The Playwright's House, page 4
“A quick lunch. You can tell me more about your father. I have no one I can reach until later today. I don’t like calling people at work. You don’t know who’s listening. Besides, if you show up too soon, they won’t let you see him.” Gimenez went to the kitchen. He brought out plates and silverware and placed them on the table in an almost ceremonious way.
“Let me give you a hand,” Serguey said.
“Nonsense,” Gimenez said. “You’re the guest.”
CHAPTER 4
The trip back to his apartment offered no consolation. With all the uncertainty, he couldn’t calculate or strategize. There was no argument or concrete plan to put into practice, no list of scenarios and he could logically consider. What Serguey had was a sensation akin to fear incessantly gnawing at the walls of his stomach. There was frustration, teetering between calamity and self-pity. What was haunting him was merely abstract, a heavy dose of Why me? Why us? As if the universe had anything to do with it.
Mostly, he felt sorry for his father. His illustrious career—his life as he had built it—could be over. At this very moment Felipe could be in a dark cell, bloodied and beaten, and here Serguey was, feeling sorry for himself, hanging on to his mentor’s goodwill, to the promise of a phone call that wouldn’t be made for hours. A stain on his record, as this had a chance of becoming, could keep Serguey from ever achieving Gimenez-like status. Regardless of what Anabel said, whatever she might convince herself of, the ramifications for them were unavoidable: the son of a political prisoner had to be doubly patriotic in a country where ideals superseded the individual, where the red on the flag superseded the red in your blood.
Serguey chose the sidewalk reached by sunlight at this hour. It would have been a perfect day to spend at the beach. It would have been a perfect day if Victor hadn’t knocked on the door. Now he would have to go see his brother, no matter what news Gimenez’s call brought.
On Paseo Avenue, he slowed his pace toward an old lady who regularly sat on a wooden chair selling roses and sunflowers out of a grungy bucket. She liked to grin, as if proud of her missing teeth, at anyone who examined the flowers for more than a second, especially tourists whose empathy occasionally led them to overpay. Serguey had never heard the woman speak, though he didn’t think she was a mute. Was it a sales strategy? If she had been a character in one of Felipe’s plays, he might have written that slinging words with her tongue—eroded by years of regrettable speech—could drain years from her waning life. Maybe this was what the occasional tourist saw, or the local men who dropped change in her hand while crooning her name, which now escaped Serguey. (If he had been asked to guess, a gun pressed to his temple, he would’ve called her Lazara.)
He and Anabel had strolled by her many times, saluting with what they thought were gracious glances. They hadn’t bought a flower, and as he lingered now by the bucket, he was embarrassed. The woman exhibited her epic smile, and all of sudden Serguey felt as if he were staring at an Orisha in the flesh, willing to forgive him for his past transgressions. (Felipe might have written this, too.) Serguey didn’t believe in saints or gods, but if help from the beyond was somehow possible, if karma was real—if in fact the universe had something to do with what was happening—surrendering to the irrationality of the moment couldn’t hurt. He fished out his wallet and picked half a dozen roses. He handed the money to the lady. She folded it into a tattered, zippered handbag, which she then placed inside her bra, above her low-hanging breasts. Serguey didn’t want the flowers for himself or Anabel. Roses would go unnoticed on a day like today. His purchase, as he intended it, was an act of goodness toward the old woman, whose skin was like a burnt raisin and whose income, judging by the floppy flowers, barely fed her. The roses were an offering, so he gave them back.
As if expecting them all along, the lady grabbed the thornless stems and, grinning again, plopped them into the bucket.
When Serguey arrived at his building, he was met by a handwritten sign on the elevator’s door: broken. please use staircase.
Was life mocking him? Should he have kept the roses?
He found Victor sitting on the steps leading to his floor. He almost laughed, as if everything on this day had been a hilariously elaborate set-up.
“What’s this?” he asked, noticing dismay on his brother’s face.
“I just couldn’t go back to the house.”
