Hector’s mother met Alejo Santinio, his Pop, in 1939 when she was twenty-seven years old and working as a ticket girl in the Neptuna movie theater in Holguín, Cuba. At that time she was still living with her mother, Doña María, in a small limestone house with a tin roof off Arachoa Street, where there was a bakery. Her name was Mercedes Sorrea, and she was the second of three daughters and not married because her last prometido, or “intended,” who worked in a Cuban sour-milk factory, was a louse. At first, he would take her dancing on Saturday nights to the social club or Spanish Society, sweet-talk her, make her laugh, and then afterward bring her out on the iron balcony to discuss the marriage. But he never went through with the wedding; he disappeared for days at a time, and when he was around, he fought with her so that she had to come home and cry on her mother’s lap. After a year Mercedes and this man broke up, and she resigned herself to spending a quiet old maid’s life with Doña María and the ghost of her father, Teodoro, and with her dreams of the much grander house in which they had once lived.
Before her father died in 1929, the Sorrea family owned an immense house of white stone, in the best residential district of Holguín, across the way from a park with towering royal palms and fountains and a bandstand where an epauleted orchestra played Sousa marches, fox trots, and rumbas on Sunday afternoons. Holguín was a city of about twenty-five thousand people, situated on a plain and surrounded by hills in the interior of Oriente province in eastern Cuba, a thickly forested region with its chief commerce in sugar, tobacco, wood, and cattle. Holguín was a center of this trade with a large marketplace and rail lines south to Santiago de Cuba and north to the port towns of Belen and Gibara. An old city, it had always been a center of Cuban insurgency against the Spanish and had seen much death. It was a city of white-, light blue-, and pink-walled houses with tin roofs, well-shaded squares, parks, slaughterhouses, churches, and ghosts.
Life was quiet in Holguín. The world was different then. People believed in God, and children died at early ages of the fever and tuberculosis. Saints and angels walked in gardens. The living called to the dead through spiritualists, horses were left dead in the streets, and honking automobiles frightened swarms of birds off the treetops. Priests were respected, and there were very few robberies, especially in Mercedes’s town, and the poor were provided for by charities and fed with scraps of food given out after the last meal of the day. People were more polite, more elegant, and they liked to go promenading in the park on sunny afternoons. Because people died more easily, there was more praying and there were more funerals, which twisted through the streets with coachmen and pallbearers dressed in long black robes and wide three-cornered hats, and everyone but everyone knew one another’s name and gave greetings as they passed.
In those days Mercedes was a little girl with a Cleopatra hairdo and a red ribbon in her hair. She spent her afternoons roller-skating in front of her house, watching people come and go through the park, waving to them and to the farmers and leather-pantalooned soldiers who traveled the road. She loved the family’s house, all her life she would always remember it. It had twenty rooms and carved mahogany arabesque doors, fine iron grillwork of stars and flowers. It had a large central gallery, a shaded rear patio of pink and blue tiles, and a courtyard with large potted palms and an arched entranceway. Her father had filled that house with wagonloads of furniture: tables and chairs with animal feet, a piano, mirrors, Chinese vases, and crystal everywhere to capture light. There were wide, pleated curtains and high arched windows that let in a serene white light, strongest in the parlor. The house was surrounded by bushes with flame blossoms and by tamarind and orange trees. Everywhere there was sunlight. Blossoms streamed down the walls and between the slats of the white picket fence. Flowers were everywhere. And from everywhere it seemed her father, Teodoro, was looking at her and smiling.
Teodoro Sorrea was a bald, plump, distinguished-looking man with an aristocrat’s nose and dark intense eyes. He dressed like a gentleman, with a stiff collar and lace bow in the Victorian fashion, and he wore a perfectly folded pañuelo, “handkerchief,” in his vest pocket. Despite the tropical climate, he never abandoned his formal attire and maintained the image of the proper señor until the day he died. He was in the timber business and knew the names of all the dark and light woods of the forest. He always carried a cane and a ledger book and would sit on a pile of white stones by the Jigüe River, giving orders to his men who hacked down trees with machetes and loaded them into the truck that would carry the timber into Holguín. Twenty men worked for his business. At home Teodoro employed a cook, a laundress, a seamstress, and a maid. He paid decent wages and was known as a good patrón. At the day’s end he would ride homeward on a squat, shaggy-maned palomino that he loved very much. He was fond of animals. He kept a parrot and six German hounds that he and his daughters took walking in the park at night.
Teodoro came to Cuba in 1897 with the Spanish army and was posted as a captain of the guard on the main road into Holguín. He liked Oriente enough to emigrate from Majorca with Doña María, who would never get over leaving her family back in Spain. Remembered over the years for his pro-Cuban sympathies, Teodoro came to be well respected in Holguín. He held local magisterial posts, was highly placed in the Masonic society, and knew all the politicians of the province. And he was regarded as a greatly cultured man. In Spain the Sorreas had owned a tannery and an orthopedic shoe business, and had always been patrons of the arts. Teodoro’s father had had some fame as an opera singer in Madrid, and his talent had passed down to Teodoro and to Hector’s mother, Mercedes, both of whom had fine voices. Teodoro also wrote poetry. Carrying a pad of bleached newsprint and a pencil, he would sit in the garden composing verse. He published regularly in the Holguín Sol, and poets and professors from the province often visited him and would sit in the parlor to hear him recite poetry. He wrote about the world as a garden where people were like blossoms that fell from the most aromatic trees when they died.
