by Achy Obejas
Less than a week later, we learned that Dulce María Loynaz, one of Cuba’s greatest poets and a friend and favorite of my father’s, had died in Havana at age ninety-four.
“I am the survivor of a generation of poets,” she had told him in a letter years earlier. “I even outlived myself, which is the worst thing that can happen to a person.”
My mother took to the Internet and printed out as many messages as she could about Dulce María to read to my father, including an eyewitness account of her internment at Colón Cemetery posted by a Costa Rican journalist.
But no matter what my mother did, whether she read him Dulce María’s intense and intimate verse or rubbed the knots on his neck and shoulders with her sage hands, my father remained despondent, weeping uncontrollably at the most unexpected moments. He refused to eat, refused to take his medicines, refused to speak on the phone, dictate correspondence, or help me with Farraluque.
Then in May came the news that Gastón Baquero, a Cuban poet who wrote about memory and magic, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Since Fidel’s rise to power in 1959, he had been in exile in Spain, quietly jotting down poems that arrived at our house in handwritten sheaths tucked into manila envelopes.
“Well,” said my father with his labored breath, “Dulce María was wrong; clearly, going on now is what would be the very, very worst thing.”
XXXI
After two days at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, my father came home to die, in the dim and golden halo of my mother’s votive candles. His lips were still soft and perfect but we all knew the life in him was ebbing. Soon his fever would pass and the sheets on the bed would be as velvety smooth as if they’d been airing out on a winter night in Havana.
My mother and I made the decision to bring him home after the doctor at the hospital shrugged her shoulders and sighed. She was about my age, only grayer, certainly wiser-looking. My mother said nothing, just stood there, her eyes wandering over the immaculate, flowered wallpaper in the waiting room. She followed the design— the sweep of a leaf, the graceful reach of the blooming buds—as if looking for the telltale flaw of connection, the tiny leap from one sheet of flowers to the other, the gap that inevitably exists no matter the workman’s care and trepidation.
There were no crucifixes on the wall, no sounds from outside coming in through the hermetically sealed windows and the thick, rubbery curtains, no water to be spied twinkling on the horizon. It was all dry land, sour aftertastes. I stood there as well, my rib cage imploding, my heart pierced by brittle, broken bones. All the air left my body, just as it was slowly but inevitably leaving my father’s.
Finally, my mother blinked. The doctor peered at me, her eyes wet but empty. When she unexpectedly took my hand, pointing with her head back at the room with my father—what was left of my father—I wanted to say, “That bundle of sticks under the covers? That’s not my real father.” I wanted to shake my hand out of hers and whirl like a dervish. I wanted to shout: “You should have seen my father! With his wide girth, his shy smile and shiny eyes.”
But I just nodded numbly instead, more or less like I did later, as a local parish priest came through the front door of our Rogers Park home, his face even more tearful and meaningless than the doctor’s back at the hospital. He glanced at the mezuzah I’d placed on the door frame a few weeks back—a little soft leather roll-up—then looked away, as if he’d decided it was something else, a shadow maybe, or a snail.
“Oh, Mrs. San José, I’m so . . .” he whispered to my mother, his voice trailing off. He was wiry and bent, in need of a haircut and anxious. He was the result of a sudden spurt of my mother’s Catholicism, a last-ditch effort to keep my father alive. I stared at my mother in disbelief but she was a blank space, as hollow as the priest’s condolences.
“Ale, por favor,” said my tía Gladys, signaling something concerning the priest.
My mother and aunt sat him down in one of my father’s chairs—the graceful Cuban-style rocker in the living room that still held the shape of his great body. My cousins aped their mother like ladies-in-waiting, each one a mirror reflection: round and buttery. The priest, catered to by the women in my family as if he were a prince or a groom, was a beehive fallen from a tree, surrounded by a barely contained panic. Mr. and Mrs. Choy floated like ghosts in the hall. She held a large metal bowl of rice, a gift no doubt, sprinkled with scallions and sprouts from her garden.
