Havana Noir

Zenzizenzic by Achy Obejas

Chinatown

There it was, framed by the oval of my airplane window: a shout of palms and prickly grass, low concrete buildings with exposed stones in hopeless need of As we descended, plumes of smoke, both paint and repair. black and white, spiraled up to meet us. I’m told exiles returning to Cuba sob as soon as the plane door pops open and the blinding Caribbean sky spills before them. But not me.

When I stepped onto the tarmac, the wet tropical air pawed at me reeking of mildew. The skies were a sweet pastel but I could barely see. I held my breath for the first few steps thinking the smell was just a bad patch — one of those sulphurous smoke trails having descended back to earth perhaps — but all was lost the minute I had to respond to the military guy with the official passenger list flapping wildly on his clipboard. His finger pointed at something and sweat ran from behind my ears.

“Yep, that’s me, Malía Mercado,” I muttered. It’d be rude to hold my nose or cover my mouth, so I was praying for my senses to acclimate quickly, very quickly. How could anybody stand this for long?

“María Mercado, sí,” he said, and went to correct the spelling on his neatly typed list.

“No, no — Malía, not María — Malía’s right,” I said in my best Spanish.

“Malía?” he asked, a hint of a smile disturbing his officially somber face.

“Yes, it’s Hawaiian,” I said, the Spanish accent my parents had added notwithstanding.

The military guy nodded. “Ah, well, it sounds Chinese,” he said.

I’d been warned by my parents and my sister Rocky, whom I was visiting, that most Cubans don’t feel the least bit uncomfortable making racial comments. And when it came to Asians — who were all Chinese to the Cubans — it was a longstanding pastime to base double-entendres on their supposed inability to pronounce the ferocious Cuban R, which the Chinese were said to render as Ls. Thus, in this guy’s mind, my Malía couldn’t be anything but a mangled Chinese María.

I nodded at him, not exactly hiding my annoyance, which seemed to amuse him. But behind me the line was lengthening — I could sense the next passenger within inches of me, like a restless shadow — so the guard motioned me toward the blurry building in the distance. My bags were promised inside but mostly I was praying for shade. My heart was fluttering in the sticky strait jacket the humidity had wrapped around my chest.

“Buenas tardes, compañera,” I heard a voice say just behind me. It drew my immediate attention because it was so cheery, and because the Spanish was so masticated and rough.

I’d noticed him before, on the hop over from Kingston: a forty-something American with a weedy mustache and long strands of thinning hair. He was slender but I could tell, even with the scorching wind making his Che Guevara T-shirt billow into a small, curvy balloon, that he was probably really fit. He had the sunbaked look of a cyclist, lean and disciplined.

“First time back?” he asked me with a wink. He’d come up behind me so we were walking side by side, unexpectedly in step.

“Uh... yeah,” I said. “How’d you know?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been coming for so long, I can just tell.”

We pushed back the doors to the terminal. Not that the air-conditioning inside was much relief. I imagined a small unit hidden somewhere huffing and puffing as I scanned the waiting area, men and women in uniform milling among the passengers. Neither their rank nor purpose was clear to me.

“They won’t bite,” the man said, his head nodding in the direction of the customs officials. “They’ve forgiven you.”

“Forgiven me?” I asked.

“You’re an exile, right?”

I nodded involuntarily. Being Cuban without being born in Cuba is a tricky proposition; the notion of exile even more complicated. But I’d just met this guy and I certainly wasn’t going to go into any kind of philosophical discourse while I was melting away in the tropical heat. Exile residue required more time to explain than I had right then.

“Forgiven...? I guess I don’t—”

“Yeah, forgiven you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For abandonment,” he said, grinning now, “maybe even treason.”

“Wha...?”

He grinned from ear to ear, immensely pleased with himself.

“Fuck you,” I said, and stormed away. This was my first time in Cuba (I was taking a semester off from my studies at the University of Hawai’i and was to stay in Cuba one month) — maybe my last too — and I sure as hell wasn’t going to cause a commotion at customs.

I grabbed my bags but kept a wary eye on the jerk. A baggage handler stacked box after box next to him. They were perfectly square, identical, and the handler treated them with loving care. The jerk, for his part, ignored the returning exiles, not even trying to hide his contempt as he looked over and through them with their anxious faces and excess baggage. While the mostly elderly in the crowd struggled with their overstuffed suitcases, he reached around them for his own bags, holding his arms out as if to avoid touching them. I couldn’t help but notice that his lips didn’t move, keeping any sort of courtesy from slipping out. In turn, the exiles eyed the jerk’s Che T-shirt with pained expressions. In Havana, even in customs, it certainly seemed redundant.

This guy, however, appeared to know everybody in any kind of official capacity: the customs inspectors, the nurse, the woman who checked the luggage tags. He shook each of their hands, even hugged some of them. In a few strategic cases, he gave out little presents — bribes? I wondered. It all seemed very acceptable. I wondered if I’d have to come up with something at any point. As per my sister’s instructions, I had brought plenty of generic ibuprofen, Band-Aids, deodorants. I’d also brought wasabi and packages of seaweed, macadamias, Kona coffee, and spices. Would any of these count as gifts here? And if so, would I know when to make an offer?

I lost sight of the guy when we stepped out to the searing sun. It took me a minute to adjust to the maddeningly white light (for a second I thought I was hallucinating, or fainting) but then I spotted Rocky — she was jumping up and down, just like the Cubans around her. Her dark frizzy hair was pulled back carelessly, an orchid with fat watery petals behind her ear. She seemed as eager to hug me as they were to hug their relatives, all apparently recovering from long separations. Except that Rocky — it was my childhood pronunciation of Raquel, which I’d soon learn had become Roh-keee in Havana — had just seen me briefly three weeks before, back on the family homestead on the other side of the world, in Honolulu.

Rocky’s unexpected return to our barely acknowledged Cuban homeland was, in fact, precisely why I had followed her back to Havana. Maybe because she was born in Cuba and uprooted early, she had always been emotionally tethered to it, considerably more so than my parents, certainly way more than me. When our parents won the visa lottery to enter the U.S., they were almost relieved to wind up in Hawai’i, so far away from all known Cubanness that most of the time, when we were confused for Puerto Ricans or Portuguese (“Potagee,” as the locals not so kindly said: “How do you get da one-arm potagee out da tree? Wave at um”) — the islands’ few Latinos — they never bothered to correct anybody.

It’s not that they weren’t proud of their Cubanness, but rather that folks in Hawai’i were completely indifferent to it. As a kid, Rocky used to walk around with T-shirts emblazoned with legends such as, Not only am I perfect, I’m Cuban too!, drawing stares from the Hawaiians, Samoans, Filipinos, and other Pacific islanders who looked at her sorrel skin and probably assumed she was one of them. (Though Honoluluborn, I elicited nothing but haole wariness with my freckles and blondish hair.)

All my life, I’d listened intently to Eddie Kamae and Keali’i Reichel; Rocky swooned to Charanga Habanera and homemade tapes of the band Porno Para Ricardo. I ate poi stirred with milk and sugar; she flatly refused it in any form, preferring when my mother sliced the taro — which they called malanga — and fried it in olive oil. I took hula lessons after school while Rocky had my dad teach her how to dance timba, and later, when she deemed he’d taken her as far as he could, she began buying videos that showed her how to shiver and thrust. My dad teased her about being so Cuban, and I said once that she was Cuban squared, which in the family vernacular became simply “Cubed.”

“Zenzizenzic,” suggested my mother, the scientist, upping the stakes, “to the fourth power.”

When my parents first arrived in Hawai’i — when Rocky was six and before I was even born — they each found fantastic, ridiculously well-suited jobs. My mother’s a marine biologist and got plugged in to a government-funded program that operated for a while off Ni’ihau, a feudal island community, normally off-limits to all but its residents. I think she was the first Cuban to ever set foot there. She spent days diving, coming back to our house with bizarre creatures and assorted ocean debris. For a while, her prized possession was an organism called a xenophyophore, which was about the size of a golf ball and looked like a moon rock. I could never tell if it was dead or alive but when it finally, officially expired, my mom moped around for weeks.

My dad also landed on his feet. In Havana, he’d studied Chinese. In Honolulu, that skill became a bonanza. Moreover, his experience coming from a Communist country gave him an aura of expertise well beyond language, even if the Cuban and Chinese models really had very little in common. As a result, he was able to pick and choose consulting clients, and our lifestyle slowly became more and more comfortable — a fact that seemed to shock my parents, who’d dreamed but never expected much in Cuba.

Whenever something wonderful happened — and in their minds, a working car and a full fridge fit the bill — my parents were dazed by their good luck. Delighted by how sunny their lives were in Hawai’i, they added a fist-sized volcanic rock — representing Pele, one of the Hawaiians’ main deities — to the tropical tableau of Oshún and Yemayá on their altar.

We weren’t Hawaiian but we identified with the natives in unexpected ways. Perhaps after all of those years hearing about America’s imperialism from the Cuban government (and because Hawai’i really didn’t seem American to us), my family drifted seamlessly into Hawaiian sovereignty activities and frequently found ourselves at rallies and other independence-related events. For me, it was what we did in Hawai’i — it never dawned on me that these issues didn’t matter to the rest of the world until I began to travel.

Rocky, however, was completely indifferent to Hawai’i. Rocky’s return to Cuba, initially just a visit under the auspices of a Japanese travel group, had been a total shock to my parents — but not to me. Rocky had always aimed her brown Cuban irises at the horizon, convinced that Hawai’i, for her, was a geographical accident. In fact, if I speak any Spanish at all — and I confess that mine is tentative — it’s because Rocky, even as a kid, insisted on talking in Spanish at home, long after we were all functioning mostly in English and I was deeply immersed in Hawaiian language classes.

“We’ll have to know Spanish when we go back,” she’d say, while my mom, dad, and I just kind of looked away, out to the Pacific. It all seemed so foolish then.

“Aloha, Malía! Que bolá!” Rocky exclaimed at the airport, all feisty and mostly Cubed. She unraveled her warm arms from around my neck and led me by the hand toward a shiny Fiat, where she flung my bags into the sliver of a backseat.

“Spiffy car!” I said, admiring the unexpected little sportster. It really stuck out next to the sad tangle of the patched Eastern European models with no names that populated the parking lot.

“We’re going to be tight,” she said, grinning.

“Tight? We can fit in there, no prob!” I said.

Rocky shook her head. “No, there’s one more person, a friend of Dionisio’s,” she said.

Dionisio was Rocky’s fiancé, her reason for staying in Cuba, and the real source of my parents’ concern. We’d seen him in photos: a winsome young man in his late-twenties, just about her height when she wore flats, pale and soft featured. She’d fallen for him on that first trip three years ago and she’d never looked back. But for an annual trip to Honolulu to see us, she’d stayed in Cuba, translating and teaching English to foreigners and Cubans with dollar connections.

Technically, I was in Havana to visit Rocky — a trip organized during her brief sojourn in Honolulu weeks before — but, frankly, more than anything I was to serve as a kind of scouting party for my parents: They needed time to acclimate to the idea of returning to Cuba, and even more so to the idea of their eldest daughter’s wedding (though no date had been set, we all understood it would happen). Because Dionisio was a doctor, his chances of leaving Cuba were virtually nil. Marrying Rocky meant little to the Cuban authorities, who expected him to stick around and perform medical duties until he’d given back enough to justify his free education.

“That’s our guy,” Rocky said, pointing with her chin in a way Hawaiian locals think particular and which the Cubans, as Rocky explained later, claim as uniquely theirs.

I turned my head to see, then snapped back to Rocky. “Are you kidding me?” There, striding toward us in all his smug glory, was the jerk. He was alternately waving hello to us and goodbye to a guy who was carting away the boxes. “He’s...”

“He’s a friend of the family,” Rocky said before I had a chance to finish. “A really good friend.” Her look was cautionary.

“La Hawayana! Raquelin,” he oozed, taking my sister in his arms. As his chin rested for a second on her shoulder, he winked at me from behind her back. She hugged him too, but quickly, not letting it go beyond courtesy. “And this is the baby sister?” he said, laughing as he pointed at me.

“I’m nineteen, I’m not a baby,” I protested, realizing immediately how childish I sounded. “And we’ve met,” I said, my embarrassed words aimed at Rocky.

“Oh yes, we’ve met,” he said, extending his hand to me but pulling it just as I approached, bringing me in to him for an unexpected — and unwanted — embrace. I decided to play like Rocky, feigning courtesy. “I’m Tom Mahler,” he continued, “practically Dionisio’s brother. Which means I’m practically your brother-in-law — that’s what we’d be, no? In any case, family!”

