The House of Rumour (37 page)

We are the antisocial elements seeking our own Earthly Paradise, she announced, quoting a comment made by the Maximum Leader. I tried my best to be nonchalant, to assume the air of the bohemian artist. But I was short of breath; the party was crowded and hot. I found myself amid a group of men doing synchronised dance moves, a sign language incomprehensible to me. The atmosphere was intimate and suffocating. I left early and wandered down to the shore to feel the sea crash against the concrete and coral of Beach 16.

Lydia began hanging out with Nemo Carvajal once more. They listened to Sun Ra records together and composed
samizdat
leaflets for an anarchist organisation. Calling itself the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, it declared its intent of establishing a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space. They entered into a playful conspiracy that somewhat excluded me. I have always found it hard to understand humour, though people constantly seem to see elements of it in my work. I couldn’t help feeling that the laughter they shared so easily mocked me in some way. And I was so absorbed with my sculpture at this time, creating a number of intricately nested wooden cabinets sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as my Chinese Box series, that I didn’t see much of either of them for a while. I concluded that Lydia, like me, was finding consolation in the imagination and that this led her to engage with the insane fantasies of Nemo Carvajal. But any thoughts I might have had that she had lost her spirit for real adventure were to be proved quite wrong.

It was clear by the middle of 1994 that the Special Period had reached crisis point. As our economy collapsed in on itself and the US blockade was tightened, ordinary people in Cuba were driven to desperation. It was the summer of the
balseros
, the rafters who used makeshift vessels in an attempt to cross the perilous straits to Key West or Florida to claim asylum. It was hardly a new phenomenon, but the number of those willing to take the risk to get to America that year swelled to tens of thousands. Even I could not distance myself from a growing sense of panic and confusion in the air. Ferries and tugboats were regularly hijacked from Havana harbour, only to be recaptured or sunk by our National Coast Guard. In August there were riots on the streets; the Maximum Leader himself appeared at a disturbance on the Malecón to try to restore order. It was here that Fidel made his announcement, clearly to force the Americans to change their policy, which restricted official immigration while welcoming illegal refugees. He declared that those who wanted to leave could do so and commanded the Coast Guard to stand down. In these circumstances, he said with a brilliant and ruthless rhetoric, we can no longer continue to guard the borders of the United States.

The fact that rafts were now allowed to be launched openly, and the sure knowledge that this permission would not last forever, generated a clamour of activity. Crowds gathered to cheer on the
balseros
in an absurd carnival. Few could hope to survive a voyage across perilous and shark-infested waters and I was determined not to be witness to this cruel spectacle. Until I learnt that Lydia was one of the participants. I found her on Beach 16, already assembling her craft on one of the concrete walkways. I did all I could to try to persuade her not to go but Lydia was, as always, absolutely determined in her mission. She wavered for only a moment, when I asked her about Eva. She’s left me, she said, turning from her task to look at me with a terrible sadness in her eyes. I knew then that her heart had been broken too many times and that there was nothing I could do. She then quickly and very deliberately brightened her mood. Listen, she told me, when Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut, went up in Vostok 6, she travelled thousands of miles into space, orbiting the earth forty-eight times. Key West is only ninety miles away.

She had built a wooden frame with stabilisers made from plastic containers lashed around a huge Russian tractor inner tube and had improvised an outboard motor from a Ukrainian lawnmower engine. Good old Soviet technology, she commented wryly. I thought of what Nemo had said about Narcís Monturiol. Lydia certainly planned her journey carefully. She had rations of water, bread and salted coffee to restore lost sodium. Her vessel carried an extra tyre and a pump, a flashlight and a compass; there was a canopy to shield her from the sun and to collect rainwater. I couldn’t bring myself to help her but I found it intolerable simply to stand there and watch. Before I knew what I was doing, I had started to fashion something from odd bits of junk that were strewn everywhere from the preparations of the
balseros
. I think Lydia noticed before I did that I was making a model of her raft. She smiled and shook her head slowly.

