The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (17 page)

The trials were over in minutes. Guilty. Now, the fun part. ¡Pa-re-dón!

When the mayor was brought forth to be executed, he fell to his knees. He wept and coughed and begged for his life. When they went to tie and blindfold him, he tucked himself into a ball and refused to rise. The crowd jeered. “¿What kind of a maricón are you? ¡Stand up and die like a man!” But he remained in that fetal position, wailing into his own crotch. In the end, they had to roll him like an egg up to the paredón to shoot him. Pápi said that his body froze in that position; they couldn’t straighten him out after that. His widow, goes the story, had to order a custom oval coffin to bury him in.

Then it was Mámi’s turn. She shook herself free of the guards’
grip and strode to the paredón of her own accord, not even bothering to step around the patch of ground soaked with the mayor’s blood. There she stood, all 5’2” of her, wearing the same practical dress she wore to work every day. She had her hands behind her back like a soldier at ease. She refused a blindfold; instead, she stared down the firing squad, moving from face to boyish face, locking eyes. When a guard offered her a cigarette, she smacked the entire pack out of his hand. The crowd whooped. Here was someone who knew how to die.

On Che’s command, the men pointed their guns at her. She raised her chin. Che asked her if she had any last words. He was smiling, Pápi remembered. It was an appreciative smile, warrior to warrior.

Mámi said, “You are all cowards, hiding behind your guns. You know this is wrong. ¿What have I done except work for your benefit all these years? But not one of you had the courage to rise to my defense. There isn’t a set of eggs between the legs of any man here. ¡I’ve bled more eggs out during my period than all the men in Brota Flor have in their pants, combined! And I die today with a thousand eggs inside me that I’ll never get to use. What a shame, because I’ve only given birth to one boy, and Cuba needs brave and honorable men more than ever. This generation is lost.”

Che laughed a little, smoked a little. He waited to be sure Mámi had nothing to add. Time held its breath. And then from Che, an afterthought. “Fire.”

There were no more executions that day. There were four other men who’d been sentenced, but Mámi’s words had shamed the
townsfolk, drained them of their bloodlust. Che pardoned the remaining doomed and left quickly.

Among the pardoned were my three uncles. The fourth was Pápi.

My uncles decided to stay in Cuba, though they moved out of town quickly enough. But Pápi had already had enough of Fidel’s new order. He hustled me out of Cuba the moment my mother was buried. We came to Miami and he made friends with other expatriated Cubans. He joined the Bay of Pigs invasion, but was part of a unit that was never deployed. Afterwards, he worked as a meatpacker, and remarried, and gave me a typical Cuban-American upbringing: lots of love, lots of hitting, and a steady IV drip of nostalgia for a Cuba that never was.

And Mámi, though dead, lived on. Her speech became legend. Ever since her execution, no one called her by her given name. Instead, they called her “Milhuevos.” The woman with a thousand eggs.

Our plane wheeled over Havana a good three and three-quarters times before we started our descent, giving those of us with window seats a beautiful establishing shot of the City of Columns.

Havana is beautiful. But in a cemetery kind of way. When you get on the street, there is color, flora, propaganda, joy; but from above, the buildings look short and sun-bleached, and there is almost none of the metal and glass of modern architecture. Fly into Havana sometime, you’ll see. It looks like it’s three-quarters graveyard.

(And I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, you’re just one of those comemierda Cuban-American ideologues who can’t say a single nice thing about Cuba. Of course you would describe Havana as a necropolis.” But I’m no ideologue. I’m a misanthrope. Every society is ruled by the worst people it can generate. We all get exactly the governments we deserve.)

José Martí International Airport was clean, well-maintained, and very orange. We picked up our bags and made our way to customs. It cost me a small fortune, because besides our personal luggage I’d brought four huge suitcases to leave behind for my extended family. One was stuffed to bursting with over-the-counter medicines, bandages, rubbing alcohol, soap, laundry detergent, 25 toothbrushes, toothpaste, and a two-year supply of 100-microgram synthroid for Gusvativo’s hypothyroidism. Two suitcases were clothes, especially women’s delicates, plus one boy’s suit and one girl’s dress for First Communion that would be passed between family and friends for the next decade. And one of them was nothing but Café Bustelo, 134 vacuum-sealed bricks of Cuban-style espresso. Gustavito told me there was almost no coffee in Cuba right now. Let me repeat that: almost no coffee in Cuba. It is unthinkable. Unacceptable. Cubans are three things: coffee, sugar, and coño tu madre. I could at least bring the coffee.

I paid a guy dressed like a bellhop from a ‘30s movie to handle the bags, and we exited the airport. As soon as we walked outside we saw a crowd of Cubans waiting behind a black metal fence to pick up their
relatives. Among all the laughing and crying and whooping we were finally able to pick out Gustavito, hands in pockets, rocking on his heels, smiling like Puck.

Next to him was a tall black man in a buttoned-up guayabera and cargo shorts and sandals. The man had a severe case of vitiligo. Really, from what I could see he was only half-black: over his face and arms and legs, continents of white floated atop an ocean of pitch. I have to tell you, that man was beautiful. He looked like some piebald prophet come to carry humanity onto its next evolution.

Oh, and the black/white man had a pert sow sitting next to him. On a leash.

“Welcome to Cuba,” Sophie said into my ear.

When we were near enough, Gustavito called out, “¡Fuckee you, mane!” This was our thing; he knows how much I love it when he curses in English. I responded with: “¿Qué tal, culosucio?” which means, “¿How’s it going, filthy-ass?” It’s better in Spanish.

