Ruins (15 page)

Virgilio’s face was oval, a whirly knot on a tree trunk. His pupils were enlarged to macabre proportions by the glasses barely hanging on to the tip of his flat upside-down T-shaped nose. But he wasn’t wearing anything other than his regular frames to protect his eyes. Even though he was annoyed and wet, his face and body continued to sparkle as if sprinkled with fairy dust.

Usnavy swallowed hard, hugging the injured lamp even closer to him.

“I see you finally got your—what was it?—Armstrong 2401?” he said, nodding in the direction of the reddish glass. “American glass, right?”

Virgilio raised an eyebrow. “So you’re a bad driver but a good listener,” the man replied, not even glancing up. “What can I do for you?” One of the domino-watching cats—the white one—came and pressed himself against Virgilio’s leg, oblivious to the water, as if he didn’t understand his own species’ natural aversion.

Usnavy couldn’t help but look up and around. So many lamps! But not one of them was magnificent and so Usnavy had secondary, conflicting emotions: On the one hand, that they hung there in varying states of completion meant that orders kept coming in before Virgilio could finish with one or another; but, on the other, if there were so many already available, the wounded one he was nursing wasn’t that special after all.

“It must be peculiar to live so close, huh?” he said, pointing with his shoulder in the direction of the American quasi-embassy. His face was also wet now from the heat, slippery.

Virgilio shrugged. The other cat, a mustard-colored brute that looked like a lioness, trailed in, sniffed at Usnavy, and turned away unimpressed.

“I mean, I don’t know … all that sadness,” Usnavy said. His shirt sucked onto his back, soaked.

Virgilio frowned again. “It’s always been like that,” he said. “Always.”

“Yeah?” Usnavy felt perspiration collecting in his solar plexus, a river down to his waist, tickling his navel. Cubans had always wanted to leave?
Always
? That couldn’t be true.

“Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but there hasn’t been a day since 1951—that’s when I first moved here—without a line out there,” Virgilio said. “The rest is lies, politics, and fable.”

Usnavy nodded out of courtesy. “‘The reality of things is their light,’” he said sheepishly while wiping his face with his hand, which dripped as it crossed his line of vision.

Virgilio finally looked up. He squinted at Usnavy, as if whatever he was giving off was too blinding to face straight ahead. “You don’t read Thomas Aquinas,” he said, not a question or accusation, but a simple statement of fact. His two assistants were now poking the barrel with a long metal pipe, the young man watching as the older one twirled the pipe between expert fingers.

“I read Fanon, I read Soyinka,” Usnavy responded, flustered. His buttocks were drenched, his underwear clinging to him like a second skin. “And Hemingway, of course.”

“But not Guillén and Langston Hughes?” Virgilio finished his engraving and lifted his foot from a pedal Usnavy hadn’t noticed before. The diamond tip went limp, the water a trickle.

Usnavy sighed. “Of course Guillén and Langston Hughes. I meant beyond that.”

“But you’re not interested in light, not really,” said Virgilio. “You’re interested in glass.” Then, without hesitating: “Is that the same lamp I saw the other day?” The snow-colored cat curled into a ball, its whiteness challenging the block of blue at the door.

Usnavy nodded as he handed Virgilio the bag. “Is that really true,” he asked as the artisan pulled the injured lamp out to the light, “that there’s been a line out there since 1951?” He gazed meaningfully in the direction of the Americans.

“Uh huh,” Virgilio answered while examining Usnavy’s lamp again. “Maybe even before that. But certainly longer than 1959. Now, tell me something.”

“Yes.” The heat was making him dizzy, the tracers orange and pink.

“Since I already saw this lamp and gave you a recommendation—a recommendation you can’t afford—why would you bring it back?”

“I felt,” said Usnavy as he took a long and labored breath, watching while the old man in the back blew into one end of the pipe and the other end grew into the color and size of an avocado, “that there was something you weren’t telling me, that maybe you couldn’t tell me … there.”

