The Death of Fidel Perez. Elizabeth Huergo

       C H A P T E R O N E

      Some fifty years after the 1953 Moncada Army Barracks Raid, at nearly seven o'clock on the morning of July 26th, and at just the moment when the sun's rays rose magically from the edges of the earth, Fidel Pérez, who had already ingested a quart of Chispa de tren, the cheapest beer his younger brother Rafael had found on the black market, was nursing a badly broken heart. This Fidel, a dissolute, angry Romeo bereft of his tatty Juliet, stepped out onto the balcony that ran the full perimeter of his brother's apartment to face the dawn. Lacking all appreciation for the morning's charms, he belched loudly, raised both fists, and furiously jabbed his middle fingers toward the sun as if it were the miserable slut who had betrayed him the week before. Infuriated at the sun's ambivalence, he leaned over the railing and shouted down at the balcony two floors below his, where he knew the middle-aged Isabel must still be sleeping, her husband beside her.

       "¡Isa! ¡Isa, te amo! ¡Isa, eres mia! ¡Mia solamente!"

      The alcohol that after a week of drinking allowed him to lower his manly guard and sob openly also slurred his speech. So even Rafael, in the kitchen making coffee, his head splitting in pain, was startled by his brother's sudden patriotic fervor for the isla, the island with which, oddly enough, Fidel seemed so consumed that morning. Rafael had never known his brother to insist so adamantly on how much he loved the isla; how much the isla belonged to him only. Rafael was smiling, having just realized what Fidel was actually shouting about, when he heard the sound of the balcony and its rusted iron balustrade giving way.

      "¡Hijo de la gran puta!" Fidel screamed, the hum of alcohol in his brain giving way to terror.

      Rafael dropped the hot coffee and ran to the edge of the broken balcony just in time to see Fidel clinging, his fingers wrapped tightly around the balustrade, his body dangling in midair.

      "¡Socorro! ¡ Fidel se calló! Help! Fidel's fallen!" Rafael shouted.

      Shocked by the fragility of life, in that moment Rafael's cry for help was both practical, an expression of his desire to save the hard-drinking older brother he loved, and incantatory, a plea cast like a magical spell, a wish that this evil fork itself onto a different path and that this terrible misfortune belong to some other Fidel.

      Rafael lurched over the broken threshold and grabbed fast to his older brother's forearms. But the weight of Fidel's body was too much, or the strength of Rafael's grip too little, or the decay of the balcony too extensive.

      Justicio, their neighbor directly across the street, was carefully wheeling his bicycle cab out of the communal garage on the ground floor when he heard an uncannily familiar voice shouting about his love for the island and then a horrible rending sound he couldn't identify. Justicio looked up just in time to see the Pérez boys falling, in a terrible embrace, tumbling headfirst toward the front garden that had been covered in concrete so many years earlier. He watched their bodies strike the concrete, though it took him what seemed an eternity to absorb what he had witnessed.

      The Pérez boys never had a chance, Justicio thought, crossing the street, kneeling before their entangled bodies, and closing their eyes.

       "¿Que paso, Justicio?"

      " Fidel calló—" Justicio explained, gesturing toward the bodies and the pile of rubble on the ground.

       "¿Y este quien es?"

       "El hermano."

       "¿Los dos calleron?"

      " Fidel calló y el hermano tambien," Justicio said.

      He knelt sorrowfully by the bodies of the two brothers, still warm, their embrace intact. He watched the neighbors who had heard the commotion flock around the bodies, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the blood that had begun to drip down from the concrete garden and onto the sidewalk below.

       "¡Fidel! ¡Fidel! ¡Dios mio, Fidel!"

      No one stopped to consider that Isabel, the woman who had broken Fidel's heart, was addressing the pulpy remains of her latest conquest. There she stood at the center of a swirling vortex of confused people who had become strangely unaware of the brothers' mangled bodies and more interested in the spectacle of Isabel, wailing like a witch bereft of her familiar, her unkempt mane of hair trailing behind her, her arms flailing, and her ample bosom bursting from the grip of a nearly transparent bathrobe as she expressed the anguish of a very good neighbor.

      The voices of the onlookers rose in empathy around the inconsolable Isabel, eventually building to a ponderous weight.

      "¡ Fidel calló!" a young man shouted from the top of a nearby lamppost