Havana. Home of my father.
Thirty-two years ago we had come here. Irony is sharp and relentless: he too was running from the murder of his wife.
Havana. Some imagined sanctuary perhaps. It had begun to show its age, to lose its charm and passion, but for me it had not lost its memories.
Losing also its Soviet patronage, but Castro was nevertheless still a presence everywhere I looked. American finance and influence had already begun to show, and as I walked my eight-year-old son through the streets of La Habana Vieja I could see where time had marked its passage through the city.
Three decades I had been absent, three decades of life with all its sharp corners and rough edges, but still the sounds and smells of this place returned to me as if it had all been yesterday.
I found the house where I had lived as a young man with my friend Ruben Cienfuegos, and for the first time I was truly aware of how much I had changed. Back then I had killed Ruben for the promise of something. Now I believed I would kill for two reasons alone: the vengeance of my wife and daughter, and to protect the life of my son.
There was no shortage of money, and I rented a small house on Avenida Belgica near the Old Wall Ruins. I hired a woman also, an elderly Cuban national called Claudia Vivó who was to stay with us to cook, to clean the rooms, to school Victor and care for him.
I was a man lost, a man without a soul, and often there would be afternoons when I would walk the streets without purpose or direction. Sometimes I would hear their voices, Angelina and Lucia, the sound of their laughter as they ran down the street behind me, and I would turn, my eyes wide with anticipation, and I would see some other child, some other mother, and I would lean against the wall, my breath shallow and fast in my throat, my eyes stinging with tears.
My heart was broken beyond repair. I knew it would never mend again.
I remember a day, perhaps a week or two after we arrived. Victor was home with Claudia Vivó; he was learning of Cuba and its history, for I had told him this was the country of his grandfather, and he wished to learn of it. Though it was only mid-afternoon, morning swallowed irretrievably in some vague wash of forgetting, the sky had deepened into incipient gray-green solidity. The air seemed thick, difficult to breathe, and I felt as if I could bear it only for moments. I wandered through the back streets, my shirt open to the waist, sandals on my feet, and at some point I stumbled towards a plankboard house with a veranda running the width of its frontage. I collapsed into a wickerwork chair, and I removed my shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from my forehead and chest. I heard voices behind me, someone calling for lemonade. Somewhere music played from an ancient phonograph, the bakelite records scratched and heavy, the sound like a chamber orchestra coming out through a maze of tunnels.
Sometimes I felt angry. Other times sad, alone, desperate, quiet. Sometimes I felt I could light the world with fire and watch everyone burn. And again, in that moment, I felt nothing. I was sick and weak and thin. I was fifty-three years old, and I felt eighty. So many things had changed, but changed for the worse, it seemed. People like me were no-one at all, less than nothing, minus zero, and we had to carve our own way through life.
Often I wished I was someone else. Someone tall and strong. Anyone else. At least it would have been different.
The heat, the bruised and turgid air, made me feel nauseous. I took my damp shirt and put it on again.
Motivation came a little later, the sky darker, the promise of a storm pressing against the afternoon, some merciless and unforgiving invasion, and I rose from the chair and started walking the streets again.
I heard the absence of music. That had disappeared some time before. I could not remember when. My mouth felt stale and bitter, my muscles ached and I was hungry.
When I thought again I thought of Angelina. Real love meant touching without hurting, crying without pain, holding a heart in your mind, not in your hand. We were all children, it seemed, and those of us who learned of adulthood paid the price in forgetting how it was to be a child. We grew up, and childhood belonged to some part of history that never existed, and when I thought of those things, remembered what it was like when everything was so much larger than me, I sensed the loss of hope: I realized that those who had taught me about life had never really understood it themselves. They had pretended. They had cheated me. If a child is smart he gets what he wants. If an adult is smart he gets used. Betrayed. Abused.
And after that I thought of where I would go now, what I would do. It was safe here in Havana, but Havana was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be in America. I wanted to be with my family. I could not stagnate here, could not dissolve and die here in this desolate quarter of the world, but I could not go back.
I thought of winter in America, the trees losing their leaves, colors that should have borne names like ‘cremona’ and ‘anguish’ and ‘eldorado’, the scatterings of snow that you could smell in the air, the bitter wind haunting the eaves above the windows of the houses, ghosts of smoke from smouldering bonfires as people burned leaves in backlots and front yards…
And the hurt began again.
I retraced my steps to the house, where my son was studying. I stood at the back door, waiting for the sky to break open with the sound of rain. It came eventually, as I knew it would, and out beyond the limits of the house I could hear the lush vegetation stretching and yawning and swelling its leaves and stems and roots. Rain came like a waterfall, the rush of sound filling my ears, waves filling my eyes, every sense echoing the crescendo of nature as she burst and broke and bled. It was vast, immense, majestic. It represented everything, and yet nothing, and there were many things I did not understand.
