Pig's Foot (28 page)
‘What’s the matter, Mami?’ he said, taking her hand.
‘Nothing,
hijo
. I’m dying, that’s all.’ Betina hugged her children. Then she told them that before Juanita died, she consulted her cauldron and told Betina that she would die on February the fifth.
‘Why do you say that?’ Betina had asked.
‘Because you are going to die,’ said the
santera
and explained that Betina needed to make plans so that her children could be with her. Betina had asked how she would die and Juanita told her that first her heart would receive a terrible shock, something Juanita felt it better not to reveal to her in advance. Then, in the early hours of February the fifth, she would die of nothing specific, that eventually the hour comes for all of us, and this would be Betina’s hour.
Having said this, the wise-woman stepped outside to gaze one last time at the collection of beautiful African orchids planted in her garden.
‘Say my goodbyes to the village. Thank them for sharing with me the good times and the bad times of old age and tell them I will wait for them on the other side.’
The following morning, the body of Juanita was laid to rest beneath one of the forest of crosses in the cemetery.
Juanita had made a mistake, Benicio cried frantically, everyone was wrong; Betina was coming back with them to Lawton. Betina replied that the wise-woman had always had a talent for predictions and she had never been wrong before.
‘Where’s Melecio?’ asked Gertrudis.
‘Ah, now that’s another story. Go warm up the coffee, Geru, and pull up a chair, because the tale I have to tell is a long one so it’s better that you make yourself comfortable.’
Gertrudis warmed the dark brew and took a seat as her mother had asked.
‘You both know that Melecio is not like other people, it’s hardly a secret here in the village,’ said Betina, sipping the coffee. ‘Well, after José died and you left Pata de Puerco, Melecio got it into his head to turn the village into a town with paved streets and schools and hospitals. Your brother always was a dreamer, as you know. So he picked out a small group of promising pupils – Anastasia Aquelarre, Ignacio and Juan Carlos el Jabao – in order to teach them what they would need to know. It would be a difficult task, he explained, but a necessary one, and if they should fail it didn’t matter because he knew that in the future others would carry on their work.
‘After a while Melecio’s pupils became experts in law and politics, even in architecture, and learned to express themselves like attorneys.
‘“It’s time,” Melecio told them, and signalled to Ignacio el Jabao to follow him.
‘Oh, I forgot . . . remember María, Melecio’s girlfriend, the beautiful black girl he used to mention in his letters? Well, she was pregnant and she came here to live with him in a house they built down by the river. She always encouraged him to dream, he had come into this world to do great things, she told him, and I saw for myself how much she loved and respected him. And so Melecio and Ignacio went to El Cobre to see Emilito Bacardí, the son of Don Emilio, who had passed away by then.
‘They explained everything to the nobleman, showed him meticulously detailed plans of the new city, with drains and aqueducts and the famous streetlamps that José used to dream about. Emilito loved the idea and promised to present it to all the politicians and the lawmakers who had the power to make the plans a reality.
‘These powerful men could not believe that there was a village in Cuba so remote that it did not have so much as a sewerage system. They pledged to fix the problem, insisting that everyone in Cuba – or at least in the district of Santiago – should have electric light. But days and weeks and months went by and no one did anything. Melecio realised that he had wasted his time, that it had all been false promises and white lies.
‘So your brother decided that if he could not do this by fair means, he would do it by foul. Slowly he began to bring together all the farmers and the labourers in the area who lived in similar conditions to ours and explained the situation to them. Over time, there were more and more of them, and one day they demonstrated in front of the presidential palace, carrying placards, chanting slogans and demanding improvements. Obviously no one dared to lay a finger on them. Everyone knew Melecio was the adopted son of the Bacardí family.
‘It was then that Ignacio el Jabao showed his claws; he turned against the protestors, saying that this was no way to behave. Ignacio had ulterior motives, and besides he had always been jealous of Melecio, whose fame had now spread far beyond Santiago. Everyone was talking about the new messiah, about the madman who had dared to champion the plight of the poor. The politicians did everything they could to get rid of him. They tried to reason with him, but Melecio simply replied that there was nothing to talk about and went on dragging his people through every street of the city.