“Why are you out here? Anabel didn’t let you in?”
“I knocked and no one answered. Your neighbor said she saw them leave.” Victor rubbed his right knuckles repeatedly in the palm of his left hand. He’d done this as a child whenever he was anxious, whenever his mischief was in danger of being discovered. “Did you find anything out?”
“My boss is going to call. We might not hear from him until tonight.”
“Can’t we go to someone else? Maybe we can check some prisons and police stations.”
“Victor, if I’m going to help, I’m doing it my way. Chances are we might not be able to see Dad for a while.”
His brother thrust his hands into his pockets. “I get it. We have to be patient.”
“We have to be smart.”
Victor looked down at the stairs, then at Serguey. “Do you mind if I stay until your boss contacts you?”
“Come on,” Serguey said.
The living room and balcony were empty. Serguey called out Anabel’s name to no response. He rushed down the hall, incensed by the thought that the sisters had inexplicably left with Manny. Serguey exhaled when he saw Anabel’s beach bag sitting on their bed, her two-piece bathing suit bunched next to it.
She’d left a note on the kitchen table:
I’m taking my sister to her place. We’ll talk to her roommates to see what they know. One of them is an actor in your father’s play. I decided not to call your cell phone just in case. Be back soon. Love, Anabel.
Victor read the note over his brother’s shoulder. “That’s a good idea, not calling. That’s why I came in person.”
“This isn’t East Germany,” Serguey said. “We aren’t dealing with the Stasi.”
“How do you know they’re not listening?”
He dismissed Victor’s insinuation, crumpling the note.
Victor snatched a chair and sat. His nail biting and knuckle rubbing had been replaced by a strange calm. “I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said, “and with Dad, this could be political.”
“Why do you say that?” Serguey said.
“He’s always having people over at the house.”
“He’s done that since we were kids.”
“Yeah, but we knew those guys. Stuck-up artists talking about art and shit. Now I don’t know half the people who walk in. Sometimes Dad asks me if I’m going to be around. I didn’t make much of it until today. I just thought he wanted space to work on his plays.”
“He never told you anything about those people?”
“The old man and I live in different worlds,” Victor said. “My apartment’s separate from the rest of the house. What the fuck are we going to talk about? I mostly let him do his thing. It’s his house, and I’m always out and about anyway. I usually don’t even bring women to my place, which is a pain in the ass. I have to borrow Kiko’s guest room for a few hours, and that asshole listens through the wall. I know it.”
Serguey rolled his cell phone between his palms like an oversized die. “I thought you were more involved with Dad’s projects. You gave him money for Electra Garrigó, didn’t you?”
“I did, but I wasn’t involved. I heard him talk about not having funds for a big prop or something. He seemed like he really needed it. I had fifteen dollars with me, and I offered them. I made it sound like a big deal last night to mess with you. Anyway, Dad usually turns down stuff like that from me, but he took it this time. He gave the money to a guy who was there. Don’t know his name. I think he was a carpenter.”
“Goddamn it, Victor.”
Victor shuffled Anabel’s note against the table’s surface like sandpaper on ragged wood. “I’m embarrassed about the whole thing, okay? I know I’m supposed to be aware of what’s going on. I’m supposed to protect Dad and give a shit all the time.”
Serguey tried seizing the note from his brother. “That’s not exactly what—”
Victor slid the note closer to his body. “I have my own life. I just fucked up. People know when they fuck up.”
Serguey desisted. “I know, I didn’t—”
“I don’t need you to judge me. You think it’s easy for me to come here and ask for help? I’m used to solving things myself.”
Serguey skipped a few responses that came to mind. He simply said, “Dad was taken. That’s all that matters. Forget the rest.” He gave Victor a moment to speak further, but he appeared satisfied.
Serguey dialed Anabel’s number.
Victor shook his head. “You’re still going to call, after she told you not to?”
“She didn’t say not to. And they should’ve stayed here. It’s safer.”
