Loving Che (18 page)

She talked about you. She wanted things to be right.

Was she sorry?

The old woman sighed and stood. Your mother was very committed to her work. And her ideas. In the late sixties, she abandoned her earlier subjects and began to paint portraits of El Che almost exclusively. She spent hours erasing and redrawing, layering colors. When I wasn't out trying to get food or standing in line for something, I sat here and watched her paint. Those were happy times, still. Though a sadness had fallen on her since his death, still there was something bright in her movements. Day after day, she painted.

The old woman looked at me. Yes, she said, you are right; she painted many pictures of him. She left behind dozens of portraits. Then she added: But most of them are gone.

She stopped. I didn't say anything.

We have to eat somehow, she said after a moment. Without dollars in this country there is nothing. You want to see my ration book? It's worthless. No one uses them anymore. I pay a boy to pick up the few items we can still get—a miserable handful of rice, some bread. It is not even worth going down to get it myself. What were we supposed to do?

The woman paused and sighed. She walked to the paintings. A few months ago, she said, my daughter began to take the paintings of El Che down to the plaza, where the booksellers gather. She sold the first one to a German man for fifty dollars. Can you imagine? Fifty dollars—a fortune. And she said the man didn't even hesitate, just picked out the
money from his wallet as if he'd been paying for a piece of candy. So the next time, my daughter went down with a painting and asked for one hundred dollars. This too sold. She sells them now for two hundred, and the tourists buy them.

The woman lifted her feet, and I noticed for the first time a new pair of Nike running shoes. She smiled. But mostly, she said, the money goes for food. And we're saving. Who knows what will come.

The woman had been talking more excitedly than she had all afternoon, but suddenly she stopped. If you would like to take one of these paintings, of course … you are welcome. She began to walk up and down, pointing at this painting and that.

Did she ever make any of herself?

The woman shook her head. And then she walked to the series of the window. She took the last one and held it out for me. Yes, that is her reflected there in the corner, she said. But as you can see for yourself, it is a difficult likeness.

I took the painting from her.

Are there any left of Che?

I stood looking at her.

Very few, she said. After a moment, she added, We still have some rough studies she did, pencil and charcoal.

She opened a cabinet and began going through the papers inside. I sat on the couch again with the blurry self-portrait of my mother. I couldn't even tell what color her hair was. I moved it back and forth, trying to find the angle and distance that made her face appear most clearly.

After a few moments, the woman sat beside me on the couch. She unrolled a length of white paper and handed it to me.

As I left, I pressed some money into her hands. She closed her eyes and lowered her head.

I flew back to Miami on a Sunday night. The pilot circled and circled above the city, an ominous silence from the cockpit. Below, the city lights shone up from the gloom. All around, dark clouds obscured the evening sky. The descent went badly,
and several people became ill. When the plane finally touched down, it did so with such force that the overhead bins popped open, spilling suitcases and jackets into the aisles and contributing to a few anxious screams, followed, when the plane finally began to taxi, by relieved applause.

The city, I learned, was in one of its periodic grips of hurricane fever; here and there homes and storefronts had been boarded up. I decided to skip the supermarket and make do with whatever I had in my freezer. That night, I listened to the wind outside and thought of Teresa; and for a brief moment just before I closed my eyes, I too believed that weather might roil the inner landscape.

The storm passed in a few days, leaving behind only the shredded clouds of a mild tropical depression. In the weeks that followed, I underwent a period of the most profound exhaustion I had ever experienced. For some days I was unable to work. I lay in bed day after day. What gripped me wasn't sadness in the way that one usually understands it, I could not even experience anything close to despair. I simply felt very tired. It was as if the world about me were in the grips of a terrible illness and now lay next to me, softly exhaling a stale breath. The song of the mockingbirds at my window now failed to stir me; the cloud shadows did nothing to me. I simply lay, as I imagined an animal or an insect might, wanting nothing, dreaming nothing, not content or discontent, just caught in a sort of waiting.

As I have few intimates, my condition went largely unnoticed. And then as the weeks and then months passed, I noticed that I was gradually improving, that the sunlight felt warm again, that leaves silvered with rain could be beautiful.

When finally I emerged, it was the middle of autumn and the days had softened. I decided to take a trip out west. But at the last minute I canceled my flight and instead drove up to Sebastian Inlet, where all those years before I had begun my life of travel.

Sitting on the beach, I made plans for another trip to Cuba. It would be an official one, and I would try to look up my birth certificate. Maybe talk to people in the government. It seemed very simple and logical, and I didn't know why I hadn't planned on it before. But when I returned to Miami, I found that I kept putting off the plans. I made appointments to see Ileana and Dr. Caraballo and then canceled them. Each time I thought of pursuing the truth of the story, I felt a bit of the creeping exhaustion that I had only just escaped. I decided then to think no more of Teresa, and put away her papers. I wrapped up the charcoal drawing of Che and hid it behind the winter clothes. A year after that last trip to Cuba, I came under contract with the telephone company, and by concentrating all my energies on writing corporate reports and small company articles, I hoped to forget the strange packet of memories my mother had bequeathed to me.

* * *

And yet, once an idea grips you, even the physical world will conspire to hold you fast to it. So it is when every object—every green branch, every cloud shadow—recalls to us a beloved. And so it was with me and Teresa's story and the memory of the man she had loved.

