The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  * * *

  Teresa’s “office” is a little side room, probably used for storage in a normal apartment, but Pepe treats his whole place like a storage bin, so this room is free for Teresa’s little setup. It’s not much, just a fold-out table with a nice cloth over it and a stool. There’s a Tarot deck and some fancy crystals and one of those seven-day white candles you can get at the bodegas. A long stick is propped against the wall behind her and a bunch of framed black-and-white family photos cluster on the ground around it. Her ancestor shrine, I presume. She lights a cigar and settles on the stool.

  “Nice setup,” Adina says when they walk in through the beaded curtain.

  “Gracias. Now, siéntense, chicos. Make yourselves at home. My dingy little side office es tu casa.”

  “You do readings and stuff in here?” Ramón asks, trying to fit himself into the folding chair.

  “Your tío and I negotiated it as part of my home health aide pay. Works out well actually, plus he gets his own in-house spiritual counselor gratis.”

  “Not bad,” Ramón admits, though I’m sure he’s thinking that neither of his parents would be thrilled to hear about the arrangement.

  “What did you want to ask, mi vida?”

  “Well, I was wondering…”

  “Estop.” Suddenly serious, one hand raised, eyes closed. Ramón clams up quick. Teresa turns to Adina. “I know it’s not for you that Ramón has come asking, but you’re hurting. I don’t need to pull a card or drop a shell to know it.”

  Adina nods. I get the sense she’s not used to being this fragile; the tears keep creeping up on her and she has to sniffle to hold them back.

  “It’s okay, mi amor. You don’t have to estifle all of that feeling.” Teresa passes a tissue across the table and Adina dabs at her eyes, still refusing to let the flood come. “I know this looks like a lot of magic, a lot of brouhaha, as they say, but really, it’s just so much science. Very precise.” Ramón raises his eyebrows and Teresa winks at him. “I don’t expect you to understand, don’t worry. Adina, you’ve always been a warrior, and now you are learning that the true warrior is also very vulnerable on the outside, the pain has become so great that it is impossible to act tough anymore.”

  Nods. Eye dabs. Sniffles.

  “I know it’s impossible to see right now, but this is a very beautiful thing, mi amor. Cherish it. It’s the moment when you are most alive, most in touch with your warrior spirit. Don’t fear it. Don’t be ashamed of it. Wrap love around even the most broken parts of yourself, because they are what God has given you to remind you how strong you are.”

  Someone said something like that to me once. Once when I was broken. His voice was gravelly and whispered; he was broken too. But he reached inside himself and found some words very much like those and he laid them at my feet like a pilgrim placing an offering. It was a world full of darkness and it was all I had. Adina hasn’t known the pain I have. I pray she never does. But she’s deep in her own dark place and I can see that what the santera says is a tiny glimmer of light to her too.

  “Okay,” Adina sniffles. “Okay.”

  “Now, Ramón.”

  Ramón’s kind of flabbergasted, I see. At least he knows when to shut up and be amazed by a powerful moment happening between two women in front of his face. He takes a second to get it together and then says: “I was wondering about the dead.”

  “Ah yes, ancestors. Egun, we call them in Lucumí.” She nods back at the photos on the floor around the stick. “They give us life, you know. In so many ways. We owe them so much and thank them so rarely.” I see she’s placed some coffee down there for them and I half consider taking a sip just to mess with everybody. But let me stop. Let me focus.

  “You don’t have to worry about the dead,” Teresa says. “They don’t mess with you.” Okay, well, I’d been impressed up till now, but Teresa clearly has some training to do. “Some people have the dead all over them like lice. Some people have a good relationship that they have cultivated with the dead; they help each other out. You? This is not a concern for you.”

  Ramón looks disappointed. I am too; I’d had high hopes for this one. “But, when the dead do show up in people’s lives, is it, I mean, is it like in the movies, where they want something, you know, some unfulfilled thing?”

