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the old city. If Calixto objected, he didn’t say anything, though he never came to visit me there. The studio’s light wasn’t as good as the house’s, but it was quiet and I could work in peace and I came to love it there.
    The house had a wide porch that served to cool the inside. The floor was laid with terrazzo and the wide windows came with wooden blinds like the ones in my mother’s home, all of which gave the house a feeling of coolness, so that the only air conditioner we ever needed was in the bedroom. It was built around a small central courtyard, as was the house I grew up in, and when I wasn’t in the studio, I grew miniature roses there that I took now and then to the children’s hospital.
    Calixto began to devote more of his time to the student groups. I assumed that the parade of young men who came to the house on occasion were part of whatever movement Calixto was involved in at the time. He kept me out of most of it. But in truth, I never cared for politics. And to follow politics in Cuba in that time, you needed a purpose and concentration that I’ve never had. Groups came apart over obscure points and the aggrieved formed new groups—the Revolutionary Student Directorate, the 26th of July movement, the Popular Socialist Party, the Second National Front of the Escambray—each trying to outdo the other. And, my God, only a linguist could keep up with all the names.
    The decade wore on and the disturbances worsened, like a summer cloud still growing to the west, not yet ready to give up its rain: a body found in the stadium, two sisters tortured and murdered, windows broken. At night, gunfire drifted through the open windows like thunder from a demented half-world. I read of a twenty-seven-year-old man who was shot to death at Los Hornos, his assassins fleeing in a green car. A thirty-five-year-old man shot to death in Chicharrones. The worker in Mabay, killed perhaps because he was related to the candidate for mayor. The man shot to death at the fence of his farm El Almiqui in Bayamo. A guajiro shot. The army blamed the rebels and the rebels blamed the army and the army blamed the rebels. …
    I listened for the storm advancing, the fast report of raindrops on the window. We held our umbrellas up, and finally the rain came for us.
    I had a good friend from school who had been walking up Twenty-third one bright March morning. Later, telling me the story, she said that the city had seemed unusually quiet. Then, out of nowhere, a black car came racing upthe street, and it was some moments before my friend realized that the sounds coming from the back were gunshots. She didn’t have time to see who they were shooting at. She ran to a business and started knocking on the door. But it was the noon meal and the women inside—she could see their faces—were terrified behind the locked door. The shooting went on for an eternity—these were the words my friends used as she told the story—and it was only later, after she had run home and taken a tea, that she realized she’d been shot in the calf.
    I awoke earlier than usual. The house was quiet except for Beatrice’s radio coming up from the back rooms. The sunlight through the window was green. The buildings were cast in its green pallor. Even the sky was green. I left through the back door. On the street, the people walked like marionettes, every move measured and false. Havana was without sound. Out past our street, I walked, round the seawall. The men in white moved their lips at the street corners, waving their dirty pictures, and not even the cars could drown out their silence. I could still hear Beatrice’s radio, telling time. The hour is now. … The hour is now. …
    And then, beyond the green light that fell everywhere, beyond the muffled corners of the city, a crack like a tear in the sun. I ran with the others, racing to the place where the day unraveled. That delicious rush