“You mean… he isn’t there?”
Her voice took on an edge of annoyance. “Look, I only let him bring me home because you insisted. I certainly did not invite him in.”
Abashed, Luis stuttered, “Yes, but, well, I thought he was coming straight here.”
“So did I. But he didn’t say and I did not ask. Look, I have to go or I will be late for work. I was already out in the hall when the telephone rang. You barely caught me.”
“Oh, sorry. I suppose he will turn up eventually.”
“I’m sure he will. Chau.”
“Hasta luego, mi amor.” But she had already hung up.
Luis held the receiver a moment longer, reinventing images of Celia. Now he saw her alone in the apartment, changing into hospital whites and crepe-soled shoes. He saw her going out the door, swiftly down the stairs, getting onto her bicycle for the short ride to the hospital. And José?
“José!” His mother screamed in a voice that might have been proclaiming the Second Coming of Christ. “Mi hijo!”
Luis dropped the receiver back into the cradle and turned in time to see José lift their tiny mother off her feet in an all-encompassing hug.
“I knew you’d come back! I told Luis—didn’t I tell you, Luis? He will come back!” Without turning to Luis for confirmation, Alma shouted to neighbours, “My son José! At last! He is here!”
The scene, which Luis had seen played out in other families countless times, sickened him. Why did Cubans always treat visiting gusano relatives like returning heroes? What was so heroic about abandoning your country? Once, after observing a neighbour behaving exactly as Alma was now, he had asked his mother those questions. With patient superiority Alma had replied, “You have no children, Luis. You cannot understand what it is like to lose one.”
That was one of the times, one of many times, when she had said, with tears glinting in dark eyes that seemed too large for her tiny face, “My José will come back. I know he will.”
Luis could not fathom his mother’s unconditional love any more than he could challenge her tears, but neither had he changed his opinion of those who welcomed rogue relatives with open arms. He believed that most families were more excited by the expectation of lavish gifts than by the visit itself. That would not apply to Alma, of course. She was like himself in that respect: largely indifferent to material things.
Luis stood unobtrusively in the background as José, still locked in Alma’s embrace, grinned self-consciously and waved to neighbours who peered from windows, doorways, and balconies up and down the street. Although the old mansions had been constructed with an eye to privacy, subsequent transformation into apartments ensured that their wide marble steps and decorative balconies provided everyone in the neighbourhood with ringside seats, so to speak, to everyone else’s life.
When Alma finally dragged José inside, she left the door wide open. Luis knew that this evening and for as long as his brother remained, curious neighbours would be dropping by to say hello to get a look at the local boy turned Yanqui. He turned to get a better look himself.
José stood blinking at what had once been the main salon of a lavish colonial home. Prior to their family’s tenancy, the spacious room had been converted into an apartment; the main part a living-dining area, with a narrow strip at the back walled off to form a minuscule kitchen. Down one side a somewhat wider strip had been partitioned into two bedrooms and a bathroom. Only the fourteen-foot-high frescoed ceilings, with fleshy cherubs entwined in faded banners, remained as an incongruous reminder of former grandeur.
“I can’t believe it!” José exclaimed. “This place looks exactly the same! I swear, even the plastic flowers!”
Luis had forced his face into a welcoming grin, but that remark set his teeth so on edge that the smile more closely resembled a sneer. Before he could compose a rejoinder, a neighbour’s child skipped in carrying a chipped enamel cup.
“Tía Alma, Mamí wants to borrow some cooking oil.”
“By the stove, María. I’ll pour it.” From the kitchen Alma called, “Put your bags there in your old room, José. Luis, did you make space for his things in the wardrobe?”
José raised his eyebrows at Luis. “You still live here? With Mamá?”
“Why not?” Luis snapped. “You know what a housing shortage we have in Habana.”
“Well, yeah. But you being in government, I would’ve thought—”
“That I would use my position to get put ahead on the housing list? Thereby depriving someone else of a place to live? No, José. I would not do that. Nor would my compañeros.” Pursing his lips, Luis waved his hand toward the bedroom they had shared for the first twenty-odd years of their lives. “Help yourself.”
The little girl headed for the door, her face puckered with the effort of not spilling the oil. Alma called after her, “Ask your mamí if she found any tomatoes at the agromercado.”
José continued to stand in the middle of the room, eyes moving from one well-worn object to the other. He motioned to a small statuette of the Virgin. “That’s new, though. Since the Pope’s visit?”
“No, no! I have had it for years. You don’t remember? It used to be in my bedroom.” Alma placed serving dishes filled with steaming food on the already-set table and cast an accusatory glance at Luis. “Always I have been a good Catholic.”
María skipped in with a tomato for Alma and slipped out again, this time daring a shy smile at José, who absently ran a hand across her dark hair.
“And what’s your reward, Mamá?” José winked at Luis. “Two sons—one a godless communist the other a godless capitalist.”
Luis snickered. One quality he had always appreciated in his brother was José’s use of humour to shield both of them from Alma’s scoldings. They had never been allies—José was too self-centred for that—but he had a way of linking them in remarks like the one he had just made that allowed Luis to feel, at times, that they were on the same side. No sooner had the warm memory surfaced than the corners of Luis’s mouth turned down. Alliances of convenience, he thought contemptuously. The only kind José understood.
“I pray for you both.” Alma placed the plate with sliced tomato on the table with a sharp thwack that said she wasn’t amused. “Come. Dinner is ready.”
José walked to the door of the bedroom. Without asking which bed might be Luis’s, he heaved his bags onto the one he had occupied before leaving home. Through the open door, Luis saw him glance around and imagined a sneer at the room’s smallness.
It didn’t seem that small after you left, he thought grimly. But if you stay long, it is going to get very small indeed.
José moved from bedroom to bathroom—the only bathroom—squeezed narrowly between his room and his mother’s.
Luis tried to stop himself from seeing the apartment—the only home he had ever known—the way he imagined his brother now saw it. But it was no use. How many bathrooms, he wondered, did “Miami Joe” have in his house?
As José slid into what had always been his place at the table, Luis mumbled, “Guess the place seems kind of small to you now.”
“It’s bigger than my apartment,” José said. “The one I moved into after the divorce.”
“Divorce?” Alma looked stricken.
“Sorry, Mamá, but that’s the way it is. In America, anyway.”
Luis watched his mother trying to cover her disappointment by plying first José’s plate, then his, then her own with food. The news jolted him too but with mixed emotions: sorry for his mother’s sake, yet pleased that José had not returned with a triumphant entourage of wife and children. Somewhere beneath those feelings was yet another one that left Luis shaken: fear of the unknown. Not yet identified for what it was, he did his best to suppress it. Yet it rose up in his gut and spread out like the hood of a cobra: the knowledge that just as his brother’s leaving had changed everything, so would his return.