“Very early in the morning there is even pornografía,” Fefé announced as she flipped the station once more, pulling Beatriz out of her thoughts. “Men with pingas the size of elephants’!”
There was a hearty round of laughter, and then someone called out, “Las noticias!”
“Oh, right,” Fefé said. “There’s Spanish-language news right now on Univisión.”
Unlike Cuban news, which was essentially a recapping of all that was going well on the island, Univisión seemed to recount only the disastrous. It was a litany of loss — a baby stolen from a shopping cart as the mother turned her back for a split second to pick out a green pepper, a man who returned to his hometown twenty years after he graduated from high school and murdered the teacher who had failed him in geometry.
“Escucha eso!” Fefé announced. “Their news is more sensational than our telenovelas.” Everyone nodded their heads in shocked silence.
When a photo of George Bush came on the screen, a loud hiss reverberated through Fefé’s living room, making it impossible for Beatriz to hear what the newscaster was saying.
By the time the local Miami news came on, Beatriz had cut a good four inches off of Fefé’s hair, and she was beginning to feel a little worried about how Fefé would react to the end result. Personally, Beatriz didn’t think that she had the type of face for short hair. It wasn’t angular enough, and would now look even rounder.
Beatriz was about to hand Fefé the bit of broken mirror when she heard the newscaster mention something about Havana.
“...After nearly two weeks of investigations into the bombing of the gallery, located on a side street in Little Havana...” the newscaster was saying, and Beatriz realized she’d misheard him.
Fefé was so caught up in the news that Beatriz decided to wait for a commercial break. Even after just two weeks of cutting hair, Beatriz had learned her lesson about asking people to approve further cutting when they were distracted, only to have them angrily retract their consent after the fact.
Beatriz set down her scissors and held the mirror in her hand, turning her attention back to the TV.
“Police have reported that the explosion was set off by a group of Cuban exiles who refer to themselves as ‘Los Rectificantes,’” the newscaster continued. And once more, a loud hiss filled the living room. “They claim to have been protesting the five painters whose works were exhibited, all of whom still reside in Cuba and have been labeled as Castro-supporters by the bombers.”
“Son terroristas todos!” a man next to Fefé declared angrily.
“Although the bombing took place when the gallery was closed, police have confirmed that there was one casualty, a young woman who had been peering through the window at the moment the bomb went off.”
As the photo of a smiling mulatta flashed onto the screen, her face framed by long black ringlets sun-streaked with redgold, the newscaster’s voice was once again drowned out, not by hisses this time, but by a lone, shrill wail, and the sound of shattering glass.
Part IV
Drowning in silence
Zenzizenzic
by Achy Obejas
Chinatown
There it was, framed by the oval of my airplane window: a shout of palms and prickly grass, low concrete buildings with exposed stones in hopeless need of As we descended, plumes of smoke, both paint and repair. black and white, spiraled up to meet us. I’m told exiles returning to Cuba sob as soon as the plane door pops open and the blinding Caribbean sky spills before them. But not me.
When I stepped onto the tarmac, the wet tropical air pawed at me reeking of mildew. The skies were a sweet pastel but I could barely see. I held my breath for the first few steps thinking the smell was just a bad patch — one of those sulphurous smoke trails having descended back to earth perhaps — but all was lost the minute I had to respond to the military guy with the official passenger list flapping wildly on his clipboard. His finger pointed at something and sweat ran from behind my ears.
“Yep, that’s me, Malía Mercado,” I muttered. It’d be rude to hold my nose or cover my mouth, so I was praying for my senses to acclimate quickly, very quickly. How could anybody stand this for long?
“María Mercado, sí,” he said, and went to correct the spelling on his neatly typed list.
“No, no — Malía, not María — Malía’s right,” I said in my best Spanish.
“Malía?” he asked, a hint of a smile disturbing his officially somber face.
“Yes, it’s Hawaiian,” I said, the Spanish accent my parents had added notwithstanding.
The military guy nodded. “Ah, well, it sounds Chinese,” he said.
I’d been warned by my parents and my sister Rocky, whom I was visiting, that most Cubans don’t feel the least bit uncomfortable making racial comments. And when it came to Asians — who were all Chinese to the Cubans — it was a longstanding pastime to base double-entendres on their supposed inability to pronounce the ferocious Cuban R, which the Chinese were said to render as Ls. Thus, in this guy’s mind, my Malía couldn’t be anything but a mangled Chinese María.
I nodded at him, not exactly hiding my annoyance, which seemed to amuse him. But behind me the line was lengthening — I could sense the next passenger within inches of me, like a restless shadow — so the guard motioned me toward the blurry building in the distance. My bags were promised inside but mostly I was praying for shade. My heart was fluttering in the sticky strait jacket the humidity had wrapped around my chest.
“Buenas tardes, compañera,” I heard a voice say just behind me. It drew my immediate attention because it was so cheery, and because the Spanish was so masticated and rough.
I’d noticed him before, on the hop over from Kingston: a forty-something American with a weedy mustache and long strands of thinning hair. He was slender but I could tell, even with the scorching wind making his Che Guevara T-shirt billow into a small, curvy balloon, that he was probably really fit. He had the sunbaked look of a cyclist, lean and disciplined.
“First time back?” he asked me with a wink. He’d come up behind me so we were walking side by side, unexpectedly in step.
“Uh... yeah,” I said. “How’d you know?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been coming for so long, I can just tell.”
We pushed back the doors to the terminal. Not that the air-conditioning inside was much relief. I imagined a small unit hidden somewhere huffing and puffing as I scanned the waiting area, men and women in uniform milling among the passengers. Neither their rank nor purpose was clear to me.
“They won’t bite,” the man said, his head nodding in the direction of the customs officials. “They’ve forgiven you.”
“Forgiven me?” I asked.
“You’re an exile, right?”
I nodded involuntarily. Being Cuban without being born in Cuba is a tricky proposition; the notion of exile even more complicated. But I’d just met this guy and I certainly wasn’t going to go into any kind of philosophical discourse while I was melting away in the tropical heat. Exile residue required more time to explain than I had right then.
“Forgiven...? I guess I don’t—”
“Yeah, forgiven you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For abandonment,” he said, grinning now, “maybe even treason.”
“Wha...?”