PEARL

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                           PEARL OF THE ANTILLES

    

     Cuba's Adam is not asleep tonight. He is seventy-two years old and never sleeps more than a few fitful hours at a time.  He is able to feel the eyes of the world tickling gently on his skin or brushing an internal organ.  Anonymous people know it as the chill of someone walking on their grave, and that haunting would keep them awake, but they are not fleetingly in the mind's eye of a million people in any given day, an awareness that continues over time zones into dreams, and so they have not become inured to it as he has.

     He knows a comet has tipped out of its orbit a billion miles from the sun.  That is what he feels.  In the last two years two comets have ghosted past.  He does not remember any comets before these and then two, one right after the other.  He felt their first dives as well, but at the time did not recognize this feeling at the pit of his stomach; a feeling of almost losing his balance, as if he has just caught himself in the act of missing a stair while his stomach and adrenal glands continue to plummet through their own glutinous ether.

     At seventy-two he is accompanied by a hectoring innuendo of instability, a "psst" from the margins. It is like the skittering of mice across the periphery of his vision.  Cuba is infested with mice and rats.  The mice enjoy the portentous omen of plague in the general economic collapse.  They adventure to the very center of rooms, stumped themselves to find a purpose for this brazenness, staring up at people with beady black eyes and tender, pink ears, their tiny faces still engraved with their species' congenital timidity. 

     Since the Sierra Maestro forty years ago he has worn a military uniform. Scrambling about in the mud, often running from shadows and will-o-the-wisps, fighting for months on end a feeling of irrelevance and play acting and mimicry; this was his military training. He adopted a military bearing and a romantic memory. The memory has been nationalized: the impeccable posture, the uniform like a body splint-this wobble threatens a living monument.

     There is a chill accompanying the small nausea of vertigo,  as if something is dissolving inside him and releasing an icy drop at its core.  And he can even say what that small object would have to be to create just that feeling: A pearl.  A pearl melting into quicksilver moonlight in his belly would create this feeling.

     Women have told him they can feel the moment of conception in their wombs.  Some with whom he spent no more than a night and who had other lovers say they felt this cold spark when they were with him and know this child is his.  At the time he thought they were just scheming to extort his attention.  The similarity of their stories made them seem the product of a gender cabal.  Now, he wishes he had been gullible enough to believe them.  Maybe from these children who issued from a chance so astronomically unlikely as to resemble fate, he could have expected the gratitude his acknowledged children had never shown. His were all so certain of their inevitability.  One daughter had absconded to the United States with stories of his inadequate fathering.  And his ex-wives, all of them sarcastic and disillusioned.

     The picture is absurd, but he soothes himself on occasion with an image of this far strewn extended litter, all naked and torpid inside Edenic squalor, the toddlers and adolescents as brown as soil, his harem of brides all with full nursing breasts.

     He had lain with them in the villages, the dogs yapping and the old bells in the crumbling church towers sounding a solitary, flat, archaic note in answer to the wind, and he may well have been closer then than ever again to wresting a pure generation from the Cuban clay.

     When this third comet arrived he would be on his deathbed.

     The Yankee dollar is again the official currency of Cuba.  Stuffed into the fists of betters at the cockfights.  The prostitutes are back. They look the same as he remembers them from the fifties, from Batista. It is undeniable, they are happier than anyone else on the island, except for, maybe, the children, who always enjoy the windfall of laxity chaos brings.  He has not visited a primary or secondary school in the last five years.  Pie-bald walls, plaster flaking like impetigo.  A few old books warped with humidity, the children outgrowing their torn uniforms. He could not face them reciting the words of Marti, or himself, or Che.

     The young students were able to look directly at him.  He had felt furtively for the brass buttons of his tunic where it bulged tautly over his belly.  They were still buttoned, but glancing at their avid, flushed faces, the lush color of their eyes and lips and cheeks, he checked them again and again, worried each time he had forgotten to button them in the morning and his huge white belly with its rank thicket of wiry white hairs was peeking through.

     The eczema under his beard was on fire.  His hands were puffy as cow's udders with edema.  He kept looking at one little boy with the pale skin of a Christian martyr, but he could not bare the child's return glance into his pink rimmed eyes.

     "Let me say at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love", the boy recited.  His eyes were enormous, he was so thin, and to make matters worse, all the boys had had their heads shaved to the scalp to combat lice, which exaggerated the size of their eyes even more. 

