Ruins (17 page)

Yoandry laughed. “Forget her for now, okay? I got more important stuff to talk to you about, old man.”

“She’s my daughter—you forget her, okay?”

“Whatever—listen to me: The antiques dealer, the one who’s gonna buy your lamp and make us rich? He’s here,” the muscle boy said.

Usnavy grunted. “My lamp, huh?”

“Yeah, that one.” Yoandry kicked open the unlocked door and pointed with his pimply chin at the magnificent one in the shadows, now hanging by both wire and rope in Usnavy’s feeble attempt to keep it afloat in spite of the crumbling ceiling. (He had taken the opportunity while up there to check yet again for anything that resembled the Tiffany signature, but his lamp was still without an identifying mark, a bastard child.)

“Fire hazard, old man,” Yoandry added, seriously. “That thing’s gonna crash and shatter and then what are we gonna do, huh? You gotta do something about that. We should take it down, put it someplace.”

Of course, the boy was right: But where? To bring it down from the ceiling in his room required moving the beds. Then where would they sleep? There was no way Usnavy would ever consider giving it to anybody else for safekeeping.

Usnavy waved him away. But Yoandry caught his wrist. “Don’t do that,” the boy warned, reversing roles with him from the day at the beach.

Usnavy yanked his wrist back. “Does Virgilio have a clue how you
really
are—how you are with everyone but him?”

“Virgilio and I are family, it trumps everything,” Yoandry said, his cigarette dripping tobacco. “Now, family, you know about family, right, old man?”

He didn’t believe for a moment this crude boy could be Virgilio’s kin, but why argue? “What do you want?” he asked, exasperated, as he took some wire he’d brought from a derrumbe and coiled it around his arm. He’d cut a little to secure the lamp but he knew Yoandry would take the rest. That meant at least a dollar or, maybe, two.

“I want to talk about the lamp—
that
lamp,” Yoandry said, “not the bullshit little one you brought Virgilio and me.”

“Virgilio and you?” asked an incredulous Usnavy. “You said it was trash, remember?”

“Well, yeah,” said Yoandry, the grin on his face just ugly now.

“Funny, you’d bring foreigners here but I bet you haven’t told Virgilio about this other lamp, have you?”

“Not yet.”

Usnavy scoffed. “Hell, Yoandry, you’re not going to. You want to sell directly to the foreigner.”

Yoandry laughed. “Hey, you’re catching on—we skip the middleman. It’s a bigger profit. Just you and me, we’ll get a much better deal from the antiques dealer.”

“But we’d get a better deal if Virgilio fixed the lamp. It has a few problems, you know.”

Yoandry shook his slimy head. “Uh uh,” he said. “We can sell this one right like this. Why go through all that trouble, huh?”

Usnavy knew why: The boy thought it was a Tiffany. He thought, even with the missing panels, that he could make such a good deal that he didn’t need to risk getting Virgilio involved, having to share, or maybe getting left out altogether. Usnavy shook his head in disgust: The same lamp, the same artistry, he was sure, would be worth nothing to him if he knew it was probably made by some poor Cuban fool in Oriente and dragged to the city by an unsuspecting young woman and her misbegotten son. And that Cuban fool, he thought, was even worse off than Lam, Picabia, and Meucci. Nobody even knew his name to argue for him.

“Hey, I can bring that antiques dealer over right now if you want,” Yoandry suggested, his palms touching and pointing in Usnavy’s direction as if he were in church, even though there was nothing reverential about his gesture.

When the boy mentioned the antiques dealer, Usnavy imagined someone tall and rugged, like he supposed Mr. Tiffany had been, or perhaps like Burt (a quasi-American), only grander—in fact, like the Americans of his mind’s eye, the ones he’d known in Caimanera and Guantánamo, sturdy and rowdy and even kind of amiable, if a little unintentionally condescending. (Mr. Tiffany surely would have fit right in among the officers at the base, Burt among the enlisted men.)

“C’mon, Usnavy, let’s take down the damn lamp,” Yoandry entreated. “I can spruce it up at the shop, I can store it. I can even put in some new glass on those empty slots. See, we don’t need Virgilio for this. It’ll make us rich.”

