Ruins (16 page)

For hours, Usnavy searched through tome after tome for Nena’s number. In all of that time, no one came looking for him; no one even peeked inside the room. It was all silence and stillness, a place without time or day of the week, a room as empty or full as he wanted it to be: the hull of a ship, the cabin on a space rocket, a womb. What could the Leakeys find here?

There are no wild animals in Cuba, Usnavy thought as he hunted, none. “No wild animals here,” he muttered to himself, “only anteaters, transparent frogs, and tiny, tiny birds. No bears, no lions, no tigers, not even a sighting, a description of one.”

Horses came with the conquerors, cats with the slaves, and the Taínos and Siboneys, he continued to himself, died from too much smoke. The Jews came to Cuba in disguise looking for salvation, the Chinese for gold mountains and silver fish, and the Africans—dragged here against their will—prayed that the island was at least less savage than those beasts that pretended to own them.

Usnavy couldn’t believe it. He’d found the right book, found the right page, except Nena’s number wasn’t there. The page followed its sick linear logic, one little numeral after another, but there, where Nena’s number should have been, next to her name, next to his and Lidia’s, was instead a gap, a tear, a hole in the page, as round as a pen, as charred at the edges as a bullet wound.

Usnavy grabbed his lamp from the floor littered with dusty books and explained this all to the nurse who’d just reappeared. She sighed as if she’d accompanied her widowed mother to those Tai Chi exercises and had learned to hold all the air of the world in her lungs and to let it out so slowly that hours would pass and she’d still be standing there, in the perfectly tranquil garden of her mind, her lips slightly puckered, the air hissing its last.

“No lions,” Usnavy grumbled as he waited for her to take it all in and decide what, if anything, to do next. He wanted the invisible giants to take him away to a cozy and quiet place where he could go to sleep, a deep, deep sleep.

The nurse gave him a quick glance, as if she wasn’t sure what she’d heard—
lions?
—then led him down another infinite abyss of a hallway to yet another room, a vault full of mildew and silence. Usnavy shivered. She didn’t turn on the light but sauntered to the center, as if it was a temple and this was the bima or sacrificial rock. After a flick of her wrist Usnavy saw a tiny point of light explode in the middle of the blackness: a star burst, an official form—another form!—taking shape on the blue screen.

“Her name?” the nurse said.

He gave her the information all over again, this time noticing that, as he waited, his feet made a squishy sound, a wet smacking sound like kisses. He looked down at the impossible blackness around his shoes, then up at the nurse, who was nothing more than a perfect silhouette bent over the computer keyboard.

“The floor’s wet,” he said.

She nodded, maybe—he couldn’t really tell—and kept typing.

“With the computer … I mean, you could get electrocuted,” he went on. He had the injured lamp in the dry paper bag under his arm.

“There’s a leak,” she said, ignoring him.

A leak? There was water everywhere. Usnavy felt his heart split open like a fleshy green coconut.

By the time he got to Tejadillo, Usnavy had not only skipped the morning shift at the bodega but was on his way to blowing off the afternoon too. He knew this would be the second time in so many days that he’d missed work and, undoubtedly, there would be worry enough to send someone to his house to see what was wrong. But for the first time in his life, he didn’t care. What could they say to him? That he was like everyone else? What could they do?

Usnavy pushed his way through the courtyard where his neighbors were brazenly preparing to flee the country, their ropes, plastic jugs, and junk collecting in the middle like the stuff for a bonfire. Instead of the clanging cymbals and braying trumpets of timba, now the courtyard echoed with the wail of recorded electric guitars and their promises.

Usnavy elbowed past the kids who ran around handing the adults bags and knapsacks and pieces of wood, metal hangers like the one Chachi had used to unstuff the drain, and belts and ropes to hold things together. (Instinctively, he looked around for Nena, relieved to not find her among those preparing to leave.) The mood was festive, like a balloon, and as fragile: This could turn into shreds of meaningless rubber, into nothing, if anybody took it that wee bit too far. No one was playing dominos or marbles or Parcheesi now. A frayed poster from a previous holiday march flapped from a balcony above, its red letters quoting Che:
We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we’re willing to die for it
.

Usnavy threw open the door to his family’s room in time to catch a startled Lidia and Rosita in the very throes of their own crime: The aroma of tender meat filled the room. Usnavy gasped. Sitting on the floor, the women were holding above an iron pot various blankets, all brown with spices, cutting them into strips that resembled beef. High above them the magnificent lamp shone like the arrival of fair-haired Columbus before the island’s natives: effulgent, imperial.

