As he followed Luis, Eladio was taken aback at how thin and fragile-looking his employer had become. How was it that he hadn’t noticed the change in Luis’s appearance earlier? Had it occurred so slowly that it was difficult to see, or had it come over him quickly as a result of his preoccupation with the dinner? Eladio, saddened by what he was seeing, could not tell.
Making their way across the property was difficult, as Eladio had not had the strength lately to tend the grounds. After long minutes of carefully stepping in the overgrown tangle that was once flowers and shrubs, they reached the area beside the herb garden. Luis immediately headed for the wrought iron bench and sat down.
Luis was flushed, Eladio noticed, and breathing hard from all the exertion. Alarmed and not quite knowing what to do, Eladio stood a respectful distance from Luis while he waited for his employer’s command—much as he would have done in preCastro Cuba. Although he did not look directly at Luis—his eyes were pointed at the ground—he still had enough peripheral vision to see Luis reach into his sweat-soaked shirt, presumably to take out one of the few handkerchiefs he had left to mop the sweat from his face. But much to Eladio’s surprise, Luis instead took out three photographs. Luis slowly studied each of the them, smiling at the images of himself and his three friends, laughing, sunburned, drunk, sitting on the stern of one of their fishing boats, eating from the enormous platter of seafood in front of them.
“Eladio, how long have you been with our family?” Luis asked abruptly, peering up. “Around forty years by my calculations, right?”
“Forty-one, Señor Luis. Forty-one last March,” Eladio replied, a bit warily. As far back as he could remember, neither Señor Luis nor Señora María Eugenia had ever brought up the length of his employment. A terrible thought occurred to him. Was he about to get fired? Where would he go? What would he do? Now it was Eladio’s turn to begin to breathe hard.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re correct.” Luis leaned back, resting his body against the bench, and closed his eyes. He sat motionless for so long that Eladio began to think he had fallen asleep. Suddenly, he opened his eyes and sat up. “Eladio, I’ve lived a long, long life—some of it good, some of it not so good. Now I’m close to the end of it.”
“Oh no, Señor Luis, don’t talk like that!” Eladio had never before heard his employer discuss his mortality. “You have many, many more happy years ahead with Señora María Eugenia. Things will get better, señor, they will improve. This Special Period is only temporary.”
“Well, I’m not so sure about that, Eladio, that’s why I asked you to come out here, to have this talk with me.” Luis turned to look at him with a stern expression on his face. “I need your help with something—it’s a big favor.”
“Of course, Señor Luis, ask anything you want of me. As always, I am at your service.” Eladio struggled to speak in a normal tone of voice.
Luis waited for a few moments before speaking again. “You know how important the dinner—the dinner with my friends—is to me.” Eladio nodded. “Well, this favor I am going to ask of you has to do with that.”
During those years, Eladio had come to both love and hate the dinners. He loved them because they gave Luis something to look forward to. For weeks before the event, Señor Luis would discuss with great animation how wonderful it was that he would be getting together with his oldest and best friends, what a blessing it was that, although they were old, they were in reasonably good health and could still recall “the good old days” when they were young and had their lives ahead of them.
For weeks before that night, Eladio would watch as his employer took out the photo albums and pored over the pictures, searching each one for details he especially cherished—an expression in the eyes of Ricardo, the way the salt spray made Roberto’s hair coarse like a scrub brush. He studied them as a detective might examine a crime scene. Luis would always dwell longest on the same three photographs, the ones of him and his friends on his fishing boat, eating the seafood they had caught.
Eladio hated the dinner for the exact opposite reason that he loved them: the get-together with the childhood friends would remind Luis of the sadness, the hollowness, the despair of the lives they had led for the past forty years. The photographs were taken when Luis and his friends were in their early twenties, at the beginning of their lives. It was when looking at the photos in the season of each year’s dinner that Luis felt it most strongly: that all hope was gone, and suffering and indignities, hunger and old age were the only things ahead of them. None of their ambitions had been realized, and none were going to be. Their lives had been wasted. Now all they had to look forward to was more suffering.
This dinner was so much more than just a meal. Eladio was willing to do just about anything to make it as successful as it could be.
