Orpheus Builds a Girl E-Book

Heather Parry

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 480

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A chilling exploration of power, love and grief' - JULIA ARMFIELD 'I am in awe of this wonderful book' - EDWARD CAREY 'Terrifyingly brilliant . . . intoxicating and beautiful' - CAMILLA GRUDOVA Wilhelm von Tore is dying. As he looks back on his life, he reflects on his upbringing in Dresden, his beloved grandmother, and his medical career during the Second World War. But mostly, he remembers his darling Luci, the great love of his life, his dark-haired beauty promised to him in a dream years before they met. Though only together for a few months in her first life, their love is written in the stars. Using scientific research compiled over decades, Wilhelm ensures that, for him and his beloved, death is only the beginning. But through the cracks in Wilhelm's story, there is another voice - that of Gabriela, and she will not let this version of events go unchallenged. She tells the story of her sister Luciana, fearless and full of life, and the madman who robbed her from her grave. FURTHER PRAISE: 'Heather Parry is a literary star of the future' - Kirsty Logan 'Strangely beautiful . . . an intensely gripping debut' - Alice Ash 'A wild, creepy, compelling read' - Jan Carson 'Sumptuously written and impossible to step away from' - Katie Hale 'Disturbing and compelling in equal measure' - The Big Issue

Leseprobe

Heather Parry is an established writer whose credits include The Stinging Fly, Gutter, Mslexia and The Ogilivie. She won the 2016 Bridge Award for an Emerging Writer, and Cove Park’s 2017 Emerging Writer residency. In 2021 she was a Hawthornden Fellow. Her work has also been performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She lives in Glasgow, and chairs literary events in Edinburgh and throughout Scotland. Heather Parry is the founder of the literary magazine Extra Teeth.

ORPHEUS BUILDSA GIRL

Heather Parry

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Original

© Heather Parry 2022

Heather Parry has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Gallic Books, 12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-805337-97-3

Typeset in Minion Pro by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

for Kay and Andrew

with apologies

‘So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.’

― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Foreword

I am here to tell you that devils exist. You’ll have heard about them in church, about hellfire and horns and pigs’ feet, but that is not how they are. They are not so uncommon. They look like us, but with white skin instead of red, and they have no need of shadows; we act as their protection. They control by words and actions, not black magic, and worst of all, they get away with it. Some of us are plagued by one devil for much of our lives. My sister was, and by loving her, I was plagued by him too.

You have likely heard my sister’s story already. She has been everywhere these six months past, in the papers and in gossip, her life broken apart and put back together in a way that suits him best. She has been rebuilt, rebroken, mutilated all over again. It has been this way for decades now; it began when we were just young women, and now I am old. You have heard his version from a dozen mouths or more. It is my job to show you the truth as we lived it. The truth as it was.

What I present to you here is the tale he has told. It is unchanged, so you may see how such creatures exist in broad daylight, wrapping themselves in the language of science and love. Between his pages, I have added my voice, to show how things really were, but the rest—it is the story as he wrote it, as he left it for you to read. For he thought of you, dear stranger, before you even knew he existed. He thought of you, and the things you like to believe, and he tailored his story towards your tastes. You will see him, if you care to, sitting by candlelight, writing in his strained hand in the last weeks of his life, thinking of you and me, thinking of the things he had done, spinning his web all over the page. As you read this book, you will come to know him as I knew him, by his own words, his lies, his strange and awful fantasies. You will enter into a world he created. But now, my world is there too.

When you first see a devil, you turn your face away. It’s too much, to see the darkness in this world, to see the way it reflects back at you. Some keep their faces turned for all their lives; some work hard to pretend they saw nothing at all. I present this story to ask you to finally look closely—not just at him, but also yourself. And, finally, at my sister.

I had hoped all of this was over in nineteen seventy-three, when we first lost Luciana. I had hoped it was over in nineteen eighty-two, when we realised she was not at rest. Now, I am in my sixties, becoming an old woman, and I am again here, trying to rescue my sister, the truth of my sister, one final time.

Gabriela Maria Herrera Madrigal de Giro

Key West

Florida

Life Beyond Death

The memoirs and findings of Dr Wilhelm von Tore

Preface

While this is primarily a medical text, intended to leave behind the findings I have made over almost eight decades of incessant experimentation and research, I find it necessary to include within it a certain amount of autobiographical information, namely that relating to my relationship with Luciana Madrigal and my introduction to the world of post-death medicine. I make no apologies for this. The reader will find that I have also written a small amount about my upbringing and experiences in Germany; this is included to facilitate comprehension of my greater goal and indeed my position on mortality. I ask the reader to trust that I am only setting forth information necessary to my final project; all other details have been discarded.

I understand that what I am writing here will be subject to the greatest speculation and criticism, and indeed many individuals, including those who call themselves scientists, will dismiss my claims out of hand. Perhaps had my life not transpired in this exact way, I would be amongst them; after all, the scientific method is one necessarily rooted in scepticism. However, I hope that by showing the reader how I came to embrace these admittedly unconventional ideas, despite years of medical training and experience which taught me such things were impossible, I will succeed in opening the reader’s mind to the possibility, indeed the proven existence, of life after death.