Dionisio’s family lived in an early — twentieth century house on San Nicolás Street, perched on a busy and narrow corner in Havana’s Chinatown, where I immediately noticed that the vast majority of the workers — vendors, shop clerks, incredibly aggressive maître d’s and hostesses in front of the restaurants — were not Chinese, in fact not Asian at all. They wore Mandarin blouses or jackets, and rayon pants imitating Heung Wun silk, but with a looseness that made them seem like careless costumes.

Very few people in this Chinatown, Rocky explained, actually spoke Chinese, even the few Chinese who were left.

“This is largest two-column Chinese gate outside of China,” Mahler piped in as we passed under the Dragon gate into the neighborhood, “measuring almost sixty-three feet by forty-three feet.” I made a face behind his back but Rocky didn’t see me.

Mercifully, the family’s home wasn’t buried in the neighborhood labyrinth but just off the main streets of Zanja and Dragones, where pedestrian and bicitaxi traffic clogged the arteries. I noticed right away that noise was constant: in the predawn hours, the local agro-market opened (the only one in the city with eggplant and bean sprouts), restaurants began pounding meat, and, later, kids trotted off to school yelling and fighting. At night, crowds lingered, with laughter and music everywhere. It never let up. (Curiously, once off the little official Chinese food mall, most of the eateries — and there were dozens of them, usually just carry-out through somebody’s living room or kitchen window — served up regular Cuban menu items like ham-and-cheese sandwiches, roasted pork, and black bean and rice concoctions — nothing Chinese at all.) Just when a lull was conceivable, a group of tourists would stampede through, fascinated by Cuba’s Chinese-less Chinatown, seeing Chinese eyes on mulattos and blacks and, after a few days into my visit, even me.

“We grow Chinese after a while,” Dionisio said, pointing to his own eyes, which he swore had an Asian slant neither Rocky nor I could discern. He spoke to me in a mix of Spanish and elementary English. “Didn’t you become a little Hawaiian after a while in Hawai’i?”

“Yeah, but there are real Hawaiians in Hawai’i,” I said, trying first in Spanish, then surrendering to English. “And, you know, we wouldn’t presume to be Hawaiian.”

“But you were born in Hawai’i!” he replied incredulously.

“C’mon, Dionisio, I’ve explained this to you,” Rocky said, tugging at his arm.

“We don’t have too many Chinese left, see, so sometimes we have to step in for them.”

I had noticed, though, that the occasional high-level Chinese diplomatic tour groups were frequently led by an elegant elderly man who looked really Chinese, even as he moved with the ease and flair of the Cubans.

“That’s Moisés Sio Wong,” Tom Mahler said when I asked the family about him. “He’s one of the original revolutionaries; he’s been with Fidel from the very, very start. One of three Chinese Cuban generals in the Revolution. Now, that is a hero!”

To my surprise, the family appeared expressionless — certainly only silence followed Mahler’s declaration — but then I thought I saw Dionisio roll his eyes. And Rocky smiled conspiratorially, apparently unaware I had noticed.

According to Dionisio’s family, they had all been very happy when he unexpectedly fell in love with Rocky, La Hawayana, as they affectionately referred to her. They could never have imagined my own amusement at my sister cast in any way associated with Hawai’i. But in Cuba, where she’d always wanted to be, Rocky reflected her Hawaiian upbringing more than ever. Around Chinatown, she wore flowers in her hair in a typical Polynesian style (which seemed to me should not have been so exotic to the Cubans). She’d found a connection through a Japanese diplomat for fresh fish for sashimi and had us shipping wasabi and seaweed regularly. In her room, I found Eddie Kamae CDs, and both Dionisio and his mother confided that Rocky frequently cried when she heard a particular Hawaiian song. I was flabbergasted — not at her emotions, because my sister has a tender heart, but at the source of such displays.

“What song?” I asked them.

The two hummed a few bars of something completely unrecognizable, frequently interrupting to correct one another.

“Do you know what the song’s about?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s about Hawai’i,” said Dionisio’s mom.

“Yes, about missing Hawai’i,” added Dionisio, quite seriously.

“Rocky misses Hawai’i?” I asked.

“Oh yes, she misses Hawai’i very much,” he responded, “sometimes I think so much that she’ll leave.”

I could tell he meant it — his voice actually cracked a bit, then withered. And his mother quietly stroked his back, already comforting him for his future loss — something she was familiar with, I was told, since her husband had died only a few years before.

“It was an embolia,” she explained to me in Spanish.

“What’s that?” I asked. The noise from the street was filtering in and I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

“An attack,” she said.

“What kind of attack?” I asked.

“A special attack,” she said, shaking her head with just enough annoyance that I was sure she thought I was an idiot.

Dionisio had met Tom Mahler years back, during one of his medical tours in Haiti. Mahler had swooped in with computers and medical software that dazzled the Cubans and Haitian authorities. All of it was top of the line, and all of it was donated. Mahler wasn’t a doctor or a salesman, just a guy who’d done incredibly well during the boom years of the computer age and had committed himself now to charity work. When Dionisio invited him to Cuba, Mahler immediately set about to modernize the island’s medical networks, a haphazard system that cribbed parts from ancient Soviet, Chinese, and Korean computers with the same spirit that Cuban mechanics rescued classic American cars.

From the beginning, Mahler had stayed with Dionisio’s family rather than at a hotel. He’d come four or five times a year, visits that could last a few days or as long as a month. His presence became so constant that Dionisio’s family had formally surrendered a room to him off the courtyard. During my visit, I was in Rocky and Dionisio’s room, which put Dionisio with his policeman cousin Raúl in another room.

“He is a wonderful person,” Dionisio’s mother told me about Mahler, “and a very good cook.”

During each visit, Mahler would fill the fridge and cabinets with foods normally out of the family’s reach: beef and seafood, dry cereals, fresh milk and cheese, canned veggies, and condiments such as mayonnaise and mustard. Each morning before taking off for work, he’d take over the kitchen and produce the kind of hearty breakfast the Cubans went wild over: steak and eggs or pancakes, skillets brimming with sausage and bacon or, once, biscuits and gravy.

His revolutionary fervor was well-known, yet after unsuccessfully trying to enlist the family in marches and volunteer projects, he had mostly gone about his business, talking things up but not pushing. It was no secret, though, that Mahler had been deeply disappointed when Dionisio took up with Rocky. But because Rocky had chosen to stay in Cuba, his feelings of “betrayal” — if I’m to guess from his words to me at the airport — had been somewhat assuaged.

Mahler didn’t see their relationship as a triumph of love over politics. Instead, he considered Rocky the cause of potential revolutionary slippage. Rocky, according to Tom Mahler, was a temptation — not necessarily erotic (it was actually appalling how he seemed to see my sister as a cut-out figure instead of a real girl) but economic and political. He would joke about how Rocky had almost brainwashed Dionisio into leaving Cuba but not quite.

“Was he falling into temptation, is that it? Are you the reinforcements?” he harangued me one day while we were cleaning rice in the kitchen, his face all smiles but the meanness in his tone evident. “He’s not gonna follow you guys back to your capitalistic island paradise when he has a revolutionary one right here, okay?”

“Tom, por favor, ya,” Dionisio said, irritated. That was probably the first time I’d heard Dionisio actually confront Mahler; usually he was like everybody else, smiling and shuffling.

But no sooner had Dionisio left the room than Mahler started in again. “Are you here to try to get me to fall in line too?” he said, again screwing up his face so that his eyebrows danced in a clownish manner. “You know, there’s nothing you can show me. I’ve not only lived in the belly of the beast, I was born there... I know it better than anyone here, including you two Hawaiians.”

“We’re not Hawaiians,” I corrected him, exasperated.

“Right — sorry!” He smiled, his face now feigning concern. “I have to get that. Of course you’re not Hawaiian. I guess I want to equate it with, like, New Yorkers or Hoosiers. I don’t know why I keep tripping on that, although it is a mouthful: not Hawaiian, but from Hawai’i. What do you call that? Not Hawaiian, not mainlander? Haole? But you’re no haole, though you certainly look like one!”

At Dionisio’s family home, the doorbell — a merciless and earsplitting metallic buzzing — rang constantly. There was the man selling illegal crabs (“How many can I buy?” I heard his mother cautiously ask); the man selling a fluorescent tube, maybe several feet in length, frosty and miraculously intact (“No, thank you,” said Dionisio himself, then quickly added, “but Mrs. Wu down the street, Estrellita’s mother — yes, the widow with the balcony full of flowers — I bet she could use this”); the woman selling illegal bags of cement who appeared with backbreaking knapsacks as local kids with features I too had begun to see as increasingly Asian paraded through the family courtyard, stacking the cement under an awning and covering it up with sheets of paint-splattered plastic. The cement was meant for an illegal addition the family was planning on the roof — in fact, a kind of studio apartment for Dionisio and Rocky.

I was told — by both Rocky and Dionisio and later, again, by his mother and Raúl, the policeman cousin who’d come in from Banes, the family’s provincial home, to live with them in the capital — that I was not to let Tom Mahler know about these purchases, that in fact Tom was not to know about the cement at all.

“He wouldn’t approve,” Rocky said.

“But won’t he like seeing that there’s more permanence to your stay?” I asked.

Rocky shook her head.

Still, I thought it peculiar at best to try withholding the information since the plastic sheets were obviously changing shape, growing both taller and fatter by the day as more cement bags were delivered, but Rocky assured me this was the agreed on strategy.

“Don’t you think he’ll be able to tell?” I asked.

She shook her head. “In Cuba — it’s strange — people are remarkably good at not seeing anything they don’t want to see.”

“But he’s not Cuban,” I pointed out.

“He thinks he is,” she said by way of explanation. “He’s zenzizenzic, actually.”

I laughed. “But he’s American!”

“Gringo Z!” Rocky exclaimed. “Mami would be so proud that we’ve discovered a new species!”

Indeed, I already had so much to tell her and my dad.

The first couple of weeks in Cuba, I really struggled to make myself understood (and heard above the barking and horn blowing and general human effusiveness that leaked into every corner of the house). Cubans swallowed letters, syllables, whole words sometimes. And they spoke at rocket speed, punctuating everything with a physicality that was equally quirky and anxious. They slapped their hands, punched their fists in their palms, snapped their fingers in the air (all at once!), thumped their chests, rubbed their tummies, and danced their digits on any and all surfaces. Plus, the heat didn’t seem to bother them at all, while I felt like there was a giant iron on my head all the time.

“But Malía, isn’t Hawai’i tropical too?” Dionisio’s mother asked me as she cut up a large avocado in the family kitchen. She lifted the knife into the air, whirling it around to suggest something akin to a vortex but which I understood to be shorthand for climate.

“Yes,” I explained, “but there are trade winds, and the islands are smaller, and we have mountains.”

“We have mountains too,” said Raúl, leaning against the counter while waiting for water to boil so he could bathe. He raised his right arm, his palm capping off what would be a mountain top, then brought it down and scratched his chest. The pot next to him — caked white on the inside and used exclusively to heat bathwater — hummed on the flame.

“Yes, but...” How to explain the difference between Cuban mountains — thick, green, and sloping — and Hawaiian mountains that go straight up, like sheets of rock, and dominate every landscape? How to explain that a tropical island can have snowcapped peaks?

“And you have volcanoes, right? Rocky is always showing us pictures and videos of the volcanoes,” said Dionisio’s mother. This time, the knife indicated an incline. “She loves the volcanoes; I guess that’s very Hawaiian.”

I nodded, amused. “Yes...” Rocky had warned me not to bother to correct the Cubans: They would insist we were Hawaiian, no matter what we said. And, in fact, it was almost dizzying. Everywhere we went, to whomever I was introduced, we were Las Hawayanas, over and over.

“So it’s actually hotter then, hotter than here, because a volcano would be spitting out fire, right?” the policeman cousin asked, smiling courteously as he puckered then extended his fingers outward. He turned off the fire and lifted the pot to take to the bathroom. He stood there, perspiring, waiting for my response as the steam rose. His face was so kind, it was nearly impossible to imagine him as a cop.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t work that way,” I tried again with my limited Spanish.

They nodded at me politely.

“We are on the same latitude, no?” Dionisio’s mother asked. The knife crisscrossed the air horizontally now.

“Yes, but it’s different,” I said, realizing even as I insisted that I would never convince them.

“Of course it’s different!” exclaimed a buoyant Tom Mahler, bounding into the kitchen for a glass of water for Mrs. Wu, whom he was entertaining in the living room. He’d obviously heard the tail end of our chat. “Hawai’i is an American colony, ripped of all its freedom and tradition. Cuba is a free and sovereign nation!”

