Some caveats: We are not Cuban; we've never been there; but we've spent a lot of hours with books and looks and blogs. This novel grew from our disillusionment with the promotion of Cuban art in the United States, especially by curators at the Arizona State University Art Museum, and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale. When we first started publishing our first version online, Val Prieto, a patriotic Cuban-American who runs Babalu Blog from Miami, wrote that he "could almost smell Cuba." That gave us all the encouragement we needed. (Then life got in the way. Read The Return, above.) The result is a magic surrealistic hopeful vision of the future of that uncanny island: the story of the New Mango Revolution, almost but not quite bloodless, told through the eyes and words of its perpetrators, as well as the testimonies of some tourists who were carried along on the wave of events.
This version of the novel has Western and American anomalies and anachronisms, for which we ask indulgence; we speak in feet instead of meters, for example.
We may not be Cuban, but the spirit is the same: resolver. So welcome, readers, to:
La Pionera and The New Mango
Introduction: Meet The Mantis
Hey, you mango, we loved you when you were green.
Now that you're yellow and ripe, isn't it time to fall from the tree?
-- from the song "El Mango," by Charanga Habanera, 1999.
My name is Jeronimo d’Anconia Reyes, recently a Lieutenant Colonel in MININT, currently out of a job. Actually, I’m sitting in my nearly-bare apartment at my computer wearing an ankle bracelet. I’m going to tell you the inside story of the New Mango Revolution, which is now almost complete. I am uniquely qualified to do so, since I’m the man behind the man behind the man. I was First Minister Carlos Lage Davila’s long arm, and for two decades almost nobody was out of my reach. Most Revolutionary Cubans know me, but by nicknames. Over the years I’ve electronically overheard myself called The Shadow, The Ear, The Blade, The Vampire, and The Snake-- typical Cuban drama, but each with its element of truth. I eventually became ashamed of every one of them. Thousands of my fellow Islanders feared and hated me, with complete justification. But those nightmare days are healing over now. I am making my restitutions and doing my penances, along with Lage, the man I served for twenty years. We have, as they say, The Information, and we’re sharing it . . .
Just recently, thanks to the efforts and ingenuity of four Cuban high-school students, their families and friends, little white slips of paper, and some unexpected supporters, Cubans were shown just how fragile, corrupt, and absurd the half-century-old system really was; and when, over the course of a single remarkable summer, the ordinary people pushed back, in wave after wave after wave --well!
Derrumbe!
Now the streets smell delicious again, the sounds of hammers, laughter, and music fill the air, everybody’s starting a business, the world is throwing money at us, and Cuba is churning toward freedom and democracy almost as fast as Castro’s yacht made its getaway to Venezuela, carrying the decrepit old fart, some of his booty, and whichever fools still wanted to be near him. I can imagine an unimaginable fate will befall him not long after landfall. (As I said, we have The Information.)
It’s good to write my real name, to come out finally, and to stop hurting my fellow Cubans. I hated myself for so long. I deserved at least one of my nicknames --the one Professor Guillermo Gorgojo privately gave me in his journal, which of course I read behind his back: The Mantis, he called me. How many dozens of times did I send my men into Cuban homes to take away whatever meager thing some huddled family had managed to scrape together, and deliver it into MININT’s insatiable maw? How many times was I sent out to protect some sorry tourist ass from himself, when I should have been protecting my fellow Cubans? How many--? But, as I said, that’s all over now.
I really do have the inside story, partly because I was the man in charge of all surveillance and CDR [Committee For The Defense of The Revolution] reports, reporting directly to Carlos Lage. (We had most of Havana wired. Day after day, I listened to the people talking behind our backs. And, by the way, I wasn't in charge of the Roaches, the stickmen who came pouring out during the demonstrations. Lage handled them personally.) And because of the role I ended up playing in this liberation story, all the principals who kept records --Yasmani, Marta, Beny, Flash No More, Guillermo, Rosa, Heather-- have trusted me enough to generously supply me with their original diaries, tapes, notes and recollections.
I have decided, given my reputation and background, and in the interests of transparency, to let these people speak for themselves, so the history that follows (after this long introduction) --the drama of The New Mango Revolution which freed Cuba-- will be a raw collage pieced together from the following:
--my spy transcripts, email and cell-phone intercepts;
--Guillermo Gorgojo's gregarious journals;
--Rosa Blanca Azul’s “precious” moleskine diaries and computer notes;
--Marta O’Gorman’s upside-down Lenin-book diaries;
--both the Daily and Historical Journals of Yasmani "La Fuerza" Oliva;
--Beny Manach's "Time Capsule" microcasettes;
--Carlos Lage's recorded soliloquies;
--Heather Benlinederry's "Tales From Her Treo";
--what I can only call the evolving apparition of Flash No More;
--and reports and summaries which I have compiled.
From time to time, I will guide the narrative with introductions, clarifications and summaries.
Readers, I ask you, respect these voices. Many of these words were never meant for publication. Among these people you will confront broken hearts and the blood they spill, dreams, tears, and despair, innermost thoughts, the pain within redemption and outrageous magic --middle-sized gods and spirits (read for yourselves!). . .
. . . most of all, though, shining bright orange like a peeled ripe mango, the irrepressible and helplessly inventive Cuban soul.
As for the epilogue, someone else will have to write it.
[And someone will: La Colibri, The Hummingbird. --Ed.]
So, before I turn this tale over to its principal voices, I need to tell you about that morning when it all began: May 26, 2005, when I was one of the first to confront the question, “What is The New Mango?” and one of the first to come upon one of those little white cards that wedged their fateful ways into so many lives.
I. A Morning of News
I arrived at seven as usual before the door of Carlos Lage Davila’s outer office. I nodded to the guard / secretary, who stood with a sloppy salute when I came in. He stank of black tobacco and knew better than to speak to me. I noticed his uniform was almost as old as his clunky revolver. I returned the salute and he plopped back down to resume his paperwork.
