The Opposite House (21 page)

Maria, the family’s maid, cleaned Chabella’s knee with something special, and told her that she’d better be more careful. ‘If you leave your blood on the earth, it gets hungry for more,’ Maria told her, and then when six-year-old Chabella trembled, she reassured her by saying that there were at least three spiritual protectors observing her; one of them was an ancestor, another one was an Orisha. Maria told Mami that she was lucky. In those circumstances, it was true.

I grow so tired that my head droops and my mouth opens and I begin to think that I am my Chabella and that I am the woman who was singing the song that made the garden in Vedado so wild. St Bernadette and Jeanne d’Arc fall heavily into my lap and I try to make merciful Mary, the Mother of God, appear to me through the strength of my own heart.

I don’t want anything from her. I just want to know that I am the one that brought her.

My neck aches, and lines run straight up from that pain to my temples. Another line makes a trampoline from my stomach to a place above my head.

The pages of the brochures feel like money to me, brittle, symbolic – if I tear a page even slightly, I will not be able to go. Outside on the street, people are drunkenly cock-crowing. They sound close. I keep expecting to see faces imprinted on the window. Aaron tells me I need to rest, and he tries to make me lie down with him. When I won’t, he says, ‘OK wait, I’m just going to get my Jung, then I’ll be right back. I’ll stay up with you.’

He’s lucky that he didn’t promise; he doesn’t come back. I know he’s spread out over the bedcovers, staring, sleeping, with
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
beside his lax hand. The leak has grown louder, but he is able to sleep through it.

Sophie calls and softly asks me if I know when I’ll be able to sing again. I tell her I’m not sure, and that it’s fine if they want to find someone else until I’m ready. She doesn’t argue. When I put the phone down I walk back to the sofa slowly, tracking liquid with my fingers; warm, gelatinous arrows of blood are running down my thigh. But my period shouldn’t come. There is no reason for my period to come
when I am pregnant. I am bloating, my stomach is touching my lap like sacking, and there is a smell that maybe Chabella would recognise. It is a bad, natural smell; logical, like rotting.

Amy’s dress is a plum divided; the deep-red taffeta skirts are the leathered skins, and the gleaming bodice is a layered tapestry of rich fruit flesh. The dress suits her completely, despite – or because of – the belt she’s slung at hip level, heavy with multicoloured scraps of silk. With every step she takes, a billow of her honey scent rises. Outside the day is chill and gloomy; cold sits still on the ground and in the air and sticks frosted leaves to the earth.

Amy wants Aya to know:

that she had thought she had settled for being just Amy,

that if it wasn’t for . . .

(she rubs at a bruise, at her bandaged arm)

she wouldn’t know that this was a lie.

Tayo leans over the bathroom sink, fingers curled around his torso, incubating agony. He spits out a string of needles; the pain is irregular, but larger than his mind. Afterwards, he rinses out his mouth to lose the metal tang and mumbles in the bath, knees drawn to his chest. Water slams his curls flat against his head.

Another time he plugged up the sink and ran the tap until it overflowed. Then he lowered his face into the water – first just grazing it, a dip as if he were simply rinsing. Then, after a moment of shallow breathing, he dived for full, jerky immersion, clamping one hand onto the back of his head, fighting. As he drowned, Aya felt the water scuff her lungs. But before she could go to him he had already lost against himself. He surfaced, coughing liquid, to lay his head down on the side of the basin as the water dripped onto his bare feet.

14
floods served to us in bowls

I don’t think my son is there any more. I killed him by being so jealous, by wanting him before I understood what he is. Or I ate too much crap. Or my body is built like Chabella’s and I must lose as much as twice before I can begin.

I keep mistaking my heartbeat for his.

My heart

(his heart?)

my heart?

(mine)

my own heart,

beating me down like a belt.

I am still bleeding.

Shhhhhh. God already knows.

I am not special. Maja you are not special.

Sleep, then get up again, and so on.

