A Quiet Vendetta (58 page)

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.