Virgilio leaned back and arched his eyebrows. He scratched the mustard-colored cat’s neck, leading him to purr so loudly Usnavy was initially startled. But after a pause, Virgilio vigorously shook his head, causing a light shower of sweat that the cat, inexplicably, didn’t seem to mind.

“No,” he finally responded. “I said all I had to say then. Maybe it’s you who has something to tell me.”

After his unproductive visit to Virgilio’s infernal studio—the man wouldn’t fix the lamp without payment of at least the twenty-dollar bill in Usnavy’s pocket, nor would he consider buying the lamp—Usnavy walked over to the hospital to see about the number on Nena’s birth certificate. Earlier, while washing and dressing, he had confided to Jacinto what had happened at the Habana Libre and he was surprised by his friend’s rather mild and sensible response.

“She’s a kid, Usnavy,” he’d said while fixing Usnavy’s shoe again. Jacinto’s mother lay quietly in her bed, flushed and satisfied. “You’re lucky that’s all that happened. Thank the saints, my friend—she’s not pregnant, she didn’t get caught stealing or leaving the country. All kids rebel, that’s what they do, old man. C’mon, how long has it been since you were a little wild? All kids are a little wild.”

Usnavy struggled to remember when he’d been a little wild … maybe back when, as a boy, he’d steal picture books and comics from the foreign men who came to sit in his mother’s parlor and then, after he’d finished looking at them—he really couldn’t read them, they were in English anyway—he’d return them, sometimes a little worn, sometimes a little smudged, but always whole.

Usnavy was crossing the street to the hospital, barely looking at traffic as he tussled with his memory, when he almost ran into the boy from the previous morning, the one who’d explained to him about Jacinto’s ex-wife and the brujería.

“Hey—
hey
—watch it, old man,” the kid said. He was wearing what looked like a dozen black hula-hoops around his neck.

“Sorry,” Usnavy answered, scarcely looking up, until he realized what it was the boy was carrying. “Eh … whoa, wait a minute.” Usnavy ran across the street after him, his knees popping and cracking with each step. The blister on his foot had swollen and broken open again from so much walking. He limped and cringed and cursed under his breath. The broken lamp, still in the sack, rattled a little. “Those are bike tires?”

The kid kept walking, eyeing the jingling bag and the old man suspiciously and nodding with disdain. “Yeah. So?”

“So I need a bike,” Usnavy said.

“So?” the boy retorted even more insolently.

“So you’ve got bike tires, I need a bike … What I’m asking isn’t so difficult to decipher,” Usnavy shot back, impatient now.

“Aw, you’re too late. I sold mine already. So you see, I can’t help you, old man, I’m out of here.”

Usnavy was panting as he tried to keep up with him. “What do you mean you’re out of here?”

“I mean, I’m gone, old man, gone!” he said with a grin that filled up his whole face. “I’m on my way to La Yuma!”

“Wait a minute—wait a minute!” Usnavy snapped, grabbing his arm. The bike tires tumbled from the kid’s skinny frame, trapping him at an angle, encircling him mid-torso but for Usnavy’s strong fingers. “What the hell do you mean?”

“C’mon, old man, you know what I’m talking about—everybody knows you helped your friend Obdulio,” the boy said, shaking him off and grabbing the tires like the hem of a colonial-era skirt. “Listen, the coasts are wide open, they’re letting everybody go … People are even leaving right from the Malecón. How long can that last, huh? I’ve got to take my opportunity.”

Usnavy was stupefied. “Everybody knows …? They’re leaving from the Malecón … Wait—what about your parents? Your family? You’re just a boy!”

He was even younger than Nena! What was going on?

The kid shrugged and laughed and ran along. “I’m going with Chachi and Yamilet—I’ll send you a postcard, old man!” he yelled over his shoulder as the bike tires danced about him.

At the hospital Usnavy could barely concentrate. He was told to go upstairs to the records office but he kept wandering into lightless rooms where long lines of patients waited with wide-eyed, resigned faces. They didn’t look much different than those curling around the U.S. Special Interests Section, their lives in the balance.

