The House of Rumour by Arnott Jake

Author:Arnott, Jake [Arnott, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2012-07-04T23:00:00+00:00

10

the wheel of fortune

Avenida 9 # 1580 esq. Calle 19

Miramar, Habana

Cuba

15 October 1958

Dear Larry,

Well, I finally met my father. Two days ago, at a party in Vedado for a man who had won the lottery. Such a frenzy of celebration around us that we scarcely had to worry whether or not the two of us had anything to congratulate each other about. This could have been a chance meeting, like everything else in life. The dancing and commotion granted us a sense of stillness, the loud music a moment of silence. For which I was thankful because I had no idea what to say to this man, nor him to me. He shook my hand and named himself as a trumpet blared behind us. People were spilling out onto the street, forming a procession down towards the sea wall, and we were swept along with it all.

Two cops on patrol near by were nervously fingering their holsters, ready to run if things got out of hand. One of the women approached them, explaining that this was a party, not a demonstration. Someone waved a 26 July Movement flag anyhow. The people are becoming bolder now, ready to take to the streets when the time comes. Civil unrest simmers beneath the surface, bubbling up in all sorts of peculiar ways. Last month there was an outcry when the fiesta for the Black Virgin of Regla was banned (her statue was stolen, and a rumour circulates that the authorities have substituted a fake one).

We found some space on the sidewalk, away from this improvised carnival, and as we struggled to converse we soon fell into a rhythm, with similar patterns of speech and diction. And it was as if we were mimicking each other’s gestures and affectations. We don’t look very much alike, my father and me, but it’s astonishing how much we share in mannerism. All the same tics and spasms of character: things one would think were socially learnt, habitual, are to be somehow found in the blood. And all at once I knew that it did not matter much what we really meant to each other. This simple familiarity suddenly made things easy between us.

It looked harder for the man who had won the lottery. He was greeting people with shouts of joy but I saw fear and panic in his eyes, an urgency in his loud insistence that he had known beforehand that his number was going to come up. This zealous belief in our own premonitions, as if we cannot bear for our will to be so diminished by such a random act. It is a disturbing notion that the most important moments of our lives, our greatest successes, are merely a matter of happenstance. As I turned to my newly found father I realised that I didn’t even owe the fact of my birth to him, just to the luck of the draw. The turn of the wheel. The odds of any particular individual’s existence are so narrow that it would be scarcely worth the gamble.

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