“Why is he doing that?” I wondered.
“In case there’s a shootout, of course.”
“How do you know he has a gun?” I asked.
“I’ve seen it. Juanita said-Hey look, it’s the sausages,” Ricky said, pointing to the line of ’izos three branches up. “That was a pretty good throw for a girl; pity girls can’t play baseball.”
“They can and they do.”
“In America,” Ricky said dismissively.
In the typically Cuban way, a man pushing a food cart appeared from nowhere. He was selling flan and beer but the police made him go away after confiscating all his merchandise for themselves.
Finally, when the policeman with the megaphone was satisfied that the crowd was sufficiently safe, he turned his attention back to the hacienda. He was a short guy with shiny black hair and boots.
“Arturo Mercado, come out with your hands up,” the cop said.
The crowd went silent and then much to our surprise Uncle Arturo answered: “What is this? I’ve done nothing wrong!”
“Send out your family,” the policeman said.
“I have a right to know what this is about. Under the Cuban Penal Code all persons have a right to know what they are being charged with,” Arturo shouted.
“You are not being charged with anything, Mercado, not yet. We want to question you. Be a man, at least send out your family.”
“How do I know they’ll be safe?” Uncle Arturo said.
“Of course they will be safe. There are hundreds of witnesses.”
“Give me your word.”
The cop blanched for a moment but then recovered his poise. “My name is Captain Armando Beltre. I give you my word that if you release your family to my care, they will be unharmed.”
Five minutes later the cousins, Mom, Luisa, and Aunt Isabella came out. Everyone was carrying suitcases and bags as if they might be going away for some time. I was impressed. Uncle Arturo had clearly had some time to prepare. They walked past Captain Beltre and were grabbed by the leading edge of the police. The children were separated from the women, who were all bundled together into a police
“Did you see that they took Mom to the police van?” Ricky asked.
“I did. Don’t worry. Mom didn’t do anything.”
At around midnight there was a shot from inside the house and everyone screamed. One of the policemen shot back and then another and another. The order came to cease fire. The policeman with the megaphone shouted into the house to see if Uncle Arturo was all right, but there was no answer. Not long after the shooting another older policeman turned up. He looked to be pretty high up and he seemed displeased with everything that had been going on. Immediately after talking to Captain Beltre, he ordered the street cleared. The cops and the army started moving everyone back into their houses or way down the village into the fields. The older policeman took the megaphone and said that if Uncle Arturo didn’t come out he would order the army to storm the place and Arturo would be responsible for the consequences.
Uncle Arturo came out.
He was wearing a white shirt and there was blood on the shoulder. He was holding his hands in the air. He walked to the front of the house and lay down in the yard. Policemen ran and cuffed him.
“This is fantastic,” I said to Ricky.
“Yup,” he replied breathlessly.
Both of us were shaking with excitement.
Uncle Arturo was bleeding into his shirt and his eyes were red and his hair was everywhere. I’d never seen him without even a tie before. Two policemen in riot gear hauled him to his feet. Uncle Arturo didn’t resist. He looked exhausted. Like us. Like everybody. I was staring at the blood on his shirt and wondering if he’d been shot or not. I’d never seen anyone shot before either.
The soldiers pushed Uncle Arturo toward one of the army trucks, but suddenly he stopped and looked up into the tree where the pair of us were hiding.
Ricky grabbed my arm and I grabbed him right back.
Uncle Arturo grinned. “I see you,” he said. “I see what you did with those sausages.”
One of the policemen looked up into the branches but he didn’t notice anything. He shrugged his shoulders and shoved Uncle Arturo from behind. “Come on,” the policeman said, and he led Uncle Arturo under the canvas flap of one of the trucks. After a couple of minutes, they transferred him to a police car and turned the siren on. Shortly after that the car drove off toward Santiago. Ricky was shaking and holding on to me tightly. We were both frightened and exhilarated at the same time.
“What do we do now?” Ricky asked.
“Now we climb down the tree,” I said.
We climbed down. I tapped the nearest cop on the back. He turned.
“We surrender,” I said.
Later, years later, I found out that Uncle Arturo had spent the night destroying papers that implicated him in dozens of bribery and blackmail schemes. He needn’t have bothered. The police weren’t interested in him at all. In fact, within six months he was back in the hacienda with his government salary and position restored.
No, the police had come because my father and some others had hijacked one of the Havana Bay ferries to Florida. Previous attempts had failed because the ferry had run out of fuel, but my father and his cronies had trundled in dozens of drums of diesel. They’d taken the fast ferry, a gift from the Japanese government, because it could do twenty knots. They’d gone on the very first run of the day, straight out of the harbor and north for Key West. It took the sleeping authorities an hour to realize what was happening and the hijackers confused them by saying that they had left the harbor only because the steerage was jammed. Then they reported a fire, and by the time the government realized it was a hijack they were halfway to the Keys.
Uncle Arturo was suspected of complicity but he knew nothing about it.
None of us did.
The cops reunited us with our cousins, and Maria told me the details at our grandmother’s house. “Your father is a dirty traitor. He has joined the Yankees in Miami.”
They took Mom to Havana and kept her in a DGI dungeon for a week and then let her out.
She had bruises on her back and thighs.
She never talked about what they did to her. She just got on with things.
The power cuts, the end-of-the-month scramble for food, mending our school uniforms, the TV repairman who would take payment only in dollars…
Eventually she got a job as a maid in the Hotel Nacional-one of the best jobs in Havana because of the tips- and saved enough so that Ricky and I could go to college.
Uncle Arturo denounced Papa in the newspapers and, of course, after that we never went to Santiago again. And nothing came from America. No letters. No money. We heard that he had remarried. He moved from Miami to New York.
And then he disappeared.
Drifted from our lives.
Dissolved, like he was never there.
Vanished like a dandelion on the curve of air.
And that’s all that needs to be said.
He isn’t here.
He isn’t anywhere.
He’s not a character in this story.
He’s a template. A tabula rasa. For me to write my narrative, for me to invent myself.
And now, dying, I understand why I came.
It isn’t for him.
It isn’t for justice.
It’s in spite of him.
It’s for truth.
