Battered and Bruised
(Life’s a bitch)
‘And what did you feel when he read you the letter, and told you about the photo?’
‘Bewildered. Really, I think I felt bewildered.’
‘Bewildered and guilty?’
‘No, not guilty.’
‘So why did you come here with a face like a funeral?’
‘Maybe because this mess isn’t exactly a fiesta.’
‘When you say “mess”, do you mean us?’
‘Yes, what else?’
‘I don’t see it as a mess.’
‘You don’t? Well, it is.’
‘Are you sorry about it?’
‘No, but it’s no fiesta.’
‘You already said that. Their situation is no fiesta either.’
‘Claudia and Angel’s situation? No, it isn’t. But at least it’s transparent. A transparent pain. A transparent love.’
‘Unlike ours, which is opaque.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But that’s what you’re implying. Everything you don’t say openly, you’re still saying. You think I don’t tell myself that as well?’
‘You know that, for me, the only thing that’s opaque is that we haven’t told Santiago. Nothing else. I really love you, Graciela, and that’s not opaque.’
‘Why go over that again? I talked to Rafael about it and he convinced me not to. And I still think he was right. It was too much for Santiago. To learn that way, and to learn while he was in there. Shut inside four walls.’
‘Well, now he’s getting out.’
‘Yes, and I’m pleased he is.’
‘Pleased he’s coming means you’re sorry about the rest?’
‘No, Rolando, I’m not sorry either. “Pleased” means “pleased”, nothing more. Pleased because he’ll be free, and he deserves it. And also, because I’ll be able to tell him.’
‘You’ll be able to?’
‘Yes, Rolando, I will. I’m quite a lot stronger than you think. And besides, I’m sure of it. I’m convinced that the other way would be a mistake. And I respect Santiago too much to go on lying to him.’
‘Life’s a bitch, isn’t it? For a guy to get out after so many years, and find this waiting for him. I mean: to find us waiting for him with this great piece of news.’
‘I don’t know. After all, as Rafael says, it’s better for him to find out here, with a different perspective.’
‘The others will find out as well. His comrades. Did your beloved Rafael mention that?’
‘No, but I’m well aware of it.’
‘I don’t think they’re going to be on our side.’
‘Probably not. Everyone loves Santiago. It’ll be difficult.’
‘How are you going to tell him?’
‘I don’t know, Rolando, I don’t know.’
‘Would you prefer the two of us to talk to him together?’
‘Look, I don’t know how I’m going to tell him. I’ll think of something. But I do know that I want to tell him on my own. I have that right, don’t I?’
‘You’ve every right. What about little Beatriz?’
‘She seems distant. And that upsets me as well.’
‘Does she know her father is arriving in a fortnight?’
‘She’s known since last Sunday. I decided to tell her, despite Santiago’s warning. Do you know why? Because I thought she had found out or sensed it in some strange way, and that maybe she was being distant because I hadn’t told her myself. But she’s been just the same since I did tell her.’
‘That little kid is too sharp. I’m sure she’s suspicious about us.’
‘Yes, I think so, too.’
‘Well, after all, it’s an inevitable reaction.’
‘Possibly, but it worries me.’
‘So why are you crying now?’
‘Because you’re right.’
‘Of course, but about what?’
‘About what you said just now: life’s a bitch.’
Exiles
(The proud people of Alamar)
I lived more than two years in Alamar, a place some 15 kilometres from Havana, that consists mostly of blocks of flats in constant construction by brigades of building workers from the capital. That is one of the ways the Cubans have found to try to resolve their chronic housing problem without it affecting production. In every factory, office or warehouse they enlist thirty-three of their employees into construction-work brigades. Since, generally, these are not builders, they begin with a basic course. After that, they start to build buildings of between five and twelve storeys, which are then occupied by those of their colleagues (or sometimes by they themselves) who are in the most urgent need of new housing. The labour shortage each brigade leaves in its original workplace is made up by the others there working overtime. Curiously, the idea came from the workers themselves; the government simply put it into practice.