Later, the air chilled and smelling of damp green destruction, I turned and walked back into the house. Upstairs I went into a small and immaculate room, the furniture not from this century, the counterpane covering the bed ancient and bleached with years of washing. I went through my dresser and found a white monogrammed shirt. I took a suit and other things from the wardrobe, silk and soft cotton and gaberdine pants with pleats and shoes with two sets of fastenings, buckles and laces, and over the laces a hand-tooled leather flap that prevented the cuffs of the pants from chafing. From beneath the pillow of my bed I retrieved my.38, heavy and solid, the handle pearled, threaded with lignum vitae beaded like marble. I hefted the weapon in my hand, tucked my finger behind the trigger guard, rolled it like a gunslinger, stepped back and aimed at the mirror, then turned and followed the lower edge of the window sill with my eye along the sight. I smiled. I sat on the edge of the bed. I reversed the gun, touched my thumb against the trigger, lifted it, opened my mouth and felt the bottom of the barrel against my teeth. I smelled oil, cordite, saltpeter – blood, I thought – and when I pressed the trigger harder I could sense the internal workings of the mechanism preparing themselves for movement.
The sound of the hammer striking the empty chamber was almost deafening, as if the sound had echoed against the roof of my mouth, filled my head and then exited through my ears. I smiled again, withdrew the gun and turned it over in my hand. I replaced it beneath the pillow and crossed the room to the narrow bathroom. Inside, the white porcelain tiling and bathtub were hued green in the sallow light from the window. I opened the lower pane, looked out towards the road, and stood there for some small eternity listening for any sound within the house.
It was close to evening. Somewhere Victor was reading aloud to Claudia Vivó. I could hear the rain out there somewhere, hammering relentlessly on some other part of the world. Unbeknown to me it was raining also in Louisiana. Three hours and the Bienvenue would overflow its banks, the Mississippi-Lake Borgne tributary would burst its concrete stanchions and flood a town called Violet on Highway 39; the River Gulf Outlet Canal would swell and threaten the safety of the Intracoastal waterway running north-east out towards Gulfport… and a man called Duchaunak, a stranger to me, would run through the everglades at the edge of the Feraud territory. He would never make it home. He would collapse into the mud and drown, and his body would rest in eternity beside that of Carryl Chevron.
I understood the depth of losing. I saw the well of despair in which I could have drowned, but the one thing that floats us is hope. Faith perhaps. But what was faith if not in yourself? We believe we understand ourselves, but we do not; and perhaps if we did we would spend less time concealing from others that we were not who we appeared to be. We perform, you see, perform some drama for the world; we carry a case filled with faces, with words, with different scenes and acts and curtain calls, and we pray that the world will never see beyond the performance we have practised for it.
I turned and looked in the mirror. My face looked old and lined, streaked with pain, it seemed.
‘Who were you?’ I asked myself. ‘What did you think or hope or pretend you were? Who did you think you had become?’
I reached out and touched my fingers to the cool smooth reflection.
My depression deepened, the urge for revenge gnawed at me, and somewhere in the small and narrow shadow of my soul I began to understand that my wife and daughter were dead, that Victor and I were alone in this world, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Later I went down for dinner. I sat beside my son as Claudia brought food for us. I listened to him talk excitedly about the things he had learned that day, and I sensed his perfect and complete desire to become a man.
One does not own one’s life, I wanted to tell him. One borrows it, and if in the borrowing there is insufficient retribution made, then the life must be returned. This is the way of all things.
I did not speak; I listened. I did not see; I perceived. I did not clamor and plead for my own voice to be heard over that of my son.
He was what he was, and that was perfect enough.
As far as my own life was concerned, I had perhaps wished for too much.
When my son was sleeping, I once again left the house.
I felt I was becoming something. I had walked out whatever thoughts had held me in the fine clothes, the buckled shoes, the gun in my hand, and I stood in the rain, water running down my face, a warmth glowing from within.
Je ne sais pas la vérité, seulement les mots du coeur, car ça, c’est tout que j’entends.
A voice inside my mind, a voice from New Orleans perhaps, rippling with echoes like a stone dropped into cool glassy water, spreading out through everything. The words of the heart: this was all I heard.
Blackness and rain and punctuations of silence, nothing but intermittent waves of water breaking up the dirt, flooding the riverbanks… nature crying her heart out…
I shed my skin like a snake, and if I believed, if I breathed and believed in all that I was I would eventually swallow my own tail and disappear. It was divine and preordained and complete in its simplicity.
There was a fluidity, a gracefulness in my motion. Like the birthing pain of some creature – unearthly, arcane, sliding through the walls of the chrysalis, splitting the cocoon and feeling it slip to the ground. I was everything, and yet nothing, and in my eyes was merely the reflection of everything I was, everything I would become. If only for my son, I would breathe forever.
I stepped aside, I sank to the ground, I rolled in the soft and yielding dirt, water cooling me, washing the sweat from my skin, and when I stood I was black. I knelt, I cupped my hands, and from the rivulets that danced between the clumps of undergrowth I scooped a handful of liquid darkness. Against my face it felt smooth and forgiving, blending away the edges, the seams, the junctures between sound and silence, shadow and light, and when I ran my fingers back through my hair, feeling the mud on my scalp, I saw that I had indeed become something all-seeing, sensual and sublime.
