CHAPTER 19

The jarring drive on Havana’s divoted roads didn’t keep Victor from passing out. His head skidded against the window like a wiper. He had folded up his pant leg to let the burnt skin breathe. The wound was a deep red, with tinges of a brownish hue, but not big in size. The hair hadn’t been singed, which Serguey saw as a good sign. He couldn’t tell how much pain his brother was in, he looked so placid in his sleep. He began to watch the houses and people outside the window, mesmerized by the variations in shapes and colors, unable to process or hold on to any particular detail. He hadn’t noticed it before, but a rank smell levitated like vapor from the floor mats of the car. The engine sounded like a tumbling bag of tin cans. He was reminded of a saying he’d heard as a child: “La bejumina hace mas ruido de lo que camina,” a reference to a small motorcycle whose engine noise was far greater than its speed. Each time the driver switched gears, a grating noise crept through the bottom of the vehicle. The Soviet-era Lada was as much a Cuban symbol as the flag. Its abysmal quality was the center of countless Cuban jokes, but at least it wasn’t a packed bus or the sizzling bed of a truck in an infernal summer.

The scraps of thoughts in Serguey’s weary mind didn’t relate to the last twelve hours but to what lay ahead. He was finally re-joining the masses—with a sullied record to boot. The kind of stain that made him a pariah, an infectious disease in the paranoid, protective consciousness of the people. The massive exodus of Cubans made more sense now. It had been easy to ignore it standing on his balcony with a romantic view of the sea. Now he was looking at himself in that sea, unable to get past the turbid waves, like a rafter, sand-laden water plugging his lungs, able to gasp long enough to retain the illusion that he was actually making progress.

The car began to weave its way into El Vedado. How much longer would he call this neighborhood home? He should be selfless, he knew, and worry only about his father. But it was he sitting in this car, Victor next to him, the likelihood of State Security harassment hovering like a black cloud. Any breeze now would feel like the prologue to a storm. Threats weren’t empty when you were locked behind bars, kicked, mocked, and proven what you’d long believed: that your knowledge of the law only secured you an ironic downfall. As the vehicle turned into Serguey’s block, he grasped, quite consciously, that he now had one job—get his father and brother out of the country, any way he could.

“See you soon,” were the only words Silvio said after barking for him and Victor to exit the Lada.

Victor ruffled his hair as the car rumbled out of view. He threw an arm around Serguey, reclining the bulk of his weight on him. “What a night.”

Serguey’s gait turned labored, as if someone were completely perched on his shoulders. “How’s the leg?”

“Just need to put an ice pack on it.”

“We should take pictures of the bruises.” Serguey took a glimpse at the elevator sign, coveting with all his heart to tear it down. He and Victor waddled like two drunks up the stairs. “We have to document what happened.”

There was no disagreement or resistance in Victor’s pendulous expression.

Anabel hugged them by hurling the breadth of her arms as if she were enveloping them with a blanket. She kept blinking, crinkling her pale nose, like she’d developed a twitch. No one had been at the apartment when she and Alida entered. No one had come to speak with them. She’d sent Alida to her parents’, and since Serguey had given her Kiko’s number, she called him for advice. With his help, she’d scribbled a list of places where they might have taken Serguey and Victor. In a decision that angered Serguey, she had also contacted Gimenez.

“Your husband should do a better job of communicating with the authorities,” Gimenez said. “I’m guessing he’s finding this out right about now.”

Serguey wasn’t surprised or disappointed. Men like his boss survived by washing their hands of people and things. What angered Serguey was how Anabel could think, at this stage, that Gimenez should be a source of help.

Anabel rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hands. “I was desperate,” she confessed, her voice feeble, fragmented.

He circled his fingers around her forearms and removed her guard. “We have to get used to the fact that we can’t depend on him anymore. He basically gave me up.”

“What do you mean?”

“He talked to State Security, told them I’d been acting suspiciously at work. He even tried to get you involved. He went for the jugular, Anabel.”

She was suddenly untroubled. Maybe, like him, she was unsurprised and just needed evidence of Gimenez’s lack of loyalty before she truly gave up hope. She told Serguey how relieved she was that he and Victor were okay, but—and here she seemed to reconnect with her distraught self—his laptop and digital camera were missing. The officers had been in the apartment before the arrest.