But there is another detail which concerns us directly. In each of these new buildings the construction-work brigades keep one flat (if it is a five-storey block) or four (if it is twelve storeys high) reserved for families of Latin American exiles, who are welcomed with furniture, a fridge, radio and TV, a gas cooker, and even sheets and crockery. All for free.
This means that a fair number of Latin Americans are concentrated in Alamar. The Uruguayan children and adolescents there are usually, if not bilingual, then at least bi-tonal. When they play and run around the streets with their local friends they speak with a strong Cuban accent. But when they’re back home, where their parents still stubbornly and deliberately use Uruguayan expressions like ‘vos’ and ‘che’, then they’re from the far south of Latin America once again.
Alamar is a pretty spot, maybe with fewer buses and trees than are needed, but the air is gentle and has a salty tang because the sea is close at hand, and there is a sense of undemonstrative solidarity.
On the 30th of November 1980, the day of the plebiscite in Uruguay, when the dictatorship tripped itself up, I wasn’t in Alamar, but in Spain. In the early hours of that morning, as the news of the explosive popular triumph spread to the front pages of the world’s media, I of course thought many things, but amongst others, I thought of Alamar. It would have been so good to be there to celebrate that incredible victory.
When I visited Havana the following January it was the first topic I brought up with Alfredo Gravina. Alfredo and I have lots of things in common, but above all two very important ones: literature and Tacuarembó, even though he comes from the capital of the department and I’m only from Paso de los Toros.
‘Oh, that night.’ He rolled up his eyes. I always thought that, with his inimitable sense of calm, Alfredo (whose second name is Dante, but I never dared poke fun at him over that, because my third name is Hamlet) came out of a Vittorio de Sica film, with a screenplay by Cesare Zavattini. Oh, but when he rolls his eyes up he’s the spitting image of Totó.
‘You know, that night several of us from the Uruguayan colony had got together to chat and have a few drinks. The result of the plebiscite? We were sure it would be a fraud.’ A beaming smile appeared among a mass of wrinkles, and spread in a way that those who didn’t know him might have thought was mocking, but which, we friends knew, was him laughing at himself. By that, I don’t mean self-criticism. There’s a subtle difference, isn’t there?
‘We began singing tangos, old tangos, perhaps as a way of calming our rosy-hued nostalgia. But one of the women, more of a realist (as women tend to be), had her ear glued to the international radio news. So that was the scene: we were singing Gardel songs and she was listening to the BBC. All of a sudden, she jumped up: “The ‘No’s won! ‘No’ won by more than sixty per cent!” Instantly, we all abandoned poor old Gardel and listened to the BBC, which confirmed the astounding news.’
On that same 30th of November, in Mallorca, I also heard the news on the BBC. Never before had the precise, sterilized Spanish they use, that kind of amalgam between Guadalajara
and Ushuaia, seemed so splendid.
‘We went out into the street with a flag,’ Alfredo continued. ‘I’ve no idea where we found it. We had to tell everyone and celebrate. We knocked on the doors of our compatriots, but most of them had not hesitated, like we had, between Gardel and the BBC. They had simply gone to bed, because Monday is a work day. A lot of them thought it was a joke at first, but gradually we convinced them, and they joined our group, which became more and more enthusiastic and raucous. We made so much noise that the police had no choice but to turn up, slightly amazed at such an uproar in an Alamar which, at that time of night, is only either resting or making love. What was this? What was going on? The clincher was the Uruguayan flag; from then on, they understood everything. They simply suggested we shouldn’t make so much noise, but I think they had little expectation we would take their advice. In fact, the celebration only ended when the sun came up.’
So, in the end, how did they feel? ‘Proud, che, proud,’ said old Alfredo, skinny, wrinkled but standing tall, his chest puffed out as if he was back in Tacuarembó.
