Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Looking back on it I have to admire the presumption of my father’s request. He was asking Eileen not only to make no fuss about ending her employment, but to help him pack up her income and send it off as quickly as possible.

He won half the battle. She took us in, showed Francisco where my clothes were and even found us an overnight bag. (My father hadn’t thought to bring one. “Men,” Eileen commented with a satisfied smile.) Then she disappeared. During her absence, while casually picking out clothes, my father continued his gay inventory of Europe, of how we would see bullfights, Flamenco dancers, the armor of Granada, the Ramblas of Barcelona — a complete tour of the country where Hemingway and Orwell had found both bravery and cowardice, enchantment and disillusion. I didn’t know what he was talking about; I strained to understand. But that was home to me: walking the narrow ledge of precocity to get a view of my Daddy’s passions. My beautiful father was back and I was ready to follow him anywhere. He made no mention of the revolution or my mother — to maintain security, I was sure. We were, after all, still in the enemy’s hands.

Eileen returned with a grim and wary expression. We were almost done packing. She stood in the doorway and looked dismayed by the full overnight bag. “Urn, I was just speaking with Mr. Rabinowitz—”

“Is he here?” my father seemed alarmed. I worried at that — was he frightened? No, I decided, he was merely startled.

“He’s still in town, but he’ll hurry over in his car. He said you’re to wait — he’ll arrange for transportation to the airport so you won’t miss your plane. He’s definite about it. Doesn’t want Rafael to go without him having a chance to say goodbye — and he wants to talk to you right away. He’s on the line. There’s a telephone in his study. I’ll take you there.”

My father smiled. He was relaxed and confident again. “Oh, I don’t think so. There isn’t enough time. I can’t take a chance.” He turned back to the overnight bag, pressed in one more sweater and zipped it up. “Say goodbye to your beautiful nanny, Rafe. We’re off to our homeland.”

“Oh, he’s waiting on the phone. You have to at least talk to Mr. Rabinowitz.”

My father said nothing to that. He picked up the bag and gestured for me to take his hand. I did. We moved to the door. Eileen stepped in our way. She was very nervous. I don’t know if she was actually trembling, but she could have been.

“I can’t let you go without talking to him,” she said, voice low, eyes on the floor.

“He’s just a bully,” my father said. “He won’t hold you responsible.” He pushed me forward around her.

She gave way, at least physically. She called to my father as we entered the hall. “You have to talk to him. He took care of your son! You owe him a few words for that alone.”

My father’s hand tightened on mine. His cheeks sucked in — that was his private look of anger, a look I had never seen him show to a stranger. Indeed, by the time he turned back to Eileen it was gone. But there was rage, operatic and inspiring, in his voice: “If Bernie gave me every penny he has, he would still owe me. Took care of Rafael!” Francisco gestured to the heavens with his right hand to show the preposterousness of this claim and moved away from Eileen, apparently ready for us to leave, only he paused again to add this final thought: “You tell your boss to steer clear of me. If I get my hands on him I’ll kill him.”

He was brave, after all. I knew it. Hadn’t he stood beside Fidel while the most powerful nation on earth blockaded and invaded poor Cuba? No one else — except for my weak mother — would have had the courage to defy Bernie.

Despite the blast of his threat to Eileen, my father continued to huff and puff with anger after we drove off. I watched his lips move: tiny eruptions of the furious interior monologue.

Let me hear you, I wished silently. Let me know your thoughts. But I didn’t have the courage to ask. Besides, I knew the gist of his mute tirade. He was indicting Bernie: damning him for being a capitalist, for taking me away from my mother and for being friends with a president who had tried to destroy Fidel.

“I’m sorry,” my father said on the Cross Island Parkway. We had been on it for a while and these were his first words to me since we drove away from my uncle’s. I had given up on his talking to me by then and was startled by the sudden and unasked for apology. “What?” I said, confused.

He glanced my way. His eyes glowed: the tanned face made their whites bright and lightened the brown of his pupils to a shimmering amber. He had lost weight, I noticed from this view of his profile. The tan disguised his gaunt condition. Francisco’s cheerful cheeks were gone. I didn’t like this look. I associated weight loss with the last few visits I had with my mother. Each time I saw her she had shrunk, each time a little bit more diminished by her illness, the institutionalization and the electroshock.

“Don’t be sorry,” I said and felt confused and sad. I wanted to cry, but I wasn’t aware of why. I thought I ought to feel glad: I had been rescued.

“I know your uncle was good to you. Or tried to be. I promised myself I wouldn’t talk like that in front of you. But she provoked me.” He glanced at me again. “My God, you’ve grown! I’m lucky to have a son who’s so handsome and so smart.” Francisco returned his attention to the road, putting on his signal, moving into another lane and accelerating to pass. He talked to the world that rushed up to our windshield. “I have nothing to worry about. The future holds no terrors for me.” My father glanced at me again and winked. “Not when I’ve got you to take care of me in my old age. I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

At Idlewild Francisco was nervous. He leaned against the car rental counter sideways and kept an eye on the doors behind us. Once that paperwork was finished he rushed us to another building away from the terminal. It was a warehouse of some kind and we entered a small waiting room, bare of furniture. A sleepy clerk manned the only counter. Above it was a sign that said something about picking up international packages. The people who appeared to get slips of paper from the clerk seemed to be truckers or delivery men. Our wait felt interminable. I whined about being tired, thirsty, hungry and so on. Eventually my complaints wakened the attention of the clerk. “There’s a coffee shop over there,” he volunteered. “You can get him a doughnut or something.”

“I’m waiting for someone,” my father answered. “I can’t afford to miss him.”

“Oh yeah …?” The clerk was interested. “Bringing a package?”

“No, we just agreed to meet here.”

“No kidding. Funny place to meet.” He peered at my father, was puzzled by his frank and friendly face, and lowered his eyes. “None of my business,” he added.

“Let me go get a doughnut,” I said.

“No. It’ll just be a little bit longer.”

“You keep saying that! Let me go get a doughnut.”

“No.”

“I’ll be okay.”

Francisco moved to the window to evaluate the journey. It was roughly a block to the coffee shop. I would have to cross one airport intersection. But there was a light and the only traffic seemed to be slow-moving buses and vans. Otherwise it was easy — a straight line.

“Okay.” Francisco gave me a five-dollar bill. “Get yourself a chocolate doughnut and a soda. Also get me a black coffee and two packets of sugar. Although it won’t be the honest sugar of Havana,” he added with a feeble smile. Earlier he had tried to distract me from my fatigue and hunger with stories about Cuba. I had expected to hear thrilling accounts of fighting with Fidel’s revolutionary army against the invaders; instead I heard about sitting on porches and drinking espresso and of cutting sugarcane in the field with happy peasants who were being taught how to read. To me his stories were a letdown. His time in Cuba either sounded too similar to being with our relatives in Tampa or it sounded like a fairy tale about a place where the good king is beloved by all the people for his generosity. I knew my reaction would reveal my embarrassing political ignorance and naiveté—the thoughts of a bourgeois American boy — so I suppressed them. Francisco told many details about harvesting the beautiful sugarcane, including how if you peeled it and chewed the softer interior, a moist liquid was released that tasted sweet. “When I visited Havana at about your age, I used to chew it. The candy bar of the poor, Cousin Pancho called it. And the kids in Cuba still do. I saw them when I volunteered to help in the fields. I saw a gang of kids ask one of the cutters and they shared it on their way home.”