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Chapter One

    Blackout.

    Julian stares at the ceiling while the noise of a patrol helicopter drums into the room. Its vibrations shake the picture frames against the walls. Boom gone, the sound scales into an echo, a fading noise that reminds him of a flock of cowbirds fluttering up from a cane field, then turns into an overwhelming silence that creeps gently in the dark. Through the cone-shaped mosquito net, the darkness works strange configurations.

    Who are they after?

    The rain taps on the patio's tin roof, beats on the windowpanes, knocks on the banana leaves by the side of the house. He shuts his eyes and wishes he would, like a magician's rabbit, disappear and appear someplace else. Lightning flashes, followed by thunder, which cracks like rotted wood in the distance.

    A mosquito caught inside the net buzzes, and when the buzzing stops, he knows that it has found his flesh, that it has smoothly inserted its stinger to suck a drop of his blood. He slaps his chest and gets the buzzing going again.

    He can't remember having ever lived through such bad weather. The rain hasn't stopped since his arrival in Habana six months ago from the muddy cane fields of Oriente, where the army sent him to finish his last year of service.

    As a child he loved to bathe outside under the rain, watch the branches of lightning fracture on the opaque clouds, listen to the sound of water running into gutters. But he has come far from his childhood, from those days when Bernarda, his grandmother, filled his headwith tales of pirates and treasures out of books whose titles he can no longer recall. Certainly too far back to remember. A bird, he thinks, must have eaten all the bread crumbs he left behind.

    So many things keep him awake. Anxiety invades him, straps him to the bed, and refuses to let go. Being rigid and too small, like an army cot, the bed forces him to sleep diagonally. He scratches an old mosquito bite on his sweaty legs, which lie on top of the bundled sheet. The itching starts ... Eight o'clock seems ridiculously early to be in bed, but these daily blackouts last for hours, and limit moving about. Usually, by ten it doesn't matter whether the lights return, for he has surrendered to sleep.

    But not tonight. Tonight the sounds of the rain and thunder and the flashes of lightning and the mosquitoes and the heat and the incessant croaking of the frogs won't let him. Heat and humidity make him feel as though he were back in the cane fields under a scorching sun, for his mattress is hot and the warm breeze that sneaks into the room keeps lapping his sweat dry.

    It is as though he doesn't trust to close his eyes to the dark. To sleep. His thoughts come in bursts, like hand-grenade explosions. He takes comfort in the fantasy that everybody in Habana is in bed praying to all the saints and virgins for sleep so that in their dreams they may find themselves in a better place.

    Julian tosses, turns, and searches for a cool spot on the bed, then, during a moment when a steady breeze makes the net billow, he feels himself float away into the freedom of sleep.

Chapter Two

    Bernarda's voice shatters his deep sleep as she calls from her bedroom. Confused, he pushes the net aside, feels over the floor for his shorts, and over the night table until he finds the candelero with the matches. "Cono," he curses. He lights the wick, slips on his shorts, and rushes to his grandmother's room.

    "What's the matter?" Julian says as he raises the fame over her bed. The flame turns the walls pale yellow. This close to her bed the air hangs musty with sickness and medicine.

    "Door," she says in her tired voice. "Someone's knocking."

    The knock comes again. His grandmother didn't imagine it, like the time she worried about a giant vulture perched on the roof of the house.

    At the door, he pushes aside the window curtain.

    "Julian Campos?" a voice says, then a light flashes across Julian's eyes.

    "Yes?" A G-Dos, he thinks while unlocking and opening the door. Secret police.

    The officer hands Julian an envelope, which he checks against the light. It is a telegram from the Ministry of the Interior.

    "Expect another officer for inventory of the house," the officer says, while water drips from his raincoat onto the porch tiles.

    "When?"

    "I don't know, companero." The officer switches off his flashlight and walks away under the rain past the front gate, which he leaves wide open.

Chapter Three

    Julian closes and locks the door. After placing the light on top of the sofa's armrest, he tears open the envelope and reads the telegram:

PRESENT ALL DOCUMENTS IN ORDER
10:00 AM / MAY 3, 1969 /
ROOM 12 / THE MINISTRY
OF THE INTERIOR

    May 3 is tomorrow. How like immigration to wait until the night before and deliver the exit notice in the rain during a blackout--that last little intimidation for people who want to leave.

    "Who's there, Julian?" his grandmother asks.

    Back in her room he places the candelero on top of her night table carefully so as not to knock over the two glasses, one in which she keeps her dentures.

    "A G-Dos," he says.

    "What did the bastard want?" she asks, sliding her hands out from under the sheet.

    "He gave me this. The exit notice."

    "Read it to me."

    After he reads her the note, he inserts it back inside the envelope. He has been waiting for those words ever since his parents left the country. His grandmother even more so, worried it would arrive too late. "I might be six feet under by then," she had said.

    She nods, then points a finger at the wall behind the headrest and says, "Please." Julian untangles her rosary from the crucifix he learned to make out of clothespins in grade school. The beads roll from his fingers into her cupped hand. When she tries to cross herself, she coughs. "You know where they are, the documents?"

    "I know, I know," he says. "In the top drawer of your dresser. But aren't you happy we're finally allowed to leave?" Tomorrow morning, he figures, there'll be plenty of time to look over the documents.

    "Damn government red tape. It took them long enough," she says, then coughs again.

