Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  In the evenings, a man across the street from the Menachs sings tangos until the wee hours, occasionally joined by his adolescent granddaughter, the two of them laughing and quarreling about the repertoire. Another neighbor attempts suicide nightly: “Bring me the alcohol!” she screams at her young son. “Bring me the matches!” Eventually, a man intervenes, tries to console her but it all ends in frustration and anger. “Go ahead, do it,” he dares her, but she never does.

  Some nights when it is excruciatingly hot and swatches of the city are black from government-ordered power outages, people sleep outside on their balconies or patios, hauling pillows and cushions to the open air. The red flares of scores of cigarettes simmer like tiny fires dotting railings and rooftops. No one really sleeps, they just rest their bare legs and arms on the cool metal or stone of the buildings, breathe the pungent air and make love. You can hear the murmuring, the groans, the slapping of wet flesh on wet flesh, and the laughter—both tender and cruel.

  In my country, the sidereal clock is backward. “Two homelands have I, Cuba and the night,” wrote José Martí. “Or are the two just one?” 4 Here, time measured by the stars is always longer than that measured by the sun. The nights are meant to be spent alert, traversed like a boiling Styx or a hallucinogenic Mardi Gras parade route, whiled away in the sopping womblike hold of an infinite lover, or in wait of—what?—a messiah, a sign, the dawn, more rain. In Cuba, to experience the night awake—out—aroused, is to trasnochar.

  It is, of course, a regular verb.

  When I come out of my heat-fueled stupor, it is Deborah’s steady hands on my shoulders, guiding me to the kitchen table, bringing a glass of water and bits of ice to my mouth. She doesn’t live here anymore but I’ve been told she stops by once every day or so, often helping around the house, sometimes staying the night.

  “Are you okay?” she asks as she anxiously places her cool fingers on my forehead then on my cheek and neck. Her hands are rough like her father’s, but from making art: hammering wood, moving stones, filtering through the lost and found of life.

  I feel swathed, caramelized. “I’m sorry . . .”

  “Sorry for what? Don’t worry about it. You scared me, that’s all. The weather’s unbearable. You want more water?”

  I tip back the clear glass, then hand it to her. She goes to the counter and plucks pieces of ice for me from the center of a towel that she must have banged against the hard surface to break up some big frozen clump. When I remember Ernesto doing the same thing ten years before, I can’t help but chuckle a little.

  “What?” says a tall, slender Deborah, turning around and smiling brightly as she pours water into my glass.

  She is a young woman now, and her hair has darkened a bit; it flashes brown and reddish highlights among beaded braids and scattered dreadlocks. But if I didn’t know better, I’d think we’d been transported to New York or Amsterdam: Black-garbed, punky Deborah—boots, jeans, and a loose-fitting T—also sports a dozen or so tiny silver hoops on her left earlobe and an elaborate, blue-black tattoo of the Hebrew alphabet’s aleph on the top of her right hand.

  “What the hell is that?” I ask, still a bit dazed, when she gives me the glass.

  “Oh, this?” she says giggling as she glances down at the swirl on her brown hand.

  “Yeah, that,” I say again, joining her in laughter.

  “This is evidence of my shame,” she says in a mocking tone. She goes back to the kitchen sink and begins to fill an empty plastic bottle with water. “At least according to my grandfather.”

  “So what is it really?”

  She shrugs. “It’s body art,” she says. “I liked the idea.” She stretches her hand for me to see, flexes her fingers like Leví. “I designed it myself.”

  “Nice job,” I say admiringly. The lines are crisp and clear and have a certain elegance. “Where’d you get it done?”

  “In Old Havana,” she says as she fills another empty bottle with water. “There’s a guy there who runs a tattoo parlor. One day this artist from San Francisco came—and this guy was really amazing— so I had him do it. I told my grandfather it was actually a sign of pride, that this way I could never deny being Jewish, but he just scoffed. I mean, okay, they won’t bury me in Guanabacoa, so what? Like, if there’s a god, this’ll matter more than what I’ve done in my life. . . . But I’m the black sheep of the family, you know.”

