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.”
“Give you cavities,” I said with solemn disapproval.
“No, no. It’s not like processed sugar. The sugar of the sugarcane is pure. Doesn’t bother your teeth or make you fat.”
“Really?” I asked and was again assured of the cane’s innocence. It really was a fairy tale kingdom, I decided. The sugar didn’t even rot your teeth.
Crossing the intersection was a breeze and I was glad — unaccountably glad — to be alone. My father’s unending talk about Havana, about my height, the relentless self-consciousness of being with him was exhausting. I bought myself a thick chocolate doughnut and was quite happy with its unnatural sweetness.
My father enjoyed his coffee, too. “Ah,” he smacked as he finished it. “Not your grandmother’s coffee. But I feel refreshed. You were right. We needed something.” He squinted at the gray airport roads. “He’s late,” he commented anxiously. “We have plenty of time,” he added, but sounded unconvinced.
I fell asleep leaning against the wall. The weight on my eyes felt especially heavy, so heavy I couldn’t open them when I heard a voice penetrate my dreams, a voice I thought I had forgotten, and that I wasn’t happy to hear. It was the man I discovered in our old Washington Heights hallway, the Asturian who had brought my father’s letter to my mother. He was grinning and telling me that message again, or trying to, only his mouth was full of gooey, oozing sugarcane. I struggled to open my eyes.
I woke up to see him, the real Asturian, standing beside my father (actually dwarfed by my father) and studying my face doubtfully. He wore a brand-new blue pin-striped suit, with a white shirt and a blue tie. He was little and looked littler in this outfit, a man stuck into a box of fabric with a hole for his head. I noticed and remembered because Francisco made a fuss about it.
“Pablo!” Francisco smacked the Asturian on the shoulder with his hand and let it linger while his fingers squeezed with affection. “You’re dressed like the chairman of the board of ITT,” he continued. “I don’t know whether to shoot you or ask for a job.”
Pablo ducked his head and smiled sheepishly, both pleased and embarrassed. He answered in Spanish and I understood that he said something about looking respectable for the authorities. He specified which authority but I didn’t know that word. It must have had to do with getting a passport for me since that’s what he produced from his pocket, a pale green object, somewhat larger than a wallet, with the word PASSPORT in embossed gold letters and below it, also embossed in gold, the bald eagle, head turned ominously sideways to fix us with one eye, clutching arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right one. E PLURIBUS UNUM was written on a ribbon streaming from its mouth, and beneath the fearsome bird, United States of America was impressed in gold script.