I Was Never the First Lady Read online

  Edelsa and Lázaro read it. It was exactly what they didn’t want.

  There was already a form letter for resignations, a methylene-blue stencil. An act of conscience. Lázaro looked over at Edelsa, who quickly crumpled my note, then tore it to pieces.

  “Child, there’s a way of doing things, a process.” She handed me a gray form. “This is the official letter of resignation, if you don’t want to accept going to the clinic. Of course, we hope you’ll go; we don’t want to lose you. Young people are shaped, not abandoned.” She put the form letter in my hand: murky, watered down, illegible. I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t even want to think about what they were asking me to sign.

  Lázaro asked Edelsa if I’d been warned by the Party representative at the station or by the creative division or by the station employees themselves.

  “It’s not a question of paternalism, but young people have to be helped along. They’re not born knowing, Edelsa. I don’t believe genetics are irreversible; people can be educated. This is a failure of the institutions.”

  Lázaro looked me straight in the eye without hesitation. I returned his gaze, grateful for the gesture. This is what we’ve come down to. There are so few people who will look you in the eye.

  They talked about my genetics as if they were referring to the locker where I kept my audiotapes. What is this?

  “Little compañera Guerra, has a colleague or a friend or even a listener approached you to warn you about the practical aspects of this job?”

  “No,” I said, playing the victim.

  “Are you sure, little compañera? No one, no one in or out of the station, has warned you about this kind of excess in the medium?”

  “No one,” I said, embarrassed. I felt like I was in grammar school again. I hate being scolded.

  “She’s suicidal, like her mother,” said Edelsa between gritted teeth.

  “Well, it seems to me more like collective murder than a suicide because it hurts everyone, because you can’t just go on the air from your own home. Nadia, we’re the state and we’re responsible for what people are told. We have to be very thoughtful about what we say to the people. Frankly, my dear, improvising your talks, talking to the four winds as if the station were yours, that could have really hurt the station if it’d been heard. It would have hurt you even more than the station: you wouldn’t have been able to travel; they wouldn’t have let you get your mouth near a mic for another twenty years. Thanks to our constant vigilance, we don’t broadcast those kinds of disorganized or hysterical thoughts. That’s an improper act by a child of the Revolution, who is who she is because of the Revolution, who owes everything she is to the Revolution. Very brave on your part, but very off base for the leadership here. Who would you please with these immature acts? The enemy. Your friends would applaud you, but you’re not going to go down in history because of these tantrums. We don’t deserve this, Nadia. We’ve been very tolerant with you and your family.”

  I don’t know why but I kissed them, I kissed them both very quickly, just to get it over with, and I went running like a naughty girl, leaving the door open, and leaving—in the worst hands—my signature’s incoherent line. It was a document I’d regret signing, but I considered it part of the collection in my personal museum.

  This is all for today, my dear friends. Until next time.

  NOTE

  I’m not going to resign from my radio program. I don’t know what life is like without being on the air. I’m doing this for me and for those who want to listen to me.

  Writing in My Diary

  Two days later, I take up the task of structuring An Hour with No One. This is my new piece, a new program to give my private life to my friends. Mouth to mouth . . . real life and music I’ve burned on CDs. This is my new movement. An Hour with No One will be Nadia’s Hour, the most transparent program that never existed. A show recorded on my computer, in my house, and distributed to my friends. I’m here, working on this idea. Ideas exist so long as we give them life; when they’re inside us . . . they disappear. “What’s not named ceases to exist.”

  Merci, Moscow, December 2, 2005

  Black tufts of hair on the white floor. Wisps of fine straight hair fall like grass at my bare feet. Dark streaks and then a drop of blue, red, ultraviolet blood spreads on the checkered floor in the living room. Now a scream in the air and the doorbell, shattering our little intimacy. We’ve cut the phone line and thus cut off the outside world.

  “Child, don’t move—I cut my finger!”

  Since I was a kid, my father has cut my hair. I would never let my hair grow long. He didn’t have the patience for braids, even less when it came to dealing with the lice I picked up at school. The sound of the scissors at my ears, me choking from the cigarette smoke, loose words—that was my life. My dad is my hairdresser, my counselor, my nurse, my cook. My father is me.

