Ruins (20 page)

Diosdado just seemed to gape at her:
Reynaldo? Is that really you?

“She is beautiful,” Jacinto asserted, tipping an imaginary hat at her like his father back in the sepia portrait in his room. He gave Howard a congratulatory nod.

“What is the matter with you people?” a furious Frank exclaimed. All of a sudden, he slammed his pieces flat on the table. The sapos peeled back.

A resigned Oscar Luis folded each one of his dominos facedown, like miniature coffins.

“Have you all lost your mind?” Frank demanded, getting up now, his simian arms held out from his body.

Poor Frank, Usnavy thought with a sudden realization: Nobody waits for him, there’s nobody to pretend not to see his faults, nobody to offer love’s great gift of forgiveness.

Then Howard stood up, lifted his hand in Reina’s direction, and pulled her toward him protectively. A trembling Diosdado rose too, his pieces having been turned down already, and in some sort of awkward and unspoken covenant with Howard, muttered apologies to those around and stepped away from the game. Both his shirt and pants were soaked, clinging to him like a giant jellyfish.

“Where do you think you’re going, huh?” Frank rasped, jumping up and down in place, but he was getting smaller and smaller as he squirmed and thrust his chest at the visitors. “Come back here!”

That’s when a jaunty Jacinto took a seat at the table and began to stir the domino soup as if nothing unusual at all was taking place. Frank looked at him, confused. Who the hell did this guy think he was?

“You in, Usnavy?” Jacinto asked. Oscar Luis, sitting next to him, laughed aloud, enthusiastically. Even the autistic boy’s lips seemed to quiver into a tentative smile.

Usnavy didn’t hesitate: He jumped from the bike, sat down, and fished out his pieces.

This was a great story. Lidia, and even Nena—wherever she was, whatever she was doing—would love it.

VI.

T
hat night, the sky was smoky and blue
. It promised rain, it promised thunder. The stars were bright smudges. A just-washed Usnavy wandered around the courtyard, restless, his shirttail flapping behind him. He was obsessed with Nena’s whereabouts—he hadn’t actually laid eyes on her in a day or so and he could hardly keep still from worry. He kept glancing over his shoulder, his hand trembling. He tried to calm down by pacing, tried to focus on something else: He counted his steps, he cracked his fingers.

Okay then, he thought: Badagry—after so many years as an officer of the CDR, after so many marches and speeches, didn’t he know anybody at the housing authorities to whom he could take their plight? The women could move—he had no problem with that!—he’d even help. But first—yes, first, he wanted … How could he even phrase what he wanted?

Where the hell is Nena?
Where? At first he’d thought Lidia would know but she was as lost as he, though less worried, more distracted with their
bisnes
. But Lidia hadn’t been to Cojímar, she hadn’t been down to the Malecón, she hadn’t seen what he had seen, she was not being haunted by ghosts. How could he explain all those bodies, like white crabs rushing toward the surrounding waters?

At Tejadillo, his neighbors sat at their doors. He could feel them watching him stride from one end of the crowded, obnoxious courtyard to the other, sidestepping the packing and raft-making which had now become central to the tenement. The hammering was relentless, the pounding arrhythmic and brutal. Some of the neighbors sucked on cigarettes, others chatted but in whispers now, everyone saving their energy for the longer, more treacherous voyage ahead. Smoke and vapor twirled up into the skies, blue and white.

Against a wall, a teenager was juggling a bag of marbles; another continuously shuffling a deck of cards. A skeletal cat tangled himself in an elderly woman’s bare legs, then leapt up to her lap and nuzzled hard, ramming his head under her chin. A little boy with dirty buttocks and wearing nothing but an undershirt stacked dominos, not to knock them down with a bright and wonderful swirl, but like building blocks. These were wooden dominos, once extravagant but now worn from use, a hand-me-down. Usnavy watched as the kid built a second story, then a third, before the whole wobbly structure collapsed. No one even looked up from their carpentry and boat-making.

“Usnavy?”

He turned around fast, only to catch Howard and a complicit Yoandry standing right behind him. Cumulus clouds of nicotine obscured Yoandry’s face.

“Hello.”

“Is there someplace we can talk?” asked Howard, calm as the waters on a northern lake, never knowing hurricanes or typhoons. He looked around, above, through Usnavy’s neighbors, never quite fixing them in his sights.

Next to him, Yoandry bit at the inside of his cheeks, his shoulders hunched. He was actually built bigger, better, stronger, but he seemed diminished somehow, as if his form was all air, his bones nothing but string.

“We can talk here,” Usnavy said, sweeping the courtyard with his hand. For a second everyone stared, unabashed; oddly, he felt he needed the comfort of their company. The cat dropped from the woman’s lap to the ground, bared its teeth, and hissed at nothing in particular.

“We can talk in your room, that would be better,” Howard replied coolly.

