CHAPTER 6

Serguey had a few devices of his own to offset his brother’s lifelong perception that he was a coward: his intellect, his reasoning, his foresight. These qualities had, at times, commanded respect from Victor, whose reckless impetus made him deficient in them. On the way to the bus stop, Serguey explained what they had to do. Arguing with Yenier or Montalvo about rights or family was useless. It would only get them thrown in a cell for public disturbance. If they were goaded into physically retaliating, they might not see the light of day for a week. It wasn’t clear whether Felipe would be officially charged, whether a trial would take place. If these things were to happen, State Security would bring in a puppet lawyer; the trial would transpire behind closed doors. There would be no case anyone could make against a politically motivated accusation, not without losing their job. There would be no other entities that could intervene, no individual that could defy the government’s ubiquitous will.

It took a summary beckoning of his reserves for Serguey to remain resolute. He had to apply the same method he’d had all these years: willfully ignore what was inherently and morally wrong with the system and continue onward with the aid of practical solutions.

“But if they don’t charge Dad,” Victor said, naively hopeful, “they have to let him go.”

“If they tag him a dissident, they can hold him indefinitely.”

“Can’t you request to be his lawyer, like you told Montalvo?”

“I work at the Ministry now. I can’t officially act as his attorney.” The brothers’ feet slammed the ground somewhere between a speed walk and a full sprint. “And if I try taking them to court some other way, they’ll bury me. They can plant anything on me, and who’s going to prove it’s a set-up? I’ve seen things, Victor . . .”

They had to figure out what they could on their own. If legal recourses didn’t suffice, they had to consider all possibilities, explore all avenues. Cubans prided themselves on their ingenuity, the product of a sound education in a nation with scarce resources and even fewer freedoms. He and Victor had to be crafty to obtain results without being jailed.

“First, we have to search Dad’s house,” Serguey said, “in case they missed something.”

Victor stared at him in silence. The passage of time, it seemed, had eroded Serguey’s familiarity with some of Victor’s gestures and expressions. Holding his brother’s gaze, as he could do now that he felt in charge, he couldn’t guess what the next words out of Victor’s mouth would be.

“I thought you were going to say we should wait,” Victor said. “Or that you were done with us.”

Serguey couldn’t fault him for the thought. Victor’s fears were justified: he and Felipe hadn’t been a priority for a decade. Still, Serguey didn’t want to give hollow promises or demonstrations of commitment. “I can’t just plunge,” he said earnestly. “I have Anabel and my career to consider. I know it sounds selfish, but this whole thing can fuck up what I’ve been trying to accomplish.”

“It’s not selfish.” Victor lowered his jaw and swallowed. “We are screwing up your life.”

The brothers stood motionless and stared at one another. The unequivocal rumble of an accelerating bus resounded behind a tall fence and the copious crown of numerous trees. Serguey and Victor broke into a sprint, the bus slugging by just as they turned the corner onto the main street. Commuters at the stop signaled to the driver, allowing Serguey and Victor to catch up. The next bus, they knew, might take ages to come.

Heading into the city early in the route, there were empty seats. The driver swerved to the middle of the road, and the brothers staggered toward the rear. They sat on the last row, their heads resting on the back wall. For the next three stops, hordes of people piled into the bus until it reached maximum capacity. The driver started to allow in only the same amount of commuters who got off. Victor gave his seat to an old man with a cane, who’d made his way patiently to the back, at times anchoring himself on other bodies, pitifully riffling for a generous soul. A decade prior, Serguey thought, he wouldn’t have gone more than two rows before a civil act had him sitting comfortably. Nowadays, men pretended to be asleep just so they wouldn’t be bothered. As a discreet form of social complaint, Serguey offered his spot to a middle-aged nurse, whose bag kept slipping from her shoulder. She thanked him emphatically. The gangly man standing next to her had breathed heavily and shot her a surly look when the bag fell on his foot. Now standing, Victor told Serguey to switch sides so he could be adjacent to the man. He too had noticed. Victor then asked the stranger if he could have a cigarette. The man brought his hand to his shirt pocket, an uncertain look passing over his eyes.

“All right,” he said at length and took one out.

“Can I have one for my brother?” Victor said. “Rough day, you know.”

The man dawdled, mumbling something about one being enough.

“Come on, comrade,” Victor said with a rigid smirk, “don’t be stingy.”

The man handed Victor another cigarette. At the next stop, he wriggled his way out. Victor showed the cigarettes to the nurse.

“You want them?”

She laughed. “Sure,” she said and put them in her bag.

A couple of stops later—the heat inside the vehicle already acquiring unpleasant, smothering smells—Victor leaned into Serguey and asked, his voice apologetic, “Do you think you’ll lose your job?”

The idea of his brother feeling guilty for possibly wrecking his life made Serguey’s stomach churn with self-loathing. Victor was ready to deal with what was coming. Serguey owed him honesty, at least to this particular question. “If I do, I’ll lose the apartment too. Anabel’s parents are nice people, but going back to their place will be rough.”

“You guys can come live with me.”

“Funny.”

Victor waited for the squealing of the brakes to cease as the bus neared a street light. “I don’t blame you for leaving, Serguey. I just didn’t have the luxury of a choice.”

“Do you really want to do this now?”

Victor sighed. “No, you’re right.”

