The Time I Remixed Charles Dickens

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you might know from my bio that I’m a novelist. But so far, you’ve perhaps only seen my essays and nonfiction pieces here.

I wanted to take a break from that today and share something with you that I’ve been sitting on for a while. I wrote a “remix” of Charles Dickens’ famous novel, A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Mine’s called THE CITIES AND THE SEA and it’s set against the Cuban Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement, in Miami and Havana.

My own father was a young teen in Havana during the Cuban Revolution, so this book is personal. But because the publishing industry branded me as “chica lit” and “commercial” early on, there’s been little interest from literary gatekeepers in seeing a more literary novel from me, mostly because literary books often earn less money and my commercial books earned a lot of money for publishers, at least early in my career.

The publishing industry in the US has changed in the past few years, too, like everything else, kneeling to fascism and white supremacism, with several of the Big Five closing their “diversity” imprints and starting and/or expanding their far-right conservative Christian ones.

For now, Substack might offer me a platform to get my “off brand” books like this one out there, along with enhancements from video and audio—exciting for me, as I have always approached literary writing more as a musician than a writer.

Also, I was never NOT a literary author. I was just branded incorrectly out the gate due to sexism and racism.

Anyway. Here’s the intro, prologue and first chapter of THE CITIES AND THE SEA. I’ve included music, because the book is musical, and I always write with music on.

Friends, I am notoriously bad at judging my own work, and am genuinely curious about how this book might land with people who like to read. People like you. Let me know.

It might be that this book belongs in its own Substack away from the essays, though to me there is little difference. To me, it’s all music.

xo Alisa

Intro.

I Could Write a Book.

When I was a jazz saxophone student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the late 1980s and early 1990s, New England Conservatory professor and pianist George Russell gave a concert in Boston Church with his Living Time Orchestra. They performed, among other things, the piece “So What,” written by Miles Davis. Many jazz artists perform covers of other people’s songs. Usually they play arrangements of the melody, and improvise their own solos after. Russell, however, arranged the entire improvised solo that Davis had played over the song in 1959, on the album “Kind of Blue”. Russell had arranged it homophonously, for the entire orchestra. The effect was a breathtaking homage to Davis’s perfect, ingenious, melodic solo. It was as though Russell said “Baby, we can’t do better, but we sure can sing along.”

In a way, that is what I’m striving for in reworking Charles Dickens’s masterpiece novel “A Tale of Two Cities”. The Dickens novel (which I highly recommend reading before you read this one) is a love story, set in Paris and London, against the backdrop of the French Revolution in the late 1700s. My version is also a love story, but I’ve set it in Miami and Havana in the late 1950s and early 1960s, against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution.

I am, by many reliable measures, a fool; but not so foolish as to think I could ever improve upon the Dickens, which needs no improvement. However, I am foolish enough to think that his message about the tendency of well-meaning movements to replace their oppressors with improved tyranny is alive and well today, in Cuba as in the United States, and bears repeating.

I am also a jazz musician, and the late 1950s was one of the golden eras for that art form, whch is why I’ve approached this endeavor more in the mindset of a musician than as a writer. I think of this as my arrangement of the Dickens, rather than as a new composition, but there is no “Arranged by” option for the front of a book. The book I’ve arranged is entirely original, in that I’ve not plagiarized directly; but it is unoriginal, too, in the fact that I’ve arranged my melodies around the same progression and changes first laid down by Dickens. As George Russell arranged the Davis for a modern orchestra, thereby exposing his genius to a new generation, I’ve tried to move the Dickens through time, replacing waltz with mambo, powdered wigs with jungly beards, and the slice-thud of the guillotine with the cock-pop-pop-pop of the firing squad.

As a Cuban-American, I was shattered by the truths I found for both my countries in “A Tale of Two Cities,” and not a little shaken by the fact that few people, it seemed, had learned anything from history in the end. I felt I had to retell this story, for America, for Cuba, for Miami and Havana, now, for the sake of sanity, for the sake of peace, for the sake of our souls. As I wrote this manuscript, the Cuban Revolution celebrated its 50^th anniversary, and the United States had just elected its first African American president.

