Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  Curiously, Pauli never gave a damn about any of these guys. Her idea of love and romance has always been particularly tragic. Put off by what she always saw as an imbalance in her parents’ marriage, she made a promise to herself never to marry, never to have their kind of relationship. So instead of commitment, Pauli looks for impact: Back then, she had affairs only with what she calls “impossible” men (and a few women). These were not married or incorrigible lovers (because Pauli’s not into hurting other women, or adding to anybody’s reputation), but people for whom having sex with her was a transgression, a triumph of desire over all else. This meant Catholic priests, Orthodox Jews (especially Chassidics), Moslems, beautiful young boys, or men so old they thought yearning was a thing of the past. Once, Pauli spent six months with an octogenarian named Mike. When he finally slipped into a coma and died, she told us it had been her longest, most satisfying relationship. In the end, Mike left her about six thousand dollars—just about all the money he had—which is what she used to go to Mexico.

  For Pauli, the whole point was memory. “I just know they’ll never forget me, ever, no matter what else happens in their lives,” she told me once about her lovers. “And that way, I’ll always, always be special.” Even then I thought, she doesn’t need to do that: Who wouldn’t always remember Pauli?

  I know how resourceful she can be, but I still worried. Pauli was young when she started having sex—fourteen, the earliest of all of us—and she didn’t always use birth control. She told us that kind of preparation took away from the spontaneity, the sacredness of those memorable moments.

  Eventually, her after-school activities caused some trouble with the police. These were minor skirmishes—charges of loitering, disturbing the peace, nothing serious like drugs or assault—but the family as a whole felt great worry and shame. And even though Pauli held her head up, even though she asked for nothing and was possibly the best worker we ever had at the Wash-N-Dry, as she grew older the family developed an uneasiness about her. When Pauli brushed wordlessly by an intoxicated Tío Pepe at work, Mami would stare off after her and shake her head. “He is her father,” she’d say. “That should be enough to get some respect, no?” Or Tía Zenaida: “What Pauli doesn’t realize is her father’s pain, or how hard he works. The girl takes it for granted that there’s a roof over her head and food on the table every night.”

  But the cousins knew whatever Tío Pepe’s grief, Pauli matched it with her own sullen soul. When she worked at the laundromat, I’d watch her sometimes as she lifted heavy boxes or hauled equipment from one place to another in complete silence: She seemed like a prisoner fulfilling a sentence. When Nena fired her—after two boys got in a fistfight over her which caused about a thousand dollars worth of damage to the Wash-N-Dry—Pauli looked her straight in the eye and nodded, saying nothing. We watched as she packed her backpack and walked out of the laundromat, wholly composed; how she strolled through the door out to Milwaukee Avenue, not once looking back at the lights bouncing off the shiny washers and dryers, not once looking back at us.

  Tío Pepe suffered plenty because of Pauli. He was visibly pained by her emotional distance, by her refusal to be around the family, by the trouble she was always getting herself into. He had a sense of her perverse sexuality too, and you could just see the torment in his eyes when Pauli, who seemed to give off light after each encounter, would wander back home. But nothing—nothing—caused him as much despair as Caridad’s relationship with Jimmy.

  It wasn’t just that Caridad loved Jimmy and was giving him time that might have otherwise gone to Tío Pepe. In fact, Tío Pepe had hated Jimmy on sight, before Caridad had ever laid eyes on him, back when we thought he was a mere nuisance and someone Nena might have liked. “Who’s the comemierda?”—those were Tío Pepe’s first words about Jimmy, spoken as he came in to work one night when Jimmy was sorting his laundry.

  It’s not as though Jimmy didn’t try to win over Tío Pepe and the rest of us. When he and Caridad were still dating, he’d come over, his black hair slicked back and smelling of violet water, never wearing jeans or gym shoes. He’d never curse, and always bring a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer to bribe the men, especially Tío Pepe. Jimmy would be extraordinarily polite, using usted on everybody, even after we’d tell him to stop. He’d bring flowers for my Tía Celia and be quite respectful to all the cousins.

  But in spite of all this, Tío Pepe never liked Jimmy. My mother said it was because Pepe knew his own kind, but she was wrong: Tío Pepe never hit anybody in his life.

