Kingdom of the Young by Edie Meidav

Author:Edie Meidav
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941411421
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

III.

Ten years of tile-laying. The good homes are those where owners bother offering you a glass of water while the bad ones have people who barely nod. To them you’re just another dark head speaking broken English and they’re paying illegally so best be quick. In the ring we called it the speed slide, off the ring. But try for a knockout in round one and it means sometimes your energy does not act like Everlast.

At least I work with friends, standing outside in the morning at La Floridita while cars rush by, the bunch of us happy lingering over coffee and croquetas, and maybe it was for these coffee friends that I came, or my girl and her mother, but no one knows why I make excuses and never bring family whenever I get invited to dinner at an American’s house. Mostly I don’t want Americans to know how bad off we are: they seem to lack some capacity for basic truth. Instead I iron my best shirt whenever I go over to eat their unsalty food, taking care of myself and also never blaming anyone for anything that happened. I’m the clean one who gets invited places. One of my bosses loves showing me his Florida room with its low ceiling and three dark walls opening up to the swimming pool. I can’t suss any of it out: how does a citizen get from where I stand to where my boss is with his Florida room but maybe where I come from is what tears open my pockets.

Sometimes at the bar, too, people raise a glass to me, people I don’t know who remember when our leader was on a rampage, who believed when he called me the greatest amateur boxer in all Cuban history until I chose to leave the island and became a traitor, what he called in the papers The Day Iron Lost Its Strength. Because the leader made his rampage so public, I changed my name back from Hierro to Icaro, my birthname, just another story for all of them back on the island, my mother in pain having called me the name of the dead son just before, this just another story like the match that never happened between our homegrown Stevenson before he became a drunk and refused fighting the great Ali, the one they always retell using the words of Che’s goodbye letter to Fidel, among all the other stories we memorized in school. The goodbye story I want to tell everyone is different. Something to get them off the idea that my name means the great young boxer who swam away to become a Judas and traitor, a shame to the nation, the boxer who was the leader’s sport for a few months, my case getting coverage with no way to spit anything back, my mother under surveillance twenty-four hours a day, punished for the escape she never guessed I would make. Back then, people liked calling me the crown

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