CHAPTER 28

Kiko didn’t speak as he worked his way out of the remote roads. When he finally located the main street, he leaned into his seat and breathed profoundly. Serguey checked the rearview mirror on the passenger side: no patrol cars were tailing them. Out in front, each passing pair of headlights felt portentous. Serguey kept anticipating the colorful display of a siren, followed by a screeching U-turn, but they never came. After a few kilometers, he got used to the cars’ transitory nature, standard weeknight traffic in the margins of Havana. He was able to convince himself, as they entered the city, that perhaps they were in the clear.

“Thank you,” he said to his friend.

“You’re lucky I found the right place. I’d never driven to that part of the coast in Marhondo.”

“Victor and I owe you.”

“Someone’s got to do it. Besides, I’m scared of your wife.”

The statement revolved like a jumbled pile of consonants and vowels somewhere on the fringes of Serguey’s comprehension. It took him catching a glimpse of a timorous smirk on Kiko’s lips for the phrase to pierce the realm of sense. There was only one logical response: “Why?”

“Let’s just say she’s expecting me to deliver you safe and sound.”

Serguey realized that he hadn’t told Kiko what he’d decided at some interval earlier in the night. “We’re not going back to Mantilla.”

His friend’s smirk evaporated. “What do you mean?”

“Take me back to my Dad’s house.”

“What for? They might be watching the place.”

“If they’re going to come for me, let them do it now. I don’t want to embarrass Anabel and my in-laws if I don’t have to.”

Kiko seemed to contemplate whether he should give up his assessment on the matter. His fingers twitched restlessly on the wheel. “You’ll be safer with them. There’ll be witnesses.”

Serguey looked at him, his gaze charged with conclusive clarity. “Kiko, take me to the house.”

Kiko grunted in protest. “I’m spending the night with you then.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I promised Anabel I’d take you back.” His friend’s eyes skipped from the road to Serguey, then back to the asphalt. “You have to understand that if you get in trouble, all of us are going to feel responsible. I know your brother and father left, and you’re in a fragile state and all that, but you can’t lose your damn mind.”

“I’ll call Anabel. I know what I’m doing. I need to go to the house.”

“What if I refuse?”

In his own mind, Serguey smiled, but the signal never reached his lips. “You won’t.”

“Your brother’s right.” Kiko shook his head and reclined once more in his seat. He was forfeiting. “You’re as stubborn as he is.”

They drove on in silence. Serguey intersected his arms and sloped his body against the window. His temples felt like the walls of an inflating balloon. The pressure caused his eyelids to droop, though he didn’t quite fall asleep. The adrenaline had dwindled. His stomach and bowels were like dried-up fruit, the air sucked out of them. There was an acidic taste at the bottom of his throat, jolting to the back of his tongue with every bump in the road. Parts of his skin itched with a stinging sensation. His muscles, and perhaps his bones, were sore.

“You look beat-up,” Kiko said. “Like they put you through a grinding machine.”

Serguey found the crack nostalgic—it reminded him of Victor. “I’m just glad it’s over.”

As the word “over” oozed from his tongue, he knew it was a fallacy. The night around them had contained more hours than it had a right to. It was like a dream from which he hadn’t yet awakened. Kiko was traversing La Lisa, north of the police station where Montalvo had spilled the hot coffee on Victor’s leg. Despite the disturbing memory, the familiarity of the buildings and neighborhoods gave him some calm, some lucidity. He unlocked his arms and rotated his shoulders, looking for his body to not shut down, not yet.

“I never went to see your parents,” Serguey said.

“Maybe you’ll be able to now.”

Kiko didn’t sound confident. Serguey didn’t possess the strength to lie, so he said nothing, leaving open the possibility that he might visit Kiko’s parents after all.

“Please tell Claudia again that I’m immensely grateful.”

“I’m thinking of joining her.”

Serguey waited for him to explain.

“I’m going to start blogging,” Kiko said. “What she did with you guys, it really made a difference. I know the Church got it done, but her blog posts really helped.”

“It’s remarkable what she does.”

Kiko began to describe technical details about maximizing readership, getting articles reposted, and finding key words to attract readers. “There’s an art to being a social media activist,” he said. Serguey’s endorsement had catapulted him into a rapt conversation with himself. A surge of delight had overtaken him. Kiko was not only fascinated by Claudia but engrossed by what she did.

“You guys will make a good team,” Serguey said.

Kiko chuckled. “Someone has to let the world know what goes on in here.”

“Maybe you found your calling. I mean it.”

“And it doesn’t hurt that she and I make a good team.”

“Claudia’s a brave woman. If you really like her, that doesn’t devalue the difference you can make.”

Kiko stopped the car at a red light. They were in El Cerro, in Kiko’s neighborhood, not far from their destination. “See, that’s where you and your brother are different. Victor would’ve already made about ten sexual jokes.”

“That’s his way of saying that he’s proud and thinks it’s a good idea.”

