Angela of the Stones Page 12

  Godofredo was already twenty-seven years old and sporting a splendid moustache when he inherited the role of Manisero de Baracoa. His sister Marisel, who was by then married with two little boys, took over the job of cone-making and Godo took to the streets, limping but ambulant. The family’s shame was long forgotten and, in any case, Godo was not recognized since he had been so long in the house making cones or else at the polyclinic undergoing physiotherapy to strengthen his foot and ankle. Everyone bought peanuts. It was an impersonal business for the most part, though a few curious souls passed the time of day with Godo and asked if he was new to Baracoa. It was a fresh beginning and Godo welcomed it. I’ve served my apprenticeship at the kitchen table, he thought, now I’m out in the world and I’m going to consume it!

  His father, much weakened by hunger strikes, came home a broken man after serving his sentence. To be greeted with the news that his only son had become Baracoa’s peanut vendor did him no good. He died shortly after his homecoming, to the relief of Liliana who no longer recognized the passionate young man she had married.

  December 2014.

  Godofredo wakes to the sound of Jose Feliciano — ‘Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Prospero año y felicidad . . . ’ He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and sits upright, feeling the floor tentatively with his right foot, as has been his habit since the accident. When he feels confident he stands up and limps barefoot into the kitchen to start brewing his morning coffee. It is seven o’clock and already sticky with what promises to be another hot humid day with tourists arriving in busloads for the Christmas season, not that Christmas is a big event in Cuba. It’s New Year that draws the foreigners, anxious to celebrate yet another anniversary of the Revolution — fifty-six years, Godo thinks with a wry smile, a true child of the Revolution, getting old.

  He heard a couple of gringas on the street yesterday talking in their stumbling Spanish to a group of muchachos. ‘We’re so glad we came now! It’s all going to change so fast now that Raúl has shaken hands with Obama.’

  ‘Yes, the embargo will be lifted and all the Yankee corporations will come in and spoil everything!’ said the other girl.

  Godo shrugs, with a dismissive gesture to his empty kitchen. The radio has told him that the remaining three of Los Cinco Heroes have come home after sixteen years in an American jail, exchanged for an American spy who served only five years and a CIA Yanqui who survived twenty years in a Cuban jail. Godo feels sick at the mention of prison sentences. ‘¡Humanidad!’ he exclaims aloud, remembering José Martí’s phrase, ‘¡Patria es humanidad!’ It has always seemed to him that imprisonment is the worst kind of inhumanity. Better to die than to rot in captivity. He remembers the gaunt grey creature who came back from Matanzas, how he failed to recognize him as his own father, and how guilty he’d felt without quite knowing why.

  He takes the coffee pot off the burner as it begins to bubble and shuffles back to his bedroom, noting with his left foot, the one that still has feeling, that the floor needs sweeping. A Cuban version of Jingle Bells is playing now and as it trails off there is the sound of kissing. The staff of the radio station are sending kisses over the airwaves to their relatives in Santa Clara, Camagüey, Pinar del Río, Cienfuegos . . . Godo wishes that his sister was with him instead of in Guantánamo with her daughter-in-law and the grandchildren. Now that Marisel is retired she spends most of her time over there, and Godo is alone, cooking for himself, trying to keep the place clean and tidy. The corners of his mouth turn down and his eyes mist as he recalls the family Christmases when his parents were still alive. Even when his father was gone to Matanzas there had still been an attempt at celebration for La Noche Buena as his mother had called Christmas Eve. There was always a family meal followed by a reading from the well-thumbed Bible she kept hidden beneath her thin mattress. What joy in December ’97 when Christmas was reinstated as a national holiday in honour of the Pope’s imminent visit! With the ban on Christmas decorations lifted, Liliana had set up a modest crèche in the sala, and on La Noche Buena she had proudly entered Nuestra Señora de la Asunción with Godofredo at her side, and there they had prayed for his broken foot, though it was by then already much healed, leaving him with only a limp and the nightly cramps in his leg.