When other rafters and their onlookers noticed what I was doing, several of them asked me if I could do the same for them. I obliged, knowing instinctively that these miniatures could somehow be endowed with the power of a fetish, to give a necessary sense of luck to their originals. Where I didn’t have time to create objects, I hastily drew sketches or made notes, with the urgency that there might be some spiritual record of this hapless armada. I was astonished by the creative ingenuity of the
balseros
with their constructions of rubber, plywood, plastic and aluminium. Many of the rafts had been given names:
Yemayá
,
La Esperanza
,
Tio B
,
Santa Maria
, and so on. Lydia named hers
Vostok 94
in honour of Valentina Tereshkova, with the bitter irony that acknowledged this would be her own first journey into outer space. Nemesio Carvajal and I watched her launch on the following dawn, her little spacecraft cresting the waves as it headed towards another world.

The Maximum Leader’s gamble worked: the Yankees could not cope with an increasing flood of refugees. In a matter of weeks the American president ended the automatic right of entry for Cubans picked up at sea (they were taken instead to the US Navy base in Guantánamo) and an annual quota of twenty thousand visas was agreed for those who wished to apply for legal migration. Since a criterion for applications was unlikely ever to be agreed between the two countries, this was to be done by lottery. The Cuban Coast Guard went back on duty and the sad and euphoric farewell parties on the beaches came to an end. To this day no one knows how many thousands died that summer. And we had no idea whether Lydia had made it or not.

I gave away some of my models of the rafts, but more often than not people wanted me to keep them with the others I had made, as part of a collection. Everyone staggered back to some kind of stability with a sense that there had been a ritual release of discontent, and that maybe we had gone through the worst of the Special Period. But it was a topsy-turvy world compared to the one I had grown up in. People now relied on the black market, hard currency sent by families abroad and the now growing tourist industry. Those who had once held important jobs found that they could make more money doing the most menial tasks in hotels and restaurants where they might get dollar tips.

Nemo Carvajal told me a joke that autumn that I did understand. Two Cuban men are sitting on a porch. I hear your daughter is seeing a waiter, says one. I’m afraid he’s only a doctor, the other replies.

Even the Maximum Leader seemed cast adrift, lost in space. Before, we were described as a satellite of the Soviet Union, he declared at a press conference. Today we could be described as a solitary star, like the star of our own flag with its own light, but nobody could say we were a satellite. Now we could be told that we are nostalgic.

And my own situation seemed ridiculous. I was hardly known in my own country, yet I was an artist with an international reputation. My work sold abroad for high prices, converted into a meagre peso allowance by the Cultural Property Fund. But I was happy enough with the moderate living I could make, hoping that my vocation as a sculptor could render some stability to my life. Then I won the lottery.

Nemo Carvajal laughed out loud when I told him the news. It had been he who had persuaded me to put my name forward in the raffle for American visas. The Lottery in Babylon! he exclaimed, naming the Borges story where all state activities, punishments as well as rewards, are dictated by a game of chance. I wasn’t sure whether or not to accept this peculiar act of fortune but he urged me to do so. A marvellous fantasy, he said; it proves that all is speculation. Then he caught my eye and in a more sombre tone whispered: you must go, you must find Lydia. And I knew he was right. It would mean saying goodbye to my family, but it also meant that I would be able to support them properly. When Nemo came to say goodbye he had a package with him. It was a manuscript that he wanted me to take to the United States. On the wrapping was the name Larry Zagorski and a Los Angeles address. I asked him about America and the time he had spent there but he did not have much to tell me. It’s a failed state, he sighed, like all states. Go. I will stay here. My friends, he murmured, his eyes rolling skyward, they know where to find me.