  Teresa laughs for a long time. It’s a beautiful sound—deep and uninhibited and straight from the gut. Then she enjoys a few tugs from her cigar while Ramón squirms. “Short answer? Sure.” A shrug and she releases a cathedral of smoke into the small room. “Sometimes. Sometimes they are hungry for things they didn’t get in life—affection or attention or some material silliness. The dead see things we don’t. They have, how you say? Like, worldview. They can see through things, no? Into the essence. So when they’re around, they can get frustrated, that we don’t see things. They want to show us. Or they have agendas, yes. Sometimes they left something somewhere. Death can come suddenly, can cancel all the best-laid plans, you know. So, yes, maybe if the dead are around it’s to get the living to help them do something, but I warn you: It’s rarely so simple, Ramón. Death is like life, laden with problems of power and impossibilities. Usually, all the dead want is to evolve. Just like us, no?”

  “I see. Kinda.”

  Teresa smiles. “You don’t, but that’s okay. I’m sure you will.” She stands. The session is over.

  Ramón and Adina stand too, Ramón fumbling with his pockets. “Can I…?”

  “No, shush, m’ijo. Don’t be silly. You are family.”

  “I am?”

  “Close enough. Go. Don’t forget what I told you.”

  A few kisses and hugs later, they’re outside, pulling off, waving through the Volkswagen windows, smiling and slightly puzzled. They drive home in silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Isabel.

  Answers the door to the address Padre Sebastián gave me with a pistol pointing out and she has her glasses on and she’s still the same Isabel but skinnier, so much skinnier, like the time away has sucked her very body into near nothingness, cheeks sallow, eyes wide and afraid. When she sees me and wraps around me, it really is her; her smell is all over me; I’m submerged in it and then I’m crying and crying into her arm and she’s pulling me inside before I make a scene and putting down her gun and holding me while I cry and cry and cry.

  She doesn’t though. The old her maybe would’ve. I’ve seen her cry; once when Papi got into a fight with Big Fernando up the street and we watched while they went at it and once when she first got her period and stained her favorite dress and Nilda scolded her for not being prepared.

  But now she doesn’t cry. She says, How did you—and then shakes her head, because she’s put the pieces together herself. And you can see the weight lift off her, my sister, the rebel; her first thought upon seeing me was that she’d somehow been caught.

  That’s when she finally smiles, and it’s so wide and toothy I have to believe it. The apartment is small, cluttered with crates and papers and canned food and clothes. There’s a table by the far end of the room and then the balcony and then the bright Caribbean open sky over La Habana and I’ve never been this high up before, never seen Vedado like this: There’s the Hotel Presidente, El Nacional, and there beyond all those rooftops is the Capitolio and the old city stretching around it and out to the sea. And I say, It’s so beautiful and Isabel just nods, like she’s just now realizing that yes, it is quite a view. I start tearing up again because of that faraway look in her eyes, and Isabel relents a little; she lets a layer of wall crumble and asks me if I want anything to eat, any coffee, anything. Before I can answer she’s asking about Mami and Papi and, with a laughing roll of her eyes, Nilda, and all of her friends and finally there it is, before I can even get out the first word, finally she breaks, shatters even, and then she’s in my arms and she’s sobbing and sobbing and I hold her and watch the clouds ration sunlight across the rising rooftops below.

  I miss you, she says, sniffling
.

  I just shake my head because all along I thought I was the one missing her and she was just out in the world, living this amazing life without me. Why would she miss me? There was a war to be fought. That’s when I start crying, and then she’s holding me, we’re holding each other and kind of sob-laughing.

  I miss you too, boba, I moan. And when everything calms down some we’re still holding each other and I say, I want to join up too, into her shoulder. I want to fight.

  My eyes are closed because I know what she’s going to say next and then she does: No, Mari. And when I shake my head, crying again, she adds: Not yet.

  Why? I try to keep the whine from my voice, because I already feel like a little girl.

  She holds me a little bit away from herself so she can look at me. Frowns. There will be plenty for you to do, believe me.

