Luz: book i: comings and goings (Troubled Times 1) Page 9

  “I’m not fraternizing,” Papi shot back. “Fraternization is nothing but a superficial act, civil artifice. Ehn al-Salahm and I are friends—actual friends. You understand?”

  “Friends!” they said. “No wonder! Now it makes sense why your colleagues have been complaining. They see that you’re friends with one of the locals and they’re jealous.”

  “Well,” Papi continued in self-defense. “If they’re so jealous, why don’t they make their own friends? That way they don’t have to waste their time worrying about me.”

  “Because they’re busy actually working!” the officials shot back. “You see, Alejo, if it were just a matter of you and this guy being friends, there would be no problem. But your colleagues are vigorously complaining that you’re never around, that all you do is delegate and take off, that you don’t teach any of the classes or correct any of the papers. That you give yourself the best shifts—oftentimes when your friend is around. They claim that when you’re not at the marketplaces with him, you disappear for the weekend, and there’s even speculation that the two of you have been taking unauthorized weekend trips. Do you know how we learned of this, Alejo?”

  “How?” Papi asked.

  “Because his wife has called and shown up at the language school several times looking for him and asking if anyone knew where he was.”

  “So?” Papi said. “What about it? I’m not a marriage counselor. I’m a linguistics professor. What do I have to do with that?”

  “What have you two been doing?” officials demanded to know. “Where have you two gone?”

  “Mosul,” Papi said matter-of-factly.

  “Mosul!” they reiterated, a look of horror on their faces signaling they must have heard wrong. “Mosul as in…all the way up in the northern part of the country? Mosul as in…hours and hours away by car?”

  “Precisely,” my father replied. “You’ll recall that, before I signed up for this mission, I did so on one condition: thirty percent of my time could be devoted to research. Well, my research thesis happens to be on Aramaic and its Dissolution in the Modern World—Causes and Effects. The reason I’ve been taking these weekend trips to the north is because the University of Mosul happens to be one of the largest educational and research centers, not only in Iraq, but in the entire Middle East. And it just so happens that Mosul is where the Assyrians of Iraq still reside: ancient descendants of Mesopotamia and the last remaining group of the modern world to speak Aramaic still. That, compañeros, is why I’ve been taking these unauthorized trips as you call them. Because the northwestern part of Iraq is the only place on the entire planet where Aramaic is still spoken and heard.”

  Both diplomats felt their heads spin from so much download all at once. Damned intellectuals! They thought they were so much better than everyone else. “We understand,” they began smugly. “We get it. Your friend goes to keep you company, and to help you if any problems arise.”

  “Precisely,” Papi replied. “Plus, I’m teaching him Spanish, so he uses the travel time to practice his conversational speech.”

  “We absolutely understand,” they reiterated. “And do you two hold hands all the way there? And hold hands all the way back?”

  My father wasted no time in joining the steps to this trite tap dance or choreographing it himself with obscenity. Neither of my parents were ones to swear, but one must remember that being coarse and vulgar was an inalienable Cuban trait, and Papi, despite his professional standing, could be extremely vulgar.

  “¡Oye, chico! If what you’re doing is trying to accuse me of being a fucking queer, why don’t you just come out and say it! That’s what’s going on here, isn’t it? You think I must be a fucking queer and that Ehn al-Salahm and I suck each other off every chance we get.”

  Both officials regarded each other with a stunned artifice, their eyes opening wide before proceeding with their mockery. “We’re not saying that, Alejo, of course not. We’re just telling you how it looks to us and your compatriots. This isn’t ancient Mesopotamia, Alejo. You know what our culture is like. It’s not just mega-machista, but uber machista. Nobody else from this mission has made the type of friendship you have, and that’s why they talk about it nonstop. Some of your colleagues even suggest you might be doing drugs, Alejo, indicating that you’re constantly wired and pumped up, alborotado all the time.”

