“That’s enough,” I said, pressing her hand.
“Ay, Tía Camila,” Belkys was sobbing now. All tangerine nail polish gone from her voice. “What would Salomé say if she could see the place now.”
What would she have said, except what she must have said to herself, time after time, when her dreams came tumbling down? Start over, start over, start over.
LATE AFTERNOONS, RODOLFO AND I sit on the galería, rocking in rhythm. The rocking chair duet, Elsa calls it. The smell of rain and ginger is in the air—there is a hedge, the girls tell me, circling the house, a moat of ginger!
Sometimes the subject comes up, not death as one would think for these two white heads and ailing bodies—that is easy to talk about—but Cuba. “The experiment that has failed,” Rodolfo calls it bitterly. Since he managed to get out five years ago with his girls, Rodolfo, like most exiles, feels driven to soil the nest for those of us who stayed. It’s a nest that is already well soiled, as I tell him.
“But that is not the point,” I add. “We have to keep trying to create a patria out of the land where we were born. Even when the experiment fails, especially when the experiment fails.”
“You weren’t even born there!” Rodolfo counters.
“It’s the place where I was raised. And as Martí once said—”
“Camila, Camila,” he sighs, “your handicap is showing.” This is what Rodolfo calls a certain know-it-all tendency in his older sister, the schoolteacher, to dispense her little nuggets of wisdom wherever she finds ignorance—a state of mind that, of course, does not exist in my brother’s head.
“The truth is,” he begins, his favorite opening phrase these days, as if his advanced years have turned him into a Moses coming down the mountain with his tablet of numbered truths, “la pura verdad is that we have been a wandering family.”
That is a truth we can both agree on. The seeds of the Henríquezes are scattered across the Américas: Pedro’s two girls in Argentina; childless Fran wherever his wife’s family took their ashes when they fled the revolution; Max’s sons shuttling here and there in South America, so that the times I have called their homes, their wives sigh deeply and say, “Let’s see. It’s Thursday . . . he is in Panamá.” Then there are Papancho’s French grandchildren, scattering his seed in France and Norway and New Jersey, so I hear. And every one of these children driven by the little motor of life and need in a world that increasingly resembles our neighbor to the north, a world without sufficient soul or spirit, as Martí put it, as if the great sacrifice and vision of the old people have washed out over time.
“You’re rocking strangely today,” Rodolfo notes, stopping his rocking as if to listen more closely to mine. Indeed, I have been beating a rhythm with my hands on the armrest even as I clack, back and forth. “You are playing jazz, not singing harmony.”
“I do that sometimes,” I tell him.
“YOU SHOULD REST, Tía Camila,” Belkys suggests. We are back on the subject of the contested tombstone. My nieces want to cancel today’s outing to the cemetery.
“Don’t you trust us if we tell you we’ve changed it?” Lupe asks me, just the slightest bit of impatience in her voice.
“I’d like to go and see for myself.”
“If you’re going to see it for yourself, you better wait until after your operation to go check up on us!” Belkys pipes up, fresh as ever.
They do not want me to go out at all today. There’s a strike of garbage collectors. In some places, the strikers have set up roadblocks of garbage.
“Besides, it really does look like rain. It won’t do for you to catch a cold before your operation.” Lupe, ever the logician. She does not believe in arguing, but in reasoning things out, she likes to say. When I used to bring them workbooks from the States, her favorite exercises were always those analogies: house is to home as country is to blank.
But their excuses make me suspicious. My operation is scheduled for next Tuesday, si Dios quiere, as the Dominicans are fond of saying, if God wills it and the garbage collectors allow it. In case anything happens, I want to be sure this last wish has been carried out. “The rain will let up soon. Then we can go.”
“Tía Camila, if we were trying to fool you, all we would have to do is take you to the cemetery and read you what you want to hear,” Lupe continues in her reasoning.
I have ways to check up on you, I think, my hands now quietly folded in my lap. The more blurred my vision has become the more sensitive my fingertips. I would feel the stone and know the difference.
“So you might as well take our word for it, dear Tía!” Lupe concludes, straightening the bow on my collar as if I were a petulant child.
Elsa, the soulful one of the three, worries that my preoccupation with this little detail is a sign of my bigger anxiety about the upcoming eye operation.
“I’m not worried about that,” I reassure her. “All I’m leaving is that stone. The least I can do is get the details right.” Indeed, my old friend Marion used to tease me that I wrote only with pencils because I didn’t like my mistakes to show.
“If there is one thing I hate about the revolution,” I add, and of course, they perk up hearing me say this, as they so much want their old aunt to agree with their point of view, “it is the sloppy use of the language.” I have any number of examples, but I don’t use them.
“Is that all?” Lupe asks—as if I had complained about a bunion when the problem is the gangrenous foot.
I think a minute about it before I respond—Elsa calls it the time lag of Tía Camila’s thinking. “Yes,” I say. “That is all.” Though I could very well have said, That is everything. The words that create who we are.
I REMEMBER MY FIRST job in Cuba after I returned in 1960.