Serguey stared out the open window. A boy on a bicycle was hanging on to the ledge, wanting a faster ride to his destination. A colorful tattoo wound its way down his right bicep to his elbow. His bronzed skin sparkled in the sun. His eyes squinted under the mid-day glare with a mischievous focus, the kind of dogged expression sported by those who spend most days at the mercy of Havana’s blistering roads. His features were inscribed with the tenacity and ruggedness that Serguey associated with Victor and those his brother knew. Like the man on the motorcycle, this young boy seemed an integral part of the streets, like he might at any point be waved at by a friend, a confidant, an accomplice. Did he also think of himself as not having the luxury of choice? Were the bicycle, the tattoo, the tenacious gaze, inevitable—the only path left for those who, like Victor, had found no other way to subsist?

Victor glinted in the direction of the boy, then turned to Serguey unemotionally. “Make sure you call Anabel when we get to the house,” he said. “She’s going to have your balls if you don’t.”

They got off the second bus at the intersection of Juan Delgado Avenue and Herrera Street, four blocks away from the house. More than a year, Serguey thought, since the last time he’d been here. As they waited to cross the road, he recalled the days he and Kiko, his best childhood friend, had walked by this stop on the way to and back from their middle school. They had often bought peanuts from a street vendor. The man’s front teeth were missing, and he always wore the same pair of tattered pants and camouflage fanny pack. Restlessly, he waded into the rush hour crowd getting off buses, the peanut-packed paper cones raised aloft like a torch. Some called him Titi, alluding to Los Van Van’s “La Titimanía.” His salt-encrusted peanuts had no equal. The packages were the bulkiest Serguey and Kiko had ever seen. They definitely got their money’s worth.

A newspaper stand, shaped like a kiosk, had stood at the edge of the block. The person who’d worked in it, Norton—a black man who Serguey’s classmates claimed was a hundred years old despite not looking a day over sixty—had passed away a few years before. The kiosk had subsequently been shut down for good. The same newspaper, dated May 15, 2003, was affixed to the window for months until the stand was disassembled. As teenagers, Serguey and Kiko loitered by the side window, where Norton taped the sports section of the Granma newspaper. They browsed through the baseball scores, looking to see if Javier Mendez had hit a home run or if Lázaro Valle had thrown a complete game. On the rare occasions when Norton forgot to post the new issue, the boys pestered him so they could borrow the sports page.

“Can’t give it to you,” the old man would say. “You’ll rip it.”

Norton had read the scores out loud to them. After a while, he began to memorize the numbers before Serguey or Kiko asked. When Industriales suffered a bad loss or their favorite player had struck out multiple times, he teased them: “They can’t hit a melon with an ironing board!”

Serguey missed that kind of banter. No one in his office followed baseball. If they did, they wouldn’t talk about it the same way as Norton. There was no flavor, no irony or personality behind their remarks. The cordiality and overall tone of importance everyone displayed at his workplace had originally appealed to him. He had felt part of a distinguished world, a world whose language and appearance created the illusion of success. In a country where the illusion itself was as close to the real thing as most could get, he’d been delighted. But now he couldn’t help wondering if, in courting that illusion, he had lost the substance of things.

As the brothers stepped across the avenue, Serguey saw two men immersed in a lighthearted debate. One of them, who looked curiously like a younger Norton, smacked a rolled-up newspaper on the other’s chest each time he made a point. The other slapped the back of his right hand on the palm of his left, staring with his head skewed at a downward angle, his eyes compressed, questioning each argument. Serguey then noticed his brother hastening toward the newspaper-wielding man and playfully punching him on the shoulder.

The man smacked the newspaper on Victor’s shoulder in return. “Licenciado!”

“I’m in a hurry,” Victor said, rejoining Serguey, “but I haven’t forgotten about you.”

“I know, hermanito,” the man said. “Tranquilo.”

Turning into Herrera Street, Victor told Serguey, “A bit of a shit talker, that guy, but he’s loyal.”

“Is he related to Norton?”

“You mean deceased Norton? That’s Yunior, his grandson.” Victor closed his fist and shook it in the air. “Always with the fucking newspaper.” Serguey wished that Victor had stalled with the men for a bit. Maybe he could have asked Yunior about Norton, see what memories might spring from it. But Victor’s steps had become determined, rushing down Herrera faster than Serguey would have liked. At the end of the block, a group of bony, shirtless kids were kneeling on a parcel of dirt between the sidewalk and the road. One of them used a sturdy twig to carve a sloppy circle, inside of which the boys began to place marbles just as the brothers passed them. Serguey remembered having weeded out, with Felipe’s doubtful permission, the rectangular plot of land in front of their house so he and Kiko could play quimbe with their marbles, or fanguito, which only required mud and a large nail. In Serguey’s block in El Vedado, there were no parcels of dirt on which to play. Now that he thought about it, the immediate area neighboring his building seemed devoid of children. Whatever sections of land were available had been planted with a tree or bush of some sort, always maintained and supervised by a senior citizen who treated kids as a farmer might treat crop-infesting mice.