“Señor Luis, I am happy to go back out again to try to find the seafood.” Relieved to hear that the request from Señor Luis was nothing more serious than that, Eladio spoke quickly.
“No, Eladio, I’m not asking you to go look for any more lobster, crab, or shrimp. You’ve looked, María Eugenia has looked, I’ve looked.” Luis shook his head slowly. “There’s none to be found anywhere, we know that.” Luis stood up and took a few steps forward, until he was only a foot away from Eladio. “No, Eladio, the favor I am going to ask of you is much more serious, more important.” Luis put his hand on Eladio’s shoulder.
Eladio felt his body turn ice cold, and he began to shiver almost uncontrollably. Eladio could not recall a single time when his employer had touched him in all of their years together. “What is it, Señor Luis?”
“Eladio, I am going to ask that you do something for me that I have no right to ask of you, but I am going to ask it anyway, because I think you understand why I have no choice.” His grip on Eladio’s shoulder became so tight that it was starting to hurt. “If I cannot serve my guests a proper dinner, I cannot continue living. The shame will be such that my life will be over. For me, admitting that when it came to be my turn to host the dinner, I could not deliver what was expected of me—this is something I cannot contemplate. I can live with the humiliation of life as it is now—but shame is something I cannot accept, will never accept. I will not be the first one of my friends to fail to properly host the dinner when it was my turn. I cannot!” Luis took his eyes off Eladio and looked away into the distance. “The Rodríguez-López family is a proud one—150 years ago, we fought for our freedom against the Spaniards, the bastards, and we paid dearly for that stand. So many young men died—but it was the only honorable choice we could make.”
Eladio, of course, had heard the stories for years. “Señor Luis, what is this big favor you want to ask of me?” Even though he was fearful of the answer, he felt he had no choice but to ask.
“Eladio, as you know, I’ve been giving the situation a lot of thought, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve exhausted all my options. There is no seafood in all of Havana—in Cuba, for that matter—for my meal. And with the celebration only two days away, we’re unlikely to find any.”
Eladio shook his head. “Señor Luis, no, don’t give up, I can try again. We can all try—you, Señora María Eugenia, me.”
Luis smiled. “No, Eladio, you’re wrong. The only way I can get through this predicament—the only way I can free myself from my obligation—is by dying.”
“No, Señor Luis, no!” Eladio was horrifled. “No! What you serve at the dinner is not what matters. The important thing is that you get together with your friends. They want to be with you. You can serve something else, anything! They don’t care what they eat. Or cancel the meal.”
“You’re wrong again, Eladio,” Luis said. “This dinner
is
that important. It is the reminder of what I once was! Not to do it and do it well would negate everything that my life was. I can’t control the events around me, but this—this is the one thing I can control.” Luis took a deep breath and let go of Eladio’s shoulder. “No, Eladio, this dinner—doing it right—is more important than what remains of my life.”
“Señor Luis, please, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but you are not thinking clearly,” Eladio ventured. “The other señores, they will understand—everyone understands—life is so difficult now for everyone. Your friends, they just want to be with you.”
“That may be so, Eladio, but it’s not the way I think.” Luis spoke in a calm, measured voice. “I know what has to be done. The only way to resolve this situation with honor is for the dinner to be canceled because of my death.”
“Your death? No, there has to be another way.” Eladio was close to tears. “Señor Luis, with all respect, I don’t think you’re well. I’m going to fetch Señora María Eugenia.”
With unexpected strength, Luis grabbed Eladio and pulled him close. “No, you are not going to do that—she cannot be involved.”
“Señor Luis, please let me go and get the señora.” Now in tears, Eladio was pleading with his employer. “You are sick. She can help you.”
“Eladio, listen, you have to do this for me. I’ve watched you, I’ve seen how you’ve killed chickens, pigeons, that suckling pig we had for Christmas years ago. You twist their necks—you do it quickly and without the animals feeling pain. It’s fast and painless.”
“You want me to kill you? Señor Luis, are you crazy?” The two men stood by the wall in the garden facing each other for what seemed like hours. Each was desperate—Luis needed Eladio to follow his final orders, and Eladio, who for the last four-plus decades had always done as his employer asked, for the first time ever, would be defying him.