  And unlike Tío Pepe, Jimmy never drinks and he’s never cheated on Caridad. Jimmy’s actually rather proud of his fidelity; in fact he’s turned it into a badge of honor. “If you’re sure about your manhood,” he tells the cousins, “you don’t have to prove it all the time, you know?” Jimmy takes pride in his work as a janitor at the hospital, in his steady paycheck and small promotions. He loves that he can take care of Caridad, and he promised Tío Pepe that she’d never go without so long as he’s around.

  It didn’t matter, though: Tío Pepe couldn’t stand him. He’d call him names practically to his face. “Ese tipo es un comemierda,” he’d say, sometimes dragging out cohhhhhhh-meh-mierrrrrrr-da as if it were some rotten tripe he’d pulled out of a dead dog. Jimmy would wince and pretend he didn’t hear.

  Everybody laughed and said Tío Pepe just couldn’t handle the idea of his little girl finally falling in love, but Caridad wasn’t so little when she met Jimmy, and she’d certainly had other boyfriends before—even serious ones she almost married—and Tío Pepe had never just plain hated anybody the way he did Jimmy.

  The day of the wedding was especially disastrous. It had been planned as a small ceremony, just family and a few friends at Saint Ita’s in Uptown, an old church with stained glass and a wondrous pre-Vatican II altar where all the Cubans in Chicago get married. As it happened, my Tío Raúl came in from New York—so the wedding became a community event. A photographer from La Raza snapped our famous uncle with Patricia in her bridesmaid dress nearly as often as he shot pictures of the groom (surprisingly handsome and happy) and bride (breathtakingly beautiful) for the paper’s society pages. Tía Celia and Tía Zenaida jumped right into the frame, as did my mother and father, but Tío Pepe, who was curiously sober as the photographer shuttered away, refused to join them.

  “Perhaps,” I whispered to Pauli and Nena, “he’s discovered secret Indian roots and believes, like they do, that cameras can steal your soul.”

  “That,” said Pauli in her newly accented English, “presumes he has a soul.”

  “Ay, Pauli, please, don’t talk like that,” Nena said, giving Pauli’s arm a squeeze. “It gives me the creeps, okay?” Pauli laughed and nodded as if in agreement.

  In the meantime, Tío Pepe, ignoring all pleas that he get in the pictures for La Raza, paced in the church vestibule, smoked cigarettes on the church steps, and shot Jimmy menacing looks, all of which Jimmy ignored and Caridad didn’t register.

  Under normal circumstances, one of us would have tried to talk to Tío Pepe and figure out what he needed to play along but, frankly, we were too busy with the wedding itself. Pauli, resplendent in a white lace dress, was the smart-ass maid of honor. (It may have been the only time any of us had seen her in anything other than black, gray or deep red since she was a kid.) Nena, Jimmy’s sister Adelaida and I were bridesmaids in matching outfits. Jimmy’s American stepbrother, a lanky white boy from Indiana named Garth, was the best man. Since Jimmy didn’t really have any close friends, there were no ushers other than Pucho and Manolito.

  There were maybe three hundred guests, including a few of Jimmy’s janitor colleagues from the hospital, Emilia Fernández, and Tomás Joaquín, one of our cousins from Cuba who got a visa just in time to attend. He’s a skeletal fellow with a stringy mustache on whom everything appears awkward, but Pucho lent him a suit for the occasion in which he didn’t look half-bad. A Fidel sympathizer, Tomás Joaquín insisted on pulling up his t
rouser leg to show off his bulging calf muscles to whomever he happened to be talking to at the time. This, he assured us, was one of the benefits of riding his bike during the “special period,” the economic crash after the Soviet Union’s subsidies to the island vanished and there was only a little fuel with which to run cars or public buses.

  For Jimmy and Caridad’s wedding, the church was covered with yellow roses (in honor of the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint). Mario Varona, a young fellow of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage, was hired to play guitar and sing Cuban songs during the ceremony. My mother, however, was not pleased with Mario’s hiring.

  “Now every picture of the wedding is going to have a Negro in it,” she said, rolling her eyes, as if Mario were actually black instead of mulato, or the only black person invited—and as if any of that mattered to anybody but her.

  “Tía Xiomara, just think how white we’ll look by comparison,” Pauli told her, winking at us. My mother groaned.