In the collective culture of jazz, the great African American art form, we often “quote” the masters who came before us, in composition or improvisation, as a wink to the past, to acknowledge that we know who carved out the path for us with their machetes and melodies. We also parrot those who play with us at the moment, the living musical conversation and interchange between creative musicians (rooted in the same call-and-response African tradition that brought us mambo and son in Cuba) being the lifeblood of jazz.

So that’s what you’ll find here, Dickens calling, me responding back. You’ll find me in creative conversation and interchange with Dickens, across time and space, across life and death, saying, in deference to the master, “Baby, I can’t do it better, but I sure can sing along.” I hope you’ll find yourself singing along, too.

MOVEMENT THE FIRST. RITORNELLO FOR CONGA A LA GUAJIRA.

VERSE I.

Sketches of Spain. El Manisero.

It was a time of carefree melody. It was a time of atonal despair. It was the golden age of lunch counters. It was the grim age of fire-hose and fang. It was a season of Christian blessings. It was a season of combustible crosses. It was the epoch of sugar and steak. It was the epoch of sick and starvation. Destined to rule the world from the white water fountain. Destined to endless subjugation at the colored. It was the tempo of Coltrane and Cachao. It was the tiempo of Oliver L Brown and Camilo Cienfuegos. We lived for the sex, son and sin to the South. We died of want, watchmen and wear, looking North. They were fresh, barefoot days of forever sunshine. They were rank, sog-shoed days of endless rain. In short, it was a time so very like our own, in these tropical cities divided by a 90-mile gash of sea, as to seem Just Yesterday. At length, it was a time that birthed eras so distinct from one another as to eventually render us a Strangers in the Night.

Back then, the presidents of these places met face to face, over drink and smoke. The one from the North was pale of head, sunken here and swollen there like something blown of glass, assembled, in the end, much like an ordinary lightbulb. The one from the South was dark, strong as stone at the jaw, symmetrical and bloodthirsty, justly earning the descriptor handsome devil. In their meetings, it was easy to notice the web of thin red strings whose ends, tugged by the hands of the lightbulb, caused motion in the devil’s hooves.

Both men had wives. The lightbulb had married an overbitten creature resembling a cocker spaniel newly groomed and festooned with ribbon. The devil had married twice – as handsome, brutal men often require. We concern ourselves here with the second spouse. She was fresh and soft as a mango, young in the tradition of second wives, beautiful as Rita Hayworth, a generous benefactor of high arts – certain of her superiority in spending that land’s money than would be those filthy ignorants behind their ox carts, say, or the bony children littering the narrow streets of her city, charming and elegant streets that, but for these tedious eyesores, might be mistaken for Paris.

In both families there was a relaxed certainty that things were as they ought to have been, and as they forever would be. To the Eisenhowers and the Batistas, all was a permanent party of cheeseburgers and flattened pork sandwiches, Coca Cola and café con leche, brandy and rum. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the blessed and beefy land to the North, as well as the piggish paradise to the South, would continue in perpetuity as shining beacons of – well, of whatever it was that they had come to symbolise for those few yet mighty denizens of either location. If there were murmurs of unrest here or there, aqui o alla, they were terribly hard to hear through the tinkling gay keys of cocktail parties, or the randy rumbon tumbao of roulette tables.

In Cuba, it had been four years since rebels staged their hairy and daring Castroid shower upon the Moncada Barracks. They’d failed, these soft boys, and they would naturally continue to fail. Batista did not worry. He was, after all, a fatherless mulattochino from the impoverished streets, a hard man who’d risen to the castle by his own exquisite thuggery. He was uncommonly smart, uncommonly cruel, with friends in places high and low. Many in Cuba had tried to take him out; none had lived as direct result. Batista, regarded by many as the worst president Cuba had ever known, slept well at night beside his pretty bride.

In Florida, a time of change was coming hard. White gangs patrolled the beaches as though storming Normandy, abusing blacks who believed the Supreme Court when it overturned segregation three years before. In shorts and sunglasses, with billy clubs and fists, men pale as paste metted out their hate, on the very same sand where 500,000 American servicemen trained for noble battle against Nazi submarines a decade before. It was the year Rev. C.K. Steele stepped outside his Baptist Church in Talahassee to find a four-foot blaze of cross, punishment to his congregants for boycotting a bus system that forced them to sit only in the back.