Moving then, on the balls of my feet, stepping lightly, gathering speed, and soon I was running breathless and windswept through the trees, dancing between the trunks of moss-clothed trees, leaves against my face, against my skin. A ghost, a spectre, a haunting.
From the heart of this land, from the boundaries and limits I went like a wraith, my skin blended with nature so perfectly I was unseen. I was silent, and it seemed that I existed only in my own mind.
For miles it seemed, slipping through the night, the rain, the silence, until I came to a fence that ran as far as my eyes could see both left and right. I stepped back, and then with one stride I vaulted it, landing on bended knees on the other side, rain glancing off my sweated shoulders, leaning once again to refresh my face in the pools that had gathered.
I recognized myself as the creature who had surfaced from the swamps a thousand years before, who had padded silently into a motel room, who exorcised the sin from pale, weak bodies.
Poetry in motion, blessed and beautiful.
I assumed right of possession over my own imagination, my own faith and belief, and I saw that I could become anything I desired, and anything I desired I could have.
I believed that they were still alive – my wife and my daughter. I believed that they were somewhere waiting for me, and it was only a matter of time before we would be reunited.
I believed these things with all my soul, for to believe otherwise would have caused me to lose my mind. It ran like a wheel from beginning to end, back to inception again, and like a thread from a spindle it would draw us all together once more.
On the way back to the house I found a dog sleeping beneath a tree at the side of the road. With my bare hands I strangled it, and then carried its limp body to the edge of the woods and hurled it into the darkness.
I kneeled in the dirt and cried until there was nothing left inside.
Back inside the walls of the house, I stood motionless outside the door of Victor’s room. I could hear him breathing, hear him murmuring as he slept, and I closed my eyes and prayed to a God I knew could not exist that he would survive these things.
I returned to my room; I lay on my bed; I closed my eyes.
I slept like the dead, for that – at least within – was what I had become.
Of these things – these thoughts and feelings – I said nothing to Victor. He was a bright child; eight years old, eyes wide for the world and all it had to offer. Mrs Vivó taught him well, even committing to his memory the basics of Spanish and the history of his grandfather’s homeland. I watched as a man apart. I loved the child, loved him more than life itself, but there was something always in his eyes, something that told me he believed me responsible for the death of his mother and his sister. Perhaps it was my imagination, perhaps a projection of my own guilt, but each time I looked at him I could recognize his loneliness and confusion. He had lost his family in the same way I had, through the brutal actions of brutal men, and had I not taken such a path, had I been a man of learning and culture, had people like Fabio Calligaris and Don Alessandro not been part of my life, then none of these things would have happened.
One day he spoke to me of God. He asked me if I believed.
I smiled, I pulled him close, I pressed my face against his hair and I told him the truth.
‘Some people believe in God, Victor, and some do not.’
‘And you? Do you believe in God, Daddy?’
I was quiet for a time. ‘I believe that there is something out there, but I cannot be sure what it is.’
‘Claudia believes in God… she prays every day before lessons, and then again before she leaves.’
‘It is good for people to have faith. Faith helps people make their way through life without fear.’
‘Fear of what?’
I sighed. ‘Fear of men, of the things that men can do.’
‘Like the men that killed Mommy and Lucia?’
I felt a tightness in my throat. It was difficult to breathe. Incipient tears stung my eyes. ‘Yes, Victor, like the men who killed Mommy and Lucia.’
‘Do you have faith, Daddy?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘In what? What do you have faith in?’
‘In you, Victor. I have faith in you. Faith as well that one day we will see Mommy and Lucia again.’
‘Will that be soon?’
I shook my head. ‘No Victor, it will not be soon, but they will wait for us.’
‘I want to pray, Daddy. I want to pray with Claudia… for you and for Mommy and Lucia, and that we will see them again soon. Is that okay?’
I pulled him closer. ‘Yes Victor, that is okay. You pray with Claudia and have faith in these things.’
‘And what will happen to the men who killed them?’
‘Perhaps God will make them hurt too,’ I said.
‘He will… yes, he will,’ Victor said, and then he was quiet, and I laid him down on the bed, and I curled up beside him until his breathing slowed and he was asleep.
I did not need to work. The money that I brought with me would have kept us in comfort for a considerable time, but I was restless before long, agitated easily, and I understood this to be an indication that I could not exist without some purpose.
During the day, while Claudia was seeing to Victor, I would walk out among the people of La Habana Vieja. I would listen to them, watch them as they went about their business, trying to find something that would interest me. On the corner of Bernaza and Muralla I found an old-fashioned store that specialized in cigars and antique books. Here I would spend time talking with the owner, a man in his seventies by the name of Raúl Brito, and he spoke of the revolucion, of the days when Batista was in power, and the fact that on two occasions he had spoken with Castro himself.
Raúl was a man of education and literature, and though he had at first begun his business dealing only in fine tobaccos and cigars, it was not long before he started to bring his own books to work in order to have something to occupy his mind. Customers would come, they would show interest in his reading, and soon he started to trade also in these. The store, known only as Brito’s, became a gathering place for the elders of La Habana Vieja, and here they would smoke their cigars, buy and sell and read their books, and occupy their hours away from home.
