Today as part of the blog tour organised by Anne at Random Things Tours I'm sharing an extract from Until We're Fish by Susannah R. Drissi.
In Until We’re Fish, Rodríguez Drissi investigates the complicity between Cuba’s Americana and the 1959 Cuban Revolution to reckon with the emotional, psychological, and historical forces that drive Cubans away from their island. To shape her novel the author reached deep into her real family’s feelings of love and bitterness for what they left behind in Cuba.
Stunning and elegiac, Until We’re Fish juxtaposes powerful images of landscapes, playful meditations on life, and penetrating insights into the human heart to richly bring to life the story of mischevious dreamer Elio, a Cuban teen whose unbridled confidence is severely tested after a near-fatal shark attack. Elio longs for freedom from the dreary home he shares with his mother. He spends his days and nights fantasizing about an American bike and Maria, his vivacious next-door neighbor. Two obstacles stand in his way: the 1959 Cuban Revolution and Maria’s dream of moving to Chicago. Yet Elio is steadfast in believing that somehow, some way he will get both the girl and the Schwinn. When an injury leaves him terrified of the sea, he’s faced with an impossible choice: to overcome his fear and do whatever it takes to realize his vision, or to stay safe and risk losing everything he’s been living for.
CHAPTER 12
SUMMER OF 1969 came in wet. Rain had been continuous since June. But to trace out the history of the whole summer in terms of rain, Elio thought, to say how it was raining at any given moment, to determine how yesterday’s drizzle was different from today’s showers, was utterly impossible.
Elio had always loved the rain. Regardless of its type, rain always came with impunity, drenching clotheslines, drumming on rooftops, seeping through crevices, and dropping with a tin-tin-tin into cooking pans in someone’s living room. It was the one thing on this island no one could control. In revolutions, everything shifted and nothing changed. Reform after reform replaced the names of things with newer, shinier names, but the things themselves remained the same. Teatro Blanquita in Havana became the Karl Marx Theater, but continued to be what it had always been: the largest movie theater in Havana. The Hilton Hotel in Vedado was renamed Hotel Habana Libre, but its standing as Latin America’s tallest and largest hotel was left unaltered. And as far as Elio was concerned, he could no more get his hands on a bicycle now than he could have years earlier. But he could always count on the rain to make him feel—well, hopeful. And there was hope. Ten Million Tons of hope, to be exact.
In only five years, they had become the new men and women of a new world, a different, better world. So new were they that a man might discover that he was meant to teach, and labor in the earth, and commune with his fellow man. So new that the island women—tired of clotheslines and dinners and mops—might run for the hills, alphabets floating behind them like clouds, to teach the unlearned to read and write. So new that children became the wards and the heirs of the Revolution. And all were energized by a new resolve, by the opening up before them of the blinding, flower-strewn meadows that led to justice, finally. To victory, always. And perhaps, because it was only the beginning, they were full of excitement and romance and love. Elio and Maria, too. Especially, Elio and Maria.
For several hours, hand in hand they walked in the Viñales landscape. Known for luminous skies, rust-colored tobacco fields, an emerald green valley, and craggy outcrops known as mogotes, Viñales was a town in the westernmost region of the island. To the people living in its small, wooden houses, rightfully outfitted with rocking chairs on shady porches, it was an agricultural town like many others on the island. To Elio and Maria, alone for the first time, it was paradise.
Rivulets of water pouring off their umbrella, they kept up a slow pace, wanting to possess every moment of their afternoon in the rain. They did not speak. But they were newlyweds; not speaking wasn’t yet something to worry about.
Toward midafternoon, the pangs in Elio’s belly gradually became stronger. They hadn’t eaten anything since leaving Bauta early that morning. He was so famished he could have eaten a whole racimo de platanitos without interruption—not that there were any available. He tried to hold on as long as possible, but when the rain finally subsided around 3:00 p.m., they slopped in through the door of their thatched-roof hotel room. Assuming Maria was hungry, too, he broke his hold of her hand at last.
He began foraging through one of the bags they’d brought along for the trip. His neck and back ached horribly, enough that he wondered how much bending, pouring, and mixing dye at the textilera he’d manage to endure in the future.
Day after day, he’d put up the brave struggle and played his role, only to end up in a honeymoon suite whose walls were irremediably thin, while he tried to ignore the radio broadcast in the room next door. All the laughter, moaning, and bed thumping told him that their next-door neighbors too, were on some kind of honeymoon.
“What are you doing?” Maria plopped herself on the bed, dabbing wet limbs with a corner of the bedcover.
“Cake time,” he said, lifting a small can in the air like a trophy.
“Already? I thought we would save it for after—you know?” She leaned back on the bed, a hand fluffing wet tresses, like she was looking into a mirror.
“A person must be prepared to receive nourishment.” He laughed, then pulled off the yarn around the paper covering the can’s opening. “I’m ready to feast, aren’t you?”
Maria laughed. “Sugar smacks,” she said in English.
“Did you bring a spoon? Or a fork?”
“I didn’t think of that,” she said.
“Are you hungry?” Elio asked.
Maria used her finger to point to her mouth, on which remained a smile. “Very,” she said.
Elio decided he’d come home, at last. He scooped out a handful of white frosting and yellow cake. “So good,” he said. “Don’t you want some? I can’t eat all this.”
The cake, their wedding cake, had been a gift from Fina Carreira, proud owner of the biggest house on the block, and for whom Maria did a bit of dusting here and there whenever the old woman happened to need it. Frosted with meringue and layered with vanilla custard and guava marmalade, the cake was just the way Elio liked it. Maria’s grandmother had been furious, though. She hated anyone getting the jump on her in the gift department, especially if anyone happened to be Fina. Eventually, however, Mima got over it. She had no choice, she said. She’d never tasted anything quite as good in her life. Maria seemed to agree. Fina’s cake, she’d told Elio, was Plus Value and Orlon Blend.
If they ate the cake now, Elio thought, they could focus on that invisible celestial signature that was the honeymoon business for a while longer. Hunger, he knew, shortened lifespans, and he’d resolved to pull an all-nighter. He wanted every moment of it to be perfect. Flowers, a light breeze, and the moonlight cascading through half-open shutters.
“It’s too bad we couldn’t get a nicer room, something with a window,” he told Maria. “Did you tell them that you wanted the honeymoon suite?”
The hotel room’s amenities included a small bar of soap, a stream of water that didn’t so much run as crawl, and an alarm clock frozen at 8:30 a.m.
Maria frowned. “This is the honeymoon suite. In any case, the mattress is better than ours,” she said, bouncing up and down on the bed to make her point.
“Well,” he said, reaching out his meringue hand to touch Maria’s lips, “at least that. As for the rest, just leave it to me.”
“I leave it to you, then,” she said.
Elio had himself pegged as an optimist. After all, he’d managed to land a job at the textilera, and he’d found a way to end up in Viñales— plus, he’d married her, hadn’t he?
“The whole thing will require some thinking,” he said with more cake than mouth.
“Can you get us some chocolates?” she said.
“I wish.”
“Mangoes?”
He watched Maria unbutton her shirt, and lean further back on the bed. He looked closely at her face. “I’ll be right back.”
Copyright © 2020 by Susannah Rodriguez Drissi
All rights reserved
Thanks for supporting the blog tour Sharon x
ReplyDelete