Serguey stayed a couple of paces behind Victor, scrutinizing the homes on either side of the street. Although some houses had been refurbished, the majority looked as they had a decade or more ago, each with its own decrepit vibe, its own history. In this part of the city, bare concrete showed on facades so clustered they allowed little to no view beyond them. The heart of Havana—in contrast to Serguey’s own lofty neighborhood—had gradually transformed into deplorable sleeping quarters for all who could fit. Block after block it was the same: backyards and garages had been turned into rooms and apartments for sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Generations of people clumped together, waiting for the elders to die off so they could claim the homes for themselves.

Your next-door neighbor knew your secrets. There was no avoiding it. Their windows opened right across from yours. To escape the sultriness of their residences and the smothering presence of relatives, people poured into the streets: kids played ringer; men argued and wielded newspapers. There was a constant coming and going, the kind of bustle that makes a place seem gregarious, nomadic, restless. A few preferred to sit back and observe, watching life unfold around them like a familiar film. They sat on the steps of their homes, or—like the large woman who was now gaping at Serguey as she sipped brown-sugared water with a cat curled up by her swollen ankles—they swung on a rocking chair, grim-faced and forbearing, hoping for something, anything, to distract them from the repetitious nature of existence in the entrails of a communist nation.

In the corner of Herrera and Milagros stood la casa de los muchos. Its foundation was slightly elevated, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped with thick spikes, some of which were missing. The lawn was well-kept. The walkway consisted of concrete slabs laid in a zigzagging pattern. The yellow-painted exterior, though admittedly in bad taste, had no visible chips or scratches. Rumors alleged that between twelve and fourteen people shared the house’s three bedrooms and two bathrooms. How they maintained the home in such good condition was as big a mystery as the family name. Everyone simply called them los muchos, the many, after an infamous gang in the municipality of El Cerro.

In all the years he walked by this intersection, Serguey hadn’t seen a single person entering or exiting the place. Los muchos might as well have been ghosts. He and Kiko never dared to snoop around. There was a story of a young boy who’d thrown a rock at the door, only to be chased by six muchos of different ages and sexes. He’d been caught two blocks down and dragged by his hair back to the house in humiliation so he could retrieve the rock and take it with him. Others said that it’d been three people, not six, and that the boy wasn’t brought back but instead beaten with a jump rope until he got away.

Closer to his father’s residence—number 709 on Herrera—the homes weren’t as enigmatic. Serguey knew exactly who lived in each and, for the majority, the stories contained within their walls. To his right was Francisco and Magalys’s two-story house. The first floor had a garage, where Francisco stored his company’s Toyota van, and a game room, highlighted by a foosball table. He and Magalys, now in their sixties, didn’t have any children. Francisco worked for an Italian corporation that helped finance the construction of hotels in Cuba. Magalys was employed as secretary for the director of a clothing distributing company out of Panama, a Muslim man Magalys had nicknamed “Ahmed the Sultan.”

The couple liked to host their poorer nephews and nieces from Alamar. One of them, Carlito, sometimes invited the neighborhood children to play video games behind the garage. In addition to the foosball table, Francisco owned two color TVs, a VHS player, a Sega system, an Atari 2600, and an impressive collection of board games. No one else in Havana seemed to have such a bounty. Serguey and Kiko kept an eye out for visitors at Francisco’s during the summer, knowing Carlito would occasionally stay with their uncle and aunt for weeks at a time. Even little Victor had joined in the fun.

Farther down, almost at the end of the block, was José El Bola, an old, crusty-skinned man with a bulging goiter on his neck. José slept in a shed encased by large tin sheets, which he had turned into walls. He sat perpetually on a wooden chair by his front door, smoking previously discarded cigarettes from a stash he’d put together. José had also wrangled up stray dogs and took care of them in his yard. Once a day, at about 5:00 p.m., he released them. The animals ran like maniacs around the block for a good quarter of an hour, knocking over cans and trampling the few weeds the children hadn’t yanked, before returning to their owner at the sound of a whistle. The children screamed and laughed, climbing onto porches and up trees, not out of fear but rather looking to entertain themselves, pretending the dogs were dangerous. Whenever José forgot his routine, one could hear the agitated animals slamming and scraping their paws against the tin sheets.

José sold guava pies for a living. They almost always had ants crawling in and out of the crust. Serguey had eaten the pies a couple of times. They weren’t bad. You just had to break the pastry and make sure no ants were stuck to the filling.

“What do you do when the pies have too many ants?” Kiko asked José once.

The old man went into his shed and returned with a large plastic bag full of crumpled pies. “The dogs love them.”

The brothers ascended the stairs to their father’s porch. The second step was still chipped in the shape of a very small, upside down Italy. This was the same chip Serguey had been gazing at the week of his fourteenth birthday—on what was then about to become an extraordinary night—while he waited for some friend or another. Felipe was in bed with a migraine, Victor somewhere in the house mesmerized by the flaring screen of a Nintendo Game Boy. Serguey had gotten it in a week-long trade with a classmate, giving him a photographed version of the Kama Sutra, which Felipe kept between a large hardcover Bible and a set of outdated encyclopedias on a bottom shelf. Victor had begged Serguey for the Gameboy so persistently, he agreed to lend it to him on just the second night. The street was empty. Neighbors were holed up in their homes—shedding the misery of their day by scooping water from a bucket and dumping it on their heads—before jaunting out for some cool-breezed banter. As if out of a fog, a girl in a tube top and Lycra shorts walked up to Serguey. He had seen her saunter by for the past few days, but he had no idea who she was. In the poor lighting of Felipe’s porch, she introduced herself as Yusimí and asked him if he had a girlfriend. He said no (Anabel had yet to enter this particular frame of his life). Yusimí’s skin, as he recalled it now, was like Alida’s, but her eyes were an intimidating dark green.