‘Some of the politicians saw Ignacio as the solution to their problem. They called him up one day and promised him mansions and castles, promised he could be a councillor, a congressman, on one condition: “All you have to do is get rid of Melecio.”
‘No one knows for certain what Ignacio said. His brother Juan Carlos swears that Ignacio had nothing to do with what happened, that he did not betray Melecio. All we do know is that one day, some months after Melecio and María’s son was born, Ignacio showed up to present an invitation to dinner at the house of Governor X during which the future of the new city was to be resolved.
‘“In that case, we’ll go,” said Melecio and he and María left for Santiago early the next morning. Ignacio went with them. This we know because Ignacio himself told us that on the way back to the village, a group of armed men in suits and hats stopped them and forced them into a ditch. It was there that they shot Melecio and María.
‘It was Ignacio who brought the bodies back here the following day. El Jabao swore he did not know why he had simply been knocked unconscious. Everyone in the village watched as he stood there, sobbing and writhing in agony. A week later, Ignacio el Jabao was mysteriously summoned to take up a position as councillor in the Chamber of Representatives in Santiago, which is where he lives now.
‘That’s what happened and, just as Juanita predicted, my heart was split in two. I ordered that the bodies be buried next to Oscar and Malena among the ruins of the old sugar plantation and I told them while they were there to dig a grave for me next to José since, as you know, tomorrow is the fifth of February, the day I am destined to die.’
Benicio and Gertrudis listened to all this, eyes filled with tears. Grandfather had been pacing up and down the room. ‘I’m going to find that bastard Ignacio,’ he roared, but Betina and Geru stopped him and told him it was not worth it, that revenge would solve nothing. The most important thing, said Betina, was to take the poor child sleeping in the next room as far from Pata de Puerco as possible, to a place where he might have a better future, a place where he would never know such misery.
‘That will be difficult, Mami,’ said Benicio. ‘There are not streets enough in this country to escape from misery.’ In Havana, he explained, there was poverty greater than this.
Gertrudis ran into her old bedroom. The little boy was sleeping in a wooden cot. Betina called for her to bring the baby in so they might all sit around her bed. When at last she could see their three faces, Betina let out a heavy sigh.
‘Do you remember, Benicio, that day you came home cursing and swearing, using words you’d learned from Ignacio?’ said Betina.
My grandparents laughed.
‘And the day Melecio recited that poem in El Cobre?’
My grandparents laughed again.
‘Remember the day Melecio cooked the chicken, Mami? Remember the beating Papá José gave him?’
Since neither Betina nor Gertrudis remembered this incident, Benicio told them what had happened and everyone laughed again.
‘Remember . . . ? Remember . . . ?’ And so the children and their mother went on remembering happier days that brought great comfort to their spirits. Betina told them about the first time she had met José down by the river. She remembered her sister Malena, her brother-in-law Oscar, recounted stories about each of her three children. Each flickering memory in her mind transported her back to distant days when the world was young, as young as she. Those far-off days were lost now in time, but still they existed, their bright, vivid colours stored in memory. Happiness filled her as it had not done in years.
‘To remember is to live. Now I understand,’ she said, her voice a faint whisper.
And still she and her children continued to wander the labyrinthine pathways of the past until, by midnight, all of them had fallen asleep.
After they buried Betina, my grandparents came back to Lawton with Melecio and María’s son – with me. This is where my story begins. I don’t know whether I already introduced myself, but in case I didn’t, shake my hand. Pleased to meet you. My name is Oscar. I shouldn’t need to tell you my surname, you’re clever enough to work it out for yourself. But I’ll tell you anyway, it’s Mandinga. Oscar Mandinga. That’s my name.