“Where have you been?” Lidia demanded, leaping from the floor but not even pretending to cover up her activities.

“Where have I …? What are you doing?” he cried.

Lidia stiffened. “We’re earning some dollars,” she said defiantly. From the floor, Rosita smirked, her hands stained gold from their labor.

“You fed this to our daughter!” he exclaimed, his teeth clenched, pointing with his nose like a hunting dog at the strips coiling in the cauldron. They swarmed around like intestines, like worms.

“No, no, no, Usnavy, it’s not what you think,” Rosita rose to his wife’s defense, all the while wiping her hands on a rag.

“Stay out of it!” he screamed.

“Stay out of it? Thanks to her our daughter has vitamins, Usnavy!” Lidia hissed. She grabbed a white medicinal bottle from on top of the fridge and shook it in his face, its pills like seeds in a maraca or chekeré.

“You fed our daughter a blanket, Lidia, how can you even talk about vitamins?”

As he fretted, Rosita maneuvered behind him and closed the door, where a few of the courtyard kids had begun to peer in, drawn by the spectacle of an argument between a couple that wasn’t known to fight. The neighbors’ eyes were larger, more intense, and precarious than the cats’ above.

“What about that, huh?” Usnavy ranted.

“I tell you, she didn’t know!” Rosita hissed. “I sold her the damn sandwich without her knowing what it was.”

“But when I found out, I asked in,” Lidia continued, without apology. “I mean, somebody here has to earn some dollars, Usnavy, and it wasn’t going to be you!”

“Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” Usnavy tossed the injured lamp down on the bed, its brittle pieces rattling and clanging in protest, and pushed his fists into his pants pocket. “You’ll see, you’ll see!” he railed, pulling both his pocket linings into the light, fuzzy sock puppets that dangled from his waist, flaccid and empty. “What …?”

He thrust his palms into his back pockets, pulling those free as well, the twenty-dollar bill nowhere to be found, while Rosita and Lidia gave each other worried looks. “It’s here, hold on—I had a twenty-dollar bill—dollars—I had them just two minutes ago,” he protested as he frantically patted himself on his chest and thighs. “Maybe that nurse … that fucking nurse …”

The scrap of paper on which Nena’s temporary birth certificate number was written rolled from a fold in one of his back pockets and he scrambled to the floor eagerly, then, realizing what it was, tossed it on the bed. “Your daughter’s birth certificate number … well, this one’s just until they find the real one … see? It’s here, I’m placing it right here,” he said deliberately, theatrically, his hair tossed all about, as he tore at Nena’s Michael Jackson poster—Lidia and Rosita cringed at the sound—leaving one gigantic jagged scar of white across it. He fumbled with the piece of tape on the poster’s back, then pulled it from the paper. The gumminess glued his fingers together unexpectedly and he jerked his hand for an instant, sticking the tape on the wall, the birth certificate number clinging to it.

Usnavy was panting. Perspiration trickled down his face, cold and clear. “Somebody stole my money,” he said, thoroughly defeated. “I had twenty dollars—I drove a Canadian around and made twenty dollars—”

“You drove …?” Lidia said, amazed. “A foreigner …?”

“You can ask Diosdado—you can ask Jacinto, he saw my money—goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it!” He was pulling his hair.

Rosita shook her head. “Salao,” she whispered, grabbing her pot of fake meat and trying to slip out the door. “I’ve got to run,” she said to Lidia, “before no one can get out.”

“Salao, huh?” screamed Usnavy. But his voice squeaked and cracked—in the chaos, he remembered a verse from the Book of Amos:
Does a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey?
“I’m so goddamn sick of being salao!” he yelped.

And with that he shoved Lidia against the door, making it impossible for Rosita to escape. He leapt on the bed, taking hold of his magnificent lamp with his two flinty hands. The lamp groaned and dropped another inch from the ceiling, raining down its wheezy white meal on Usnavy, who seemed not to notice that his prize now hung by the miracle of a thin knot of red and blue wires intertwined like cardiac arteries. As the two women watched dumbfounded, Usnavy snapped a red glass panel out of the lamp, then another.

“See these? See these?” he shouted at them, one panel like a fiery flame in each fist. “I’ll show you who will bring the dollars to this house! I’ll show you who’s salao!”