“I’ve looked at you a few times,” she said, her voice devoid of excitement or seduction, “and I think you’re the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen.” She extended her hand. Serguey’s heart was hammering the scraggy bones in his chest. He feared that its feral beating would show through his plain T-shirt. He presented his hand floppily, wishing to possess the courage to say something suave, to rise above her on the steps and avidly stare down at her green eyes.

It turned out he didn’t have to. She led him to the pitch-black gap between Felipe’s house and the next. She pulled down his pants and asked, “Is this okay?”

He nodded absurdly, unable to see her face just inches from his, then said like a wisp of smoke, “Yes.”

She began to stroke his penis, his erection stiffening quickly. “You’re a man now,” she whispered, again and again, then asked him to warn her when he was about to finish.

Seconds later, he did, and she took him in her mouth. He grasped at the porous cement wall, almost fainting, the aching pressure in his buttocks and prodigious sensation in his penis causing a slight bending of his knees.

Yusimí stood, released a wet moan, and said, “Was I the first?”

He nodded, and she walked off swathed in a bout of giggling laughter.

Days later, after failing to see her around the neighborhood, Serguey heard the friend with whom he’d traded the Kama Sutra brag about losing his virginity to a Yusimí. “She called me a man,” the boy said with a stupefied grin, which, to Serguey, was the most hideous thing he’d ever witnessed. It was this fragment of the memory that greeted him as he planted his foot on the miniature shape of upside down Italy, which, looking closer at it, had lost its Sicily.

He had told Anabel about the encounter, though in that version he’d rebuffed Yusimí’s advances. Anabel had shared similar stories about naïve sexual excursions with boys in her block, but nothing as explicit as what Serguey had experienced. Had she lied too? Did she have anything like these porch steps, paved with graphic memories? One day, he told himself, he would tell her the true story.

He unlatched the small gate and swung it open. Victor overtook him, keys in hand. The history of this house Serguey knew best. It had belonged to Felipe’s father, Joaquin Blanco, a sculptor and art professor before the Revolution. Joaquin had served fourteen months in an internment camp alongside writers, musicians, architects, and professors in the late 1960s, for declining to participate in a government project to propagate communist-inspired artwork throughout Havana. While at the camp, he contracted hepatitis and never really recovered. He died a few years later, when Felipe was only fifteen.

Felipe hadn’t told his sons how he truly felt about his own father’s death. Once, as Victor lay asleep next to him while in the living room Felipe and a few artist friends drank from a bottle of mint-flavored alcohol—the smell of which had invaded the house like imported toothpaste could overtake the inside of Serguey’s mouth—Serguey heard his father say, quite solemnly, that Joaquin’s passing had been “preventable.” A young Serguey hadn’t been able to pin down who or what exactly Felipe was blaming, but now he was convinced that it’d been the government. The newly implemented communist system had placed Joaquin in a precarious, unmerited situation. Mistakes had been made after the Revolution: even Fidel Castro agreed to this in an interview, admitting that the camps had been an error, though the words crime and gulag, which those familiar with the conditions used to describe them, didn’t come close to absconding The Commander-in-Chief’s lips. The tragedy didn’t lie in Joaquin’s debilitating hepatitis but rather in the unnecessarily cruel treatment of people who saw things differently, who wanted to be true to their politics in a time of uncertain change. Where most would compromise or assent, Joaquin had been steadfast. Serguey interpreted all of this from the other thing Felipe had said that night about his father: “He had balls the size of a bull’s, the kind I wish I had.” Serguey had rarely heard his father speak such plainly vulgar language to describe people, least of all a loved one.

Felipe also chose not to speak at length about these events with him or Victor. He preferred to focus on Joaquin’s artistic life, on what he saw as the man’s legacy. He described him as a virtuoso with his hands, capable of molding anything into a beautiful sculpture.

“He saw what others couldn’t,” he liked to say in his more melancholy moments. “Can you imagine having such a gift? I work with other people’s words, with someone else’s vision. He was pure. His work was truly his own.”

These were the only instances in which Serguey saw the pompous, proud Felipe refer to his own work as inferior, as somewhat unworthy: when he was comparing himself to his father.

Serguey suspected (and the arrest had intensified this suspicion) that his father had always wanted, to some extent, to embody Joaquin. As a young playwright and professor, Felipe had published two controversial papers lamenting the pervasive presence of Socialist Realism in the arts. He called for a more fluid relationship between politics and theater. The result, he argued, would be a broader, more diverse role for theater in Cuba. Playwrights and directors could offer an array of methods and topics to help shape the island’s artistic identity, unburdened by the inherent limitations of political views. It had been a risky endeavor, considering that Joaquin’s history could influence cultural authorities to tag Felipe an ideological threat to the nation. But Felipe, unlike his father, had been tactful and conciliatory. In the tone of his essays, he was careful not to ruffle any feathers, especially when it came to the government. He credited the advantages of practicing theater in a country whose system made it easily available to the masses, and described himself as indebted to such a system. He had been measured and cynical and passively academic. Serguey questioned whether Felipe had grown tired of assenting, whether—at age fifty—he had finally decided to be type of bull Joaquin had been.

