Ruins (5 page)

That he loved Obdulio and his family was not the matter; after all, it was Che himself who said that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. That he loved them so much that he put them above everyone else—that was the black smear on his soul now. Usnavy’s hands trembled, his eyes moistened from shame.

How—he was asking himself, his hands deep in his empty pockets—how could he ever question anyone else? How could he ever seek out the answers to other missing items at the bodega, rice and soap and cooking oil that were sometimes reduced by half from arrival to dispensing? What about the blankets that someone would no doubt steal for Rosita? He would never—not with a clear conscience, not without first confessing his own transgression—be able to ask that the others be mindful and disciplined, that they be selfless in their duties. He could see his coworkers shrinking from him. Or worse: What if they suddenly included him in their schemes? What if his crime automatically implicated him in every other petty theft at the bodega? What if, once revealed, he was expected to cover for everyone else so that they’d cover for him?

Usnavy shuddered. He thought of Lidia for a moment, worried about what her response would be. His stomach flipped, made him a little seasick. He stepped back from the water.

“In Miami,” said Obdulio, now beside him and gazing out at the gloom before them, “maybe I’ll finally learn to drive a car.”

“You could learn to drive here,” Usnavy replied, thinking how it had never really been essential.

Until recently, buses had been plentiful, distances all seemed attainable. At the end of her cab route, Lidia, herself a bus driver’s daughter, had always come home energized, ready for more. (She would have been a bus driver too, if only she’d had the opportunity.) Usnavy had learned to drive long ago, back in Oriente, when he was only fifteen. It was a strange feeling, all that power in his hands, though none of it ever truly his: Each time he drove, it was with a burly American who’d sit next to him, or frolic with a local in the backseat while he toured the lesser-known roads aimlessly.

“Nobody’s stopping you,” Usnavy finally said.

Obdulio sighed. “Yeah, but what for? And in whose car? I’ll never get to own a car here. Neither will you, my militant friend.”

“You think you’ll get a car there? Do you have any idea how much a car costs?” Usnavy asked.

“No, but my brother … he has a car and, god willing, I’ll get to drive it.”

“Seems like a stupid reason to leave …”

“C’mon, Usnavy … don’t you have any aspirations? Don’t you want a place to live that’s made for humans instead of laboratory mice? Don’t you want a little privacy with your wife? Don’t you have any dreams?”

“This is my dream,” Usnavy said.

He stepped away again, watching as another group labored over planks and tubes, but Obdulio moved right along with him. Usnavy wanted to say something—anything—so they wouldn’t go. He wondered how many would disappear like his own father, gone without a trace into the blue.

Obdulio persisted. “C’mon … when you look at that crazy lamp of yours—do you realize it’s the only thing you have of value, my friend? Don’t you see anything in all that light and color besides clouds and giraffes and Africa? Africa—I mean, Usnavy, how perverse is that? Who dreams of Africa when you can dream of Miami? Don’t you see any hope at all?”

Usnavy took a deep breath. “Obdulio, I am here because you are my friend,” he said. “Now I will ask you to be a friend to me and stop this crap. I’m not leaving, now or ever.”

Obdulio shrugged. “Fine,” he said as his nephews began to drag their raft to the water. It eased in with squeaks and whines, bouncing on the soft waves with the weight of each new person. Usnavy took off his shoes and socks and stepped into the sea to help, the smell of saline almost overwhelming him. He held onto the raft and steadied it as they loaded up, all the while feeling the sharp rocks under his feet, the ticklish weeds wrapping themselves around his ankles. The local fishermen looked on, nodding approval at the superior work. Finally, it was Obdulio’s turn to board.

“Look, your wife and daughter … Usnavy, you need to get over this saintly devotion, your ridiculously selfish virtues,” Obdulio said, one foot on the gravelly sand, the other on the shaky vessel. “If you’re going to stay, for god’s sake, at least do something for them … get some dollars. If you sell that lamp—it’s a monstrosity, it must be worth at least a few hundred, maybe even a thousand dollars!—think of what you can do. You could start your own little business on the side, you could buy things Nena and Lidia only dream about.”

Obdulio’s daughter took his hand to help him sit, and with a bereft Usnavy waist deep in the water, the raft pushed off.