     His Latin people had such beautiful eyes. Filled with tragedy.  But there has always been something else there too, a creamy thickening of the white, and a nearly oily sheen to the tears.  Their eyes do not gleam like gems but have a bovine languor in them, a fleshy opaqueness in the globes.

     And their skin, so luxurious.

     Felicia Vargas once again is just his social secretary. She has very little to do.  He almost never leaves the presidential estate.  The few people he sees are his doctors.  He spends hours in the courtyard looking at the carnival of tropical flowers and palms, stretched out on a lounge chair in his uniform with his black paratrooper boots laced to the top, his face abandoned to the expression the totality of old age has printed on it: Horror, disgust, a mendicant melancholy. No one dares to disturb him or has the heart to do it.  It is the boots mostly, highly polished. No one could stand it if he called them a name from his past or flinched at a sudden stranger.  A steward in white coat brings a sweating glass from time to time, filled with a pastel colored fruit juice, places it gently on the table beside the President, and removes the old one on his silver tray.

     Felicia has reached her middle fifties inside the penumbra of his neglect. Five years have passed since she last slept in his bed. For five years before that not a week would go by where he would not call her for a late night re-briefing about the next days schedule, and keep her until downy sunlight came through the louvers.

     He was a surprisingly passive lover. She could not list other presidents or generals as past bed mates, but based on his authority and his familiar, public presence she anticipated a brief, hostile exercise, like being an over-ridden horse, and because of the complete contrast, his awkwardness and stilted constraint seemed almost clairvoyantly tender.  She had even fallen in love with him, partly from being spared-not pain or humiliation but the endless reassurances of virility a big black woman has to give or the false mothering-but mostly for sharing an equality with the nation's president that pleased her ego.

     She was nearly a quarter century younger than he, a strong, healthy woman whose smooth black skin glowed and whose shoulders were broad and round, and he had stroked her firm muscles in an unheated reverie, and it was only after hours of soliloquy, much of it rather ridiculous commiseration for the life he imagined she had suffered, that he was able to loosen up or thought well enough about himself to appropriate her body.

     He became much freer with her, even ribald, nipping her bulbous rump, his monologues taking on a nearly drunken flow punctuated by laughter. His facial expressions became operatic with relieved emotion and a sated insouciance saturated his limbs.

     Soon after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union they had undressed together as they had for the all the previous years. She never found him waiting in bed, but as if they would surprise themselves each time with their need for each other, they would begin with a reading of tomorrow's schedule at his desk where he would finally take her hand in a gallant gesture and after a nuptial kiss walk each other to the bed.  She knew he saw the skit as courtesy, a proof of his respect and appreciation, and consideration for her volition, while re-playing his expertise and irresistibility as a lover. 

     From the opposite side of the bed he would watch her undress.  She placed her clothes on the waiting chair carefully, revealing her body with its stalwart buoyancy.  Best of all was how she consigned herself to the white sheet, launching herself as smoothly as a swan, with the same poise, but with none of the hauteur: Ideal, but generous and familiar.

     This time he thought he saw sympathy in her eyes as he removed his uniform, even pity. He had never noticed it before, although a wry forbearance is usually part of a mature women's ardor, and he had suddenly felt shy about the gap in their ages. He started re-buttoning his tunic, wondering for the first time why he should always remove his pants first. It seemed unnatural, and he thought  it was because he had abandoned his legs and hams a long time ago and retreated upward to the last keep above the rising waters, and besides his head and shoulders which would compose his official bust, the rest, including even the fount of his virility, had been dismissed from judgment.  He must look foolish.  She was already on the bed, floating above it on the very edge of her body, as if only her nimbus of health touched the sheet.  

     It was unthinkable to send her away, and after his hesitation he continued undressing. For the first time, she left his bed while it was still dark, and he never called her back, although he was too principled to have her replaced as his appointments secretary.  If it was principle.  Their relationship was common knowledge.  He could not have faced his house staff, let alone his coterie of advisors, if he surrendered to interpretations of personal whims ruling his actions.

     Only he failed to notice his curt petulance and icy formality with her, how he became theatrically arch whenever she was around, over dignified, like an old maricon, or to notice she introduced thicker fabrics, and autumnal, spinsterish cuts into her wardrobe to publicly accept the blame and to join him in the failure that had been the threshold of old age.