“If it’s my lamp, it’s not going to make you rich now, is it? Not for sale,” Usnavy said as he locked the door to his room behind him, guarding his treasure. A panel here and there he could do, he’d decided, because those could be replaced eventually—but to pack up and give away the whole thing? No way. If somebody ever got ahold of the lamp and had a chance to examine it, there would be no fooling anyone anymore. Then what would he have?

“Everything’s for sale,” countered Yoandry.

Usnavy stiffened. “Let’s see if we understand each other, okay? The damn lamp is not for sale. It’s my lamp, get it?”

“Yeah, but—”

Usnavy rolled right past him. “You’re just a punk speculating about things you know nothing about. Not for sale—understand?”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” Yoandry said. “But you will.”

Usnavy had been reading again, not just at the library, but at Virgilio’s, where the silent gaffers recycled glass in huge barrels (most of it Cokebottle green when it came out again) and the sparkly man spent hours hunched over a table, soldering little pieces of copper foil into panels for glorious lamps that would disappear in a day or two while countless others hung in the shop gathering dust.

Now that he’d become a regular, now that he’d gotten used to entering beyond the wall of heat at the studio door and knowing that he’d melt only a little with each visit, Usnavy had also begun to notice other things: that Virgilio only worked on lamps that were sold upon completion, that Santiago and the younger man, Manolín, often studied catalogues and old, yellowed magazines for hours to figure out designs.

Between turning pages in the old magazines and scratching the necks of Virgilio’s plump cats, Usnavy would worry about the lamps that were there eternally, never meant for sale yet not quite decoration. They existed, Usnavy decided, as a distraction, so that if a visitor came only once or twice, he or she would think they would be sold like any other piece of merchandise. But they were too plain, too simple, too cheap. They were part of some larger scheme, this he knew.

Mr. Tiffany, he now determined, had been a man who aspired to art and a purity of spirit completely at odds with what made him famous. But those lamps of his—his signature pieces—were assembled in factories, churned out by the hundreds and thousands with little regard for art. Usnavy thought of Louis Comfort Tiffany not as a robust practitioner of capitalism but as its victim, a man simply too caught up in it to understand how it was killing him. His lamps existed solely to exploit electricity, the twentieth century’s juice, to blunt its queer light, to make it mellow and safe.

The man died alone (regardless of what that woman from Indiana had said), Usnavy noted, his moment in the spotlight long gone, all those people who’d bought those lamps once thought of as treasures having moved on to the next thing, the lamps stowed away in basements and attics all over the eastern seaboard and Midwest of the United States. In a weird way, Usnavy felt for him, pitied him.

No longer keeping regular hours at the bodega, Usnavy had, in the meantime, become the focus of the CDR, which sent friends to search him out.

“Look, just come in the morning,” Minerva said during a visit to the stoop at Tejadillo, where she found a fastidious Usnavy squinting at a hazy but sunny day.

He was listening to reports on his new (used) Walkman about the upcoming invasion of Haiti by U.S. troops and he was bewildered by the fact that they were actually going to reinstall a Marxist-leaning expriest as president, not topple him. It must be a trap, he thought, what else could it be?

A black cat peeked at him from a nearby rooftop, inscrutable.

“It could rain, don’t you think?” Usnavy asked Minerva absentmindedly, pointing at the sky. He listened for the murmur of a building in distress. He’d tried to check out Badagry’s again—he’d convinced one of her sisters to let him take a look at her leaky ceiling, telling her he might be able to help put up posts like Jacinto. But he didn’t get very close to the lamp because Badagry was home and stopped him cold at the door, saying they were moving soon, that the housing authorities had promised them a new place.

Usnavy’s pulse had quickened. He knew that thing in there was treasure (whatever it was). She shouldn’t have lied to him about having such a lamp, he thought; now that he was in business for himself, he would have bought it, he could have given her the money to fix their roof. Sometimes just the threat of rain could start things off … It was all a matter of paying attention. How long did she and her sisters have there? How long did he?

Minerva glanced up but couldn’t read the signs in the sky that had Usnavy so enraptured. “Try to come by, at least in the morning,” she repeated, back to her task. “You know, when they’re all there. You can leave later. I’ll cover for you.”

“You have relatives in Pinar del Rio, right?” Usnavy asked.

She nodded, confused.

“You could call them and see if it’s raining there, couldn’t you? They have a phone, don’t they?”

“You want me to call my family in Pinar del Rio to see if it’s raining there? For the love of god, why don’t you just watch the weather report?”