From his abbreviated interactions with his father, in which an inebriated Felipe was always willing to reminisce more freely, Serguey had learned important details about his family’s history. These conversations caused him to conclude that Joaquin’s death had, in fact, set in motion a series of events ultimately leading to the death of Serguey and Victor’s mother.

Serguey’s grandmother, Maria Estela, a seamstress whose religious family left the country the minute the word “socialism” escaped Fidel’s mouth, struggled to make ends meet after Joaquin’s death, while Felipe continued his education. On more than one occasion she considered selling several of Joaquin’s belongings, but Felipe wouldn’t let her. He saw his father’s possessions as a goldmine of memories. He was attached to them in a way that Serguey had never been to either of his own parents’ things. On the tenth anniversary of Joaquin’s death, while taking flowers to the cemetery, Maria Estela was hit by a bus and died instantly. By then, a woman named Irene had moved into the house with Felipe. She was pregnant with Serguey.

Felipe vehemently swore, to anyone with the gall to imply the contrary, that this was not the reason why he married her, that they were deeply in love.

In his bedroom, Felipe had placed—next to a photograph of himself, Irene, and the children at a playground in Lenin Park—a black-and-white picture of his mother, a close-up of her unassuming face and shoulders, with a tiny cross hanging below the crevice of her neck. Joaquin was nowhere to be found on the nightstand. Felipe had other ideas for his father: he’d hung an enlarged picture of him above the headboard, making it the first thing people saw upon entering the room. In the imposing photograph, Joaquin was hunched over his workstation. His fingers and the hairs on his arms were caked in mud or paint. His head sloped downward, his eyes peering over thick-rimmed glasses at the indecipherable shape of a sculpture-in-progress. This was the god his father had decided to worship. This had been, from the very start, what doomed Felipe and Irene’s marriage.

Serguey and Victor’s mother was a strong-willed woman, but she never saw Herrera 709 as her own. Felipe refused to let go of his father’s possessions, his fervor deepened by his own mother’s passing. The living room was flanked by Joaquin’s favorite works, some of them nude women who—according to Irene—seemed to stare deridingly at her. (Serguey remembered her covering the statues’ heads with dishcloths while she cleaned the living room.) With Joaquin’s book collection neatly organized in two huge cases along the wall, there was little space for Irene to decorate. She had to turn down the furniture that her uncle, a carpenter, offered as a wedding gift. Irene and Felipe slept in Joaquin’s bed, used his dresser and nightstands, sat on his sofa, and ate dinner at his dinner table. Every night, she had to face that large photograph, a reminder that, in this house, art always took precedent.

Once Felipe’s writing career began to take off, loneliness gradually consumed her. Six-year-old Serguey and three-year-old Victor were her only company. During her evening walks around the neighborhood, when she would push Victor in a stroller, she developed a relationship with a neighbor’s son. He was an amiable and flirtatious young man, temporarily staying at his parents’ near the end of the block, two homes down from José El Bola. The man’s name was Raidel. Serguey hated it, especially the singsong way his mother would say it. Thanks to his father’s connections, Raidel had been appointed as a funeral director at age twenty-nine. Death was a part of life, he sometimes said, as if that were profound. But it seemed to work on Irene. She started an affair with him. She would leave Serguey and Victor in Raidel’s parents’ living room, telling them that they—the adults—would be in the bedroom discussing the details of his work, which the boys were too young to listen to. She carried on with the affair for months before she told Felipe she wanted a divorce.

“The entire neighborhood knew,” Felipe told his sons years later. “I was so wrapped up in my plays that I genuinely thought they were just friends.” Here he laughed the most absurd laugh Serguey had ever heard. “The handful of times I talked to the guy, I actually liked him.”

On a rainy morning, Serguey remembered, his mother had taken him and Victor to their new home—to Raidel’s home. After hugging his sons and telling them he’d see them soon, Felipe had sat at his typewriter, clad despondently in his underwear, slamming away at the keys. His body, Serguey could see, tensed and shuddered as if under electric shock. He didn’t acknowledge Irene while she nudged the boys out of the house.

“This isn’t easy for me,” she told him from the threshold. He continued typing, and even at his young age Serguey knew that, despite the lack of words, his father’s non-reaction had been its own form of response.

As they walked up to the car, Victor started sobbing—silently, sedately—wishing to avoid attention. Irene swung the backdoor open, and Victor clung to Serguey’s hand, tugging at it slightly.

“He doesn’t want to go,” Serguey said, or later recalled himself saying.

“Get in.” Irene’s weary stare implored her eldest son to help her. Nodding, she said, “This isn’t easy for me,” as if he could understand this better than his father.

Victor didn’t resist when Serguey led him into the boxy vehicle.

“Did he make a show?” Raidel asked, glimpsing at the boys. For some time Serguey erroneously thought that he’d been referring to Victor.

“Just go,” Irene said.

The clouds and downpour did not relent. The wipers streaked the foggy windshield with every swipe, the sound of which seemed to soothe Victor’s crying. Rain stuck to the top of Irene’s cotton-like, brown hair. Serguey was so bewildered by the strangeness of the moment that he simply gazed at the back of his mother’s head, water from her hair sliding down the passenger seat. He waited for her to turn around, to change her mind.

