The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  “Ugh.”

  “She was trying to fuck with you, and she succeeded. Consider yourself fucked with, a lo cubano. Or a la cubana in this case.”

  “Ah hell.”

  “Ramón.”

  “What?”

  “I know this is important to you, but you do realize we have a concert tomorrow night, yes? And it’s actually going to be something along the scale of gigantic, something people will remember. Cuba will hear your music, live, for the first time…”

  “I know, man, I’m sorry. I’m cool, I just…”

  “And the orchestra is set to—”

  “Wait! The orchestra?”

  For the first time, Kacique looks put out. “You didn’t read the emails I sent you, Ramón?”

  “I did, but I … you know, I skimmed them.”

  Kacique shakes his head. “Ramón, Ramón, Ramón.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Every second is crisp.

  Still diminished, still uneasy and writhing in the ecstasy of all my memories, I slide down the darkening Havana streets. The echoes of that place fill me—the shuffling papers, that rigid, wretched bureaucracy. It was just a simple conversation, but still I feel we barely escaped intact. Out in the avenues, the lanterns barely fend off the night. The sky is unstoppable, and even down these inland side streets, a mile or two from the Malecón, the ocean breathes its impossible hugeness all around, into the cracks and corners, the salty air.

  It’s quiet.

  In slowly shattering apartment complexes, behind peeled-paint facades, families curl up inside themselves. There’s an American movie on TV, a white cop and a black cop trade insults and save each other’s lives in increasingly improbable misadventures; something from the early nineties, I’d say.

  And of course, everybody’s watching. As I pass each window I catch glimpses of it: stern eyes beneath a tragic mullet, the cutaway from a sloppy makeout session. “I don’t think that’s possible,” the white cop says. “It’ll all be up in smoke soon.” The black cop just shakes his head, lights a cigarette.

  An old man trudges across the street I’m sweeping along. He stops very near me, smells the air, smiles. Walks on.

  Forward, forward, I enter the warm Caribbean wind and let it merge with me. Suddenly, I am not alone: The night is full of ghosts. They are all around me, hanging silently, impossibly still in the empty air. They are sullen, almost comatose. They hold no secrets for me; their mysteries are locked away or gone. I leave them there, sulking mindlessly, forever maybe, in the night. I keep my trajectory toward the sea.

  I don’t know what I thought I’d find here. More life? My own life, somehow? An answer. There’s nothing. A couple kids were playing guitar and singing by the crumbling wall of the Malecón, but they leave soon after I show up. Afraid maybe, or just on to haunt some other corner of town. They weren’t great singers anyway. The last of the tourist gift stands has just finished packing away their knickknacks, fake indigenous artifacts, and corny watercolor still lifes of the Capitolio dome, a cartoon santera with big lips and a cigar.

  I am alone, every second still crisp. Every answer waiting in the silence and roar of the ocean around me. And still: nothing. No secrets, no lies, no answers at all. I am alone.

  * * *

  Padre Sebastián.

  Minus almost a hundred pounds—he was charmingly stocky back in Las Colinas; you wanted to poke his little pudge and watch him giggle—now he’s caved in, sallow. But there’s a light in him. Somehow, watching him, I understand a thing about what must make a man dedicate his life to God. Sebastián carries something in him that doesn’t dull, even here amidst all this concrete and festering wounds and rotting bread. Sebastián’s body has decayed, but that light in him is relentless. The church always seemed like such an archaic, confining institution for a man as free as Sebastián, but I see now it gave him something to structure his light around. Focus.

  We’re in the yard. The sun is an unbearable coating over our skins and the sweat doesn’t stop pouring off us and I’m thinking how I wish I knew Sebastián as a teenager, when he turns to me and smiles. When I am most wretched, I think about the saints.

  It’s a strange thing to say because even with the unrepentant sun and mindless stretches of hard labor, this is a relatively good time in our lives at La Isla. I’m still reeling from the joy of not being alone in that tiny room. I feel strangely safe. I’m gaining my weight back. I know some of the guards well enough to get cigarettes or medicine when we need it. The captain leaves us alone. And I don’t think about home too many times a day.

