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Orlando Ricardo Menes
Abuela Nena
Freedom Tower-El Refugio-
processing center for Cuban refugees
Abuela Nena waddled into the waiting room
her red dress crumpled like cellophane
her scuffed Soviet shoes
cajas de muertos
the orthopedic pair
my mam�'d sent confiscated (filched) in Guanabacoa's post office.
Abuela gusana
passport stamped NULO with her tears, eleven years
muttering Ave Marias
to escape
Fidel's infernal island.
Toothless mouth:
dentures bartered
for a pound of rice, half the bag tiny black stones or
were they turds?
Hands scarred, fingers crooked
from having washed 20 tubfuls a week
charging less than black women, old Chinese washermen
who'd come to Cuba as coolies.
My Catalan grandfather, mathematics teacher, earned barely enough for
tripe
& a one-room apartment
near the docks.
Abuelo used a parasol
to shield himself from Cuba's primitive sun.
Dreamt of returning to Barcelona, barrio Pedos
de Jes�s.
Died in La Habana spitting hostias from his mouth.
Abuela began a new life
on Miami Beach, an efficiency on 12th & Euclid, her neighbors
Holocaust survivors.
Refused mam�'s money or any help with chores & shopping.
When food stamps ran out
Abuela made do with cans
of surplus corned beef, powdered eggs
even peanut butter
which she called mierda
de pollo.
A few crumpled dollars in the fridge (can of
Caf� Bustelo).
Abuela lit round candles
for the Virgin of Regla, patron of Havana, Our Lady of Miracles
who cured mam� of diphtheria
when she was seven.
In Cuba Abuela's black neighbors gave la Virgen rum & Lucky Strikes;
she wore silk gowns & faux agates
& like Abuela had a terrible temper
but also a loving heart, a joy for life, laughter from the gut.
At 70 Abuela was losing her memory, at times unable to recognize
Abuelo from his photograph
next to a large St. Roch.
Advanced arteriosclerosis, the doctor said, a lifetime of eating lard
& pan con chicharr�n.
Abuela warned she'd rather die than go
to a nursing home in Sunny Isles
Est�r La Turca-a neighbor-called mam�
with news that Abuela had stopped eating, bathing & grooming.
She was roaming the streets
como un alma en pena.
We found Abuela on the kitchen floor, dehydrated, barely conscious.
Blaming herself, mam�
banged her head against the wall, pulled clumps of hair
chewed valium like chiclets.
After a week in Mount Sinai, Abuela died of a brain hemorrhage.
Lying in a casket of burnished cherrywood, she wore a frilly dress, her
favorite orthopedic shoes
her face waxy & hollow, her jaw wired shut
so that she smiled mischievously.
Mam� wept, fist beating her heart, murmuring she'd made a mistake
bringing Abuela to this country, just 90 miles away, while I
cried too, though offering no real consolation, yet I knew
at that moment for mam� Miami was the island
sinking in the sea.
-----------------
cajas de muerto: boxes of the dead.
gusana: worm, name given by Castro to those Cubans fleeing the island
nulo: void, refugees would automatically lose their Cuban citizenship,
thus becoming people without a country.
Pedos de Jes�s: Farts of Jesus.
hostias: literally "hosts," but in Iberian Spanish this word is
frequently used as "damn."
mierda de pollo: chicken shit.
pan con chicharr�n: bread with fried pork rinds.
como un alma en pena: like a soul in Purgatory
La Turca: the Turk, name given to Cuban Jews of Sephardic origin.
Orlando Ricardo Menes
T�o Manolo
T�O MANOLO HAD no table manners. Told lewd stories about the very ripe
plantain and the avocado. Crunched chicken bones, picking shards from
his teeth like flakes of gold. Good for the blood, he said. Mam�
retched, an embroidered handkerchief pressed against her nose, Spanish
linen atomized with Coco Chanel No. 5. Mam�, la mezzo who sang
Neapolitan canzone in the shower, baked cauliflower souffl�s in Little
Havana, wire-brushed her fingernails with alcohol. Pap� slept on a
mattress of sawdust, drank sugar water para matar el hambre. Without
shoes, the soles of his feet became hard as hooves.
T�o Manolo liked to show off the tattoo on his
shaved breast, muscles twitching, the American flag fluttering. Worked
out with Mr. Atlas chest pull and hand grips. Swore he'd be the first
exile to make a million. This country's wonderful,
he said. Los americanos walk on the moon, crap on gold-plated
toilet seats. Cars will soon run on guarapo. A super-secret satellite
will shoot Fidel con rayos laser. Mam� said, Est�
loco. Pap� (clapping): Genio! T�o Manolo
shouted Corta, then called her an old maid, uglier
than rags. It took thirteen gifts for her to speak to him again.