Lage was probably the fifth most powerful person on the island, and he acted like it, but with a refreshing honesty. He often spoke aloud to himself while pacing in his private office --long, incriminating soliloquies, some of which you will read-- knowing full well that F was listening and recording everything. (Like many rooms in many homes all over Cuba, it was a human-sized voice recorder. I had set up most of them, but not this one.) I hesitated outside the door, knuckles raised, ear close to the wood. Faint rustling of papers. Smell of coffee brewing. I knocked, and he said in his booming voice to come in.
Carlos Lage Davila, First Minister of the Council of Ministers, loomed behind his plain polished wooden desk, in his plain panelled office, the desk stacked with papers and folders and a discreet black laptop computer with a small, simple printer. At his left elbow sat a complicated telephone, also black, and behind his Aeron chair were two mahogany doors flush with the wall, like mute sentinels behind him, both with steel plates near the knobs; no keyholes, just little steady beady red eyes. Not many knew what lay behind those doors. But I had copies of the keycards. I knew it all.
Carlos Lage is thick and stocky, fleshy-featured and clean-shaven, and bearing a full shock of pure black hair over black eyes and bushy eyebrows. He always reminded me of a swarthy Stalin without the moustache.
“Good morning, Jeronimo,” he said, nodding to the coffepot on the sideboard. He already had a small cup of black coffee in front of him, with a demitasse spoon.
“Good morning, sir,” I answered. I helped myself to some coffee, set the cup on the edge of the desk, then opened my briefcase on one of the two chairs facing the desk. I took out a chunk of tinfoil and handed it to him. While doing so I studied him closely. His custom-made grey suit, though five years out of fashion, was nicely pressed, shirt collar clean and tight, necktie knot just so --but he was unshaven first thing in the morning.
Even before he unwrapped the foil, he could already smell my gift.
“Chocolate,” he whispered, actually impressed, peeling the foil open into a silver lily, lifting the chunk of dusky brown to his big nose, and then setting it down before him on the desk. Scarcity had even reached the big shots, apparently. He looked up. “Thank you.” He didn’t ask where it came from.
“How are you feeling, sir?” I asked as I sat down. He had dark circles under his eyes.
Lage took out a pocketknife and began to shave the chocolate into his coffee. His hands were shaking, and some of the flakes fell onto the saucer like fat brown commas.
“Fine,” he answered. “The usual insomnia.”
“Sir--”
“I’m fine,” he insisted, scraping and shaking.
“And the supplies--?”
He set down the knife and flung out the right-side desk drawer.
“Look!” he snapped.
I stood up and came around the desk. The double-depth drawer was filled with boxes of disposable needles, racks of six-packs of little bottles of insulin, boxes of swabs, three bottles of isopropyl alcohol, stacks of testing strips, and, resting on top of all this bounty, a brand-new OneTouch blood-level meter.
I was relieved. Good old DHL. I reached into the drawer and lifted the meter out gently. “Does it work?” I teased him. I knew better.
“Of course it works,” Lage snapped again. He took the meter out of my hand, worked the controls briefly, and replaced it in the drawer. “I even have extra batteries. Satisfied?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.” I closed the drawer. “As long as you use them.” I went back around the desk, took my seat, and picked up my coffee. The hot and bitter bite felt good on my tongue. My heart picked up speed.
He slid the drawer closed, leaned back in his chair, and blew out his breath. “Sorry.” He came back forward to look down at something on his desk, and when he looked up he was in serene control again.
“What is the New Mango, Jeronimo?” he asked me.
I took a moment. “Is this a joke?”
“No.” He slid the chocolate chunk and the pocketknife across the desk. “A couple of my nephews heard some street whisper among the ropa de marcos. Nothing on the wires? Think: The New Mango.”
I shook my head. I picked up the chocolate and shaved some into my coffee. I forget very little, and I drew a blank with ‘The New Mango.’ The only thing I could think of-- I put down the knife and stirred my coffee.
“There was that Charanga Habanera song--”
“Yes, I remember,“ Lage interrupted, “but that was years ago. 1999. My nephews said that group has since disbanded, anyway. Good thing, too, for them.”
I recalled the tentative plans Lage had drawn up to subvert the band, which became unnecessary when they broke up. Lage kept his power partly by monitoring every squeaky wheel, every whiff of dissent. He was a detail man. And when he wanted to pull a lever or turn a dial or put the bite on someone, he sent me and my cadres.
“The New Mango . . . ” I murmured slowly, testing the phrase. I took a generous drink of my coffee, bittersweet and creamy --and closed my eyes and took another moment to actually savor the flavors on my tongue, one of my ascetic life’s little luxuries . . . I shrugged. “Could be anything. A new dance? A new juice?”
“It’s the New part that bothers me. I don’t like New things, unless they come from Him . . . “ Sipping his coffee, Lage scanned his desk, and suddenly did a take, almost spilling his cup. He grabbed one of his folders and lifted it.
“Art!” he exclaimed. I raised my eyebrows. “It might be an art prank,” Lage offered.
“Art. Art?” I repeated stupidly, like a barking dog. Oddly, for just a moment, the word seemed foreign in my mouth. I knew what art was: in my business, and because of Lage’s own interest, I’ve had to pay a lot of attention to recent Cuban artists, because they had been touching the outer world, and bringing in dollars, for at least a dozen years. “What do you mean?” I asked. I reached for the folder, but he put it down.
“No, that’s something else. I mean, it’s about art, what’s in here” --he tapped the folder-- “and I’ll get to that in a minute, but it just hit me that maybe the New Mango is some art student project out at ISA. Just a moment.” He scribbled on a pad with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. I stared at the pen. I am not an acquisitive person --it’s saved a lot of heartbreak for me on this heartbroken island-- but I admire beauty and efficiency; and the lack of both of those here for most of my life has supplied its own share of heartbreak and frustration. Just trying to get the transmitters to work--! Dependable wiring! That reminded me that I needed a new (that word again!) charger for my walkie-talkie, now sleeping in my briefcase.
Lage finished his writing, then handed me the folder. “Read.”
