XVI

After my father’s circumcision, Ytzak and baby Enrique returned to Oriente and the puny plot of land where Luis and Sima lived. Banned by the angry parents for nearly an entire year from seeing his grandson, a dejected Ytzak went back to the small but tasteful house he’d once shared with Leah, the wife he’d left behind when he went off in search of a Jewish life. No one could have known then that her death years later would be so enigmatic, so emotional.

For her part, Leah, a gloomy woman whom Ytzak had once seen as both a challenge and beautiful, neither resisted nor encouraged his return. Whether they ever shared matrimonial intimacy again is anyone’s guess, but what’s certain is that they signed a new covenant, one in which their lives intersected but did not necessarily connect.

Lacking a church to attend out in the wilderness, she went to a prayer circle for her communal Catholic performances, leaving Ytzak alone to his solitary Jewish meditations. No menorah was ever lit in their house again, publicly or privately, no candle lit at all unless it was to the Virgin of Charity. Ytzak brooded and anxiously limped about on his peg leg but said nothing, not even when Leah brought a half dozen criolla women to the house to recite the Roman rosary on Mondays while he fasted. (Afterward, the women would retreat to their homes, where, for insurance, they’d blow cigar smoke, drink rum, and light candles for Elegguá.)

What the two of them shared was a kind of awkwardness and embarrassment. Water was boiled until half of it steamed away, laundry was pressed stiff with starch, and vegetables were rubbed raw in the kitchen. All the while, Leah’s practical speech was accented with a flourish of may I’s, thank you’s, and por favor’s that were both unnatural and vaguely threatening.

Ytzak, who couldn’t bear to return to the grinder or any other job at the sugar mill, made a living for a while fashioning shoes for the nearby campesinos and writing letters for those who were illiterate. If he signed his own name, he’d follow it with samech tet, or True Sephardim, which nobody but other Jews—and not even most of them—ever understood.

In the years after “the dance of the millions”—the late twenties and early thirties—when world sugar prices dropped, chaos came to Cuba, particularly Oriente, where the mills were virtually the only industry. During that time Ytzak often served as an interpreter— he’d learned a bit of English from the Corwens—for the U.S. businessmen his Havana friends would send his way. These were invariably speculators, investors in sugar, cattle, or lumber, men who saw Cuba as the wild west, a new frontier to be conquered and attached to the mainland, one way or another.

“Statehood for Cuba’s not important to me, not at all,” a wily Virginian confided once after several glasses of rum while languishing in a rocking chair on Ytzak and Leah’s porch. “You know why? ’Cause Cubans are going to become Americans anyway. Heck, man, you’re crazy to buy everything we bring down here. Let me tell you, trade will make you an American faster than statehood, taxes, or that Platt Amendment.”

The Moor, Ytzak’s old friend from Havana, was still working as a traveling salesman now and then—he was successful enough that he had set up his own store on Muralla Street in Old Havana but had been stung, like everyone else, by the Great Depression. Though he was an undistilled capitalist in his own business dealings, in the intervening years he’d become friends in Havana with radical Jewish refugees from Palestine and Poland. They had brought with them pamphlets and books on Zionism, Marxism, and the Russian revolution that he found compelling.

Sometimes, late at night, The Moor and Ytzak would discuss these ideas behind screens of cigar smoke while rocking on the porch. Oriente, cradleland of all of Cuba’s uprisings, was in anarchy then. With alarming frequency, the campesinos would set fire to the sugarcane fields. When hunger got especially sharp and distorted their reasoning, they’d turn on each other, their machetes sharp and murderous.

The Moor said Havana was no better; in fact, just a few years after the dictator Gerardo Machado came to power, the city was choking with panhandlers and thieves, workers’ strikes paralyzed commerce, and there were frequent and armed insurrections. The Moor was sure anybody in his right mind could look out at the port of Havana and see the Americans sitting there in their impenetrable steel ships, directing the madness, ready to invade.

