The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

  In a few more blocks they each went their way, Elena sensing she would never see them again. Her situation, and that of Daniel’s, was very different from theirs. No matter what trouble he got himself in, he was a well-known figure, with friends outside the country. He wouldn’t just disappear into the maw of the state as others had. There would be inquiries made—she’d make sure of that—and writers the world over, including those who were supporters of the Revolution, would protest and demand his release. All Lolita and Vivian and the other women had was love, hope, and anonymity, weak weapons against the police.

  Elena spent the following week doing her paintings, which acquired somber hues and shadowy edges, in contrast to her earlier lively ones. She refrained from using the phone, concerned that it was tapped, and stayed away from most of her neighbors, distrustful of the bad ones and afraid of compromising the good ones, except for Mirta and Juan, who insisted on feeding her whenever she needed.

  She was not one to be alone for any length of time and was at her wits’ end when Ricardo Kushim, the kindly, sinister messenger, returned. With him he brought a basket of fruit, a box of French shortbread cookies, and some fine English tea. Elena couldn’t resist. She had a few of the cookies and some of the fruit, then remembered Daniel in a jail cell with only prison food to eat and subject to the worst conditions.

  Kushim’s face was placid and warm.

  “I’ll talk to Daniel,” she said, without having come to a decision but anticipating it. She had no doubt that Daniel would succumb to his interrogators sooner or later, and it would be better to volunteer the confession under his own terms than those imposed by his jailers.

  “We’ve already arranged the visit,” he said.

  She wiped some crumbs that had stuck to her blouse and took a deep breath. Kushim wandered around the living room admiring her paintings.

  “These new ones are very strong. There’s a note of sadness in them that enhances the frivolity of the others.” He asked to sit next to her on the sofa. She nodded and he continued. “His recantation will be of benefit to many people.”

  Hearing this, she wanted to throw the fruit basket and the cookies at him. She knew she had to bring Daniel the message from the despot, and she was, for her own selfish reasons, desperate to see him, yet she felt she might compromise herself and, by extension, Daniel even further. To be contrite was to yield and to yield was to put themselves at the mercy of the despot, a man whose moods changed by the hour.

  “I need a guarantee,” she said through the lump that was growing in her throat.

  “What kind of guarantee?”

  “That once Daniel recants and confesses, he’ll be freed and we will be allowed to leave the country.”

  “That decision is not within my reach. What I can tell you is that your request will be given the most serious consideration. We mean to be fair, not vindictive.”

  “When can I see Daniel?” she said quietly, her hands resting on her lap, her head bowed.

  Kushim put his hand on her back and told her that was the wisest thing she could do. “Someone will be here tomorrow at seven thirty in the morning.”

  “Not you?” She looked up at him, glad to feel his hand still resting on the small of her back, even if he was a representative of those who were trying to do them harm.

  By eight A.M. Elena was seated before a metal table in a small gray room off one of the interior hallways of the Office of State Security. A window at ceiling height allowed some sunlight to come through, and over the table a recessed bulb covered by steel mesh afforded the only other illumination. Daniel entered accompanied by a guard, who stood rigidly by the door as he sat down before her. He was wearing the same clothes he had been wearing when he was detained, and a pallor in his face betrayed a lack of natural light. There was fear in his eyes and there was solitude, but when he spoke, his voice carried the same resonance she’d heard when they first met in Piedra Negra.

  “There is nothing to recant, nothing to confess,” he said in reply to her entreaty. A week’s detention had not weakened his spirit. That would come later, after the torture, the deprivations, and the drugs.

  He was permitted a cigarette, the first since his arrest, which the guard lit with a plastic American-made lighter. When Daniel brought the cigarette to his lips, Elena noticed his hand was shaking. The men who had picked her up earlier that morning had warned her she could speak only about the recantation, nothing else. Then Daniel said something that surprised her, given the probable microphone hidden somewhere in the room.

  “The bastards are using you.”

  “Daniel,” she said, “all it will take is a public statement admitting your mistakes.”

