A Quiet Vendetta

I laughed with him. I remembered these things. I had been there too. Ernesto Cabrera Perez. We were amongst them, me and my ghost of a father, caught in the whirlwind of revolution and passion and gunfire.

My father was all of forty-six years old, but he carried himself as if he were sixty or seventy. The Havana Hurricane had come home, back to a place whose name he had used with self-aggrandized pride, but in the face of everything, the age and history and significance of this place, he was nothing more than what he truly was: a fighter, a whiskey-fueled brawler, a bare-knuckle madman possessing neither sufficient sense nor sanity to work a trade alongside his Friday night thunderings. And yet he was even less than that – weaker and more broken and less substantial than I had ever believed, and he carried inside of him a guilt so burdensome and weighty that the strength remaining in his bones and frame could not have borne it for long. He had killed his own wife. In a fit of insatiable sexual fury he had broken his own wife’s neck as he forced her against the wall. That was what he was, and that was all he was, and that was all he ever would be: a stupid old man, old before his time, who in some moment of drunken madness had killed the only person who’d ever really loved him. Loved him not for what he was, but loved him for what she believed he might become. In the end she was wrong, for he became nothing, and I walked with that nothing, the shell of a man that was my father, through the streets of Old Havana, down along Calle Obispo to the Plaza de Armas, and as he walked he whispered in his hoarse and fatigued voice, No es facil… no es facil… It’s not easy… it’s not easy.

‘I know, Father, I know,’ I would reply, and though my words bore the face of sympathetic understanding, they carried behind their backs the grim steel of vengeance.

The Sicilians – years, so many years later – would tell me of vengeance. ‘Quando fai i piani per la vendetta, scava due tombe – una per la tua vittima e una per te stesso,’ they would say. You head out for vengeance, you dig two graves… one for your victim and one for yourself. And then they would smile with their mouth but not with their eyes, and in that expression you could see a thousand years of understanding about the darker elements of man and the shadows that he carried.

But during those first few weeks, as we found our feet, as I discovered the land of my father, as Cuba gave birth to something inside of me that made me believe that wherever I might have been born, wherever I might have been raised, this place – this impassioned, heated, sweating, writhing confusion of humanity and inhumanity, sprawling out from west to east, a punctuation mark between the Atlantic and the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Straits, the Windward Passage – was so much more than I had ever believed or imagined.

Such romance, such fiction! Names such as Sancti Spiritus, Santiago de Cuba, a stone’s throw from Haiti and Jamaica, from Puerto Rico and the Bahamas; St James the Apostle Carnival, the African-Catholic faith of Santeria, and rumba and salsa and cha-cha-cha, and lazy island days out of Cayo Largo, and here is where Hemingway would live at Papa’s Place, Finca la Vigia, and after his death his family would give his home to the people of Cuba for carrying the dreams of their son for the better part of twenty years.

And it would only be later, much later, years behind me once I had returned to the United States, that I would look back and believe that Cuba had always been in my heart and soul, that had I stayed there all the terrible things to come would perhaps never have happened. But by then it was too late, and by then I would be looking at my life with the mind and eyes of an older man, not the man I was then, the young man walking my father through those self-same streets, believing that here I had found nothing more than a sanctuary from the justice that my father would inevitably meet…

Though not the way I then believed.

And not from my own hand.

For now my hand did nothing more than lead the way for him, show him where he would lie down in the dark one-room hovel we rented for a single American dollar a week – the same hand that gripped the sill of the window as I looked out towards the lights of Florida while my mind believed that if I could only make it back there alone, if I could only find my way, there would be something waiting for me that would give everything else some sense.

But then it did not, and would not for a great many years to come. The New Year of 1959 I was nothing more than my father’s keeper, and as he lay on his mattress, as he mumbled unintelligible words interspersed with the sound of my mother’s name, as his mind slowly dissolved into the final darkness of guilt for who he was and what he had done, I knew I had to escape from this life any way I could.