“Look, Tom, you don’t know—” I started to say, but then Raúl excused himself and trotted off to bathe, bumping right smack into me.

“I am so sorry!” he said, the hot water having splashed him, not me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded as Raúl and Dionisio’s mother shrugged, both slightly chagrined.

In the meantime, Tom laughed, practically skipping back to Mrs. Wu with a cold glass of water.

I confess I was amazed in Cuba — not at Socialism’s wonders, even as Tom rattled off literacy rates (“The highest in the Western Hemisphere — even higher than the United States!” he exuded) and infant mortality rates (“The lowest in the Western Hemisphere — even lower than the United States!”). More precisely, I was astounded by how my sense of being an islander was constantly challenged. Nearly every Cuban I met happily confessed he or she couldn’t swim. This, of course, was nearly unheard of in Hawai’i, where learning to swim is no more of an option than learning to breathe. The Cubans sat on their weathered Malecón with their backs to the sea, unaware and undisturbed, chatting and drinking and sometimes even fishing, their lines dangling behind them as they continued their social dalliances. Just looking at them facing away from the water like that gave me the willies.

They wore shoes — flats and loafers but often heavy-soled shoes, more suitable for mountain climbing than anything else, and even better if the shoes were some brand they recognized: Mephisto, Doc Martens, and Prada of course. And they kept those shoes on all the time, even in their own homes, constantly wary of germs and viruses that, according to them, were both ubiquitous and lethal if they attached themselves to a naked foot.

“You don’t die from the virus,” Raúl explained, trying to reassure me, “but from the symptoms.”

These were said to be utterly extravagant. There was the patatú, an attack of undetermined origin completely undetectable by medical science, the sirimba (a milder form), and a whole series of weird medical conditions with no translations that even Rocky openly laughed about. What was crazy was that Dionisio — a medical doctor! — actually seemed to sign on to these diagnoses.

“You’re telling me that you really believe empachos can only be caused by eating too much Cuban food?” I asked.

Dionisio nodded serenely. He was less handsome than charming, with a gentility in his eyes that made my sister’s attraction to him completely understandable.

“But isn’t that just indigestion?” I asked, irritated. “Couldn’t you just get it from overeating anything?”

He shook his head. “No, no — this is particular. Malía, it doesn’t happen to people who don’t have a regular diet of Cuban food.”

Was he kidding me? I couldn’t tell. I was going to ask him about embolias, which I suspected, having killed his father, might take us down a more serious path, but then he started talking about serenos, a condition said to occur when you step outside and are enveloped in the night air.

“The night air? For real?” I asked, looking for cracks in his façade.

Dionisio shrugged. “And only old people can tell if you really have it.”

“That’s so mental! C’mon!”

Rocky laughed and laughed. “She’s not very Cuban, see?”

“Of course she is,” he said sympathetically, then reached out to touch the back of my head. His fingers dug through my hair to my scalp. “Absolutely she is.”

“What are you doing?” I snapped, pulling away from him. Rocky was holding her sides now, she was laughing so hard.

“Well, it’s as I suspected, somebody probably touched your mollera when you were born,” he said after his cursory examination of the spot at the very top of my skull.

“My what?”

“Your mollera.”

I looked at Rocky for clarification but she was bright red, tears streaming down her face. “Your...” She pointed at the back of her head between gulps and hysterics.

“It’s a soft cranial spot, very sensitive, much more sensitive on Cuban babies than on any other babies,” Dionisio said, still straight-faced. “You know, if it gets touched when you’re little — if it gets touched the wrong way — you can suffer irreparable harm, like losing your Cubanness. But yours—”

“Por dios!” I said in Spanish, naturally Cubed for once. “You’re just playing with me!”

And they both fell back on the couch, Rocky bubbling like lava and Dionisio finally erupting, slapping his thighs and his chest in the national fashion.

It wasn’t until later, alone in my noisy room writing in the travel journal I’d decided to keep for my parents, that I realized I’d never gotten a chance to ask about embolias.

As a result of the Cubans’ collective hypochondria, we had to watch for germs and viruses that could cause these things, and wear shoes — real shoes — all the time. To me, it was a real hardship not to go barefoot in the house. But my slippahs, which were the only things that really made sense to me day to day in the tropics, were a source of such embarrassment that one night, Dionisio’s mother asked Rocky to please suggest I not wear them as we headed out to a nearby casual restaurant.

“Just wear sandals,” my sister said, amused.

But it was all I could do to keep from laughing when Tom Mahler showed up that night with his feet encased in the dirtiest, most disgusting rope sandals I’d ever seen. Halfway to the restaurant, the left one came apart and he just chucked it to the side of the street (trash cans were virtually nonexistent, even in touristy areas like Chinatown, so that Rocky and I, our American habits ingrained, tended to walk around with handfuls of trash at any given moment) and kept going with only one sole protected.

“Oh, Tom, you can’t do that, it’s littering!” Rocky said, picking up the sandal remains between her thumb and index finger.

The entire family looked on in horror at each step Mahler took, warning him about upcoming dog feces, unidentified animal remains, vomit, and other revolting obstacles.

“You’re such gringas!” he exclaimed, motioning to the rest of the family for support with a flail of his arms. In response, they just nodded again.

“Tom—” I started to say, but Rocky elbowed me so hard, I almost lost my balance.

“That’s not ordinary trash — it’s hemp, it’s organic, it’ll decompose,” he explained.

“Not for a long time, Tom, not for a long time,” Rocky said.

She carried that thing all the way to the restaurant, dumped it in the kitchen trash, and, because she was carrying her own bar of soap in her purse, was able to scrub her hands before settling down to eat. The entire family maneuvered to avoid Tom Mahler, so he sat next to me, his left leg across his right knee, the germ-infested bottom of his foot bumping into me and leaving viral traces on my skirt throughout the meal.

“Careful or you’ll have an empacho,” Dionisio said, his chin pointing at the huge chicken and rice dinner before me.

In all honesty, I could hardly eat. Rocky’s jab had had its effect. “I thought you needed a regular diet of Cuban food to be vulnerable to those,” I shot back, trying to be jovial.

“Well, you’re on your way,” Mahler said, grinning malevolently, “don’t you think? Soon you’ll be like your sister, Cuban again, wanting to stay. Then you’ll have a fully rounded Cuban diet all the time.”

Infuriatingly, the family — Dionisio and Rocky included — again just smiled, their lips zipped.

It was just a few days before my scheduled departure (a long, roundabout trip from Havana to Kingston to Miami to Houston to San Francisco to, finally, Honolulu) when Dionisio and Rocky announced a party.

“But not just any party — a luau!” said Rocky.

“A luau?” I asked. Was she kidding?

“Turns out,” she said, all excited, “that Eddie Kamae is in Havana for a world music festival. Dionisio found out and invited him to dinner.”

“So maybe he’d like a typical Cuban fiesta or something instead of another luau, don’t you think?”

Rocky waved me off. “Don’t you see? It’s such a great opportunity to show the family a little bit of Hawaiian culture. Eddie’s probably getting plenty of Cuban everything from his festival hosts.”

When we told Tom Mahler, he immediately filed his protest: He thought it inappropriate that Rocky and I — non Hawaiians — should be leading anyone through a Hawaiian experience. “You yourselves have gone out of your way to tell me you’re not Hawaiian, and now you’re pretending to be our cultural tour guides?”

“Don’t worry, Tom,” Rocky said with a wink, “it won’t be authentic, but diluted and commercialized — as much as we can do that here.”

To my surprise, the family laughed openly and Mahler, stuck somewhere between pride and embarrassment, shrunk a little.

To prepare, we put together the Hawaiian supplies I’d brought and went out searching for a few other necessary items, like flowers and pork. Raúl was negotiating for a lively little piglet raised on a neighbor’s balcony when, unable to keep silent anymore — it’d been almost a month of putting up with Tom Mahler and following everybody else’s passive example — I confronted Dionisio and Rocky.

“What’s the deal with Mahler? I mean, why do you guys even put up with him?”

Dionisio grinned. “Malía, you don’t believe he’s part of the family?”

“No, I don’t think you guys can stand him — which is why I don’t get why you let him think that he is.”

Rocky cleared her throat. “It’s another one of those Cubed things,” she said.

“What did you call him when I first explained it to you?” Dionisio asked her.

“Pet foreigner,” Rocky said in English.

“That’s right, he’s our pet foreigner,” Dionisio repeated.

“Your what?”

“Our pet foreigner,” he repeated, relishing the English through his laughter. “It’s every Cuban family’s aspiration to have one. See, we need someone who can travel back and forth, bring us things, bring us dollars, and remind us that there is another world.”

“One of the pet foreigner’s obligations,” Rocky chimed in, “is also to give hope.”

“And you don’t count?” I asked pointedly.

“Sometimes, yes,” she said.

“But sometimes not,” said Dionisio, now screwing up his face with mock concern. “Because, frankly, these days she doesn’t bring in much more in real dollars than a well-connected Cuban. Yes, we get wasabi and ukulele music, but no hulas — did I tell you? — she won’t grace us with a hula—”

“That’s her job,” Rocky said, her chin aiming at me.

“I’m not dancing hula here,” I said. “But — wait — you’re going off subject.”

“Ah, yes, the pet foreigner. How is my English, eh?”

“Diiiiiiiiiiiiiooooooooonisio!”

“Yeah,” he said as he and Rocky laughed it up, slapping their chests and snapping their hands in the air. “Okay, so what can we do? He attached himself to us and we realized, here’s one lonely little leftist. So we took him in. Don’t get me wrong — there’s real affection there. And he is well-intentioned. You see, he really believes. He believes so much that he just can’t see why we need him.”

“Or that you might be using him.”

“Malía!” Rocky said, aghast.

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you see that it’s mutual?” Rocky argued. “Don’t you see how Dionisio’s family authenticates his experience?”

“Sure, but—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Dionisio literally put himself between us. He turned to Rocky. “Why pretend? Of course we’re using him.” Then he turned to me. “His services are invaluable, what he does for our hospitals and clinics. Do you realize every clinic in Chinatown has a computer now? And us — well, before Rocky, how else would we get medicine? Who would negotiate for us, even with other Cubans? Here people do for foreigners — for strangers — what they would not do for their own mothers.”

Just then, Raúl stepped up, the squirming pink piglet in his arms, its unsuspecting mouth turned up. “Beautiful, no?” he asked as we left, bopping his head cheerfully.

There is a terrible joke in Cuba which people perversely insisted on telling me over and over while I was visiting: A global conference is being held on the future for young people. The CNN reporter — all foreign TV reporters in Cuba seem to have morphed into CNN — asks a young Belgian, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The girl says, “A chemist!” The CNN reporter poses the question to a Chinese kid, who says, “An investment banker.” Finally, the CNN reporter asks the Cuban delegate. “Me?” says the boy, inevitably named Pepito. “I want to be a foreigner!”

The joke’s tragedy is not just that it underscores Cuba’s obsequious deference to outsiders in order to survive, but also that it betrays history: Cubans — and my sister’s the proof — have never wanted to be anything but Cuban. Scattered to New York and Madrid, Tampa and Luanda, Miami, Moscow, and Honolulu, they hold onto their Cubanness with audacious caprice.

But bizarrely, in Cuba, I told Rocky, it seemed Cubanness was diminished.

“No, no, no,” she said, annoyed.

“C’mon, it seems like Tom Mahler’s more interested in Cuba, more Cubed than most people here!”

She sighed. “He’s a necessary evil, in spite of his good intentions. And that’s just for now. You’re missing the point. The idea, Malía, is that Cuba not turn into Hawai’i.”

“Hawai’i? Please... there are worse fates.” I was appalled.

And now it was Rocky’s turn to be amused. “Really? Because back in Hawai’i nee, hearing you and Mami and Papi, but especially you — with your Hawaiian language classes and your sovereignty speeches and your Pele — Hawai’i isn’t exactly paradise.”

“By comparison? Are you out of your mind?”

“Aren’t you the one who’s always worried that native Hawaiians will be wiped out by development and ‘immigration’ from the mainland? I mean, isn’t that part of the tragedy, that native Hawaiians are already outnumbered in their own land?”

“But Rocky, there are no native Cubans!”

“There are no indigenous, Malía, but what the hell do you think we are? What the hell do you think I am?”

As it turned out, the luau came off fairly well. I’d brought spices for the pork, and between Dionisio and Rocky they’d found taro leaves and something they said was a butterfish (it didn’t look quite right to me but Rock swore by it). The Cubans were skeptical, made faces about it, but polished off every last shred of meat nonetheless. We also made lomi lomi salmon and cold mac salad, which didn’t seem to do much for them, but they were knocked out by our fried rice — not Hawaiian or Chinese but a Mercado family recipe that included all of those crazy influences (like huli huli sauce and chorizo). Tom Mahler ate with enthusiasm.