  “And be made a fool, not to mention a coward.”

  “Once it is done, you’ll be freed, and we can leave the country.” She was on uncertain ground saying that. Kushim had been clear that he couldn’t promise anything.

  “I don’t want to leave,” he said, raising his voice. He asked the guard for another cigarette, and the guard obliged.

  “That attitude will only lead to serious trouble,” she said in an oddly formal tone. Suddenly she became aware that she was passing on a threat, thus falling into a conspiracy with Kushim and, by extension, the man whose name she would not say. She tried to soften the message by telling Daniel that no matter what he decided, she would support him, but by then both knew what was at stake. By the stroke of the despot’s pen, he might spend the next thirty years in jail. It had happened to others and it could happen to him. Courage was not something she associated with her husband, who carried with him a skepticism acquired during his years as a journalist that would have served him well if he’d been a writer of novels rather than a poet. She was now witnessing that courage for the first time.

  “Give it some thought,” she added calmly. She would not let the guard see or those listening hear the turbulence brewing in her.

  The same two men who took her to State Security were waiting to take her home. Before getting in the car, Elena looked across the street in the direction of the poinciana tree, but there were no women under it.

  Despite her mistrust, she was glad to see Kushim waiting for her at the entrance to her building. He greeted her in the same gentle manner as before. For the first time she noticed a gold ring on his pinkie finger and a silver Rolex watch on his left wrist. Only the government elite wore those watches, given to them as reward for their loyalty. He helped her out of the car and held her arm as they climbed the stairs to her apartment. Once inside, Elena sat on the couch and collapsed sideways on it. She wept freely in front of him, her whole body shaking and her black hair dampening with tears of shame and regret and desperation and fear, her mind roiled by a great confusion about how she might have done things differently: not married Daniel and returned to Piedra Negra to care for her daughter, whom she hadn’t seen or spoken to in months. But this was her life and this was her time and there were no circumstances that might have allowed her to behave in any other way; there were only moves, as in a chess game or, more pertinently, a game of chance in which the outcome was never known until it appeared before her.

  Still standing, Kushim bent over her and cleared the strands of wet hair from her face.

  “I understand,” he said in a confiding tone. He’d been a promising actor once.

  Elena looked up at him and thought, This man has no idea what I am going through, and if he does, he doesn’t care.

  “You tricked me,” she said, sitting up and wiping her face with the back of her hand.

  “There’s been no trickery,” he said. “You agreed to do it. You shouldn’t feel shame in that.”

  Regaining her composure, Elena told Kushim he didn’t know her husband, not the way she knew him, though as she was saying this, she realized that whatever she knew about Daniel had come in fits and starts. It was the mystery of Daniel she loved, not the knowledge of him.

  “I know he is a man of principles,” Kushim said.

>   That was a platitude meant to appease her. Daniel was principled only when it was convenient. He was selfish and stubborn and kind and intelligent, and he was still a child of Paraíso, the town where he’d been born, pampered by his mother, expecting the world to pay him back for his father’s abandonment and her own unhappiness. State Security would get to him by pitting the child in him against the adult, entering that fissure and pulling out his debilities. It was only a matter of time before her husband agreed to the public confession, driven to it by the tactics they had at their disposal.

  Kushim, ever the manipulator, promised to return soon with news of Daniel.

  While she waited for Kushim, she occupied herself by painting the effigies of the ladies-in-waiting, turning them into angry, jagged creatures with triangular heads and rectangular teeth. She occasionally visited Mirta and Juan at dinner, seeking not only their company but also Mirta’s remarkable culinary abilities with the limited ingredients to be found in the city. Her picadillo was a miracle of taste and resourcefulness, her beans were earthy and satisfying, and her lobster stew, the one time she was able to get lobster on the black market, celestial, or whatever adjective one uses to describe the succulent meat of a creature that lives in the bottom of the sea. One night when Elena arrived early, she found Mirta in one of her frantic states, pacing the living room and holding her head between her hands.

  “The birds,” she said.

