by Pablo Medina
Words dropped around her like leaves. She wrote a tree without a trunk, she made a field of snow. Poetry was poison; poetry was a salve. She walked into the distilling room with its sickening smell of bagasse, then into the bedroom where she and Pedrito had the wild sex that made Soledad, and she felt a stirring in her womb. She wandered outside to the garden, where the lone tomato plant grew over the mound of her father’s grave and watched as the flock of blackbirds perched on the lemon tree burst into the air like a thousand shadows, then went into the alley behind the garden wall where veterans sometimes slept. It was overgrown with weeds, and there were mounds of refuse deposited by people sick of waiting for a garbage truck that never came. Big green flies landed on her and bit her, and she rushed back inside and saw her mother sitting on the armchair with Soledad against her chest. They seemed happy together. Elena’s mind rattled like a dry gourd filled with tiny stones.
She wrote a letter to Daniel, which was part an admission of love, part an excuse explaining why she hadn’t returned. She wanted him not as she had wanted Pedrito, but as sometimes, in desperation, one wants a lover to erase all trouble. She never sent the letter because at that time the capital seemed like a city built on a rock floating in midair with no way to reach it. She flipped through an old Bible she found in the armoire that had contained the weapons her brothers took with them to the mountains and discovered in the opening lines of Genesis an apt and fearsome reflection of her present condition. “In the beginning God created the heavens and earth. The earth then was formless; everything was a bottomless ocean covered with darkness.” Even in the midst of a brilliant afternoon, the dark surrounded her and she felt like she was drowning in the beginning and end of things.
She was sitting on her bed leaning against the headboard with a blank notebook on her lap when a white turkey entered the room. Its wattles were long and red like Diego Velázquez’s testicles. The turkey walked around gobbling and defecated in the room before exiting the way it had come. Was it an apparition? A saint or demon in disguise? The feces were real and so was the smell. The turkey returned the next day, repeating its actions and walking out in the same deliberate fashion as the day before. A short time later Elena heard a shot coming from outside, and when she went to the garden to investigate, she saw Pedro el Cruel holding a smoking shotgun and the turkey spread like a cross over her father’s grave and the ground around it covered with white feathers.
“Cándida,” Pedro said in the way of a man whose every statement is an announcement of his presence on the earth, “get your stew pot ready.” Then he went over and picked the turkey up by the neck.
The neighbor next door, roused by the shotgun blast, flung open the back gate and beheld Pedro holding the bird.
“That’s my turkey,” the neighbor yelled. He’d been the town telegrapher before the telephones came and spoke nasally in a stuttering staccato, a consequence of his trade.
“Not anymore,” said Pedro el Cruel.
The neighbor took a couple of steps toward Pedro, who raised the shotgun and aimed it at his chest. The neighbor stopped in his tracks and the blood drained from his face. He was about to say something when Pedro spoke.
“That guanajo intruded on this property,” he said, using the Cuban word for turkey intentionally. “Like you’re intruding now.”
The neighbor’s left leg started shaking and he made another attempt to speak, but no words came out of his mouth.
Pedro lowered the gun and said, “It’s a big bird, enough to feed this family and yours. You’re welcome to come and have some stew. Right, Cándida?”
Wanting no more bloodshed in her garden, avian or human, Cándida immediately agreed, and the neighbor was left with little choice but to accept the invitation. He turned on his heel and left the way he’d come, saying that he needed to alert his wife and children.
Pedro’s confrontation with the neighbor showed yet another side of him Elena had never seen. Perhaps her former father-in-law was not the monster Pedrito told her about when he was courting her. For years the telegrapher neighbor had complained about the pungent smells given off by the fermentation of sugarcane juice, about the rats that gathered to eat the rotting avocados on the ground, and many other things that occurred to him on the spur of the moment. Even the sharpness of the winter air brought a complaint out of him. Now Pedro had put him in his place. And, out of a sense of generosity, he had then invited the family to share the turkey stew, country-style guanajo fricassee, to be exact, which was the only way Cándida knew to prepare the otherwise insipid meat.
It was a grand meal, the guanajo enhanced by the tomato sauce, peppers, onion, garlic, and potatoes Pedro had mysteriously brought after a brief foray in the back streets of Piedra Negra, where the black market flourished. And in another feat of benevolent magic he had a case of beer appear at the back door. Warm though it was, the beer had the effect of loosening whatever tensions remained in the air from earlier in the day. Despite his rough blacksmith’s appearance, his gruffness of manner, and his reputation, Pedro charmed everyone with his stories of wrestling sharks in Guantánamo Bay for coins thrown to him by American sailors and gunrunning for a band of rebels during the height of the war. After eating, he and the neighbor went to the garden with a slingshot to practice their aim against the rats that came to feast on the avocados. The women cleaned the dishes, and the children played with Soledad until late evening, when finally the guests went home, tired, happy, their bellies filled with guanajo stew and their minds unburdened of complaints.
