Posted on 10/21/2006 7:21:23 PM PDT by Luis Gonzalez
Alfredo was thinking and remembering many things when the old woman arrived; it had been a while since someone had arrived at the place where he was selling his fruit. The old woman asked him for the price of the oranges.
They haggled for a few minutes, until Alfredo cut her short with some advice:
“If you’re going to buy, hurry up and do it; if the police come by, they’ll take everything from me.”
The old woman checked the oranges out one last time and placed them back to the wooden board where Alfredo displayed all his produce. She left without saying another word, and without buying anything.
Alfredo felt a sense of relief as he watched her walk away; today he wasn’t interested in sales…today he wanted to remember.
The memories came to him in a rush.
They were all in the old school yard, some of the group had seated themselves beneath the old Poinciana tree back in the far corner. Alfredo saw that El Gordo Palacios was signaling him, so he walked to him; El Gordo looked happy as he waited for Alfredo, and he laughed as he broke the news.
“Oye, Flaco, El Chino just received another Beatles record, and he invited us over to his house this afternoon to listen to it.”
Alfredo accepted his invitation and that very afternoon the song that would become both their favorite: Yellow Submarine, by Lennon and McCartney.
He was humming the song when the mulatto woman arrived at his little sales rack, bringing him back to the present; she didn’t buy anything either.
Occasionally, Alfredo looked to the corner; his sales were clandestine and it wouldn’t be a good thing to allow himself to be caught unawares by an inspector or a policeman.
The first time he listened to Yellow Submarine, he did not suspect how difficult things would become later; The Beatles changed things in nearly the whole world, but Cuba was no longer part of the world, the island’s authorities prohibited all music in English…it was a crime to listen to it, and anyone who danced to it would be punished.
One afternoon they rounded up some of the group, El Gordo and Alfredo were among them; they had been caught listening to The Beatles in a classroom. All the students were brought out of their classrooms and into the immense schoolyard, where a sort of public trial of the fans of the Beatles was conducted; the school Director accused them of being, in the current popular phrase in the government’s official language, “Ideological Deviates.”
Alfredo recalled these things and smiled, but his smile faded slowly. The memories of Angola came to his mind uninvited. That war of crazy people that he, El Gordo, and a whole condemned generation where thrust into.
That place in Africa was like an infinite tomb whose desire to swallow lives was never satiated. They were showed into that tomb, Alfredo got out, but El Gordo Palacios was trapped inside forever.
He remembered Angola with all the clarity of the world; that last night of the great battle was like a huge noise in his head. He could not forget how that night, just a few minutes earlier, El Gordo Palacios was singing was singing that song by Lennon and McCartney: Yellow Submarine.
The next day was different, he saw how El Gordo’s shattered body was carried away; a mortar had showed death in right there, in the place where El Gordo had been singing.
Alfredo also remembers how that night he’d heard something strange in El Gordo’s voice as he sang; he was going to tell him so when the battle ended, but death didn’t give him a chance to do that either.
He didn’t want to remember anything else, and the day was not a good sales day, so he decided to pick up his wares and leave. He threw the fruit in his backpack – it was the same backpack that he had taken to the war – and walked down the sidewalk for a while.
He thought then that he heard El Gordo’s voice singing Yellow Submarine, and he began to hum along with it. Then, he realized that there was still something strange in El Gordo’s voice as he sang the song that had marked them both beyond life and even death; truly, El Gordo still sang with the voice of a shipwreck survivor.
El Gordo’s voice followed Alfredo like the scream of a drowned generation, lost without hope, and without ever having been given the opportunity of setting adrift, to be picked up by a Yellow Submarine intent on rescuing it.
For your Cuba ping list.
Great read.
"There was something in the air that night. The stars were bright ..."
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