“So long as he keeps eating, nothing to worry about,” Raúl whispered to me as his chin aimed at the family’s pet foreigner. The guests lounged about the courtyard, oblivious to the plastic-covered cement bags lining the walls.

Most importantly, everybody loved Eddie and Myrna Kamae, both of them impish and kind: Eddie’s twinkly eyes nodded approvingly while sipping from his iced red wine, Myrna bravely trying on new Spanish phrases and laughing heartily. With them was Eddie’s accompanist, a boyishly handsome Hawaiian named Ocean, who the Cubans adored for his playfulness. After much eating and drinking, Eddie slipped his ukulele into his arms and — the Cubans again unabashedly skeptical — graced his fingers across its strings. As he played, the Cubans’ astonishment was obvious: Their mouths eased open as Eddie pulled sounds from that little box that not one of them had ever imagined. Clearly loving the way Eddie had upended expectations, Ocean grinned and followed on guitar. All the while, Mahler’s eyes glistened without his usual malice.

“He plays the cuatro so well!” exclaimed Raúl, reappropriating the ukulele, if not for Cuba then for the generalized Caribbean.

I don’t know how long Eddie and Ocean played. I know that I was flush with satisfaction, the closest to happiness I’d been since arriving in Havana. I looked up, past the enthralled group, leaned on Myrna’s shoulder, and found the sky. Like Honolulu, Havana glowed right back at the stars, a duel of lights canceling each other out in a shimmer. The air smelled of a dark sweetness, like molasses. And the faces, familiar to me now — even Mahler — were, I knew even then, the touchstones of future memories.

“Ake a e kamanao e ike maka,” sang Eddie and Ocean. I closed my eyes and joined them: “Ia Waipi’o e kaulana nei.” The mind yearns to see / Waipi’o so famous.

“What’s the song about?” Dionisio asked, leaning across Myrna to me. I looked around: Rocky was nowhere to be seen. He smiled, unconcerned.

In English, I explained Waipi’o: its fecundity, its five deafening waterfalls, the tension between the water’s beauty and our volcano, how Pakaalana — the ancient place of refuge nestled in the valley that protected innocents during wars — is now nothing but a rumor. I didn’t tell him about all the weekend camping trips my family took to the Big Island and Waipi’o, trespassing onto what is now private land to look for Pakaalana and other signs of Hawai’i’s glorious past. We’d pick opihi — those stubborn little limpets that attached themselves to rocks — by prying them off with knives. I loved them grilled over an open fire but Papi would just salt them, like the few natives left on the islands, and pop them into his mouth whole and fresh.

“Huli aku nana i ke kai uli,” I whisper/sang, my eyes closed — Turn and gaze at the dark sea. “Ua nalo ka nani o Pakaalana...” The beauty of Pakaalana has vanished.

When I lifted my lids, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: Rocky was dancing hula, dipping and swaying, her torso liquid, fingers fluttering. Eddie, Myrna, and Ocean beamed but she was somewhere else: back in Hawai’i, back in misty Waipi’o perhaps.

“Haina ia mai ana ka puana / Ua ike kumaka ia Waipi’o,” we sang as she turned her back, its slope a wave. Let the refrain be told / The mind has seen Waipi’o.

The Cubans went nuts. They clapped and shouted. Rocky laughed. Then the policeman cousin started tapping out a rhythm on his chair. It had the same wooden tone as Hawaiian meles but I realized immediately he was building a rumba, the beat hiccupping, sparkling. Dionisio palmed his thighs. Mahler, who was squatting during Rocky’s hula, stood up and raised his arms in jubilation, as if the Cubans had won some kind of competition.

I thought Rocky would stop then. But instead, she stamped her feet, twisted her heels like they do on Moloka’i. “A la ’a ko ko i ke a u!” she shouted in Tom Mahler’s direction, and he grinned, not realizing she was taunting him.

“That means a swordfish is jabbing you,” Myrna explained, and Dionisio nodded but I wasn’t sure he got it.

Rocky bent her knees, thrust her pelvis, and aimed her ass at him. While I sat agape, she mercilessly slid from hula ku’i to guaguancó.

“Eh mamá / eh mamá,” the Cubans chanted.

Now it was Eddie, Ocean, and Myrna who stared wide-eyed.

Suddenly, everybody was up — Raúl had acquired actual bongos, Dionisio’s mother was scratching at a gourd with a thin stick, and a crowd of friends and neighbors I’d barely noticed before were singing. I couldn’t understand any of it. It was as if they’d excised every consonant from the words. Out on the floor, Dionisio and Rocky mesmerized us with their turns and twirls, their busy feet. When Raúl finally slapped the bongos to conclude the dance, his hands like starfish across the skins, there was explosive applause.

Dionisio leaned on my sister and put his moist cheek on her shoulder for an instant, then made a motion for us to calm down. “We have... we have an announcement,” he declared in English between labored breaths. Rocky leaned down and giggled something into his ear. I noticed Mahler, his arms across his chest.

“You know, when Raquel and I met, well, it was like east and west, the four cardinal points coming together, all the distances reduced to nothing,” Dionisio said.

I translated his Spanish/English mishmash as best I could for our guests from Hawai’i.

“We promised to be together and, you know, she threw her lot in with us, she stayed here... in Havana!”

“That’s love!” interjected a sarcastic neighbor, and everyone laughed.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dionisio continued, so giddy he seemed a little drunk. “That is love... Hey, she has bathed with just one cup of water!”

Rocky nodded, bending at the waist to acknowledge the Cubans’ spontaneous applause.

“And stood in line with us for eggs!”

The Cubans continued with their merriment but Mahler was shaking his head now, scowling.

“What’s wrong, huh?” I asked him.

“What’s special about any of that? Cubans do that every day, it’s ridiculous that they’re making such a big deal out of her doing what they do every single day here as part of the revolutionary project.”

“God, Tom, do you ever get off your soapbox?”

“This is wrong,” he said.

“Relax,” I told him. But when I went to uncross his arms, he shook me off. “Oooookay,” I said, and backed away.

“So now... after three years, it is my turn,” Dionisio continued.

“Yes!” Rocky said in English, pumping her fist in as American a gesture as I’d ever seen on her.

“My Cuban sister... disappeared!” I joked with Myrna. “Who is this woman?”

“That’s right, that’s right — my turn,” Dionisio repeated. “We’re delirious because we can’t believe it — I got a flancé visa to La Yuma — and the Cuban government is letting me go!”

Dionisio’s mother bit her trembling lip and held her hands to her heart. I could feel her prayer of gratitude even in the wild screaming and hugging that was now taking place.

“How is it possible? You’re a doctor! The government doesn’t let doctors go to the U.S.!” Raúl exulted.

“It was some weird mistake,” Rocky said, her own limbs now echoing Dionisio’s mother, her hands folded over each other right at her chest, reaching to her throat. “The papers somehow — we don’t know, we don’t care — they left off Dionisio’s occupation.”

Raúl shushed her, his fingertip to his lips. “There are Moors on the coasts,” he said, indicating the guests.

“And ideologically correct pet foreigners,” I muttered under my breath.

“We’re just going to try it, that’s all — see how we feel in La Yuma,” Dionisio said, clearly backpedaling. “It’s an—”

But he didn’t finish. Tom Mahler had stepped up, his red face within inches of Rocky. “Try it, my ass,” he fumed. “You’re trying to take him, you’re trying to take him from his country, from his family — from all the people who need him. Are you happy now? Are you? Because I, for one, am not just going to stand by and let you get away with this! First thing tomorrow morning, you’ll see!”

Before anybody could figure out what had actually transpired, Mahler rocketed out of the courtyard to his room. The force of the door closing slammed into us like a storm surge.

Dionisio took a step after him but Raúl, for the first time showing the iciness needed to do his policeman’s job, put a hand on his chest and effortlessly held him back. “Forget him,” he hissed. “You’re going to La Yuma. We can take care of this; we don’t need him anymore.”

Eddie, Myrna, and Ocean left sometime after that, and though I offered to help clean up, everyone told me to go on to bed, since the next day would be my last in Cuba and I still had much souvenir shopping to do. I decided I was tired enough to accept. Sometime near dawn, when I made a somnambulistic trip to the bathroom, I heard voices and what seemed like a scuffle, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The noisy spillage into the courtyard made everything fuzzy, and at that moment I was instantly nostalgic for the breezy peace of Honolulu. It was definitely time to head home.

The next morning, Tom Mahler did not emerge to make breakfast. Without need of notice, everyone of their own accord made coffee and made do with the bread rolls from the ration book. When I emerged from my room, I heard Dionisio muttering as he and Raúl left for the day. I confess I was thrown off — I’d gotten used to Mahler’s breakfasts, which were just scrumptious.

“Where’s Tom?” I asked Rocky, who was making coffee when I stumbled into the kitchen. She shrugged and looked away.

“That was pretty crazy last night.”

She nodded and poured us each a demitasse of espresso. She was still in her bathrobe, her hair a mess.

“Have you seen him yet? Has he said anything?”

She shook her head.

“My God, are you mute now?”

Rocky shook her head again. “No, I’m just... tired,” she said, and I saw through her morning hair that her eyes were red-rimmed.

“Hey, what’s going on? Everything all right?” I settled an arm around my sister’s shoulder.

She finally turned her sad face toward me. “Rough night, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I’ll say... What an asshole Mahler was.” I didn’t mention Raúl; I still didn’t know what to make of that. But I’d written quite the journal entry about the whole episode.

Rocky moved away from me, her free hand massaging her temple.

“I mean, there was just no excuse for that, none at all.”

“Malía, please...” Rocky said softly.

“What? C’mon, that was not appropriate pet foreigner behavior.”

“I’m begging you...” She scrunched up her face, as if my words were lacerating her brain.

“Okay, okay, “ I said, gulping my espresso and going off to shower and pack. “But honestly...”

Tom Mahler did not show up for the rest of the day. I hung out until about 2 in the afternoon without any sign of him. When I returned many hours later from souvenir shopping (books, CDs, T-shirts, and tchotkes for my parents and friends) out in the scorching heat, I found Dionisio and Rocky in a morbid silence at the kitchen table.

“Who died?” I asked in English.

“Qué...?” Dionisio replied, his face losing all color.

“Malía!” Rocky exclaimed, shooting up from her chair. “It’s just an expression,” she said in Spanish to Dionisio, who seemed on the verge of an anxiety attack.

“What?” I asked.

“Just, please...” But she couldn’t quite finish it. Then she spied my shopping bags. “What’d you get?”

“I’ll show you,” I said, hoping things might lighten up. “Let me change first.” I stuck my foot out and shook it a bit, showing off a shoe I’d borrowed from Rocky. It was flat and relatively comfortable but it still felt alien on my foot. Dionisio smiled weakly.

I dropped the shopping bags on the table and ambled back to my room, past Mahler’s, which remained shut. I thought I smelled a bad patch right at his door — something thick, sulphurous like that breeze that had caught me at the airport the day I arrived. I continued to my room, undid Rocky’s shoes, and put on my slippahs, then grabbed a scrunchy and pulled up my hair. The back of my neck was sticky with sweat. I decided to wash my face and neck and noticed, at a different angle as I passed Mahler’s en route to the bathroom, that his door was slightly open. On the way back to the kitchen, my neck cooled, there was a sliver of view into Mahler’s. Had Tom, who always made himself heard, come back in that split second? I hadn’t heard any voices greeting him. Was it possible Mahler could be tiptoeing about in shame?

I touched my finger to Mahler’s door and gently pushed. The hinges whined. I pulled away, but not before I caught a glimpse of a fully dressed Mahler on the bed, his eyes and mouth open.

“Tom...”

“Malía!” It was a frightened Rocky, with Dionisio right behind her.

“What are you doing?” he asked, grabbing me and pushing us out of the room. I felt his fingers hot on my flesh. His Spanish was so furious I barely understood.

“What...?” Mahler hadn’t stirred. “Hey, I think there’s something wrong.”

“He’s a very sound sleeper,” Dionisio insisted, closing the door to Tom’s room behind us.

I looked to Rocky but she avoided my gaze. “Dionisio, his eyes are open.” I couldn’t conjure anything in Spanish.

“You will wake him,” Dionisio said in English, his voice steely and cold like Raúl’s the night before.

“Malía, let it go, let it go,” Rocky whispered, pulling on my arm, trying to drag me back to the kitchen.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked, angrily yanking myself free from them. “Mahler’s in there, and something’s not right.”

