The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

  He said this as he prepared Mirta’s coffee. He put the demitasse on a tray with an embroidered cloth napkin and a glass of water. Then he carried the tray to his wife, who was still in bed, slowly rousing.

  While her father was still sleeping, Elena called her mother. Few houses in Piedra Negra had phones, and Elena had to place the call directly to the dispatch office, which was two blocks away from her parents’ house. A messenger then alerted Cándida that there was a call for her, and she had to walk to the office and enter one of the booths that afforded a semblance of privacy. In reality, the dispatcher could listen to the call, and often did, by simply pressing the right switch. There wasn’t much else to do after the morning rush except catch a bit of news that might quickly expand and roll through the town’s gossip network. Elena was well aware of the dispatcher’s ear when she told her mother Fermín José had shown up unannounced.

  Cándida said she knew that and demanded that he return immediately.

  “He is claiming certain things,” Elena said.

  “What things?” Cándida almost screamed at her. Her mother usually behaved meekly, her voice barely louder than her breath, and this was a side of Cándida Elena had never heard.

  “I cannot say exactly,” Elena said. She could sense the dispatcher listening, urging her coworkers to tune in as this was sure to be a good one.

  “Is he there with you? Put him on.”

  Elena lied and said he’d gone to the corner to buy some bread.

  “He should be back here with us,” Cándida insisted. “And you should too. Your daughter misses you.”

  Eventually Elena would find out that this was not precisely true. Her daughter had inherited Fermín José’s ability to disconnect from whatever might entangle him in the family’s emotional web. Soledad missed her as she might miss a table that had been removed from its usual place or a stuffed toy she was accustomed to sleeping with. The name Soledad suited her. She played by herself, talked to herself, and preferred to eat by herself.

  At the time, however, Cándida’s comment nicked Elena’s conscience, and she asked after her daughter. Cándida replied that the girl would be a lot better off if Elena were with her. Mothers belong with their children. Elena reassured her—but she was really saying it so that the dispatchers would hear—that she would send her father back one way or another and that she would go back to Piedra Negra after the press conference the following week. Again for the sake of the dispatchers, she exaggerated and said that the minister of culture and several members of the Central Committee were attending the conference.

  Fermín José was already awake when Elena hung up. He was holding a cup of coffee and talking with Juan about the chess match between Capablanca and the Russian Alekhine in 1927. Juan claimed Capablanca had lost the championship because he didn’t bother studying Alekhine’s games, while the Russian, who considered himself the lesser player, had spent weeks poring over his opponent’s games until he had every one of them memorized. Fermín José differed, claiming Capablanca lost the match because he loved Argentine women and spent his time in Buenos Aires dancing the tango and going to parties. By the time he got to the last and defining game, Capablanca was exhausted. Still, it took all of Alekhine’s mental and psychological strength to beat the Cuban.

  “That proves Alekhine was the better player,” Juan said.

  “He never gave Capablanca a rematch,” Fermín José said. “He was afraid of Capa’s prowess.”

  Elena interrupted and spoke sternly to her father. She didn’t care that Juan was present.

  “Mama thinks you’re crazy, and I am beginning to believe her,” she said. “She wants you to go back immediately.”

  Fermín José looked at her then back at Juan. “I’m taking a vacation,” Fermín José said. “I’ll go back when I’m ready.”

  Fermín José had a coughing fit that made his eyes water. He took a deep breath and let a gurgle out of his throat before composing himself. Juan stood and left the room, saying he had to feed the pigeons.

  For the first time in her life Elena challenged her father. Out of her came a torrent of charges, resentments, and recriminations that she’d kept in check since that fateful day when the man with the thin mustache came to tell them of the death of her two brothers. She said all her life she’d been waiting for him to communicate with her and the one time he did was to berate her mother and charge her with something she was incapable of doing.

  “Be a man,” she told him, surprising herself when she said it. “If you don’t want Pedro el Cruel around, tell him to go to hell.”

  Elena saw her father’s lower lip quiver. Unshaven and with his face unwashed, he looked defenseless. Any other time in his life he would have stood and left the apartment, gone to the park or the Malecón or anywhere else where he wouldn’t be bothered. Now he sat without moving, his face contorted by a truth he had resisted for many years: he was by nature a loveless man.

  “I can’t stand her,” he said. “I can’t stand your mother.” And it was as if a balloon had popped in him, the room, the whole city.

  Elena felt the air flutter out and the pretense of many years blow away to the sea.

  “Rook to G-8,” he said, openly weeping now, his head hung low and his shoulders shaking. “I mated myself. The game is over.”

  In those few words he had said much more than she in her tirade, but sense was immediately followed by nonsense.

  He asked where he was and who had brought him there. He called her Eulalia and asked her to cure him. His soul was sick; he had mind fever.

  “Remember, Eulalia, how we used to sing? Ae, ae, ae la chambelona. My time has come now, time to die, time to let the spirit fly.”

  He stretched out on the couch, closed his eyes, and crossed his arms over his chest. Elena waited several minutes, and just as she was ready to touch him to see if he was indeed dead, he scratched his nose and opened his eyes, which swirled around the room and focused on her. A tuft of gray hair stood out from the side of his head.

