The thud of a blunt object echoed in the stairway. Through the peephole, the neighbor lady watched a woman stuffed tightly into a yellow dress walking upstairs. Euphoric, everything inside her seemed to be leaping: the copious flesh, the tight black curls, the little round and corny mouth painted red; tropical Betty Boop crushing a handbag beneath her arm. Coming up behind, an entourage of sweaty guys dragging a Queen Anne bed and a canopy.
“It isn’t much farther! Just here, at the end of the hall!” Olinda rallied them, unable to conceal her impatience. Each time the cabriole legs got stuck in the narrow hallway, she thought about the varnish and winced. With considerable effort, they managed to bring the bed upstairs and through the door of an apartment with high ceilings and a balcony that, fully open, let in the Havana summer. In the distance, the statue of the Virgin Mary at the Iglesia del Carmen cut an outline against a white sky, the entire city a postcard of deterioration. Once they fit the bed into the room—a difficult task, considering the minuscule amount of space left by the armoire and the dresser, also Queen Anne—Olinda brought her palms together in ecstasy with a cacophony of bracelets. Next, they installed the canopy, and in addition to paying them generously, she made coffee to reiterate her gratitude. One of the men let his eyes wander around the apartment.
“Whoa, it’s like a museum in here!” he exclaimed, dumbfounded. Without a doubt, it was an odd place, a capriccio amid the smoke from the bus.
When she met Armando, one afternoon at Coppelia, the ice cream parlor, he was reading an edition of Père Goriot with golden letters on the spine. That man had to be special. Marrying him—a man with a promising career as an agricultural engineer boded well for a position at a Ministry—confirmed her status as a great lady, which she always suspected was her destiny. They would have children and she would bring them up to be important people. But there was no position or lofty future, no children either. Armando ended up in a shirt factory, stealing fabric cuttings to resell on the street, and she was a salesgirl at a bland little store in Central Havana.
To compensate, she turned her house into an empire of kitsch. Norton, who was Jamaican by blood, knew Havana like the back of his hand and was knowledgeable about antiques. He served as her dealer. Mahogany furniture, crocheted doilies and porcelain shepherdesses mingled with Bavarian dinnerware and an old, but still functional, grandfather clock. As a solitary touch of modernity, a portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos and a calendar featuring beauties in thongs. It was Norton who got her the bed, an old woman in Lawton was selling it for three hundred pesos. Now whatever happened, more frequent blackouts and more severe hunger, but she was sleeping in a Queen Anne, her own form of rebellion and resistance, the only thing they couldn’t take from her.
The men went away. She was left alone, happily absorbed in the contemplation of dinnerware and figurines. The light began to dissolve, and Armando would be home soon. She waited for him on the sofa, posed like Goya’s Clothed Maja, and a look on her face like it was her birthday.
“I have a surprise for you!”
“Are they shutting off the power today?”
“No, not today. Hey! Did you hear me? I have a surprise for you.”
“Yes, mi china, sorry. It’s just that I’m dead tired,” he responded gloomily as he put away the bicycle. “It was a terrible day, the inspector showed up out of nowhere.”
They had to put the big fabrics on top so the missing ones wouldn’t be noticed. If they got caught, they’d be sent to jail. On top of that, there was the heat: a thick steam that greased the skin and the soul. The Chinese-made fans at the factory weren’t enough to scare off the island’s crushing summer. Fatigue, exacerbated by hunger and the hours spent pedaling their bicycles, made the workers faint often. All of the island was a torpor; a fistful of flies atop the unmoving wheel of destiny.
“Okay, show me your surprise.”
“Close your eyes!” Olinda took him by the hand and guided him toward the bedroom. “Now open them!”
“Ah… it’s pretty.”
“Pretty? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“No, no. It’s beautiful, like everything you have,” he started covering her neck with kisses. “We’ll sleep like royalty, do everything like royalty, in there. Now give me the towel, I’m going to take a shower.”
His enthusiasm sounded false. Olinda could hear the water breaking against the tiles as she served a plate of rice and beans and got ready to watch Día y Noche, the police drama most Cuban families were probably watching at that hour if they had electricity. The episode was about solving a crime involving a firearm that took place at a bus stop, but what was more important to Olinda was the subplot of the possible breakup of Pablo and Elia’s marriage. In the end, she had told him that helping her do the dishes didn’t have anything to do with real solidarity in a marriage.
