The night before he died, Alejo Santinio could not sleep well. He kept waking up, gasping for air. There were no breezes in the room. It was a hot night and he kept getting up for a glass of water. At five o’clock in the morning, time for him to get ready to go to work at the hotel, he dressed before the mirror, brushed his thick curly hair, went to work, returned at three in the afternoon, tried to nap for a few hours, could not breathe, thought of Hector, was hungry, thought of Mercedes and Horacio, and of Cuba, and his job, and money and perhaps opening a store one day after all, and of the USA, ate steak with onions and thin French fries for dinner, read the newspaper and then, at 5:30 P.M., wearing his checkered pants went to his second job. For the last few years he had been working a dinner shift as a cook at the University Faculty Club restaurant, which was located on the roof of a tall neighborhood building.
According to one of the restaurant workers, he was “in a good mood.” He was attending to a large pot of vegetable soup, stirring it with an immense ladle, when he turned to this man and said, “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” And so the man opened the window. But Alejo was still too hot. Heat came from the ovens and from the steaming pots. “Why don’t you get some fresh air?” suggested one of the waitresses. Alejo put down his ladle and went out onto the roof. He could see all the neighborhood, Harlem to the east and the river to the west. But Cuba was very far away. He could not see it, leaning at the railing and looking far away… The waitress, who had watched him from a roof doorway, later said that Alejo looked at the clear sky and took a few deep breaths. He was perspiring. When he noticed her, he smiled and nodded in his friendly way and then leaned against the railing again and took a few more breaths and then sighed as the artery inside his head abruptly burst and flooded his brain and sent a shock through his body making his right arm shake. He felt the spasm in his arm, looked around with a confused expression, and then fell down. It took five kitchen workers to carry him inside, where he was laid on the tile floor, black and white, just like his shoes. The waitress called Mercedes, who at the moment of his death was peeking out the window.
It was six o’clock. Horacio was pulling out of a McDonald’s parking lot in Brooklyn when his arm started to shake. This shaking made him nervous enough to call Mercedes an hour later. By then one of the neighbors was in the apartment, trying to comfort her. She was not speaking. Her eyes were glazed. She would turn her head toward no one, whisper as if someone were there. Paula had heard her scream when the waitress told her the news. How do you tell someone that? When Mercedes heard the news she said, “What, no me digas eso? What did you say?” And the waitress repeated, “Your husband is dead,” and Mercedes said, “What?” and sat down and then screamed Dios mío like a siren, and that left her without a voice. Then she became unable to hear or understand anyone. She lay down on the bed and curled up in fetal position and began to cry, the sadness and terror pouring out of her. Neighbors attended to details—calling Buita in Miami and Luisa in New Jersey, making coffee and cooking food, trying to calm Mercedes down when she started to shake, trying to make her respond to questions when she could not speak.
When Horacio arrived, he had no patience for Mercedes and left her in the care of the neighbors. He had to go to the faculty club restaurant. He got there and saw the large army blanket spread out in the middle of the kitchen floor. Under the blanket was Alejo. Around him workers were still cooking and rushing around and doing their best to get along, because the manager did not want to close the restaurant down. Horacio froze. He felt like a helpless fool standing over Alejo’s body and moving out of the way as waitresses went by with platters of hamburgers and french fries and onion rings, salad, and Coke. He stood there looking down, then jingled change in his pocket and looked out the windows, asking, “When is he coming?”—meaning the medical examiner. Then he knelt down, pulled off the blanket, and looked at his father’s face.
Horacio ran his fingers through Alejo’s hair, touched his ears, his unmoving face. He tried to lift up Alejo’s head, it was so heavy, and then he said, “A cook…” He started to think about Alejo’s original ambitions or the way things worked out for him without the little store in the country or a color TV set or a pot to piss in, lying there, his head flooded with blood, when just a short time before he was strong enough to shake walls, punch and slap, to frighten the hell out of his children, strong enough to leave a little hick town in eastern Cuba and take an adventurous woman with him. But for what? To work all his life and then be laid down on a dirty kitchen floor? He didn’t like to think about it because then he’d say fuck this fuckin’ world, so when he looked down at Alejo’s face he thought instead, “At least now he’s peaceful.” But everyone says that, even when they feel they’re looking at a piece of stone, something for the worms, a stuffed man in a museum.
