XX

It came out of the blue one fall day, it seemed, after a long, torturous summer: The Berlin wall—that hideous stretch of murderous concrete between the German people, the line in the Cold War sand— emerged as a riser for dancers, a wailing wall, a fortune for those with a pick and a shopping bag, gold nuggets strewn on the cobblestones on a cold autumn night.

It appeared the whole planet was watching Berlin in November 1989, when harmony and goodwill seemed to reign. In Chicago, as everywhere, coverage dominated every channel, every station, every solitary conversation. It was a world away from the summer’s news about Arnaldo Ochoa, the Cuban general executed in Havana over drug trafficking charges that no one could believe; those headlines had been buried, wire stories on the inside pages, or ignored.

“Remember, Ale, what you do tonight,” a friendly lawyer told me after we finished a deposition early, eager to rush home and turn on the tube to watch the drunken, jubilant revelers in Berlin. We already knew how even the border guards, those notorious Stasi wanna-bes who’d been cold-blooded assassins just the day before, were now happily unified Germans, carried away by the wave of emotions. “This is history. You’ll want to be able to tell your children where you were when the Berlin Wall fell,” my client said all misty-eyed. “It’s a nice little Christmas present, don’t you think?”

By that time, the city was already flushed with holiday decor, twinkling lights, plastic reindeer, and swarms of shoppers that seemed to suck all the air out of the sky. We stood on a corner waving aimlessly for a cab for him. I was feeling proletarian and wanted to take the train, but I’d driven in and would have to face the solitude of driving out.

“It is kind of marvelous,” I said, allowing myself to be awed by the wall’s fall.

A taxi pulled up to the curb, its braking tires tossing slush at our shoes. “Yes, imagine the lawsuits!” my client said, laughing as he got in. “My god, as soon as those West Germans start claiming all their lost property in the East, it’ll be a gold mine!”

They had the wall’s collapse on the tiny black-and-white TV behind the cash register at Cachita’s, a barren little Cuban bodega up on Berwyn that I thought looked an awful lot like the empty-shelf groceries on the island. The old man who owned the place, an exile named Santiago with thick glasses held together with white tape, had been talking for months about selling it, thinking about moving down to Miami with his daughter and her new Puerto Rican husband. He was sure with Ochoa’s execution, an uprising was bubbling right under the surface in Cuba, and he wanted to be as close as possible when all hell broke loose. There was a huge sign outside Cachita’s door, right under the Cuban and Puerto Rican flags, which advertised the Realtor’s name.

Every time I stopped by—it was usually on the drive up to my parents to pick up a last-minute can of guava shells and a packet of cream cheese for my father—Santiago would joke around with me about taking it over.

“You have come to give me money!” he’d yell whenever I stepped through the door. There was usually a handful of Cuban men loitering around the cash register, talking politics and trash, smoking cigars and thinking up new combinations for lottery tickets. I knew a few of their faces from my father’s domino games. They’d welcome me with huge smiles and say, “Ah, the new owner!” It was all a big, sweet joke.

“Alejandra, isn’t this incredible?” Santiago said, pointing at the TV, his eyes like huge freak house distortions behind the thick lenses of his glasses. His face was inches from the too loud screen behind the register. The crowd of men nodded and murmured.

“It’s unbelievable,” I concurred, setting my father’s can of guava shells and a slab of cream cheese on the counter. I had refused to let my client’s comments about lawsuits and property depress me; I had kept Ochoa’s ghost at bay.

“You know who’s next, don’t you?” one of the men around Santiago’s cash register asked.

When I didn’t answer right away, another guy piped in: “Fidel!”

“Oh, he’s a goner, a real goner!” exuded Santiago, rocking back on his heels, rubbing his hands together.

“They’re on their way down—finally!—those Russians!” exclaimed still another.

“And then Fidel, and then Fidel!”

“You know how much money he takes in from those Russians? A million dollars a day! He can’t survive! He’ll come down!” cheered Santiago.

“Abajo Fidel!”

I finally grinned at them, shaking my head. How long had they had that cry in their throats? How many times had their hopes been raised like millions of festive balloons, only to deflate within days? Maybe this time, with Solidarity raising the ante in Poland and Vaclav Havel drawing the spotlight to Czechoslovakia, Fidel might finally stumble—so many people thought the stage had been set by Ochoa’s execution.