Where was his brother now? Had they swapped boats yet? Was there another round of waiting on the outer island Mario’s cousin had mentioned?

“I’m going to miss that son of a bitch,” Kiko said.

Serguey nodded. “He’ll miss us too.”

The light changed to green, and Kiko eased the car into first gear. “Victor in Miami. He’s going to be up to a thousand things in no time.”

“Hopefully Dad will end up there too. Not that he’s the best role model.”

Kiko made an incoherent sound, marooned somewhere between agreement and dissension. “Felipe’s a good man. Artists sometimes tend to be a little complicated, that’s all.”

Serguey couldn’t subscribe to such romantic views. “My father isn’t the saint people think he is, Kiko. But better flawed and free than in prison.”

Kiko made a couple of unhurried, meticulous turns, sweeping the curbs for unrecognizable cars, and pulled to the front of the house. With the porch light off, the door and front wall regressed from them into a deepening darkness. They waited until their eyes adjusted and they could see no one hiding behind the columns. There was no sign of vandalism, no splashed eggs, no accusations. It was a desolate home, excavated from some dream that now felt too real. Its size seemed too big for one person yet even bigger for none. Serguey had no legal claim on it. The keys in his pocket weren’t an inherited responsibility, which he would’ve welcomed. They had been Victor’s gesture of allowing him to say goodbye to the place where they had grown together. But Serguey couldn’t keep from worrying that his eyes were deceiving him, that an officer was in fact hiding behind a column or a nearby bush, or that Montalvo was sitting on the living room sofa, salivating at the opportunity to spook him, drag him out, make another spectacle.

What Serguey wanted most, as he took hold of the car’s door handle, was to be left alone.

“I spoke with you brother’s buddy,” Kiko said. “He’s acting as if he doesn’t have his stuff. I think he figured Victor’s in serious trouble and wants to keep the money.”

“Let him have it. We owe Yunior anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Unless he has a box of gold watches, it isn’t worth it.”

“Your brother’s deals were mostly with pacotilla. Nothing exuberant.”

If he were to believe Victor’s stories, Serguey knew that wasn’t precisely true, but what did it matter now?

“Don’t forget to call Anabel,” Kiko said.

Serguey shook his friend’s hand. “Thank you.”

“You should be proud. You got your brother and father out of this godforsaken country.”

“And we get to stay.”

Kiko shrugged. He had no suitable response. “Get some sleep. I wasn’t lying when I said you look like shit.”

Serguey sat sluggishly on the front steps, leaning back on his elbows. The muted glow of the streetlamps cast a spotlight on him. He didn’t want to hide, to prevent being detected. As the hum of Kiko’s car faded, the neighborhood turned silent. If a vehicle were to approach, he’d be able to hear it as far out as Via Blanca Avenue. If there were State Security officers hidden behind columns, let them come, he now thought. They wouldn’t be arresting a defeated man, a fearful man. They’d be taking the man who beat them.

He flipped his phone from hand to hand, debating whether he should call Anabel. With her, he would be susceptible, exposed. He would tell her that he was afraid. With time to grasp what he’d be losing, he was terrified. But if it wasn’t going to end well for him, he wanted it to end soon. He was exhausted. His thoughts were rambling. He couldn’t muster up the energy to do much else. If he could be more coherent, he’d tell her how much he loved her, what she meant to him. He nodded to himself as a way of expressing these things, as if she could actually see him, read his mind.

He put the phone in his pocket, walked up the steps onto the porch and then toward the door. He opened it and faced the house. It felt haunted—not quite abandoned yet not quite livable. The kitchen and bedrooms were dark, concealing the phantoms of memories and events, moments that transpired before Serguey’s time, before Felipe’s. He shut his eyes and heard Irene in the kitchen, telling Victor amidst bursts of laughter, “No, don’t spit it out!” Victor cackled himself to a cough, then a labored breath, as Irene gave him a glass of water, a plastic cup Victor clumsily held with two hands too close to the bottom, often spilling water down his chin.

The empty bookshelves nearer to him still vibrated with a modicum of life. At his father’s request, he had assisted in alphabetically organizing Felipe’s library once. He must’ve been nine or ten.

“This one,” Felipe had said, raising The Old Man and the Sea, “was written by an American author named Ernest Hemingway. It’s about a Cuban fisherman and his struggle with a marlin and sharks. It got Hemingway the Nobel Prize because of his prose style. I’ve gone on a tour of his house here in Havana. He used to have orgies there, you know. An American came to Cuba to have orgies and to fish, and they gave him a Nobel for it.”

Felipe had paused several times while arranging the books to share similar anecdotes.

“Lezama Lima, you’ve heard the name, right?”

“Yes,” Serguey said.

Felipe showed him the hefty tome that was Paradiso. “There’s a chapter here about a penis. Most people only read that chapter and then claim to know Lezama.”

When they reached the playwriting section, Felipe pointed out that Meyerhold, after revolutionizing theater, had been killed by the Soviets.