He opened his laptop and pressed a button. After a moment, he started tapping away. I opened the folder and examined the following documents:
1. Photocopy of a news story:
SANTA CLARA, May 24 (Cubanacán Press / www.cubanet.org) -- Officials at the Art Teachers' School in Villa Clara expelled a 16-year-old student for producing a poster in which could be read in big, bold letters, “Down with Fidel.” Observers say the whole affair has been handled very quietly.
First-year student Yasmani Oliva presumably acknowledged that he had drawn the poster at the school. Officials handed him over to his mother, to take him home until he is summoned to a minors' reeducation center.
The Art Teachers' School has approximately 2,000 students in Music, Dance, Theater, and Painting and Sculpture. Admission is said to be very selective.
2. Photocopy of Student Incident Referral Form from the Art Teachers' School, Villa Clara, dated May 24, 2005, with highlighted handwritten notes by Yasmani Oliva's teacher, Sra. Daysi Lema Facil [excerpts]:
. . . The assignment was a simple graphic exercise, combining the bold, aggressive dynamics and limited palette of early Russian Constructivism with our own early, classic educational posters, between 1960-65. I wanted the students to capture the energy of both of those times. That was the idea, anyway. . .
. . . Yasmani is an intelligent and intense young man. [See attached evaluations.] What's puzzling here is why now? He had never done anything like this before; he likes to draw -- anything from the beach or the ocean -- and he's very talented. He could be a scientific illustrator. During his evaluation year he expressed no deviant political opinions. At this point in his education he had just cleared a big hurdle: getting into the school itself. And right here, in his first year, he sabotages himself . . . It's a mystery.
. . . Yasmani was clever: he was actually working on two posters, or, rather, on both sides of the paper. I don't know how he worked on that in class without either myself or one of the monitors noticing. But the monitors are interviewing the other students . . .
3. Handwritten note scrawled across news story:
Investigate. Send that teacher -- you know, La Pionera. F.
That was it. I fixed on the rarely-seen handwritten note --when is He ever this brief?-- and lifted it close to my face, as if I could smell Him. What would He smell like now? Ripe? Then I came to --what the hell?-- slapped the folder closed, and looked up. Lage was hunched over to his right, waiting for the humming printer to finish. He looked up askance from beetled brows. “Well? What do you think?”
“Clever boy. Sounds like hormones, but, you know . . .” I looked up and closed my eyes, tapping the folder softly, eyeballs rolling under my lids. Lage saw. He knew these gestures well and waited patiently, the printer humming behind him as if it was voicing the humming in my riffling mind . . . “I recall four separate incidents in the past three months, no arrests, two in Havana and two in Santa Clara, using the same phrase, but these were anonymously done on two walls, one Venceremos billboard, and the last one on the side of a PNR patrol car. Cojones, eh?” I chuckled, but Lage scowled. I cleared my throat. “So you’re going to send that artist Rosa Blanca Azul --I assume that’s ‘La Pionera’ He refers to here-- to do . . . what, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think pressure will work here, though. Yasmani Oliva did this right out in the open. He’s not afraid of Re-education. I’d like to know why not. He’s a smart young man --part of the Prodigy Program-- in other words just beginning a guaranteed way out of the usual daily grind-- so why jeopardize that golden future? Something’s going on here. Rosa Blanca Azul --you know, La Pionera--” he permitted himself a small smile-- “Rosa is a famous artist, she’s been off the island, she’s taught before at ISA, she’s available to ‘counsel’ him--”
“You’ve talked to her already?”
“Excuse me. I meant to say, she will be available to counsel him. You know the Americans denied her her visa, so she can’t even attend the opening of her latest show in Washington DC?”
“Please pass me a tissue,” I murmured.
Lage chuckled. “The boy will be flattered. She can tell him her story --how she was part of a new wave of Cuban art that made it in the wider world. What was it called?”
“The New Inventado Movement,” I answered immediately, in English. (I did know something about art.) He nodded, not even bothering to ask how I knew. Who better to entrust your information depository to but someone with eidetic memory? (And in all sensory modes as well. One of the reasons I have very little around me: overstimulation.)
He continued: “She can tell him about El Yuma, and Europe. She can describe what kind of future he could have if he just gets back into the Prodigy Program.”
“Which is one of . . . “ I lowered my voice and stroked my chin “ . . . His pet projects, correct?”
Lage chuckled again, at length, rocking slightly in his Aeron chair. For him, this was almost giddy. Should I get him to check his level before I leave? I could say I just want to know how the new thing works.
“We don’t need the beard gestures in this office, Jeronimo,” he boomed to the room. I wondered if the outside guard could overhear. “We’re honest and transparent here. The Prodigy Program is an excellent idea, and I definitely want it to continue, on its own merits.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.” Must check his level before I leave. “Do you wish me to deliver the message to La Pionera in person?”
“No.” He hesitated, looking at me as if gauging something. Then he slipped the page from the printer and handed it to me. “Add this to the folder.” When I saw the name of the addressee I felt a sudden chill clamp my shoulders, not because I feared the addressee, but I feared what else I would end up delivering to him, and how I would have to acquire it.
4. Typewritten message from Carlos Lage to Prof. Guillermo Gorgojo:
Guillermo,
I shall impose upon our long understanding, and our Party loyalty, and trust that you will destroy this letter once you're done reading, and then lock the folder in your desk. I'll send someone to pick it up in the next couple of days.
I'm worried about Him because He's worried about some arrogant kid that's going to be slapped down within a month. Notice how quickly He got on this. I should have anticipated it, since He's always had an interest in art and the children's indoctrination, and the Prodigy Program is one of his ever-proliferating special projects. Still, it seems more paranoid than usual.
Anyway, he wants Rosa Blanca Azul -- you know, La Pionera-- to go out there, talk to the little bastard, then write up a report for me. Since her visa was denied by the American gusanos, she won't be able to attend her show in DC, so she can help out the Revolution at home. Brief her, let her look over the enclosed materials, and then send her to Santa Clara as soon as possible. Of course, you will never let her know of His interest. As far as she's concerned, this order came from me. That ought to be enough.
Keep me informed.
