The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

  With no other recourse, Elena changed her clothes and returned to the State Security office, an hour’s walk away. She tried to speak to the guard inside the sentry post, telling him her husband was detained inside. He looked at her a long moment and replied that there was no one detained there, after which he turned away, ruffled some papers on his desk, and shut the sliding window. Then she approached the guard by the main door, a tall, light-skinned mulatto who commanded her in a military voice to move to the other side of the street. Elena, struck by his martial attitude, crossed the street and stood under the shade of a poinciana tree that grew in a small park.

  Soon a woman carrying an umbrella as protection from the sun came around and asked Elena if she had a relative inside. She was small and poorly clothed in a faded cotton dress and torn leather flats. Elena told her her husband had been detained the night before.

  “My son has been inside for twenty-eight days,” the woman said. “You’re wasting your time speaking to the guards. They tell you they don’t know anything, give you ten excuses, and send you to the Ministry of Justice. And why should I go there when I know perfectly well my son is here?

  “You have no idea,” she continued, “of my suffering these days. My soul is torn to pieces. All I have left in life is my son and a ten-year-old dog with mange.”

  “And your husband?”

  “He took the midnight train,” the woman said, waving the question away. “Hasn’t shown his face in five years. May a bolt of evil lightning strike him.” It was the curse of all curses on an island known for lightning strikes.

  The woman blinked quickly several times and looked away, then moved to Elena’s side and stood next to her watching the building glowing in the afternoon sunlight. A few minutes later another woman appeared. She wore a paisley kerchief on her head and introduced herself as Vivian. Her husband and brother had been detained two months before. Two more women showed up a half hour later, and after a few minutes three more came and all of them gathered under the poinciana as the heat increased and thunderheads gathered over the ocean some kilometers away and rolled onto the land dropping their rain. The squalls passed quickly, increasing the dampness and thickening the air so that it stuck to Elena’s skin like mucilage.

  By six P.M. it became clear that none of them would learn the fate of their loved ones that day, and the group began to disperse. Elena and Alicia, the first woman, were the last to leave. As they walked a few blocks to where Alicia was to get the bus to Santa Fe, Elena asked if keeping vigil in front of State Security made a difference.

  “If I stay home I accomplish nothing,” the woman said. “Nothing here I might as well accomplish, and I will do so until my son is returned to me, or I burst, come what may, so help me God and all the saints. Without hope, hell waiting is.”

  The woman’s speech reminded Elena of the patterns of the Piedra Negran argot, and she asked where she was from.

  “Amarra la Mula,” the woman replied.

  Amarra la Mula was a village not far from Piedra Negra that had a reputation as a place rife with moral decay and inbreeding.

  “I am from Piedra Negra,” Elena said, seeking a bond that might bring them together.

  The woman looked at her as if she’d met a mortal enemy and not a compatriot.

  “That’s a town of drunks. My husband was from there, may a bolt of evil lightning strike him and may he survive with a scorched tongue. You have the eyes of a firewater addict, like him.”

  Elena, who hated firewater, wanted to counter Alicia’s prejudice. Then she remembered her first husband, Pedrito, and how his eyes contained only one thing: an unquenchable need for liquor. She moved her purse to her other shoulder, for the Amarramuleans had also a well-earned reputation as thieves, and told Alicia that she did not drink firewater, or any sort of alcohol.

  “You must be the only one,” Alicia said, and cackled. “You strike me as a decent person, and I have decided to believe you, but you must beware of how you act and what you say. Evil city this is, like a monster with a thousand ears and two thousand eyes. Tentacles everywhere. Tentacles and tongues.”

  They quickened their step, and when they made it to the bus stop, Elena left her waiting for a bus that might or might not come. Alicia was right in this: to the degree that hope exists, it is the child of waiting—for a son to be released, for the bus to Santa Fe, for the rain to stop. She crossed the street and went in the direction of home, eager to go take a shower before the water was turned off for the night.

  The next morning a man who claimed to be associated with the Ministry of Culture came to visit her. Ricardo Kushim was one of those people who thrived on the misfortune of others, acting as an interlocutor (he would have detested the word spy as inaccurate and dismissed the word informant as vulgar) between the authorities, in this case the highest possible one on the island, and those crazy enough to question the legality, effectiveness, and moral standing of the ruling elite. He was a gentlemanly sort with silver hair and a full, perfectly trimmed mustache, and he spoke like someone educated in a previous time, with carefully measured tones and perfect elocution, qualities that were rare in the speech patterns of the capital, where language was increasingly regressing into bursts of grunts and hisses. He said he came to pay his respects and show his concern and spoke admiringly of Daniel’s work, especially one of his plays, in which he’d played the lead at the National Theater. He praised her poetry as well, quoting passages that he compared favorably with the works of Juana Borrero and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, two Cuban poets of the nineteenth century. Elena, who was in no mood for flattery, asked him directly why he’d come now, when her husband lay in the dungeons of State Security.

  “Dungeons?” Kushim said. “The Office of State Security has no dungeons.”

  “He has done nothing wrong other than write poetry,” she said.