In my early life as a medical practitioner, I was given almost limitless resources. Money, equipment, time, bodies; I had as much as I needed, and my research during this time was of a quality unmatched since. My necessary emigration brought with it a demotion in role and an enormous loss of resources, and this slowed down my ability to continue my work—as did several personal matters unrelated to this text. It was only my introduction to Luciana that spurred me to transcend the position I’d been given and indeed to surpass my previous experiments in intensity if not in scope. I was forced to build my own equipment, spend my own money and devote almost all of my waking life to my goal, as well as working full-time at the hospital to fund my ongoing research. An enforced hiatus of two years undoubtedly retarded the development of my treatments, and perhaps my project never recovered from this defeat. Regardless, I continued with my experiments, and the results—which, with all humility, may change the very nature of human existence—can be found within these pages.

Where my notes depart from normal medical or scientific method, consider that I was working with restricted means, in my own home, far from a laboratory or surgical theatre where I should have been allowed to work. Putting limits on medical research means that we as a species are held back from the potential of science. Human squeamishness condemns us to perish. Where I have quoted conversations directly, I trust that my reader will allow me some degree of artistic licence. Without recordings of these conversations, I can only quote from recollection, but have attempted to preserve the accuracy of sentiment according to the best of my memory.

On a personal note, I would simply like to say that as I approach my final months and look back on the full century of my life, I cannot say that I would have done a single thing differently. Given the power to change the actions of those around me I would, of course, alter the timeline to mean that my Luciana would never have been taken from me, and would never have been committed to her second fate. However, with regard to my own actions, I rest easy; I could not have done a thing more for my beloved, nor could I have shown my love in any greater way. My conscience remains clear, and I can only hope that as I pass into the next realm to meet Luciana once again, the text I leave behind will save many in the future from losing their lovers.

Dr Wilhelm von Tore

1.Wilhelm

I was born in Dresden in nineteen nineteen. The end of conflict is an aphrodisiac like no other, and to it I owe my existence. My father was twenty-four at the time of my birth, my mother eighteen. They were married quickly upon confirmation of my mother’s condition, but their relationship lasted barely longer than my gestation. Finding the responsibility of a young family at odds with his natural virility and longing for experience, my father left my mother when I was only a few months old, and my mother returned to the familial home. Her own father had died in the war, but her mother, my grandmother, remained. It was in this house that I was raised.

As my mother was but a child herself, my grandmother took on the responsibility of raising the young boy in her home. The house in Striesen was of two floors, and my mother was generously given the bottom level, with a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom of her own. My grandmother and I resided on the top floor, where we had our own living quarters; everything that my mother had below, but with a study, a playroom and a balcony in addition. The washing facilities were on the ground floor, and, in exchange for our room and board in the home, my mother was given the task of taking on this part of the household upkeep.

Now, perhaps, is a good time to give an overview of my grandmother’s character and personality. She was fifty one when I was born; a practical woman, she had waited until her early thirties to marry, and she considered my mother a frivolous fool for bringing a son into the world when she had neither the means nor the maturity to raise him well. She felt it her duty to pour her energies into my development, to account for what she saw as my mother’s maternal deficiencies. I can only say that I loved Oma completely and without restraint. I slept in a cot by her bed until I outgrew it, then I slept in her bed itself until I reached puberty. The playroom was, at that point, converted into a room of my own. Yet there were many nights on which I stole through to my grandmother’s bed, once she had fallen asleep, and tucked myself into the covers alongside her, comforted by her light snoring and the smell of her hair wrap, which she rarely washed. There is an air about the elderly, a sensory fullness of the rooms in which they reside, and to a child this is an embrace. On restless nights I would watch her sleep, thinking of the years scored into her face, the experiences that she’d had; that I might have. In the mornings she would go through the charade of chastising me, but never without a smile; she slept more soundly with me at her side. Oma was a tiny individual, previously strong, then withering and thinning, very aware of the ways of the world and the darkness and light within it, but she was also a sickly woman, bedridden for much of my life and often confined to her own rooms with the stench of illness around her. When she reached her sixties, an unkind eye might have guessed that she was twenty years older. She was frail in body but in mind she was resolute; she was a learned woman and possessed a singular dedication to knowledge. Despite not being physically well travelled, she had a broad and all-encompassing interest in the beliefs of other cultures, and practised what I now recognise as a somewhat bastardised form of Zen Buddhism, where she engaged in focused breathing and hours-long meditation, lying perfectly still and ruminating on the things she felt and knew. I should make it clear here that she did not find the Asian cultures particularly insightful; she merely enjoyed the way the practice made her feel, and taught me the same, pressing her warm palm to my sternum and teaching me to control what entered my body. She did not believe in the frivolity of an excess of food, having lived through trauma and hardship and being cognisant of the needs of others, and in her later years she preferred to survive on nuts and berries, things that I could collect for her on my daily walks, or that could be bought cheaply, with no need for preparation. Oma always said she had better things to do than cook.