A recent winter, browsing in Manhattan, I entered a bookstore to escape the cold. I made my purchases and was ready to walk out when a box of holiday cards made me stop.
Vive la Christmas!
they said. And there again, against an olive-drab background, was the familiar face, the curled dark hair, the steady gaze, and above the serene eyes, a red and white Santa hat, accented with a comandante's star.

I found as the weeks passed that I could not escape his face. Once I looked up at a giant billboard and met his eyes in an advertisement for a clothing store. Another time I turned my car around at a light so I could follow a man in a red convertible that I was sure was him. I found myself staring one day at a little boy in the mall who looked so much like the small Che in a photograph that I had cut out of a book that I drew an angry comment from the woman I took to be the boy's mother. When I willed myself to stop examining people's faces for traces of him, I began to recognize him in the graceful arc of a palm, in a stone face set high on a wall.

As I began to see him in unlikelier and unlikelier places, I came to believe that in a secret way he was seeking me out; I began to wonder if the dead, too, have memory.

* * *

Some months ago, I found myself in Paris, on contract to write about the future, or lack of it, of fiber-optic technology.

The day before my flight back to the States, I wandered into a neighborhood where the woman at my small hotel had assured me I would be able to find the most interesting antique stores. I strolled from store to store, walking amid polished desks and gilded lamps and doing my best to be polite. I spent a few hours roaming the stores. But though they were clean and peaceful, I emerged from the last one disappointed. The stores were all organized on the grand, elegant scale of the city, each of them orderly and fresh-smelling, and not one with anything that would remotely interest me. I was about to give up and return to the hotel, for I was getting hungry and had yet to pack up my things for the early flight back, when I decided to turn down a narrow street. The decision was quite arbitrary, for the street looked like a quiet one of the sort that, in Europe, hold little more than private doors into private homes. But the sun that shone from the bottom of the street had caught the cobblestones and given them such beauty that it seemed ungracious to walk away.

I walked for a while, almost able to ignore the creeping anxiety that always marred the last day of a trip. Near the bottom, where the street turned onto a broader avenue, I came across a little storefront whose window, piled as it was with brown books and yellow paper, appeared to be in such a state of disorder and neglect that I was immediately intrigued. The store was dark, though, and I stood some time before the door wondering if it was closed. After a moment, I decided to give the door a little
push, and to my surprise it opened. Once my eyes adjusted, I noticed an older man sitting at a desk in the back. I nodded to him. The store was a bit shabbier than the rest, and I was delighted to find, behind a large desk, two cardboard boxes of old calendars and record covers and black-and-white photographs. I must have been in the store for about an hour when the old man rose—I heard the scratch of his chair in the empty store—and stood beside me. He watched me look through the photographs for a while and then said that if it was photographs I wanted to see, he had another box to show me. And he opened a drawer and pulled out several bunches of loose photographs, which he then began to arrange, in a slightly overlapping pattern, on the old desktop. Most of the photographs, judging from the style of dress and hair, seemed to date from the 1950s, but then he pulled out another group that seemed older, dating back into the twenties, until he was spreading out browned photographs, almost now completely faded, of women in elaborate dresses and hats that seemed so far removed from our time as to make me wonder about the unbroken link to the past that I had always assumed.

I went through the photographs in silence: the somber faces of men, the round cheeks of children, the haughty stare of a merchant, the curl in a pretty girl's hair. The man stood by me and after a moment he said, Photographers labor diligently with their lights and their chemicals, without realizing they are agents of death.

When I turned to him he said, Roland Barthes—he is a French writer. He was correct, the man said after a moment.
In our time, death more and more appears to reside most comfortably in the photograph. I stared at him, unsure of what to say. He shrugged, as if suddenly embarrassed. Look here, he said, beckoning me with his finger. I have a very old photograph here.

I followed him to his desk, where he turned on the overhead lamp and unlocked a nearby cabinet. He pulled out a glass case and held it with a shaky hand. It was a view of a garden, taken, it seemed, from a balcony through some buildings. This is the world's oldest photograph, he said. When I raised my eyebrows he added, Well, not this one, of course; this is a reproduction, about twenty years old. The original is in Texas now. They are restoring it. It is called, I believe,
The View from the Window at Le Gras.
The original was taken in 1826 by a country gentleman named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He used a camera obscura, a well-known novelty at the time, modified with a pewter plate that he coated with a kind of petroleum.

The old man looked at the photograph and then back at me. Amazing, yes? One wonders what he thought when he washed the plate and saw what he had made. This Niépce, you know, he was supposed to be something of a frustrated artist. He must have been delighted to be able to create something with his brains. The old man pointed to his head and laughed. You know, he wasn't able to interest the Royal Society in his new invention. But the little plate created some interest, and it was exhibited until 1898. After that, the old man continued, the plate fell into the peculiar obscurity of things we haven't yet learned
to name, languishing beneath old papers, hidden among diaries and pressed flowers. Then, in 1952, after science had yielded to the world far more frightening imaginings, a historian became interested in the legend of the pewter plate and after much searching found the long-forgotten image.

The original photograph, though, the old man continued in a more somber tone, is almost completely faded. It must be viewed under special lighting, at a thirty-degree angle to the perpendicular, or else the landscape etched on the plate fades to nearly nothing.

I handed the frame back to the old man and thanked him, without realizing it, in Spanish. He raised his eyebrows. You are Spanish, then. I hesitated a moment before responding, No, Cuban.