by Noel Hynd
“Tell me about Robert,” he said.
“Robert?” she asked, turning toward him.
“The man you were engaged to,” he said. “Is there another Robert?”
“No,” she said, looking back to the road. “There was just one. A wonderful man.” She gazed at Paul, waiting to see if he would direct his questions to any details. Nothing further came. “He was wonderful and I loved him,” she said. “Strong. Supportive. But romantic and capable of great tenderness. Understanding, fair-minded, and kind.” A mile of the old highway disappeared beneath the wheels of the Toyota before she spoke again. “Sometimes he and I seemed so close that I didn’t even think of him as another person. He was an extension of me, and I was an extension of him. Can you follow that?”
“Easily,” Paul answered.
“Part of me died that day in Ukraine … and remains dead. Like a window that’s been sealed shut,” she said. “I can see through it, I can admire what’s on the other side, but I can’t open it. What makes it worse, what makes it so much harder to accept, what keeps it so unsettled, was the suddenness of it. The arbitrariness of it. The jolting reality of how the end happened and how someone I loved was taken so far before his time.” She paused. “I know, I’m dwelling a bit. But you asked. And the wound is less than a year and a half old. It’s still there and hurting.”
“I understand. My father’s been gone for thirty-eight years,” Paul said. “I still miss him. If he came back and stood in front of me, I have no idea what I’d say to him. But I miss him. See, you know, that’s what lurks here between us, Alex. That’s what we have in common. Important people were taken away from us. Taken unfairly, taken by murderers, taken suddenly and violently.”
“You have a point,” she said. She directed the conversation back to Paul. “I don’t know how you got me going on this. I’ve never told anyone what I just told you.”
“I asked,” he said. “My question was as much about the man you lost as how you’re dealing with it. You answered both, which was what I was looking for.”
Behind them, the sun had long since fallen below the horizon. Deep evening approached. They stopped once to search the sky again, but saw no choppers. They stepped back into the car with great relief but rode the next half hour in silence, other than the tinny cackle of the radio.
Toward their destination, the highway wound through steep hills and pristine forests, coming down to the side of the sea. Then it continued to the east for a final stretch. There were several rest stops on the side of the road, and in each there were children selling fruit, strings of bananas, guava, and mamey, a sweet orange fruit with the shape and consistency of avocado. They passed some crumbling stucco houses where people, mostly old, sat on sagging sofas and sipped drinks on decrepit verandas. Children played in the streets, mostly in ragged shorts, and gave way with excitement as the four-wheel-drive vehicle eased through them.
Then the road turned into a private driveway lined with flowering plants in large industrial drums. Paul pulled the Toyota up to a veranda on the side of a house that was particularly imposing due to its setting. The veranda, and the house it was attached to, did not sag, and Alex could tell it was in good condition. There was a battered Peugeot 404 parked to one side, also. It was a faded maroon with rust and dents.
A screen door opened. A lithe brown woman in a short green dress appeared quietly. She stepped out and looked carefully at the arrivals. Across her chest, held carefully and at the ready, she carried a rifle.
“We’re here,” Guarneri said. “Be careful. She’s a sweetie, but she can be trigger happy. I’ll get out first.”
FIFTY-TWO
This is Thea,” Paul said to Alex, introducing the woman with the rifle. “She’s a cousin of mine. Or maybe she’s my sister and no one ever told me. Who knows? I lose track.”
Thea laughed.
“You’re a beast, Paul,” Alex said.
“That I know,” he answered.
Thea stepped forward, and smiled. She was tall for a Cuban woman, perhaps five ten, with reddish brown skin and eyes that suggested a hint of an Asian lineage. She was thin and wore a simple green cotton dress that flowed to her mid-thighs. She had a pretty, unaffected face and a wide smile.
Paul introduced Alex by her real name, indicating to Alex that these were people Paul could trust.
“Bienvenida, Alejandra,” Thea said to Alex. Thea spoke no English.