Then he hopped from the bed, his right shoe inexplicably flipping open, and ran out of the room, out to the courtyard where Chachi and Yamilet and the boy with the bike tires were tying together the handles of bulging plastic bags to take on their journey. Usnavy rushed past the swarming flies by the deserted bathroom, past Jacinto’s clean and varnished door and the noise of radio and TV broadcasts in a babel of languages he couldn’t understand, out to Tejadillo, now as rude and jammed as if it were market day in Dakar or Lagos.

V.

I
n the north of Africa—in Egypt—a sculptured tomb
found in Memphis features carved yellow-brown human figures blowing glass, the crystalline globes at the end of their long pipes dangling delicately in the air. Scattered about are 4,000-year-old glass beads, glass scarabs, glass amulets, glass pieces for games no one’s been able to decipher and play.

In Sidar, the capital of Phoenicia, the rulers had special sand brought in from Mount Carmel just for glassmaking. But the first manufacture ever of colored glass—the kind that would lead to Usnavy’s magnificent lamp nearly a millennium and a half later—occurred in China, the birthplace of dominos, when the Emperor Ou-Ti established a factory to make rods of tinted beads and other glassware.

That’s all gone now, their existence as things of beauty in ruins, alive only in the collective imagination, in the same way that fossilized teeth from Aramis and Kanapoi evoke primitive man/monkeys with their sloping foreheads, inculpable and extraordinary, the unlikely progenitors of Mandela and Madame Curie, Lenin and Lennon, José Martí and Celia Cruz.

But when Usnavy burst through the door at Virgilio’s, he wasn’t thinking about any of this. He had run—sprinted, each leg bending and stretching, sinews expanding and contracting—through the streets of Havana with his two red panels like lumps of burning coal fused into the very fiber of his fingers.

“What the …?” Virgilio leapt from his work bench, surprised and frightened, his eyeglasses slipping from his flat upside-down T-shaped nose, not shattering on impact with the concrete floor only because of the many layers of newspapers and cardboard that cushioned the dozens of lamps all around him, each one staring unabashedly at Usnavy.

“Armstrong? Are these Armstrong? Are these American glass?” a winded, spent Usnavy asked, his arms outstretched and shaking.

A concerned Virgilio pried the panels from Usnavy’s hands—searing red, they looked like bloody blades, like something criminal. The minute his fingers were loose, a sweaty, dizzy Usnavy spasmed.

“Let me see,” Virgilio said, turning away in a slow, deliberate manner, making sure there were no sudden moves, no causes for alarm. But Usnavy followed him up close anyway, placing his damp, anxious face above Virgilio’s shoulder as soon as the artisan sat back down. “Give me some room.” Virgilio gently pushed Usnavy away. “You can watch from there but I need to see these in the light.” There was no one in the studio but them, the barrel of fire in the back just a can of embers now, the heat simmering, tolerable.

Usnavy moved a bit, rattling a lamp on the floor next to him, startling the snow-white cat, which disappeared like a jolt of light, like the tracers Usnavy saw when he was overwhelmed by hunger.

“I appreciate you bringing these to me,” Virgilio said as he picked up his glasses from the floor and fumbled to put them on his flat, whirlyknot face. “But I don’t want you to get too excited. Armstrong is hard to find in Cuba. And in the end, you know, I can work with anything—stained glass is just regular glass colored with oxides and chlorides, then ground up with the right fluxes and fused into the surface. We blow a lot of glass ourselves right here, we recycle a lot—Armstrong would be nice but we don’t really need it, you know what I mean?” He adjusted his glasses, settling in to examine Usnavy’s treasures. Virgilio was, as always, sparkling, twinkling all over, like a comet or a falling star. “It’s the design, the artistry, which makes a difference. Sometimes when we’re lacking in imagination we blame the materials—our egos are too big, I think—but a true artist works with anything.” He coughed, looked around as if searching for the gaffers, anyone. “And anyway, let’s be realistic: This isn’t really art, this is more like an auto shop. I fix these things the same way some other guy fixes a DeSoto or a Ford. Except that he’s doing something for his compatriot, and me, I’m mostly working for the English, you know what I mean?”

Usnavy leaned against the door, his leg trembling like Yoandry’s that day at Lámparas Cubanas. He hated that expression—
working for the English, working for the Man
—the English had been in Cuba for only a blink of time and, in his mind, they’d done more good than bad. Who else could they say that about? The Spanish? The Soviets? The Americans who were everywhere but pretended to be nowhere, always igniting fires they then came rushing to put out, demanding payment for service or, worse, hero’s medals?

