Loving Che (3 page)

The package, which had been postmarked in Spain without a return, was secured very carefully, and it was clear that someone had taken great care to protect its contents. The box itself was flat and rectangular and wrapped in a thick tape. Even so, its edges were soft and dark from wear. I turned the box over several times, trying to find where the strip of tape began. I thought I had found it on the back, but when I tried to put my nail under it, I saw that it was only a crease in the wrapping. After some time of this turning and turning of the box, I stood and went for a knife and gave the tape a quick cut. When I pulled, the tape peeled off cleanly and quickly, almost as if it had been of one piece. Beneath the tape, thin ropes wrapped around the box, indenting the edges. I tried to pull them off but finally these, too, I had to cut. I held the bare box in my hands now, the surface gone fuzzy where the tape had pulled away. It was not very heavy for its size. I shook it. Nothing rattled, nothing shifted. I moved to open it, but my fingers trembled on the box. I had to stop then and close my eyes,
and after I had regained my peace, I peeled at one of the sides with my fingernail until the tab came loose.

The papers and photographs that spilled out smelled of dark drawers and dusty rooms. Some fell apart when I touched them. Some of the letters were written in such a small hand that it was as if the writer were whispering secrets into my ear. I hoped, at first, that by arranging the notes and recollections in some sort of order, I might be able to make sense of them. But on each rereading I found myself drawn deeper and deeper, until I feared I might lose myself among the pages, might drown in a drop of my own blood.

Falsos me parecieron mis primeros esfuerzos.
Y ahora solo quedan estas rajas de memoria,
escritas sobre banderas de viento. …

One day, when I had already grown old with the revolution, a woman came to my door and asked to see the lady of the house. It was June and my sixty-fifth summer in Havana. I had the blinds drawn against the heat, but the windows were opened behind them and I could hear Beatrice telling the woman no one was home. She didn't leave and instead called up in her young woman's voice, saying she only wanted a quick visit. Then, as if she knew I was listening behind the blinds, she recited in a deep and serious voice:
Farewell, but you will be with me
… I felt the years heavy on my chest and finished the lines softly to myself:
I found you after the storm, the rain washed the air, and in the water, your sweet feet gleamed like fishes.
I sat in the afternoon heat and waited for her footsteps to fade. I heard Beatrice come up the stairs and I heard her pause behind me and then move on.

Later, when the sun had gone down, the woman returned. Beatrice was below in the kitchen peeling tomatoes for the evening meal. I waited a few minutes, listening for sounds on the street, and then walked out to the balcony myself. The young woman turned her face up and I saw, even by the yellow light of the lamps, that her dark hair was pulled back low and the ends curled around her neck
in a style that was familiar to me. She was young and slender and I can say—without regret or false modesty, as old age has long since stripped me of these conventions—that she reminded me of myself at the same age. Her Spanish had the rounded edges and swallowed vowels of Cuba, but she wore slim black pants and angular shoes, so that I knew she was not from here. She told me her name and said she was looking for a woman who had given up her baby daughter years before. I told her she had the wrong house; that I was nobody. She asked if she might come up and talk. I said I was sorry that she had been misled to my house. She stood there on the street looking up at me for a long moment. I imagined her trying to make out my face in the darkness, recognizing the years on it. Then all at once she apologized, hands open in front of her. She waved, and still looking up at me began to walk down toward the sea. I watched her until I could no longer make out her figure in the dusk.

That night, the old wind blew and the windows rattled in their frames. I could smell the coming rain. Beatrice lit a yellow candle in the hallway and I lay in bed, watching shadows flicker beneath the door.

I remembered another night when the wind sang with ghosts. He lay beside me in the dark, listening. Memory, he'd said, is a way of reviving the past, the dead.

When you live for a long time in one place you begin to confuse your life with the city; its avenues and landmarks come to stand for your memories until you become the tourist of your own past, viewing a younger self with the fascination of someone just passing through. For so many, the past has gone soft with distance, so that when they talk of a building that used to be beautiful or an avenue that once burst with yellow flowers in March, they are really talking about a self they wish to have been. I am afraid, if I tell the story now after all these years of silence, that I will be confused for one of those dreaming tourists who point out only the graceful and vital, who are happy to deal with the surface of things.

As a child, I had been one with weather. When we went down to the farm on the weekends, and the nights without moon were so black that you could scarcely make out your fingers in the dark, I used to lie awake, battered this way and that with the sound of the wind. If there was a storm coming, I could feel it miles away, smell it; and often I would wake the family, my parents and all the cousins, with my howling. This is when I began to wonder if perhaps the outer world was no more real than our imagination and all its thrashings but a mirror of our own thoughts. And I wonder now if our recorded history isn't like this, if our idea of history isn't another way of saying an idea of ourselves. First comes childhood, the innocence of times gone by, then the trauma of awakening to pleasure and pain, and then the expulsion, the revolution: all our private fears and desires cloaked in the great story of man. Behind us lies our beginning, ahead of us only oblivion. Because it is the old who look back, sometimes with fear and sometimes with joy. The young are all revolutionaries, struggling toward the future, convinced that just over the rim of sky—There; there!—lie the happiest times. But both the old and the young indulge in longing. And the older I get now, the
more that longing for the past seems the only true course. Why idealize the future, where only death awaits? How much lovelier to think on the past when we were young and untested and our beginning lay behind us like a forgotten dream.