“They won’t tell you that in school here, of course. The saddest part is that they pardoned him later. They figured out he was innocent after they’d shot him. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky was about to be killed, his grave dug up next to him, when he got his pardon. Can you imagine what that must be like, to be moments away from certain death and survive?”

Serguey remembered staring at his father, terror and excitement charging through him in equal measure.

“Art always gets its tragedies and triumphs from real life,” his father told him. “Don’t believe everything’s made-up.”

Serguey had seen his own mother murdered. He knew it all too well. Yet Felipe saw nothing but the innocence of his son’s age, of his childish mind. At the time, all Serguey could think was that his father had, if only for an afternoon, allowed him into his world. Nothing was as exhilarating, not even attending his father’s plays.

He considered lying on the sofa. There could be comfort, however temporary, in spending one last night inside his childhood home. But he didn’t want to be arrested in his sleep, dragged from the house as if it were being snatched away from him. The sense of loss should be experienced on his own terms. He shut the door and paced across the porch, returning to the front steps. Once more, he sat, wearied. The air was balmy, the streetlights softer. There was distant traffic but none in his direction. He watched his block through blurred eyes, listening to the quiet of its collective slumber. In his tiredness, he still felt present, more than he had felt anywhere else. He had caused ripples. He mattered. His father had been liberated, was now safe in another continent, his file already accumulating dust in one of Montalvo’s drawers. Victor and Alida were racing toward Florida, buoyant about their futures. What a month before had seemed so dangerous and unattainable was now a simple reality. The price Serguey had paid wasn’t really a price. He’d freed himself from the traps of a delusion and returned home. He’d been a bull like Joaquin, his grandfather. He’d staked his claim, defied the authorities, risked everything for his family, and he’d won.

The faint glimmer of the streetlights was soon replaced by the dimness of Serguey’s dreams. He saw Gimenez coming out of a plane, dressed in Mario’s getaway outfit, and descending the stairs into a tarmac crowded with State Security agents. He saw Alida diving off the rocks into inky water, her giggles mixing with the waves. He showed off his diving skills for her, only to find it was Anabel and not her sister who’d jumped before him. He then heard a ringing sound, similar to a melody he’d heard in a movie, and woke with a start to realize it was his phone.

Serguey stared at the screen. It was Anabel. He declined the call, searching instead for missed messages. There were none. He returned to the main screen and looked at the time: 7:05 a.m. He pocketed the phone and pushed himself from the steps. The sky to his right was radiant, like the flash of a faraway explosion. The flow of cars on Vento and Lacret and Via Blanca sounded steady. He peered down the sidewalk and saw no one of interest. He felt a slight pain on his cheek and temple, from leaning his face against the porch railing. His fingers could trace narrow lines of indent on his skin. His dry eyes were in urgent need of water. He filled his lungs with early morning air and groaned, allowing his body a moment to become aware of itself. He didn’t want to speak with Anabel until he was fully awake. He had no news from Victor or Alida to share, and she would surely reprimand him when she found out where he’d spent the night.

He entered the house and went to the bathroom to urinate. When he finished, he turned on the faucet and watched it spurt feebly, agonizingly. The water had been shut off. He flushed the toilet with what was left in the tank and headed to Victor’s apartment. It was locked, no way to climb through a window. He considered whether he should smash his way in, take anything his brother might have if given the chance. Finally he decided to leave it. He walked through the house once more, inspecting each room, as he’d done at Gimenez’s apartment. If there were any ghosts the previous night, they had already made their departure.

He found himself at the front door, suddenly anxious about who might be on the other side. Maybe this had been the game: to let him believe he was safe, forgotten, that he’d not only succeeded, but that he would be able to enjoy his success. Maybe they had watched him sleep, allowed him to dream, and now they were waiting with detestable smiles, ready to take him to Montalvo, who was sharpening whatever tools he saw fit for the Blanco who hadn’t slipped through his fingers. This sensation—this particular instant—if Serguey were lucky, would be the rest of his life: a ceaseless, dreadful inferring about the loud knock on his door, the car sputtering toward the curb, the reticent passerby. Spending the night at his father’s had accomplished little except postpone the fear of a probable arrest. Serguey thought about political prisoners, marked by the government, constantly hounded. In the grand scheme of things, Felipe and Victor had been fortunate. Perhaps it was only right that he pay the price. Too many things had gone their way. Too many pebbles on their side of the scale.

He stepped out onto the street, encountering no unfamiliar faces, no strange vehicles. The sun was beginning to sear the pavement with a yellowish gleam. He called Anabel’s number, thinking of what he should tell her—not just about Alida or Victor, about his decision to stay at the house—but about how he intended to provide for her, to make it work with Antonio and Julia. The best way to defy fear was to plan for the future. He listened to the line ring as he walked, another wave of exhaustion burdening his body. He looked at the slabs of fractured sidewalk that lay ahead, tiny weeds beginning to sprout from the grooves. He fought not to lift his gaze, waiting, with subdued desperation, to hear his wife’s voice.