Cándida, exhausted from all the activity, fell asleep on the armchair, while Pedro went home boasting about the many rats he’d dispatched with the slingshot. When Elena went to her room, she found Soledad sleeping in her bed. She too was tired from the feasting and didn’t stop to think who’d placed her daughter there, or whether she’d crawled into the bed by herself. She lay next to the girl, strongly sensing that the creature next to her was an extension of herself.
It was the last time they saw Pedro. He left behind an envelope on the coffee table containing three thousand American dollars, which would serve Cándida well as the years passed and old age came upon her. On the envelope he’d written in the coarse script of a blacksmith, No guanto má. Me boy pa’ la Yuma. As if they’d been infected by a fever to flee, Piedra Negrans were leaving by the dozens for Miami, which beamed its abundance from two hundred miles away across the Florida Straits. On the island only lack was abundant—lack of food, lack of soap, lack of embalming fluids. Who knew how a blacksmith might survive in a modern city like Miami? That question was rhetorical. Even if Pedro wound up selling fruit on the street corners, as many did, he’d be better off there, eventually saving enough money to buy himself a color television and a used car he could fix himself in order to drive to the beach on Sundays and lie on the sand to watch the topless European tourists roasting in the sun.
Three days later Elena was on the afternoon bus back to the capital. Through the window she saw her mother holding Soledad by the waist. Cándida was wearing a simple black dress and an old-fashioned feathered hat. One of the plumes was broken in half and the others had faded with time. She looked simultaneously comical and sincere. Soledad had her doll in a choke hold. Her face had the same self-sufficient look Elena had noticed when she’d first arrived, and for a moment she had the urge to get off the bus and stay with them in Piedra Negra, but the pull of the new life in the capital was much stronger and the urge did not last. The bus, an old General Motors coach from prerevolutionary days that still had the shadow of a greyhound imprinted on the side, roared up and lurched away from the curb.
The first person Elena ran into in the courtyard of the Writers’ Union was Elvis Santos, who told her Daniel had been removed as president of the union and been assigned to the press office in Moscow. News from Elvis was always colored by doubt, given as he was to inventions of all sorts. She went to Daniel’s office and found that the room was empty except for old photographs of Marx,
Lenin, and a dreamy José Martí. She went to the cafeteria, or what passed for the cafeteria. The lone attendant had never heard the name Daniel Arcilla, but the cleaning woman said that Arcilla had been there an hour before and she had heard he’d been summoned to the minister’s office, never a good sign. Then Elena saw Roberto Ferrante as he entered the building and went to him to inquire further.
“Don’t worry, my child,” Roberto said. He was a tall man and his words dribbled down to her ears. He wore a militia uniform, which suited him poorly. The sleeves were too short and the pants too wide. “Your book will be published next year, and Daniel made me promise you’d have a job when you returned. I’ve named you editorial assistant of our magazine. When can you start?”
She thanked him as generously as she could and said she could start the next day but that she needed to see Daniel.
“The minister should be done with him by now. Here is the last place you’ll find him. Try the Café los Cantos.”
Once a gathering place for writers and artists, the Café los Cantos was empty in midafternoon, except for Daniel who sat in a corner by a dusty window. Before him was a bottle of rum and a glass half full. He looked tired and his face was shadowed and lax. The overhead fan had stopped working long ago, and had it not been for the sea breeze that blew in through the open doors, the heat inside the café would have been unbearable. When she approached him, Daniel stood to greet her.
“You’re back just in time,” he said. He held both her hands and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I thought I wouldn’t get to see you before leaving.”
He asked her if she was hungry. She said she hadn’t eaten since breakfast and he ordered a media noche and a café con leche for her.
“Sorry,” the waiter said indifferently. “We don’t have ham and we don’t have pork and we don’t have cheese.” The old owner of Café los Cantos, a Sydney Greenstreet look-alike whom everyone called Carlitos Bodeler, would never have allowed such informality.
“What do you have?” Daniel said.
“Bread. We have plenty of bread, still warm from the oven.”
“Then bring her that with butter,” Daniel said. After the waiter left to place the order, he added, “The wonders of a centralized economy never cease to astonish.”
The bread came piled high on a plate, steaming and golden. The café con leche was lukewarm and tasted chalky.
“When are you leaving?” Elena said, getting straight to the point.
“Three days. These things happen quickly. They don’t give you time to think.”
She bit into a piece of bread. It was delicious, in contrast to the coffee, and she offered some to Daniel, who declined. He finished the rum in his glass and poured himself another.
She recounted briefly her stay in Piedra Negra and her decision to come back and live in the capital.
“There was never any question about that, was there?” Daniel said, looking into his glass. “I’ll be gone a year.”
Elena was about to say something when Daniel took her hand and pressed it, motioning with his head in the direction of the waiter, who was wiping a table near them. He waited for her to finish the bread and the coffee, then threw a ten-peso note on the table.
The breeze made for pleasant strolling, and they took their time getting to his car.
“Are you in trouble?” Elena asked.