  And I do believe her, but I’m not sure what she means because there’s a heavy rain cloud around her words and I can’t put my finger on it.

  And anyway, she says, smiling now even though her eyes aren’t, it’s almost over. This part anyway.

  Over canned pineapples and cold coffee, she tells me about months and months of dodging the secret police, passing messages between the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains and the leaders of the Student Directorate in the city. Terrible nights waiting for the door to burst in, trying to look innocent, showing falsified papers to guardia officers that would harass her on the street. She tells me she gave up her body more than once to get away with things, rubs her eyes and I wonder if it’s to try and shake away the nightmare memories that keep rising, but when she looks at me, her face is even, not broken, just concerned. There’s no tell I can find to match my worst fears about what she’s been through, what it’s done to her. I shake my head, trying to wrap my mind around it but not wanting to, trying not to imagine what that really means. Put my hand on hers and hold it tight. She’s still there, still strong, in spite of it all. There’s still light in her eyes when she looks up at me. She’s still so alive.

  In the morning she tells me it’s all happening, and the radio is bursting with frantic transmissions. It’s almost New Year’s; the three fronts are converging in Santa Clara, Ché’s troops will sweep away the last battalions of government fighters and it will send a devastating shock wave all the way to La Habana and into Batista’s corrupt little heart, and then he will know, finally and without any doubt, that the people have risen against him and defeated him at every turn, even though outnumbered and living like animals in the mountains, the people have risen. And the victory will echo across the world, the very seat of empire will shake, a resounding answer to the question asked centuries ago. The yanquis won’t own our sugar anymore, won’t own us anymore, and they’ll have to rewrite all the history books to sing about our victory. She sounds like the propaganda the rebels leave scattered around town, but she believes it, it’s real on her lips, I feel it in my own heart, my gut. But there’s something else too: She’s afraid.

  I realize now it’s not just the fear of the bursting-in door; there’s a deeper, more sinister menace lurking in her nightmares and she doesn’t even have words for it. I can tell because even as she narrates all the things that are about to happen, all swollen with revolutionary glory and patriotic fervor, her voice trembles ever so slightly, and she doesn’t smile, she’s not excited, she just sees it, says it, and then she’s quiet.

  And a few days later, while I’m still staying at her apartment in Vedado, that’s how it happens, just like she said: The three columns of revolutionary fighters converge, and while Batista’s men destroy one, the other two sweep through the streets of Santa Clara, with a revolutionary fervor that crushes the undertrained, underpaid, and afraid soldiers and keeps rolling all along the dark countryside highways and into La Habana, up the palace steps and into the ear of the dictator, who nods silently, eyes closed, and knows in his twisted little heart that after years of pushing back against the rebels, cracking down and executing, torturing and cursing and waiting and fighting, he’s finally lost.

  And he flees.

  And then the streets flood with hundreds and hundreds of people, Cubans, my people, yelling, cheering, screaming, throwing flowers, shooting rifles, being alive and in love and spontaneous and free free free suddenly free. Isabel and I make our way through the writhing crowds, through the living streets, past the waves crashing against the Malecón, along the edge of the brand-new city in the brand-new world. Up ahead stands a group of rebels, beautiful, uniformed men with beards and machine guns, all yelling and cheering and watching up the road, waiting for their savior to sweep through and herald the dawning of a new day in Cuba.

  They embrace Isabel, flirt with her, laugh with abandon and scream at all they’ve been through, and Isabel whispers to me that I’m not to leave her side, not to disappear for any reason at all no matter what, to stay close, and she cracks a smile and plays along, and the men are kind to me, although I see them keeping me in the corner of their eyes and minds, their pretty rebel girl’s pretty young sister. I feel them see me and it is one part terrifying, two parts invigorating. These powerful men, I wonder what power I could hold over them, whether these conquerors would fall over themselves to win me, like they do on TV.

