never turned anyone away. Maybe he should have."
"He sheltered people."
"He sheltered dissenters. That was enough to get him killed, but I don't know."
"Who killed him, Armando?"
"I saw the American pull the trigger. I saw him," Armando explained. "I don't know who hired him or why."
Even now Saturnina tried to imagine the moment when the American with the thin mustache had called out her son's name, Tomás Olivera Díaz, and how Tomás had stepped forward, with that frankness that was intrinsic to his character, and discovered a cocked revolver. Not a single friend standing on the dock with Tomás that day could explain to Saturnina what had happened to the American, who seemed to have been absorbed by the chaos that followed. She knew with an abiding faith that her son, in his last flicker of consciousness, had recognized and forgiven him. The boy who helped everyone the way she had taught him would have forgiven this, too. She imagined the American, lit cigarette in hand, standing in a far corner of the dark interrogation room that last time Tomás had been arrested by Batista's men and then abruptly released.
"They didn't want to kill him there," Armando explained.
"But they did kill him, didn't they?" Saturnina asked.
"Yes, Saturnina."
"Are you sure, Armando?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure he's dead?"
"Yes, Saturnina."
"But why, Armando?"
"I don't know, Saturnina."
At her insistence, Armando recounted to her over and over again the details of what had happened until Saturnina could imagine the burnished revolver's soft gleam, smell the acrid cloud of powder expanding through the air, and feel the pressure of the stranger's finger on the trigger. Armando told her the story of her son's assassination, and with each retelling the details would reverberate within Saturnina, heaving, fading, reconstituting themselves within the ebb and flow of her obsessive desire to witness Tomás's last breath, as she had witnessed his first. She had gone to the city morgue with his wife Vania and his friend Armando to identify his body, but she had never been able to reconcile the son she loved and raised with the body lying on that table, the flesh of her son's face as hard and cold as its metal surface.
"This is not my son. I don't know who this is."
"It is," Armando and Vania explained.
"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! " Saturnina called out now, as she had that day in the morgue.
The fragments of Armando's story, so difficult to accept, began to dance across the shifting surface of her mind, hurtling her backward and forward through time, until eventually she began to insist to Vania, Tomas's young widow, that Tomás would rise, like Lazarus, awakening to this world again.
"This son of mine will come back," she insisted.
In 1959, still nursing the terrible wound of Tomás's death, she and Vania poured into the streets of Havana along with every race and class of Cuban. They were celebrating the end of Batista and the arrival of Fidel— El Caballo, the Horse— who had descended from the Sierra Maestra like an avenging angel in green army fatigues and a long beard to liberate them all from Batista's puppet government, a regime whose brutality had been sanctified and financed by the United States. That very week Saturnina played charadas, but instead of putting her peso down on number 17, Lazarus, the beloved whom Christ raised from the dead, her favorite saint since Tomás's death, she played the number 1, the Horse.
" Saint Lazarus won. Paid 50 pesos."
She had spent countless hours explaining this irony of fate to her favorite mongrel, who rocked behind her on three legs, his white coat gray with fleas.
" Saint Lazarus," she would intone, her left eyebrow cocked meaningfully. "Not the Horse."
It was a bad omen. The Horse was not what he seemed. He would delay the arrival of Lazarus. Saturnina was certain. Fidel would not liberate them. He would be their torment, just as Batista had been. Saturnina remembered crying out to the skies, hoping her words would reach Tomás:
"You died fighting Batista. This puñetero Fidel is the same."
Today, however, something had shifted. She knew it. Rocking back and forth on her stairwell perch, she could see that the morning sky held new auguries. The bad omen of '59 had been undone. The Horse was gone. The promise of Saint Lazarus had come to pass. The tears rolled down Saturnina's ancient face. She had waited for what seemed an eternity, but her faith had been rewarded. Christ would raise Tomás. She had prayed, believing; and believing, she knew. Tomás would be back soon.
The sound of a trumpet blaring in the distance startled her. From the top of the broken stairwell, she looked down through the gauzy scrim of her cataracts at the entranceway far below and noticed an odd figure hovering there, glowing as white as the flesh of a coconut, his countenance aggrieved. It was the angel of the annunciation. She was certain of it.
"Pobresito," Saturnina whispered, trying to imagine the angel's burden. "I will do as you command. Don't be sad."
There was no time to dawdle. She must spread the message: Fidel had fallen, and her son Tomás would be here soon. She must tell La Milagrosa, one grieving mother to another.
C H A P T E R F I V E
Poor Justicio! The stranger's words had left him shattered. He walked back across the street to the garage where he had left the bicycle cab, mounted, and began pedaling away. To see the bodies of the Pérez boys tumbling to their deaths was like witnessing the deaths of his own two sons, the death of those hopes he had held in his heart for that generation born on the cusp of revolution. Justicio reflected on his conversation that very morning with Irma when he had expressed his well-worn lament. If all those boys had jobs and families and ambitions of their own, as his generation had, Justicio averred, they wouldn't drink all the time; they wouldn't be so morally and mentally stunted.
"¡Viejo, basta ya! We're all stunted," Irma reprimanded
him, blustering through the house as if her husband's laments could be shooed away like chickens.
Justicio hadn't heard her. He was biting into his dry morning biscuit and drinking his cup of café con leche to the dregs, recalling his old two-door Chevy Del Ray. When at last the car could offer nothing except worn parts to be sold on the black market, that's what he did: He sold them— carburetor, tires, spark plugs, steering wheel, mirrors, belts. Whatever had not disintegrated with use, Justicio sold bit by bit, eventually using the money to buy another vehicle, a Schwinn Spitfire with a two-seater cab welded to the back, a contraption composed of aluminum tubes and patched wicker and a canvas top with yellow and red stripes, long faded, and a tattered fringe, once bright white, that ran along its edges.
God has His ways, Justicio thought. He remembered looking down into his empty cup and hearing Irma on the rear balcony beating the bedroom rug mercilessly, his wife's way of expressing the inexpressible. Justicio smiled to himself, recalling the moment. We are given everything we need. The bicycle cab had allowed him to make a living
