Cubop City Blues Read online

  Also by Pablo Medina

  Fiction:

  The Cigar Roller

  The Return of Felix Nogara

  The Marks of Birth

  Poetry:

  The Man Who Wrote on Water

  Points of Balance/Puntos de apoyo

  Puntos de apoyo

  The Floating Island

  Arching into the Afterlife

  Pork Rind and Cuban Songs

  Translation and Memoir:

  Poet in New York: Federico García Lorca

  Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood

  Todos me van a tener que oir/Everyone Will Have to Listen

  CUBOP CITY

  BLUES

  Pablo Medina

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2012 by Pablo Medina

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9455-8

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Arístides Falcón Paradí

  Le monde bat de l’autre côté de ma porte.

  —Pierre Albert Birot

  He vivido en el monstruo y le conozco las entrañas.

  —José Martí

  Beat on those tom-toms, man.

  —Dizzy Gillespie to Chano Pozo

  CUBOP CITY

  BLUES

  Storyteller

  I came to Cubop City as a boy, brought here by my parents, who fled one Sodom and entered another and never looked back. My father was a soap maker, my mother was a housewife. Before I was born, she’d been an aspiring torch singer. After I was born she gave up the torch and tried to be a mother but motherhood wasn’t in her. She did everything in her power to keep me from coming into being, but she failed. Here I am.

  Growing up I heard her singing in the shower, her voice silky and seductive. Dry, she wrung her hands and became ill—moans and wails coming out of the bedroom. A burning in her womb. My grandmother took care of me, my grandmother who was all power and love, bountiful love and meaning, and when she could no longer, a bevy of aunts fawned over me. There was Leonora, who bathed and dressed me; Alba, who woke me and powdered me with talcum; Minerva, who tried to teach me the ways of the world; and Carlota de Los Ángeles, who made me kiss the Virgin every day, though I never learned what that brought or why it was better than eating a banana or listening to rain splattering on the roof. Finally, there was Marina, who took me to the beach and told me that all great things come from depth. She put wreaths of seaweed on my head and made me stand at the water’s edge so that I could feel the tongue of the sea at my feet. I couldn’t take a step without their knowing; I couldn’t say a word without their leaping with excitement in exultant dances, quick flighty steps into the light of the future. I woke up at night clawing at the mosquito net, thinking my mother’s illness was my fault. Years later, I found out it was.

  In Cubop City, my father became a teacher of high school Spanish, my mother a secretary for a perfume magnate. In reality she was his mistress. Her womb stopped burning. She brought home perfumes, leftovers from the magnate, and the apartment smelled of My Sin.

  My father accepted his horns with convenient indifference. By the age of twelve, when I began to feel the pull of sex, I suspected that he was having an affair with Cornelia, the housekeeper. I heard them giggling in the kitchen when they thought I was asleep in my room, and there was something in his tone of voice when he spoke to her that wasn’t there when he spoke to my mother—complicity, duplicity, the quicksilver language of love. Mama and Papa never fought, but between them was a space I filled and cushioned, like cartilage between two bones.

  Cubop City was subject to its own rigors and laxities and demands and dynamics. Gone were my grandmother and my aunts, gone the slow warm days of the tropics, the creatures Minerva brought me—slugs, toads, and lizards she dissected so I would learn how the world worked. The answer’s in their entrails, she said. She’d pull out the lungs, the stomach, and the liver, and lay them out on wax paper. There, she said. Where? I asked, moving closer. All I saw were tiny lumps of tissue, wet and spongy to the touch.

  In Cubop City I heard the steam shovels digging, the workmen screaming orders at one another, the taxis and trucks blaring out their songs like maladapted geese. ¡Ey, Papo! ¡Ey, Mamita! Coming through, coming through. Get that van out of here. I’m making a delivery, man. Move that piece of shit or I’ll give you a fucking ticket. Cock-sucking scumbag pig.

  Mama, what is a scumbag?

  What your father wasn’t wearing the night you were conceived, she might have said but didn’t, as my father wasn’t really my father. Instead, she answered, Nothing, an insult. You shouldn’t repeat it.

  I was born nearly blind, couldn’t see but six inches in front of my face, sometimes seven or eight if I’d rested sufficiently the night before. Beyond that was a gray ooze filled with indistinguishable forms, emanations from the bodies of those close to me. When I reached out and touched them they were solid and responded in the ways those close to you respond, affectionately, patiently. Then I’d move in close enough to make out their features—my father’s Roman nose, my mother’s stony eyes, the smudge of her mouth, the dry riverbeds of her hands. When their patience wore out, they spoke. ¡Ay, muchacho! Enough. Go read your encyclopedia.

