After the boys were supposed to be in bed that night, Juan snuck into Alberto’s room. He told his younger brother the only thing that really bothered him about what their father had told them was the fact that their mother “wants to have control.” Juan explained how he respected their father for undermining their mother at the game of control, even as she could be the most hysterical person anyone had ever known. The brothers discussed how she may not have wanted to relinquish control, but she was perfectly content with losing her emotions and causing drama if it served her purposes.
“You know what infuriates me most about her?” asked Juan.
“Qué?” said Alberto, listening.
“That if something big happens, will she even care?”
“There’s really no way to find out until something big does happen.”
Abuelo Gabriel was nearly twenty years older than Abuela Teresa when he married her. He was a man of relatively good health, but since making Cuba his home, he had also made the smoking of a Cohiba cigar one of his favorite leisurely pastimes. Every night after dinner, he liked to light up a fat cigarro and suck in the rich tobacco smoke and puff away curlicues into the ozone of the Caribbean, his adopted home, the island where he found love and would live out his life.
After finishing his cigar, Gabriel often ended an evening with one or two glasses of white Havana Club rum, finishing off a bottle every four to five days. By the time he hit his seventies, his health began to deteriorate almost daily. His reddish hair blanched to steam white, the grayness under his eyes darkened and drooped into his cheeks, and the creases at his temples deepened like a desiccated field when he smiled and told stories of his adventures as a ship captain. He looked weary and his walk became more labored, often making him short of breath. He began to stoop, and his height did not seem so imposing. He started using a cane and sitting for longer periods of time. Teresa insisted he give up the cigarros. At first, he resisted, but after he fell stepping out of the bathtub and dislocated his shoulder and had to harness his arm in a sling for a month, he listened to his wife’s advice and gave up the smoking. The habit was like an amputation at first, but he achieved his last great feat of life: he quit smoking. However, the damage had been done, and he then refused to give up his rum. His liver took a harder beating than he believed, and then one day the call came to the Ramos home. Cuca picked up the phone, took the message from Teresa, and called Lucretia at La Hermosa.
“I’ve been preparing for it a long time,” said Lucretia with frustration in her voice. “How hard was it for him to figure out that cigars and liquor would shorten his life?”
“The boys will be saddened,” said Cuca.
“Sí,” said Lucretia. “They enjoyed my father’s stories. As you have always done, I know you will be there for them. I will find time to talk with them later esta noche.”
When Cuca told the brothers of Gabriel’s passing, they both fell silent, and then Juan cried. Alberto went to his brother and put his hand on his back. “I’ll miss him too,” he said and then quiet tears also oozed from his eyes.
Besides a brief talk with her sons on the day of Abuelo’s passing, Lucretia didn’t openly demonstrate much sign of bereavement. She quickly went about preparing for Father Ballesteros to hold a funeral service and then for the burial of her father in el Cemeterio de Necrópolis Cristóbal Colón—Cuba’s largest graveyard covering over fifty hectares in central Havana. Statues and religious icons decorated the hallowed grounds of the cemetery. With Gabriel having left plenty of wealth to Teresa, she purchased a mausoleum near the Capilla Central, and a small ceremony celebrated the long life of Gabriel Stradford, traveler of the seas, a good man who arrived in Cuba and became a loving husband, father, and grandfather. When Lucretia showed little emotion at her father’s funeral, Teresa called her out. They yelled at one another. Teresa called her daughter ungrateful. Lucretia called her mother intolerable. The brothers looked upon them both with pity.
For now they said, “Adios, Abuelo Gabriel.” They prayed for his soul’s safe ascendance. They kept his story of survival in the Solomon Islands close to their corazóns.
* * *
Chapter 13
Early in 1955 Juan began attending catechism classes for his ensuing confirmation, slated for sometime after his fourteenth birthday in April. Even though Catholicism had been a looming presence over his entire life, he felt no love in his heart towards the church, nor did he feel anything but estrangement towards God. In the same fashion as his father who rarely attended church, Juan wished he could choose to skip weekly Mass. He much preferred reading his books or hanging out with his younger brother and their friends.
But neither Juan nor Alberto had a choice regarding their attendance at church. Their mother forced them to go and expected them to show subservience to the Lord, her Christ. Whether she realized it or not, her insistence on them submitting to faith in God gave them reason to resist loyalty and devotion to the church. They knew their mother could not make them believe that God dwelled within them if they did not feel it. So they resisted, using doubts and questions to fill their minds. If God was out there, why hadn’t He made their mother love them? Why didn’t He make their father spend more time with them? When Juan discussed his disinterest about his upcoming confirmation with Alberto, his younger brother expressed a similar indifference to the whole process of devotion, which he would have to prepare for in another two years.
“I’m just pretending to care,” Juan told him.
“At least in a few months you’ll be done with it, but I’ll have to wait two more years to feel the Light,” said Alberto with sarcasm directed at the church.
