Havana Lunar (2 page)

31 July 1992

T
wo weeks ago, my Friday shift at the pediatric hospital was almost over when Director González stepped around the curtain and handed me an envelope with my week's pay. “Rodriguez, you have tomorrow off, don't you?” Director González has always cultivated a studied, comfortable air toward my mark.

“Sí, señor.”

“Would you stay over? Portuondo's bus was canceled.”

“Sí, señor.”

The admitting nurse briefed me on the next patient. “Una niña, ten years old, complaining of fever and an earache; high temperature, blurry vision, and slightly slurred speech.”

Holding her mother's hand, the girl sat on a bench in the sala de examinación, a four-by-five compartment partitioned by plastic curtains strung up in the hot, drafty lobby. “First the earache,” said the girl's mother. “Then the fever started. We waited a few days to come in.”

“How many days, exactly, since the onset of the fever?”

“Four.”

“Cuál es tu nombre, amiguita?”

“Me llamo Tonia.”

I asked Tonia's mother, “Does your daughter have a speech impediment?”

“No.”

“Tonia, can you tell me how many animals you count on the curtain there?”

“The light hurts.” Her slur was pronounced. She focused on the mark beneath my right eye. “What's that on your face?”

“A bird dropped it on me.” I turned and asked the mother, “Is anyone else with you?”

“My husband is in the waiting room.”

My first task of the second shift was to convince Tonia's father that the girl's ailment was a lot more serious than a simple ear infection. Both of the girl's parents sat across from me at the desk I shared with four other pediatricians. “Your daughter has to stay here tonight.”

The father stared suspiciously at my mark. “Come on, doctor. Just give the girl a shot and we'll be gone.”

“She might have a cerebral abscess. She needs to be under close observation. This could require massive antibiotics.”

“We live right around the corner in the Máximo Gomez apartments.”

“You can spend the night in her room, if you'd like, but Tonia has to stay.”

The father stood up and left the office, slamming the door behind him. The mother looked at me. “Do you have any children, doctor?”

“No,” I said. I try to take care of every patient as if she were my own child, but to tell a parent this would just irritate the situation.

“If you let my baby die, you will be killing me too.”

“I will do everything in my power to help your daughter.”

“Imagine if your own mother had lost you, how she might feel.”

There is no more powerful antidote than a mother's will for her child's survival. Sometimes this takes the form of a bitter pill, a country woman suspicious of all the gleaming machines and of their handlers, the doctors and nurses. Then there are those who trust modern practices. Either way it is a welcome medicine when a parent's stubbornness overpowers a child's fear.

I gave the nurse instructions to admit Tonia to intensive care and asked an orderly to set up a cot for the mother beside the girl's bed. Then I walked down the hall to the physician's lounge, a small, windowless closet with a bare bulb on the back wall and a dusty jug of water for refreshment. The coffee-maker had been stolen during the second week of my residency, and nobody had bothered filing a report because it had been a year since they had stocked coffee. Sometimes, in the middle of a double shift, I'll go there to stretch my legs across two plastic chairs and catch a short nap.

Tonia's father pushed the door open without knocking. “What are you doing in here?”

“Taking a siesta.”

“Nothing is happening. Why can't I take my daughter home?”

“Please, get some sleep yourself. They made up an extra bed in her room.”

“I don't like a bed. I sleep on a bench.”

A nurse interrupted. “Doctor Rodriguez, venga pronto.”

I pushed past the father and ran down the hall to Tonia's bed. I had been planning to order a CT scan in the morning, hoping there would still be time to go with a sequence of antimicrobials, but now Tonia's condition had become critical. The abscess was hemorrhaging. I told the head nurse to prep the OR for emergency surgery and went in to scrub up.

After the anesthesiologist put the girl under and the intern shaved the area over the abscess, I made an exploratory incision with the scalpel. Fortunately, I found the mass near the surface and completely encapsulated by membrane. Excision was completed quickly and without complications. I took a culture of the residual fluid with an aspirator and asked the intern to sew the patient up and send her on to post-op. Then I requisitioned the biopsy exam and wrote up a preliminary convalescing plan, treatment to be adjusted upon identification of the infecting microorganism.

By the end of the shift, Tonia was stable in the ICU. I informed Tonia's parents that surgery had been successful and that I expected the girl's complete recovery in a matter of days. Candelario arrived to relieve me for the graveyard shift.

When I left the hospital toward midnight, there was a teenage girl in new blue denim jeans and a powder-blue top standing beneath the neon sign outside. She had a pretty face, light skin, and the dirty-blond hair of a true rubiecita. Our eyes met and she walked over to me. Casually overlooking the mark on my cheek, she handed me a sack. “It looked like you were never going to get a break, so I brought you something.”

Inside the sack was a malted milk and a sandwich. “Where did you get this?”

