The Killing of the Saints Read online

  "How am I supposed to tell the world I've become a woman if I can't have my quinceañera?"

  "Don't play the virgin with me! With all the cocks that get into you, everyone knows you're a woman-you're everybody's woman, nothing but a streetwalker, spreading your legs for a nickel!"

  "At least I enjoy it, which is more than you ever did with that pile of refuse in that wheelchair!"

  "I forbid you to talk about your father that way!"

  "So stop me if you can, then! If it was up to me I'd wheel him out on Sunday so the garbage man would take him away! But with our luck, he'd probably leave him on the sidewalk!"

  (Throughout all this Papá would follow the argument from his wheelchair with terrified blue eyes, which for years had been progressively drained of their color to the faint blue of spoiled milk, trying gallantly to move his mouth to articulate a sound but succeeding only in drooling and moving his bowels in agitation.)

  These tirades would end up with Celia and Mamá crying in each other's arms, asking themselves why God had seen fit to punish them and forgiving each other for their respective insults. They would seal their pledge by washing my father, mother and daughter sponging off the waste they had caused, Papá happy to be in his bubble bath, then powdered and changed, a fifty-year-old baby with a gray beard. Mamá would wheel Papá back to their bedroom, Papá to sleep and Mamá to pray her rosary, while Celia would wait until late in the evening, once the only light in the house was the votive candle to the Virgin of Covadonga, to sneak out and meet with her latest boyfriend and the cycle would start its fetid turn again.

  Once I went away to college, I didn't return for two years. When I finally came back, I found Papá had suffered another stroke and all he could do now was to roll his eyes and chew his food. Mamá hugged me when I dropped my bag in the living room, which seemed smaller and more stifling than I recalled.

  "You've grown," she said in Spanish. "I'll bet you grow up to be as tall as my father. You know we are the descendants of the Huanches, the original inhabitants of the Canaries. They were all like you, tall and blond. Que bonito, mi hijo."

  "Thanks, mom," I said, embarrassed by her unusual outburst. "And Celia?"

  Her mouth turned awry, as though she'd bit into a green guava.

  "Por ahí anda, puteando."

  "What do you mean, she's whoring?"

  "I mean to say that's what she does now, the little slut," answered my mother in Spanish that sounded straight out of the Castilian plain. "She left school and is working as a waitress in a nightclub. She makes more money in one night than your father made in one week and she spends it all. See, come here."

  She took me by the hand and led me to Celia's closet, full of gossamer gowns and silk blouses, with dozens of pairs of shoes and boots, and even mink and sable furs, shedding their expensive hairs on the warm tiled floor.

  "Look at this! Tell me, how can an honest working girl earn enough for this? She's a puta, that's what she's become, God help her soul."

  I sometimes wish Mamá had been right and Celia had been a streetwalker. Instead she had fallen for the biggest pimp of the Cuban people, after politics-drugs. She made no effort to hide it from me, thinking as a member of her generation I would understand and approve. The first thing she did once we were together was close the door and whip out the little hand-tooled leather case with the small mirror, straw, two full vials and silver-plated razor blade. She spread the coke and chopped it into lines with the same concentration she'd once shown when baking lemon meringue pies.

  "What do you think you're doing with that?" I asked.

  "What does it look like, stupid?" She snorted up the lines greedily, then dipped her finger in the glass of water and let the drops fall into her nostrils. "I'm trying to forget all about this. God, I hate this place."

  She sat on the edge of the bed, rocking back and forth, in contemplation. "Do you remember our garden back in Havana, Charlie? I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I don't know why. Remember how Ignacio grew anemones and tulips? Everybody said tulips couldn't grow in Cuba, but he did it. I asked him once and he told me the secret-he put the bulbs in the refrigerator. We had the best garden in the island, didn't we? Sometimes at night I start remembering how I used to run and hide under the bushes, by the trellis or near the well. It's the best way to fall asleep. I have such wonderful dreams. Then I wake up, and everything is worse off. It would be better if we forgot, if we could just wipe that whole fucking stupid island off our fucking minds." She paused, inhaled from her cigarette, flicked the ashes away. "God, I hate this place."

  It was an August afternoon. Dad slept a siesta, Mamá was in church. A truck thundered down the street, rattling the windows. The hot humid haze hung in the air like words never said, like regret and infinity.

  "Why don't you go back to school?"

  "Not everyone can be smart like you, Charlie. Some of us have to suffer with our limited minds. I'm doing what's best for me, just like you did what's best for you."

  "Working in a nightclub is the answer?"

  She laughed, the drug now plucking the string of happiness.

  "That's what she thinks. What am I going to tell her, that I sell lady for a living?"

  "Pardon?"

  She snorted contemptuously. Her round brown eyes had become deep and fulgent. She fluffed the streaked tips of her hair.

  "Don't be so naive. Anyhow, I'm not intending to stay here long. I'm going to Colombia for a while. Tony wants me to meet his family."

  "You're going to get married, then."

  She laughed again. "You are young, even if you're older than me. This is strictly business, you know. I mean, OK, so we've been doing some serenading too but that's only because he's so cute. You know, you should talk to him. He says his people would pick up the cost of your schooling, if you were to work for them later."