“Muchas gracias,” Alex said. “Mucho gusto, Thea.”
Thea had an easy grace as she led her guests to the house and set aside the weapon. The veranda had an awning above it that presumably gave it shade during the hot Cuban afternoons. Several wicker chairs with cushions were scattered around and a large red cat sat quietly, inspecting the new arrivals.
Once inside, Alex could see that there were many rooms, joined together railroad style. The colors on the walls were bold and contrasting. Decorating the walls were an array of seashells, bottles, and driftwood, cleverly designed to look like animals, marine life, and human faces. The furniture ranged from the modern to the threadbare. Thea led her guests to another screen door, which led to an outside sitting area, one that was enclosed by a screen but which faced a vast, empty stretch of beach.
“I’ll get my uncle,” Thea said when Alex and Paul were seated. “He’s sleeping now. May I get you refreshment? Tea? Wine?”
“Either would be fine,” Alex answered. “Something cold would be good.”
“Of course,” she said. “We have a refrigerator … and electricity so the refrigerator is running. Does that surprise you?” She laughed and smiled broadly. “Please make yourselves comfortable. I’ll get Señor Johnny. Please, Uncle Paul, show our guest around.”
Thea disappeared. Alex looked around.
“Señor Johnny?” Alex asked.
“It’s what my uncle likes to be called. Go with it,” he said.
“Absolutely,” she answered.
She noted a garden in a different direction and what appeared to be a small farming area with chickens. Paul saw her looking.
“Step outside if you want,” he said.
“May we?”
“Of course. This is family.”
“But you’ve been here, what? Once in fifty years?” she asked.
“It’s still family.”
Paul led her through the screen door. The air outside was salty and fresh. “Who do they think I am, by the way?” Alex asked.
“You agreed to come to Cuba and pose as my wife,” Guarneri answered. “So here you are, and that’s what you’re doing. It’s really mostly for Señor Johnny’s purposes. He has very traditional values. He’d be heartbroken if he knew I’m divorced.”
“So we’re lying to your family?”
“It’s in their best interests right now. I’ll set them straight eventually.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say sometimes.”
“That’s usually a good time to say nothing.”
There was no sound except the waves rolling onto the shore, gentle white surf upon the dark water. Alex caught a whiff of a fire, smoke from a grill, followed quickly by the aroma of food cooking. Nearby, an array of fishing rods leaned against the screen from the outside. The rods looked worn, but also as if they’d been freshly used.
“Everyone here fishes,” Paul said in English, reading Alex’s thoughts. “They catch grouper, turbot, snappers. Also crabs and eels. It’s a simple life, unspoiled, for better or worse.”
“Your family seems to have done better than most,” Alex said.
“They’re smarter and better educated,” Guarneri said. There was a pause and he added, “Better connected too.”
“In what sense?” Alex asked.
Guarneri glanced back to make sure they were alone. “As I said, my uncle was a héroe de la revolución.”
“A hero how?”
“An early supporter of the winning side,” Guarneri said. “He left the university in 1957 and joined
the revolutionary Twenty-sixth of July Movement, which Castro had formed in Mexico. In March of 1957, Johnny was one of the students from the Revolutionary Directorate who attacked Batista’s presidential palace. The attack was a miserable failure. Thirty-five students were killed, and then scores of others were tortured or murdered in the days that followed. Johnny went underground after that and eventually found his way into the rebel army.” He paused. “Somewhere in the house there are photographs. If you want to see them, he’ll show you. With pride.”
Alex felt her fascination battling with her own convictions. She was in the belly of the beast, the home of the enemy. As an American, and a practicing Christian, as someone who believed in democracy, the man she was about to meet had spent his life on the other side of history’s battles. Yet she was in no state of mind now to refight old wars.
“You seem to celebrate this sometimes, Paul,” she said. “Your family was torn apart by the Castro revolution, many of you lost property, and the island has been isolated for years thanks to the revolution. You can’t be in favor of it, can you?”
