CHAPTER 16

They were losing natural light, so Victor flicked on the porch lamp, showering the space in bright yellow. Yunior had been true to his word: he’d brought a bucket, which Victor filled with soaped water, a small can of paint remover, and two sponges. Serguey was given the job of cleaning the egg mess using a throwaway rag. He was surprised to see how little Yunior and Victor spoke as they scrubbed the paint off the wall. They toiled with care and precision, their arms tightening and expanding like unrelenting machines. Their bones, muscles, and veins seemed to pulsate in unison. Serguey snuck glances at Yunior—his nose and cheeks, and maybe the shape of his head, too, a reminder of Norton.

Though, under these circumstances, he should welcome the quiet, Serguey felt an increasing tension, as if every moment that passed without acknowledging Yunior’s generosity would deter the man’s willingness to help. The rolled-up newspaper jutted from his back pocket, bending in a way that refuted Victor’s theory of a knife. It was this sight: the folded wad of paper, that made Serguey believe he should speak.

“I knew your grandfather,” he said.

Yunior continued scrubbing the wall, and Serguey worried that he’d made a mistake, but to say nothing else didn’t feel right. Victor hadn’t looked at him, which was a good sign.

“My buddy Kiko and I used to get baseball scores from him.”

“Yeah,” Yunior said. “A lot of people knew my grandfather.”

Serguey detected no reproach or annoyance. “I was sorry to hear he passed.”

Yunior stopped working and scratched his face with the nook of his elbow. “He was old. Went out on his own terms. All that cigar smoking got to him.”

Serguey had seen a cigar in Norton’s mouth on some occasions, but it was not the first thing he associated with the old man.

“When I went to see him at the hospital,” Yunior continued, “toward the end, he looked nothing like himself. My mother let me in the room for only a minute. He was wheezing bad. Fucking tubes sticking out of his nose.” Yunior mimed the tubes with the hand holding the sponge, dripping soaked up paint on his shoes, but he didn’t seem to mind. His pupils peered into the bucket near Serguey’s feet. “He finally looked his age. Worse than his age, I’d say.” Here he started cleaning again. “I ain’t going out like that. I rather it’d be my liver or my heart than my lungs.”

Victor took a glimpse at Serguey and pressed his lips. All right, he was saying, don’t get him started.

They worked for another twenty minutes without stopping. They were covered in sweat, their heightened breaths combining to form a rhythmic flow. Serguey had spent too much time in offices. Despite feeling physically tired, there was something refreshing about manual labor, about seeing immediate results. Up-close, one could see faded smidgens of red, but overall they had done a good job. As they stood back and beheld the wall and door, Serguey had the sense that they’d reclaimed something, a restoration to the way things should be. Cleaning the apartment was a mere vanity act for him and Anabel, all for the sake of proper appearance. This was more than that. It was a refusal to submit. This home was theirs: fuck whoever had tried to deface it.

“You should paint the entire outside of the house,” Yunior said. “I can get you what you need for it.”

Maybe he had searched for his in-laws’ refrigerator paint in the wrong places, Serguey thought.

“My dad has final say on that,” Victor said.

“Maybe you can do it as a gift, for when he gets out.”

Victor forced a chuckle. “Maybe.” He shook Yunior’s hand, neither men worried about the residue of paint and chemicals on their skin. “I’d buy you some jama, but my brother and I gotta get some stuff done for tomorrow.”

Yunior bobbed his head appreciatively. “No worries. I got dinner waiting at home. Just don’t forget about me, like you said the other day.”

Serguey and Victor observed from the porch as Yunior dumped the soiled water on a plot of dirt a couple of houses down, dropped the sponges into the bucket, and walked with a slight hop in his step, the newspaper still drooping from his back pocket.

“His cousin got a job at a paint warehouse,” Victor said. “If you need some, he can get you a good price.”

“I thought you said he was a shit talker.”

“He is, but usually not with me.”

“You should’ve let him eat with us, then.”

“I know, but he drinks a lot when he eats, and I’m running low on beer.”

After dinner, the brothers read over Serguey’s statement for the video. Serguey recurrently probed his brother’s opinion—unsure as to what sounded too general, too confusing, too obtuse. To Victor, the whole thing was enormously harsh. He recommended that it be more emotionally descriptive, more relatable.

“You want people to be moved by it.”

“Is that what Kiko told you?” an irritated Serguey asked.

“He might’ve mentioned it.”

He made some edits, but he told Victor that he intended to come across as fairly provocative. He’d mulled it over, and tiptoeing around the situation would accomplish nothing. “I want people to know Dad’s worth helping,” he said, “that his family’s on his side. Unless they release him, he won’t get a chance to talk, so we have to do it for him.”

