Days of Awe Read online

  It was because of José Carlos’s letters and calls just before the invasion of Playa Girón that my parents came to the conclusion that we had to leave Cuba, at least for a while.

  The first thing my mother did was sign me up for a foster child program sponsored by the Catholic Church, which would have placed me with an American family in, say, Iowa or Indiana. In her thinking, at least one of us—me, the baby, the important one, the hope for the future—would be passed over, spared whatever was going to happen in Cuba and sent off with the hope of finding a modern pharaoh’s daughter.

  It never occurred to my mother that I’d disappear, become an American, perhaps not too outwardly, but in those small imperceptible ways in which people don’t even realize that they’ve made irreversible changes. She never considered that, away from them, I might learn to slouch, that I could feel cocky enough to hurry people along when they tried to tell me a story, or that, in the golden fields of Iowa or Indiana, I might pick up a fear of the dark, a revulsion for the predicaments of faith.

  That something happened anyway; that I eventually lost some of my equilibrium, even with the two of them present, didn’t matter. In the end, my mother didn’t have to think about those possibilities—not about the wheat and corn of the American Midwest (with which we would become familiar later, but by our own choice), or about whether they’d lose me for a month or a lifetime.

  Certainly my father didn’t want us—and especially me—to be anything but Cuban. “It’s better for you to be Cuban,” he’d say, as if I had a choice then, as if I understood any of it enough to have any input in the matter.

  To my father the island was as much the caiman-shaped rock that’s Cuba, with its breathless beaches and poverty, as wherever the three of us might be living. He could manage with an imagined isle, but not without the substance of us. We—my mother and I, the weight of us—were the necessary elements to anchor my father in the physical world. As soon as he heard about my mother’s plan to send me off to the United States without them, he immediately and without discussion canceled my trip.

  “We will not be separated,” he said gravely, “ never. The act of separation itself is what’s evil.” And he tore the application forms in half very carefully in front of an unnerved priest, who told him in no uncertain terms what a selfish man he was to deny me safe passage to a good Catholic home in the United States.

  “This program is run by the church—what could be safer, Señor San José?” the priest implored.

  My father just smiled. “Yes, yes,” he said, his hands trembling, “I’m very familiar with your programs. And, no, thank you.”

  As my parents explored their options, there was never any question about where we would go. (By the mid-1960s, Cubans would be welcomed with open arms in the United States, enrolled in special welfare programs, eventually even given unique financial aid packages to help us get through college.) We were prized, frisky, and smart, and, perhaps most important, we would surely return to our sunny island once the United States had toppled Fidel. This is what had always happened: Nobody who displeased Uncle Sam stayed in power very long. A few months, maybe a year or two, and then the dictator himself would be in exile somewhere—usually Miami— and we’d be back to our normal lives, our real lives, the lives we were destined for in Cuba.

  After the foster parent program fiasco, my mother signed us up—all three of us—to leave Cuba through one of the regular flights to the United States. She took me to a local photographer, who snapped me all giggly for my passport photo, and had us all vaccinated, fingerprinted, and examined by the government authorities who would decide whether we could get a visa. All the while, she saved her pesos—which had had, until just a few months before, an even exchange with the U.S. dollar—for three round-trip tickets on Pan American Airlines: Havana-Miami, Miami-Havana.

  At my mother’s insistence, both she and my father began to learn English during this time, practicing by reading to each other every night and inadvertently starting my father off on his life’s work. For textbooks, they used an old English-language Bible, the revised standard version with the more contemporary approach, and compared its verses to the old Bilbao Spanish-language Bible my mother had inherited from her father. My mother would read entire English sentences in a rush, barely flirting with each word, waiting for their purpose to emerge through banter and play.

  “For everything there is a season,” she would say, but it was all as cryptic to her as the original Hebrew and Aramaic. All her life, my mother would decipher messages as much from facial expression and posture, tone and attitude, as from any etymological knowledge.

