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ELIO WAS AT THE DYE HOUSE when he heard the call over the loudspeaker. “Duty calls, compañeros.” He’d been tipping dyestuff into mixing barrels since 6:00 a.m. It was now 10:00 a.m. and he was covered in purple powder from head to toe. If he could have dug out an escape tunnel just then, he would have. But where in hell would he escape? He had no choice but to hide in a goddamn water closet again.
He opened the bathroom door, avoiding the small mirror above the sink. He wondered whose house it was his coworkers would march toward and who would be the poor bastard they’d take by surprise. This was the reality that he didn’t want to face. Behind the appearance of so many years, without realizing it, everyone had changed. It wasn’t just his face, or Maria’s. Everyone was now someone else.
Elio gripped a paper bag in his hand and climbed onto the toilet seat, a foot on each side of the cracked toilet bowl. As soon as he steadied himself, he pulled out a dog-eared book from a paper bag. The Count of Monte Cristo, the gold embossed letters on the tattered cover read. It was the second time that week he’d refused to board the bus, hiding instead in the bathroom stall—reading a bit until he couldn’t take the heat any longer and it was safe to go. He was eager to finish the book and, at this rate, and with the increasing number of rallies per week, he’d be done in no time.
The human herd on the bus that afternoon would come from schools, and jobs, and housework in buses, on foot, and on rickety bicycles. Wielding bats, bottles, lengths of rusty pipe, chains, and anything else they’d found along the way. Then windows would shatter and they’d break in, dragging bodies out through front doors and broken glass, over cracked sidewalks, and in and out of potholes. Tearing flesh and breaking bones, as they harassed and tormented the poor bastards who, having nothing else to hope for, opted to leave. Someone somewhere, he knew, would hang themselves. Animals, he thought. Neighbor against neighbor—it was criminal, that’s what it was. The island, he knew then, had turned against itself.
He crouched, keeping his head out of sight and waiting for the stragglers on foot, the ones who had missed the bus, to run out of the building and head to the park to join the others. He tried to read, but it was hotter than a pig’s ass in the stall. Were he to stay in there longer than necessary, his heart would send smoke signals to his temples and panic would take over. Poor bastards. Had someone warned them?
He could hear a rush of water, something like a steady flow coming from somewhere inside the toilet bowl. The little maneuver inside the tank must have been broken. But, for a second, Elio imagined something else: It was a clear day, with air temperatures in the high eighties. He was in Baracoa, near the bend, and about fifteen feet from shore. It came up fast from deep down in the water. Its high dorsal fin parted the blue sea in two like some strange Moses.
Elio lay on an inner tube, his right arm gently circling to counter the action of the tide. Without warning, his paddling arm was seized. It was a huge shark, approximately ten feet in length. Elio struck him with his left arm, but the shark seized that one too, tearing at his elbow. The weight of the giant fish knocked him into the water. For a moment, the shark loosened its grip and re-submerged. Elio swam away desperately but the fish went after him, seizing him again. This time, it had him by the leg, just above the knee.
The toilet’s tank let out a metallic sound. Elio stared at his arms, and rubbed his thigh. His heart rate had risen and he was short on breath. At least the goddamn fish had left his testicle alone this time, he thought, shifting his weight on the seat. There was no way in hell he was ever going back into the ocean. He knew better now.
Hours later, Elio turned onto his street. It had just started to rain. He passed the turbina and saw the house of Elsa La Gorda and her daughter, Silvi. He could only guess, given the broken shutters and the cracked egg on the walls, that Silvi, just as she’d always told Elsa she would, was leaving for good. He was dismayed. It was Elsa’s house the mob had marched toward. Doing what they always did. Sticking long metal rods through the shutters, breaking eggs and smashing tomatoes against the door and onto the porch. Tearing flesh with purple-polished finger nails. Spewing insults and slogans at the house like it’d been the house that threatened to leave.
Later, those same people who marched on Elsa’s house—her neighbors, her coworkers, perhaps even her friends—would pretend that nothing had happened. Like the whole town didn’t turn against her. Everyone would go back home, banking hard on the government bonus can of Vita Nuova they’d receive for turning on their neighbor.
Maria was already in bed when Elio came home but she’d left him a small pot of black beans on the stove. Elio reheated the beans, and listened to the latest radio reports of the Mariel boatlift— it was gaining strength.