“Malía, calm down,” Rocky said, but she was unsteady, glancing over at Dionisio for reassurance.

I suddenly remembered the noises from the night before, the scuffle. “Tom!” I yelled toward Mahler’s room. “Tom, can you—”

Dionisio grabbed me, his hand over my mouth as we struggled, all the while whispering fiercely in Spanish at Rocky, who didn’t seem to know whether to help him or me.

“Qué pasa aquí?” a voice rumbled behind us. Raúl pulled Dionisio off me. “What are you doing?” he demanded. He was wearing his uniform, his hand on the service revolver tucked into his holster.

“She went inside,” Dionisio said defensively, and in Spanish, all the while pointing at me. “She was disturbing Tom.”

I started to say something but Raúl put up his official policeman’s hand. “Enough,” he commanded. He turned to me. “Tom is a deep sleeper, and a monster when he’s awakened by noise.”

“But—” In a month, I’d seen and heard many things about Mahler but this was not one of them.

“Malía, shut up!” Rocky interrupted. She’d made fists and was holding them out in front of her now, her eyes shut hard, no longer able to keep back tears.

“For God’s sake — something is wrong in there,” I insisted. “Don’t you think it’s weird he hasn’t reacted to all this noise? And his eyes were wide open!”

“I will take care of this,” the policeman cousin said, pushing me aside.

He strode purposefully toward Mahler’s door, then stepped inside. We heard him make his way to the bed and back but I noted that he did not call out to Tom or make any kind of attempt to wake him. He emerged from the room in seconds, closing the door behind him.

“He is dead,” he said conclusively.

I gasped. “How do you know?” All three of them were staring at me, their reactions seemingly dependent on mine. I swallowed. “I mean, try waking him,” I persisted. “I thought I heard something last night...”

Raúl, who hadn’t understood a word I said, dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Dionisio, as a doctor” — he underscored the word doctor — “I need you to determine the preliminary cause of death,” he instructed. “I will call the station to file a report and the coroner. You two” — he meant us, Rocky and me — “you will stay out of the way. Do you understand me?”

Rocky nodded but I must have made some other movement because Raúl turned on me with a barely contained rage. “Do you understand?”

Soon the house was filled with cops, paramedics, and gravelooking men and women who talked almost exclusively to Dionisio and Raúl. They glanced now and again at me and Rocky, who paced in the kitchen, her eyes watery (but not crying). Dionisio’s mother wrung her hands, worried about bearing the curse of an American dying under her roof.

“Every foreign journalist in Havana is going to be at the door wanting to know what happened,” she complained, then looked pointedly at me. “Malía, you must remember, if someone — if anyone — asks, nothing happened.”

I nodded, not because I intended to keep that promise (I honestly had no idea what I’d do if anyone asked), but because it was clear that’s what was expected of me. Rocky looked at me approvingly but I wondered, with dread flooding me, how I fit into all this, how I was supposed to deal with it all.

“Do you know what happened?” Dionisio’s mother asked when he came back to the kitchen.

He shook his head. “Probably an embolia,” he said solemnly.

“How old was Tom?” I asked, regaining some of my Spanish.

“I don’t know, in his forties,” Dionisio said. “He was young.”

I stood up from the kitchen table, pushing my feet into my slippahs, and made my way to the courtyard.

I saw the panicked look on Dionisio’s face. “Where are you going?” Rocky asked in English, articulating his fears.

“To get some air,” I said. “I’m not leaving, I’ll be right here.”

Outside, the yellow streetlights poured into the courtyard and obscured the night sky again. I ambled until I found a dark patch, somewhere to stand where I could merge into the shadows and disappear. I leaned against the wall and let my body drop into a squat. All I could think was how very zenzizenzic, how ironic this was: Tom had had a Cuban death, except that his last meal had been our Hawaiian extravaganza. The neighborhood soundtrack of yelling, music, and cars continued unabated. I could see Rocky fidgeting through the kitchen window. I really wasn’t sure I could ever tell my parents about this.

In a moment, there were sounds coming from Mahler’s room. A man and a woman emerged with Tom’s body on a stretcher, wrapped from head to toe in a white sheet that made him look like a cocoon. Dionisio followed with a police officer I hadn’t seen before, while his mother peered from the door to the courtyard, tracing their route.

I waited a bit, just watching the goings-on in the kitchen as if the window were a TV screen. Everyone seemed appropriately sad and worried except Raúl, who I could see was relaxed enough for an occasional laugh. I finally surrendered to the inevitability of going back inside for my last night in Cuba, rappelled up the wall like a crab, and strolled over, the direct light making my vision fuzzy for an instant.

“Malía, there you are,” Dionisio’s mother said.

“Sit down,” suggested Dionisio, leading me to the table.

As my eyes began to clear, I looked for Rocky but saw only Raúl, his cheeks moving as he chewed on something, his arms outstretched in my direction. I redirected my vision to his offering: a plate brimming with garlicky pork chops, shimmering black beans poured over rice, and toasty plantain coasters.

“Eat, Malía,” he ordered.

I nodded but slowly stepped back and away.

Virgins of Regla by Mabel Cuesta

Regla

The emptiness by the wall. Her and her shadow, both escapees, in a panic. Lost now in a place unknown, far from their home in the provinces.

They always knew that Regla, ultramarine, was a place for fishermen and stevedores. Whenever they went there to see the Virgin, they were surprised by the black men who walked past them on their way from the docks, stinking from the dirty sacks.

That dawn, after running from the bitter scene (that’s how she’d remember it for years to come), she feared one of those men from the docks would show up to continue the violation. Afraid they’d confuse her for one of the sacks they hauled, possessed, dragged from the ships to the docks, trucks, roads, or warehouses anywhere on the island. She feared being mistaken for one of those inanimate sacks, prime for theft, expropriation, sale, or scrap.

She had no way of getting home at that hour. She was broke. She had no map with which to orient herself, and worse, she had no idea where exactly she was in the neighborhood. All she wanted to do was go home.

To leave Regla there were always the ferries, with their eternal and tired run all day long and a good part of the night across Havana’s oily, filthy bay. But not at dawn. Dawn in Regla was all silence and fear.

She and her shadow rested against the wall. They became one to try and figure out a way through the terror — the terror provoked by her trembling legs, smeared with a substance that she could not identify. She remembered what she read somewhere — probably Margarite Yourcenar: love’s white blood... could that be it? The viscous substance that drenched her underpants — could that be the blood that Yourcenar talked about in one of her novels? Impossible. The writer had placed the word love next to the image of the white blood. Neither she nor her shadow would confuse the two concepts; they were both excellent readers.

Her shadow could, in fact, tell jokes, recall, for example, the famous Arab telenovela in which, during an unusual dialogue between the barbarous and the civilized worlds, the Muslim man asked the beautiful, kidnapped North American lady in a subordinate tone, And who has asked you for love, Diana Mayo?

She and her shadow relished that scene from the telenovela, which made them and their friends laugh so much because of its kitschy language and its singularly disturbing and maladjusted hero... but this was no time for jokes. Now they needed to understand if that stuff that made her feel wet and broken was in fact the white blood of love. Leaning against the wall, they wanted to determine how the unknown substance had been deposited inside her. They wanted to determine who had extradited her from her peaceful world in the provinces to bring her to this place, and especially to this corner where it was impossible to see the small turret of the chapel in which resided the city’s most loved virgin — her patron.

If we could at least see the steeple, she thought, we’d know which way to walk. If, at the very least, they could reach a small fragment, a miniscule piece of the compound around the Virgin, they’d be saved. The Virgin would protect her shadow and would bring back all that had been taken.

But here at the wall the only things in sight were her and her shadow. They looked at each other with shame because of the twisted projections on the wall, still in the thrall of recent events.

She let herself fall. With her back against the wall, she eased her way down it, and once on the ground, she opened her legs. The substance was still there, lingering. The substance took her back to the memory of a drunk Horacio, his tongue in her ear, saying, Let me suck your tits... Horacio squeezing her against the bed while Michelle brushed her teeth at the bathroom sink. Horacio saying over and over how he wanted to tangle them both with his body, to join them in an infinite night. She was going to say in an infinite night of love, but the words got stuck in her throat and she left it at that.

Michelle, an innocent, would talk to him from the bathroom: My love, let the girl rest... Get her ready for bed and come to our room, I’m waiting.

The girl kicked. The girl had no shadow to defend her then because the house was full of light. The girl cried and hit Horacio so that he’d leave her in peace, so that he’d get off her, so that he would not stick his hard fiesh into her flesh... and Horacio just laughed... Horacio never answered Michelle but rather bit the girl’s mouth. A girl almost as small as Michelle, but more lost, more alone in the storybook wilderness of his mouth and then the neighborhood to which Horacio had brought them.

That’s when she stopped fighting and just let things happen... She decided to pray, but she didn’t know any prayer in its entirety, didn’t know any potent psalms, but she prayed nonetheless — so that Michelle wouldn’t step out of the bathroom and surprise them, so that she wouldn’t have to offer explanations, so that she wouldn’t have to ask forgiveness, that’s what she prayed for.

The only thing left was Horacio whimpering, his continued delirium: Gimme your tits, gimme the milk from your tits, lemme drink it, lemme... and then silence. Silence and an acute pain in her vagina. A sharp pain that hours later was still present. A pain that made her shadow bend over while the two of them ran through the blackness of the night in Regla, looking for the Virgin. A lacerating pain, acidic and nauseous. A pain that made her breathing short, a pain that made it impossible to shake off her worsening, perpetual tremors.

Michelle didn’t come out of the bathroom. Michelle never knew what Horacio did to her. Michelle found him on the floor, without his pants but with his underwear undeniably on. Michelle was so determined that he be a part of things that she refused to look at the condition of the girl’s bed. Michelle did not see the disoriented eyes of her friend, nor did she feel her tremors or the sharpness in her lower abdomen. She only had eyes for him: Sweetness, you’re so drunk.

Nor did Michelle ever understand why the girl used the pretext of getting some fresh air to go out the door and never come back. Years later, they would talk about these things. Years later, the girl would say she had a panic attack and decided that the best time to visit the Virgin on the shores of the bay would always be right then, at dawn. Years later, Michelle would feign belief in this excuse, as if she was actually convinced, then change the subject.

But in those wee hours, she and her shadow were not thinking about Michelle. They imagined as they wailed against the wall that Michelle had been devoured by Horacio, swallowed by his dark mouth. His mouth and the streets were part of the same image. Horacio’s mouth extended the length of the neighborhood, through all of Regla. He couldn’t live anywhere else in Havana. He and Regla belonged to each other. His mouth and this ultramarine district, black lines on the same color strip. Black like the sea and the Virgin; the only black woman adored on this island.

They adored her too. Ever since Emilio, right smack in the middle of a trance, had told them that the Virgin was their mother too, she and the shadow had made intermittent pilgrimages to the chapel just to leave white flowers at her altar. Trips made on the mythic ferry, each one to view the appearance of the black mother in the midst of the stench, in that bay saturated by oil; so many journeys to Horacio’s neighborhood without ever going as far as his house out of sheer terror that that night could be repeated; so many restrictions; so many pleas to the mother-virgin-black-woman-Yemayá-patron-of-Havanaguardian-of-fishermen-docks-stevedores-seas-pregnanciesfury-storms-peace-and-pools-of-water. So much begging: Please don’t abandon me, please don’t leave me, don’t leave me, oh Virgin, men’s anger is aimed at my sex; liberate me from heartlessness and wildness; liberate me from lack of affection; be my mother; make me virginal always, before and after each birth, so that each one leaves my womb untouched.

There was so much supplication to the small black woman dressed in that intense blue, to the talismanic stone that Emilio had given them the day of the baptism — deadline day to name guardian angels — only to falter in the end, to let Horacio drag her along with Michelle; to leave a celebration that could not be postponed, and the long list of acquaintances who kept leaving, finally abandoning her in the vestibule full of fear, knowing that once Michelle went off to the bathroom there was no going back, that the only relief would be exposure to that darkened place, chock full of thieves from the docks, workers, traffickers in whatever merchandise filled their hands or their bellies; all that praying, for this. It wasn’t fair.

Emilio said the black mother was obsessed with justice. Emilio, godfather-father-big-brother-blood-of-her-blood poisoned against other men, said their mother would never abandon them, especially if they were in Regla, her home, the ultramarine. But on this airless night, as dawn neared, the only thing she and her shadow had to hold onto was a wall that left them exposed. It was so high they couldn’t possibly climb it and try to guess the way to the chapel.