WHen he drank too many Millers, T�o Manolo would
tell the same story of how Fidel's bearded guerilleros attacked his
barracks just as he was brushing his teeth. The other cops drinking
run, playing Russian roulette with a captured fidelista, casting dice
to decide who would get his testicles. T�o bolted out the door spraying
bullets. Yito's fruit stand exploded. Mango shrapnel. Papaya pellets.
Coco cannonballs. The sergeant's prize-fighting cock -- Quiquiriqu� --
a ball of bloody feathers. T�o collapsed, submachine gun between his
legs, saw little stars of Bethlehem. Days of electroshock therapy,
nights of catatonia. Visions of La Virgen confessing la vida es una
porquer�a. He imagined himself in heaven, angels singing Guantanamera.
A week before the Cuban missle crisis, pap� sent
T�o Manolo a oneway ticket to New York City and he landed at La Guardia
with $20 in his pocket, amulets of Saint Jude for good luck. Slept in
fleabags on Lexington Avenue, piles of New York Times for warmth. Said
he got blisters from rubbing his hands so hard. Pawned his gold tooth
in Chinatown for fried rice and egg foo young. Learned Yiddish cuss
words at the automat. Hustled pool in Spanish Harlem. Got hustled
himself on 42nd Street, a Puerto Rican transvestite who sang mambos,
spoke Ricky Ricardo Spanglish. T�o hated the slush. The cold. The
canyons of skyscrapers. Cried for home at Saint Patrick's Cathedral,
washing his face in holy water. If the world's coming to an end, he
thought, I want to die in the tropics, then boarded a Greyhound bus to
Miami.
T�o Manolo found a job at Blackwell Plumbing,
selling copper elbows and T-traps, threading galvanized steel. Mimicked
the drawl of his cracker customers, ate soul food in Overtown. In 1970
he opened his own plumbing sotre, married Elo�sa, a chubby
schoolteacher from his hometown. Twenty-eight years later T�o's store
takes up half a block, showroom the size of a skating rink. Two
delivery trucks, a dozen workers, three attack dogs that answer to
Prince. Apart from a summer home in Marathon Key, T�o built a
quarter-million ranchhouse in West Miami. Lladr� porcelain on every
tabletop, BMW's for my cousins Manolito and Eloisita. A small plane
could land in the backyard, it's that long and narrow, blades of grass
glistening like emeralds at night. There are no bushes or flower beds,
just a lone Cuban plum tree, smuggled seed, that has yet to give fruit
in exile.
-----------------
para matar el hambre: to kill the hunger.
guarapo: sugar-cane juice.
mam�n: sucker.
corta: cut the yap.
la vida es una porquer�a: life is rubbish.
Orlando Ricardo Menes
Introduction to Jos� Kozer
JOS� KOZER WAS born in Cuba (1940) of Jewish parents who had emigrated
there from Eastern Europe to escape the Nazis. He himself became an
exile in this country soon after the Cuban Revolution, settling in New
York City where he taught Spanish literature at Queens College until
his retirement in 1997. He now resides in M�laga, Spain.
A prolific poet, essayist, and translator, Kozer
is one of the major voices of his generation, whose work has been
widely anthologized in Latin America and Spain. He has written over
fourteen books of poetry, including Under This One Hundred
(1983) and The Crane without Shadows (1985),
from which four translated poems appearing here in Artful
Dodge were taken. His work has been the object of study by
critics in the United States, Latin America, and Spain; last year a
colloquium was held in Denver to discuss and celebrate his poetry.
Until two years ago I had no idea that a Jewish
Cuban poet existed, and I was very excited when I discovered Jos� Kozer
in Jorge Rodr�guez Padr�n's Antolog�a de poes�a
hispano-americana (1915-1980), published in 1984. As far as I
can tell, Kozer is the only Jewish Cuban writer around, though Cuba's
Jewish community before the Revolution was a sizable one, having grown
considerably since the arrival of the first Sephardic Jews in the
1890's. The Jewish immigrants who followed them were almost entirely
Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe who settled mostly in
Havana, founding synagogues, schools, Yiddish newspapers, and other
Jewish institutions. My own grandfather, though not a Jew himself, was
principal of a Jewish high school in the town of Regla. Few Jews remain
in Cuba today, most having emigrated to the United States.
I find Kozer's portrayal of Jewish Cuban culture,
specifically through the experiences of his family, delightfully
vibrant and earthy. There is an impulse to document these lives, with
every line becoming a kind of snapshot. Nevertheless, Kozer's poetry
possesses the power to transmute the minutiae of everyday life into
gems of memory. The poems achieve the resonance of myth without the
crutch of abstraction. In addition, they pay homage to the ancestors,
while at the same time resisting the romantic tendency to idealize the
past.
Above all, Kozer is a poet who loves words.
