Читать книгу No Way Home: A Cuban Dancer’s Story - Carlos Acosta - Страница 18

The new school term started and, with it, my second year of ballet. I developed a compromise routine: I would play truant for one week out of every month. Unsurprisingly, I was missing a lot of important rehearsals in the process. The school would communicate this to my father and I would suffer the consequences, but I would continue to skip class. I studied ballet, but I thought constantly about football. Little by little I managed to find the balance between what I had dreamt of doing and what had been imposed on me. In spite of my numerous absences, my marks were consistently high, which was a great mystery to me, but I am sure that it was the only reason I was not expelled in my second year. They were giving me some rope to see what I would do with it.

The summer term would end with the National Festival of the Schools of the Performing Arts, in the city of Camagüey. It was a very important event for the school. Many ballets would be presented, amongst them Dreams of Sailors, by our teacher Lupe Calzadilla, who took me aside and told me that she would include me if I would promise to attend all of the rehearsals. I accepted the deal, thinking it would be nice to see another part of the country, and resolved to make a big effort. I abandoned the La Fortuna lake and for the first three months of the year concentrated on ballet. Everyone was so amazed at my transformation that I was given a special mention in front of the whole school.

At home, things were returning to normal. My mother had recovered her powers of speech and she could walk and undertake light activities. It was wonderful to see her up and about again; she illuminated the entire apartment. Marilín and Bertica were growing up. Marilín was now an adolescent and Bertica had a boyfriend, a local boy called Joel. The school called my father at work to congratulate him on my improved behaviour. When they told him they were thinking of nominating me as a model student, he was so proud he forgot the friction that had existed between us in the past.

There was bad news too, however. In fifth grade Nancy would not be our teacher any more. Now we would take classes with María Caridad and María Isabel, who could not stand me. She constantly told me off and blamed me for everything. Even when it was someone else who farted, she rounded on me and dragged me off to the head’s office to be disciplined.

In January, there was to be a performance at García Lorca, the most important theatre in Cuba. The Mazurka, The Cherubs and many other ballets were going to be performed there for the first time, and I would be dancing with Grettel again. Unfortunately, she was now a guy called Idris’s girlfriend. I used to see them walking hand in hand near the school and was horribly jealous, but I had also started to flirt with another girl called Ana Margarita. Ever since I had received my special mention, she seemed to be always looking at me and smiling, and soon I began to smile back. Once or twice I even spoke to her. My head swelled to immense proportions. I thought I was a ten-year-old Don Juan, until I discovered that the laughter and the flirting were not for me, but for Israel, who sat at the desk behind me. What a fool!

One day, our teacher Soraya was ill and could not take her classes, and so I got to go home early, which I was delighted about because it meant I would be able to play ‘Eat Mud’ with my friend Pedro Julio. On the way home the bus stopped three blocks too early to avoid an enormous crowd of people at the bus-stop. Everybody shouted at the driver, but it was no use, he threw us all off. I strolled on contentedly, whistling a popular tune. Just as I approached our apartment, a black cat crossed in front of me to the other side of the street, where it stopped and looked at me. I was not superstitious, but I felt as if the animal were trying to tell me something.

When I arrived home, Marilín was crying.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘Oh, Yuli… Papá’s had a car accident!’

‘Where are Mami and Bertica?’

‘Everyone’s inside with the doctor. Mamá has to be sedated: her blood pressure went up.’

‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I don’t know. Papi’s at the police station.’

I went to the bedroom with a familiar feeling of dread. A doctor was injecting my mother, who was in a terribly agitated state. There were a few neighbours helping to calm her down and there was the medicinal smell that I hated. It was like a small hospital. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My mother did not notice my presence as I stood observing in the corner, and Bertica acknowledged me surreptitiously, so that Mamá would not know that I was there and get even more upset.

My mother fell asleep shortly after the doctor gave her the injection, but my sisters and I waited and waited, awake and anxious. At around three in the morning, my father finally returned home. His exhaustion showed in his face and we could see from his preoccupied glance that the situation was bad. His eyes darted about, constantly unable to rest on any one thing. He drank a cup of lime-blossom tea that Marilín had made for him and told us all about it.

