The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  They say when you love someone, all the things that seem crazy about them are just normal to you, and that’s what it was with us and Maceo. It was crazy, what he did, but we never blinked. He formed part of the natural landscape of our community; people would stop and listen as they walked their kids to school, bring their lunch and camp out on a park bench for hours. Lovers would make out under a tree nearby; sometimes Maceo would cede the spotlight to some teenagers who had their own poems to unleash.

  In the year of protests and street fights with the cops, the politics of public space caught fire. Maceo yelled his poems; a new raspy wrath had entered his voice, new rage in his arsenal. The cops had demanded he move, they had berated and bullied him. Maceo kept on strong. When they shot him, they said he had a gun. We poured out of our houses and shops, teeth clenched and fists high. Maceo having a gun was crazier than Maceo yelling poetry at the sky from dawn to midnight on a sweltering summer evening. Maceo ain’t have no gun. You want to see brown people with weapons? (They didn’t.) Hold on, we’ll go get ours. (We did.)

  * * *

  The newspaper articles tacked to the wall chant alarming warnings about that day. BLACK RIOT, TERROR ON MAIN STREET, VIOLENCE WOUNDS 4 IN NEW JERSEY SLUM, they yell. Maceo’s death erased. One grainy photo shows Serrano, brow creased, charging a cop. Behind him, Luis reaches out, mouth open, but he’s getting bodied by two other cops. And there, there beside him, a grainy splotch that resolves into a face, barely visible over the burly shoulder of that cop. That’s me, I’m sure of it. I remember that day: It felt different. Maceo’s murder did something to us; we weren’t just angry anymore. We were ready for war. The cops felt it; they bristled, moved in quick.

  We carried clubs and broomsticks. A helicopter buzzed overhead, cops or news crews, I couldn’t tell which. Didn’t matter: Surveillance is surveillance. We marched halfway up Grayson before they charged us.

  Here’s Maceo’s obituary. It’s from one of the local papers, so they actually didn’t make him out to be a lunatic or a gangster, just a poet and a friend. Here’s a poster from the rally: JUSTICIA it says in bright red letters. Here’s another poster, from the next day. It’s a wrinkled piece of paper with the word MISSING on top and a picture of me in the middle.

  “I said what the fuck are you talking about!” Luis’s voice bellows from the other room. Ramón says something; it’s just a mumble through the wall.

  “¿Pero cómo te atreves?” Luis again.

  My name is beneath my photo, Marisol. Just Marisol. I never used my family name after I escaped, because I had no family. Just Marisol. Here’s the same poster, this one sun-bleached. And here’s another. They form a circle on the wall: the posters and newspaper clippings and photos. The circle is a halo, in the middle sits a small table with a white cloth over it, a white candle, and a little plaster statue of a mermaid. It’s kitschy, probably from some tourist shop in Florida, but it’s me. I know I was his mermaid, pulled from the sea, tattooed forever across his arm.

  “You don’t know a single goddamn thing about my life or what I’ve lived through, Ramón. You don’t know…”

  The day I vanished. The day I vanished again. My life has been a series of deaths and resurrections. Maybe this was my final death. I remember the cops surging at us, helmets and shields, an unstoppable onslaught, and I remember not caring. Other times I’d had that same jittery tingle I’d get in skirmishes in the Escambray. That day, nothing. I became a rock and stood solid as they flooded through our ranks, demolished us.

  “Vete de mi casa.” Luis’s voice. “You can’t just come here and tell me these fantasies that you have no basis for, just boberías that you made up!”

  That’s all I remember.

  A glass shatters in the other room.

  “Luis, no!” Adina’s voice.

  Something huge crashes against a far wall, probably Ramón, and the building shudders. A word catches my eye as I spin. It’s in one of the articles about the street fight that day. It’s longer than the other words and definitely Spanish; it jumps out and tangles my vision, a centipede among ants. A name. I slow, return to the article. Skim.

  Gutierrez.

  Councilman Gutierrez.