  “The pigeons?” Elena asked.

  “They’ve disappeared,” Mirta replied. “And my parrot too!”

  “Surely they’ll come back,” Elena said.

  “It happened yesterday afternoon. I didn’t have any ground beef so I put crackers out. The grackles and the seagulls ate them, but there was no Pity.”

  Juan was on the roof trying all the tricks he knew to attract the birds. So far nothing had worked, not even borrowing a friend’s lead male, a beautiful white-and-brown bird that cooed with great authority. He was now placing fake pigeons made from empty toilet paper rolls and down he’d collected from the coop along the roof wall.

  “Edmundo,” he said when he saw Elena come up the steps. “He’s back and he’s stolen my pigeons. You don’t steal a palomero’s flock without there being repercussions.”

  Elena hadn’t seen Edmundo since he’d been sent to reform school to be cured of his chronic truancy. Now he’d returned with a vengeance. Juan went on about how Edmundo was ignoring the rules of pigeon keeping. He was too old to do anything, but the younger palomeros would take action. He said people had been killed for that kind of behavior.

  “I’m convinced he brought some birds from the other side of the island, where pigeons are very primitive and savage. They will kill the weaker birds that don’t respond to them. It’s a reign of terror, I tell you. Mirta’s parrot is probably dead by now, pecked to death by those ruffians.”

  Something stirred in Elena. She’d felt a maternal affection for the boy, though he was hardly that by now, and she offered to talk to Edmundo.

  She found him leaning against the wall by the door to his grandmother’s tenement. He was thin and strikingly tall, well over six feet, and had skin the color of burnished copper and blond curly hair. When he recognized Elena walking in his direction, his green eyes lit up and his lips opened broadly into a smile, which was both sincere and picaresque. He walked toward her at an easy pace, his arms opening to receive her in a full embrace. She felt the warmth of his body and the strength of his arms and back and momentarily imagined a dark, inviting possibility, but she came to her senses and gently pushed him to arm’s length so she could see his face. He said her name as a child might say it, eagerly, and his hands rose to her shoulders and rested there while he sang a few lines from a bolero about time passing and love’s brevity. He’d grown into a young Adonis with the classic lines of a creole and smelled as if he’d been working in the sun, except that he wasn’t working when Elena came upon him, not in a visible way. After the cursory exchanges about his life in the east and her life in the capital (she said nothing about Daniel’s arrest, though she was sure he knew already, given how quickly news spread in the neighborhood), she brought up Juan’s pigeons and Mirta’s parrot.

  Edmundo laughed maliciously and said it was a joke in order to get back at them for the way they’d treated him.

  “They’re very upset,” Elena said.

  “I was upset when they insulted my family and wouldn’t let me in their house. I’m teaching them a lesson.”

  “I can tell you, the lesson has been learned. I ask as a personal favor you return those birds.”

  “Okay, Elena, I’ll return them, but I don’t know what happened to the parrot,” he said through a half smile. His green eyes bored into her and she grew nervous. They were the eyes of someone who would stop at nothing to satisfy himself. He had let go of her by then and his arms hung at his sides, accentuating his height.

  “¿Quieres un cigarro?”

  “You know I don’t smoke, Edmundo.”

  He shrugged his shoulders in a dismissive gesture and smiled his pícaro smile, reverting to a habit Elena noticed time and again when he ran wild in the streets of the city. He was nothing if not the boy she had known, an attractive, devil-may-care creature with the energy of a river fish.

  By the time Elena made it back to Juan and Mirta’s house bearing good and bad news, Mirta was sitting on her favorite chair staring straight ahead holding a lace handkerchief, a corner of which she was rolling into a tight ball. It was a strange habit Elena had seen only one person practice before, an old widow who lived two doors down from them in Piedra Negra. Out of the shadows of her memory came the image of that woman, dressed in the long-sleeved widow’s dress she had worn since the death of her husband, the old postmaster, sitting on her porch rolling and unrolling her handkerchief, her hands working independently of her mind, which was, Elena could only imagine, focused on some happy memory the habit brought up. When Elena told Mirta the sad news about Pity, Mirta looked at her blankly, her hands still rolling and unrolling the handkerchief, and she said, “I knew that all along. A voice inside told me Pity was dead.”

