I’m working on a novel about my father, although he is fictionalized, completely fictionalized in the story. And it’s called The Book of Unintended Consequences. It’s about a boy who does not read in Cuba in the ‘30s. And his father dies during el Machadato, the depression, named after Machado, the president at the time.
And so he lies. And the book begins with, “Benno never intended to be a liar, a thief, nor a murderer, but by his 16th year he would be all three. You see Benno was born good, he wasn’t born well, the son of a cane cutter couldn’t ever be called well-born. He was born good, the way some people are born left handed or gifted at cyphering. All this happened because of a book. You see books can be dangerous.”
And I love working on this. I have spilled blood on this thing, psychic blood on this thing. I mean, it’s like every time … my dad was dying, it was very hard, so as he was passing, I told him that I was working on this book and he was coming in and out of a fog.
And I said Papi I’d hoped to have this book finished. And he said, I said you know it’s really about you. And he said how about that, you know, be humble. I said I’ll try. But I said it’s about you. And he reminded me why I started it. He had asked me once if you do not write some of these stories, Carmen, who will tell the stories of poor people, of ordinary people, who make up I’m sorry most of the world? And I love the stories of real people.
And so I’ve been listening to his stories all my life, he lived to 93, and I’ve done a lot of sort of, I don’t like narratives that are led by isms of any sort. I wanted to tell the story that was as honest and true as I could make it about the conditions then, but also about this boy and the people he met and have you feel that you really knew Cubans, the ones that came up out of the soil, the Taínos, the Espanolas, the Africanos, the ones that make up this very complex, and I believe beautiful people.