    "Water?" he asks, reaching for the glass.

    He slips his arm under her neck and lifts her head from the pillow as her long bony fingers wrap around the glass. The asthmatic cough returns between swallows and then ceases.

    "Better?"

    "Wait until I tell Carmina."

    "She's going to be happy. Carmina has been more than a neighbor and nurse."

    "Go to bed. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."

    "Can't sleep. I'm going to make coffee," he says, moving toward the door, which he secures with a wood stopper so that the wind won't shut it.

    He takes the light to the kitchen, searches among cupboards for the coffee can, but finds it empty. He'll have to wait his turn at the bodega; and besides, he realizes, coffee at this hour will only keep him awake. His grandmother's right, he should rest. But he feels too tense, too excited to go to sleep, the same kind of excitement that made him want to get his life going when he got out of the service. Hoping he won't have to go to the Ministry of the Interior in the rain, he sits and tilts the chair against the wall, facing the living room.

    In the room the old television set and cabinet radio take the forms of two fat men sitting opposite each other, engaged in a conversation.

    The sound of the helicopter returns, this time stronger and louder, shaking the kitchen, rattling silverware and glasses. He runs his fingers through his hair as he stands to return to his room. The lights won't return tonight, he thinks, to hell with them. Overcoming his inertia, he bends over the candelero and thinks of leaving Habana. The note on the table disappears the instant he blows out the flame.

Chapter Four

    The crow of a rooster wakes him. He stretches, gets out of the net, rises, and draws open the curtain. A glare rushes into the room. When his eyes adjust, he sees that it is no longer raining. The raindrops that hang from the top of the braided wires fall when the chickens peck on the sides of the cage. He feels exuberant, overjoyed with last night's news.

    In the bathroom he shaves with his father's razor blade while showering. Calabazar is more than thirty minutes from downtown Habana. It might be a good idea to take a taxi, since he knows how crowded buses get in the mornings. In his grandmother's room he tiptoes over to the dresser, pulls the top drawer open, and removes the bundled documents: their birth certificates, his service discharge, and passports. Before he leaves the room, he walks over to the bed and kisses his grandmother good-bye, for good luck. Her rosary is on the floor against the wall on the other side of the room. Wondering how it got there, he picks it up and puts it on top of the night table.

    After making sure that the front door is locked, he walks away from the slippery porch. The thick smell of wet grass and mud fills the street. The kitchen light of the house across the street burns brightly behind the window shade. Julian imagines Fermin curled on the kitchen floor coming out of one of his hangovers. At the corner where the fallen leaves of Carmina's coffee plants clutter the sidewalk, he turns and heads toward the front of the bodega to catch a taxi.

Chapter Five

    Julian checks the bundled documents in his coat pocket one more time before the taxi stops, then he steps out, pays the driver, and walks up the flight of stairs that leads to the old Spanish facade of the Ministry of the Interior. From the ledge where an escutcheon of liberty hangs, the ash-colored pigeons coo and flap their wings. Julian enters through the rotating glass door and walks up to the information booth where a man in a blue uniform sits and stares at him as he goes by.

    On the second floor, inside the room, two or three people work behind a Formica countertop: typing, filing, and shredding papers.

    "Yes?" the man typing says. The click-clacking ceases. Julian takes the telegram out of his coat pocket and shows it to him.

    "All the documents are here," he says, pushing them toward the man's hands.

    The man reads slowly, his thin hands tremble. He puts the note down, walks to a filing cabinet, and, after opening the second drawer, he withdraws a manila file.

    "When can my grandmother and I leave?" Julian says.

    "Why isn't she here?" the man asks.

    "She's restricted to bed by her doctor's order."

    The man looks at Julian as though he isn't telling the truth. "It says here you were in the army, were you not?"

    "Three years," he says, finding his dog-eared service discharge. "Long enough to lose my sense of humor." He smiles, but the stern look on the man's face doesn't change.

    "In order for the exit to be granted, you'll have to do voluntary work," the man says.

    "What type of work?"

    "Cut cane."

    "That's what I did last year."

    "That was in the service, companero," the man says. "What are you doing now?"

    "Attending the university."

    "Wait here." The man walks away and disappears into another office.

    So many concerns pass through Julian's mind while he fights fatigue--it will all be a mistake and he won't have to cut cane again, he assures himself. This time they'll let him go, for God knows he has waited long enough, played all their games by their rules! Five years ago they refused to let him leave with his parents, because at fifteen he had to enter into the Young Pioneers to prepare for the service. That day at the airport his parents were forced to choose: leave or stay, and they chose to leave.

Chapter Six

    Two airport security officers, guardias, hold his father back. "Your son cannot leave!" the customs officer, a short, bald man wearing dark sunglasses, says.

    "Listen to me," his grandmother says to his mother. "Go! Elena, please go!" Then, as she and Julian walk to the window from where they could see the plane, she says to one of the officers, "Sons of bitches."

    Julian's mother takes Ernesto, who shouts obscenities past the narrow corridor past the security checkpoint, by the arm and leads him down the boarding ramp. The guardias take them out of sight.

    When the tow truck pulls the plane away from the terminal gate, Julian presses his forehead against the hard glass and waits for the plane to taxi to the beginning of the runway, turn, gather speed, the sun's glare flashing off its windows, and take off.