Through my childhood and into my teenage years, Oma read to me daily—European classics mixing with the medical textbooks that my grandfather, a physician himself, had left behind. In this way, I was predominantly home-schooled. I did not often mix with children my own age, apart from the rare occasion where my mother, home from long hours at her factory employment, could wrench me from my grandmother’s grasp and put me out to play, or into a club, or at a meeting for young boys. I never took to sports, and my physical activity was focused on inspiring growth. It could be posited that my early exposure to my grandmother’s infirmity served as a vaccination against sickness, as I rarely fell ill, and when I did so, recovered quickly. My mother claimed that this was due to my father’s robust military constitution, but this is nothing more than supposition. My studies, conversely, consumed me. From a young age I was allowed to remain in the room when the doctor visited Oma (despite the doctor’s initial reticence) and as I grew more dextrous and capable, I was taught how to administer her medications, how to move her body to avoid bedsores, how to examine her to check that her pulse was strong, her blood pressure manageable and her temperature consistent. My grandmother did not enjoy being hauled about by the doctor. Her thin frame was light enough for me to handle, and I was more careful with her, seeing her as more than a bag of bones. In my arms she was free from the shame of growing decrepit; she was teaching me, I would remind her, and I could have no better patient to learn on. In my free hours, I threw myself into the romantic and gothic classics. Goethe, Schiller, von Kleist, Novalis; from these I gained my understanding of matters of the heart as well as matters of the flesh, and as I grew older, I read these to my increasingly ailing Oma, watching her blossom once again in the realm of love.

It must have been a strange tableau: a young boy and his grandmother in the same bed, sharing joy in the dark romantic classics; and indeed we shared a deep and powerful relationship. Affection blinds one to the other’s faults and to me, Oma was perfect—stoic, capable, wise. I had my father’s looks (I deduced as much from a photograph found in my mother’s purse) and my grandmother’s muscular intelligence; with my mother, I had little that I could find in common.

Of course, part of this lack of connection was a combination of natural childhood rebelliousness and sheer immature egoism. My mother was a harried woman, unprepared for parenthood and forced to work long hours. Oma, on the other hand, had nothing but me to give her attentions to, and she taught me that the world was mine; that I was destined for eminence, that great things were owed to me. She instilled in me a pride in my mind and my heritage, cemented in me a love for the great European cities of old. Her love for Dresden was as infectious as any disease. As she grew unable to take me out to the city herself (which, she said, was a blessing, for she could not bear the presence of the Poles who had begun to plague the city on their way to seek work), I was sent away for afternoons to sketch the sites she used to love, coming back to report which type of people lingered around the Frauenkirche, which performers were coming to the Semperoper, whether foreigners gathered in numbers that should cause concern. I was never a natural artist but worked hard to develop some skill in still life drawing, and with pride I can say that this skill remains in some form to this day. Oma covered the walls of our room in my artworks and said that I was her eyes. I was her everything.

It was on one of my artistic excursions into the old city that an accident befell me. I was thirteen years of age and had spent the morning drawing scenes in my sketchbook, using charcoal to show shadow, pencil to show lines. I was building an entire skyline of the city and was making some progress when I grew hungry and headed for home. Strolling across the road with my papers under my arm and pencils in hand, I was hit by a wagon driven by a young woman. I was not a large boy, and the impact threw me across the street where my head hit the pavement, knocking me unconscious. I woke up five days later in hospital, with my mother at my bedside, playing the dutiful parent. My distress at not seeing Oma was great, but my doctors stated that only my mother should be allowed to visit me in my condition—and Oma, without assistance to leave the home, was effectively confined to her bed. As I awoke, the nurses and doctors came to my aid, and the doctors proceeded to tell me what had happened—and were stunned when I interrupted them in the middle of their explanation, able to tell them exactly when I had arrived at the hospital, how long I had been there, and who had visited me. Trapped in my brief coma, I had nonetheless been fully aware of the things around me; the movements of soft bodies around the room, the sharp introduction of medical equipment into my person. I recognised the doctor who had taken the most time with me and was able to say hello and express my gratitude while the colour rapidly drained from his face. Conversation then turned to my confusion, and all present agreed that I was playing some sort of trick on them, until I, in a proud voice, told the doctor that he had been humming Strauss’s Radetzky March while he treated me—one of my grandmother’s favourites, in fact.

The reaction to this information by the medical establishment sowed the first seeds of distrust in my mind. Here I was, a fit, intelligent young boy, reporting to the medical gatekeepers an accurate recollection of events that had occurred while I was in a supposedly non-conscious state. This should have excited at least a small curiosity in these men. Hearing facts that challenge our perception of the world is at the root of every great discovery, and here I was presenting doctors with proof that I had been fully cognisant for the duration of my apparent coma. Yet these individuals, after brief consideration, simply dismissed my claims. They mumbled words about the unlikeliness of such a scenario and said that I must have deduced the doctor’s love of Strauss from something about his person, or something in the ward (where there was nothing). It was a blow to a young boy who deified the medical establishment, the grandson of a physician. How would humanity ever go beyond its narrow understanding of the world if we turned away from clear evidence when put before our faces? I said nothing more about my experiences in my short coma. They did not care to hear, and neither did my mother, who lambasted me for lying to the authorities, for attention-seeking, for arrogance. And yet this experience did teach me one positive thing; that our understanding of the machinations of life and death are highly archaic and obsolete, and our ability to embrace science is hindered entirely by men who would deny the possibility of impossible things.