Armando came out of the bathroom and sat down to eat. In the dining room light his face looked yellowish. He didn’t speak, the only sounds were the noise of the spoon against the plate and the muffled voices from the television set. Olinda looked at him with a furrowed brow.
“And what’s the matter with you?”
“I already told you, I’m tired…”
“Sorry, Armando, but I know when something’s going on and when you’re tired. What’s going on with you?”
Armando dropped the spoon and held his head in his hands.
“Oli, I have to tell you…”
She got dizzy. Now what?
“Drop the mystery, spit it out.”
“Do you remember Rafelito, the young guy that works with me?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Well, he’s like Alberto, the soldier that came out in the procession…”
“What?”
“Launching a boat to sea… He’s leaving, Oli, he’s leaving. He’s building a raft. something better than a raft! He’s got everything planned, and I’m leaving with him. We’re leaving!”
“Finish eating, come on, Día y Noche is starting.”
“Are you listening to me? We’re leaving. I can’t take it any more, I can’t handle this.”
On TV the intro to Día y Noche started playing. Olinda got up and started stacking the plates. Armando followed her with his gaze. In the kitchen, she exploded.
“Do you really think that’s how it works? Leave and that’s it? How do you know Rafelito isn’t a gigantic snitch? Do you know how many years we’d get if they catch us? Do you have any idea of the number of people who’ve died in the ocean? Besides, who the hell told you that I want to leave on a raft? You can’t be talking seriously!”
“But I am serious! C’mere, sit down.”
“I don’t feel like it!”
“I said sit! Cojones!”
She burst into tears. She didn’t tolerate anyone yelling at her, and Armando didn’t yell at her or say bad words to her. That sudden rage scared her; it seemed to her like a bad omen. Shaking, she sat down next to him. He knew Rafelito wasn’t lying because he’d seen the plans for the raft with his own eyes, along with his mother’s desperation.
“Anguish like that can’t be faked. Besides, I already know the plan, I’m the one helping to set it up.”
They would leave in April of next year. Departing from Santa Clara, where Rafelito’s uncle lived and, if they were lucky, they’d make it to the islets of Key West. The uncle, who had been a fisherman all his life, had plotted a route; in the vicinity of the Bahamas they could rest a while. The vessel would be safe, it would float on steel tubes. They would also add on a Russian tractor motor and a sail. Of course it would have an oar, in case the motor fails.
“Remember that Rafelito studied at CUJAE Technological University and he’s good with engineering. Mima, we’re going to build a Kon-Tiki!”
“But… Armando, that’s nine months away! What am I supposed to do with the house and the furniture?” Olinda sobbed. “You shoulda told me before and I wouldn’t have been killin’ myself to buy the bed!”
“We can sell the stuff. We’ll need money to build the boat. Whatever’s left over, we’ll take it with us.”
She started crying. The chinaware and armchairs were her assets. How did he think she could get rid of her assets?
“What assets, Olinda? What do we need porcelain plates for? To fill them with rice and beans? Cut the bullshit, chica!”
She stood up, feeling offended, and went into the bedroom. If she could have screamed, she would have done so with such pitch that only dogs would have heard. Were there still dogs in Havana? She covered herself up completely in bed and sank into the abyss of the cabriole legs.
The next few months were dizzying. By virtue of his wife’s possessions, Armando made himself into the capitalist partner of the enterprise. Havana had become a good market for the antique trade, a lot of families still had family relics—not out of a sense of heritage or sentimentality, but because there was no other option—and they were selling well to collectors and merchants who, disguised as run-of-the-mill tourists, would buy them at ridiculous prices. The first to go were the jewels that Olinda inherited from her grandmother: the gold zirconia ring, the silver barrette, the pearls (she refused to part with her wedding ring, made of white gold. If the raft sank, the ring would sink with it. If the sharks ate her, they’d gobble up the ring too). Next went the furniture. Norton, without asking too many questions, took it upon himself to get the best deals. With the money they got for the armchairs, they bought two steel tubes. They bought them from a guy from the provinces who worked in La Antillana and they had to go pick them up, at night, in a beat-up little truck that tumbled down the streets of El Cotorro. The other pair was acquired through a contact, who in turn had a contact who worked in construction.