I arrived in Miami an alien – a frightening identity but a liberating one. It forced me out of introspection. I now had a sense of purpose and I needed to connect. I got in touch with the Transit Center for Cuban Refugees and other exile organisations. None had any record of Lydia Flores. I consoled myself that the documentation of those who had survived or had been lost was as yet incomplete and that, after all, she could be in Guantánamo. Hope and fear are very close companions. My new circumstances filled me with a tremendous energy and with that I went to work.

Using the many contacts I had accumulated in the art world, I found a studio and a gallery space more than willing to present my planned exhibition. I duplicated from memory all the models of the rafts I had made, adding sketches, notes, fragments of testimony. I put it all together quickly; my own urgency and an acceleration of outside interest in what I was doing gave the work momentum. The central piece was a reconstruction of Lydia’s
Vostok 94
. But this was not to scale. For once I wanted to recreate the exact dimensions of my subject. Life-size, I found myself muttering, as if in prayer.

The show generated an immense amount of publicity, featuring in current affairs and opinion columns as well as in reviews and articles on cultural criticism. It became a talking point for debates on the function of art and on the discourse in international relations in a new world order. More importantly it became a place of contact and an information exchange for the recent Cuban exiles. But I was quietly determined not to become any kind of spokesperson. I relied on Tommy Bernstein, the affable, red-haired gallerist who so diligently curated my installation, to deal with the media coverage and requests for interviews. His Spanish was as rudimentary as my English but I found him easy to get along with and was relieved to have him as my protector.

I started to float in a kind of euphoric exhaustion. I found it hard to sleep. In the early hours, ghosts of the lost
balseros
would visit me, chanting their names, their stories, their innumerable tragedies. By day all the fresh opportunities that were now open to me as a successful artist, of course, offered no solace or peace of mind. The one personal outcome that I had sought from my exhibition remained elusive.

Then late one evening I received a frantic phone call from Tommy Bernstein. I was to meet him the next day at an address north of Miami Beach. His voice was agitated and I found it hard to follow all that he was saying, but he mentioned Lydia and
Vostok 94
. Just one phrase stuck in my mind and reverberated with the shock of hope. I’ve found her, he told me.

That night Lydia Flores came to me in a dream. It was just her voice coming through the airwaves, crackling with deep-space static carrying a simple message: I’ve made it, don’t worry, I’ve made it.

Tommy Bernstein was waiting for me as I arrived at a gas station at Biscayne Point, our designated rendezvous. He smiled at me as I walked across the oil-stained forecourt, and I wondered what strange miracle of survival had brought me here. But when I asked him where Lydia was, his expression slackened and I realised there had been a terrible misunderstanding. I had learnt that English does not usually use gender in the naming of inanimate objects, but I was hopelessly ignorant of some notable exceptions: that ships and seagoing vessels are always given the feminine article. When he had said: I’ve found her, he didn’t mean Lydia but her raft, easily identifiable from the duplicate of it I had made. And there she was, the real
Vostok 94
, lying outside the gas station restroom, having been found washed up on the shore earlier that week.

After months of waiting with no word, the discovery of Lydia’s craft was the closest I’d get to confirmation that she had been lost. I knew from conversations I’d had with members of the US Coast Guard that, after any rescue at sea, rafts would be burnt or sunk to avoid them becoming navigation hazards or false targets for other ships or helicopters. And in my delirious grief I felt that the meaning of my dream of Lydia that night was that she had made it in some other way. Into the outer space she had always longed for. I cannot think of her anywhere else but up there, somewhere in orbit above me.

I had to leave Miami and decided to give up my US citizenship. But I could not face going back to Havana. Besides the desperate sadness I felt, I found myself constantly being used in an argument I had no part of. Some claimed me in their attack on the iniquities of the Cuban Revolution, others to blame American imperialism and its economic blockade. I grew tired of insisting that I was a moderate. But I could no longer diminish the world with my art. My work had become a memorial and the number of those it commemorated continued to increase. I felt a growing sense of responsibility that I could not bear. I sought asylum from myself.