CL
PS. By the way, have you heard recently of something called The New Mango? Just some street whisper a couple of my nephews picked up and passed on to me. They don't know what it is, either -- a new dance, a musical group, a soft drink, a political movement? I'm asking you because I thought it might have to do with art -- one of your student's pranks, perhaps. See what you can find out. You know I don't like surprises. You know I don't like not knowing.
Without comment, I slipped the note into the folder, the folder into the briefcase, slammed the briefcase, and slugged down the rest of my coffee without tasting it. When I looked up, Lage was holding out a large padded sealed envelope. “The other materials for Guillermo,” he said, squinting at me. “Are you all right, Jeronimo?”
“Yes, sir.” I reopened my briefcase and fiddled with stuff to make room for the envelope.
“Jeronimo--”
“Yes, sir.” Shuffling.
“Look at me, please.” Stern growl, but he hardly ever said please. I looked at him.
“What is it?” he said.
I let a moment pass, then sat back in my chair and held my long, thin, mantis-like arms up to the ceiling in a theatrical gesture of having nothing to hide. I let them drop. “Let’s be honest and transparent, then. This isn’t everything you want me to take to him, is it?”
Lage’s eyes dropped, but just for a moment. He shut the lid of his laptop and turned off the printer. He straightened in his chair as if bracing for his own words.
“I guess I’m getting predictable.” He shrugged. “Too bad. That’s right, she just finished a new one, and I want you to deliver it to Guillermo.” He waved a hand. “The usual way --no need to bother him.” (He meant: break into the professor’s apartment.) His brows grew together and an unpleasant smile twisted his lips. “You know, the guards tell me she trades her food for different insects from the other inmates.” He chuckled nastily. “And of course the guards keep her supplied as well.”
Mierda. I had to lower my eyes. “Have you seen these . . . things, sir?”
“Of course! I have the guards take videos and digital photos of them when she’s asleep.” He patted the laptop. “They’re all in here.” He looked me straight in the eye, without shame.
I stared at the laptop, wondering how long and how often he studied the images when he was alone. And Guillermo Gorgojo had all the originals. I knew, because I had delivered every one to him personally.
Or, rather, impersonally. I slipped into his Havana apartment (at ISA) when he wasn’t there and left them as surprise and unwelcome gifts. Sometimes I would linger, under orders, to read his journals and explore anything else in his place which would interest Carlos Lage. As I had with many Cubans whose homes I had creeped, my long fingers slyly tapping keys, deftly turning pages, and delicately prying open secret places --all unknown to them-- I had a pretty detailed psychological sketch of Guillermo Gorgojo, and I how these “artworks" wounded him. But I delivered them anyway.
It was a dirty duty.
I said, “Do her hands still move in her sleep?”
I might as well have slapped his face. He stared at me a long time. “I know how I know that.” He touched the laptop. “I’ve watched her sleep. But you--”
“I never knew her, sir. You ordered me to read Guillermo’s journals. He mentions it, from their early days.”
He looked down. “Of course.” Then back up, drilling me with the black eyes. “To answer your question: yes, she’s still very restless-- but she’ll eventually run out of energy,” he finished with an uncertain growl.
When? I wondered. It had been ten years so far. I sighed and said, “Where’s the bag?”
Lage reached to his feet and handed over a burlap bag. “I know it isn’t easy for you.”
I folded the bag into my nearly-bulging briefcase, then straightened and studied my master for a moment. “There’s not a lot about you in those journals . . . Why do you do it, sir?”
“It’s a reminder,” he answered immediately. “Every one is a reminder, and a reinforcement. As you know” --he spread his hands over his crowded desk-- “we have to put out a lot of fires. Judge me all you want, I know what I’m doing here. This one may be one we can keep from starting --again.”
“Are you talking about the New Mango, or Kiku?”
“Both. More. All.” He sat forward, suddenly agitated, his hands shaking again, ruffling into his stacks of papers as if burrowing. “It isn’t just that. Can’t you hear the rumbling? Well, you would know --the reports you send me show me crack after crack after crack. Even the cadres are crumbling. Why are we allowing these corrosive slogans on the walls? Regular assemblies of lawbreakers in churches? The Women in White! Private businesses sprouting up after every blackout! Why are they even there! And this Yasmani! This is a bright kid! Doors have been opened for him! At least the system is working for him! Why doesn’t he--?” He pounded the desk amid a sudden white fountain of paper, and I sprang to my feet as if he had slammed a buzzer.
“Sir!” I shouted. He looked up at me and blinked, fists balled to his chest and shaking as if trying to control a runaway horse. I pointed at his desk.
“Sir,” I continued calmly, “could you show me how that new meter works?” And I took a deep breath.
He blinked again, watching me breathe, and then shook his shaggy head as if he had something in his ear. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said calmly, “you never know,” and he unclenched his fists, rolled out the drawer and showed me. He even showed me how to reload the charger and extra batteries.
When we were done and I was ready to leave, he rewrapped the chocolate and said, “Have you got room in that briefcase for this?”
I tilted my head.
“For her,” he said, and tossed it across the desk into my hand.
II. To Red Ceramic
I drove West, alone, through the increasingly blasted countryside, still early on that quiet clear day, the sun like a warm hand on my shoulder, the sky so cloudless and close you felt you could reach out and ring it like a blue glass bell. Neither reassured me: I was worried that my master seemed on shaky emotional ground, and I had to detour into a hell I helped to make.
I rated a driver, but I disliked sharing any of my time or space with anyone on a regular basis --hard to think, plus my whereabouts was worth money to some-- and I would rather have control anyway, but also I admit that driving kept my eyes on the road, and away from rack-ribbed cattle and rack-ribbed people, and wilting crops, decrepit vehicles, stupid billboards proclaiming VAMOS BIEN like a verbal grinning idiot, and empty carts, and drunks draped at bus stops, the skeletal fences of abandoned farms, roads with moon-crater potholes, and all the other reminders that in the new millennium the drums of Cuba spoke only derrumbe, derrumbe, as we crumbled softly day after day . . .
