The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

  “Elena,” Kushim said in a tone of false concern. “Why did you not ask someone to turn the air-conditioning down?”

  “There was no one to tell,” she said. She had knocked several times on the door, which had been locked from the outside, and called out through it and not received a response. She then asked where Daniel was, and Kushim told her that Daniel had refused to come and given no explanation.

  Elena doubted whether that was true. It was reasonable to assume that State Security had never intended for her to see Daniel, that he was, at that moment, suffering any number of iniquities at the hands of his interrogators. Manejadores, that’s what they were called, people trained in the Eastern Bloc whose purpose it was to break inmates until they were ready to confess to anything.

  “Allow me to introduce you to Major Adela Arroyo,” Kushim said with his usual formality. “She will be your liaison with the Office of State Security.”

  Elena looked at the major. Was she her manejadora? She had full, dark lips. Her nose was thin and angular and she offered Elena a kindly smile. Out on the street she would have marveled at the major’s beauty, but now Elena could see only a mask of duplicity.

  “I want to go home,” Elena said. She found herself shivering again, even without the air-conditioning.

  “Yes, of course,” the major said. “Soon. We’ve arranged to have some food brought in.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Elena said, though she was famished. While waiting she’d kept her imagination in control by thinking up wonderful things Mirta would cook for her—vaca frita with onions, moros con cristianos, and creamy avocados she got from a cousin who lived in the countryside outside Havana.

  Then the food was brought in: red beans with rice, plantains, and shrimp al ajillo, the odor of which melted any resistance left in her heart. Elena was, after all, a creature of the senses.

  “Unfortunately,” Kushim said, “I cannot stay, but I leave you in the best of hands.” His formality was becoming unctuous.

  As they ate the major told Elena the story of her family’s involvement in the war in the mountains, which had taken the lives of Elena’s two brothers. After the triumph of the Revolution, a number of peasants who refused to surrender their lands to the state joined a group of disenchanted revolutionaries. They went up into the mountains near Piedra Negra and, from there, mounted guerrilla actions against militia convoys that passed through the region and regular army barracks in the foothills. It was a war unknown to the outside world, but in the beginning, the rebels gave the revolutionary forces a beating, killing militiamen like flies and routing the army wherever they found them. It was during the early stages of that war that Major Arroyo’s father and four brothers joined the uprising after the government took their plots of land. They were guajiros, country people, stubborn and proud, and if they felt aggrieved, they settled the matter with weapons. The war suited them. Her youngest brother, Justino, was a hothead and he was the first to challenge the government surveyors who came from the capital and set up their tables in the plaza of a nearby town called Agarraquetecai. They asked him to sign some papers he didn’t understand since he could not read or write, and when they told him what the papers contained, he refused to sign them and exclaimed in his bullheaded peasant way he would rather die than give up his livelihood; then he swung his machete down on the table and cut off a surveyor’s arm at the elbow, after which he raced out of town and took to the hills to join the insurrectionists. Soon the other brothers followed, and the father did as well, thinking he had no option but to follow his sons. All the brothers were killed, and when the father was eventually captured, as he had to be, given the odds, he was executed in the field for being a traitor to the revolutionary cause. His body was buried in an unmarked grave.

  “It took me a long time to realize my brothers and father were wrong, unlike your brothers, who died for the Revolution,” the major said. “It was a man’s war involving men’s concerns. It’s always that way. Women bear the consequences of their follies.”

  “The Revolution is a war,” Elena countered, “the result of men’s craziness.”

  “That may be so, but the goals of the Revolution are worthy. We are involved in a great historical process to bring social justice to the people. Once that process begins it cannot be reversed. You have supported those goals yourself.”

  “I never supported incarcerating people for what they believe.”

  “Sometimes we must modify our expectations for the greater good. We do that with our families and we must do that with our nation, which is—don’t you think?—an extended family.”

  “That shouldn’t include persecuting a great poet.”

