Achy Obejas
Havana, Cuba
March 2007
Part I
Sleepless in Havana
Nowhere man
by Miguel Mejides
To the memory of my father
Old Havana
There are people who need to go against the grain but I’m not going against anything. Perhaps everything stems from the great handicap which life has given me: I’m cross-eyed. Ever since I’ve been able to reason, since the first time I was able to contemplate my image in a mirror and saw my own eyes, I told myself I was a man meant for silence, for meditation, a man made to work at smiling, fated to take long walks through the city I choose for my solitude.
My mother, thank God, always knew about the shadow of the silent songbird that surrounded me. Likewise, she understood my decision to leave my hometown to go to Havana and find work. I’ve never been able to forget her, bidding me farewell at the train station with her linen handkerchief waving between the smoke and her saintly smile, which never left her, not even in death.
Even though it’s rained a lot these years, until very recently I could still give myself the pleasure of contemplating Havana through the same lens as when I first glimpsed it in January 1990. Back then, Havana still retained that halo of light and mystery. My bus came in on the old central highway, continued past Virgen del Camino, and straight through the disastrous streets of Luyanó. At the end of my journey, I was awed by the statue of Martí in the Plaza de la Revolución and the sparkling Ferris wheel in the amusement park in front of the bus terminal.
I’ll never forget the taxi that took me to Infanta 234; it was a mandarin-colored De Soto, with the coat-of-arms from an ancient Spanish province affixed with the number 13. The driver was a little old man with an Andalusian accent and a multicolored hat.
“That’s the place.” I remember the stains on his teeth that flashed when he talked. As I paid him, he betrayed a certain anxiety about my eyes. “Buddy, buy yourself some dark glasses,” he told me.
My Aunt Buza welcomed me half-solicitous and a bit taken aback too. She looked at me just like the taxi driver and talked about spells that could cure whatever was wrong with my eyes. Her husband greeted me gruffly and asked me if I knew how to drive. When I said no, he began talking about modern times, how a man of this century must learn how to handle machinery. Later, he coached me about the interview I had scheduled for the following morning.
“Say only what’s necessary, don’t blow your nose, and lie: Say that you know how to drive.”
To this day I have no idea what any of that had to do with the job for which I was interviewing. That night they set me up in a tiny room adjacent to the kitchen whose only charm was a large window looking out at Havana. Everything was so different from my hometown. I was struck by the city’s traffic, by the sea on the horizon which at night I could only imagine, and by Radio Progreso’s building right in front of me, from which flowed the station’s love stories that made my mother sigh. I was in Havana, I told myself, and now I would never leave its flame — which could easily become either pleasure or hell.
But because I was still in a grieving phase — I don’t know if I’ll ever really get over it — the interview was a disaster. At 8 o’clock in the morning, we planted ourselves in front of the manager’s door at the Hotel Nacional. I was so nervous that I told my aunt’s husband I needed to go to the bathroom. He pointed the way, and I found myself in front of a mirror. I noted that I’d never been more cross-eyed. I was afraid my pupils would fall out of their sockets and drop into the bathroom sink.
When I came back, they were already waiting for me. We went into the manager’s office. He was a man in his thirties, with a mole on his nose. He said something about Greek beauty, or Greek ideals of beauty, and that hotels were like the palaces of kings.
“You have to understand, Jerónimo,” he said abruptly.
“Maybe with dark glasses no one will be able to tell,” my aunt’s husband said.
“But he won’t be able to use them at night, and a hotel is a living organism,” the man declared. “If there’s a single alien cell, its beauty is spoiled.”
On the way back, I remembered what the taxi driver had said. I needed to buy myself a pair of dark glasses. My mother had managed to convince her sister to have Jerónimo get me a job interview at the Hotel Nacional, where he’d worked since his youth. But the one thing my mother had not mentioned was my eyes. She had sent photos of me in profile, as if I were the most beautiful boy in the world. Now my eyes were going to force me back to my hometown, they were going to force me to grow old in that part of the world where only a tiny cemetery marks the turn to the single road that connects to Camagüey. “Stay a week if you like, then buy a ticket back,” suggested my Aunt Buza.
“There aren’t any opportunities there,” I said.
“In small towns, people get used to oddities like yours more easily,” she declared.
That same day, in the afternoon, I went out and bought a pair of cheap glasses. I decided to walk all over Havana with my new face.
At 7 the next morning I was already on the street. First, I explored all of El Cerro, then Marianao; by the time I began to stroll by Carlos III, it had been more than a week. I didn’t spend much. I didn’t turn the lamp on at night, I rarely flushed in the bathroom. In the morning I only drank coffee, and when I returned late at night, I ate whatever was left for me on the stove. I had the firm hope of finding work and staying in Havana. But everywhere I went, I was told there were no openings and everyone looked at me funny.
After a month, my aunt’s patience was finally exhausted. I still remember the night I arrived and found nothing to eat for me. Where there had always been a pot, there was just a note telling me they’d bought me a ticket on the next morning’s train. That’s when I knew I was truly alone in Havana.
Without asking questions, I took my suitcase and left. I headed for Prado Boulevard and made myself comfortable on a marble bench in front of the Hotel Sevilla. The laurel trees made a fine roof over my abandoned self. I put the suitcase near my feet and crossed my arms under my neck and settled in to sleep.
I was just drifting off when I heard voices coming from the roots of the laurel trees. It was a debate about the previous Christmas, about curses that had befallen the city.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
I thought about the kinds of dreams hunger provokes. Yet that endless conversation had a strangely calming effect on me. The voices seemed to be coming from a megaphone. Now and again, they were drowned out by a droning laugh.
“Eh!.. What are you? Fish? Angels? What?” I pleaded.
I threw myself down at one of the laurel trees and put my ear to its roots, where I could now hear a jazz band, Glenn Miller and his “String of Pearls.” I stayed there a long time, my face resting on the ground. Finally, I heard a bizarre dialogue. “That hive of humanity that lives up there, that Havana that is enslaved by the light, will one day build a monument to our catechistic work, a monument to our galleys which sail the earth’s furrows, a monument to our warehouses chock-full of salt and coffee, cured meat and garlic, brimming with commerce and customer service, filled with the soundtrack of the world’s life.”
It was at that moment that I heard the scraping sound of my suitcase being lifted from the park bench on the Prado.
I saw two people fleeing with it into the night through the street next to the Sevilla. Laughter rose from the bowels of the earth, and I uttered one of those words reserved for when you’re miserable. My voice was completely drowned out by the sound of the jazz band.