If only we could hear a siren, they thought, any kind of sound from the boats, a sign from their mother that would allow them to slow the infinite tremors in their legs, in their belly, in the head that could barely sustain itself. Her body continued to lean against the white wall, the screen on which her disharmony was amply projected. Her shell of a girl, broken, deflowered, stained... This wall that took in her shadow just to show her how naked she was under the only streetlight in the area. If only we could hear a siren, they thought again.

But the silence insisted on swallowing all hope. Silence crowned her, covered her, enclosed her, surrounded and embraced her; the silence whispered to her: I am as divine as you’ll ever get, only to me should you direct your prayers; only I will be your guide in this city that has never wanted you, little provincial girl, simple, simple country girl, backwards girl, so backwards, adorer of false gods, lover of women who will not save you. I am Almighty Silence, I’m the man you cannot hurt, now you see me, now you don’t, but I’m always here... Let me caress you and your terror will be different...

Silence overwhelmed them. Silence like a million voices circled them. Silence through their viscera; silence through their body in a long loop. Long and sonorous, like the siren they so wanted to hear. More and more voices accumulating.

The voices took them to the very edge of consciousness, a total disconnection between flesh and the senses. The silence screamed its insults and they closed their eyes. They allowed themselves to be dragged under by the perpetual noise of the absolute silence coming from the place where they’d lost track of the Virgin. They were going to drop to the sidewalk forever, remain stuck to the asphalt; they wanted a small death, definitive; their own screams stuck in their throat; they wanted to ask the silence to stop, wanted a blue cape to rescue them, to lift them above the houses with red-tiled roofs, the ruined edifices; a blue maternal cape, a refuge that enveloped them together, that transformed them in mid-flight, so that when she finally opened her eyes, she would find herself at the edge of the docks, ready to traverse the bay on the morning’s very first ferry.

Translation by Achy Obejas

Olúo [2] by Arnaldo Correa

Casablanca

Eulogio Gaytán realized that after he lost his hearing, he could penetrate more deeply into the folds of his clients’ and godchildren’s[3] thoughts and sexual desires. He realized that because words can be deceiving, they can take you down the wrong paths, they can hide the truth in a warp of sound. That’s when he grasped that he’d reached the highest level in his ministry as a babalao. From that moment on, his deafness was no longer a punishment come late in life, a life dedicated to pursuing happiness, health, and the wellbeing of society’s most humble and least appreciated folks. All of a sudden, he understood it was a gift from Orula at the end of an existence that had been plagued with the same misery and deprivations as those of his flock. The absolute silence now allowed him a greater balance, a greater closeness with the Eternal Father, who had given him the gift of divination, and the cosmic energy that put such astonishing words in his mouth.

He was well aware of his goddaughter Elodia’s movements as he tried to determine if this was another of her long pauses filled with thoughts, tranquility, and suggestions from eyes of singular beauty, or if she was finished telling her story. At the beginning of his deafness he’d tried to lip read, but the effort of following each word actually distanced him from the conversation’s real meaning, so he’d stopped trying and began to concentrate on the language used by other parts of the body: the infinite facial expressions; the revealing light, intensity, and expression of the eyes; the hands’ flights and the movements of the feet and legs, which said so much about a person’s mood; the tension in the muscles and the breath’s rhythm, which betrayed the most intimate feelings... All of those things came together in his mind, along with conscious and unconscious memories of the river of people who’d consulted him during a life dedicated to solving other people’s problems; all those things said so much more than words.

Now, one of his most devoted goddaughters was in anguish over something no doubt terrible, since she was a strong person who only came to see him about important things. She had grown up in the home of a refined and prosperous family where her mother had been a domestic worker. The owners of the house had raised her as the daughter they’d never had. She’d learned good manners from childhood; she’d studied at select schools until she’d fallen into this grave crisis.

She had been brought to Gaytán years before by a godson who was already famous as an oriaté, a diviner, and who was considered deeply knowledgeable about the science of seeing the future. Gaytán’s disciple had been trying to untangle the girl’s problems without success. He told Gaytán that all of the girl’s difficulties had begun after the owner of the house where she lived, Dr. Casals, a well-known lawyer, had died abruptly during a party in his home. The forensic pathologist had diagnosed a myocardial infarction, but back then all sudden deaths had been diagnosed that way. The oriaté confessed that he’d gone to investigate and the widow had told him she was certain her husband had been poisoned. According to her, there had been too many important people at the party for the police to open an investigation into each and every one of them. “Yes, of course Casals had enemies — what famous lawyer doesn’t have lots of enemies?”

Since that time, the girl had suffered from terrible nightmares. She opted to stay awake all the time by taking pills, ruining her health in the process. The oriaté was convinced the dead man was one of the clues to the case, since his Diloggún shell-throwing ritual had turned up four and five, Eyiolosunoché by way of Osobbo: The dead man was looking for someone to take with him. Moreover, whenever the oriaté consulted the oracle through the coconut shells, the letter Oyékun kept coming up in the girl’s readings, four shell pieces facing down, definitively signaling that one of the dead wanted to talk, but all efforts to establish communication had been unsuccessful. It seemed he was a very backwards spirit, unaware of his own situation, something that happened often with the souls of those who died unexpectedly.

In the first reading that Gaytán did for Elodia, he was left astonished and perplexed by the ípkuele’s[4] revelations. For the first time in many days, the girl slept, falling gently facedown on Gaytán’s chest immediately after the reading. He cancelled the rest of his appointments for the day and remained there, without moving, watching over the girl’s dreams until the following morning. When she awoke, he saw the smile on her face, those bright eyes that he’d later see furious, in love, and hateful.

Elodia’s physical and psychic states were horrible. It was imperative to act immediately; Gaytán recommended she be given to Olokun[5] immediately so she could get her strength back and ease her ailments. But her troubles dictated only one possible solution: The young woman would have to undergo the Kari Osha and live by the strict mandates set for her by the orisha who ruled her destiny.

Making good use of the fact that he’d already scheduled a spiritual possession by Orula, Gaytán and three other babalaos decided the girl was a daughter of Oyá Yansa, the orisha queen who reigned over cemeteries, lightning, winds, and storms; she was also Changó’s lover. Gaytán gave Elodia to Margarita, a very experienced and smart santera of the highest order, so that she could be her godmother for the Kari Osha, the ceremony in which the saint is given to her, or “made,” as it’s commonly called.

Elodia then began to prepare for this great event, in which the initiate is born again and the orisha receives her in the appropriate ceremonial way, promising to protect her in this new life. But whoever is reborn must commit to the rules of their celestial father or mother, and those determinations are made in the Book of Itá, on the “middle day” of the Kari Osha.

After receiving the Olokun, the young woman had faltered at first, dazed, as if absent from the natural world, tormented by visions she didn’t dare describe. During that time, Gaytán was at his family home in the Escambray mountains, where his centenarian grandmother had just passed away, and so he was unable to help with the new crisis. After two weeks of intense work with the sick young woman, however, Margarita managed to reanimate her spirit and make the proper connection with her sponsoring orisha.

For long afterward, everyone in Margarita’s house remembered “the middle day” of that initiation, when the babalaos consulted the Book of Ífa. Without any sign of her prior illness, a finely dressed Elodia, on her queenly throne, received her friends, godchildren, and non-initiated friends who came by the house. These were left dumbfounded by the beauty and majesty she projected even before turning thirteen years of age. They all left deeply moved, awed by the bright vision, as if a real goddess had sat on that make believe throne.

It wasn’t until many years later that Gaytán realized that Margarita had actually given Elodia to a different goddess of the dead, Yewá, instead of the one he had thought was appropriate, Oyá. He considered this a terrible mistake, which doomed Elodia to a life without sex or children; the daughters of Yewá cannot have sexual relations without risking death or dementia. Margarita’s action had been a grave transgression, because he had been precise when he told her about the infallible dictates during the spiritual possession by Orula.

Gaytán immediately sent for the santera, who refused to explain her actions and bid farewell after a bitter argument.

“You babalaos think you know everything, but it’s only us, the santeros, who can perform the ceremony to connect with the right orisha, that’s our responsibility,” she said. “I gave her to Yewá for a very powerful reason that you, you silly old man, couldn’t divine. There is no mistake. I know what I’m doing.”

As time passed, Margarita appeared to have been right. The girl’s previously fierce, rebellious character seemed to get sweeter. Her health improved to the point where she was leading a normal life, and she seemed happy, though she was destined to live alone. Yet Gaytán was never convinced; there was too much fire in her to be Yewá’s daughter. And although she was calm, she had not found spiritual peace or the deeper happiness she should have attained. He believed that behind her apparent humility and the simplicity appropriate to Yewá’s devotees, there lurked the fury, appetites, and passions typical of the daughters of Oyá. Why did Margarita accuse him of not understanding why she’d done what she’d done?

Now Elodia was before him again, explaining why she’d come back. Through her fingers folding and unfolding one by one as she spoke, the pauses in the rhythm of her breath, the intensity of her facial expression, and the excitement betrayed by her nipples at certain moments, he’d come to understand that there were three important problems, all springing from the same cause: His goddaughter was in love, she craved sex, she was burning with need. Her desire stole her sleep and was disrupting her health. She had come to him as a last resort.

Gaytán got up with the aid of his caguairán wood walking stick. He took two steps toward the window in the little room where he received his godchildren and clients. He surveyed the blackened tile rooftops of the neighborhood down below, and focused on a ship unloading coal at the dock. He took notice of the passengers getting off the ferry that had just docked. He watched the bay for a long while and finally gazed up at the horizon, at the immensity of the sea where Yemayá reigned... As always, he thanked his father Orula for conserving his sight, augmented now by the memory of the clear and vibrant siren sound from the ships coming and going from the bay; the noise of the people getting off and on the ferry that came and went from Casablanca to Old Havana; the crashing of the waves against the Malecón...

Two neighboring women, employees of the Observatorio Nacional on their way up the concrete stairway to their jobs at the top of the hill, stopped to catch their breath and waved hello to him. Gaytán came out of his daze and waved back. Now that he could no longer go up and down that stairway, the only way to get to his house, his life had been reduced to the living room where he spent his mornings, the room in which he slept, the good-sized kitchen, and the terrace, which was the real heart of this place he loved so much. It was there that his clients and godchildren patiently waited for their appointments with him, sitting on the rocks with flowers sprouting here and there, in the shade of the great ceiba tree, or in the chairs that lined the hallway, much wider because it led to the back.

Gaytán quickly turned his head and saw that Elodia was waiting for him. Then, as he often did, he began to speak when things came to him. Sometimes even he didn’t understand the relationship between what he was saying and the problem he was treating. But those were the words Orula put in his mouth and his job was to transmit them to his clients and godchildren, because Orula never said anything without a reason.

“I’m old. My memory plays games with me, forgets what happened just an instant ago but remembers details from my childhood. I think I see my father walking down a dusty road in the Escambray hills, to San Juan, where we went every year during the summer to visit family. So you want to know what life’s about, son? he said as he looked at me and smiled. Come, we’re going to follow that little stream of water and you’ll see... He lifted the bag with our provisions onto his shoulders, took my hand, and we began to walk, following the stream which flowed eagerly around the rocks and down the hill. At sunset the little stream was now a creek. In a quiet area, we fished for langostinos and cooked them in an old can of Spanish sausages that my father had brought in his bag. We ate them with salt and lemon from a tree that grew nearby. Dessert was guava paste with homemade white cheese. Life can be so marvelous! I can still taste those things... We slept at the foot of a waterfall, with the sound of the crashing all through the night. We woke at sunrise. That day we walked a great deal, always following the rush of water as it became stronger, until we reached a little town in the middle of the Escambray mountains. The stream had become the powerful Agabama River, which was churning everywhere we looked, dragging rocks from the shore, or from very far away, bringing down tree branches, animals caught by surprise... We camped below a cliff, by the water, beneath a very high bridge that connected the town and the sugar plantation. It was incredible to see the audacity and force of the waters as they hurled themselves off the cliff, and how they roared. I was awed and frightened. I’d never seen a waterfall of such magnitude nor heard such a terrible sound.”

Gaytán sat down again, looked for a moment at Elodia, and then continued with his story.

“From that point, we followed the train tracks that bordered the gorge the Agabama had carved into the mountains over thousands, perhaps millions, of years. We continued walking for a long time, gazing at the way the deep waters shone as they cut through. My father leapt from one tie to the next, while I tried to balance myself on the tracks, until we finally reached the giant valley in Trinidad. There the river widened, started to slow down, flowed about the sugarcane fields as if it had lost its way, only to surrender its currents to the immensity of the sea. That’s life, my son, my father said, now sitting at the start of another dusty trail. It was the first time I’d seen the ocean and I was mortified.”