“No, my family’s in there, my daughter’s sleeping,” he lied. (Then, for a second he thought, maybe she is in fact there—he considered how they’d laugh later, him so consumed by worry when all along she was napping …)

Yoandry widened his eyes, sending him signals he refused to acknowledge.

For Usnavy, it was all instinct. Nena was a mystery. Lidia was out, busy with her new obsession, checking out another possible car purchase. None of the others had worked out. And this one would be complicated because the car was brand new: Usnavy and Lidia would have to divorce (they would explain it to Nena—she was old enough, she would understand), Lidia would have to marry the Russian diplomat who as a foreigner had the right to buy a new car, and shortly thereafter, divorce the diplomat, taking with her in the settlement the right to the car. Then and only then would she and Usnavy be able to get their hands on what they’d hope would be an air-conditioned Mitsubishi. If they could pull it off, life seemed to be guaranteed. It would cost him a good chunk of the lamp and a lot of traipsing up and down Old Havana, but once Lidia started driving, Usnavy knew they’d make the money back and he could replace the missing pieces on the lamp, good as new—maybe even better than new.

Nena, he thought, would be taken care of.

It was hot in the courtyard.

“Usnavy, do you speak English?” Howard asked.

“No.” Nena was studying English at school; if she were here, maybe she could help …

“Do you speak any language at all except Spanish?”

“No.”

Howard sighed. “Very well. My friend here, Yoandry, tells me you have a lamp I might be interested in. I understand my business partner, Burt, got a quick look at it as well.”

This, he figured, is why Reina had been so friendly; it had had nothing to do with him, with any kindness he’d ever extended. It was the lamp; it was
bisnes
; it was money.

“I have access to lots of lamps. What are you looking for?”

“I am looking for a lamp that was made for the Presidential Palace but was never installed,” Howard said. He could have been talking about the weather.

Usnavy ran his hand through his white hair. “People keep talking about that lamp.”

Like a clumsy spy, the skeletal cat tiptoed toward them, craned his neck.

“It’s your lamp,” whispered an impetuous Yoandry. It was clear he did not want the neighbors to hear. He mouthed: “The one in your room.” Then he kicked the cat, which shrieked and disappeared into the chaos around them.

Howard gave the boy a stern look.

Usnavy closed his eyes for an instant. Tonight, outside the tenement, he prayed, the city would slope down to the sea, bright and rugged, meeting the water with a kiss. He imagined not traders or tourists, but natives splashing about, the sea full of marlin and flying fish, tiny, tiny silver things that looked like sparks underwater. The eyes of his neighbors were pelicans, herons, and cranes.

“The lamp I have is not that lamp,” Usnavy finally explained. He had to buy some time here, telling them without showing. The lamp was riddled with missing panes, holes. He couldn’t imagine letting go of it. “It was my mother’s lamp, it was never a Presidential Palace lamp. How would my mother, who was nothing but a simple woman, ever get her hands on a presidential lamp, huh?” He was going with the truth that he knew, not as a strategy per se, but because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. The neighbors perked up, twitched as they worked.

Howard shrugged. “You never know. If you show it to me, I could tell you. It could be worth a lot of money if it’s the one I’m looking for.”

But as Usnavy’s feet (in those wonderful new shoes) began to squish in the water perennially underneath his soles, he felt a drop on his head. It was more like syrup or honey. He tilted his chin up, receiving another, then another. In the distance, a whistle and grunt then a groan came from deep inside somewhere.

Wordlessly, Usnavy turned away from Howard and the muscle boy, away from the turbulence in the courtyard, and toward the rain and the hazy sky.

At the derrumbe, just blocks from his own home, Usnavy dug through the freshly fallen bricks and rocks like a dog after a bone. After the rage of rain and wind had become nothing but a whisper, he dropped to his knees and used his bare hands, scratching at the cement to get underneath the wreckage, scraping at the dirt, the wet plaster, the ripped fabric of old laundry, the crumpling cardboard, the corroded tin, the rotten wood, the rusted steel pins, the oxidized nails. He did not think of Badagry, of where she was, of her sisters and whether they were alive.

He dug and dug and dug: Somewhere underneath there was that damn lamp—he had taken quiet measure of its dome, had registered the lead molding so that he could almost taste the metal on the back of his own tongue, had understood immediately from the way Howard and Virgilio talked about the presidential lamp that this was as close as he could hope to get to the treasures of Alexandria and the pyramids.

When it began to pour, Usnavy ran—ran and ran (he ran easily now)—ran right past Howard and Yoandry and the kids splashing about outside, because he knew the house down the street would quake, knew it could lose a limb or two with each new drizzle, knew that, finally, its joints would surrender, its foundation would fold, its muscles would hiss and sputter and everything would come down to crush the invisible sleeping giant who had been miraculously holding up the paper walls, this weird miracle of Cuban architecture. He knew too that this was it; this was the moment he’d been waiting for.