She never did. Instead she repeatedly took Raidel’s hand after he switched gears.

The period they resided at the man’s home was foggier than any of Serguey’s dreams. He remembered it in snippets: their mattresses were hard, and Raidel forbade standing or jumping on them; if Victor peed his bed, Raidel placed a large plastic cover underneath him the following night (the friction gave Victor rashes, which Irene then treated with talcum powder); the next door neighbor, a decrepit woman whose window was always agape, owned a small dog who barked constantly and only stopped when its owner yelled, “Muchi, you’ll be the death of me!”

Irene never expressed any doubts about the move. She had no idea that her new boyfriend would stab her to death within a year in a drunken rage—in front of her sons—while screaming that she was an adulterer and a whore.

Serguey and Victor saw Irene gasp for air like a goldfish, blood pooling under and around her body. Muchi, the crazy lady’s dog, yapped and whimpered two walls away while the boys cried. Finally, neighbors came and took them. A black woman, who occasionally gave little bags of hard candy to Irene for her sons, kept screaming, “Hang that desgraciao!” For some hours Serguey actually believed, in his shock and confusion, that someone had tied a noose around Raidel’s neck and dangled him from a tree, as he’d once seen in a Western movie.

It did, in fact, take three days for the police to find Raidel. He was asleep on someone’s roof by a dove coop, his mouth severely blistered by exposure and excessive intake of alcohol, a block away from the funeral home he managed.

The tragic nature of existence, Serguey had heard someone say, is that we repeat history despite the warnings. In the legal community, precedent mattered for a reason. It was a sign of things to come. In regards to family, Serguey was no stranger to what might lie ahead with his father. He was no stranger to the possibility and subsequent realization of loss. “Try losing your mother when you’re seven,” he had always wanted to say if questioned. Now that he thought about it, Victor had been four. Serguey remembered trying to understand what it must have been like for his brother, how the discovery of death had come too damn early for him. He remembered thinking about it infrequently, images of his mother’s body, the adults’ copious tears, sitting in a room with Victor while listening to a psychologist with a hideous beard, asking them about where they thought their mother was now. They were memories too visceral for rational thought to prevail.

At the time of Irene’s death, Serguey internalized the pain of losing her, thinking only of pleasant moments as if they were tokens, like something stashed under a pillow. Kids at school asked about her death, hoping for gruesome details, but he and Victor refused to speak about it, even among themselves. Victor got into his share of scuffles with boys who’d say “tu madre!” as a way to offend him. Throughout the years, Serguey repelled the desire most people get to explore their family’s past. He chose to look forward, a decision that was solidified after meeting Anabel at age sixteen. His memory of Felipe and Irene as a couple was hazy and bleak. Serguey didn’t recall his parents kissing passionately. He hadn’t walked in on them making love—as he had done with his mother and Raidel on a night Victor had wet the bed—or seen his father snuggle close to her at the movies. He remembered Felipe chiefly for his absence, showing up late with a friend to discuss edits on a play, missing birthdays, dinners. What exactly Irene must have felt in her isolation, he couldn’t imagine—he had been too young to know her well enough for that. But he understood, despite the horrific consequences, why she left the house.

Felipe had reassured the boys he loved their mother to the end, despite everything that had transpired, despite her betrayal. He cried when she passed, he said, although the boys hadn’t seen him do it. One of the tragedies of life, he also told them (tragedy became the operative word for anyone referring to Irene’s murder: family, neighbors, police) is that no matter how hard we fight it, there are things we cannot control. It’s part of the excitement and the fear. It’s what makes us care for everything a little more, because we don’t know when we’ll lose it. On his more nostalgic days, he’d quote Shakespeare, spellbinding the boys with the sound of the words, not explaining their meaning.

Serguey remembered their home taking on a lively atmosphere following the last session with the child psychologist, when Felipe told his sons they had to turn the page toward a new life, cherishing the positive memories of their mother. During weekends, instead of making good on a weekday promise of a trip to the beach or the zoo, Felipe hosted dinner parties for his colleagues. People acted out scenes from their favorite plays and made fun of the obtuse administrators at the cultural centers where they worked. Once in a while someone would bring an acoustic guitar and play Nueva Trova songs. Felipe, however, rarely let his boys be a part of the celebrations, which made the few times he allowed them to remain particularly notable. Serguey recalled the laughter, the smoke snaking up from the ashtrays, he and his brother dancing for the crowd. These moments had washed over the otherwise dull, solitary lives they led under their father’s supervision.

As with Felipe’s current predicament, he hadn’t wanted to involve his sons in his personal affairs. During their childhood, he had given them fleeting kisses on the head, dismissive sighs at their misbehavior, quick waves of the hand in the mornings. He had, very seldom, shown them books, paintings, played them music—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Picasso’s Guernica, Bola de Nieve’s “Ay Mama Inés”—but he never related them to their actual lives, never linked what he shared to their daily struggle of growing up motherless. It was as if he believed that exposing young boys to art would be curative and edifying on its own. He never discussed his own work, either, not in the dim light of their bedroom or the ash-ridden air engulfing his writing desk, intimate places where their young minds would have been perceptive, prone to remember. He reserved himself—the vulnerable Felipe, the thoughtful and authoritative Felipe—for his circle of artist friends, for the stage he directed. Serguey and Victor had spent their lives watching like intrigued spectators, wondering about this figure that was their father.