Critics have commented on el recargo verbal (the
verbal overload) of his verse, a style that positions him in the
Neo-Baroque tradition of such Cuban writers as Jos� Lezama Lima and
Severo Sarduy. The poet therefore captures the singularity of something
not by conciseness but by excess. Kozer declares in one poem that "his
ambition is one: all vocabulary." In another he adds, "(I love) the
hybrids / (Peruvianisms) (Mexicanisms) / of diction and words." And
Kozer's search for poetic language is not limited to the Americas and
Europe but extends all the way to China, as can be seen in the final
section of The Crane without Shadows where he
"steals," as he puts it, from the style of the Tang Dynasty poets.
This lexical multiplicity is a reflection of his
multicultural identity. I know of no other poet who can imagine Kafka
"dream[ing] about canefields," and be convincing. Of course, some might
find his uprootedness disconcerting, for people's sense of place tends
to be local. Yet where Kozer writes, "I'm neither one (nor the other),"
he is actually rejoicing over his condition.
I am also a product of diaspora, hence my
attraction to his poetry. I was born in Per� of Cuban parents who had
left their homeland fleeing tyranny, and I lived in Lima until 1968
when my family moved to Miami. My work, in turn, is multicultural as
well as multilingual, many of my poems inspired by Judaism and
AfroCuban mythology, though I am neither a Jew nor a person of color.
Hybridisms of language and culture have the force of metaphor for me.
In fact, I have come to realize that italicizing non-English words in
my own poetry only serves to privilege English at the expense of
Spanish. My ambition is the same as Kozer's: all vocabulary. --Chicago,
Illinois, September 8, 1998
Jos� Kozer
This Is the Book of Psalms
That Made My Mother Dance
This is the book of psalms that made my mother dance,
this is the book of hours my mother gave me,
this is the stern book of precepts.
Enraged and impelled, I come before this gaunt book,
I come before it like a rabbi to dance a sovereign polka,
I come before it in the height of glory to dance with ceremony a
minuet,
death's clandestine arm-around-the-arm.
Goose stepping, I come before it to dance while smoking,
I'm a rabbi who raised his gown in the Russian steppes,
I'm a rabbi that an enormous czar forces to dance before the bastions
of death,
I'm Grandfather Leizer who danced ceremoniously pressed to the
waist of Grandmother
Sara,
I'm a damsel who arrives--all wanton--to expand the borders of
this dance,
I'm a damsel distended by a sudden confusion of the ankles,
but death imposes disorder on me,
and there's a vase falling in the large shelves of my room,
there's a lustrous and farcical misstep,
and my feet are like a loud bellowing of four generations of the dead.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando
Ricardo Menes)
Jos� Kozer
Desolation of Rebb Leizer
For
Jacob Kovadloff, with Sonia
It was his harsh homeland: the village Chejonov.
Rebb Leizer, head shaved, shuffled in his slippers through the ovens of
coal.
Rebb Leizer warehoused insatiable tons of potatoes in the tunnels of a
house.
A tiny man, he felt the salt of attrition with his fingertips.
And with his fingertips the tiny man raised the exhalation of the
psalms.
His voice burned amid the red craters of a chronology.
The tip of his index dripped a thick wine.
Rebb Leizer distributed gold's temptation among his children.
With his intransigent walking stick he evaded the rustic roundness of
bread.
Elbow leaning on the counter of torment,
he didn't know the sudden leaping of fish, the foggy decision of a port.
His seven children perished
between the ancestral gears of war:
Rebb Leizer affirming the stump of suffering.
Rebb Leizer jotting down paradigms in a sacred book.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando
Ricardo Menes)
Jos� Kozer
Lupe Singing in the Kitchen
Lupe singing in the kitchen,
the whole earth marinated by Lupe,
Lupe is piles of sugar in Havana's docks,
and I again emigrate to the saltpeter,
I again emigrate to the land filled with strings of Czechoslovakian
garlic,
Lupe, a schoolgirl in Catholic Cantabria,
today Lupe glowingly says goodbye to her mother,
there she is again, dipping bread in the essential wine of my
grandparents.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando
Ricardo Menes)
Jos� Kozer
Mom's Grammar
In May, which bird was it
that mom loved: or did she talk about mimosas?
Says she doesn't remember the names of rivers that circumscribed her
home town:
even though in the summer a male and a female would always drown,
a male
and a female in the summer. Mentions
a crucial conversation
with her sisters: they're like friends intertwined by the little finger;
they'll leave. What
despondency, even though
in the cabins
there's a centerpiece with tropical fruit, on deck there are beautiful
harlots who speak a
guttural language,
aviation doesn't amaze them,
not even the transatlantic cable; gaping sparrows rouse
letters or discharge
butterflies of light. They'll arrive
amid talcum-powdered boys, the aromatic scent of their tresses will
disseminate through
Havana's streets: Apodaca,
Teniente Rey, Acosta;
they'll end up purchasing
a mahogany chifforobe-with some tepid initials on the
undergarment's
drawer-that will work
as a strongbox too. By then they'll have settled down,
soon they'll attend
Zionist seminars to address one another in the
familiar t�; mom in proper Castilian.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando
Ricardo Menes)
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