By midnight they had the final draft of their testimony. Victor retired to his apartment while Serguey lay in his father’s bed. The box spring creaked the same notes it had years before, when he and Victor pretended it was a boat lost in the middle of raging seas. Victor’s feet had tangled once with the sheets, which they employed as sails, as he fell overboard. He’d split his lip upon hitting the floor.

Felipe said afterwards, “No more sails. Use imaginary oars.”

Serguey imagined himself living in this house, sleeping nightly on this bed. He felt like a stranger. The sensation he experienced after cleaning the porch had receded, gone from him like a tide that leaves your feet trapped in the sand. He was stuck in the house, in this bed. The familiarity of the objects around him didn’t purge his alienation. He thought of Toya’s words, the one piece of advice he could in fact use—to embrace—and he tried doing just that. He gazed at the wall to the right of the bedroom door, at the sooty silhouette of a frame. The painting that used to hang there, a fine reproduction of Fidelio Ponce de Leon’s The Children, had fascinated him without end. He’d been mesmerized by its texture, by the eerie semblance the image had to his dreams. He would stare at it sometimes, picturing the thick brushstrokes, one swooping stroke after another. His father told him that Fidelio had applied them dexterously, masterfully, forming dark layers, making it hauntingly alive with movement, the wind practically visible on the children’s clothes.

Serguey had wanted to touch them, but Felipe forbade it, afraid he might ruin the painting.

“The man died prematurely of tuberculosis,” his father reasoned. “He didn’t go to Europe or study with any masters like his contemporaries. He did it his own way and ended up a misunderstood alcoholic. We must respect his work.”

One day, seeing Serguey entranced yet again by it, Felipe approached from behind and hoisted him inches from the painting. From this viewpoint, the image was much more haunting. The expressions on the children’s faces looked aghast and nightmarish. The brushstrokes could be easily traced, streaks that burrowed and swelled in miniscule detail.

“Softly,” Felipe said. “Just once.”

Serguey ran his juddering index finger across the bottom, where the painting seemed thickest. It felt smooth and dry.

Felipe lowered him and said, “It’s a reproduction. Not the real thing. And don’t dare tell Victor you touched it. He’s already broken two of your grandfather’s statues.”

He was Felipe’s favorite, Serguey had to admit. Victor had been more attached to Irene. Unfortunately, he had lost her before memory and cognizance could take hold. Maybe this was why Serguey was being punished. Life made sense that way. He’d been given the easier childhood, the easier adolescence, the easier beginning to adulthood—all an effective antidote to a dead mother and aloof father.

Victor lived inside an ever-present reminder that he was the least favored child.

There had been plenty of times when the only sound inside the house was Felipe’s typewriter. Serguey remembered joking about it to Anabel—as though it were just an anecdotal detail—the first time they watched The Shining together. Did Felipe spend time at his typewriter now, or had the writing duties been passed on to Mario completely? Could Victor still hear his father through the wall from the adjacent apartment, the click-clack they had left behind as Irene led them from their home to Raidel’s car?

Sinking deeper into his ruminations, his body feeling heavy on the bed, Serguey remembered Victor being hesitant to race inside the house for fear that Felipe might discipline him. Serguey pictured his little brother carefully pushing their bedroom door open, Felipe’s hammering of the typewriter invading the room with its monotonous, nonsensical language. Victor would bend his front knee forward, the sole of his foot firmly planted on the floor. The other leg he stretched back, anchored on the toes, his heel in the air quivering twice their father’s typing speed. He was like a runner eternally on the verge of sprinting. He stayed like that until Irene came to get him. She carried him in her arms as she cooked, her hair wrapped in a headscarf. She let him taste the food and laughed when he made a face. She let Serguey try things too, if he went to the kitchen, but Serguey had his homework, his Rubik’s cube, his coloring books. It was Victor who needed his mother to keep him from running, to make him forget that he wanted to run in the first place.

After Irene’s death, Victor took to racing inside the house. He no longer idled by the door, but rather shot out like a cannon at will, which led to the broken globe and shattered statues. Maybe he was rebelling against the previous restrictions, but it was more likely that, at his age, he was simply acting out. Felipe wasn’t a violent man, not even an unreasonable man. He allowed Victor to run, as a father should a motherless child. He wasn’t negligent, either. He punished Victor after he broke things, locking him in the bedroom, but always for less time than he would initially indicate.

To Serguey he gave tasks. The eldest son could be trusted with those. At Felipe’s request, he’d scurry to the local bodega to buy a box of cigarettes, back when Serguey barely knew how to count. Serguey lingered on that box of cigarettes for a moment, seeing it clear as day next to his father’s typewriter, surrounded by ash and fingerprint-smeared sheets of paper. When they were older, Victor stole a pack once (maybe it was more than once, but Serguey was only aware of this one instance) and sold it at half-price to a neighbor. Felipe checked the inside of their mouths and made them stick out their tongues.