Don Rafael
(Clearing the rubble)
It’s odd. My son is about to leave prison, he’s going to arrive here someday soon, and I receive the news completely naturally, almost as if it were the corollary of a premonition. Was it really so foreseeable? How many, even with fewer years inside than Santiago, found one day that they could no longer bear their anguish, their cancer, their own story, and died? And yet right from the start I knew he would get out. Possibly by instinct, a father’s sixth sense. What’s even odder is that when Graciela told me, at that first revelatory moment, it wasn’t him or me or my granddaughter or the big problem awaiting him here that I thought of. I thought only of his mother, Mercedes. I thought of her as if she were still alive, as if my legitimate, reasonable impulse was to go and run to tell her, inform her that soon she would be able to embrace him, hug him, stroke his cheeks, cry on his shoulder, who knows what. This was when I realized that, despite all the years that have passed, despite Lydia today and other women yesterday and before that, there is still a private link between me and Mercedes, to the name and memory of Mercedes, always dressed in brown; her tranquil gaze, which, deep down, always held a hint of emotion; her weak, yet safe, hands; her unmistakable, often hermetic smile; her tender concern for Santiago. Sometimes it seems to me (and it’s no more crazy than anything else), that she would have liked to have a screen behind which she could talk to Santiago, caress Santiago, look at Santiago, without the rest of the world (me among them) bothering her with their curiosity, deference or suspicion. But since, of course, there was no such screen, she suffered rather, although without any fuss, in moderation, as was her style. Mercedes was not ugly. Nor pretty. She had a face that was one of a kind: attractive, impossible to confuse or forget. And a kindness that was complex but real. Now, at this great distance, if I wished to be absolutely frank with myself, maybe I wouldn’t be able to recognize what I fell in love with, or if I ever really fell in love with that excessively private woman. That’s what I tell myself, and then immediately sense I’m being unfair. It’s obvious I must have fallen in love. It’s just that I don’t remember it. We used to talk to each other less than an ordinary couple does, but then again, we weren’t an ordinary couple. And those few conversations we had were definitely not ordinary. She often flummoxed me, but I could never offend her, shout at her, or blame her for anything. She always seemed like a survivor from a shipwreck who had still not entirely come to terms with her survival. I found it hard to communicate with her, but on the few occasions I did, it was a miraculous, almost magical communication. Perhaps making love to Mercedes was like making love to a concept, rather than a body, but afterwards she was so sweet and tremulous that this epilogue meant a much closer union than the act itself. It was only when she listened to good music that she regained the expression of a model for a Filippo Lippi fresco. After no more than two years of married life, in one of her rare bursts of confidence that were like concessions she made to us (to herself and to me) she said how good it would be to die listening to one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And all those years later, on exactly the 17th of June, 1958, when she was reading and all of a sudden remained still for ever, on the radio (not even on the record-player) they were playing ‘Spring’. Santiago heard this, and maybe that’s why that word, ‘spring’, has always been so linked to his life. It’s like his thermometer, his reference point, his norm. Even though he has only mentioned it on very rare occasions, I know that for him events in the world in general and in his own world in particular are divided into spring-like, not very spring-like, and definitely un-spring-like. I imagine these last five years won’t have seemed very spring-like to him. And now he’s coming out. Was it wrong of me to advise Graciela not to write to him about the new reality? There are only twelve days to go before I find out. Or maybe six months or six years will have to go by for me properly to learn whether my advice was correct or if I goofed. Life goes on, as banal songs never tire of telling us, or if they don’t say that, they suggest it. And just because they’re banal songs, we brainy types completely reject their schmaltz. And yet there’s always a nugget of truth in everything schmaltzy. Life goes on, of course it does, but there’s not only one way for it to do so. Everybody has their own route and destination. I