  A line of trucks passes us by, more bearded rebels hanging off the sides and yelling and shooting into the air. They pass and suddenly there are people all around us, the whole city of La Habana has emptied out into the streets and everyone is screaming at once, the whole city is screaming, years—no, centuries, generations of tension, fear, mourning suddenly explode into one outrageous outpouring, unrepentant, unafraid, alive.

  Truck after truck passes, then a few tanks and smiling rebels jogging alongside. I wonder where Mami and Papi are and if this finally means the end of all our terror and whether Isabel will come back home now, and if this explosion of life will carry us along through time into sustained peacefulness, some kind of freedom. Then Isabel tugs on my sleeves and points at one of the men passing on a tank; he’s bearded like the rest of them with a childish face, all cheeks and forehead, and he’s waving and smiling, surrounded by the black-and-red flags of his movement; the light blue, white, and red flags of our country; his fighters and his people. You can see he’s on fire with the glory of it, all that it means and all the future has in store.

  And then he’s gone and we’re swept up in the parade, all rebel green and black and red. Beards and smiles and eyes wide open with excitement. A moment, a moment if only just a moment of total enthrallment. A whole city, a whole country, this beautiful island that is my home wide awake and hurling into the future with an open heart and a mouthful of hope …

  * * *

  Ramón has the day off and, having scrawled out the dream in his journal, he’s making beats. I wonder if all this history-giving is too much. There are no experts to consult, or the ones there are, like Teresa, don’t even recognize my presence, so what good is that? It’s a purging, like vomiting but beautiful somehow, and when it’s done I am diminished and weak, but I am clean. Does that mean Ramón is dirty? Have I made him into a waste bin for my memories, our diseased past? I can only hope this process will get him somewhere better, that his ignorance is perhaps its own form of filth, that knowing, however painful, will be its own cleansing.

  When his eyes close and his mind goes I glide just above him, then give over to his flesh, allow myself to dissolve into that solidness and so we merge. Then, I remember.

  When I have the choice, I choose carefully. There’s only so much time and space, even with the odd out-of-proportion dream state. He needs to be able to retain it, at least the important parts, when he wakes, so I can’t pour all of La Habana into his sleeping mind. So I craft, form, fix, and then I give. Some of it clicks into place so easily; he already knows what the house in Las Colinas looked like; he’s seen the pictures. He has stored away images of Mami and Papi, his own mother when she was a child. Other things, I have to paint as gracefully
and honestly as I can so he sees it the way it was. He sleeps and I give, empty myself, and as I give I grow. My own past unrolls through the act of showing it, and so I become, ever so slightly, more real. Less a sprinkling of displaced air currents, more a living memory, a participant in the world, however shadowy. I live.

  No one’s home, so he has the speakers on and María Teresa Vera’s voice pouring out of them. He woke up early, scribbled the whole winding dream saga as best he could remember it in his journal as always, and then made his coffee and got right to work. Now he flips back to the beginning of the song, plays it out once—those guitars dancing together, building into the now familiar opening line—and then stops. A messy collection of bass beats burps out of the speakers until he finds one he likes and throws it on top of a ticking metronome with some snares and cymbal crashes. It’s all very cursory, I see; he’s trying to get a sense of what can be done, eschewing precision for progress, mean mugging the screen, sipping coffee, rubbing his stubbly face.

  This is why I’m not worried: Ramón is not a closed circuit. Yes, it’s a lot that I give him. A heavy load to carry, all that history, and someone else’s to boot. But we all walk with history, whether we know it or not. It was there anyway, the hints of it at least—the collected lies, aversions, and half-truths my sister told him. The filled-out story only becomes meat on the bones, something he can sink his teeth into. But it doesn’t sit heavy in his cells, doesn’t metastasize or gather like plaque and turn malignant. He pours it out just like I do, wraps around these halting beats and basslines he makes.

  He hits play and watches the song scroll by in dancing waveforms. Takes a swill of coffee, leans in, and lines up the beginning of a measure to the tallest spike, squinting. He’s not thinking about Gutierrez or the crowded streets of La Habana or Aliceana or old Tío Pepe. He’s lost in the beat and happy.