando is Moisés’s son-in-law,” said Félix.
“So how old is Orlando?” Seth asked, now amused.
Félix looked at him and then at me and shrugged. “I don’t know. In his forties, I think. They are friends, Orlando and my sister, because he is who drives her to visit my father in prison. The prison is on the outskirts of town. Not everyone would do this favor.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Seth stuttered, embarrassed.
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I had deliberately put the entire episode with Orlando out of my mind, refusing to consider what I had seen with my own eyes or experienced in the flesh, choosing instead to view it as a fantasy almost, as a possibility rather than a reality. Now I was being forced to deal with the garish and vulgar truth. And I was horrified: Orlando existed, as a man, a man to whom I’d given something of myself, quite possibly a monstrous man.
“Are you okay?” Seth asked, touching my elbow with his hand. I nodded. Félix, indifferent, reached down to pinch his frozen toes.
“What is your father in prison for?” I ventured cautiously. I figured he could add murder to his charges if he ever knew the price of his daughter’s visits.
>
Félix straightened and shrugged again. “For activities against the state, of course. What do most people in Cuba go to prison for?” he asked rhetorically. “The official charge, I think, is sedition or something like that. It’s been very hard on my sister because, since her mother died a year ago—we are only half-siblings—she had become close to our father, and then this happened.”
“You mean she lives alone now?” I asked. My stomach acids churned; my disgust with Orlando became even greater. “You don’t have other siblings?”
“No, no, that is why,” Félix added with a smile, “I say she is a young woman, because she is older than her years.”
“Your father, how long will he be . . .” Seth began to ask in his hesitant Spanish.
“About twenty-five years,” Félix said. “It’s about what they sentence everyone for those sorts of activities. Maybe he’ll be out sooner. I don’t know. There’s a group in Miami that has him on their prisoner of conscience list, but I’m not sure how much that helps in Havana. And Moisés has promised to see what he can do, but so far, nothing.” The more Félix talked—about his father’s troubles, about his sister’s lonesomeness and his own sense of impotence—the more Seth and I felt sorry for him.
But I had the extra burden of guilt: I could have stopped his sister’s exploitation, I could have let the Menachs find Orlando with his head between her legs, but instead I’d chosen to make time for him, to serve as an accomplice. And to make love with him.
In my mind’s eye I could see a weeping Celina in Orlando’s brown arms, struggling to escape his grip. Her legs, long and tapered, kicking (though, curiously, not at him) as he leaned toward her for a kiss, which she avoided by vigorously shaking her head. I told myself this happened every day.
As I engaged in my own inner torture, Seth sat Félix down on the couch and brought a small blanket for his blue feet. We invited him to dinner—Seth made a delicious tortellini that Félix gobbled up in huge forkfuls. We opened a bottle of Havana Club and toasted to the future.
All night long I wondered when it would all explode, when someone would catch Orlando and kill him, or when Celina would become pregnant, or when he’d beat her out of frustration. I was convinced it had to end badly, no matter what moral lessons could be salvaged from the wreckage.
Although Seth and Félix drank wildly, chatting about politics and music for hours, I watched my own intake, fearful the rum would serve as a truth serum and I’d find myself talking too much, asking too many questions, giving myself away with too much interest. Seth, his dark golden hair flopping around his ears, his smile all pearly, seemed the very picture of health and goodness.
By the time we realized it was one o’clock in the morning, a warmed-up, sleepy Félix protested only out of courtesy when we invited him to stay in our guest room (which was really the sofa-bed in my office). We pulled out the mattress, gave him a pair of Seth’s pajamas, indicated the bathroom and broke out a new toothbrush for him. He was grateful and a little embarrassed.
It was when we were in the bathroom, stripping the cellophane from the new brush, that I first saw a resemblance between Félix and his sister. It was in the intensity of his gaze, reflected there in the bathroom mirror as he stared at me, at my small breasts, without regard to Seth’s naive presence. His eyes betrayed a lazy confidence, a certain arrogance as they lingered. I remembered Celina, her swan’s neck leaning back as she met my eyes.
From the very beginning, Seth had been supportive of my first trip back to Cuba. In fact, in some ways, he’d been more excited than me—not because he had viewed it as any kind of return to my roots, or because he considered my connection to the island as something particular and special (although, of course, he did—my birthday was too much for him to ignore), but because he was an admirer of the Cuban revolution. (This was not a problem with my parents: Seth just kept quiet around them and, whatever their suspicions about his political affinities, they played their protocol roles perfectly, too.)
When I returned to Chicago, he peppered me with questions, thrilled at the snapshots I brought back of the Pioneros, the exercising seniors, and the doctors, and despaired at the sight of buildings beginning to crumble. When I pointed out the obvious poverty, he’d nod thoughtfully, reminding me that it was not abject, that people in the Mexican countryside were certainly far worse.
“The Cubans look healthy,” he said. “The rural Mexicans, you can see, are skinny and malnourished. It’s worse in places like Bolivia. There you can see the void in people’s eyes. They have no idea at all why they are alive.”