  My father, who would go on to become one of the most sought-after literary translators in the United States, would read aloud slowly, savoring each word on his tongue as if it were an essential oil, a delicate spice, or water for the garden.

  “. . . and a time for every matter under heaven,” he would breathe, each consonant crisp, each vowel like a musical note through his peony lips.

  He’d write down the English words believing each letter contained the formula for happiness and, after he and my mother were through reading for the night, look them up in his gold-leaf Oxford English/Spanish dictionary. After he found the Spanish translations, he’d cross-reference them back into English, discovering synonyms, searching for the new words in prayers of deliverance to see how they stood in context, if he could tell by the company they kept if these were helpful words, if they were friend or foe. He was fascinated by the pursuit of meaning, by corralling significance in a word or phrase from the vast array the universe offered.

  As time went by and I began to share some of his curiosities, he would tell me about his frustrations with heaven, how he searched in vain for a Spanish equivalent. “The dictionary said cielo, but that’s sky,” he explained. “I looked up paradise—paraíso—I looked up nirvana, Valhalla, Eden. But still the closest thing was cielo, as if, in Spanish, the enigma of the sky could never be penetrated, as if the stars were just the stars, the moon just the moon.”

  Over the years he would compile a catalog of words that refused to convert from one language to the other. Heaven was at the top of his list of stubborn English; in Spanish, it was escampar, which is what happens when it stops raining.

  For my father, these were fascinating dialectic conundrums: What was the purpose of any one word? What came first: the concept or the sound? How do words mean?

  But for me there was something much more crucial at stake: If it is true that speech reflects the realities of life, that it is, for example, precisely the everyday abundance and diversity of snow that feeds the dozens of Eskimoan terms, or the handful of Taíno words for tobacco, what does it say about us—Cubans, Hispanics—that we can’t even imagine heaven enough to name it?

  Most of the time I like to think that our inability to express heaven is simply a measure of our respect for a higher power; that, ACHY OBEJAS like certain Orthodox Jews who insist on never pronouncing or writing the word for god, we have a deeper understanding, a profound humility about our role in the cosmos. I hold fast to this notion, always praying that it is not just a fatal lack of imagination.

  The rest of the time I remember escampar, with its promise that the rain will cease, and that the skies will once more be clear and full of heavenly light.

  II

  During the time my mother was trying to get us passage out of the country, my father was wondering how long he would be able to keep his job at the floral shop on Muralla Street in Old Havana under the current conditions. He’d travel there every day by foot, a circuitous route north from the Vedado to the Malecón so he could see the ocean and feel its breeze, then east to the colonial district, through the labyrinth of dusty narrow lanes.

  For my father, the walk was a meditation. He’d gaze at the plate of shimmering water—at the promise of its coolness in the winter, the tepid embrace of the waves in summer when Havana was smothered in humidity—and review the miracle of his life
. It had had such a long and seemingly aimless trajectory before finally finding some direction when he met my mother. Each day, once in the morning, once in mid-afternoon during his lunch break, and again on his way home in the early evening, he gave thanks over and over, sometimes more than a hundred times a day, right there at the altar that was, for him, the Malecón.

  During the early months of 1961, however, he often found himself distracted. He’d look out from the shore and see shadows under the surface of the water, black phantoms slithering around the reefs off the seawall. Every day, he’d pick up endless cigarette butts, paper cups, and discarded mamey or mango seeds, their pulp dried and dirty. He’d arrive at the floral shop and make a beeline for the sink, where he’d scrub his hands and try to erase the refuse from his mind, using all his might to focus back on the beauty of his young wife at the seawall, the smell of talcum and violet water on baby me, and the comfort of the lamplight next to his favorite rocking chair for reading.