But Ytzak resisted The Moor’s vision; it was the only way he could stand the misery around him in Oriente, the violence and the suffering of his neighbors, who appeared to him thinner and ghostlier by the day. Indeed, as time went by, the city took on a rosier and rosier tint in his mind: The Americans in Havana had always treated him well. There was a community of Jews, he had helped found the first Sephardic synagogue in Cuba. He remembered the way the fog lifted in the morning, the bright yellow globes of the gaslights extinguished one by one by lively boys with long poles that reached up to cap them. The city was wonderfully noisy, full of gaiety and beautiful women. He was sure it was comparable to Rome, Alexandria, or Hollywood.

On subsequent trips to Ytzak’s house, The Moor brought him articles and books by Fernando Ortiz and Jorge Mañach that argued for a sense of cubanismo, and which Ytzak, of course, ardently supported. “Why do you think I went to war?” he’d ask. “Why do you think I gladly sacrificed my leg?”

Later, The Moor delivered issues of Cuba Contemporánea and other magazines critical of Cuba’s growing dependency on sugar and the U.S. market. They were dog-eared and worn, but still capable of causing tense talks on Ytzak and Leah’s porch. The only way out of the morass, declared The Moor, was to free Cuba of all foreign influence, especially that of the United States. The only way, retorted Ytzak, was for Cubans to act more like Americans, who struck him as civilized and smart. All the while, Enrique and Moisés would roll around between the rocking chairs and the tired extremities of the passionate men, indifferent to it all.

When The Moor came to Oriente, he’d also leave goods at Ytzak’s for the campesinos to pick up. One time, a visiting American inquired about the vast collection of obviously new kitchen pots stored on the back porch, and when Ytzak explained that they belonged to some of The Moor’s clients, the American offered to bring him carving knives, cheap, on his next trip from the United States.

That’s how, slowly, without his even noticing it, Ytzak’s house developed into a little trading post, and eventually into a dry-goods store. In its heyday, it carried everything from soap to oil lamps, underwear to pine nuts, and even reading glasses. Ytzak kept the political pamphlets and books The Moor brought him in his room, in a box under the bed he reluctantly shared with Leah.

For Ytzak, those years were all a waiting game.

The focus of his patience was Enrique, who ran naked around Luis and Sima’s garden and played with Moisés, the roly-poly charcoal-colored son of the only openly Jewish family they knew. Ytzak had been heartened by the fact that Enrique had been naturally drawn to Moisés, although the Menachs’ religious practices, while out in the open, seemed to him as disinterested as Sima and Luis’s. No one seemed to know or care much about praying or the Sabbath, much less anything more complicated, like tefillin. Moreover, the Menachs struck Ytzak as occasionally pretentious. Since Haim had studied in French schools in Turkey, they seasoned their already fractured judeo-español with the language of Napoleon and added cream to all their sauces, constantly mixing meat and milk. (Not that Ytzak understood or kept kosher very well—in Oriente it was virtually impossible—but he always hoped to find in other Jews examples for all the ways he aspired to be.)

After Enrique’s brit milah, Luis and Sima’s observances had dropped to a bare minimum, offering prayers, just like the Menachs, only on the High Holidays. Like their ancestors before them, they kept young Enrique away from their rituals. They understood that he might recognize elements from the Menachs’ worship, or perhaps overhear something from the Lithuanian and Russian Jews who were streaming into Oriente to work on the railroad, but both Luis and Sima insisted on waiting until he was older before burdening him with the meaning of his Jewishness.

If Enrique ever questioned anything that seemed to separate his family from the natives around him, Luis and Sima assured him with what would eventually become his own refrain: “We are Spanish, descended from nobility, that is all,” they’d say in their own unconvincing open-mouthed Cuban way. Not even they believed it.

Ytzak would roll his eyes and mutter under his breath: “We are Cubans—that is why we had a war of independence from Spain— and we are Jews.” He refused to link up to the mother country, refused to claim any blood but that of Abraham and what he’d spilled on the island.

Most of the time, Ytzak simply observed Enrique from afar. Sometimes Leah would spend time with the two of them, undoubtedly out of grandmotherly love but also to supervise the untrustworthy grandfather. After the circumcision episode, the entire family was on the lookout for Ytzak. Luis and Sima had made him promise not to say anything without their permission, threatening to ban him forever if he went back on his word.

