Ruins (21 page)

Jacinto, his hair covered with dust, found her like that, sitting at Usnavy’s side. (If Usnavy had been awake, he would have imagined Jacinto like the slaves who brought rice to the New World, grains hidden in his hair.)

“How is he?” Jacinto asked, shaking his head clean.

“Sleeping,” Lidia said. “I don’t want to wake him, not yet.”

“My mother made some coffee,” Jacinto offered. Lidia looked up at him, puzzled. “She’s in my room. We’re okay—I had put up supports. I thought this might happen. Let me tell her you’re here.”

Lidia nodded and Jacinto stepped out for a moment. When he returned, he sat down next to her and placed his arm around her shoulder.

“Hey … we can rebuild,” he said, his voice soft but buoyant. “We always rebuild, don’t we? And didn’t I hear you’re about to get a car—Lidia, you’ll be up and fine in no time.”

“Screw the car,” she said and started to cry again.

Just then Jacinto’s mother came in with a little tray carrying steaming demitasses. The coffee rippled in the cups—she was unsteady. Jacinto handed one to Lidia, using his fingertips to carry it. Then Usnavy stirred on the bed, his teeth chattering.

“Don’t sit up,” Lidia cautioned, putting her cup back on the tray and guiding Usnavy’s to his lips. Jacinto reached around and held the old man’s head up, so that his lips could feel the heat from the cup, his tongue the sweet sting of the burning liquid.

After he was finished, Usnavy sat up and looked around him, surveying the destruction. His eyes settled on the lamp above them.

“It’s … it’s still here,” he said, his voice cracking.

Lidia and Jacinto glanced at each other with concern.

“I’m glad it’s still here,” Usnavy whispered, then choked a little and coughed. The fingers of his left hand played almost imperceptibly on the bed and rolled a piece of gravel, a smooth little pebble, around on the sopping sheet. “Nena …?” he muttered, a faint ripple on faraway waters.

Lidia shook her head ever so slightly. Her eyes were moist and shimmered.

Usnavy squeezed the pebble in his good hand, scratched the dirt from it, stroked it discreetly like a talisman.

“Ay …” Usnavy said, his voice hoarse, his face smeared with dirt. “It’s just … just like … just like …”

“Please don’t talk,” said Lidia.

Jacinto stood and leaned against what was left of the wall.

“It’s like with Africa,” Usnavy said. “Africa and its curse …” He stared off at the lamp. It was gray now that daylight was creeping into the room. It was a mess: a splintered tibia, a mangled rib cage.

“I can probably fix that.” Jacinto followed Usnavy’s gaze to the lamp. “You wouldn’t believe how good I’ve gotten at fixing things.”

Usnavy realized Jacinto really believed he could.

“I can fix it, I swear to you,” insisted Jacinto. “Hey, we’re a nation of giants. Aren’t you the one who’s always saying that? You’ll see, it’ll be fine.”

“But you don’t believe in giants, Jacinto, you put up those posts,” Usnavy mumbled. With his right hand still hidden under the sheet and his left holding the pebble, he shifted and sat up a bit more. A few bits of gravel rolled off him to the ground. “And look, you were right …”

Jacinto was flustered, obviously unsure about how to deal with what he was hearing. “You just get better, Usnavy, and we’ll fix it together. Now, let’s get you to a hospital, okay?”

Usnavy rolled the sheet around his right wrist and hand. The blood underneath was coagulated and black but oozed a bit.

“Let me see that,” Lidia said the instant she got a glimpse of the red blotch.

Usnavy shook his head. “At the hospital.”

As they crossed the courtyard and the funnel of flies, a party of tourists exploring the derrumbe met them midway. Usnavy thought he recognized the guide from the day Diosdado had refused to have his picture taken.

“Look at that,” said one of the tourists—suddenly, Usnavy understood her English perfectly. He followed her eyes to something in the remains: It was a nugget of rainbow—ruby, emerald, imperial gold—there amidst the broken walls, rusted steel spokes, shredded paperback books, and the inevitable orange slush from the tenement’s fluids.

“A light in the ruins!” barked a man with a camera.

Usnavy cringed.

The tourist snapped a photo, delighted with his find, looking right through Usnavy as he trudged by, held between Lidia and Jacinto.

At the hospital, an emergency room crew unveiled the injury—Lidia gasped and immediately opened a new cascade of tears when she saw it. The wound was black, almost green, its odor salty and pungent, like rotting mollusks.

The surgery to save Usnavy’s hand was executed under a portrait of Che with the legend
Until victory, always
and a long frosty tube of fluorescence, without anesthesia because there simply wasn’t any. Instead, the doctors had Lidia, Jacinto, and a couple of volunteers hold Usnavy down while they treated him. Their fingers dug into his skin, leaving strings of blue-green bruises like ancient beads. All the while, his teeth bore into a piece of black rubber—maybe the remnants of a fan belt from a still vibrant Ford or Buick.

After the operation, a drained Usnavy, his mouth open and maroonish, was put to bed as Lidia and Jacinto took turns watching over him. Jacinto’s mother dropped by, now in the full glow of health. Minerva from the bodega read him the headlines from
Granma
. Even Frank and Diosdado, on good behavior for their friend’s sake, showed up with Oscar Luis, the cab driver, retelling favorite stories from the domino game on Montserrate.

They knew about Nena but talked only obliquely about her absence. And they had some news too: The autistic boy, it turned out, had also left the island on a raft, the winds pushing him every which way so that he landed in Haiti, just as the U.S. marines were setting foot on Boukman’s native soil.

“How salao is that, huh?” asked Frank in his slightly chagrined voice.

As his friends watched over him, Usnavy rested under a thin sheet, the future of his fingers uncertain, his pulpy palm a nest of scars like Virgilio’s fingertips. He tossed and turned, his eyelids fluttered.

“I need some rest,” he said, barely audible and to no one in particular. His lips were dry and sticky, his tongue stabbing at them with its parched tip. “We all need some rest.” He could see himself greeting those who stayed and those who left, Nena too.

Abruptly, Usnavy turned, rearranged his body—numb and heavy—to face the wall on the other side of the bed.

I want to die old and contented
, he dreamt,
in the soft dapple of a primal Antillean night.

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