When Teodoro sat at a small desk in his study, composing, the house seemed to fill with light. Curiously watching him work on rainy afternoons, Mercedes sometimes noticed a frightened butterfly lingering by the dry glass of the window, as if waiting to be carried into the refuge of one of Señor Sorrea’s poems.
We live in the garden
butterflies resplendent
in the sun
joyful because one day
our brilliant wings will
carry us upward
and we will not burn
but prosper.
Imitating him, Mercedes wrote her own verse and gloried in the applause of their refined, educated visitors. She lived for her father’s approval and followed him everywhere, proud to be a Sorrea. She wrote so well that she won prize after prize for composition and poetry, and dreamed of going to the university to become a poet or a teacher. When she was seventeen years old, she won first prize in a province-wide Catholic essay contest. Her winning essay was called “On the Lost Souls of the Titanic,” in which she compared the world to a ship heading into an iceberg of sin. The award ceremony was held in the park and broadcast over the radio. Stands with seating for a thousand people were erected on the green, and the prize-winner in each category was given a blue ribbon bearing an image of our Blessed Mother and a bouquet of roses. Mercedes would always remember sitting beside the Bishop of Havana and shaking his hand, and that when she looked down at her classmates in their white and blue dresses, she saw her sisters and mother and father proudly smiling. Standing before the microphone, Mercedes gave a little speech in which she said she had never been so honored in her life, and this message boomed and echoed across the park and was met with great clapping from the crowd.
She was very happy in those days, but then things started to come down around her.
Teodoro Sorrea, good businessman and poet, was not a good judge of character. His troubles started in the 1920s when he involved himself in politics, giving out loans and making campaign contributions to liberal party candidates. Among mayors, senators, and ministers he had a reputation for reliability. During elections he often went out on a truck, making speeches through a megaphone to the people of small towns. One of the men he supported with an enormous loan eventually became the eighth president of the Republic of Cuba. This was President Machado, who once visited the house and bounced Mercedes on his knees. His first term, from 1925 to 1929, was considered most productive. He built the Central Highway that linked Cuba east to west, brought new electrical generators to Havana, and increased economic investment by Americans in Cuba. But during his second term he began to seek total power. Fighting widespread opposition, President Machado shut down schools, tried to disband labor unions, set up torture prisons, and almost brought the economy to ruin.
He was given a nickname by the poor people: “Second Nero.”
Machado owed Teodoro a large sum of money that was supposed to be paid in a tax-skimming scheme. Teodoro waited and waited but never received a cent. He had overinvested in a number of projects and was on the verge of bankruptcy when he decided to approach Machado personally. One day in 1929 Teodoro arrived in Havana and roamed the halls of the presidential palace. It was a most opulent mansion with glittering chandeliers, Venetian mirrors, and Greek statues adorning the halls. With so much wealth in evidence, Teodoro thought Machado would surely be able to pay him back. But after three days of patient waiting, after making countless requests to one minister after the other, Teodoro did not meet with Machado. He returned to Holguín, sick from worry and depression. Unable to sleep at night, he paced the floors, smoking cigar after cigar, until morning. He did not spend the usual time before the mirror, looking himself over; his eyes were heavy with sadness.
One evening he heard Mercedes crying out from a bad dream. He went to her room. In the dark he was as wide and high as a mountain:
“Mercita, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Papa. I was having a dream.”
“Don’t be worried.”
“But it was terrible,” she told him. “There were dead butterflies in my dream.”
“Your dream was made of air,” he told her. “Just remember when you see the butterflies, they are made of air.”
But during the succeeding nights the air filled with more of the dead butterflies that weren’t there, and one evening an immense butterfly fluttered down the hallway and fell to the floor, crying. The next day Teodoro came home, ate dinner, sat in the patio with his pad of bleached newsprint and pencil, grew drowsy, went to bed, and died in his sleep.
There was tremendous confusion that week, and many flowers were brought into the house. A line of mourners that stretched past twenty of the largest houses went from the street to the door and into the parlor where Teodoro rested in his coffin on a bedding of lilies and orchids. Farmers and poor people came dressed in clean guayaberas. The poets came and then military men and politicos, Teodoro’s workers and his banker, the local priests and merchants, fellow members of the Masonic lodge, his doctors, young señoritas who carried parasols, the tough young machos of town with their mothers, nuns and the local prostitute, feeble old women and the youngest children, who did not know about death. Inside the room they looked into the coffin and prayed for his soul. Mercedes, who greeted the mourners without looking at their faces, sat beside her mother, trembling.
The funeral paralyzed the main road of Holguín for the several hours the procession of wagons and horses needed to make its way to El Campo Santo, the cemetery where Teodoro Sorrea was buried in a fine white tomb in the shade of a tree. Mercedes would not too quickly accept his death. She would not believe it even though she had run her fingers through his hair and touched the bucket of ice that was kept under the coffin as it stood in the parlor, not after she had touched his face and he still did not move, not when they took him out and the procession wound through the streets, past countless mourners who crowded the walkways, and not even when he was put in the ground and she watched a basket of flowers float down into the dark of his tomb.
The years that followed Teodoro’s death were not good to the Sorrea family. Never paid by Machado and without an income, Doña María had to finally sell off the house, the furniture, and the grand decorations and move away to Arachoa Street, one of the roads the farmers took on their way to market. Mercedes’s days were spent quietly on the porch with Doña María, reading romantic novels, the Bible, and movie magazines. She wanted to be with her father, but he was gone, and so she sometimes saw his ghost. Resting in bed, she would hear a noise and see on the wall a sprinkling of light, like the sun rippling on water, and her father would appear for a moment, shaking his head. Or she and Doña María would go to the cemetery, pray for his soul, and then come home to find him in the living room looking for something. For years she could not stop thinking about him and their old life together. That is the way with the dead, she thought, see him one day and not see him the next. It turned her into a nervous prankster. She played tricks on her sisters and loved to show them how she could still laugh. But at night she dreamed about Teodoro: about walking with him up the white steps of Palo Alto, a mountain in Holguín, to sit before a statue of Jesus; about being a little girl again with a Cleopatra hairdo, happy as a mouse by his side; about feeling his kisses on her face and hearing his voice when she went to bed.
