Love and Ghost Letters, page 4
The memory of that afternoon, of her wedding day, filled her with anger. Josefina sometimes fell asleep with those words trapped in her mind, repeating them like a scratched record. So it was that she always threw away her responses to the sergeant with her dinner’s hardened rice.
* * *
Josefina’s son, Eulalio Miguel, was born in 1935 on a Wednesday. The doctors in the hospital were surprised that he came so quickly. She barely laid down on the bed and Eulalio, called Lalo, pushed his way out of Josefina. His birth was like squeezing an old, soft banana out of its peel. He slithered into the hands of the doctors and whimpered instead of crying.
“So much like you,” Josefina had whispered. “My tiny Renzo.” But Lorenzo was afraid to hold his son and only looked at him from far off a bit before kissing Josefina’s lips and sitting down next to her bed.
Josefina spoke to Regla from the hospital phone. Regla’s voice trembled with happiness, and she recommended the name Eulalio, because it had every vowel in it, and those kinds of names were especially lucky. Though this was her first child, Josefina felt only an awkward attachment to him. She was delighted that he looked like his father, pale with a full head of the blackest hair. Even when he had gas, the baby’s crooked, gassy smile was like Lorenzo’s. But when he was first born, the nurses had laid him on her chest, and Josefina wanted nothing more than for them to take him away so that she didn’t have to see him again.
Lalo was a tiny thin boy who cried at the softest sound. For the first year of his life, Josefina thought him more of a bother than anything else. He was colicky, and when letters from the sergeant arrived, Josefina gave them to Lalo to chew, and he would quiet down. The ink would smudge around his mouth, so that later, he would leave blackened kiss marks on his mami’s cheeks. The chatter at the market calmed him as well, and he was her daily companion. Rosa Arias loved the arrangement. Ever since the child had begun coming to the market with his mother, sales were up, and Rosa Arias began calling Lalo her “little bird.”
* * *
As years passed, Lalo grew into a wiry, nervous boy, and Lorenzo had gotten into the habit of leaving Josefina alone in El Cotorro for months at a time. They had stopped paying the rent to the old woman who was their landlady three years earlier. They believed that she must have died, lonely there with her son and daughter-in-law, and so both Josefina and Lorenzo assumed that the house was now rightfully theirs.
Regla made sure to visit at least once a year after Lalo was born, bringing candles, cigars, and statues of saints in a ratty suitcase. Regla was as stout and alive as ever, and every visit was for Josefina like a sigh of relief that lasted a few days. Lorenzo made sure to be home on those days, because he was afraid Regla would cast a spell on him if she caught the scent of another woman on him, and so he sat in the parlor for her entire visit, eyeing her hands for any sudden gestures that might signify a curse.
Even with Regla’s blessings, things in El Cotorro seemed to be getting worse for Josefina. Lorenzo had become fatherlike toward Josefina, rarely commenting on her beauty or complimenting the meals she cooked, but at night he was his old self. Josefina pretended that she was back in her bedroom in Vedado and that Lorenzo had climbed the lattice, like Romeo. It filled her with a sense of excitement, of youthful lust, and that carefully crafted mood enticed Lorenzo. At night, they were young still, and their hearts beat faster in each other’s arms. In the morning, they would look at each other’s sleep-swollen faces and feel the burden of the day ahead, the tiresomeness of being together.
Josefina lost her job at the market after Rosa Arias, the bird woman, died. When the students from the University of Havana protested against President Grau’s government, her daughter, Yesenia, was shot and killed by one of the guards. That night, in honor of the girl she barely knew, Josefina tried to read a book by a man named Tolstoy that the girl had given her, but only got through the first page when she realized the book was about funerals. In the market the next day, the vendors told of how they found Rosa Arias and all of her baby birds dead inside her little house with the tin roof, all the windows shut tight and the gas stove turned on. “She could not go on without her daughter,” Josefina said to one of the other vendors, and they nodded in agreement.
Josefina mourned Yesenia and Rosa Arias, and those baby birds, frightened then for the baby who would be born to her in a few weeks, a daughter she would name Soledad for the loneliness she felt. There had been many evil signs during the early years in El Cotorro, and Josefina lamented that she had Regla’s interpretations in person only once a year.
