Loving Che (7 page)

Some days later, I returned to the studio. I walked as before, taking the route that took me past El Encanto. I stood in front of the display windows for a while as I had done so often, and this little familiar routine seemed to comfort and settle me—the mannequins so clean and perfect in their pillbox hats and smooth limbs.

But at the studio, I opened the door to the old dread. I walked around, opened the blinds. After a bit of this, I stood in front of the canvas that I had finished in such a frenzy of excitement. The lines now seemed crude, the colors garish. I began, very quickly, to paint over everything and ended, finally, by taking a planing knife to the entire canvas. I tore it to shreds with long wide movements and after lay exhausted on the small mattress in the corner of the room.

When I returned home, tired and exhilarated, I was surprised to find Calixto there. He was lying on the couch with a small glass of rum beside him. Without even saying hello, he said, You just missed your revolutionary admirer. I stopped where I stood and Calixto may have taken the change that came over me as ominous because he said, Listen, we have to try to engage him, them. Why did he come? I said and was relieved when my anxiety
came out as anger. Calixto held up a packet, Some work for me. What work? I said. Calixto only shook his head. To this day, I'm not very sure what it was they were asking him to do. I suspect it had nothing to do with the packet of worthless paper that Ernesto or his secretary dropped off now and then. I think they were keeping an eye on him. No one quite understood his writings to begin with. And already a thin black core of doubt had begun to burrow into the revolution's heart.

I told Calixto that I never wanted to see anything again of that man. He's a communist and a charlatan, I said, and I just don't like him. And on top of that, I added—somewhat to my horror—he's a womanizer; I can spot one from three leagues. Calixto laughed at me. You're wrong there, he said. He's forbidden his men from going to the dancing halls. And, Calixto continued, when he learned that a few of them had girlfriends they were seeing in the bushes around La Cabaña, he ordered them to a mass marriage ceremony. He's quite in love with his woman. The word is that they'll get married soon. When I heard this, I walked very slowly to the couch and sat next to Calixto. Everyone knows about the girlfriend, Calixto continued, me barely hearing. She's blonde and beautiful. I guess the Argentine rebel is not so revolutionary in his taste for women. From Batista to Guevara, Calixto said, they all like them blonde and beautiful.

In March, the weather began to change. I had not heard from El Mono for some time, but every morning, I went to the studio to work on the panels. Why I returned again and again I don't know, for I found the work difficult and often recoiled from the canvas with such obvious disgust that many times I wondered if there were not better work for me someplace else.

Many mornings, I did nothing more than stand at the window watching the monstrous clouds of the coming summer cast shadows on the scene below, the soldiers like small insects under the immense sky. I spent entire days like this, rarely working, standing at the window, watching the wind turn the white sheets hung out to dry between buildings, and often when the wind caught them and billowed them my own heart would swell and I would think again of Ernesto.

In March, too, was when Beatrice left us. Only Calixto was surprised. She had taken to shouting at me from across the house. And at the same time, she had begun to slink around corners with great secrecy. I would step into a hallway and be startled by the sight of the woman standing in a shadow, watching me. When I asked her what she was doing, she would only say, Resting, madam. Later, she
began to add, incredibly, This house is a lot of work, you know. After a while, it began to seem to me that she positioned herself around the house with the express purpose of startling me. Strange things happened when she was around; it was as if she disordered my thoughts. I remember one day I had been in the courtyard tending to my roses now that the heat was coming when I heard a car pull up to the house. I heard it quite distinctly, and with my heart in my throat I stood and wiped my hands and ran to the door before Beatrice could get it. But when I flung it open, I was surprised to find the street empty except for a small boy walking slowly up the side of the road with his books. Standing there, I had the sensation that the sky was bending down around me like an empty tunnel. I closed the door slowly, thinking, and when I turned around Beatrice was in a dark corner; she gave me such a fright that I mentioned it to Calixto that night. She left us three days later, after I had paid her for the month.

Years later, I opened the door one day to find Beatrice standing on the threshold. She told me a fantastic story about how she had had to leave because the security forces had asked her to spy on us. I never believed it. But she was thin and ragged, and I was at the beginning of a very bad state, so I welcomed her back.

She lives with me still, through many moves and seasons. Every other weekend, her daughter comes to visit. And then we stay up late, drinking beer out of little coffee cups and playing cards into the early morning. Sometimes the young woman will look up at me, a mocking smile breaking the line of her lips, and time shifts and I imagine it is you sitting before me and I allow myself a sorry old woman's wish to turn back the years.

One morning I wake early, before daybreak, with an aching so long suppressed that I think I will tear at my skin. In the dark, I find my way to the front door, glowing blue in the night. I step through it as through a wall of water. I float above the street, until I reach the far shore of El Morro. I sit on the ledge of my dream and gaze at the fortress that rises from the other shore like an old pale moon on the harbor's edge. I prefer the streets at night. The Havana day gives up too much. It is a lonely streetwalker telling all, showing all before the sale is done. Night in Cuba, like sleep, quiets detail, erases the inessential. It crouches about the edges, polishing the bones of the city like water lapping on a dock.

