Adios Happy Homeland! Read online

  Adios, Happy Homeland!

  Also by Ana Menéndez

  In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

  Loving Che

  The Last War

  Adios, Happy Homeland!

  ANA MENÉNDEZ

  Copyright © 2011 by Ana Menéndez

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

  “A Found Poem” is quoted from Alejo Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos (Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2008), used with permission from Alianza Editorial and La Fundación Alejo Carpentier, Havana, Cuba.

  The José Martí quotations in italics in “The Poet in His Labyrinth” are taken from José Martí: Selected Writings (Penguin Classics, 2002) and reprinted with kind permission of the translator, Esther Allen and the publisher.

  A version of “You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors” originally appeared in World Literature Today (September/October 2010).

  A version of “Traveling Fools” first appeared as “Travelling Madness” in Literature: Craft and Voice, Volume 1, Fiction, A New Introduction to Literature (McGraw-Hill, 2009), edited by Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse; and as “Traveling Fools” in Bomb Magazine (Spring 2009).

  A version of “The Melancholy Hour” was originally written for the PEN/Faulkner Gala: “Revelation,” Washington, D.C., September 2009.

  “The Shunting Trains Trace Iron Labyrinths” appeared in Boston Review (May/June 2011)

  “The Poet in His Labyrinth” appeared in Our Stories, www.ourstories.us (Spring 2011).

  “Cojimar” appeared on Anderbo.com (May 2011)

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  e-Book ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9552-4

  Black Cat

  a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For my two Peters

  The first bridge, Constitution Station. At my feet

  the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths.

  —Jorge Luis Borges

  Who is the ignoramus who claims that poetry

  is not indispensable to a people?

  —José Martí

  Contents

  Prologue

  You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors

  Cojimar

  The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish

  The Boy’s Triumphant Return

  In Defense of Flying

  Glossary of Caribbean Winds

  The Parachute Maker

  From: The Poets, To: Herberto Quain

  From: Herberto Quain, To: The Poets

  Redstone

  The Express

  Zodiac of Loss

  Journey Back to the Seed (¿Qué Quieres, Vieja?)

  The Boy Who Fell from Heaven

  The Poet in His Labyrinth

  Adios Happy Homeland: Selected Translations According to Google

  Un Cuento Extraño

  A Brief History of the Cuban Poets

  The Melancholy Hour

  End-less Stories

  Three Betrayals

  Voló Como Matías Pérez

  Traveling Fools

  The Shunting Trains Trace Iron Labyrinths

  Contributors’ Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Adios, Happy Homeland!

  Prologue

  The modern reader may well wonder what impels me, an Irishman molded in the nineteenth century, to imagine I have anything to add to the literature of that Caribbean island.1 It is a fair question and I will try to answer it. I was born in Roscommon, a happy green paradise in the heart of Connaught in the west of Ireland. It is, today, still a gentle land of few people and many lakes and rivers. In fact, the name Roscommon derives from the Irish “Ros,” which means land of trees; and “Conman,” which does not mean what you think it means. Actually, Conman was the name of our famous Irish saint, who was also the see’s first bishop and a man of almost supernatural humility and goodness.2

  In those days, the woods rolled away to all four corners of the earth. Or so it seemed to me as a boy, whose imagination was not yet sullied by the world of encyclopedias and unyielding fact. It was in those early years that I, encouraged by my sweet mother, came to discover that in the warm waters off the coast of Florida, there existed an island of mysterious beauty and boundless promise. I became enchanted with Cuba—an unusual enough interest for a boy of that era, but even more odd in my isolated village, where a man who had been to Dublin might be called well-traveled and too much interest in the outside world was considered something of a deviance. My father took pains to dissuade me from this alarming new interest, arguing, with reason, that the history of our own island was a more proper endeavor for a son of Eire. To this end, my father and I spent long hours exploring the banks of the river Shannon and gathering chestnuts amid the red cedar and Monterey pine of Lough Key. In the winter, when the work on the farm eased, we spent the short afternoons exploring Rathcroghan,3 the old burial site that was also home to the high kings of Ireland. Roscommon was covered in castle ruins, ancient battlements, oddly worked stone. History, it seemed to me, was always threatening to overtake the living. I began to suffer from historical claustrophobia—the weight of that enormous past—but, not wanting to further upset my father, I accompanied him as cheerfully as I could, pretending that we were exploring not the ruins of Ailill and Medb but the ramparts of El Morro, the warm Caribbean lapping below. We lived on a farm at the edge of the great plains of Boyle. The farm had belonged to my grandfather before us and to his father before that and his father in a succession that stretched all the way back to the era of the kings. My father never claimed to be descended from royalty himself, but he could recite the Quain lineage by memory to the fourteenth century. Quain, you may know, was once spelled in Gaelic O Cuinn, which means “descendant of Conn”—unless you consider the alternative spelling Ó Cuáin, in which case it means “descendant of Cuán.” In fact, though my father seemed to have a firm grasp of who fathered whom, the name Quain itself suffered several bastardizations through the long winter of illiteracy and English atrocity: O’Quinn, MacQuin, MacCuin, Quine, etc.4 So who’s to say when Quién appeared? And then there are the other variations I discovered in my travels: Cual, Que, O’Como. My own family seems to have settled on the present spelling sometime in the late sixteenth century, when Connaught was broken up by Sir Henry Sidney, the bastard.

