Translating Cuba

The heat began to flood the bedroom little by little, appropriating the space. I uncovered Amanda, who was still sleeping undisturbed, and she began to turn around in bed looking for the cooler side of the sheet. The minutes before dawn lasted three hundred seconds. We were gradually moving from an overwhelming stillness to the first signs of morning life: you could hear the grandfather just waking up doing his toilet routine in the bathroom, including all the throat clearing and the most scandalous evacuation. Then, the grandmother chasing after the baker or yoghurt maker, shouting at them from the back of the house as she walked to the door, and the dog barking, sticking her tail between her still agile legs.

From the bedroom, we could hear all the conversations inside and outside the house, no matter the tone of voice. I heard my mother-in-law whispering at the window: “Don’t shout, you’ll wake up the girls.” When the sun finally began to rise, Amanda became meat for the mosquitoes; they appeared to bite her legs and torso without any compassion. I tried to kill as many as I could and turned my hand into a fan to scare them away. I was not stung; mosquitoes never liked my blood, but she woke up full of red welts and almost always about to cry, soaked in sweat.

By that time I had spent four or five hours awake in that thick darkness, thinking. I watched her sleep as only a woman in love, twenty years old, can watch the dreams of someone who was about to become the most immediate victim of emigration. I pushed her hair out of her face and kissed her sweaty and sour forehead. She groped for my hand with hers, passing over the quilt, the clothes I took off, my thigh, the cell phone, a portable charger and, finally, my hand.

Amanda and I were arguing louder each time, more violently, more like men. I let months fly by watching as the relationship of my teenage dreams crumbled and dragged us in its wake, becoming two monster daughters of other monsters that occasionally made love. Twenty-three years of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen sleep, with her mouth open, mosquitoes making a halo over her head and my hand clinging to hers. Completely naked in front of me, on equal terms, we the most optimistic thoughts about a future together, which only required that we fix a little here and there to make it sparkle, and I had to punish myself for forgetting that the night before she had spit in my face and we had screamed until we were completely exhausted.

They were daily hours of a struggle between the deepest love and a dangerous madness. When there was a spot of light on the ceiling, we were two women recognizing each other’s more miserable and rotten side, and when not, the only miserable and rotten thing we could see was the Revolution. Amanda woke up in a puddle of rancid fluids and tears. By then I had bathed, cried, and had breakfast with her mom and grandmother. She would sit on my legs on the Swiss couch in the kitchen and share with me her most horrible impression of the blackout: we were visiting, but her family and my mom lived like that.

“My mother had decided that she was running out of time, that, with almost fifty years under her belt, the bars of the island prison were closing and she wasn’t going to stay inside”

My mother had decided that she was running out of time, that, with almost fifty years under her belt, the bars of the island prison were closing and she wasn’t going to stay inside, even if to leave she had to sell the only asset we had in the world: the house of my childhood, with everything inside. House for sale with everything inside, in Pueblo Nuevo. It comes with the washing machine and the scratches made by the dog on the door. I will leave you the microwave and the landline telephone, the picture of the girl’s quinceañera, the fish tank, the extra bed. Also if you want to occupy it, there is a cat, how are you going to keep him from breaking into his house? I will leave the blacksmithing things with the tools, and the pillows… everything, but I ’m taking the quilts because they say that it’s cold in El Salvador.

The sticky mark on the wall is from a poster of Malú, I think with acetone it will come off. That air conditioner does not work, but I’ll leave it and you can sell it for parts. Look, this is how the door opens, by pulling the cord on the stairs so you don’t have to go up. The armchairs are not upholstered in the back. The water tanks are on the roof, one is yours and the other is for my sister who lives downstairs, and it’s all painted because my husband bought the girl some spray paint years ago, and I had to let her graffiti the ceiling in exchange for not vandalizing the street. Yes, it was necessary to control her so she wouldn’t get into that gay propaganda, but she came out lesbian anyway. Do you see how there are two keyholes on the door? They open with the same key. If you want to buy it we can sign the papers this week, the refrigerator is still under warranty. I want to sell now because in a few months there will be elections in the United States, and you never know.

“I was forced to make a very cruel decision: take part of the money and stay in Cuba, or leave with her”

Once put on sale in all the Facebook groups, with explicit photos that violated the privacy of what was once my home, I was forced to make a very cruel decision: take part of the money and stay in Cuba, or leave with her.

The return to Havana was an even more excruciating hell. Sometimes my in-laws would take us in their car, but we had to make most of the trips on foot through the street, stumbling, loaded with packages of frozen food and clothes, until we reached the Martí neighborhood. The university, which in other years had been the place of greatest achievement for my generation, had become a deeply hostile place, and I, adapting to circumstances, had completely lost the interest and passion that some time ago took me out of my province at all costs and positioned me among the best ranks of Medicine.