  I consider her siblings’ current states and tell her I can’t imagine that. So she explains that because much of her performance work is seen as politically ambiguous, she’s constantly drawing official suspicion and thus embarrassing her grandfather. Her last piece— a collaboration with a U.S.-based Cuban-born artist named Pilar Puente—actually drew the attention of both Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior and the New York Times.

  “Didn’t you see the article?” she asks with a mixture of pride and amazement. “It was in August, with a picture and everything.”

  “My father died in August,” I say. “I wasn’t paying attention to much of anything.”

  “I’m sorry, of course,” she says, pausing respectfully from her task as the faucet gushes white.

  “What’s with the water?”

  “Oh, these?” She scans the half dozen or so plastic bottles she’s lined up next to the sink. “They’ll get us through the next few days, while the water’s shut off. Don’t flush the toilets unless you have to. It’ll be at least three or four days, maybe a week, before we can fill the water tanks again. It’s so hot, everybody’s going through their water really fast.”

  Deborah plucks a curl of hair from her face. She explains that her piece with Pilar involved simultaneous actions in Havana and Miami. They each wrapped themselves in a Cuban flag and hung by a wire from the apex of a historically important building. In Miami, Pilar dropped from the old Freedom Tower, where arriving refugees like my family and I were processed. In Havana, Deborah was lowered from the spire of the cathedral. When they touched ground, both women dropped the flags to reveal their naked bodies. Then they walked through the streets until each was arrested.

  “That was the point,” she explains.

  “Getting arrested?”

  “Confronting authority, confronting conformity, confronting the attitudes that say the truth—which is beauty—can only be defined by imposed order,” she says, turning off the water to finish talking, her energy all intense. “The idea was to force another look at ourselves, to reconsider that all of our accomplishments—whether it’s the revolution or the success of the Cubans in Miami or whatever—are all meaningless, all illusionary, unless we go back to our true origins, to our unmasked, vulnerable selves, the ones we see in the mirror when we’re alone. We wanted to take this image, which is of such magnitude, and confront the institutions of our society, but not in a violent way, not in a disrespectful way, and not in a way that could possibly echo left-right politics, because then everything just gets lost. We wanted it to be universal, classic, but also fresh, also radical.”

  “And your grandfather . . . he got freaked out by the nudity?”

  “Not so much, really,” Deborah says getting back to filling more bottles. “He worried that it could be interpreted as antirevolutionary, which is ridiculous. It’s about renewal, which, maybe in these stagnant times, is pretty revolutionary in its own way. In any event, the police didn’t hold us long, either one of us. Just enough to try and scare us a little. Pilar and I, we’re going to do another piece, about communication. We’re trying to get animal sounds down in different languages. I’m learning the English ones now. She’s learning the Spanish. I don’t know how we’re going to do it yet.”

  As Deborah talks, it becomes obvious to me: She will never leave. She’s the one who will wear the legacy, the one for whom the future’s a gift of awe. Then I feel a night breeze, a cool blue air snaking through the house. In the living room, a veiled Rodolfo squeaks in his rocking chair. My head is lighter, my vision clear.

  “So what does you
r father think about all this?” I ask her.

  Deborah turns around slowly from the sink and grins. “Who do you think snuck me into the cathedral?”

  During Yamim Nora’im, Moisés goes to temple every day, morning, noon, and evening. Most of the time, he has Orlando drive him to the Sephardic Center, but sometimes he goes to the Askenazi synagogue in Vedado, the Patronato, the one with the silver arch at the door and the high, tattered ceiling where birds fly in and out during prayers. Chevet Ahim, Orlando tells me, is closed.

  “The congregation was very old,” he explains one day as he drives me to see José Farraluque, with whom I have to discuss the translation I worked on with my father in his last few months. “Everybody died or emigrated. The few old men who were left couldn’t really keep it open by themselves. They eventually drifted off, some to Adath Israel—the Lubavitchers give them a free lunch, you know.”

  Every day, I try to catch Moisés, to talk to him about my father and the photograph he left behind, but he puts me off each time with a dismissive wave and a grunt. His foggy pupils roll away from me.

  “Not a good time,” says a weary Ester. “Los días terribles—he has so much on his mind.”

