Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

“I live from a town small near to Toronto under Canada. I travel and study. I collect information of people, places, things. I watch and listen, then I bring stories to people mine. People mine do not much travel, and they want to know what world is. Your mother is nice to take me. After fire, I tell her I go other place, but she say I stay here. If I am problem, I go.”

“No!” growls Pedro, “Unless my mother says otherwise, you will go nowhere. As long as you are in Cuba, you stay in this house. Understand?”

WaLiLa shakes her head in agreement, keeping an eye on the questions. They still sit across from her, but they are shrinking. Now their eyes barely reach the rim of the table top.

“There is much to study here,” says Modesto. “We have a long and rich history, why don’t you take a tour?”

WaLiLa’s message-center processes this question as a challenge rather than a suggestion. She feels a tightening in her torso. The nuance of accusation she hears in his voice discomforts her. Is this what it feels like , she wonders, to be hunted? She slowly winds her arms around her belly. The smoke from the fuel she liberated from Elisa’s prayer room has saturated her being-center and clouded her judgment. With her hunter’s acumen weakened, she has not even attempted to find the source of the pain. She has one intention: to connect Pedro to the ancestors. To do this, she must reach his eyes. She turns her face toward him and says, “Tell about history long and rich. I feel pain, many pain here.”

Pedro lights a cigarette and glances up at the ceiling. As he exhales a breath of smoke with a sigh, WaLiLa stands and slowly walks to the kitchen window. She casually pulls a rose from a vase of flowers sitting on the window sill. She pushes the rose against her nostrils and returns to her seat, maintaining surveillance on the thin curls of cigarette smoke. The smoke does not reach her, but she keeps the rose pressed to her face anyway. She trusts its petals to filter smoke from the air before it can enter her body.

She looks at Pedro, and their eyes lock for a brief moment. When Pedro looks away, words start to spill from his mouth. “The pain you sense here is very specific to this time period. We have always lived with pain. Sometimes very little, sometimes a great amount. Today we are living at the limit of human dignity. We struggle to maintain some semblance of life, but it is …” he pauses, his effort to translate thoughts into words visible on his face.

“When we lost the Soviet Union, we lost a lot. Without their support, we are isolated and alone in the world. It’s a strange thing really,” Pedro mutters as he squints at the wall as if looking at something in the distance. “We are isolated and alone, yet the entire world watches us and regards us with curiosity and suspicion. You came out of curiosity, I assume?”

Pedro turns his head and glances at WaLiLa, then turns away when she nods her head in agreement.

“Oh, especially the Americans, they salivate waiting for us to fall so they can pounce on us. Castro will never let that happen…”

WaLiLa focuses on the bitterness in Pedro’s voice. She tunes out his speaking, wishing she could gain some assurance from the ancestors. Her muscles strain, begging to communicate with them. Can they want nectar from such a bitter fruit? Her thoughts are interrupted by a loud crash. She realizes Pedro is no longer talking and her wrist is stinging. Both he and Modesto are staring at her.

“Why you look me?” she asks.

“Do you know what you just did?” Pedro asks.

“No.”

“You knocked everything off that shelf above your head.”

She looks up and sees a small plank of painted wood tilted off its wall supports. She looks down and sees the floor littered with overturned spice jars.

“Oh, my muscles jumps, must came back.” How could the arm flick have returned? She scrambles for words to explain, as her message-center simultaneously races to find an explanation.

“I have muscles jumps. I have no medicine here, so they come back.”

WaLiLa mumbles this as she kneels to pick up the spilled spices. Modesto also kneels. As his knees knock against hers, she looks up, and their eyes lock. Barriers open, and Modesto dives into the infinite space he sees in her eyes. He begins disrobing his soul. I hate it here , his soul cries. It is too painful to stay. Breathing the air here is like tapping a raw nerve . He speaks of a child conceived with a Spanish tourist. He speaks of joining her and their son in Spain. He admits to staying home so as not to see the prostitutes selling their bodies to foreigners. He describes the pain of having nothing, doing nothing; of endless days of smoke, smoke, smoking. He details the days he sits alone holding himself for he has nothing substantial to offer the hungry young women the regime has bred.

Pedro’s fingers wind themselves around Modesto’s collarbones and dig into his flesh. The pain forces Modesto to blink. The connection broken, Modesto looks up at his brother with a wet face.

“Qué haces?” Pedro yells. “What the hell are you doing?”

Pedro drags Modesto to his feet and pushes him away from WaLiLa. He shoots her a sharp, angry glance. His eyes are full of fire. In them, WaLiLa sees fear and a stubbornness that screams, You will not conquer me.

Over the next week, the memory of Modesto’s crouched frame heaving with confessional sobs under WaLiLa’s gaze remains in Pedro’s mind. When she blows into the room, he examines the burning end of his cigarette, stares at her lips as they move, focuses on any other activity so as not to fall into those eyes. Neither witty conversation nor exposed shoulder can draw his eyes to wade in her vision pools. Her attempts to establish herself as a love interest have fallen like a dove struck by a stone. Her body feels just as bloodied. Each passing moment of failure brings more pain pushing through her like pins piercing skin.

One day while the house is quiet, WaLiLa finds herself slumped on the floor almost paralyzed by pain. With each inhalation, she feels the air squeeze her like quicksand. She bites the inside of her cheek and pushes herself up from the floor. She holds onto the wall and pulls herself upstairs. Her arm leaps into an arc as she stumbles into bed.

She nestles into the folds of a rough blanket and closes her eyes. She intends to do a full review of her body functions and find the source of her pain. But before she can begin, her hunterself pushes against the inside of her chest. She taps her chest and allows her hunterself to exit. Her hunterself brushes against her forehead then starts buzzing around the room. After sweeping the room twice with broad wing strokes, her hunterself discovers one of Pedro’s rumpled T-shirts discarded on the floor. She lands gently on the shirt and collects his scent in the wells of her body, then flies out the room’s only window.

WaLiLa quickly loses the energy her hunterself is expending and abruptly falls asleep. With the road map of Pedro’s scent in front of her, WaLiLa’s hunterself goes flying through Havana, dodging families who spill out of doorways onto sidewalks, bouncing on the sounds of conversation, and flying over avenues filled with rusted vintage cars and legions of bicycles. She skids to a stop when she no longer feels Pedro’s scent. She doubles back and locates his scent two blocks away, floating outside the first floor of a little house. Hovering in the air that presses against a cracked window, WaLiLa’s hunterself sees Pedro gathered with ten people in a small, cluttered living room. Eleven mouths share a bottle of rum while eleven pairs of hands exchange cigarettes and finger snaps. One of the eleven leans against pillow cushions embracing a guitar. They all sing, glowing in the space made light by the gathering of hearts.