Thinking of him influenced her life. One day, after a long bus ride, she arrived in Santiago to take a scholarship exam for a teacher’s school. This was her great hope, and she was certain to pass the exam with ease. But in the middle of the exam she began to think about her dead father, and soon she couldn’t answer the questions or decipher the numbers on the pages, and she broke down crying, excused herself, and ran from the examination room. She never attempted the scholarship exam again. So she remained with her mother, María, and watched her sisters Rina and Luisa find men, get married, and move into their own houses. When she became bored at home, she went to work as an accountant’s assistant for a family friend with a tobacco concern in Holguín. She passed a few years in this job. But in the riots of 1933 the building she worked in burned down. Then she didn’t do very much for three years. She spent time with a few different novios, but these romances amounted to nothing. Sometimes she dabbled in prophecy and entertained herself and friends with predictions about love. One afternoon Mercedes decided to go to the movies at the Neptuna movie theater, where Snow White was playing. Just as she was going inside, the manager of the theater came out and asked if she would like a job as a ticket girl. She accepted.
There is much more to be told… One day Hector and his older brother Horacio would hear all the different stories, and it would amaze them that for all her ability and talent their mother ended up tearing tickets off a spool and pushing them out under the window of a gold painted booth. She sold those tickets for a peseta each. Sometimes she looked up to find the god Neptune with trident staring back down at her from the marquee, and she would leave the theater and walk the street, sad because she did not have a good man, sighing as the other couples passed by her and strolled to the park where they held hands and kissed behind the trees.
Sometimes, as she waited in the booth, blossoms blew over from the park. One whiff of the enlarging fragrances and she began to think about her father, Teodoro Sorrea, standing in the parlor of the grand house, in all the sunlight, with the famous poets and other admiring visitors. And she would hear his fine voice speaking of nightingales and stars. She would daydream about these things until someone rapped at the window and interrupted her, saying, “Señorita? Señorita?” or someone caught her eye, like Alejo Santinio, whom she saw one day standing a few feet away from her.
In those days, on Sundays, Alejo Santinio used to take the bus into Holguín from his town of San Pedro, about ten miles away, and go walking down the avenue by the park. San Pedro was a nothing town, known long ago as a center for trading and selling slaves. It had a town square of pounded-down dirt that sent up clouds of dust any time a strong wind came along. Going into Holguín was thrilling to Alejo because that city, surrounded by hills, had everything from a movie theater to an enormous dance hall. On Sundays there were crowds and music in the park and young couples strolling and friends to be met, sweets and fruit to be eaten.
For a small town dandy, Alejo was a good dresser. He usually wore an embroidered guayabera but sometimes put on a flashy linen suit with light blue stripes and a pair of black and white spatted shoes. He was tall, nearly six feet in height, with broad shoulders, a large nose, dark eyes and hair, and a typically sad Galician expression. Several generations back his family had emigrated from Galicia, Spain, to the Canary Islands and then to Cuba. Then his grandfather had done something in the slave trade. He had sailed the seas between the Canaries and Santiago de Cuba with that terrible cargo, made some money, and settled in San Pedro where he bought up farmland. Alejo was not a handsome man. Nor did he look particularly Cuban or Spanish. His immense ears and longish face gave him the air of a gypsy. But he was very clean, well manicured, and well shaven, with skin fragrant with a lilac after-shave lotion that attracted the stingless bees of the park as he walked along.
One Sunday his girl had refused to go kissing with him behind one of the trees, so he left her alone—to hell with her, she was a prissy virgin—and crossed the wide avenue and walked down the side street until he found himself on the corner where the Neptuna movie theater stood. Looking around, he noticed the ticket girl staring at him, so he smiled and nodded and called out, “Señorita, Señorita,” which made her blush and return to counting the receipts. But she kept taking peeks at him, and seeing this, Alejo decided to make her acquaintance.
An Edward G. Robinson double feature was playing, and the big posters that fluttered like ghosts off the theater pillars showed a gangland floozie hanging from the leg of her man. This must have put certain thoughts into Alejo’s mind. He straightened his hat and walked over. Noticing blossoms on the sidewalk, he stepped down and gathered them into a bouquet, went to the booth, and shoved the flowers into the opening saying, “Señorita, if I may be forward, my name is Alejo Santinio and these flowers are for you. Flowers for the flower. Señorita, you are very pretty.”
She blushed and, giggling, said, “And I think you’re a little crazy, Señor.”
