The Tower of the Antilles

by Achy Obejas

  A few say he became a doorman in Manhattan, detached and polite, though others say he lived off disability as soon as his refugee benefits ran out. They say he suffered from AIDS-related dementia and died by his own hand sometime in the nineties after leaving behind a long letter blaming Fidel Castro, his own personal Doomsday, for his demise. There are reports of paramedics wearing long yellow gloves as they brought him out on a stretcher from a Bronx tenement into the bright light of a cold winter day.

  Others testify they saw Enrique in San Francisco in the late sixties, happily buying Victorians in Haight-Ashbury. A few claim he migrated to Neptune, New Jersey, where a long-lost cousin helped him set up a little café he ran with measured success until his retirement. One alleged witness says he talked to him when he was a school janitor in Tampa, married to a third- or fourth-generation Cuban, a deaf woman who owned a beauty salon. Between her kids from a prior marriage and the ones she had with him, they raised seven success stories. Someone else reported he was one of the big donors against the antigay brouhaha raised by Anita Bryant in Miami so long ago. Another says he made it all the way to Egypt, where he worked for years as a guide at the pyramids.

  What’s true is he’s as gone as Amelia Earhart or Matias Pérez—except in Los Sitios. There, the writing on the walls continues to call out his name, today and maybe forever: Viva Supermán!

  The Maldives

  As soon as I was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I knew I wanted to be here, in the Maldives. My tumor is benign, at least technically, just a little drop of fat, not cancerous. It’s growing about one centimeter a year, which is about the same as the rising sea level in the Maldives. But this coincidence isn’t what drew me to these islands.

  For me, everything started just before I left Cuba. I’d just scored an American visa because my father, who’d escaped years before on a raft, had filed for me under a family reunification provision of US asylum laws. Not that my father had much interest in being reunited with me: when he’d lived in Cuba, he’d never hesitated to tell me I was a punishment from God.

  I’d ask him, For what? What did you do to deserve me? It must have been pretty bad.

  But he’d just shake his head and walk away. I’m not going to confess to you, he’d spit over his shoulder.

  Years later, all settled in San Francisco with a new Mexican wife and a revved-up religious calling that involved marching up and down Market Street passing out pamphlets urging homosexuals to repent, he decided maybe God would be more convinced of his commitment and sacrifice if he saved his own daughter first.

  And I was ready to be saved. Not from homosexuality, but from the boredom of Havana. Oh, I know, most Americans hear Havana and think Tropicana and classic cars, parties and salsa, even though salsa is Puerto Rican. But for a Cuban like me, Havana means living with several generations in a crowded three-room apartment (in my case: my mother, her boyfriend, my grandmother and her boyfriend, my sister and her boyfriend, my nineteen-year-old nephew and his boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s two-year-old son), a job during the day earning worthless pesos (I was a security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts), and a job at night earning hard currency (I washed dishes at a fancy family-run restaurant, a position I got by marrying—that’s right, marrying—the owner because Cuban law demands that family businesses only hire family). My Havana was dirty and teeming, and so loud it sometimes felt like a piercing in my ears. I honestly could not remember the last time I’d been alone for more than it takes to relieve myself, and even then I wasn’t immune to the soundtrack of screaming and clattering.

  Given my age—thirty-four—and my situation, I’d already been with pretty much everybody I was going to be with in Havana. And given how overcrowded we were at home (I slept in the same sweat-drenched bed with my nephew, his boyfriend, and their two-year-old, or, weather permitting, on a hammock I’d strung up that ran parallel with the clothesline in the tenement’s back patio), I knew nobody was going to move in with me, even if she loved me, and I wasn’t sure I brought enough to the table, in spite of my dollar-earning dishwashing job, to be wanted enough to take home. In the few instances when the possibility arose, it was only because the other girl’s overcrowded home mirrored mine, but with an additional half-dozen cousins from the provinces. That only left tourists as romantic possibilities, and though my English is fine, nothing calmed my ardor quicker than some American telling me all about the wonders of the Revolution as she paid my way into a dollars-only club I would otherwise not be able to afford.