  As it turned out, my mother and Tío Pepe weren’t the only ones who were miserable on Cari’s wedding day. If it weren’t for the publicity for the Wash-N-Dry my father was sure would be generated by the photos in La Raza, he probably wouldn’t have cracked a smile all day either. He’d gone ahead to check how things were going at the church’s banquet hall, where the reception was scheduled to take place, and discovered that the band hired for the occasion—a group called Mercy, put together by some of Pucho’s friends—had made liberal use of duct tape to hold down its cables and cords. Papi had come back from the banquet hall pale and despairing, hoisting his pants up unnecessarily and mumbling at a little piece of duct tape stuck to his fingers.

  “Mira, Juani, look at this,” he said to me, his eyes watery, his lower lip flaccid, “what should have been our future. The gods, they mock us at every turn, no?”

  He turned away, sobbing. I put my arm around him and told him not to think about it anymore. I tried to get Pauli’s attention, hoping she’d tell him a funny story about life in Mexico or in some way get him out of his dark mood, but she was too busy flirting with the priest, a handsome, red-haired American named Father Sean who became utterly flustered in her presence and spoke a rather broken Spanish (learned while on a mission in Nicaragua during the Sandinista years, which we kept a secret from our parents, who would not have approved).

  The night before, at the rehearsal dinner, Pauli and Father Sean (our parents all pronounced his name “Chong,” as if it were Chinese) sat side by side. A dismayed Tomás Joaquín later told us they talked and laughed until almost two in the morning outside her parents’ house (Tomás Joaquín, a chivato, as my mother would say, was staying over at their house for the wedding). Nobody heard what Pauli and Father Sean were saying during the rehearsal dinner, but we did notice that he kept blushing and covering his mouth with his palm. By the end of the night, Nena and I had bets on whether Father Sean and Pauli would beat Jimmy and Caridad to the nearest honeymoon suite.

  I was still comforting Papi about the duct tape when Nena came in, totally agitated. “Has anybody seen Tío Pepe?” she asked. We all shook our heads. We were all sitting around an anteroom, waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin. “Look, it’s only about ten minutes until we’re supposed to start, and I can’t find him anywhere,” she said.

  “Have you checked under the chalice?” Pauli asked sarcastically. Father Sean giggled inappropriately, then caught himself and began flipping through his prayer book and notes.

  “Listen, we’ve gotta find Tío Pepe, wherever he might be,” Nena said. Already Patricia was out the door, looking both ways, a woman on a mission. As Father Sean, Papi and I headed out in search for Tío Pepe, we noticed Pauli wasn’t moving. I turned around, but it was almost as if she’d read my mind.

  “I’ll stay here,” she said softly. “In case he comes back, so he doesn’t find an empty room.”

  We searched everywhere: Pucho and Manolito scanned the congregation from the balcony; Nena and Patricia looked for Tío Pepe at a couple of bars on the same block as Saint Ita’s; Papi and I checked out a nearby liquor store and a bodega; and Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida, divorced but friendly, drove around the neighborhood in his rented car looking for our lost uncle. Not only was Tío Pepe not to be found, but everyone we asked claimed not to have seen him. Finally, with Caridad and Tía Celia growing more anxious by the minute, Jimmy starting to really look like Frankenstein, and the congregation whispering so loudly that it sounded like a swarm of bees had invaded Saint Ita’s, Nena took over.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said, ordering Father Sean onto the altar and Caridad onto Papi’s arm. “If Tío Pepe shows up, great, but right now our concern is going to be getting Cari married. Everybody got that?”

  We all nodded as if we were trained dogs. Tío Raúl grabbed Tía Zenaida and a sobbing Tía Celia and led them up to the front of the church to signal the wedding was about to begin. Jimmy beamed; he couldn’t have been happier to be rid of Tío Pepe. We lined up accordingly and, with the first few notes of the wedding march, proceeded. Jimmy and Garth, the bridesmaids and ushers, the ring boy (Jimmy’s little nephew Fidelito) and the flower girl (his niece Yoli) filed out, and finally, Caridad, wondrous even through her worry about Tío Pepe and his whereabouts, led to the altar by my father, who held his pants up with one hand and rolled that little piece of duct tape between his fingers during the entire ceremony.

  The service itself was simple but poignant. Father Sean, who kept looking up and smiling at Pauli as if there were already a secret between them, managed to get through the service in English and Spanish without major gaffes. At Caridad’s request, he included a modest verse written by Rafael, the Peruvian orphan to whom Cari sends monthly checks through Christian Charities. To everyone’s surprise, Father Sean also recited a little poem by Jimmy about how much he loved Caridad.