*

I recovered quickly from my accident, with only a broken leg and a sore head which hampered me vaguely for several weeks. However, my absence had had a profoundly negative effect on my grandmother. My mother had not returned to the house for the entirety of my confinement, meaning that my poor, proud Oma had been left near starving, alone and scared, and had been forced to withstand the indignity of defecating in her own bed.

When my mother and I finally reached home, with crutches supporting me, I almost fainted upon seeing the state that my beloved matriarch had been left in, and in a fit of pique I pushed my mother down the stairs to her own quarters. Gathering herself in the small hallway, with pathetic tears running down her face, she shouted back up at me—but I, equally angered and with the strength of righteous indignation, swore that if she ever climbed the stairs again, I would beat her with my crutches and leave the house, never to return.

I went to my grandmother, the magnificent figure under whose care I had grown, now small and terrified in the humiliation of her situation. She gently wept and I held her, caring not for the various odours and stains of dampness that covered her garments and bedclothes. I placed my arms around her and she cried into my chest, saying no words but expressing her gratitude with her grasp. She held me like her protector. At that moment, she was the vulnerable child, and I the adult. The world moved around us and I closed my eyes against the vertigo. My position on the bed brought pain to my leg, but I would not move until she did.

Limping on my crutches, I fetched bowl after bowl of hot water, brought sponges and clothes, and, softly humming, began to rescue my grandmother from her predicament. I pulled back the sheets under which she had lain, gently tugging on the parts where fluids had made the fabric stick to her skin. I patted these areas with the warm water of the cloth, soaking off the dried material so it could be removed without tearing her delicate skin. I held her in my arms and drew her to one side of the bed, then the next, so I could take off the sheets without forcing her to stand, then I rested her head in my lap while I took the pillows, discarded the stained cases, and covered them in fresh ones. I told my grandmother of the intoxicating things I had seen on the morning of my accident, of the city as it was then, of the people out there telling us things we should listen to. I recalled everything I had learned in the hospital as I pressed the sponge to her body, starting at the soles of her feet and her ankles, squeezing the sponge out into the bowl and bringing clean water every few minutes. She was quiet and passive, intently listening to my story as I sponged her calves and knees, smiling against the stench of urine and faeces that permeated the room. Combined with the comforting, maternal smell of Oma, it became sweet, almost delicious. I cleaned her arms and neck while I spoke, then dabbed at her chest. Staring up at the ceiling to hide her shame, she lifted her hips and allowed me to pull down the soiled underwear she was wearing, and all the while I kept talking. Though she would not look at me, I whispered as I gently cleaned around her soiled areas, discarding one cloth and reaching for another, making her pristine before moving on, her nightdress covering my forearms to preserve her modesty. She remained silent as I worked, and when I was satisfied that she was restored to her dignity, I brought from her chest of drawers a clean pair of bloomers, threadbare as that style had been out of fashion for decades, and slid the yellowed material up her legs. She wiped away the wetness from her face and rolled over, ashamed that she should find herself at the mercy of the young boy that loved her, that her agency had been so cruelly removed. I held her as I would have held a younger sister in distress and remained until she slept. In fresh sheets, cleaned and loved, she radiated a strange sort of beauty, one that had gone beyond time. I watched her until nightfall, whereupon I removed the stained sheets to my mother’s wash basket, creeping quietly so she would not see me. I retired to my bed that night knowing that I had become a man, and that the world expected much of me.

A week later my grandmother passed away. A more romantic mind might suggest that she never recovered from such harsh treatment, that heartbreak can drive a person to death—however, she was old and in poor health, and while I was ready to blame everyone around me, as the grieving young will, I understood even then that the universe is entropic, and death (at least, the first death) cannot be kept at bay forever.