  “Perhaps,” Elena said, trying to soften the blow, “someone else has adopted her and she is still alive.”

  “Everything dies, my darling,” Mirta said. “Even parrots, even my Pity.”

  And just as Elena sat near Mirta to comfort her they heard a squawk, followed by a crackly voice saying, “Vieja puta, vieja puta.” It was Pity, come back from the dead, and they both ran to the stairs leading to the roof to behold the parrot perched on the bannister, beautiful and vulgar as ever, though it was lacking half the feathers of its head. Mirta was beyond herself with joy and wept copious tears of gratitude. Elena wept too and followed Mirta’s stealthy steps up the stairs, not wanting to spook Pity. The bird had learned its lesson and come back, humiliated by those barbaric pigeons from the east, and when Mirta stretched her hand to it, the parrot jumped on and allowed itself to be carried into the safety of the house.

  When she reached the door of her apartment, Elena noticed that it was slightly ajar. Her initial instinct was to walk back down and return to the safety of her friends’ house, but it was her home, after all, and she wouldn’t let anyone keep her from it. She pushed the door open slowly, standing in such a way that she could spring back and run down the stairs in case she was attacked. No such attack materialized. Instead, a man she’d never seen before was sitting on the couch reading her poems from a stack he had placed on the coffee table. She asked him, with contained outrage, what he was doing in her apartment.

  “You are a very good poet, Elena Blanco. Too bad you’re wasting your talents with these poems.”

  “You have no right to look through my papers,” she said though she immediately realized her statement led nowhere but back into itself. Her rights were feeble concepts when confronted by the power of the state. She couldn’t contain herself and asked again what he was doing.

  “I’ve been waiti
ng for you.” Then he quoted a stanza from one of Daniel’s poems: “‘I wait for the spirit and marrow of morning, / your hands in the sun, / a cloud like a tongue / in the roof of the sky.’” He had a strong, prominent jaw pocked with acne scars. Despite them he was handsome in a rough-hewn sort of way, the kind of man women would fall for because of the violence dormant in his eyes.

  Elena folded her arms and stood facing him until he gave a direct answer.

  He gathered the papers on the table and returned them to her desk. “My name is Wifredo Horta. I have orders to take you back to State Security.”

  She asked what for and he said it was not for him to know.

  “Don’t you ever ask why you’re ordered to do things?”

  “No,” he answered. “It’s better that way.” They both knew that his job would become dangerous if he started questioning his orders, whether he agreed with them or not. He was a poetry lover, though it might have been part of his job to use poems for lowering her defenses.

  As they drove away she noticed Edmundo standing at the corner smoking a cigarette. It was a strange place for him to be at that moment, but she gave him no further thought.

  Elena entered State Security via the front door this time and was led into an air-conditioned room furnished with a leather sofa and an office desk, on which sat a pitcher of ice water and two glasses. As the time passed, the room got increasingly colder. The control knobs had been pulled off the air-conditioning unit, making it impossible to adjust. Dressed only in a light cotton blouse and a skirt, she soon started to shiver, and to warm herself, she walked several times across the room, swinging her arms wildly and doing jumping jacks and squats before turning and repeating the strange calisthenics at the other end. When she sat back down, the shivering resumed with greater intensity, and by the time the door opened fifteen minutes later, she was curled in a corner of the sofa with her teeth chattering.

  It was Kushim. There was no pretense now that he was anything other than a high-ranking officer in the employ of the state. Along with him was an imposingly tall woman. She wore an olive dress and over that a gray cotton sweater. Her hair was tied tightly into a bun on the top of her head, stretching her facial skin and giving her an air of severity, like a Modigliani portrait Elena had seen in an art book in the National Library. The air-conditioning stopped and the room quickly warmed.