“Not necessarily. They need somebody in Moscow. I hope you’re pleased with the job Ferrante gave you. He owed me a favor.”
“I am. Thank you, but it was presumptuous of you thinking I’d come back.”
Daniel did not respond to her. Of course he was presumptuous, and he was right. They got in his Lada and drove in the general direction of Mirta and Juan’s house. His driver had been reassigned.
When they got there Daniel leaned across Elena and opened her door. Then he kissed her fully on the lips.
“Wait for me,” he said, holding her forearm. Elena had been right about him. He could be shy and vulnerable and still very much a man.
“And your wife and children?”
“We’ve separated. It was long overdue. By the time I return I’ll be divorced.”
Elena looked at Daniel a few moments. No matter what he’d said about the reassignment, she knew there was some trouble brewing, though she didn’t yet know the nature of it.
“A year is a long time,” she said.
“A minute can be a year and a year a minute,” he said.
She wished him a good trip and stepped out of the car. Just before entering the building, she turned to wave, but the Lada had already pulled away into the avenue.
There were days when Elena could see herself floating at the bottom of a river like a complacent fish; other days the water churned by her, foamy and dark with fierce currents, which forced her to swim with all her might to keep herself in place, fighting the roiling tides and slipping out of the way of larger fish that tried to swallow her. With Daniel away there was no one to protect her and so she learned to protect herself. She worked her eight hours at the Writers’ Union, decorated her apartment with trinkets she picked up here and there, and accumulated goods she bought on the black market—lipstick, hand creams, candy, soap and such—that she sent periodically to Cándida and Soledad. Nights were the worst times, when she had to confront her solitude, her empty bed, and her shame at having left her daughter behind. Twice during that year of waiting she went to Piedra Negra, returning both times without her daughter. It could not be said that she missed Daniel, now that he was in Moscow. After all, she’d seen him only a few times before he left. Rather, she missed the possibility of life with him in the city that was quickly beginning to feel like home. Was that love? She had no idea.
Every morning on her desk at the Writers’ Union there was a pile of manuscripts to get through and on top of the pile a poem by Elvis Santos. Some manuscripts needed heavy editing, and she tried as best she could to make them better; if they couldn’t be improved by simple corrections, she would rewrite the article or poem or story until it became her own, though in print it would bear the original author’s name. With Elvis’s poems the issue was more complicated. He wanted to woo her, but she fixed on them as objects to tweak and prune, rather than the jets of emotion gushing out of a needy heart. Every afternoon Elvis retrieved his daily poem with markings and notations. He was undaunted, and the next day he placed another poem on her desk, which she, in turn, would, after her day’s work was done, revise and rewrite until it was far from mushy love but close to the intricacies of poetry.
It took two months for Elvis to gather enough courage to confront Elena about what she was doing.
“I’m making the poems better,” she said.
“Love is love,” he said. “How can it be made better?”
She tried explaining that both love and poetry are constructs, and when they come together, one invariably wins out over the other.
“But I love you!” he blurted out. Neither of them knew what else to say. Elena sat at her desk. Elvis stood by her with his valise stuffed with papers and the portable green Hermes typewriter he carried everywhere. The response Elvis longed for, the “I love you too” that would be followed by an embrace and then, if he was lucky, a kiss, was not forthcoming. Instead, Elena responded, “That is not a poem,” a parry that kept her from dealing with the matter before them and alerted him that for her poetry would always trump love.
He was indignant. He took the poem she’d just critiqued from the desk and stormed out of the Writers’ Union. Elvis was away for several days, and Elena was relieved that she wouldn’t have to confront his daily onslaught of love; nevertheless, she felt sorry for him, starved as he was for the affection she couldn’t provide. Who could, given his looks, his dirty, rumpled clothes, and the jagged nature of his emotional makeup?
When he resurfaced he’d shaved and cut his hair, and the light gray suit he was wearing was neatly pressed. The only sign of the old Elvis was his thick glasses, but he had wip
ed those clean and his eyes were clearly visible. He was almost handsome, almost like a man whose figure and demeanor might get him places. Then he spoke a poem he called “Zeppelin Lady”:
For you have not grieved,
for you have not seen the bull’s-eye
of the arrows of indifference.
For you have not learned to tell
the difference between the summer clouds
and the globes of affliction.
I take hot coffee to my lips
and burn my tongue. From it
comes a turbid thought
that takes me to the cave of shadows
and the poetry of fire.
Zeppelin lady, you dance, you leap,
you come and go across the sky
and leave behind an opaque light,
a trembling ghost. I call it love.
You call it drivel. And so you look
at me, and so you leave my blood
boiling and salt crust in my eyes.
As you grow huge you lessen me.
Elena realized that, despite the changes in appearance, Elvis was still Elvis, a good poet whose mind and heart were out of sync and the lack of connection spilled into the poetry, or what he called poetry, which was engorged by his confusion. Is this what the city did to people and their poetry? Or was it a beating at the hands of a Parisian pimp?