Victor unlocked the front door, and they entered. The living room was too dark for such an early time in the day. The bookcases were still there, though the books were missing. A couple of shelves had slid off their supports, forming a triangle with the shelves below. The sculptures of naked women were scattered on the floor, their heads and legs broken off. State Security hadn’t just toppled them—they’d demolished them. The walls felt bare, rectangular lines of dust marking where the frames had been, like a looted museum.

“The paintings too?” Serguey said.

“Those fuckers,” Victor muttered.

The brothers tiptoed around the shattered statues into the kitchen. The fridge had been plundered. It smelled of stale ice and fish.

“At least they kept it plugged in,” Serguey said.

They began the search in Felipe’s bedroom. All the pictures were gone. It wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility, Serguey considered, for the authorities to use Joaquin’s framed photograph as evidence that Felipe admired a former counterrevolutionary. It wouldn’t matter that the image was of one of the people who’d brought him into this world. If anything, the connection made the evidence more convincing: Felipe was just like his father.

The mattress and box spring were leaned against the wall. They’d been gutted in several places. Pieces of dirty cotton were strewn here and there, rendering the air viscous and allergenic. Victor tripped on a drawer and cursed. Serguey felt a fit of sneezing coming on. The mirror had been detached from the dresser and smashed on the floor. The closet doors were open, mounds of clothes disgorged as if from a torn sack. The light was still on in the bathroom. The contents of the medicine cabinet had been dropped on the sink. Some of the bottles had broken, leaking their guts into the drain. There was a powerful odor—a mix of alcohol, ammonia, and cherry—exuding from it.

“You didn’t tell me it was this bad,” Serguey said. “We’re not going to find anything.”

“We should at least pick everything up and clean a little. We might get lucky. I got a mop in my apartment.”

“You’re right.” Serguey sneezed into his own hands. “If all we can have is the appearance of dignity, so be it.”

“I don’t care about dignity. I just can’t be tripping over all this shit every time I walk in here.”

“If Dad’s locked up for a while, you’re going to be in charge of the house.”

“I don’t know what ideas you got in your head, Serguey, but this place will never be mine. I don’t want it.”

“I don’t believe that.”

Victor exhaled and curled his mouth to one side. “Please follow me so I can give you a broom.”

His place was dark and stuffy. He’d built it as an addendum to the house with the help of a friend and the proceeds from the sale of cases of stolen booze. Serguey had bought a couple of bottles himself through Felipe.

“To assist in the cause,” he had told his father.

The bottles he gave to Gimenez.

Felipe had insisted that Victor stay in the house’s second room, but Victor wanted more privacy. As a result, Felipe turned the space into a guest room, though as far as Victor was aware, it was rare that anyone actually slept there: stacks of posters advertising Felipe’s plays had hijacked the bed.

Serguey had twice been inside Victor’s diminutive apartment, but as he walked in now he barely recognized it. The modern furniture, the scent of vanilla candles, the low ceiling and narrow layout: they were slightly strange, like his brother’s facial expressions. An acoustic guitar hung on the far wall. African-themed ornaments lined a bar counter that Victor had thrown into the design at the last minute. “One of my proudest achievements,” he said the first time Serguey visited. “How many people can say in this part of Havana that they have a bar in their living room?” The African figurine in the middle had a small body with a large penis aiming upward at a 45-degree angle. “I sometimes stir the guests’ drinks with it,” Victor had joked then, too. These things Serguey did remember, and as he did, the place felt more familiar.

“Smells good,” he said.

Victor was struggling to retrieve the broom and mop from the slender cavity between his fridge and the wall. “I always keep a candle going,” he shouted back, “in case a lady stops by. I have to enhance the experience, give a strong first impression. I don’t have a big home, you know.”

Take away the pleasant scent, Serguey thought, the cutesy bar and the exotic ornaments, and this was a clammy cave. A hideout. A tacky addition to a complicated past. Complete detachment is what Serguey had sought and achieved. His home had plenty of light and brisk air. More importantly, it was not an extension of anything. After all, Gimenez wasn’t family.

“No television?” he asked Victor.

“I have a portable DVD player. I keep it tucked away.”

“Has it gotten that bad in the neighborhood?”

“It’s gotten bad everywhere.” Victor emerged from the kitchen, broom and mop at either side, like lances. Sweat was starting to drip from his forehead. “It just takes longer in your neck of the woods.”

“You’re lucky they didn’t trash your place.”

“They went through it, but I guess they didn’t have it in for me as they did with Dad.”

Serguey lifted the African figurine and aimed its penis at his brother. “Looks like they barely touched it.”

Victor took a quick gander around the apartment. “I fixed it up a bit before I went to see you. I’m lucky I didn’t have any merchandise, but something tells me they wouldn’t have cared about it.”

“DVD players are not under the State Security’s jurisdiction.” Serguey put down the figurine. “That’s more local police.”

Victor stuck out his bottom lip and huffed, foolishly attempting to get rid of the sweat. “I don’t remember you being this funny.”

“I don’t remember you ever cleaning anything. You take the mop. I got the broom.”

