Luz: book i: comings and goings (Troubled Times 1) (12 page)

“Really?” he said. “And who will you find with my knowledge and skills? Nobody, that’s who! Nobody!”

“You’re quite mistaken, Alejo. Not only have we found your replacement, he starts tomorrow. Good thing too. We really needed a change around here. Fresh talent—an emerging intellect, if you will.”

There it was. The final nail in my father’s heart. By taking his teaching job away they might as well have deprived him of the air he breathed. From then on he languished and lacked all motivation. He wouldn’t talk either, answering yes or no to the simple things, providing only the most minimal response whenever necessary. He would sit alone and stare pensively at the floor, his expression inscrutable but melancholy. All we could do was watch him withdraw into himself. What could anyone say? What could anyone do but let him swirl within a torment intent on smothering him? Nobody could reach him, not even Pilar. Needless to say, never again would we hear him speak a word of Arabic or Hebrew or Aramaic especially. Never again would he look at or touch his beloved texts in the towering bookcases inside his room. The books sat silent and ignored, gathering but a thick sediment of neglect.

Only once more would I witness my father come to life, coinciding with the unexpected arrival of a letter. Not just any ordinary letter, but one from overseas. The return address coded in that indecipherable Arabic script, the stamp containing the image of some elaborate mosque awash in tones of blue. It was a letter from Iraq, from his friend Ehn al-Salahm.

At the sight of the envelope, my father alternated between excitement and agitation, retreating to his room and hurriedly closing the door. He longed to read the contents, but in shielded privacy.

I had to know what was going on—
I just had to!
I crept toward his room and put my ear to the door, but would soon regret it. After a few minutes I heard him sobbing. He tried crying inaudibly, but no mistaking the muffled sobs. What the letter said, we had no clue; it was, after all, written in Arabic. And whether he had any intention of writing Ehn al-Salahm back or not, we couldn’t surmise. He certainly didn’t sit down to pen an immediate response. I don’t think he ever revealed the contents of the letter even to Pilar. But I did note a marked change in his demeanor the day after its arrival.

From that moment on, my father couldn’t seem to sit still.
He seemed constantly in motion. The only thing he now took interest in were neglected houseplants tucked away in our side patio: a sad and meager collection of greenery that he tended to religiously until they flourished anew and our side patio resembled an oasis in a Roman atrium. And he focused most lovingly on the leaves until they glistened in their verdancy. Plants, coffee, and smoking—that was all he cared about. He drank coffee morning, noon, and night. He smoked more than ever too. And when we ran out of coffee he had to have more, right away. He and Mamá fought constantly since he insisted that she locate additional sources for him. But when she couldn’t or refused, Papi turned into a crazed fiend, going from house to house and neighbor to neighbor asking for what little of it they might be willing to spare and even bartering against our future rations. Some were willing to trade their precious café for a choice selection of his fine creations, famous throughout the neighborhood now, but my father’s plants were strictly off limits, non-negotiable.

I must admit I found this hopeful. At least he’d regained a sense of living. It was better than sitting around and staring into inner space and collapsing within himself. One day I even caught a glimmer of the old light in his eyes. He’d gotten out paper and pencil and I thought this was it. He was getting back to his work and research.

“I’m writing my friend,” he announced. “I’m replying to Ehn al-Salahm.”

I felt a throbbing of old resentments as his pencil formed the incomprehensible Arabic script. He managed to jot down the date and a greeting, but before eking out even one word, my father stopped. He doubled over in excruciating pain and collapsed at the table, complaining about a pain in his stomach so sharp we had to rush him to the nearest clinic. On the way there little could we imagine he would be leaving us again, but this time for good, that our beloved but troubled father would actually die that same night.

Of all the vices to do him in, never did we suspect coffee to be the ultimate culprit. Doctors at the clinic said they had never seen anything like it: a caffeine-induced ulcer that had
gnawed away at his intestines and bored a hole through his stomach the size of a baseball. Whether it was from the Middle Eastern coffees he had consumed in Iraq or the Cuban coffee he had consumed all his life, or a combination of both, nobody could say for sure. But coffee had taken its toll and they pronounced my father dead on November 11 of 1992.