  ‘Baracoa ciudad primada, en los colores de libertad,’ sings the daily jingle in a syrupy little-girl voice. He’s on the children’s channel. Godo turns the crackling knob until he comes to Radio Reloj with its reliable ticking and regular news updates. ‘Cuba in this 56th year of Rrrevolución . . . ’ booms a deep voice. Godo sighs. I must listen either to children’s jingles, he thinks, or to very old news of the youthful activities of men who are now very old. He had watched television the previous night after returning late from his beat in Parque Central, his jingling bolsa heavy with pesos. They had replayed the old film clip of a proudly bearded Fidel in army fatigues entering Havana with Camilo Cienfuegos at his side, tall and handsome. The clip was so familiar that Godo didn’t even see it, like the time his papá had shaved his moustache and Godo hadn’t noticed. Familiarity is a blindness, he thinks, remembering the months in hospital with his eyes closed against the pain. It is a foreign country of eternal repetition until you learn submission and become the servant. He had grown up with images of military triumph, but what was it like, he wonders, for those who had lived before the Revolution? And for those who came after, much later, only to learn about it in school? And what of Fidel? Everyone wonders at his silence as Gerardo, Ramón, and Tony return to Cuba. Is he too ill to speak? Is he even alive? Is he keeping silence until he’s ready for one of his marathon speeches? Or perhaps he’s angry about the new relation between Cuba and the US? Some say that the old Cuban-Miami families, the ones who fled after the Revolution, are still full of bitterness, holding onto their grudges and waiting to reclaim their property after more than half a century. Will Fidel face on his deathbed the mirror of his own rigidity in the form of the Miami right wing? Godo mulls over these questions as he prepares for yet another day on the streets of Baracoa, filling the old cloth bolsa with peanut cones, looping it over his shoulder. He stands a few moments listening to Für Elise, one of his favourites and an especially welcome relief in this season. As the final notes die away he switches off the radio and allows his thoughts to return to Christmas and how it will soon be over, then he can listen to Polo Montañez singing Amenece el Año Nuevo — on the radio, on the streets, in the bars. What a tragedy that our most popular singer died in a drunken car crash, Godo thinks. If Polo hadn’t been discovered he would still be a campesino, singing to his oxen in the fields of Pinar del Rio.

  The first person Godo greets as he strolls on the newly constructed Boulevard fronting Casa Cultural and Hotel Habanera is Heike, the German girl who comes back to Baracoa every year to visit her lover. She runs over waving merrily and greets Godo in her strange Spanish. ‘Mein Freund, cómo estás?’ she lilts.

  ‘Tan gorda!’ Godo says with a grin, and then he sees her face fall. ‘Tan gorda, tan gorda,’ he repeats, ‘muy linda, mas joven que antes . . . ’ — all the compliments he can think of, but she still looks offended, sucking in her stomach and pulling herself upright so that her breasts rise impressively. Godo thrusts a fistful of peanut cones at her. ‘No quiero,’ she says, ‘no quiero a engordarme.’

  ‘No te ofendas,’ he says quickly. ‘It’s beautiful to be fat, Heike, a sign of prosperity, la vida buena . . . ’ But she’s turned away, her attention caught by another German, a really fat one. Heike is in fact quite slim apart from her impressive breasts. Obviously she doesn’t understand about the accumulation of flesh against an uncertain future. Godo remembers only too well the collapse of the Soviet Union and Fidel’s “Special Period,” when everyone went to bed hungry, awoke hungry, perhaps managed a cup of watery coffee, and spent all day searching for food. There were even rumours that some ate the vital organs of corpses if they were lucky enough to work in a funeraria, or had money enough to buy the illega
l meat. Many actually died of starvation. But nobody talks about that. They just say with well-meaning admiration, ‘You’re fat!’ because that’s how everyone wants to be. Godo remembered his sister so thin that she’d had no milk in her shrivelled breasts to feed her baby. And people’s feet had troubled them, young and old, because there were no proper shoes. Godo was content to go barefoot because it was easier on his damaged foot, but he’d cut up old rubber tires to make shoes for Marisel and Liliana, attaching them to their feet with twine, which made them waddle like ducks. In the Special Period he had not been the only lame one.

  Three days later Heike hails Godo on the street and after a brief exchange of greetings launches into her complaint about the lack of money in the Bank. ‘¿Que voy a hacer?’ she asks. ‘First there is no connection for my credit card, then the ATM eats my card, I have to go all the way to Guantánamo for a replacement and travel back to Baracoa in a cattle car with campesinos and their pigs and chickens! Now there is no money, neither in the Banco de Credito y Comercio, nor in La Cadeca. They have to send to Guantánamo for more convertible pesos. I’m so stressed with all these I feel sick to my stomach!’

