Luz: book i: comings and goings (Troubled Times 1) Read online

  “The new Varadero,” they proudly informed him. “Cuba’s new international hotspot.”

  “Was it hard getting hired?” Rigo asked. “Are they paying you well?”

  “Well, we’re not exactly hired,” the cattle hand explained. “And we’re not actually getting paid.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rigo said.

  “Well, technically we can’t get hired because that would be accepting foreign currency, and the state won’t allow it. But we can put in hours of unpaid volunteer labor.”

  “And you don’t mind?” Rigo asked. “You wouldn’t rather be earning something?”

  “Well, of course! But as long as we have to put in volunteer hours anyway, it might as well be for something exciting. Besides, sometimes we get tips on the side—but you didn’t hear that. Hey, aren’t you that new architect in town? That visitor everybody’s talking about?”

  Rigo felt so disgusted by all he had heard, he couldn’t think straight. These were the local jobs created by outsourcing? Measly menial labor with no monetary compensation? How would he ever get his school built? How, when all the able-bodied townspeople preferred building hotels for free just to be part of the experience? How, when all the locals preferred the paltry handouts of foreigners to the stoicism of self-dignity? Even here, all the way in Camagüey, the residents preferred to lend themselves to visitors of foreign lands than give of themselves to their own posterity. On the ride back from Santa Lucía to Rio Piedras, Rigo did some long, hard thinking and decided that the moment he arrived at the cattle co-op, he would resign immediately and head back to Havana. My husband had had it with all the deception and chicanery and no longer wanted any part of it. But when Rigo made his announcement to local leaders, they wouldn’t hear of it.

  After only one week with their new visitor, everybody from Rio Piedras had grown quite fond of Rigo and did not want to see him go. People from the countryside understood disappointment better than anyone else in Cuba and told him to forget about the schoolhouse along the rolling plains. It turned out that, while he had been visiting his non-existent aunts over the weekend, a strange cable came in from Havana about a new project slated to take precedence over all else and for which ministry officials were seeking an appropriate candidate. Local leaders from Rio Piedras hoped Rigo might be suited for the position even though it didn’t seem related to architecture in the least.

  “Do you know what calculus is?” they asked him. “Have you ever heard of the word calculus?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course I have.”

  “What is it?” they asked.

  “Well, it’s higher math,” he explained. “It’s one of the branches of mathematics that focuses on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series; in short, it’s the study of change. That’s all calculus is—change.”

  They all looked at Rigo with vacant expressions on their faces, as if he had just uttered a foreign language to them.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, are you any good at it?” they persisted.

  “I’m excellent at it,” Rigo replied. “As architecture students we not only study theory and design, but engineering, physics, drafting, and we go all the way through calculus, both differential and integral.”

  Perfect, they thought—absolutely perfect! Local leaders had no clue as to what Rigo had just said, but it appeared they could keep utilizing his talents. They revealed the contents of the mysterious cable and this new project that had received the blessings of officials from key ministries in the capital: a grassroots calculus program for students all across the country, including those in the most remote regions of the island. They wanted no child left behind and meant it. Strangely, it was not calculus for accelerated high schoolers or university students who had already gone through geometry, advanced algebra, and trigonometry, but calculus for fifth graders who barely understood decimals and fractions.

  “It’s called Early Exposure,” they told Rigo.

  Cuban researchers had recently concluded there was only one way to produce a truly competent society: by ensuring that everyone thoroughly understood calculus. But the calculus had to be instilled before the other branches of math that preceded it. Years of data showed that those exposed to calculus before geometry, algebra, and trigonometry grasped and retained the calculus all the more when they were finally ready for it later on. Data also showed that subjects were less interested in change as a result, now that change had been dissected and demystified for them. The Revolution planned on leading the way with math, science, and technology into the twenty-first century, and this, they determined, was the optimal way to do it. Personally, Rigo thought the whole thing absurd and slightly insane, but he’d grown tired of battling all the elements conspiring against him.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll do it. I’ll go ahead and teach the calculus.”

  They were thrilled! Ecstatic! Normally, those who hailed from the outer provinces had to petition Havana vigorously for any request, no matter how minor. But local leaders from Rio Piedras decided to sidestep all that. They were taking no chances on losing the likes of Rigo. Everything in the capital always got mired in red tape and miscommunication, but Rio Piedras leaders took their own initiative, wiring a cable back to ministry officials and respectfully notifying them that they had located the perfect candidate for teaching all this calculus stuff. Best of all, he could start right away. Residents from the cattle co-op expected a long and protracted battle, but much to their surprise, the response came back quietly approved.

  It was settled. Rigo would start teaching these math classes immediately. But his new adopted family from Rio Piedras hoped Rigo could help with one more pending matter. It had nothing to do with architecture and nothing to do with calculus, but they sensed that, with his talents, Rigo might be just the man for the job. They also hoped that being so devout a workaholic, Rigo wouldn’t mind devoting his free time to this pet project.

