Loving Che (4 page)

A woman in black clasps her hands to her chest. What a fine mimic! she says. The man next to her nods. All madmen sound like someone else, he says.

When my mother died, we laid her body in the front hallway and my sisters hung the geraniums, whose perfume still smells to me of reproach. We kept everything as it was: the curved rosewood chair with its cool straw mat, the carved table her parents had bought in Spain. We watered the plants as she had, and at the same time of the day. When they shriveled, we kept them in their pots until the dirt cracked and sank amid the roots.

I heard voices below and I knew they'd come for me, the nuns with their black hats in the tropical sun. My mother had probably received them in her bedclothes and when they paused, I imagined they were studying her soft face, the bags of sleep beneath her eyes.

A girl her age, they said.

I stood outside my bedroom, above the stairs. My mother's voice came up slow. Without the languorous face to attach the voice to, she seemed a stranger. When the nuns left, my mother called me down. I sat at her feet. She was silent as she braided my hair. My mother was alive, almost frivolous with my sisters. But when she and I were alone, we barely talked. Sometimes I would turn and see her contemplating me and she would nod.

My mother braided my hair and I sat, my eyelids almost closing in the afternoon heat, the sound of cars below like a lullaby. After a while she stopped and I turned to look.

You have to go to school now, she said.

I tried to shake my head, but she brought her hands back to my braids and held me tight.

You're hurting me, I cried.

She undid the braids quickly, pulling, her fingers stiff and cold on my scalp. She turned me around roughly.

You are a girl and you think the world is this small. But there is a lot you don't understand, little lady. Tomorrow morning and the day after and the day after, you are going to school. I don't care what you do after, I don't care what you do before. But the nuns will see you in class. I bit my lip to keep from crying and then I bit it to keep from speaking. My mother bent to kiss my forehead, then left the room.

After I was married, I left my mother's house to my father and my sisters. Every Sunday I continued to visit. They received me on the porch where years before they had waited for their suitors. We drank coffee, talked of the events in the hills.

The last time I sat on the porch with my sisters, the years were already galloping upon us. In weeks, my oldest sister would be gone to Spain with her Galician husband. But that last afternoon was like the others. We drank and even laughed. It was one of those cool Havana afternoons, the sea air thin and fragrant. And when it was late, my sister sat at the piano and played Bach as she always had, the notes spilling onto the streets all out of context, like leaves in the wind.

One morning, I am walking through the alley. Maybe I have returned to school, the school of nuns where mirrors have been banished and the sisters bathe in white sheets that hide them from themselves.

It is hot again, yellow-green heat like liquid. The buildings stand blurred in heat against the sky. From above, the sound of pots and metal spoons, children crying. I am walking in the slender shadow of corners. The wind is still, blocked by the solid houses that have sucked the last gusts into their dark rooms, breathed the ocean into dusty corners. What reaches the alley is the exhalation, the hot detritus of a day, soiled paper and coffee grounds and soft black-skinned fruit.

A woman leans out of a window, finds me walking and leans back into shadow. A moment later, she returns with a bucket. The dirty water fans out ahead of me, splashing into black pools. A dribble slides down the side of the building. The woman shuts the window with a bang. When I come to it, the window is still shaking. The day is very bright. I walk. The heat wends inside me like a yellow illness. I want to remove my blouse where it sticks to my back, let the air lick my bare skin clean. I am soaked beneath my skirt; the sweat runs down my legs. The sky
darkens at the edges. Maybe there will be rain. I turn onto a narrow street and cross into the next alley. Rain, yes, and thunder. I can smell it. And then up ahead, behind an open door, movement. I stop. A dog barks. A radio sounds. And then quiet. And above the quiet, a low moan. They stand pressed against the wall opposite me, a house down. They have opened the door to hide in its shadow. The man's hand moving inside the woman's blouse. The hand moving like wild heartbeats beneath her blouse. And then his hand emerging, hungry, to her neck and down, down her back, down to her waist, pressing. He draws the flowered skirt in front of him, reaches underneath. The woman's shoulders fall, her head tilts back to show the white rise of her throat. Sweat darkens the man's shirt. And then he turns his face very lightly and his eyes meet mine, the blackest eyes beneath thick brows. He watches me watching him. Then he blinks slowly, once, twice. And his eyes close and I am still, heart beating, sweat like cool stars on my skin. Other sounds return. Children's laughter. A door slamming. I turn and they are gone, the door shut, their wedge of private shadow now in full sunlight, spilling like brilliant water into the footprints in the dirt.