Usnavy shrugged. “They don’t always get it right”—he pointed to the earphones wrapped around his head—“and I don’t need to know about tomorrow. That’s all they’re going to tell me about, you know, tomorrow—always tomorrow. I need to know about now, about today, about a few hours from now,” he insisted. “Whatever’s in Pinar is headed here.”

“What’s so important about the weather report two hours from now?” Minerva asked with an arched eyebrow.

Usnavy got up from the stoop, dusted off his pants, and followed Santiago’s example, shaking his head in disbelief, grunting, and walking away.

He sure wasn’t going to give his secrets away to anybody.

Because, of course, now there were secrets. There had always been, certainly, but these secrets were grave and disorienting. They went beyond him and Lidia hiding what they were doing for dollars from Nena and the neighbors, beyond the white lies of ordinary life, yellow headlines and propaganda. They went beyond the peasant origins of his lamp, its shabby Third World pedigree.

They began to peek out of their hiding place when, needing to pull a few more dollars together so that Lidia could show a potential seller enough to have a shot at buying his car, Usnavy had extracted another glass panel from his magnificent lamp—this one not so loose but still easy to get at—and taken it over to Virgilio, who handled it with care but with less reverence now.

“So, are you ever gonna tell me where you get these, huh?” the artisan asked him.

Usnavy shrugged and shuffled, waiting for his money.

“I know they’re coming from the same lamp, I can tell,” Virgilio said. “And it must be quite extraordinary because these are not common pieces. They’re a bit big, a bit unusual for a Tiffany. But they’re definitely Favrile, definitely Tiffany.”

A sparkly Virgilio handed the pane to Santiago, who took it away brusquely, practically tossing it at Manolín. Virgilio reached in his pocket as if to pay Usnavy.

“I’m thinking, Usnavy, that for all your revolutionary spirit, maybe your family was really part of the bourgeoisie, that you must have had a lot of money and influence once if they owned a lamp like that,” he said, pulling his hands out of his pockets. All Usnavy could focus on was that those pockets were empty.

“I’m from Oriente,” Usnavy said, unsettled. “Nobody had money in Oriente.”

“Sure they did, all those sugar barons, all those Americans.” Virgilio was now working on a small lamp, polishing the panels, as if he’d forgotten all about the payment due.

“Well, I’m not American. I’m descended from Jamaicans.”

“You, Jamaican? Somebody’s pulling your leg, my friend. What makes you think you’re Jamaican?”

“My father was Jamaican.”

“He was black?”

People made that connection frequently, and though most times Usnavy wanted only to say yes and confirm it, to claim a little bit of Africa in his blood, he found himself a little disappointed this time, surprised that Virgilio would respond in so common a fashion. “No, but you know, not all Jamaicans are black.”

“Sure they are. The rest are called Englishmen. Nobody who’s not black actually calls himself Jamaican. What’s your last name anyway?”

“Martín Leyva.”

Virgilio stopped cold.

Usnavy shifted his weight, now acutely uncomfortable. “Martín, it’s English … Martín Leyva. Leyva’s pretty common in Oriente, though not here.”

“I’ll bet!” said Virgilio, now grinning. “Tell me something, Usnavy: Was your mother a churchgoer?”

“No!”

“And your father?”

“I …” Usnavy stammered. He had no idea. “I never met my father.”

Virgilio stared at him.

“What?…What?” a rattled Usnavy demanded.

“You, my friend, are a Jew,” said Virgilio, “or, at the very least, the son of a Jewish woman—just like me.”

A Jew …? Hadn’t Virgilio heard him? He was Jamaican—Jamaican, descendant of Africans and Englishmen, not Turks and Poles. Was Virgilio trying to get out of paying him? Usnavy turned on him. “You know, I’ve always thought you didn’t look Jewish, that you look mulatto.” He knew instantly his tone was accusatory and he stopped himself before this could go further: Anybody else might have said something about how Virgilio was trying to clean up his family tree, pretending to be Jewish rather than black. But what kind of insanity was that? Usnavy swallowed, the taste in his mouth vinegary and dry.

“Yeah, well, like I said, you don’t look Jamaican—you look … American—actually, you look like an American Jew. I bet you were blond or red-haired as a kid, right?” Virgilio shot back at him, only he was smiling.

“This is ridiculous. I’m Jamaican,” Usnavy repeated, annoyed.