I frequented Brito’s more and more often, until there came a day in June of that year, a day no more than a week after Victor’s ninth birthday, that Raúl asked me if I would be interested in managing the store once he had retired.
‘I am seventy-four next month,’ he said, and he leaned on a stack of battered leatherbound volumes that looked barely able to stand his weight. ‘I will be seventy-four, and as each week passes I wonder if I can manage to make it down here again.’ He smiled, the creases around his eyes causing them to almost disappear into the origami warmth of his face. ‘You are a good man, Ernesto Perez, a man of character, and I believe it would suit you to settle here and make your business.’
I did not give Raúl Brito an answer that day, nor the next. I did not give him an answer until August, and then I told him I would be willing to manage the store, but I believed we should enact a partnership, that the name of the store should stay the same, and I should pay him a partnership fee to buy into the business.
‘Money?’ he said. ‘I did not suggest this because I wanted your money.’ He seemed slightly offended, as if I had made some improper suggestion.
I raised my hand in a conciliatory fashion. ‘I know, Raúl, I know you didn’t, but I am a man of principle and honor, and I feel it would be unjust to enter into this without making some contribution to the venture. I insist that it be this way, regardless of your viewpoint.’
Raúl smiled. He winked. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘If that is the case then we shall employ a lawyer and we shall draw up an agreement, a letter of co-operation if you like, and we shall have it sworn in and made legal.’
I held out my hand and we shook. I would give Raúl Brito ten thousand American dollars, and I would become his partner.
It was then that the difficulties began. My money was well-hidden in my house. I had no bank account, I had no records or registered assets. In organizing the legalities of our partnership I was required to provide a passport or some legal means of identification. These things I did not have, at least nothing current and admissible in a Cuban lawyer’s office, and when the lawyer suggested I solve the problem by registering my name and place of birth at the local police headquarters I was caught like a rabbit in the headlights. I had made an agreement with Raúl to do this, but what was asked of me I could not provide, and no matter the attempts I made to construct this agreement based on a handshake and a word of trust, Raúl insisted that if we were going to do it then we would do it properly. It was, after all, my idea, was it not?
When I failed to appear at the police headquarters, not only on one occasion, but a second time also, the lawyer – a suspicious and invasive man by the name of Jorge Delgado – commented to the local constabulary that there was something unusual about the elderly man who lived in the house on Avenida Belgica. The constabulare, a card-carrying member of the Crusade for the Defence of the Revolution, an organization that was nothing more than the eyes and ears of Castro’s secret police, was interested enough in me to ask details of Claudia Vivó, and she – loyal and reticent in her own way – merely served to awaken his further curiosity.
It was in the second week of September that he came to Brito’s, and there he found me seated near the window, smoking a cigar and reading a magazine.
‘Mr Perez,’ he said quietly, and sat beside me at the narrow table.
I looked at him, and everything within me told me I was in for some difficulty.
‘My name is Luis Hernández. I am the constabulare for this sector.’
I held out my hand. ‘I am pleased to meet you, sir,’ I said.
Hernández did not shake my hand and I withdrew it slowly.
‘I understand that you have been here in Cuba for some months?’
‘Yes, I have… myself and my son Victor.’
‘And how old is your son, Mr Perez?’
I smiled. ‘He is nine years old.’
‘And I understand he is tutored by Claudia Vivó?’
‘He is, yes.’
‘I have spoken with her and she tells me he is a very bright boy indeed.’
I nodded. ‘He is a bright boy, yes.’
‘And his mother?’
‘His mother is no longer alive.’
Hernández shook his head. ‘I am sorry. She has been dead a long time?’
‘In March of this year.’
‘And she died here in Cuba?’
‘No, she did not die in Cuba.’
Hernández was silent. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
‘In America. She died in America.’
‘Aah,’ he said, as if suddenly understanding something significant. ‘And may I ask how she died, Mr Perez?’
‘An automobile accident, she and my daughter, Victor’s sister.’
‘And her name?’
‘Angelina,’ I said reticently. I knew what was happening. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Hernández was soliciting all the information he could with the appearance of concerned interest.
‘Such a tragic thing, Mr Perez… my condolences.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and turned back to my magazine.
‘And I understand that you have now come here to stay in Cuba?’
‘Perhaps, I am not sure. After the death of my wife I wanted to be away from America for a while. Such a thing is very difficult to come to terms with, and I felt it would be better for my son to be away from any reminders.’
‘Of course,’ Hernández said. ‘If it were me I am sure I would feel much the same way.’
I turned and looked out of the window. I could feel beads of sweat breaking beneath my hairline.
‘And you came in with a visitor’s visa or as a Cuban national?’ Hernández asked.
‘As a national,’ I said. ‘My father was born here in Cuba and I possess Cuban national status as a hereditary right.’
‘Indeed you would, sir,’ he said. ‘Indeed you would.’ He looked at me askance, and then he leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. ‘I have one question,’ he said, and he smiled like a man setting a trap for something he knew was defenseless.
I looked back at him and attempted to show nothing of any meaning in my expression.
‘I understand that you are looking at the possibility of engaging in this business with Raúl Brito?’