The jefe of the personnel department at the Ministry of Education had heard that a Dominican woman had resigned her job as a professor at Vassar to come join the revolution. (The inaccuracies were already creeping in.) Would la compañera Camila like to serve as technical assessor in the national literacy compaign? His own letter was full of errors and messy efforts at correction. No doubt his secretary had been liberated to a cane harvest, and he had been left alone to type his own correspondence.
It was not the letter itself that made me feel uneasy. It was the close at the end. Revolutionarily yours, ¡Patria o Muerte! ¡Venceremos! Surely one of these phrases would have been enough.
It was happening all over Cuba, this awful, overwrought language. Every time I ventured out I would have to fight an urge to take my red pencil. One shopkeeper posted, “The customer is always right except when he attacks the revolution.” Both false statements: one of capitalism, the second of Marxism. Oh dear, I thought, what have I come back to?
The first few years, before I learned the new names, it was impossible for me to travel anywhere by taxi unless I happened upon an older driver. A young driver would not know Calle de la Reina because it had been liberated and renamed Simón Bolívar before he had learned to read. Carlos III Boulevard was gone, but Boulevard Salvador Allende could still take you where you were going. We were at the foot of our very own Tower of Babel, ideological as well as linguistic, and the exodus began, mostly of the rich who had the means to start over in the United States of America.
“What they don’t want to admit is that now their servants’ children are getting schooled, and everyone can eat, and everyone can get medical care,” my friend Nora Lavedán observed. “When there is food and medicine,” she added wryly.
One spot I did want to visit before all of the names were changed was Domingo’s grave. But by the time I made it to the cemetery, the place was a mess. Graves had been plundered, statues toppled, the busts and bones of rich ancestors carted to Miami on Pan Am.
The young compañera in charge of records kept mumbling to herself as she checked through a pile of file folders she had been renumbering. “I would have to know his date of death and date of burial.”
“I’m not sure,” I told her.
“You see, I was gone for so many years, that he died and I never knew of it.”
The sharp-featured woman in her beret and combat boots eyed me curiously. “Was he a relation of yours?” She needed that affirmation before she could go on with her task.
“No, not a relation exactly,” I explained—always the stickler for accuracy. The priggishness of the schoolteacher in my voice was itself like a red pencil mark across the permission she might have granted me.
“Compañera, I will need a pass filled out by the comandante of cemeteries before I can release any information.”
Comandante of cemeteries! I thought. Everyone was now in charge of something. That was the bad news. But the good news was very good: we were all in charge of taking care of each other. I could live, and die, for that, too.
“If you would be so kind, compañera, to write the comandante’s address down.” I complied, even when the rules seemed foolish, even when the means were flawed. We had never been allowed to govern ourselves. We were bound to get it wrong the first few times around.
One evening, with Domingo on my mind, I followed the smell of the sea and found myself at the docks, where we had once protested together, for what cause I can no longer remember. I walked among the fishermen and stevedores, unloading cargo from Soviet vessels, hauling bins of sugar and barrels of rum and crates full of fragrant cigars with cranes into the holds of those ships. I had this sudden desire to hide myself in one of those vessels and wake up in a whole new land where the revolution had already succeeded and the people were free and my work was done.
MY LIFE IN CUBA—it was a whole life, wasn’t it? Thirteen years flew by. I was busy all the time. For one thing, with our fuel shortages, I had to get everywhere on foot, so each task took twice as long.
The exodus that began as a trickle became a flood. With so many gone, those of us who stayed were needed even more. I taught at the university at night and in factorías during the day. Weekends, I joined my young compañeros, writing manuals and preparing materials for the teachers who came in from the rural schools. Sometimes I was sent out into the countryside.
Soon after I arrived, Rodolfo applied to leave, taking my nieces with him. “How can you stand this, Camila?” Rodolfo whispered to me as we walked to his final hearing with the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. “What kind of a revolution is this?” He glared at yet another poster of Fidel going up on Lenin Boulevard.
“Con calma, Rodolfo,” I reminded him.
I was disappointed with his reaction. For I had never thought of the real revolution as the one Fidel was commanding. The real revolution could only be won by the imagination. When one of my newly literate students picked up a book and read with hungry pleasure, I knew we were one step closer to the patria we all wanted.
One summer, I was assigned to a literacy brigade in a cafetal up in the Sierra Maestra. Day after day, I read to a large, stuffy hall of women sorting coffee beans. One morning, I put aside my suggested list (Granma, Karl Marx, José Martí) and read them a poem of Mamá’s that had never been published. She must have written it right after Fran was born.
There sleeps my little one, all mine!
There sleeps the angel who enchants my world!
I look up from my book a dozen times,
absorbed with him, I haven’t read a word.
I looked up after I was finished; the women had stopped sorting and were looking at me with interest. “What is it?” I asked, glancing over their shoulders at our compañera-in-charge at the back of the hall. She could be rather brusque when the sorters fell behind on their quotas.
“That was written by a mother?” one of the women asked.
I nodded. “It was written by my mother, in fact.” And then, I told them her story, and when I was done, one by one, the women began to clack with their wooden scoopers on the side of their tables, until the din in the room drowned out the compañera, shouting for order, in the name of Fidel, in the name of the revolution.