  The province of Camagüey certainly did not possess the glamour or glitter of Havana, but it remained a vital province of the republic regardless. It even had a more impressive history when it came to academics, and Camagüey was the first province in all of Cuba to erect a library. It housed more libraries per square inch than the rest of the country. Just one problem: Camagüeyans had not devised an indexing or cataloging system in keeping with the complexities of computerized collections or the databases of the twentieth century. They hadn’t even devised a system in keeping with the indexing of the nineteenth century. But they longed desperately to be brought up to date. Camagüeyans wanted their libraries to be ranked among the best in the world, especially the central one in their provincial capital. One day a minor delegation from Ciudad Camagüey showed up at the cattle co-op in Rio Piedras to pay Rigo a visit. Officials could barely contain themselves from excitement over the new project.

  “What is it?” Rigo asked, knowing he would regret asking.

  “Do you know anything about library science?” they asked him.

  “No,” Rigo said. “I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  Members of the delegation looked at one another and came to a tacit agreement, having heard of his distinguished accomplishments in teaching calculus and forming a gut feeling that Rigo would be perfect for the job. “Well, as long as you’re so good at numbers and designing and drafting, do you think you can help us create a system that will index and catalog our books?”

  In dazed resignation, Rigo looked back and forth and from side to side at the vacant faces of his Camagüeyan hosts. How could he refuse them? They were so nice to him. And so in need. He wanted to accommodate them, but how had he ended up in this predicament? How had he gone from wanting to fulfill a lifelong dream of designing luxury hotels to being stuck in a cattle co-op in the Camagüey countryside teaching calculus to fifth graders who barely knew basic arithmetic? From wanting to alter Havana’s skyline, to library cataloging! This was what all his yea
rs of studying and passing rigorous exams had amounted to? It made absolutely no sense, but the answer he provided made even less.

  “Sure,” he replied. “Why not? I’ll try it.”

  If his new friends were ecstatic before, they were overjoyed now, exuberant. Soon, local leaders from Rio Piedras held a banquet in Rigo’s honor and even invited neighboring towns. The feast included generous servings of beef and goat and pork, and even the vegetarians from the coop found themselves partaking in the meal. Amid all the hoopla, Rigo had not the slightest clue as to what he would be doing or how to accomplish it. But if the people of Camagüey had selected him for this task, he was all theirs. They could do whatever they wanted with him, whatever their hearts desired. He was at their disposal as long as he never had to build so much as a four-by-four mud hut anywhere on this earth; as long as he never had to gaze upon another hotel anywhere in Cuba built and owned by foreigners, while the everyday, ordinary Cuban could not so much as step foot on such a property. For what seemed an eternity now, a whole year, my husband and I saw each other only once a month. Naturally, when he came home to Havana for those very brief weekends, I was only too eager to hear about Rio Piedras and Camagüey and how the school was coming along.

  “Is everything going as you planned?” I would ask. “Is the project ahead of schedule?”

  “Ahead of schedule!” Rigo shrugged. “We haven’t so much as dug one bucket of earth from the ground yet. That’s how ahead of schedule we are.”

  By now Rigo had been working in Rio Piedras for months, which made no sense to me. “But why?” I insisted on knowing. “What in the world is the hold up?”

  How could he explain? How could he accurately describe all his misadventures? I found out much later that for months he had hidden the truth from me. He’d been too embarrassed, too ashamed to reveal the unexpected turn of events with his career. For the longest time I believed the delay was all due to lack of materials and lack of workers, lack of planning and communication, revolutionary red tape and bloated socialist bureaucracy—the US embargo even! I pressed Rigo for answers and information, but each time he brushed me off. He didn’t want to go into it. To explain was to relive, and he didn’t feel like reliving all his frustrations. He’d say that he was in Havana for only two weekends a month, and preferred to spend his thoughts on anything else but his second life in Camagüey.

  Or had it become his primary life? Rigo didn’t know anymore. There were times he felt and acted like a visitor in his own home. Even here, a ten-hour train ride away, Camagüey was all he thought about. And there were times he felt and acted like a visitor in his own home. Especially with some grains of truth to the government’s Early Exposure Theory after all, for officials were already reporting positive results. Only one year after the program’s initiation, Rigo’s fifth-grade students barely knew how to multiply and divide decimals or add and subtract fractions, but they were scoring in the top tier of national calculus exams. As for the libraries of Camagüey, they now employed an efficient and sophisticated cataloging system that rivaled that of the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana.

  More than ever the people of Camagüey did not want to see Rigo go. But should he feel honored or trapped? Should he feel that this experience had opened up new opportunities and directions in his life or turned into one giant holdup? Maybe he should accept his fate; after all, these undertakings in Camagüey represented a form of architecture, and he was indeed functioning as an architect of sorts. But since he couldn’t formulate an adequate conclusion, Rigo pondered his predicament and continued feeling torn between his two lives.

  When turmoil struck him the hardest, and when a swirl of confusion left him hanging in the balance, only one act freed him from insufferable abeyance, only one act provided the clarity he desperately craved. It pained him to do it, especially since he’d sworn off the urge for months, but on those rare occasions when he had nothing to do in Rio Piedras, Rigo could not resist, could not keep away. He’d hire a car to drive him to the white sandy beaches of Santa Lucía to satisfy the itch of mordant curiosity.