Horacio remained with Alejo for three hours, and then the medical examiner came, a tired Jewish man who carried a black leather bag. To declare Alejo dead he listened to the chest with his stethoscope for a moment and then opened the right eyelid with his thumb; the eye was like a cracked piece of glass.
The evening of Alejo’s death, Luisa and her son-in-law Pedro drove in from New Jersey. Luisa tried to soothe Mercedes by rocking her in her arms, but Mercedes kept saying, “Now I’m going to join him,” and then she would faint in Luisa’s arms, and her pulse would seem to have stopped. Quiet for a while, she would then start screaming. Sometimes her nose began to bleed, her arms trembled and flailed as she insisted over and over again, “I didn’t make him that way! God, why did you send me this man?” She would shake and spit and cross herself so much that finally Luisa took her to the hospital, where the doctors shot her full of tranquilizers and kept her in a room for the night. When she returned the next afternoon, her skin was so pale and the look in her eyes, like those of a lizard, was so stony and glazed that Hector could not recognize her.
Suddenly Mercedes was the greatest invalid of all time, oblivious to everything around her. Horacio was suddenly in the position of patriarch, and he had to be strong. When Mercedes would not eat or lift a finger, he would take hold of her and shake her arms.
“You’re not going to ignore this situation. You have to be here.” And then in an unpleasant slip, he said, “After all, you did that to him, you killed him.”
And that started her on a long string of denials. Now it took Mary, Luisa, and Paula to calm her down. As they clustered around Mercedes in the living room, Horacio and Hector went down to the funeral parlor to make the arrangements. Cousin Pedro made phone calls to inform people that Alejo was dead.
By the afternoon there was a constant flow of visitors through the apartment. The first to come were Alejo’s drinking buddies from up and down the street, drunk but not too drunk, so much in sorrow that no amount of alcohol could undo the forlornness. These men wept irrepressibly, but without embarrassment. They made solemn promises to Mercedes: “Look, he’ll come back.” The same promise Luisa had made to Mercedes: “He’ll come back the way Papa did. Don’t you remember those ghosts in Cuba when we were children?”
His old drinking buddies drank some more and went outside, stood in front of the building, and told everyone Alejo was dead. One by one, neighbors came downstairs to offer their help. The worst shaken was Mr. Kent, who had ridden to work that very morning with Alejo. He began to drink, unusual for him because he reserved alcohol for the holidays. On Christmas and Thanksgiving, Mr. Kent would come downstairs and Alejo would get Mr. Kent, who was of New England Puritan stock, completely soaked in whiskey. Mr. Kent would sit in the kitchen, happily rapping his fingers on the table, as if hearing a song. He came downstairs now bawling and shaking his head. And he got so drunk that he could not leave his bed for the next two days.
When it was time to get ready for the wake, Hector complained that he had no black shoes. Aunt Luisa came up with an old pair of Alejo’s.
“Dios mío,” she declared, “I haven’t seen these things since Cuba.”
After some urging, Hector tried them on. The shoes were much too large, but they started to close in around his feet, and as the day went on they gripped him tighter and tighter.
Horacio dressed up in a black suit and put on the ring that he had removed from Alejo’s hand. Then he kept pacing back and forth down the hall to the bathroom, copiously urinating even though he had hardly anything to drink. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, he kept having the impulse to wash his hands. He spent the morning looking everywhere for ways to make use of himself, as befitting the new head of a household.
And Mercedes? Helped by Luisa to dress, she stood before the bedroom mirror, staring at herself. Carefully she placed a medallion bearing the image of the Virgin of Cobre, a recent gift from Alejo, around her neck. Luisa was brushing Mercedes’s hair and pulling lint from her dress. As she looked at herself, Mercedes kept wondering, “Who is that woman in the mirror looking so grieved?” over and over again, until it was time for the wake and she was led away.
The problem was that his body, stretched out in the coffin, was so imposing. Immense to begin with, in that coffin Alejo looked the size of two normal men. He was laid out in the blue suit he had purchased for Horacio’s wedding. He was wearing a white shirt, a new tie, no socks, no shoes—his feet were hidden from view. His mouth was stuffed with cotton and his cheeks thudded with the touch of the hand. His eyelids were closed tightly and felt like leather. There was a lotion on his face that gave it a healthy glow. He might have just come from a walk in the park or from watching an exciting cowboy movie on the television. His hair was wavy and nicely curled, thick and full, like a young man’s hair. His hands were folded one on the other. He did not look drunk.