  Godo shakes his head sympathetically and offers her a couple of cones filled with fresh peanuts still warm from their roasting, and she accepts, pouring them into her mouth and chewing hungrily. ‘Adolfo doesn’t believe me,’ she complains. ‘He’s waiting for money for our bathroom tiles and if it doesn’t come soon someone else will buy them.’ Godo pats her shoulder in an attempt to cheer her, and indeed her face brightens. ‘Adolfo is building a casa for us in Cabacú,’ she says proudly, smoothing the orbs of her breasts in a distinctly Cuban gesture. More likely feathering the nest for his guajira, Godo thinks. He has no faith in these relationships with foreigners. He’s seen too many lovers’ fights on the street, ending in the tears and tantrums of disappointed girls. Ah well, they pay for their adventures, he thinks, smiling apologetically at Heike. He’d like to warn her but he keeps his opinions to himself. People never listen anyway. They must learn for themselves. And who knows what the real lesson is? Perhaps it has nothing to do with the matter at hand. During his time in the darkness of the Guantánamo hospital, drugged to the gills with his eyeballs rolled back into his skull, Godofredo had discovered another reality which he likes to think of as el otro mundo of which Martí wrote. My discovery was possible only because of my accident, Godo thinks, and he is truly grateful despite the months of pain he endured and the sad redirection of his life. What if I had become a doctor? he often asks himself. I would have been working long hours at the hospital or at the polyclinic, writing prescriptions for all the sick people of Baracoa and earning at most twenty convertible pesos a month. And look at me — I have the freedom to walk the streets of Baracoa all day long. Everybody knows me and yet I am invisible because they see only el manisero and they expect no more of me than a cone of peanuts, the time of day, a word or two about the daily struggle. He does in fact harbour a strong desire to become a writer. This is his secret identity, and he sees his daily work as research. He knows from conversations with the local writer, Oscar Pérez, how easy it is to become addicted to research and to procrastinate over the actual writing process. So now he sees himself as a man who, though he never writes a word, carries a library of information in his head, awaiting the right moment.

  Next day Heike sidles up to Godo with a big smile on her face. ‘The convertible pesos have arrived from Guantánamo,’ she says, ‘I can have three hundred a day from the ATM.’

  ‘¡Caramba!’ exclaims Godo, his eyebrows shooting up. That was more than he made in two years. And it would all go on tiles for her boyfriend’s bathroom. Perhaps I should set myself up as a jinetero, he thinks with a chuckle.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Heike asks.

  ‘¡Felicidades! Estoy tan feliz!’

  ‘Gracias,’ she says, and with a little frown, ‘It’s still very stressful. Every time I put my card into the ATM I’m holding my breath in case the machine eats it and I have to take that trip to Guantánamo again across La Farola, which makes me dizzy with all the twists and turns.’

  ‘You could go with your boyfriend on his motorbike. ‘¡Pelo suelto y carretera!’ Godo tosses his head in a gesture of abandonment, imagining Heike’s blonde hair streaming behind her in the wind as she locks her arms around her lover’s muscular torso, both their bodies vibrating with the thrum of the motor.

  ‘Adolfo’s bike is broken,’ she says, the fine lines of a frown marring her milky forehead. ‘He’s waiting already two month for a mechanical part to come from La Habana. It’s so boring to be every day in Baracoa. We used to travel many places — Playa Maguana, Parque Humboldt, Finca Duaba . . . ’ Her voice trails off and she sighs, causing her breasts to rise dramatically and then sag with her exhalation as though her shoulders could not support their weight. Godo flushes and extends a handful of maní to her, which Heike accepts with a wan smile, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. Godo is so affected by the touch of her skin on his that he turns away in confusion just as Aragón, the portly city historian, passes by resplendent in a white guayabera with embroidered front and crisp cuffs. He wears his signature sombrero which he does not trouble to lift as he says in his soft nasal voice, ‘Buenas tardes, manisero.’ Aragón drops a coin into Godo’s bag, takes a cone of peanuts and inhales their aroma. ‘Mmm, tan delicioso,’ he says and pours them into his mouth. Aragón has a slight lisp, Godo notes. Must be all his trips to Spain. Many of the Spanish tourists have the same lisp. When he turns back Heike is gone.