  It’s a few hours before the opening of the Latin American Film Festival, before the homage he’ll receive, a kind of eulogy in life to try to ease the pain they’ve caused him. We talk between snips of the scissors and the cologne, talcum powder, the little electric shaver, nail polish, makeup, scripts full of scribbles, and ash on the dining table.

  My dad’s famous, respected by the elite, adored by his students, and attacked since the ’60s for everything he’s dared to say. Dear Diary, you know that—you wouldn’t let me lie.

  And who am I? I’m my father’s daughter. He’s the rock in my shoe. My pointer, my scratched record, my nightmare. Everywhere else in this world my father’s on duty, on billboards, in magazines and on the banners announcing his retrospectives, in the words my friends quote from his scripts. There are hit records with theme songs from his films. My father is a great film director; he’s a one-man orchestra. He’s the myth that blurs the mirrors because wherever he goes it’s impossible to see anything else. My father was around in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and he’ll be there in the 2000s because they can’t do anything to silence him. He’s a nonconformist, and talented. As far as I’m concerned, no other man can compare. So I go to the psychiatrist and we start with the Oedipus complex. Not that I think it’s relevant, but others believe it matters. They wear me out looking where there’s nothing to see, and avoiding looking where there might be something they’re afraid to find.

  I got the two grants I applied for, one in France and the other in the United States. I’m a grants hunter and I shoot every which way. I’d always been turned down before, but now there’s a chorus saying yes! No one believes I deserve any of it.

  Patiently, my father has been cutting my hair for the last thirty years.

  “Papi, I applied for two grants and I got them both, but people think it’s because of you.”

  “It’s because of you. You have my brains, my name, and now you have yourself.”

  I am desperate by the time I arrive at the opening. I can be delusional and self-referential. People are always looking for the least important details, gossiping. Undoubtedly, they will say: “She’s Daddy’s girl. She gets her daddy’s leftovers.”

  I’ve made a decision. I won’t use this grant for what I said in my application. To hell with Atelier Calder, to hell with the Guggenheim, to hell with research, to hell with everything. I’m Nadia. I’m going to look for my mother. I’m nobody, nothing, and I need to know who the rest of me is.

  January 1, 2006, 7:30 a.m.

  Havana on January 1st seems like the Sahara surrounded by water. Dust, rocks, and silence. The blue background goes unnoticed and saves us.

  I don’t know much about dawn in other places. At this hour, on a day like today, I go swimming in the Caribbean. I want the sea to wash me clean of all the negativity I carry in my head and my body. “The sea doesn’t fit inside anyone’s head.” Here, on January 1st, we commemorate everything and celebrate nothing. On January 1st at this hour, the triumph of the Revolution is on display. Flags and whatnots hang from the balconies alongside wet laundry. The street seems like an
ice rink without ice, it’s so empty. There’s not a single car braking on the avenues. Everything’s dormant.

  I now have all the plans for what I’m going to burn in the gardens at Atelier Calder in France. My sculptures are heroes made of fire and ice. They may melt or go up in flames, but those are my heroes.

  I’m told the grounds at the Château de Saché are snowed in.

  I’ll make two sculptures a day: one from fire and one from ice.

  The one from fire: a great sculpture, human-size, made from leaves and clothes, which will be burned. Lit every night against the white background, it’ll look fabulous. That’s the hero who wears my father’s face.

  The one from ice: a similar sculpture, carved out of snow, built on wires shaped into the body of a heroine with my mother’s face.

  From ice to water, from fire to a frozen cold. One burns, one melts.

  I’m a pyromaniac, and I’m fascinated by burning everything. It must be because I was raised between blackouts.

  I’m going to immortalize my father and search for my mother. It’s an ephemeral but personal gesture. It’s my nighttime ritual in Atelier Calder’s snow. These are the heroes for my altar of fire and ice on the feeble frost of my body, where the water melts and eases away from me.