My aunt waved at me again. I was right outside the den, which had been turned from my office into my father’s sick room. “Por dios,” she said, exasperated. “Help us, Ale.” She stomped over to me. “Get the father something to drink, please.” My cousins, idle and indignant, shadowed her.
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. Mr. and Mrs. Choy glanced up, their eyebrows twitching on their otherwise flat satin foreheads.
“What do you mean ‘no, no’?” Tía Gladys asked, incredulous, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. The cousins gasped.
“I can’t help you,” I said.
“¿Qué qué?” Tía Gladys’s face was all scrunched up, annoyed. She scanned the room for her husband, the weight-lifting dentist, but he was lost behind the cousins, the Choys, and a small group of my father’s students who’d stopped by to pay a visit. “This is no time, Ale, for whatever is going on with you. We need to do this soon, before your father dies. The Last Rites don’t count if he’s already gone. Get the father some water, please, some Coca-Cola— his throat is dry.”
“I can’t, Tía, I’m sorry, I can’t help with this. You guys didn’t even discuss it with me!”
“With you? With you?” It was as if she’d been stung by a loose bee, her face distorted. “Why should we consult you?” In Gladys’s world, my father was my mother’s province. Even I was an intruder.
“I’m his daughter, remember?” I looked to my cousins for support but they seemed temporarily confused.
In my head, I was already plotting how I was going to sneak into my father’s room after they were all gone, with their incense and oils, how I would have a private, final audience with my father’s body. I’d clean his fingernails, buff them with cloth as he had done in life. It would be a small gesture, the tiniest symbolism, but it would be something.
Master of the Universe! Have compassion for Enrique Elías, son of Luis and Sima, for he is a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. . . . May he tread with righteous feet into the Garden of Eden, for that is the place of the upright, and god protects the pious.
I was deep in my reverie when my mother came up to me leading the black-garbed priest, the rosary dripping from his fingers. I was about to protest—about to repeat the whole business of not being consulted, about to tell my mother how inappropriate I thought it was to have this man here—when she leaned up and kissed my cheek with her moist lips.
“This is not for him, not for you,” she said, meaning the priest. “It’s for me. We’ll do something else, something for you and him, later. Isn’t there something to be done later?”
The door opened to the den before I could answer. They disappeared, the priest mumbling. Incense wafted from inside, pungent and yellow in the candlelight. I listened to them praying on the other side of the closed door, a hive buzzing. And I remembered that the tropical variety—the only kind native to Cuba, the only bee on the island before the Spaniards arrived—is stingerless, capable of defending its territory only by distracting the enemy.
If my tía Gladys had asked, I wouldn’t have been able to explain. Even though I stood by, in my own mind insisting on my and my father’s Jewish souls, I fear if called to testify I might have breathed nothing but empty air, my mouth wide apart in an O, mute and cowardly.
Why? It’s in my genes, just like my father’s, a DNA string that carries scratched into its intricate binding sparks from broken vessels and ancient light. But unlike my father—whose anxieties are historical, whose worries are based on the knowledge that he could not hide his Jewishness even if he tried—mine is exactly
the opposite: What I fear is discovery, not as a Jew but as a fraud.
I have only claimed to be Jewish once in my life: at the airport in Indianapolis, on my way home from deposing a Mexican farm-hand in Martinsville, Indiana, home of the Ku Klux Klan. He had watched a piece of machinery completely swallow his teenage son, spitting him out in a completely unrecognizable and bloody mash. At the airport, I was minding my own business when two fresh-faced young white Hoosiers approached me with vinyl-bound Bibles.
“Have you found Jesus yet, ma’am?” asked the young man, well-scrubbed and plain, his shirt ironed stiff.
I was reading Newsweek behind dark glasses. I was sipping black coffee from a Styrofoam cup and thinking about that poor man back on the unyielding farm, where he and his grieving wife had lived for twenty years and owned nothing more than a tin trailer, a TV, and a hot plate.
“Ma’am?” asked the young man again.
