Dramatis Personae of a Previous Life in Havana

I can only imagine how carefully you applied make-up on your bruise. How long it took you to work around the edges of your battered eye. I can only imagine it. For I never saw you doing it. By the time I had come back from school, got changed into plain clothes and sprinted up to the third floor of my bloc of flats, you had mutated. The damage had been done and you had “moved on”. By the time the dominoes table had been set and you, your mother-in-law, one of your brothers-in-law and his wife had perched up together, you had put on the other face. “Nothing to see here. Shit happens. I caused the shit to happen. It was my fault. I’m the shit that makes the shit happen”. He was not there. He had already left for his beat, starched copper’s uniform, duty weapon in holster, probably whistling on his way down the stairs, José José or Emanuel (he was a romantic, after all); feeling like a man.

You, left behind. You, x-months pregnant. You, sitting around the dominoes table, smiling, laughing even, the corners of your mouth rising like the temperature outside in the sultry Havana heat. The others, reassuringly seeing calm after the storm.

I saw rictus.

Even at that young age, I could tell the truth behind the acting. It was a slow process, though. You set the stage for your one-act, one-actress play, but I never believed your silence-enforcing monologue. It was a performance-within-a-performance. I knew you had no choice but join this bruise-concealing farce, this confidence-destroying mise en scène. You were on your own, family-less, home-less, friend-less, a Cuban Easterner, palestina, looked down upon by habaneros. Habaneros like me.

We were the spectators. On the third floor, we were the audience during all the years you stayed in that house. That third floor was the observatory. To the outside world, never to the inside. The inside world was off-limits. It was known what was going on but… well, “shit happens.” That third floor was the balcony, the perfect site for the telescope that was missing but not needed. Around us the houses and apartments whose white-sheet-decked derelict rooftops cried out surrender. Surrender to the inevitability and the inevitable. Did anyone else see him raising his hand? Did anyone guess what was going to happen straight after? Did anyone notice the ever-growing bump, imperceptible still but noticeable once they came close to you? Did anyone care?

Every time you threatened to leave, every time, he laughed. I know, not because I saw him but because I heard him. The sarcasm-filled adverb. Destination? I did not need to see your face to know that in your head you saw a future of endless make-up-applying hours. The barrel of his duty weapon rammed down your throat as your pregnancy bulge kept him at arm’s length was evidence. The twelve-year-old secondary school girl he chased, groomed and started a relationship with was evidence. His own mother’s bruised arms the only time she very mildly dared to defend you were the evidence.

You did not seek help. In fact, you stood up for him. Some people said you had it coming. After all, you came from Oriente. What were you doing here? They asked. Correction: we asked. Also, why did you not leave him? Some others pointed at his outstanding attitude and behaviour in the community. Of course, sometimes he went a bit over the top.

I never asked you. I do not know if I would, were I to run into you now. After all, even you were aware that no matter how carefully you applied your make-up, we could still see your battered eye.

© 2016

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 30^th January at 6pm (GMT)

Dramatis personae of a previous life in Havana

The blue of the sea in the distance, seen from the vantage point my classroom afforded me on the second floor of our old, derelict building, contrasted sharply with the inimitable act of him rolling his sleeves. The former pointed at freedom and possibilities. The latter, as I found out later, was the preamble to a performance of ill-disguised cruelty, a pantomime of power, a display of male bravado.

We noticed that the rolled-up sleeves and his beard were a way to divert attention from his ever-expanding pot-belly. This might have been Havana in 1990 and the economic crisis with the resulting food shortages might have been hovering over the Cuban capital like barbarians at the gates but his waistline took no notice of the fast-becoming desperate situation.

Perhaps his performance was a sort of masquerade with which to hide his tired-looking face and the sweat patches on his striped shirt. Perhaps all this was coupled with the fact that the subject he taught was a tough one to deliver. How could it be otherwise, though? Political economics of capitalism and socialism. A term for each system. Roughly five months each, plus an exam at the end of each semester to make you decide whether you wanted to join “the rafters” or stick it out on the island with the dying economy, the ubiquitous corruption and the loss of hope. He couldn’t, however, bring himself to doubt. Doubt in his case was the single bullet in the gun in a game of Russian roulette. You never knew if the next attempt would be the last one. A doubt begat questions and questions meant uncertainties. In front of him a classroom of late-teenagers in their second year in uni. To cap it all, they were linguistics students, doing the course that could open up the doors to information, access to alternative sources of knowledge: English. Still the language of the enemy. No, uncertainties would have meant conflict. He hated conflict. Or rather, he hated conflict when he could not win it. No, there would be no uncertainties. Even if that meant war.

The war was declared during that first lecture in September; the moment he rolled his sleeves up.

The beard, the demeanour, the glasses, the sun-kissed neck, the air of someone who understood you, you, late-blooming adolescent who was finally getting to grips with the world even if someone was pulling the carpet from under your feet because they would be flogging it off to the highest bidder next. I remember it all. Even if after the carpet-pulling, you fell over, you got back up, dusted yourself off and indulged in yet another bout of world-understanding. You knew that after he nodded and nodded and continued to nod as you asked your questions and displayed your uncertainties, as you gathered your books and walked towards the door, you knew that he would go straight to the dean’s office, knocked on his door and reported you. For what? For thinking. You knew that capitalism came in the first term and socialism in the second, but the order did not matter. You were supposed to hardly notice the former whilst praising the latter. Even after the first images from the fall of the Berlin wall found their way clandestinely to Cuba. Oh, yes, they did show the other – sanitised – images after. The ones accompanied by commentary that was so partial you had not realised they hated (East) Germans so much. And then, it was the turn of the Soviets. Meanwhile all the hitherto unexpected changes were explained in our lectures in an articulate and cogent way.

But it was for the final exams at the end of each that SL (I’ve chosen to use his real initials) reserved his better thespian skills. The two-teacher examination board, the two classrooms, one for waiting and the other one for the actual test, the silence, softly interrupted by nervous whispers and the heavy steps (because he always made sure they were heavy) approaching, the slow entrance and the shirt sleeves being rolled up, like a butcher, first one and then the other, the whole time his eyes fixed on his hairy, beefy forearms, until he raised them and with one look he seemed to catch us all at once, his voice booming, just the one word, but delivered in the same way as the sword brought down by the executioner on the head of his terrified victim in years gone by: Next!

© 2015

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 19^th September at 6pm (GMT)