  “Is it so great to give aid and comfort to the enemy?”

  “What enemy?” Elena was ready to scream by now. She knew very well who the enemy was.

  “The enemy outside and the enemy inside.”

  “Inside?” Elena asked. The major had surprised her.

  “Yes, that skeptical voice inside us that tells us that the revolutionary process is too difficult, that it won’t work, that it would be nice to have a new refrigerator or a late-model car and to speak our minds whenever we feel like it. Social justice requires sacrifice and discipline. It will take all our time and devotion to see the results of our struggle. But your husband acts like a cynic who believes the new society is a chimera, a utopia. Do you believe that too?”

  Elena said no, she didn’t believe it, although at the time she would find it impossible to say what she believed.

  “Then you must accept that what we are doing is very important to our country and essential to humanity. All our willpower must go into the struggle.”

  Elena felt herself getting smaller, more irrelevant, a mouse among pachyderms. She just wanted Daniel out of jail, safe at home with her. She said yes meekly and a great tiredness came over her.

  The major’s face lightened and a smile appeared on her lips, officious, triumphant. She asked Elena if she had enjoyed the food, and she replied that she had and thanked her.

  On the way home, breathing in the fresh night air, she felt less oppressed by the atmosphere of manipulation that had surrounded her in that cold room. You use heat to force your belief on someone, cold to convince them of it. At the same time, she was trying to keep her balance on the deck of that storm-tossed ship, the Revolution. She tried to clear her head by walking faster until her breath quickened and her skin dampened with sweat. The streets of the city were mostly empty at that hour. People were at home watching soap operas or getting ready for bed. There was a time when the citizens of Havana were extroverts, out on the streets at all hours enjoying themselves. But their gregariousness had been eroded by the new ideology. Banter, laughter, anything that buoyed the spirit, was dangerous, since it could be taken as a sign of frivolity, of the relaxation of the discipline that Major Adela Arroyo embraced with such zeal. Only those who were up to no good, dealing drugs or selling themselves, dared to walk the streets after dark.

  As she went deeper into the city, the barking of dogs followed her, and she heard muted voices floating down from second-story balconies and the whispers of dark silhouettes on street corners. She was startled by a rat, which stared at her with glowing eyes before jumping off the curb into a sewer hole, and then, as she rounded the corner to her street, she heard her name being called. Given how darkness will sometimes bend and alter sounds, it was not a voice she immediately recognized. She heard it again: it was Edmundo standing in a doorway.

  “You shouldn’t be out after dark,” he said, stepping forward.

  “Ay, Edmundo, you scared me!”

  “I’m serious. It’s not safe.”

  “If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for you.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Making sure you get home all right.”

  Edmundo was a government agent. She was sure of that now. Part of being watched was being taken care of
, and that was what Edmundo was doing. State Security was not interested in her harm but in her cooperation, and it would use all resources at its disposal to achieve it. Ricardo Kushim, Edmundo Müller, and Adela Arroyo were all under the same orders.

  “Some things never change, Edmundo, except now you are officially following me.”

  It was impossible to see his reaction in the darkness, but his silence was confirmation enough.

  “I’m almost home,” she added. “Nothing will happen. Go home.”

  No sooner had she spoken than Edmundo disappeared into the darkness as suddenly as he had appeared.

  Over the next three weeks, Ricardo Kushim visited Elena four times, bringing fresh fruit, cakes, milk, and other delicacies. Whenever Elena asked him for news about Daniel, his answer was always the same: he is eating well and he is rested. On his third visit, Kushim admitted to her that he had known Daniel when they were both young reporters covering the night beat in the late 1940s.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Elena asked.

