Mile Zero (14 page)

Great Góngora’s words echoed in Justo’s ears as if spoken only moments before by Abuelo in the back room of the
grocería
. Justo last heard Góngora’s poetry twenty years ago, in a time of “beautiful confusion.” All gone now, gone the way of handmade cigars and natural sponges. The turtles were endangered, and not all sport fishermen let their less than prize catches from the sea off the hook. What would Abuelo think of it all now? This time of rich rock and roll crooners of drug tunes and hot dogs in alligator loafers blowing away slow greyhounds. A time of conspicuous corruption which had less to do with simple survival and more to do with spiritual greed. Stella Maris had lost more than her virginity and glitter. The Góngorian time of “sweetness and variety,” which Abuelo once hailed in
the now deserted great halls of the cigar factories, gone forever, along with sponges in the sea and arias soaring to the chandeliered ceiling of the San Carlos.

Justo popped another conch fritter into his mouth, let it gather in the sour storm of his stomach. He handed the last fritter over to Ocho in the backseat of the car as he wheeled around the corner onto Passover Lane across from the cemetery. He parked beneath the spread of a Banyan tree shading the high morning sun. Handsomemost’s escapade at the airport had not slowed Justo down too much this morning. The iron gates of the cemetery were just being swung open, still early enough so he wouldn’t have to deal with mourners he didn’t know, or the afternoon scramble of tourists prowling through tombstones gawking at quaint Cuban and Bahamian family names chiseled into granite, or searching among crumbling limestone crosses to discover the locally famous inscription of eternal recrimination cut into a marble slab:
I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK
. The cemetery was near the highest point on the island, towering a full fifteen feet above sea level. This fact made some laugh with derision, the more timid to look anxiously in the direction of the sea, where twenty-foot tidal surges might appear. The cemetery had been moved to this high ground more than a hundred years before, when the waves driven hard before a hurricane gouged a tumble of bones and buried family secrets from the island’s original graveyard, exposing skeletons of slaves rescued from Slavers only to receive a final reward of Christian burial. The town fathers did not want another jumble of bones to bob up in the wake of a hurricane’s tidal fury, exposing a nightmare past married to a dream future.

The cemetery possessed an odd calm at the island’s crowded heart. It was corralled on all four sides by narrow streets of cigarmakers’ cottages and steep-roofed Conch houses, nudging for a better view of this high point on the island, reserved not for the living, but for the dead. An unnatural peace prevailed, as if this were simply a grassy plain overgrown with tombstones, mausoleums and monuments, where island birds found refuge to root undisturbed for grubs and worms, oblivious to grief or curiosity of human passersby. Gaggles of spindly-legged white ibis stalked awkwardly in grassy tufts between tombs, long curved bills held ready. Atop a twenty-foot obelisk erected to memorialize a man of forgotten distinction a swallow-tailed kite hawk perched, alert for an errant fieldmouse to scamper among bouquets of plastic flowers arrayed among weeds crowding hundreds
of neglected tombstones. The swallow-tail eyed Justo loftily as he walked along deserted asphalt pathways. Where one pathway bisected another, a short cement monument had been erected, stenciled with avenue designations:
FIRST AVENUE, SECOND AVENUE, THIRD AVENUE
, avenues not intended for cars, but a grid laid out for ghosts in a city of the dead. Justo’s family plot was on
THIRD AVENUE
, beyond the Jewish section, close to a red-bricked plaza of a fraternal organization bearing the name
WOOD CUTTERS OF THE WORLD
. Justo did not like being in the cemetery any earlier than he was. Cocks had stopped their shrill crowing in the distance, giving up their demand for longer dawnings and shorter days. The quiet cocks gave Justo comfort, for any Santería ritual carried out in the cemetery during the night had to end before first light. Over the years the cemetery was the scene of many such rituals. At dawn tombstones were discovered with chicken blood smeared across them to drain evil from the graves. Often an entire chicken was found, wings spread, gutted bowels scattered like gaudy rocks to hold down restless spirits. These were normal things, which sometimes appeared as alarming headlines in the local paper. There were other things not so normal, which spooked jittery newcomers, solidified long-held beliefs of old-timers about voodoo spirits prowling from their nocturnal nests. What was to be avoided by all was to arrive at the cemetery before the last cock crowed. To glimpse a nocturnal ritual of private acts and sacred offerings inadvertently was to invite horrifying calamity. Those trying to appease the spirits were not to be exposed, the Saints must be fed, the devils dodged. The innocent onlooker could be overrun in a rush of transcendent deliverance or final evil. Some things are best left undisturbed.

Justo rubbed his gold chicken bone as he made his way quickly through this city of the dead. The swallow-tailed hawk eyeing him from the obelisk’s granite point whistled high to the wind and wheeled off into open sky. Ocho crashed about among the tombstones and weeds, not so much on an intuitive hunt, but a tentative exploration. The dog stopped, pointing his long nose at objects not seen, but sensed. Ocho looked back at Justo with a wild-eyed superstitious expression so natural to a dog. Justo took the dog’s cue, he stopped beneath the high-arched branches of a leafless woman’s-tongue tree. He thought he heard a noise. He held his breath, there was a slight rattle in the distance. Justo’s gaze swept across the crowded horizon of gravestones and tombs divided by salt-rusted railings defining
family plots decorated with reposing lambs carved in stone, alabaster angels in flight, marble cupids descending and winged cement cherubs rising. Everything was bleached by the sun to an other-worldly sepia. Growing among crumbling mausoleums and cracked stacks of aboveground grave vaults tall trees existed in faded ethereal stateliness. Skimpy palms lined the avenues of the dead back to the cemetery entrance, where it was rumored six hundred men were secretly buried on a dark night in 1909, pieces of their shattered bodies carted in by horse-drawn wagons, intermixed in an anonymous jigsaw puzzle of a common grave. These men, Abuelo had told Justo, had been blown apart in a savage blast while struggling to complete the Overseas Railway, more than a hundred-mile run of bridges across the forty-three Florida Keys, linking Key West to mainland America’s way of life. Justo believed the men were buried in the cemetery. When he was a boy he discovered the neatly severed head of a pig resting amidst a tangle of mexican fire-cracker vines covering the rumored location of the mass grave. Some things were best left undisturbed. The sound Justo thought he heard in the distance was now above him. The rustle of a breeze shook the bronze-colored seed pods of the woman’s-tongue tree. That was the sound. In high winds the tongue-shaped pods rattled with a pitched racket some likened to the deafening sound of gossiping women. There was only a slight rattle above Justo. He walked on, turning toward Third Avenue to where his parents and grandparents rested in coral rock beneath a life-size marble angel, an eternal offering of spring lilies in her outstretched hand.

