The Tower of the Antilles: Short Stories

By Achy Obejas

PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist: A “superb story collection” about America and Cuba, escape and return, and history and hope (Los Angeles Times).

Longlisted for The Story Prize

One of Electric Literature’s Best Short Story Collections of the Year

In “Superman,” several possible story lines emerge about a 1950s Havana sex-show superstar who disappeared as soon as the revolution triumphed. “North/South” portrays a migrant family trying to cope with separation and the eventual disintegration of blood ties. “The Cola of Oblivion” follows a young woman who returns to Cuba and inadvertently uncorks a history of accommodation and betrayal among the family members who stayed behind during the revolution. And in the title story, an interrogation reveals a series of fantasies about escape and a history of futility.

The Cubans in Achy Obejas’ story collection are haunted by islands: the island they fled, the island they’ve created, the island they were taken to or forced from, the island they long for, the island they return to, and the island that can never be home again.

“[A] memorable short fiction collection.” —Publishers Weekly

“By turns searing and subtly magical . . . Obejas’ plots are ambushing, her characters startling, her metaphors fresh, her humor caustic, and her compassion potent in these intricate and haunting stories of displacement, loss, stoicism, and realization.” —Booklist

“Obejas writes with gentleness, without flashy wording or gimmicks, about people trying to figure out where they belong.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Jul 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781617755538

Book preview

Para Cecilia,

contigo

aquí, allá, y everywhere

Siempre he vivido en Cuba.

—Heberto Padilla, 1968/Lourdes Casal, 1981

Table of Contents

___________________

The Collector

Kimberle

Exile

The Sound Catalog

North/South

The Cola of Oblivion

Waters

Supermán

The Maldives

The Tower of the Antilles

E-book Extra: Excerpt from Ruins

About Achy Obejas

Acknowledgments

Copyright & Credits

About Akashic Books

The Collector

For Humberto Sánchez

1.

What is your name?

He looked at his passport. There was no question it was him in the photo, that was his name on the blue paper and on the visa attached unevenly to the page. On the tarmac, steam rose from the airplane waiting to leave the island.

He turned. Behind him, past the shadows and the glass partition, there were others—without passports, without visas—schools of them beyond the moist and blurry pane.

What is your name? the uniformed guard at the checkpoint asked again. The guard’s eyes darted between the passport and the man, who was still looking over his shoulder at the shimmering aquarium.

The man opened his mouth and pronounced his name with a questioning lilt.

Look at me, said the guard.

But the man was afraid if he took his eyes off what now resembled the quivering lines of a galvanograph, he’d never find that familiar seascape again.

Look at me, said the guard, and this time he stretched his hand and cupped the man’s chin, encouraging him.

He said his name once again, this time with more certainty, but his eyes remained fixed on the watery window. There was a bed of tiny fingers along the lower rim and a charm of eyes above them. Figures fluttered: expanding, pausing, contracting; he could almost feel the bodies moving forward, relaxing, then slowly beginning to spin.

Look at me.

Instead, the man lowered his eyes and the aquarium faded into twilight behind him.

2.

Before the island had visitors, the natives traveled easier on water than on land. The shoreline served only to launch and beach the smooth dugout shells of maca trees they shaped into canoes, each identical except in length.

In spite of this, the islanders were terrible, unambitious mariners who rarely lost sight of the banks. They depended on the indented shoreline to create bays and lagoons to keep them close to home. Sometimes they’d wait for turtles to lay their eggs, then rush to the sand and flip them on their backs. They’d steal the eggs and slaughter the mothers, fashioning the carapace into combs and hooks for fishing. They found their best trawling where the depth of the continental shelf didn’t exceed more than forty fathoms, where the waters were crystalline and warm and they could see the seabed drop to black.

They used bows and arrows, bottom lining, rodding, spearing, seine nets, and fish pots to catch snapper, grouper, garfish, kingfish, lobster, tuna, and shrimp. They had gourds to bail the canoes, to gather rainwater for drinking, and to store their catch. They crafted nose rings, necklaces, and earrings from fish bones and shells and used fish scales to make their bodies sparkle. They had no calendar, no writing system, and kept track of days by counting on their fingers and toes.

3.

The orange nylon wrapped around the man’s ankle like seaweed. When he bent to pick it up, he saw there were still crumbs of cork inside. He tossed the torn vest, then pulled in his line to cast again. It was early and the water was cool in the bay, the sky silvery. In an hour or two he’d be able to see the black dot of the island in the distance.

