‘You, Maja, you wonder why the people who have to teach you never like you; it’s because you sit there looking at them as if you don’t believe a word they’re saying. That parents’ evening when you sat beside me and yawned while your History teacher was praising your mock exam results. If I had been your teacher, at that moment I would have taken a big red pen and drawn a line through the results and said, ‘My mistake — she failed. Her problem is a lack of interest.’ You are lucky that you have been educated in a country where you’re supposed to act uninterested. You’re very lucky that you’ve been educated in a country where it is not necessary to get out. Imagine if the only way you could have a good life was to learn your books! Would you yawn then? No, indeed, you would grin and say, thank you Mr Englishman, please tell me how I may continue to improve.’
‘I yawned because I was tired! I have manners,’ I protest. ‘Anyway, Mami —’
‘Chabella,’ said Papi, ‘would never in a million years have yawned. In fact she was too focused. She looked at me and I spoke rubbish. She was. . I mean. . all of those years I spent building my intellect and here comes this woman and throws it all away. Why did she have to wait until I’m retired and settled and, and. . satisfecho de mi mismo before poisoning me?’
We study each other. I know that he forgave Chabella approximately two seconds after he realised what had happened.
‘How is your body now?’ I ask.
Papi nods, waves me off, fumbles down the back of the sofa and pulls out a pouch of Cohiba cigars. He lights one with a match. Chabella is desperate to know where Papi hides his cigars so that she can throw them away and save his life, but he changes his hiding place every week or so.
Papi used to smoke pipes. Ages ago Amy Eleni and I smoked his pipes too, when he and Chabella were out; we stuck our heads out of my bedroom window to send away the clotted scent of apple tobacco. We wore chequered flat caps and grumbled about immigrants while we smoked. ‘Bloody Africans, Pakis, bloody Cubans, soap dodgers,’ Amy Eleni muttered in a maniacally off-kilter Cockney accent. ‘Send ‘em away, or they’ll have the whip hand over us, mate. There’ll be rivers of mud. Yeah, that’s right, that’s what I said, rivers of mud. You cut one of those darkies and you’ll see; they bleed stinkin’ river water.’
For my part, I puffed out smoke spirals and said in sly reference, ‘Damned Cypriots. Dark as sin, what. Wrong colour, aren’t they? Taking our jobs and marrying our gentlemen. They didn’t fight any of our battles, what.’ It was 1987 — in Poplar, people were still calling out things like ‘Soap dodger!’ in the streets.
‘Are you hungry?’ I ask Papi. I have brought some leftovers in plastic tubs, and I point to the bag of them at my feet, but Papi shakes his head.
‘I could cook something else,’ I tell him, standing. With a simple touch to my forearm, Papi brings me back down beside him.
‘So she’s really serious about this altar,’ he says.
‘Pero por supuesto — but of course, Papi.’
‘Because you know how you Cuban women can be sometimes. Dramáticas, siempre el drama.’ He gingerly flexes his hands, examines his inflamed finger joints.
I say, ‘No, she’s. . it’s real.’
‘But I need to think about this. If I have that thing moved back here, it is like saying that it’s OK that she is going to consult with these people, these poor, ill people who are looking for something that has meaning and don’t know what it is they’re looking for and call it Santeria. As for my wife being one of them, it makes me think, What is it that she wants that I haven’t given her?’
Papi wouldn’t be asking me this if I were Tomás. I am slow to reply because if I am to be Mami’s voice in this argument I need to think of what she’d say, and I don’t know.
Papi shifts the cigar to the other side of his mouth and says, ‘Santeria is a garbled religion. So it draws on Catholicism, and it draws on Yoruba religion. It’s like throwing a rosary in the air and saying it’s magic because it fell from a slave’s hand. Suffering isn’t transformative.’
I say, ‘True, but that doesn’t mean that suffering can’t be religious.’
He doesn’t hear me.
‘I mean, Maja, these gods or whatever, these beliefs don’t transcend time and space; they stretch them unnecessarily, stretch the geography of the world like an elastic band. And you can’t do that. You can’t erase borders and stride over Spanish into Yoruba like that. You can only pretend that you have.’
I would hate to be in a lecture of his and ask him a question. He just doesn’t hear you. He closes his eyes, sucks in smoke, streams it out, just breathes and breathes. The Holy Child of Atocha is looking him full in the face; the aguardiente has evaporated from its dish. The Holy Child of Atocha is staring at Papi and Papi does not care.
‘I’m going to bring the altar back downstairs,’ I tell him. ‘And then we can fix whatever parts of it are broken.’
Papi reaches for his ashtray, knocks ash off his Cohiba without opening his eyes.
‘Papi?’
‘Yes, Maja, let’s do that,’ he says finally, in quiet, good-humoured obedience. As I go upstairs, he calls, ‘Please bring some air freshener down.’
I stop in the doorway of Tomás’s bedroom, unwilling to test the borders of his wild order of Cuban flags and Union Jacks and WWF relics. They jostle with collaged images of Rogue and Wolverine from Marvel’s X-Men.
Tomás has a teddy bear now; it sits on his pillow, by his head. The bear has one club foot and one normal foot. He is a production line reject; his fur is too black, as dark as despair must be. The bear’s name is Henry S. Foote. Amy Eleni found him in a charity shop last month. A few days before her discovery, she, Tomás and I had watched a TV programme about the US Civil War.
The presenter mentioned, very briefly, a Mississippi senator called Henry S. Foote who got so het up about the question of the South’s secession from the North that, right in the middle of the Congress building, he threatened the Congressman next to him with a loaded revolver. The presenter was just talking about how feelings were running high in the mid nineteenth century, and Henry S. Foote only came up for a second, Henry S. Foote was only an example he was using. But because of Tomás, we ended up talking about Henry S. Foote for the rest of the programme.
Tomás was upset by him. He kept saying, ‘What was Henry S. Foote carrying that gun around for?’
I said, ‘Maybe he just really wanted to keep his slaves or whatever.’
Amy Eleni offered the opinion that politics were different in those days. Or that Henry S. Foote was toying with the idea of killing himself. I suggested that Henry S. Foote had gout and was irritable. Together Amy Eleni and I proffered a theory that Henry S. Foote suffered from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and had this compulsion to protect himself with terminal intensity. Or that Henry S. Foote was so rabidly anti-abolition because he had black ancestors and was terrified that someone might find out.
Tomás didn’t accept anything we said. He said, No, Henry S. Foote was fucked up. Chabella popped out of nowhere and nearly chewed Tomás’s ear off about his language. Then, while clothes shopping, Amy Eleni saw the bear. She brought the ugly thing over to the house, pointed at the club foot and raised her eyebrows at Tomás, who immediately remembered and said, ‘Henry S. Foote.’ Then they both nodded, as if something was confirmed.