From this beginning sprang their romance. She kept the flowers and he went into the movies free. This was a good deal for him, and he returned week after week. He liked the movies and he liked Mercedes. Soon he began to take her out. She would meet him in the back of the theater and sit beside him in a creaky chair, fanning herself as they watched the newsreels. In those days there were Nazis marching arrogantly down European squares and shots of a scowling Hitler and movie stars and shots of Eastern European refugees, so poor and lost. “Persecuted,” as Mercedes would say, “even though they believe in God, too.” They would see cartoons and then Laurel and Hardy (El Flaco y el Gordo), funny enough because when Alejo would grow older and world-weary, his face would grow round and heavy, and he would begin to resemble Mr. Hardy more and more each day. After the movies they would get lost in the park and wander in the orange grove, watching the moon in the wash of stars. They kissed behind prickly trees and under gaslights as bright as the moon. They walked under luminous clouds, sighing and speaking in whispers. In little cafeterias, they feasted on rum-drenched sweet cakes and guava paste, then went to the dance halls and the three-hundred-year-old Central Gallego with its Spanish pillars, endless mirrors, and archways. They inhaled each other’s breath, kissed under the shadows of church walls, and wandered in the cemetery among the white tombs held aloft by apostolic hands and by exhausted saints, and they sat on the low white benches of the placitas throughout town ecstatic in their mutual love.
Who knows what caused the original love. Was it the taste of the tongue that had been sipping a creamy café con leche? The weight of his body pressing her fearful body, thin and soft, against a stone wall? Gentlemanliness on his part, ladylikeness on hers? Was it religion? The shadows on the street? Or the fact that when she mentioned her father’s name, Alejo took hold of both her hands? Or was it the twisted, deformed elbow he had gotten from a childhood fall? His sad eyes? The air of chivalrous melancholy about him? Her fears? Was it because he took her to a friend’s house, or to a shed in the slaughterhouse part of town, or up north to the beach whenever he pleased? Did she ever try to resist?
Who knows? But when Alejo brought Mercedes home to Arachoa Street, they would find Doña María sitting by the front window watching the street and shaking her head because so many of the young people of the 1930s were starting to go where they pleased without a chaperoning aunt or mother—a dueña—to keep an eye on them. In María’s youth she could go nowhere with a male unless her mother accompanied her. But now things were different. Poor Doña María, even though she was infuriated by this change, she wanted Mercedes to find a man and have a life of her own. Even though she was very old herself and might be left alone if Mercedes married.
So when she saw them coming to the house, holding hands and playing around, she remained silent. As they sat on the porch, María’s head would appear silhouetted behind the curtains and then disappear. She constantly spied on them and rarely smiled. When Alejo called out to her from the porch in a cheerful voice, “Good evening, Señora!” she remained silent, perhaps nodding. The only emotion she seemed to show was sadness, which had been her way since she first came to Cuba with Teodoro. That sadness had made her very strict with Mercedes and her sisters. Perhaps it had turned her hair white. Even though she loved Cuba, María refused to forget Spain, and this stubbornness made her suffer.
“Good evening, Señora,” Alejo always said a second time, waving until her face left the window. Then he and Mercedes followed a tile path through bushes and hanging lianas to the yard behind the house, where Teodoro Sorrea’s ghost sometimes became visible.
“My father comes here when it’s very late at night. And then he’s quiet. A good man doesn’t like to frighten people. It’s just that spirits want to be near people so much they can’t help themselves.”
“When did he die?”
“When I was younger and prettier. He died from a bad heart.”
“My father’s dead, too. He passed on two years ago, but it’s just as well because he said we were all trouble to him. It’s just as well that he stays in the ground.”
“Dios mío, don’t say that. Or he’ll cry. It’ll make him suffer and then you won’t know what to expect from him.”
“Psssh,” he said. “I don’t really believe in all those superstitions. And besides, the world is hard enough. Why do you have to think about ghosts?”
“Because they are there,” she said wistfully.
“You think too much.”
In those days, being young and strong, Alejo did not think too much about death or cry in the evenings fearing the end of things. It’s hard but pleasurable to imagine him that way. No tears. Instead he preferred to think about the opportunities in his life. He had some money. His father, Isidro Santinio, had left the family some fruit and livestock farms. All but one had been sold and the money divided up among his family. They were nine daughters and two sons, Alejo and his older brother after whom Hector would be named. Alejo’s share came to about five thousand dollars. When he met Mercedes he was thinking about what he would do with the money. All he knew was that he wanted to leave San Pedro and head out into the world, to break away from the small town life he sometimes found so boring.
“Then why don’t you go?”
“Why? Because I feel tied to this place. I want to go and I want to stay.” He looked down into his hands. “And there’s also my family.”
“Is that all you’re afraid of?” She laughed. “Ai, leave them when you want to!”
She was prone to say what he wanted to hear and to compliment him on the way he dressed and carried himself and on his soft voice. This pleased him. Being the youngest he was used to having affection and praise lavished upon him. And he was accustomed to having his way and generally doing what he pleased. The accident that deformed his right arm as a younger man had exempted him from the hard work of the farms. His brother, Hector Santinio, managed the farms and was the patriarch of the family after Isidro. He was always after Alejo to do something more with himself. But Alejo liked the easy life, the big parties his mother enjoyed giving, cock fights, gambling, domino games, the movies, women, dancing, lazy naps, suckling pig with large platters of saffron rice and black beans… Go away? Yes, he would like to go, but in San Pedro he could work only when he felt the urge. He had an occasional job taking mail into the mountains by mule. For two days he would travel south through the countryside to reach the mountains. Then he would stop to eat and drink with the people who lived there and give them news about the outside world. To them, as to the people of San Pedro, he was a big man. If he remained he would never have to worry about friends, food, or money. The Santinios had been in Oriente for more than seventy-five years. They were respected and their life was good.
“Yes I think I would like to go somewhere,” he told Mercedes. “These towns are too small; maybe one day I will go somewhere.” And then he looked around at the windows and up into the trees where little bell frogs were chirping, and he pulled her close and kissed her.