Inside the coffin there were no birds or radios or televisions. There were no parks or shady trees or tables covered with foods that are bad for the heart, no whiskey or rum. There were no sea creatures or gently crawling caterpillars or lilac lotion bottles on a shelf. There was no Cuba, no San Pedro, no musicians strolling on Sunday afternoons, no New York, no beautiful women, no Coney Island, no sunsets, no stars. There was no morning, no night, no chilliness, no heat. There were no sweets inside the coffin, no music. And they were not in the coffin. Horacio and Hector were standing on either side. Calmer now, Horacio kept sighing and repeating, “It’s hard to believe he’s dead. At least it took a lot to kill him.”
But Hector wasn’t ready for this, and he did not really believe it. The room smelled of eucalyptus, flowers, and candles. The walls, the wood of the coffin, were cold to him. Alejo was not in this world, but he wasn’t dead. Hector kept thinking, “I should have kissed him one last time.” He remembered how Alejo had leaned into the car when he left for Florida, and how he had denied his father a kiss. Now that Alejo was dead, he became worried that Alejo’s ghost would come after him.
Hundreds of people came to the wake. People kept coming up to Horacio and Hector, saying, “From now on, when I see you on the street, I am going to think of your papa.” Everyone came by: neighborhood kids, priests, people from far away, Eliseo Hernandez, and other Cubans from all over the city. They came to take a look at him and left shaking their heads. For three days processions moved back and forth between the funeral home and the apartment, and there was always someone to say, “After so many years in this country, he didn’t even own a car.” People came forward, patted their backs, offered sympathy, departed never to be seen again. Diego, Alejo’s co-worker, showed up dead drunk and stood for an hour whispering into the coffin. The union reps showed up. Then the family doctor. Women getting old but still curvaceous, who had probably been Alejo’s girls at one time, came in, wept into their frilly handkerchiefs, and went out again.
In a chair, Luisa held Mercedes tightly. “Don’t worry,” she kept saying, “he had the sacrament.” Meaning the priest had said words over his dead body. The female cousins and women from the neighborhood sat with Mercedes and tried to calm her down whenever she had a vision.
“He’s moving! He’s moving! My God!” And then she would almost faint.
For three days, they stood near the body. Alejo kept changing. He was good and kindly, and then the image changed so that he was pounding the walls. He seemed at peace. He seemed to weep. For Horacio, the worst had passed. He saw a tired man finally at rest. But Hector saw a frightened man who wanted one last embrace but died with his arm shaking. That was the detail that stood out in his mind.
“Are you going to kiss him when all this is over?”
“I don’t know,” Hector answered Horacio.
“You will, if you loved him.”
At night sleep was not easy. Mercedes walked through the apartment, saying his name, as if his ghost would soon come. There was drinking in the kitchen, continuous phone calls, Hector had nightmares. Horacio kept trying to shout Mercedes back into the real world. Aunt Margarita could not sleep at all. Exhausted, she would sit with Hector in his room.
“When this is done with, child,” she said in a low voice, “Buita will let you stay with her, and then you’ll be happy. It you want to go. No one is forcing, you understand. But it would make her so happy, and you would be away from your mother… Oh your mother’s good, but Buita would treat you so well.”
But Hector had decided to stay. As crazy as she could be, Mercedes was still his mother. “Tell Buita I will come and see her again one day.”
Margarita touched his face. She looked just like Alejo. She exhaled smoke from her cigarette, kissed his forehead, and then left the room. Even though she was not there, Hector could not sleep: an afterimage of her face, so sad, like Alejo’s, lingered in the room.
The three days came and went, one no different from the other. Sometimes, at the funeral home, the body in the coffin moved; that was all. People touched him. In the apartment there were all the old smells, of the meat and his cigarettes, persisting in the air. His shoes and clothes were laid out by Mercedes. Pictures of him were out. The contents of his drawers were dumped out: union cards, Havana cigars, old letters from Buita and Margarita, an old passport dated June 10, 1943, a folded-up chef’s hat that smelled like his kitchen, a ring, boxes of Chiclets, a penny collection, some Trojan prophylactics, a few old pictures of Cuba, a lock of hair. “Yeah, these things were Pop all right,” said Horacio peacefully.