  Our farm was neither the smallest nor the largest in the village. At one time, when the families had been bigger, most of the land was given over to grazing. By the time I was a boy, some of the outlying parcels had been sold off, and on what remained—about twenty hectares—we grew mostly oats and potatoes. The house itself had grown with each generation until the various additions with their twists and odd steps had come to resemble a maze.

  There was only one entrance and one exit and to walk from one to the other took more than forty-five minutes. The outer layers of the house were, naturally, the more modern ones, and the home aged as you walked inward. When I was a boy, a large porch ringed the house on three sides—I have seen such porches in Varadero—and these were covered in sheets of glass to keep out the cold and magnify the sunlight. There was no other house like it in Roscommon, but I never thought to question why it had been built or where the glass—little known in that era—had come from. There was a door that slid open on casters onto the porch, which was furnished in white wicker; and from there, another door that opened into the next layer of the home. Here you entered a small reception area with a closet to hang wet things. To the right was a dining room—the latest of many—and to the left the kitchen, a modern, bright place with taps for hot and cold water. Through the kitchen and around to the side of the house was a small sitting area, and here the house began its first turn inward, toward its origin. The next passageway also contained a kitchen, or what used to be one. In its time it, too, had been modern. The sink was still there, and so was the pump; and where the black iron stove had been, we had installed a toilet for guests. From there, one passed into a long hallway opening onto the bedrooms. And so the house wound deeper and deeper, around rooms and sitting areas, some of them closed off since before I was born. Above the doors and along the corridors, vitrales and wooden window screens let in the light and air. At the heart of this house, at its very center, representing the original one-room stone house built by Deoradhán O Cuinn sometime after the construction of the great M’Donough castle, there sat an enormous library, with books piled floor to ceiling and more, as I discovered one day, neatly organized and alphabetized under a trapdoor in the floor. A single window on the roof lit the room from above, catching bits of dust in i
ts great shaft of light. Over the door, someone (Deoradhán?) had written, in gold letters: Cha’n eil mi na m’ sgoileir, ’s cha’n àill leam a bhi, ma’n d’thuairt a mhadadh-ruadh ris a mhadadh-allaidh. Which, most would agree, was an odd thing to assert.

  In this room, I spent the greater part of my childhood, passing my hands over the cracked leather covers until they stopped at a fresh volume with its promise of new worlds and adventures. I was an only child, born to my parents when they were both over forty years old. Perhaps because they had waited so long, both my parents were unusually protective of me, and their care encouraged in me the quieter pursuits of reading and imaginary worlds. In the early evenings, after my chores and my lessons, I would wind my way through the house back to the library, where I remained until I heard through the walls the faint voice of my mother calling that supper was ready.

  It was on one such day, in early winter, that I came across a curious book. The book was unlike any other in that library and I remember being surprised that I had not come upon it earlier. Its cover was made not of leather but of a shiny material that was smooth as glass, but lighter than paper. I brought it down from the shelf, opened it at random, and began reading about a poor farmer who lived in a land far, far away and had three sons named Pedro, Pablo, and Juancito. Pedro was big and fat with a red face and a dullard’s gaze. Pablo was sickly and pallid, consumed with envy and jealousy. Juancito was as pretty as a girl and so small that he could hide in his father’s boot. Everyone called him Meñique.

  If you are not an only child, you cannot imagine the delight that a story of brothers engenders in a solitary boy. I was enthralled and sat very still, reading. I read for hours and when I was finished, I wiped away the tears before my mother—who had been yelling about supper with increasing energy—could see them.