The man straightened the line. He’d made the rod himself, a three-meter bamboo he’d cut, trimmed, sanded, and hung for nine months. In that time, he’d eaten boiled plantains and stared up at the long vertical cane as if in meditation. When he first took it down, he couldn’t wait to put a line on it. He ran outside to his suburban yard and whipped it from side to side, the bamboo sizzling through the air. Now he wielded it as if he were stringing a bridge to heaven. The rod aimed, the line rose to the sky instead of the bay.

The orange nylon floated back toward him in a bunch; he grabbed it. Then he saw a metal water bottle, its mouth open. An upside-down tennis shoe skimming the surface. A box of saltines. The man remembered his flight, how he’d pasted his face to the double panes of the window and lost count of the dark shapes in the water. Now his eyes followed the line of debris: a magazine, a compass, the jagged edges of a torn foam floater, a Manila rope like an albino snake curling on the sandy bottom.

4.

The first visitors to the islands emerged from a tropical mist on three caravels, each sporting three lateen sails angled against the wind. Each ship ran nearly thirty meters in length and weighed more than ninety tons, dwarfing the native canoes beside them. The glittery islanders stood uneasily on their tiptoes, trying to see beyond the caravels.

Through grunts and signs, the new arrivals and the natives managed to establish some basic communication.

We’ve come a long way, said the visitors.

But how did you get here? asked the islanders, the fish scales on their bodies twinkling like tiny mirrors.

We sailed on these big boats, said the visitors.

What boats? We see no boats, responded the natives, still standing on their tiptoes, their canoes trembling on the waters.

5.

One day, he stumbled on a tiny boat on the shore. He folded it like paper and took it home, setting it in his backyard. The next day, he returned to the same beach and found another craft, this one a long-sided wooden pentagon with slats across it. He dragged it from the water, tied it to the roof of his car, and took it home, placing it next to the paper boat. The day after, he was passing by when he heard a rhythmic thumping and turned off the road, down a dirt path all the way to the water, where he discovered a barge consisting of two long pontoons and a giant metal barrel hitting the rocks with each wave. He pulled it to the shore, then rented a trailer so he could take it home. This one he positioned in the front yard.

Later that week, he came home with a sloop made of balsa wood that had climbed the shore at high tide. Its skin was smooth as a baby’s. Soon other crafts found a home in and around his yard—canoes and kayaks, floats built out of driftwood, hollowed tree trunks, discarded refrigerators made buoyant with inflated tubes, car chassis with water wings. A green truck with propellers. Inner tubes piled one on top of the other, filling his garage and blocking his driveway. There were dinghies and skiffs on the roof, and in the neighbors’ yards, on homemade trailers in the streets. He sold his bed and slept on a sail he’d strung up like a hammock in his room.

By the time the new year rolled around, he was working three jobs to house the vessels in storage lockers and playgrounds, church parking lots and abandoned rural tracts, in a grassy yard behind a museum, even an airplane hangar. On Saturdays, he took flying lessons so that, eventually, he could reach them before their desolate landing.

6.

He would try to explain. He would come in and sit across from the good citizens. He showed them his check stubs from dishwashing, from dog grooming, told them he got paid in cash to pick tomatoes. He had plans for a tower that would display the crafts and tell their stories. The good citizens had grown used to his pleas. They would listen politely then shake their heads. These are ghost tales, they’d say, phantom rafts. After a while, he’d scrape his chair back, get up, and leave.

7.

In an overgrown and flooded marsh, alligators rested in the shadows of boats. Herons and egrets stepped gingerly through brackish water. Now and again, a transom moaned as it came loose and eased into the muck. Sometimes a new raft—usually made from truck tubes and bedsheets—would float up by itself, then slip away.

One day, just before sunset, the man drove up wearing wading boots and carrying a toolbox. He surveyed the collection in the reservoir. Then he took a hammer and drill and, one by one, undid each and every vessel, piling the planks, stacking the tires, making a heap of the lawn-mower motors, folding the fabrics left to right into triangles, like a flag. A short distance away, a plane began its descent, its white tail vanishing into the horizon.

Kimberle

I have to be stopped, Kimberle said. Her breath blurred her words, transmitting a whooshing sound that made me push the phone away. "Well, okay, maybe not have to—I’d say should—but that begs the question of why. I mean, who cares? So maybe what I really mean is I need to be stopped. Her words slid one into the other, like buttery babies bumping, accumulating at the mouth of a slide in the playground. Are you listening to me?"