But in America there were plenty of jobs, strong unions, and expansion of the New Deal. There was at last a vaccine for polio. There was a satellite, a man-made steel moon, orbiting the earth, for the first time. So, yes, there was resistance in Florida, a heavy weight of obscene gravity in every direction, but progress too, bubbling up from the marshes, lapping at the shores. Eisenhower, regarded by many as the best president American had ever known, slept uneasily at spaniel’s side, and therein, perhaps, lay the defining difference.

In both places, revolution whispered like wind against the palms, because Africa, beaten and brutalized, refused to die. Oracles south of the strait threw their shells, their diloggun, called it Santeria, sang their call and response, beat their drums, danced with spirits that brought back story from the past and the future. Things will get worse, things will get better. Oracles north of the strait threw their shells, called it black magic, sang their call and response, called it blues – blue the color of Yemaya – played their drums, called it voodoo, danced with spirits that brought back story from the past and from the future: things will get worse, things will get better.

The Yoruba gods, more than 400 orishas in all, had aspects, complex personalities, none of them entirely good or bad, not one of them so foolish or simple as to be devil or savior alone, but, rather, both at once. A loving mother might change, in the presence of a hungry lion or viscious poacher, into a fierce warrior capable of murder, all to guarantee her place, in the order of things, as a loving mother after all. Ache in English, ache in Spanish. With pain comes birth, with birth comes death, with death comes pain, and so it rolls on. Things will get better. Things will get worse. At the edges of song, there must be silence.

Africa, oversimplified in both places for centuries, was awake from her bloody coma, and rising. It was 1957. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was Miami, it was Havana. Aspects all, of one enormous, collective, and holy enough.

Yemaya watched, from her watery home in the depths of the sea between, and knew change was coming, and that with this change millions of people, here and there, aqui y alla, would be bound together once more in difficult passage, the cities and the sea forever in chorus with the immutable call, among human hearts, to freedom.

VERSE II.

Free. Por fin.

North and west of Key West were best for fishing, in the placid emerald lagoons and channels, among the Mangroves. It was quiet here, there were no other people to bother a man. A man, in fact, could be alone with his ghosts here, on pretense of hooking Snook or Redfish. He could sip a bottle of beer, and savor each bite of his ham croquettes, without another man in some other boat now relieved of its own food and drink, amiably motoring past to inquire if he had extras. Sin duda, there was no better place to cast a line and pass the time, not for hundreds of miles, no better place to take in the salty fresh air, unencumbered by the agitating presence of humanity.

At least that’s how Jose Manuel Quesada Leal saw it. You could argue that the fishes were bigger and stronger at the southern reefs, or in the wrecks, or deep sea, or that a man was not truly a man until he’d harpooned a grouper heavier than a woman. To be sure, there was no shortage of rummy red-faced men in the small city’s bars who were up for this debate, at any hour of the day or night. But Jose Manuel cared no more, in his antisocial semi-retirement, for the supidities of men than he had as a genial young man about town.

For this reason, and for the misfortune of a genetic liberation of his hair ages ago, Joe’s smooth ochre head could be found glistening with sweat in the sun, as he motored his AristoCraft up and down his favorite solitary waterways in search of the most isolated spots, most mornings of the year. Generally, Joe’s glisten was enjoyed only by the blinkless black eyes of white egrets, or osprey and pelicans, sometimes green herons or the occasional sleepy aligator blinded by the man’s tremendous glint. It was precisely how Joe liked his attentions, that he should be admired as alien and at great distance by all, and disturbed by none. Amen.

For this rugged individualism he was much better suited to the United States, where half of his family had settled some 80 years prior, than he was to Cuba, where the other half still maintained a great number of prosperous businesses and a venerable law practice active in both places. Though he was Cuban to the bone, Cuba was not the place for Joe. In Cuba, there was always noise, and damp happy arms wrapping about you, always pressure to answer some shouted question of a personal nature, always this insistence that a man play dominos or tease other men, or, worst of all, dance; in Cuba, a man could never find himself still and alone, except, Joe thought bitterly, in prison. In America, a man could spend his whole life mute and solitary, behind an emotional wall thick as El Morro, and no one would give him a second look or think him the least bit unusual or off; indeed, here such a a man might earn the admiring gaze and whispers of his fellow citizens, for his Puritanical stoicism.