Every first friday of the month Justo came at dawn to kneel before the sweet-faced angel guarding his family’s plot. He brought fresh lilies to match the angel’s stone bouquet, and prayed. He prayed for the souls of his loved ones, dead and living. He prayed for the strength to hold himself steady as a family man in the disturbing winds of change. Someday he and Rosella would rest beneath the angel, forever holding hands throughout eternity. Justo wondered if his daughters would join them. Everything was happening so fast now. Who knows if they would keep the connection. Justo tried to instill in them the connection, the pride. Maybe, if they had been boys, he could have done better. He didn’t know. He thought himself a failure with his own women. He knew how to love and protect them, but did he truly know how to guide them? Justo felt his daughters respected far more
their own female charms than their family past. Maybe that too was his fault. Lately he doubted his masculine purpose. The women had done that to him. Would they ever understand Abuelo as he had? Could they conjure Abuelo whacking his metal-tipped tamarind cane on the
grocería
floor, raging about the betrayal of General Narciso López’s ragtag army training to invade Cuba from America? Would they remember that López’s army was ordered disbanded by President Taylor, and when López’s ill-trained men landed at Cardenas in the 1850s they were devoured by the Spanish jackals? Abuelo had stormed in the back room of the
grocería
that America would again betray Cuba. Abuelo knew this in his bones. Cubans had to rely on Cubans. That was the history lesson. Justo wondered if his daughters would ever understand their old grandfather, dying of grief and hacking a cancerous cigar cough one week after the Bay of Pigs invasion proved his prophecy of America’s betrayal correct. Abuelo’s tamarind cane rested now in Justo’s living room, next to a statue of the Virgin Mother beneath which Rosella always kept the flame of a novena candle burning. Would his daughters remember they were Tamarindos, carved from the tree of Cuban liberation? Justo always asked himself these questions as he came upon the small family plot with its neatly lined rectangles of aboveground whitewashed graves.

Ocho stopped again, tipping his long nose in the air, sniffing at uncertainty, then moved slowly toward Abuelo’s grave at the center of Justo’s family plot. A tall stone cross was affixed atop the plain headstone with the chiseled words:
MANUELO DIEGO ROSA TAMARINDO
??—1961. Ocho looked back at Justo. Justo grabbed the dog’s collar, yanking the surprised animal away from the grave. Two streaks of blood, crossed in the shape of an X, had been slashed across the white rectangle of Abuelo’s grave. The blood had come from the slit belly of a South American bufo toad perched dead and drained in the center of the X. The warty five-pound blob’s bulged eyes were crudely sewn shut with fishing line, its mouth closed by a nail hammered through the head and out the lower jaw. At the foot of Abuelo’s grave a sheet of white paper was weighted down by a rock. Justo turned cautiously, looking back up the long avenue behind him. No one there. Far across the horizon of tombstones, at the entrance to the cemetery, there was only the distant silhouette of a lone bicyclist. Probably someone pedaling a shortcut path through the cemetery on his way to work downtown. Justo turned back to Abuelo’s grave. He
held Ocho’s collar tightly. The milky substance which had foamed from the toad’s mouth and coagulated on its fat lips contained a poison which could send a big dog into convulsions, drop a small dog dead. The blood on the grave glistened, still fresh. Someone knew Justo’s habits, knew he would be at the cemetery this first friday of the month. Justo slipped the white paper from beneath the rock on the grave. He held it up to read words written in elaborate cursive flair:

The name Zobop was signed at the end with a purple felt-tip pen. Beneath the name was sketched a slinking snake with a man’s face, a hissing snake’s tongue extended from the human lips. The creature wore a jaunty black top hat.

Ocho lunged at the toad. Justo dragged the dog further back. He looked around among the weeds and plastic flowers for a stick to knock the ugly creature from Abuelo’s resting place. There were no sticks, just skink lizards skittering away from the disturbance. Justo made the sign of the cross, then stepped onto Abuelo’s grave, kicking the dead weight of the toad with the toe of his shoe. He crushed the sheet of white paper into a tiny ball, hurled it over the right wing of the sweet-faced angel guarding his family. He remembered the words
Casa mala nunca muere
. Abuelo was so fond of saying these words as he leaned on the handle of the tamarind cane looking into Justo’s young eyes.
A bad thing never dies
.

Justo turned his back on the bad thing and clutched the gold wishbone at his throat like a man gasping for life-giving air. The veins of his thick neck swelled as he strode down Third Avenue in the city of the dead. In the tumult of his mind two lines of poetry came up
from the past to carry him far and away from this evil, a revelation in repose only now awakening to true meaning.

Some things are best left undisturbed.