THE RAIN IS COMING down hard. Elsa sits down beside me, our chairs pulled back from the edge of the galería. Rodolfo has caught a cold and is napping. We sit in silence, listening to the downpour, a mist of the raindrops on our faces.
“See, Tía Camila, Lupe was right. It did rain.”
“I don’t mind a little rain,” I say.
“Are you upset at us for not taking you out there today?”
“You are the ones in charge now,” I say, with an edge in my voice.
“Maybe Sunday,” she says. “The operation isn’t until Tuesday, remember.”
“Maybe,” I agree. But Sunday the sun will be too strong. The strike of garbage workers will have made the streets impassable. Rodolfo’s cough will be so bad that everyone will have to be on call in case he decides to die.
“Tía Camila, I often wonder, are you glad you went back to Cuba?”
I sigh as this is a question I am asked a lot by people who find out I had another life in the States. I might have retired with a nice pension and lived out my days in a cottage on a lake in New Hampshire or Vermont or maybe even in Sarasota, close to Marion and her husband whose name I never could get right. How could I throw that life away at sixty-five?
“How could I not?” I always answer back.
“You gave up so much,” Elsa notes.
“Less than you think, dear,” I tell her. The pension I later discovered I had lost by moving to Cuba was nothing compared to what I had found. Teaching literature everywhere, in the campos, classrooms, barracks, factorías—literature for all. (Liberature, Nora likes to call it.) My mother’s instituto had grown to the size of a whole country!
“It was a lot, Tía. You always want to make your self sound less great than you are.”
I have to laugh. “We are all the same size, don’t you know? Just some of us stretch ourselves a little more.”
My niece squeezes my hand. I am reminded suddenly of Domingo, how he always had to be in physical touch when he spoke to me. I feel again that old regret at how I might have misled him. But then, I misled myself, thinking I had fallen in love with the man, when in fact, I had fallen in love with the artist, his intensity, Africa in his skin—the things that connected me to my mother, not to him.
“It was time to come home,” I tell my sweet Elsa. “Or as close as I could get to home. I wanted that more than anything.” Who can explain it? That dark love and shame that binds us to the arbitrary place where we happened to be born.
We listen to the drops beating down from the galería roof to the hedge below. The scent of ginger is very strong.
“I miss Cuba,” Elsa confesses at last. She was older than her sisters when they left, and so she feels a greater pull back. “But I don’t think Castro is the answer.”
“It was wrong to think that there was an answer in the first place, dear. There are no answers.” I hesitate. I don’t even know how to explain this to her. If I could see her face clearly, perhaps the words would rise up from the mute knowing of my heart. “It’s continuing to struggle to create the country we dream of that makes a patria out of the land under our feet. That much I learned from my mother.”
“So you think I should go back?” Elsa is a dentist, she has studied long and hard to set up her little practice in the front rooms of her father’s house.
Such a mistake to want clarity above all else! I feel like telling her. A mistake I myself made over and over all my life.
“Again you want an answer, my dear.” I smile because I understand just how she feels.
EARLY IN THE MORNING, I dress quietly and make my way to the front of the house. Usually my roamings take place in the middle of the night, in and out of rooms, as if I had lost something during the day which I need to recover after dark.
“Ignacio,” I call out when I get to the front gate.
I had caught the young driver by the front steps the day before and arranged for this drive to the cemetery. I offered him my change purse of pesos, but he refused. “I
t would be an honor,” he insisted.
An honor! A young man working for honor! I was impressed. In spite of our disappointing history, my people keep surprising me with their generosity of spirit. What is it that Martí used to say, Every time has its own evil but a human being can always be good? Or was it Hostos who said that, or was it Mamá, after all? The beautiful, the brave, the good—they are all running together in my head, into that great river of time that is now hurrying me along.
The morning is cool, rain on the trade winds coming off the sea. Soon we will edge toward our tropic winter, the waves going wild, the dark closing in earlier each day. I shiver thinking of those long, cold winters in Poughkeepsie and Minnesota and of the long eternity ahead of me. So much left to be done! And no children of my own to send into the future to do it.
Not true! My Nancy in Poughkeepsie, my coffee sorters in Sierra Maestra, my Belkys, my Lupe, my Elsa in Santo Domingo—my own and not my own—the way it is for all us childless mothers who help raise the young.
The gates are already open by the time we arrive. I can smell the carnations, brought from the outskirts, being put out in their cans, a welcome scent after the stench of uncollected garbage on the city streets.
“Would the señora like some flowers,” a marchanta calls out after us, without much enthusiasm in her voice—a tic of selling, to offer wares to anyone passing by. The real buyers come later in their black Mercedes with shaded windows that do not expose their privileged grief to the curious passerby.
Ignacio knows the way, as he brings Don Rodolfo here often to visit Don Max and Doña Guarina. “I have to go take care of the car,” he reminds me after he has settled me on the stone bench that faces the family plot. We left the car by the entry turnabout—the sereno let us—so that Ignacio could help the old woman find her dead people before coming back to park it.