  Godofredo has not been lucky with women. He’d had his eye on a girl in high school, but after the accident he never saw her again, though there had been one chica, a neighbour’s daughter, who used to visit him in the evenings. Mercedes would stand at the door twisting her fingers, as shy as Godo. ‘¿Cómo está tu mamá?’ she would ask.

  ‘Mas o menos, mas o menos,’ he would say. Okay, not too bad. Godo had been encouraged by her visits and by the fresh aroma surrounding Mercedes. He had only to close his eyes and the smell of her would fill his nostrils and arouse in him an intensity of feeling. He had been working up his courage for a kiss when his mother fell seriously ill. Liliana was in the hospital only three days before she died. In no time, it seemed, she was dead and buried. Her body was laid out at the funeraria in the morning and at two in the afternoon they slid her coffin into the hearse and made the slow journey with it up the hill to the cemetery, Godo limping along behind with a spray of coral isora in his arms. There had been a few mourners to join him and Marisel — Pucha, some neighbours with their snotty children trailing along, and of course Mercedes. What made Godo sadder than anything was the fact that his mother had died without ever really living, though he supposed there had been happier times before his birth, before the Revolution — a time that he could only imagine. Liliana had never spoken of the past, and now it was too late.

  After the death Mercedes had stopped coming to his door. It was unseemly for a Cuban girl to visit a young man alone in his home. Inquiring after his mother’s health had been her only excuse. A few months later Godo had heard that Mercedes was to be married to a medical student from Guantánamo. ‘They’re waiting until he graduates,’ a neighbour informed him, then she will move to Guantánamo. ‘What good fortune to marry a doctor! And who would have thought it of such a quiet unassuming girl?’ But what a body, Godo had thought, trying to distract himself from an emerging pattern of loss — first his career, then his papá, his mother, and now Mercedes. He had begun ogling the schoolgirls as they strutted around Parque Central in their skin-tight shorts and low-cut tops. He would make sidelong glances, trying to hide the evidence of his lustful thoughts. And alone in his bed at night he had fantasized about those girls and about their particularly alluring parts so that he didn’t have to think about Mercedes and her imminent departure to Guantánamo.

  It is six o’clock in the evening, the hour on the equator when the trees are alive with birds a
nd the streets are crowded with a quick bustling of tired people unwinding after a long day, hurrying home, stopping only to buy bread or vegetables for the evening meal, crowding the doorways of stores for one last look before they close. It is the hour when a poor town can luxuriate in the end of the workday as it is crowned by the glory of a rapid sunset.

  Godo turns down Calle Ruber López on his way home to rest before the evening which is when he makes his best sales, to tourists, hungry after guzzling half a dozen Bucaneros, or a bottle of Havana Club. He starts down the hill and passes a group of big ladies exercising in the street. They are clustered on the shady side facing a slim chica in magenta tights and yellow top. She jumps up and down, her arms flapping like birds’ wings. ‘Y uno y dos y un dos tres,’ she chants rhythmically, brilliant in the sunlight. Then she is suddenly eclipsed, her bright clothing losing its glow as the sun drops behind the buildings.

  ‘En tus manos, en tus manos, en tus manos Señor, en tus manos . . . ’ Godo hears the children singing as he passes the Pentecostal Church, a large blue building, newly renovated and still awaiting its finishing touches. Nothing is ever quite finished in Baracoa. He wonders if it’s the same in La Habana. He’s never been to the capital, but the tourists tell him that Baracoa is another country, a unique place, so he can only imagine what it is like outside. Now they’re singing in a strange tongue, but he understands because it’s the same tune. On and on it goes. Pablito has told him that they learn the same song in French, Italian, English and Portuguese. Pablito is six years old and very intelligent. He hops around Godo pretending to be a frog in his brand-new running shoes which are way too big for him and contribute, with his protruding eyes, to a froggy appearance. His mother has bought the shoes for him for Año Nuevo with money she’s earned cleaning houses and cooking for a tourist B & B. She has made sure that there is room for Pablito’s feet to grow.