I studied him over my sunglasses.
“We’re here to talk to you about Jesus Christ, Our Lord,” said his companion, a young woman in a yellow rayon dress.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to peddle at the airport,” I said.
“We’re not selling nothing,” the girl said with a strained smile. “We just want to talk to you.”
“I’m a Jew,” I said.
The boy stumbled; he quickly glanced at his partner, his mouth agape, unclear about what to do next, but the girl stood her ground. “That’s okay,” she said. “Jesus was a Jew, too.”
I’ve never done that again, never used Judaism as a front or shield, no matter the temptation. The irony of it all didn’t escape me even then—to tell the truth, the immediate truth, would have only encouraged the proselytizers. I knew as I stared them down that what I was seeking was protection, authenticity, weight. What I really wanted to say was that I belonged to something so powerful, so strong, that it would repel them.
And yet the reason I’m not a Jew—a real Jew, a public Jew—is because claiming that very same identity five hundred years ago before a vicious Spanish council would not have protected my ancestors. If they stood up to the Santo Oficio and said “I’m a Jew,” they would have been tortured, perhaps killed, certainly mocked and ridiculed. Being Jews guaranteed their suffering. It is because they were Jews then, in that moment, at that time, choosing to embrace their Jewishness at all costs, even at the cost of lying and pretending to be something else, that I cannot be one now.
But when those kids approached me with their Bibles tucked under their arms, I was clear-voiced: “I am a Jew.” It didn’t stop them, of course, they continued their preaching, condescendingly telling me that there are many Jews who believe in Christ, that Judaism is just a beginning. They talked and talked, but when they finally walked away, exhausted, the pages of their Bible wilted, I had not been converted.
I’m a Jew.
It was for my father, for Luis and Sima, for Leah and Ytzak—and for me. In that moment, under siege in a sterile airport, I avenged the injustices of five hundred years ago, even if for only an instant, even if only in my own small way.
XXXII
When it came to translation, my father’s method was always the same: use the clearest, most lucid language; the point is always and above all to communicate. Nothing was ever too complicated, too obtuse. Even when the original was deliberately vague, my father found ways to bring it into the light.
But on the topic of his own life, he retreated from his profession, preferred to talk as if what had happened was just beyond his grasp, a mystery so deep even his finely honed talent of investigating meaning was completely eluded. By the time my father died, I understood that well enough to know I’d always have a million unanswered questions. I’d have to be satisfied with reading signs, with looking at his life as parable or prophecy. I knew I was destined to be an acolyte at Delphi.
In spite of my mother’s best efforts to save my father from extinction, to cut deals with African and Christian deities, he died with me as his only witness. It was not in the black of night but at dawn, with the sky painted in pastel ribbons, delicate fingers reaching in through the windows of the den. They seemed to cradle him, give him an olive tone, revive him for an instant. My father passed away wearing a halo of morning light.
Earlier, the strain of watching his life leak away had been too much for my mother, who at one point just collapsed and had to be given a sedative, convinced to rest upstairs in their vast and empty bed. My tía Gladys dozed on the living room couch, her husband and daughters back in their own cozy home, waiting for the new day’s vigil. I imagined their alarm clocks ringing, Mike Kauf buffing his biceps with a thirty-minute workout before calling in to cancel his appointments, my cousins all taking turns in the shower, pondering closets of inappropriately colorful clothing.
It had been a rough night. My father was ashen, sunken, often unrecognizable. His chest heaved, his purplish hands quivered like frightened starfish. Every breath was an effort. At about three in the morning, it was just him and me, my mother’s candles, roses, and sunflowers. My father’s prayer book—a gift from Ytzak, a sheath of powdery pages in Ladino published in Salonika shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire—was balanced on the blankets covering his spindly legs. We said nothing about it; it was understood, finally, that his secret was out.
I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about—maybe it was the Farraluque translation, or the rumors swirling around Miami and Havana that Fidel had finally died because he didn’t show up on the 26th of July to deliver his usual speech—but my father just looked up at me with stubborn tears, tears that wouldn’t fall.