     He cauterized the wound by concluding the relationship had been largely political. He had to forget most of what it actually had been to conclude this, but he did have to forget or else fret with that rosary of trivial enormities that is the residue of an affair for any man.

      He had used her to hammer the Russians.

     The Russians were lazy pigs. Everyone on the island called them the "stinkers" because the fat slobs sweated all day and never bathed.  There were always a few staying as guests at the Presidential estate; he could not even get away from them at night.  Usually, they were drunks with distended stomachs and tuberous noses overlaid by a roseate veil of ruptured capillaries. They had a slovenly sensuality, a slothful rut that seemed perfectly realized for the first time in their lives when they were with a Negro.  They passed through mulattoes like they were watered rum, and could be seen any day in moribund rookeries on the beach, fat corpses in skimpy racing trunks laying in state, tended by Negro girls so black the whites of their eyes flashed, who greased their moon glow stomachs with big, strong hands, their breasts barely snagged in their bras by their nipples.

     The Russians who had audiences with the President of Cuba never seemed impressed by the event. Though they never exerted themselves to convey the opposite, it was hard to believe there was no design to their rudeness, and that bellicose clumsiness was just national character. But let Felicia enter a room even behind his back, and he could see the event of her presence pass a bolt through their bodies.  He made sure she pointedly had nothing to do except advertise her availability to him.  She did not so much as hold a note pad, but passed in and out of the room in concupiscent indifference, a brimming surplus.

     He had lost much losing her. Sometimes when sex had worked its paradox on him, concentrating his attention until it was a solid object inside him but was directed entirely onto the spectacle of her powerful femaleness, she had validated his place in Cuban history. For a while this third body into whom they had passed lingered between them, they were the chimera of Cuba redeemed.

     Nobody in Cuba knew of his pre-occupation with rats.  They had conquered the island.  They had decimated the populations of flamingoes, spoon-bills and egrets, eating the eggs out of the nests.  They had the balance of acrobats.  It was a common occurrence to spot one using telephone wires as a bridge across a street, the sudden explosion of pigeons or ravens off the wire heralded their passage.

     Could he confess, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that a true revolutionary might be guided by a vision of Cuba returned to actual paradise-at least in his ecstatic moments when the image of a factory just would not do-and that this image might be-for lack of imagination perhaps, or out of the same imagination which tuned the hand and voice of the primitive- found already in the impossible annunciation of pink flamingoes and angel white egrets too large to be inhabiting trees?   

     Such anthems were left to the poets, they were encouraged to be barkers of the messianic inside the rational, but for him only the new creature he had made with Felicia had been left.  For the rest, it was the rats. Though they waddled along the walls of buildings in broad daylight, for the most part they continued their outlaw lives.  The cane fields were theirs.  At one time workers had feared snakes in them, but now as they hacked their way through a harvest, legions of rats abandoned the field on the other side.  At first, their philosophers, nosing out of the lush green far ahead of the advancing machetes, but as the square was reduced to a remnant strip, out darted the panicked remainder, scooting to the next field at their fastest gait, which brought them onto their strong hind legs for a second, as if their feet were out racing them.

     Their nation of sly operators and sardonic realists was flourishing in the new Cuba. And he no longer had strength to fight the nagging suspicion that this was a result of Marxism.  Of course, of course, it was only superstition.  Had they only had the money for eradication programs, of course, but the rats were not Cuban.  They had been brought to the island in European boats. Norwegian rats, weighing a half kilo, with the somber dispositions of Norwegians.  From the black wharves of Scandinavia where the freezing rain swept in off the North Sea and the gelid sea worried at the stony shore like a corpse grinding its molars.

     How else could they be thriving except inside the Marxism’s transplanted North?  Catholicism was the opiate of the people, it provided hallucinations, but it was a Latin export.  Marxism imported winter.  The grey beards admonishing the ripe skin of youth. And he was its agent because...because it was the only thing the Americans could not stomach.  Certainly, they were the victims of the propaganda of their own rich, there was a plan to this allergy of theirs, but for the greatest part of their people who owned nothing except their debts and who would have been well served by class consciousness, people who consumed tacos by the ton and Zen mediation by the hour, communism was the only product of the planet or the human mind they could not digest.  And not being eaten by the titan of the North was the necessary project for any Latin American.

