Lest They Be Forgotten

From Both Sides, Now

(Sometimes those who leave do not fare better in spirit than those who stay. This is the gamble that the immigrant takes when he sets out for that other shore. I set this story in Cuba, another "old country" that has spawned many immigrants. "From Both Sides, Now" was published in the anthology That Not Forgotten - Hidden Brook Press in 2012) 

From Both Sides, Now

Part 1 - (The scene – a young man sits at an outdoor table on a farm, writing)

The farm boundary gives me security, it encapsulates my known world. And my family stand watch over me by the fence line in the graveyard that Father created for Papa and Mama. Father joined my abuelos in the graveyard three months ago when his crumbling 1940 Chevrolet carrying him, Mother, and my sister Maria, stalled in the middle of the road and was crushed by the petrol tanker hurtling around the bend on the coastal road into Santiago de Cuba. All of them, gone, but they still stand watch over me by the fence.

The only one to get away from the farm was my younger brother Juan. He was the top performer in school and qualified for a friendship mission to Canada ten years ago from which he never returned. Embarrassed officials later told us that he ran away from his hotel room one night in a city called Windsor and was never seen again. No one knew at the time whether he was still hiding in Canada or had slipped over to Detroit across the water in America. I was happy that he had made it to the other side, but I was also envious.

Two years ago, the letters began to arrive, smuggled in by Canadian tourists who had arrived in the resort hotel nearby. His first letter contained beautiful pictures: of the famous Niagara Falls, of lush vineyards, of a tower in Toronto which was supposed to be the tallest in the world. Juan said that he had lots of friends, mostly white Canadian girls who thought his swarthy looks and accent sexy, and lots of money, and to prove it, there was a hundred dollar bill enclosed. Father did not know what to do with it, whether to cash it in the black market and betray the tenets of the Revolution or to keep it as a testament to the “Capitalist connection” in our family. And so the note sat in his wallet, pending a decision, which, like everything else in this country, takes a long time to be made.

 Mother wrote back, through those same generous tourists who left us with stationery and maple syrup, asking Juan when he was going to come home. He did not reply for over a year. When his answer finally came, it made Mother sob, and Maria went out into the field and did not talk for days afterward. Juan said that he had become a Canadian citizen after a lengthy process called a refugee claim. He was working in a vineyard in a place called St. Catharines and was learning English and hoped to buy his own farm one day. He was not coming home, he said. He had new boundaries now, and with the ability to travel and carry money with him, the entire world was his playground. That letter, along with the hundred dollar bill, was found in Father’s wallet on the day of the car accident.

Because of Juan’s transgression, we were not allowed to visit him either. It is as if by escaping to another life, we pass through a one-way door, like air through the valve of my soccer ball when I pump it.

I look around my world, this farm, and the door to the house needs new hinges; it hangs to a side and does not close properly. Tomatoes are ripening on the vine and will have to be plucked soon. The grass is overgrown in the field and I need to borrow the baler from my neighbour and stack the barn with hay before the drought dries everything out. In return, I will give my neighbour a few bales for his cows. I also have to see if I can get a piece of piping from the village hardware shop, or from the garage next door – that water tap needs to be fixed, it’s dripping too much water. And those tiles on the roof, I am not sure what to do about them; tiles are in short supply these days, like just about everything else  – perhaps I’ll go down to the artisans village and ask the potter to custom-make me a few so that I can repair the leak in the roof  above my camp cot.