If anyone had asked, Kiku Ybarra would have unselfconsciously called herself an ethnartist from the beginning of her short-lived career, fourteen years ago. She was obsessed with the palimpsest of Cuban history, the churning passionate layers of who we all came from. (“Love sees all colors!” she would cry out on her improvised stages. “Passion claims no race!”) While she was still in school at the ISA --classmates with Guillermo Gorgojo, from whom I obtained most of this information, though without his knowledge-- she would disappear alone on the weekends with just a backpack of food and water, and head out into the countryside, or the mountains, to seek out not just old places, but old farmers, and Indians, and Chinese, and other “living memories of Cuba,” as she called them. (She even claimed she ran into the descendants of the Ropemakers once.) Then she would return with sketches and notes and sometimes objects. From these she created surrealistic performances grounded in Cuba’s history, swinging her long, thick, glossy black hair (which she never cut), fashioning her own costumes, moves, words, music, lighting, and sets. Though she was small and seemingly fragile, she was supple and tough as a whip. She worked alone, and she lived with constant energy. She seemed to vibrate involuntarily, like a small electric motor.
But at that time in Cuban history, and in the trajectory of Cuban art, she was out of step, for three main reasons. For one thing, the Revolution threw a smothering green-fatigue blanket over any part of Cuban history which was irrelevant to indoctrination. How could our ancestors’ pain and suffering and triumphs be irrelevant? she asked. She got tired answers about the glorious revolutionary future. She tried to show the color and life in the great patches the teachers and the government left out.
Secondly, Cuban artists were just then reaching out to the wider world --or, rather, according to Guillermo, learning marketing savvy to tailor their “arte povera Cubana” to the “neo-colonialists.” She had so little time for this pre-New Inventado that nobody can remember her even mentioning it. She was about Cuba and only Cuba.
Not that she said much at all; many foreigners actually thought her mute, and strangers with this misinformation would sometimes wave their hands before her face, signing crudely, talking at her loudly. She would walk away without a word, shaking her head.
And that was the third thing: she just didn’t have much to say to anyone, so most of her fellow students, and the teachers, considered her arrogant and aloof --especially since she wouldn’t go along with the safe Cuban pop movement.
By the time she graduated, many were asking: What was her art, anyway? She would sometimes photographically document her forays into the more primitive parts of the island, and display these, but often her “art” would be undocumented performances in private locked rooms before very small groups of people, all attendees vetted by Guillermo and Kiku beforehand. Most witnesses were tongue-tied to describe these events. “She transforms herself so quickly,” said one, “her references fly by like flocks of birds, that it’s like being on a really fast intellectual tilt-a-whirl. You know you’re missing so much, but it’s really exciting.” Another said: “This is trance work, channelling, Oracle of Delphi stuff. She doesn’t have the background, as far as I know, but she acts like a santera.” Another: “You don’t notice when it’s going on, but afterwards you realize you stood dangerously close to a whirling propellor.”
She stayed reclusive and didn’t pursue a career either in art or teaching. Instead, she supported herself by returning to a traditional family trade: custom cabinetry and cabinetry repair for a small list of well-to-do Cuban clients. Some were Party members. She didn’t care, because she didn’t say much to anyone besides job details, and she did excellent work. (She would not work for foreigners, though.) She had inherited her own tools, and often did work on the client’s site.
The New Inventado Movement began to gain ground, but she ignored it, and much else. She sketched and wrote constantly. Nobody visited her --why? what for?-- except her lover Guillermo, who often had to make her eat. They would do laundry together. When he could get her to sleep, he would straighten up her studio, and pause every once in awhile to gaze from her face, an olive mask against a fan of glittering obsidian black, to her hands, where her constantly moving nimble fingers, as tireless as the legs of spiders, created invisible artwork after invisible artwork.
Then began the rumors of spirit walking and levitation. Apparently a drunk had broken into Kiku’s studio late one night. It seemed deserted, with sketches laying all over the floor and a single kerosene lamp on a large wooden table in the middle of the room. Deserted, but somehow, even in his stupor, the drunk got the feeling that someone had been in the room just a moment before; the papers were rustling in a sleepy swirl, as if settling, and the kerosene flame fluttered nervously in the lantern. The room seemed to be holding its breath along with him.
Then he heard a kind of keening sigh over his head, and looked up just in time to see a large black spider with long black hair fall from the ceiling right onto his poor head, driving it into the cement.
When he woke up a few minutes later he was alone, his head bleeding slightly and throbbing with pain. The door to the studio stood ajar. As he began scrabbling toward it, looking wildly in all directions, Guillermo appeared in the doorway, and was the first to hear the outrageous claims about a spider woman clinging to the ceiling as the babbling drunk skittered his way across the floor.
Of course this was nonsense, Guillermo told everyone. Guillermo was a good Communist, and besides, this kind of talk was dangerous. Still, because of her voluntary reclusiveness, nobody knew of her comings and goings, and rumors spread. “What is she doing in there?” people wanted to know. “It’s antisocial. It’s antirevolutionary.” Guillermo protected her as best he could, while he rose in the ISA administration, and he persuaded Lage to keep MININT and the Soviets off her back.
Then, just as the Russians got off all of our backs and deserted our Revolutionary Paradise for good, Kiku Ybarra came out for a rare, special, and --even more rare, publicized-- performance. I was there. Carlos Lage ordered me to be there. I remember the day he gave me the assignment.
This was ten years ago, in his office, when he was thinner and more confident, and still wearing a uniform. “She’s so reclusive, and with the recent rumors, there’s bound to be a large crowd. And look where it is: in the rubble of that collapsed hotel.”
He was referring to a major recent embarrassment. A famous grand old hotel, more a landmark than a residence, collapsed quietly one night. No one was hurt, because nobody was there, because nobody had cared about it or for it for decades. But when it fell, people blamed the government. Nobody cleaned it up, either. They pointed at that empty sighing square of rubble as a metaphor. Worse, the tourists chuckled and thought it was quaint and came and took pictures.
“It could get troublesome,” Lage continued. “Make sure you take enough men to shut it down if necessary. Take a Van.” He meant in case we had to kidnap someone. Guess who. “And take this.” He handed me a hard black plastic briefcase, medium-sized. I opened it to find a brand-new Sony portable video camera, the latest compact model, with tapes and battery backup. I didn’t have to ask if it worked: it was from Lage. For a spy, it was like beholding gold.