They spent the next hour picking up the mess and cleaning the floors. Serguey opened the windows to let the sunlight cast its bright warmth on the old house. As they toiled, Serguey searched for anything that the State Security guys might have missed: a book, a piece of paper, a postcard.

He found nothing.

Inevitably, with all that was missing, the house felt incomplete. The living room was studded with empty stands. Serguey put the statues’ remains in a box. The government looters had had their way. What better method to dissuade people from straying into the foggy terrain of dissidence? The trade-off was categorical: dissent, and forgo everything you’ve ever owned. Their entire childhood—the house where a hyperactive Victor constantly bumped into furniture and stumbled over blocks of paper, where Serguey stared at paintings for long stretches, hoping to see if the people and objects in them moved, where he and his brother chased and swiped at their father’s cigarette smoke as it floated like a genie fleeing a bottle—it had started to crumble. Serguey couldn’t help momentarily regretting the distance he had created for himself. As he sat at the edge of his father’s sofa, some of him wished he and Victor could be children again, roaming inside the house like curious animals. To amuse Felipe’s friends, Victor would stroke the statues’ breasts and flick their nipples, cackling like a madman to disguise his embarrassment. Serguey impressed everyone by reciting numerous titles in Grandpa Joaquin’s book collection, which he memorized like the countries in Felipe’s globe. (The globe had been discarded after Victor knocked it over, cracking a chunk of the Sahara Desert and the Middle East.)

Now that the house was quiet and he was older, everything seemed smaller. He wondered how so many people had come together without destroying the furniture, which looked used and scraped, but with presentable character. Felipe would have probably said “with a sense of depth, of ancestry.” He’d certainly had his way: this was an artist’s home. The playwright’s house, as people in the neighborhood had called it. Serguey had no idea if that was still the case. He glanced at his brother. Victor was fidgeting with the broom and mop, trying to get them to stay put against the wall. Serguey questioned whether he’d ever possessed anything resembling Victor’s cackling laughter to hide his own embarrassment—the embarrassment that now overtook him for not knowing, for having removed himself so effectively from his past.

Victor hurled the broom and mop onto the floor and wiped the sweat from his forehead. His brother suffered from what Felipe called “profuse perspiration.” Any kind of physical activity ended with a soaked shirt and a dribble from his chin like a broken faucet. It’d begun at the worst possible period: Victor’s early teenage years. The first time Serguey brought Anabel home—both of them sixteen and Victor only thirteen—Victor had been racing with his friends for some hours around the block. As he trotted into the house, his drenched T-shirt over his shoulder and his face engulfed in sweat, Anabel giggled at the sight.

“Is this your little brother?” she said.

Serguey grinned. “The one and only.”

“Were you swimming or something?” she asked Victor.

Victor’s sunburned skin turned even redder. He hesitated for a second before scooping a handful of sweat from his neck and flinging it at his brother, who recoiled and cursed. Anabel shrieked with laughter.

“Ask your boyfriend,” Victor told her as he walked past them.

Victor had been a lot skinnier then, though crude and brash already. He took off his T-shirt now and swabbed his head and chest with it. He’d grown a lot more muscular, as if his body had caught up with his attitude.

“You’ve been working out?” Serguey asked.

“For five years. You like what you see?”

“You’re the muscles and I’m the brain.”

“Whatever you got to tell yourself. I’m going to fry a couple of eggs and warm up some leftover rice so we can have lunch. I’m starving.”

Serguey stretched his arms on the sofa’s backrest. “You’re cleaning, you’re cooking, you’re working out.”

“And you’re talking shit.” Victor pitched the dirty shirt at his brother. “Bring Dad’s fan from the bedroom. I can’t eat with this heat.”

A few minutes later, they were sitting at the dinner table, clanking their spoons against the bottom of their plates. The fan rattled like an engine behind them.

“How old is that fucking thing?” Victor said.

“You live here. You should know.”

“I think it was Grandpa’s.”

“It was.”

With his mouth full, Victor said, “I forgot to give you a fork. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“This is fine. Anabel’s the one who prefers a fork.”

Victor smiled condescendingly, flashing pieces of food on his teeth. Serguey took one last bite and placed the spoon on the table. Victor gulped down the remaining water in his glass, then drank Serguey’s.

“Give me your stuff so I can drop it in the sink,” he said. “I’ll wash it later.”

Serguey lifted his plate. “Man, you’re ready for marriage.”

Victor exhaled disdainfully. He seemed prepared to retaliate, but the phone started ringing. He waited for his brother’s reaction.

“I’ll get it,” Serguey said.

They hurried toward the living room. Serguey picked up the receiver.

“Felipe?” a fraught voice said on the other side of the line. “Felipe?”

“Who’s this?” Serguey said.

“Victor?” the voice said.

“It’s Serguey. Who’s this?”

“Oh. Do they still have him? Is your dad in prison?”

Serguey raised his eyes at Victor. His brother shook his head, indicating he had no guess as to who it could be.

“What are you talking about?” Serguey spat into the phone.

“Please just tell me if he’s still in prison.”

“Either you tell me who you are or I’m hanging up.”

The voice sighed. “They still have him, don’t they?”

Serguey lowered his tone. “Mario, is that you?”

“Let me talk to him,” Victor said, snatching the receiver from Serguey. “Hello. Hello!”

Victor continued yelling, his fingers choking the handle, but the line was already dead.