     So difficult not to love the Americans.  They were so ridiculous. Try as they might, aspiring to apocalypse to reach a conclusion, they could never actually be anyone, and their confusions and tyrannies and crimes could not help but bathe the world of its sins in amnesia.  Nobody could resist their millennial, obliterating innocence.

     Marti himself had chosen exile in New York. It was something a Cuban could chose to do. The counter-revolutionaries in Miami made the same choice because it was understood that the time in North America did not count. No one aged there. You dyed your hair. You reserved the right to come back and Cuba was obligated to maintain your immediate relevance until your return.

     The Caribbean is like Leda, loved by a god, his brow reflected in the object of his desire. A mirage.  In some lights it disappears, when the geometry of sight is diffused into metaphor or proven to be longing.

     Every sunset old mulattoes come to the shore of a broad bay where fishing boats are pulled up onto the sand.  Into the bay they throw shell fragments they sift from the sand and plastic bottles and other trash that washes up. This is part of Santeria, the local religion, vaguely transcribed from faint African echoes, and improvised from town to town without a written canon, looking childishly haphazard and crazed. The setting is beautiful. There are whole seasons when the bay lies utterly placid and the boats are invisibly suspended as if floating in air and when over the course of the afternoon, light alchemizes the bay into successive sheets of exotic metals or Oriental silks, and the stick silhouettes toss flotsam into a Byzantine mosaic of celestial gold and turquoise.

     Up and away into this Tarot card or astrological chart the rafters float. To America, that ball of gas. The Caribbean is no border it is a passage into fantasy. They would need the Atlas Mountains, not the peaks but the earth freighted burden designated by their name, to stop the migration.   

     They are leaving in inner tubes wearing only bathing trunks supplied with nothing more than a bottle of beer. The buildings are all crumbling.  Rain, wind, hurricanes. This climate can infect stone with rot like old bread. If only...he thinks as he looks with offense and resignation at the estrous of the courtyard...They were all perfect again.  If they were naked.  Nothing less than Eden can prosper.  He no longer blames water damage for eroding the buildings; it has passed that.  He has seen large chunks hammered off, whole buildings collapsed inward. The sun itself has taken up the cudgel and is bludgeoning Habana into powder.  This is not something he could have foreseen or which any system of reasoning can postpone. Weather as agent of a general hostility in nature towards human strategies, as an ambassador of proportion or futility is one thing, but light itself the reified essence of mind, the purest ideal the materialist may imagine and still maintain his objectivity, for it to take up arms is to know enlightenment ends by bursting into insanity.

     He believes he can almost face death. He must labor at minimizing it. The scatological tropes the old comrades used have lost their potency, waning with redundancy. It is only with half-honesty and no enthusiasm that he can declare it a pain in the ass. The moronic un-philosophy which is the hard tack pension of an old soldier is sufficient for the beginning of the day when he sheds the rust of aging that accrues over night, but inadequate to face the night itself with its briny dip into dreams and darkness.    

     He may end a crack-pot. That is the danger of being spread across the island so that he must personally suffer what nature and reality inflict on any geographic promontory and especially an island with its predisposition for solipsism.

     The dogs have reverted to curs.  They roam in dissolute packs, the separate vertebrae stitched into their skins.  They know the barren stores of generosity left in the human spirit.  Some neighborhoods where people used to work have been abandoned to them, and they have formed their own gangs, some sly and treacherous, others debauched and indolent.

     Whole districts are periodically plunged into darkness when the electrical grid fails, and lack of oil for the generating plants means that only the tourist neighborhoods have power after ten at night.

     The sky falls up and the stars rain down.  The moon rolls through the streets.  If he chooses he can walk to the perimeter, as far from the blotting drone of the generator as he can get, and hear the drums and chanting of the Santeria in the streets of the sunken city. 

     He had forgotten how palpably dark the night is for the undeveloped regions of the world. Not since childhood has its absence been accompanied pressing fathoms and claustrophobia.   He can do it now if he wishes, now that Felicia has been banished:  Open his eyes at a late hour as he did as a boy, hardly able to feel the smoothly sliding lids, and look into the medium where the phosphorescence of nightmares burns.

     In 1976, on the two hundredth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, Cuba began construction of the July 19th Institute for Technological Transformation.  He dug the first shovel full for the foundation and kept the workers at bay for four hours while he spoke about this leap into the future.