Gaytán went quiet; he couldn’t get that blue immensity out of his mind; it kept calling to him, as if the river of his life had finally reached the sea. He was drenched with sweat.

He noticed that Elodia was looking at him with a great deal of worry, still struggling with finding something in his story that addressed her problem. He was convinced his goddaughter would destroy herself if she could not satisfy the passion that was obsessing her. That’s how the gods had made her. Love for his goddaughter was a devastating fire, a fouralarm blaze. She was Oyá’s daughter forced to live with great restraint, contrary to her true nature, subject to the strict rules of the daughters of Yewá. No sir, Orula had not been wrong!

But neither could the santera Margarita be underestimated; he could still feel her screams in his deaf ears: “I gave her to Yewá for a very powerful reason! There is no mistake!”

But to what powerful reason could Margarita be referring? Was she simply trying to avoid explaining? Then Gaytán remembered how disconcerted the oriaté who’d brought Elodia had been over the readings he’d done for her and the dead soul who’d kept coming up. And suddenly everything became clear to Gaytán. How could he have missed it before? What had he been thinking? Why, he really did deserve to have Margarita call him a fool!

“Elodia, my dear, give me your hand, I want to feel the beating of your heart when you answer this next question for me.”

She extended her hand and the old babalao took it between his.

“Now, tell me, why did you poison Dr. Casals?”

Elodia’s face froze for an instant, then hardened. She was quiet for a bit, as if she was asking herself the question for the first time and was searching out her brain for an answer. Then she began to speak, very slowly, so that Gaytán could follow what she said by watching her lips move.

“I had to do it, Godfather! He was going to leave me. He told me to stop going to his room. Do you understand what I mean? Ever since I was a little girl, I’d been getting in his bed with him as soon as his wife left for work. He showed me everything I had to do... Now he wanted the cook’s daughter, who was younger than me... I consulted a santera who threw the coconut shells for me and it came out Eyife, and she said that the orishas told her that we shouldn’t ask about what we already know — that I knew very well what I had to do!”

In other circumstances, Gaytán might have consulted his ípkuele. But he was too old, he’d lost the faith to blindly follow the oracle’s dictates. He felt that his Eternal Father had been filling his heart with doubt even as his mind got wiser — though in the end, mankind can never be God.

He stayed like that a long while, just staring at the four coconut pieces he’d been shaping to use in divination as Elodia told him her troubles. It was from that prodigious fruit that the most effective way to talk to the gods had developed, the best way to ask concrete questions and receive blunt answers. Now he had to ask what to do with Elodia, and he was well aware that this time he could not fail.

He took the four pieces in his hands. He said a brief and silent prayer, and threw the pieces of coconut on the yarey mat in front of him. Two faced down and two faced up. Eyife! The clearest of all the coconut oracle’s letters. An unquestionable yes: You do not ask about what you already know.

“Listen to this, my dear. Oyá, your real mother, says she left you years ago in care of Yewá because it had to be that way,” Gaytán explained. “You have been very good and as a result she will take care of you from now on. But she asks that you not consult her about what to do with this new life she offers you. You need to decide for yourself, and to answer before mankind for whatever it is you do.”

Translation by Achy Obejas

Settling of scores by Oscar F. Ortíz

Cojímar

The rodents are relentless; they’ve been feasting on me for days. Everything hurts inside; I feel close to death, which is good news now. I’m sick of living. I could have had a happy childhood, like anyone else, but it’s not easy to carry the burden of dishonor. My soul weighs on me because I’ve been left alone. Papá and Mamá are not here anymore; they’ve gone on to a better place. I’m in agony but... I laugh.

They think I’m going to give them the satisfaction of pleading for a quick death instead of wasting away from the infected bites from the giant rats that share this stinking cell with me. Oh, how wrong they are! If I cling to this damn existence it’s to pass on the story of my life (even if it’s only to these walls) and how I turned into a killer. Nothing could have been further from my mind, but even killing can seem necessary when life deals us a bad hand. For sure, no one I killed was innocent. Whoever has died by my hand was paying for their sins. Everyone I got rid of had murdered, stolen, snitched, hurt, betrayed, and persecuted. This should be clear.

For what it’s worth, here’s my story...

Cojímar is a tiny town just north of Guanabacoa, which borders Havana to the east. It’s more a neighborhood than a town, although at the time of this story it was home to about 8,000 residents. Cojímar has a beautiful beach and a tiny port which bears the same name. Before the Revolution, it had an active trade in all sorts of supplies — liquor, hardware, and other miscellaneous items. There were clothing stores, shoe stores, and places to buy perfume, jewelry, etc. We had drugstores where we could get any kind of medicine and a druggist who thought he was as qualified as a doctor when it came to filling prescriptions; he’d write the script himself without ever worrying about being wrong.

There is a church, Nuestra Señora del Carmen, named after the town’s patron saint. Her feast is held in July, in splendid weather. The Cojímar River, as beautiful as it is tranquil, empties out to the bay. Right off the port, there’s a fort called El Torreón. It was built in the seventeenth century, then destroyed by the British almost a hundred years later, then restored. It’s the only thing at the port, a huge block of stone looking out at the waters.

The story goes that the town arose from the workers who came to build it, and that before that, there were only indigenous here. I have fond memories of the place because my father would often take me strolling to the port and we’d pause in front of it. Pointing with his index finger, he’d whisper: “Freedom.”

Freedom, for those in the Cuban-Chinese community, is a sacred word.

When the Revolution triumphed, Papá was a prosperous merchant. Soon thereafter, private businesses were integrated by the government and folks who resisted indoctrination, and those who chose not to join the vulgar crowds, were persecuted. One night when I couldn’t get to sleep, I heard a heated argument between my parents, although back then I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. It wasn’t the first time, the argument actually repeated itself frequently, and none of the three of us could get any rest, although they never knew I was eavesdropping on them. My father and various other Chinese businessmen were preparing to escape by boat behind the backs of the government dupes. The idea was to flee to the United States with whatever they could get off the island. Of course, the treasure was considerable; we Chinese are a hardworking people and know how to manage things. We’ve shown that everywhere we’ve ever emigrated.

Since it was a fairly dangerous proposition, not exempt from tragedy, all the conspirators had decided to talk to their spouses and explain that they needed to stay on the island with their children until the men could get to the United States and file legal claims to bring them over. As my mother later told me, she was anguished because she didn’t want to break up the family, even if just temporarily. But Papá convinced her in the end. Well, Papá and the circumstances.

Things got tighter every day, and life got tougher for those who didn’t accept the commander-in-chief’s wild whims. That’s why my mother finally gave in.

But the escape didn’t work out. The coast guard surprised them and they were machine-gunned without mercy when the government’s henchmen ordered them to stop and they refused. My father’s death was a hard knock, though the actual killings weren’t enough for the Communists. They brought the bodies back and laid them at the foot of the imposing Torreón, which my father had so loved. They left them strewn there for twenty-four hours, so that all of Cojímar would learn the lesson. I saw it all; so did my mother.

From that day on, at eleven years of age, I began planning my revenge.

The first thing I did was start to act abnormally. Some people lose their minds after a devastating emotional shock, so no one was really surprised when the Wongs’ only son started behaving oddly. The neighbors would see me in all my foolishness. Some called me an idiot, others a silly little Chinese boy; most of the time, they’d try to reason with me, but I would fake them out with a blank look and a dazed smile. The crueler among them would engage me in mischief and then turn me in; it was never anything serious, just kid stuff.

Once all of Cojímar had me tagged as the neighborhood’s official cretin, I started to cultivate effeminate mannerisms and pretend to be disabled. When puberty arrived, I stopped being the silly Chinese boy and became the little Chinese faggot. All this was fine by me because I wanted to be seen as a completely defenseless creature.

The next step was to locate and study each and every person who had taken part in the massacre. The most dangerous of those responsible was Captain Correa, who everyone called Pirigua (I’ll never know why). Pirigua was a forty-something man, short but sinewy. He drank too much, especially rum, and smoked cigars, helping to project his stereotypical rebel image. He always wore the olive-green uniform of the hated Territorial Militia, wrinkled and marked by sweat stains under his arms, his chest, and knees. Just like every other militia guy I knew, he had a beard and a mustache. Pirigua’s men were cut from the same mold, and they all tried to copy him; Correa, for his party, tried desperately to be the Maximum Leader’s clone.

After the murders, Pirigua became the town’s master. He didn’t hesitate before harassing the widows of those he’d killed, especially those he found most attractive. Unfortunately, my mother was one of these and he was soon installed in my house. My resentment grew by the day... If he’d only known how many times I fantasized about cutting his throat as he snored and slept soundly in my parents’ bed, he would have died from fright. But I knew that if I did it, that’s as far as I would get. The others would outlive my revenge. So I stoically tolerated everything he did to my mother. She hated him as much, or even more, than I did, but played along because of me, because Pirigua never tired of threatening with all he’d do to me if my mother didn’t accept his passions (even if it was reluctantly). So that was our situation.

As time went by, my plans for revenge began to take shape, and once I had it clear in my own head, I started preparing to act on it. The hardest part was getting everybody accustomed to seeing me shovel dirt in a wagon and then run from one end of town to the other with it, making like I was playing at being a construction worker. Initially, I got stopped a few times and they took me down to the town jail, because they were sure I was up to some mischief, but my mother always intervened with Captain Correa and he finally ordered everybody to leave me alone. After all, I was not normal, there was no malice in anything I might do, and my atrophied brain really wasn’t up for delinquent activities. Pirigua’s men left me in peace and I spent the livelong day pushing that wagon full of dirt from one place to another. I always did it around the port, in a fairly orderly fashion that didn’t cause anyone any inconveniences.

What seemed like sheer idiocy to everyone in town was actually quite useful to me. For starters, it made me stronger. I began to develop muscles that, quite frankly, were rather rare for a boy my age. But it also made the militia completely indifferent to my presence, so that eventually none of Captain Correa’s men even looked at me as I went from one place to another with my wagon full of dirt. Whenever anybody stopped to make fun of me, I’d just look at them stupidly and say, “I’m a little Chinese construction worker!” They’d laugh and then let me be. After all, the little foolish Chinese boy was harmless.

Pirigua continued his visits, and when his drunkenness would render him unconscious on the bed, and my mother would run to the bathroom to wash her body and spirit of that jerk’s residue, I’d sit by the bed and contemplate Captain Correa, thinking about all the things I’d do to him when the moment came. Although it may seem unbelievable, this gave me strength to continue with my plans for revenge, because I knew I could keep control of the situation. There was the pig, snoring effortlessly and without an ounce of strength to put up a fight if I picked up a kitchen knife and decided to dismember him alive.

Assimilating that power was addictive, and stimulating. Besides, one thing I’d learned from my father, before the tragedy, was that to put a plan in play, it was best to “see” it first through the prism of the imagination. So, as I sat at the captain’s side while he snored, I’d “see” exactly how I was going to cut him up into little pieces, and how he could do nothing to stop me, just as helpless as my father and his friends had been to stop the militia from gunning them down.

When I killed the first guy and buried him at night, near the port, no one found out. They had no idea that I’d strolled with the dismembered body buried in the mound of dirt in my wagon right under their noses. Who was going to suspect a foolish Chinese faggot? That’s how rumors began to spread that there was a curse on Cojímar. Most people in the know, those who weren’t all that superstitious (like Captain Correa and his remaining henchmen), knew, or believed they knew, that the curse was pure myth... Those “disappeared” militia, the henchmen said, had fled for Miami. The misery they were enduring under the Communist system was pushing them to leave the country and turn their backs on the dictatorship. But neither Correa nor any of the others ever said this publicly; I only knew about it because of some confidences he shared with my mother.

My mother was nobody’s fool, and I’m sure she soon suspected the truth, though she never said a word. I would surprise her sometimes while she was gazing at me; when I’d turn to her and smile with that beatific expression I’d developed as an organic mask, she’d smile too, and something would filter between us without a need to speak directly. That ethereal thread of silent complicity brought us closer together and gave us strength. Mamá understood then that keeping Correa happy was a fundamental part of the game, because it gave her a certain power over him (the most feared man in Cojímar) that we would not otherwise have. And she also understood that this power she had, if used astutely and subtly, could save our lives. That’s why it was such an important part of my plan to keep Pirigua alive until the very end; although that was a hard bargain with myself, for sure. To cope with the situation, I’d imagine Captain Correa like that pig you fatten all year in order to slaughter it at Christmas.