This is where I begin to live.

Eddy Chibás, unlucky Eddy who even now rests under an unlucky sign, is the first man I love.

Every Sunday at eight, I turn on the old mahogany radio in the study to listen to his voice. Some nights, I raise the volume until the sound trembles coming through the speakers and my sisters bang on the walls to get Eddy to be quiet. But I want his voice to last longer than these Sunday minutes mingled with the sound of dinner; I want to go on hearing it forever. His voice is hungry; it comes from beneath deep waters. Seagull's voice, voice of tongue-tied rapid railroad runners, voice of the drowned man. I don't want to see what Eddy looks like. I want to know him only by the way he says, Honor, honor, honor.

On August 15, 1951, I climb the stairs to the study. I open the heavy wooden blinds, hoping to catch a breeze, but the night is still and hot. An electric sky flashes in the distance. Tonight Eddy's voice catches on the air. A chair scrapes across a bare floor. Eddy wants sacrifice, justice; one cannot love the way he loves without pain. Eddy's beloved island, forever disappointing him. And he the faithful lover, squandering fortune and sanity in search of honor.

This is my last call, he says across the rooftops of the darkening city, past the lonely alleys, through the open windows, his voice skirting the edge of the hot night to lodge itself in the stars.

No one realized he'd shot himself—a commercial had been playing when he put the pistol to his stomach. Unlucky Eddy, Eddy the madman, Eddy who would fast for days, Eddy who held his head underwater. Eddy, my first love.

One year later, the coup, like a great shot in the dark, ended the illusion that the future was forever. The constitution of 1940 was buried without pallbearers. I watched our greatest men tear their own flesh, and I thought of Eddy, to whom death must have come like a great hunger.

This is the island Marti gave us: a green lip taunting us with its loveliness, calling us back to the black edges. Suicide is our one constant ideology; our muddy heart's single desire.

On May 28, 1953, I married Calixto de la Landre, having first fallen in love with his voice—crying, Mr. Peanut Vendor!—as I crossed the park on my way to an art class. A blue voice, I thought, with flecks of gold. And because I had picked this voice out of all the voices in the city, it seemed a mystical thing and true that I should know the man who owned it. This was the way I always knew love would come, like a burst of color in the throat.

Calixto, as I came to know, was a professor of Spanish, and he spoke with the careful diction of a man grateful for his life's work. When he objected to this or that political position, it was not out of conviction only, but out of distaste for the way it had been articulated. Over the years, I came to consider this stern defense of language evidence of a certain calcification of belief, but at the time I found his thoughts clean and unadorned and in service of the same truth that I was just then trying to discover through my painting.

My new husband busied himself with writings for scholarly journals in Spain. These writings, which I never came to understand, focused on the idea of language as a precise science that might be dissected and rebuilt in a way that aspires to heal as something out of a laboratory
might. It was a rough Jungian hope, the idea that language had developed along with our deepest selves and still carried inside it our oldest wishes and fears—and just maybe the secret to our salvation. What was Calixto proposing? No one knew. And his writings were so obscure that no one ventured to guess out loud. Sometimes I suspected that he proposed the complete destruction of language as a way to progress. Other times I wondered if he wouldn't destroy everything in order to preserve the purity that had once resided somewhere in the sentence but that was now under attack by modern man, with his babble of radios and half-written newspapers. We might ponder, he wrote in a typical passage, why the Romance languages are so rich with syllables and colors, trellised with flowers and diversions so that we cannot say a plain thing even when we think it and all our endeavors become hopelessly entangled in the baroque.