     Within the year several glass skinned buildings were completed and a greensward carpeted the area around them, traversed by gracefully wending cement paths; everything conforming to the pan-national conception of technical hygiene.  Upon occupation the air conditioning proved useless and the windows could not be opened. By ten in the morning every one had flooded out the impressive glass doors and flopped down in the grass, wrenching off the thin ties garroting their throats, grounds-keepers sweeping around them on motorized lawn mowers. 

     The shifts were switched to nights.  Beetles pinged against the glass and moths tiptoed up the panes, their wings fluttering and their eyes-the size of a gem in a watch-ruby sparks.  Beyond the few bleached feet was interstellar black.

     He had believed in the purgative of pure reason, but had little to suggest as an immediate purpose for the Institute, only an inspired vision of technicians in thin ties.  And this was realized, though the satire of sexually active Carribeans in glandless garb was never overcome. Once exiled to the necromancer's midnight hours, the staff had nothing to do.  They brought coffee, then rum, and finally lovers, and cooked and played cards and went outside the aquariums to watch the bats lance insects in their milky glow.

     This was less than twenty years into the Revolution and before the evangelical invasion of the personal computer.  The seed of his vision was the talismanic Swiss watches worn by his father and every other businessman associated with American firms. Beneath the crystals a precise cosmos glowed.

     Before the buildings were abandoned and the lawns reclaimed by shrubs and vines, and the shattering of the optical illusion of sky reflected on the glass facades, the last rumored purpose for the institution had been as a biological weapons lab.  Only the idea existed in the grand incubator, but while the idea of sterility lived and he conferred with his biologists on the feasibility, Cuba again stood on the brink of the world, at a vantage  point holding prophesy over the whole globe, and in a livid, St. Elmos's fire, the Revolution returned to him.

     For thirty eight years he had not been able to think about himself.  Now he could remember from his boyhood the strange beginnings of the very self-consciousness that had been submerged in national destiny.  Once again there was the longing interrogation from his eyes in the mirror.  The Presidential estate was devoid of mirrors in the public halls, there is something innately pessimistic in these portals opening to mortality, a vitreous melancholy. To glean a figure in the corner of the eye as it glances back startled to be discovered, is to whisper with ancestral ghosts.

     In his bathroom is one small mirror in a plain wood frame hanging on the wall by a cord that makes a triangle above it.  Again, his eyes become mired in the gluey varnish on the pane.  He moves his head from side to side and the pink-rimmed, filmy orbs remain fixed, praying something out of the prison of the skull, as they had to his confusion when he was seven years old.  Again, the intense sweetness and pain, the Calvary of the personal.

     For nearly forty years he disappeared.  He was the state.  His health was the sugar harvest.  He was battered by hurricanes. He visited the spring known as the Sangre de Cristo and could feel the sweet elixirs in his own aorta.  The villagers waited for him to love the fern shaded pool, stricken with anticipation of his happiness, and when he did, when he blessed their gift and returned it to them unblemished, they laughed and shouted and slapped themselves on the back.

     In 1961 he walked to the edge of the sea which slid to a halt at the toes of his paratrooper boots and fists balled on his hips looked north to the USA where the entire military was on red alert in preparation for an invasion, and felt the firmness of his thighs and buttocks.

     A wind traversed the shore and on the sand varnished by the brush of the neap tide, legions of small crabs sidled away in their wicked, mincing way, their black eyes at the end of their stalks regarding him with Noe paranoia, and he turned and with the sky thickening into evening velvet as a background, said to the soldiers from the shore battery waiting behind him-men he had led out of their bunker to the sea-with the sea behind him disappearing into night and the shore wind filling their ears with intimations of tempest or prophesies of eternal emptiness, said to these boys whose faces plead with him for some of his courage or place in history, faces with broken expressions like faces looking for themselves in shards of glass: "Fuck their whores of mothers", and they cheered.

     Forty years without glimpsing himself before he was Cuba.  The anniversaries of the victory when he stood before thousands in the great plaza and their love was released without limit, when the life that had been put in them lost all its sour taint and roared forth its destiny, its covenant with sacrifice and brotherhood, and he dissolved into eternity.    