  I still feel bad about throwing that book at you, I say.

  He shakes his head with a smile. One of my favorite moments we have shared. Did you know there are over ten thousand saints officially ordained by the Holy See?

  I put down the rock I was carrying. That many? Jesus Christ!

  Padre Sebastián’s smile shines crookedly through his filthy beard. Well, technically he’s not a saint, no.

  That’s a lot though.

  And that’s only the ones they’ve made official.

  What do you mean? I pick up my own rock and take his too, because he’s wobbling beneath its weight. We start toward the half-constructed wall.

  I mean when the Church makes a saint, that person’s whole life is a part of the saintliness, no?

  I guess.

  Of course! Their struggles with faith, their journey to God, and all the twists and turns along the way. Saint Augustine, who died a bishop, spent his formative years as a street scoundrel. He ran with criminals and loose women. He was a mess.

  But he’s a saint.

  Through and through. Was he a saint when he was sinning? His whole life is divine: His sins led him to the path of righteousness. All part of the plan.

  You’re saying … I stop because Padre Sebastián has stopped walking. His eyes are closed, he’s swaying gently, and I’m not sure if he’s about to collapse or start singing. I put down some of the rocks I was carrying.

  What of all the saints that have yet to be beatified? The wait is long, the process fraught with political nuances and gerrymandering that have little to do with the actual actions of the souls in question. What of the truly sanctified souls that don’t make the cut? Are they not saints as well?

  He opens his eyes, takes the hand I’ve reached out to keep him upright, and together we hobble forward. I don’t know. I’ve never thought that much about it. Just paid attention when the stories got juicy and mostly forgot about the saints except the ones they talk about a lot.

  Think on it, Marisol.

  * * *

  Back from my midnight sojourn, I am spread thinly across the room, my breath a faint susurration while the lovers sleep. Everywhere and nowhere, I allow those gentle bodies and their momentary peace to fill me. I won’t trouble Ramón with any dreams, not tonight. And anyway, they’re stirring, and each small motion resonates and booms into the late-night quiet, their tenderness for each other, their want.

  Ramón opens his eyes to find Aliceana staring into them. It’s still dark out; some strange birds scream into the Cuban early morning sky. Her skin seems to glow softly in the predawn gray. She’s propped up with one elbow against the bed, her hand cupped thoughtfully around her face, and that long black hair, usually pulled back, now tumbles freely down her shoulders and over her chest. One of the straps of her nightshirt has slipped down her shoulder and a glint of light from the lamppost outside catches her collarbone.

  Ramón takes her in, resting his eyes on the smudge of brightness against her clavicle, down along the outlines of her breasts told through the creases of her nightshirt. He wants to lunge across the tiny distance between them, spread and enter her again and again a hundred times harder and harder until she’s screaming and empty of breath in his ear and then explode. But he doesn’t want this moment to end, right here, this soft perfection waiting for him like a holy vision when he shakes off sleep. So instead he reaches out a hand, t
rembling with the effort of restraint, and traces one finger along her collarbone. She closes her eyes; her mouth becomes the slightest of smiles. His finger glides up her throat, caresses the line of her jaw, lands gently on her lips, and darts away before she can bite it. His whole hand wraps around the back of her neck, beneath her hair, and he pulls her close against him, his hardness pressed up against her soft tummy; one leg slides between hers.

  “I … I’m sorry,” Ramón whispers.

  “Ramón, for what?”

  “I’ve just been … I’m such a mess, Aliceana. I’m trying so hard to keep it all together, to make things make sense, but they don’t, no matter how many ways I turn them upside down or inside out, they don’t make sense.” His fingertips creep along the back of her neck to the hard surface tucked away behind her ear. “These dreams, and the fire. Tío Pepe … my mom. Shit, my whole fucking family.”