“At the Habana Libre cafeteria.”

“They let you in?”

“A friend picked it up for me, a foreigner.”

“Thank you. Let me pay you.”

“I won't take your money, doctor. That girl you operated on tonight is my closest cousin.”

“Please, share this with me.”

“No thanks. I already ate.”

I bit into the sandwich: ham and cheese on bread that wasn't stale.

“You're a lifesaver. I haven't tasted anything in twelve hours.”

We talked about the heat while I finished the sandwich and the malta. Then she looked me in the eyes and said, “Pardon me, doctor, but a girlfriend told me you have a clinic where you can do the HIV test and keep the results secret.”

I looked over my shoulder—nobody. “Yes, but when it's necessary I recommend treatment and counseling.”

“I'm not going to one of those sanitoriums.”

“You're getting ahead of yourself. My polyclinic is on 12 y 23 in Vedado. There are open consultations this Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 to 5:00. I close for an hour at midday.”

“I'll see you tomorrow then,” she said. The girl walked off into the night.

* * *

Back at the attic, I flipped on the light and said to El Ché, “The sun through the French doors has been sucking the color from your face.”

El Ché replied, “You look like hell yourself. Even if there's not much to eat, you should at least keep clean-shaven.”

“I can't buy a razor anywhere. And who are you to talk, barbudo?”

“My beard is different. It's symbolic.”

“I'll say: totemic.”

I flipped on Radio Reloj. “
Economic aggression from North American reactionaries has not dampened the spirits of the volunteer brigades picking cucumbers in Varadero …”

There are certain advantages to occupying the third floor, like fewer encounters with the CDR and other people of the street. It's quieter up en el tercer piso and cooler in the breezes from the Florida Straits, and although there are relocados downstairs, none trudge overhead. For the past few years, I have resigned myself to every six months seeing all that sustains me—the real value of my salary, my ration of food and coffee, my allowance of sex, and the square footage of the house I can call my own—cut in half. I have a galley kitchen where I make coffee (when there is coffee) and slice whatever scraps of vegetables I can find on the bolsa negra with a dull scalpel salvaged from the pediátrico. The bathroom is tiny with a toilet, a basin under an iron tap, and a shower three feet square. In the living room there's a braided rug where I throw my dirty work clothes, three walls of books, and a sofa where I sleep beneath a poster of El Ché. I got rid of the bed after Elena left. The saving grace of this attic—added during pre-revolutionary days less for the servant-occupant's enjoyment than to appease the façade of proportion at the time—is a pair of French doors that open onto a shallow balcony facing the sea: a living blue movie where imagination paints ninety-mile-away views of that most unobtainable peninsula. On good days I get up and put Beny Moré on my father's old tocadisco. I open the French doors and let the ships' whistles blow in from Havana Bay. On bad days I awaken too early, hours before dawn, and stay on the sofa with my eyes squeezed shut but getting none of sleep's reprieve.

I lit a cigarette, brand Popular: black tobacco packed in sweet rice paper, ten cents a pack on the ration card, but that's for just one pack a week, and everybody who smokes Populares craves at least a pack a day. Now two packs of Popular go for an American dollar on the black market, so nobody who gives up smoking ever surrenders his weekly ration. Most people I know who have recently quit did it so they can go on eating. Coffee can help the headaches, when there is coffee. I use the grounds four or five times, dehydrating them in the window between infusions and preserving them with a bit of plastic in the refrigerator. Then again, coffee can be the cause. Neurons become greedy for caffeine, and when abruptly there is no more caffeine they become confused and send messages to the pain center. Coffee can hurt or coffee can be a remedy. When I was interning thirty-hour triples, I could try to plow through the migraine, but lately the pain has been making me dizzy. There's no more aspirin or ibuprofen. I'd have to steal it from the pediátrico, and that would mean directly from the patients' provisions. I won't stoop that low. Not yet.

There was no coffee, not even tea, but as a psychosomatic tactic I got an empty cup from the kitchen and took imaginary sips. Sometimes it stems the migraine. Every day is pervaded by headaches. Hunger headaches, heat headaches, just missed the bus and have to wait four more hours for the next one headaches. Berliners on la tele chiseling chunks of concrete to sell to American collectors headaches. Desperation headaches. Headaches of locusts pealing invisibly from saw grass and palm, of shrill locusts flying smack into your eye and crunching under your feet. Headaches that make your jaw ache. Headaches that begin between midbrain and cerebellum and rise, pausing to rock the pons, and shudder back down the spinal cord through the medulla oblongata. Headaches that settle into one shoulder or the other. Headaches that make you vomit. Headaches that make music, their very own music, broadcasting on low-frequency radio waves that shake the bowels of passersby.

