Havana Best Friends (8 page)

Then the fight against American imperialism began. Miranda spent weeks, sometimes months, in a bunker somewhere waiting for the American invasion; in the Bay of Pigs, crushing Brigade 2506; hunting counter-revolutionaries in the mountains of Las Villas; in Algeria, fighting the Moroccans; training guerrillas to foster subversion in Latin America. Sometimes of an evening, taking time out from his action-packed life, Major Miranda would come home to the confiscated Miramar apartment he had been assigned by the Housing Institute in 1960, and his kids would spend a couple of days playing with Daddy.

Neither Elena nor Pablo were old enough to understand the reasons for their parents’ divorce. It hadn’t been a normal home, but the breakup was still a shock because Gladys, who never talked much about her husband and didn’t seem to be particularly distraught by his prolonged absences, all of a sudden spent hours cursing the
son of a bitch
, a term that, like countless other swear words, she had learned in the dressing rooms of the Tropicana. She also blamed some nameless whore for her misfortune.

After Pablo completed second grade – or was it third? – school became an important dividing factor. The boy resented his sister’s tutoring, which Gladys made Elena give him at home. He also detested her dedication to school and her being elected head of the Detachment of Pioneers, the children’s communist organization. It was worse in junior high. Having inherited her mother’s genes, at twelve Elena was the most beautiful and popular girl in her school. Pablo at nine was an exact copy of his father: short, lean, and bold to the point of being nicknamed “El Loco” – The Wacko.

In the following three or four years, the siblings became the centre of contrasting groups. Pablo was the undisputed leader of five or six angry, frustrated, and rebellious teenagers, most of them kids from one-parent homes, who played hooky, roamed the streets, and flunked exams. Elena was his opposite. She became president of her school’s chapter of the Federation of High School Students at fifteen, valedictorian of her class at seventeen. They were living in a peculiar symbiosis: different species under the same roof, avoiding each other, always on a collision course.

Then one evening in 1980, General Miranda returned unannounced from Angola to find his second wife, an extremely beautiful brunette thirteen years younger than him, in his own bed with the next-door neighbour. The general drew his 9mm Makarov and emptied its first clip into the two pleading lovers. Their legs and arms kept jerking spasmodically, so Miranda changed clips and made sure neither lived to tell the tale. Then he drove his Lada to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and turned himself in.

In the ensuing three or four months, Elena and Pablo’s lives were a chaos of incomprehension, apprehension, and irritability that little by little evolved into indifference and insensitivity, then to some measure of consolation when they learned the general had been sentenced to thirty years in prison, not the death penalty, which was what a much-hated prosecutor had recommended.

Like most Cubans, Gladys was firmly convinced that lambasting the living is not as unacceptable as speaking ill of the dead. She would repeatedly tell her daughter and son, then eighteen and fifteen years old respectively, how men become assholes when they think with their little head instead of their bigger one. “You’ll regret this,” she claimed to have warned her husband the
day he packed his belongings and moved out, “when you catch the slut cheating on you and remember that you renounced the decent home and wife you once had.”

The Cuban media knew better than to report scandals involving top communist officials; the notion that all of them were paradigms of human perfection couldn’t be jeopardized. But this story was too juicy to put a lid on. Generals and colonels stationed abroad told it as a cautionary tale to their usually younger and beautiful wives and mistresses, who in turn told it to their friends and relatives. From the island’s easternmost town to its westernmost village, Cubans learned what had happened by tuning in to Radio Bemba – lip radio – among them a neighbour of Gladys and her kids who considered it his duty to inform a few discreet friends on the block. The news spread like wildfire.

The teenagers who had once envied Elena and Pablo – observing them ride in their father’s cars; staring at the olive-drab tarpaulin-covered trucks that delivered heavy cartons in late December; ogling the toys, clothes, and shoes they wore; savouring the huge, exquisite birthday cakes and slurping as many bottles of soda as they wanted to on Pablo and Elena’s birthdays – those same teenagers split into two groups. A few provided unwavering support and encouragement. But most turned their back on the Miranda family. As far as they were concerned, Elena and Pablo had been born with a silver spoon in their mouths; now they would at last learn what building socialism was really all about.

That same year Elena started a B.A. in education at the University of Havana. She felt like Alice stepping into Wonderland. Nobody seemed to care whose daughter she was or where she came from. She was no longer the high-school senior who gave the cold shoulder to juniors, but the junior who got the same
treatment. Now there was the professor in his early forties, the first mature man she felt attracted to; there were the huge buildings, the enormous library and stadium, the serious political rallies. At last she was able to shed the school uniform, ride a bus daily, have lunch wherever she felt like and her allowance permitted. She also had to study a lot harder.

The Wacko, however, remained in the same school and was demoted from rightful heir to a generalship to son of a murderer. His response was violent: in the first two months he had fist fights with two teachers and nine schoolmates, something that could not be overlooked. Before expelling the boy, the principal wrote a letter to the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Thirty-five-year-old Major Domingo Rosas, from Army Counter-Intelligence and a psychologist by profession, was ordered to “look after” the son and daughter of former general Manuel Miranda.

Major Rosas visited Gladys first. He explained that in consideration for the outstanding merits of her ex-husband, the “Direction of the Revolution” – an expression generally meaning Number One in person, yet vague enough to shift the blame to Numbers Two, Three, or Four should something go wrong – had instructed that a liaison officer for Elena, Pablo, and their father must be appointed. He would take them to visit their father in prison when and if they felt like it; he would also try to win their trust and provide counselling. Gladys should feel free to call him when any problem seriously affecting her son and daughter couldn’t be solved through regular channels.