Soledad’s birth was anything but easy. If her brother had been a soft, pliant banana, Soledad was an anchor lodged on the ocean floor. Lorenzo was in Santa Clara that month, and Josefina walked herself over to the hospital, Lalito seated on her hip because he would not walk when asked. His long legs dangled. Every few yards she would stop, breathe deeply, and go on. No one offered a hand, and Josefina thought the world and its people were cruel, so she wished them all dead.
In the hospital, the nurses locked Lalo out of the room, all by himself. Though he was already five, he was small, and people thought he was much younger. Still, he wailed along with Josefina with each painful push, and she could hear him banging on the door of the room with such ferocity that the cross above the door danced on its nail.
* * *
In the torrid heat of a tropical spring, Josefina wrote her first reply to her father’s letters, a letter he would never read. It was short, composed quickly at night while Lorenzo was not home. She listed the dates of her children’s births (knowing that Regla had already told him everything, she thought it would be a courtesy to announce it all herself), a description of her house, a wish that all was well, a kiss for Regla. The paper was damp with her sweat when she folded it into the envelope. Her next letter, she promised herself, would be longer.
Always in April, when Lenten winds blew the weighty palm fronds off the tops of trunks, the trees outside their house would be alight with avocados, the tiny oblong fruit, like strings of lanterns draped over the branches. By late summer, half the avocados were lost, and Lorenzo believed the fruit fell because someone counted them. They’d lie on the ground, broken and torn, the large white seeds, the size of a fist, sticking up out of the yellow pulp like grave markers. In the summer, Lorenzo would come home again, and he would look through the window that faced the backyard, his eyes scanning the tree outside for fruit, finding only limbs and the luminous green leaves.
“Who counted the avocados?” he’d yell in mock anger and walk through the front door, his slick hair falling into his eyes, his left hand pulling a few thin pesos from his pockets for Lalo, his right lowering a new cane suitcase to the floor. Josefina would follow him as he moved about the parlor, making odd paths around him, straightening his guayabera shirt, so stiff with its gray satin embroidery, pressing smooth the handkerchief in his pocket, her hand flat on his thin chest, until he would stop and kiss her hard.
On those days of his return, he would sit with his children on one of the oversized wicker rocking chairs and begin pulling out gifts for them—a rag doll in a blue dress for Soledad, shiny brown shoes for Lalo, sugar candy for both of them. When Josefina would sit on the rocker beside him and begin to ask questions, he would push her aside and sit alone on a stool in the kitchen, waiting for his wife to prepare his first meal at home in months, resigning himself to the idea that he would not have avocado slices to mix with his rice.
On those warm evenings one could hear the people of El Cotorro outside on their rocking chairs, telling dirty jokes, clicking domino tiles on the wooden slats of their porches. It was then that Josefina would come into Soledad’s bedroom and push aside the mosquito netting. She’d listen quietly for a second, to make sure that Lalo was sleeping and that his heavy breathing had found its sedated rhythm. Then she would speak.
“Your papá is killing me,” she would say, and she would breathe in hard, her chest growing so large in her effort to inhale that Soledad could feel their ribs touching. Josefina would plant her fingers into her daughter’s hair, drawing the strands up and away from her neck as she spoke, doing this with so much fervency that by morning, her fingers ached, trapped in a net of curls.
As she wove the hair with her fingers, she would tell Soledad about Lorenzo’s lovers and how she could smell the perfume of the women of Havana on his hands and buried in the lines of his face, because those ladies wore violet perfume—deep, purple cologne inside small bottles of yellowed glass. She said she knew he had been to Oriente province, because his tongue was thick with the accent of its women and his back bore the ruby-red scratches of their long fingernails. And she told her of the prostitutes that lounged on the beaches of Varadero and how they had left sweet-smelling grains of sand in his hair. Josefina told her all of these things as if she could read them off Lorenzo’s face, or in the secret language of his hands, mannerisms which he carelessly brought home with him from his trips. Soledad believed her then, because she was very young, and because her mother only spoke to her on such occasions as this, when the midnight crickets were quiet, because her papá was outside disturbing their mixed chorus, lifting rotten avocados from the ground.
