The Black Pen – Matias Travieso-Diaz

“What’s that?”

My father pointed to me and said firmly: “This is our other son […]. He needs to come with us, but is not on the list.”

The Swiss turned to me: “Son, how old are you?”

I gulped and answered truthfully: “Twenty.”

Mr. Spenhauer turned to my father and shook his head in sympathy. “I’m truly sorry. The program under which you are to travel is available only to the parents of unaccompanied minors in the United States and their minor children. Your son is not a minor. I cannot authorize his travel.”

I felt as if a bolt of lightning had struck me and rendered me insensate. I fought the numb feeling and addressed the man for the first time: “Sir, I am still a minor under Cuban law.”

Mr. Spenhauer looked at me appraisingly. I held his gaze. There was a pause. The only sound in the room was the whirring of the window air conditioning unit.

Finally, the Swiss reached into his coat pocket and extracted the most beautiful artifact that I have ever seen: A black Montblanc fountain pen. He unscrewed the top and carefully entered my name on the telegram that advised of our parents’ authorization to travel. He then opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper and added the same name to a typewritten list. He got up and waved us goodbye, and shook my hand as we left. “Good luck in America,” he said.

10

That weekend we alternated between frantic activity putting our affairs in order and waiting fretfully for the final days of our stay in Cuba to end. Sunday afternoon we received the fateful telegram from the Ministerio del Interior advising that the three of us had been granted a permit to leave the country and were scheduled to depart on Wednesday. The same night we received the departure telegram, we were visited by four female members of our block’s Comité, the vigilante group that spied on us and our neighbors to ensure we did nothing prescribed by the state. They came to draw a detailed inventory of our household possessions, which were to become government property upon our departure. They took note of everything we owned, from my mother’s frying pans to my father’s two dress suits (one of which he would be allowed to wear the day we left). The leader of the group, a Socialist firebrand by the name of Crispina Vázquez, even opened the bookcase in the living room and entered in her notebook the titles of all my books, from the high school textbooks to the few comic books that I had kept since early childhood. Somehow, that felt like a particularly stinging violation and I had to restrain myself from crying out my anger at the vultures.

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