  “Drugs!” my father scoffed. “Drugs! Are you joking? If I seem wired, it’s only from the coffee. It’s only because for the first time in my fucking life my body is drinking real coffee and it’s not used to it. It’s strong and makes me alert and enables me to put more hours into my research. I’ve noticed that after several cups of Moroccan coffee, my Aramaic is even better than ever.”

  “How insulting!” they shot back, appalled by such hubris; all long-time residents of Havana were endowed with hubris it seemed. “Are you telling us we don’t have real coffee in Cuba? Are you? We’re famous for our coffee, chico. Just like we’re famous for our sugar and tobacco. Why else do you think we’re here?”

  “Not like this coffee,” Papi said. “Not at all.”

  “Well, you listen up, chico. We’re here to tell you something you need to know. Word of your antics has reached the wrong ears in Havana, and there are new stipulations for your continued involvement with this mission. This is a very sensitive project, Alejo, and we can’t afford any scandals. According to this cable from the Ministry of Economic Development, which came in overnight, this research of yours in Aramaic or Mesopotamia or whatever it is, comes to an end right now! Understand, Alejo? As of this moment, you are here to teach and teach only. You are not to fraternize or make any more friends. You are not to take any weekend trips anywhere with anyone. And you are authorized to visit the local marketplace only once a week! Is that clear, Alejo? Don’t forget this country is at war with the Americans right now, and by befriending the locals you not only endanger your life, but ours as well.”

  “Are you telling me I’m not allowed to make friends while I’m here? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re saying, Alejo! No more holding hands, no more putting your arms around another man’s shoulder, and especially, no more kissing.”

  They both laughed uproariously at this.

  “To hell with you!” my father burst out, rising up and stepping away from the table before storming off. “To hell with all this! Effective immediately, I quit! I didn’t come halfway around the world to be treated like a prisoner! That’s not why I came all the way to Iraq! I could have stayed in Cuba for that!”

  That was it, the reason his assignment came to a premature end. I remained transfixed by the end of this account, eerily entranced. I shook my head slightly in disbelief and fought back tears I felt forming. Not just from learning the truth, but because this depiction of my father seemed so uncharacteristic of the man I knew. I had always regarded Papi as a quiet and bookish intellectual. But the man Pilar just finished divulging revealed a passionate adventurer and courageous individual, one who would not be defined or hampered by social conventions.

  No wonder he returned to Cuba without even one can of coffee. Customs officials had either confiscated it, or he wanted no reminders of his year and a half in Iraq. No wonder my father refused to talk about this even with Mamá. What a fall from grace. How demoralizing and ignominious an ending. I felt horrible now. I hated myself for all the times I had said I despised him and really meant it. Pilar was right. My words came back to haunt me and filled me with sharp pangs of regret. Never haunting me more than now, forced to observe him around the house with nothing to do, for now he had no job either. Little did my father suspect that when he resigned from his mission in Iraq, he’d be resigning from his entire career.

  “What are you doing here?” the chief administrator of the language institute asked him when Papi showed up for work his first Monday back. “You resigned, remember? And when you resigned from your post, you resigned from everything.”

&nb
sp; “Really?” he said. “And who will you find with my knowledge and skills? Nobody, that’s who! Nobody!”

  “You’re quite mistaken, Alejo. Not only have we found your replacement, he starts tomorrow. Good thing too. We really needed a change around here. Fresh talent—an emerging intellect, if you will.”

  There it was. The final nail in my father’s heart. By taking his teaching job away they might as well have deprived him of the air he breathed. From then on he languished and lacked all motivation. He wouldn’t talk either, answering yes or no to the simple things, providing only the most minimal response whenever necessary. He would sit alone and stare pensively at the floor, his expression inscrutable but melancholy. All we could do was watch him withdraw into himself. What could anyone say? What could anyone do but let him swirl within a torment intent on smothering him? Nobody could reach him, not even Pilar. Needless to say, never again would we hear him speak a word of Arabic or Hebrew or Aramaic especially. Never again would he look at or touch his beloved texts in the towering bookcases inside his room. The books sat silent and ignored, gathering but a thick sediment of neglect.