Now Usnavy dug, his fingers feeling through the viscera of the flattened, imperceptible titan: its sticky bodily fluids, its softened tendons, its jagged bone fragments. When Usnavy pricked his palm and pulled it up to see the cut—a stream of blood flowing smoothly from the wound interrupting the curve of his lifeline—he bared his yellow teeth and smiled. There was no other glass in that house, its windows had been open to the elements, there were no mirrors, barely any plates, zero knickknacks, no toiletries—there was no doubt in his mind: The bit of blood now wiped on his pants was the sure sign he’d struck gold. Whatever pane was fractured or lost could be replaced, like on his own lamp—glass was ageless, untraceable, Virgilio had assured him; no one would ever know.

Usnavy reached under the rocks, grunting and wailing, thrashing and pulling, finally wrapping his fist on something long and plump—not the lamp, no, but some other treasure, something for Yoandry perhaps, a little something before finally reaching the lamp. He sucked in air and yanked as hard as he could on what might have been wire or cable, his lungs almost exploding, his spine extending, arching until he fell backwards, tumbling down the garbage heap, the tower of terrible treasures.

When Usnavy finally stopped rolling and falling, his shirttail twisted and his waist poked by something sharp, he thrust himself up on an elbow, noticing he was lying in a puddle that smelled of both petroleum and urine, and took a good look at what he had in his grip.

It was roots and earth, black and fertile and wet. But his hand was wounded, the bone jagged, his fingers stabbed by shards of colored glass and bloated like petals on a flower.

When Usnavy limped home that night, Tejadillo was desolate. It was starting to rain again. The drops felt like pinpricks on his skin, sharp and cold. There were no lights in his courtyard, no human sound or movement. It was a lunar landscape, austere, overwhelming. The water was rattling where the funnel of flies that had been the bathroom once stood, now just a pile of glistening rubble. He touched his chest where his heart might be, felt its slight beating. He looked ahead and saw through the darkness the barrel of water outside his door sprinkled with rocks. The door itself was outlined by light.

Like a somnambulist, Usnavy started to walk through what had once been the courtyard of his home, holding his bleeding right hand ahead of him the whole time, but he tripped on something and tumbled. He exhaled, his breath warm and acrid. His body felt wrenched, contorted against the bitter ruins. Still, he lay there for a while, shivering, unable to move, his fingers numb. He was chilled and soaked and alone. A cat with something dark and squirmy in its mouth brushed by, going about its own business, barely glancing at him. At one point, he realized the wooden planks beneath him were the remnants of a raft, left unfinished by his neighbors. He rubbed his sun-blotched face against the grain, pressed his nose to it. Then, with a heave, Usnavy hauled himself up until he pushed past the glowing door of his room. He closed his eyes for an instant, held his breath. Whole walls had crumbled on one side yet the ceiling, though buckled, swooned in place. The light that gave the threshold its aura was coming from the new (used) refrigerator, tilted now, its door unhinged, its tiny bulb a beacon. The floor was a slippery swamp but the rest was more or less there: the beds filled with debris; the new TV set crushed by a piece of concrete. Water ran everywhere, between rocks, chunks of walls, a neighbor’s toy truck.

But—thank god!—neither Nena nor Lidia was there: They were surely elsewhere, safe. Usnavy sighed, lips aquiver, his stomach turning, all the bile that he’d been holding inside streaming out his mouth and nose. He wiped his face with his good hand, ran his fingers through his stringy hair, now brown and brackish. On the floor, loose pages from Martí swam in the muddy currents. An inflated anonymous paperback caught them between its own pages, then bumped up against the back cover of something else.

Finally, Usnavy leaned against the wall, not wanting to look up: The lamp was hanging by a strand from the improbable hunk of ceiling, its remaining glass shattered, the black holes of the missing panels like rotten teeth. Its shadow draped the room like the suspended, battered cadaver of a giant jungle cat.

Usnavy couldn’t think. He fumbled his way to his cot and, with his working left hand, picked the sheet up by the corner, shaking the dirt and rocks from it. He lay down and pulled the sheet over his shoulder, tugging his injured arm inside, close to his chest. It was sticky with blood, warm still.

Usnavy stared at the shadows around him. Was it just his room? The end of the earth? The backside of his own eyelids? He wished with all of his might to look out over an island with no water, surrounded by nothing but air. He shut his eyes, tight, seeing the island rise above the world, as if after some sort of apocalypse.

Usnavy turned on his side and felt the bits of rock on the bed poke and pinch him. He tried to picture himself walking along the contours of the shore, feeling the breeze, soaking in the clear and unfettered light from all around.

Usnavy was asleep when Lidia found him the next morning. The rain was still rushing down, leaking through various holes in the ceiling and rioting. Lidia saw that he was breathing and started to cry.