They were going together for a long time. Generally speaking, she let him have his way with her. Who knew where they would go, groping and kissing one another? Maybe into the parlor after Doña María had fallen asleep, perhaps to the rear patio where they could hide behind jade plants and creepers. Mercedes did not mind Alejo’s forwardness. She always waited anxiously for their evenings together at the Neptuna, in the dance halls, and for their romantic walks in the park and then home.
On Saturdays he would bring her out to San Pedro. He lived on a farm outside the town. The main house was in the old Spanish style, with iron balconies, winding stairways, a central gallery, and a little garden by the entrance that led into a courtyard. The Santinios always held big parties in the house for their friends from town. Tables and chairs and Chinese lanterns were carried out through the gallery into the central courtyard. So many delicious foods were cooked: suckling pig with garlic sauce, chicken fricassee with rice and black beans, yucca and plantain soups, platters of beef picadillo. Mercedes would remain until midnight, spending much of her time with Alejo’s mother, Doña Isabel. They would sit in the shade, laughing and chatting, watching the maid and the cook prepare the courtyard for the festivities. Isabel would come out in a red dress with beads and a flamingo plume in her hair, in the style of the flappers of the 1920s. A wind-up phonograph played tangos, and dance contests were held, all for the amusement of Doña Isabel, who needed such festivity to forget the death of her husband. Nearly a hundred people would come from town to dance and eat. Doña Isabel and Mercedes would sit together talking about life.
Isabel’s husband, Don Isidro, had died abruptly one day, and this fact drew Isabel close to Mercedes.
“Sometimes I wonder where he is,” Isabel said sadly.
“In heaven,” Mercedes answered, looking up at the sky with wide-open eyes. “Up there it’s like a park, so very nice with benches and trees and streams. There’s plenty of sunshine and tables set with food. The leaves have little pictures of Jesus Christ on them.”
Isabel laughed. “And how do you know this is so?”
“Because I know, as sure as I am here.” Then Mercedes took a rose and gave it to Isabel. “Take a deep breath, Isabel. That is what heaven is like.”
“Ai, but you’re a funny woman,” Isabel said to Mercedes. “But you’re a good one, just the same. Alejo is making a good choice.”
As Mercedes always knew, Doña Isabel liked her. And she was well liked by almost everyone in Alejo’s family. The exception was Alejo’s eldest sister, Buita, who hated Mercedes from the start. They were opposites. Mercedes was thin and dainty with a mermaid’s amazed face; she liked to laugh, easily felt the pain of others, and had a delicate soul. But Buita was harsh and liked to give orders; she was physically huge, good-looking but not pretty. A jealous woman, she criticized people easily. Although she was fervently religious and owned a chest of crucifixes, she had no real interest in the suffering of others; her soul was eight feet high and made of chain mail and armor.
Buita was married to a musician whom she had met in Havana on a shopping trip, but he was always going away. He was the leader of Los Bufos Cubanos—“The Jolly Cubans”—and his name was Alberto Piñon. He was popular in the States, where he sometimes toured, and occasionally he asked her along. But just as often Buita remained in San Pedro taking care of her mother and watching over the household. During his absences, Buita liked to pass her time with Alejo, with whom she was very close. But sometimes she would embarrass him by giving him too many orders, and so Alejo tried to avoid her, sneaking out to spend time in Holguín with friends or with Mercedes at the Neptuna. Sometimes Buita would go looking for him, cursing Mercedes and calling her a witch who had put Alejo under a spell.
Buita was thirty-five years old. Being the eldest, she had the power of a substitute mother over her brothers and sisters. When Mercedes came to visit, Buita said whatever she pleased, and Alejo never protested.
“Chica,” Buita would often say, “how can my brother want someone like you?”
“Well, Buita, he does have eyes.”
“But not much of a brain.”
Things never improved. Whenever Mercedes came to visit, Buita interrogated her. “And can you sew? Do you know how to clean a house? Can you cook?”
“Oh yes, of course, I know how to do those things,” Mercedes assured her.
But when Buita, treating her like a house servant, put her to work, Mercedes burned up a pig in the oven, stripped off the finish of an old German cabinet with metal polish, and dropped an old family mirror, shattering it into pieces on the floor.
“Dios mío,” Buita said. “How can my poor brother want you?”
Because she grew up in a house with servants, Mercedes never learned how to cook or sew or clean properly. Whenever she mentioned her “other life,” her life before her father’s death, and offered it as an excuse, Buita would laugh and say, “You? You never had anything!”
“Oh, but we had a grand house with a cook from Cienfuegos and three others to do the work,” she answered Buita. “We had two coaches and a car, three horses, and six German hounds.”
“Psssssh, no tenia nada! You had nothing. Ni pío! Nothing!”
“We did!”
“Then why do you look at everything in this house with such big eyes?”
“I don’t.”
“You know what she’s up to, don’t you?” she asked Alejo, who pretended that nothing was being said. “She’s like a little cat who wants to lick up all the milk in our family because her family had none. She’s not interested in you but in your plata.” Buita was rubbing her fingers together as a fly rubs its legs. “She’s a lower kind of woman, and you would be better off without her.”
Soon Buita took to spreading vicious gossip around San Pedro and Holguín, calling Mercedes “a stupid ticket girl,” “a cheap harlot,” “a lowlife,” and a “seducer,” as if she had taken Alejo’s innocence from him. Buita hated Mercedes so much that she went up to Alejo one day and bluntly told him, “If you marry that girl, you will lose the family.”
Torn between Mercedes and Buita, whose power over the others was strong, Alejo tried to avoid the subject of marriage. But the rivalry continued until finally one day Mercedes went to the Santinio house to have a talk with Doña Isabel about Alejo.