The kitchen smells of toasted coconut; Mami has been baking before church. At the table, Papi has drawn up a chair and is sitting at Tomás’s shoulder, leaning his chin onto his fist as he watches Tomás write his homework.
Usually Tomás fidgets and shrinks if someone is in his space for longer than a few minutes. But Tomás’s arm, spread over his paper to shield it, is gently touching Papi’s. Papi nods at us, and when Chabella and I come at him and Tomás from separate sides to kiss them, he says, ‘And how are my Kingdom Kids?’

Tomás looks at me directly and I see that his lip is swelling under a deep pink cut. There is bruising on his temple. I narrow my eyes at him, but Papi pulls me awkwardly onto his lap and asks, ‘How are you and Aaron? You know, last night I had a dream that I was in a big, cosy den in Lapland or somewhere, smoking my pipe –’

(Mami shouts and flaps a napkin at him)

‘– and it was snowing hard outside, so hard. But suddenly there was this tiny rap on my door, and I thought, Who could that be? So I opened up, and there were two beautiful children, one little boy and one little girl – the boy was sturdy, curly-haired, a little older, and quite a lot taller than the girl, who was so beautiful I couldn’t look at her for long. She was wonderful; a princess. If you’d seen her, Maja! Anyway, I let them in, and they warmed themselves, and I gave them
cucuruchos
and hot tea, and they said some very intelligent things about Communism, and then I said, “Now, who do you belong to?” and they said, “What do you mean,
abuelo?” Abuelo!
Imagine! “So,” I said. “So, so, so.” They called me
abuelo!
They were my grandchildren . . .’

I hold myself very still. I am wrapped in layers, long jumper over long skirt, scarves, but any motion might bring Papi that smell that is all over me.

‘Hey, yeah, right, keep dreaming,’ I tell him.

Papi says, ‘You are breaking my heart. And you’re disturbing Tomás’s homework. You and Chabella need to clear out and let Tomás’s discovery of his love of history continue as before.’

‘History makes me want to kill myself,’ Tomás mumbles.

I take the seat next to Papi and look from him to Mami. ‘Papi, I have tickets to go back to Habana next month, but Mami says you don’t want me to go.’

Papi looks at Mami as well, as if my going is her suggestion and her fault. Papi taps Tomás on the shoulder to make him look up. ‘Tomás, I want you to listen to this as well.’

Tomás looks at me as if he wouldn’t mind if he died right now. Tomás looks at me like,
stop this
, but I won’t.

Papi turns his eyes to me.

‘Why do you want to go back?’

‘What’s wrong with me going back?’

I see Papi’s hands; they are quivering.

‘Do you think I brought you here for a joke?’ he asks me. His voice is very low. ‘Do you think that I just brought you over to England for a long holiday? There are reasons why we are not living in Cuba, Maja.’

‘And these are?’

‘That it’s not safe; that staying there is accepting the lies of a regime that in its aimlessness will destroy the country,’ Papi says. His tone is that of the teacher soothing a gormless pupil.

‘You want me to stay away to make a
statement
? A statement that doesn’t affect anyone, that doesn’t reach anyone’s notice but mine?’

Mami wrings her hands.

Papi says to her, ‘I suppose you want to go, too?’ He says
it with too much calm, and maybe that is why Chabella doesn’t reply. Out of respect for Papi, Tomás is not writing, but he is not looking our way either.

‘Why do you want to go?’ Papi asks me again, a hand to his forehead. This thing I want is a problem that he is trying to understand. There are no texts he can turn to for this problem.

‘If you were asking me about Turkey or Morocco or America or Spain, it would make more sense! Like if you were saying, why are you interested in going to Turkey, there’s nothing in Turkey for you, I’d understand. I’d still go, but I’d understand why you were asking me. But what you’re asking me now – I mean, how can you ask me why I want to go when I don’t understand what it means to have left?’

After that he will not let me speak.

‘It means that you are free. That is what it means. I brought you here so that you could live in a place where the people who are in government do not affect whether or not you can eat what you want to eat, see films you want to see, read what you want to read. I brought you here so you don’t live in a place where politics can actually bust your door down, or make you disappear. Turbulent times, Chabella and I know turbulent times.

