Читать книгу The Death of Fidel Perez - Elizabeth Huergo - Страница 8

"Saturnina sangrando vino

A decirnos el destino.

Girando viene, las sallas sangrosas.

Girando va, contando muertos como losas."

Saturnina watched the crowd coalesce and begin to make its way to the plaza. She felt the press of an invisible hand at her back, propelling her away from the commotion, pushing her across the city as if she must mark the hour of doom and salvation. She moved toward the trees in the square, toward the grass tamed into rectangles by the surrounding brick. She felt the tiny green teeth of each blade biting her ankles, pressing against her flesh. She watched as the blades of grass changed color— no longer green but turquoise, like the morning sky. She saw the drops of water from the predawn rain coagulating on the bricks before her, their shiny translucence unaltered by the tread of broken shoes. The trees in their prison rectangles stretched into the dome of morning sky and smiled at her, despite their sorrows, all the while plunging deeper into the earth and beyond their visible prison. She touched the dark-stained bark, rough-furrowed cloak that channeled the rain deeper into the roots, and looked up to see the massive limbs, jostled by the breeze, with each movement reframing segments of the sky.

"Dime," she whispered to the bark. Tell me. "Can you hear me?"

The cars sputtered along both sides of the avenue. The houses shrank imperceptibly into the soil, their movements glacier-like. Their faces reflected Saturnina's own: unshuttered, broken by time, entire pieces missing, and yet insistent. They held within themselves a series of histories, of those who had lived and died within those walls, and of those who had come here to imagine and then build them.

"When I stand here," Saturnina began to tell the tree, "I feel heaven. The Lord dangles me head down by the ankles. Then I stretch my arms out toward the world. He massages the soles of my aching feet and helps me through another day. He pulled Tomás up into the heavens and held him safely in His arms until today. Batista's men, the ones who killed Tomás, the Lord let go of their ankles long ago. The Lord sent them spinning into oblivion."

Saturnina felt the press of the invisible hand propelling her forward again. She hobbled along as quickly as her aching knees would carry her. She passed the ruined buildings, the mosaics on each façade shattered by time. She could feel the tesserae striking the ground, her heart constricting as each one began to dissolve into the dust. She felt obliged to stop and rescue as many as she could, placing them carefully in a small pouch by her side.

She liked to hear the tesserae clicking, rubbing against one another; the soft swoosh of her many skirts and the counterpoint of colorful marble. She liked to collect these pieces every day and then at nightfall empty the pouch on the floor of the broken attic she called home. She would light a candle, arrange the tesserae by color and pattern, and whisper a prayer to the God who held her ankles so delicately, that He might watch over these hardened tears that dropped from her buildings just as He watched over her son in heaven.

"¡ Fidel calló!" Saturnina cried out to every passerby.

She walked as fast as she could, surveying the ground before her, picking up bits of fallen marble, trying to ignore the smell of fried dough in the air and the growl it had triggered in her belly. She had given away her last bit of bread to the children, and she wondered if there would be bread today at the food dispensary. The pouch of tesserae jostled on her hip, the sugary dough sizzled in the morning air, the invisible hand pressed against her back. She didn't have a single centavo in that pouch, so if the dispensary was closed, she would have to wander back with an even emptier belly into the heart of the city. She would have to stop by the farmers' market stalls and find a soul who would take pity and give her a handful of uncooked beans or a ripe mango.

The old woman covered her face and began to cry. The press of that invisible hand pushed her forward, the undertow of sorrow and regret pulled her under, until her mind began tumbling through the past, the image of her broken son on an aluminum slab at the city morgue rising before her. She felt the stiffened hands that had once held hers, tiny fingers wrapping round her immortal soul. All the fighting and the blood and the words— her son had been taken away unjustly, but he would return.

"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! ¿No quieres café?"

"No, Mamá," she could still hear him saying. "I'll have some of your lovely coffee later."

The sound of Tomás's voice was so close by today that it was nearly unbearable. His voice had become amplified, as if all at once Tomás had become many people and was shouting at her from many different directions.

"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! ¡ Fidel calló!"

Each time she called out the day's news to him, Tomás shouted back, the sound reverberating in her head, confusing her. Why was her boy shouting at her? This beloved son whose whispers she usually strained to hear, his voice like the rustle of new leaves in a summer breeze, today was shouting at her as loudly as a gale wind across bare-limbed trees.

"Madrecita, viejita de mi alma," the first soldier called out to Saturnina as she approached the dispensary. "Aquí tienes pan."

"Comrade, take your bread!" the second soldier barked.

Saturnina grasped the small loaf, tucking it inside her blouse.

"No lines today," the first soldier said, shrugging, a crooked smile on his face. "Why don't you take these, too? No one's here."

Saturnina said nothing but held out her skirts to receive the few hard biscuits that remained on the dispensary shelf, receiving them as if she were waiting for communion— a pragmatic, unexpected communion held before a ramshackle wooden shed and dispensed by a couple of priests in army fatigues.