     Raul, his brother, comes with a reminder of some unpleasant business. Just seeing Raul has become unpleasant, the news is always bad anyway.  Raul is eight years younger, but it is not enough anymore to lift his spirits.  They look too much alike.  Raul is shorter, but they are variations on a common theme.  Raul has gone mostly gray, sooner certainly than he did, or else eight years ago he was not noticing such things in himself.  Recently, he has become quarrelsome with his brother, pecking at his appearance.  Raul pouts under the abuse. He is here, the Minister of Defense because it was impossible to leave him behind. Better to hide him among efficient people who could do the work, and whose ambitions in the threatening positions they occupied could be monitored by his faithful acolyte.

     Look at his fat ass, the conquistador's Spanish ass, female, and unfortunately, the Castro family ass.  Short, stocky legs, the President's height is in his torso, long, like a dachshund, which Raul lacks. Raul moves like the President, even more so when he is in his brother presence and his servile instincts animate him. Is the President himself that close to being insignificant? If his face were slightly redrawn, a half inch deducted from its length and a half inch broader as it is on his brother, so that its air of Gothic portent was missing-was everything really that chancy?  Both brothers have their father’s bushy eyebrows arched in surprise over their sad little eyes. His father suffered painful flatulence in his final decades. His grave bearing-an air he has inherited more faithfully than Raul-quashed any humor. Still, posture and disdain can not overrule bad gas, and its memory lingers and corrodes. It is becoming nearly unbearable to see Raul and to hear the heckling reinterpretation of his entire rise to power as warped genetic destiny and personnel compensation.

     Rivera has been conscious for nearly a week and the President has yet to visit, Raul reminds him.  Certainly, he must make a visit.  No? Remember he was in the Sierra Maestra with them.  One of the old guard.

     Rivera is older than the President, or was until two weeks ago when he shot himself twice in the left breast and so must be counted as only two weeks old, having put the final period on his first biography. The President has long concluded that it is caffeine alone that keeps him going by agitation.  A man of seventy-five who jerked about with such spastic panic would have died yeas ago from a coronary if he depended on his heart. It was not a vital organ in him. Blood does not reach Rivera's icy extremities.  He wears two sweaters and a herringbone coat, and his skin is dry and scaly and powdery white.  He might as well have tried to shoot a fly as that fidgety organ living on subsisting on sugar and espresso.  But there should have been infection if there were anything but book dust inside his chest, and in Cuba there was a drastic shortage of antibiotics, let alone the full compliment of machinery for intensive care.

     Even in youth Rivera was never young.  An over sized, brittle cricket. There were times when his presence alone-a fully devolved species of urban vermin, a beady-eyed neurotic stamped with an expression of anxiety, blowing dust off his food before eating and looking for rocks to sit on so he would not be bit by snakes or fleas or goo his pants  with mud-had parodied the gallantry of the campaign.

     And now Rivera has been spit out by death as tasteless gristle, and the President cannot stomach the thought of visiting him at the hospital.  He has taken his own trips there recently and breaks out of the carbolic sanctum as from flood waters, hitting his driver a blow on his square shoulders and breaking open the flask of rum he has smuggled into his room and passing it between them and lighting up a forbidden cigar.  However, if Rivera had been hit by one of the ‘fifties’ American cars that have found the afterlife in Cuba, he could have stood the visit, but Rivera is widely known to have shot himself because Cuba broke his heart. It is a kind of challenge, a martyrdom that has confused the President and ignited defensive rages. That sheaf of straw loved Cuba more than the President?  How diminished Cuba must be if the quirky Rivera is all who is left of her passionate suitors: a dowager that is the object of arid quarreling and reprise among her waddle-necked coterie.

    Rivera had been given the ornamental title Minister of Cultural Heredity, a dead end where his feverish pedantry could harmlessly burn out in the muck. His mission had been to splice the history for the Revolution onto that of Marti, a recombinant narrative which had no urgency until the collapse of the Soviet Union when this book worm had to come up with a vaccine against moral collapse. 

     Rivera had sent him pages and pages of suggestions from his hospital bed, capitalizing on his Resurrection, the arm that wielded the pen garlanded by an intravenous tube.   He overflowed with stale ideas that were embarrassingly familiar old vows.  Some intellectuals have a soft, avuncular or pediatric voice, but Rivera's was slimy, oozing insinuation and superiority until frustrated when it sharpened to derision and hysterical excitement.  It managed to wither even the script on his pages whose crippled forms seemed to import Rivera's stale breath. 

