Heretics Page 11

  “Or, it is also possible that the Jews wanted to seem like the Germans in order to leave behind the image of the stout-bellied business owner, miserly, petty, who counts each coin, thus achieving acceptance by the Germans … It’s not a coincidence that many German Jews totally assimilated, or nearly, and some even abominated Judaism, such as Marx, a Jew who even hated other Jews … The terrible thing, says the man with such disquieting opinions, is that, nevertheless, the German dream was quite the opposite: like the Jews in key things, in other words, being pure of blood and spirit as the Jews said they were; feeling superior, like the Jews, due to their condition as God’s people; being loyal to Laws that were thousands of years old; being a people, a Volk, like the national socialists said; and, thanks to all of those marvelous possessions, they became indestructible, like the Jews, who, despite not having a country and having been threatened with destruction thousands of times, had always survived. In short: being different, unique, special, thanks to God’s protection.”

  “I don’t really understand,” Conde admitted, “but it sounds logical. With a perverse logic, given what happened in Germany and in Europe…”

  “But there’s more … What led to the disaster and the Holocaust was that they were all wrong: the Jews, in wanting to be German without ceasing to be Jews, and the Germans in their aspiration to take the example of Jewish predestination and singularity. Something like that, although luckily not ending in tragedy, had already happened in Amsterdam when the Dutch Calvinists and Puritans found in the Jewish book the basis for enshrining their national singularity in myth, to explain the history of their national mystique as a chosen and prosperous people. In the Jews, they found a glorious parallel to their exodus and the foundation of a country … even the justification for becoming rich without moral or religious prejudice. Thus, they accepted the Sephardim expelled from Spain and Portugal and even let them practice their religion and build something as majestic and impressive as the Portuguese Synagogue, which is a futuristic variation of Solomon’s Temple, placed in the middle of Amsterdam. Why do you think Rembrandt and the rest of the painters of that time preferred to find themselves in Old Testament scenes…? Look, if being Jewish has come to mean something, it is precisely being the other, a way of being the other that, despite not having worked many times for the Jews, has survived three millennia of attacks. And that’s what the German national socialists most wanted: to be other and eternal, to have a feeling of belonging as strong as that of the Jews … And to achieve it, they had to make them disappear off the face of the earth.”

  “Things are getting sinister.”

  “Could be, in fact, they are,” Elias Kaminsky admitted. “Everything I’ve told you could fit together pretty well if you stop to think about it for a while, right? Look, my advantage lies in my being a peripheral Jew, in all senses, and although I belong, I don’t belong, although I know the Law, I don’t practice, and that gives me a certain distance and perspective to see certain things. What the Germans did with six million Jews, including what must have been my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my aunt, can’t be forgiven. But at the same time it requires an explanation, and the hate for other races or the death of Jesus Christ on the cross can’t cover it all in a process that ended up being so deep and so radical that it encompassed an entire continent. That’s why I like that explanation. I almost believe it…”

  The food put a pause to that conversation, which had veered off on paths too thorny for Mario Conde’s mental exhaustion. According to Elias, the chili sauce was excellent; Conde found the hogfish sauce to be a mediocre copy of one he tasted some time before at a modest eatery in Caibarién or of the one Josefina prepared with the stark simplicity implicit in the improvised but simultaneously fabulous combination of basic ingredients available to the poor fishermen who set a pot of water over a flame while cleaning the scales of a hogfish. To make it better, the former policeman had drizzled some hot sauce on it that was making him sweat, despite the restaurant’s freezing temperature.

  “When I told you about the Saint Louis”—Elias poured a new beer into his glass—“and you told me that you were ashamed to hear that story … well, a few years ago, the United States offered an apology to the Jews, but Cuba did not.”

  “Naturally,” Conde said, and reflected on the rest of his comments for a second. “We’re too proud to apologize. Besides, the past is in the past and no one today would ever think to apologize for something other people did, even if they were also Cuban … I’m ashamed of that story because I’m a first-rate moron.”

  Elias Kaminsky smiled, making the moment less dramatic.

  “By the way, something I can’t leave without doing is visiting the cemetery where Uncle Joseph is buried,” Elias said.

  “It must be one of the ones in Guanabacoa. Since there are two.”

  “Yes, one for the Ashkenazim and the other for the Sephardim.”

  “I’ve never visited them,” Conde admitted.

  “Are you on board?” Elias Kaminsky asked, relying on his mother’s lexicon again.

  “I’m on board,” Conde said. “But after dessert and coffee. That’s also part of my expenses,” he added, and lifted his arm to get any of the blasé waiters to actually deem them worthy of their attention.

  * * *

  Misinformed by a passerby for whom all Jews and all dead people were one and the same, Conde and Elias Kaminsky went to the Sephardic cemetery first. What they found was not encouraging in the least. Dusty tombstones, some of them broken, weeds growing everywhere, a crumbled wall, tombs cannibalized by the seekers of Jewish bones to round out the symbols in the ritual pots belonging to Cuban followers of Palo. Because, Conde knew all too well from his time with the police, the bone of a Chinese person or a Jew strengthened the power of the religious “accessories” of the paleros, even more so if it was for doing evil. But he didn’t comment on this to Elias Kaminsky.