" Fidel calló," Saturnina explained, offering them the words in gratitude.

"Madrecita—" the soldier with the crooked smile began. Saturnina saw him raise a forefinger to his lips. "Be careful."

Saturnina gave him a sidelong glance, her ancient underlip jutting into the infinity of space before her, the rope of her hair twisted into a crown at the top of her head. She looked down and remembered the bloody edges of her skirts. She wasn't certain which frightened her more, the knowledge she carried with her or the smiling soldier's response to her words.

"Calló. Fidel calló. ¿Qué van hacer?" Saturnina asked softly, calmly.

"Get out of here," the second soldier commanded. "You're lucky I'm not arresting you, you crazy old loon. Fidel is alive."

" Fidel calló. What will you do? Who will you stand with?" Saturnina insisted.

"Do what he says. Don't come back again, madrecita. For your own good," the soldier with the crooked smile insisted.

Saturnina squinted. Why did he insist on calling her madrecita?

"¿Tomás?"

The soldier with the crooked smile shook his head.

"José," he offered.

"I understand," Saturnina replied, winking.

Saturnina lifted the uppermost layers of her skirts until she reached the old apron with the deep pockets. She stuffed the hard biscuits into her pockets, then pulled the small loaf from her blouse and took a bite.

"You remind me of my mother," José said.

"I am your mother, boy. You all belong to me."

She smacked her lips and cocked her left eyebrow.

"Remember," Saturnina said, shaking an arthritic forefinger at him, "I was the one. I told you the truth. What are you going to do? Who will you stand with? You'll have to decide."

The second soldier scowled at her. Saturnina turned and walked a short distance from the dispensary.

"¡ Fidel callo! You'll have to decide. Soon."

Saturnina scurried away, shrugging off the volley of curses the second soldier hurled at her. She began the walk back to her hovel. As she walked, she broke off small pieces of bread, putting each piece in her mouth, chewing and walking until she reached the ruin she called home. From the outside it appeared intact, the blue-and-white Alhambra tiles that decorated the façade and entrance untouched. Inside, most of the walls and ceilings had collapsed onto the ground floor, slowly, piece by piece, covering in rubble the marble surface of the once grand foyer. Only the top floor, the carved wooden stairs, and a portion of the roof that extended precariously over the rubble remained. It was here, in this niche that extended from the landing and along one of the interior walls, that she made her home. She climbed up the long, rickety staircase and sat on the top landing in her battered rocker, glancing up at the morning sky through the broken walls of the building and then down at the passersby flitting across the broad entranceway below her.

Fidel's death had triggered in her a set of barely dormant preoccupations that began now to shift and commingle with the sound of the children's rhymes floating across from the building behind hers. She thought about how much she liked to play with the children; how they would call out their rhymes, running at her full tilt, fearless, like birds in flight. They trusted her dusty lap and her arthritic hands, which even now, in old age, could grip and raise them toward the sky. They would dance circles around her, hiding in the folds of her skirt, laughing from their hard, round bellies at the old woman, old as a rock, dark as a river idol raised from the mysterious depths on a fisherman's hook.

They were her children, she thought. Even the soldiers were hers. She extended her right hand before her proprietarily, beneficently, as if she were blessing her congregants. These were Saturnina's streets, her cobblestones under the tropical sun, her bony mongrels that sniffed and scraped for any morsel and died among thick cords of flies, their rib cages thrust into the midday air, defiant. The streets that tilted down in a long cascade, eventually finding their way to the sea; these were hers. The rusted wrought-iron balustrades; the perilously worn balconies; the toothless slatterns who hung their dingy laundry across rows of drooping rope suspended between doorways; these belonged to her, too. Sorrowful Saturnina, her neighbors called her, harmless bag of bone and flesh buffeted by forces so much greater than herself; crazy old woman, living trough of memory and despair. How she liked to rock back and forth on her perch every day and think about Tomás, her sweet and only boy, calling out his name.

"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! "

She rocked steadily back and forth, calling out to him as if he were in the next room, as if he would be bringing her a bag of yarn, a misplaced pair of glasses. But today only the image of Tomás's bloodied body and that last, startled look on his face rose before her.

Though Saturnina lived through the turmoil at the end of Batista's regime and the beginning of Fidel's, she remembered very little, images of the violence and injustice of those years imprinting themselves on her memory as if they had been observed by someone else. She moved through the days and months after Tomás's death practically, methodically— the way someone moves through a series of facts memorized but not quite understood. She had always known about Tomás's interest in politics; she had never realized how actively he had been working against Batista, joining the Revolutionary Directorate and running an underground student network that provided food and shelter for dissenters of every political stripe. He had been arrested several times, but so had many of the university students who were members of the Directorate, and who had sworn themselves to the overthrow of Batista.