     His return fell like a stone on the President's heart. Surely, at least in the gap between the first and second shot when Rivera knew he had had the resolve to finish with his life and now had the chance to see it lying supine behind him, when he had jerked himself from its gluey hold, from the insults, regrets, and rejected love, surely during that suspended time when all the leashes had been cut, he should have been visited by some revelation.  How could even the stark confirmation of his absurdity which had propelled him to the second shot have left him in tact and with this second wind for cant?

      That spite would even survive death.

     After Rivera he began pursuing the Pope. The politics were immaculate. The Americans had destroyed all the environments where soul might live and had to believe they fought on the side of the angels or be damned. They loved the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Cheyenne Medicine men, or any and all living remnants from a purse that was once sung of for containing something worth more than gold. If he could get the Pope to Cuba, maybe they would relent a little.

     This was the foxy Fidel of yore.

     He had an audience with him in Rome. The feelers he put out were warmly received.  There were Catholics in Cuba who had been without the Church's sustenance for more than a generation. The Pope, too, had his motivations.

     He had decided he would not address him as Your Holiness. That would be affirming the institution which had a dubious history in Latin America. He addressed him merely as "father" as if he were a rural priest, maybe even one of the many who had discovered that working for the social causes of the poor was the true holiness. The Pope accepted it as completely natural. It was Fidel who immediately regretted the term, finding it tore at his heart while Holiness would have only peeved him or tickled his irony.  Since the Revolution it had seemed necessary for confirming his own destiny that he even call his own father by his name as long as he was alive, and when "padre" emerged from his throat he melted.

     The Pope was immune to slights.  He may even have been naive. Though only a few years older, he was already inside that frail era of old age whose appearance shares so much with infancy.  It was easy to attribute innocence to him. He asked the others to leave the room, and in elegant Spanish said that seeing the President was personally for him one of the most pleasing experiences of his Papacy and might he call him Fidel since they were in private, all the while using the singular rather than the Papal plural.        

     The Pope travelled with a retinue of aides and Church officials.  When he met with them, the President became bitter.  If he had an entourage like this the Revolution would have triumphed everywhere.  They made him feel like a rube.

     The leader of a country must deal with cannibals, murderers and torturers.  Every nation has summoned them. Fear glues a nation together.

     Men from Argentina whose greatest pride was their immediate association with actual German Nazis and who imitated their mannerisms, even their German accents were floppy as clowns beside the Pope's men.

     The Pope's men were absolutely evil.  Only those working for God could be certain enough to allow themselves absolutely everything.  The Pope was their salvation.  They pampered his innocence as if he were a pre-mature baby who must be fed sterilized sugar through tubes.  Any signs of vigor in the old man made them fear for their necessity and justification. They sent for his doctors to check his temperature and pulse.  His increasing frailness was the axiom for their ruthlessness and their angelic reprieve. The Church had lasted two thousand years. Outside of its rituals, it was the least sentimental institution in the world. 

     They stayed at the Presidential Palace.  The President and his guard and a few immediate aides might remain, but everyone else would have to find other accommodations during their visit. Since there were more of them than the estate could hold, some of them consented to staying at the home of the Vice President or the head of the armed forces, provided these houses were completely vacated, except for furniture, of course.

     The President existed like a butler in his own residence, summoned to answer for the poor plumbing by a man in his sixties of chilling, exquisite handsomeness who dressed in three thousand dollar Italian suits.

     The third night, the President in a pique ordered a cigar brought to him.  He would smoke it alone in the garden. 

     The Pope appeared in a white dressing gown, his bald head glowing, an apparition, as beatific as an idiot child or a senile grandfather.

     How could he be alone?  He must have escaped, padding out on his bare feet, purposely not donning his complex regalia so he would not disturb his slumbering keepers.  It must be very late, though the President had not noticed, and everyone except the military guard, who were like obelisks, was asleep.  The two old men did not sleep.  During the day they would nod and doze.    The President snuffed out the cigar, it belched a last cloud of smoke.  He was swamped in feelings of gratitude, so long unfelt they seemed childish.  Having been slighted and shunted about since his arrival, now, in the whole world, he had the Pope all to himself.

     He gestured towards the garden, to himself alone in the dark.  His people in their ten thousands had shown they loved this man more than their President.

