HABÁNAME, Chapter 8                                                                      - 2 -
?Matamoros,? corrected Barbara, smiling. ?They?re a golden age trio that wrote a lot of classic sons and ballads. Good tunes.? Cynthia removed her hand from Barbara?s and replaced her eyeglasses, signaling a return to a more formal register of interaction. ?I respect how much you?ve immersed yourself in the local culture, Barbara. The Cubans really like you.? Barbara swallowed hard and shifted to face Cynthia, who was delicately picking at some salami. ?I need for you to know something, Cynthia. It has to do with the visa issue. I?m hoping that this won?t create any complications for Tufts or for the project, but I am going to meet with whoever is in charge of foreign-national residency here. I am going to do everything in my power to remain in Cuba. If that requires me to renounce my U.S. citizenship, I will be doing so.? I hope I can do the Heimlich maneuver in this small a space. I should have waited to tell her until she was finished with her snack. Oh, well. It?s the truth. Everything I need to be happy is in Cuba. Chela and I will work it out. So? Alex is leaving the day of my information pick-up at the Ministry. I guess his dirty work is done. My hands are about to be soiled. Please God, let my plans for getting them clean again go smoothly. Fuck, between Chela?s altar and breathing in atmospheric Catholicism in Southie the last few days, I seem to be invoking the Great Dude all the time. Southie?long may she sit like a righteous zit on the nose of a Boston that wants to forget the regular folks that built the friggin? city! ~~~~~~ She had never felt so attached to her hometown as on the weekend during which she carefully traversed it in a journey of leave taking, a Via Crucis of torn attachments that left Barbara raw from grief. At times this was the grief for connections that should have been stronger and where she felt consuming guilt for her ability to walk away. The trek actually began in the city of Framingham, less that an hour?s drive from Boston proper. Barbara hurriedly left the Harvard lab on Friday after her final morning of work there and sped to make the early afternoon visitation hour at the Framingham State Prison for Women. It was a truly banal last encounter that she shared with her older twin sisters. Wilhemina and Ruthie seemed incapable of entertaining any subject beyond institutional politics - who was at fault for what egregious injustice that they were currently suffering and what was going to be done about it. It?s the same conversation we?ve been having for years, thought a weary Barbara. We said goodbye a long time ago even before we were forced to talk to each other on a phone through a plexiglass window. I don?t remember the last time I touched either of them. For that matter, I don?t remember the last time I touched any of my sisters. The small grate and rotating turnstile through which she communicated with her three eldest sisters later that afternoon also failed to satisfy her need to feel family connections in an embodied way. It was worse than at the prison, in a way, because she arrived during a period of Silence. She sat on the opposite side of the barrier, writing brief notes to each sister in turn, dropping her missives into the little drawer and watching it spin around. After a short pause the contraption would rotate again, and the response from her cloistered siblings would magically appear. Barbara wondered if voice and touch could have overcome the profound gulf between them anyway. Barbara: ?I have fallen in love. I probably will be leaving the country. I may not make it back. I wish that Ma and Da wouldn?t be all alone and that I could share my happiness with you.? Bridget: ? We have wonderful tomatoes in the garden this year; our prayers have brought a rich bounty.? Constance: ?I will pray a Novena for your safe journey and for our parents? health.? Cecilia: ?Just remember that if you cannot offer up your chastity to our Lord, then you must try to wait until you have entered into matrimony. And, Barbara, please, please, get married in the Church.? She remembered her childish frustration upon her first visit to the monastery, after Bridget?s profession. That afternoon had also belonged to the time of Silence, and Barbara had wickedly spun the little turnstile fast, like a potter?s wheel, and felt a perverse satisfaction at hearing her sister?s gasp of surprise and then her whimper as her fingers caught in the iron mesh. She had thought it served Bridget right for running away to God and to a place where she could not be seen or heard. And this is where I was supposed to be seen and not heard, Barbara reminisced that evening as she looked in through a classroom window at the first of her two pre-collegiate schools, St. Vincent?s. She could see in the twilight that very little had changed. The hooks where she ? a stigmatized scholarship child ? had hung up her ratty winter coats were still there, the copper-colored claws ever ready to display the local economic pecking order. The desks seem to be defying natural law in their tenacious upright balance upon their rotting legs. The wood had already been decrepit when Barbara sat at the small square seats during her seventh grade home room period. And I wonder if there are grooves in the linoleum from where I used to have to kneel in penance for mouthing off to Sister Mary Frances. She left for the missions two years after I graduated eighth grade. I guess after working with me there were no domestic challenges left. She had to go find cannibals in the tropics or chicken-fuckers in Scandinavia or something that would let her work up a redemptive sweat after she?d survived contact with real sin. Heh. The basketball court at South Boston High was not empty when she arrived to pay her regards. Yep, this is the same too. I could just join any of these little groups in the shadows, flash my Cryin? Shamrock and get offered a beer or a toke. If they saw the black I?d score hard ? get a piece of whatever action was happening. I?d load them into the T-Bird and off we?d roll for a night of burglary or aggravated assault. She impulsively ran up to a basket and lunged, pushing the ghost ball up into the air and over the rim of the hoop. Score, Murphy! Ah, I owned this friggin? place. She came down, swinging herself around the pole. Or did I? I wonder if anyone even remembers the kid behind the trophies in that case next to the principal?s office. Geez, I wonder if they?re even there! I could break in and check. Practice for fuckin? Cuba. Oh that?s right ? I?m not going to be a ninja of the night, I?m gonna be a nerd knife-in-the-back turncoat of the daytime. If it comes to that. If they don?t let me stay with her. The reminder that she might be forced to cooperate with the National Security Agency soured the evening for her. Even stopping at JP Licks for a generous serving of rocky road flavor ice cream on her way back to Eladio?s house did not restore her spirits. The second day was more difficult. She drove out to Castle Island early in the morning and joined the sparse gathering of townies and gentrifying yuppies who were up and about at the dawn. Barbara briefly contemplated lying down on the grass and watching the planes fly overhead, their bellies so close to the ground by the time they made the pass over South Boston that she could almost visualize the luggage falling out of the holds and onto her head.  Nothing did ever fall from the sky, like I?ve heard happened in Eastie. With my luck, though, it woulda