  Regardless of his efforts, it was hard to stay focused. Up and down Muralla, where Jewish immigrants had established a flourishing enclave, fear of nationalization plagued every business, whether a warehouse with a large-mouthed metal door or a general store or textile factory. For months now, the shopkeepers would sometimes find their business day disrupted with the sudden appearance of soldiers at a neighbor’s front door, their guns heavy and menacing. Then they’d see the deposed owner, pale and weeping, as he handed his keys over to the imposing commander. The businessman would be shooed away as the embarrassed employees heard from the military men how the enterprise was theirs now, part of the national patrimony.

  Most of the time the takeovers were peaceful, even if tense; sometimes the owner would resist but always lose in the scuffle that followed. A few times the soldiers would be a little overenthusiastic and rough up the merchant unnecessarily, or break a window or two just to prove they could. In nearly every case, the entrepreneur and his family would vanish, reappearing in Miami Beach via a postcard or phone call within weeks.

  The owner of the floral shop where my father worked, an elderly Polish Jew named Olinsky, had heard that Fidel was planning to take over his modest little store as well, and he, too, had begun to make noises about fleeing.

  “The only reason they think they’re going to get this place is because they don’t know me!” the old man would say. He was short, bent over, his hair bursts of thick white that shot up like Albert Einstein’s. He had wide blue eyes that seemed in perpetual shock. “I’ve been through this before, there’s nothing these amateurs can teach me! I’ll have it shuttered and burned before those bastards will have the pleasure of a single one of my roses!”

  Olinsky did not believe in planes—he’d come to Cuba on a Spanish freighter during World War II—nor in asking permission to leave, and was aghast at my father when he told him we were waiting for our chance to get visas and plane tickets.

  “Hrrrmmmph,” Olinsky muttered, his hand waving my father away as if he were a fly. “Why are you so stupid, Enrich, eh?”

  My father’s name is Enrique—Enrique Elías San José—but Gregor Olinsky, branded survivor of Auschwitz and hater of Germans, a man who loved my father like a son, never called him anything but Enrich, to my father’s constant amusement.

  “Enrich, how can you be Ytzak’s grandson and be so stupid?” Olinsky asked. “What does Ytzak say about all this, eh?”

  Ytzak Garazi, an imposing military veteran who’d lost the lower half of his left leg in Cuba’s struggle for independence, was my great-grandfather. It was through Ytzak, an active member of many of Old Havana’s civic organizations, that the job had landed in my father’s lap, a plum, really, with flexible hours and surprisingly good pay. My father, whose green thumb was legendary in our family, could work there while he went to the University of Havana, where he studied pedagogy and dreamt of someday becoming a literature professor. He was already forty-one years old, a late bloomer if ever there was one, and genuinely happy for the first time in his life. Even the revolution and the possibility of exile had failed to affect his first flush of satisfaction.

  “Señor Olinsky—” my father began in explanation, but Olinsky cut him off.

  “What if they don’t let you go, huh?” the old man asked. “What are you going to do then? Because you can’t suddenly pretend you want to stay here—you can’t, they’ll know you once tried to leave—and what kind of job do you think you’ll get after I leave, huh? Because you know, even if they take over what’s left of this store after I’m gone, nobody—not even you and your beautiful hands, Enrich—can run this place without me. I am the soul of this shop!”

  Whenever Olinsky got going, my father kept busy so as not to upset him. That day he took a handful of red roses and baby’s breath and arranged them into a long-stem vase to be taken over to the beautiful young Italian woman who was currently staying at the Ambos Mundos Hotel. She was a correspondent for a Communist newspaper back in Rome and she’d chosen to lodge at the Ambos Mundos because that had once been Ernest Hemingway’s hotel, and she was sure, U.S. invasion or no U.S. invasion, there was a story in Hemingway’s haunts, no matter what.

  In spite of the tension in the air, the beautiful Italian journalist’s brisk walks through Havana had caught the eye of a local doctor, a young fellow named Paco Tacón, who was sending her a fortune in roses every day for weeks, all of which she accepted, none of which she answered.