  “I don’t see any inconsistency in the police reports. They took the necessary action against an angry mob and defended the people of New Jersey,” said Councilman Gutierrez. “That’s their job. If some rabble-rousers got hurt in the process, they will hopefully learn that armed demonstrations and disturbing the peace are not the way to get things done in America. This isn’t Cuba; this is a democracy.”

  Gutierrez. I can see it so clearly: the monstrosity of documents tucked away in that file cabinet in his cozy Oaks mansion. He saw it all. Watched the whole movement rise and crumble.

  Surveillance.

  “Let me explain!” Ramón pleads, his voice finally a roar.

  “There’s no fucking explanation.”

  Gutierrez’s files. He had the answers. The answers are somewhere.

  I spin back into my circle, the same one I spun along the inner walls of my prison; faster now. The newspaper articles, photos, and posters blur into a slosh of black and manila and red. That song emanates from me, the same spinning song, quizás, dammit, quizás, but it’s not enough, they can’t hear it over their own yelling. I spin faster, let my charged molecules accumulate, burn, and rupture, and get reborn even hotter, heavier, angrier inside me—then dip my trajectory ever so slightly down, collide head-on with the glass of water on the altar. The glass tumbles, knocks over the mermaid. The mermaid lands in two pieces in a puddle. The glass rolls along the surface of the table and then over the side, shatters.

  A moment passes as I recover myself from the exertion.

  Footsteps approach and then Aliceana stands in the doorway, one eyebrow raised. She walks in and her breath catches; the shrine room instantly makes sense to her. For a moment, she’s lost in the clippings and photos.

  I wait, a wisp of a shadow and fading, always fading. Down the hall, the argument rages on.

  Aliceana’s eyes travel down past the MISSING poster, to the empty table, the water, the broken glass. She crouches, picks up a piece of the mermaid. Looks up. She’s not looking at me, I’m in the corner, but I know she understands. I move myself to where she’s looking. She still doesn’t see me, I’m so close to gone, but it matters to me. She blinks twice, smiles ever so slightly, and I realize she knows she’s pregnant.

  “Ramón!” Aliceana yells, still crouching. “Luis!”

  The argument doesn’t stop. She grabs up the other piece of mermaid and runs out of the room.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Luis’s face hangs slack. Sweat shines off his tan skin. His shirt is ruffled where Ramón must’ve grabbed him back. He’s panting and scowling, but he knows, he knows. He has to know.

  “What do you mean it just fell?”

  “You heard the glass break,” Aliceana says.

  “And it was…” Luis crouches by the table, puts a finger to the wet floor, “… this?” He’s still so bulky, a solid man after all these years. I remember in street fights he would break out of the line like a cannonball and all that girth moving so fast would have cops scattering. I remember all that thickness being around me, devouring me, holding me up, holding me down, cocooning my nights.

  “This was my … this is.” He looks around and it’s like it suddenly dawned on him that strangers have entered his temple. “She’s … I already let her go for dead. I don’t understand. I looked for … so many years.”

  Ramón lets out a sigh from the doorway. He clutches the notebook to his chest. “I know, Luis. I mean, I don’t know, but I understand. My whole family barely speaks of her. But … the dreams are real. I couldn’t make them up if I tried. She’s … she’s with me.”

  Enough of this. I don’t have the luxury of these slow-to-realize-the-truth living folks. I need answers, if nothing else so I may vanish this time with some peace and end this terrible cy
cle. Gutierrez has answers. Or he did before I ended him. But that house—up in that house there’s a file. One of them has my name on it, or Luis’s maybe, and inside there must be answers.

  “Marisol,” Luis whispers, his head lowered. “Te esperaba.”

  I know he waited. I see. And now I need him to move, this man of interminable action. I need his body and his weight and his brain. And I need my nephew. I need them to understand this last piece. It’s not in me though. I hurl myself at the wall where the article is, claw at it, direct all my waning strength to the far edge of myself and batter against it, but I’m spent. That last spin pushing the glass emptied me.

  “What happened?” Aliceana asks. “What happened at this rally?”