“They might’ve wired the place,” Victor said.

“I looked everywhere,” Anabel said haggardly. “I couldn’t find anything.”

Another search through the apartment came up empty. Serguey wasn’t worried about the computer since it contained no compromising information. But without the camera, they had no way of photographing the contusions on their bodies. It did worry him that the officers had been able to access his home so easily. There was no sign of forced entry, nothing damaged or evidently out of place. He began to play a few scenarios in his head, but he found his thoughts disorganized, incoherent. He decided it was best for all of them to put food in their stomachs and get some sleep.

Anabel prepared tea, which Victor accepted without any snide commentary, and boiled some potatoes to mash. Victor made it through half his plate before stumbling to the guest room. Anabel handed him an antibiotic cream to apply to the burn, which had begun to blister. Serguey slurped the last of his tea in a haze and would later not even recall heading to his bed.

He woke close to 5:00 p.m. While he showered, he saw that his bruises had started to dissipate—it was hard to tell where they began and ended. The muscles beneath the skin were tender. So were his ribs. He found it excruciating to wash his legs, the pain concentrating on his lower abdomen. He let the water slither down the back of his neck and soak his naked, frail limbs, ridding him of soap and leaving him with a sleek texture glued to his body hair. He would have to take an aspirin if he wanted to avoid a headache. As he drenched his face under the shower, he suddenly became certain of how Silvio and Pablito had gotten into the apartment. The week he and Anabel had moved in, they exchanged spare keys with Carmina. The woman was a stickler for following rules, a vestige of an older generation who saw the promises of the Revolution devolve into prevalent poverty and social restrictions, and who nonetheless decided to carry on with their civic duties. How else was she to give meaning to her life, to prop herself up onto a higher moral ground? She was a guardian of the Revolution, clipping feathers to the bone before any subversive or opposition group could grow wings. She had let the officers in. Serguey was willing to bet his own pound of flesh on it. And she’d enjoyed it too, faking concern, saying Serguey and Anabel were nice people, but that, to be frank, lately they were acting strangely. She had been asked—not asked, entrusted—to keep a watchful eye and report what she saw. She was a valuable asset, a street level troop, a cog without which the Revolution couldn’t grind ahead. And there was, in all probability, an incentive: during the next neighborhood allotment of electronics, she would be at the top of the recipient list.

During his childhood and teenage years, he and Victor had learned to divide their neighbors into two groups: those who could get their hands on what they considered rare merchandise—video game consoles; color televisions; Sony, Sanyo, or Panasonic stereo systems; brand new freezers or blenders—through family abroad or black market deals, and those who depended on the government for breadcrumbs: a Chinese Panda TV; a second-rate multi-speed fan; a bicycle; a refurbished, decade-old refrigerator or washing machine. These items were usually given out immediately after Cuba had received a cargo ship worth of donations from China or Mexico. Only one or two people per neighborhood were selected to receive them, if that many. More recently, the government had implemented a rent-to-own plan to provide air conditioners, water heaters, rice cookers—which had previously been as rare as laptop computers—to the masses. People paid monthly quotas to keep these items. Retirees like Carmina could only afford them if they received money from overseas. In her case, government allotments were a welcomed price. A microwave was worth someone going to jail.

Serguey put on a pair of khaki shorts and a white T-shirt and headed over to his neighbor’s. Water was still dribbling from his hair. His ears felt clogged. He knocked several times to indicate urgency. Carmina opened the door with a look of apprehension on her wrinkled face.

“My keys,” Serguey said tersely, handing Carmina hers. “I need them back.” He could hear a pressure cooker hissing in the background. The smell of boiling beans pervaded Carmina’s living room. Now that he thought about it, her entire home reeked of old age.

“What happened?” she asked. “You know, a couple of officers—”

Serguey cut her off. “I need the keys. Now.”

She dithered a moment, then took her own keys and nudged the door shut. Her shuffling steps returned a minute later. She stretched out her hand, the keys dangling from her swollen, pockmarked fingers.

“You and Anabel haven’t fulfilled your duties . . .” she started to say.

“Scratch us off your list. We’re moving out of here soon.”