  For I was, if nothing else, an avid reader of the Britannica, 1911 edition. It was one of the first things my parents bought in our exile to replace the one we’d left behind. I hovered over the tomes like a dirigible. The day my father found me reading volume 1 was a great moment for him. It’s a miracle! he said. My mother, or the shadow I imagined was my mother, stood beside him and looked down at me. I felt then the canyon of shame and guilt between us. What was the source? Love comes in many guises.

  Of course it was not a miracle. I’d simply convinced the housekeeper to teach me to read English as she had taught me to cook. All men, even nearly blind ones like you, she said, should know how to prepare a few dishes. I learned more than a few. Cornelia was Hungarian by birth and had been a university professor on the island. She had a degree in philosophy from the University of Frankfurt, but in Cubop City her degree counted for nothing. As I said, she was hired to care for me and to cook and clean. Her affair was with Papa. I heard her frolicking in the kitchen, laughing the way Europeans laugh, a prelude to pleasure.

  I’d learned enough to identify words in Eng
lish. Pronunciation was another matter. Out loud, things came out sounding like a Finno-Ugric version of Old English. My father insisted I was a genius. I was remaking the language. From then on he was at my disposal, especially in matters of the mind, and provided me with all the books, magazines, and documents I requested, and many I didn’t request but he felt compelled to place strategically in my room: mathematical and scientific treatises, studies by famous linguists and philosophers, things I didn’t understand and had no interest in. As I said, I was not a genius, just a boy with a lot of time and a curiosity of the world beyond the six inches in front of his face. Study at your own pace, he said. Read what you want. And I did, filling the house with dictionaries, manuals, picture books of all sorts, comics, and graphic novels about Mexican wrestlers and Cuban boxers, my face floating over the varied topography of the texts as all else receded into a milky snowfield like an infinite margin, a wall-less labyrinth where all limits fell away.

  Grey’s Anatomy I asked for and Grey’s Anatomy I got, as well as large-print editions of The Origin of Species, The World We Live In, Moby Dick, The Double Helix, Don Quixote (with illustrations by Doré), The Mysterious Island, The Tigers of Mompracem, Two Years Before the Mast, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Art of Bullfighting, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, and The Knights of the Round Table illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. It was only when I asked for a copy of the Bible that my father responded with a definitive no, his inbred anticlerical fervor rising to the surface like a thick black poison. I’ll not have a priest lover in my house. Hijos de la gran puerca!

  On the chance that I was a genius, he put aside his prejudice and found, in a used bookstore downtown—where there used to be many and now there are few—a battered King James version of the Bible dating to 1865, which elevated my young and burgeoning English to tolerable heights. The text was crammed and small, and the reading was arduous, but I loved the feel and smell of the old pages and the pressed flowers and bits of paper on which were scribbled notes about the weather, the harvest, the bread making. Then, in between the pages of Matthew, I found a treasure. It was a letter from a Skene Gordon in Alicedale, South Africa, to his mother. It was dated 1883.

  My Dear Mother, I suppose you are angry with me for not writing, but I have been very ill since I left and I am sorry to say I am not much better—You must excuse me, writing a long letter as I am still very unwell and am scarcely able to get to do my work However I am very glad to say that I am getting better, but very slowly The baby has been christened since I came out and her name is Mary Skene Gordon I have nothing more to say except that I am anxious to know how father and everyone else are in health You ought to have written by now You Affect. Son, Skene.

  I was beyond myself with excitement. The Biblical text left me cold. The letter, though, was alive—not because of what it said but because of what it didn’t. I found the Britannica map of South Africa in volume 25 and located, after a long time of hovering over it, the town of Alicedale, northeast of Port Elizabeth. I read the letter several times and tried to build a world around Skene. Was he angry, contrite? I didn’t know what anger was, or contriteness or joy or fear. To me all emotions were the same—beans in the soup, kernels in the labyrinth, tufts of grass growing out of the frozen flatlands of the spirit, if spirit there was. I found things out eventually, as one is prone to do. The Hindenburg burning is not a metaphor for passion. A stormy sea is not a metaphor for passion. Or a thunderstorm. Or an earthquake. A lamb suckling her mother is. A worm slithering on the ground. Grass growing at the foot of the cross where Christ is hanging. A mirror without reflection. There was no joy in Alicedale. You ought to have written before now. Was Skene chastising or speculating? And that abbreviation in the closing—was he simply too busy or sick to write out the full word, too reticent to give his mother the full measure of his affection? Underneath the careful script was the equally careful negotiation of emotion—saying too little was better than saying too much. The distance between them went beyond geography, that much was clear, but just as strong was the pull of duty that led him to write his mother and she to read the letter and save it in between the pages of the family Bible. I felt a kinship to Skene, his reticence, and his mystery. Just like Skene’s mother, my mother loomed over me and all I was and would not be.

