Pig's Foot (13 page)

The days became long and heavy. People ceased to dream about the possibility of progress. By the time they looked up and took notice, it was 1914.

During this time, Grandpa Benicio grew so much that José could not explain the change in him. One morning he simply woke up and he was not the same. José began to watch him closely, to follow him constantly; he even went into the bathroom when he was bathing, something he had not done since Benicio was a little boy. Sometimes Grandfather thought José had gone mad because at night when he was asleep he would creep into Benicio’s room, slip a hand into his shorts and measure his
pinga
with a length of string. My grandfather woke with a start, as did Gertrudis, and they frightened him off. It was an obsession.

‘I don’t understand, Betina. Malena was small, Oscar was scarcely four feet tall and you’ve told me that your parents were not very tall either, so where the hell does the boy get it from?’

Betina answered that it was simply in the nature of things, but she could not convince him. The truth was that every day José was growing older. He walked more slowly and constantly had to look down, careful not to trip. Overnight, he appeared with a walking stick which he had whittled from the branch of a ceiba. His hair had turned white, his shoulders had begun to droop and something like a hump began to grow on his back.

Yet still he went on working in the vegetable garden every day to feed his family. Benicio helped out as much as he could while Betina and Geru made a little money washing clothes down at the river, or sometimes they would go to El Cobre and sell the skirts and trousers the Santacruzes made. This way they managed to get by.

José began to talk constantly about the past, almost always with a sense of guilt about the death of Oscar. No one could persuade him that he was not to blame for the death of his friend. Over and over Betina had to remind him that Malena had died in childbirth and that Oscar had simply decided to follow his wife into the next world. José would never listen. And so he got into the habit of walking to the cemetery every morning to talk to his friend. He would go very early, when the half-light still veiled the colours of day and the dew heightened the forest smells of the village.

José Miguel Gómez, who had been a general in the war of 1895, was the new president of the country. Everyone in Cuba knows that Negroes were not allowed to join the police force, could not take part in official ceremonies or hold public office; they were not allowed into hotels or anything of that kind. But very soon a wave of protests erupted across the island by unions, veterans of the war of independence, progressive movements campaigning against exploitation. And so the
Partido Independiente de Color
– the Independent Party of Colour – was founded with the aim of abolishing the exploitation of coloured people and the death penalty, while supporting a policy of free education and other civil liberties. The movement grew to become a political party which participated in elections; however the Morúa Law – introduced by Martin Morúa, one of the few black men in the Cuban senate – outlawed political parties based on race. At this point, the sectors of the oligarchy who had always lived in fear of a race war began to sow the seeds of hatred among the traditional parties and the wealthy classes, accusing the PIC of seeking to impose black power in the island and spreading rumours of black men supposedly raping white women.

Matters became heated. The PIC mounted demonstrations in the streets and rose up in arms in Oriente, particularly in Santiago, Pinar del Rio, Havana and Las Villas. These rebel groups did not initiate violent confrontations; they were mobilised simply to put pressure on the government to recognise the demands of their party. The government of José Miguel Gómez responded by sending in the Rural Guard, the volunteers and all the heavy artillery, urged on by retired general Mario García Menocal, who years later would become president of the republic. In less than three months, the ‘rebels’ and their leaders were all butchered. Three thousand black people died in the massacre.

‘I told you, Aureliano, but you wouldn’t listen. It’s just like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes,’ José told the coachman one day. Betina, Benicio and Geru looked at him, puzzled. ‘You know the story – the emperor who always wanted to wear the latest fashions and one day, having tried on a dozen outfits and finding none of them suited him, was persuaded to leave the palace wearing a suit of invisible clothes. Everyone clapped and cheered until one little boy shouted, “But the king is stark naked.” This is exactly the same. I told you that the white men were a double-edged sword and you went on clapping and cheering just like the people praising the bare-arsed emperor. It took this race war and the mass slaughter of everyone for you to finally understand.’

‘I still think as I always thought,
amigo
José,’ said the coachman, shaking his head. ‘Our mistake was to think like sheep. This is why the Independent Party of Colour failed, because it tried to put all white men in the same basket when there are tramps on the street who are white, there are white people who are oppressed and exploited. But let’s not argue, these things are not over yet.’

From the pocket of his red jacket, Aureliano took a sealed letter that smelled of ink and glue. Everyone stared at the yellow envelope.

‘But that’s a letter,’ said Betina, looking into the coachman’s eyes. ‘What are we supposed to do with a letter since none of us can read?’

The coachman asked Betina to warm a little coffee and said that he would take charge of reading the documents. José suddenly announced that he was going to the cemetery.

‘To the cemetery?’ said the coachman, surprised.

‘Yes. Betina, you can tell me what’s happening with Melecio when I get back. And you, Aureliano, could you please tell my son that he has been gone a long time. Just tell him that. And give him a hug from us.’

How to Conquer a Woman According to María

José left the shack. Five minutes later Betina reappeared with the coffee. Aureliano asked what the matter was with José and Betina told him it was just old age. The coachman began to take sheaves of paper from the envelope; it seemed as though this letter was unending. They realised that it was not just one letter, but all the letters that Melecio had written since his departure three years earlier.

The Bacardís had shown a great affection for Melecio and had accepted him as a member of the family, especially Marina, Lucía, Adelaida and Amalia, the daughters of Don Emilio's second marriage to Doña Elvira Cape.

Don Emilio, a man passionate about poetry and about art in general, patiently taught Melecio his vowels and consonants, the difference between subject and predicate, between adjectives and nouns. In the field of poetry, he taught him about metre, about how some poems rhymed while others did not, all the things Melecio did not know but which he had instinctively applied in the poetic improvisations when words seemed to come to him as though dictated by some supernatural being. Melecio learned mathematics, physics and chemistry. Bacardí was very happy with his results and was constantly surprised by the boy's ability to learn.

