XXXII

When it came to translation, my father’s method was always the same: use the clearest, most lucid language; the point is always and above all to communicate. Nothing was ever too complicated, too obtuse. Even when the original was deliberately vague, my father found ways to bring it into the light.

But on the topic of his own life, he retreated from his profession, preferred to talk as if what had happened was just beyond his grasp, a mystery so deep even his finely honed talent of investigating meaning was completely eluded. By the time my father died, I understood that well enough to know I’d always have a million unanswered questions. I’d have to be satisfied with reading signs, with looking at his life as parable or prophecy. I knew I was destined to be an acolyte at Delphi.

In spite of my mother’s best efforts to save my father from extinction, to cut deals with African and Christian deities, he died with me as his only witness. It was not in the black of night but at dawn, with the sky painted in pastel ribbons, delicate fingers reaching in through the windows of the den. They seemed to cradle him, give him an olive tone, revive him for an instant. My father passed away wearing a halo of morning light.

Earlier, the strain of watching his life leak away had been too much for my mother, who at one point just collapsed and had to be given a sedative, convinced to rest upstairs in their vast and empty bed. My tía Gladys dozed on the living room couch, her husband and daughters back in their own cozy home, waiting for the new day’s vigil. I imagined their alarm clocks ringing, Mike Kauf buffing his biceps with a thirty-minute workout before calling in to cancel his appointments, my cousins all taking turns in the shower, pondering closets of inappropriately colorful clothing.

It had been a rough night. My father was ashen, sunken, often unrecognizable. His chest heaved, his purplish hands quivered like frightened starfish. Every breath was an effort. At about three in the morning, it was just him and me, my mother’s candles, roses, and sunflowers. My father’s prayer book—a gift from Ytzak, a sheath of powdery pages in Ladino published in Salonika shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire—was balanced on the blankets covering his spindly legs. We said nothing about it; it was understood, finally, that his secret was out.

I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about—maybe it was the Farraluque translation, or the rumors swirling around Miami and Havana that Fidel had finally died because he didn’t show up on the 26th of July to deliver his usual speech—but my father just looked up at me with stubborn tears, tears that wouldn’t fall.

“Your mother . . .” he whispered, smiling, eyeing the makeshift altar she’d erected on top of the TV. It covered all her bases: flowers, rotting fruit, pieces of candy, novenas, a rosary coiled in a circle, and her Virgin of Charity. A small table held a handful of glasses of water (these would be stagnant, powerless) and a candle lit to Babalú-Ayé, the god of illnesses, depicted as an old white man on crutches on the label. All of this vanished whenever the parish priest arrived, shoved in the closet or under the bed, the candle trailing a silvery wisp that always prompted the cleric to ask if something was burning.

My father and I both laughed a little. He coughed, his body lifting off the bed each time, then falling back into it with a muffled thud. I knew both of us should have been elsewhere: Him, downstairs in his office, puffing on a puro, preparing notes for a lecture he’d deliver to a throng of adoring students somewhere in Mexico, London, or New York; me, dancing somewhere, swiveling my hips like my mother, away from the usual heartache and boredom of my job, perhaps in the arms of someone sleek and sinewy.

“Alejandra . . .” my father said, his voice hoarse. No doubt there was pain there, effort, too. He rearranged his bones on the mattress, in the nest of pillows we’d built for him. “I need you . . .”

“I need you, too,” I said, meaning it more than I could have ever imagined.

He closed his eyes in his kingly way—for a second, I confess, I held my breath, afraid they might not open again, and I made a million promises right then so that I might see myself reflected one more time in his deep, dark pools. “Yes,” he said, smug, his lids rising in his usual condescendingly slow motion, “but, you see, I’ve always needed you.” The tears still clung to the rims of his eyes, his lashes black and beautiful.

He could be infuriating even while dying, I thought.

“I . . . need a few things . . .” he said. He swallowed. “In my office . . .” Then he gave me instructions in his new elliptical style. And I understood that when I descended the stairs this time, I was breaking a seal, I was entering his Holiest of Holies.

In my father’s office the light is different, clearer somehow, although there has always been less of it there than anywhere else in the house. It’s a cave with an Amazonian waterfall, a bridge of bones, the secret passageway to another dimension. Whenever I stepped inside, I always felt my heart slow, its beat mute.

When I entered it on the night of his death, I breathed in the lingering sweetness of tobacco, the vague traces of cologne, the spice of his still living body. I stood there for a moment, on the threshold between the real world and his, trying to adjust my senses.

Through the play of light and gloom his desk appeared to me like a sailing ship, wooden and dark, Columbus’s caravels—not imposing but efficient, sturdy, typical of Spain’s conquering fleets. I could see him standing atop that smooth surface, like a captain (Noah or Columbus, both a little mad), searching for land, for a white feathered bird to bring him a sign that somewhere there was a resting place, an Eden, a heaven.

I touched his desk chair, grand, padded like his own body had been once, and felt it like the pelt of an animal now surrendered to its own mortality. I might have heard a whimper, I might have heard a howl.

“You will be . . . returning to Cuba . . . no?” Every word my father spoke was a test balloon, an experiment in using a limited supply of oxygen.

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t know when really. . . . I want to go, but I don’t have much reason to, not really.”

