Often in her first month at my Abuelo Damason’s house, when Brigitte couldn’t find the Spanish for what she was thinking, she would fall to repeating the German word instead and very seriously miming its meaning with her long, smooth arms, which she shaved so that the dark hairs wouldn’t show. Mami squeaked ‘What, what?’ and made desperate guesses. But the more Brigitte mimed, the less Chabella understood, and they made their own comedies. Brigitte would constantly try to reach for those words most difficult for a foreigner to remember.
Brigitte was afraid that every place in the world was the site of a murder. She was afraid of Fidel because, above all, he asked for the people’s affection, and she didn’t see how justice could live alongside affection. She tried to describe a regime of love: lovers get jealous; they are petty and impetuous; they give you stupid gifts that you cannot use. When things become desperate, lovers may stalk you, and ultimately, if they saw a way to, they would tap your phone. So, love into hate.
Brigitte refused to show Chabella the bullet wound she’d been given by her jealous boyfriend. Instead she narrowed her eyes, hovered a finger above the soft bend of Chabella’s elbow and said, ‘There.’ She stabbed the air just above the spot and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. The pain of it crashed through all Chabella’s joints.
Brigitte was a Republiksflüchtling. She came to Chabella and Habana at the same time as there came a feeling of imminent change, a sense that the world had set an alarm and the trees and buildings and sky would tell the time before the people could. Nobody could give a date, but people gossiped and did not trust the stoic face of Habana, the mud-glued potholes and dull, scrolled balconies. Things would change completely — but when?
Chabella supposed that roof tiling would slip westwards like birds chasing warm weather, the clouds would let down a white drinking straw and someone above would suck up all the harbour water like it was ron. The trees would shake down a new kind of water, leaves as liquid sacrifice.
Brigitte’s escape circumstances were privileged, but for Chabella and my grandparents, Brigitte was evidence of a hushed statistic of the time. She presented herself to the Montoyas as one of those East German citizens — one in every six — who managed to flee the country before the Wall went up. Brigitte was both lucky and clever; her parents had been long-time members of the Communist Party and had kept on believing even when Hitler and National Socialism had put them in danger. But when Germany was divided between the power blocs, police and Soviet tanks crushed the grass roots, the workers who demonstrated and raided food factories because they had already given of themselves according to their ability but were still hungry.
Brigitte heard about it on the radio, but she had already known it in her head and the knowledge translated into a great silence inside. In her views she was careful to toe the party line, and she took her well-chosen degree in political philosophy with its emphasis on Marxism. And she used that degree to disappear with permission. Brigitte took Spanish classes and bent her thoughts on Cuba, since Cuba was close to America and America was not Communist or Fascist or anything too strongly other than rich.
The temporary teaching post that Brigitte won at the University of Santa Clara was justified by the ‘rising levels of interest in political philosophy amongst students’, but really it was small-scale antagonism against the fading Batista dictatorship. Brigitte’s post was intended by the Faculty to help foster links between one nation on the path to Utopia and another. After a week’s classes, she finally did what was in her heart and disappeared.
Then, when Brigitte needed money, my Abuelo Damason said to her, ‘I’ll pay you to teach my daughters German. The German language is poetic — that is to say it is both vague and precise. Perhaps once my girls have learnt German they will all become men and go and fight for freedom and frustrated dreams.’
Apparently this grandfather of mine had a way of talking that made him sound as if he was never entirely sincere. Brigitte’s lips thinned.
Even after Abuelo Damason had managed to convince her that he had not been mocking her country’s role in the war, Brigitte still refused to teach his daughters German. My aunt Tia Dayame refused to learn German. Tia Pilar refused to learn German, and so did Tia Caridad. They all said the same thing: ‘What’s the point of learning German?’ but each of them had different reasons. The sisters were not close.
‘German is the language of ideas,’ my abuelo repeated, in an attempt to persuade Brigitte and his daughters.
‘But not of reality,’ Brigitte said, and she was sad. Chabella took up Brigitte’s copy of Der Struwwelpeter and started reading aloud Heinrich Hoffmann’s dire warning to bad children. Her beginner’s accent was jaw dropping. (Chabella can still muster that accent now. When she puts it on she sounds like an adenoidal man morphing into a frog.) Brigitte looked at her blankly. Brigitte said, ‘Do you have any idea of the meaning of those words?’
Chabella looked at an illustration; a giant in yellow trousers was dipping two squirming boys headfirst into a cauldron of ink. She said, ‘Not exactly.’
Brigitte said calmly, ‘You’ll sound better if you elongate your vowels when you see those two little dots — they’re called umlauts.’ And so Chabella’s first German lesson began.
That is the collection of things Chabella and I have decided about Brigitte. She is the only non-saintly white face in Chabella’s candle-lit display. Brigitte bought her place in Chabella’s altar with the gold-dust scarcity in Habana of red leather pumps. Brigitte put a pair under Chabella’s pillow the morning she finally left for America. And Chabella didn’t even find the pumps until she hid her face in the pillow to cry because she missed Brigitte. Brigitte had known that she would do that. When she left Chabella at the front door, Brigitte didn’t hug my Mami, but she touched her fingers to her own red lips and said, ‘This is a kiss.’ Chabella felt it the same as the gunshot. ‘Esto es un beso, moquenquen, dies ist ein Kuss,’ and then no word from Brigitte again.
Not long after she left, Batista left too — he fled Cuba. The change that everyone had promised and threatened came, and it came in the form of a military junta, which meant that uniformed men toted guns and smiled celebratory peace and did not fire in places where they could be heard. Chabella didn’t break her routine of stumbling into the one pothole on her street that was her particular bane.
When Mami speaks German she becomes wise. Glad crinkles frame her lips and eyes. Weltschmerzen, Dasein, Sitz im Leben, and so, and so, from web of thought to web of thought she departs from images and describes things unseen.
I walk back to Aaron’s with my Walkman switched on. My favourite song is sung slowly, blues about a woman who is alone and still and doesn’t understand that she doesn’t like it that way. But because the woman is patient and because she has perfect hair and because she enchants her clothes with French perfume, she sometimes gets a visit from her man, and then, oh. Then the song is poison in your ear, music to seal you in. Because when her visitor comes, the shadow song begins. Nobody has reason to cry the way someone is crying inside this song, not alone. Nobody has it inside them to climb just that note and keep ascending, they couldn’t, not even if they were crazy.
The song woman who curls her hair, she is white, I think. The singing woman, the one who makes me know that the song woman curls her hair, she is black, her voice is whisky dark. The screech in this song is bigger than either of them and it’s both of them doing it, both of them telling on each other until it seems that they fuse into one face and the piano player and his gentle backing notes are playing themselves out from a dangerous position on the screamer’s nose. But the piano player doesn’t fall into the mouth, of course. Screaming doesn’t do anything.