  According to the bellboys at the Ambos Mundos, though the beautiful Italian gave away many of the radiant roses, she kept enough that their scent trailed all the way down the halls and into the elevators, causing the few tourists still willing to come to Havana under the threat of an American attack to think that this distinct fragrance was a signature of the hotel, which they remarked upon in their calls and cables back home to Barcelona and New York, Cairo and Caracas.

  For Olinsky, who was making an unexpected bonanza from this unrequited love, Paco Tacón’s roses were a sure sign that his plan to leave was the correct one, certainly not Enrique’s passive waiting game: The profit from the yearning doctor was going to bribe a local playboy—one Johnny Suro, with his thin movie star mustache and sparkly eyes—into sailing his yacht to Miami and taking Olinsky into a cheery exile.

  Olinsky knew nothing about boats, except that Johnny’s was spacious and could surely accommodate him. He also knew that Johnny, in spite of his aristocratic and very rich forefathers, was flat broke: His family money had been illusionary for about a generation already, and Johnny’s real source of income—hustling American tourist women, especially divorcées—had dried up since tensions had escalated between the United States and Fidel. (As it was, Johnny already owed Olinsky a nice chunk of change from past courtships.)

  More important, through some bit of snobbery, Johnny Suro’s yacht—even though Johnny himself, with his easygoing manner and the long cigar in his mouth, couldn’t have been more criollo— sailed under a Spanish flag. Aside from comforting Olinsky because it echoed his first arrival in Cuba, it also meant that there was hope it could slip through both the American and Cuban Coast Guards, an enemy of neither.

  “Señor Olinsky,” Enrique announced one day as he ran into the shop, his face aglow, his avian hands fluttering, “I have the best news!”

  “Hrrrmmmph,” said the old man, barely looking up from some leafy poincianas he was watering. Though he had lived in Cuba for nearly twenty years now, the old Pole was still perplexed by the natives, whom he regarded as too easily excited. Even Enrique, who was generally mild-mannered, could get red-faced during a domino game, swoon over a particular bit of poetry, or do unspeakable things with his shoulders and hips at the sound of a drum.

  Yet my father—who wanted so much for me to be Cuban—was always cautious about identifying himself as Cuban, as if he knew that, in spite of his passport and all other appearances, there was a mark somewhere on his heart that would give away his imperfection. He admitted, always, to a Cuban birth, but what
he celebrated, perversely enough, was his Spanish heritage. In his later years in particular, he loved to tell others how certainly Cervantes was better than Shakespeare, how the Spanish armadas had crossed the Atlantic as if it were nothing more than a glistening pond.

  “What I speak is pure castellano,” he would say proudly, anchoring himself solidly in Iberia, “from Castilla, the land of castles.”

  The only sure thing that pleased him about being Cuban was directly derived from Spain: an adaptability that he saw in the Cuban sense of joy. That it arose as an answer to the Spanish attitude toward inevitability—a corrupt and funereal surrender, neither godly nor bright—never occurred to him.

  If I suggested that black Africa was the real source of Cuba’s vitality, my father, who was not a racist by any means, would retort: What kind of propaganda could have led you to such a conclusion? There was certainly good from that dark continent, but in Cuba it all manifested in music, all else was Spanish, all else was by the grace of god. As adults, we’d argue about this many times, a debate with no end or winners, each of us defending what we perceived to be the island’s honor while my mother silently suffered our stubbornness.

  What has taken me a lifetime to understand is that my father reached back for his spiritual inheritance to Spain, as if Cuba almost didn’t exist, because Spain was scar tissue, whereas Cuba was a gaping historical wound.

  “Señor Olinsky, please listen to me,” my father insisted that April morning in 1961, grabbing him by the shoulders. It was the first time he’d ever touched the elderly Polish man and the sudden warmth and strength of my father’s hands startled him. Instinctively, Olinsky recoiled. Flustered now, Enrique reached out again for the old man, which only caused him to back away even more.