‘You do that every day?’
Tomás said, incredulous, ‘What?’
‘It happens two or three times a day,’ I interjected, surprised.
Papi didn’t look at me. ‘Stop that, Tomás. Do you hear me? Do you see me doing that kind of thing? It’s unheard of. Boys don’t do that.’
‘Papi, girls don’t do it either, though. Mami doesn’t do it. Maja doesn’t do it. Just me does it,’ Tomás argued.
Papi straightened up and looked down at Tomás. All he said was, ‘Don’t test me.’ He went downstairs, back to his newspaper. Tomás came and took my hand, and gave me a look full of surprise. ‘It’s OK?’ he said. He meant everything. Papi, vomiting, everything.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, gently putting his other hand back down to his side — Mami didn’t want him sucking his thumb because that was how people got buck teeth.
After that, Chabella and I watched Papi watching Tomás.
We all got to know the signs of Tomás’s regurgitation, the way his cheeks expanded, the way he’d get a dizzy, gassed look from trying to hold it in. Then, when we couldn’t bear to sit around watching Tomás hold sour food in his mouth any more, Papi let Tomás scramble up the stairs to the bathroom. To Mami, Papi said, ‘Why is this happening to my son?’
Chabella said, ‘El crecerá fuera de ello, Juan, he’ll grow out of it. He’s so small now. And he’s the London baby.’
There was a thing that happened that I didn’t tell Papi. My Spanish teacher wrote lots of letters for Amnesty International and thought that I should take more of an interest in Cuba. Miss Roberts was no more Spanish than I was, but we always had to call her Señora Roberts, to sustain the mood of the language lesson. After one lesson she leant on the edge of my desk and asked me, ‘You know what gusano means, don’t you?’
I glanced at the door to make my intentions clear and I said, ‘Yeah, it means “worm”.’
She said, ‘That’s what they call anti-revolutionaries and other dissidents in Cuba. It’s actually a key term in Fidel’s political vocabulary. Gusano. Or if not that then you’re the son of a gusano. It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, using language to take away the humanity of someone who opposes you?’
I said, ‘Yeah.’ I fidgeted with my bag strap; I didn’t like the way Señora Roberts had said ‘Cuba’ so softly, as if she were trying to rein in the towering force of it, as if she expected me to gasp or something. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me, eyebrows raised, lips quirked; she was looking at me as if we shared something, as if she knew me much better than she did.
I knew that Señora Roberts was thinking that my father must have told me all about being gusano, what it was like to have your colleagues begin to denounce you to avoid the label themselves. She thought that as she spoke a painful reel was playing behind my eyes, a sequence in which someone wearing a Cuban flag for a bandana spits in my father’s face and shouts, ‘Gusano!’ Then, perhaps, the same man kicks Papi’s legs out from under him and stamps on his ribcage. But that is not the story. If Papi says ‘gusano’, he doesn’t let the word or its meaning come near him. Papi sits silent and bespectacled behind Cuban broadsheets, then he throws them away and says little about them.
What Papi did say about having to leave the country was something that Señora Roberts wouldn’t have found exciting. He said that the process that ends with you fearing for your life is gradual and actually quite congenial. It begins in a warm daze as the sun lays you bare in corner-room meetings. Paper falls apart under your sweaty fingers as you read and re-read directives and statements that you know it is essential for you to understand. If you don’t teach certain things, or if you forget to praise certain people and initiatives, you are called to account and at first you think that you are defective — then you realise that you’re becoming unreasonable because no one else is being reasonable.
Papi says, ‘If not reason, then what else can it be that separates us from animals, what is it that makes us fail to be innocent before God?’
I said, ‘I suppose by God, you mean reason undiluted.’
Papi ignored me and said, ‘There is something else. Unless the nature programmes are hiding something interesting from us, you never see a wolf struggling in a trap while a full pack of its own stand around it in a formal square, waiting for it to escape or to die. I don’t know what to call it, this other thing that makes us different from the wolves.’
‘Papi, I think that’s called malice.’
‘But that’s not what it is. It’s functional, it’s a process, it’s what must happen to ensure that a group remains a group. It’s what happens when something inside you cancels out your outer appearance and you show yourself not to belong. That’s what makes us different from the wolves; a body may appear as one of us and not be treated as one of us. Three categories of treatment instead of one. Person, God, and beast. And no term for what’s at the heart of it. Well, German’s the language of ideas. I’ll ask Chabella,’ Papi said, and I knew that he wouldn’t.
When Papi looks at Tomás trying to fight his reflux, I can see how darkly simple his pain is. My brother did not get his co-ordination from Papi. Papi was a bad dish washer and bad at keeping stacked crockery close to his body — he would forget his limits, place his hands higher and let the bottom of the stack go to pieces on the floor. Or if it was cutlery he had to wash them all over again. He didn’t think of money as money; he thought of it as a way to get books, going over title lists in his head over and over again, returning to the places where he felt strongest. Cuba was the restaurant kitchens and the narrow, high platform on which he moved. Whenever he cut his knuckles on knives and potato peelers hidden in the dishwater, the pain always came very late.
For a long time my Papi did not realise that hunger was the reason why he had to keep touching things to stop them floating away from him. When Chabella first met my Papi his eyes were still too big; prolonged malnutrition is hard to shake off.
History books: Papi stubbornly scratched surfaces to look for Africa. He knew that his friends hid dismay behind their teasing, that they wondered where the black boy was in him, the snap-back, the physical intelligence. But he had the snap-back; it was in his head.
When my Papi was Tomás’s age he would not listen to the restaurant owners’ comments that began: ‘The good thing about you morenos is that you can work! God, but can you work. . on and on.’ He didn’t listen, but because he didn’t sneer, people didn’t know what he was thinking.
Papi saw a babalawo cry. Papi saw a babalawo come out into the street and stretch himself out on the ground because his daughter had died. He had come to heal her because under Batista no one poor could get taken care of unless they knew someone in authority. But that babalawo could do nothing against his daughter’s cancer, the cells that unsheathed crab claws and waged civil war on each other. The babalawo was dressed in civilian clothes but Papi recognised him; he had come from La Regla. Papi’s uncle worked the docks there, and Papi’s cousins had been blessed and made Santeros by this very babalawo. Papi told me that this babalawo was over six feet tall and white-haired, that he was very, very black. ‘Can you imagine?’ Papi mused.
I could not.
‘The other boys from the neighbourhood were playing some bastardisation of baseball, but they steered clear of this priest. They took their game down to the other end of the street. They said, “Juan, come in on Miguel’s team,” but like the bookhead I was, I was on my way to the library and I didn’t want to tell them. But to get to the library I had to pass that priest. He lay very still; he was like a stain on the ground. So black. After only a second of looking at him he became something very simple to me, something just hurting on the ground, something with no other thoughts. I think I could have stamped on him and he would not have understood what I had done.