XVII

For Leah, watching Enrique grow up was a trial of patience, too, but for different reasons. While Ytzak watched him anticipating freedom, Leah couldn’t help but see an inevitable disgrace coming upon her. Twice Ytzak had left her, and she knew the third and final time would be with Enrique. She’d look at him and mutter, “Goral, goral.”

Ytzak, who was known as Antonio then and hadn’t yet decided he wanted to use his Jewish name, first disappeared in the summer of 1897, shortly after they married. Leah had been a beautiful, black-haired fourteen-year-old bride, supposedly lucky to have snared a husband from Santiago instead of one of the cruder campesinos. But after reading treatises by José Martí (illegally smuggled into Cuba from Tampa and New York, where they were published), sixteen-year-old Antonio and all four of his older brothers left to fight for Cuba’s independence from Spain.

For months, there would be no news from him except maybe a report from a friend saying that he was okay, a hero in General Máximo Gómez’s regiment; or that he was dead, buried with honors on a hill somewhere in Las Villas or in the fields of Pinar del Río. A few times she heard he’d been interned in Spanish concentration camps (a generation later, Adolf Hitler would tell a journalist he knew about the camps in Cuba, and thought they were a great idea).

Four times young Leah thought she was widowed, only to learn later that the dead boy was not Antonio, but one of his brothers, each one a martyr for liberation. (With each death, she aged a little, so that by the time they were in their late twenties, she already had a few gray hairs and lines around her mouth, while Antonio, in spite of the horrors of war, remained sunny and youthful—their disparity was such that, years later, he’d often be confused for her ward.)

A few times during the war, Antonio appeared to her in the night—always a stranger, his downy beard dirty, his muscles flaccid, dressed only in rags—and they’d fall on each other, making love, holding on for as long as possible. He’d conclude his visit with an extraordinary feast in which he would forget his manners and gnaw like a wild dog at whatever meat was left on a salty chicken leg. He’d fall asleep, greasy and exhausted, snoring like a beast.

But as soon as Leah surrendered to the exhaustion of his whirlwind visit, she’d be startled by the sudden emptiness of his departure. She never saw the dawn with him, only the soft outline, the streaks of dirt left by his body on the sheets. Outside, the thick blanket of fog that covers Oriente each and every morning erased all trace of him.

Then for a long time there’d be no word, no touch, nothing. Leah heard from the men who came by that the yanquis were coming, lustful for the island. She heard about the Maine, about the black American soldiers who took San Juan Hill and the portly white colonel who stole their story and fame.

When Leah went to Mayarí searching for news about her husband, she saw for herself how the Americans had set themselves up to govern. Taller, thicker, and better dressed, they would push the Cubans around as if they had been the enemy. At one military camp she saw hundreds of Spanish cadavers being burned by the U.S. occupation forces and wondered if the wives and lovers who were waiting for those men back in Spain would ever know the real fate of their loved ones. Vultures circled above the crackling fires and stench, quietly waiting their turn.

Antonio didn’t turn up until several years later, after the U.S. invaders had left. He limped up to the house, balancing his weight on his new peg leg, claiming to have been a victim of cannon fire, amnesia, and politics, a virtual prisoner in a Havana hospital. Never having been convinced of his death, a gleeful Leah took him back on the spot, wiping his brow, boiling soup from lamb bones, bits of yuca, plantains, and wild basil.

In 1904, two years after the Cuban republic was established, she bore Sima, blue-gray–eyed like Antonio, a fountain of sweetness, a child who barely cried, just looked around as if in shock at the wasteland into which she had been brought to the world. She would grow up with neither her mother’s severe beauty nor her father’s brio, but with her own healthy radiance, prudent and reliable.

For Sima’s naming ceremony Antonio and Leah couldn’t find a Jewish virgin (there was only one other anusim family immediately nearby, and none of its members were young women) to be Sima’s godmother, so they resorted to recruiting a black girl named Lucía, who assumed the wholly improvised rite was just the Garazis’ own style of orisha worship. It was performed in utter secrecy, of course, with the windows closed in spite of the suffocating heat (they still put out saucers of milk and honey for the visiting hadas). They dipped the baby girl in a basin of warm water and tossed coins and gold into it for good luck. In the end, Lucía left there no longer sure about what she had seen, not sure at all if Antonio and Leah’s strange rites and prayers weren’t all devil’s play.

Two years later, when he was twenty-five years old and Leah was twenty-three, Antonio met The Moor. He came home from Mayarí in a tizzy, talking nonstop about the salesman’s brazen admission. “He just said it! He just said, ‘I’m a Jew!,’ just like that,” he exclaimed, amazed the man hadn’t been consumed on the spot by the native anti-Semitism.