Every afternoon, the whole family would sit out on the porch of the majestic house in the shade of the almond trees and admire the talents of the boy from Pata de Puerco: Doña Elvira and her four daughters, the six children from Don Emilio's previous marriage to the late Señora María Berluceau, Don Emilio's brothers José and Facundo and their wives, and the coachman Aureliano. Melecio would delight them with a dozen spontaneous poems, which were all the more powerful now that his vocabulary had been enriched by his classes with Don Emilio. These gatherings invariably ended with Melecio being showered with praise and with kisses, as though he were not just some poor black boy from Pata de Puerco, a village no one had ever heard of, but an exceptional individual or, as they often referred to him, an
illuminato
. Never had Melecio experienced such joy as in these moments. These afternoons beneath the almond trees became an attraction for Don Emilio's friends who included key figures from Cuban society, heads of government, mayors, colonels, even Americans drawn by the legend of this child prodigy of extraordinary sensibility who could recite poems that seemed to emanate from the very heart of God.

One day, after coffee, Don Emilio gave a little speech in front of the assembled company. It was time, he said, to expand his business, to take his rum to all corners of Cuba, beginning with Havana; when this was done, he would take on the world. To do this, he needed a symbol that would give his product weight, a powerful image that would mark the peak of the Bacardí empire, and that symbol, he concluded, should be a building, a building surmounted by a statue of a bat, the animal adopted as the emblem of the Bacardís since the beginning and one which had brought them their good fortune. All those present agreed with his proposals and suggested a number of possible architects, some already established and some who had recently emerged with the new tendencies and demands in the art of construction. There was talk of Rafael Fernández Ruenes, of José Antonio Mendigutía and Esteban Rodríguez Castell, of Govantes and Cabarrocas and the structural engineer José Menéndez.

Melecio listened in silence to the names of these distinguished personalities. Ideas teemed inside his brain, ideas which even he did not understand, ideas that existed only in his mind.

‘Where are you going, Melecio?' asked Marina, Don Emilio's daughter, seeing the boy get up to leave.

‘I don't feel well. I need to lie down,' he said, and went back to his room.

No one knew what was the matter with him. Every time they knocked on his door to ask, Melecio simply said, ‘I just need some time to think.' They tried to open the door, but Melecio kept it firmly locked. There was nothing to be done but leave food on a tray on the floor outside, which Melecio would eat in the early hours when everyone was asleep.

‘Melecio, we have guests, why don't you come out and recite something for us? It's getting so we can hardly remember what you look like,' Don Emilio said one day after Melecio had spent three weeks completely isolated from the outside world. Don Emilio received the usual response: ‘I need time to think.' That afternoon, as on so many others, the guests had to make do with the tales told by Aureliano the coachman, Don Emilio's stories of his trip to Egypt and Emilito's accounts of the war of independence which invariably featured General Maceo who, Emilito insisted, was mulatto though Aureliano maintained he was a pureblood Negro, and so the chatter went on into the early hours.

One sunny morning, Melecio finally decided to emerge. Having hugged him as though he were a relative recently arrived back from the wars, everyone gathered in the living room. Melecio placed dozens of sheets of paper on the marble table in the centre of the room. They were covered with drawings, mathematical calculations and geometric diagrams of something that looked like a huge box or a house, projected in various dimensions that from some angles looked like crates of rum, from others like coffins or sinister towers. It was so strange that no one present had ever seen its like.

‘Who are the coffins for?' asked Don Emilio.

‘It's a building,' said the boy from Pata de Puerco, smiling mischievously, his hands, as always, stuffed in his pockets.

The faces around him looked puzzled as they struggled but failed to see anything resembling a building in the sketches. Until Melecio began to colour in a frontal elevation. The marble tiles of the façade were reddish; deep terracotta for the ground floor rising to a soft beige on the remaining eight floors. Each floor had eleven carved wooden windowframes and the central tower was studded with dark crystals and mosaic tiles. Melecio sketched the huge streetlamps that hung from the ground floor like opulent pendants and, on the apex of the tower, he drew a globe of the world straddled by the hairy feet of a bat. Little by little, all these details appeared before the astonished eyes of the assembled company.

Don Emilio summoned his partners to a meeting attended by some of the most esteemed architects in the country and showed them Melecio's designs. The calculations were precise and the extraordinarily ambitious project was brilliantly conceived. But what astonished everyone was the imposing, ornate style, the innovative grace of the brightly coloured embellishments. It was an expression of modern art, of sophisticated elegance unlike anything they had ever seen.

‘This architect is either a genius or a fool. And I don't think he's a fool,' commented Señor Rafael Fernández Ruenes, peering at the drawings through rimless spectacles. ‘One thing is certain. This man is someone with exceptional talent and considerable experience. I would go so far as to say we are dealing with someone who has created a new style.'

Rafael Fernández Ruenes was referring to the art deco style which Melecio unwittingly invented when designing the Bacardí Building in Havana.

‘I'm afraid you're wrong, Rafael. The architect is a boy of sixteen who has never so much as designed a sewage system,' said Don Emilio, patting Melecio on the shoulder.

‘Are you telling me that this was not designed by an architect?'

‘It was designed by this boy standing next to me.'

Rafael Fernández Ruenes and the others present stared curiously at Melecio as though he were a new species recently mentioned in some zoological treatise. They studied every detail of his clothes, the hands stuffed in the pockets of his shorts, the noble face, the bushy eyebrows, the square jaw, as the boy smiled at them artlessly.