We embraced, and then he embraced Sophie while apologizing for using profanity in a way that made clear he wasn’t at all sorry. Both the black/white man and the pig smiled at us and waited to be introduced. “This is Jesús,” Gustavito said. “The historian who is going to help us.”

I shook hands with him seriously. “Mucho gusto,” I said.

“It’s an honor to meet the son of Milhuevos,” he said. I didn’t see any attempt from him to wear the colors of the saints, and he had a big, quick smile. Cuba’s poverty makes it hard to judge people by
appearances; people take what they can get, not necessarily what they would choose. But the babalawos I’ve known spent most of their time trying to look badass and mysterious: wide-eyed, smileless, stentorian, purposefully vague, etc. Jesús, by contrast, came across as a nice guy with an amazing skin condition and a sincere handshake who happened to traffic in the recovery of lost spirits. Interesting.

When I was done staring at him, it was time for Jesús and Sophie to meet. “I’m Sophie,” said Sophie. “I’m a journalist. If you don’t mind, I’ve love to ask you a few questions about your work.”

“Jesús,” said Jesús. “I will gladly answer any question you put to me.”

“Great! First question: who’s your friend?”

“¿This?” Jesús replied, giving the leash a tug. “¿Fat, isn’t she? In a few hours, this will either be Pedro’s mother, or tonight’s dinner.”

The sow looked up at Sophie, smiling widely, as if nothing would please her more than to become either.

We drove out of Havana and headed toward Brota Flor. It’s a speck on the map between Matanzas and Cienfuegos (i.e., between “The Killing Place” and “Land of a Hundred Fires”). It lay on the way to Santa Clara, where my extended family had lived ever since my uncles had fled town. Our Easter-Island luggage was tied to the roof and back of Gustavito’s Tata Nano, a tiny car from India that was only slightly less roomy than a model-railroad prop. Gustavito was
“driving”: comemierda spent more time looking over his shoulder to joke with Jesús and me than he did keeping us on the road. That left poor Sophie to lean over and try to hold the wheel straight whenever Gustavito remembered a new chiste or chisme to share with me.

The pig sat like a finishing-school valedictorian between Jesús and me, smiling and enjoying the ride. She was surprisingly clean. Fresh from the market was my guess.

Jesús saw me eyeing his pig. “We’re going to eat like kings tonight,” he said. “That is, if we don’t end up using her for the other thing.”

I noticed he was touching his left guayabera pocket again. He’d been doing that periodically since we met. And now that we were sitting, I could tell he seemed to have stored something long and hard there. Its outline reminded me of a two-barreled cigar case.

“Feel free to smoke,” I said. “My wife and I don’t mind.”

He looked at me, momentarily confused. Then he stopped touching his pocket and, with a slight, contemplative smile, said, “My wife was killed four years ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” was all I could muster. ¿The hell did that come from?

“She was murdered by her lover,” Jesús continued. “I didn’t mind that she had a lover, and I had lovers too—¿who in Cuba doesn’t? But her lover was jealous and violent. He wanted her to leave me, to be his alone. When she wouldn’t, he knifed her to death.”

“It’s not easy,” said Gustavito. “No es facil” is the island’s collective catchphrase. Everyone uses it. Fits pretty much any situation in Cuba.

I asked Jesús, “¿Is that when you became interested in the spirit world? ¿When you learned to contact the other side?”

“Yes,” he said simply. Fingering his left breast pocket.

Now we were in Sophie’s territory. For the last 25 years she’d worked all over the world as a photojournalist, mostly stories on travel and culture. She practiced no religion but believed in them all; I termed her worldview (when I wanted to piss her off) “sedimentary religion.” And now she was ready to add another layer: “How exactly does it work?” she asked Jesús, peeking around her seat to face him. “How do we speak to the dead?”

“We probably won’t speak,” he answered. “Speaking would require the spirit to enter a living human being, and that is very dangerous. If you want, we could put her in this sow. That’s why she’s here, in fact. Pigs are very intelligent, so they make good vessels for spirits. They give the spirit a lot of options for communicating with us. But sometimes pigs are driven insane in the process. Sometimes, two souls is too many for one little pig-brain to handle. Then the spirit is just along for the ride as the crazy pig runs itself to death, releasing both souls forever.”

“¿We are Legion, eh?” Gustavito quoted, smacking Sophie on the shoulder. He enjoyed fucking with her as much as I did. And just like she would me, she smacked him back twice as hard. He pretended to lose control of the car, she gripped the dashboard and cursed him out, he giggled, and Jesús, softly, told him to drive carefully, or he’d upset the pig, and then she wouldn’t be able to serve as my mother’s host.
Gustavito sobered up immediately, concentrated on his driving.

“You seemed to imply there was another option besides putting Mámi in the pig,” I said to Jesús.

“Yes,” said Jesús. “We could place her in a meaningful object. That is in fact what I suggest we do.”

“¿What does that mean, a ‘meaningful object’?” Sophie called from the front.

“Something important to you to serve as the new home for Milhuevos’s soul. It’s your attraction to the object that makes the soul interested in it. And then, once the soul decides to stay there, you can hold the object in your hands, press it to your forehead, kiss it, do all sorts of the things to commune with it. But if the soul gets greedy, starts pulling at you, you can put it away for a while. That way, everyone stays safe.”

“So it’s good to take breaks and maintain a little distance from spirits.”

“Absolutely. The past is greedy and gluttonous. It wants nothing more than to consume the present and replace it. And ghosts are living instances of the past. You must always keep them at a safe distance.”