Elio thought about Silvi, waiting for her turn to climb on the boat. Leaving for good, and changing Elsa’s life forever. Hell, if anyone knew about that, it was he. Hadn’t his own father’s leaving changed his life forever?
As for the rest—and even as they, too, waited for their chance to leave—they did what they were told: spied on their neighbors, took notice of their ins and outs, showed up unannounced to take count of every container, appliance, radio, bicycle, and flashlight in the house so that, if one went missing, they’d be ready to take a leap of faith and call it in. Because there was nothing like having nothing to make people fight tooth and nail, to rat people out, to defile someone’s good reputation, to ruin someone for good.
Elio was pleased to see that Maria had left him rice too. He heaped both rice and beans on a plate and ate standing up. Taking no pleasure in knowing that, if no one in Bauta had an egg to fry that afternoon, it was because they’d all been cracked against La Gorda’s door. The value of it all had been lost to him when he saw the eggs on the walls of the house. But—at that moment, at least—he never once wished he could join them. He’d stay put. He might as well have been allergic to eggs and seawater.
Just as he was getting into bed toward 10:00 p.m., the phone made an odd sound. Not its typical ring, but loud enough that Maria turned over on the mattress and faced the wall. It took him a minute to trace the sound to the phone in the living room. At first he thought it must be broken because he heard something like a death rattle. Then a long, empty pause. “Operator, please hold,” the voice said. Another pause. Then “Ricky here,” the receiver finally said. The words echoed Ricky heeere in Elio’s ear. His knees buckled and he coiled the sticky cord around a wrist, as if to steady himself. He said nothing. “Ricky here,” he heard again. “I’m in Mariel with a shrimp—” Before the voice could finish, Elio pulled back on his arm so hard the cable snapped off and dangled from his wrist. He knew the word boat would follow. What a joke, he told Maria that night. Doesn’t the guy know I won’t get in the water?
No, of course he wouldn’t know.
He never heard back—and he figured he wasn’t going to. But he wished he’d had the balls to say something. If he had, it would have gone something like this:
“Who’s Ricky? You mean, Ricky Lopez? Ricky Lopez, my biological father?” Not that he’d ever had another one. “Wait, so where are you? Mariel, you say? You’re in the Port of Mariel with a rented shrimp boat? And who the hell gives a flying fuck?”
“I’m sorry,” he’d have heard him sob. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know who was more pathetic, his father and his apology, or him for hanging up.
“You’re selfish,” Maria told him the following morning. She was pulling a bedsheet over the edge of the bed.
“You’re a funny woman,” Elio said, sitting on the edge of the bare mattress. “You swore to your grandmother once that you’d never leave this place.”
“I wish I’d never told you about that conversation. Why couldn’t you talk to him? He wouldn’t be calling if he wasn’t planning on helping us. You’re an arrogant son of a bitch, you know that? It’s your father.” Sheets flapping in the air like a bullfighter’s red cape.
“That’s not a father,” he said.
“And how would you know? Tell me that—how the hell would you know?”
Elio waved off her words. “Look,” he said. “If it gets really bad here, we’ll leave.” But he didn’t mean it. He wished he could vanish. So he did the next closest thing—he walked out of the house, slamming the door behind him. Outside, two stray dogs, startled by the noise, ran in opposite directions.
Although neither Elio nor Maria told anybody about the phone call or the resentment that followed, Elio caught people on the street, at work, at la bodega looking at him in strange ways. They might not have known the specific details—who and when and what and all those things that didn’t really matter—but they knew something. Enough to make him suspect. Enough to make him feel that his own neighbors—official and unofficial sentinels for the state—were watching him, knowing him in ways that only he could know himself.
He distrusted the inflection in their voices whenever they asked him how he was or where he was off to. He was aware of them beside him wherever he went, whatever he did. Listening in on his most private thoughts, jotting things down. Like Elsa, he wasn’t going to get off that easy. Although only Silvi managed to leave, Elsa paid with three more rallies. It didn’t matter that she was still there. Leaving was a family affair, so she was guilty by association. Everyone paid—whether they left or stayed. Elio knew they wouldn’t relent until they heard him confess. Until they ruined him for good. Whatever else would happen from that moment forward, he knew he would never be alone—not really. Not in the way that people are alone with their thoughts.