  “You are my home” Father Sean read, concluding Jimmy’s piece.

  As the words floated out, Jimmy looked intensely at Caridad, who, unable to withstand the force of his gaze, looked away. Nena and I were actually moved by the moment—Nena even got a little sniffily—until we looked over at Pauli, who was enjoying Father Sean’s attention a little too much (her dress strap had actually fallen and she made no attempt whatsoever to fix the situation, standing there teasing him). They were so obvious, and so ridiculous.

  Just then there was a commotion in the back of the church. We all turned, thinking perhaps Tío Pepe had reappeared. But though Caridad swears she saw his figure going back out the door, no one else saw a thing. Later, Tomás Joaquín said he’d gotten his trouser leg caught in one of the little hooks on the pews that hold the day’s missal; he said the noise we all heard was his knee banging against the back of the bench. Apparently, he’d been trying to show his calf muscles off to another wedding guest. He had Pucho’s torn pants to prove his embarrassing story, but Cari never forgave any of us anyway, especially Nena. She was convinced we all acted too soon, that Tío Pepe had in fact come back and that he cracked when he saw the ceremony under way without him.

  As it turned out, Tío Pepe disappeared for three days after the wedding. During that time, Caridad called every day from her honeymoon in Miami Beach to see if he’d returned. She was crying each time; we all knew Jimmy couldn’t have been very happy. When Tío Pepe finally re-appeared, he offered no explanations, as usual. But it was different this time. For one thing, he never spoke to Caridad or Jimmy again—not one single, solitary syllable. Caridad begged and pleaded, threw tantrums and hung off his arm, but Tío Pepe offered nothing. (As Patricia pointed out, we all suddenly understood where Pauli got her ability to turn into the Fortress of Solitude.) Eventually, Tío Pepe stopped speaking to Nena, Patricia and me, and then our parents and Tía Zenaida, and finally to Tía Celia. One day, she came home from the laundromat and found him in his pajamas, tucked into bed, a rosary tangled between his fingers. Ten months after the wedding, Tío Pepe was dead. Mami said it was his heart that
broke.

  It was just as well. When Pauli came up from Mexico for her father’s funeral, she shocked everyone by bringing along her baby daughter, Rosa—a luscious little brown thing with no resemblance whatsoever to Father Sean. Of course, she refused to name the father. If Tío Pepe hadn’t already been dead, the sight of Pauli bare breasted and nursing the fatherless baby at the funeral home would have certainly been enough to kill him.

  CHAPTER 7

  FOR EVERY CUBAN I’VE EVER MET in the U.S., there is at least one relative left on the island. This is the relative who sends coded messages in letters, who describes how long the lines are everywhere, and all the new ways of making cafesitos from used coffee grounds and crushed red beans. The stories they tell are always slightly incredulous, but those of us who are here have no choice but to believe them.

  We have several relatives—mosdy cousins—in Cuba, all with different relationships to the revolution. Some, such as Tomás Joaquín, are happy within it. A government bureaucrat, he considers every hardship a righteous struggle and rationalizes Fidel’s every absurdity. No matter how difficult things are in Cuba, he will never leave, he will always live in Cuba.

  Some cousins, like Titi, hate it there and are constantly trying to get out. Titi has applied for visas to the U.S., Mexico, Spain, even Israel (she claimed to be a marrano, a Catholicized Jew, and tried to sneak in through the Law of Return, but Israeli authorities saw the sham in her request pretty fast when she also claimed to be a descendant of the distinguished Bartolomé de Las Casas). She tried to get on a boat at Mariel in 1980 but fell off and the people already on it refused to turn around for her in spite of her cries. Once, she tried to pass as the great Mexican singer Lydia Mendoza and board a flight out of José Marti airport, but she was immediately caught when she didn’t know any of Mendoza’s songs (she also apparently didn’t know that Mendoza, in spite of her youthful appearance on the album covers in her apartment, was about fifty years older than her). Last we heard, Titi had attempted to get out through Cojimar during the great summer exodus of ’94, but everything she tried to use as a balsa (at different times: an inner tube, a bus roof, and a covered lounge chair) sank within a few feet of the rocky shore.