“Of course you know the things people are saying about us are not true,” Mercedes told Isabel, “but there is one way of stopping this gossip, and that is a wedding. I wouldn’t ask unless I thought it would be for the good—otherwise people will continue to talk, and all our names will be shamed.…”
Mercedes probably shocked Isabel with stories of their love. She may have even said she was carrying Alejo’s baby. Like in the romance novels. In any case, after this, Doña Isabel more or less ordered Alejo to marry Mercedes.
The ceremony was held in an old colonial church with cool stone floors and walls with saintly figures recessed into stone, under a ceiling of cracked crossbeams and fresco depictions of celestial battles. Everyone from both families attended the wedding, except Buita and two of her sisters who were no longer living in Cuba—Lolita, who had moved from San Pedro to Havana to California, and Margarita, who was living in New York. Doñas Isabel and María sat together and chatted like friendly widows, and both sides of the family were smiling at each other. Alejo looked very handsome. He wore a one-hundred-stitch-per-inch cotton suit and a pair of gleaming black shoes. Mercedes wore a plain blue cotton dress, dotted with little flowers, and a pair of simple low-heeled shoes. Alejo held both her hands because Mercedes was trembling and also giggling as the priest, Father Julio Verdad, an old family friend, read the marriage vows. Mercedes was thinking about so many things, feeling the warmth of blood in Alejo’s hands and watching the faces around her nod and blink, and soon her mind really started to wander, so that she saw the statues of saints and angels look around and blink their eyes, and then beyond the windows, it began to rain even though it was not raining. Then the ceremony was suddenly over. The priest gave the final blessing. Alejo kissed her, and everyone kissed her, and they left the church and found themselves outside, being serenaded by a troupe of singers from San Pedro playing guitars and violins, and then they got into a noisy, blossom-covered white automobile and drove off into town.
They went to the Spanish Society and danced all night to a charanga band. Mercedes kissed her sisters, and her sisters, Luisa and Rina, kissed Doña Isabel and Hector, who kissed Doña María, and she kissed the other Santinios, Juanita, Sarita, Consuelo, Vivian, Linda, and Concepción, and then friends and neighbors. Everyone danced and ate and drank, toasting the new couple, and this went on until long past midnight when they left the Spanish Society for their hotel room, which happened to be around the corner from the Neptuna in Holguín.
During the honeymoon night the unrestrained act of love inspired a kind of hysteria in Mercedes. She got up from bed, which was made of squeaky metal, to hang a cloth over the mirror, and later, as Alejo was being his most forceful with her, she seemed to drift away, floating off the bed, becoming more a spirit than a wife, weightless and without a body. She was thinking about so many things: the lariats of hair that curled up from his belly, over his chest, and behind his neck; the strength of his body; his good looks; his wishes for the future. She thought about the taste of his salty sweat while he whispered his love and looked at her with sad, angelic eyes. She imagined birds circling the garden of her childhood house and saw her father walking up the path to their house with gifts for her in his arms, and this made Mercedes shiver. And she found herself looking down over the hotel room at herself and Alejo in bed. She began to shake from loving and kisses, and when they were finished, Mercedes sighed and Alejo murmured, “Mi querida, mi querida.” “My love, my love.” Entangled in each other, they caressed and kissed until they fell asleep.
Mercedes dreamed that she was a flower in her father’s hands, and Alejo, standing on the bow of a ship under a sky of gently spinning stars, felt an ocean breeze cooling his face.
Later that night their peace was broken by a violent pounding, as if a bull were trying to knock down the door. They sat up in bed, holding each other, and then Alejo called out, “Go away!” But neither he nor Mercedes dared to move from the bed. They remained there, holding each other, for another half hour, until finally the pounding ceased. Alejo smoked a cigarette and then they went back to sleep. Years later Mercedes would tell her sons, Hector and Horacio, “It was some poor lost soul who was jealous of our love.… Ask your Papa if you don’t believe me, and he will tell you the same.”
They were very happy. The uncertain future was open to them. Alejo was thin and tall, with hope in his eyes. Like a character from a romance novel, he promised Mercedes the world. And Mercedes, frail and vulnerable, with long curly mermaid’s hair, wanted to believe in him. In those days she would do anything for him. She was a willing slave and never wanted to let him go.… They spent a week honeymooning up at Gibara beach, but after that they had no real plans. What were they going to do? It was 1941. There was a war in Europe, and a new crooked president in Havana. They rented a little house with running water outside San Pedro, within walking distance of the bus stop, bought a radio, and for a time spent their afternoons loving on their rickety bed. Sometimes Alejo went into the mountains with his mule, carrying mail, and Mercedes passed the evenings at the Neptuna, tearing tickets off a spool. It was around this time that Alejo started thinking seriously about coming to America.
Alejo’s sister, Margarita, lived in New York, and she would send Alejo letters that spoke of her loneliness for the family and practically begged him to visit her. She was married to Eduardo Delgado, a tobacco exporter from Cienfuegos. They had been living in America since 1932, when Eduardo had opened a shop on Madison Avenue and started retailing cigars for the Santinio family. It was a short-lived venture, producing Santinio “Comets” and “Fires,” because the cigars never caught on. When the business folded, Eduardo began selling cigars and smoking items to the hotels and men’s clubs, and he soon started earning a good living for himself. Margarita liked New York, but she had another reason for staying there: She had stolen the love of Eduardo Delgado away from Buita, and this had caused a rift that would last for the rest of their lives. Margarita was by far the prettier and gentler of the two sisters. When Eduardo had visited their house, he was more attracted to Margarita and little by little began to spend more of his time with her. Even though he was twenty years older than she, Margarita fell in love with him. He was a kind man and very good-looking for his age. One day, when he was supposed to take Buita dancing, Eduardo confessed everything and began to court her sister openly. For years neither Buita nor Margarita spoke a word to one another. Relations eventually improved when Margarita moved to America and Buita found herself her own husband. Mercedes always told that story to explain Buita’s mean streak, but there was more to it than that.