‘We had discussed such a thing,’ I replied.
‘But the details of the agreement have not been worked out?’
I shook my head.
‘It is not something you wish to do? You have changed your mind perhaps?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have not yet made time to attend to the paperwork.’
Hernández nodded his head. ‘So I understand. I happened to be speaking with the lawyer assigned to this matter, a Mr Jorge Delgado, and he told me you have failed to make both of the appointments he has arranged with Mr Brito and yourself to conclude the documentation.’
‘That is correct,’ I said. ‘I have been very busy with my son’s schooling.’
‘But you are not so busy now,’ he replied, and once again he smiled his reptilian smile and looked at me through slitted eyes.
‘I am not,’ I said, for there was nothing I could say in my defense.
‘Then I think it would be a good idea, if only for Mr Brito’s peace of mind, that we conclude this matter this afternoon. I think it would be fair, in order to further prevent any inconvenience for both him and Mr Delgado, that we go to your house now, collect your identification papers, and sign these partnership agreements.’
I smiled. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I think that would be an excellent idea.’
Hernández rose immediately. He looked very pleased with himself. I gathered my coat, threw it around my shoulders, and with a sense of ease and lack of concern I showed Hernández to the door and followed him out into the street.
We conversed as we walked, of nothing consequential – the weather, the shameful lack of care shown to some of Havana’s more historic and beautiful buildings – and it was little more than fifteen minutes before we reached Avenida Belgica and the house I had rented.
The thoughts that passed through my mind were those thoughts one always encountered solely in hindsight. I had considered entering Cuba under an assumed name even as I left America, but I was so caught up in the necessity to leave that country, so unwilling to engage in any formal investigation of the murder of my wife and daughter, I had fled as I was. Of course I possessed a Cuban passport, and it was in my birth name, but that passport had been purchased for seven hundred and fifty dollars some years before from a skilled counterfeiter. In America I had carried no social security number, no formal identification, and the customs and immigration people at the Havana docks had no more than glanced at my documents as I entered. Leaving would have been different, a far more difficult enterprise altogether, as I knew from experience with my father so many years before. The passport I would show Hernández would be identified as a forgery under scrutiny, and that was a road I did not wish to travel.
I welcomed Hernández to my home graciously. I had prayed that Claudia and Victor would be away, and my prayer was answered. The house was still and quiet. I showed Hernández through to the main room of the house where Victor’s study books were spread across the table, the room where he would sit with his tutor and learn everything he could of the world. I asked Hernández if he wanted a drink, and he accepted.
I walked back through to the kitchen and started to make some coffee. He called out questions through the half-open doorway. How long had I been living in America? What business had I been involved in there? Did I have any other living family here in Cuba? I answered tactfully, diplomatically, but I realized even as I was speaking that it made no difference what I said to him now.
I returned to the room bearing a tray, upon it two cups of fresh coffee. I asked Hernández if he wished for some warm bread, perhaps some cheese with his coffee. He declined politely, took his coffee, and then asked if he could see my papers.
I smiled, and said, ‘Of course, Señor Hernández’, and once again left the room.
When I returned he was sitting quite relaxed in the chair. In his hand he held his coffee cup.
I walked towards him, my forged passport in my hand, and when he reached out to take it from me, as he closed his fingers around it, I lunged forward suddenly and buried a steak knife through his right eye. I jerked the knife upward and then down. He seemed transfixed, his other eye looking at me with such an expression of surprise I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing, and it was almost as if Hernández smiled, as if this was some kind of practical joke, as if I had somehow managed to create the image of his impending death, and then would suddenly retrieve him from his fate. The smile did not last long. A second, perhaps two, and possibly it was nothing more than some involuntary reflexive action taken by the muscles in his face as they fought the intrusion of the blade. Perhaps, and this may be closer to the truth, it was nothing but my own imagination.
Hernández leaned forward as I released the handle of the knife. His hands clawed at his face, almost out of control, and then he rolled forward off the chair onto his knees.
There was little blood, almost none at all, and for this I was grateful. Visions of Carryl Chevron and the wide lake of blood that had pooled out of his body and across a dirty linoleum kitchen floor a thousand years before came back to me. I stepped away. I watched Hernández struggle with the pain, the shock, the agonizing disruption of all bodily functions, and then from his throat came a stuttering feral snarl like some wounded animal in its final death throes. And then he was still. I leaned over his body. With my right hand I pressed against the side of his throat. There was nothing. Constabulare Hernández was dead.
I removed my tie and jacket. I rolled up my sleeves. I dragged his body towards the edge of the rug and then I proceeded to roll him sideways until he centered it. I put my foot on his chest and used both hands to withdraw the knife. The muscles had already tightened around it and it took two or three sharp tugs to remove it. I walked to the kitchen, and with the remainder of the hot coffee I washed the knife thoroughly. I took a bottle of cleansing bleach from the cupboard, half-filled the sink with water, emptied the cleanser into it and then submerged the knife. I walked back to the main room and looked down at the cocooned body that lay there.
