LITMIR.BIZ

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had been sitting in his lorry at an intersection, waiting for the lights to turn green so he could turn left. The traffic lights changed and as he was pulling out, a motorbike crashed into him at great speed. The two men riding it had time to jump clear, but the woman who was travelling with them got her dress caught in the sidecar and was killed on impact. The men suffered a few cuts and bruises, nothing serious. They were both so drunk, said my father, that at first they did not seem to understand that their companion had been killed and her body was lying beneath the lorry. When they realized what had happened, they started weeping pathetically, in the way drunks do, and exclaiming: ‘It can’t be true! Help us, God, help us!’ On and on they went, lamenting and calling on all the saints, one by one, while my father looked on in shocked silence. In the forty-five years he had been driving, nothing like this had ever happened to him. He thought about the fragility of life, how just one single second can make the difference between life and death, and he thought, above all, about that corpse which just moments before had been a healthy woman. He thought about us, and about how this situation would weigh against us, for after this nothing would ever be the same for my father again. He stood there, motionless, at the edge of the pavement until the siren of the police car jolted him out of the paralysis into which he had fallen. The noise of a different siren heralded the arrival of an ambulance a moment later, which transported the corpse to the hospital and the survivors to the police station.

      My father assured us the accident had not been his fault and that everything would turn out fine, but the smile flickering about his lips was so thin it filled us with doubt. Papá never smiled like that. When he did smile, which was not often, his smile was full and firm without the slightest trace of weakness. We knew he was lying.

      At last the old man stretched out on the bunk bed and fell into a deep sleep. We made a pillow out of our fears and went to bed with sadness in our souls. I remembered the black cat which had been trying to send me a warning. I pressed my face down hard on the bolster and let exhaustion drag me under.

      The trial took place just one month later. The court deprived my father of two years of liberty even though he had been the least blameworthy party, and the real culprits got off lightly: one was fined a thousand pesos and the other went to prison for a year. It did not matter to the judge that they had been drunk and had jumped the red light; the death had to be paid for in one way or another and the person who paid most dearly for it was my father.

      They sent my father to a prison known as the Combinado del Este, on the east side of Havana, where most of the prisoners were murderers, thieves and common criminals. In one of the oppressive cells, my father sat and waited.

      My parents’ relationship had been over since I was three and they were now divorced, but this was the first time fate had physically pulled them apart. We did not want my mother to visit the prison – she was not in a fit state to bear any more suffering – but she insisted on going. All three of us went with her in a bus to Cotorro, carrying a plastic carrier bag full of food, our mouths bitter with injustice, and my mother staring out of the window of the bus, silent and confused.

      When we arrived at the prison, they made us go through to a room that seemed to pulse with both joy and misery. There were innocent children playing and running round and desperate men smoking and eating; living people and dead souls.

      When our father spotted us his face lit up and he hurried over to greet us. He had dark circles under his eyes caused by insomnia and malnutrition. He was dressed in clothes so carelessly made they seemed designed to humiliate the wearer. We sat down at a large table in the middle of the hullabaloo so he could eat and talk. He told us that on the same day he arrived, he had witnessed one of the prisoners having his throat slit with a knife during dinner and he had not been able to sleep since then.

      ‘God Almighty!’ exclaimed my mother, as she squeezed my hand tightly.

      My sisters shivered, and I saw their bare arms were covered with goose-bumps.

      I sat watching all the other prisoners in the room as my father spoke, without losing a word of what he was saying.

      The following week they were going to move him to a cadet school where he could work for a salary. Money was even more of a worry for us now that he was in prison. My mother had had to sell our sewing machine to buy the shopping for the month. As Papá devoured the meal we had brought him like a ravenous lion, one of the prisoners said hello to him.

      ‘That’s Augusto,’ he told us. ‘He’s the oldest inmate in the Combinado. He’s got life.’

      ‘What does “got life” mean?’ I asked him.

      ‘It means he’ll stay in prison for the rest of his days.’

      ‘Have you got life?’

      ‘No, my boy, no, I’ll just be here for a few months then we’ll all be together again.’

      Papá’s big, strong hands stroked my head as he gave my mother instructions on how to feed the saints in his shrine. By then they had gone far too long without food.

      My eyes followed Augusto as he wandered out into the courtyard. I stared at the withered face and the white head balanced on top of the slight body that paced to the beat of its own silent drum. Sitting on a wall, bathed in golden afternoon sunlight, he seemed to drift away. Intrigued, I asked my mother if I could go to the toilet and I walked outside, towards this man in his desolation. There he was, alone. No plastic carrier bag of food for him, not even a little drop of home-made coffee. The sun seemed to be his only friend. Prison, my father would say later, is a place where you have to get used to saying little or nothing at all, to forget about the passage of time and about life on the outside. After twenty years, Augusto looked as though he had learnt not to need anything. He turned towards me and his stare chilled me to the bone. The poor man looked like he had ceased to exist a long time ago, as though his soul was a place where hope had crumbled to dust and ashes.

      ‘Yuli, what are you doing?’

      I was suddenly aware of my mother calling me.

      ‘Just coming, Mami, just coming.’

      I went back to her, but I never forgot the look of that man who spent four hours sitting on a wall, gazing into the void. When we said goodbye to Papá, I saw that Augusto was still there in the same place. The day had become overcast. Even the sun had abandoned him.

      After that visit, my nightmares became unbearable. I dreamt that my father was sitting on the wall with Augusto. I would draw near and just as I was about to hug him, he would suddenly turn and look at me with that same lifeless gaze. Or I would dream that his lorry was falling over a precipice and my two sisters were trapped in the back. I woke up every morning with my eyes swollen from crying, but I continued going to class, as I had promised Lupe I would. I did not want to break my word, especially not now, when the performance at the García Lorca Theatre was about to take place.

      Try as I might, though, our teacher María Isabel was constantly scolding me.

      ‘You’re dirty and you smell,’ she often said, in front of everyone, and they laughed as if she had cracked a joke worthy of the finest comedian.

      I explained that my mother could not wash all our clothes and I often had to wear the same uniform as the day before. Not satisfied, she would ask me in a loud voice if we did not have any soap or deodorant in our house. Ashamed, I lowered my head and tried to work out what it was I had done to offend her so. However hard I tried to be good, they still thought I was worthless. I endured the humiliation for as long as I could, then one day something snapped in my brain. Fury formed a knot in my throat. I started truanting again.

      Even on the day of the performance at the García Lorca, I could not bear to go into school. My mother, ever sympathetic, did not question the lie I told about there being a day’s holiday from school. She cleaned the house, throwing buckets of water around and sweeping away the dead insects, while I slept all day. ‘Just stay where I can see you,’ she said when, at about six o’clock in the evening, I eventually got up, put on a pair of torn shorts and went down outside barefoot and without a shirt.

      My

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