At his worktable, Virgilio examined the red panels with care, touching, staring, putting them under a magnifying lens. At one point, he put each in his sparkly palm, feeling its weight, then limped out to the patio—Usnavy at his heels, limping too from his blister—and looked at them in natural light. He stepped aside and probed the way light itself performed as it filtered through them. Red danced on the broken tiles, made the mustard-colored cat glance up from his regal nap and sniff the air.

“Where did you get these?” Virgilio asked, clearly astounded.

Usnavy shrugged. “Your cat,” he said, avoiding the question, “it looks like a lion.”

Virgilio ignored him, lost in the texture and power of the two red panels. “These are … well,
interesting
,” he said.

“Can you … can you tell where they come from?”

“Where they come from? What do you mean, where they come from?”

“I mean, you know, who made them, how old they are, that kind of thing,” Usnavy said, a bit flustered.

Virgilio shook his head. “You can’t really date glass, it’s got no carbon in it. Sometimes you can tell something by the color—you know, certain colors didn’t exist before certain periods of times. We know that gaffers didn’t invent certain formulas until later. Other than that, well, unless you know the chemical formula you’re looking for, and unless you take a little piece of the glass you’re trying to date and grind it down so you can get somebody to do a chemical analysis, well, my friend, it’s pretty much impossible.”

Usnavy pondered. “You have to do a straight-ahead comparison like that?”

“Yeah, which, you understand, usually means you have to break the glass. That’s the only way to get a little piece to test it. And that pretty much ruins everything, so you can see what I mean by it being pretty impossible.”

Usnavy nodded at the panels in Virgilio’s hands. “Are they Armstrong? Can you tell that?”

Virgilio shook his head again. “They’re better than Armstrong.” He hobbled over to the apartment building and the silent domino game and came back, peeling bill after bill into Usnavy’s hand, all Washingtons, with their wavy white hair (like Usnavy), more bills than Usnavy had ever dreamed of.

“Bring me the lamp,” said Virgilio, shimmering now.

“The lamp?” a staggered Usnavy asked. His magnificent lamp? “I … I can’t.”

“Then bring me the one you already brought me … you haven’t already sold it, have you? I’ll fix it for you.”

“Oh that one!” said Usnavy, rolling the bills into a ball like Frank might have and stuffing them in his pocket. “Yes, yes—I still have that one, yes.”

“You got this glass from another one, right?” Virgilio asked cautiously.

Usnavy composed himself and ran his fingers through his white hair. “There are many others,” he said, mentally inventorying all the lamps he had seen across town, especially the one he thought he’d seen at the Badagry woman’s home, “many, many others.”

In the weeks after the two red panels left Usnavy’s hands, Nena’s ID problem was finally solved, thanks to the temporary number and an accompanying U.S. bill discreetly placed in the palm of the clerk who, days before, could only shake his head. Jacinto’s mother got her medicine and was soon full of vim and vigor again, washing clothes out in the courtyard. Jacinto himself was able to buy varnish and putty and began working to restore the treasures hidden in his room. He put studs on the pillars, secured them with rope and wire. In the meantime, Lidia and Rosita’s sandwiches were now stuffed with single slices of canned Russian meat and sold at a profit on the streets of Old Havana.

Usnavy had gotten the small lamp fixed too, not by Virgilio but by one of his assistants, the older guy who always hung around in the rear of the studio, his back a slope, his hands strangely stained and deformed, but agile. His name was Santiago and he never made eye contact with Usnavy, only shuffled along, agreeing with a grunt to all of Virgilio’s requests. Unlike Virgilio, Santiago did not sparkle, rather he seemed to sweep the light from the room. Usnavy would see him, a shadow, a manikin blowing bubbles, something unreal about him.

Once fixed, the small lamp was sold to a woman named Fay Reeve from Martinsville, Indiana, who claimed to know a real Tiffany when she saw one. “My aunt—she was just a young girl from Ireland then—she was with him when he died,” she boasted of her connection to Louis Comfort Tiffany, never mentioning that by the time he passed, Tiffany was marginalized, a nineteenth-century anachronism, an embarrassment to American arts and crafts.