He had been sitting in his lorry at an intersection, waiting for the lights to turn green so he could turn left. The traffic lights changed and as he was pulling out, a motorbike crashed into him at great speed. The two men riding it had time to jump clear, but the woman who was travelling with them got her dress caught in the sidecar and was killed on impact. The men suffered a few cuts and bruises, nothing serious. They were both so drunk, said my father, that at first they did not seem to understand that their companion had been killed and her body was lying beneath the lorry. When they realized what had happened, they started weeping pathetically, in the way drunks do, and exclaiming: ‘It can’t be true! Help us, God, help us!’ On and on they went, lamenting and calling on all the saints, one by one, while my father looked on in shocked silence. In the forty-five years he had been driving, nothing like this had ever happened to him. He thought about the fragility of life, how just one single second can make the difference between life and death, and he thought, above all, about that corpse which just moments before had been a healthy woman. He thought about us, and about how this situation would weigh against us, for after this nothing would ever be the same for my father again. He stood there, motionless, at the edge of the pavement until the siren of the police car jolted him out of the paralysis into which he had fallen. The noise of a different siren heralded the arrival of an ambulance a moment later, which transported the corpse to the hospital and the survivors to the police station.

My father assured us the accident had not been his fault and that everything would turn out fine, but the smile flickering about his lips was so thin it filled us with doubt. Papá never smiled like that. When he did smile, which was not often, his smile was full and firm without the slightest trace of weakness. We knew he was lying.

At last the old man stretched out on the bunk bed and fell into a deep sleep. We made a pillow out of our fears and went to bed with sadness in our souls. I remembered the black cat which had been trying to send me a warning. I pressed my face down hard on the bolster and let exhaustion drag me under.

The trial took place just one month later. The court deprived my father of two years of liberty even though he had been the least blameworthy party, and the real culprits got off lightly: one was fined a thousand pesos and the other went to prison for a year. It did not matter to the judge that they had been drunk and had jumped the red light; the death had to be paid for in one way or another and the person who paid most dearly for it was my father.

They sent my father to a prison known as the Combinado del Este, on the east side of Havana, where most of the prisoners were murderers, thieves and common criminals. In one of the oppressive cells, my father sat and waited.

My parents’ relationship had been over since I was three and they were now divorced, but this was the first time fate had physically pulled them apart. We did not want my mother to visit the prison – she was not in a fit state to bear any more suffering – but she insisted on going. All three of us went with her in a bus to Cotorro, carrying a plastic carrier bag full of food, our mouths bitter with injustice, and my mother staring out of the window of the bus, silent and confused.

When we arrived at the prison, they made us go through to a room that seemed to pulse with both joy and misery. There were innocent children playing and running round and desperate men smoking and eating; living people and dead souls.

When our father spotted us his face lit up and he hurried over to greet us. He had dark circles under his eyes caused by insomnia and malnutrition. He was dressed in clothes so carelessly made they seemed designed to humiliate the wearer. We sat down at a large table in the middle of the hullabaloo so he could eat and talk. He told us that on the same day he arrived, he had witnessed one of the prisoners having his throat slit with a knife during dinner and he had not been able to sleep since then.

‘God Almighty!’ exclaimed my mother, as she squeezed my hand tightly.

My sisters shivered, and I saw their bare arms were covered with goose-bumps.

I sat watching all the other prisoners in the room as my father spoke, without losing a word of what he was saying.

The following week they were going to move him to a cadet school where he could work for a salary. Money was even more of a worry for us now that he was in prison. My mother had had to sell our sewing machine to buy the shopping for the month. As Papá devoured the meal we had brought him like a ravenous lion, one of the prisoners said hello to him.

‘That’s Augusto,’ he told us. ‘He’s the oldest inmate in the Combinado. He’s got life.’

‘What does “got life” mean?’ I asked him.

‘It means he’ll stay in prison for the rest of his days.’

‘Have you got life?’

‘No, my boy, no, I’ll just be here for a few months then we’ll all be together again.’

Papá’s big, strong hands stroked my head as he gave my mother instructions on how to feed the saints in his shrine. By then they had gone far too long without food.