Who was going to tell the 18-year-old teenager who sat in a psychological consultation about to decide that she would leave her home, that it would be to the capital, that she would study medicine, and that she would have to marry her stepfather to get the papers from Havana and be able to study there, that half of her dreams were going to be consumed like raisins when she put them in the hands of the system. When the alarm sounded in the morning, I broke into uncontrollable crying that has accompanied me since childhood, as the crudest symptom of depression. The days that I could open my eyes without crying and transport myself to school were even more miserable, and I ended up finding an excuse to go back home, prepare food and throw myself into bed to watch a pretentious A24 movie.

“Exaltation and doubt had been brutally murdered by the disinterest in teaching and the lack of resources”

The peak of academic demotivation was reached in my first direct experience with the clinic in Fajardo. What could a young college girl with such gallant passion do but pack her bag and run? The Red Theater, which once bestowed on me the Relevant Award on the Day of Science, was one more arm of the dictatorship, where the dean exercised his power of political-ideological coercion.

My group of friends, who used to be an optimistic study team and successfully navigate the group dynamics, had become a flock of zombies walking around the hospital, dodging reasonable protests from patients and waiting for the visitation pass to end. Exaltation and doubt had been brutally murdered by the disinterest in teaching and the lack of resources.

My last day at the Teatro del Fajardo, which I recently heard collapsed, was the day they announced that they were going to assess the school for accreditation. The news came with a blackmail that put in play my grade of a filler subject, if I did not answer the questions cautiously to favor the prestige of the University of Havana. That day, for the first time since I arrived in the capital, I did not raise my hand to speak. I shut my mouth and chewed up the virgin and scandalous girl who first entered the theater and was amazed when they turned on the lights, who cracked open a window and directed her group towards the row on the right because more air came in, who stood in front and explained a research paper and published it, who ate an omelet with bread on the staircase of the theater at midnight on guard duty. I swallowed them and never went back in. The system was given a passionate, enthusiastic, revolutionary, idealistic and committed-to-science teenager, and in three years it returned a woman imprisoned in anger and skepticism.

The decision was not difficult; it was taken before it was considered possible, before 1959. The day I was born, in the maternal hospital of Matanzas, bald, pink and without consciousness, this fate had already relentlessly swept over me. The only thing left for my very small and not so free will, was when.

“I walked slowly all over G, in the same uniform coat they gave me in my first year, now a faded yellow and tight”

It was over a month, which felt like a year, before I could accept that I was saying goodbye. I went out to buy vegetables in the country and observed the fruits and the delicacies in detail, the avocados that did not fit into my hands, the yucca that did not know what it was called in Colombia or in Uruguay, the man on the little square who signaled me that he had shrimp for sale under the table. Would these things happen anywhere else in the world?

We turned on the projector and I placed with excessive care the books that supported it (Internal Medicine I and II), and I memorized the counters and the prices of the kiosk where we shopped daily. The rattling of the key that closed the front door, and the roar that the balcony door made when it was thrown open; we always agreed to put a quilt there to cushion the blow but then forgot. Halfway through the film I paused the projector and asked Amanda to bring something to eat. She protested, surrendered, came out, projected the film on her naked body. I tried to memorize it, ran behind her to hug her and started crying. There was no need to speak, it was over. I had pronounced a death sentence and after that there was only room for silence and crying.

The streets of Havana appeared bigger, more beautiful, more populated; they embraced me with their capital’s arms. I walked slowly all over G, in the same uniform coat they gave me in my first year, now a faded yellow and tight around my chest and arms. I made a mental journey with my eyes closed to the theaters of El Vedado; I imagined the sound of my boots stepping on the wooden floor of the Trianon, like the first time I went to see The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife [a play by Federico García Lorca].

I crossed and walked making a mental sketch, with the privileged memory of grief, of the previous occasions I had walked those streets, and with whom, and what clothes I wore, and how I felt. Every two or three blocks I would stumble upon someone to greet and tell him that everything was fine, I’m here, struggling, say hello to your mom. The smell of the salt water from the Malecón began to accost my nose, and the memory of the first night I sat alone on the wall, just arrived from Matanzas, believing that I was going to die of homesickness and that I was in a movie by Fernando Pérez.

The city held my hands very tightly, as if I wanted to escape and it had to tame a naughty child. I walked clenching my fists, why was I so upset, so tired, so violent? I did an urgent introspection exercise, and the anger was born so far back that I had my own stuffed animal in the crib from which I fell at three months. My face was burning, red with fury and flooded in tears: I’m leaving, I’m leaving Cuba, tomorrow I’ll confirm it to my mother, I’m leaving here. I had begun the journey.

* An endangered Mexican salamander

Translated by Regina Anavy

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