  I got up abruptly, disgusted. "I don't want to know about this."

  "Go ahead, leave," she hollered suddenly. "Run away, just like you always do, that's your specialty. Carlos Morell, Ph.D. in escape! You and Houdini!"

  "I don't have to take this either."

  I walked out of the bedroom, through the living room, down the stairs and into the street. She ran after me.

  "Yes, you do have to take this, because it's your fault, Charlie, you brought us here. It was you who didn't know what to do, it was you who made our life a piece of shit, it was all your fault, your fault!"

  I ran away down the street, people turning from their shopping, the old men in the domino tables looking up from their hands, the couples at the coffee stand at the corner sipping their cafecito, staring at me.

  "Come back here, maricón! Don't be such a coward! Take it like a man! You don't like it when I sing you the truths, do you? Well, I won't stop, come back!"

  I crossed the street, dodging traffic, across the parking lot of the welfare office and into the schoolyard, losing myself in the crowd. What was the use of arguing? She had the freedom of resentment, blame laid elsewhere, the soul burning with indignation. I carried the weight of responsibility, the hurting knowledge of sin. I would have traded places with her in a second. But still, I didn't want to know about it, I didn't want to hear about it, I didn't want to think about it. I'd dug a hole and buried the child. I didn't want it back.

  Celia and I avoided each other after that, and never mentioned the incident again. A few weeks later I left for Jacksonville, to make some money picking oranges before school started. Celia moved to Colombia that year, just a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday. Technically she was a minor and Mamá made noises about having her deported back but her threats were useless. The next time I visited Miami, Mamá had turned over the living room to the many saints of the Catholic church and like the priestess of a forgotten Punic cult, wore only black among her images. She went to Mass twice a day and said the rosary after each meal sitting at the window watching the traffic go by, fingering the holy beads as she rocked herself in her cane and mahog
any rocking chair, mechanically reciting the paeans of praise to the Virgin: "Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte."

  I, bored by the torpor of the room, drowsy from the heat and the rice and beans of the meal, would close my eyes and imagine her as she once was, when we were still in Havana and Papá ran the largest oil refinery in the country and we lived in our own gray-walled mansion in the Vedado and Mamá headed a dozen charitable ladies' associations and we had two maids, a butler, a gardener, a cook and a nanny in a paradise that I was certain to inherit as surely as the sun rises, the sugarcane grows and Uncle Sam lives. But it was all right. In fact, this longing for lives never lived led me to a kind of peace, knowing that our finely crafted plans for the future had been dashed by an indifferent maelstrom of politics and violence. (Was there ever much difference between the two in Cuba?) Back in Havana I would have become what the Communists call a social parasite, that is to say, a reduced tropical version of a Mellon or a Du Pont, wasting my days on women, Mercedes-Benzes and teak-planked sailboats, grasping the wheels of power as effortlessly as a lesser man spins the face of a combination lock. On those nights when the swampy mustiness of Miami would plug my sinuses and the din of passing cars and Spanish curses would reach my ears in my family's tenement in Little Havana, I would imagine myself in the real Havana, the soaring old white and gray city ninety miles away. I, dressed in a white linen suit, would lie in a gutter with my back riddled by a dozen bullets from a revolutionary gunman, my blood draining and mixing with the street debris, the dead leaves, the cigarette wrappers, the spit and black gunk floating on my mortal crimson rivulet spiraling down a drain and somehow I would be happy.

  The final chime of fate in this story sounded when I was in my last year of law school and had returned home for one of those brief periods of torture called vacation. Celia had moved back from Medellín, her brief marriage to Tony having collapsed when she decided Colombians, her husband most prominent among them, had to be the filthiest people on earth, no matter what social class they came from. Never one to suffer from the absence of male companionship, Celia had taken up with Adolfo, also known as Pipo, the Nissan dealer who had sold her the Silver Z Tony bought her as a wedding present.

  I tried living at home but I no longer had the patience (or the stamina) to put up with my mother's constant praying and the decomposing smell of my father. With money I had saved from clerking at a law firm in Newport the previous year, I rented a tiny studio in Fort Lauderdale. A schoolmate got me a job at Rickey's Bar, which featured wet T-shirt contests every weekend for the price of a warm stein of pisswater beer. I visited home as little as possible and dreamed about my family every night. I don't know what dreams Celia had, if any, about the wicked joke luck had played on us.

  Yet the situation, sordid as it might have appeared, had actually improved. The insurance company had settled the case and Mamá had enough money to hire an occasional nurse to relieve her of her duties. Papá's condition had stabilized, so that he only fouled himself involuntarily once a day and his drooling no longer came in torrents. He could even mutter words, words that were not essential to his life but that must have had some other meaning besides the obvious, words like bread, milk, water and liberty.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. I was on stage at Rickey's, emceeing one of the wet T-shirt contests, my eye set on a little redhead named Donna with perfect pear-shaped breasts when I got the call. As the contestants paraded in their bikini bottoms, drenched tops clinging without mercy to their torsos, I grabbed the phone at the bar.