  It was then that I asked for a copy of One Thousand and One Nights, a request my father gladly fulfilled. At first I thought he was unaware of the racier parts of the book—those parts where salacious women trick their men, losing their morals but gaining the world, but I eventually realized he knew what he was giving me: a trove of tricksterism, a manual for survival. Then I learned of desire, the key to staying alive, the way into the labyrinth, the way out, all the while guzzling life’s liquor until it ran dry. Scheherazade, Scheherazade, give me your body, give me your stories or your life. Maybe.

  I discovered, too, that desire was the lure of life. To want was to prolong living and to prolong living was to trust the future. The enormity of what a child learns, I think now, is extraordinary. Just as extraordinary is the time spent in coming to terms with all that knowledge. I’m nearly blind. What I imagine I create.

  You can’t miss what you’ve never had—all that clutter of images. That others saw much more than I was not my concern. I saw what I saw. Nor did I miss playing baseball or soccer or tennis or badminton, because I’d never learned those games. I found children my age trite and torpid and, more often than not, brutish. They were tiny versions of adults, sans subterfuge. The only game that held my attention was chess, which had been taught to me by Cornelia, a grand lady whose life was truncated by exile. Languages stuck to her like barnacles. She knew half a dozen. Tragedy was her cloak, made of a substance like lead. She led lives like a cat, in Hungary through the German and Soviet occupations, in Austria and Paris, in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Havana, and had come to Cubop City aware that this was her last. This city, she’d say in the melancholy tone of the uprooted, has done me in.

  It had not done me anything except make me imagine what lay beyond the door, outside our building. While I waited for her to move a piece, I told her stories. Once upon a time, Tuesday refused to go away for three days. Then it was Monday for five minutes, and Sunday appeared in a great expanse of expectation, followed by Wednesday, a block of meat, and Friday, giddy as a songbird for his mate. It wasn’t Saturday for a year and when it came I slept through it. Mama got sick, and soon after, Papa got sick, too, Thursday forever.

  Once upon a time there lived a missionary named Skene whose hobby was big-game hunting.

  Cornelia looked up from the chessboard. I hadn’t shown her the letter.

  Missionaries are not big-game hunters, she said.

  Why not? I asked.

  They’re too busy converting the natives.

  Okay then, he wasn’t a missionary. He was an accountant.

  Big-game hunting is an expensive hobby, she said. Only very rich people or famous writers, who live off the rich, can afford it.

  Once upon a time there lived a famous writer named Skene Gordon whose hobby was big-game hunting.

  Famous? I’ve never heard of this Skene.

  He was famous, I insisted. He’d written many books that were made into movies.

  And so it went until she made her move. Then she recited Petöfi in Hungarian and Heine in German. I couldn’t understand either language, but her declamations distracted me from the game and I made serious errors, which she exploited with the ruthlessness of a killer.

  I couldn’t tell her that the real Skene, the one who’d written the letter to his mother, appeared to be a weakling. Big-game hunters are ruthless, with hearts of stone and veins of lead. I remembered a photo from Hunting in Africa that showed a hunter aiming his rifle at an elephant as it charged directly at him. If you can shoot an elephant, you can shoot a man, bu
t what pleasure can be derived from that? I kept that to myself while Cornelia thought. What I did say is that Skene shot two elephants as they were mating.

  A crack shot, this Skene, she said, still looking at the board. And two beasts at once! Hard to believe.

  She moved and quoted Heine’s comment that if you can burn a book, you can burn a man. I countered immediately and continued with Skene’s story, ignoring her comment. I was much more interested in my narrative than in the game.

  Seeing the elephants in death joined as they were in life, Skene so regretted his act that as atonement he joined the National Elephant Preservation Society. Through his activities in the society he met Miss Priscilla Winkley, board member and former president, who became his wife.

  No courtship, no romance? Cornelia said, moving one of her knights and threatening my queen.

  I got the queen out of harm’s way and said there was, but it was irrelevant to the story. Cornelia gave me a stern look and said, How could romance be irrelevant?

  On one of their trips to Africa they had a child and Skene became ill. Nevertheless, they lived happily, conjoined by his guilt and their interests, until, finally, he succumbed to his illness and died in his sleep. At the moment of his death, he dreamed he was shot by a hunter of humans while he copulated with an elephant cow who bore an uncanny resemblance to his wife.

  How could a man have sex with such a large beast? Cornelia asked. Her voice had cracks in places but was wrapped in elegance. For some reason the thought occurred to me that she was a very lonely woman despite her many lovers.

  It was a dream, I said. Dreams don’t have logic.

  Yes, they do. They may not be linear but they have logic.

  A pygmy elephant, then. I was becoming annoyed by her criticisms. In truth, I had never seen a live elephant—only pictures in the encyclopedia and that stunning photograph in Hunting in Africa—at close range, so I had no sense of the true size of the animal. I continued. Wracked by grief, Miss Priscilla Gordon, née Winkley, moved to Calcutta and became a Hindu mystic and devotee of Ganesh.