Loving Che (5 page)

And then, beyond the green light that fell everywhere, beyond the muffled corners of the city, a crack like a tear in the sun. I ran with the others, racing to the place where the day unraveled. That delicious rush of danger like an ecstasy I could inhale. Men and women ran from buildings, spilling out over the sidewalks, into the streets, their movements fluid now, so natural. Shouting and machines cracking and still I ran. The crowd thickened, blood around a wound.

Someone shouted that the presidential palace had been taken. The radio station was in our hands. But the
afternoon was still green with sunlight. This story goes round and round like the hands on a clock and you can pick it up anywhere. The sun still out, all the celebration tapered to a single cry. The bullets like a sudden terrifying rain. Blood that darkened on the steps. Faces crushed to the sidewalk. Around me, the crowd reversed suddenly. My knees hit the pavement and I lay there very still, my heart beating in my temples.

And then a woman's voice, slick with tears. Echeverría is dead!

José Antonio Echeverría was so gorgeously lost, even before the last bullet found him near the grand steps. What faith these beautiful men have. To storm the dictator at noon. To declare victory while drowning in puddles of steel.

After Echeverría, I lay awake in bed for two nights. I ate nothing but milk and sugar. Calixto found me one morning on the back steps, wrapped in a blanket, reciting quietly, Green, how I love you, green. Green gusts. Green limbs.

The bombs went off on street corners, in schools, outside movie theaters. Everywhere I saw the crushed faces of March 13. The shadow of a bird made me remember: I had run toward the palace with the others, all of us running. And then the pigeons in the plaza suddenly rose as one, like a black veil lifting. And then the bullets, tearing into time, opening the day into another one, letting me see the other side of things. As a girl, I had thought only love could change us so completely.

Love. Already I have used the word too often. Do you demand now that I explain myself, define what I myself never understood?

My dear daughter, I weep to see how much I have failed you. You are lovely. I could not take my eyes off of you. And I followed you down the street until you turned and were gone. The next day I traced your steps on the cobblestone over and over again, amazed and frightened at how lightly one world rests on the next.

When I think of my past now, it seems so far away, like India or the moon, farther almost than my future seemed to me then. And yet, when I turn my life, like a crystal, it shrinks in my hands. It fits in the space of a fist.

Be vigilant, my daughter; memory is the first storyteller. Anyone can simulate history, it's easy enough—there are classes of people, politicians and writers in particular, who have made it their calling. One can catalog the years, write long lists that will recall small moments. I can say Patent bedsheets “are eternal,” or Napoli socks for men, or Polvo Tres Flores (I can still see it at the corner store, red boxes piled one on top of the other), and these things mean something to those of us who lived in a particular time at a particular place. I can sing that jingle, so overlaid with meaning, “Tasty until the last drop,” and I am in the old city, passing an open window in an apartment where a man in a white T-shirt leans into a radio, adjusting the frequency, ahead of the terrible news. But these cues are open to corruption.

Now, late at night, when I can pick up the stations from Miami, I sometimes hear the same jingle and think the ghosts are speaking to me again.

I had long retained an odd memory from my childhood. It was neither traumatic nor happy. It was nothing, a pretty banality. But it would bubble forth unbid sometimes when I was quiet. And there I'd be: me yet a baby, turning to the lamp shade, where someone had pasted a little sticker of two purple feet. Those purple feet retained all their color in my memory throughout the years that followed. And often I found it disconcerting that I could remember that insignificant little sticker with such clarity of detail while the faces of so many I had loved have smudged and faded as if memory had worn them from the handling. I wondered about this aloud once to my mother. I told her I had hoped life would unfold like a book where each detail built on the one before it, all of it racing to a satisfying conclusion. But life is not a tidy narrative, she had said, pulling her hair back into a smooth bun. We learn this late. These scraps of memory that become untethered from the rest, flapping disconsolately in the wind, these memories are the most important of all. Memories like these remind us that life is also loose ends, small events that have no bearing on the story we come to write of ourselves.

* * *

Forgive me, my daughter. I have labored to construct a good history for you, to put down the details of your life smoothly; to connect events one to another. But my first efforts seemed false. And I am left with only these small shards of remembrances written on banners of wind.

After the triumph …

I don't know if I can describe to you the feeling of that time—it was the strange and dreadful excitement of a world turning, of everything staid and ordinary being swept away. The future rode a chariot and the people pressed together to watch it pass. We were all so happy then.

And those palms, eternal witness to the blowing winds. Oh Cuba my beautiful land!

How quiet was that first of January. An eerie quiet as if everyone were waiting to see what had really happened, no one quite ready to celebrate in case the dictator's abrupt departure had been a trick. But by the next day the crowds came spilling into the streets, as if a great convulsion had emptied every house in Havana. Men and women lined up past El Cotorro to the palace and out toward Columbia. Up and down our block, people hung the red and black July 26 flags. I didn't join any of the demonstrations. I have had since I was very young a terrible fear of crowds. But for days, from my little studio, I could hear the roar of the people, like a monster come out of the sea. Shouts, gunfire, glass breaking. There was hardly a block, it seemed, that didn't have at least one store that had been destroyed. Someone who wasn't there to see it, as I was, might say all that glass was broken out of bitterness or revenge or greed or even envy. All those explanations fail. Cataclysmic events, whatever their outcome, are as rare and transporting as a great love. Bombings, revolutions, earthquakes, hurricanes—anyone who has passed through one and lived, if they are honest, will tell you that even in the depths of their fear there was an exhilaration such as had been missing from
their lives until then. In those first days of January, the air was clear, the nights were cool. It was like being young and knowing the joy of it as well as if one were old.