  “So much for which to ask to be forgiven,” says a nasty Paulina as she gobbles a piece of buttered bread at the kitchen table. Rafa, sitting idly at the table, guffaws loudly. I remember what Orlando told me and immediately note Paulina’s New Balance sneakers, the gold chain around her neck, and the midriff-revealing tube top above her tight, impossibly high denim shorts. She’s thin and flat, a little girl cynical and bitter beyond her years. She sneers at me as she chews and I begin to wonder what Rafa’s intentions really are, whether he’s grooming his sister to take on his girlfriend’s business if she should leave him.

  (Later, Orlando will tell me that part of Moisés’s stress these days comes from the Cuban Jewish community’s new relationships with foreign Jews, how Cuban Jews are in desperate need of knowledge and materials about their own faith and need the foreigners to bring them, but how it also puts the Cubans in the strange position of trying to prove their worthiness as Jews, and even their Jewishness.)

  “You must have so much to do here besides just, you know, your father’s business,” says Ester, sensing the tension. Her face is shiny from sweat. Here in the kitchen, the temperatures are even higher as she boils the water Deborah has hoarded. “That fellow Farraluque called.”

  “Yes, yes,” I say, feeling like Ester’s pushing me out the door, trying to get rid of me again.

  I leave the kitchen and crawl back to the unlit, dank loft that is my refuge. In the darkness I pull out my father’s plastic-swathed ashes and the photograph he gave me and stare at the girl on the ship in Havana harbor. She is olive-toned and comely but she isn’t Cuban, this I know. I try to decipher the ship’s coordinates, looking for clues in the photo’s horizon, but I feel too lost to trust I’d know what to do at that water’s edge.

  Farraluque, it turns out, is a devilishly handsome man, his hair almost blue it’s so black, his eyes clear like mine. His jaw is square and his nose slightly hooked, his upper body rippling with muscles. Rumors suggest he has an enormous penis and many lovers, but what no one has told me is that Farraluque uses a wheelchair in his home, his right foot a butchered stub from an accident during a sugarcane harvest. An elderly aunt and uncle live with him, making his meals, running his errands, and helping him about. His house, a two-story structure in Miramar, is equipped with ramps and a strangely rigged, homemade elevator on which the uncle pulls to get his famous nephew upstairs.

  But because Havana’s streets are so riddled with potholes and rubble, Farraluque leaves the chair at home and maneuvers on wooden crutches in public, swinging his body like Tarzan. I have to rush to keep up with him; Orlando follows along silently, his long strides effortless.

  “The thing is, really, how do I know?” Farraluque says in reference to my work. “Forgive me but I have no choice but to take your word that the translation is what you say.” He is wearing baggy brown pants that hide any possibility of taking his measure. When Orlando catches me looking, he chuckles and I blush a Russian red.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say, rattled. The heat continues, steam rises, everything is so bright there are no shadows anywhere. “You can have somebody read it whose English you trust, you have my references—”

  “But you’ve never done a literary translation before,” says Farraluque with a sly smile. He sucks on cigarette after cigarette, each gesture suggestive of other possibilities. “I mean, it’s not the same thing as an immigration form or a legal writ.”

  “You have her father’s recommendation,” says Orlando, the first words he’s spoken during my meeting with Farraluque, who insists on taking me to a friend’s house. I’m going along because the exchange has been strained and when he suggests it, Orlando signals that it might be a good idea.

  The weird thing is, Farraluque hasn’t rejected the translation, hasn’t commented on its merits. What he wanted, he says, was to see me with his own eyes, to ask me how I’d gone about the work. By hand or via computer? he asks. Do you read it aloud first, or later? Do you go silent during the violent or graphic scenes? Can you say singar, mamar, pinga, papaya above a whisper?

  At first I think he’s kidding. I want to say, Look, buddy, I was raised in the United States, what do you think? Then I remember Deborah and Paulina and the neighbors all around the Menachs—their loud, salty arguments, the constant innuendoes, the brazenness—and I want to grab him by the shoulders and ask him what kind of macho asshole is he that he thinks such language might unnerve me, or any Cuban woman anywhere.

  An unflustered Farraluque lurches forward, his bad foot hanging back, working like a rudder. And suddenly I realize he isn’t really asking me anything. He’s simply talking, posing, winking at me between sentences.