  In fact, I was celebrating the visa my father had gotten me at precisely one of those clubs, listening to a pretty terrible reggaeton band whose terribleness was underscored by a terrible sound system, when I experienced the tumor’s first overt symptom. In an instant, the bass just dropped out of the music. It became tinny and thin. Because the sound quality at all Havana venues—even the very best ones—is unpredictable, I was sure it had nothing to do with me. I was with a bunch of friends, typical Cubans, and a Canadian who was being hustled by one of those friends and had paid for all of us. I shrugged an apology her way and she smiled uncertainly in my direction.

  When we left a few hours later, my left ear felt plugged. A loud argument was taking place as we passed a café and a drunk blared a trumpet at the corner, but it all sounded gauzy and far away.

  Oh, I know that feeling: my ears got waterlogged when I went diving in the Maldives, the Canadian said.

  Everybody nodded as if they knew the exact coordinates of the Maldives, afraid to seem ignorant in front of the Canadian, but I wondered if it wasn’t one of those countries where Cuba had sent medical brigades. I was pretty sure I’d seen something in a documentary; Cuban TV is one long parade of documentaries. In any case, I hadn’t been diving, ever, in my whole life, but I did wonder, immediately, if going deep underwater meant peace and solitude or if all those schools of fish and shivers of sharks made you feel just as crowded as the city and maybe even a little paranoid.

  Do you have hydrogen peroxide at home? the Canadian asked. Pour some in your ear—it’ll sound like fireworks—then lie on your side and it’ll clear up.

  But it didn’t, and I suspect it wouldn’t have even if we’d had hydrogen peroxide. In fact, over the next few days my hearing seemed to fluctuate wildly. Most of the time, it felt like everything was at a great distance, as if everyone were talking to me from the bottom of the sea. My mother told me she thought it was stress, and that seemed a reasonable explanation. After all, I was leaving soon, headed to the great unknown of the United States, and though I wasn’t planning on living with my father, legally I did have to stay with him for a year and a day because he was sponsoring me. I hadn’t seen him in more than a decade; I hadn’t heard his voice in almost that long when he’d called out of the blue to say he wanted to save me. My mother said it must all be happening for a reason.

  My hearing got no better as I prepped for my trip, but by the time I was ready to go, I must have gotten used to it because I wasn’t paying attention to it anymore. Then, as I was getting on the plane, waving at my family waving at me from the tarmac—my grandmother’s boyfriend has a relative who’s a high-ranking airport official so they all got to personally escort me to the plane—I felt a twitching in my left eye. I’d been very sad, especially as I waved at my grandmother wondering if I’d ever see her again, but I hadn’t been able to cry, or, more precisely, to cry in any kind of recognizable fashion. My right eye teared but my left remained stoic. And now this: little electrical flashes flaring across my eyeball. Because, you see, it was in my eyeball—not on my eyelid, not on my brow—but right there, in my eye, as if my retina had developed a tic. For a few minutes, I saw double and I had difficulty climbing the airplane stairs and finding my seat. Everyone assumed I was just too emotional to make sense of boarding.

  But the twitching didn’t go away. At customs in Miami, it got so bad I was actually asked by an agent if I needed medical attention. I said I didn’t, that I was just nervous abou
t my new life, which my trembling hands seemed to authenticate. What had me genuinely concerned was that my left eye now felt as if someone was constantly opening and shutting a set of blinds. I was supposed to have two hours of rest before I caught my next flight to San Francisco, but assuming it was the prospect of seeing my father that had triggered my state, I quickly pulled out my contact list—the list every Cuban has of who they’ll call if they ever get off the island—and asked a passenger from my flight if I could borrow her cell phone. I tried to calm down enough to dial.

  One of the advantages of my worthless museum security guard job was that I got to meet a lot of foreigners, especially artists. They were usually busy proving their proletariat bona fides to the other Cubans—who never talked to us—by making nice with guards and janitors and such. That’s how I’d gotten to know a video artist named Laura Vaas when she had a one-woman show at the museum. During her installation, it’d frequently been just her and me through many an afternoon, and I’d proven a good helper and sounding board. Before she left Cuba, she’d given me her number and said to call her if I ever found myself in Miami.