They walked to an area where the sand was wet. Alex removed her shoes and continued to walk by Paul’s side. Paul’s eyes found the horizon on the distance, then came back. “No,” he said, answering her question after many seconds. “Of course not. I’m not a Marxist or a socialist or a closet apologist for Castro. But sometimes one can see heroism in those whose views differ from one’s own. Can’t you? Look at what a horrible regime preceded Castro’s. Who can blame people for rising up against it? In the generations before Castro, much of North America treated Cuba as its gambling den and brothel. My own father was part of that. I’m not here to be judgmental. I’m here to get some answers and do a job. Same as you, right?”
“Right,” Alex said, “but if you really believed all that, then what’s the big deal with the money?” she asked. “Why not let it lie where it’s lain for all these years?”
“Why did you use that expression?” he asked. “‘Lie where it’s lain’?”
“Just a figure of speech,” Alex said.
“Alex,” he said, “I can poke gaping holes in my uncle’s Marxist-socialist values the same way he can poke holes in my Western capitalist ones. So what? At some point a man gets tired of looking for the weaknesses in everyone else’s system. I know I do. What did I say a moment ago?” he said amiably. “In the end, it’s just people. It’s family.”
“Did your father stay in touch with his uncles in Cuba over the years?” she asked.
“No. They hated each other for what they believed in. Never spoke again. Never in their lives.”
“So what this trip is about, for you, is reconciliation, of sorts,” she said. “Setting things right. History. Family.”
“You could say that.”
“And no hard feelings?”
“On my part? To whom? No, of course not, none.”
Thea’s voice, calling from the main building, interrupted them. They turned. She walked to them. “Everything okay?”
“Just fine,” Alex said. She liked Thea.
“Señor Johnny’s awake. My boys are helping him. I have two sons — Manolo, who’s ten, and Willie, who’s eight.”
“Wonderful,” Alex said. She made no mention of a husband or father, and Alex knew better than to ask.
“Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes,” Thea said. “Alex, let me show you something first.” She took Alex by the hand and led her to a small farm that they kept at a low plateau that ran down toward the beach. They continued to speak Spanish. “We keep chickens and rabbits back here.” She indicated chickens in a fenced-in yard and the rabbits in various hutches. “We trade with the people in the town. It all works out very well. Over there in that field, we raise potatoes, carrots, and onions.”
“No cash?” asked Alex, intrigued.
“Do we raise cash?” she laughed.
“No. You don’t use cash for your transactions?”
Thea shook her head. “Money is scarce. Troquamos,” she said. Barter. She indicated a small inlet that ran up against their land. The water seemed shallow, forming a small tidal basin that was alternately blue and reddish in the light from the setting sun.
“In the evening, crabs and eels come into that little cove to feed on minnows,” she said. “I go out to where the water comes in and we catch them. Do you like eel?”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever had it,” Alex answered. “Maybe once. Pickled.”
“You liked?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You should try fresh,” she said.
“Algún día.”
“Yes, someday,” Thea agreed. “Tomorrow is made up entirely of somedays. I wish you could stay longer. I’d catch and cook eel tomorrow.”
“Someday,” Alex said again.
A screen door slammed up at the cottage. “Ah. Here’s my father,” Thea said.
A trim, tanned Cuban stepped out. Alex looked at him. His appearance was so similar to an elderly version of Paul Guarneri that it was frightening. For a split second she thought she was seeing his father back from the dead. But this was Señor Johnny.
A smile creased his lined face. He lifted his left hand and waved to them. He walked forward a few paces with a shuffling gate, the result of the minor stroke he had suffered a few months earlier.
He waited till his guests had walked up the path to his home. Then he greeted Alex warmly, placed a hand on her shoulder, and welcomed her into his home. It was in that instant that Alex completely understood how Paul had been so easily made to feel like family by people who had lived in a different world than his own.