  “It didn’t come up,” he said, sipping coffee she had made for him. He continued, saying that Daniel was very talented, even then. His poems were saturated with desire, which he disguised in the common figures of the day—glistening lips, tremulous fingers, and, yes, the sweet papaya and the roseate guava. He told Elena of the times he and Daniel went to a bordello called La Candelaria, a hangout for reporters. There was a filthy bar where the whores gathered with their customers. The rooms were in the back, facing a dirt patio, with curtains for doors. Everything could be heard—the squeaking beds, the moans, the laughter. When it rained, the customers dragged the red mud into the rooms, and you could tell the most popular girls because the mud was fresher in front of their doorways.

  Elena was both repelled and attracted by Kushim’s story. She almost told him to stop but bit her lip and listened. What is it about men and their urges and their need to talk about them?

  “All we could think about in those days was sex, and the money we made from journalism made its way into the hands of the cheapest whores in the city. What my colleagues and I knew was that the best of Daniel’s poems were addressed to those women, two in particular. One was young with a round face and a broad nose they called La Chata. The other was a tall black woman named Malena, who teased him at the bar, whispering all the things she would do to him out back. One of the older journalists taught us to bring the girls gifts. That way they were especially generous with their bodies. Daniel bought Malena a small tin crucifix made by the mendicant nuns at the cathedral, which she wore around her neck with pride and devotion.”

  Kushim passed over the irony inherent in the anecdote of the cross and speculated that Daniel’s poems to La Chata and Malena were a form of that same devotion, a way of honoring their sexuality and their grace, which were real and considerable.

  “He never wrote again with the same passion and sense of urgency. Poetic ambition came later, when he convinced himself he was better than all the poets around him.

  “I asked him if he really believed that he was better. He said it was not a matter of belief but of conviction. Conviction is glandular and cannot be altered easily. The poet contemplates everything with equal attention and equal detachment. Poetry makes life blessed but living it intolerable. There is no choice in the matter. Daniel Arcilla was one of the few people I met then who tried to live his life according to those convictions.

  “He had a dim view of capitalism. The cult of wealth left him empty probably because he had no way of acquiring it himself. He joined a cell with Marxist leanings that was planning a demonstration against Batista’s regime. He even gave a few feeble speeches before several student gatherings, but he was overshadowed by others who spoke with greater ardor, among them our current prime minister, who was then a law student. I accompanied Daniel out of friendship, nothing more, and on more than one occasion he confided that he’d had it with his country, its political convolutions, the ineptitude and the corruption of its leaders. He felt sick inside, ashamed of himself for his reluctance to embrace political action. Yes, the thing about Daniel was that he was much happier in bed with a prostitute than at any of the meetings we attended.”

  On his last visit Kushim brought news. Daniel had agreed to the public confession, to be made before a plenary gathering of the Writers’ Union the following week. Elena felt let down by her country and the siren song of the Revolution. At the same time she realized that Daniel was not the heroic sort. The strength of poets lies elsewhere, and in the struggle between princes and poets, the poets always lose.

  “And your promise, Ricardo, to let us leave?” she asked him.

  Kushim had made it clear when she first brought it up that he couldn’t make such a promise. Still, she was certain he had brought it up to the highest authorities, or the highest authority, for it was the despot’s will that mattered most.

  “Be patient a little longer, that is all I ask,” he replied.

  One week later, on the night before the gathering, Daniel was released and driven home. When Elena embraced him, she felt him droop as if his body were deflating, and it was only after the officers who accompanied him left that he broke down, not in tears or recriminations, but in a physical plummeting that affected every muscle in his body. He sat on the couch with shoulders down and eyes drained of light. His delicate poet’s hands were bruised from punching the walls of his cell, and his diction, which he’d always prided himself on, was slurred. He told her that he’d already written and memorized the speech he would give before the Writers’ Union. When she asked to hear it, he said no.

  And no, he didn’t want anything to eat. They’d fed him well since he agreed to the confession. Before that it was bad soup, bad coffee, stale bread twice a day, a muddle of prison cuisine. Being in prison was like being inside a cliché—surly guards, angry interrogators, damp cells, enormous cockroaches. The banality of his incarceration and the awareness of it as a game that had to be played to the end made him get through the experience, but barely. Now he was very tired, he said. She was tired too, exhausted from the pity, anger, and defeat, and ready to do whatever the authorities wanted.