  The following day I pulled down the book and again opened it at random. This time I came across a poem of such delicate beauty that again my eyes stung with tears on reading the last lines:

  Farewell! . . . The anchor from the sea ascends,

  The sails are full. . . . The ship breaks clear,

  And with soft quiet motion, wave and water fends.5

  All that week I returned to the book. It was there that I first saw Morro Castle, sketched against a red sky. The great misty sweep of the Malecón in winter. In that book I learned of a place where there is good sun, and water of foam and sand so fine. I learned that it snows because the door to heaven is open. I saw a hallucinatory world, a pilot who never returned, a pair of audacious roses, and understood that my own yearning for the future, for escape from the long history of Ireland, was a reaching out for the words now before me. It seemed to me that whoever had written this book had written it especially for me.6

  The book I am talking about, of course, is A Brief History of the Cuban Poets, written by Victoria O’Campo at the start of the republic in 1902—the wound, as they say, preceding the blow. I did not dare remove this book from Deoradhán’s library. Perhaps I was afraid it would turn to dust—I had read a story about a man who finds a splendid ancient costume hanging in his attic only to have it crumble at his touch. So I was careful not to love the book too much. But I did not stop reading it. For many years, through the Irish winters and the disappointing harvests, I returned again and again to the library to open its covers once more. It is curious now to think about it, but I don’t believe I ever reached the end of the book. Perhaps I was afraid of the hollow that exists at the conclusion of every story, the disconsolate sense of loss.

  I expected to live out my years in Roscommon, with Cuba remaining a boyhood dream. But as I grew, I learned that the desire to escape—the longing for wings—was not a private fantasy. While I read my strange book, Ireland was becoming a country of emigrants, too, and at the close of my seventeenth year, I had my chance. An uncle on my father’s side was shipping out to Mexico the following summer and invited me to come along. I would pay my board and transport by working in the ship’s kitchen. I hesitated, being a good son, and not wanting to leave my old parents on the farmstead by themselves. But they insisted—both understood that my prospects for a career and marriage were slim in Roscommon—and on a clear day in June, one of the warmest on record, we set sail for the New World.

  The March Warbler was not a large ship, and the journey took an entire month. The passengers were an odd lot. Some of them were very tall and so white as to be almost translucent; others were dark and slender, their women veiled. I met up regularly with such a couple on deck, after the evening meal. In halting French, they told me they were fleeing the Ottomans. The woman, who did not speak as often as the man, had relatives in Mexico, and that is where they were headed. At first, I doubted their fantastic story—being chased from their home, gathering their things in the dark, fleeing with only a few kurus sewn into their shoes and hems. But as the journey progressed, I learned that such stories were common on that ship.

  We arrived in Havana on the first of August; it was the most beautiful land that human eyes had ever seen. I bade my uncle farewell—he was traveling on to Mexico—and set about making for myself a new life. I worked for a while as a shoeshine boy and then as a waiter in a restaurant that specialized in paella. In a year, when I had become more certain of my Spanish, I found the courage to present myself at the National Library.

  In those years, the library was still directed by Domingo Figarola-Caneda—who was searching for academic guidance. I confess here that I was compelled to misrepresent myself slightly as a doctor of letters from Trinity College. In those years, such claims took time and effort to verify, and so hiring depended much more on character and apparent intelligence than it does now. I don’t know if old Domingo saw in me some evidence of genius or whether he simply needed an English-speaker. But whatever the reason, I soon found myself director of a newly created section called Poetry of the Americas. In those years, Cuba was beginning to move away from imperial influences. For some reason, old Domingo saw in this Irishman someone who could purge the library of its foreign mannerisms and replace them with something like Creole honesty. It is given to a few fortunate men the grace to find the perfect intersection between their obsession and their livelihood. So it happened to me, and I have spent the happiest years of my life immersed in Cuban verse. What follows here is a modest anthology of my life’s investigations. Modest because, as the reader alone knows, I am not, in fact, a doctor of letters from Trinity College or anywhere else. But I know something of imagination, having sheltered under its enormous shadow-wings. And, though I may not be Cuban, I have learned to speak the language of escape. Untether your expectations; be lifted by these unseen poets struggling to translate that which has no translation. And remember what a great friend once told me: just because it never happened doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

  Herberto Quain

  La Habana, 1936

  You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors

  BY CELESTINO D’ALBA

  Many years later, at the end of this story, I found myself, somewhat inexplicably, on a railway platform. It was December. Outside it must have been snowing—I had a memory of snow—but inside the station it was very warm. At first I thought I was alone, but then I realized, with a quickening horror, that I had been joined by two men in long coats. They wore identical black hats and looked like brothers, except one was bearded and the other hairless. Each stood in a puddle of melted ice. They stamped their feet, and every few minutes they moved closer to the rails. The air was humid and menacing.

  “He was in a delicate state.”

  “Yes, very delicate, that’s true.”

  “He couldn’t even work anymore.”

  “And yet, the papers formed an archipelago around his bed.”

  “But he was drowning on the shore.”