So now you know. Oscar Mandinga, at your service. Like I said at the start, I don’t remember any of this stuff. And I can hardly blame my grandparents for not asking Betina before she died about the precise date and time I was born, which means of course that I don’t know. The poor things had enough to deal with, going back to Pata de Puerco after all those years only to find my great-grandmother dying. About me, Betina told my grandparents only one thing.
‘Whenever little Oscar plays up, just put him in a basin of mud. It’s the only way to calm him down.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked my grandparents, and Betina told them the story of how I was born in muck and mire in accordance with the ancient traditions and beliefs of my mother María’s family. Imagine it. I slid down the thighs of the mother I never knew and into the mud like a slug and as soon as my mother plucked me up out of the muck, I started bawling like I’d been stuck with a fistful of needles. Only when she set me in the mud again did I calm down. So my grandparents always kept a basinful of mud in the bathroom beside the glass that held Grandpa Benicio’s teeth during that phase of my life they called the ‘mud period’.
They told me about a little bald man with a hooked nose called Judío and another man who owned the laundry called Augusto. They told me that when I was four I hung around with them all the time and called them Uncle. El Judío even put one of the little round caps Jews wear on me which made everyone laugh. My grandparents tell me they were magical years, but I of course have no memory of Judío or of Augusto.
By the 1950s, Lawton had changed a lot. The laundry business was booming with the introduction of new electric washing machines from America. Financially everything was fine until Batista mounted the military coup in 1952 which led to terrible unemployment. The mafia started to take over, though it has to be said that as far back as the 1930s Meyer Lanski and Lucky Luciano had been wandering round the streets of Havana dreaming of creating a casino paradise where the mafia would control not just the country’s finances but its future leaders. I don’t know if you’ve seen
The Godfather, Part II
, the scene re-creating the meeting at the Hotel Nacional in 1946 that attracted every mob boss in organised crime from Albertos Anastasia to Santos Trafficante. The top two floors of the hotel were closed to the public, and this is where Meyer Lanski revealed his long-held dream of converting the island into the Monte Carlo of the Americas, a vast metropolis of hotels, casinos and private airports even bigger than Las Vegas. With Batista back in power, anything was possible. Once they had him in their pocket, they began building the Hotel Riviera, the Duville, the Capri, the Comodoro, and the Havana Hilton – what we now call the Habana Libre.
Cash began to flood into the country, and there was a lot of conspicuous wealth; meanwhile on the flipside of the coin only a third of the population had running water, and the salary of the average family was barely six pesos a week, which resulted in starvation and destitution. Pretty quickly, the people started to rebel which only made Batista adopt a trigger-happy policy meaning that anyone caught up in any form of sedition was dead meat.
Augusto and Judío joined the underground resistance. They really hated Batista. The government was illegitimate they maintained and therefore unconstitutional, that elections could not be cancelled, that the people had a right to choose their own future, their own president.
‘That bastard Batista is sullying the reputation of Lawton,’ Augusto would complain. When my grandparents asked why he said this, he explained that he knew Batista who had lived for some time above the Cuchillo Café near Toyo and that whenever he went to the bakery, he used to meet him queuing to buy bread. Judío said this was why he preferred people to be either black or white, because mulattoes like Batista, if they don’t fuck up in the beginning, they’ll fuck up in the end. In spite of everything, my grandparents still lived a relatively peaceful existence, though overnight the laundry’s clientele began to dwindle because everyone was being frugal, carefully guarding what little money they had. But Cubans like to dress well, and given that the middle classes were least affected by the slump and many of them lived in Lawton, money kept coming in.
A thousand times Benicio and Gertrudis told Augusto and Judío not to go mixing with revolutionaries, that they were too old for such shady business, but their friends went on
distributing posters for ‘M
-
26
-
7’ – the 26th of July Movement –
and storing them in the laundry. They took part in strikes, marched in public demonstrations, saying they were tired of all the lies. Grandma Gertrudis asked Judío what he had to do with any of this, given that he was a Jew and came from Europe. ‘I’m a Cuban Jew. That’s something very different,’ said Judío Alemán and went on conspiring against Batista.