One evening, I noticed my mother was acting different, irritated. Pirigua had taken a trip outside Cojímar for reasons I didn’t know and so we had more space to ourselves. I sat down in the corner of the living room and watched her pace from one end to the other, wringing her hands. I didn’t ask what was going on, but I did smile at her, the same as always, and my eyes invited her to share her torments with me.

She finally decided to let me in on her thoughts, but in keeping with the style we’d established of communicating without talking directly. Mamá approached me and held my hand.

“Come with me, son. Let’s take a little stroll, like when you were younger and your father would take you down to the port.”

She didn’t need to say anything more. Her restlessness had everything to do with our tragedy and revenge. Papá, the port, the walks that always ended up at El Torreón, where my father would pause and point and whisper (with an intense light in his eyes) the word freedom.

I let myself follow her. Mamá took note of the calluses on my hands, the result of the constant back and forth with the weighty wagon, and she caressed me very tenderly, as if with that gesture she could make me understand that she was giving silent assent to my activities. Real Street was deserted, weirdly deserted, as if everybody was hiding from some terrible monster let loose in the neighborhood, looking for someone to devour. Fear floated in the air. In those days, the government wouldn’t stop yakking about a fictitious yanqui invasion which never materialized but which kept everybody on their toes and distracted from the country’s real problems — things like the lack of food, censorship, the total denial of human rights... Actually, why go on? It was always better to blame yanqui imperialism. And the yanquis were coming soon (or so they said)... Fatherland or death and all that.

We arrived at the Port of Cojímar without being bothered, since the days when people made fun of me were now in the past; I had become something of an invisible person, no longer a novelty. We walked holding hands without making any stops until we had circled the port, then went back to Real Street. The afternoon became night. My mother guided me toward El Torreón and I knew in an instant that I needed to sharpen my senses and pay close attention to whatever she said or did, whatever she revealed that was roiling inside her.

“Remember how much your father loved this place?” she asked without waiting for a reply. “Do you know why? In a boat not far from here, the first Chinese arrived in Cuba. They left from a port called Amoy, in the south of China, in the 1840s. The ship was called the Oquendo, it was a Spanish brigantine. The English ruled our land then, and they’d taken it upon themselves to repress our collective spirit, and to addict Chinese youth to opium. Those first exiles that came to Cuba did so under horrendous labor contracts, practically slaves, just like black people.”

She continued: “The hours of forced labor were abusive. Everyone worked in agriculture or as domestics, with a miserable salary of five pesos a month, two sets of tops and pants, a blanket, and two pairs of rope and rubber sandals. The diet consisted of rice, cornmeal, dried beef, codfish, and a few tubers. Those who worked in the countryside lived in barracks where they slept in hammocks made of rope and hemp. It seems crazy, but it feels like we’re going back to those times. In the days of our pilgrim ancestors, the labor contracts were for ten years and then you could go back to your birthplace, if that’s what you wanted, so long as you could pay the passage. But our compatriots didn’t leave. They chose to stay on in Cuban land and make this our home. Sometimes I ask myself how it’s possible, after nearly two centuries of such hard work and sacrifice, that new slave masters could arise like this to displace us again.”

She went on: “The ancestors who came from Amoy, Canton, Shanghai, and Manila created strong communities, well-organized, which preserved our symbols and our religion, always obeying and respecting Cuban laws and customs. They also enthusiastically set about to learn all manner of trade and honorable work, and in due time they greatly improved their economic fortunes. By the end of the 1850s, there were Chinese-owned businesses in Havana: restaurants, laundromats, grocery stores, fruit and vegetable stands, ice cream shops, and small lots for cultivation by the riverside.

“Everything was achieved with long hours of sacrifice. The Chinese work day isn’t like that of Westerners. To this you add a tenacious management style that has always allowed us to save for the future. Another thing that has always characterized us,” she explained, and Mamá paused and looked me directly in the eyes, “is our loyalty and respect for others. In the long struggle for Cuban independence, we Chinese threw ourselves into the fight with vigor and valor alongside the liberation army. General Máximo Gómez, talking about our people, once said, ‘There’s never been a Chinese traitor, or deserter, in the Cuban army.’ And as a sign of appreciation of our courage and fidelity, a park was built in the capital to honor Chinese veterans.”

At this point, Mamá paused again and pointed to the fort-like Torreón, its impenetrable stone walls.

“Loyalty, my son, is very important. Unfortunately, your father’s expedition was betrayed.”

So there it was... finally. It had taken a lot for her to tell me, and she’d certainly danced around it for a long time, but the moment had come to reveal the truth: There was a traitor among our people.

“In every ethnicity, although it’s not common among ours, there are greedy and unscrupulous people who envy other people’s achievements and riches, and this causes them to commit terrible acts. Your father was a prosperous merchant and I, so it seems, an attractive woman. There was no lack of envy in our community. Do you understand me?”

She looked at me and I smiled.

Then she caressed my shoulders with her hand and we walked back to the house. We moved without hurry, enjoying the evening, the views, the strange and black emptiness of the neighborhood, the moon. Mamá was quiet until we reached the front door of one of our neighbors.

“Isn’t this Mr. Lin’s house?”

That’s all she said, and that’s all I needed. She gave me a knowing look and I answered by nodding and smiling again.

Captain Correa returned to Cojímar the next day. Since he’d practically moved in with us (Mamá made sure he was comfortable), he now told my mother his problems. The trip to Havana had been disciplinary. They’d asked for him so they could reprimand him because of the disappearance of some of his men. What was going on in Cojímar? How was it possible that a guy like Captain Correa — revolutionary hero and all that — was letting this happen with his troops? Poor guy, he was so disconcerted about the scolding, I felt bad for him... But there were also some things my mother had put in my head that I wanted to confirm. Papá had been a jeweler. When the Communists impounded his business, he managed to hide two bags full of diamonds and other gems. Mr. Lin, like all the others trying to escape, knew these details and was the only one who, on the agreed upon day, did not show up at the port at the appointed time.

“Your father was a prosperous merchant,” my mother had said, “and I, so it seems, an attractive woman. There was no lack of envy in our community...”

Two days later, they found Mr. Lin’s head at the foot of El Torreón, his tongue cut out. All of Cojímar headed to the port to see it. I went with my mother, and while everyone else whispered and gossiped, I studied my mother’s face and the movement of the militia men with feigned indifference. Standing there, checking out everything, I had the feeling the circle was finally closing. If I wanted to take the final revenge for what had been done to my father, I needed to up the ante. Captain Correa would begin to put the pieces together soon...

That night, he came to our house but he didn’t get drunk, although he did have his usual tumble with my mother. After she pretended to fall asleep, Pirigua got up, and thinking I was in my room, he moved toward the patio, which was quite large and had guava, mango, and anon trees that my father had planted. I tiptoed after him. The door to the patio was in the kitchen, and to get there we had to cross an open-air vestibule; the moonlight fell on his wide back and his tangled black hair. He was actually quite a strong man — at another time he might have intimidated me. But so much time shoveling dirt and carrying that wagon from one place to another had hardened my extremities to such an extent that when I flexed, you could see my muscles moving. I knew I could beat him if I had to because, more than brute strength, I had accumulated so much rage that Captain Correa, or even ten of him, could not possibly stop me.

Pirigua crossed the vestibule, passed by the dining room, and arrived at the kitchen. Ours was colonial, much longer than it was wide, and from where I was I could see him struggling with the back door. He opened the lock then went out to the patio. When I got to the kitchen, I stopped to grab a long butcher’s knife. With weapon in hand, I looked out the window and saw Captain Correa heading down the stone steps, past the outhouse and sink, and straight for the guava tree. He knelt and started to dig at the earth with his hands. So my suspicions were dead on: Papá’s jewels had been returned.

I came up to him without him hearing me. He was breathing heavily and had dug quite a bit already. He had powerful hands and he moved them well, excavating large chunks of dirt. When I thought it right, I let him know I was there. He was so terrified that he gasped and stood up in one single movement.

“What the...?”

“Just a little foolish Chinese boy,” I said, then plunged the knife deep into his belly.

“Aaaaggghhh!”

I grabbed the handle with both hands and pulled up with all my might. I practically lifted him off the ground.

“Just a little Chinese faggot,” I said, and I helped him down, feeling his blood and viscera ooze through my hands.

After he died, I cut him in pieces and went to get the shovel and wagon. From the very same hole Pirigua had been digging, I shoveled the dirt onto the bloody load that Captain Correa — great revolutionary hero and my father’s killer, jewel thief and oppressor of women, dirty Communist s.o.b. — had become. I mixed the flesh and the dirt and pushed the loaded wagon out the back door of the patio.

Armed with an icy calm, I went down Real Street until I got to the foot of El Torreón. If anybody saw me, they did nothing to stop me; as I’ve said, everyone in Cojímar was already used to my comings and goings at all hours with the wagon full of dirt, and no one paid any attention anymore to the Wong boy, that effeminate fool who just smiled stupidly whenever anyone insulted him or laughed at him.

I went to my private cemetery near the port. One by one, I unearthed the heads of all those among Captain Correa’s men who’d disappeared. I buried Pirigua’s remains with the others, and with the seven heads in my possession, I headed back to El Torreón. I was exhausted but satisfied.

Oh, revenge can be so sweet!

I set the heads out like they’d done with my father and his friends. I sat down in the center of the circle of rotting heads and waited until dawn. At first light, they found me. Someone sounded the alarm, and when the first militiamen showed up, I stood up and put the knife to my own throat.

“For my father!” I screamed as loudly as I could before the stupefied crowd so that they would know exactly what was going on.

But they didn’t let me kill myself. They shot me three times: once in each knee, another in my chest. They fell on me like a herd of rabid dogs, but I fainted.

Now I’m being held in this windowless cell where the rats are eating me alive; but I don’t mind. There’s not much time left. My mother didn’t survive my imprisonment; she poisoned herself as soon as she heard the news of my capture and realized our settling of scores was complete.

Translation by Achy Obejas

Abikú[6] by Yohamna Depestre

Alamar

I’m the assassin. I did it for a bit more space on the floor tiles, 845.1 centimeters to be exact, not just the lousy seven tiles where my bed stood. Yeah, even though seven’s supposed to be a lucky number.

Everybody else had a bigger slice, although not equal in size. My miserable little seven tiles didn’t provoke anything; no one even had an opinion about them.

My mother was the number one accumulator of space. Her territory extended from the biggest bedroom to the bathroom, kitchen, balcony, and then stopped there, at the very foot of my bed. All that measured exactly 372.5 centimeters of tile space. And 372.5 centimeters of tiles entitled her to:

1. Walk by with the excuse of needing to go to the bathroom whenever the owner of the seven tiles was making love with her husband so she could peek at his thing.

2. Say: Wrap it up or you’re screwed.

3. Stick her nose in every single discussion because she believes the owner of the seven tiles is useless.

4. Ask where everybody’s at all the time.

I killed her, she didn’t let me think.

The second one was my brother-in-law. His territory extended from the smallest bedroom all the way to the couch, which he usurped during the heatwaves, because as a paying tenant he thought he was first in line. All that measured exactly 225.6 centimeters of tile space. And 225.6 centimeters entitled him to:

1. Stare suggestively at the owner of the seven tiles.

2. Bring undesirable friends over and act like a clown.

3. Shout to the world that he has more buying power than the owner of the seven tiles.

4. Listen in whenever seven tiles made love.

I killed him, he didn’t let me think.

The third one, my sister. Her territory was in the same room, but as a wife and homemaker her territory extended 191.0 centimeters, which was enough. And 191.0 centimeters entitled her to:

1. Have complete authority over the TV, the radio, and to scream at everyone about everything.

2. Hang clothes out to dry in the best spot on the balcony.

3. Demand that the owner of the seven tiles’ bed be made by 5 in the morning, because the brother-in-law has company and the bed can be seen from the living room.

4. Play Parcheesi until 1 in the morning.

I killed her and ripped out her daughter’s tongue, because she screamed too much at bath time. Who could think with all the racket?

I could stack up my humble seven-tiles entitlement in one tiny little corner. And seven tiles entitled me to:

1. Sleep (whenever possible) and shut up.

2. Shut up and eat.

3. Scream at my husband, since he had only 0.0 centimeters of tiles.

And 0.0 centimeters of tiles entitled him to:

1. Put up with everything and anything.

2. Snitch.

3. Keep 845.1 centimeters of tile, plus my seven, of course.

I have my territory marked out like a sacred animal. My pee and shit ooze out from my seven tiles and beyond my cell, past the bars. The guard tells me it stinks in here, that it’s impossible to eat. I keep an eye on him. His foot falls on a mark I made with my own hands.

Translation by Achy Obejas