  Each time he did so, Rigo regretted it deeply. After one year of breaking ground along the northern coastline of Camagüey, those luxury hotels being outsourced to foreign companies were weeks away from a grand opening, and it plunged him into deep despair. His heart felt like imploding. Most depressing was the ordinariness and nondescript appearance of these luxury hotels, the rush job being employed. They looked little better than the sardine can, Soviet-style apartment buildings of the last thirty years in Cuba—row upon row of them.

  It nearly slayed him, knowing he could have done a much better job, a much more innovate job of designing a new generation of edifice. But the hell with it. It wasn’t his problem. Every once in a while I would ask Rigo about the initial project he had been promised upon graduating, and if there were any updates on it. But Rigo brushed off my inquiries without any detail or explanation.

  “No,” he’d reply. “Nothing new. Just chalk it up to life in Cuba, where you can never count on anything being different or calculate how things will turn out. It’s no coincidence that nothing ever gets done around here, especially when nothing ever seems to change.”

  But Rigo wasn’t the only one stymied by disillusion. Our system had frustrated my passions too. Even from a young age I had fancied myself a writer, always receiving excellent marks in literature and composition, but for good reason: I loved language. Words were my passion. Syntax my spirituality. As far back as I recalled, I had made it clear to professor and advisor alike that I wanted to pursue a career in writing. Not as a creative writer or a novelist—the thought of what novelists did and the process they went through terrified me—but as a critic. I loved critique and analysis and the dissection of art form.

  “Don’t worry, chica,” they told me. “With your grades and determination, you’ll have no trouble getting accepted. You’re a shoo-in.”

  Sure enough, during my senior year in high school, I was first to be notified by the Ministry of Education of full acceptance into an elite program at the University of Havana: an honors literature curriculum with emphasis on literary criticism. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Among other things, the university boasted a great hall known as the Aula Magna, and I couldn’t wait to bask in the greatness of that sacred hall and absorb all its history. That summer I read rapturously, dissecting and deconstructing everything I got my hands on, analyzing and breaking everything down in an effort to foster the critic in me. Then, in August of ’93, one week before I was set to start classes at the university, I received another notice from the ministry—a less than thrilling one. They were sorry to inform me that, due to very low interest, the elite literature program had been eliminated and replaced by a course in advanced mathematics. Furthermore, this would render my university admission null and void.

  “Null and void! But why?” I asked officials, calling immediately to demand an explanation. “I’ll just study something else. I’ll study journalism, creative writing even.”

  “Sorry, compañera. It doesn’t work that way, and you know it. Those spots have been filled and allocated for the next five years.”

  “Five years! But under the circumstances that rule shouldn’t apply to me. Shouldn’t I be able to try for something in one year?”

  “Five years, compañera. You know everything in Cuba is on a five-year plan. That’s when you can try again. If you’ll excuse us now, we’ve got planning to do!”

  Five years! What was I supposed to do for the next five years if not study? How was I supposed to cultivate and sharpen my mind during all that time? How would I ever make up half a decade lost? The period following high school was ripe for the mind’s development, crucial years for the brain to hone its ability in tackling complex thought patterns and mastering abstract concepts, for developing intricate skills that could be refined into a specialty. To start five years from now would mean starting too late and losing too much ground.

  B
esides, by then the ministry would most likely deny me all over again, especially since I knew what this was really all about—my parents. My acceptance had not been revoked due to cancellation of the program. My acceptance had been revoked due to my mother being openly religious and my father having been fired from his job.

  That was the only thing happening here. Nothing else made any sense—the way it happened so quickly, so unexpectedly. You had to grow up in Cuba to understand how things worked: the Revolution and its repercussions. My father Alejo—this was really all about him! Let me just say I had always respected and admired him tremendously. I had always regarded my father as an intellectual, and only because of his towering intellect did I aspire toward greatness with my own writing.

  My father loved language too, but in a different way. I had a love of language, he had a love for language. He was not a writer, but an interpreter—a translator and researcher, a professor too. He was fascinated by the way languages spoke to one another and interrelated. He was not an interpreter of Spanish or English or Russian. He was fluent in several Middle Eastern languages including Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and even Armenian. There was only one Middle East language he never truly mastered: Aramaic. It had always given him great trouble, and nothing put him in a worse mood than speaking and writing or trying to read in Aramaic. My father didn’t understand his impediment with it, especially since Aramaic was merely a derivative of Arabic. But he had one. To us it sounded fine and he seemed to speak it perfectly, but in private, my father ranted and raved that his Aramaic was slow and clumsy and his accent sloppy and awkward.

  My father always seemed wrapped up in his work, and even when I was little, I viewed him as emotionally detached and distant. I was forever devising ways to lure him from his detachment. One day, when I was ten, I thought I found the way: by showing a genuine interest in that which captivated him so.

  “What is it about that culture that fascinates you?” I asked.

  “The marketplaces,” he replied wistfully. “Whenever I see pictures of marketplaces in the Middle East, or of the surrounding architecture of the squares, or of the men sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes while discussing politics and history in that sea of sound and smell and color, I long to be there. I ache to be there.”