  Fading, always fading. I hurl myself at the wall again, almost make purchase with a folded corner of the newspaper but slide off instead.

  “They killed a poet we loved. A … friend,” Luis says. “Maceo, his name was. We took to the streets once again as we had been doing all summer that year. They came heavy, crushed us, shot tear gas canisters directly into the crowd. Marisol was by my side like she always was and then everything was that impossible white and she was gone. When the world came back to normal I was bruised and my eyes were burning, but I was okay. Marisol … gone.”

  “Did you…?”

  “Of course I looked. For years, I looked and looked. I scoured public records, wallpapered the city with her picture; I fell asleep at the courthouses, wading through red tape and political backwaters.”

  Ramón steps beside Luis, who suddenly looks very old. My nephew reaches down, wraps his hand around my old lover’s shoulders, and helps him up.

  “I searched,” Luis finishes. “Until I nearly had a nervous breakdown and they sent me to Puerto Rico for a year to recover.”

  Nobody knows what to do with their hands, where to look. I lean hard against the newspaper article, achieve only a vague breeze. No one notices.

  “Then I came back here. I opened the club and I went on with my life.” Luis looks around. “Mostly.”

  We are not alone. With nothing having changed, the room seems fuller, the air thicker. I see Aliceana cock her head to the side and look around. I feel them surround me like a sudden forest; I am full of them, enraptured. Luis looks up, blinks through the tears he’d been holding back.

  There are so many of them, a perfectly still tidal wave materializing in its own fine time.

  And then I see Gómez, and I understand.

  Ramón still cradles the notebook under one arm. The book that contains my life, the lives of so many others. A tremendous feat of conjure work, the act of remembering. Isabel stands beside Gómez. She wears a white dress, her beautiful shoulders bare for all the world to see, a cigarette in her hand. I thought I was just remembering for my own sake, to save myself, but I brought so many with me. Papi and Mami linger in the back, holding each other close, their faces drawn and serious. Prisoners from Los Pinos appear, first one by one and then in clusters. Miguel and Meelo. Altagracia, Echeverria, even Tesoro Milán.

  Luis made this room a shrine. A shrine to me. And now we’ve brought into that sacred place a book full of all the stories that made me who I am, the people who helped me get through. Of course, a certain alchemy would commence. They are everywhere. And then, together, we move toward the far wall. Together we reach forward and as one, we swipe the article from where it was tacked. And together we watch, the living and the dead, as it dips and glides through the air and lands at Ramón’s feet.

  He bends down, retrieves it. The whole room stares at him.

  “Councilman Gutierrez,” Ramón reads. He looks up. “As in, Enrique Gutierrez?”

  “Of course,” Luis says. “That hijo de puta. What about him?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  I remember the cell. Thinking how much brighter American prisons were than Cuban ones. I missed the darkness, even for all the nightmares it concealed. That penetrating, forever shine of this place would destroy me even faster than the caverns of Los Pinos did. The brightness was all I knew though. They didn’t wash the pepper spray from my eyes, so I lay there, sobbing in a ball and blind, and waited.

  “Okay, te quiero,” Ramón says into his mobile. He rolls his eyes. “Sí, Mami, claro. I know how to handle myself.” He ends the call, shaking his head. “My mom wants us all to be very, very careful.”

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” Luis asks. He’s giddy, almost laughing now, but his hands tremble.

  “I’m not totally sure,” Ramón says. “I just know … I know this is where we’re supposed to go.”

  Aliceana nods, keeping her eyes on the road. “I felt it too. There’s no question. There’s something at the house she … they…” She takes a deep breath. “They want us to find.”

  The spirits linger. They surround the car, a solemn entourage, a few stragglers pick up the rear. They don’t speak, barely look at me, but I feel them inside myself, their love and sorrow. I wonder where Padre Sebastián is. Been wondering since they first showed up. I’d waited. Hoped.

  “I think,” Ramón says, “I know what we need to find.”

  * * *

  Something is wrong. It can’t be this easy. We were let immediately through the gates. The guards are all gone, a single smiling butler in their place. The Gutierrez mansion is a spiraling stucco monstrosity. But it is almost entirely empty.