I stand across the harbor and look on La Cabaña. Its stone walls are lit with blinking torches, like eyes opening here and there in the impenetrable facade. How many untold stories behind those thick stone walls. How many muffled dreams. And yet, from the watery distance the ancient walls seem soft, like cork, like something I could caress. I know he is inside, can smell him from the far shore. He has just finished a trial, is sitting next to Duque on the bench. So many prisoners, hundreds, thousands, some without names, some who beg, eyes red before
him; some who stand still and straight, already dead. I watch their hands, pale and trembling, watch them walk slowly toward him as if they were afraid of tripping. As if some unseen object lay before them, sent down from that other world that opens its doors tonight.

Outside the fort, bonfires cast alternate shadows on the white statue of Christ that looks over the water. Two figures crouch at the base, hiding between the veils of light and dark. They meet, come together. Even from where I stand, I can hear the soft play of grass beneath their bodies.

The entire world bends down to touch me—the stars and the invisible clouds and the limbs of trees all draw closer and closer. Soon dawn will come, dusting with pink the tops of the cathedral, polishing the capitol dome. And then it will move down to the alleys, like a drunk returning home, slowly tracing its steps, illuminating the city corner by corner before bursting out over the rooftops, flooding the ocean again with its reflection.

This photo I've given you—look at it. The camera has caught him mid-sentence, his shirt half-buttoned, leaning forward. He is both reduced and inflated on the page. A grand enough person to have his photo taken. And yet his face is flattened, frozen, his eyes dead in the camera.

First he was a distraction, a snaking shiver on the smooth surface of the day.

When the new
Bohemia
came, I sat on the couch, turning the pages quickly, until I came to his photo. I searched the papers, the foreign magazines. Each time I came across his image, I lay there looking at his face for a long time; then I carefully tore out the page. Over the next weeks, I did the same with other photos I found. I trimmed them and stacked them carefully in a box in my closet with these recollections. One night, when I again awoke before my husband, I went to the closet and pulled out a photo from
Bohemia.
I sat cross-legged on the floor of my closet, the only light coming from the half-moon outside as I traced the outline of his dark mouth.

I begin to study my own face in the mirror. I am still a young woman. But by the conventions of the time, I should have long ago left behind the flatteries of youth to settle into motherhood and home. The men still look from the corners, bend forward in their chairs. And yet, now and then, as I regard myself, I see the frontier of a shadow advancing and, in my eyes, the understanding that whatever else I might make of my life, whatever joys might broaden a day, time itself is irrevocable.

One day, as I stand in front of El Encanto as has become my custom, a wind unusual for that time of year suddenly picks up from the sea. I hear it first in the high rustling through the buildings and imagine the sea rising white over the sea wall again. First, it brings a pleasant coolness and the smell of salt. But then the wind gathers force until it cries its way around the corners of the city and blows bits of trash deep into the narrow alleys. From far away comes the sound of sirens and then the wind banging shutters and metal cans and I become slowly aware of daylight retreating behind a dull haze. I stand still at the corner, facing the avenue down to the sea, and my heart begins to pound. The streets around the store are deserted. Not one face in a window, nor a
body on a balcony. It is as if the whole city has been warned of some catastrophe that only I now stand ignorant in the midst of. The trash blows about me, the dried leaves. I gather my things, holding my skirt down from the wind, and as I run through the empty streets I feel the first grains of sand rubbing against my face.

For two days I lie in bed with a high fever. Calixto comes to sit by my side, stroking my hands. He stays by my side and bathes me in the mornings until one day, I open my eyes and the sun is inside the room and I know I am cured. I sit in bed, all heaviness gone from my head, and watch a flock of white birds fly past the window. And beyond the birds the green leaf of the ceiba and beyond that the blue sky that cradles the clouds and arches over the world and whispers to me a sharp and infinite rebuke to my secret longing.

And then one day I pass a store and stop at a familiar voice, the Argentine habit of shuffling a word's accents so that sentences seem disconnected, even subversive. I stand for a long time by the radio, again with the sense that the radio voice is hollowing a tunnel in the day for me, everything bending close.

We can keep on making plans like that, he says into my ear. But when we come to drawing up a balance sheet—that is, to comparing all we want with what we can do—we see that this cannot be done.

Then there is a long silence before the commercials return.

That night I burn again beneath the sheets. Someone has gathered up time and compressed it to a whisper. Behind my closed eyelids I watch the squares of colors bend and fold over one another, each a new shade of red. It is good to say things clearly. And I struggle to identify the voice in my ear. I wake, covered in sweat. In the dark I find my way to the courtyard and stand staring over my garden. The house has taken on a softer feel since Beatrice has gone. Its lines have blurred. Calixto complains about dust on the cabinets. But I begin to welcome the fraying edges, everything slightly askance, all the baubles of the house having abandoned their usual place. It is a moonless night and very dark and for a moment it is as if someone has pulled a shade down before my eyes.

Two days later, I go to the university, where he is to give a speech. I watch from far away. Slowly, I make my way to the front, through the throng of bodies, the naked skin of young men and women warm and slick against me as I pass.