Days of Awe Read online

  “ENCHANTING ... With subtlety and grace, Obejas depicts Alejandra’s intensifying awareness of her own identity, as a Cuban, a Jew, and a woman.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Obejas relates the compelling and disquieting history of Judaism and anti-Semitism in Cuba amidst evocative musings on exile, oppression, inheritance, the unexpected consequences of actions both weak and heroic, and the unruliness of desire and love.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Achy Obejas trains her poet’s eye and her journalist’s zeal on the ambiguities of exile, the disappointments of passionate love, and the fascinating 500-year story of Cuba’s hidden Jews. We won’t get anything as pat as a happy ending for our heroine, Alejandra, born with the Revolution, but the reader is guaranteed a magnificent journey.”

  —RAY SUAREZ The News Hour with Jim Lehrer Author of The Old Neighborhood

  “Unforgettable . . . Obejas combines the best elements of her writing into a novel of contemporary epic proportions.”

  —Windy City Times

  “Lyrical . . . Obejas invests her characters with passions and peculiarities, making them and the details of their days luscious.”

  —Girlfriends

  “A NOVEL THAT MANAGES TO BE BOTH SHARP-WITTED AND ELEGIAC, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN AND FULL OF SURPRISES THROUGHOUT.”

  —JOAN SILBER

  Author of In My Other Life

  “Blockades of the heart, of the mind, cannot withstand the trumpets that ring through Achy Obejas’s magnificent Days of Awe. A wondrous epic of the Cuban diasporic experience . . . Days of Awe is a dream, given form by Achy Obejas’s fearsome imaginative gifts. Obejas writes like an angel: flush with power, vision, and hope . . . With this novel she has vaulted into the ranks of the Caribbean’s most important writers.”

  —JUNOT DÍAZ Author of Drown

  “Days of Awe is a metaphor for our need to belong in a world that tears us asunder. It is probably the first novel written in English to reveal the Spanish Jewish spirit now inhabiting Anglo America.”

  —EDMUNDO DESNOES Author of Memories of Underdevelopment

  “The searching narrative digs deep into questions of faith, conversion, nationality, and history, exploring philosophical issues in human terms. . . . Sharp, cleverly observed details bring Havana and Chicago to life. . . . [A] clear-eyed, remarkably fresh meditation on familiar but perennially vital themes.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2001 by Achy Obejas

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2002 by Achy Obejas and

  The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “A Conversation with Achy Obejas,” copyright © 2002 by Ilan Stavans

  All rights reserved under International

  and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published

  in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division

  of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. www.ballantinebooks.com/BRC/

  Library of Congress Catalog Control Number: 2002092022

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41494-6

  v3.0_r1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Selected Readings

  Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  Son los hombres los que inventan los dioses a sus semejanzas, y cada pueblo imagina un cielo diferente, con divinidades que viven y piensan lo mismo que el pueblo que las ha creado. Siempre fue el cielo copia de los hombres, se poblo de imágenes serenas, regocijadas o vengativas, según viviesen en paz, en gozo de sentido, o en esclavitud y tormento las poblaciones que las crearon; cada sacudida en la historia de un pueblo altera su Olimpo.

  —JOSÉ MARTÍ

  It’s humankind who invents gods in our image, and so each nation imagines a different heaven, with divinities who live and think in the same way as the people who create them. Heaven has always been a reflection of humanity, populated by images that are serene, joyful, or vengeful, depending on whether their creators live in peace, in the fullness of our senses, or in slavery and torment; each shake-up of history alters the nation’s Olympus.

  —JOSÉ MARTÍ (TRANSLATION BY ACHY OBEJAS)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Though I use many different sources throughout, including Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia/Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), most of the biblical quotes are from The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1952).

  Revolutions happen, I’m convinced, because intuition tells us we’re meant for a greater world. If this one were good enough, we’d settle, happy as hens, and never rise up. But we know better: We feel the urge, ardent and fallible as it may be, for a kind of continual transcendence.

  Even Eve—or was it Lilith?—felt the pang of desire for something else well before she was officially bestowed the mortal right to yearn. It wasn’t sweet talk that drove her out of paradise but a longing for the kind of exultation only rebellion can bring. In my book, she traded up: placid immortality for the anarchy of emotions.

  In a word, revolution.

  Sure, revolts are inevitably messy and bloody, no matter how just; sometimes the cataclysms they bring only provoke a wish for more and more uprisings. Revolutions can be so unstable, so heart wrenching, that they can make yesterday’s lethargy seem heavenly.

  Revolutions, however, are as human as the instinct to breathe. The word itself is imbedded with a kind of circular logic that has at its core a contradiction. Revolutions are, after all, for the moment. The minute they cease to be the outside challenge, the moment they become the power inside, they shift more than their balance. They demand another upheaval, another ensanguined engagement.

  And they’re as regular as the seasons.

