XXV

One day, three years before we parted, Leni answered the phone and found herself talking to an officious Cuban operator who asked her in fractured English if she would accept a collect call. I wasn’t home but Leni said yes anyway. The caller, it turned out, was a young woman in some sort of panic, and where and how she got our number was a mystery to both of us. She spoke only Spanish, and Leni not a word, so the questions lingered.

I don’t know why but at first I thought it might have been Estrella, the Cuban interpreter with whom I’d remained friendly in an official sort of way, but it didn’t make sense that Estrella wouldn’t speak in English; she was, after all, flawlessly fluent. We considered, more logically, that it might have been Deborah or Yosemí, Moisés’s granddaughters, but I was certain if there had been a family emergency it would have been Moisés himself, or Ester, who called. I imagined it would be Angela, with her job at the Spanish embassy, who would have the best chance of getting through.

After much debate, we decided I’d place a call to Moisés’s house in Havana, friendly, just in case the call had had nothing to do with them, but open enough so that if a crisis was at hand we could help. It took hours to get through, even with patient and sympathetic operators—at first the line wouldn’t connect, then the call would crash instantly, or we found that even screaming into the phone, they couldn’t hear me. We’d stand there helpless, listening to their faraway, echoing voices asking who was calling, debating among themselves who could be calling.

At some point, Ester and I finally heard well enough to recognize each other, but after some awkward greetings and exclamations of surprise, she offered nothing dramatic enough to have justified a call, and Leni and I, now more confused than ever, sat on the couch dumbfounded after it was all over.

“She did sound sad,” I said to Leni.

“How could you tell—you were both screaming,” Leni said. “And besides, everybody in Cuba sounds sad.”

“Not everybody—”

“Oh, please!” Leni said, exasperated.

In good Cuban fashion, I contemplated extremes—that the call had been some sort of test from state security, that perhaps it had been designed to tap my phone by the CIA, or that maybe even Moisés himself might be a part of some larger conspiracy and had placed the call as a way to acknowledge contact with me to someone else.

“You are nuts,” Leni said, incredulous. “Maybe, just maybe, I didn’t understand and the call wasn’t from Cuba at all.” Her bracelets rattled with her quick, jerky gestures. I think she wanted to slap me, like in the movies, to bring me back to my senses.

But I was convinced the call was from Cuba—Cuba calling, if not Estrella, Deborah, Yosemí, or Moisés, then the island itself, a chorus of ghosts in limbo.

In March of 1991, as Cubans reached a kind of numb nadir, Playboy magazine did a spread of women on the island (amazingly enough, apparently with the cooperation of Cuban authorities), that would ultimately serve as a portent of things to come. Leni and I sat on the couch reading the article, convinced all the models would be out of the country in a matter of months, courtesy of marriages—arranged, willed, or bought—with foreigners.

“This is at the pool at the Hotel Nacional, where my parents met,” I explained to Leni, ignoring the desperate, leggy girl strewn on the chaise longue in the photo. “And this, obviously, is a rooftop in Miramar, what was once the poshest neighborhood and where a lot of the embassies are now.” On the page, a young woman raised her arms in the air, exposing beautiful, natural breasts, firm and brown, through an open shirt.

“This is so twisted,” Leni commented. “It’s like they’re officially advertising sex tourism.”

One particular photo caught my eye and it was not because of the cityscape. In it was a young, caramel-colored beauty, her hair long, lush, and wavy, naturally streaked with a rainbow of browns and reds, and an irresistibly sensual but melancholy gaze. She was not entirely nude, managing to show just a few curls of bristly black above a casually draped towel. Her breasts were ripe buds, the aureoles like drops of butterscotch. The caption identified her as Marísol and said she was an engineering student but she seemed too young to me to be in college.

“This is the girl,” I said, astonished.

Leni understood my meaning immediately. She sat up right away and examined the picture up close. “Really? Do you think? My god, she could be at the Playboy mansion as we speak, swapping blow jobs for freedom!”

I cut the photo out—just around the face, so that no one would ever suspect her nudity or the source—and found a simple frame for it on my desk. For days afterward, I contemplated her while I worked: the smoothness of her skin, my memory of her marine essence. I’d close my eyes and try to focus, imagining that moment when she leaned back with Orlando between her legs, the way her eyes sparkled and welcomed me. But every time I tried to configure her face—its actual color and tone, the shape of her nose—my mind would become a wash of intense white light and I’d lose her.

“Are you sure it’s her?” Leni asked, amused as much as anything else. “I mean, you know, beautiful fourteen-year-old girls don’t necessarily grow up to be beautiful seventeen-year-olds. The real Celina might have gotten acne, or needed glasses, or maybe her teeth rotted.”