My eyes followed Augusto as he wandered out into the courtyard. I stared at the withered face and the white head balanced on top of the slight body that paced to the beat of its own silent drum. Sitting on a wall, bathed in golden afternoon sunlight, he seemed to drift away. Intrigued, I asked my mother if I could go to the toilet and I walked outside, towards this man in his desolation. There he was, alone. No plastic carrier bag of food for him, not even a little drop of home-made coffee. The sun seemed to be his only friend. Prison, my father would say later, is a place where you have to get used to saying little or nothing at all, to forget about the passage of time and about life on the outside. After twenty years, Augusto looked as though he had learnt not to need anything. He turned towards me and his stare chilled me to the bone. The poor man looked like he had ceased to exist a long time ago, as though his soul was a place where hope had crumbled to dust and ashes.

‘Yuli, what are you doing?’

I was suddenly aware of my mother calling me.

‘Just coming, Mami, just coming.’

I went back to her, but I never forgot the look of that man who spent four hours sitting on a wall, gazing into the void. When we said goodbye to Papá, I saw that Augusto was still there in the same place. The day had become overcast. Even the sun had abandoned him.

After that visit, my nightmares became unbearable. I dreamt that my father was sitting on the wall with Augusto. I would draw near and just as I was about to hug him, he would suddenly turn and look at me with that same lifeless gaze. Or I would dream that his lorry was falling over a precipice and my two sisters were trapped in the back. I woke up every morning with my eyes swollen from crying, but I continued going to class, as I had promised Lupe I would. I did not want to break my word, especially not now, when the performance at the García Lorca Theatre was about to take place.

Try as I might, though, our teacher María Isabel was constantly scolding me.

‘You’re dirty and you smell,’ she often said, in front of everyone, and they laughed as if she had cracked a joke worthy of the finest comedian.

I explained that my mother could not wash all our clothes and I often had to wear the same uniform as the day before. Not satisfied, she would ask me in a loud voice if we did not have any soap or deodorant in our house. Ashamed, I lowered my head and tried to work out what it was I had done to offend her so. However hard I tried to be good, they still thought I was worthless. I endured the humiliation for as long as I could, then one day something snapped in my brain. Fury formed a knot in my throat. I started truanting again.

Even on the day of the performance at the García Lorca, I could not bear to go into school. My mother, ever sympathetic, did not question the lie I told about there being a day’s holiday from school. She cleaned the house, throwing buckets of water around and sweeping away the dead insects, while I slept all day. ‘Just stay where I can see you,’ she said when, at about six o’clock in the evening, I eventually got up, put on a pair of torn shorts and went down outside barefoot and without a shirt.

My friend, Pedro Julio, was practising our game ‘Eat Mud’ on the corner. This involved taking a small piece of wood with a nail in one end, chucking it at the ground and making it stick upright in the mud. You could throw it from different heights – from the knee, the head or the elbow – and even make it spin in the air. The loser had to put a mud ball in his mouth and bite it in two. It was my favourite game, even though I quite often had to bite a mud ball and inevitably I would end up swallowing some of it. It was a miracle I never got worms.

That evening, we were halfway through a match that was very important for both our reputations as mud-eaters when I caught Pedro Julio trying to cheat.

‘Stuck!’

‘It’s not stuck!’

‘It is so, Yuli, look, it’s standing up.’

‘I know your tricks, bro’, that stick’s lyin’ down in the mud. Look, look!’

‘Shit, bro’, that’s cheating, nooo!’

I grabbed the mud-stick, and balancing it on the end of each finger in turn, threw it at the mud. Pedro Julio turned green because the stick landed upright each time. I kept on throwing it from my knee, my elbow, my head and every time the stick fell right down and stuck perfectly. It seemed it was my lucky day.

‘Now you’re really gonna see how it’s done. Get ready to bite!’ I crowed.

Preparing my final throw, I took hold of the mud-stick by the nail and walked back a few paces. Pedro Julio was sweating. One, two, three and splat! Stuck!

‘That doesn’t count, you cheated. I’m not playing any more!’

‘Look who’s talking, stop being a wimp and eat the mud ball!’

‘I’m not going to fucking eat it!’

‘Bite it, bite it, you lost!’

‘I’m not biting nothing.’

‘Take that then!’

I rubbed the mud ball in his face. He got another even bigger one and pressed it against my forehead. I jumped on top of him and we fell into the mud. I had him pinned down good and proper by the neck when a black car drew up beside us.