  This is who again? Laura asked after I’d identified myself. The volume was up high enough that the phone’s owner heard her and looked at me with concern.

  I told her my name again. From the museum in Havana, I said.

  To my surprise, Laura didn’t hesitate once I explained about my father the avenging Christian and the way my body had gone into revolt at the thought of seeing him. In about an hour she was exactly where she said she’d be, at a Starbucks in Terminal D East just outside the security check. I’ve never been so relieved in my life; I honestly don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t shown up. The twitch in my eye went into overdrive while I waited.

  Laura greeted me with a hug that far exceeded our island acquaintance, grabbed my single suitcase, and drove me to her home, which turned out to be not a palace on the beach but a small wooden house in Kendall with a garage that served as her studio. I almost asked her what had happened, that I thought she was a successful artist, but I caught myself: she was driving a 2002 Ford Focus Wagon. By Cuban standards that’s practically a luxury car, but I knew, even in the airport parking lot where it was surrounded by scores of newer, shinier cars, that I’d probably misjudged her situation.

  That very night, after settling me into her guest bedroom, Laura gave me a spare laptop—a spare laptop!—and set up an account for me on Facebook. She suggested I try to find people I knew in the States. I told her about my contact list but she said on Facebook all you needed was somebody’s name, that I didn’t need their phone number or address. I sat at the kitchen table long after she went to bed, one hand covering my jittery eye, the other typing in name after name of people I knew from Cuba who’d been long gone.

  I was on an old friend’s page when I saw some pictures of myself from the very night my ear had started giving me trouble. There I was dancing, though you could see from my expression something was wrong. Then I noticed the Canadian was also in one of the frames. My friend had tagged her and I followed the link to her page where I discovered there was a whole album—132 pictures—of her trip to Cuba, including many places I’d never even heard of, like a beach called María la Gorda in an area that had been declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO. This was a Cuba unknown to me: all parrot fish and blurry hummingbirds, with only the occasional brown arm helping the Canadian onto a boat or serving her and her friends a bountiful meal.

  I scanned her other albums and saw she was quite the world traveler: swimming with green sea turtles in the Philippines, with moray eels in the Solomon Islands, and walking along what appeared to be a beach at night with blue-white stars scattered in the sand, as if the sky had emptied a constellation on the shore. I wondered if my eye was playing tricks on me. The caption read: Ostracod crustaceans, kind of like bioluminescent phytoplankton, lighting up the shore in Mudhdhoo Island in the Maldives. I thought: Wow.

  I stayed up close to dawn searching for more photos of this strange phenomenon but mostly finding image after image of beaches and beach towns in the Maldives: little storybook villages with an infinite span of blue-green water surrounding them, the sky an endless and tender light. Nothing looked crowded in the Maldives, and even in the capital city of Male, houses were wreathed by gardens of blue and orange flowers, hammocks everywhere. Best of all, of the approximately 1,200 islands that make up the country—and I say approximately because the number of islands depends on the season—only about two hundred are inhabited, and only half of those have tourist resorts. Honestly, I couldn’t figure out why UNESCO hadn’t declared all of the Maldives a Biosphere Reserve.

  The next day, I opened my eyes and everything was in perfect focus: the ceiling fan above Laura’s guest bed, the floral print on the duvet, the giant black screen on the wall with its blinking red light. It took me a second to remember where I was—the United States, Miami, the home of someone I barely knew—and then I heard a low bass throbbing through the wall and the sharp knock of Laura’s knuckles on the bedroom door.

  Adelante, I said, and in she came with a tray holding a glass of orange juice, a banana, a stack of pancakes, and a small cup of black coffee with a full head of foam.

  You won’t get service like this every day, she said, but today being your first day in America . . .

  I almost said something about America being the entirety of the Western Hemisphere but gratitude shut me up. Instead I asked her how to make the picture of the glow-in-the-dark beach in the Maldives the wallpaper on my new laptop.