I didn’t mind Leni’s gentle teasing, perhaps because in my heart I wasn’t entirely sure it was Celina at all, but also because, in a way, the banter kept Celina fresh for me in a way I had never expected. As if to seal our bond, I bought a small bouquet of yellow roses and put the vase by the picture frame, an offering to Ochún, the Virgin of Charity, patron saint of Cuba, and of love.

By the winter of 1992, we were used to hearing about the hardships described by Moisés: the never-ending lines, the blackouts, the food shortages, the daily debacles, even the new emerging blindness and immobility some Cubans were experiencing.

At the Menachs’, it was Rafa who was afflicted. We got updates with each letter about his condition: a debilitating weakness, swollen joints, extraordinarily painful and too frequent bowel movements. “It’s as if he’s atrophied,” wrote Moisés. “Not his body so much, but his heart and mind, his experiences.”

Rafa spent weeks on end paralyzed, a younger, sickly version of Rodolfo, the mummified TV-watching old man who seemed immune to the conditions, so bad by then that even Fidel allowed that Cubans would have to “create miracles” to survive. Leni and I sent medicines whenever we could, vitamins and foodstuffs, especially powdered milk and eggs. We consulted with American doctors about Rafa’s symptoms, offering advice whenever medicines weren’t available.

Then one day, in a letter with a typical listing of tragedies but still imbued with Moisés’s unshakable faith in the revolution’s ability to come through, we got the news: Félix, Celina’s brother, had killed himself sometime the previous summer, as the entire island was celebrating another brilliant baseball victory during the Pan American Games. He had been accused of a political infraction, told he would be forbidden to leave the country, perhaps forever, and he’d become despondent.

But the manner of Félix’s death was something else entirely: Unable to find a length of rope, he had wrapped his neck in one of his father’s ties and, while sitting on the floor, forcibly hung himself from a doorknob. I could have never imagined him capable of such an act. It was Celina who had found him, framed by the door, a trauma serious enough to have caused her to be hospitalized until just recently.

“That means your pinup girl can’t be her,” Leni said immediately. “I don’t know which is worse, though, really . . . ”

All I could think about was how badly Félix must have wanted to kill himself to do it in so willful a way.

I didn’t take down the framed photo of the semi-nude girl in Havana. Instead, I bought more flowers and added a clear glass of water for good measure.

Though I’d resented Félix terribly when he had spied on Seth and me, his was the first death in Cuba I had to deal with as an adult. It caused an overflowing and restless anxiety. Not only was there the surreality of the circumstances, but time and detachment had distorted Félix, too. Suddenly he was not some sadistic voyeur but a funny, almost pathetic fellow, someone I could feel for and mourn.

I knew even then that what was most unsettling was the question that Félix’s death provoked: What would happen to Celina now? Though I already knew she lived alone, I began to imagine Félix as her guardian angel, as the brother who bridged the distances to bring her news, food, and affection. (I put aside the question of Orlando, understanding too well that her brother’s death might make her even more dependent, more vulnerable to him.)

In response to the news about Félix, I wrote Celina a short note in care of the Menachs, bought her some blue jeans and a green pullover (with the pinup girl as a guide to what her size might be), packed some pens and soaps and tampons in a box and sent them down with a Catholic delegation working against the blockade.

“Let me get this straight: All this for someone you didn’t even talk to?” asked Leni, adjusting and readjusting the metal bands on her wrists. “I think your little fantasy’s getting out of control here. . . .”

In the meantime, I tried to get Félix out of my mind. For months on end, all I could see was his body, hanging lifeless from the doorknob of the bedroom I’d once shared with Seth. In these terrible nightmares, whenever I approached him to undo the tie, he’d wake up, cackling madly just like when we discovered him snooping on us. I’d shoot up screaming, the sheets scrambled about the bed, my skin cold from sweat.

“Sweetie pie,” Leni would whisper each night, her body stretched over mine as if to protect me, “you need some closure, you need some closure.”

Sometime after that I found a picture of Félix and us that Seth had taken the night of his visit. He was so skinny, so brittle. In the frame, he’s looking at the two of us instead of at the camera. Seth is beautiful and in love. My eyes are downcast and ashamed.

I pulled open my desk drawer, took out a pair of scissors and clipped Félix out of the scene, propping his figure like a cut-out doll against the glass of water I’d set for his sister. Then I went rummaging through my bookshelves, the ones way above head level, until I found what I knew was the answer: “Y’hey sh’lama raba min sh’ma-ya . . .”