  Only once more would I witness my father come to life, coinciding with the unexpected arrival of a letter. Not just any ordinary letter, but one from overseas. The return address coded in that indecipherable Arabic script, the stamp containing the image of some elaborate mosque awash in tones of blue. It was a letter from Iraq, from his friend Ehn al-Salahm.

  At the sight of the envelope, my father alternated between excitement and agitation, retreating to his room and hurriedly closing the door. He longed to read the contents, but in shielded privacy.

  I had to know what was going on—I just had to! I crept toward his room and put my ear to the door, but would soon regret it. After a few minutes I heard him sobbing. He tried crying inaudibly, but no mistaking the muffled sobs. What the letter said, we had no clue; it was, after all, written in Arabic. And whether he had any intention of writing Ehn al-Salahm back or not, we couldn’t surmise. He certainly didn’t sit down to pen an immediate response. I don’t think he ever revealed the contents of the letter even to Pilar. But I did note a marked change in his demeanor the day after its arrival.

  From that moment on, my father couldn’t seem to sit still. He seemed constantly in motion. The only thing he now took interest in were neglected houseplants tucked away in our side patio: a sad and meager collection of greenery that he tended to religiously until they flourished anew and our side patio resembled an oasis in a Roman atrium. And he focused most lovingly on the leaves until they glistened in their verdancy. Plants, coffee, and smoking—that was all he cared about. He drank coffee morning, noon, and night. He smoked more than ever too. And when we ran out of coffee he had to have more, right away. He and Mamá fought constantly since he insisted that she locate additional sources for him. But when she couldn’t or refused, Papi turned into a crazed fiend, going from house to house and neighbor to neighbor asking for what little of it they might be willing to spare and even bartering against our future rations. Some were willing to trade their precious café for a choice selection of his fine creations, famous throughout the neighborhood now, but my father’s plants were strictly off limits, non-negotiable.

  I must admit I found this hopeful. At least he’d regained a sense of living. It was better than sitting around and staring into inner space and collapsing within himself. One day I even caught a glimmer of the old light in his eyes. He’d gotten out paper and pencil and I thought this was it. He was getting back to his work and research.

  “I’m writing my friend,” he announced. “I’m replying to Ehn al-Salahm.”

  I felt a throbbing of old resentments as his pencil formed the incomprehensible Arabic script. He managed to jot down the date and a greeting, but before eking out even one word, my father stopped. He doubled over in excruciating pain and collapsed at the table, complaining about a pain in his stomach so sharp we had to rush him to the nearest clinic. On the way there little could we imagine he would be leaving us again, but this time for good, that our beloved but troubled father would actually die that same night.

  Of all the vices to do him in, never did we suspect coffee to be the ultimate culprit. Doctors at the clinic said they had never seen anything like it: a caffeine-induced ulcer that had gnawed away at his intestines and bored a hole through his stomach the size of a baseball. Whether it was from the Middle Eastern coffees he had consumed in Iraq or the Cuban coffee he had consumed all his life, or a combination of both, nobody could say for sure. But coffee had taken its toll and they pronounced my father dead on November 11 of 1992.

  “But what did the letter say, hermana? The letter from his Iraqi friend? I know that you’ve got to know something about it.” The thought of using the term “friend” in conjunction with my father and this individual made my stomach churn and turn as if I had developed an ulcer of my own.

  “I don’t know Clara. Really, I don’t.”

  But I found this hard to swallow, especially now that Pilar had divulged all that she had. Papi must have said something to her—something! My older sister was the only one he had ever confided in and, whatever that letter contained, it must have been too great for him to keep to himself. I knew my father. I knew he must have been bursting at the seams to share some part of its contents, however minimal, and so I pressed.