My eyes were open, my heart was willing, and I had already long-since realized that the pathway to freedom was bought with dollars. Hard-earned or not, there was only one way out, and that way carried a price.

I’ll tell you something now: in the 1950s it was different. Seemed to me a man was a man and a girl was a girl. None of this free love, men holding hands with men in public kind of thing. Guy wanted to take it up the ass then he did it in the privacy of his own home, or maybe he rented a hotel room by the hour. At the time I figured people like that were crazy, not the Jesus told me to stay home and clean my guns crazy, but just a little short on whatever it took to make a hundred cents spend like a dollar. Maybe I don’t seem to be the truthful kind of person, but I’ll let you in on one other thing: I say something, well you can take it to the bank, and I’ll tell you what happened in 1959 with the old guys and the rent boys and the promise of a dollar.

The room I rented for me and my father was on the outskirts of Old Havana, La Habana Vieja, and back behind the Plaza de la Catedral there was a street called Empedrado. The house we inhabited was shared by the better part of six or seven families, some with kids no taller than my knee, and some with babies who would cry at night when the heat was fierce, or who would cry from hunger or from thirst, or from the croup when it came and infected them, all of them at once.

Met a boy there; seventeen he was, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but he smoked cigarettes like he’d been doing it for a thousand years. His family name was Cienfuegos, his given name Ruben, and Ruben Cienfuegos became as close to me as any other human being. It was with him that I spoke of the revolution, of Castro overthrowing Batista and taking Cuba back for the people. It was he who taught me how to smoke the cigarettes, he who showed me pictures of girls with wide mouths and wider legs that made me so horny I could’ve fucked a cracked plate given a little lubrication, and when he told me of his cousin, a sixteen-year-old called Sabina, when he told me she would do me for two American dollars, I went like a lamb to the slaughter. A narrow mattress in the corner of a darkened room, and Sabina – whose hair was longer than any girl’s I’d ever seen, whose eyes were wide and bright and eager, and yet somehow wary like a feral thing; a girl who pulled down my pants and massaged my cock until it was stiff and aching, who took me by the hand and laid me down, and then lifted her skirt and sat astride me, who then lowered herself onto me until I felt I would disappear completely between those muscled brown thighs, and who rolled over me like a wave of something terrible and magical and profound, and who later would take my two American dollars and tuck them into the waistband of her panties, and lean forward and kiss my face, and tell me that she could feel my warmth inside her, and then had laughed and told me that what had just happened was as necessary and vital as being christened by the Pope himself in the Vatican, and told me then that if I had left it any longer I might very well have drowned her. And then she showed me to the door and down the stairs to where Ruben stood smoking and smiling and satisfied… When Ruben Cienfuegos told me of these things, and then made his promise that it would happen, and then brought me to the place where it did happen, well Ruben became perhaps the most important person in my life.

And she, she whose name I would never forget, and yet met only once, became something that existed only in my mind and my heart. In years to come I would think of her, Sabina, and make-believe that she was somewhere thinking also of me. In some way that moment with her was as meaningful as the moment I stood over the dead body of Carryl Chevron such a long time before. A defining moment. A moment that would stand as a testimony of my life, evidence that I had in fact walked the earth, that, at least once, perhaps twice, I had truly been someone.

I thought of her often, but never spoke her name, because to speak of her would have been to break the spell and let the world know something of who I was. Who I was belonged to no-one but me, and that was the way I wished it.

It was Ruben who told me of the Italians. He told me of the Hotel Nacional and how a black man called Nat King Cole – who was not a real king and did not possess a kingdom – had sung there for the Italians and yet could not stay in the hotel that night because he was negroid, and how the Italians had come here to Cuba when they had been forced out of Florida by the authorities, forced out because they had killed so many people and taken so much money, and how the law could do nothing to stop them. Cuba was their salvation, Cuba was their home from home, and in ten-thousand-dollar apartments they would drink Folger’s Coffee and