there – my father and I – there in Havana when the victorious Castro entered the city, and the people believed, the people
And all I could think of was how my mother should have been with us, but by then she was dead, and how we had fled America, land of my birth, and made our way here to the country of my father’s birth.
So I will tell you about that night – a Friday night, 19 December 1958 – and you can ask yourself if what happened to my father could really be called anything but justice.
When the men came down to drag the body from the yard I remember thinking something.
For I knew all of these men had wives and children, just like my own father. Just like the Havana Hurricane.
Less than a week to Christmas, and the dead man’s wife and children would be home even then, waiting for him to return. But that night he would not come stumbling through the door, red-faced, his fists bloody, his vest drenched with sweat. That night he would be dragged from a yard by three men, his body hefted with no more grace or respect than if it had been a side of beef, and bound tightly within a length of torn sacking, and thrown into the back of a flatbed truck. And men with callused hands and callous faces, men with no more soul than a stone, no more mercy or compunction than a lizard bathing itself on a sun-bleached rock, would drive that truck away, and for ten dollars, maybe less, they would strip the body and burn the clothes, cut the flesh and let it bleed some, and then sink it into the everglades where alligators would swiftly dissemble everything that could be identified.
And my father, the Hurricane, staggering home, his own vest spattered with a dead man’s blood, and roaring drunk in the doorway, and challenging the world to defy him, to tell him he was not the master of his own house, and my mother scared, pleading with him not to hold her so roughly, not to be so angry, so violent, so insatiable…
And me, crouching there behind the doorway of my own room, tears in my eyes as I heard her scream, and listening as she rallied all the prayers she could muster, and hearing her voice and knowing that such sounds would only incense him further, and feeling that somewhere in amongst all this madness there must be something that made sense.
But I didn’t find it – not then, not even now.
And then the silence.
Silence that seemed to bleed out from beneath the doorway of their room, and walk its soundless footsteps down towards me, and feeling with it the shadow of cold that could only be translated one way.
And the silence seemed to last for something close to an eternity, perhaps longer, and knowing that something was wrong.
Dead awful wrong.
And then the wailing scream of my father as he burst from the door of their room, and how he staggered down the corridor as if something had taken ahold of his soul and twisted it by its nerves into torment.
The vacancy of his eyes, the whiteness of his drawn, sweat-varnished skin, the way his hands gripped and relaxed, gripped and relaxed. Fighter’s fists. Killer’s fists. And waiting for him to open my door, to look down at me, and recognizing something in his eyes that I had seen only an hour before as he stood over the beaten body of a slain man, and seeing something else, something far worse, something akin to guilt and blame and regret and shame, and horror and despair and madness, moulded into one unholy indescribable emotion that said everything that could ever need saying without a single word.
I rose to my feet and pushed past him.
I ran down the corridor and heaved through the door of my mother’s room.
I saw her naked, more naked than I had seen her since my birth, and the blackened hollowness of her eyes, the way her head was twisted back upon itself at the most unnatural, awkward angle, and knowing…
Knowing that he had killed her.
Something rose inside me. Alongside the hatred and panic, alongside the revulsion and hysteria, something came that was close to a base impulse for survival. Something that told me that no matter what had happened here, no matter how this thing had come about, I had to escape. Murder had been committed, murder of my mother by my own father’s violent hand, and irrespective of my feeling towards him in that moment I was certain that to stay would have been the end of my life as I knew it.
Perhaps, in some dark way, it was everything I had been waiting for; something that was sufficiently powerful to drive me away.
I stepped forward.
I looked down at her.
Even as I stared at her cold and lifeless face I could hear her voice.
Could hear the songs she sang to me as a baby.
I turned back towards my father, his back towards me, his body rigid and yet shaking uncontrollably, his fists clenched, every muscle inside of him taut and stretched and painful, and I knew that I had to leave. Had to leave and take him with me.
I ran from the house. The street was deserted. I ran back without any comprehension of why I had left.
I shouted something at him and he looked at me with the eyes of an old man. A weak and defeated man. I hurried to my room and gathered some clothes, stuffed them into a hessian sack; from the kitchen I took what few provisions remained, wrapped them in a cloth and buried those in the sack also, and then I took a shirt and forced my father’s arms through the sleeves, buttoned it to the neck, and then walked him out, walked him as if I was marching with two bodies, and I took him down to the side of the road and left him standing there, gaunt and speechless.
I returned to the house, and after standing over the dead form of my mother for a minute further, after kneeling and touching her face, after leaning close and whispering to her that I loved her, I backed up and returned to the kitchen. I took a kerosene lamp and emptied its contents in a wide arc across the floor and the table, trailed it out through the doorway and down the hall, and with the last inch and a half of fuel I doused my mother’s body. I backed up, I closed my eyes, and then took a box of matches from my pocket and lit one. I stood there for a moment, the smell of sulphur and kerosene and death in my nostrils, and then I dropped the match and ran.
We had run a quarter of a mile before I saw the flames make their way to the sky.
We kept on running, and ever-present was the urge to run back, to douse the flames and drag her charred body from the ruins, to tell the world what had happened, and ask a God I didn’t believe in for forgiveness and sanctuary. But I did not stop, nor did my father beside me, and in some strange way I believed that that was the closest I had ever been to him, the closest I would ever come.
It was December of 1958, a week before Christmas, and we headed east towards the Mississippi state line, and when we reached it we headed still east towards Alabama, knowing full well that to stop was to see our destiny slip from our hands.
Seventeen days we walked, stopping only to lie at the edge of some field and snatch a broken handful of hours’ rest, to share the few mouthfuls of food that remained, to rise and ache through yet another day of passage.
Into Florida: Pensacola, Cape San Bias, Apalachee Bay; into Florida, where you could see the island of Cuba, the Keys, the Straits and the lights of Havana from the tip of Cape Sable. And knowing that we were merely a handful of miles from my father’s homeland.
We hid for three days straight. My father said nothing. Each day I would creep away at night and walk down to the beaches. I talked with people who spoke in broken-up Spanish, people who told me they could not help me time and time again, until finally, on the third night, I found a fisherman who would take us.
I will not tell you how I traded for our passage, but I closed my eyes and I paid the price, and I still believe that I carry the scars of my own fingernails in the flesh of my palms.
But we were away, the wind in our hair, the sea air like some cleansing absolution for the past, and I watched my father as he clung to the edge of the small craft, his eyes wide, his face haunted, his spirit broken.
That was my mother.
Her life and her death.
I was twenty-one years old, and in some way I believed my own life had come to an end. A chapter had