Anabel didn’t pick up. Frustrated, Serguey dropped the phone on the table.
“She’s smart,” Victor said, leaving the note next to it and walking away to the living room.
Serguey thought about texting her, but he decided that, at this point, he might as well wait. He had to resign himself to a lack of control over the circumstances. He prepared some linden tea, grabbed two glasses from an overhead shelf, and stirred two teaspoons of brown sugar into each glass. He listened absentmindedly to the clinking of the spoon. He realized that the gravity of his father’s arrest hadn’t truly affected him. A son should’ve been devastated, terrified, irate. He hadn’t instinctively rushed to the nearest police station, as Victor had suggested, or the State Security offices, as he had contemplated. He wanted to believe there was no reason to panic, not until Gimenez’s call. Worst-case scenario, he thought, they shut down the play and ban Felipe from directing on a big stage again. Men of his father’s prestige rarely went to prison. The government seemed to know that stripping artists of their work—of their voice, as Felipe referred to it—was punishment enough.
Serguey saw his brother standing on the balcony, watching the city. He was wearing a pair of Ecko Unltd jeans, white Adidas sneakers, and a Nike T-shirt. He looked like so many young men in Havana, men who prided themselves in the brands stamped on their clothes, their spiky, overly gelled hair, the cell phones clipped to their belts, as if these things signified a superior ability or advantaged position—the mark of a shrewd mind, con chispa, or family in another country, en el yuma. Or both.
The sun, now somewhere behind the building, wasn’t as oppressive as it had been in the morning. The brothers sat in the balcony holding their respective glasses, which were dripping from the humidity.
Victor sipped his tea and frowned. “You should’ve put some rum in this.”
“I try not to drink alcohol.”
“You mean to tell me you have no beer in this house? No Havana Club? They have to give them out like bread at your job.”
Serguey drank his tea slowly.
Victor chuckled. “You’re worse than Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got his smug attitude. But even the old man drinks beer and tells dirty jokes now and then. You’re too fucking uptight.”
“I don’t think of it as uptight.” Serguey finished his tea and rested the glass on a narrow patio table, a gift from Gimenez.
“What do you call it?”
Serguey raised his eyebrows. “Mature? Serious?”
“Boring, conceited, out of touch.” Victor delivered the words with an emphatic rhythm. He meant each one, carefully selected, and he wasn’t finished: “How does Anabel put up with it?”
Serguey allowed an instant of silence to settle between them. It was hard to deny his condescension toward the world Victor knew. Did his brother see it as contempt? For some time now, Serguey had been able to elude many of the gritty, dispiriting aspects of life in Cuba. There was the hunger and sickness and persecution, the “aspirin to cure everything” and “only pair of shoes” and “inner tube rafts” reality of it, which was no longer his reality. There was the deadpan bureaucracy, which he regularly circumvented thanks to his connections, and the endless imperialism-bashing speeches and stodgy political discussions, which he avoided by watching films and American television shows on his DVD player. There was a pervasive, deeply entrenched lack of hope in Havana. He recalled perceiving it in his teenage years, when the Special Period was at its worst. This attitude had not only prevailed, but it had gained strength. Victor was closer to it. He saw it and lived it every day. Serguey didn’t have to, not from this apartment, not in the places he and Anabel frequented thanks to Gimenez. He no longer had to buy pizza from government establishments or grungy street vendors—as Felipe had done for him and Victor—when his boss often took him to fancier lunches near the Ministry. He could treat the flower lady on Paseo Avenue as an ornament, like most tourists did, while in Victor’s neck of the woods she would be a social case, the neighbors’ responsibility. He didn’t have to hop on the back of some street hustler’s motorcycle, make a living selling stolen goods in the black market like his brother. Serguey’s ambitions, particularly after he had met Gimenez, were all branched from a singular goal: to remove himself from the Cuba most people knew, the Cuba in which he’d grown up, in which his father and brother still lived. He wanted to join his mentor’s Cuba, to have it be his. He’d begun to get a damn good taste, and now he wanted to remain.