“As long as our mother is alive, she’ll try and force us to love the church.”
“Seems like that, but she can’t make us believe anything we don’t want to.”
“True, but that still doesn’t change the fact that I have to go through confirmation.”
“At least you’ll go through the whole thing with Benito and Miguel,” said Alberto. “What am I going to do with you guys gone every day?”
“I know. I hate thinking about it too.”
Starting the second week of January, Juan had to stay after school each day to attend his instructional sessions at the church on his middle school campus, San Mateo. As the boys waited for the maestro, Brother Marco, to arrive, students from other schools, who did not have to go to catechism, mocked those at San Mateo, calling them maricónes. Benito and Miguel often ran one of the antagonists down and shoved him against the wall, slapping his head with their hands until he pleaded for mercy. Still, the bantering and name-calling volleyed back and forth outside the steps of the school’s small parish church until Brother Marco showed up to open the thick wooden doors and begin class—the students stepping in for study, their antagonists heading down the street. In his dark, free-flowing robe with a rosary wrapped around his waist, Brother Marco was in his mid-twenties, yet he was headed towards priesthood, a beatific life of chastity, no choices other than piety to Christ. So the school chose him to conduct the catechism courses.
“Each of you has reached a level of maturity as young men, and now your covenant with Christ must be strengthened. Confirmation is one of the Church’s sacraments. It will sanctify you beyond your original baptism,” Brother Marco told them the first day.
And so for two hours a day after school, five days a week, over the next several months, the boys of San Mateo had to sit, listen, write, and memorize the essential wisdom of Catholic dogma: the names of the saints, the important dates in church history, the central tenets of the faith that defined their lives, the union that would light God’s everlasting torch of love within them. They had all started out life with the conferment of baptism, the blessed trickling of warm drops of water graced upon their heads, running over their brows to their lips, the taste of divinity, the priest uttering a consecration, “This child is a servant of God, baptized in union with the Father.” And now their confirmation
would knit them with a sturdier yarn to God, fit them into the divine quilt with Christ, give them direct access to the warmth of the firmament of the Holy Spirit. Once confirmed, communion would no longer be the formality of taking a tasty wafer and a sip of wine. It would be transubstantiation, the body and blood of the Holy Son grafted into the parishioner’s soul like a patch, a shared Lord’s Supper to overcome the flesh of earth in preparation for their transcendence someday into Heaven, the gates lined with successors awaiting new arrivals.
After their confirmation, the Church would then become their true home, the only place where their words and actions had purpose, and where those words and actions became purified only when they sought penance and confessed their wrongdoings to the priest, the grill chambered between them, parishioner and Father, the trust complete like warm, leavened bread. Only then could their souls be cleansed and forgiveness be gained from the Church, and only if they held remorse in their hearts for their missteps and vowed to carry out the necessary good deeds of reparation appropriate to amend their mistakes, their mortal sins on earth. So follow the holy orders and live a life of bliss through charity and prayer. Live, love, marry, and start a family to see that the Light you are accepting can become something you can give to others. Pledge your soul to the Lord because the Son is watching your every act. Do not let Him down.
“Do not take confirmation lightly, young men,” Brother Marco reminded them daily. “For everything you do and say from here until forever after will be etched on your soul.”
He often continued: “And when you die, if you have adhered to the sacraments, before the moment of transcendence, the priest will perform unction, the last rite, an anointment of healing oil to cleanse any sin during your last confession. It will be the final chance to influence the last reckoning of a life on earth and whether that life was lived with adherence to the sacraments: a devotion to Christ, an honoring of God’s word.”
For those many months each day after school, Juan strained in the pew of the school church. He tried to take notes. He sighed and shifted position. He used his hand to prop up his chin. He dozed off and when he woke up again, the drone of Brother Marco’s voice labored on about divine interaction and the responsibilities of devout Catholics. Juan felt defenseless, his patience and attention in tatters, his weariness like Christ in the desert, the temptation to scream barely contained. He thought he might throw a fit the way his mother so often did.
Benito and Miguel felt no different. They struggled to keep their minds focused, and so they scribbled notes and passed them among each other each day. Do you think Brother Marco likes girls? What will happen if I want una señorita before I’m married? Do you think Jesus went his whole life without a girlfriend? Without a piece of ass?
