Miguel Mejides - Havana Noir

Emilio said the black mother was obsessed with justice. Emilio, godfather-father-big-brother-blood-of-her-blood poisoned against other men, said their mother would never abandon them, especially if they were in Regla, her home, the ultramarine. But on this airless night, as dawn neared, the only thing she and her shadow had to hold onto was a wall that left them exposed. It was so high they couldn’t possibly climb it and try to guess the way to the chapel.

If only we could hear a siren, they thought, any kind of sound from the boats, a sign from their mother that would allow them to slow the infinite tremors in their legs, in their belly, in the head that could barely sustain itself. Her body continued to lean against the white wall, the screen on which her disharmony was amply projected. Her shell of a girl, broken, deflowered, stained... This wall that took in her shadow just to show her how naked she was under the only streetlight in the area. If only we could hear a siren, they thought again.

But the silence insisted on swallowing all hope. Silence crowned her, covered her, enclosed her, surrounded and embraced her; the silence whispered to her: I am as divine as you’ll ever get, only to me should you direct your prayers; only I will be your guide in this city that has never wanted you, little provincial girl, simple, simple country girl, backwards girl, so backwards, adorer of false gods, lover of women who will not save you. I am Almighty Silence, I’m the man you cannot hurt, now you see me, now you don’t, but I’m always here... Let me caress you and your terror will be different...

Silence overwhelmed them. Silence like a million voices circled them. Silence through their viscera; silence through their body in a long loop. Long and sonorous, like the siren they so wanted to hear. More and more voices accumulating.

The voices took them to the very edge of consciousness, a total disconnection between flesh and the senses. The silence screamed its insults and they closed their eyes. They allowed themselves to be dragged under by the perpetual noise of the absolute silence coming from the place where they’d lost track of the Virgin. They were going to drop to the sidewalk forever, remain stuck to the asphalt; they wanted a small death, definitive; their own screams stuck in their throat; they wanted to ask the silence to stop, wanted a blue cape to rescue them, to lift them above the houses with red-tiled roofs, the ruined edifices; a blue maternal cape, a refuge that enveloped them together, that transformed them in mid-flight, so that when she finally opened her eyes, she would find herself at the edge of the docks, ready to traverse the bay on the morning’s very first ferry.

Translation by Achy Obejas

Casablanca

Eulogio Gaytán realized that after he lost his hearing, he could penetrate more deeply into the folds of his clients’ and godchildren’s [3] In Santería, godchildren are those sponsored in the rituals by particular santeros or babalaos — godfathers or godmothers. thoughts and sexual desires. He realized that because words can be deceiving, they can take you down the wrong paths, they can hide the truth in a warp of sound. That’s when he grasped that he’d reached the highest level in his ministry as a babalao. From that moment on, his deafness was no longer a punishment come late in life, a life dedicated to pursuing happiness, health, and the wellbeing of society’s most humble and least appreciated folks. All of a sudden, he understood it was a gift from Orula at the end of an existence that had been plagued with the same misery and deprivations as those of his flock. The absolute silence now allowed him a greater balance, a greater closeness with the Eternal Father, who had given him the gift of divination, and the cosmic energy that put such astonishing words in his mouth.

He was well aware of his goddaughter Elodia’s movements as he tried to determine if this was another of her long pauses filled with thoughts, tranquility, and suggestions from eyes of singular beauty, or if she was finished telling her story. At the beginning of his deafness he’d tried to lip read, but the effort of following each word actually distanced him from the conversation’s real meaning, so he’d stopped trying and began to concentrate on the language used by other parts of the body: the infinite facial expressions; the revealing light, intensity, and expression of the eyes; the hands’ flights and the movements of the feet and legs, which said so much about a person’s mood; the tension in the muscles and the breath’s rhythm, which betrayed the most intimate feelings... All of those things came together in his mind, along with conscious and unconscious memories of the river of people who’d consulted him during a life dedicated to solving other people’s problems; all those things said so much more than words.

Now, one of his most devoted goddaughters was in anguish over something no doubt terrible, since she was a strong person who only came to see him about important things. She had grown up in the home of a refined and prosperous family where her mother had been a domestic worker. The owners of the house had raised her as the daughter they’d never had. She’d learned good manners from childhood; she’d studied at select schools until she’d fallen into this grave crisis.

She had been brought to Gaytán years before by a godson who was already famous as an oriaté, a diviner, and who was considered deeply knowledgeable about the science of seeing the future. Gaytán’s disciple had been trying to untangle the girl’s problems without success. He told Gaytán that all of the girl’s difficulties had begun after the owner of the house where she lived, Dr. Casals, a well-known lawyer, had died abruptly during a party in his home. The forensic pathologist had diagnosed a myocardial infarction, but back then all sudden deaths had been diagnosed that way. The oriaté confessed that he’d gone to investigate and the widow had told him she was certain her husband had been poisoned. According to her, there had been too many important people at the party for the police to open an investigation into each and every one of them. “Yes, of course Casals had enemies — what famous lawyer doesn’t have lots of enemies?”

Since that time, the girl had suffered from terrible nightmares. She opted to stay awake all the time by taking pills, ruining her health in the process. The oriaté was convinced the dead man was one of the clues to the case, since his Diloggún shell-throwing ritual had turned up four and five, Eyiolosunoché by way of Osobbo: The dead man was looking for someone to take with him. Moreover, whenever the oriaté consulted the oracle through the coconut shells, the letter Oyékun kept coming up in the girl’s readings, four shell pieces facing down, definitively signaling that one of the dead wanted to talk, but all efforts to establish communication had been unsuccessful. It seemed he was a very backwards spirit, unaware of his own situation, something that happened often with the souls of those who died unexpectedly.

In the first reading that Gaytán did for Elodia, he was left astonished and perplexed by the ípkuele’s [4] A tablet and necklace used for divination. revelations. For the first time in many days, the girl slept, falling gently facedown on Gaytán’s chest immediately after the reading. He cancelled the rest of his appointments for the day and remained there, without moving, watching over the girl’s dreams until the following morning. When she awoke, he saw the smile on her face, those bright eyes that he’d later see furious, in love, and hateful.