  Fingertips knead gentle circles behind her ear, three times around then back the other way. “I want so badly to just be … to be, you know, ferocious. Unafraid. To be sure of what’s true and what’s not. Like the way Marisol seems like she was, she stood up. She was confused and afraid, but she stood up through all that bullshit and tyranny and did something, you know? And it didn’t even seem like a choice to her, like it was just a route of her life that she followed effortlessly and, yes, she paid for it, paid with everything, but … but I’m talking about someone I never even met and only know through … through dreams, but … she’s family, whoever she is.”

  Ramón stays quiet for a few minutes. His fingers keep drawing slow circles just behind Aliceana’s left ear, three around, three the other way. He takes a deep breath, looking down at the top of her head, the light line of her scalp showing through where her jet-black hair is parted in the middle. Her forehead, just peeking out like a setting sun from where her face is buried in his shirt. This tiny, phenomenal woman who adores him, who followed him here on a whim and a dream. He puts a kiss on her crown.

  “And then you showed up, a love … yes, a love because that’s what it is, way more so than anything else I’ve known in my life, even my … anyway, yes, this love showed up and I really thought I’d lost you and what that really meant was more than any kind of pain I could look at square in the face, it was bigger than fear or doubt, it was heartbreak, but I never could’ve said that at the time, because I was too deep in the thick of it, too busy not looking at it, looking at anything else to be able to call it what it was, just like I was too busy looking away for the whole first part of our … whatever that was when we were just fucking. I couldn’t see you and everything it was because I wouldn’t look. Because I was scared. Because I knew I was pretending to just fuck you, I was really really, really what I was was doing something totally different. But pretending felt so good, and it felt safe, safer than really standing back and looking at you, I mean looking at you, in a for-real way, and what you did to me. Inside of me. You know?”

  He stops his circling fingertips and lifts her face out of his shirt. Her eyes are closed and lips slightly parted, trembling. “Don’t … stop,” Aliceana whispers.

  “What, talking?”

  “No.” You can barely hear her, it’s more an exhalation than a word. “Circles.”

  “Oh.” Ramón finds the spot again, circles, as she grinds against his knee.

  “I’m listening to you though, I swear Ramón. Just…”

  “It’s okay, babe, I—”

  “Uhhh!” Her moan comes out so loud and suddenly Ramón is sure the entire apartment could hear it.

  He lifts his thigh a little tighter into her crotch and smiles against her forehead. “Like this?”

  “Uh … huh.”

  “I didn’t even…” He stops because her whole body is trembling and for a second he’s not sure if it’s a convulsion of some kind. She cranes her neck back, eyes rolled all the way to the side, lips quivering, and you can see the wave after wave of heat, light, sex pulsing out of her body and cluttering up the room around them. She breathes in one time deep, all the way in, lets it out and then pulls in again, body still quaking, and the waves and waves of pleasure burning out of her quicken, become blinding. Her body clenches in his embrace and then she gasps and Ramón feels a shock of pain in his chest.

  “Ow! Jesus!”

  Aliceana releases the little nip of flesh from her clenched jaw, twitches one more time, and then goes limp in his arms, panting.

  “You alright?” Ramón says once she’s caught her breath.

  “Yes, I’m sorry, babe, I was there with you, that was beautiful, what you—”

  “Shhhh.” He brushes some hair out of her face and slides underneath her on his back, pulling her on top of him. “It’s alright, sweetheart, I just … I didn’t know you … I didn’t know that was a spot for you.”

  “Well, you never tried it before.” Her grin is huge as she rubs her pelvis back and forth against his erection.

  “Mmgh.” With minimal fumbling, Ramón is inside her, all the way. He thrusts once, twice, three times and then she leans forward and catches his face in her hands.

  “Listen, Ramón, and listen good.”

  He raises his eyebrows. The room is perfectly still around them. The morning has come, a hazy gray seeping through the window.

  “I heard everything you said. I felt it deep inside of me. You’re better at this than you realize, trust me. You think it’s all buried away, but I see it, I’ve seen it all along in you, all those emotions you think you’re hiding—you show ’em, you just got weird ways of doing it. But I see you, Ramón. I see you and I love you, okay? I love you.”

