“We’re going to let you go,” says the bureaucrat who has just given me the approval to leave Cuba. “We’re going to let you go because your soul is no longer in this country, you don’t think or feel like us. You haven’t matured enough to forget the idealism of your youth. You have not taken advantage of all the opportunities we’ve given you.”
I am left dumbfounded, trying to figure out what these opportunities were that I didn’t learn from or appreciate. But in this moment of joy, I mentally thank him instead, for not torturing me with a long delay in approving the leave for my family and myself.
The dark of the blackouts pursues me while I work, during dinner, trying to read or attempting sleep under the heat’s caress, hauling buckets spilling water up and down the stairs, waiting in interminable lines to buy something to eat, as I make love, or during a funeral, healing or teaching others, trying to heal myself or trying to learn. I should be used to this since it’s been the same thing since childhood, when the city of Havana began to lean on crutches.
I live in what could be called the clitoris of the Ayestarán neighborhood, which was built in the mid-twentieth century between the old colonial district of El Cerro and elegant Nuevo Vedado. My apartment is in a part of the neighborhood that looks like a giant vulva right in the middle of Havana; it’s south, at the perineum of the intersection of Ayestarán Road and Rancho Boyeros Avenue. To the north, both avenues stretch for various blocks like thighs inserted in the city’s hips, crossed on the west by 20 de Mayo Avenue, parallel to La Rosa, and headquarters to the National Library, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Economy, and other public buildings.
The worst part of pedaling incessantly in the dark isn’t the actual darkness or not being able to perceive the difference between the street and the sky, the asphalt or the pit. It’s not the fact that you see the same thing whether you raise or lower your eyes, whether you look ahead or to the side. The worst isn’t even having to go slow enough so that you can jump off when the bike’s wheels slide into the ditches, invisible because of the water. Nor is it getting lost, but rather losing your life, if this can be called a life.
For some time now there have been rumors about events which the mass media obscures: dozens of adolescents and adults have been killed while riding their bikes on the darkened streets. Following the bikers, the murderers hide behind the giant ocuje trees then bash them with baseball bats, or they trip the bikers by stretching a nylon cord from one side of the street to the other, which they then pull quickly and violently around their necks, before the bats deform their craniums. Life is the price of a bounty that is nothing but a pair of used shoes and a cheap, obsolete bike. And, of course, the police don’t investigate; they can’t be bothered with the everyday.
The domestic battles between Juana and Francisco began a little after they started living together. They always ended with vociferous screaming and Francisco getting kicked out. Apparently, he didn’t steal enough to support the young widow and her three children. Soon, the light bulbs from the building’s common areas began to disappear, and more than once the motor that pumped water up to the higher floors vanished.
We all suspected Francisco, and I wanted to punish the crook who had me carrying dozens of buckets of water up the stairs every night: Francisco would leave the building and find a bottle of rum in the same hiding place where he always hoarded his alcohol; Francisco would be unable to resist taking a mouthful of rum, and a little later he’d be vomiting, having convulsions, his extremities stiffening involuntarily, then he’d finish off with a respiratory collapse and cardiac arrest. Sodium monofiuoracetate, also known as Compound 1080, dissolves in water, is colorless, tasteless, and without odor. Francisco’s fate was sealed.
I am going around and around the puddles and I can’t seem to find my home. If only there was a star to guide me! In the distance I see a very bright building, the Palace of the Revolution. Now I can orient myself; I’m going in the wrong direction so I turn right, go straight. I soon feel like I’m falling off a precipice, there’s no asphalt anymore but an enormous emptiness, and my bike and I smash against the rocks below. Can anyone see me or hear me from here?
Once, during Yom Kippur, I felt the same way. I had begun my fast well before what was religiously necessary. It was unavoidable. I walked and walked toward the synagogue, dead tired, hallucinating, not from the incipient fast but because my body could no longer tell the difference between one day and the next. I saw the synagogue filled with well-dressed people and I imagined, as in a dream, that I was a dybbuk who sexually possessed a beautiful young woman I’d never seen before. What terrible thoughts for the Day of Atonement! I was enraptured by the hazzan’s voice flying high with the most impressive of melodies and words: Kol Nidre... ve’esare... vecherame... vekoname...
The melody abruptly stopped when someone sat down next to me. That’s when I opened my eyes and saw that the synagogue was actually almost empty, only seven people attending the service, there was no hazzan, there was not then and there never would be a Kol Nidre, that young woman and hundreds more had been living abroad for years and who knew if they were even dead or alive.
If this pit is anywhere near where I live, I should be able to hear Quimbolo, my nearest neighbor. Quimbolo is the only Cuban who is allowed the privilege of screaming improprieties against our absolute Big Brother without anybody ever thinking of locking him up for the rest of his life. Quimbolo’s real name is Everardo and he’s mentally retarded.
He wanders down the street in utter filth and repeats the rich and profane lexicon that drunks have taught him. I’ve never heard anybody scream Pinga! so stridently, so forcefully and sonorously. Pinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnga, drawing out that N until the middle of oblivion. I remember hearing that word many times in the dark and at dawn like a war cry. For years, there wasn’t a child born within three blocks in any direction who learned to talk by first saying Papá or Mamá, but rather by repeating Quimbolo’s word.
One day Quimbolo was diagnosed with diabetes, I’d forgotten. His ulcerous legs got dirty and he died, amputated and septicemic, depriving the neighborhood of its most obscene crier.
“It looks like he had a heart attack! Run and call an ambulance or a doctor!”
“There are no doctors at the polyclinic?”
“The man is dead!”
People scream around Francisco’s body. Now he’ll never again steal the light bulbs from my building or the motor to pump water. There will no more thefts in the building. One thief less.
I’m not afraid to come out of the pit in the middle of the street. This huge trench must be the hole at the corner of Ayestarán and Lombillo, in front of the dilapidated pharmacy, with its empty shelves. So I’m only a block from home. I crawl up the rocks until I believe I’ve reached the surface. I paw at the loose stones around me that should indicate wet asphalt. There’s no sign of a bus or car that might illuminate me and possibly hit me; bikes pass in the distance. I crawl and carry my broken bike with me, its wheels destroyed. Now there are only three more flights to go up in the dark... a few more steps... a breather, twelve more steps... another pause. I take care not to hit what remains of the bike against my neighbors’ doors. This stairway is such torture! I place the key at the same height as my navel, and this makes it easier to find the lock.