He didn’t give her a chance to retort, to snoop, to lecture. He marched into his own apartment and slammed the door. He wanted her to feel confused, and if he was lucky, scared. The idea of Carmina standing inside his home while State Security dug through his things—probably itching to scour through the rooms like a curious rat herself—it incensed him. The audacity and impudence of it, the sense of entitlement one had to have to do away with someone else’s privacy like that. The warped communist notion that all must be shared equally, that private property was somehow a mark of greed and moral corruption, had given the people a carte blanche to meddle, to question what you were hiding behind closed doors. Spies, moles, informants, they’d been bred right out of the populace. The senior citizen who offered everyone coffee, the university student who sometimes tossed a baseball around with the kids, your uncle’s best friend, who’d driven your family to the beach—they could all turn on you in a heartbeat. Some might go out of their way if they were looking to score points, to obtain the government’s commendations and rewards for weeding out counterrevolutionaries.

Carmina wasn’t an exception. She was part of a bigger malady.

Victor picked up his belongings and told Serguey and Anabel that he was going back to the house. He had to let Kiko know things were fine and warn him about State Security for his own sake. Anabel told him to keep the antibiotic cream. Victor made Serguey promise that he wouldn’t give up, that their father’s release was still the final goal.

“I just want to be sure they didn’t soften you up too much,” he said.

“He’s stronger than you think,” Anabel said.

The brothers agreed that as soon as there was word from Claudia, they would meet with her. They just had to be more cautious.

“And we need new phones,” Serguey said.

Victor agreed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Early in the evening, Serguey and Anabel sat at the dinner table, staring at a warm plate of chicken and rice soup and one-a-day bodega-allocated bread. Anabel thought it best for him not to eat anything too solid until the stomach and rib pain was gone, in case there was some internal damage. She suggested going to a clinic or maybe the family doctor in their neighborhood, but Serguey snubbed the idea. Reluctantly, she asked him if he wished to file a report. It was good to have a record of the incident, in case he needed to plead his case later. He told her in a hushed but dogged voice that he’d already considered it, but he’d resolved not to seek assistance from the system. The government could easily manipulate the procedures available to him. They wouldn’t keep him from being harassed or immured, not if they really intended to fuck with him. Anabel responded that he should at least issue a statement through Claudia about the beating and overnight incarceration.

“Your dad’s no longer the only target,” she said.

The understatement of the year, he thought, but it would’ve been unfair to point this out when he hadn’t told her about the house being defaced, when he’d been so cruel to her about Victor just before getting into the taxi the previous night. Serguey split his crumbling bread to dip it in the soup. “I’ll speak with her about it.”

“There’s something else we need to discuss.”

He bit into the sodden piece of bread. As he swallowed, his sore belly contracted, but he felt he could eat the whole thing. “What is it?”

Anabel ran her spoon slowly across her plate, the rice and chicken swirling in tiny vortexes. “We’re running out of food. The freezer’s almost empty. I was able to get a few things at the bodega today, but it wasn’t much. Now that we won’t have Gimenez’s help, I’m not sure what we’re going to do.”

“I’ll figure something out.”

“I was thinking maybe I could ask my dad.”

Serguey shook his head, making a flippant sound with his throat, as his mouth was full of bread.

She raised her tone. “He has contacts in Mantilla and here in the city through the Church, and we have a little money saved.”

Serguey swallowed again with a frown. “Out of the question.”

Anabel sighed and dropped her spoon. “Serguey, don’t fight me on this. You have other things to worry about.”

He wiped his mouth. “I knew we shouldn’t have gone to that restaurant last night. That money Victor spent, we could be using right now.”

“It was your idea.”

“Technically, it was Victor’s.”

“So it was his. What does it matter?”

He leaned back in his chair and caressed his stomach, reflecting for a moment. “All of this is going to keep getting worse. I’m not sure we’re prepared to handle it.”

“We’re not alone. We’re going to be all right, mistakes and all.”

He looked at her repentantly. He loved how she could forgive him, though he knew that a discussion about the previous night was eventually going to happen; it had to happen. He loved how she always convinced him that the two of them, as a unit, were enough.

“How’s the soup?” she asked.

“The soup’s fine,” he said. “It’s the stale bread that’s killing me.”