  “Yes,” the man said, smiling gently, as a favorite uncle might. “And it is great poetry. But no matter how good it might be, such work can only undermine the efforts of the Revolution.”

  “In a free society, this shouldn’t matter. A poet should write from the depths of his soul.”

  “And take the consequences.”

  “Like Mandelstam and Pasternak and Akhmatova?”

  “Yes. Like them. The freedom to write as one wishes is a luxury the Revolution cannot afford, not while there are enemies trying to use any weapon they can to destroy it. Perhaps in the future …”

  “The future doesn’t exist. Daniel is a committed socialist, that much I know.”

  “All he has to do then is acknowledge his errors, but his intransigence is making things more difficult than they need to be.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Elena asked. She noticed that his voice had changed from conciliatory to strident.

  “You can convince him to accept his mistakes publicly. Such an admission will go a long way toward showing the Revolution that he is contrite and willing to make amends.”

  There was no question in her mind that by “Revolution” Kushim meant the one man who had instigated, organized, and carried it through, whose real name she had vowed never to say out loud.

  She asked Kushim how she was expected to do that if she was not allowed to see Daniel. He replied that a visit could be arranged if certain conditions were met. As he was leaving he assured her that no harm would come to either of them as long as Daniel agreed to the public confession.

  “And if he doesn’t agree?” Elena asked.

  “The Revolution cannot afford to be merciful to its enemies,” he said, and left the apartment in a flurry of formalities of the sort that had become obsolete since the new order had been imposed.

  Left alone, Elena tried to unravel the confusion in her mind. Jailing someone for writing great critical poetry, of the sort that Daniel had mastered in solitude, was the attempt of narrow minds to take over the processes of thought. As defined by the despot and his cadre, good poetry was poetry committed to the goals of t
he Revolution. The problem was that the despot had polarized cultural activities (the writing of poetry included) to such a degree that if the poet did not subscribe to or openly support those principles, he was considered seditious. There was no space where poetry as an art form might exist, let alone flourish, without being subservient to ideology.

  Uncomfortable with this line of thought, she resorted to her notebook. She wrote that you can’t make poetry into one thing or another. Poetry is like breath, regular and rhythmic, uncontainable. It is as deep and shallow as dreaming, strikes like lightning and spreads like water or smoke, binds and frees. Poetry praises and poetry damns, flies like a butterfly or a crow. Poetry blights and poetry blazes, builds castles and disperses. I don’t like poetry and I love poetry. I make it and it makes me. It is a cloak, a hole, a feast, a famine, war sometimes, never quite peace, answers that are lies and questions that are truth. Poetry is a trap, and she didn’t know what she meant by that. Where does it lead? No where. It is not a key, a door, or a reward. Poetry was all she ever wanted, all she ever thought. She’d abandoned her parents, she’d abandoned her daughter, and what did she gain? A husband in jail and the sword of the state dangling over her. And then she copied from memory one of the poems that had gotten Daniel in trouble:

  The Dream of the Patriarch

  Ten men are rowing

  the patriarch into a dream.

  His tears are feeding the river

  on which they row.

  The river turns to city streets

  bearing his name, wide with esplanades

  and shade trees.

  Out of the dream

  the patriarch has the look

  of a lost child with a gray beard.

  What happened here? he asks.

  His teeth are in the drawer.

  His pants are loose around the waist.

  His eyes are brown dots

  driving out the light.

  He once thought he owned

  the morning and the night and let

  the afternoon bear down

  on steaming streets that bore his name

  where no one was allowed to walk

  or talk except the ten men

  who rowed him to the sea.

  He sits on the beach

  and lets the waves wet his feet.

  He wears a blue swimsuit. The sky

  is like his beard but fuller.

  He barks and there is no one

  to listen or obey. The ten men

  disappear. His children ride

  their rocking horses to their own dreams,

  his women turn to other gods

  who smoke cigars and beat their chests

  and drive fast cars in Miami without end.

  The patriarch pants and sways

  as if the wind were shaking him

  to follow the caravan of years

  under the sheets’ white billow.

  She put her notebook and pen in her purse, brushed her hair quickly, and walked to the State Security complex, where she found the women gathering under the poinciana tree.

  The heat had diminished the number to five, among them a young mother with two somber, well-dressed children on either side of her. When two of the women complained that this was not a place for children, the young mother responded that she’d brought them because she wanted the bastards to see them and in that way inspire their pity.

  “They don’t care,” the kerchiefed woman said.

  “They’re idiots,” said one with unkempt hair and a sleepless look in her eyes.

  “They’re sadists,” another woman said in a calm, tired voice. She was dark and old and had rings on all her fingers. She spoke through an unlit cigar. “They’ve kept my husband for a year, and I’ve only been allowed to see him once.”

  She turned to Elena and said, “You look like an educated woman. Maybe you can do something—write a letter, speak for us.”

  Elena was about to say that she was as helpless as they. Once the system swallowed a person, it was up to the system to spit him out, letters and speeches notwithstanding. Her husband was inside perhaps, unless he’d been moved elsewhere the night before, and she had no way of knowing in what condition he was and under whose supervision.