  Indeed, we measure time by the constant and sluggish turn of our own watery orb; nothing could be steadier and more predictable than these collective, planetary revolutions. Constant insurrection is in our system, in our programming, our cranial codes.

  And me, I’ve got my own revolution.

  I was born New Year’s Day 1959, at one in the afternoon in Havana, with church bells clanging raucously under baroque spires and cong
regations purring with prayer. Along the Malecón, the stone lip around the city’s coastline, people are drunk with happiness, insomnia, and the pungent aroma of sex. They throw lilies, carnations, and white roses to the ragged coral off the shore for Yemayá, goddess of fertility, the moon, and the ocean.

  At Maternidad de Línea clinic in the Vedado neighborhood, the windows rattle from a plane zooming by, crucifixes quiver on the walls. The aircraft glides eerily close to the surface of the seaboard, casting raven shadows across the petal-covered waters. At the hospital, every radio is tuned to the same screaming news.

  Everyone’s in the streets, red and black armbands and beaded bracelets hang from their wrists, gold crosses against the moist skin and shiny hair of their chests. The radio announcers play carnival music, military anthems, and, finally, patriotic songs.

  Up and down the clinic’s halls there are intermittent cries of joy and despair. Beautiful women faint from the rapture and heat, or erupt suddenly into inconsolable sobs. When they hear the bulletins, several patients lapse into comas from which they will never recover.

  “For the love of god,” says an old man, “but this kind of thing happens here all the time!”

  I am only minutes old and already dying, my tiny heart pumping in a struggle with the incompatible Rh factors my parents have bequeathed me. I’m hooked up to tubes and electric machines. A glass cylinder of blood is strung up, then another, but my insolent soul refuses every new dose. Each time, the machines rattle and beep with diminished hope.

  A doctor whispers to my father: “It’s a new day, a new day—and your daughter will live because she is the first new life of this new day!” (A lie, of course, but a persistent one.)

  In the meantime, my mother is splayed on an operating table, exhausted. She is so white and soft she looks like she’s made of soap. She has a bluish mole on her right cheek; the sign, some say, of those who confuse pain and bliss. Her arms dangle over the sides, her legs akimbo and useless, barely covered by the sheet the nurse has tossed over her.

  My father, his blue-black beard glistening from tears, gathers my mother in his arms. In spite of the horrible humidity and the pallor of her skin, she is ravishing. He caresses her forehead, squints, and gnashes his teeth.

  “She is cursed, your daughter,” says a bitter nurse, “for she has arrived on the darkest day in the history of the world!”

  The doctor shoos her away and my father nervously wipes his brow with a handkerchief that’s already soaked with my mother’s sweat. On the wall behind my parents is a picture of Christ offering his vain and hallowed core.

  But my mother has a singular plan. She makes the sign of the cross and pulls a tin box from a bag my father has reluctantly but respectfully brought her. She carefully extracts a small ball sheathed in fragrant mint and basil leaves. She unwraps it, revealing a mauve rooster’s heart with purple veins, a thin sash of fat at the crown. Then she drops the heart unceremoniously in her mouth, chewing purposefully.

  My father’s grip on her loosens. He promises to light a blue candle when he gets home, to let the gore from the slaughtered cock continue to drench the floor.

  A janitor whispers: “Congratulations, congratulations!” He sweeps in a circle around and away from my parents.

  All the while, hoses from a new bottle of blood drip into my veins, uninterrupted and without solace. My mother’s eyes are shut, her hand on my father’s, her fingers circling the bone of a hairless knuckle.

  In the distance, there’s the staccato of sniper fire. It will take the rebel leader Fidel Castro one week and one day to traverse the whole of the island, from Santiago de Cuba to Havana, marking each stop along the way with a fusillade of words.

  Before this day is over, I will have eight tumultuous interludes of my own. The first and the last blood transfusion will be from my father, the swelling vein on his arm a verdant river flooding the tributaries of my circulatory system. He will insist on standing, insist on cradling me in the nest formed by his long, elegant fingers. An astigmatic priest will be by, one of his hands on my father’s head, the other on my burning torso, his lips moving in Catholic prayer.

  Then my father will slowly close his eyes and offer his own quiet but defiant benediction.

  “Ner Adonai nishmat adam,” he will whisper, “my dear Alejandra, ner Adonai nishmat adam.”

  I

  Well before dawn on Sunday, the fifteenth of April 1961, the day we left Cuba—a dreaded day, an ashen day without a single blush of blue in the skies over Havana—my mother ensconced herself in a back room of our apartment, arranging a series of clear glasses of water under a small effigy of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

  “This will help purify us,” she said carrying in the tumblers, filled not with tap water but with the sanitized kind that came in huge blue bottles.

  If my mother’s Saint Jude looked a little shiny compared with the other saints on her altar, that’s because he was fairly new to her pantheon. My mother’s prayers usually went to the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron, to whom she’d entrusted my mortal soul if I survived those delicate first hours of transfusions and gunfire.