I was alert for any sound from the front of the house, of Claudia and Victor returning. I had no idea where they had gone or when they would return. I contemplated the situation I had created. A body does not disappear. A body is a body. One hundred and sixty pounds of deadweight that will stay one hundred and sixty pounds of deadweight until it becomes something else. The house had no furnace, there was no rapid passage to the sea and, unlike Louisiana, there were no nearby everglades where such a body could be submerged and forgotten in moments.
I sat down where Hernández had been seated. The chair was still slightly warm from where he had relaxed. Through the end of the rug I could see the side of his face, the single open eye that seemed to look at me askance. I leaned down and closed it. He still seemed accusatory and suspicious even in death.
‘You should not have been so interested in business that did not concern you,’ I told him, and ‘You should have attended to matters of greater significance and importance than this. This is your penalty for being too concerned with the details of other people’s lives.’ I considered the perfect irony of the situation. After all the things that had been done, after so many lives had been abruptly terminated by my hand, this man had been perhaps closer than anyone to discovering who I was, and all because of some paperwork.
Having reprimanded him, in and of itself nothing more than a poor explanation to myself of why he was now dead, I was still faced with the grim reality: on my front room floor, wrapped in a rug, was a dead constabulare, and until I did something decisive he was going nowhere.
Fifteen minutes later I got up from the chair and started pacing the room. I walked around Hernández clockwise, and then anti-clockwise. At one point I stopped near his head, leant down, peered into the hole where his face lay and said ‘¡Hijos de puta!’ with such venom that spittle flew from my lips.
I felt vexed, angered by his silent presence, and though my first impulse was to take something heavy – perhaps a hammer, or a large stone – and beat his head to a useless pulp, I restrained myself. This matter was a problem enough without further complications to clean up. And then in back of that reaction was a sense of regret, a narrow sense of guilt perhaps. I felt a momentary panic as I considered the possibility that Victor might return and see a dead body in his house. I was not afraid for myself, but when I thought of my son my viewpoint changed. I wanted the past behind me, and yet here, even as I stood over the dead body of the constabulare, the past was making its insidious way towards the present.
I glanced at my watch. It was a little after two. I went out to the front and backed my car up as close to the house as it would go without attracting too much attention. I unlocked the trunk and propped it open with the edge of a blanket inside. I returned to the house, and from a strong cord I found in a drawer in the kitchen I cut two lengths which I used to tie up each end of the rug. Hernández was not as heavy as I had imagined, and I was surprised at the ease with which I hefted him up onto my shoulder. I stood within the doorway of the house until I was certain there were no passers-by or people standing on their porches, and then I hurried across the few feet of pathway, used my knee to push the trunk upwards, and lowered Hernández’s body into it. I had to bend Hernández at the knees to get him inside, and then I slammed the trunk shut and locked it. I drove the car down to the edge of the road and parked it once again. Visions of Carryl Chevron came back to haunt me. I remembered how the death of the salesman had started me along this path, how I had been a similar age to Victor, and the sense of coincidence was almost painful.
Claudia and Victor returned no more than half an hour later. I greeted them warmly. I had taken the steak knife from the sink, dried it carefully and replaced it in the drawer. I had warmed some bread, sliced some dried meat and eaten a sandwich. I felt level-headed, altogether in control, and while Claudia prepared our evening meal I sat with Victor in the main room and listened as he read to me.
Later, evening closing up against us, I asked Claudia if she would be willing to stay with Victor for an extra hour or so as I had a small errand to run. Claudia was more than happy to facilitate me. I believed she was lonely perhaps, her husband having been dead more than three years, and the time she spent with Victor, the hours she spent in my house catering to us, seemed to give her purpose and respite from a world she felt no great desire to long inhabit. I took my car keys; I left the house. I let the handbrake off and rolled the car down to the end of the street before I started the engine. I did not turn on the headlights until I reached the junction at the end, and then I took a route north along Belgica onto Avenida de las Misiones. I headed out towards the coast, to the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta, and down there, down along the edge of the Canal de Entrada, I pulled the car to a halt above a dark gully that climbed down to the edge of the water.
From the trunk of the car I lifted the rug with Hernández’s body inside and carried it to the edge of the high verge. I rolled him out from within, folded the rug and returned it to the trunk. I took a small can of gasoline from the back of the car and doused Hernández’s body liberally. I stepped back and struck a match. I watched the flame for a moment, like a single candle against the night sky, and then I tossed it towards his body. The body ignited with a sudden whoosh, and flames swelled upwards. I was panicked for a moment. Such a fire would be visible all along the coastline, but by then it was too late. I hurried back to the car, started the engine without illuminating the headlights, turned around, and headed back to the road. At the top of the incline, perhaps three or four hundred yards from the fire, I killed the engine and sat watching for a while. No-one came. There was no sudden alarm raised. It was as if the eyes of Cuba were turned the other way. How long the body burned I did not know. After thirty or forty minutes I started the engine once again and drove away. I was half a mile from Hernández before I switched on the headlights, and by the time I reached the house I had almost forgotten the man existed.
