After the Hurricane(67)

“You could, but it’s terribly expensive, all that way, and people aren’t really back up and running on Uber yet. You’re welcome to stay here, and I can give you a ride back to San Juan in the morning. It seems that we have a lot to talk about, anyway.” Elena thinks about it. Her most recent attempt to trust in the kindness of strangers had not worked out well, although she couldn’t say Fernando had intended to hurt her, or been cruel to her, just that he had wanted something other than what she wanted to give. On the other hand, Diego was a friend of her father’s, for whatever that was worth, and the more time she spent with him, the more she might learn.

“You’re very kind,” she said.

“I’m not, really. It’s just that you seem very tired. Like you are under a lot of stress. It can’t be easy for you to have come here and be looking for him, like this. Drink. Stay. I promise I don’t mind. I invited you here, didn’t I?” Elena smiles at him, suddenly so very tired. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Diego confesses. “I’ve always wondered what you might be like.”

“If I had known you existed, I would have wondered, too,” Elena offers, and Diego smiles.

“I have plenty of room, and the generators give out at night, since the storm, which means the stars are magnificent. No light pollution. No light,” Diego says.

Elena thinks of all the things she was told as a child, is told as a woman, knows to be true. Being alone with strange men is the worst thing she can do, the worst situation she can put herself in.

She does not have to do this. She could leave with him right now, she could wait in San Juan, she could give all this up and go home, and tell her mother that her father is an adult and if he gets lost, he gets lost, she could sink back into her life and forget this ever happened, she could stuff all of the things she feels and wants and needs back down again and pretend she does not know that they exist. She could jump up and down on her anger and pain until they are bite-size, compressed and easier to carry, lodged in the pit of her stomach, safe like joeys in a kangaroo pouch.

And yet she knows she will say yes to this offer, that she will stay here, because her sense of danger is not as great as her craving, her need, to find her father, either in real life or through his past, from someone who knows him, to find the pieces of his life that he has kept from her, to find out if he has kept his promises.

“That would be wonderful,” Elena says. “Thank you.” She sips her rum, as he drinks half his beer in one swallow. Is he nervous? Or a drunk like her father? But he doesn’t seem that way, not all vague and numb like her father is when he’s drinking.

“What did you think of him? When you met him, back at Yale?” She doesn’t really want to know about this, at least not first. She wants to know the more recent things, the immediate things. But they have all night now. And the other things can wait.

“I thought . . . I thought your father had real chutzpah. Am I saying that right? Could never get the hang of Yiddish, all those chhhhhuh sounds, like clearing your throat all the time. Well, you have to have it. Cojones. Something.”

“Did he talk much about himself? Where he came from?” She wants to change the subject, go back to the things she wants to know.

“He didn’t. But I could tell, the way he talked about his life, the very little he said, I knew his family actually were jibaritos. No plantation parties and Spanish lace for them. There is a Cuban film I saw at a film festival maybe ten years ago, from the 1980s, Cecilia. Have you heard of it?”

Elena shakes her head.

“It’s set in the nineteenth century in Cuba, it’s what I imagine my family’s lives to have been like. Of course, it ends in disaster because it’s about passing for white. And no one in my family ever had to pass. Your father never said his family were jibaritos but I knew enough about the island to be able to tell. He’s from San Sebastián, a farm area, and my family has good records, I would have known if he was from landowners. By the time I met him, he’d cleaned up his Spanish so much it barely held a trace of the island, but sometimes, when he was tired or, um—”

“Drunk.”

“I was going to say high. We didn’t drink much then. That came later.” Diego sighs, finishing his beer. “And stayed long for him. Then a little of that rural accent would come out. I know he grew up in New York, but all his family were from El Pepino, so that’s the accent people around him had.

“But largely, your father didn’t talk much about his past, and I understood that. Unlike my family, with our proud legacy,” he almost spits the word out, “I think for him, the only way out was to block out his past. Leave it behind. Never talk about it, never discuss it. See, today everyone is obsessed with ‘owning themselves,’ right, ‘check your privilege,’ whatever the kids say. But then, to be anything, you had to be the right thing, the right kind of minority, keep your head down, stay in line. I never heard him talk about his family, beyond your mother and her parents. We talked about everything, your father and I, we were friends, study partners, for years, but we talked about outside things, music, art, law, history. When it came to his life, most of it was closed chapters.”

Elena knows exactly what he means.



The inside of Diego’s house is clean and tasteful, and far better designed than his beach bum appearance had implied. Art hangs on his walls, signs of a well-traveled life. Black-and-white photographs of carved frescos, Hindu gods and goddesses standing out in sharp relief against a jungle scene. A beautiful piece of Turkish kilim, rusty reds and olive greens in the weave. A mask that looks like it is from a Noh theater production, a print that looks like a Matisse copy. Sleek bookcases in bleached wood that looks like driftwood, and shines in the excellent natural light.