I was, I really was. She was asking me to keep her from killing herself. There was no method chosen yet—it could have been slashing her wrists, or lying down on the train tracks outside of town (later she confessed that would never work, that she’d get up at the first tremor on the rail and run for her life, terrified her feet would get tangled on the slats and her death would be classified as a mere accident—as if she were that careless and common), or just blowing her brains out with a polymer pistol—say, a Glock 19—available at Walmart or at half price from the same cretin who sold her cocaine.

Hellooooo?

I hear you, I hear you, I finally said. Where are you?

I left my VW Golf at home and took a cab to pick her up from some squalid blues bar, the only pale face in the place. The guy at the door—a black man old enough to have been an adolescent during the civil rights era, but raised with the polite deference of the previous generation—didn’t hide his relief when I grabbed my tattooed friend, threw her in her car, and took her home with me.

It was all I could think to do, and it made sense for both of us. Kimberle had been homeless, living out of her car—an antique Toyota Corolla that had had its lights punched out on too many occasions and now traveled unsteadily with huge swathes of duct tape holding up its fender. In all honesty, I was a bit unsteady myself, afflicted with the kind of loneliness that’s felt in the gut like a chronic and never fully realized nausea.

Also, it was fall—a particularly gorgeous time in Indiana, with its spray of colors on every tree, but, in our town, one with a peculiar seasonal peril for college-aged girls. It seemed that about this time every year, there would be a disappearance—someone would fail to show at her dorm or study hall. This would be followed by a flowering of flyers on posts and bulletin boards (never trees) featuring a girl with a simple smile and a reward. Because the girl was always white and pointedly ordinary, there would be a strange familiarity about her: everyone was sure they’d seen her at the Commons or the bookstore, waiting for the campus bus or at the Bluebird the previous weekend.

It may seem perverse to say this, but every year we waited for that disappearance, not in shock or horror, or to look for new clues to apprehend the culprit: we waited in anticipation of relief. Once the psycho got his girl, he seemed pacified, so we listened with a little less urgency to the footsteps behind us in the parking lot, worried less

Reviews for The Tower of the Antilles

[susanbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In these dreamlike stories of life in Cuba and America the sea always feels like it's within hearing distance. Or if it's not, as in landlocked, wintery stories like "Kimberle," then the atmosphere is almost something you can swim in: its air, light, claustrophobia. Thus, these stories constantly remind you of the physical, the way the body feels as it experiences the world. Wrapped within that miasmic cloud of human-ness, Obejas' characters, some in Cuba, some in America, others shuttling between, try to anchor themselves through books, through history, through human contact. I'm a fan of her work and she did not let me down here.

[andreablythe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Tower of Antilles is a beautiful collection of short stories, centered around the Cuban experience, both on the island and as an immigrant elsewhere. These stories explore the nature of individuality, with the question "What is your name?" being the entry point for both the opening and closing stories. There's also a thread of queer experience throughout many of these stories. One the many story that was resonant for me is "The Cola of Oblivion," in which a young woman returns to Cuba only to be addressed with the old grievances of her family there. It builds to a heavy conclusion, bearing the burdens of family expectation that stayed with me long after I finished the story.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is such a strange and fast collection of short stories, I ended up reading it in one sitting. There are flavors of writers like Marquez and Borjes here, as well as contemporaries like Gaiman and Link. And each story, given the depth that it has, could easily be imagined as a far longer tale, complete as it is in the short form. I'm not sure how I feel about the framing stories--the first and the last--but beyond these short ones, each one is a sort of world of its own, and strange enough to keep a reader enthralled, entertained, and sometimes shocked or delighted. All told, there are a few stories here I already plan to read again, and a few I feel I need to, but I look forward to reading more of Obejas' work.

[mdbrady_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Achy Obejas was born in Cuba in 1956. When she was six she came with her parents to Indiana where she grew up. She lived there long enough to realize that her lesbianism was viewed negatively. She worked in Chicago as a journalist and now lives in Oakland, California, where she currently teaches creative writing at Mills College as a Distinguished Visiting Writer. She has previously published award-winning poetry and stories. Her writing has focused on her sexuality and her Cuban identity. In an interview she stated that she is “interested in both Cuba as a real place and as a kind of metaphor for power and for powerlessness, for private and public identity.” She says that, while Americans tend to think about their own agency, Cubans are more likely to attribute events to fate or to God. Such ideas shape her writing.The actual stories in this collection include some centering on Cuba itself and others featuring Cuban Americans. The characters and their actions seemed strange to me. Sexuality for both lesbians and gay men is described very explicitly.