Next, Major Rosas went to the high school and interviewed its principal and Pablo’s teachers. The information he gleaned convinced Rosas that the boy was a real deviant. He explained this to
his commanding officer and was relieved of all his other assignments for a month, at the end of which he made a report and a prognosis. It was an excellent report and it had an optimistic prognosis; it omitted just one significant fact. Major Rosas had fallen madly in love with Elena Miranda.

“Comrade Elena, could you come over?” Captain Trujillo was standing at the door to Pablo’s closet. The DTI officer had taken a video cassette from a carton containing many more. It was numbered thirty-five.

“There must be forty or fifty videos in this box,” Trujillo said. “Was your brother a big video fan?”

“I wouldn’t know, Captain.”

“Didn’t he show these to you?”

Elena sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. “Listen, Captain, I think I ought to level with you from the start,” she said. “As Pablo’s sister, with both of us living under the same roof, it’s perfectly natural for you to think I’m the ideal person to give you background information on my brother, what he did in his spare time, who he hung out with, if he was doing okay at his job, the sort of thing you need to know to find out what happened to him. But my brother and I didn’t get along. He lived his life, I lived mine. We didn’t have friends in common. We didn’t share our hopes and aspirations and problems. I cooked for myself, he cooked for himself. As you can see, he kept his room locked. My TV set is the old black-and-white in the living room, I don’t own a VCR. Pablo never showed me those videos. For many years we agreed on one thing only: swapping this apartment for two smaller units, so each of us could live alone. But we never found
the right swap; either he didn’t like the apartment he’d move to or I disliked mine. So, I’m probably the least informed person about my brother.”

Trujillo lifted his eyes to the witnesses. Kuan remained impassive, but Zoila gave him a slight nod. The captain put the cassette back in the carton, then pulled out another one. Its label read thirty-four.

“Sorry to hear that, Comrade Elena. It slows down the investigation. Let’s see what’s here. Probably a movie.”

Elena shrugged and returned to the doorway. Trujillo found the remote control under a shirt on top of the writing table. He inserted the cassette and pressed Play.

Blue. White clouds on a clear sky, the camera gliding slowly down to the horizon, the sea, then panning gradually to a sandy beach. Two young women holding hands approach the camera, laughing and jumping over little waves that break and die under their feet. Both wear straw hats, dark glasses, and minimal two-piece bathing suits. Fade out. Same girls under a shower, naked, playfully splashing water on each other. The game loses momentum, with a lecherous stare the brunette gently caresses the blonde, they embrace and kiss hungrily …

Trujillo stopped the VCR and ejected the cassette. “I will take all these tapes with me to the department,” he said.

Elena tore off another layer of forgetfulness. At what age had sex become the driving force in her brother’s life? She didn’t know. It had been early on, though. She recalled the disgusted looks of her high-school girlfriends whenever a drooling Pablo ogled them. One afternoon she’d caught him masturbating in the hall as an unsuspecting schoolmate, sitting on the living room’s chesterfield in faded denim short shorts, legs tucked under her,
studied for an upcoming exam. How old was he? Thirteen? Perhaps only twelve.

Elena clicked her tongue. This made Zoila steal a glance at her that went unnoticed.

Had her brother been bisexual? Judging by appearances, among his visitors there were as many gay men and lesbians as heterosexuals. She suspected that Pablo, despite his promiscuity, had never been in love. He was the kind of man who wants only the delicious early stage of an affair and must always find someone new to fantasize about.

It seemed as though he was one of the increasing number of people who could experience infatuation, lust, sex, perhaps even romance, but not love. Men and women who try to conceal, under a veneer of sophistication or cynicism, their inability to involve themselves beyond a certain point, who believe that the absence of commitment is the greatest expression of individual freedom. Unmarried, generally childless people who profess to love their relatives and friends, those human bonds that hardly ever demand forgiveness and understanding and self-sacrifice.

Kuan gasped; Zoila covered her mouth with her hand; Elena returned to reality. Trujillo had found a thick manila envelope under the mattress and had taken from it a wad of hundred- and fifty-dollar bills an inch thick.

“Comrade Kuan, Comrade Zoila, would you please count this money?” Trujillo said.

The witnesses stared as if they had been asked to fly to the moon.

“You have a problem with that, comrades?”

Kuan shook his head; Zoila said no. They took the cash and started counting it by the writing desk.

The search brought no further surprises. Trujillo sat down and wrote in duplicate on DTI letterhead the seizure of forty-three video cassettes and 2,900 U.S. dollars found in the bedroom of Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés. The serial numbers of fifty-four bills followed. All four present signed, Elena was given the carbon copy, and the captain and the neighbours left. A minute later, as she sat on the chesterfield holding her head in her hands, the buzzer startled her. It was Trujillo, asking whether it would be possible for Elena to be at the IML at eight the following morning to identify the body. She limited her reply to a nod and closed the door.

Half an hour later, still angst-ridden, lying in bed with the night lamp on, Elena suddenly realized she was doing something she hadn’t done in the last thirty-one years – sucking her thumb. She pulled it out in disgust. What was the matter with her? Regressing to childhood? Totally freaked out? She turned the lamp off and tried to relax.

Her unruly memory began replaying her greatest personal calamity, the one that had made her reflect philosophically for the first time about life, love, and God. Her angelic son, the most beautiful child in the whole world, in his white small coffin, eyelids closed, golden locks framing his head.
No!
She set the memory aside. No more thoughts of death. No more wading through the saddest moments of her past, either. Elena turned the light back on. She would make espresso and read until daybreak, then call her mother.