  The cigar woman came closer and said her name was Dolores, but everyone called her Lolita de Marianao because there was another Dolores, from Arroyo Arenas, who came a couple of times and never returned. “If you help us, we’ll help you.”

  Elena gave her name and said, “Help me how?” Her question sounded selfish, though she didn’t mean it that way.

  “We can tell you what to expect, how to deal with it. Nights are the worst times. We keep the black monkey at bay under this tree. We joke and we sing and we cry together.”

  “That woman with the umbrella—” Elena started.

  “Alicia?” the cigar woman interrupted her. “Don’t pay attention to her. She’s crazy.”

  “Her son is inside twenty-eight days,” Elena said.

  “There are others who have children in there. They’re not like her. And let me tell you something else. If anyone deserves to be locked up forever, it is her son, Lelo Carranza. Have you heard of him?” Lolita didn’t wait for Elena to answer. “He is a chulo, a pimp, the biggest and the nastiest in the city. Brings young girls and boys from the countryside and offers them to foreigners.”

  “But State Security only deals with political detainees,” Elena said.

  “He was caught with counterrevolutionary propaganda in his house. A former lover—he’s a bugarrón on top of everything else—planted it and informed on him. Now he’s up to his nose in trouble.”

  Another woman present that day was a slight, sad girl, no older than eighteen, who sat on a broken park bench away from the poinciana and spent most of her time crying quietly. She’d been waiting six months for news about her fiancé. Lolita explained that at one point one of the guards had promised to let her see him in return for certain sexual favors. Every one of the women advised against it, convinced it was a trap. She nevertheless agreed to the tryst, which involved not only the original guard but his off-duty partner. Once they were done, the men laughed her off. That was three months ago, and she was still waiting for the visit to materialize.

  “It’s a foolish thing to sell yourself for anything other than money,” the woman named Vivian said. “Una bobada.”

  Two of the women had brought cheese, a loaf of bread, and canned Russian meat, which they shared with the rest. The children grew animated and chased each other around a tree, and one of the women, a former professional singer, sang boleros in a scratchy but perfectly pitched voice. Soon two young policemen, alerted no doubt by the guards at the gate, materialized out of a side street and demanded to see a permit. Lolita was the first to speak up and told them they didn’t have one. They were having lunch and the officers were welcome to join them. Confused by the invitation, the policemen looked at each other, then insisted that without a permit they couldn’t gather.

  Lolita squinted at them up and down and said, “I’m old enough to be your grandmother. We’re not doing any harm.”

  One of the officers responded that a public gathering of more than four people was illegal without a permit, and that was the law.

  “The law?” Lolita said. “I have the law of old age. Are you two boys going to arrest me?”

  Just then a car pulled up about a hundred feet away and two plainclothes policemen, older and tougher looking than the first two, got out and started walking slowly in the direction of the group. Lolita was too distracted putting the two upstarts in their place to notice. Vivian called to her and pointed to the two tough men. It was immediately evident from their demeanor that they were capable of anything, even arresting a grandmother. Lolita turned away from the two young cops and threw her chewed-up cigar on the ground.

  “Things are going to get real hot now,” Lolita said to Vivian, who stood long and still as a statue. The other women were quick
ly gathering the food and placing it in plastic bags. Elena watched, not sure whether to join the scurrying women or stand with Vivian and Lolita.

  The two men strolled past them, smoking dark cigarettes of the type called Populares, and went to the two young cops, who were now standing about thirty feet away. They chatted a few minutes and the plainclothes officers came over to the women.

  “Ladies,” said one who looked like Pedro Armendáriz playing a villain. “Please leave immediately and don’t come back. You are trespassing on state property and will be arrested.”

  “These days everything is state property,” Lolita said. “You’ll have to arrest the entire population of the country.”

  The officer gave her an empty smile. “The fact is you don’t have a permit. I’d like to see your ID card.”

  “We’re waiting for news about our loved ones,” Elena said.

  “You know what that building is?” The man pointed behind him. His voice sliced right into her. By now the other women had gone. Only Vivian, Lolita, and Elena remained.

  “It’s the Office of State Security of the Ministry of the Interior,” Elena said.

  “And do you know the kind of individual who is detained there? Worms, counterrevolutionaries, CIA agents, that’s who. And if you don’t go back to your homes, that’s where you’ll wind up.”

  The man still held his smile like a knife blade, and the three women realized simultaneously that he was no joker. Lolita mumbled some curse word under her breath, and they walked away in silence. After a few blocks Lolita said she’d decided she was coming back tomorrow, no matter that they might arrest her. At least she would suffer alongside her son. Vivian agreed and said she too would be there. Elena wasn’t so sure she wanted to sacrifice herself that way, and the thought of being shut in a small cell under unknown conditions terrified her. What good would it do anyway? She urged the women not to return. They could meet elsewhere—she even offered her apartment—and she would help them write letters to anyone inside or outside the country who might help. “No one will see us in your apartment. Might as well not gather,” Lolita said. And she was right. This matter of bearing witness was dangerous.