I felt someone tugging at my arm.

‘Let him go, let him go, Junior, let him go …!’

Everybody called me Yuli around the neighbourhood, a few people called me El Moro, but nobody ever called me Junior.

I turned and in one quick movement an extremely strong man had thrown me into the car.

‘Quick, quick, quick!’

Shit, no! It was my teacher, Silvia, and a driver.

‘Hurry up, hurry up, or we’ll be late!’ she ordered the driver and then she turned to me.

‘How is it possible, Carlos Junior, that you have failed to turn up for a performance that is so important for your school?’

I only managed to say: ‘Oh my God, I forgot! Miss, it’s just …’

‘The show has been suspended for the past half hour because the mazurka is incomplete. Do you think that’s right? Look at the state of you. You look like a vagrant.’

I was completely covered in mud.

The driver put his foot down on the accelerator. He went over every pothole, rattling around as though it were cattle he was transporting not people. In the back seat, I was pinned between Silvia and another teacher, who stared at me and smoked as Silvia fired out questions.

‘Why were you fighting with that boy?’

‘Because he didn’t want to eat mud …’ I replied, all innocence.

‘That’s no reason to fight … of course he didn’t want to eat mud. Whoever would have thought of such a thing?’

I kept quiet. Obviously I had thought of such a thing, as had all my friends who loved to play ‘Eat Mud’ and enjoyed it when their opponents lost.

When I arrived at the stage door there were several teachers waiting to whisk me rapidly inside.

‘For God’s sake, he’s completely covered in mud … Where’s he been, a pigsty? What are we going to do with you? You’re a disaster!’

They all spoke at once as they scrubbed the mud off my face and legs. One applied a bit of make-up to me while another whipped off my clothes and shoved me into a dance-belt and leotard. They moved fast, shaking me and manipulating me as though I were a puppet.

‘Up, put your hand in … Stand …’

I did what they said. They finished putting my jacket on then bustled me out of the changing room. There were a lot of people in the corridor, most of them students who looked me up and down as though I were a Martian. I was just about to go onstage, when I heard the music for the mazurka and, behind me, someone shouting: ‘Your shoes, your shoes, you’ve forgotten your shoes!’

My heartbeat accelerated. The music was getting to the part when we had to enter.

‘Get a move on, get a move on, or we’ll go on late!’ cried Grettel in a panic.

I fell to the floor, put on my shoes and ran like lightning.

Aaaand … a-one, two, three, one, two, three.

Phew! I had made it. I faked a smile and executed the geometrical formations all around the stage, while Grettel shot me furious glances.

Afterwards, I lurked in a corner at the back of the theatre wearing only my muddy, torn shorts, skulking along the wall like a rat. The phrases I had so often heard echoed in my ears: ‘You’re dirty, you stink, you’re a disaster.’

They were right. I was a disaster. My life, my world, was a disaster. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps the saints knew that on 2 June 1973, a disaster of a boy would be born in Los Pinos, a muddle-headed, mud-eating, break-dancing fool with a sick mother and a jailbird father determined against all odds that he should study ballet. Perhaps that was my destiny.

I was replaced by Ulises in the Camagüey Festival because of my continued absences. The school won nearly all the medals that year and our teacher Lupe’s ballet, Dreams of Sailors, in which I should have been dancing, won most of the prizes. Lupe had done everything she could not to lose me from the cast, but I kept skipping about a week’s worth of classes each month and everyone was frightened that I would fail to turn up for performances during the festival.

At home we made a pact not to say anything to my father. We did not want to upset him now that he had been transferred from the Combinado to a cadet school. He was working there, earning seventy pesos a month. The salary was not enough for us to live on, so we had to try to cut back on household expenses. We stopped going to the cinema and we went to school with the exact money for the bus journey and nothing more. I had to keep wearing the same pair of trousers even though they were already too small for me. My sisters sold our coffee and soap rations to get money for food and my mother resumed her fortnightly trips to the countryside to exchange our rations with the farmers.

At the beginning of September 1984, I enrolled for what should have been my third year of ballet. In fact, I had to repeat my second year because, having started at the age of nine instead of ten, I was a year younger than my classmates. Repeating the year meant that I would be in the correct group for my age: eleven years old, in my sixth grade of schooling and my second year of ballet.