“Good luck,” Usnavy said, waving weakly.

“Good luck to you, my friend,” Obdulio shot back.

The raft glided away, pulled north by the currents. Its shadow clung to the shore at first, black figures thinning, then turning into gold strings reaching back to the island. As he watched, Usnavy discerned the arcs of flying fish in the distance, like pebbles skipping across the surface. He felt something collapse in his chest. This was it, he realized with a start, this was the last time he’d ever see his lifelong friend.

In a moment, Obdulio’s raft had vanished into the bright nimbus of dawn.

The trip home from Cojímar was usually easier, downhill with the wind in the biker’s favor, but this time it was longer. Usnavy couldn’t count the hours; they seemed so viscid and unreal. Part of the difficulty was that Obdulio had left his bike as a gift for Nena—Usnavy knew she’d be thrilled—and he was having difficulty maneuvering both bikes at once. He’d tried riding his and leading the other with one hand on the handlebars, but the roads around the bay to Havana were demolished, as if a squadron of bombers had just passed, and what had been inconvenient zigzagging en route to Cojímar had become impossible on the way home. The two times a truck zoomed by, it knocked Usnavy off balance. Then his feet began to hurt; taking off his shoes and socks to get in the sea and help push off Obdulio’s raft had exposed his bare soles to the craggy reefs. Not only had he been cut, bitten, and scratched in a million places, but his joints ached and his skin itched from the dried salt.

To make things worse, as soon as Usnavy decided against trying to ride and surrendered to walking home holding a bike on each side, it began to rain. A rush of water soaked him from the tip of his head to the squishy toes of his now surely ruined shoes. The downpour grew so intense that Usnavy couldn’t see anything but a gray mist in front of him. It fell with all the noisy fury of a galloping herd of horses, tiny hoofs rampaging all over his exposed skin.

There was no point in running for cover; the shower had come after an ear-splitting crack in the sky, as if it had abruptly opened up, sending a cascade from the heavens to this caiman of dirt. Usnavy wondered about Obdulio and his family. Would they survive the storm? Might they be just out of its reach, or were they now bailing water out of the boat, desperate and scared?

Maybe, thought Usnavy, turning the matter over, the weight of so many Cuban prayers had finally eroded celestial resistance. (He was an inadvertent believer, his faith so personal and spontaneous that it stood apart from all debate about the merits of religion, or even his own conscious acknowledgment.) Maybe, he pondered, the layer of sky that works as a streambed had been undermined, finally giving way and discharging into a divine cataract.

This is Mosi-oa-Tunya—Victoria Falls—he mused, as the water plunged from hundreds of feet above him with a mighty howl and pounded on his shoulders and back. If only this could be harvested somehow, if only Cuba could absorb this awesome force. (It would solve all the electrical problems, that’s for sure.) It was coming down in a furious free fall.

A drenched Usnavy was limping along when he thought he saw a shadowy shape—something eerie, its limbs oversized, its head sprouting a kind of feathery ornament. Was it one of his giants, one of those Goliaths on whom he was sure the entire city was dependent? Usnavy stared ahead as the shape slipped right through the screen of water in front of him. He stopped, leaned a bike against each hip, and ran a hand over his face. But when he looked up again, he saw not one but several black stick figures sneaking in and out of view in the blink of an eye.

As Usnavy stared ahead, he realized they’d begun to take notice of him too: He was sure one had just made a quick gesture his way, pointing and snapping its fingers; another clicked its tongue. Usnavy shook his head like a dog that’s just made it back to shore, trying to regain composure. Then he looked again: There they were, the figures now more roundly human, less black and more muddled, rushing in and out of the undulating sheets of rain. There were voices too, each mixed into the soundtrack of thunder and the rattle of water on the pavement, nearby awnings, and cars.

Somebody somewhere was playing with sticks, their
tick tock
marking the time. There was a flicker of light, a flash. Instantly Usnavy realized he was in Old Havana, right on Tejadillo, only blocks from home.

“Cuida’o, abuelo, cuida’o,” a young man called out as he snaked around Usnavy.

He was carrying long pieces of wood, their ends jagged as if they’d been torn. Usnavy pulled back, avoiding the spear points by centimeters.

