Excerpt from Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Call Me Cassandra

I'm sitting here, watching the sea.

It's very early, so everyone in the house is still sleeping, but I got up, opened the door, and came out to the balcony. I brought over a chair from the living room to get comfortable. I'm ten years old and it's Sunday, so there's no school, I can spend the morning watching the sea and the morning stretches out to infinity, but then I hear my mother's voice behind me.

"Oh, Rauli, where have you gone off to?"

I feel like I don't want to be this Raúl, I want to be Cassandra, not Raúl. I don't want them to call me Spineless at school, I don't want my mother to call me Rauli, I want to spend a long time watching the sea, until the sea runs out before my eyes and becomes nothing more than a white line that makes my eyes tear up. I'm in Cienfuegos, I'm not yet a little pretend soldier here in Angola where it never rains, the captain still hasn't called me over to his tent to tell me, "Take off your clothes, we're going to play a game you'll like."

The captain is from the eastern part of the island, he drops all his s's when he speaks, and I smile because I'm afraid. I always smile when I'm scared, I can't help it. I smile when we go through the villages and the people see our caravan of war tanks and trucks go by, with their wide-eyed, muddy faces, they watch us with their bare, red-dirt-covered feet, and it seems like they want to say something to me, specifically. I dream that those feet ask me, "What are you doing here?"

But luckily, I am still in my house now and I watch the sea and I think—because I'm very contemplative at the age of ten—I think that I would like to spread my arms and leap and fall on the flagstones, and then Papá and Mamá would cry a lot and José would stop staring at me with that know-it-all face. "Raúl killed himself," they would say at school and this time it would be true and I would be happy, I wouldn't have to steal money again from Mamá to go to the bookstore and buy books and say, "Give me one by Edgar Allan Poe, because they stole mine at school."

"We're out of Poe, but we have Robert Louis Stevenson," the bookseller says. "The book is pretty, with that skull on the cover, but I don't know if it's appropriate for your age."

"It's for Mamá," I say and he puts the book in my hands, looking at me suspiciously.

"Okay, but don't take it to school, because then they'll take it from you. And if anyone asks, it wasn't me who sold it to you … Is that clear?"

"Yes," I say, I who can see ghosts.

I peer into the door of my school and there they are, dressed like sailors. My school is very old and used to be a military barracks. It's called Dionisio San Román, after a sailor who died in a September 1957 uprising. I walk back home. I spent my bus money on books and I drag my feet to kick up the dust and then I inhale it. I like the smell of the dust. "Just look at your shoes," my mamá says when I go upstairs and knock on the door to our apartment, which Nancy opens.

"I can see the dead," I tell them, and they don't like it. It's not good to see the dead, it's madness. Now we're all Marxist-Leninists, atheists, and if you see dead people, you must be mad.

"Do you want to be mad?"

"Of course not," I say, and then I hug Nancy and hug my mother. I eat the snack that Nancy puts on the table for me with a smile; I thank her and go to my room to read Stevenson.

I also predict things. My Zeus, I know I will die at nineteen, very far away from Cienfuegos, here in Angola, the captain is going to kill me so that no one finds out about us, I can see it in his eyes, in his mustache, in the way he looks at me.

"Don't let anyone find out about us, okay, Olivia Newton-John?" he says to me when I crouch down to suck him. "I'll kill you, you know, don't you go and ruin my career here, because I'll kill you like a dog, is that clear?"

Copyright © 2019 by Marcial Gala

Translation copyright © 2022 by Anna Kushner