  “At one point I fainted,” he said. “They took me to the infirmary and injected something into me. Later on, back in the cell, they gave me pills. I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t, and they played before me the movie of my life.

  “They said this: ‘If it weren’t for the Revolution you wouldn’t be here.’ I said, ‘You’re right. If it weren’t for the Revolution I wouldn’t be in jail,’ which of course is not what they meant, but they were careless with their words. What they meant was that I wouldn’t be Daniel Arcilla, the great poet. They said the Revolution made me and supported me. True enough. It expected something back—loyalty and humility—and I failed to give it. I tripped the Revolution up in my poems as it was learning to walk. They believed this, that the Revolution was a child and needed their protection.

  “They knew many things about me: how the schoolchildren taunted me when I was a child, how they yelled niño bitongo, mama’s boy, after me. They knew about the day I saw the naked man wearing a straw hat coming out of my mother’s bedroom. He was holding his machete, ready to cut me into pieces, and my mother was behind him yelling, ‘He’s my son, he’s my son!’ They knew how afraid I was of that man, my mother’s lover, how I never went home after that; how, without the man’s knowledge, she would send me money for food that I’d spend on prostitutes instead. They said things about you.”

  “What things?”

  “That you were having an affair with Edmundo. They brought him in. He told me to my face.”

  “Those are lies.”

  “Lies and truth mixed together. How could he know what you liked in bed, things only I would know?”

  How would they know, except that they had read her journals? Mirta was right when she had said the boy was capable of anything. Now he was a man capable of anything.

>   Elena reassured Daniel by repeating that she’d not had an affair with Edmundo or anyone else. “They gave you drugs. Your sense of reality was compromised.”

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to him anymore, he said, still mumbling his words, which had no edge to them or confidence or authority. He rose from the couch and shuffled to the bedroom. Elena stayed in the living room for a time. It was not just his veracity that had been undermined but his trust. In him doubt and belief were conjoined, made of the same substance.

  When they arrived at the hall where the confession was to take place, the only one to greet them was Elvis Santos, who had given up poetry but was now writing a voluminous novel. He tried to offer a copy to Daniel, but a guard interceded and pushed him away. “Good luck, maestro,” he shouted as he was taken outside. None of the others in the hall dared adddress them. Instead they watched in uneasy silence as the couple moved to the front. Elena sat in the first row and Daniel took a seat on the stage next to Roberto Ferrante and several officers of the Writers’ Union, his colleagues and comrades, who shuffled the papers in front of them and avoided acknowledging his presence.

  A few minutes passed during which Daniel sat back on his chair and looked out at the audience, settling on Elena, who nodded back at him and fought hard to keep her tears in check. Just then Roberto Ferrante, in an ill-fitting dark suit and his face contorted by a duty he had not the courage or the disposition to reject, pounded the gavel, calling the meeting to order. After reading a few introductory remarks, he directed the group’s attention to Daniel, who recited his speech, blaming himself for his political and moral errors, which he attributed directly to his lack of foresight and his unbridled reliance on his own selfish vision—narrow and counterrevolutionary. As directed by his interrogators, he also blamed several of his friends there in attendance, as well as his wife, for errors of conviction, and thanked the workers of State Security, his true comrades, for letting him see the gravity of his mistakes. When he finished a half hour later, a more oppressive silence than before invaded the audience and, slowly, a few of those friends he had blamed came forward to confess their errors, express their shame, and declare their love of the Revolution. Only one, a thin, poorly dressed writer who would soon be marginalized himself, meekly expressed his fear; the rest buried it inside themselves. There was no poetry in the hall that night. Instead, the room filled with the rancid odor of fear. People looked at one another wondering who would be next, and slowly they rose from their seats, abandoning the hall until only Daniel and Elena were left.