“Ojo, ojo,” called out another man as he dashed by—almost running into him—pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks still covered with paint and mortar. The chalky stench of wet plaster rose like vapor.

“Usnavy!” a woman shouted, but with an unmistakable tone of annoyance. “For god’s sake, you’re in the way!”

It was, he noticed, his upstairs neighbor, shamelessly reaping construction materials from the ruins of the building next to him—a derrumbe that had suddenly come in to view. The building lay like a crushed egg, parts of its white walls piercing the exposed insides: a smashed mirror, a stained mattress ripped open like a vital organ, its yellow foam guts growing grotesquely in the rain.

“Yamilet, what’s going on?” Usnavy called out to her. “What are you doing?”

She rushed by him with doorknobs and light switches dangling from her hands like viscera. “What does it look like?”

It looked, Usnavy thought, like a scourge of locusts. His neighbors swarmed the body of the place, each tearing off bits that seemed two or three times their size and weight. They worked like the rafters at Cojímar, in utter silence. The only sound came from rocks groaning as they were moved, the hard human breathing of such extraordinary effort, and the occasional mumbled courtesy or warning extended a bystander such as himself.

In a moment, Usnavy realized he was drip-drying, the rain having stopped abruptly, the warmth slowly returning to his face and shoulders. He felt the water still on him running down, inexorably pulled by the magic of gravity. It clung to the bottom edges of his T-shirt, the rim of his short sleeves, and the seams of his pants. The rest of his clothing stiffened a bit as if touched by a natural starch.

Usnavy looked up—it was only mid-morning and the sun, though rising, wasn’t quite high enough to hide the beauty of a western rainbow, its red arch sweeping across the colonial rooftops. He located the orange, yellow, and green layers that dropped down—like on his own lamp at home—and then just below the first rainbow, a second, paler one, barely visible, like the reflection in his own amazed eyes.

To his surprise, Usnavy spotted a glint of the same swatch of colors in the earthly rubble before him, now stripped clean of every usable element. He leaned forward and squinted, holding onto the handlebars of the bikes on either side of him, trying to make out exactly what it was. Everyone seemed to be walking away now; no one else appeared to care or even notice the tiny fountain of colors. Yet the beams danced and danced: ruby, gold, emerald.

With the bikes at his sides, Usnavy pulled up as close as he could to the edge of the wreckage, but he was still too far to decipher the precise secret of the light in the ruins. With luck, he thought, he might be able to maneuver the bikes over there. But after venturing a bit in to the destruction site, it became clear that was impossible: There were rusted nails poking out everywhere, broken cement, sharp rocks, slippery puddles of rain. The tires wouldn’t make it; the chains might get caught on something. And the bikes were so heavy.

Again Usnavy leaned on the bikes and stretched forward for a closer look, but the shards of color sparkled obliquely. He wondered if perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. He’d heard on the streets how the food shortages had begun taking their toll on people, how the new spartan diets had started to eat at some, making their bones mushy, causing paralysis and blindness in others.

Usnavy rubbed his eyes, looked again. Then, to be sure he wasn’t imagining anything, he pulled a coin—a hollow Cuban coin—out of his pocket and pitched it in the direction of the shiny treasure. The coin struck something, producing a little geyser of what looked like red mist or powder.

Usnavy was taken aback. He put the bikes down in a pile, Obdulio’s newer one on top so it wouldn’t get scratched, and rather than undo the chain around his waist and deal with that complication, he snapped the American U-shaped lock on the necks of both bikes so that they seemed to be embracing. He dashed to the lights, skipping over chunks of broken walls, rusted steel spokes, shredded paperback books, and the inevitable orange slush from the old building’s life fluids.

The lights! Usnavy got down on his knees. The lights came from a lamp like his, only small, injured, its stained-glass panels fractured, strings of soft mucilage barely holding onto a piece of glass here, a loose wire there. Usnavy unearthed the heavy brass base, shoved aside the pieces of cement that pinned it, and held the lamp, letting light filter through its surviving color insets, the rainbow passing through to his face and chest.

Instantly, he felt the light waves oscillating somewhere deep inside him. At that moment, Usnavy could surrender to the splendor; he could believe, like Pythagoras, that everything could become bright by its own force of nature.