see what I can do, comrade. Now, I’m conducting an investigation and as part of it I need to examine your brother’s personal belongings. His papers, clothing, anything that can shed light on what happened to him. Comrades Kuan and Zoila are here as witnesses. We would appreciate it if you could take us to his bedroom and any other room where he kept his things…’
Elena was shaking her head emphatically, two tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘I don’t have the key to his bedroom. We…well, Captain, he put a lock on the door to his room. I don’t have the key to it.’
Trujillo produced Pablo’s key ring. ‘Do you recognize this?’
Elena nodded. The last shadow of a doubt evaporated in her mind.
‘It was found in a pocket.’
‘Come with me, please.’
When Elena switched on the light, the visitors saw that Pablo’s bedroom was a mess. It hadn’t been cleaned in a long while and disorder reigned. Ten or fifteen cockroaches scurried in search of hiding places. Under a table supporting a colour TV and a VCR were a roll of tissue paper, old newspapers, and a broken CD player; a pile of soiled sheets and towels and underwear lay on top of the unmade bed; slippers under a writing table; three ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, several empty and crushed packets of Populares on the floor; shoes and socks all over. It reeked of human sweat and grease, and dirt.
As Trujillo professionally searched the bedroom and the embarrassed witnesses stared, Elena, leaning in the doorway, occasionally fighting back tears and biting her lip, wondered why she and her brother had become enemies, when the split had begun, what part of the blame was hers. Memories kept coming, the way waves wash over a beach, only to ebb away and be absorbed by the sand.
Elena couldn’t recall the rejection she must have felt right from the very beginning. She was three when what had been a big balloon of striated flesh all of a sudden deflated and transformed itself into a screaming, crying, red-faced newborn demanding her mother’s full attention. Had the little thing sensed that she probably hated him? Was it possible for a suckling infant to somehow intuit repulsion?
Her sources were family stories. Funny anecdotes told by Gladys of which she had no memory whatsoever. Like the morning when she found Elena sucking from the bottle she was supposed to be using to feed her brother. It was how their mother learned why the boy was always hungry so soon after having been fed by his improperly supervised sister. Or the day she covered his face with her excrement. Or the evening she fed him a quarter pound of raisins, which Pablo happily chomped away on, and nearly dehydrated from acute diarrhoea. As teenagers, when these and other stories were recounted, Elena and Pablo swapped cursory smiles, made jokes, but in her brother’s eyes there was a strange gleam, as if he were thinking: See, see how it was you who started it all?
According to her mother, Elena was amazed to discover Pablo’s penis. Why? What did he need it for? Once he learned to stand and walk, she had wanted to pee standing up, too. Family stories, however, excluded one which Elena remembered vividly. The day when, at age seven, she was found fondling her brother, aged four. Her mother spanked her like never before, so she figured she had done something terrible and for many years the memory hid at the back of her mind as some unspeakable atrocity she had to atone for. After the Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Havana expounded on sexual games among children, Elena experienced a huge spiritual relief. The feeling of guilt disappeared and her sexuality improved noticeably.
Perhaps as part of her atonement and to stave off their growing antagonism, but if so unconsciously, she tried hard to become her brother’s favourite playmate. The Parque de la Quinta was their playground. She learned to throw a baseball and skate and ride a bike as he learned to swing a bat, ride a scooter, then a tricycle. They were the object of undisguised envy by many other children in the neighbourhood, those who didn’t have fathers with the special connections required to obtain for their offspring what was unavailable for 99.9 per cent of Cuban children in the 1970s.
In practical terms, however, their childhood was fatherless. Manuel Miranda had been a major in the revolutionary army – the highest rank – since 1958, aged twenty-one. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant two months after joining the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, he was made captain four months later, then appointed major two weeks before Batista fled and the regular Army collapsed. By the time the rebels reached Havana he was a living legend: a hundred stories portrayed him as a fearless, highly adventurous young man who laughed uproariously in the face of death.
Major Miranda had a few wild months in 1959 Havana. Only five feet four, his self-assurance, shoulder-length hair, and personal history made him the third most sought-after man in the Cuban capital (after Fidel Castro and Camilo Cienfüegos). Gladys Garcés, at the time one of the chorus girls of the world-renowned Tropicana, was two inches taller and two years older than the major, had a statuesque figure, and danced the way palm fronds sway in the afternoon breeze – with an almost magic sensu-ousness. They met, made love, and the country boy lost his heart for the first time. He didn’t want to wake up from the dream and persuaded the young woman to quit the cabaret and marry him in June. After four years of nightclub life and several dozen men, Gladys was too well versed in the vagaries of passion to fall madly in love with anyone, but she felt in her bones that marrying a swashbuckling hero considerably reduced the uncertainty of a future in which millionaires, business executives, and their bejewelled mistresses were threatened species.
Right then the struggle against American imperialism began. Miranda spent weeks, sometimes months, in a bunker somewhere waiting for the American invasion; in the Bay of Pigs, crushing Brigade 2506; in Algeria, fighting the Moroccans; hunting counter-revolutionaries in the mountains of Las Villas; training guerrillas to foster subversion in Latin America. Sometimes of an evening, taking time out from his action-packed life, Major Miranda would insert his key into the lock of the confiscated Miramar apartment he had been assigned by the Housing Institute in 1960, and his kids would spend a couple of days playing with Daddy.
Neither she nor Pablo were old enough to discern the reasons behind their parents’ divorce. It hadn’t been a normal home, but the break-up was still a shock because Gladys, who never talked much about her husband and didn’t seem to be particularly distraught by his prolonged absences, all of a sudden spent hours cursing the son of a bitch, a term that, like countless other expletives, she had learned in the dressing rooms of the Tropicana. She also blamed some nameless whore for her misfortune.
After Pablo completed second grade – or was it third? – school became an important dividing factor. The boy resented his sister’s tutoring, which Gladys forced Elena to give him at home. He also detested her dedication to school issues, and her being elected Head of the Detachment of Pioneers, the children’s communist organization. It was worse in junior high. Having inherited her mother’s genes, at twelve Elena was the most beautiful and popular girl from among 165 female students. Pablo at nine was an exact copy of his father: Short, lean, and bold to the point of having been nicknamed ‘El Loco’ – The Wacko.
In the following three or four years, the two personalities became the centre of contrasting groups. Pablo was the undisputed leader of five or six angry, frustrated, and rebellious teenagers, kids from one-parent homes most of them, who played hooky, roamed the streets, and flunked exams. Elena was his exact opposite. She became president of her school’s chapter of the Federation of High School Students at fifteen, valedictorian of her class at seventeen. They were living in a peculiar symbiosis: different species under the same roof, avoiding each other, always on a collision course.
Tragedy struck one evening in 1980, just after General Miranda returned unannounced from Angola only to find his second wife, an extremely beautiful brunette thirteen years younger than him, in his own bed with a next-door neighbour. The general drew his nine-millimetre Maka-rov and emptied its first clip into the two pleading lovers. Their legs and arms kept jerking spasmodically, so Miranda changed clips and made sure neither lived to tell the tale. Then he drove his Lada to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and turned himself in.
In the ensuing three or four months the lives of Elena and Pablo became kaleidoscopes