“Excellent,” I whispered, closing the case. We both knew why he wanted a strong security turnout. We both knew why he had an inordinate interest in a marginal, reclusive, frankly loony artist, who basically bothered nobody and even had a regular, protected, registered job. We both knew that Guillermo was lying when he used the word “nonsense.” Because I had read Guillermo’s gregarious journals, I knew that the drunk’s story was no surprise to him.
Just a month before the drunk’s unfortunate serendipity, Guillermo himself turned the key in the lock of Kiku’s studio late one night. He had returned early from a conference on postmodern art, off schedule. The people at the conference had been insufferably inauthentic, even more than usual. Toxic, he scribbled to himself in his journal on the bus home. He felt . . . unclean, bent somehow. He loved her, needed her, he wanted comfort and the restoration of his compass, so to speak; so --breaking the rules-- he came straight from the train station late at night without cabling her or calling her or warning her in advance, as he usually did. He knew she would be alone --Kiku Ybarra was just too intense, obdurate, and obsidian for most people. Heavy soul. He turned the key and opened the door to the studio.
Kiku Ybarra, dressed in a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black boots, hovered serenely in the middle of the air, stretched out like a human-sized X above a kerosene lamp fifteen feet above the floor of her studio, listing six inches this way, and then that way. Her eyes were closed, and the cascade of her waist-length hair wafted calmly back and forth in quiet counter-rhythm with her drifting.
He stood and watched her for two long, deep breaths, until the second one ended in a shuddering sob as he sank to his knees. “Kiku!” he cried out. “I can’t--!” Her eyes snapped open, and she fell to the table. The kerosene lantern rattled, but didn’t topple. She scrambled to the end of the table and crouched there, looking down at her knotted lover, tears streaming down both of their faces. Her eyes blazed down at him and she spoke in the voice of a jaguar:
“Don’t tell anyone. I couldn’t bear it.”
He managed to answer: “Of course not. I love you. I’m for you.”
She looked at him sadly for a long moment. She said, “But not for long enough,” then dropped off the table on top of him before he could ask her what she meant, covered his mouth with hers, and they wrapped their arms and legs around each other and held on for a long time tightly and silently.
It is now a Havana urban legend that a video record exists of Kiku Ybarra’s uncanny last performance, though no one who talks about this video has actually seen it. But the two hundred people who showed up that night at the derrumbe in question became lifetime witnesses. They bent so many ears with their tales. It was --just briefly-- like the return of Clavelito, or those persistent UFO sightings we would hear about over Mexico City. We could not take away what the witnesses had seen, without taking away the witnesses themselves, and there were too many of them. So we left them to talk, and they eventually quieted down. They would soon have other, more viscercal, concerns.
That night, my men were in position. I stood in a second-story window across the street, the video camera at my feet, my walkie-talkie on my hip. Through binoculars I had a clear view of Kiku Ybarra’s stage: she had managed to obtain enough spotlights to frame a bare area near a brick wall --the old hotel’s still-intact neighbor, now exposed after a hundred years. Chunks of concrete, hunks of bricks and mortar, wooden beams, and other debris formed a rough rectangular border in this lighted area. Two spotlights were trained high on the wall --at least fifteen feet up-- where she somehow had attached three large cardboard symbols: on the right (her left as she faced the audience) a red star; on the left a large green dollar sign; and in the middle an orange oval, lying on its side, which took a moment for me to decipher: it had a little dent in the upper left, and was scattered with green and red dots that grew thicker around the bottom third of the oval. Oh! it was a mango. Well--
Wait. A mango? What the hell? But there wasn’t time to think about it. Kiku Ybarra, in black turtleneck, black jeans, and black boots, appeared on the roof at the top of the decrepit wall, thirty-five feet above the street, just above the mango symbol.
Oh, no, I thought, Cubans are jumpers, and reached for my walkie-talkie with one hand while keeping the binoculars trained on Kiku with the other.
But then I saw Guillermo struggling back and forth toward the wall with a long, rickety wooden ladder (nailed together from several short ones), canting this way and that, and which he finally managed to lean next to the dollar sign logo. I slipped the walkie-talkie back into its holster, put the binoculars on the windowsill, and picked up the video camera. Guillermo’s long ladder reached nearly to the roof. Kiku moved to the ladder, but instead of turning her back to the crowd and descending in the normal manner, she stepped off the roof into midair, seemed to float for a moment, and then skipped nimbly down the ladder as if it was a flight of stairs.
As she reached the concrete floor she paused, then struck a ballerina pose, but clearly as a parody. Slowly she spun to her left, lifting and pumping her knee in the classic manner, and calling out in Russian every time she faced the audience:
”Wormword fell, didn’t you see it? San Juan wrote it in the Bible and then it happened!”
Spinning closer to the wall where the red star glowed above. Everyone was quiet. She spoke so rarely people had forgotten how strong her voice was. Spinning and shouting:
”Wormword fell, didn’t you see it? San Juan wrote it in the Bible and then it happened!
And then --I have it on video: mine is the sole surviving record-- she stopped her revolutions just below that red paper star --crouched-- and leapt fifteen feet into the air and landed like a lizard to the left of the star, where, amid the collective gasps of two hundred witnesses, she reached out with her right hand, ripped the red paper star off the wall, watched it float to the ground and then, as if realizing the impossibility of her position, she followed the star down to the concrete --but much more quickly-- where she landed with a heavy thump which crumpled her and made her cry out.
Guilllermo and a bunch of others rushed forward, but Kiku Ybarra jumped upright and held out both hands in a forbidding gesture. Her palms were bloody. My thumb was jammed to the record button, breathing forgotten, my eye screwed to the lens cap, tracking her every move, suspending all questions and belief for now, just thinking What could be next?
She spun some more, this time to her left, and with a decided “limp” in her movements. That leap up the wall had cost her. Still she spun with the synergy of a dervish until she collided with the bricks beneath the dollar sign. She stopped spinning, faced the audience, and shouted out in Cuban Spanish:
“Beware the pretty green snake! Its bite will make you sleepwalkers!”
