Counterrevolutionary Epigenetics

He asks me how my novel is going and I ask him about the screenplay. He’s teaching himself how to play the guitar and I’m teaching myself how to write a novel.

He’s six years older than me. He jumps out of helicopters for a living. Not to entertain, to search and save. He introduced me to Before Night Falls, Kabbalah, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2, apple cake, hookah, Coney Island, the Russian bathhouse in Brighton beach, Amores Perros, Y Tu Mamá También. He taught me how to catch lizards, taught my son too.

He lights candles for me when I’m worried and celebrates my mediocrity, my choices, my lifestyle. I once gave him my car and he once gave me his apartment.

I need to call him back to tell him what my grandfather told me when I was in Miami last month.

Both of my grandfathers are revolutionaries. Rebels. Fighters. Fathers. I’ve written about my father’s side but never my mother’s. Never about the arabs in New York. Never about how madre cleaned a house in Brooklyn where the mafia showed up and knocked on the door. How she opened the door and they shot the son in the face. Never about Pupi.

Pupi carries around his passport in his shirt pocket. He’s been in the United States sixty seven years and never learned English. The Italians helped him in New York. Eventually he made it to Miami where he’d never need it.

Pupi is the youngest of six children. They’re all dead, except him. When his twin died, he changed his birthday back to June 8. My whole life it was July 8. The day before Sara’s. Apparently there was a mixup in New York: junio y julio. He never corrected the person at immigration. He does things only a gemini would do. We should’ve known. We thought he was a cancer.

At Mateo’s baptism Pupi recited the second half of the Our Father in latin, then told the priest he met my grandmother when she was eighteen and he was forty. Keep that to yourself the priest said.

He used to be an altar server in Cuba. He tells everyone many times. When he tells me the story about how he told the priest that he was an altar boy in Cuba and recited the prayer in Latin, I tell him I know, I was there, it was yesterday. I used to be altar server, too. I used to stuff unconsecrated Eucharists into the pockets of my jeans.

I beg him to tell me things about the revolution. How he joined the underground groups to help aid the rebels in the mountains. How he’d hear about fulano or fulana going up to the Sierra. He thought about it but he couldn’t do that to his mother.

When he recalls being captured imprisoned beaten and tortured the pain he still feels is for his mother. How she cried and suffered and worried. When I ask if any of his other siblings participated in revolutionary activities, he says no, just him. And then the script flipped as it often does in revolutions. Revolutionary values became counterrevolutionary. He had to hide, again.

His friends set him up in Jamaica and then the arabs set him up in New York and he brought everyone else over one by one. And he never got a ticket. He has a perfect record and a blue passport and blue eyes.

He asks me later if I was recording him when he told me those stories. No, I lie. Good, good, good thank you.

He’s scared of everything now, especially the doors. The doors must be locked and checked every hour on the hour. I was not like that until this summer.

He spent thirty minutes staging this photo. Pupi loves photos.

Pupi is ninety-six. Pupi loves music. He became a musician in his sixties. Plays the congas at the club and at home. Pupi is the backbone of the band. I thought covid was going to kill him because it kept him home from the club but it didn’t. No one in Miami stayed home anyway.

I had no idea exactly how deeply he was involved in the urban movements to topple Batista. People nowadays don’t care too much about what happened in 1959. I’ll tell Alex, he cares. He’s the only one that gets me like that. He’s the only person I can call to talk about Frank País.

We were the first in our family to return to Cuba. Separately in 2016, and then in 2018 together, with our mothers. We were supposed to return in 2020 with more people, in March, but well, you know.

There were years where I’d avoid his call because I was frozen. Overwhelmed with the relationships that asked too much of me, avoiding the ones that nourished me for free. Now I call him in the car.

Our names are the same and so they mean the same thing: protectors of humanity. “Defenders.” We defend the people that we love and protect each other’s dreams.

And so how’s the guitar? I love music just not the music the world loves now he tells me. His friends listen to music you need vitamins¹ to enjoy.

I think me and you are on this planet to keep the past alive I tell him. Write that down he tells me.

My mother is his godmother and he is my son’s godfather.

And I am the prettiest girl in the whole wide world who everyone loves.

1. drugs