  Ramón nods, then comes silently, gigantically, emphatically inside of her, somehow is standing, on the bed, breathless and drenched, still enwrapped in her, sits back down, then collapses, still breathless, and whispers: “I love you too.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Padre Sebastián, his tattered Bible in one hand, the other gesticulating in time to his excited voice, tells me about another saint. But the tower is behind him and I can’t concentrate. The tower is always behind everyone, everywhere. The tower is immense, a verb and a noun, ever present. It’s a dull yellow, sits square in the middle of the yard where we do our work, right in the middle of the compound, and at the top there’s the window where the guards sit. Or maybe they don’t; no one knows.

  It doesn’t matter: After twenty-four hours of wondering you just assume they are, and it’s like there are two little bearded men with guns inside your head, watching, always watching. And then slowly they fade away: The brain doesn’t want to be in chains; it gradually ejects the intruders. They dissipate; you forget. And then you run outside one day to see what the commotion is about and it’s your friend Meelo writhing in a pool of his own blood that keeps getting bigger and bigger. And he cries out, his hands scrambling to stop the flow pouring out of his leg, but he can’t he can’t and you watch the eyes of everyone standing in the wide circle around, some of them squinting and determined, some wide and wet.

  When someone steps forward you know what’ll happen before it does and then it does: Another crack rings out and this time it’s Miguel, whom you never liked that much—he leered at you and talked too loud about his rich family in Miami and all his ludicrous escape plans—but you never, ever wanted to see the top of his head blown clean off like that, replaced by a sudden burst of pink and red flesh like a watermelon. He drops before the echo dies out. And Meelo is still screaming and everyone’s still staring and you’re helpless, helpless and useless when the final shot rings out catching Meelo in the right chest, laying him out. He coughs and it’s wet; blood speckles the air above him and you pray he dies right now, but he doesn’t: His body stubbornly refuses to stop twitching and writhing, his chest rises and falls, faster and faster and then slower and slower and then finally, finally not at all and then, then you never ever forget that the tower is always there, always watching. Even when it’s not.

  Marisol? My name,
always a tiny prayer on the lips of a man I love but will never have.

  Santa Cecilia, I say quickly. I’m listening.

  No you’re not. He smiles though, resigned. It’s alright.

  Padre?

  Hm?

  How do you remember all this stuff anyway—about the saints?

  Ah, some of it they drill into us at seminary. Behind him, the tower watches and watches. In the yard a few middle-aged women congregate, cigarettes in hand, and trade insults and survival tips. And I always loved the stories, so I used to stay up all night in my little room at San Bartolo reading them over and over.

  Fun.

  And then when I forget stuff I just make it up.

  Padre!

  Well … Look around you. We have to survive somehow.

  The women in the yard start yelling and Sebastián whirls around. My heart is in my brain, pounding relentlessly, too fast, but then they’re laughing and one of them stands a little away, soaking wet. When Padre Sebastián turns back he exhales and turns his face to the sky.

  I feel like I’m disappearing, he says quietly.

  I just nod. I’ve lost track of time again, as days bled into months, years. My wounds healed. I got some new ones, although none as bad as the first, and those healed too. And that’s become the new timekeeper: how long the body takes to replenish in order to prepare for more brutality. One day, I know it won’t bother, and we’ll all just be walking bruises, bleeding the last of our lives into our broken hearts.

  And then we’ll be gone.

  I know exactly what he means.

  * * *

  Kacique picks them up after a hearty breakfast of café con leche, fresh fruit, and fried eggs.

  “Adina, you sure you don’t want to come with us?” Kacique says, crossing his arms over his chest.

  Adina looks up at the bright Cuban sky. “I’m good.” She’s overdressed, wearing sharp sunglasses and a button-down shirt tucked into slacks. And she looks more uncomfortable than usual, out of her element. “I got some long-lost folks to look up too.”