All of this will go toward explaining the exceedingly sour look upon Joe’s round and wrinkled face, an expression a person might suffer upon encountering a rat in the eaves of a fine restaurant, one cloudy Thursday morning, when a silver monstrosity of metal buzzed and sluiced at top speed along Joe’s secret waterways, aimed, it seemed, directly at him. Joe had heard the grating saw of the powerful outboard motor for several minutes now, and had become increasingly despondent about its growing louder with the passage of time.

Now, it was clear that he could not avoid this speeding interloper, though he might yet preserve his store of food and drink. Quickly, Joe capped his beer to stow it beneath his seat; he wrapped and hid the croquetas behind the tackle box, dusted any crumbs from his pale blue guayavera. Next, he focused his large brown eyes in a squint, at the form of a man standing tall at the wheel of the encroaching vessel, Poseidon at his podium.

He was black, large as an ogre, with thick, muscular arms that twisted like nautical rope. His hard torso was bare, and a quantity of colorful beads and golden chains deorated his wide stump of neck. Upon his head, a dark cloth, maybe a shirt, that peaked up in the wind of his velocity and looked to Joe like the reaper’s hood. The mysterious man casually steered the craft with one hand, the other being occupied with what appeared to be the world’s largest cigar. When he smiled, sunlight ricochetted across his army of metal teeth in a way that, in spite of it being June, and hot, sprouted a cold sweat on the back of Joe’s neck. As the man drew closer, Joe saw upon him a wide, pink seam that reminded him of denture paste, a raised scar an inch wide and two feet long, neatly diving the solid torso in perfect halves, from left shoulder to right hip-bone. It was the work of a machete. Joe knew this man. This fact did not lessen his dread. Joe blinked his eyes once, slowly, and spoke two singularly expressive Cuban syllables:

“Coñó.”

Joe flopped back into his seat, the tension of not knowing who came now replaced by the stress of unwelcome awareness. He hurriedly uncorked the beer once more, and poured it with all haste down his throat, to blunt the impact of whatever bad news was surely headed his way. As for the croquettes, Joe was sorry to realize he’d lost all appetite.

“Jose Manuel!” shouted the man in the other boat, once he’d drawn near and slowed the motor. The words came slangy and grizzled, rough and songlike, betraying this man’s origins in the poorest, most violent backwater of the Easternmost tip of Cuba. “Is that you, man?”

It was just the sort of question this person might ask, knowing full well that Joe, looking exactly like himself and having been located precisely in this spot of his, could be no one else. Joe waited until the man had maneuvered the silver boat aside his own and cut the motor before replying.

“Javier Crujido,” said Joe once the air was still and silent between them. “To what do I owe the great honor of your intrusion?”

“Oye,” laughed the strong young man, his arms opened to his sides as a sort of shrug meant to convey a mockery of innocence. “Calm yourself, old man. Stop jumping up and down to see me. I’ve missed you, too.”

The men stared for a moment at each other, neither one much pleased with his mission to either find or be found by the other.

“Well, out with it,” said Joe, shuffling in his mind’s eye through the faces of distant aunts and cousins in Havana and, God forbid, his own younger brother in Miramar. “Who’s dead now?”

Javier knit his brow beneath the black bandanna, and shook his head. “Dead?” he laughed. “No. No one’s dead. Well, many people are dead, but what I mean to say is that none you know have died since we last spoke. I see you’re still paranoid.”

“Bankrupt, then,” said Joe, snapping his fingers. “Ramon finally ran things into the ground. Am I right? The fag never had the balls to run anything.”

Again, Javier shook his head. “The Havana firm runs very well under Ramon’s excellent leadership. What kind of brother are you to insult him like that, eh? Your brother’s a good man.”

“Well, then,” said Joe, ignoring the question. “Out with it, negrito. What brings you here? What bad news? I haven’t got all day to guess at it, you know.”

“What makes you think it’s bad news?”

“Just speak it.”

“Is it bad news, really? Hmm. I think that depends on how you look at it,” said Javier, sadistically relishing the delay.

“Never mind how I’ll take it,” snapped Jose as he popped the top on a new beer and his pulse raced against the prospects of doom before him. “Spit it out.”