  In truth, Laura Vaas turned out to be an exceptional friend. When I further explained my situation—including that I wouldn’t have a green card or a work permit for a year and a day—she got on the phone and found me a job washing dishes at a restaurant owned by some friends of hers who paid me in cash. She also got me odd jobs with other artists packing work for shipping. I wasn’t making a ton of money, but enough to buy a bus pass, go to a movie now and again, and buy groceries and creams for my chapped hands. Then Laura said she was going on a fellowship to London for part of the year and would have had to pay someone to house-sit if I hadn’t shown up. My free housing would continue, so even though I was sending money to my family every month, I was even able to start saving.

  I did get a cell phone pretty quickly, and I did eventually call my father and thank him for getting me out of Cuba. He was furious with me, accused me of using him just to come over, but I made no effort to explain how I’d gotten sick just thinking about living with him. Part of it was that as time had passed and my vision and hearing returned to normal, it was hard to believe my symptoms hadn’t been psychosomatic, and I just didn’t want to give him that kind of power.

  In spite of having my new cell, I didn’t make other calls. I knew people in Miami and Key West and Tampa, but I actually didn’t want to see anyone. I folded up my contact list and put it away. Laura’s house was blissfully quiet—all I ever heard were little warblers up in the palm trees and the mailman lifting the letter slot in the afternoon. My bed, which Laura constantly apologized for because it was only a single, felt as long and wide as a luxury liner to me.

  Initially, I had tried to pay Laura back for her kindness by cooking and cleaning, but she got upset, said she was gaining weight, that she liked to take care of her stuff herself. I was terrified I’d offended her so I just tried to stay out of her way and holed up in the guest room. I watched a lot of TV on the big screen in my room, especially documentaries, including The Island President, about how the Maldives are disappearing due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. The Maldivian president wants the world to learn a lesson from his country’s predicament. He wants the world to take responsibility. The situation is so bad they’ve even got a sovereign-land fund to buy new territory and move once their country’s submerged, like Alexandria and the pyramids of Yonaguni in Japan. Or like Guanacabibes, an underwater city off Cuba’s western shore, except no one w
ho isn’t Cuban actually thinks it’s a city, just a bunch of geological anomalies.

  As soon as Laura left for London, I ended my self-imposed exile in the guest room. I opened every door in the house and danced from room to room. What splendor to open my arms wide and just feel cool, satiny air-conditioning on my skin. What extravagance to take a hot forty-minute shower in the morning and a cool hour-long bath at night. I walked around naked and whistled and even did cartwheels in the living room.

  I thought for sure I’d grow lonesome at some point but I didn’t. I got plenty of human interaction at the restaurant and on the bus. Every now and again I’d run into someone I knew, and when I evaded their questions they assumed I was either having a mysterious affair with a rich American or spying for Cuba. They’d write my mother and then she’d write me and we’d both laugh about it.

  One night at the restaurant, I was loading the dishwasher and singing along to a new song by Calle 13 when somebody turned off the radio. Hey, I said, c’mon, as I reached for a pair of latex gloves to tackle the pots. But the music didn’t come back on. I walked over to the radio and turned up the dial and almost immediately one of the owners swatted my hand away. He was saying something—his mouth was moving and his face showed irritation—but I couldn’t hear a thing. I shook my head but the bubble tightened: suddenly I could only see him through what appeared to be a fish-eye lens. He grabbed me by the shoulders and brought his face close to mine, but I couldn’t understand him.

  Before I knew it, the other owner, a Panamanian guy who had been trying to set me up with his fifty-two-year-old sister, threw me in his Jeep and drove me to the emergency room at Jackson Memorial Hospital. We were there until dawn and he stayed with me the whole time, occasionally squeezing my hand and bringing me something to eat or drink. The ER wasn’t much different than Ciro García in Havana, except that the electricity didn’t go out the whole time we were there. Otherwise, it was the same defeated faces, the same resignation to whatever fate had just been ordained by a fall or accident or, in my case, a sudden short-circuit.