Saturnina remembered asking Tomás's classmate, Armando, to tell her what had happened.

"They singled him out. They singled a lot of us out," Armando explained. "They saw Tomás as part of the Directorate's conspiracy to assassinate Batista."

"Was he?"

"I don't know, Saturnina."

"You must know, Armando. You were with him."

"I just helped him shelter dissenters. We never told one another anything that could be used against us."

"He sheltered people, Armando. He would never kill."

"He never turned anyone away. Maybe he should have."

"He sheltered people."

"He sheltered dissenters. That was enough to get him killed, but I don't know."

"Who killed him, Armando?"

"I saw the American pull the trigger. I saw him," Armando explained. "I don't know who hired him or why."

Even now Saturnina tried to imagine the moment when the American with the thin mustache had called out her son's name, Tomás Olivera Díaz, and how Tomás had stepped forward, with that frankness that was intrinsic to his character, and discovered a cocked revolver. Not a single friend standing on the dock with Tomás that day could explain to Saturnina what had happened to the American, who seemed to have been absorbed by the chaos that followed. She knew with an abiding faith that her son, in his last flicker of consciousness, had recognized and forgiven him. The boy who helped everyone the way she had taught him would have forgiven this, too. She imagined the American, lit cigarette in hand, standing in a far corner of the dark interrogation room that last time Tomás had been arrested by Batista's men and then abruptly released.

"They didn't want to kill him there," Armando explained.

"But they did kill him, didn't they?" Saturnina asked.

"Yes, Saturnina."

"Are you sure, Armando?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure he's dead?"

"Yes, Saturnina."

"But why, Armando?"

"I don't know, Saturnina."

At her insistence, Armando recounted to her over and over again the details of what had happened until Saturnina could imagine the burnished revolver's soft gleam, smell the acrid cloud of powder expanding through the air, and feel the pressure of the stranger's finger on the trigger. Armando told her the story of her son's assassination, and with each retelling the details would reverberate within Saturnina, heaving, fading, reconstituting themselves within the ebb and flow of her obsessive desire to witness Tomás's last breath, as she had witnessed his first. She had gone to the city morgue with his wife Vania and his friend Armando to identify his body, but she had never been able to reconcile the son she loved and raised with the body lying on that table, the flesh of her son's face as hard and cold as its metal surface.

"This is not my son. I don't know who this is."

"It is," Armando and Vania explained.

"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! " Saturnina called out now, as she had that day in the morgue.

The fragments of Armando's story, so difficult to accept, began to dance across the shifting surface of her mind, hurtling her backward and forward through time, until eventually she began to insist to Vania, Tomas's young widow, that Tomás would rise, like Lazarus, awakening to this world again.

"This son of mine will come back," she insisted.

In 1959, still nursing the terrible wound of Tomás's death, she and Vania poured into the streets of Havana along with every race and class of Cuban. They were celebrating the end of Batista and the arrival of Fidel— El Caballo, the Horse— who had descended from the Sierra Maestra like an avenging angel in green army fatigues and a long beard to liberate them all from Batista's puppet government, a regime whose brutality had been sanctified and financed by the United States. That very week Saturnina played charadas, but instead of putting her peso down on number 17, Lazarus, the beloved whom Christ raised from the dead, her favorite saint since Tomás's death, she played the number 1, the Horse.

" Saint Lazarus won. Paid 50 pesos."

She had spent countless hours explaining this irony of fate to her favorite mongrel, who rocked behind her on three legs, his white coat gray with fleas.

" Saint Lazarus," she would intone, her left eyebrow cocked meaningfully. "Not the Horse."

It was a bad omen. The Horse was not what he seemed. He would delay the arrival of Lazarus. Saturnina was certain. Fidel would not liberate them. He would be their torment, just as Batista had been. Saturnina remembered crying out to the skies, hoping her words would reach Tomás:

"You died fighting Batista. This puñetero Fidel is the same."

Today, however, something had shifted. She knew it. Rocking back and forth on her stairwell perch, she could see that the morning sky held new auguries. The bad omen of '59 had been undone. The Horse was gone. The promise of Saint Lazarus had come to pass. The tears rolled down Saturnina's ancient face. She had waited for what seemed an eternity, but her faith had been rewarded. Christ would raise Tomás. She had prayed, believing; and believing, she knew. Tomás would be back soon.

The sound of a trumpet blaring in the distance startled her. From the top of the broken stairwell, she looked down through the gauzy scrim of her cataracts at the entranceway far below and noticed an odd figure hovering there, glowing as white as the flesh of a coconut, his countenance aggrieved. It was the angel of the annunciation. She was certain of it.

"Pobresito," Saturnina whispered, trying to imagine the angel's burden. "I will do as you command. Don't be sad."

There was no time to dawdle. She must spread the message: Fidel had fallen, and her son Tomás would be here soon. She must tell La Milagrosa, one grieving mother to another.