It was a Tuesday evening and there was snow on the ground. The cold had descended quickly and without warning, so I took a blanket from my own bed and entered Oma’s room, for I knew that she preferred to sleep with fewer coverings when she could, and being a stubborn woman, would not have prepared adequately for the weather. I knocked softly on the door and pushed it open, finding Oma illuminated in a shaft of streetlight breaking through the curtains. She was pale, having so rarely left her room in the previous years, and still had a sallow look about her, but her lips were full of colour and she looked calm. Again I was struck by her beauty, and wondered, for the first time, about her courtship with my grandfather. How had they met? Where had they married? What was he like as a man, as a suitor? We had spoken so little about him outside of his achievements, yet I was curious, and felt for a brief moment indignation at having been robbed of his influence. I made a note in my mind to enquire about this with Oma later in the day. She looked to be sleeping, so I gently stepped over to her bed and spread the blanket out on top of her sheets; as I had suspected, she had too few layers about her. As I adjusted the covers around her body, tucking them into and under her girth, her hand caught on the sleeve of my nightshirt and fell to the bed—too easily. I stared at the hand and understood immediately that she was gone—but there was no blood running cold, no descending of grief, no floor giving way underneath my feet. I pressed my warm fingers to the soft folds of her neck and waited for the pulse, knowing that it was not there, and in none of these moments did I feel horror. Her body was still warm. I leaned over and pulled on her eyelids; the whites of her eyes were milky, but the iris had turned to black and the eyeballs had dropped into her head, leaving the sockets even darker still. Some say that looking into the eyes of the dead is like looking into an abyss of sorts, but rather, I felt myself drawn into the blackness that existed where my grandmother once was—enticed, even. It was a comforting, protective darkness. Eventually I drew her lids closed and allowed my body to press against hers, to feel the residual heat draining out of her, the slowing of the life systems working in her body. I climbed onto the bed and positioned myself so Oma’s back was resting against the front of my torso, and I placed my arms around her neck and chest. Her head lolled against me and I let her mouth fall against my arm; her jaw had dropped and a small line of drool dripped onto my skin. How tender, this moment. There was total peace as she moved between planes, and yet even then I felt that she had not departed completely. Her presence was undeniable, and the body felt as a body should. Oma and I stayed on the bed together until nightfall; I quite naturally fell asleep in her embrace.

It was several days before we were discovered. The separation in the house meant it was common for my mother and grandmother to go without speaking for as long as a week, but in those days after Oma’s death I was in something of a reverie, and finally, hearing little movement from the upper floors of the house, my mother sneaked up to see what had occurred. It was late morning, and I had permitted myself to sleep late with my grandmother. My mother screamed, hysterical, upon finding us, and I couldn’t find the words to say that the reason I hadn’t called her was that Oma was not gone. Perhaps I didn’t know that this was the reason—now, with the benefit of a lifetime of knowledge, I can say that what I was feeling was real. I knew that Oma would be taken away from me then, that they would cart her body from our room, from our home, and into a cold place, then into the ground, and it was then that I experienced the true terror of death; not the horror of the loss of life, because I knew the life had not gone, but the fear that the body should be thrown away, and with it any hope of keeping your loved one in the world with you. Had my mother been an astute woman, she might have noticed that Oma had not begun to decay as she should have, that her body was so incredibly well preserved that it had forgone the many ‘normal’ processes of the end of life, the spills and smells and staining of fresh death. She had not bloated, as I now know that bodies do. She had no rectal or nasal leakage. My mother realised none of this. Had she taken more time with the body, she might have thought about how Oma’s way of living had affected the way she moved from one state to the other, might have looked at Oma’s stomach, felt her skin, seen the dryness of her, the desiccation of her skin. She might have seen a different type of death, and wondered how her mother’s life choices had caused this. But she did none of these things; she saw merely a corpse. We throw away the dead; we cast them into the ground as a means to forget them, to rid ourselves of the responsibility for them. I knew my mother would take Oma from me so I clung on to her body until my mother called the authorities, until five large men came to take her, until they wrenched my hands from around her chest, needing all their energy to fight off this young boy, hysterical in grief, and when she was gone from the room, from our home, I collapsed into childish tears and wailed until nightfall. That night, and from then on, I slept in my grandmother’s bed.

2.Gabriela

On the day of her birth, Luciana del Carmen came out of our mother as wet as the sea. She slipped through our grandmother’s waiting hands, landed on the floor, and from her very first breath, she screamed as if dying. My father picked her up from my mother’s mess and, wiping her wailing face, called her mi sirenita, like she had come straight out of the ocean and into his life.

Luciana was born in our family’s house in Havana in nineteen fifty-one, just as I had been two years before. After us there came two boys, Andrés Ignacio and Juan Antonio, then another girl, Ximena Maria. Each child was born in the wet season; the screams of my mother would build as the clouds gathered, as the blanket of warmth wrapped around us, and then with the first cry of the baby the rains would come, and so too the breeze, the clear air, the new breath. Each time it happened like this, as if Mamá controlled the skies with her pain. Our grandmother, Tita, said this was the case. Over the years of my life, I have come to believe she was right.

Our parents were Juan Pablo Herrera and Elenita Providencia Madrigal, and according to my grandmother they were very much in love. Papá was a businessman, and he dressed to show it; bright shirts, beige trousers, the kind of smile that drew in strangers. If you lived in our part of Havana you would see him in the mornings, walking around town smoking cigarettes, buying fruta bomba and shaking hands with acquaintances. He was a man who liked to be seen. Mamá was a quieter person; she was studying, in classes for pharmacy most days of the week, but in the warm Havana nights she enjoyed being seen on my father’s arm. They took off in his car on the weekends, telling no one where they were going, taking next to nothing with them, and arriving back on Sunday nights, faces flushed with sun and sin. These are the stories that Tita told us of their life before we were born. They got married at her insistence, on a summer break from my mother’s studies, because my father was a good man and Tita did not want her daughter to lose him. By the time my mother went back to school I was already forming myself in her belly, and I arrived in the heart of a storm the week of her final exams, three weeks early and hardly breathing. Mamá would not let me out of her sight until my lungs were strong and my eyes clear and active, and by the time I was fully awake in this world, her exams had come and gone. She could have taken them later, picking up a dropped thread of possibility, but by then she lived a different life. My father bought us a house and the two of them quickly filled it; Mamá had three more babies in six years. And then she had Ximena.