Then one of the men, a man I didn’t know, turned to me. “Are you Cuban?” he asked.

“Of course she’s Cuban!” Santiago shouted.

“Well, I don’t know, I can’t tell,” the man said.

“She’s Enrique San José’s daughter!” Santiago exclaimed, as if that were obvious—or as if my father, the Cuban called down so patriotically at that moment, could testify to any love but for Spain.

“Oh, my, yes, Enrique San José,” the man said, stepping back, genuinely impressed. “He’s brilliant, very decent. You must be very proud.”

“Of course she is,” Santiago chimed in as he collected the can of guava shells and the cream cheese and put them in a little sack. “She’s a translator, too—she’s following in his footsteps.”

“Well, not exactly . . .” I tried to explain. Up on the TV screen, a young woman danced with a soldier, the wall’s vulgar graffiti in the background, but transformed: Even in black-and-white, it looked fluorescent, psychedelic, like paisleys now.

“No, no, Enrique San José’s a genius,” the man said. “With all due respect, you can’t possibly touch the sole of his shoe, but it is a noble thing to follow in your father’s footsteps. Do you have a brother?”

I fixed my eyes on the man, who was exactly my height, balding, and dull-skinned. “Excuse me?” I snapped, in English, deliberately, and with a sharp, cold edge to my voice.

A flustered Santiago waved his hand in the man’s face. “What do you know, huh? What do you know? She is the pride and joy of Enrique San José—even he says she is a better translator than he is, okay?” He turned to me with the little sack of groceries. “Give this to your father as a gift. In honor of a free Germany, you don’t pay tonight.”

I protested. “Santiago, you don’t need to . . .”

“And a free Cuba—that’s what’s important . . . a free Cuba,” added the man who had questioned me, his lecturing finger in the air just like Fidel—and my father.

“Next year in Havana!” Santiago shouted, making a tense power salute.

“Next year in Havana!” echoed his chorus of cronies, who stood at anxious attention looking at me.

“Yes . . . next year,” I responded, then quickly exited Cachita’s into the bitter cold of Chicago.

At my parents’ house we sat in front of the television, little portable TV dinner tables before us. I spread out on the couch with my mother while my father sat a few feet away in one of his Cuban-style rocking chairs. My mother, her hair up in a glorious bun of black and sparkling silver, nervously switched channels with the remote control while my father stared dumbfounded, his guava shells drowned in their own syrup, the cream cheese covered with beads of perspiration.

“Why don’t they say something about Cuba? Why don’t they say something about Cuba?” my mother asked, overwrought, her hands rolling the channels up and down in futility. Since Ochoa’s execution in Havana, she’d been obsessed with the island, checking the temperature every day in the Tribune’s weather page, spending hours on end with her ear up to the undulating sounds of short-wave transmissions. “Don’t any one of these newscasters think something’s going to happen in Cuba? Why don’t they have correspondents there?”

I cleared my throat. “Journalists need Fidel’s permission to report from Cuba, Mami, you know that,” I said.

“Even at a time like this, when he might be falling, just like the wall?” She clicked and clicked, the TV a smear of color and light.

My father sat motionless, his hands beached on his thighs, heavy and useless. He stared, just stared, his eyes red, his skin flushed. Every now and then I’d see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

“Papi, are you all right?” I had asked already several times.

“Yes, yes, of course, quite fine,” he had responded, never taking his eyes off the screen as the images of celebration—grown men weeping, families reuniting, the barbed wire like confetti at their feet—continued scrolling with my mother’s wild channel flipping.

“Stop! Stop there!” my father finally cried, his hands covering his mouth in an instant, his eyes widening.

My mother and I quickly glanced at the screen: A group of young toughs, their swagger luxurious in leather and chains, curled their lips in front of a newsman’s microphone. Their leader’s head was hairless, hard as a cue ball and nearly as shiny. His features were sharp and delicate all at once, and he spoke with a venom that came through even without the translation that was being offered by his sidekick, a little crew-cutted thug with a pin in his nose.

“They’re just punks,” I said, turning back to my father.

“No, they’re not,” he said, pointing now to the screen. The camera had focused close enough to the group’s leader that his forehead took up more than half the camera’s view. And there, in a fleshy cross of scars, was a swastika, just like Charlie Manson’s, its crooked legs jerking in the light of my parents’ den.