On the morning they were going to close the coffin, Horacio said, “At least he won’t be suffering anymore. You won’t see him yelling or crying anymore. No more work for him. Now he’s resting.”
Nodding, Hector was thinking about bones, worms, dirty soil, and being in the coffin beside Alejo.
“You won’t see him drinking rum anymore. You won’t see him falling down the way he used to.”
The degree of sadness in that room was unbearable, but one by one the family came forward to say a last prayer over him. There were the cousins and Aunt Luisa and then Margarita Delgado, who said to Mercedes as she left the room, “Let’s forget the past.” But Mercedes did not answer her. Then Horacio and Hector brought Mercedes forward to the coffin and held her as she looked down into the coffin. She began to whisper. They watched her kneel and touch Alejo’s face and lips with her fingers, saying in the last moment, “I was good to you,” and then withdrawing into her silence. Luisa led her away.
Then Horacio touched Alejo’s hands and his face, as tough as leather, and then the hair, lively as the hair of a younger man. He leaned down, listened to his chest, and then kissed Alejo’s closed eyelids and then his lips, which were cherry red. Standing with his hand spread over his face, Horacio began to cry and, shaking, remained beside the coffin some time before he stepped aside.
“Now it’s your turn,” he said to Hector.
But Hector couldn’t kiss Alejo or begin to cry. Instead he touched Alejo’s folded hands and his face. He stood there, anxious to go. And then Horacio started to cry again, and Hector, thinking of good days, tried to cry but could not. Finally the priest arrived with some men who would carry the coffin to the hearse.
On the way to the church and during the funeral service, in which the host was lifted toward heaven to promote the soul’s safe journey, Hector tried again to think of things that would make him cry: Alejo on the floor, Alejo yelling at Mercedes, “You are killing me. You are killing me.” But nothing was there. “Pop, you did this to me,” he kept thinking. He remembered resting beside Alejo when he was sick as a child, when he thought he would die. He was comfortable beside Alejo, touching Alejo’s big belly and chest and feeling the hair and inhaling the mixed scents of meat, lilac lotion, and talcum. What had happened to those days of peace? The next moment he had opened his eyes and seen drunk men falling and Mercedes alone in the bed, suffering, and men with twisted smiles coming close and touching his hair and saying, “You’re his boy? You’re so Americano. Speak to me in Spanish.” Alejo slumping in his chair at the table would reply, “Yeah, he’s my boy. He and I are the same,” repeating that with blood in his nostrils and saliva at the corner of his lips, bloated from eating and drinking so much. “Yeah, he’s my boy,” he would say, so drunk and close-eyed that the room must have been spinning and all faces glowing red and strange, repeating incessantly, “That one… I am the man, and he’s the boy.” Try to cry? I’m trying, but it’s no use, Pop, you made me this way. Alejo would put his thick hands on the boy’s face, pull him closer into the meat and booze smells, take the boy’s hand and place it over his heart. Alejo would hold him so tightly that the boy could not pull away. The boy would close his eyes because he did not want to look, but there was Alejo’s voice, low and calm, saying, “Look at me. Look at me.” Or sometimes he would struggle down the hallway to the bathroom where he would lean one hand on the wall and piss in the toilet, then crash open the door to Hector’s room and ask, “Do you love me, boy? That’s what I have to know. Do you love me?” These memories went through Hector’s head while the Latin rang out in the church, while Horacio and the others were crying. Hector was trying to cry, too, but he could not. He had dropped into a hole as deep as the earth. Inside the hole was the image of his father, Alejo Santinio, a man who always had to beg his son for kisses.
At the cemetery they lowered Alejo’s coffin into a grave near a fence overflowing with blossoms. Mercedes dropped a bouquet of flowers into the hole and began to whisper, saying that she forgave him if he forgave her. Hector watched her with contempt, and the others bowed their heads and prayed. Horacio wept again, and one by one, the mourners passed and dropped flowers into the grave. Everyone cried except Hector. He had weeds in his mouth and in his heart. No tears. He was frightened and stood by the grave, not saying a word.