  Fortunately, the Ashkenazi cemetery was a few blocks away, and since they chose to cover the distance by foot, Conde took advantage of the walk to keep satiating his unbridled curiosity.

  “Your parents left, but Uncle Pepe stayed. How did that happen?”

  “After the wedding, my father moved to my grandparents’ house, until they bought a little house in Santos Suárez. But his uncle stayed in the tenement for three or four more years. Until he got married before a notary and went to live with Caridad and Ricardito in a neighborhood called … I can’t remember now. When my father established himself in Miami, he asked Uncle Joseph if he, Caridad, and her son wanted to go live with them. But he said no, at his age, he didn’t have the will anymore to start over. He didn’t want to go anywhere, and less still to a country where a black woman couldn’t live like a normal person. He would stay in Luyanó. Could it be Luyanó?”

  “Uh-huh, yes, Luyanó.”

  “Well, he rented a little house with two bedrooms, one for him and Caridad, and another for Ricardito. He put his sewing machine and his tools in a shed at the back of the house, but he almost exclusively worked in Brandon’s workshop by then, until communism came and the workshop, Brandon, and nearly all the Jews disappeared … Uncle died here, in 1965, before turning seventy years old. In the end, he was earning a living by fixing shoes…”

  “What about Caridad?”

  “My parents kept in touch with her until she died, in 1980 or so, around then. Whenever he could, my father sent her a package of clothing, medicine, something to eat. It was very complicated at the time.”

  “What about Ricardito?”

  “As far as I know, he became a doctor. He was able to finish high school before 1959, thanks to Uncle Joseph. Later, it was easier for him and he went on to the university. But since my father left here, he was never in direct contact with Ricardito, he only received news of him through Caridad. She explained to my father that for Ricardito, especially as a doctor, it wouldn’t help him to have a relationship with people who lived in Miami.”

  �
�I know that story well,” Conde confirmed.

  “Me too. Your friend Andrés told me about that. He spent years without a word from his father because he lived in Cuba and his father was in the United States. That made them practically enemies. What nonsense!”

  “The New Man can only have fraternal relations with those who share his ideology. A father in the United States was an infectious contamination. You had to kill all memory of the father, the mother, and siblings if they weren’t in Cuba. It was much more than nonsense … What do you know about Ricardito?”

  “Nothing … I suppose he is still here, don’t you think?”

  When they arrived at the Ashkenazi cemetery, the gatekeeper-gravedigger was about to shut the gates, but a five-dollar bill kept them open and guaranteed his services as a guide and, had they requested and had the man been capable, even some funeral prayers in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic. Just barely over the threshold—Abandon all hope, ye who enter here—Conde noted that the distance between one hallowed ground and the other was imposed not by doctrinal differences but by an economic abyss. Although the state of abandon was similar to the one that reigned over the Sephardic cemetery, the surviving tombstones, marbles, and mortuary symbols announced that these dead Ashkenazim had been living people who reached their ends with much more money than their Sephardic counterparts.

  Like the other necropolis, some of the tombs were crowned with small stones placed there by some relative or friend. But the effects of time and neglect had eroded almost everything. Those final dwelling places expressed their fate better than any other testimony of a community that, in its heyday, had been active and thriving. Even their sepulchres were dead.

  Conde noted the differences in the existing last names between one cemetery and the other, imprints of the parallel paths that those Jews had followed for centuries, some in Spain, the prosperous Sepharad, and some in the exodus and the dispersion through the vast regions of Eastern Europe, the territories where each one of the branches of the chosen people had arrived just to forge their own languages and to shape their own last names capable of announcing their belonging to the two cultures united by the Book. But the prosperity of the Ashkenazim who came to Cuba from Poland, Austria, and Germany contrasted with the humble origins of the Turkish Sephardim, even after death.

  The gravedigger-guide led them to Joseph Kaminsky’s tomb, covered with a cheap granite slab on which, with difficulty, could be read: KRAKÓW 1898–HAVANA 1965, and in backward Hebrew letters that, most possibly, the uncle himself had ordered as a message to posterity, so that, if anyone was still interested, they would know who he had been in his life. The efficient gravedigger rubbed his damp handkerchief over the dew on the granite plaque, until Elias was able to read: JOSEPH KAMINSKY. BELIEVED IN THE SACRED. VIOLATED THE LAW. DIED WITHOUT FEELING ANY REMORSE.

  7

  Havana, 1953–1957

  It was during the winter baseball season of 1953–54 that the great Orestes Miñoso, “the Cuban Comet,” the very spirit of the island’s professional Marianao team and, during the summers, also of the American Chicago White Sox, made the longest home run ever in the Grand Stadium of Havana, built just a few years before. The opposing team’s pitcher was the American Glenn Elliott, who was at the service of the powerful Almendares club that season, and what Miñoso delivered was an out-of-this-world lineazo that went far over the central garden fences, an inhumanly good hit in which that five-foot-ten, compact black man had invested all of his energy and his incredible talent for hitting the ball with the beauty and perfection of his terrifying swings. When the league’s inspectors tried to take the measurements of that connection, they tired of counting once they went past the distance of five hundred feet from home plate. As a souvenir of that great feat, a sign was hung announcing: MIÑOSO WAS HERE. Starting with the next season, when Marianao’s star approached the batter’s box, the megaphone of the greatest sanctuary in Cuban baseball played the cha-cha-cha recorded in his honor by Orquesta América and whose most popular refrain said, “When Miñoso swings the bat, the ball goes cha-cha-cha like that.”