That afternoon Anabel spoke to her father. Serguey was glad to see her focus on these simpler but no less important things. For his part, he decided to not see Gimenez, not on this day. If Montalvo had been honest about Gimenez’s disposition, there was not much left for Serguey to salvage. His firing was inevitable, as was losing the apartment, and it seemed to him that meeting with his now ex-mentor would only serve to expedite the process. Let Gimenez do the work, he thought. Let him be the one to come and throw us out.

Serguey wanted to speak with Anabel about the post-restaurant argument. He really did. But if they were to plunge into another argument, he might detonate, go berserk like his brother. He might say something he couldn’t take back. They drifted inside the apartment like an old couple, sighing their way through dinner, and were only jolted back to mindfulness when Victor called in the evening.

Claudia wanted to meet in two days, he said. As before, she preferred to do it early in the morning, though in this occasion she had picked El Malecon, near The National Hotel. Serguey recommended for Victor to join him on the way to her. The apartment had become too compromised. He didn’t want to fall down a rabbit hole of paranoia, but it was difficult to ignore their recent incident. No need for State Security to have them cooped up in the same place they’d been detained.

Serguey recognized that the stifling sensation he had begun to experience—the fear that stepping outside his building put him at risk—was perhaps the most effective method the authorities could use against him. There were only two ways to get rid of that sensation: collaborate with Montalvo or leave the island.

But he thought of these things only transitorily. He had less grand but more pressing matters to tackle. His father-in-law had given Anabel a few contacts in the city where they could procure food at a reasonable price. They spent the next twenty-four hours rushing all over the city. Cooking oil and soap they could still afford at the dollar stores, but not for much longer. Buying rice, beans, plantains, tomatoes, avocados, coffee, and meat dug considerably into their modest savings. The latter, which after the Special Period had been the hardest to find, they bought in San Miguel del Padron from a man who was missing part of his arm. The stitching job on his stump looked like the morcilla he’d hidden in the shack behind his home. He told Serguey and Anabel that in another life he’d been a butcher, deft with knives and hooks. Serguey sensed a shade of sarcasm in the man’s voice, but he didn’t laugh, in case he was wrong. The man went on to claim that his greatest achievement had been in carpentry: he’d given the exterior of the shack the appearance of an outhouse to evade suspicion. It was a delicate balance, Serguey thought, attracting reliable customers and fooling the Carminas of the world.

To his relief, the meat inside the rusted freezer was clean and smelled fairly fresh. Since Anabel’s father vouched for each one of his contacts, they bought a few chicken leg quarters, a cut of beef, and a dozen eggs, which the man assured them were less than a week old.

Back home, Serguey advised Anabel to exhaust their ration booklet at the bodega. On the weeks when Gimenez had gifted them food or led them in the direction of someone who could, they hadn’t taken full advantage of the booklet. They hadn’t even gotten their share for a needy neighbor or for Alida. Victor, in contrast, had gifted Kiko’s parents a pernil. Now he and Anabel had to scrape and hoard. Perhaps this was what spiritual people, like Toya, referred to as karma.

When visiting Antonio’s contacts, he had to be particularly careful. Acquiring food from proscribed vendors was a crime against the state. The authorities could exploit any misstep, any evidence of wrongdoing—such as purchasing illegal meat—to throw him in jail. Thus, he appreciated the small things, such as the vendors being unaware of his father’s political prisoner status, a fact that would surely cause them to refuse him service. If he and Anabel couldn’t fend for themselves, they would become a burden upon her family. Dividing whatever they could would put a strain on their relationship, not to mention the amount of pressure they would all have to get food. That was the fate waiting to befall them: the grinding, daily quest for lunch and dinner. How would he look Antonio and Julia in their eyes? How would he face Anabel each morning with the feeling that he was a failure?

It occurred to Serguey that, in all honesty, it was no simple achievement for the government to sell the people on communism when their stomachs were growling. It took a special kind of hypocrisy and abuse of power to get away with it.

Together, they drafted a budget. The numbers looked grim, so they debated the possibility of asking Victor for help. Serguey told Anabel he’d speak to his brother after the meeting with Claudia, to gauge how much he could rely on the contacts and vendors he knew. For all his redeeming attributes, and despite his expert bragging, Victor hadn’t been the smartest of delinquents.