There was no shortage of money, and I rented a small house on Avenida Belgica near the Old Wall Ruins. I hired a woman also, an elderly Cuban national called Claudia Vivo who was to stay with us to cook, to clean the rooms, to school Victor and care for him.
I was a man lost, a man without a soul, and often there would be afternoons when I would walk the streets without purpose or direction. Sometimes I would hear their voices, Angelina and Lucia, the sound of their laughter as they ran down the street behind me, and I would turn, my eyes wide with anticipation, and I would see some other child, some other mother, and I would lean against the wall, my breath shallow and fast in my throat, my eyes stinging with tears.
My heart was broken beyond repair. I knew it would never mend again.
I remember a day, perhaps a week or two after we arrived. Victor was home with Claudia Vivo; he was learning of Cuba and its history, for I had told him this was the country of his grandfather, and he wished to learn of it. Though it was only mid-afternoon, morning swallowed irretrievably in some vague wash of forgetting, the sky had deepened into incipient gray-green solidity. The air seemed thick, difficult to breathe, and I felt as if I could bear it only for moments. I wandered through the back streets, my shirt open to the waist, sandals on my feet, and at some point I stumbled towards a plankboard house with a veranda running the width of its frontage. I collapsed into a wickerwork chair, and I removed my shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from my forehead and chest. I heard voices behind me, someone calling for lemonade. Somewhere music played from an ancient phonograph, the bakelite records scratched and heavy, the sound like a chamber orchestra coming out through a maze of tunnels.
Sometimes I felt angry. Other times sad, alone, desperate, quiet. Sometimes I felt I could light the world with fire and watch everyone burn. And again, in that moment, I felt nothing. I was sick and weak and thin. I was fifty- three years old, and I felt eighty. So many things had changed, but changed for the worse, it seemed. People like me were no-one at all, less than nothing, minus zero, and we had to carve our own way through life.
Often I wished I was someone else. Someone tall and strong. Anyone else. At least it would have been different.
The heat, the bruised and turgid air, made me feel nauseous. I took my damp shirt and put it on again.
Motivation came a little later, the sky darker, the promise of a storm pressing against the afternoon, some merciless and unforgiving invasion, and I rose from the chair and started walking the streets again.
I heard the absence of music. That had disappeared some time before. I could not remember when. My mouth felt stale and bitter, my muscles ached and I was hungry.
When I thought again I thought of Angelina. Real love meant touching without hurting, crying without pain, holding a heart in your mind, not in your hand. We were all children, it seemed, and those of us who learned of adulthood paid the price in forgetting how it was to be a child. We grew up, and childhood belonged to some part of history that never existed, and when I thought of those things, remembered what it was like when everything was so much larger than me, I sensed the loss of hope: I realized that those who had taught me about life had never really understood it themselves. They had pretended. They had cheated me. If a child is smart he gets what he wants. If an adult is smart he gets used. Betrayed. Abused.
And after that I thought of where I would go now, what I would do. It was safe here in Havana, but Havana was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be in America. I wanted to be with my family. I could not stagnate here, could not dissolve and die here in this desolate quarter of the world, but I could not go back.
I thought of winter in America, the trees losing their leaves, colors that should have borne names like ‘cremona’ and ‘anguish’ and ‘eldorado’, the scatterings of snow that you could smell in the air, the bitter wind haunting the eaves above the windows of the houses, ghosts of smoke from smouldering bonfires as people burned leaves in backlots and front yards…
And the hurt began again.
I retraced my steps to the house, where my son was studying. I stood at the back door, waiting for the sky to break open with the sound of rain. It came eventually, as I knew it would, and out beyond the limits of the house I could hear the lush vegetation stretching and yawning and swelling its leaves and stems and roots. Rain came like a waterfall, the rush of sound filling my ears, waves filling my eyes, every sense echoing the crescendo of nature as she burst and broke and bled. It was vast, immense, majestic. It represented everything, and yet nothing, and there were many things I did not understand.
Later, the air chilled and smelling of damp green destruction, I turned and walked back into the house. Upstairs I went into a small and immaculate room, the furniture not from this century, the counterpane covering the bed ancient and bleached with years of washing. I went through my dresser and found a white monogrammed shirt. I took a suit and other things from the wardrobe, silk and soft cotton and gaberdine pants with pleats and shoes with two sets of fastenings, buckles and laces, and over the laces a hand-tooled leather flap that prevented the cuffs of the pants from chafing. From beneath the pillow of my bed I retrieved my.38, heavy and solid, the handle pearled, threaded with lignum vitae beaded like marble. I hefted the weapon in my hand, tucked my finger behind the trigger guard, rolled it like a gunslinger, stepped back and aimed at the mirror, then turned and followed the lower edge of the window sill with my eye along the sight. I smiled. I sat on the edge of the bed. I reversed the gun, touched my thumb against the trigger, lifted it, opened my mouth and felt the bottom of the barrel against my teeth. I smelled oil, cordite, saltpeter – blood, I thought – and when I pressed the trigger harder I could sense the internal workings of the mechanism preparing themselves for movement.
The sound of the hammer striking the empty chamber was almost deafening, as if the sound had echoed against the roof of my mouth, filled my head and then exited through my ears. I smiled again, withdrew the gun and turned it over in my hand. I replaced it beneath the pillow and crossed the room to the narrow bathroom. Inside, the white porcelain tiling and bathtub were hued green in the sallow light from the window. I opened the lower pane, looked out towards the road, and stood there for some small eternity listening for any sound within the house.
It was close to evening. Somewhere Victor was reading aloud to Claudia Vivo. I could hear the rain out there somewhere, hammering relentlessly on some other part of the world. Unbeknown to me it was raining also in Louisiana. Three hours and the Bienvenue would overflow its banks, the Mississippi-Lake Borgne tributary would burst its concrete stanchions and flood a town called Violet on Highway 39; the River Gulf Outlet Canal would swell and threaten the safety of the Intracoastal waterway running north-east out towards Gulfport… and a man called Duchaunak, a stranger to me, would run through the everglades at the edge of the Feraud territory. He would never make it home. He would collapse into the mud and drown, and his body would rest in eternity beside that of Carryl Chevron.
I understood the depth of losing. I saw the well of despair in which I could have drowned, but the one thing that floats us is hope. Faith perhaps. But what was faith if not in yourself? We believe we understand ourselves, but we do not; and perhaps if we did we would spend less time concealing from others that we were not who we appeared to be. We perform, you see, perform some drama for the world; we carry a case filled with faces, with words, with different scenes and acts and curtain calls, and we pray that the world will never see beyond the performance we have practised for it.
I turned and looked in the mirror. My face looked old and lined, streaked with pain, it seemed.
‘Who were you?’ I asked myself. ‘What did you think or hope or pretend you were? Who did you think you had become?’
I reached out and touched my fingers to the cool smooth reflection.
My depression deepened, the urge for revenge gnawed at me, and somewhere in the small and narrow shadow of my soul I began to understand that my wife and daughter were dead, that Victor and I were alone in this world, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Later I went down for dinner. I sat beside my son as Claudia brought food for us. I listened to him talk excitedly about the things he had learned that day, and I sensed his perfect and complete desire to become a man.
One does not own one’s life, I wanted to tell him. One borrows it, and if in the borrowing there is insufficient retribution made, then the life must be returned. This is the way of all things.
I did not speak; I listened. I did not see; I perceived. I did not clamor and plead for my own voice to be heard over that of my son.
He was what he was, and that was perfect enough.