[momweaver · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had great hopes, but ultimately didn't care for this book. It seemed to be about little vignettes of life in Cuba, but I really do like a story with a beginning, middle and end. Some of the stories were more enjoyable than others, but overall, I couldn't wait for it to end.

[bayleaf_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Tower of the Antilles, a book of short stories by Achy Obejas, concerns individuals who live in Cuba under revolutionary rule and those who have physically escaped to the United States. I say, “physically escaped” because their emotional ties to Cuba are still strong and unbreakable. They have this in common with those they have left behind. Some of the stories in this book really appealed to me and struck me as great examples of the migrant experience. Others didn’t seem to fit, and I felt gave the book an uneven feel. I was particularly struck by the opening story, “The Collector,” which was an excellent lead-in to the rest of the stories. Ultimately, The Tower of the Antilles is a small book with big stories and a good addition to Latin American literature.

[mistermelon · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I don't want to take too many words to say that I did not enjoy this one. Felt a little beat over the head with sexuality, honestly. I get it, apparently this is an LGBT book... But I didn't know I was getting that when I signed up for this ARC. Such is the nature of the game. And I get it, it's probably my fault/hangup or whatever, but I really felt like the author went out of her way to work in "she" pronouns sometimes where they wouldn't normally be, just to make sure you couldn't forget, and it felt forced. Lastly, there were some stories that I couldn't figure out what was even happening at points. And even more that I couldn't figure out what the point was of what was happening. So sorry to the author and all, I hate negative reviews, but this was a miss for me. **I received a free copy of this book in exchange for this clearly unbiased review.**

[isolablue · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Achy Obejas' slim volume of short stories is a mammoth gift of just 158 pages. Magical, provoking, and different, THE TOWER OF THE ANTILLES is bookended by two stories that both introduce and end the author's tales in a kind of mind-boggling and sly way. And, what lies between that first and last story!Obejas writes about the immigrant experience, gay and lesbian life, the Cuban revolution, reality and speculation - all through truly enchanting short stories that twist and turn and surprise. Obejas starts a most traditional sounding tale of a relationship and ends up writing a magnificent piece of noir (not really surprising considering that she was the editor of HAVANA NOIR.) She begins another tale with heavily erotic overtones only to end up writing history. The best part about reading this book is discovering Obejas. She has written other books of short stories as well as novels. One can't help but finish THE TOWER OF THE ANTILLES without wanting to order more of her books or requesting that the local library stock them. She also has the power to inspire. A creative individual cannot finish her book without feeling inspired to write one; a visual artist will want to paint her words; a dancer may want to choreograph them for the stage.Although Obejas' work may appeal most to lovers of immigrant literature or works by Latin Americans, she will also appeal to the LGBTQ community, and, it is hoped, to just about anyone who values what it is like to be slightly on the edge of the establishment of anything. Is her work "outsider art?" Perhaps. But the more one reads of her, the more one realizes how all of us in some way are on the outside of something. A universal sense of belonging is almost impossible to have, but, through her words, Obejas comes painfully - and with incredible talent - as very close as possible.

[mike1990-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I went into this very open-minded as I've not read anything from any Cuban authors. A few stories were okay, but there was far too much eroticism/sex/romance in it for me. Just not my thing. The ones that talked about the life on Cuba and the lives of Cubans living in America without the eroticism were good though. I did enjoy how "Kimberle" took place near me. Overall, the descriptions of Cuban life here, and in Cuba is what saved it and made it a 3/5 instead of a 1 or a 2. A little less eroticism, and it would have gotten a 4 for sure. That stuff just isn't my thing, might be to others, but personally not for me.

[sigmundfraud · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Tower of the Antilles is a wonderful collection of short stories by Achy Obejas, a Cuban American. Her stories are of Cubans in Cuba and in America. I like settings and I especially loved the settings in Cuba which made me feel and understand better the country. My favorite stories were later ones, Superman and The Maldives. Superman is an erotic story of a young man, an entertainer. We follow him through his life. The language and the story are rewarding. This book is a gem and I highly recommend it.