Leah winced. She knew from Antonio’s stories about the hospital in Havana that he’d met American Jews, doctors and soldiers who let him know about their common faith. Since their arrival, there were even public worship services in Havana. But she considered that their ability to function as public Jews had more to do with their U.S. citizenship than with any new tolerance. Now here was this Lebanese man, brown as mahogany, stirring things up. She remembered The Moor’s effortless smile, the easy credit terms she was sure could bankrupt them, the neckties and Catholic icons in his wooden peddler’s box.

“Since when are you so religious anyway?” Leah asked her husband, who usually had to be reminded to come pray as she lit candles on Fridays.

What Leah didn’t realize was how badly Antonio wanted to leave Oriente, to go to the city. He argued with her at every turn, ridiculing her paranoia when strangers came by and noticed the mezuzah awkwardly hidden inside the elaborate branches and leaves that served as decorations on the door frame, or wondered why their candles were braided and how it could be possible that everyone in the family should have an aversion to pork, Cuba’s most abundant meat.

It took Antonio six years to work up his nerve, six years to put a few pennies together, and to realize Leah would forever be a crypto-Jew, trapped by tradition, habit, and fear. One day, he came home from the mill, black with dirt, his skin covered with the usual cuts from the cane stalks, and told her he wanted to be called Ytzak—the Spanish spelling deliberately jagged, the same way Hebrew letters might seem to the unknowing, so as to provoke questions—that he was leaving, that he would walk back to Havana on his peg leg if he had to.

“There has to be another way,” he said. “I can’t be pretending I’m only half of who I am.”

“But this is who we are,” Leah said between sobs.

Two years later, in 1914, Ytzak posed for a photo with the founders of Chevet Ahim and sent a copy to Oriente with The Moor (with whom he also occasionally would send some money). Sima, the daughter he missed growing up, pinned it on the wall next to her mother’s bed, where she slept now that her father was gone. She wouldn’t see him again until many years later, after she’d married Luis San José, the son of the only other anusim family they knew, and news reached Ytzak that she was pregnant with his grandchild.

At that, Ytzak immediately packed all of his belongings, said good-bye to the Corwens, and headed back to Oriente.

One steamy day many years later, Ytzak struggled up the path to the house he shared with Leah, shaking his head in disgust. Not far away, the earth was scorched, the sweet smell of blood and sugar rising in spirals from the cane fields. It was 1932. He was fifty-one years old, his hair a soft white haze. His grandson, for whom he had left Havana and come back to the countryside, was nearly twelve, practically a man by rural standards. Ytzak steadied himself on the painful prosthetic that left the soft flap of skin on his knee red, often bleeding from sores.

“What’s going on?” Leah asked, gazing at the increasingly black sky. She had not grayed quite like her husband, yet the sternness of her expression made her seem like a schoolmarm always ready to impose detention.

Ytzak collapsed in a rocking chair, grimacing at the sharp ache from his war wound. “The foreman at the mill, Morales, accused the campesinos of being Communists, tried to get them all fired,” he said. “That’s their response.” He pointed with a nod at the fire in the distance, clearly visible through the bush. “Then they killed him.” He sighed.

“They killed him?” She drew her arms across her chest.

Ytzak nodded. “Slashed his throat,” he said, “then cut him into pieces with their machetes and let the dogs at him. It’s enough for me, Leah,” he said. “It’s enough.”

She didn’t need an interpreter. “What about the store?”

“Do with it what you please,” he said. “I’m not taking anything with me.”

“Except Enrique,” she added bitterly. The corners of her mouth dropped like little steel clamps, harsh and cold.

“If he wants to come,” Ytzak said. All he could dare to do was hope.

In a few days, Ytzak and Enrique were packed, saying good-bye to Sima, who wept, and Luis, who paced in dismay, knowing that it was useless to stop Ytzak, and now convinced that there was no place in Oriente for a delicate boy like his son.

“Perhaps,” he had told his wife the night before their departure, “he will find his destiny in the city.” Lovely, sweet Sima cried into his shoulder; she had never counted on losing Enrique so soon.

As they prepared to leave, steely Leah gave her grandson a formal, chilly embrace and wished him well. Then she turned away, walking back to her house with her head held stiffly, never once looking back on her husband.

“Write us, Enrique, write us—promise that you will write,” Sima pleaded with her boy, who promised he would do so every week as he buried his nose in her hair (perfumed with the tangy scent of lemons)—a pledge he kept until she died.

Ytzak and Enrique climbed into a horse-drawn cart and galloped off to Santiago, from which they took the train to the capital, repeating what had once been another fateful journey. Ytzak waved his straw hat while Enrique beamed and laughed from nervousness and joy.

Sima held on to her husband’s arm with both hands, her flawless peasant’s face red and wet from crying.

After her husband left, Leah kept her house sealed, letting no one in but Sima, who resented the drama of her father’s abandonment and its fallout. Sima wanted things to be normal—whatever that was—to stabilize, to calm down. But her mother insisted on bleakness, on hibernation and shame.