  “I am not ready. In the head I’m not well,” he said. “You must find me a priest. Confess my sins I must.”

  She’d assumed her father was an atheist. He’d never talked about religion or sin or confession. Now he wanted a priest, but finding one in the city would not be an easy thing. Few churches were open and the religious were leaving in droves. She humored her father and told him she would go out in search of a priest while he washed.

  With Fermín José in the bathroom, Elena rushed to Delia Müller’s house and explained the situation.

  “Everything is for sale in this city,” Delia said, her spirit lifted now that she could be of help to someone. “You just need to find whoever has what you need.”

  She rummaged through a stack of papers on the table and found the address of a friend who had once been a seminarian. Though he’d never taken holy orders, for a small fee he would listen to Fermín José’s confession and give him Holy Communion.

  When Elena returned to the apartment her father was gone. She went out and searched for him everywhere she could imagine and then recruited Edmundo to help her. He led her to the cathedral, then to the capitol, and finally they took the ferry to the town of Regla on the other side of the harbor, where, he said, all counterrevolutionaries eventually wound up.

  “My father is not a counterrevolutionary,” Elena told the boy.

  “He wants to talk to a priest,” Edmundo said. “It’s a fact that all priests are against the Revolution.”

  “Maybe the Revolution is against them.” For the first time she said something that might be construed as seditious.

  They walked several hours more, combing the city from El Templete in the old section to La Chorrera by the Almendares River. With her feet hurting and her clothes damp with sweat, she was making her way back to the apartment when she spied Fermín José crouching down by Capanegra, playing a game of chess. Her father was so absorbed that he didn’t look up when she stood over him. Capanegra
did and he welcomed her, saying he would teach her as soon as he was done with the old goat.

  “He’s my father,” Elena said.

  This time Fermín José looked up and saw his daughter. He muttered something under his breath and went back to the chessboard.

  “Papa, please,” she said. “You need to go home.”

  “Mate in five moves,” Fermín José exclaimed.

  Capanegra studied the board and agreed, stretching his hand to Fermín José.

  “He is your father?” he said to Elena.

  What’s left of him, she wanted to say, but merely nodded. She took Fermín José by the arm and he stood, smiling the smile of the lost. That tuft of gray hair was still sticking out from his head.

  Elena led a compliant Fermín José back to the apartment. The old loafers he was wearing were loose and they flopped like sandals as he shuffled his feet on the sidewalk. She didn’t want Mirta and Juan to see her father this way, bent over like someone who had lost the will to walk upright, and was relieved that they were out. Once in the apartment, she fluffed the cushions on the sofa and sat him down, then got him a glass of water and urged him to have a drink, bringing the glass to his lips, cupping her hand under his chin to keep the water from dribbling on his clothes.

  “Papa,” she said, trying to engage him. “Did you like playing chess with Capanegra?”

  From the other side of the living room the parrot called out “Crica, crica, dame la crica, vieja puta” over and over again, all the while flapping its wings and stretching its neck. Mirta had told Elena that the parrot once belonged to a famous radio personality, who taught it the filthy language it would on occasion voice with great delight. Elena thought she’d go crazy. She yelled at the bird to shut up, and the bird squawked more loudly. She wanted to wring its neck and stuff it down the toilet or throw it out the window and let it fly away for good. Finally, she found some saltine crackers in the rear of the kitchen cupboard and offered a couple to the parrot, which it took with its claws and finally quieted down.

  Fermín José was now taking quick shallow breaths, and she sat next to him on the edge of the couch. He extended his hand to touch her face and said, “Mi niña.” The hand dropped down to rest gently on his lap, just as his last breath came out of him like a warm breeze at dusk, and his face muscles relaxed into the blank, spiritless attitude of death. Elena stayed in her position, resting her hand on her father’s empty chest for some time, and it occurred to her that she should read something to mark his passing. She picked up Elvis’s book and opened it to the title poem, “The Man with the Mottled Face”:

  The man with the mottled face

  married the woman with the trembling breasts.

  The cantaloupes chanted, the cabbages danced.

  The bombs came raining down

  on children and parapets alike.

  She died among the ruins looking up at the dusky sky.

  He ran away and tripped and fell.

  His nose shattered and his lips

  flamed with the fires of the heart.

  He breathed the airs of a festering glen,

  the gloom of a forest primeval.

  The sea brought to an end

  the grace and disgrace of a mariner.

  My father was cannon fodder, my mother

  a gunslinger in the pontifical wars.

  Oh the short road of the lit cigarette,

  oh the long road of waiting,

  oh the mottles spreading on my cheeks,

  oh the tender glow of a black hole.

  I chew the words of saints like a somnolent ox.

  Saint of the split forehead,

  saint of the thousand unities of milk,

  saint of the bull whip of penitence.

  As a child I entered the alcázar of dreams,

  now I enter the capsule of time and grief.

  The truth is we defend the monster,

  we feed him and bed him down.