Ximena Maria came out of my mother all skin and bones, and didn’t ever grow fat like the other babies did. When you held her she felt like an armful of cutlery, like parts of her might drop out of your grip. She never learned to look our mother in the eye, and Lord, that girl cried. For months after Ximena was born, Mamá would go every day to the local church to pray for the baby to be shaken from whatever reverie she had been born into. Tita told us that the church was looked over by St Mary, from Egypt, the patron saint of those who repent; she said that Mamá was repenting for every bad thing she had ever done, for every bad thing we had ever done, for every bad thing her youngest child would ever do if God let her live. Our father told us that we had to be good and quiet, be the best children there had ever been, because mother was talking directly to God, and God would hear us complaining that we couldn’t sleep at night because of the baby’s cries. We had to be quiet so that Mamá might be properly heard. But all my mother’s conversations with the Lord could not convince him to leave her youngest child on earth. Ximena died before her first birthday. Our mother fell into a sadness that she would never truly emerge from, and I felt a great shame; because we had complained and God had heard us, He had taken the crying Ximena from our home. I prayed to St Mary to forgive my sins, but the baby girl could not be brought back. Mamá would learn to wear a mask of contentment sometimes, for the sake of the rest of us, but she was never the same woman she had been before Ximena.

The house we lived in was big enough for us all to have a single room, and by the time Ximena died my grandmother also lived with us, in a large room on the ground floor, so that she could help with childcare and so that she wouldn’t be alone. My mother was her only surviving child and my grandfather had long since died. Our mother’s father had been an American soldier who married Tita after the first war, and even though they stayed together until his death, there were many other children in Havana that counted him as their father. Mamá had a dozen half brothers and sisters but she would never admit it, and even though they knew each other’s faces they would not speak when they passed in the aisles of the grocery store. Tita became bitter about this as she got older, and she often stroked my skin with a sadness, running her fingers over my face and staring at me as if she wasn’t sure how I was part of her family. In the evenings Tita sat Luci and I at her feet and brushed our hair, fretting for our futures. She said because our grandfather was a yuma we were all born in water, this family, neither one thing nor the other, and that if we were not careful we would be seen as strange and disregarded. As girls we must be attractive enough to catch a man, but chaste enough to keep ourselves for marriage; only then would we be looked after; only then would we earn respect. St Mary would help us, so there was no need to worry. But it was Tita, not St Mary, who showed us how to redden our lips and curl our hair, even when Luci was so small that she fell asleep with her lips still painted and smudged the colour on her face the next day by getting her breakfast all around her mouth.

Being the older sister, I thought myself very mature. I understood the grown-ups more than Luci, and I did every chore I could. I loved to help Mamá crush the tostones and mash the masa, thinking if I worked hard like her, she would come back as she was before Ximena; if I showed her I was good, she would become the glue at the centre of the family once more. Every day held so many risks for family catastrophe; if there was an argument too long or too loud, we might crack in half and never come back together again. Luci had no such fear of conflict. She refused Mamá’s chores, running around in the yard (and outside of the yard, when Mamá’s back was turned) with the local boys instead, eventually coming home to the smell of cooking, and eating two tamales pulled from the pot before they were ready. Everyone thought her very charming, and she was spoiled because of it—at home, at school and in the local fondas too. To my mind, Luci was annoying, childish and greedy, but I couldn’t be more than a few steps away from her. I needed to watch her closely.

How do I describe Cuba, as I remember it? It’s difficult to try and summon a piece of that place and show it to you here. To explain the essence of one place or another. America is very quiet, to me. Everyone closes their doors, keeping their lives to their own boxes and yards. In Havana you are all amongst each other, even when your houses are apart. Music in the morning comes from one apartment and into another. You keep your doors open against the heat. The casino cheers of the gamblers are screamed from sunrise to sunset. You fall asleep to the songs of the music in the street, the boy who drags his double bass from place to place, the maracas of the thin old man, the woman who sings with no microphone and yet her voice carries to the next barrio and beyond. You wake up because a girl is yelling up three flights to the babysitter who drinks, who is supposed to take her baby before eight so she can go to work. You take a fruta bomba from the stand on the corner on your way to school. After class you get a cup of shaved ice with condensed milk on top and it makes you run all the way home. When the rain breaks in the afternoon you jump through someone else’s front door to escape it, then you change your mind and run out into it anyway. The cars go by slowly and the drivers hang out of the windows. There is always talking, day and night. It is hot and it is close and your feet are always dirty. It is loud and everything is bright colours, and every day is alive.

