by Pablo Medina
As they walked out, Daniel tripped and fell on a root that had buckled the sidewalk. He rose quickly and composed himself, helped by Elena. From behind, it was impossible to tell who was holding on to whom. It didn’t matter. They had become one, bearing on their shoulders the burden of poetry’s failure. They heard Elvis calling from behind, but he was once again stopped by the guards. He’d been the only one who had come to them in solidarity. Unconcerned about their destination, they continued walking and eventually found themselves wandering down Calle O’Reilly to its end and north via Avenida del Puerto to the mouth of the bay, where they stopped, just before dawn, across from La Cabaña fortress, built in the eighteenth century, and Morro Castle, with its emblematic lighthouse, dating back to the sixteenth. On stormy days the spray from the waves breaking on the rocky promontory covered the lighthouse, which had withstood the power of the sea for almost four hundred years. But it was not a stormy night tonight. The moon had just set and the sea was calm.
“Someday,” Elena said, “we will be in the north.”
“Miami?” Daniel asked.
“Not Miami. Somewhere where we can live quietly and at peace.”
“We will never be at peace.”
“We will put all these bad memories behind us, like good immigrants, and we will find supporters who will understand what we’ve been through and help us get settled.”
“You’re a dreamer, Elena.”
“First you dream, then you hope, and you work at making your hope reality.”
Daniel grumbled out a reluctant laugh. He’d be a broken man without this small, dark poet from the countryside, who had stood by him without regard for her safety.
“We’ll bring Soledad with us, and we’ll get a small house with a fireplace and a backyard. In winter we will shovel snow and in summer we will mow the lawn.”
“It’s a nice picture.”
“We will bring my mother too.”
Daniel rolled his eyes.
The sun was rising behind the fortifications, illuminating them with swirls of pink and yellow light. It was a beautiful sight, but there was no hope in it and no peace. The fortresses were prisons now, where many of their friends wound up. Some had died inside and others had come out barely alive. No sunrise could erase that.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is an arduous process that can take years. I am fortunate that I had the help, friendship, and support of many people during this time, too many to list in this brief paragraph. I would especially like to thank Kassie Rubico, Mark Statman, Pablo A. Medina, Arístides Falcón, Alex Rodríguez, Emma Romeu, and Elisabeth Schmitz for their insights and Nancy Tan for her extraordinary copyediting skills. My agent, Duvall Osteen of Aragi Inc., and my editor, Olivia Taylor Smith of Unnamed Press, kept the faith and helped enrich this book with their comments and suggestions.
PHOTO CREDIT: KRUBICO
About the Author
Pablo Medina is the author of eighteen books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translation, among them The Island Kingdom (poems, Hanging Loose, 2015); the novels Cubop City Blues (Grove Press, 2012) and The Cigar Roller (Grove, 2005), and the newest English version of Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel The Kingdom of This World (FSG Classics, 2017). Medina’s work has appeared in several languages, among them Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and in periodicals and magazines throughout the world. He was a member of the AWP board of directors from 2002-2007, serving as president in 2005–2006. Winner of numerous awards, among them grants from the Rockefeller and Oscar B. Cintas foundations, the state arts councils of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the NEA, the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and others, Medina was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012. He has taught at various institutions, most recently Emerson College. Currently, he lives in Vermont and is on faculty in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