“You ask, you don’t steal,” he said. “Stealing is cowardly unless it’s out of necessity. Last time I checked, you don’t need more than you already have.”

That same night he took the boys out to the movies and bought them pirulis, thin caramel cones on a stick, while he bought himself another pack.

That’d been a good day.

At some juncture, Serguey concluded that his father’s biggest flaw wasn’t his narcissism, though it could, at its peak, feel unbearable. It was how he had chosen to deal with the family drama through his work and not with his sons. Felipe’s obsession with theater aside, Serguey believed his father had been unable to emotionally navigate the slipstream of Irene’s infidelity, of her death. It wasn’t his narcissism that led him to bury his head in his art. It was fear, spawned by emotional deficiency. His response to the tragedy revealed a weak man, one unqualified to warmly nurture his own flesh and blood. When Irene made the decision to leave with Raidel, she had taken the boys. Her wishing to lead a different life did not exclude her children. Felipe, on the other hand, stayed at his typewriter. Later on, when he accepted the boys back, he turned to his directing, his artistic friends, his popular plays. Serguey and Victor were largely left alone, with Serguey, the favorite son, having the upper hand.

Many were the evenings when a babysitter watched over them. Mariela, a sixteen-year-old obsessed with acid-wash jeans, spent hours talking to her boyfriend on Felipe’s landline or paging through his painting books. She let them watch the 9:00 p.m. telenovela, which put Victor to sleep and numbed Serguey’s brain. Paquita, the elderly neighbor who had worked at a daycare before the Revolution, forced them to eat at the table and spend the rest of the night in their room. Whenever Victor’s pent-up energy was too much to bear, he would scream uncontrollably, prompting the woman to give him a glass of orange juice, which Serguey knew was laced with a sleeping aid.

Serguey fixated on the outline of Ponce de Leon’s painting, his eyelids getting heavy, his mind dimming like evening morphing into night. He wasn’t like his father, he thought—so fervently that it made his head shake slightly on the pillow. He couldn’t be like his father. He wished, more than he had in years, that his mother hadn’t died, that for his brother’s sake she were still in the house.

They made their way to Kiko’s under an overcast sky. The air was cool, carrying with it a persistent spray of rainwater. The streets took on an ephemeral fresh smell—an earthy, almost floral scent—whenever it drizzled, as if the raindrops themselves had aromatic properties. Heavy precipitation, on the other hand, caused the gutters and sewers to flood, relocating garbage and a myriad of unsolicited, deplorable smells from one block to another. Not that the children minded. They turned puddles and the sturdy streams jetting from rooftop drains into their personal playground. A sprinkling shower, on the other hand, did nothing for them, not even excuse a school absence.

It was on a day just like this one, under a light rain, that Irene had taken Serguey and Victor to Raidel’s house. This particular weather prompted Serguey to remember himself inside that car. But it was Victor who seemed most bothered by gloomy early mornings.

“Does Kiko think we’re safer at this hour?” he said, shielding his eyes from the rain.

What was Victor’s memory like? Did he not remember that morning—the water dripping from their mother’s hair, the perturbing stillness inside the car—like he didn’t remember his dreams?

Serguey said nothing. He could feel his own hair wet and laden.

“First Claudia and now him,” Victor continued. “Can’t we just meet over dinner or something?”

“We’ll record the video holding a hot plate of rice and fried egg. That’ll make a statement.”

His brother waited a moment, then said, “What did you think of Toya?”

Without a second thought, he chose to be truthful. “I’m not into that stuff, Victor. I don’t believe any of it. But she’s a nice lady.”

“I think I’m the one who’ll have to sacrifice. She said one of us would have to.”

“They all say that. It applies to anybody.”

Victor didn’t reply. After a moment, he said, “Thank you, anyway, for seeing her.”

Serguey bumped his shoulder against his brother’s as if they were marching in a crowd.

Kiko had coffee waiting for them. His computer monitor was opened to a video recording application. A slim microphone jutted from the base of the monitor. Kiko explained that the brothers had to sit close together, their mouths far enough from the mic to not create any feedback. He could remove some background noise and static afterwards, but the initial recording had to be as clean as possible. He had also shifted his furniture and removed a poster so that only a white wall could be seen behind them.

“Have you recorded yourself having sex?” Victor asked Kiko, slurping the last of his coffee.

Kiko chuckled and looked at Serguey. “Was your brother ever dropped on his head as a baby?”

Victor shrugged. “All I’m saying is that if you record yourself, maybe you won’t have to listen to me through the wall anymore.”

“Again with the listening to sex.”

Serguey construed the lamentable timing of Victor’s crass humor as his way to combat jitters. “He lacks imagination,” he told Kiko. “He’s going to beat that joke to death.”