In our house was a piano, a grand piano, big and imposing and demanding attention. No one could play it, apart from a few notes to make a simple tune, but even that felt wrong, because the piano had never sounded right—at least since we children had been around. It had been our father’s first gift to our mother when they were dating. The house they lived in as a family had been small and cramped, and when the truck showed up with such an extravagant gift after only their second date, Abuelo was so angry he made them put it in the yard. It was rainy season and my father couldn’t explain where he had got it from, and wouldn’t take it away, so in the yard it stayed, getting so wet it bent out of shape, ruining the strings inside so the sound was ghostly and off-key. But soon Mamá and Papá were married and had a house of their own, and Papá made sure it was big enough that the twisted piano could sit right in the middle. Mamá had to dust it every day or the keys got gritty and stuck together, and years later the sound of us children bashing the keys made the neighbours crazy. Still, the piano stayed, because she loved it, ghosts and all.

One wet day when Luci was five years old, she ran in from the yard where she’d been playing castles with the neighbour’s boys; they had rushed home to their mother when the clouds opened, so Luci had no one to play with. I was in my room and Mamá was at the store, and Tita was upstairs asleep, taking one of the afternoon naps she had more frequently as she aged. Even speaking seemed to tire her out. I heard the sound of a few scattered notes and came down to see who was home: there was Luci, standing on the piano stool, holding the wooden sword high with both hands and bringing it down violently in front of her. I could see the chips of ivory flying off the keys and into the air, each one hanging suspended for a moment in front of my eyes, Mamá’s poor piano spitting its broken teeth onto the floor. I stared at my slippery little sister. If I moved, it might make it all real; if I stayed still, Luci might not really be breaking the keys, and Mamá’s piano might be okay after all. I stood and watched until I heard Mamá drop her shopping on the floor. Mamá shrieked and Luci fell to the ground, her cries lost in the widening ocean of my mother’s wailing. Luci was all big eyes and shaking lips, like she’d been in a dream and someone had woken her up. Mamá began to scrabble on the floor for the tiny pieces of white that were scattered all around, and when Tita flew down the stairs, pushing me aside, she found her daughter with crushed tomatoes all over her knees, picking pieces of piano out of her spilled shopping. Luci ran out into the rain and hid at the neighbour’s house until night-time.

Papá had a man come and look at the piano, promising my mother he could make it good as new again. The man spoke quietly and when he was gone, Papá closed the door of the kitchen and said to Mamá that it was too much. ‘Especially now, Elena, with things how they are. And in a year, or two years, who knows? We’ll buy a better one, after all this.’ We ran to bed before we could eavesdrop more, but the next day, scared that it would be ruined forever, I took my glue and my paints to it. I dipped wooden splinters in the white and tried to stick them into the gaps in the ivory, but they wouldn’t go. The glue leaked in between the keys and the paint spilled. I tried to clean it up but it just pushed everything deeper into the spaces. I tried and tried to fish it all out, but then some of the keys wouldn’t come up again. I pulled and one came off entirely; I yelped then, in panic, looking around to see if anyone had heard me and come running. But Mamá was already there, just watching. I had done the wrong thing, I had made it worse, I knew it all in a second, and Mamá held me while I shook and panted and went to the toilet in my clothes. All the while she just held me, shushing, not angry in the least. Her eyes were full of pity; she knew I would always be this way.

Even with its broken keys and the bad memories of Luci’s bruises, with its bits of splinter that now nicked your fingers when you tried to play and the C that would never come up, the piano remained, a small reminder of how things used to be before the children came. At night when it was hot and we were supposed to be in bed, Luci and I would sneak to the stairs and look down and see Mamá sat at the piano with a daiquiri in her hand, running her hand over the keys but not pressing any down. Mamá smiled sometimes at the piano on her own, even as she stroked her fingers over the badly glued ivory. It was good to see her this way.

Luci had been running towards trouble ever since the day she first walked. In the wet season you couldn’t stop Papá’s little sirenita from dashing out naked into the breaking rain to play in the puddles and soak up the water. If Mamá turned her back for a second she would be gone, off down the street and over the big road, darting along the Malecón to feel the spray of the waves as they hit the barriers. She would never come back at the time she was told to, and if she was ten minutes late I would cry, so scared that the fragile frame holding our family together would break. That girl seemed to have no fear—not of death, not of our parents, not of God. If she fell, as she did often, she would pick herself back up and carry on, no mention of the scratches on her knees or the dirt in her hair. She came home with dried blood and bruises and could not tell Mamá how she came by them. One time when Luci was seven, our neighbour—who had three young boys that Luci liked—brought her home with her face all covered in blood and her nose out of place. The neighbour was frantic, saying her son had kicked the ball and she was so sorry, so sorry, but Luci did not cry a single tear—not until she was at the hospital and the doctor had to break her nose again to put it back into place. It was never really fixed, Luci’s nose, and Tita would stroke it and curse it and say it was the one thing that stopped her from being beautiful—and her own fault at that.