  Even as she lit a white candle to Saint Jude to help us on our journey, which seemed impossible enough, her preferred icon was carefully wrapped in newspapers, plastic sheets, and a double-folded yellow cotton blanket. It was then tucked into a box to which my father had fashioned a handle from thin rope and the inside of a toilet paper roll. Regardless of Saint Jude’s divine jurisdictions and whatever seemingly untenable situations we might encounter, it was the Virgin who was traveling with us, the Virgin who would be settled at the pinnacle of whatever new altar my mother constructed wherever we might wind up.

  I’ve always thought of the Virgin of Charity as the perfect mentor for Cuba: Cradling her child in her arms, she floats above a turbulent sea in which a boat with three men is being tossed about. One of the men is black and he is in the center of the boat, kneeling in prayer while the other two, who are white, row furiously and helplessly. (It’s unspoken but understood that it’s the entreaties of the black man, not the labor of the white rowers, that provides their deliverance.)

  I’ve always found it poignant, if not tragic, that Cuba, whose people are constantly seeking escape and entrusting their fortunes to the sea in the most rickety of vessels, should have early on foreseen this fate and projected it onto its sacred benefactor. When her feast day rolls around each eighth of September, devotees like my mother dress in bumblebee yellow and wink knowingly at each other in church. Also known as Ochún, this particularly Cuban madonna is the Yoruba goddess of love, patron saint of sweet water. She’s a beauty, the pearl of paradise, a flirtatious but faithful lover to Changó, the capricious god of thunder.

  It’s these very elements, I think, that make my mother’s choice of this vision of Mary—la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre—as my patron a perfect guardian: I am a child not just of revolution but also of exile, both of which have so much to do with love and faith.

  Even then, on that gloomy gray dawn in 1961, as my father waited for my mother and paced on the third-floor balcony of our home, there were Cubans leaving the island on anything that would float and looking to the skies for signs of salvation. The Cuban Revolution was two years old then, and already defying expectations.

  What fueled those who were leaving was less fear of communism, which Fidel had only hinted at at that point, or shortages of any kind, because the U.S. embargo was still a distant concern, but the persistent rumors of invasions and imminent combat that were sweeping Havana. From the countryside came reports that cane fields were being torched, the flames like red waves. What were thought to be American planes constantly buzzed the city. Weeks before, El Encanto—Havana’s most exquisite department store and perhaps its most conspicuous link to the United States—had burned to the ground. Its destruction had traumatized the city no less than the break of diplomatic relations between Cuba and Washington, D.C., back in Jan
uary. Not an hour went by without the breathless dispatch: “The yanquis are coming, the yanquis are coming.”

  Perhaps no one would admit it now, generations later, but until that spring, when Fidel’s police began to sweep out its enemies, real and perceived, and to make chants of “¡Paredón! ¡Paredón!” a part of every Cuban nightmare, few people aside from Fulgencio Batista’s operatives had left Cuba because of political persecution or economic opportunity. Though sugar prices were flat, no one believed they’d stay that way. What was actually propelling people off the island was a sense that things were beginning to look more and more like another one of those bloody skirmishes the United States periodically undertook in Latin America.

  We knew, through my mother’s cousin José Carlos, who’d call us surreptitiously from Guatemala City, where he was engaged in a training mission with American military and CIA advisers, that there were Cuban exiles amassing in Nicaragua, waiting to assault the island. José Carlos’s voice was always anxious, almost giddy, on the scratchy line from Central America—surely, had anyone known about the calls, they would have been sufficient grounds to kick him off the invading refugee-composed Brigade 2506.

  “Peru is very beautiful, yes, and we’ve met Indians from all the tribes,” he’d say in his own convoluted code in case the lines were tapped, meaning that there were Cubans from all over involved. “Some are a little savage,” he’d add, and my parents would imagine that the men were simply more rugged than José Carlos, a gentle soul who’d been a second-grade teacher in Sagua La Grande before the revolution.

  It was only later that they learned that José Carlos, who’d worked arduously for Fidel in the early days of the revolution, was finding among the ranks of the 2506 men who’d served in Batista’s secret police, murderers and torturers who had personally abused him during his short stint in jail just before Fidel triumphed.

  “They have no shame about what they may have done in the past,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Eliana, which she received much later, when a friend who’d also been in the 2506 tracked her down and delivered it for José Carlos, who died without firing a shot, drowned in the warm coastal waters just off Cuba. “Orejón Ramos, the man who slashed my throat in jail, just laughed when he saw me. ‘You? Here? But weren’t you one of Fidel’s best friends?’ he taunted. He pointed me out to everybody: ‘See this guy here, this skinny hero of the 2506? If it weren’t for him and his friends, none of us would be risking our lives here today!’ ”