She spun and spoke:
“Beware the pretty green snake! Its bite will make you sleepwalkers!”
Then, to put it plainly, she turned and climbed the wall quick as a gecko and ripped that dollar sign off the wall. Once again, she fell hard, even overtaking that green paper shape as she hit the concrete again. She moaned. The video camera whirred. I had stopped breathing.
Kiku Ybarra struggled to her feet and faced the paper mango way above her head. She swayed. The crowd rustled and seemed to leaned forward. She started waving her hands wildly at the paper mango and speaking in a language I couldn’t understand. (I later learned it was a derelict Taino dialect she could not have known about.) I kept recording. I was transfixed as Kiku Ybarra waved and raved.
I felt a tug at my belt. Carlos Lage had appeared from nowhere and was speaking into my walkie-talkie:
“Team One. Take her to the Van. Team Two: take the evidence.”
I managed to pry my eye from the eyepiece. What the hell was he doing here?
“What’s the matter with you?” Lage growled. I didn’t answer. I turned back to the scene and continued to record.
Out of the shadows beyond the crowd two groups of our MININT --my guys --black trousers, white shirts, walkie-talkies, and guns-- plowed through the spectators. One crew tackled Kiku Ybarra with a blanket and hustled her over to a black van that suddenly appeared where the old hotel’s grand entrance used to be. The van roared away. The other crew, two at a time, snagged the very few cameras and video recorders some students and tourists had managed to bring to the event. They simply snagged them and marched away, despite outraged yelling in four languages. Sirens sounded the approach of reinforcements, which was the signal for the rest of the crowd to disperse. A few minutes later the only unofficial person on that plaza was Guillermo Gorgojo, who stood still, gazing up at the wall, until one of my men cut the generator and the spotlights all went dark.
I lowered the camera and turned to Lage. “Sir, I’m--”
“Never mind that,” he interrupted, tilting his chin at the scene across the street. “Get somebody to get that thing off the wall --and clean the blood up, too.”
The blood? I lifted the camera and turned the zoom. Flanking the mango sign, on both sides, barely visible without the spotlights: bloody handprints on the bricks.
“Yes, sir,” I said, lowering the camera and turning, but Carlos Lage was gone.
That was ten years ago, and Kiku Ybarra has not been seen in public since. Oh, there have been plenty of “sightings,” but so many people have disappeared on our sad island that relatives and friends eventually start to see what they want to see. Even after years, they don’t recognize the illogic of catching sight of someone as they had looked years ago.
Anyway, though I had never, since that night, actually set eyes on her, I knew very well where Kiku Ybarra was, and visited her there on an irregular basis. So once again, last May 26, I found myself breathing shallowly in the stink and the moaning within the thick whitewashed walls of Red Ceramic Prison, holding an empty burlap bag.
The guard supervisor pointed to the bag and said, “Here to see Kiku the Cuckoo again, eh?”
I nodded and handed over Lage’s usual gifts, a carton of cigarettes and some Hershey bars. The supervisor was profusely grateful, as usual. I suppose he was the one who surreptitiously took photos and videos of her for Lage. He locked the gifts in his desk drawer and insisted on leading me himself to the master door for Special Side Ward 2, which all the guards called The Nutbag.
The supervisor unlocked the heavy door and was about to swing it open, but I reached out and held it closed. “I know the way from here.”
He saluted. “Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.” And he scurried off.
I made sure my long-sleeved cuffs were buttoned and fastened the top button on my uniform shirt. I took a small cotton painter’s mask from my pants pocket. I slipped it on over my head, adjusted the two elastic straps, pinched the metal strip over my nose, and made sure my chin area was sealed. Preparations for an alien environment --one I had helped to create. I stood before one of the many dank, fetid cracks which, all over the island, trapped and held the shrunken, twisted hearts of Cuba. I hesitated. I was hesitating a lot lately. Why was Lage so shaky? How could two words --new mango-- bother him? Why was this woman, this imprisoned, helpless artist, dangerous? Why--? I took a deep breath. Those questions led to these cells. I stopped myself.
Special Side Ward 2, in Red Ceramic, was for the truly cracked vessels, those completely broken open, split for any holocaust, and who no longer posed any threat of violence.
Small cells with vertical bars, about six by seven feet, lined both sides of the dark, windowless concrete corridor, some empty, some occupied. Bare bulbs hung every few feet, casting tired yellow light on the straw-covered cement and the filthy troughs running the length of the ward just outside the cell doors, twin sewers festering in the sluggish flow. Flies buzzed in the yellow-grey air, and the stink of old sweat and urine and feces and fear clung to me like sudden beggars. Even with the mask I kept my mouth shut, barely breathing through my nose, and stepped as softly as I could. Roaches ran away from my steps. There were small sounds of movement from several cells. The stink was throat-gagging. I glanced into one or two, only to see what seemed like heaps of rags with staring eyes and hands clasped in prayer or paralysis. Others curled up in fetal stillness, knobby knees shining. I did not know these people. I did not bring these particular people here. I kept telling myself that as I slunk down this particular corridor of F’s many hells.
I stopped outside the cell just before last on the right, which, thank God, was unoccupied. I crouched on my heels and peered closely at the corner of Kiku Ybarra’s cell, keeping out of her sight. Peeking out from the very front edge of her cell’s floor, nearest to me, a ragged wedge of cardboard. I heard a soft, rhythmic keening, or was it singing, or weeping? I laid the burlap bag out flat on the floor. Then I carefully pulled on the edge of cardboard until the whole new “artwork” was out of the cell. I didn’t look at it as I slipped it into the burlap bag by its edges and closed the flap gently. I would have to carry it out flat, to keep its fragile contents undisturbed.
There was no need to linger any longer in this stench. She never communicated to anyone. Oh, she spoke, the guard supervisor once told me; she just never made any sense.