Though he was much older than me, Calixto and I shared many things, including a cushioned upbringing and, appropriate to the sentiments of those times, a growing unease about it. He had long been estranged from his parents. Since my mother's death, my father and I had rarely spoken. With the years, the space between us had widened, until it seemed we could not be heard across the abyss without shouting at one another.

My father did not attend my wedding—he was traveling in Spain. But when he returned, he came by every week for coffee and a year later made us a gift of the house in El Vedado. Perhaps it was out of remorse, or perhaps, as Calixto believed, he was trying to keep me beholden to him. In any case, against my husband's wishes, I accepted the house on L Street, which, unfortunately, was around the corner from the construction site of the Havana Hilton. There was a terrible racket, of course, which perhaps my father had taken into account all along. Some days the pounding and heavy machines would shatter on deep into the night. It was then that I began to despise the Americans, with their monstrous shiny buildings, the clanging of their ceaseless industry. Constant noise has a way of slowly driving you
insane. And after a few months, I decided to take a studio in a run-down fourth-floor apartment in the old city. If Calixto objected, he didn't say anything, though he never came to visit me there. The studio's light wasn't as good as the house's, but it was quiet and I could work in peace and I came to love it there.

The house had a wide porch that served to cool the inside. The floor was laid with terrazzo and the wide windows came with wooden blinds like the ones in my mother's home, all of which gave the house a feeling of coolness, so that the only air conditioner we ever needed was in the bedroom. It was built around a small central courtyard, as was the house I grew up in, and when I wasn't in the studio, I grew miniature roses there that I took now and then to the children's hospital.

Calixto began to devote more of his time to the student groups. I assumed that the parade of young men who came to the house on occasion were part of whatever movement Calixto was involved in at the time. He kept me out of most of it. But in truth, I never cared for politics. And to follow politics in Cuba in that time, you needed a purpose and concentration that I've never had. Groups came apart over obscure points and the aggrieved formed new groups—the Revolutionary Student Directorate, the 26th of July movement, the Popular Socialist Party, the Second National Front of the Escambray—each trying to outdo the other. And, my God, only a linguist could keep up with all the names.

The decade wore on and the disturbances worsened, like a summer cloud still growing to the west, not yet ready to give up its rain: a body found in the stadium, two sisters tortured and murdered, windows broken. At night, gunfire drifted through the open windows like thunder from a demented half-world. I read of a twenty-seven-year-old man who was shot to death at Los Hornos, his assassins fleeing in a green car. A thirty-five-year-old man shot to death in Chicharrones. The worker in Mabay, killed perhaps because he was related to the candidate for mayor. The man shot to death at the fence of his farm El Almiqui in Bayamo. A guajiro shot. The army blamed the rebels and the rebels blamed the army and the army blamed the rebels. …

I listened for the storm advancing, the fast report of raindrops on the window. We held our umbrellas up, and finally the rain came for us.

I had a good friend from school who had been walking up Twenty-third one bright March morning. Later, telling me the story, she said that the city had seemed unusually quiet. Then, out of nowhere, a black car came racing up
the street, and it was some moments before my friend realized that the sounds coming from the back were gunshots. She didn't have time to see who they were shooting at. She ran to a business and started knocking on the door. But it was the noon meal and the women inside—she could see their faces—were terrified behind the locked door. The shooting went on for an eternity—these were the words my friends used as she told the story—and it was only later, after she had run home and taken a tea, that she realized she'd been shot in the calf.

I awoke earlier than usual. The house was quiet except for Beatrice's radio coming up from the back rooms. The sunlight through the window was green. The buildings were cast in its green pallor. Even the sky was green. I left through the back door. On the street, the people walked like marionettes, every move measured and false. Havana was without sound. Out past our street, I walked, round the seawall. The men in white moved their lips at the street corners, waving their dirty pictures, and not even the cars could drown out their silence. I could still hear Beatrice's radio, telling time. The hour is now. … The hour is now. …