  Second idea: the fire figure will be a guerrilla. Like one of those wax sculptures. I’m thinking about the Museum of the Revolution. Materials: leaves, wool, wire, military boots, cap, olive-green uniform. She’ll have the face of a well-known guerrilla, and on close inspection the face will reveal itself clearly as my mother’s, a beloved stranger who burns and dies.

  My dad’s asleep on the couch. I’m going to Paris tomorrow and I’ll miss home, I’ll miss Cuba, I’ll miss myself. I’m going to go swimming. Dear Diary: Happy New Year.

  PACKING MY BAGS AND TAKING THE ISLAND WITH ME

  I PUT your broken dragonfly at the bottom of my empty suitcase. Then blankets and socks for this absurdly cold weather spring.

  I know they’ll read my diaries, but I take them with me anyway. They’ll take my things, go through my underwear.

  Ah! To ask permission in order to render myself nude in my drawings. There they are, the drawings, snuck into my life’s suitcase. Me, in my glassy tears. Screens full of doubts, backlit by the desire rooted in this eternal journey.

  The songs of my generation, screaming our fears, faking them. The excess weight of hidden ideas, things I don’t want to declare. All of this terrifies me.

  Books by dead authors in order to survive.

  Books by living authors I miss when I read them and whose hands I feel on the wet paper.

  Originals, anchors, seaweed—they all help me escape this drowning feeling.

  At the very bottom, some mottled mangos from Pinar del Río, contraband: their smell will give me away.

  Sand from the beach at Santa María, rum from Santiago, and a Virgin, who’ll keep me from hurting when I touch bottom.

  Wings flapping, the broken dragonfly takes off; this tousle-haired Cuban girl’s trying to stuff the island in her suitcase.

  Winter clothes, bathing suits for the sun.

  An endless journey with this bottomless suitcase.

  January 2, 2006 (Red Diary)

  At the Havana airport, tears fall like scattered pearls to the floor, the “marble of farewells.” I slip and fall, without fail.

  Planes. People saying “See you later.” My father standing at attention like a soldier; my father saying goodbye until I don’t know when. Now I remember his crazy story about my dramatic inclination toward weeping. That early morning when I wouldn’t stop crying: He grew desperate. My mother had walked out the door, I was five months old, and it was just Papi and me, alone together. He tried to give me a bottle. Tried giving me drops for colic. Rocking me at top speed in the living room rocking chair. He would lay me down and pick me up without success. Until, finally, terrified, he offered me his nipple, and that’s when this man that is my father (thirty years younger then) noticed I had begun to fall asleep.

  My mother returned later, but only to leave us forever when I was ten years old. In 1980, she fled from Cuba. We’ve never known why, or at least no one’s ever told me. Weaned (from her), already used to my father’s arms, I almost didn’t miss her, and we went on with our lives together.

  “Goodbye, goodbye, see you soon.”

  I cry quietly as the customs agents check my books, my papers, ask me questions that have no answers. Routine will bring order to this. I think of my father and I remember that piece: “A Stop on the Way to Egypt.” The agent asks me many questions and I gift him with two pearls from my eyes, made in Cuba.

  Tired of saying goodbye, my father goes home. I remain in limbo, between Cuba and the World. “Territorial Waters,” Island, Father, Goodbye.

  February 3, 2006, Paris—The Wee Hours

  A month to get to know him, five minutes to undress him. An hour to wake him.

  I think about Marguerite Yourcenar’s quote about disliking watching loved ones while they slept—how they were getting away from her more so than taking a break.

  When I saw Saúl arrive, suitcase in hand, I locked myself in the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to greet him. I didn’t want to talk to him. We were introduced and I ran off. Although the excuse for these grants is a search for my mother, I stuck my hand in my coat pocket and pulled out a photo of my father.

  Saúl looks like my dad. My psychiatrist would lift my punishment. It’s no longer a subconscious fact; I pursue my father even in bed. My father in another body, my father in me. I told Saúl while he was making his wooden pieces. He’ll end up as a critic and curator; his mind gets in the way of the beautiful art he could make. The force of his intelligence kills the results.

