“She went inside,” Dionisio said defensively, and in Spanish, all the while pointing at me. “She was disturbing Tom.”
I started to say something but Raúl put up his official policeman’s hand. “Enough,” he commanded. He turned to me. “Tom is a deep sleeper, and a monster when he’s awakened by noise.”
“But—” In a month, I’d seen and heard many things about Mahler but this was not one of them.
“Malía, shut up!” Rocky interrupted. She’d made fists and was holding them out in front of her now, her eyes shut hard, no longer able to keep back tears.
“For God’s sake — something is wrong in there,” I insisted. “Don’t you think it’s weird he hasn’t reacted to all this noise? And his eyes were wide open!”
“I will take care of this,” the policeman cousin said, pushing me aside.
He strode purposefully toward Mahler’s door, then stepped inside. We heard him make his way to the bed and back but I noted that he did not call out to Tom or make any kind of attempt to wake him. He emerged from the room in seconds, closing the door behind him.
“He is dead,” he said conclusively.
I gasped. “How do you know?” All three of them were staring at me, their reactions seemingly dependent on mine. I swallowed. “I mean, try waking him,” I persisted. “I thought I heard something last night...”
Raúl, who hadn’t understood a word I said, dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Dionisio, as a doctor” — he underscored the word doctor — “I need you to determine the preliminary cause of death,” he instructed. “I will call the station to file a report and the coroner. You two” — he meant us, Rocky and me — “you will stay out of the way. Do you understand me?”
Rocky nodded but I must have made some other movement because Raúl turned on me with a barely contained rage. “Do you understand?”
Soon the house was filled with cops, paramedics, and gravelooking men and women who talked almost exclusively to Dionisio and Raúl. They glanced now and again at me and Rocky, who paced in the kitchen, her eyes watery (but not crying). Dionisio’s mother wrung her hands, worried about bearing the curse of an American dying under her roof.
“Every foreign journalist in Havana is going to be at the door wanting to know what happened,” she complained, then looked pointedly at me. “Malía, you must remember, if someone — if anyone — asks, nothing happened.”
I nodded, not because I intended to keep that promise (I honestly had no idea what I’d do if anyone asked), but because it was clear that’s what was expected of me. Rocky looked at me approvingly but I wondered, with dread flooding me, how I fit into all this, how I was supposed to deal with it all.
“Do you know what happened?” Dionisio’s mother asked when he came back to the kitchen.
He shook his head. “Probably an embolia,” he said solemnly.
“How old was Tom?” I asked, regaining some of my Spanish.
“I don’t know, in his forties,” Dionisio said. “He was young.”
I stood up from the kitchen table, pushing my feet into my slippahs, and made my way to the courtyard.
I saw the panicked look on Dionisio’s face. “Where are you going?” Rocky asked in English, articulating his fears.
“To get some air,” I said. “I’m not leaving, I’ll be right here.”
Outside, the yellow streetlights poured into the courtyard and obscured the night sky again. I ambled until I found a dark patch, somewhere to stand where I could merge into the shadows and disappear. I leaned against the wall and let my body drop into a squat. All I could think was how very zenzizenzic, how ironic this was: Tom had had a Cuban death, except that his last meal had been our Hawaiian extravaganza. The neighborhood soundtrack of yelling, music, and cars continued unabated. I could see Rocky fidgeting through the kitchen window. I really wasn’t sure I could ever tell my parents about this.
In a moment, there were sounds coming from Mahler’s room. A man and a woman emerged with Tom’s body on a stretcher, wrapped from head to toe in a white sheet that made him look like a cocoon. Dionisio followed with a police officer I hadn’t seen before, while his mother peered from the door to the courtyard, tracing their route.
I waited a bit, just watching the goings-on in the kitchen as if the window were a TV screen. Everyone seemed appropriately sad and worried except Raúl, who I could see was relaxed enough for an occasional laugh. I finally surrendered to the inevitability of going back inside for my last night in Cuba, rappelled up the wall like a crab, and strolled over, the direct light making my vision fuzzy for an instant.
“Malía, there you are,” Dionisio’s mother said.
“Sit down,” suggested Dionisio, leading me to the table.
As my eyes began to clear, I looked for Rocky but saw only Raúl, his cheeks moving as he chewed on something, his arms outstretched in my direction. I redirected my vision to his offering: a plate brimming with garlicky pork chops, shimmering black beans poured over rice, and toasty plantain coasters.
“Eat, Malía,” he ordered.
I nodded but slowly stepped back and away.
Virgins of Regla
by Mabel Cuesta
for Yemayá
for Raquel Pollo
Regla
The emptiness by the wall. Her and her shadow, both escapees, in a panic. Lost now in a place unknown, far from their home in the provinces.
They always knew that Regla, ultramarine, was a place for fishermen and stevedores. Whenever they went there to see the Virgin, they were surprised by the black men who walked past them on their way from the docks, stinking from the dirty sacks.
That dawn, after running from the bitter scene (that’s how she’d remember it for years to come), she feared one of those men from the docks would show up to continue the violation. Afraid they’d confuse her for one of the sacks they hauled, possessed, dragged from the ships to the docks, trucks, roads, or warehouses anywhere on the island. She feared being mistaken for one of those inanimate sacks, prime for theft, expropriation, sale, or scrap.
She had no way of getting home at that hour. She was broke. She had no map with which to orient herself, and worse, she had no idea where exactly she was in the neighborhood. All she wanted to do was go home.
To leave Regla there were always the ferries, with their eternal and tired run all day long and a good part of the night across Havana’s oily, filthy bay. But not at dawn. Dawn in Regla was all silence and fear.
She and her shadow rested against the wall. They became one to try and figure out a way through the terror — the terror provoked by her trembling legs, smeared with a substance that she could not identify. She remembered what she read somewhere — probably Margarite Yourcenar: love’s white blood... could that be it? The viscous substance that drenched her underpants — could that be the blood that Yourcenar talked about in one of her novels? Impossible. The writer had placed the word love next to the image of the white blood. Neither she nor her shadow would confuse the two concepts; they were both excellent readers.
Her shadow could, in fact, tell jokes, recall, for example, the famous Arab telenovela in which, during an unusual dialogue between the barbarous and the civilized worlds, the Muslim man asked the beautiful, kidnapped North American lady in a subordinate tone, And who has asked you for love, Diana Mayo?