“¡Radio Reloj! Son las doce de la noche.”
I lit another cigarette and turned on la tele, thinking there might be something good on Cine de Medianoche. There was: Oliver Stone's
Jota-éFe-Ka
. But just as it was beginning—
¡ñó!
Otro apagón. Blackouts follow schedules as faithfully as the Friday-night features.

12 August 1979

“¡Q
ué calentico y rico está!” Aurora bounced me in the furrow of her glorious thighs, off-key harmonizing with the man mamboing down 23rd Street. “¡Ya no se puede pedir mas!” With her ebony-smooth skin and pendulous breasts, it was the housekeeper, Aurora, who was the light of my young life. Not Mamá. Mamá was downstairs in her room, shutters closed against the heat of the Havana afternoon. She stayed in bed for long periods of time, days sometimes. My father had left for Miami in '69, two months before I was born, and now it was my tenth birthday and Mamá was dying of cancer. Aurora would insist Mamá hug me like you would entreat a sick person to eat: “Un abrazo, señora, por favor …”

After school I had gone straight up to Aurora's attic to play with dominoes until that twilight hour when the peanut vendor breezed by. As soon as we heard the call come up from Calle 23—“Cacerita no te acuestes a dormir …” and by cacerita I knew he meant Aurorita; she was his little housekeep—Aurora scooped me up, shifted me to her hip, threw open the French doors, and lowered the line with a peso in the basket. She reeled the basket back in and Machado, my pet dog, stood on his hind legs. Aurora swatted him. “¡Mendigo!” She stuffed the hot nuts in the front pocket of my overalls.

“Aurita,” I said, “what's the man singing about that's so hot and tasty?”

“Algo que tu tienes en los pantolones.”

“¿Y qué es eso?”

Yanking the paper cone from my pocket, Aurora cried, “¡Maní!”

Aurora unraveled the cone and poured me two handfuls. It was hot. It was good. I knew what the man meant. You really didn't want to go to bed without a little something hot in your belly. That afternoon Mamá seemed to be feeling okay, so Aurora took the evening off. Mamá baked us a cake and we had the world all to ourselves.

After Mamá died, I developed a small hemorrhage beneath my right eye. Many photos and X-rays were taken. Dermatologists and neurosurgeons first diagnosed that, if the hematoma were to burst, I could suffer a massive and likely lethal stroke. I carried a time bomb in my head. Should they schedule surgery? Would it do any good, or would it just trigger the detonator? Although I was allowed to leave the hospital in a few days, I had to return daily for medical observation. After two months the doctors decided that the thrombus was benign. Although the only thing the lab-coats did was figure out to leave me alone, my case was considered a milestone for Socialist medicine, a great prognostic step. The chief pediatrician was flown to Gdansk and Stockholm and Mexico City for conference presentations, complete with slide projections. An intern pointed out that the macula was shaped a little like Havana on the map. The custodians of Communist health care came up with a term for my
infarctus incubatus
, indexed in medical textbooks throughout Cuba, China, East Germany, Russia, and Angola:
Havana Lunar
.

My grandmother Mamamá moved into the house, but she grieved so deeply for Mamá that I was left in Aurora's care. In this way things were not much different from before. I did not play with other children. I would look in the mirror, wondering why the mark shows up on one side of my nose in photos, the other in the glass. I worried that I didn't really know which side to hide from strangers. What most disturbed me about someone seeing it for the first time was not the steady stare, the curled lip, or the involuntary “¡Qué raro!” or “¡Qué asco!” It was the follow-up among those brazen enough to ask aloud: “How did you get that?”

Aurora would take me to Cemeterio Colón, the necropolis, to visit Mamá. We passed the monument to the firemen, dozens of them who perished in a great conflagration at the turn of the century. On each corner of the tomb, a stone mourner bowed her head. I tried to peer up under the shrouds at their eyes, but these statues were never given sight. We passed the tomb of La Milagrosa, and Aurora told me the story of this famous resident of the necropolis. The woman died delivering a stillborn child. They were buried together, the child's corpse laid to rest between the mother's legs as was the custom in the early part of the century. Years later, when the widower requested that his late wife be moved, the remains were exhumed and they found the infant skeleton cradled in the mother's arms. Pilgrims visit her grave every day, requesting her intercession in all kinds of family matters.

At the corner of H y 8 was Mamá. Going to the grave was therapeutic for me. It was a place to be left alone not only by the doctors but by all the strangers around the neighborhood or at school who had heard of my tragedy. Just by stepping into Cemeterio Colón I was inoculated against anyone coming up to me and saying
I'm sorry.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture Mamá's face. She wasn't so different in death from the months leading up to it, losing a fight with cancer and very depressed. Now that she was out of her suffering, I loved her more than ever. There were days, sometimes many in succession, when I wished she had taken me with her.