I opened the velvety white bags I’d brought up from his room, both relatively new, and pulled out his prayer shawl and the two little black boxes wrapped tight in their well-oiled leather laces. I don’t know why I was surprised that my father’s tefillin wasn’t hundreds of years old. I suppose I had a romantic notion that they might have been passed down for centuries, that I’d inherit a relic infused with the spirits of many, many generations.

“Ytzak . . .” my father said, his chin pointing at the phylacteries, as if he’d read my mind. “A gift . . . bar mitzvah . . .”

“You were bar mitzvahed?” I was stunned.

He struggled with the prayer shawl, draping it over his head, then pulling it down around his shoulders like a scarf. “Not like here, no. No . . . my thirteenth birthday . . . that’s bar mitzvah. No party.”

“No Torah reading at the synagogue?”

He shook his head again, his Adam’s apple twitched. “Not required . . . just birthday . . . then tefillin.” For an instant, his eyes drifted back, as if he’d momentarily lost consciousness. “You will say kaddish for me?”

It was such an airy, hollow whisper I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. I thought maybe I’d willed it, but then I saw him, his eyes drowning in tears. Mine were not as stubborn as his and as I nodded, they free-flowed down my cheeks, landing in huge circles on the sheet.

“Women . . . can say it . . . in private, it’s okay. . . .”

As I stood there shivering, trying to pull myself together— my father was dying, my father whom I absolutely adored, was dying —I heard him pawing the blankets. I lifted the tefillin, one in each hand for him to see but he shook his head and kept searching like a blind man with his hand outstretched. I grabbed the bags but he waved them away, as annoyed as Olinsky had ever been.

“My siddur . . .” he croaked. His hair, which was now as wispy as cotton, was also extraordinarily long and fell in his face, further obscuring his view.

I put the tefillin in his hands and picked up his prayer book. The thin leather-bound volume shed a confetti of disintegrating pages as I lifted it into the air. Then my father motioned for me to open it. I lifted the cover. A black-and-white photograph dropped from it, zigzagging through the air until it landed on his thigh. When he bent his head down to look at it, his tears finally fell, one of them forming a ring of bloated moisture around the central figure.

“For Moisés,” he mumbled.

I put down the prayer book and stared at the girl in the photo. “Who is she?” A swirl of script on the back said: “La Habana, 1939.”

He opened his mouth and I could see his tongue gummy and white inside, struggling like Jonah trapped in the whale. “Moisés . . . can tell you. . . . Now, help me . . . help me with these. . . .” And he gestured at the boxes in his hands. “This one . . .”

I don’t know where he got the strength but my father sat up for the binding. He held out his bony left arm while I moved the box up to what had once been his bicep and pulled on the strap. It was practically impossible to keep it from falling, and I feared that if it was knotted too tight there might be terrible consequences.

But my father, like an addict desperate to isolate a vein, yanked on the strap, breathing hard, his eyes bulging, then waved at me to help him wrap it around his forearm. I moved quickly, draping the leather ties over and over, watching the sweat form on his forehead even as the skin on his arm grew colder and colder. Knotting the straps to his hand and fingers was a complicated process, frustrating because I had no clue what I was doing and was trying to follow some sort of logic (“Ashkenazi . . .” he snorted at one of my efforts) and because I feared hurting him. His hand was puffy, bruised from where an IV had been.

“Baruch attah Adonai, elohainu melach ha olam,” he mumbled, embarrassed.

When I reached for the other tefillin, he pushed me away, moved his legs to the side of the bed.

“You’re going to stand?” I asked, horrified.

“I have to stand,” he said with his typical condescension, as if it was all so obvious.

After a struggle, he managed to put his stockinged feet on the floor, his buckling knees locked as best they could, and he more or less sat on the edge of the bed, leaning forward.

Trembling, I lay the tefillin on his head, letting the box drop between his eyes—on a trip to Israel, I’d seen the old men at the Western Wall with them practically resting on the bridge of their noses—but my father cringed, aggravated. “Up! Up!” he practically shouted, as if he might throw a tantrum. I pushed it back, making his hair stand up in funny waves, white bursts like Olinsky’s, but he reached up, felt the box with the tip of his swollen right hand and nodded approval.

He pulled the shawl up over his head. Then he picked up his prayer book, held it to his body, and actually tried to balance himself without help. I watched as he teetered, his eyes closed, the uneasy sway of his once magnificent and now emaciated torso creating a kind of natural although uneven davening.

At one point, he stumbled, as if his legs had given out for an instant. But I was standing in front of him and caught him. His body against mine felt like paper, the shawl a deflated kite, like something that could take flight if I gave it just enough of a push.

For a moment, I buried my nose in his shoulder, his hair smelling of tobacco now mixed with medicine and Vicks. As I stood him up, I didn’t let go but maneuvered around him, so that I was standing behind him, my arms around his waist, my face against his wingless back. He was bony, his heart like a bird in a cage, each prayer sung sending powerful vibrations down his spine, into me.

I don’t know how long we were rocking like that, only that it was until he finished and climbed into bed on his own, silently helping me remove the bindings. When I finished putting everything back where it belonged, he patted the bed and signaled me close to him. The August sun was washing in through the windows. I leaned in to him, waiting for his final words, but there was a quiet stillness instead.