‘Maja, unlike your mother, I did not grow up in a nice house. I grew up in a tenement in Habana Vieja, and when I turned fifteen, I didn’t have a nice party but I was happy because it meant that I could pretend I was sixteen a little bit more convincingly and ask for a better wage when I had finished washing restaurant dishes. Why are you testing me like this? The idea of a library that I could borrow anything from seemed like a dream to me.

‘When those boys came around, I believed more than anyone that what Fidel, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfugos, Juan Almeida and the others would do would be a great thing – the greatest thing for Cuba. I mean, Juan Almeida was black! A black revolutionary! My God, I thought, yes, we have a share in Cuba. They say it’s not a black man’s country, but it is! My heart overrode my mind. They were already saying suspicious things, those boys, saying things along the lines of “We don’t want to identify with any ideology because we want our worth to lie in our actions,” et cetera, but
el corazón hace caso omiso de mi mente
.

‘What they are doing now is bad, of course. Yes, go on, nod and shrug. You know, you know it all, and yet you want to go back – but just a few days ago, they detained a man just your age because he criticised the government for not doing anything about finding his schizophrenic brother who had gone missing. And they were probably the ones who got rid of his brother; after all, the brother left a note saying he was trying to leave the country via Guantanamo –’

(Who are
They?
)

‘Papi, I know all this. I know,’ I say. Tomás has left his chair and has wrapped his arms around Mami. Tomás looks at me and shakes his head; I am to forget this. It is my job to keep the peace and hold my peace and all the peace is on my shoulders.

‘Look. I’m not here to fight anybody. But I have the tickets and I am going. I just thought I’d tell you.’

‘No, Maja. You are not going. I say you are not going. Let it stand, let what I say stand. You say you know, you know – no, you don’t know anything. Look at Cecilio Haber, only just out of jail. Why? Because he did something
that would be perfectly acceptable over here in a free election –’

We are talking over each other; my words slip into his, but I know he hears me. I’m saying:

‘I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, I don’t care what you say . . .’

I sound like a person who doesn’t think. I am all fingers in my ears and la la la. It’s the hysteric doing it, or maybe just me, or maybe all along it’s just me. Today it’s hard to tell. Papi rubs his hands together – he has finished, he is certain. ‘I am sorry,
querida,’
he says. ‘But let me tell you about the people of Abeokuta in Africa, where my family and your mother’s family, may once have come from.

‘The story goes that the township was established when a company of slaves managed to escape the slave gatherers and fled west of Lagos. They did not know where they were going, but they passed some caves in which a spirit dwelt. They were afraid of the spirit, but less afraid of the spirit than they were of losing themselves. And that spirit repaid their trust, and it took care of them and showed them fertile land where they could live. I ask, I always ask, Where is that spirit? Why did it only go with those slaves who escaped? Anyway, forget about going. You’re not from there any more.’

He talks about the spirit. He talks about the spirit but he doesn’t know. Papi thinks ‘spirit’ and in his mouth the word becomes
Geist
, a train of reason that chugs on and on and drags us all behind it without our understanding. But I want to make Papi understand about my Cuba memory and St Catherine’s, that strange, safe Old Testament feeling that was there in the night, peace in the centre of a locust swarm. The sting that catches you before you have a name for it.

As if he knows what I want to say, Papi tells me, ‘I did not want to raise . . . “spiritual” children. Spirituality doesn’t protest injustice, it just bears it. I don’t want that. I want you to think.’

It must be something in my expression that makes him reach for me now. But I stand up.

To Mami I say, ‘Why don’t you tell him? Why don’t you tell him about all your flowers and your crying?’

Mami covers her mouth with her hand and says nothing. She looks sick.

I sit at Tomás’s dressing table with all his tiny paint tubes in front of me, and my tears have dried on my face. I look at my brother’s reflection in the mirror. His hands are on my shoulders. When he sees what I’m looking at, he self-consciously touches the wound on his lip and hisses, ‘Shut up.’

‘You should leave that school,’ I say. ‘Tell Chabella and she’ll find another school.’

He picks up one of the paint tubes. ‘You want some on?’

It scares me, the thought of him choosing his armour already, the thought that already he is hiding. Tomás balances a tube on his palm, squints at it with one eye closed.

‘I run almost twice as fast with this stuff on, you know. I run like no one knows me, like no one can hold me.’