  Piano keys on a grand scale. Earth and snow at once. Saúl isn’t scared off. He gets it, all of it. He shaved his head with a gadget that looks like a little lawnmower. Saúl watches as I create my parents; he knows they’ll vanish soon. Ephemeral art. To kill one’s parents, said the judgmental psychiatrist. For the moment, I shave off what little hair’s left on Saúl’s head with the gadget.

  We make love with the same precision with which his chisel tears at the edges of the wood. It’s much more beautiful to watch him undress than to see me throw my clothes on the floor. He undresses perfectly, like a woman. He understands the codes for posing nude. Five minutes later and we’re inside each other. Saúl and I, not knowing each other, trapped in the snows of Saché. He pummels me over the wood and I like it; my desire is such that I begin to cry; the secret honey from my body empties into Saúl’s mouth. I open my legs like a port and let the lights pass under the bridges. Hunger and thirst. Hunger and fear. Saúl seems Cuban, but he’s not. He smells of oysters when he sleeps, and I dive down to quaff at his sex, to swallow him, curl into him, lost in his carelessness, moaning.

  With Saúl, the truth is a lie. Women from all over the world call him here, while he’s at this atelier in the middle of nowhere in France. There are emails in many languages. Saúl doesn’t tell me he loves me. I make up Saúl’s love. I make him lie, I help him lie, I give him the tools to lie. He says he holds me in esteem and that he’s alone. He doesn’t know my country or my father or my house, none of my absurd pedigree. He knows nothing of the men whose lives I’ve been a part of.

  The women he embodies continue on the telephone and in his smell. Saúl lies and I let him hurt me, hurt me with his mute sword, until he drowns in the pain of having hurt me.

  Here, “as you can see on the laminated page,” Saúl conducts private interventions in my soul. Not knowing who we are, Saúl and I make art in the snow. Spells in the white stuff. White magic.

  I call my house before waking Saúl. There’s so much snow, the door’s blocked. I want to tell my dad I met Saúl, I’ve seen snow. It’s me who answers in Havana, Cuba, 537.

  “Hello. Papi and I are out for a while. Leave your message and I’ll surely get back to you.” Beeeeep.

 
Surely? I can surely call myself? What would I tell me? I don’t know. I have nothing new to tell me. Same old thing, same as always: that I want to find my mother.

  “Saúl, wake up. The snow has us trapped and I’m Cuban. I’m going to freeze; get me out of here. I want to see the sun, I want the sea.”

  “I hate the sea,” says a sleeping Saúl, leaving me alone in that distant atelier in the middle of nowhere in France.

  February 20, 2006, Paris

  Saúl taught me to ski. We fashioned our skis from two royal palm leaves a Dominican artist left behind. We reinforced them with resin so they were both firm and light. We used feathers to keep warm and fly through this harsh winter blast. Like a blade on the wind, we sliced through the landscape, made tracks on the snow as we slid down the nearby hills. I went from my hidden peak to the fiery frost of his sex. “Eskimo word.” I like this man; I could love him if he didn’t lie. The truth is his sex is dark, Mediterranean, strong, impulsive like the outgoing tide as it grapples with the rocks on the shore, tearing at the seaweed, shattering driftwood. The truth is this slender Cuban girl fused with this Catalonian, as sinewy as ebony, illuminated like the Ancients. At three in the morning he talks about Kant as if he’s talking about himself. I talk about hurricanes as we watch the snow fall. We both levitate. Yes, that’s it, the Mediterranean versus the Caribbean in the midst of a hurricane that this solitary island must defend against. A lost island that wanted to swallow the fierce, scheming, masculine Mare Nostrum, cultured and extravagant. A sage sea, a sea that bumps against my thighs, pulling me down with his wise words. What kind of sex is this? Depressive sex, succulent sex, sex infused by Barthes, Beckett, Derrida, Musil. My God, there are so many people in this bed! I don’t understand; I just touch. I walk his back with my fingers and revel in desire down to the tips of my toes. I feel water on my thighs. Heat, pain, a spray of semen, which gives itself away on tasting. It’s snow and mango.