     Gigantic awkwardness hardly seems the vehicle for revelations, but if suddenly the entire structure of character collapses in inadequacy, the next move emerging from the hollow is no less than a leap.

     The President bent to kiss the Pope's ring, and then took him by that same puffy hand which had strewed blessings on the heads of millions, and walked with him to a small out building on the estate grounds, in size similar to a lavish family crypt: A stone chapel in conspicuous disuse, its crenellations split off or reduced to lumps by age and car exhaust.  He had the sole key.

     The Pope seemed to have trouble walking. The President slowed his pace in consideration; then realized his guest was sliding his feet on the lawn, savoring the wet grass brushing his bare soles.

     Inside, the dark chamber smelled of decaying lime mortar and tallow, an unhealthy, dry mist, and both old men coughed.  The President found a box of matches on a ledge near the door and with blind rote began lighting tapirs around the chapel.  A sticky incense rose from them along with a coven of whirling shadows.  These were church candles, originally three feet tall, burnt down to nubbins and surrounded by glaciers of melted wax, with ivory icicles hanging from the cornices. 

     The President motioned the Pope in from the threshold. There was an altar in a wall and on it a large jar containing a yellowish solution.  Floating in amniotic ghostliness and serenity were a pair of hands.

     "Mea Culpa", the President said. "These are the hands of my brother, Che."

     He knelt and placed the Pope's hands on his head.              "I killed him.  I never loved anyone but him. I drove him off.  You can not know how beautiful he was.  It is not possible for someone that beautiful to live long. They may not grow old. It would be sacrilege. But, I was the agent of his death.  We were brothers. In the Sierra, before our success. I was as beautiful.  No, I was never as beautiful, but it was true that he was not more beautiful, within the cause when we were willing to spend our lives, when we lived close to death, he was only the most like us, like us all. He did not rise above us, he was all of us together.  Because we were together and willing to die, each of us, even cowards, because we were together during that time when we would have washed ourselves by our deaths, all together we were beautiful, as if we were a colony of lepers, that is how we are all damaged inside, but one with one ear missing is joined to another who has the other ear, and ten fingers and ten toes are culled from among us, and a smooth skin is made from patches, and the result is one beautiful man who is only our willingness to die for something, to believe.  He was that completed man whose death could be a tragedy.

     Details. I sent him to Bolivia where, of course, he would be killed.  Details. I killed him the moment the Revolution succeeded and we had to make plans to live. From then on we became old men scared of death.

     There would have been no revolution without him. Because we loved him we could act. We had talked for years, and then he came, and in a minute we knew it was possible.  We had not been destroyed.  We could love.

     I slept with him in the Sierra. It is the only thing I am still glad of. No woman needs our sympathy as much as a man.  Sometimes we had nothing but the clothes on our backs, wet from rain and all our plans for Cuba disappeared into mist and we existed in the mud. Of course, a corpse does not shiver.  What can I hope, and I killed him, but consider, the cold mud, that is all, the mud, and the night and the leaves dripping as if we were not there.  And he shivering in my arms.  From that, one might hope a little that it might be possible for some, not myself but for some, to actually do it, to comfort, against that, if by nothing more, finally, if by nothing more than, than shiveing together. Tomorrow, a hundred thousand, at least.  A band. There is an iron mural of him in the square, seven stories tall. You will need a microphone to be heard.  It is all taken care of.

     "Forty years. You understand. A lot of noise.  But, otherwise, if I stop for an hour, silence and mud.  By now he is dust.  I can no longer tell the difference between light and melting ice since the heart, the heart of all things, is certainly forced to love. I may come to believe he melted into the dark, his murder, you see, no worse crime than creation."

 

     The President accompanies the Pope to the airport where he boards his special jet.  The plane sits out on the goopy tarmac, a red carpet leading up its gangway.   The Pope's retinue, the air conditioned cabin looming with its suspended instant stretching straight back to Rome, can not wait to kick Cuba's dust from their shoes. Several scrape the thin soles of their Italian shoes against the first stair up the gangway to remove any contagion. 

     Although unobserved as yet by astronomers, the light made of ice crystals is falling towards the earth.  Its arrival will not be necessary for confirmation; that voyager of eternally fading light journeying endlessly through empty black at best is only an approximation of this eternal theorem of the soul.