But Ytzak needn’t have worried. As he grew older, Enrique began to drift toward him on his own, as if he instinctively recognized something that inevitably linked them together. He’d stroll from Luis and Sima’s little home deep in the woods over to Ytzak and Leah’s busy store and loiter about the place, reading, napping, just hanging around. Ytzak would sometimes give him and Moisés errands to run in exchange for candy.

“Goral,” a proud Ytzak whispered to himself (he’d learned a little bit of secular Hebrew, and Yiddish, too, from his time in Havana) as he told stories to his grandson and Moisés. His heroes included José Martí and Antonio Maceo, Abraham Lincoln and the Indian Hatuey, who preferred to die at the stake than share a heaven with his Spanish oppressors.

But Ytzak also snuck in Jewish stories, like the one about David and his mighty slingshot, how he was just a boy like them once, tending sheep out in the wilderness. Ytzak was particularly fond of the account of David and Jonathan, of the remarkable friendship that surpassed women and war. As a result, he looked on Moisés as a sacred gift, a sign that Enrique’s soul would not be lost to Israel.

That Ytzak could see his grandson in any kind of intrepid role— undoubtedly, in Ytzak’s mind, my father was David, Moisés merely Jonathan, his loyal adjunct—was somewhat of a miracle of faith in itself.

Although Enrique was an excellent student, he dropped out of the mill-run school after the fourth grade. An exasperated Luis tried to teach him a few jobs at the sugar mill—hauling cane, helping to run Ytzak’s old grinder, simply cleaning the machinery—but Enrique, whose exquisite hands would split and bleed with the slightest effort, was a disaster at everything.

In truth, my father was masterful in the garden, but it was not a talent that could be cultivated. What Enrique did was touch things, just touch them, and they would grow spectacularly. He could spit on the ground, out of spite even, and in days huge white tubulars would sprout, thick tentacles pushing anxiously out of the dirt. He’d pat a hen on the head and she’d deliver egg after egg, each one with a perfect yolk and plenty of white for meringue.

But Enrique had no interest in his special endowment. It baffled and frustrated him. Everything had to be coaxed, forced out of him, so that nothing in the end could be appreciated. People said he was spoiled, lazy, even cursed.

Left to his own devices, Enrique would throw himself in his hammock or rock away on the porch at Ytzak and Leah’s and read and reread everything he had discovered in the box behind the mosquito netting and under his grandparents’ bed. My father found that he loved Martí—the poetry most of all, tolerating the essays just enough to contextualize the verses.

When Enrique turned twelve, he tried to teach the kids who didn’t attend the mill school how to read, a task most everyone considered useless, since many of the campesinos saw literacy as an affectation. The lessons were always interrupted by the more urgent needs of families and cane. Eventually, one of his students, a pale skinny boy with wild hair named Celestino, began writing poems on tree trunks, but the campesinos taunted and beat him. Sometime later, a stunned Enrique found Celestino hanging lifeless from a branch.

Traumatized and scared, Enrique stopped his lessons. He wound up working in Ytzak’s store, taking orders from across the counter his grandfather had installed, dully discussing spices for meat and Mexican lace with the women who made up the majority of the clientele. While at the store, he often thought about Celestino, imagined him with scribbled bark stuffed in his mouth.

When he had to walk home at night, Enrique worried about every snapping twig, every flutter and tweet in the darkness. He envisioned killer shadows and his own legs dangling above the ground. He wondered if Ytzak felt the same way in Oriente, if that was why he’d developed his vision of Havana as a fairy-tale city—a city in which men were free—free to be themselves in every sense. In his heart, Enrique knew that this paradise could not possibly exist, that everyone he encountered who’d actually been to Havana reported constant mayhem. But in the thick black of the tangled woods, he’d close his eyes and visualize Ytzak’s paradise: The mighty ships on the shore, the noise of the vendors, the tang of sea salt. At the time, he’d never even seen the ocean, and he was dying to taste it.

In the end, Ytzak’s visions proved to be a kind of training ground: Listening to his grandfather talk about Havana, Enrique learned how to construct a dream of perfection, how to conjure heaven so as to live on earth.