  “Come meet my friends,” he says, “we’ll have a drink, we’ll dance.” He peeks down at his useless foot and lets loose a chilling laugh.

  At his friend’s house, a perspiring Farraluque waits patiently for the large wooden door to open. It’s a lavish mansion on the shore in Miramar, like his own only two stories high, but much more expansive. All around it are foreign embassies or corporate headquarters for Cuba’s collaborative ventures with European and Latin American partners. They are painted picture-perfect pastels, with manicured lawns and bent Cuban gardeners pruning orchids and hibiscus behind decorative steel fences. There are no wildflowers here, no uncontrolled bursts of tropical exuberance, no dusty patches.

  At Farraluque’s friend’s, a gated driveway curls around to the back, disappears in a thicket of stout palms and lush evergreens. Through the windows we see immaculate pink walls, a whirling overhead fan with shiny new blades, and a large canvas of splattered colors buzzing with a devil-may-care energy.

  “Aren’t you just dying?” Farraluque asks, meaning the heat. He pulls his V-neck T from his chest, showing off wet hairs making squiggly lines on his skin. “We can swim here, there’s a pool,” he adds before I can answer. I feel as if the temperature will strangle me.

  The door slides open and we are greeted by a smiling, older man, a starched white shirt on his black pear-shaped torso. “Señor,” he says warmly in Farraluque’s direction. “So good to see you. Come in, your friends, too.”

  I quickly look to Orlando: Can this be real? A butler? In Havana?

  “Where are your friends from?” Orlando asks casually. He is amused, I can tell.

  “From Havana,” Farraluque says as we follow the butler through the modern living room—everything is made from imported blond woods and metal, the lamps scream of Scandinavia. In the background, the air conditioner’s frosty breath hums. “I know what you’re thinking,” he continues, “but they’re Cubans, real Cubans— in fact, revolutionaries of the best kind.” Then he snickers.

  As we near the sliding glass doors to the back patio, the view comes into focus. There’s a large kidney-shap
ed pool, a psychedelic glare distorting its surface. The ocean sways just beyond, undulating like a blue whale waiting to be petted. The men make a small huddle, patting soft bellies. Shapely young women stretch on lounge chairs and dangle off the diving board. They are cinnamon-toasted Cubans (I’m relieved when I realize Celina isn’t one of them), the men mostly scorched Europeans, trembling blisters ready to burst.

  “Wait a minute,” I say as the butler, too much like a character out of Gone With the Wind for my taste, tugs meekly at the door for our passage. “What’s going on here?”

  “I can’t believe it!” a startled voice says behind me.

  I pivot. “Dios!” I swear. I’ve moved too fast and my head spins into a momentary fog. In reality, I’ve been taken by surprise once more by Estrella, my old interpreter friend. She’s doughy now, almost round, but with all the elegance of the lady of the house. A confused Orlando blinks; Farraluque, muscles relaxed on his crutches, grins malevolently. I’m dizzy and unintentionally lean on him, which makes Orlando edgy.

  “Alejandra, I am always running into you unexpectedly!” Estrella’s wearing a white linen dress, tastefully accessorized as if she were hosting a business luncheon or diplomatic visit. “What are you doing here?” she asks, her hands fidgety. But, like Farraluque, she does not let me answer, kissing me and sliding her arm through mine, leading me out to the heavy heat of the pool. “Johnny! Johnny!” she calls out excitedly to the men, who turn around as if in slow-motion. “Farraluque brought us a surprise! You’re not going to believe who’s here!”

  A dashing, satin-robed Johnny Suro, his Clark Gable mustache snowy white now, excuses himself from the group. He’s lean like a movie star, a whiskey glass and cigar poised in the same hand. “Welcome to our home,” he says, kissing both my cheeks, pulling me to him so I feel the moist softness of his lips.

  On the way home from Miramar, Orlando turns on the car radio. It’s the first time Fidel has appeared in public since early September and he’s been talking for hours now. There’s nothing else on; when Orlando skips stations, Fidel hops with him from frequency to frequency. Finally, Orlando clicks the knob off.