I remember passing a jewelry store on San Rafael in the early days of January. Every window had been broken. And yet all those jewels remained in their cases. I stood for a long time in front of the shattered glass, staring at a necklace adorned with a row of red rubies, like little drops of blood.

Toward the end of the month of January, my husband and I threw our party for the revolution. I thought at the time that the revolution didn't know what it wanted to be yet, but it was we who didn't know what we wanted to be.

Our house was made for parties. Even during the summer months you could put a small band out in the courtyard and the music would carry up to the top floors and at night the sound seemed to come from above and the stars seemed little points of light from the uppermost balconies.

I wore a dress of blue satin. I had spent the afternoon at the beauty shop, where the girls had gathered my long hair into a swirl at the nape of my neck and shaved the stray hairs and powdered me with lavender and rubbed my shoulders with rose oil. I had descended the stairs like a garden that night and I was happy for the murmur that rose, the faces that turned to me. I would relive the moment all that night; everything we do, all that we seek—beauty, wealth, even learning—is really at its heart a quest for power. Ever since I was very young, I was aware of the attraction I held for certain men, but it wasn't until I was older that I understood it. For a brief few years, I
had the loveliness of youth and the knowledge of middle age and I felt I had found something unshakable and lasting. I was drunk on this power of mine. And that, too, passed and I came lastly to know how small this beauty had made my world, how little I really knew about living.

I danced with Calixto that night. Moonlight on the trumpets and the candlelight jumping in the cool January breeze. And then on toward midnight after the food and the drinks, we heard a distant siren wail and we waited until the sound was upon us. Car doors slamming. Shouting. Only Calixto was calm. Perhaps it had been a surprise of his, a visit that might delight his guests, raise his esteem in the eyes of his wife. … It seems like a dream now to retell this. I have not told this story ever. And now to put it into words seems unreal even to me. But it all happened; everything I put down here in the halting rhythm of memory, happened.

There he stands at the front door, his arm still in a cast. Walking through the door ahead of the others, his hair greasy, his uniform dirty, walking, eyes ablaze.

Comrade Guevara, my husband says in a too-pompous voice, I present to you Mrs. de la Landre. The revolutionary recoils slightly and our eyes meet very briefly. Much later, I will see this as the moment that we reach a private understanding with one another. But now, I don't acknowledge it, and instead am filled with a strange guilt whose source I can't quite place.

Ernesto took my hand and kissed it. I remember that Calixto laughed at this gesture, a little bird laugh. My wife, Calixto said, has a beautiful garden in the courtyard. You should see it. She raises ixoras and—her own particular specialty—miniature roses. He stopped and then added, On Thursdays, she arranges a dozen bouquets to take to the destitute sick in the children's ward. Ernesto bent at the waist at this last mention. And a beautiful heart, too, he said, still watching me.

That night, I lay next to my husband, whom I loved completely, who filled me and adored me, and I thought of this other man who frightened me and repulsed me with his smell and filth. I felt Calixto move next to me and then clear his throat. The revolutionary seemed very pleased to make your acquaintance, he said. I was quiet for a moment and then I said, He's vulgar, I know the type. And filthy on top of everything. The next thing Calixto said surprised me a little. He said, very slowly, the way he measured his words, Well, the way things are, it's not a bad idea to have important friends. I said to my husband that I hoped he wasn't in some kind of trouble. I'm not, he said. None at all. But I've agreed to do some work for them for when the trouble comes. Some writings, he said.

I closed my eyes then and listened for the sound of the wind, but the night had stilled and all I could hear was my husband's light breathing beside me, and long after it had deepened, I lay awake listening to the rise and fall of his breath.

Some days later I was in the courtyard, carefully trimming the small bush of miniature white roses I had managed to grow in a shady spot. It was a lovely tree and I was taken by the tiny petals of the roses that lay close and tight and would soon open, wide-armed, to reveal the soft darker center where the bud began. A friend of Calixto's had brought a small cutting of the plant years before from someplace in North America. I tended to it first in the cool of the home's interior and then gradually introduced it to the outdoors, moving the pot closer to the windows, then onto the porch and then out in the courtyard for an hour each morning in the winter, and then two, until by the time the cutting was big enough to be transplanted, it had been spending most of the day in the tropical sun.

I was talking to the plant as I pruned it, cooing softly to it, so that I hardly noticed when the front door rang. After a few moments, I heard Beatrice calling to me, and, a bit annoyed—annoyed also because Beatrice had developed this habit recently of yelling to me instead of walking to where I was—I wiped my hands on my pants and went to the door. A man introduced himself to me as Comrade X and said he had some papers to deliver from Comandante Guevara for Mr. de la Landre. I took the
papers and thanked him. I asked him if he would like some coffee and he declined but he stood there not moving. You are Teresa de la Landre, then? he asked. Yes, I said, my hand on the door. The Comandante has heard many praises of your paintings. I smiled and nodded a sort of thanks, mute in my surprise. He has heard they are very beautiful, the man continued. I was stupid standing there. I think of it now and all the things I could have said.