“Enrique . . .” my mother said, her hand now on his knee, the remote on the floor.

“They’re just punks, Papi,” I said again.

“They are German punks,” he said, his voice no longer frightened but patronizing, as if I’d missed the most conspicuous observation of the night.

“Yes, well, Berlin is in Germany; it’s only logical that the soldiers will be German, and the party-goers will be German, and yes, even the punks will be German,” I hissed. “What did you expect? And what do you care, huh?”

“Alejandra!” This was my mother.

“A little racial memory, Papi? A little trouble with the family secret?” I continued as I got up from my seat and started to turn. I had every intention of making a grand exit, of leaving at the point of high drama in which I knew my father—the reluctant shamefaced Jew—would collapse like the wall into my mother’s arms.

But I didn’t get a chance.

“How dare you!” he boomed, shooting up from his chair and grabbing my arm, turning me around so fast that I fell back flat onto the couch. “You don’t know!” he shouted. “You don’t know!”

And then he caught his breath, straightened his shirt and sweater as if he were off to an appointment, and walked out of the room as regal and composed as the crown prince of a northern kingdom.

I glared at my mother, who by then was quietly picking up the room as if I wasn’t there: turning off the TV, gathering the bowl of discarded guava shells and festering cheese.

“What don’t I know . . . that he’s a Jew? That even though he’s in some sort of historical denial, when the neo-Nazis come, he and I will both be tossed into the ovens no matter how much he explains that we’re Spanish nobility?”

31 December 1989

Dear Alejandra,

Greetings for the New Year. I hope it is good to you, that it brings you all the things you need and hope for. I certainly hope it brings you this letter, which I’m sending through the regular mail as a test.

Here, we are grateful for the blessings we have. Our biggest news is that Ernesto and Olguita appear to be reconciling, which makes us all very happy. They are seeing each other regularly and she has returned to our table for dinner.

But we have other news, too: Angela has begun a new job with the Spanish embassy. She is working as an office assistant, mostly processing permits and visas, and, though it is not within the scope of the diplomatic career she’d once hoped to study, she is very happy. I wish that her job were not necessary, that the lines of Cubans wishing to leave the country would disappear, but it seems that they are inevitable, especially now, as the world twitches and shakes.

There is much anxiety here, and I confess I, too, share it. I am not worried, like many people here (and there, too, perhaps even more so), that our system will collapse or fall apart. I know that we will prevail, we have worked too hard and too long, and we have already survived too many things, for it to be destroyed now. But I am worried about what else we may have to endure, and what sacrifices—not of the material kind, although that, too—but of the spiritual kind—we will have to live through.

I know that there are people in Miami, and perhaps Chicago, too, who looked upon the fall of the Berlin Wall and wished those rocks would fall here, wished they’d created a bridge from Mariel or Cojímar straight to Key West so that they could rush back, like the West Germans did into East Berlin.

I know you probably saw the other invasion, the needy Easterners staring at washers and dryers, color TVs and sausages hanging in store windows on the Western side, but there was another flow as well, a stream of West Germans and their allies looking at the forbidden zone, at the spartan cool of the east and imagining hamburger palaces, multilevel department stores, and car dealerships.

I have no problem with any of that, not on principle; what I fear is what will happen to the East Germans, whether Communist or not, whether in solidarity with America or not, while their streets are being paved with dollars and gold.

I know in Miami, and perhaps in Chicago, too, they are hoping that the fall of the wall will inspire spontaneous celebration here, and then, in turn, a horrible crackdown. But there won’t be a civil war here, or the kinds of demonstrations they dream about in Miami. Our walls are all of our own making—all of us—and none of them are real.

In the long run, we will survive here, and there, too, with all our mutual yearning, and we will find our own way back to each other, and it need not be with war, cold or otherwise, or with dollars.

In the meantime, I remember that I’m a Jew, and I look at the fall of the wall in Berlin and know that it is more than just a pile of bricks, and I worry about what unification will mean, and what will happen next.

Please let your father know I’m thinking of him.

We haven’t had a minyan in years here, but we pray and pray anyway.

Un fuerte abrazo,

Moisés

P.S. I was sorry to hear that you and Seth are no longer together. Though I had not met him, he seemed, both from what Estrella and Félix said, as well as from your own letters, to be quite a fine young man.