“But what did the letter say, hermana? The letter from his Iraqi friend? I know that you’ve got to know something about it.” The thought of using the term “friend” in conjunction with my father and this individual made my stomach churn and turn as if I had developed an ulcer of my own.

“I don’t know Clara. Really, I don’t.”

But I found this hard to swallow, especially now that Pilar had divulged all that she had. Papi must have said something to her—
something!
My older sister was the only one he had ever confided in and, whatever that letter contained, it must have been too great for him to keep to himself. I knew my father. I knew he must have been bursting at the seams to share some part of its contents, however minimal, and so I pressed.

“But you must!” I insisted. “He must have said even the slightest of things to you. Just think, Pilar! Think back to anything he might have uttered.”

Sure enough, my insistence was about to pay off.

“Well,” Pilar finally acquiesced, not having to take me into the strictest of confidence because she had honestly not given it any importance. “He did say something, but I really didn’t pay any mind to it. He was not acting himself. He was almost irrational, hermana. His thoughts were jumping from one thing to the next and he was almost incoherent. I mean, Papi of all people!
Papi, incoherent!
”

“About what?” I urged. “Incoherent about what?”

“Something that made no sense, chica. Something about the sugar and the Iraqis and even maloja.”

“Maloja?” I asked confusedly.

“Yes, maloja,” she repeated. “
Maloja
of all things! Don’t
you remember how, ever since he started tending to all those plants in the patio, all he did was carry that big book of his around and refer to it constantly?”

I didn’t respond. I was too spellbound. I could think only of how we all knew about our father’s furtive fascination with leaves, his passion for them even, as if he had secretly wanted to be a botanist all his life. Why, one of his most guarded possessions was this big reference book called
Hojas
. It was a thick book with beautiful illustrations, all hand-made, of all the different leaves of the world. All three of us sisters knew that we had to treat that book with the utmost of care and respect or we could never touch it again. Many a time he had warned us so.

“Now do you see why I didn’t pay any mind to it?” Pilar continued. “I thought he was just going on and on about leaves again. I’m telling you Clara, he was delirious at the time. I think he knew the end was near.”

Her words haunted me. And if this was truly the case, his was not the only state of delirium. I too felt delirious, under siege after his death, under constant attack by my conscience. Guilt for having been so selfish in my thoughts and words overwhelmed me at times. How greatly it pained me that I had never told him how much he meant to me or how much I admired him. True, it was he who had always inspired my love of expression and an ardor for language, but it was he who now inspired me to proceed with life.

It was only upon his death that I came to understand this, that I came to recognize the rushing force behind all my aspirations. No doubt his fall from grace had sealed my fate with the university. No doubt at all. That was what happened in Cuba: the sins of the father always visited the son, or the daughter. But I would not blame my father entirely for the rescission of my acceptance. There was someone else who I held equally responsible and whom I despised for his part in my father’s demise. His name was Ehn al-Salahm. He lived somewhere in Iraq. One day I would take his letter and have it translated. One day I would learn the truth of all that had transpired between my father and him in the marketplaces of
Iraq. And one day I would also learn what in the world maloja had to do with any of this.

Forget it then! I wouldn’t apply to the university in five years or ten years or even fifteen. I’d never step foot inside the Aula Magna. I wouldn’t study anything in Cuba. Not under this miserable system that slanted everything in a way officials saw fit. I would get married instead. Rigo wanted me to wed straight out of high school anyway, so now I had the perfect excuse. We would become man and wife. We would start a family. Damn all the ministries and the university and everything else! I never wanted to read or write another critique as long as I lived. I believed this at least. I made up my mind and refused to deviate from the decision until, one day, unexpectedly, a fellow student and good friend of mine named Nelson heard about my predicament with the university and approached me with a strange proposition.