  "What the fuck is it?" I barked over the persistent beat of the latest single of the Doobie Brothers.

  "Charlie, Charlie, it's happening again!" said a woman's voice.

  "Celia? What the hell's going on? I'm at work!" I shouted over the din. Donna, waiting for me to introduce her onstage, doused herself with a pitcher of water, then gave me the eye.

  "It's Papá, Charlie. He's dying."

  The same web of wires streaming out of my father, the same aggrieved faces, the smell of disinfectant, a cloudy view of the bay from a hospital window. Only the floor is different from the one years before.

  "I didn't know, how was I supposed to know he was allergic to shrimp?" protests my aunt Julia in the waiting room, her authority hanging from her words like the wattles from her neck.

  "I made him some frituras, the fritters everybody likes. I never heard of such a thing. He eats them fine, no problem."

  She stops, looks at all of us in the room, Celia, my cousin Alvaro and his wife Magdalena, my uncle Rafael, my father's compadre Virgilio, a succession of faces that keep popping in and out, grieving choruses of the day. I feel the grit of the sand in my loafers from driving straight from the beach to the hospital. I force my attention to her words.

  "Then, five minutes later, he starts making these noises, uggh, uggh, aggh, aggh, like he's choking, his face turns red, he can't breathe. I don't know what to do. I try to call everybody and I can't get in touch with anyone. So I called the ambulance."

  All day and all night Julia repeats the story to the new arrivals, the old mariner reciting the tale of familial woe, a public confession for absolution from the gathered, who all nod and say yes the poor thing what could she do they would have done likewise and there is no blame, that is just destiny, God's way for which man has no name.

  Celia and I step down the hall for a cigarette, watching the islands in Biscayne Bay shimmer in the late afternoon heat.

  "Do you hate her?" asks Celia.

  "How could I? It's all for the best."

  She takes a drag from her Marlboro. She looks thinner yet harder, as though the pounds shed have revealed the thin reed of steel at the core. Her brown eyes, now a shade of hazel from fatigue, seem enormous in her hollow face.

  "The doctor says he won't recover. I don't know. Mamá's been praying at the chapel all day. She's convinced there's going to be a miracle. I don't believe in miracles anymore."

  Celia laughs nervously. "I stopped believing when I caught Papá putting the gifts from the Three Kings in the box full of straw we hid under the bed. Remember?"

  "It was shredded newspaper."

  "That's another problem with you. No imagination."

  We both smile.

  It's four in the morning and all the guests are gone. Celia is asleep in the waiting room outside the emergency ward, Mamá is still, like the nun she once dreamed of being, on her knees in prayer at the hospital chapel. No one is stirring, the entire hospital seems shut down, off duty, on vacation. The faded red carpet lies before me like a well-trod path to a ravine of spent hopes. The double doors of the ward open automatically. I enter, pass the nurses' station. Empty. The patients, wrapped like blood-stained mummies, lie silently in their beds, drugged into sleep.

  My father is hooked to a respirator. Awake. His blue eyes flutter in recognition when I approach. We are the only two souls awake at that moment, staring at each other across the divide of life and culture. For a brief, vertiginous moment I become him and I see myself standing at the foot of the bed, sun-bleached blond hair, stained shorts, youth plucked from the shores. I see myself and I know what he wants. Father moves his lips, attempting speech. I come near, to decipher his meaning. His eyes dart to the side, frantically alert, more alive than any time since we left Havana, his eagerness to speak painful to behold. I shake my head. He moves his lips and somehow a breath comes out, a breath that wants to be a word. I shake my head again. Straining, he tries once more, the breath this time flowing through the vocal cords, ringing the word so beloved of our people, of the Spanish race, the eternal partner of sin.

  " 'uerte," he utters, then the lips finally obey after all these years and in confluence with the larynx and the soul the beautiful, splendid word flowers.

  "Muerte."

  Again he darts his eyes to the side. I look at him hard, he nods slowly. There is no doubt. I kiss him once then I move to the respirator. I don'
t know what switch to pull. He glares at one by the bed, a foot away from his hand. I turn it off. Father automatically shudders as the air is cut.

  I sit in the chair at the foot of the bed and watch Papá as his skin turns red, then blue, as the lungs fill with liquid. Our eyes are locked. I think of nothing, can think of nothing, time is a fluid that congeals around me as his face twitches from asphyxia. He stops breathing.

  A minute goes by. What am I doing? I ask myself. What do I feel? I am closing the door, I reply, I am cutting the cord, releasing the spirit, letting the man fly free to the green-eyed island of his soul he should have never left. I feel nothing, then a hollow in my chest, then a pain I know I'll always carry. I'm oddly detached, I'm not there, someone else is occupying my body, I am nowhere.

  Two minutes. Three, four, five. I get up, take a last look at my father. I kiss him on the cheek.

  "Bless me, Papá. I love you."

  I turn the respirator back on and I slip out of the room. I walk down the hall, then race down the stairs, out to the back and to the bay and I jump in the water, the cold dark water of night. I swim and I swim and forget, forget, forget.