The truth is, I admired Seth, I envied the easy way he assumed his humanitarianism. In my mind, he was wholly noble, intuitively just.
“Whoa, the secret life of Orlando!” Seth whispered as we crawled into bed the night of Félix’s visit. His skin was toasty, the little hairs on his chest like cornsilk.
“What do you mean?” I asked, defensive and guilty.
“What do I mean? Ale, you don’t believe he’s just friends with this totally vulnerable fourteen-year-old girl, do you? I mean, he sounded like an asshole when you described him giving his wife orders. But this . . . this is so evil!” said Seth. He stretched his arms around me, drawing me against him. “Imagine that girl—he probably has her completely intimidated.”
But in my heart I knew better: Whatever was happening between them wasn’t coerced, no more than what had happened between Orlando and me. I had scaled that wall of my own volition, I had gotten in the car with him of my own free will, exultant and aroused long before he touched me. My body had opened to him with a quake.
“I mean, not that I think fourteen-year-old girls these days are virgins or innocents,” Seth prattled on.
To my surprise, his penis stirred against the small of my back. “Oh, really, what do you think of fourteen-year-old girls today?” I said, turning on him. I threw my leg over his, pressed his chest with my palm. “Hmm?”
My pure and virtuous lover blushed. “Well . . .” he said uneasily, unsure about where we were going.
“It sounds to me, Seth, like you’re getting turned on by the idea of this middle-aged man making it with this nubile fourteen-year-old girl. . . .” I circled his naked nipple with my index finger.
“Who said anything about her being nubile?” he asked, grinning.
“What fourteen-year-old isn’t nubile?” I continued, pinching his nipple, pulling it.
“I think it’s turning you on. . . .” He was splayed on the bed, his arms and legs apart, waiting to be taken.
“Oh, not as much as it’s turning you on,” I said, reaching down to his penis, which had grown heavy.
Seth moaned. His arms stretched under the cascade of pillows, his toes cracked. I kissed his chest, his ribs, his hips, then slowly turned him on his tummy and pushed him down, my hand still on his member. I crushed my pubic bone into him from behind. He pushed his perfectly round little butt back at me. As he turned around to look at me, I could see the slope of his lip shimmering red. His legs were trembling.
We were playing, me on top but losing my balance, when Seth, his eyes shiny, flipped me over, dropping my head over the side of the bed. I was imagining the exquisite pleasure of his hardness inside me when Seth and I both saw Félix: a snide ghoul watching and enjoying the show, his pose relaxed against our bedroom door.
“¿Qué qué?” I blurted, grabbing the sheet to cover my nakedness.
“What the fuck . . . ?” Seth translated, angrily leaping from the bed, his penis bopping and gleaming.
By the time I was up, it was too late: Félix had gone bounding out our front door in his dry shoes, laughing and dancing on the freshly fallen snow, while an exposed Seth stood impotently at the entranceway, cursing at him.
XIX
4 December 1987
My dear Alejandra,
It’s a beautiful dawn here, after a run of rain all last week. I awoke minutes ago and there was light already pouring in the windows. It fills the
house and reminds me of your great-grandfather, Ytzak. I can still see him, his long white hair combed back, rocking on the porch at his house, explaining the concept of colors to your father, who sat on his lap, awed: “Blue is the sky on a clear day, yellow is the yolk of an egg.” A generation later, he did the same with you, out on the balcony of your parents’ apartment, and you gazed up at him, as enthralled as your father had once been.
This morning, I wish you were here, wish you could see this house when it is quiet and peaceful, and not just when it is in convulsions.
Much love from the entire family,
Moisés
Moisés’s letter was on onionskin, thin as a whisper, with lettering that rose and fell with exquisite loops. It looked exactly like my father’s script—so much so that I had to recheck the envelope, not for a postmark but to verify the flimsy construction, the par avion logo to remind myself it came from abroad.
“That’s all? ‘It’s a beautiful morning’? That’s it?” asked an angry and resentful Seth. He kept hitting his fist into his palm, pacing in our bedroom. The light on his skin was blue. He looked pale, frostbitten.
When I told my father I had received correspondence from Moisés, he lowered his eyes in that regal way they both have and savored the information for a second before opening them back up and smiling.
“That’s wonderful,” he said. We were in my mother’s kitchen, soaking in the rich aroma of a pot of lentils simmering with garlic, carrots, and a huge soup bone.
“Don’t you want to know what he said?” I asked, put off by his lack of curiosity.
My father shrugged, his big shoulders barely twitching under the thick wool of his sweater. “If you want to tell me, yes, of course, but the letter is to you, no? It is not to me.”
I had shared with him and my mother all the photographs I’d taken in Cuba, including the ones of our old apartment and of Moisés and his family. My parents had gasped at the conditions of the buildings but had been so overjoyed to see Moisés’s healthy brood and the utter light that came off his face in every shot that it was not until later that they shook their heads and sighed, noting that he also looked aged, fatigued.