She was quiet now, not even humming, perhaps contemplating the empty space where her newest piece once lay, and wondering what happened to it. I took out the foil-wrapped chunk of chocolate from my shirt pocket and tipped it into her cell. I heard her sudden indrawn breath, and she was on it at once. Sound of foil unwrapping. Sound of chewing and moans of joy. And then, for the longest time, the sound of her smacking her lips, rolling her tongue over her teeth, sucking, and smacking her lips, over and over, then moaning, and weeping. A line from Kafka hit me like a bolt: “Written kisses never reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.” I almost gasped myself, but gulped it down. This fucking job. I straightened up and started back down the corridor, holding the new piece horizontally like some horrible pizza, but I hadn’t taken more than three steps when I heard Kiku Ybarra say in a clear, distinct voice, the voice I remembered from the crumbled plaza, one word:
“Mango.”
But I had given her chocolate.
III. Red Ceramic To Havana
Kiku’s last --her only-- word stood still and stark in my head on the drive back into Havana. I kept all the windows down so the wind could blow the stink out of my clothes, but I remembered everything anyway, as I always do.
Some ghost, I said to myself. This morning Carlos Lage asks me about something called The New Mango, and not three hours later here’s Kiku the Cuckoo speaking nearly the same words.
I am a rational man, I hope; not an honorable one, at least until recently, but with a decent respect for trusting one’s own two feet on the ground. I don’t do mystery, I don’t understand voodoo or santeria, and though my family, like Lage’s and many others, has ties to Abakua, mine are merely formal. I have always been a Communist agnostic, a stranger to mystery. And I don’t believe in coincidence. So . . . what is the New Mango?
Using my walkie-talkie, I checked with one of my cadres to make sure Guillermo Gorgojo was at his desk at the Art Institute. I parked outside the Art Institute building and carefully carried Kiku Ybarra’s new piece up to Guillermo’s apartment on one open palm, carrying my briefcase with the other. I set the burlap bag down outside his door and took out my set of superkeys. Within seconds I was inside his art-crammed flat.
I went immediately to his desk and set the burlap bag down. I took the padded envelope out of the briefcase. I wiped my hands against my green khakis, and then again, and again. I took a deep breath and looked around. Sculptures, paintings, and drawings hung from, stood in and leaned against nearly every available space.
I am not an art expert, but not much on the walls impressed me. But compared to what lay under the burlap . . . I noticed mail and other papers lying on the floor: the only way to make sure of delivery these days. I knew I had to sort through it, but before that I had to unveil Kiku’s latest.
I moved back to the paper-cluttered desk and carefully slipped the burlap off Kiku’s latest piece. I stared for a moment, and then collapsed to my knees below the desk, grabbing for the metal wastebasket, where I threw up everything I had in me --rice, beans, eggs, mango juice, coffee, chocolate. I began to sob. What was happening to me? The woman was crazy. People were cruel. Lage was a bastard. So was I. I was used to these facts.
I crawled out from under the desk and sat in Guillermo’s chair. I stole a few of his tissues to wipe my mouth and shirtfront, and then I leaned back to better view Kiku Ybarra’s latest creation: a portrait, in cockroaches, flies, earwigs, bees, and centipedes, of none other than Carlos Lage Davila as he appeared when she last saw him ten years ago. I wondered: did he already have a digital picture of this portrait?
The guards had told me on previous visits that Lage had allowed them to issue Kiku flour and extra water to make her glue / paste. (You don’t want to know what else she used for binder.) What made me shudder most was that his hair, of which he was inordinately proud, was composed entirely of centipedes.
I couldn’t understand why something like that would bring me to my knees. I was a hard man. I took the wastebasket to the bathroom and cleaned up my mess. As I emerged I saw the mail scattered over his floor. I set the wastebasket back under the desk and then gathered up the stuff on the floor. Most of it was bureaucratic junk from the school, and flyers for art student projects, but one little business card fluttered down from the jumble in my hands and landed on the dark hardwood floor.
I set the other mail on the desk and bent down and picked up the card. It was not even stiff card stock, but simple printer bond paper. The side facing me showed a small orange graphic of a mango shape --mango again!-- and under it the words in simple black Futura: THE NEW MANGO. I turned the card over. Same typeface, different words: WE ARE NEXT.
Mierde, I thought. I racked my brain, which, in my eidetic case, means something. I found nothing.
I shuddered suddenly. I wasn’t used to not knowing. I tried to examine the card as minutely as I could with the naked eye. And nose. I smelled it. It was utterly ordinary white 20x bond with laser color printing. I kept stupidly flipping it over and over. WE ARE NEXT.
No. Only the Revolution was next. The Revolution was always next, even if It stayed the same. So who was WE and why did they think WE were NEXT?
WE was obviously some group calling itself The New Mango. I monitored all the independent libraries and study groups, and I had never heard of this one. Whoever was behind it, they were keeping their purposes pretty close to their chest.
I replaced the mail on the floor, then went through the routine of checking the listening devices and straightening the desk. Then I stood and looked hard at that obscene portrait for a long interval just to test myself. I had to admit it was well-done. Carlos Lage Davila as he was ten years ago, his face made of dead insects.
"Are we next?" I asked him.
--End of Introduction
Sneak Preview into Part One:
Heather Benlinederry and her husband Dillard are lounging in their North Scottsdale home’s Great Room, he reading on the couch, she with her laptop at the antique maple table, online, checking her email.
Suddenly Heather leans forward, rereading her latest email. She rereads it again, then turns off the computer, shuts the lid, and sits back.
“Dilly,” she says.
Dillard looks up from his copy of The Purpose-Driven Life. “Yes, dear.”
“We’re not going to Bermuda this year.”
“Oh, but darling--”
“Don’t be silly, Dilly. Listen.”
He shuts up immediately.
“This year, we’re going to Cuba.” She crosses her arms over her chest and smiles smugly. “This year, we may even get something for nothing.”
She turns in her chair and smiles at her husband, who was holding his place in his book with his index finger.
"Don't tell me," he says. "This is about Kiku Ybarra."
“Bingo. I just found out from our guy in Havana. The rumors are true. The Insect Portraits are real.” Her eyes blazed. “We’re going to make a fortune.”
Posted by Jerome at July 17, 2005 04:35 PM | TrackBack