Victor said, “You better hope State Security never goes through this computer. They’ll find some perverted shit.”

Kiko seized the empty coffee cups from Serguey and Victor. He positioned the brothers in front of the monitor.

Victor studied his reflection. “I’m definitely the good-looking one.”

“Let’s get serious,” Serguey said.

Victor breathed in and out. “Okay.”

They needed four takes. Victor stumbled twice. He blamed it on Serguey’s handwriting. His section described how Felipe had been arrested, how the house had been violently searched and Felipe’s property confiscated or destroyed. “I’m not aware of any political involvement on my father’s part,” he read. “He’s a good-natured, affable, and respected man. He has always behaved in a way consistent with the demands and expectations of the system.” Demands and system had been Serguey’s choice. It implied oppression, bedecked in the nobler tone of a family plea. Victor went on to give more details: “We have attempted to visit our father at Calderas, just to be forced out, rifles at our backs, and told to return in a few weeks. We have not been allowed to see or speak to him since.” Serguey’s idea for Victor’s last words was to imply helplessness, to create suspense and let the viewers formulate their own opinions as to what might be happening to Felipe in prison. The diaspora would never give the government the benefit of the doubt. They’d immediately think, and rightfully so, abuse, torture.

Serguey spoke about his father’s physical condition and his lack of access to a lawyer or proper medical treatment. He listed some of the plays Felipe had directed and the accolades he’d received. “A career encompassing over twenty years,” he read, “serving his country as a model citizen. Now the authorities bank on his family’s and colleagues’ fears, on the government’s unconditional control over mass media to keep both Cubans and the rest of the world blind and deaf to this injustice.” Serguey criticized the treatment of prisoners he’d seen in the past, who’d been accused of politically related offenses. “The Cuban legal system,” he concluded, “offers no rights to the detained. They’re not allowed to choose or confer with their own lawyers. I am calling for my father’s release, or at the very least, a fair, open trial. Those of you who are watching, we implore you to help in any way you can, and we beseech you to make others aware of the situation.”

Kiko’s pupils were aglow. “Claudia’s going to love this,” he said when the recording ended. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re going to get in a shitload of trouble, but this is gold.”

“I brought it up last night,” Victor said, “about the trouble, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Serguey was tired. Reading the statement and maintaining an earnest, staunch attitude throughout had necessitated copious amounts of strength. “We need to get as much attention as we can.”

Kiko played back the short video. It clocked in at just over three minutes. The short length had a clandestine feel to it, an immediacy that rendered their appeals more urgent. The visual and audio quality was acceptably clear.

“We definitely have a winner,” he said. “As a fellow Cuban, I applaud you. But as a friend, I should tell you that there are going to be repercussions. What you just said won’t go away.”

Serguey fluttered his eyelids. They felt as hefty as fronds. “How soon will you get the video to Claudia?”

“Tonight.” Kiko inserted a flash drive into the computer’s USB port. “If by some chance it gets damaged, we’ll have to record it again. I’m deleting the file from my computer.”

Serguey thanked his friend. Victor bobbed his head, blinking at the monitor.

“I’ll let you know when Claudia has something new,” Kiko said. “I have to go see my dad in Regla, so I’ll meet with her on the way.”

Serguey watched his friend drag the audio file into the flash drive folder. “How’s your old man?”

“He’s been having some trouble breathing at night. His doctor came by the house and told him he was fine. He gave him a prescription that’s supposed to unclog his airway or something.” Kiko glanced at Victor. “My mom gave the doctor half the pork leg, and it worked wonders. Now he’s going to be checking in once a week.”

Victor didn’t wait for Serguey to ask. “I got Kiko’s parents the pernil before all this. I’ve been staying put, I swear.”

“He’s telling the truth.” Kiko body-checked Victor, wordlessly requesting that he move. The brothers stood, and Kiko sat in front of his computer, opening several folders on his desktop. “By the way, my buddy at ETECSA told me that Mario’s number isn’t disconnected. He’s just been using calling cards with it, like we have. The account was blocked for a while, probably by State Security, to see if he got desperate.”

“So we can call him?” Serguey said.

“Been trying since I woke up. Goes straight to automated voicemail, which is full.”

“Can I at least text him?”

Kiko swiveled his chair toward Serguey. “They can track it, but yeah, you can try.”

Serguey brought out his phone. He selected Mario’s number and wrote call this number. He showed it to Victor and Kiko.

“Are you sure?” Victor said.

Serguey nodded, pressed Send, and deleted the message.

Kiko returned to his computer. “Now you two get out of here.”

Kissing his friend’s head, Victor said, “I love you, buddy.”

The siren-like domain of the screen had instantaneously absorbed Kiko’s attention. “Sure you do.”