At school I was given the nickname “La Mancha.” I developed a crush on a girl in my class but was too young to know what to do about it. She sat directly to my left, and I stole glances all day long. Her light blue eyes: such a beautiful rarity on this island. The girl's eyes were windows onto another place, somewhere remote from Cuba, somewhere altogether different from this world. During reading time I lifted my book to shield my face and gaze sideways at those arctic eyes while the teacher, an embittered Catholic widower, graded papers with Last Judgment gusto. I taught myself how to speed-read through
Edad de Oro
. If I scanned the basic gist of the issue in four or five minutes, I was ready to deflect the oral comprehension questions, and then I could spend a good quarter-hour getting lost in the girl's icy countries. That's the cold North where my father is, I told myself. I knew winters in Miami weren't icy, but there was a supermarket with a big machine that made a mountain of snow in the parking lot to entertain the children last Christmas, which is what the gusanos celebrate two weeks before Reyes Magos. Perhaps if I touched the girl's hand and looked into those eyes, I could travel there to the cold North.

“¡Manolo! ¿Qué te pasa con el cuello?” The teacher came right down our row and loomed over me like a malicious gargoyle. Suddenly subjected to my classmates' scrutiny, I didn't even have the presence to turn away. My fellow students, happy to be distracted from their tasks, began to chatter, and the girl turned to face me. She was annoyed, anxious to get back to her book. She was looking at me for the first time, and there was nothing special registering for her. It was utter indifference I was looking back at. The teacher pinched my cranium and rotated my flushed face toward the book. “Qué bonitos ojos tienes ¿no?” the teacher blurted. The entire class erupted in laughter, except for the girl with blue eyes. As punishment, the teacher made me switch desks with the boy seated in front of the blue-eyed girl. No longer was I just “La Mancha.” Now I was also called “El Enamorado,” and my beloved became “Ojitos Lindos.”

Near the end of the school year I set myself the task of observing a ghost. When Aurora was asleep one night, I left the house for the place they lived: the necropolis. I boosted myself over the wall and snuck past the gargantuan arch, wherein the groundskeeper lay sleeping. The moon, at its brightest, burned my cheeks while I penetrated deep into the heart of the cemetery to the corner of H y 8. I sat cross-legged against the tomb of Mamá's neighbor, cracked where tree roots had pushed through, and waited for a ghost to show. The sharp spines of obelisks glowed against the night sky, and my accelerated heart rate made it impossible for me to sleep. Finally, toward morning, I lay on my side to rest.

I opened my eyes onto a deep blue dawn. A narrow column of light emerged from the earth. My body rigid with sleep paralysis, I couldn't move to make sense of the apparition. I stared at it for an un-measurable moment and felt no fear or curiosity, just the serene indifference of a hypnotic. Mesmerized, I shut my eyes. They didn't open again until I was aroused by the sour notes of a funeral procession. The brightness was blinding. A figure stood above me, eclipsing the sun, and when I shaded my eyes I was astonished to see the living spirit of my own longing come to greet me: Ojitos Lindos. “What are you doing here?”

“My father,” she said, with a jerk of the head in the direction of the funeral. “He's the one in the box.” Her soft voice betrayed no emotion, only the indifference of a child before the drama of death. “What about you?”

I sat up and squinted at the sky. The sun had already risen above the tombs. I was embarrassed to admit I had been trying to see a ghost, so I said, “Visiting my mother.” It occurred to me that my mother and her father were both ghosts. They were alike, Mamá and Ojitos Lindos's father. I stood up and flicked the straw from my hair. “I'm sorry I caused you such trouble in school.”

“What do you mean?”

“They called you names.”

“They called you names too.” She looked hard at me. Burning, wishing I hadn't reminded her, I looked away. “Well, don't you want to see?” she said.

“See what?”

“My eyes.” I looked up and Ojitos Lindos glared back at me. Nobody had ever looked at me in quite that way. She was not staring at the mark. She looked at me and saw me, the real me, not La Mancha. With the big blemish on my cheek, people rarely looked me in the eye, but here in the necropolis with Ojitos Lindos nothing came between. I gazed straight through the light blue of her eyes to the brightening sky behind. The color was the same. “I have to go,” she said. “My mother will send my uncle searching for me.”

When I returned to the house nobody asked where I had been. The block was buzzing with news of the occupation at the Peruvian embassy, and Aurora spent all day in front of the television. On Monday Ojitos Lindos wasn't in school. Vacations were nearing, and her mother had arranged for her to stay at home in Oriente during their time of mourning. In the weeks after the fiasco at the Peruvian embassy, the port of Mariel became choked with boats from Florida picking up gusanos. A wealthy cousin sought Aurora out and took her to Miami to prove something, perhaps just that he had become wealthy. At the end of the school year, a neighbor took me to the bus terminal, where I was packed off to Pinar del Río to spend the summer with my father's family.