But we were happy when we were small. Papá was doing well, and he liked to buy new things—toys for us, furniture for Mamá, things he could show off with. We were the first in Havana to get a television, a fact we all rode high on for months before it finally arrived. When the delivery came in, the neighbours crowded into our front yard. People followed the delivery men into our house and soon Tita was shuffling back and forth with iced lemonade, and when there was no more lemonade, with rum, and even though it was hot and the air was wet and heavy, more people stuffed into our living room, sitting on the couch, the chairs, the floor and even on each other to see this miracle that Papá had preached about. Papá made a grand fuss of turning it on; he made the neighbour’s sons move from the armchair so he could sit in it as if it was a throne. He pushed the button and people gasped so dramatically you would have thought the Holy Father himself had come down. Luci climbed onto Papá’s knee to watch, but Papá was not looking at the moving pictures on the screen. No; he was watching the faces of all the neighbours and friends and strangers as they stared at the tiny TV, laughing at the yumas on it. Now when I think of Papá, this is how I see him: playing the machismo game, yes, but also content, making others around him happy. The neighbours stayed until it turned into a party and the men were sent out for more ice, more rum, more candies for the kids. It got louder and louder and when Mamá started to fret, Papá made her favourite drink, bringing one daiquiri after another until she was dancing with a schoolteacher and had given up trying to stop the party. Tita carried us to bed long after midnight and when Luci elbowed me in the back and I woke to the first light of the day, the music was still coming from downstairs. It was the first time I had seen Mamá dance since she lost Ximena.

But things were happening under our feet. Havana was changing and our parents knew it. As we grew, father seemed to shrink. Company at the house became less regular, and when Papá’s friends did come over he would send Juan Antonio to the store; when Juan Antonio came back with no ice because the store freezer was empty, Papá would hit him on the legs, and once even smashed his glass on the table. Sometimes there were strange men we didn’t know in the house at night, and on those nights the radio was turned off and Mamá sat on the step outside until they were gone. Papá’s mood was strange after these visits, and he often went out and stayed away the whole night, which he had never done before. When he was out of the house, Mamá tuned the radio to a station we didn’t know. It was all static and talking, the sort of thing that hurts your ears. These were the hot-wet nights, and we went out to play in the street, but Mamá sat close and listened, with one hand on the windowsill, as if the neighbours might hear the sounds coming from our living room and come to take her away. One of these evenings I ran inside from the street to get a glass of lemonade and there was Tita, leaning against the doorway, watching Mamá as she listened to the radio, holding it like it was little lost Ximenita. Tita looked neither happy nor sad; she looked drained and afraid, as if she was seeing time move by, watching things change faster than the rest of us could. Mamá said it was because she was so old each moment moved more quickly for her, because it was just one of a million moments she had already experienced. When Tita saw me running in, she placed a finger to her lips and turned silently to go back up the stairs. Mamá never knew she was there, and she listened to that radio until she fell asleep where she sat. The more our father stayed out, the more we would come downstairs late, hungry for torticas de morón, to find Mamá in the kitchen with her radio. On these nights the four of us slept in bed with Mamá and she held us all night, until Tita broke the new morning with coffee and got in bed with us too.

Looking back now, I can see what was happening. But we only knew that there were cracks in our family where there had been none before.

It was this that started everything. As the changes started I clung to routine, thinking that I could keep everything the same if I only tried hard enough. Luci, on the other hand, was aching for change. She tired of Tita’s ramblings and took the scissors to her hair so that our grandmother could not sit and comb it. But Tita still did so, each night before bed, cursing Luciana for making herself ugly. Luci grew sick of having make-up smeared on her face while our grandmother told her she would have to try twice as hard to make the boys come; she would find herself claimed by a bad man with nothing to give, she would end up a mere shadow of her former self. One evening Luci ignored all the calls to come in and I was sent to talk to her out in the yard. I found her sitting on the ground with her arms crossed, facing the house and scowling.

‘Luci, just come in.’

She spat in the dirt and drew saliva crosses.

‘I’m not having that stuff on my face.’

‘You know Tita likes it. You can put up with it. She’s an old lady, you can just sit and be quiet.’

‘She’s wrong about everything.’

She uncrossed her arms and pushed her fingers into the soil.

‘She’s just wants to tell us stories, Luci. She just wants to help.’

She dug her hands in deeper.

‘I’m not being painted. Tell Tita to choke.’

She would not come in, no matter how much I begged, so instead I sat twice as long for Tita, letting her paint my eyes as well as my lips, learning how to pull the hairs from between my eyebrows so that boys might want me one day.

It was a few weeks later that Papá, looking sad and old, took us all out in the car to Varadero for a day trip. Papá said Varadero was what the whole of Cuba could be if we all got some sense, if only people had some imagination. We had been many times and we all loved it, with its skyscraper hotels and its impossible pools and its parasols that made us feel like movie stars. But Tita stayed behind, saying she felt ill. When we arrived home at night, full of sugar and sand and stories to tell, we found Tita dead in her bed. We had done it again; we had said something bad and God had listened. I took Luci to the church the next morning and forced her to pray, to say sorry in front of St Mary, but she would not, so I prayed twice as hard, hoping that I would be given so much forgiveness that I could share it with my wayward sister.

3.Wilhelm