It was three days before Hernández’s body was finally identified, more than a week before another constabulare came to Raúl Brito’s shop to ask if Hernández had been seen there in the previous days. Raúl, forgetful at the best of times, said he could not recall the last time he had seen the man, and I acted patient and yet suitably ignorant of anything but books and cigars. I had already spoken with Raúl, told him that all necessary documentation had been signed, and had given him the first thousand dollars of the ten he was due. Raúl did not question me, I was his friend, and there was nothing requiring further discussion. I heard mention of Luis Hernández once more in the subsequent week, and then there was nothing. He seemed to have been a man of little consequence in life, and equally lacked consequence in death. The lawyer never contacted Raúl Brito regarding any incomplete documentation and the matter became unimportant. Each month for the subsequent nine months I gave Raúl a further thousand dollars, and Raúl – he of the old ways – never felt any need to consign the money to a bank. I was a partner in spirit, not on paper, and this arrangement served me well.
For three years my life with Victor became a simple and uncomplicated matter of moving from one day to the next with merely the darkness providing the seam between. He was schooled well, and by the time he reached thirteen years of age I could see in him the wide-eyed longing for the world that had been present as a young child. He asked me of America frequently, of the things I had done, the life I had lived in the New World. I lied to him in small matter-of-fact ways. It seemed unnecessary to tell him anything he would not have been able to comprehend, and thus he heard what he wanted to hear and he imagined the rest. The better part of a year later, as we entered the fall of 1996 and I approached my fifty-ninth birthday, Victor came to me one evening and sat facing me in the kitchen. Claudia had long since left for the night, and the house was quiet. He brought with him a book filled with pictures, landscapes and night-time horizons, and he showed me the towering image of Manhattan against a brilliant sunset.
‘You have been to New York,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper.
‘I have,’ I said. ‘I lived in New York for some years.’
‘Before I was born.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, before you were born. I left New York in the spring of 1982 and you weren’t born until the summer, and by then we had moved to Los Angeles.’
‘And you met Mommy there?’
‘Yes, I met her at the beginning of 1974 and we were married in May of 1977.’
‘Where did you live?’
I smiled. I could remember the sounds and smells, the faces of the people in the street. I remembered almost word for word the discussion that was held regarding a man called Jimmy Hoffa.
‘We lived in a small suburb of New York called Little Italy.’
‘Italy? Like the country?’
‘Yes, like the country.’
Victor was quiet for a time, pensive almost, and then he looked up at me and said, ‘What was it like, Daddy… what was America like? I find it hard to remember much at all.’
I leaned forward and took his hand. I held it as if it was my lifeline to something precious and eternal. ‘It is a vast country,’ I said. ‘Many, many, many times larger than Cuba. Cuba is just a small island near the coast of America. There are millions of people, tall buildings, wide streets, shopping malls larger than the Old Wall Ruins. Sometimes it is difficult to walk down the street because there are so many people coming the opposite way. It has everything good and everything bad that can be found in the world.’
‘Bad?’ Victor asked. ‘Like what?’
I shook my head. ‘Sometimes it is difficult to understand why men do the things they do. Some men kill, some men take drugs and steal other people’s property. Some men, out of desperation perhaps, feel that this is the only way they can live their lives. But against that it is possible for anyone to be happy in America. There is enough of everything to satisfy, and if a man works hard and keeps his word the whole world can be his.’
Victor was quiet again. I watched his face. I saw the light in his eyes, and I knew what he would say.
‘I want to go back to America, Daddy. I really want to go back to America and see it. I want to go to New York and see the buildings and the people. Could we do that?’
I sighed and shook my head. ‘I am old, Victor. I have come here to live the rest of my life. You are young, and when I am gone there will be all the time you need to see America… all the time you need to go anywhere you want in the world, and you won’t have your old father slowing you down.’
‘I don’t want to go alone, I want you to take me. I want you to show me everywhere you have been, all the places and the people-’
I let go of Victor’s hand and raised my own. I shook my head slowly. ‘Victor… I don’t know that you will understand even if I explain it to you, but I cannot go back to America. I am an old man now. I am nearly sixty years of age, and there is a great deal of America that I want to forget. We will stay here for a few years more, and then when you are eighteen you will be free to do whatever you wish and go wherever you might want to go. I will not stop you. I would not have it in my heart to stop you doing anything you wanted to do-’
‘So don’t stop me now,’ Victor said, and in his tone I heard that edge of fiery determination that I possessed as a young man. He was so like me in so many ways, and yet he was also innocent, and blind to the brutality of the world he desired.
‘I cannot-’ I started.
‘You mean you will not,’ he retorted, and he snatched the book and slammed it shut.
‘Victor,’ I said, my voice stern, unforgiving.
He glared at me defiantly.
‘We will not talk about this any more tonight,’ I said.
‘We will not talk of this ever again if you have your way,’ he replied.
‘Victor, I am your father-’
‘And I am your son. And I lost my sister and my mother too. I am lonely here. I spend all my time with Claudia, studying every hour of the day, and I cannot stay like this for the rest of my life.’
‘No-one is asking you to stay like this for the rest of your life… just for a few years more.’
‘A few days more would be too long,’ he said, and he rose from his chair. He looked down at me, a young man defying his father, and though at some other time I might have raised my voice to him, though I might have sent him to his room for his lack of compliance and misbehavior, I could do nothing but watch him silently as he spoke.