Javier cleared his throat now, and with much ceremony removed the thing upon his head, to press it against his chest with a comic show of somber humility. His nappy black hair razored about his head, coils of it stabbing out in every direction. “It’s Mister Garcia.”

“Mister Garcia,” said Joe, confused. “Which of the hundreds of thousands of Misters Garcia do you speak of, exactly?”

Javier flashed his metal army once more. “Mister Amado Garcia of Santa Clara, Villa Clara, sir,” he clarified, with obvious delight.

“Amado Garcia?” said Joe, weakly, letting the bottle fall from his hand to the floor of the boat, where it emptied with foamy enthusiasm. “Not dead, is he? They found him? Is Amado dead?”

Javier paused a long while, as if thinking, before saying, “Not at all. Released. Free. Por fin.”

Joe stared at the beer pooling at his feet, his mind brought back to that time thirty years ago, when that other boat had filled with water, and they’d sunk, the woman and the girl, to the bottom of the sea without him.

“Hey,” called Javier, waving a massive hand in the air for Joe’s attention. “I said Amado Garcia is out of prison. You hear me?”

Joe lifted his heavy eyes to Javier’s, without effort to conceal the dampness in them. “You’re sure of this, Javier?”

“I’ve seen him with my own eyes.”

Joe examined Javier’s eyes now, noted them set much too close together, flat and cold, hateful even, but not dishonest. He said, “How am I supposed to believe you?”

Javier shrugged with annoyance, wiped the sweat from his brow. “Look, I came 100 miles to find you, my job was to give you this information, and now that it’s done I don’t really care if you believe me.” He gestured impatiently with the cigar. “I’m done here.”

Javier made as if to fire up the outboard once more, but Joe stopped him with a hand in the air, saying, “Hang on. Where is he? Amado. Where did you see him?”

Again, Javier shrugged as though he could care less about any of this, but he answered. “In Havana, in an apartment there, above a bar.”

“What you say makes no sense, Javier,” said Joe.

“Don’t believe me, I don’t care,” said Javier. “I get paid either way.”

“What was it he said, Javier? Can you recall?”

“I recall exactly.” Javier appeared insulted. “He told me to find you, and to ask you to help him recover what was left of his life.”

“And why didn’t he come with you, then?”

Javier looked at Joe as though Joe might be the least intelligent person he’d ever met. “If you were in prison for nearly twenty years, do you think you’d be ready for the modern world, Jose Manuel? Your friend, he’s not right, here,” Javier pointed a long, thick finger to his own temple.

“He’s lost his mind?” asked Joe.

“Oh. Not that bad. Shell-shocked, more like. He’ll be all right, with time. But right now, it’s too much to ask that he travel alone. He’s just learning about television and modern cars.” Javier licked his lips and laughed out loud. “Hey, you should have seen the old man’s face when he saw how tight and short ladies’ skirts have gotten, man. He’s got a lot to learn about.”

“Does he want me to come there, to the apartment you mentioned?”

Javier nodded, took a long pull at his cigar before producing a damp piece of paper with an address on it. He handed it across the water to Joe.

“He’s kept there,” said Javier.

“Kept? By whom?”

“Some guys I know. When you’re ready to go, I’ll help you find it if you want, and for you, because you’re Ramon’s brother, I’ll charge only half-price.” He smiled, even the businessman, hoping to land a few extra pesos, but Joe, dazed, did not seem to notice Javier at all anymore.

“My God,” Joe said to the address in his hands. “Is this even possible? How can I believe it? How?”

Javier started the motor of his boat now, suddenly angry. “You know what, you ungrateful son of a bitch? Believe what you want, okay? I don’t care. I have other business to take care of. I’ve told you, now you know, you do what you want with it.” He flicked a hand as though to remove the residue of Joe, threw one last disparaging look toward him, and bucked his head in cruel humor. “Enjoy the fishing.”

And with that, Javier Crujido began aggresively to sing the cheerful melody to a popular dance song by Orquesta Aragon, a song Joe liked well enough but which, in this context, sent chills down his spine.

No te vuelvas loco. Tomate tu tiempo. Que poquito a poco, vas aprendiendo, como se baila se baila, cha-cha-cha.

Joe watched, salt water in his eyes, as Javier steered the fancy boat back toward the South, toward Havana, where spirits were returning to life, prepraing to take back what was theirs.