long avenues, oozing past statues of nineteenth-century generals and plazas spotted with bronze plaques. Spreading, the news flowed down the white marble avenues, the broken cobblestone streets, the flanks of crumbling mansions, brittle vestiges of a colonial life suspended now, like the forgotten rags hanging on frayed clotheslines attached between archways and windows.
The shocking news that Fidel and his brother had both been killed coincided with the weekly rolling blackout across parts of Havana, a practice instituted by the government to save precious electricity. Now that blackout was adding to the fear. What had become to most Habaneros an habitual nuisance quickly took on a foreboding quality. Fidel and his brother had fallen, and so had the city descended into a metaphorical darkness on that bright July morning.
The Habaneros who heard the rumors and still had electricity turned to the government radio and television stations, which that very morning had been shut down for a series of upgrades. Those upgrades had been deferred, month after month for more than a year, until the day before, when a team of Italian technicians had arrived in the city and begun to test the emergency-band frequency. So when those citizens tuned in expecting to be told that, at the very least, Raúl Castro was well, or that Fidel was fragile but holding on to life as any old man with too much power would, they heard instead a high-frequency screech, an angry bionic grasshopper, harbinger of dread and pestilence and things easily imagined by people who have nothing left in this material world.
Saturnina's cry continued to resonate along the streets, buttressing the old woman and lending her words a factual quality that belied her exhaustion. To the university students on their way to class, she seemed no more an anomaly than the mongrels that wandered from door to door or the obsolete tank on the central quadrangle of the University of Havana, Fidel's iron Rocinante, the very tank on which he had ridden into the heart of the city in 1959, only six years after the Moncada Army Barracks Raid, an event that had been dismissed at the time as a thing of no consequence, the magical thinking of puerile misfits, by the pundits who considered themselves the best sort of historians.
C H A P T E R T W O
"¡Saturnina, Saturnina!
Vuelta das tan clandestina.
¡Saturnina, Saturnina!
Dando vueltas, ¿qué destinas?"
Saturnina struggled to walk deeper and deeper into the center of the crowd that had gathered at the spot where Fidel and his brother had fallen. She found herself swarmed by the squealing, singing children who loved her but had no inkling of the agony of her mission.
" Tengo hambre, Saturnina," one of the boys called out to her, rubbing his belly.
She handed out the remaining hard biscuits she kept stuffed in the pockets of an apron located many layers deep under her skirts. She gave each child a pat on the head, then continued to push through toward the center of the enormous crowd. When the press of bodies blocked her from going farther, she squatted, then crawled through a forest of legs and feet until she reached the center. She could see that the bodies had been removed. She crawled closer. She could see the pool of blood. She crawled closer. Now she could touch the blood that covered the concrete. Fidel's viscous blood, the blood of a dictator, was on her fingertips and palms. She looked at her skirts and saw that his blood had wicked upward along their frayed edges. It was an omen. She was certain of it. If the speed with which the blood had merged with the color and pattern of her skirts was any indication, then her son would be here soon. Time had folded back on itself like the wings of a dove, like the arms of her beloved boy around her. What had been done would be undone.
" Fidel calló!" Saturnina shouted, pulling on the pant legs closest to her, trying to get back up on her feet.
" Fidel is gone!" the nearly naked Isabel sobbed.
Still on her hands and knees, Saturnina strained to see the woman who had seen the blood and understood.
"What about Raúl? " a man standing just behind Saturnina asked.
" Fidel is Fidel. You should know that," Saturnina heard another man shout angrily.
" Fidel can't be replaced," someone else lamented.
Saturnina pulled with all her strength on a different pant leg as the voices continued to volley over her head.
"They're both gone."
"The government collapsed?"
" Fidel relapsed?"
"Hey, you! What'd that guy say?"
"¡ Fidel calló!" Saturnina shouted.
"The government collapsed?"
"The balcony collapsed."
"They were both killed!"
"Coño, help me up," Saturnina shouted, fearful they would begin to stampede, disoriented by the voices around her, the reverberations of their words as ceaseless as a tide.
"What did she say?"
"Both killed in a stroke."
"They fell from the balcony."
"He had a stroke?"
"Yeah, he had a stroke and fell."
"His brother, too?"
"Raúl saw his brother die!"
"Imagine seeing that go off."
"The balcony was blown up?"
"Who blew up the balcony?"
" Maybe Raúl? He wants power."
"Raúl killed his brother!"
"Is that true?"
"That woman just said so."
" Which one?"
"The one with the great tits in the see-through robe."
"Where?"
"Here, down here. Help me," Saturnina shouted, feeling submerged, unable to breathe.
Saturnina sank the few teeth she still had into the bare, hairy calf that was closest to her. The man winced in pain and looked down.
"Shithead! Help me," Saturnina demanded.
"You bit me, you old bitch," he said.
"You're lucky she didn't bite anything else while she was down there," his friends roared, laughing, raising Saturnina up by her armpits and tossing her out toward the perimeter of the crowd.
Standing on her feet again, she couldn't see the spot where Fidel and his brother had fallen, but she could see the children who had eaten her bread and often trailed behind her like a cloud of dust. They were sitting together on the top step of a steep entryway, watching like circus spectators the antics before them. The ambulance was long gone. The crowd remained, watchful and expectant. Cars and scooters had begun to flow slowly past again, passengers craning their necks to see what had happened. Everyone stood coiled, unsure of what to do. They had heard that two brothers, one quiet, the other charismatic and long-winded, had died tragically, unexpectedly, and in midsentence on a balcony. So they waited.
"Get back! Get back!"
A neighbor stepped out of a side alley and began officiously throwing pails of water on the sidewalk to wash away the blood. The crowd began to turn and shift. Saturnina watched in horror as each arcing swath of water struck the pavement, the impact sending spatters of diluted blood into the air, each droplet like a small bouncing ball striking at the passersby. Hundreds, thousands of drops of watery blood striking the feet and calves of the congregants who had gathered there to witness Fidel's fall; who must be made conscious now of the terrible burden each bore to spread