It was Luis who broke the silence. He knew his window of opportunity was closing fast, and he had to convince Eladio to do his bidding, otherwise his plan would not work. “Eladio, it’s the only way, trust me. I know that I am asking a lot of you—it’s not right, and it’s not fair. If there were another way, I would not ask this of you. But I’m seventy years old, I’ve lived a full life, and this is the way I want it to end—with honor, without shame, not a failure because I could not deliver the meal to my friends. But to do it, I need your help.”
“No, Señor Luis, I cannot do it.” Eladio looked down at the ground. “I understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t matter. I still cannot grant you your request. I cannot. It’s not right. No meal is worth your life.”
By then, it was close to midmorning and the August sun beat down on them, making the air sizzle with tropical heat. Luis decided that the only way to get Eladio to do as he asked was to act in an authoritative manner. Decades of following orders would take over, he was sure of that.
“This is what you are doing to do. Right now, right here, you are going to twist my neck—the way you do the animals. Quick and painless. I’ve already been to see Father Antonio, and I’ve confessed my sins to him and asked for his blessing. Of course, I didn’t tell him what I was going to do—he wouldn’t allow it. The Catholic Church condemns suicide—I couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground, which would kill the señora. So my confession omitted this one matter. Afterward, I stayed in the church and prayed for forgiveness, and prayed for you, what I’m asking you to do.”
Eladio stood speechless. All that was sinking into his brain was that he was supposed to kill Señor Luis—in this moment, to put his hands around that neck and head. It was too much for a simple man to understand.
Luis continued outlining his plan. “After you kill me, you will go to see the señora and tell her that we were out in the garden getting some herbs for the dinner, and that I collapsed, I fell down on the ground, but I did not want you to leave me to run to get help. I dropped dead—you think it’s a stroke; maybe the heat brought it on, maybe the stress about the dinner, but my last words were for her not to notify the authorities of my death, so they would not take the house or move strangers here to live with you. Everything has to stay the way it is, for the future, when, God hopes, this madness will stop. She knows how important this house is to me—so she’ll agree to that. Tell her also that I asked you to bury me in the back, by the wall, so that no one knows I’m gone.”
“Señor, no, please! Please, I beg you, don’t talk like that!” Eladio put his hands over his ears so he would not have to hear what Luis was saying. Luis, ignoring him, started laughing, not in his normal way, but manic laughter—the sound frightened Eladio even more.
“Listen to me, Eladio. So that all is not lost, you can use my body for fertilizer. You’re always looking for compost for your garden—at least I can help you out some.” Luis smiled at his own feeble joke. Then, seeing the stricken look on Eladio’s face, he shook his head slowly, raised his arms, and reached over, removing his employee’s hands from his ears. “Eladio, whether you help me or not, I will still take my life. I promise you that.” He took a step closer. “You know that we Cubans have the highest suicide rate in the Americas, don’t you?”
Eladio’s eyes grew so large that for a moment it looked like they might pop out of his face.
“Yes, well, that’s true,” Luis said, laughing bitterly, “it’s the one thing we can do correctly: kill ourselves. But you wouldn’t want to see me add to that statistic, would you, Eladio—make that number grow by one? You don’t want to see if I can kill myself correctly, do you? And if I botch it and end up with bigger problems than I have now?” Luis got a cunning look in his eyes, an expression that Eladio had seen on a couple of previous unpleasant occasions, which meant that his employer was going to use an argument he knew would win. “And after I kill myself, how would you explain a suicide to the señora? How do you think she would feel if she knew I killed myself?”
“No! No! Señor Luis!” Eladio was babbling in an almost incoherent manner. Sweat was pouring down him, dripping off his body in such copious amounts that soon he would be completely dehydrated.
Luis continued giving instructions, so that there would be no mistakes, no unforeseen eventualities. “Tell her I asked you to contact my friends to cancel the dinner—that’s important, you cannot forget that part.” Then Luis added, smiling, almost as an afterthought, “Tell the señora also that I love her—those were my last words.”