‘I am fourteen years old… old enough to know what I want, Father, and what I want is to go to America. No, we will not talk about it any more tonight. But we will talk about it again, and we will keep on talking about it until you are prepared to see things from my point of view. Then you will make a decision, and if the decision is that you will not take me then I will find a way to go by myself.’
He pushed his chair back with his knees, the sound like something ugly dragging itself across the ceramic tile, and then he turned and walked to the door.
He looked back as he stood in the doorway. ‘Goodnight, Father,’ he said, his voice curt and brusque. ‘I will see you in the morning.’
I listened as he made his way up the stairs to his room, as he slammed his door shut behind him, and I leaned forward, my arms folded on the table, and I rested my forehead on my hands.
I imagined Victor finding his way to America alone. I imagined him reaching New York and wandering the streets alone. I imagined what might happen to him, who he might meet and what would become of him.
I felt tears in my eyes, a knot of twisted emotion in my throat, and I believed for a second that if he went he would become what I had become. Either that, or he would die.
I did not sleep that night, and when I heard him rise in the morning, as I listened to him prepare his own breakfast in the kitchen below me, I could not face the prospect of seeing him look so defiantly at me again.
I waited until Claudia arrived and his lessons began, and then I rose and showered. I dressed quickly and quietly, and left the house by the rear door and made my way to the store.
Victor did not so much withdraw from me as quietly disappear. I saw less and less of him, and this, I believed, was how he intended it to be. In the morning he would say little. He would prepare his own food and retreat to his room until Claudia arrived. Then he would join her in the main room and close the door firmly behind him. Though it was not locked it was obvious that he did not wish me to enter, and so I did not. I believed perhaps that I was allowing him some degree of control over his life, but all I was doing was allowing him to draw himself further away from me. In the evening when I returned from the store he would be upstairs in his room. I learned very quickly that he would arrange for the evening meal to be prepared before I came home, and he would eat with Claudia. This again was of his own devising, and it was evident in his manner and attitude that he no longer considered me a part of his life. I had refused him something that he longed for, and thus I had been summarily excommunicated.
On many occasions, too many to recall, I attempted to win him back, but he was stubborn, and as we entered October of 1996 I realized that he had chosen a path, much as I had done. Perhaps I consoled myself with the knowledge that where I had killed a man to gain my knowledge of the world, all my own son wished to do was visit America, the land of his birth, the home of his mother.
On the last Saturday of that month, a day that would mark the beginning of the end in so many ways, I went up to my son’s room and sat on the edge of the bed. He did not look at me, he merely turned onto his side and went on reading his book.
‘Victor, listen to me,’ I said calmly.
He did not respond.
‘Victor, listen to me now. I am going to say something and you are going to listen.’
Again he did not move or turn his head towards me.
‘You want to go to America?’
There was a flicker of movement in his face.
‘If you want to speak to me of going to America then you will turn and face me and talk to me like a man.’
Victor moved sideways. He turned to look at me, his eyes almost without expression.
‘We will go to America,’ I said quietly. ‘We will do as you wish and we will go to America, but you must understand something.’
Victor sat up. He started to reach towards me. I raised my hand and edged backwards. ‘Listen to me, Victor, and listen well. I will take you to America, but you must understand that I had a life there before you were born, and there were things done and things said that I believe you could never comprehend. If you happen to hear of these things then you should come and talk to me before you assume they are true, and before you make any judgement of me. I am your father. I am the closest person you have in this world, and I love you more than life itself. But I will not have you judge me, Victor. I will not have you judge me.’
The fear was there, buried deep inside me, almost an integral part of my being. The fear of who I was, the fear of my son discovering the truth about his father. It was there, always had been, but I had been too afraid to face it.
Victor leaned forward and put his arms around my neck. He pulled me tight and hugged me. I inhaled slowly. I closed my eyes. I held him for some small eternity and I would not let go.
I did not want my son to see that I was crying.
The following day I made some calls to Chicago. I discovered that Don Calligaris, Ten Cent, some of the others, had moved back to New York in the summer of 1994. I found Ten Cent without difficulty, and when I told him I was planning on returning to New York he told me that he could arrange a private charter out of Havana that would bring me to the mainland of Florida, and there I could take a train or drive up to New York. There would be no need for papers or identification. There would be no need for anyone but the Alcatraz Swimming Team to know that Ernesto Cabrera Perez was coming to America once more.
Five and a half years I had been away. My son, all of eight years old when we had left, was now a teenager with a mind and a character and a vision all his own. New York would be filled with painful memories, and I knew the time would come when I would walk those same streets where I had walked with Angelina Maria Tiacoli so many years before.
But that was a different life. That was a different man altogether, and I swore to myself that this time, this time it would be different.
I could not have been more wrong, but as I boarded that small aircraft, as we taxied along the narrow runway and then watched through the windows as the ground was swallowed into obscurity beneath us, I imagined that I could return and still stay somehow disconnected from the past.
Truth be known the past had been there all along, and it was just waiting for me to come home.