  On that historic day, about which baseball fans would talk for years and years, Daniel Kaminsky the Pole and his friends Pepe Manuel and Roberto were three of the 18,236 fans occupying the Grand Stadium’s stands to enjoy the game between the destructive Alacranes de Almendares and the humble but seasoned Tigres de Marianao. And, like almost all those other fortunate fans, Daniel and his friends would remember for the rest of their days—many days for some; very few, in reality, for another—the home run by that black Matanzas-born angel descended from slaves brought all the way from Calabar, Nigeria.

  On the streets, Daniel had been infected with the incurable virus of passion for baseball that ruled over Cubans. And, by that absurd logic which love sometimes follows, from the beginning he proclaimed his preference for the humble Marianao team, a team that in fifty years of history had barely risen up on four occasions with the Winter League champion crown. Two years before Daniel arrived in Cuba, the Tigres had achieved glory for the second time. And they wouldn’t do that again until the fabulous seasons of 1956–57 and of 1957–58, when, led by Miñoso’s unsparing bat and the joy with which that man went on to the playing field, they would do so in a crushing manner. Daniel Kaminsky would always think that his choice to love a losing team was part of a complicated plan of recompense, since after a long period of frustrations it was precisely in the last two years that he would live in Cuba, wrapped up already in the definitive tensions destined to change his life, that the Marianao team won those championships and Orestes Miñoso, the most loved hero in his entire life, would achieve the climax of his glory, showing, as never before, that “When Miñoso swings the bat, the ball goes cha-cha-cha like that.”

  Despite Marianao losing season after season during almost all of Daniel Kaminsky’s Cuban stay, the young man who that 1953 afternoon had gone to Havana’s stadium had many other reasons to consider himself a happy man. “What is happiness?” he once asked his son Elias, many years later, when he was already a guest at the exclusive Coral Gables geriatric home and, on his night table, occupying the most visible spot, was an enormous photo in which the Polish Jew and the black Cuban baseball player were shaking hands, smiling, although the Jew was already bald and the Cuban was already going gray. The painter thought about the possible response, tallied up proofs, but preferred to remain silent.

  “You tell me.”

  “Happiness is a fragile state, sometimes instantaneous, a flash,” Daniel started to tell his offspring while he directed his gaze at the photo where he appeared with the great Miñoso, and later, to the face of Marta Arnáez, covered with wrinkles and far removed from the beauty she had displayed for years. “But if you’re lucky, it can last. I had that luck. At the time you make your lifelong friends, I found those friends. And ever since I met your mother I was, in life’s main areas, a happy man. But when I think of things like the privilege of being one of the eighteen thousand people on earth who was at the stadium that afternoon and could enjoy Miñoso’s super home run, I know that for a few moments, I was very happy … For years, even, I was able to bury the pains of my past and live looking toward the future, only toward the future. The screwed-up thing is that, when you least expect it, even those pains that you believed to have conquered come out of the shadows one day and tap you on the shoulder. Then everything can go to hell, including happiness, and it’s not easy at all to get it back later.”

  The Santos Suárez house that the newlyweds had managed to buy in 1954 with the combination of their own savings and the generous contribution of their Galician in-laws and their Jewish uncle was modest and comfortable. It had two bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, and, of course, its own bathroom with all the amenities, a brilliant little black-tiled corner where you could take a shit privately when you liked and as often as you liked. In addition, the house had a small yard and the luxury of a covered porch through which a breeze blew, even on
the steamiest days of summer. It had been built in the 1940s by the owners of the ostentatious, modern, and roomy neighboring house, whose head of household had experienced a quick financial ascent ever since his friend Fulgencio Batista came to power and turned him into one of the heads of the Havana police and could allow himself, thanks to the many bribes he received due to his position in the police, the immediate construction of that mansion that made the Kaminsky house look so puny.

  Once he had graduated and became the accountant for Brandon’s luxurious Minimax, Daniel’s salary had gone up to two hundred pesos monthly, which went further, given the discounts with which he was able to acquire the market’s magnificent products. Marta, meanwhile, even though she didn’t need to for them to get by, had insisted on working in her professional field, and, always thanks to Brandon’s influence, had gotten a spot at the recently opened Edison Institute, in the neighboring area of La Víbora. By 1955 the couple could allow themselves the luxury of acquiring a same-year Chevy model and, for Christmas, spent their vacation in Mexico City, where they saw Dámaso Pérez Prado’s orchestra perform and danced to María Antonieta Pons just when there was a world furor over mambo and Cuban rumberas. Life smiled upon them. To top off their dreamed-of perfection, all they needed was for nature to award them the arrival of the son or daughter they both desired, and for whose gestation they had been trying with determination, frequency, and love.