Alejo received Margarita’s letters monthly and kept them in a special box, rereading them whenever he felt the desire to leave San Pedro. In her letters she tried to entice Alejo to New York with stories about the high-living Cubans he would meet there. He would have a good time with this crowd at dance halls, ballrooms, restaurants, and parties, and he would get to see something of the world. Buita had been to New York with Alberto to visit Margarita and had liked it, but Alejo had never been outside of Cuba. Next to his better-traveled sisters, he felt like a country bumpkin. Sometimes as he walked through the main plaza of San Pedro, he bemoaned his simple quiet life, wishing for more. What would he do if he remained in Cuba? He didn’t want to be a farmer like his brother. That work was too hard for too little return. He had struggled with the idea of opening a store of some kind in town, but at almost thirty years of age, he realized that it might be his last chance to change, to have an adventure.
One evening Alejo went to his mother and told her that he was thinking about making a journey to America. And he did the same with family and with his friends, finding support from all except his brother Hector, who could never dream of leaving Cuba. Hector kept a farm in the countryside, lived like a nineteenth-century gentleman, raised his children strictly, and didn’t care much for the modern age. He referred to America as the “machine country” and told Alejo, “You’re your own man, so go if you want,” but his disapproval was obvious and this made Alejo doubt his plans. Still, he decided to go.
Mercedes was secretly shocked by this decision, and she was afraid that Alejo was going to leave without her. Dwelling on this possibility, she spent many of her days with her mother and sisters, weeping and suffering from a case of racked nerves. The afternoons found her in the cemetery where her father was buried, kneeling beside his white tomb with her hands folded in prayer, whispering to him. Finally Alejo asked her to go with him. Then she was relieved and in some ways happy to be leaving Cuba on an adventure. Alejo would be removed from the influence of Buita who was a thorn in her side; Mercedes would have him for herself.
When Alejo looked into her eyes and spoke about the future in his soft voice, Mercedes believed they would be happy. But who gave thought to the fact that they spoke no English? Who considered the differences between doing business in a small Cuban town and in America? Or that they would need plans, connections… that it wouldn’t be a casual little vacation voyage? Or that Mercedes would be unhappy with fear and loneliness, or that they would miss the very things that so bored them now? Alejo? He thought only that he would have more excitement and fun, perhaps more opportunity, and that he would escape the midday lethargy, the sleepiness of humid, heavy-aired, Cuban afternoons.
So one day Alejo and Mercedes received passports from a certain judge, Alfonso Alonso of Oriente Province Cuba, dated June 10, 1943.
The following week they and about ten members of their families made their way south to the bustling port of Santiago. Among the family were Luisa and Rina and their children, doñas Isabel and María, Buita and Concepción, and Hector. Mercedes was wearing a plain cotton dress, sunbonnet, and dark glasses. Alejo was wearing a linen suit and stood by the water’s edge casually smoking American cigarettes, Lucky Strikes, “Un fumo muy bueno,” as the billboard ads used to say. He passed the hour speaking quietly with his sisters, but when the boarding horn sounded and one of the crew told them to get moving, Alejo put out his cigarette and buried himself in his mother’s arms.
She kept repeating: “Dios mío, I don’t believe you’re leaving us.”
“Don’t be worried, I’ll come back in a short time,” he told her, as if he would indeed return soon. She kept patting his back and reassuring him that she would pray for them. Then it was time for the final embraces and all the women, including Buita, were crying. Alejo and his brother, Hector, shook hands in a manly way, but in the final moments they came together like children, patting one another’s backs and kissing each other’s faces, and then Mercedes did the same with her mother and sisters, and Alejo kissed his sisters and mother. Then they went up the boarding ramp and stood at the railing.
Seagulls swooped at the water which was choppy and rocking the ship. A woman’s hat blew away. Mercedes kept waving down at the dock, and with the last whistle she almost leaped over the railing and ran down the ramp, but Alejo took hold of her, calmed her, and then he lit another cigarette. He waved down to his family. All waved back except Buita, who stood with her arms folded, looking sternly up at Mercedes. Then the ship pulled away from the dock and headed northeasterly toward the Windward Passages, away from the bursting sunlight on the horizon and the bending royal palms and their sweet aroma that Alejo would never smell again.
While Mercedes spent much of the journey by herself, Alejo passed the days under the shade of a deck umbrella, playing cards and making conversation with the other Cubans on board. These were well-bred Cubans with enough money to go on journeys whenever they liked. They came from families who had profited during times of great hardship. They were clean, well manicured, well scented, and well dressed, with soft leather shoes from Spain, linen suits, panamas. They liked Alejo because he was polite and clean-cut and spent his money buying them daiquiris and icy beers. And the waiters liked him. They came from Europe and spoke very little Spanish. They liked the way Alejo imitated the Americans who wore Stetson hats, leaving a rolled-up dollar bill under a plate, as a tip, after the morning refreshments were served. An Italian waiter would come along and slap the back of Alejo’s jacket with a soft brush, for which he received a twenty-five-cent piece and a return slap on his shoulder. Alejo and the Italian treated each other like brothers. The waiter would come up on deck after working hours and sit in the dark, watching the sea, morosely silent because he had left his family in Italy. Playing the big man, Alejo bought the waiter a drink and then another, so that money flew from his pockets. Everyone had seen refugees in those days. The Cubans of coastal towns would find families of dark-eyed Europeans, dressed in black, exhausted from their journey, resting in the plazas. Alejo had seen refugees in Holguín and in the newsreels, and as he left the deck to play some rummy with the other passengers below, he considered himself a fortunate man.