FIFTY-THREE
They sat in a small dining room, Johnny, Paul, and Alex seated at a table for six. Thea moved in and out of the cottage, completing her dinner preparations. Her boys helped, briskly going in and out of the house with slams of the screen door. Paul and his uncle sat and talked quietly in Spanish over a shot apiece of calambuco, a local moonshine rum. The drink was dark and thick. When they offered her some, Alex declined.
Thea cooked a dinner of chicken and rice, plain but delicious. The chicken was freshly killed and grilled over driftwood on an open-air grill on the north side the house. The rice had been cooked in a pot that boiled on the same grill. Thea added greens from her garden and served. Paul’s uncle chatted and rambled, his cane leaning against the table near where he sat. He told a story about an abandoned building that had recently collapsed in Santiago. The fall of the building had killed three men and two women who lived on the first floor. Like much else in Cuba, he remarked, the building was a paradox. If the building were abandoned, why were there people in it when it collapsed?
“The reason they were there was because they were stealing bricks from the support pillars of the building,” Johnny explained to Alex. “But it wouldn’t have collapsed if it had been completely abandoned. That’s Cuba today.” For some reason, Uncle Johnny thought this was funny, or at least ironic. He tossed back his head and laughed. The old Marxist retained a twinkle in his eye. He treated Alex and Paul as a couple.
“You two, who do not live on this island,” he said toward the end of dinner. “Perhaps you do not know things politically. Can you tell me the difference between a Cuban socialist, a Cuban Marxist, and a fascist?”
Paul shrugged.
“Dígame,” Alex answered. Tell me.
“A Cuban socialist has two cows. The government takes one and gives it to his neighbor. A Cuban Marxist has two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. A counterrevolutionary fascist has two cows. The government seizes both and sells you the milk. You join the underground and start a campaign of sabotage.” He turned to Paul. “How does it work in America?” he asked.
“We have two political parties,” Paul said, “who do things differently.”
“¿Cómo?” Johnny asked.
“An American Republican has two pigs. His neighbor has none. ‘So what?’ the Republican s
ays. An American Democrat has two pigs. His neighbor has none. So he feels guilty. He votes people into office who tax the pigs, forcing him to sell one to raise money to pay the tax. The people he votes for take the tax money, buy a pig, and give it to his neighbor. He feels righteous.”
Paul’s uncle laughed and so did Thea. Then conversation drifted.
Afterward, they wandered into a sitting room next to the screened porch on the back of the house. The sound of the surf punctuated the night. As promised, there were pictures on the walls, old black-and-whites in frames that didn’t appear to have changed from the 1960s or ‘70s. In each, in varying poses and places, Alex spotted Johnny as a young man, often in his military uniform in the revolutionary army.
Johnny lagged behind. Paul gave Alex a walk-through of the photographs.
“My Uncle Johnny left university in 1957 and served in Castro’s regiment in the Sierra Maestra mountains,” Paul said. “He rose in the ranks. Then Castro’s rebel army split in half and a second division was formed. Uncle Johnny was a major under General Guevara. Johnny knew Che personally. Very well, in fact.”
They arrived at a wall photo that evidenced what Paul was saying. Several revolutionaries huddled together under tree branches, a setting that appeared to be jungle. Paul indicated his uncle with an arm around a thirtyish Guevara.
“As the war continued in 1958,” Paul continued, “Guevara led his divisions west for the push into Havana. They traveled by foot for seven weeks, entirely at night to avoid ambush. Sometimes they didn’t eat for several days. In the final days of 1958, my uncle was promoted again to take the place of revolutionary officers who had fallen. He became part of the high command with Guevara. The rebels cut the island in half with an attack on Santa Clara, the capital of the La Villas province. Santa Clara was the final military victory of the revolution. Johnny was wounded there. Fractured kneecap. But he stayed with his men. A few weeks later, he rolled into Havana on a captured government tank. Guevara’s regiment came into the capital six days before Castro’s and two days after Batista had fled to the Dominican Republic.”