In Santa Clara, the new Kon-Tiki developed according to plan. “With revolutionary efficiency, comrade!” Armando and Rafelito would joke. The hardest part was the motor. A guy who worked at the UBPC agricultural cooperative in Arroyo Naranjo was asking two hundred dollars for it. Weeping, Olinda bid farewell to her dining room set. That day she didn’t want to eat, or even to watch Día y Noche. In vain, Armando tried consoling her: he spoke to her of the furniture, of all kinds, that they would buy once they got to Miami; of Tiffany lamps bought for a bargain from Jews in New York, of Asscher cut emeralds and diamonds. But it wasn’t about furniture. It was about her life, brought to ruin once and for all by mediocrity.
Next were the porcelain figurines, dinnerware, and fountains. They sold the dressing table to buy the canvas for the sail. The apartment was emptying out, the walls becoming naked. Olinda’s empire turned into a wasteland, and the desolation laid waste to her; unkempt curls, a slack and colorless mouth. The departure was two months away and Armando spent nearly all his time in Santa Clara. When he came back, he’d only talk about building materials and progress, of routes and islets, of what they would do and wouldn’t do once they got to Miami. From an outside perspective, the vessel was an absurd heap of rubble, a mashup of dissimilar objects that would have delighted the Surrealists: the encounter, not of an umbrella and a sewing machine, but of truck canvas, metal tubes, and a Russian motor. Nonetheless, he was convinced that it was a marvel of naval engineering and applied design.
One Saturday, he showed up in dirty clothes, dark circles around his eyes, and an air of triumph. He poured himself a glass of water with sugar and sat down at the plastic table that had taken the place of the antique dining room set. In the kitchen, Olinda was plugging away at a new recipe for condensed milk made with powdered milk.
“Mima, I’ve got good news! It’s ready, it’s got almost all its parts! It’s time for us to start packing up!” The rhythmic and continuous noise of the fork was the only response.
Armando continued with the checklist of things they still needed: white clothing for daytime and black for nighttime, which would hold in the heat. He’d been told that they could make it thermal by lining it with newsprint. May the Granma newspaper be useful for something besides wiping our asses! They’d also need to wax the backpacks they would use to carry their important papers, to protect them from the water. To finish the vessel, the only thing they needed was the floor that would go above the planks.
She kept whisking, waiting for Armando to finish his monologue, but then there was just a long silence. She wiped her hands on her apron and left the kitchen. Armando wasn’t in the dining room or the living room. She found him in the bedroom with his gaze fixed on the bed.
“Don’t even think about it! Forget about the bed!” She screamed and lunged at him, as he tore off the sheets. Olinda grabbed them and tried to put them back in their place, but a shove from him threw her against the wall. Huddled in the corner, she watched him take everything apart and look for a saw. She watched the teeth bite into the flesh of the wood. Two hours later, the dismembered boards were piling up, the cabriole legs scattered and alone. Armando left and came back with two guys. Together they carried everything off. Once she was alone, she threw herself on the mattress and cried herself to sleep. When she woke up, night had fallen. She groped blindly for the light switch. The power was off.
In the dark, Central Havana was a silent mass, you could almost hear the ocean. She stood out on the balcony and exhaled deeply, the air smelled like garbage and efflorescence. The Virgin Mary at the Iglesia del Carmen looked like a specter, cut out against the blackboard sky. A young couple walked by on the street, and their laughter ruptured the sadness of a city forgotten by the gods. She remembered her first years with Armando, how he made her laugh and now, at her feet, the void called out to her. Then she felt him come in, approach stealthily, hug her from behind.
“Forgive me, china,” he said in a whisper. “You know I’m not like that, but I’m going crazy, this country is driving me crazy. What’s the point of the beautiful furniture, the beautiful things, if we can’t eat, make choices, talk?”
“It’s funny, right? A Queen Anne bed,” Olinda turned around. In her face there was a weary resignation. “I guess, in the end, that’s what this island is too: a piece of stylish furniture turned into a raft.”
They finished packing that week; they would go to Santa Clara a few days early. They hardly said goodbye to friends and family. They told the neighbors that Armando had been transferred outside the city. The day of departure, he went downstairs first as Olinda stayed in the doorway, looking at her house for the last time. What was awaiting her? The image of the ocean, an ocean like a desert of water, gave her chills. Would they make it? Would that vessel, her Queen Anne, rise to the occasion? In the living room, all that was left was the clock, Camilo Cienfuegos, and the beauty in a thong. She said goodbye and closed the door. The hands marked eleven, the peal of the clock chimes shook the empty floor.
Translated by Whitni Battle