During this time, the store remained closed, too, the plank of the counter leaning against a wall. The neighbors all knew Ytzak had left Leah, although not his motivations, and they stayed away. The situation was embarrassing, after all. Moreover, of the couple, it was the eccentric Ytzak the locals had liked, with his war stories and warm smile, not Leah, who frowned and always kept to herself, almost as if she considered herself better than them.

Occasionally, an unwitting salesman would come by, hawking linen guayaberas or bottles of fancy perfume. Leah wouldn’t answer his knocks, preferring to stay inside in her darkness until he gave up, bewildered by the lack of hospitality, and went off to Mayarí to find out what happened from the gossips who hung out on their front porches, rocking and twittering.

One day, a particularly incessant peddler appeared hauling two huge wooden crates of women’s underwear. He rapped on the door and cooed in a language she didn’t understand. When Leah didn’t answer, he took residence on the porch, swinging in what had been Ytzak’s chair and slicing a juicy mango with a pearl-handled knife. The fruit smeared his chin and dripped between his legs. When he was finished, the man leaned back on the rocker, put his feet up on the railing, and pulled his hat over his head.

Leah stayed up all night, pacing, worried about the stranger on her porch. When dawn came, she peeked out into the thick morning mist only to find him urinating just off the wooden deck, not at all worried about whether anyone could see him. He aimed his piss in an yellow arch and laughed. She drew back in amazement.

By noon, the man was conducting business off the porch, yelling at passersby with his gravelly Germanic accent. He would draw a few folks forward, rattle off his pitch in his native tongue, which caused the natives to laugh and snicker, and barter by holding up his fingers for the price he wanted in one hand, a pair of panties in the other.

Later that evening, still ensconced inside the house, Leah heard another pair of footsteps on the porch. These were heavier, blunt. Then she heard a voice she recognized—Tatán, a local fruit and vegetable vendor, a huge black man—ordering the stranger off the porch. When the peddler laughed at Tatán, Leah heard a growling like an animal—a tiger or leopard perhaps—a scratching on the wood, then a clatter, the stranger’s bloodcurdling scream, and the fast clip of running feet.

That was how handsome Tatán began to court my great-grandmother. When she opened the door to see what had happened, he pulled off his hat, bowed his head, and asked her forgiveness for intruding in her life uninvited.

“I think a woman like you deserves more respect than that man was offering,” a gallant Tatán said.

“Gracias, gracias,” Leah said, blushing. Her rigidity just melted away then, the lines around her mouth suddenly seeming almost like dimples.

Leah couldn’t invite Tatán inside—it wouldn’t have looked right under any circumstances—but she did ask him to come by the next day, to help her reopen the store. Because he worked for her— an arrangement that satisfied them both—they could see each other nearly every day, spend hours on end talking and laughing, without drawing too much suspicion.

Whatever actually happened between them, whether in fact they ever became lovers, is a mystery. I heard the story from Moisés. My father refused to discuss it, telling me he was not in Oriente at the time, that he was busy in Havana, unaware of his family’s daily lives.

But what Moisés told me is that at some point, Tatán became the object of Lucía’s affection. When he tried to rebuff her, Lucía told him about the Garazis’ rituals and accused him of having fallen under the devil’s spell, that Leah was in fact a bride of Satan. For proof, she suggested he look in the tiny canister tacked to the inside of her door, hidden behind the dried branches on the frame.

Though he dismissed Lucía’s taunts at first, eventually Tatán took notice of the mezuzah. One day when Leah was in Mayarí conducting business, he pried it from the door, emptying its contents. Tatán was illiterate, so the parchment was utterly meaningless to him but he ran with it to Lucía, who took him and the paper to one of the local santeros.

“You are very lucky, m’hijo,” the holy man told him. “You’ve arrived right in time, we can still save you.” He compared the Hebrew script with a page from a Cuban newspaper. “See? See the difference?”

A frightened, perspiring Tatán pressed the santero: “What does it mean?”

“It means you have been consorting with Lucifer himself,” the santero said, “and you need to cleanse your spirit or you will burn for all eternity in the fires of hell. Had you stayed any longer, Tatán, you would have been consumed by demons who taunt humans with their perversity.”

A wide-eyed Tatán never returned to Leah’s store. Indeed, when she went looking for him, thinking something awful had happened— an accident, an illness—he ran from her, making the same clattering and screaming sounds as the peddler that night on her front porch.

Leah was baffled and heartsick. “What did I do to you?” she called after him, but he just ran, fast and away from her. Her face turned frigid again, this time pale and veiny like marble itself.

When Leah vanished, Sima and Luis scoured the woods between her house and theirs. A frantic Luis went to Mayarí and asked a million questions, but no one had seen her. Days later, when Sima had begun to imagine her mother had gone to Havana to confront her father after all these years, Leah’s bloated body floated up on the shores of the river.

The official cause of death was drowning. But many people disagreed. In Mayarí, they said she was kidnapped by a güije, a spirit who lives in rivers, a mischievous male phantom who steals stray children and lonely women.