  Mottled faces of the world, unite,

  you have nothing to lose but your chains.

  You have many moons to gain.

  The poem lacked the elegiac qualities she might have wished to send her father properly into the next world. She looked for another. There was one called “The Thousand Points of the Compass,” which almost worked but was too consciously metaphysical. There was “Dog Licking Itself,” which she didn’t bother reading, given the title, and “Quartet for the Affliction of Time,” an Eliot knockoff that bored her after the first two stanzas. And she came across “Zeppelin Lady,” which she liked, but it had nothing to do with death. She read almost to the end of the book and found “Man without Arms”:

  Today I take on the soul of a bird,

  a fish in the sea of the sky.

  I find the solstice and the white flag

  of flowers that spill on the spiky grass

  and look for you on the bed, under the clothes

  you dropped on the chair last night.

  The earth grows flatter by the moment.

  Literature is the light of the world,

  which you no longer read or feel or dream.

  You are the root of science and the fountainhead.

  You are the long slow step toward the liminal sea.

  Man without arms, without a face,

  kindling the bushes of a covenant.

  You are flesh of the stone, you are

  a sudden cosmic wind on the mountain,

  an unplowed field, molecule of anodyne.

  Sing me your monkey chant, your song of the sphinx,

  lull me to sleep like a biped

  forging the frontiers of sight.

  She looked beyond the book to the couch. What sat on it was no longer her father but a cold piece of flesh on its way to becoming something else, a diamond ring, a cow chip on the bogs of the American continent, the faintest dust on the surface of the planet Uranus. He went quietly, so like a man who didn’t matter much in the universe, and she decided she would not read aloud but sit and wait for Mirta and Juan and then figure out what had to be done in order to put Fermín José, or the flesh that once housed Fermín José, in a box and ship him home for a proper burial.

  Mirta arrived first, and when she saw Fermín José she made a comment about how peaceful he looked while he slept. Elena said that no, he wasn’t sleeping, he was dead. Mirta teetered on her feet and had to steady herself against the wall to keep from fainting. No one had died on her couch before. Once composed, she twisted her face like a sponge to bring forth tears of solidarity. Only a couple came. By then Elena was fully practical, no use now going into grief mode, and said that they should call the authorities and she almost did, had Mirta not urged her to wait for Juan before doing anything. When he came home soon after, he said she should think twice about the authorities. He’d heard from two morgue attendants who were his regular customers that there was a shortage of embalming fluids in the capital, and that an edict had been passed down from their superiors that no corpse could be transported outside the city limits. The long-standing custom of sending dead people to their hometowns for burial was therefore forbidden.

  “I won’t bury my father here,” Elena said. “Even if I have to tie the coffin to the top of the bus, he’ll be laid to rest in Piedra Negra.”

  One moment she was thinking her father’s corpse was nothing but a slab of old meat and the next she was concerned about the place of his burial. Elena was practical only to a point. She came, after all, from a small town where customs counted for something.

  “Have you let your mother know?” Mirta asked.

  She hadn’t. She’d have to call again and give her the ultimate news. She’d have to call Daniel as well to tell him there wasn’t much of a chance she’d be able to make it to the press conference. Poetry would have to take a back seat to death and its offices.

  There was a long, cold silence on the line when Elena told Cándida about Fermín José’s death, followed by a faint series of whimpers and the phrase
“All this time,” repeated twice, and the directive, given in a strong, willful voice, that she bring her father home so he could be buried in the family plot. Elena promised she would and hung up.

  Daniel came as soon as he could after hearing the news and told her not to worry. She would be missed at the press conference, inferring that it was he who would do the missing, but it was not an essential event. He also offered a solution to taking the body back to Piedra Negra. Tomás Gutiérrez, his boyhood friend from the town of Paraíso, transported fish to the eastern part of the island on a regular basis in a refrigerated truck. For one hundred American dollars he could hide anything among the snappers, swordfish, and tuna hanging from hooks in the back. It was not the first time he’d delivered a dead man home.

  That same night Fermín José, wrapped up in a blue tarpaulin secured tightly with rope, was lowered from the balcony to the street as the neighbors were having their dinners and watching the nightly news on the television. Tomás Gutiérrez placed the body next to a large shipment of lobster destined for the old yacht club of Santiago, where a group of Soviet officers was gathering for a week of rest and relaxation. Elena sat in the cab next to Tomás Gutiérrez, who regaled her with half-invented stories of boxing with Hemingway and drinking with Errol Flynn. They stopped three times along the way: the first to collect three cases of Russian vodka; the second to pick up a side of beef—“the Russians like their meat as well”—and the third for a parcel the size of a shoebox that he slid under the seat. She asked what was in it and he refused to say.

  “Isn’t all this illegal?” she asked.

  He laughed at her question. “You’re riding in a smuggler’s truck. And the most illegal contraband is your old man, all nicely wrapped like a birthday present to God Almighty.”

  He uncorked a bottle of vodka he’d pulled from one of the boxes and offered her a drink.

  “I don’t drink,” she said.

  “An abstemious Piedra Negran? It’s a miracle.”