know (because Graciela herself told me the story) about the clear-cut case of that couple Angel and Claudia (I think he was one of my students). For them, life went on in the same tender, moving way. But there’s no guarantee. In fact, their story is moving and tender precisely because it happened without any inner violence, with an absolutely natural inevitability. I trust Santiago. I think that however much he loved and admired his mother, deep down, he has more of me in him than of her. So, I imagine what I would do, what my attitude would be in a case like his. And that’s why I trust Santiago. It’s obvious that I’m sixty-seven and he’s only thirty-eight. But there’s little Beatriz, who is so wonderful and who, I’m sure, will fill Santiago’s new existence. Until now I’d kept the news to myself, but last night I told Lydia. She listened to my long monologue without interrupting even once. She felt (she confessed later) contradictory emotions. On the one hand, she was pleased by this mark of trust. I think that from tonight on, she murmured, we’ve grown closer, I think we’re a couple now. Maybe. But she was also worried about me being so worried. She was silent for a while. She kept curling and uncurling one of her lovely black locks, and then said, Leave them to it, yes, leave them, don’t get involved unless they ask you to, leave it to them and you’ll see that life not only goes on, as you put it, but it settles down, it readjusts. Perhaps she’s right. This earthquake has left us all limping, wounded, partially empty, sleepless. We’ll never again be what we were. Each of us will have to decide if we’re better or worse. Inside, and occasionally outside as well, we were in a storm, a hurricane passed over us and the calm we’re enjoying now contains uprooted trees, collapsed roofs, torn-off TV antennae, and rubble, lots of rubble. Obviously, we have to rebuild ourselves: to plant new trees, but maybe we won’t have the same shoots in our nurseries, the same seeds. It’s fine for us to build new houses, but is it a good idea for the architect only to faithfully reproduce the previous plan? Wouldn’t it be infinitely better for him to rethink the problem and draw a new plan, one that takes into account our current needs? To clear the rubble, as far as possible; because there will also be rubble that nobody can clear from their hearts or memory.
Extramural
(Fasten seat-belt)
the fasten seat-belt sign has been switched off, so I get my life back again and the stewardess is pretty/ when she hands me the orange juice I see her discreet pale pink fingernails that are so incredibly well-manicured/ I can tell she’s a bit concerned about my beret but I’ll take that off over my dead body
five years two months and four days and I still exist hurrah/ that makes one thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine nights bah
I
’m so sleepy but I want to enjoy this huge change to the full/ to know I can do and undo the seat-belt and do it up again as often as I like while I listen to the murmur of the bumblebees/ none of the other three hundred passengers is enjoying the jet-engine bumblebees as much as yours truly here
the stewardess leaves me a newspaper and I ask her for another one/ she stares at the beret and leaves me two/ so there’s a neutron bomb now the jails will still be standing but not the prisoners but also the millions and not the millionaires/ the schools will be there but not the schoolkids
but also the cannons and not the generals/ ah and the missile that leaves hamburg may fall on moscow but the response might not fall on hamburg but in oklahoma changes changes changes
I’m so sleepy yet I want to remember the faces of all my loved ones there/ the ones still there/ aníbal isn’t a number esteban isn’t a number ruben isn’t a number/ they wanted to turn us into numbers but we screwed them we refused to become things/ esteban brother you’ve got enthusiasm for a good while yet/ you’ll have to help those who don’t have any/ ah but who’ll help you?
so much hatred and yet I don’t want to crumble into it lose myself in it/ during the first years I watered it daily as if it were an exotic plant/ then I understood I shouldn’t pay them that homage and besides there was so much to think about plan analyse and do/ they’re going to rot all by themselves aren’t they?
they succeeded in driving andres mad/ perhaps it happened because he was too innocent had too much faith in mankind/ everything took him by surprise he always thought they’ve done all this but that must be an end to it/ they can’t be so cruel but they were/ I’m going to convince them and he started to talk to them but they smashed his mouth/ he was too innocent that’s why he went mad