Chapter Two #2
The Americans had banned all trade with Cuba, and what had historically been a close if not fraught relationship was seemingly irreparably severed.
Now Fidel was a great friend to the Soviet Union.
The invasion at Playa Girón—the Bay of Pigs as the Americans referred to it—had failed, Fidel impossibly surviving a staggering number of attempts on his life; the missile crisis had brought both countries—and the larger world—to the brink of war.
Her home was no longer a place Pilar recognized, a place that seemed to wish for her to be there, a place where she could stay, a place where she could leave.
She was here and not, caught between politicians and the games they played.
It was hard to know which version of reality to cling to.
The daily one she lived where she went to work and drank watered-down coffee to make up for the fact that sleep eluded her, and filed books on shelves, and waited in food lines, and fell asleep on the couch with an open book resting on her lap praying that she would be greeted by dreams of her husband and their happier days, or the one that told her that the world as she knew it could end at any moment and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.
“It won’t be the same without you,” Pilar said, searching for the right words to give in a moment like this.
She had always been more comfortable with the characters in her books than with the people she encountered in her daily life.
It wasn’t that she didn’t feel things, as a former boyfriend had once levied at her in accusation—she did, deeply—but she lacked the ability to translate her feelings to others.
That was one of the qualities that first drew her to Enrique.
He had an uncanny knack for understanding people, for getting to the heart of their strengths and weaknesses, for knowing others and for being known.
In Enrique she had found someone she didn’t have to explain parts of herself to, someone for whom she didn’t need to pretty aspects of her personality or strive for an acceptance she might never receive.
With him she could just be , and there was little that was more powerful than the sensation of being loved for exactly who you were.
“Where will you go?” Pilar asked Zenaida.
“Madrid. To my cousin’s.”
The decision had clearly been made, and yet the indecision in Zenaida’s voice rang through the silent night, an invisible question mark suspended on the end of the sentence, as though Zenaida couldn’t quite believe it herself.
Pilar was staring at a woman who was caught between two times, two places.
A part of Zenaida had already moved on, had left Cuba a long time ago—or perhaps, more accurately, Cuba had left her—and now she was left clinging to her memories, a tether tying her to the island forever.
“We cannot stay,” Zenaida added, as though offering an explanation, an apology, when none was needed. Maybe she was simply trying to convince herself of the inevitability of it.
We cannot stay.
How many times had Pilar whispered the same words to Enrique? How many times had the beat of them sounded in her breast like a warning she ultimately hadn’t heeded?
Now she could not stay, and she could not leave. Not with a husband who was a political prisoner somewhere in Cuba.
When Enrique told her that he was working against Fidel’s regime, that he was helping people who had been targeted, every single fear she’d ever had rose to the surface.
She had weaved her way through Havana choking on her terror, her only solace the moment when Enrique would walk through the front door.
He had never gone into details on the work he did or who comprised the network of Cubans secretly fighting against the regime.
It was as if he knew that telling her too much would only make her worry more, and no doubt he’d been trying to protect her as well.
She’d been somewhat grateful for the way he shielded her from the intricacies of what he was doing, but now she was left with more questions than answers.
Why did the regime turn their sights on Enrique? Did someone betray him?
“Our fridge will go to Mrs. Padilla,” Zenaida added. “Hers is a few years older.”
Mrs. Padilla was a good choice. In a building of twenty families, she was beloved.
Her children had fled to Miami, and she had stayed behind caring for her elderly mother, who had decreed that facing imminent death, she would live her last days on Cuban soil even if she couldn’t stomach the bearded man.
Passing along items was a common enough practice before one left Cuba, one that Pilar had watched play out under the cover of darkness in their apartment building as possessions and lives shifted from one room to the next like the acts of a play.
It was survival, and a show of Cuban ingenuity and defiance—a way of privately sticking it to Fidel.
He might try to strip their dignity from them, but at least in this they had the last laugh.
When they left the airport fleeing the revolution, at least they did so with the knowledge that while Fidel’s men had recorded a 1955 refrigerator on their inventory, they had really owned a 1958, which was presently being enjoyed by someone else.
It was a small victory to be had, for sure, but when the odds were so clearly stacked against them and the stakes were so high, those small victories were what fueled the soul.
“I’m afraid for my son,” Zenaida said, making the sign of the cross over herself with practiced ease.
Fidel was determined to drive organized religion out of Cuba, even as many privately clung to it in these difficult times.
“My eldest. He speaks his mind too much, has too many opinions. It’s not good. Not here. Not now.”
A loud series of booms echoed off in the distance.
Zenaida’s grip on the bundle tightened even more.
Those booms had become a death knell—the sound of gunshots echoing in the city.
Before the police took Enrique, Pilar had grown accustomed to the sound of executions—they all had.
She was now ashamed to admit that they had once become a regular part of the tenor of her days, that she had grown used to the gunshots until her husband was sent to prison and she began to wonder if it was Enrique facing down the barrel of a rifle.
“We pray for him—your husband—the whole building does,” Zenaida added as if she had belatedly realized who she was talking to, that Pilar knew better than anyone the perils of having a loved one who spoke their mind and “had too many opinions.”
“I’m sorry for your troubles,” Zenaida whispered. “And I’m sorry to add to them. But I’ve heard…” Her voice trailed off, and then it strengthened. “…what you do with the books.”
A stone sank in Pilar’s stomach.
“You save them,” Zenaida continued, and the way she said “save” made it sound like Pilar was doing a great thing indeed when she worried she wasn’t doing enough.
“Save them” was an audacious term for the fact that she had become a guardian of books that belonged to Cubans fleeing the island.
Like Pilar, those tomes existed in a state of flux—their owners could not take them with them when they left or risk seizure at the airport, but they certainly did not wish to have them confiscated by the regime, either.
It wasn’t just the ones whose value was immense that she cared for; she was the temporary custodian of people’s histories, their lives and passions contained in the pages of the books they loved.
A book was so much more than ink and paper; it contained a part of the author’s and reader’s souls.
It was the first book I ever read. My parents gave it to me for my birthday.
I remember my mother sitting next to me in bed, her arm wrapped around me as we read the words aloud together.
She passed away this year, and whenever I look at the cover, I’m reminded of her and how safe I was in her arms.
My family recorded each new birth at the beginning of the Bible. It has hundreds of years of our family history. Perhaps we can find a way for you to send it to us once we’re in Miami.
Sometimes, they didn’t say anything at all, merely handed her the books wordlessly, some sacred trust passing between them from one book lover to another.
“I don’t do enough,” Pilar said, which she worried was not exactly the right thing to say, but the best she could do under the circumstances.
Saving books hardly seemed enough in a world where firing squads were the reality, and yet, if they did not save them, if they did not do what they could to preserve their histories, their memories, the things that shaped their souls, then what was left?
Fidel’s regime was already doing everything they could to craft what Cubans thought, how they felt.
Some books were banned as others were published by the state’s new publishing arm as propaganda to thrust upon schoolchildren in the classrooms.
“I need your help,” Zenaida replied.
Here was the moment when they were forced to show their cards, to be vulnerable with each other, to go beyond the normal bounds that tied two neighbors who up until this moment had little occasion for their lives to cross paths besides the polite hello or the casual inquiry about a maintenance problem in the building.
When Enrique was taken, Zenaida had not come, but Pilar had not held that fact against her.
They were all doing what they could to survive.
Someone had left a flan on her doorstep days later, though, and while Pilar had barely been able to eat the baked custard in her grief, the sweetness of the caramel overpowering her, she knew how dear the ingredients were these days, and the sight of it had told her that someone cared.
She was not alone.