  “Hello?” Ramón calls into the massive front hall. His footsteps ricochet through the corridors. The butler has vanished. No one answers.

  “Maybe we just go ahead in?” Luis suggests. He moves slowly, eyes darting back and forth. The warrior will always be ready to strike.

  “Hello?” Ramón yells again.

  Aliceana shakes her head. “No one’s here?”

  The spirits fan out and stream through the corridors, up to the rafters, out into the courtyard.

  None of this makes sense. The old political wrangler sent out his final cryptic email and died and who knows what happened after that? His silly overzealous grandson probably picked up the reins, but to what end? Did he run the whole family fortune into the ground in such a short time?

  “Ramón?” Alberto appears at the banister of an inner balcony. But he’s changed. His doufy blond hair has been shaved off and he’s smiling. His smile appears … genuine. It’s disconcerting. “So glad you could come through! I was wondering how your trip to the motherland was.”

  The motherland?

  “The motherland?” Ramón says. “Alberto, what’s going on?”

  “Come, we’ll discuss. Coffee? Tea?”

  * * *

  “Anyway, the whole thing, it just … it changed me.” Alberto smiles again and sips his coffee. “I think my abuelo really did die peacefully.” He has no idea how peacefully. “Having had that revelation, I mean. But I realized that even if it was, in a way, too late for him, it wasn’t for me. And if he had done the single powerful act of changing me before dying, and I dedicated my life to something worthwhile, to peace and reconciliation instead of war and terrorism, well … what better way to honor his dying wish, no?”

  “That’s beautiful,” Aliceana says. Luis and Ramón just nod, speechless. We’re in the same sitting room that old Enrique received and threatened Ramón in just a few weeks ago. The walls are bare now, no more awards and gloating photos with right-wing politicos. No more war memorabilia. I hover near the ceiling, trying to keep track as all the spirits from my life float past.

  “Anyway, what can I help you folks with today?”

  Ramón shakes off the puzzled look. “I believe your grandfather has a file that we need to see.”

  “Oh?”

  “The night you kidna … the night I was here, shortly before he passed, the councilman mentioned that he had kept ties on the left-wing activities going on downtown for the past few decades.”

  Alberto closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “My grandfather did have a very complicated relationship with moralit
y, didn’t he?” This boy still possesses the slipperiness of a wet toad, regardless of what side of the political line he’s slinked over to.

  “He was a…,” Luis begins. Then he coughs and settles himself. “Okay.”

  “My aunt Marisol was a political prisoner in Cuba and then came here, but she never got documented and at some point she disappeared. We think she may have been arrested. I think your grandfather’s records might be able to lead us to her.”

  The spirits have gathered again. They’ve found what we need; they bristle with it. Time slides past, wasted on this young clown.

  “You still run the club, yes, Mr. Cavalcón?”

  Luis nods curtly. “We reopen next month.” No thanks to you, he doesn’t say.

  “And you still command a fairly large audience when you DJ, correct, Ramón?”

  Ramón balls his fists. “What are you getting at?”

  “I’ve retooled my grandfather’s organization into something positive, peaceful. But we’re starting from scratch, in a sense. What do you say we strike a deal?”

  Luis narrows his eyes. “You want to hold a party at the club and have Ramón DJ, for your organization?”

  “Yes, but more than that: I want to use your club as a center for community building. It’s a perfect spot, and we can—”

  Ramón stands up, knocking over his coffee cup. “No.” Everyone looks at him. A black stain seeps into the couch. None of them had been buying Alberto’s bullshit, but the suddenness of his switch up must’ve tipped Ramón’s finally fed-up meter over the edge.

  Alberto’s eyes go wide. “What?”

  “I said no. No more bargaining, no more politics, no more bullshit. If you’re leveraging information we need to find my lost family member to get your organization a home, especially with all the money you have, then you’re just as full of shit as the assholes trying to play me for more visa money or the corrupt pricks that imprisoned my aunt. You’re just as fucked up as your twisted grandfather.”