“If you don’t like the tea,” he finally told his brother, “don’t drink it. Linden calms me when I’m nervous.”
He couldn’t bring himself to drop his armor and shield, not after years of contention. Why give Victor the pleasure of highlighting his hypocrisy? Why let himself be openly criticized, when his brother had always shown contempt for his accomplishments, an unwillingness to respect his job, to appreciate what he and Anabel had built together? It was Victor asking him for help, not the other way around. Serguey was the one with the connections, with the means to make a difference. He was the one in the fortunate position, with the imminent ability to have the city at his disposal.
And why should he negate what he’d worked so hard to achieve? Wasn’t that what most Cubans aspired to: some kind of relief from the drudgery and scarcity of communist life? He had chosen to see Havana for its beauty and enduring heartbeat: Spanish fortresses and lighthouses turned into museums; centuries-old churches and cathedrals; wrought iron gates and fences encasing colonial-era houses and courtyards; cobblestone roads leading to open plazas or cul-de-sacs, large balconies and eerie lampposts watching you along the way. There was a tropical, communal spirit that buzzed in the parks of El Vedado, in Old Havana’s narrow streets, at bodegas and bus stops in each municipality, and in almost every inch of sun-drenched shoreline during the summer. There were theater, film, and book festivals; African-themed music and costumes; children flying kites and chiringas from rooftops; old men fishing along the esplanade or playing dominoes on street corners; the unbearably loud, smoke-spewing trucks carrying resilient commuters; the ringing of bicycle bells as workers sped into and away from roundabouts and hurried home.
He didn’t dare paint this picture to Victor, however. His brother’s response would be swift: Havana was more than a romanticized collection of historical and cultural images. Serguey wouldn’t argue against this point, but he could dispute there was nothing wrong with viewing the city this way, and more importantly, that the lifestyle he had started to attain was its own form of survival. It was a triumph, in fact, deserving of respect and yes, even praise, not derision or envy or spite. It was proof that the system, for all its flaws, could produce success stories.
In admirable form, Victor chugged down the entire contents of his glass, then forced a burp. “Still tastes like crap,” he griped, putting the empty glass on the balcony’s ledge.
Serguey watched the glass as if it were a toddler at the edge of a pool. “Be careful.”
“What?”
“You’ll knock it over.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about.” Victor surveyed the street from above. “There’s nobody down there. This neighborhood’s dead.”
“You’ll hurt somebody.”
“And they’ll put me away for good.”
“Give me the glass.”
“What if I throw it? You afraid your neighbors will file a complaint?”
Serguey jolted from his seat in anticipation. The pugilist in his brother was getting ready to unleash a barrage. “Victor, give me the glass.”
Victor grabbed it and stretched his arm into the open air. “It’ll just be a splash.”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Just a little splash.”
Serguey seized Victor’s wrist.
Victor laughed wildly, surrendering the glass. “You’re one sad human being.”
Serguey ground his teeth, showed the glass to his brother as if it were a rock, and said, “I should smash it on your head.”
Victor stopped smiling. His top lip quivered with rage. He got close to his brother’s face, their warm breaths daring each other. “What I hate most about you is that, no matter what you say, you don’t have the balls to do it.”
The sound of jiggling keys and a turning lock interrupted them. Serguey moved away from Victor. The door opened, and Anabel entered.
Serguey approached his wife and kissed her. “How’s Alida?”
Anabel chucked her bag on the center table. “She’s more composed now. I convinced her not to tell anything to Mom and Dad. I don’t want them worrying.”
“Of course.”
“What did Gimenez say?”
“He’s calling tonight. Victor didn’t go home, as you can see.”
His brother waved from the balcony.
“Are you staying for dinner?” Anabel asked him, massaging her temples.
“Are you inviting?”
Serguey said, “Anabel, I don’t think—”