Gambling, he lost money. Luck was not with him, and when he wanted more money he would send Mercedes down into their compartment below deck. She had hidden his cash inside a pair of low-heeled shoes at the bottom of their black trunk. Sighing, she would open the trunk and take out the money for him. Sometimes she slipped an extra amount into an envelope, which she hid in her dress. Saving money in that manner would become a lifelong habit. Even though they had about five thousand dollars—in those days a considerable sum—she was worried that it would suddenly disappear. Alejo always reassured her that everything would be fine. And for a long time those few words were enough for her. What was he going to do with that money? He had some kind of vague plan to double, triple, infinitely multiply it. His plan was vague, because there was no plan. Somehow he would find Cubans in New York to give him ideas, honest Cubans like his sister and her husband, to point him toward prosperity. Somehow he would triumphantly return to San Pedro with gifts of fine clothing, electrical appliances, watches, and jewelry for everyone.
Alejo was not worried. At the very least he would be able to find work in New York. As one of the Cubans on board put it, “If you’re willing to kill yourself working, you’ll always make money.”
On the third day of the voyage Alejo was approached by a man from Havana who was returning to New York after a visit. He had heard about Alejo’s ambitions and noticed his generosity. As Alejo stood by the deck railing having a smoke, this Cuban presented him with a business proposition. Then they sat on the deck chairs, talking for an hour. The man had a negocio, a shoe store in the Bronx, and he offered Alejo a share. He said he needed the money to bring one of his brothers up from Cuba, that he didn’t have enough to do it. A little while later Alejo was rustling through the trunk in the compartment, counting out five hundred dollars.
“Alejo! What are you doing?” Mercedes pleaded. “You’ve been spending money like water. Are you rich?”
“It’s for a friend.”
“Who?”
“His name is Gregorio Cruz and he’s from Havana and that’s good enough for me.”
Then Alejo left the compartment and went up to the deck with the money. Uncertain about the future, Mercedes sat on the bed, felt the motion of the ship, and sighed. “Ai, but I wish my father was alive,” she said, as she would whenever there would be trouble later on, after she had her sons.
Trying to nap, she kept turning over in that bed. She tried to read a romance novel, but soon she put it away and decided to go up on deck. At the stern of the ship she leaned over the railing, staring into the waves and the whorls of electric eels that followed in the ship’s foamy trail. She was seeing things in the water, as if there were an ocean of waving plants, sunken caravels, and mermaids under the ship. Then her eyes grew wider and she began to shiver in the breeze, as if only a few yards below she could see her father, Teodoro Sorrea, submerged and floating on his back. As she stared down into the water she was filled with her recollections of this calm, responsible, and intelligent Cuban who had made her family so happy, and of their life together in a serene Cuba she would never know again. The faces of poets who would sit in their garden with its aromatic trees came back to her, and she thought how all good things seemed to pass from this world. Then she thought of her house on Arachoa Street with her mother and sisters, and her days as a ticket girl at the Neptuna movie theater, and her romance with Alejo, and she knew that this life, so alluring and pleasant, was now being washed away forever in a trail of white foam in the choppy sea.
In the morning all the passengers rushed to the railing because the ship’s whistle had sounded entry into New York harbor. New York, America. Los Estados Unidos. “De Unidad Stays.” They saw warships, tugboats, and American flags everywhere. They saw seagulls circling over the docks. They saw the Statue of Liberty, startling as the moon. They saw buildings and marinas and countless merchant ships unloading their cargoes by crane. Hurrying down into their compartments, they returned with their bags and held one another as the ship began to dock and another whistle blew, and they went down a ramp into America, past policemen and rushing porters and messengers and sailors and dock workers. Mercedes and Alejo were happy and excited, checking through customs like a couple of rich Cuban tourists in New York for a visit.
Suddenly they heard a voice: “Alejo! Alejo!”
Behind a wire fence they saw Margarita and Eduardo Delgado.
“Here, here,” Eduardo and Margarita called, waving their hands.
Eduardo was very tall but frail-looking, and he kept dabbing his mouth and nose with a blood-speckled handkerchief, his pañuelo, which he kept in his jacket pocket. Margarita looked very much like Alejo, with a long face but pretty features. Seeing her brother for the first time in seven years, Margarita started to shake and laugh and blow many smoke rings from her cigarette, and she threw her arms around Alejo and kissed him, repeating, “Alejito! Alejito!” And she was nice to Mercedes, saying, “And this is your wife? How good she seems!” Then excited talk came, convoluted like crazy speech from a speeded up phonograph record.
They were out on the street, waiting for a taxicab, when the Cuban from Havana came up to Alejo and embraced him. “We will see each other soon,” he said. “This is my address in the Bronx.” Alejo did not doubt Cruz for a second. Good-bye to Cruz. Good-bye to another Cuban family posing for pictures. Good-bye to the Italian waiter who was sitting on a saggy, brown leather suitcase. They drove under endless projections of metal: trestles, elevated trains, cranes, water towers, construction sites, street lamps, telephone poles, power lines, highway ramps. Mercedes was tired but excited and nervously took hold of Alejo’s hand and closed her eyes as they made their way uptown to their new home in America.