The profits from the sale to the lady from Indiana provided enough for two bikes—a new (used) Trek for Usnavy and a Flying Pigeon for Nena—a small Samsung color television, new shoes for him (the kind with multilevel soles) and Lidia and Nena, and a new (used) refrigerator. Usnavy was bewildered, dazzled, by what he found he could do for himself and his loved ones all of a sudden.

Now that there were dollars coming in, Lidia began to dream about driving again. “I can make more money that way than selling sandwiches,” she said, having done the calculations. (Besides, she was a driver by training and disposition, that was her life.) “If we could buy a car, I could taxi,” she continued, foraging in a box of Belgian chocolates for yet another piece, “and that’s not just easier to disguise but it also brings in more money.”

In immediate response, Usnavy went about his new business every day, riding up and down Old Havana on his new (used) Trek bike, pedaling easily in his new multilevel shoes, looking for the telltale sign of a light in the ruins. He looked for glints, for iridescent rainbow reflections, for the kind of color evoked by glass and bronze. He’d peer in windows shamelessly, cataloguing goods, jotting down anything he thought might be of interest later. Soon, very soon, he would have enough dollars for a car for Lidia. Very soon she’d be cruising happily through the city.

When not checking out the neighborhood—with its old colonial buildings, their walls leaning on the shoulders of those invisible giants Jacinto refused to believe in—Usnavy would spend hours sitting on the stoop, searching the skies for clouds and lightning. At the first raindrop, he would tear out of Tejadillo, his route all mapped out on his little notebook, zipping from one precarious building to another, looking for derrumbes. He could hear them before he saw them: a low groan buried deep in the pitter patter of the rain, a shriek when the wood surrendered, a sinister crack, and then
boo-o-oom
.

If at one point he had worried that his neighbors would view him critically if he ever ceased in his duty to the Revolution—which Usnavy interpreted, first and foremost, as an implacable honesty—he now realized that by engaging in
bisnes
, as the Cubans called it, he’d actually gained a respect he’d never enjoyed before. The neighborhood thugs who once greeted him out of habit or obligation now slapped his shoulder in camaraderie. Bizarrely, this made it easier to get them to clean up the tenement, to chip in to the CDR. When he and Lidia went out for an evening walk, he could feel the eyes of the others, not exactly envious but desirous of her place, of being suddenly able to relax a little, to put worries aside. If he was not entirely comfortable with his new status, he was at least fascinated by it.

These days, it seemed he was always prepared to dive into the mud and disaster of other people’s lives (his new [used] bike secured with chains and locks he carried around his shoulder like a presidential sash), rescuing treasures to sell to Virgilio and his mute assistants—or, in the worst cases, to Yoandry, who took on not only the lamps and electrical fixtures that Virgilio rejected but anything from broken chairs to bricks to children’s toys. However filthy he got in the process, he could wash it off. He could afford soap now, the good kind.

Soon after the sale of the small lamp, Yoandry had come rapping at Usnavy’s door, sniffling and impudent, with his nicotine-stained fingers, eyeing Nena who, to Usnavy’s dismay, returned his gaze.

“Get inside,” Usnavy said to her sternly.

But an icy Nena ignored him. Instead she directed her eyes beyond him, to the continuing activity in the courtyard where every day, one or two groups would disappear through the arch of the entrance, never to be seen again. They’d stroll away, cocky and cool, dragging plastic bags and homemade rafts, each farewell pulling on Nena’s own longing, he knew, like the tight, outstretched string of a crossbow.

“I said, get inside,” Usnavy ordered again, then grabbed Nena’s arm and dragged the sullen girl into their room.

Something had happened to her since the incident at the hotel, no matter that he’d gotten her the new bike and followed Lidia’s advice to buy her a few other things too: perfumes, creams, new clothes. The girl he’d known, sweet and open, had disappeared into the countenance of this sour young woman. She dropped on the bed without saying a word, her arms across her chest, staring at the dullness of the lamp above her, lightless.

“What do you want?” Usnavy growled at the oily muscle boy outside.

“He’s here, old man, that antiques dealer,” Yoandry said through a smirk. He looked past Usnavy to the door, as if searching for Nena.

“What antiques dealer?” Usnavy asked as the door to his room popped open and a defiant Nena glared at him so hard and full of hate that he didn’t have the wherewithal to stop her as she rolled her own bike through the labyrinth of activity in the courtyard and out of sight.

“You know what the man said,” declared a snickering, mocking Yoandry: “‘Silence is an argument carried on by other means.’”

Usnavy sighed. How was it possible that this boy could be so disrespectful?