The Fugitivities, стр. 58

warnings to the effect that the books were his personal property, and he hoarded them accordingly, stuffing them under his shirts at the bottom of his travel bag. In just a few days Octavio had snagged a rare printing by the black poet João da Cruz e Sousa, one of Lazaro’s recommendations, an obscure Symbolist of the late nineteenth century who died of consumption in poverty and neglect. The next day he was obsessed with a volume of tropical haikus by Paulo Leminski, who wrote a biography of Trotsky and translated Bashō before drinking himself into oblivion. But his most revered discovery was a rare collection by Ana Cristina César, who threw herself out of a window in 1983 in the nineteenth year of the dictatorship. The same year and month, Octavio noted, that he had been born at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.

Jonah decided to do his best to steer clear. He spent late evenings online in the “business center,” writing emails to Arna and Isaac and reading up on news from home.

It was uniformly depressing. The war in Iraq was going badly. Even the stalwart bureaucrats and blabbering policy wonks grinning their way through the morning shows were starting to admit that they were wrong. They had miscalculated. They had lied from the beginning through Colin Powell, who had done the state some service. His loyalty was exploited and he was being forced to take the tarnish as the story fell apart. This was the news—avarice and hubris smothering the future like burning oil wells. In New Orleans the black neighborhoods drowned by Katrina were still in ruins, most folks still displaced across neighboring states, some still in shelters, the stench of needless death extended by a spiking murder rate. The bumbling president was still insisting the government had done everything it could to help. The number of controversial police shootings was growing. Another kid had gone berserk and shot up a college campus, leaving scores of dead bodies in classrooms and hallways. It was said to be the worst shooting of its kind in American history. Talking heads warned there would be more to come as “copycats” stocked up their weaponry.

Arna was in Poland, according to her typically brief email update. Reading between the lines, it sounded like the first hairline fractures of disillusionment with her job had started to appear. The email didn’t suggest she was unhappy, but possibly that she had a better sense of the difference between what she had expected the job would be and what it actually was. He would have to wait until he could read one of her real letters to find out more. Isaac’s email was characteristically laconic. His take on the media frenzy over the massive school shooting: “Nothing new under the sun, chief—just another day in America.”

Jonah was often up late clicking aimlessly through screens that loaded with a sluggishness that made the experience brutally hypnotic, so he tended to wake up late, sometimes around noon when Octavio was already gone. He left behind the traces of his ongoing mania. A mound of reeking maté filled the trash can. Greenish-yellow dribbles keyed the sink. Normally, Octavio stashed his writings away with his books in his personal affairs, but one morning Jonah woke to find Octavio’s journal still resting on the little desk. Checking the hall to make sure he wasn’t around, Jonah returned and rifled through some pages. With a sense of curiosity and some alarm, he skipped back to the first one, squinting hard to decipher the dense Vesalian microscript.

Perhaps it is my turn. The hour of my madness. Santa Yemanja! She has brought me to this—to this!! Te acalma, minha loucura, I hear you, Ana Cristina. But is it even my fault? From my Asturian forefathers who came for the money. Who came feverish for cruzeiros. Didn’t I inherit? A case of King George’s disease? Across the world for money. Oro y plata for a Habsburg plate. Silver and gold for a Habsburg jaw. O yes! Cienfuegos men and women. My people in the centrifuge of history. Navel of Las Américas. Immortal Martí standing at the waters of the Contramaestre, the blood of the soldiers Quintín Bandera and Antonio Maceo, son of Mariana, mother and warrior, Paulina Pedroso “madre negra” de Martí, patriots of 1895, of the Grito de Baire, forged in Santiago, raised out of the generations that came in chains in the galleons and brought the African gods of the slaves Xangô and Ochún and Obá into the green hills of Guantanamera where the flowers of the virgin Guadalupe come into the songs of the people and inspire the feast days of San Juan, the tumbadoras calling forth the dancers into the square …ay, que linda la mélodia, sweetness of the rumba flaring like the heat of a wound in the open sea, el mar, el mar…elle est retrouvé…moi…l´éternité…for what was I a century ago? what am I today? Vagamundo. I only understand revolt, my voice planted in its wild survivors, the whole island entire, planted like Virgilio Piñera says, los pueblos y sus historias en boca de todo el pueblo…so what do I care if I come from an inferior race? A race blasted by science, a race the technocrats will always want to do away with, just as even now, someone, somewhere, is scheming to rid the world of blacks. To rid the world of all tropical tribes, to do away with once and for all those who refuse to be regulated, who refuse to work, who refuse to behave, who refuse the orders of the police, refuse the orders of the Big Men. Barthes could know nothing of this, she could never understand…I lost my mind for her anyway. And yet how she stays! O cheiro inebriante dos cabelos…O Ana Cristina, she has destroyed me so wonderfully, so exquisitely…I call on Cruz e Sousa, coração, tristíssimo palhaço…the heart a sad clown. But I go to Martí again…as one must…para aquel