  “But you must!” I insisted. “He must have said even the slightest of things to you. Just think, Pilar! Think back to anything he might have uttered.”

  Sure enough, my insistence was about to pay off.

  “Well,” Pilar finally acquiesced, not having to take me into the strictest of confidence because she had honestly not given it any importance. “He did say something, but I really didn’t pay any mind to it. He was not acting himself. He was almost irrational, hermana. His thoughts were jumping from one thing to the next and he was almost incoherent. I mean, Papi of all people! Papi, incoherent!”

  “About what?” I urged. “Incoherent about what?”

  “Something that made no sense, chica. Something about the sugar and the Iraqis and even maloja.”

  “Maloja?” I asked confusedly.

  “Yes, maloja,” she repeated. “Maloja of all things! Don’t you remember how, ever since he started tending to all those plants in the patio, all he did was carry that big book of his around and refer to it constantly?”

  I didn’t respond. I was too spellbound. I could think only of how we all knew about our father’s furtive fascination with leaves, his passion for them even, as if he had secretly wanted to be a botanist all his life. Why, one of his most guarded possessions was this big reference book called Hojas. It was a thick book with beautiful illustrations, all hand-made, of all the different leaves of the world. All three of us sisters knew that we had to treat that book with the utmost of care and respect or we could never touch it again. Many a time he had warned us so.

  “Now do you see why I didn’t pay any mind to it?” Pilar continued. “I thought he was just going on and on about leaves again. I’m telling you Clara, he was delirious at the time. I think he knew the end was near.”

  Her words haunted me. And if this was truly the case, his was not the only state of delirium. I too felt delirious, under siege after his death, under constant attack by my conscience. Guilt for having been so selfish in my thoughts and words overwhelmed me at times. How greatly it pained me that I had never told him how much he meant to me or how much I admired him. True, it was he who had always inspired my love of expression and an ardor for language, but it was he who now inspired me to proceed with life.

  It was only upon his death that I came to understand this, that I came to recognize the rushing force behind all my aspirations. No doubt his fall from grace had sealed my fate with the university. No doubt at all. That was what happened in Cuba: the sins of the father always visited the son, or the daughter. But I would not blame my father entirely for the rescission of my acceptance. There was som
eone else who I held equally responsible and whom I despised for his part in my father’s demise. His name was Ehn al-Salahm. He lived somewhere in Iraq. One day I would take his letter and have it translated. One day I would learn the truth of all that had transpired between my father and him in the marketplaces of Iraq. And one day I would also learn what in the world maloja had to do with any of this.

  Forget it then! I wouldn’t apply to the university in five years or ten years or even fifteen. I’d never step foot inside the Aula Magna. I wouldn’t study anything in Cuba. Not under this miserable system that slanted everything in a way officials saw fit. I would get married instead. Rigo wanted me to wed straight out of high school anyway, so now I had the perfect excuse. We would become man and wife. We would start a family. Damn all the ministries and the university and everything else! I never wanted to read or write another critique as long as I lived. I believed this at least. I made up my mind and refused to deviate from the decision until, one day, unexpectedly, a fellow student and good friend of mine named Nelson heard about my predicament with the university and approached me with a strange proposition.

  Nelson was also a writer. He too was an intellectual and reminded me of my father somewhat. He was funny and had a mordant sense of humor, an acerbic wit. But Nelson was funnier for something else: his eyeglasses. While nobody in Cuba under the age of forty ever wore eyeglasses—they were considered unsightly and unfashionable—Nelson refused to dispense with his dark-rimmed pair. He considered eyeglasses an essential component to a writer’s appearance.

  “How would you like to be part of a group?” he asked. “A writer’s group.”

  “A writer’s group? Maybe,” I said. “I guess so.”

  “Great!” he replied. “There’s just one catch.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It isn’t exactly a typical writer’s group. We’re not going to sit around in a circle and read each others stories or chapters or verses from poems and suggest ways to make them better.”