“Your mother . . .” he whispered, smiling, eyeing the makeshift altar she’d erected on top of the TV. It covered all her bases: flowers, rotting fruit, pieces of candy, novenas, a rosary coiled in a circle, and her Virgin of Charity. A small table held a handful of glasses of water (these would be stagnant, powerless) and a candle lit to Babalú-Ayé, the god of illnesses, depicted as an old white man on crutches on the label. All of this vanished whenever the parish priest arrived, shoved in the closet or under the bed, the candle trailing a silvery wisp that always prompted the cleric to ask if something was burning.
My father and I both laughed a little. He coughed, his body lifting off the bed each time, then falling back into it with a muffled thud. I knew both of us should have been elsewhere: Him, downstairs in his office, puffing on a puro, preparing notes for a lecture he’d deliver to a throng of adoring students somewhere in Mexico, London, or New York; me, dancing somewhere, swiveling my hips like my mother, away from the usual heartache and boredom of my job, perhaps in the arms of someone sleek and sinewy.
“Alejandra . . .” my father said, his voice hoarse. No doubt there was pain there, effort, too. He rearranged his bones on the mattress, in the nest of pillows we’d built for him. “I need you . . .”
“I need you, too,” I said, meaning it more than I could have ever imagined.
He closed his eyes in his kingly way—for a second, I confess, I held my breath, afraid they might not open again, and I made a million promises right then so that I might see myself reflected one more time in his deep, dark pools. “Yes,” he said, smug, his lids rising in his usual condescendingly slow motion, “but, you see, I’ve always needed you.” The tears still clung to the rims of his eyes, his lashes black and beautiful.
He could be infuriating even while dying, I thought.
“I . . . need a few things . . .” he said. He swallowed. “In my office . . .” Then he gave me instructions in his new elliptical style. And I understood that when I descended the stairs this time, I was breaking a seal, I was entering his Holiest of Holies.
In my father’s office the light is different, clearer somehow, although there has always been less of it there than anywhere else in the house. It’s a cave with an Amazonian waterfall, a bridge of bones, the secret passageway to another dimension. Whenever I stepped inside, I always felt my heart slow, its
beat mute.
When I entered it on the night of his death, I breathed in the lingering sweetness of tobacco, the vague traces of cologne, the spice of his still living body. I stood there for a moment, on the threshold between the real world and his, trying to adjust my senses.
Through the play of light and gloom his desk appeared to me like a sailing ship, wooden and dark, Columbus’s caravels—not imposing but efficient, sturdy, typical of Spain’s conquering fleets. I could see him standing atop that smooth surface, like a captain (Noah or Columbus, both a little mad), searching for land, for a white feathered bird to bring him a sign that somewhere there was a resting place, an Eden, a heaven.
I touched his desk chair, grand, padded like his own body had been once, and felt it like the pelt of an animal now surrendered to its own mortality. I might have heard a whimper, I might have heard a howl.
“You will be . . . returning to Cuba . . . no?” Every word my father spoke was a test balloon, an experiment in using a limited supply of oxygen.
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t know when really. . . . I want to go, but I don’t have much reason to, not really.”
I opened the velvety white bags I’d brought up from his room, both relatively new, and pulled out his prayer shawl and the two little black boxes wrapped tight in their well-oiled leather laces. I don’t know why I was surprised that my father’s tefillin wasn’t hundreds of years old. I suppose I had a romantic notion that they might have been passed down for centuries, that I’d inherit a relic infused with the spirits of many, many generations.
“Ytzak . . .” my father said, his chin pointing at the phylacteries, as if he’d read my mind. “A gift . . . bar mitzvah . . .”
“You were bar mitzvahed?” I was stunned.
He struggled with the prayer shawl, draping it over his head, then pulling it down around his shoulders like a scarf. “Not like here, no. No . . . my thirteenth birthday . . . that’s bar mitzvah. No party.”