5
The sergeant, in Vedado, went about his life, pining for his daughter and grandchildren. He had become thin, and his bones showed in his chest, like a cooked snapper. Regla blamed it on Josefina’s departure, and the sergeant said nothing to disprove it. Regla returned from visits to El Cotorro with stories about Lalo’s foolishness or Soledad’s seriousness, about Josefina’s arroz con pollo. “Just like her mother’s,” Regla had sighed. Never did Regla mention Lorenzo, and the sergeant was grateful. Better to pretend that the man was dead than burn with rage, he thought. The sergeant’s mailbox was often empty—a tiny physical void that saddened him. One morning in May, while Doctor Oliveros listened to the sergeant’s heart, a messenger arrived with a telegram and a new letter from Josefina.
He had received the doctor early in the morning. Manuel Oliveros dusted his jacket in the doorway with both hands, holding his leather bag between his knees. This had become routine for him, his monthly visits to the sergeant’s house. Though he complained that the cab ride was expensive and that he lost profit when he closed his practice in Old Havana for the visit, Doctor Oliveros enjoyed his time with the sergeant.
“Buenos días, Antonio,” Oliveros said, dangling his satchel in the doorway, like a white flag of surrender.
“Oliveros, come in and poke me.” The sergeant held a plate of fried eggs and rice on his lap. The doctor walked into the sergeant’s bedroom and frowned at the plate of greasy salted eggs. Here we begin, the doctor thought to himself and chortled through his nose.
“Is an officer’s bad heart a joke to you, Oliveros?” the sergeant asked from his bed.
The doctor balanced his bag on the bed’s thick footboard, cleared his throat, and said, “Sergeant Navarro, please do me the honor of using my title, Doctor Oliveros. Respect, sir, respect.” Both men erupted in laughter. The sergeant rose and embraced the doctor.
“Come, sit down and unbutton your shirt,” Oliveros said, and pulled a polished stethoscope from his bag. He pressed the cold disk to the sergeant’s chest, listening for the missing beat. The arrhythmic heart followed no particular pattern, but its cadence was interrupted by a brief silence every so often.
“Have you heard about the rallies in Matanzas province?” the sergeant asked quietly.
“No speaking, Antonio.” The doctor had still not heard the return of the beat. He slid the disk an inch to the right.
“Things are bad, Manuel. I think I’ll be leaving soon.” The sergeant looked up at his friend’s face.
“Nonsense, your heart is strong still. You aren’t going anywhere.” Oliveros misunderstood. He was aware that he had just lied to his friend, that the missing beat this time lasted too long, and then struck up again weakly before gaining strength.
“I mean I’ll be leaving Cuba soon.” Again the doctor noted the silence in the sergeant’s chest. He put the stethoscope away and brought together the folds of the sergeant’s shirt.
“Leaving? Back to Spain, gallego?” he asked, using the common epithet for Spaniards that was taken as either an insult or compliment, depending on who used it.
“Perhaps the United States. Things are getting worse, Manuel, and I don’t just mean my heart. This country is on the verge of civil war,” the sergeant said, and placed his hand over his heart. “Just the other day we arrested thirty-eight demonstrators on the steps of the university, and can you believe? The whole time, Oliveros, one of them cried for his mamá.” The doctor shook his head as he tucked the stethoscope back into his bag. “I should never have left my father’s home,” the sergeant concluded, and dug his buttocks deeper into his bed.
As if to emphasize his point, Regla appeared through the doorway with a telegram newly arrived, and Josefina’s letter. The letter he squeezed in the palm of his hand, crumpling the paper a bit, and stuffed it into his pocket to read later. The telegram was already torn open, and from the purple shade suddenly cast upon Regla’s cheeks, the sergeant knew the message was not gladdening. He read aloud for the doctor to hear:
1 SEPTIEMBRE 1946
A DEMONSTRATION IN MAR LINDO, THREE MILES FROM THE EL COTORRO POLICE ACADEMY, HAS DEVELOPED INTO A RIOT IN THE PUBLIC SECTORS OF BOTH SMALL TOWNS.
THE STUDENT INSURRECTIONS MUST BE STOPPED. OFFICERS FROM THE PROVINCES BORDERING THE RIOT WILL BE ASSIGNED TO POSTS THERE. SERGEANT ANTONIO NAVARRO WILL REPORT TO EL COTORRO AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
The sergeant felt his cheek and read the telegram once more, to himself. “Regla,” he said, “pack a small bag for me, only the essentials.” And then to Oliveros: “You see, my friend, how things are going?”