As Juan, Benito, and Miguel trudged down the road to confirmation, Alberto had no one to play music with, no one to toss the baseball around with, and no one to talk about girls with. He may have been only twelve, but ever since the day Benito and Miguel had climbed the tree to spy on Señorita Silvia, he had felt cheated with not having the chance to go up and catch a glimpse for himself before Miguel ruined his opportunity by tumbling from the branches. So what if Juan, Benito, and Miguel were older? They didn’t have the suavecito to talk to girls? As for Alberto, he felt the nascent urge of young lust sprouting within him like a hearty patch of strawberries. He felt a hankering for pretty girls, lithe and curvy, their voices full of laughter. He thought to himself that he wanted to marry them all, and he knew his amorous inclinations had something to do with his interest in music. Although he didn’t have Benito and Miguel to jam with after school, he jotted out lyrics and sang new tunes to the accompaniment of his guitar. He developed a serenity and tenderness in his music that compelled him to surrender to a deeper appreciation of love. He felt that when all sadness, all fear, and all hate had eroded, love would rise to the surface of the skin, the sensual body starting to take command. And once you understood the flesh as a craving animal with irrepressible feelings, the only way to satisfy the craving was to seek out love. Even at age twelve, Alberto wanted to fall in love, so he turned to his lyrics and music to work out his feelings:
While your love comes and goes
Flows fast and then slows
Mine stays steady like a cobblestone road
He wrote love songs to unknown female lindas, and early one evening while he strummed his guitar in the backyard, he heard someone clapping her hands after he finished his chorus. He looked up and from across the breadth of the yard he saw a beautiful face watching him from atop the brick wall adjacent to the yard where Miguel had fallen from the tree on the night they tried to spy on Señorita Silvia. The girl sat with her arms taut at her sides, her hands gripping the ridge of the wall, her legs dangling down. She wore a white cotton blouse with a thin red sweater and a pair of denim shorts. She bounced her feet in penny loafers against the bricks.
“You sounded really good,” she said in a voice loud enough for him to hear her from across the distance of the yard.
“Gracias,” he hollered back and stood up. He had been sitting on a turned-over crate on the porch.
“What are you staying so far away for?”
“I’m not.”
“Well, if you’re not scared, come closer, ven aquí, so I don’t have to yell,” she requested.
“Okay,” he said and started down the porch steps towards her. He carried his guitar at the neck.
“Es mejor. That’s better,” she said as he got nearer. “Now we can talk.”
“How’d you get up there?”
“I jumped,” she said, slanting her eyebrows upward at him and grinning.
“No you didn’t.”
“There’s a ladder from my side, silly boy.”
“Oh, right . . .”
“This the way you always talk to girls?”
He didn’t know what to say, his heart aflutter like a bee discovering nectar. He examined her beauty: light brown skin, green eyes, cinnamon-colored lips, and dark hair tucked behind her ears.
“So where’d you learn to be so triste?”
“I’m not sad,” he said.
“Your canción was sad.”
“It’s just a song.”
“But it came from your corazón.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I also like to sing,” she said. “I know what something from el corazón sounds like.”
“You do?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“No, it’s just I . . .”
She giggled and lifted her hand to push back a strand of hair that had come loose from behind her ear and slid across her temple. “You’re funny.”
“Oh . . .” he said, blushing and averting his eyes from hers.
She smiled and shook her head. He wondered how old she was. She looked his age, but could have been younger.
“Cuantos años tienes?” she asked, as though reading his mind.
“How old are you?” he countered.
“I asked first.”
“I was thinking it first.”
“So? I asked it out loud first,” she said.
“Doce, twelve,” he blurted out. “Now you have to tell me your age.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, just like you sang in your canción.”
“Tell me about it,” he pretended to gripe, starting to catch on with this flirting thing, learning on the spot and doing quite well he thought.
“Let’s see, we’re about the same age,” she said, her tongue poking out a sliver and clenched between her teeth.
“How can I trust you if you keep things from me?”
“You act like we’re going out,” she said.
“I’m just trying to find out who you are.”
“I’m Emilia, and you’re rude,” she said, a leer of coyness in her green eyes. “You haven’t even told me your name.”
Wow, he thought, she’s smooth. “I’m Alberto,” he said. “Now you know everything about me. But you won’t tell me your age?”
“Once, eleven,” she said. “Now you want to talk about music?”
Emilia Pamperos and her mother were now living in the house of Emilia’s maternal grandparents because her mother was divorcing her father. “He’s a cheating, no-good drunk,” Emilia called her father. He had gambled away their house, and she and her mother had nowhere else to go but to live with her maternal grandparents. Emilia’s mother was happy to see her parents, but she had left a good job as a maid back in Santiago, and Emilia missed her amigas in her hometown as well. She had to stop her singing lessons and she couldn’t bring along her piano, which she was learning to play when her mother had finally had enough of her father and packed up and left after he could not make the mortgage and the bank moved to take over the property. As soon as the decision to leave was made, Emilia and her mother whittled their belongings down to a single suitcase each to haul with them on the train to Havana. They had traveled for two days by rail, arriving yesterday evening. Emilia had slept most of the morning, but that afternoon when she investigated the backyard, she heard singing. She went to her grandparents’ shed and fetched a ladder. She dragged it to the back wall and propped it up. She made certain it was rooted and then climbed to sit on the wall. “And that’s how I found you,” she said to Alberto.
The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy Page 10