There was a handwritten sign on the elevators:
Reserved for Patients Only
. Usnavy counted steps as he went up in order to keep himself focused.
One, two, three, four
. He’d heard that this was a good way to concentrate; you could see a lot of seniors in Havana now, veterans of those early-morning open-air Tai Chi classes, going about their days counting everything from the cracks in the sidewalks to the liver spots on their hands. Usnavy held the injured lamp under his arm and strained as he took the steps—
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen
—imagining himself at the local park, doing stretching exercises with widows and lost men.

On the second floor, he found himself in a shadowy hallway turned into some sort of office where a few solemn-faced nurses scribbled by hand. Their work was tucked into file folders piled high on a table. One of the nurses appeared to be on break, smoking, with a severe look on her face as she played solitaire. Another nurse was talking on the phone, giggling and gossiping.

After inquiring about hospital records and waiting for what seemed an infinity, yet another nurse—she barely looked at him—led Usnavy down an even blurrier hall to a room full of books with yellowed pages. She deposited him there, turned, and closed the door behind her, leaving Usnavy and his broken lamp all alone. Here, even the floor had stacks of dusty books everywhere, the result of prior visitors too lazy or in too much of a hurry to put them back in any kind of order. It occurred to Usnavy that, alone, he could embed secret messages in them, tear the books to pieces, pee on their pages, or set the room on fire. If only he were capable of any of it, he thought, if only …

He sat down at the only table under the nervous flickering of yet another long fluorescent tube. He placed the broken lamp carefully on the floor beside him, then ran his hand through his hair and sighed.

“Okay,” he said aloud, “okay.”

Then he pulled the first heavy tome toward him and began to strip the flimsy pages one from the other, searching for names corresponding to 1980, Nena’s birth year and the last time Cuba had experienced a mass exodus. He remembered thinking at the time that it would never happen again, that this tide of people leaving couldn’t be more than this one explosion, and that Nena’s arrival was not just replenishment but also a rebirth, a new dawn, with its subtle rainbows, its dignity and glory. He wanted to return to Cojímar, to call everyone back from the lure of the lights on the other side.

Our fate
, he thought as he turned the pages,
can’t be to suffer these constant losses.

Usnavy stared at the scores and scores of names, at the hundreds of Cuban births on the page in front of him. And in a second, he saw them all: Cubans on the bounding sea, Cubans at sunrise and dusk; multitudes of Cubans before Che’s visage, wandering Fifth Avenue or the Thames, the shores of the Bosphorous or the sands outside the pyramids; mirrors and mirrors, mercury and water; a family portrait in Hialeah that he recognized from years before in Caimanera; the thick green leaves of tobacco and forgotten stalks of cane flowering in the fields; his mother with her tangled hair, his father tilting his hat like Jacinto’s father but in New Orleans or Galveston; the shadows of birds of paradise against a stucco wall; ivory dominos; a shallow and watery grave, then another longer passage, a trail of bones back to Badagry; bison and cheetahs.

As he went from page to page, Usnavy fingered the lamp in the bag and realized Virgilio was right: He was engaged not by the reality of light, by its brilliance or heat, but by the universe of colors in his magnificent lamp—the one in his room, the spectacular one with no signature—by the bubbles and ripples that marred certain panels but which he had grown to think of as particularities, not imperfections; all parts of the greater and more beautiful whole.

He knew his great lamp by heart: the panel with a wave, the one with effervescence; one for sure had a hairline—or a hair itself, perhaps. Some were thicker, bolder than all the others. He knew each curve and slope, each flat surface, each sharp grain. They were flawed but steady, genuine,
his
.

The reality of light for him was precisely this: The surfaces on which it glittered, the scenes it illuminated. Light alone was air, nothingness.

And glass, he knew, was not what it seemed. It was solid to the unknowing eye, but Usnavy understood the atomic structure belied its true identity, indeed, its DNA. Glass was liquid, just like rain, like the ocean, like the water embracing his beloved island.