“Yes, I see,” Oliveros said, and helped the sergeant to his feet. “Be careful, gallego.”
“Adiós,” the sergeant said, and began to dress, pushing his daughter’s unread letter into his coat pocket.
* * *
He arrived in El Cotorro that night, stepping off the train into the moisture in the air, and felt as if he were swaddled, suddenly, in a wet towel. From the station he could see the outline of the academy and the lights of the fires there, flickering west in the direction of the wind, despite the drizzle that continued to fall. He had little time, though, to take in the sight. Cadets from the academy, their cheeks flushed and beardless still, led the arriving officers in the direction of what once was the ticket area. Now the booths were stocked with rifles, the butts sticking sharply out over the countertops. Old wooden shields, bearing the scuffs and rifts from Cuba’s independence, were laid on chairs and benches, so that there was no place for the wounded police to sit. Instead, they leaned against walls, holding bloodied wads of cotton to their wounds, and sat under signs that read, RIDE THE RAILROAD TO HAVANA or TRAVEL THE ISLAND LIKE A KING. The signs belied the island’s instability. In just a few short years General Machado had been replaced by Céspedes, then came Grau, then Mendieta Montefur, Barnet, Gomez, Bru, Batista, Grau again. The list of names seemed endless, and the men that alternately took power had been certain that they could make changes. No matter the name, the sergeant thought, blood and loss were always part of the scenery.
The sergeant stood near the weapons, stroking the cold shotguns. He wondered if he could find the battered rifle he had shared with his brother during the Spanish War. He had carved an A onto one side, and an F, for his brother Francisco, on the other. The sergeant had never fired his weapon in the war, but he remembered the weight of that rifle on his shoulder, and the way the bayonet would heat like an iron in the sun, scalding his skin. He was sixty-two now, though he didn’t look his age, and he still frightened the cadets nearby into standing up straighter.
The sergeant’s search for his old rifle was interrupted, and he was led, at last, before a group of twenty cadets. One of them, a boy wearing tiny rimless glasses that reflected the lights of the approaching trains so that his eyes looked like flashbulbs for a moment as the train passed, stepped forward, trembling at the sight of the sergeant’s tassels and medals, and handed him a small notice on yellow paper. The sergeant was to lead the group to El Cotorro’s Plaza Perla to subdue the mob that had gathered there. He sighed loudly and shoved the paper into his pocket. “Vámonos,” he said and began the slow march to the plaza.
The people at the Plaza Perla seemed to quiet when they noted the police walking toward them. Many of the men had begun brawling, slashing at each other with kitchen knives and shards of glass from windows and lanterns. Even they stopped, holding their makeshift weapons toward the sergeant and the young cadets. The crowd was shaking in its anger. It had been the grand hotels that did it. They had seen the postcards—of luxury suites and Olympic swimming pools, of glitter and three-piece suits—and wondered where all the money had gone, while at home, they were telling their children stories of how the cows had stopped making milk.
The sergeant halted the march, placed the shield between his knees and cupped his hands over his mouth. “¡A sus casas, todos!” he shouted, his Spaniard’s accent incensing the crowd that did not move. An elderly man took a light, cautious step out of the Plaza Perla, his foot leaving the grassy circle and onto the pavement of the road. Several men near him caught him by the shoulders and dragged him back into the ring.
“¡A sus casas!” he yelled again, but still no one turned toward home, nor dropped his weapon. The sergeant could hear the uneven breathing of the cadets behind him and the murmurs of the crowd before him. He looked at the faces, most of them young and dark from being out in the sun. Their hands, he saw, gripped tightly at fragments of glass, yet their tough skin did not split against the biting edges. They hated the state of things, President Grau, and secretly, the sergeant did not blame them. Though he profited from the fat-faced leader’s preference toward the wealthy, though he had fought in the Sergeants’ Revolt of 1933, the sergeant knew that Havana had become a corrupt capital. Still, he did what he could to protect the presidency. It was a far cry from his own days as a rebel in the Sierra Maestra, when he and his brother crouched in holes and aimed their rifles at Spaniards to liberate the island. The years had, indeed, changed him.