Nelson was also a writer. He too was an intellectual and reminded me of my father somewhat. He was funny and had a mordant sense of humor, an acerbic wit. But Nelson was funnier for something else: his eyeglasses. While nobody in Cuba under the age of forty ever wore eyeglasses—they were considered unsightly and unfashionable—Nelson refused to dispense with his dark-rimmed pair. He considered eyeglasses an essential component to a writer’s appearance.

“How would you like to be part of a group?” he asked. “A writer’s group.”

“A writer’s group? Maybe,” I said. “I guess so.”

“Great!” he replied. “There’s just one catch.”

“What?” I asked.

“It isn’t exactly a typical writer’s group. We’re not going to sit around in a circle and read each others stories or chapters or verses from poems and suggest ways to make them better.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“We’re going to sit around in a circle all right, but we’re going to be discussing all the things wrong in Cuba and how
to make them better. We’re going to shine a light on all the defects here in the hopes of exposing every single one of them. We’re going to document and distribute, we’re going to quietly inform the world about what’s really happening in our homeland, highlighting the injustices and figuring out how to set them right, like the injustice done to you with the university. You do know that the elite literature program was not canceled, mija. You do realize, I hope, that it was just a lie they fed you. So are you in, Clara? Are you in?”

It didn’t take long for me to formulate a response. Even before Nelson finished explaining the nature of the group, I felt the fire of his words fanning the air. I felt the sting of his ideas sizzling through my blood. How quickly things changed at times, how unexpectedly. Here I’d been denied the opportunity to study that which I loved most, literary criticism; here I was never going to write a critique again as long as I lived; but here I was being given the chance to become a critic anyway. Who would have thought?

“I’m in!” I said. “Count me in!”

Nelson leaned forward. He gave me a heartfelt hug and I hugged him back. We smiled at each other with brewing enthusiasm. I liked the look of his eyeglasses. Everybody gave him a hard time and urged Nelson to switch to contacts or get surgery, but I liked how intellectual they made him look. I hoped he never got rid of them.

“Just one thing,” I said. “What’s the name of the group?”

He wasted no time in responding. “Insurrection!” he replied. “Insurrection is the name of our group. How do you like it?”

Insurrection
, I mused, instantly connecting with the word. I loved it too. I loved the meaning. I loved the connotation. I even loved the sound of the word, so raw and rumbling. Insurrection seemed the perfect name for an underground group, for rebels dedicated to exposing all the savagery and disillusion, all the unfairness woven into the fabric of daily life here.

“Does this mean we’re dissidents?” I asked.

“No, mija. We don’t waste our time with the word dissident. We’re insurrectionists; that’s what we call ourselves:
insureccionistas
.”

Again the perfect word, the ideal concept and I loved it. Nelson was right. “Dissident” was too nice a word, too pacifist and pathetic. The title insurrectionist highlighted our plight with a focused ruthlessness, and now I had a new anchor in life.

But I also got married since my university career ended before it ever started. And now that Rigo was in Camagüey for long stretches of time, I occupied myself with writing and editing and confirming facts for our publication
¡Insurrección!
I had never felt more motivated or determined; the very danger excited me. I was getting a real education now, reading the works of José Martí from start to finish and coming to learn that no greater model for criticism, no better source of inspiration existed than the poetry and essays of our liberating father. To hell with the university! To hell with it! The only words and ideas I needed to thrive on and sharpen my mind with were those of our national apostle.

My involvement with the group eased some of my suffering then, but did not entirely erase the injustice I felt, especially after learning the elite literature program remained very much intact. It only reinforced what I knew deep down: I needed formal training. If ever I were to be taken seriously as a writer, I needed the proper scholarly credentials. Nelson did what he could to help. He brought over his study materials and urged me to follow the syllabi of his classes as if enrolled right alongside him. What a colleague. What a friend. I embraced his magnanimity, and for the first time since Papi’s death, life coasted smoothly, a faint but hopeful light stirring within. If not for Nelson’s efforts, my spirit would have broken. But thanks to this serendipitous union I enjoyed a respite from the turmoil.