When I was a girl, it seemed to me Havana was full of beautiful women. They had their dresses made in the shiny window shops, where the seamstresses wore white gloves so as to not soil the material from Europe. The salons were filled with women reinvesting in themselves—massaging thick cream into their heels, curling their hair to emphasize pretty slanted eyes, a plump cheek. Women ate their dreams and bloomed like orchids in the rain.

My two sisters knew, too, how to rest their heads on their hands so the line of their long necks formed the symbol for longing. They had a way of moving their gold hair off their shoulders, slowly, as if in doing so, they had discovered a way to prolong the day. The men came to sing to them after dinner, when they sat on the porch to take the evening breeze, and their girl laughter took on the color of sunset.

My own hair was thick and dark and I wore it short against my neck. In the evenings when the others sat on the porch, I climbed to the roof and watched the sun go down over the rooftops, letting my hair dry in the breeze, watching the horizon where the sky came every night to be swallowed by the ocean.

I was smaller and darker than my sisters, with a boy's skinny hips. The men did not sing songs to my window at night. In the afternoons, the suitors who came for my sisters forgot my name at the door. But I saw how the men leaned back from their wives at the little restaurant by the cathedral, the way their eyes darkened to match my own. A young girl and already knowing that silence held the heavier balance of truth.

My mother let me roam the streets; she gave up on me long before I knew it. In the clear tropical mornings, before anyone was up, I left through the back door and went down the alleys of sleeping dogs. A different neighborhood. The rain and heat, the saltwater you could taste everywhere in Havana, got inside wood and metal. Cars rusted, foundations wasted. It took everything to keep the street-side faces of the house smooth and neat. Every year a new coat of paint, new curtains behind the windows, brass knockers taken down and soaked. The alleys were the dim backsides of so much industry. Paint peeled away with abandon and mold darkened the empty places. Where the cement had cracked, small purple flowers blossomed, as if every house held a garden prisoner within its walls. I ran through the alleys, wild for the disorder that, young as I was, shone exotic and beautiful in the light that slanted through the buildings.

I am walking in the old part of town after a storm, the cobblestones slick and shiny. I am beginning to like narrow streets, dark places. The city is my first love. I delight in the simple things: a curved cornice that catches the sun on an angle, the yellow of a billboard showing through the top windows of someone's home.

The rain runs through the grooves in the stones and the slide of tires echoes down the alleys. Laughter seeps from little rooms like sweet medicine.

At a corner, I stop to let a car pass, a black Chevrolet sequined with the reflection of street lamps. A light goes out in a room above me; a sliver of lacy curtain pulls away. The car stops and men's voices sound low and angry. I stand, pressing myself against the damp old walls. The driver opens the door and pulls a man out from the back. His face is turned and in the dark I imagine a shroud covers his head. He stands in the headlights. Another man gets out of the car. He is dressed all in white in that muddy alley, white shoes and pale straw hat collecting water on the rim, falling in tiny droplets like a veil about his face. The man goes to the shrouded figure and bends over him, speaking quietly. He walks back to the car. The laughter from small rooms. And then the pistol
shot. And the man's life passes before me as if I had been the one to die: I remember breakfast that morning, looking out over the street, buttering bread, slowly stirring coffee, watching sugar dissolve. I remember his loves as my own and lean against the stone and cry for all the things I haven't finished.

The tires slick on the road, and then the rain rushing through cobblestone again.

Against the wishes of my mother, I go to the hotel to hear the old mulato play Lecuona because he always makes me cry. I pull my hair back, low on my head, and curl the ends around my neck. I wear red lipstick and the old mulato player bends his head when I lay my arm across the piano.

Every Friday, I give him a peseta and after, when the people have gone, he kisses my hand in the dark.

From certain angles, El Prado seems to run straight to the sea, as if it were a ship with a deck of flowers. The benches lie sunbathing under black iron lamps. I am almost fifteen, too old for toys and sweets, but on a bench I eat the chocolate I buy from Señor Juan, letting it soften on my tongue, begging it to last. I think of the other children still locked inside their classrooms, my sisters of the golden hair, the Almeida girls, the boys who come in the evening to call. And I with the afternoon melting around me, a patch of sky all my own through the clouds.

It is winter and the women wear brown and navy, defying the green, the flowering plants, the sky so blue the eyes hurt. It is winter, warm and bright, and the women wear hats as they walk down El Prado on the arms of their men. Broken conversations, the rustle of fabrics, women's laughter. They bend their heads so the rims of their hats cover just their eyes, highlight white rows of happy teeth.

A tall, thin man in a red hat stops in front of me and asks why I'm not in school, a pretty little thing like me in clean clothes who must have a mother and a father at home. I eat my chocolate slowly. I tell him I am orphaned. It's too late now to take it back. And I smile because I have
no fears. The man stares, one eye drooping. He is thin, but his hair falls thick and shiny beneath his hat. When he turns to go, I stand and follow him. He looks back once and then rushes to the top of El Prado as if I were chasing him. The women nod at him and then giggle. Some of the men tip their hats. The thin man stands on top of a bench and claps. A small crowd gathers. Loco, Tell us a story, they call. He takes off his red hat with an exaggerated arc. He bows deeply and pretends to fall off the bench. The women laugh and the men throw coins. The man puts his hat back on his head. It lies crooked and I laugh and point. The man grows serious, puts a finger to his lips before speaking: Before the beginning, he whispers, the island was empty and the wind was without voice and the fish walked through the sand leaving footprints that lasted for years.

The man bends at the knees, pretends to tiptoe like a fish.

And then God saw this green jewel, the man says, this perfect island, and he raised a great army of angels and declared himself minister for eternity.