Havana Lunar (3 page)
W
eekends at the policlÃnico are always busy, but on that Saturday a patient brought me coffee at lunchtime and I was feeling a little better when the girl came by in the afternoon. Outside the pediátrico the day before, she had seemed too modestly dressed for a jinetera. Now she wore the characteristic short skirt, tight T-shirt, and platform sandals of the girls who walk the Malecón. She was bajita, a little bigger than petite, and gordita, which is not to say fat, but shapely.
I told her that HIV antibodies take anywhere between six weeks and six months to develop. “This test won't detect any exposure to the virus that might have occurred in the past three months.”
“I'd say it's none of your business, but I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me: I've had a steady boyfriend for over a year.”
I took her blood sample and attached a numerical label. “Hold on to this ticket; the number corresponds to your test.”
“Can't you give me the answer now?”
“I have to take your sample to the lab at the pediatric hospital. But you can come back here to get the results after 5:30 on Monday. I live upstairs, the top buzzer.”
“What will I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
“Surely you're taking a risk by not reporting the results to the government.”
“I'll keep it a secret if you will.”
“It's a deal. And don't be so sure I won't owe you.”
After closing up the clinic, the question was whether to spend my week's pay from the pediátrico on a liter of gasoline or on eight ounces of coffee. Gasoline is sold in liters gracias a los Rusos, y los Chinos turned rice into kilos, but los Cubanos will always think of café in pounds and ounces. It was the night of the annual pediátrico cocktail party at the director's home, so I opted for the liter of gas, anticipating a ride with Carlota. The station attendant tallied up my coins with the look of disgust I have come to take for granted among government workers, sitting behind empty mechanical cash registers in front of stockless shelves, taking monotonous orders for sugar water and stale congris at desultory cafeterias, their jobs served up to the humiliating doldrums of the Special Period.
Up in the attic there was water, so I took a shower with a sliver of camphor soap scraped from a drain at the pediátrico. Before I finished bathing, Beatrice yelled up from the second floor, “MaNOlo! ⦠TeLÃFono!” I went downstairs barefoot, dripping in a towel. Gasoline turned out to have been the wrong choice for my two hundred pesos. It was Carlota calling to tell me she had one of her headaches. “I won't be much fun tonight. Would you mind going for a ride another night, maybe tomorrow?” Carlota, too, was on a telefono del vecino, and so for decency would say no more.
“Of course not. No te preocupes. Que te mejores rápido.” I handed the phone back to Beatrice, who was grinning maliciously, and climbed the stairs to my apartment, letting the towel slip to give her a good look at my culo. I sprawled on the sofa and considered the liter of gas, wishing I had gotten café instead. Just one pot brewed on a Friday afternoon can give me a buchito every three waking hours through Sunday. With a little coffee in my belly, I don't notice hunger as much. I might even manage to accomplish a few cosmetic jobs on the Lada. But now, with a bottle of gasoline and no place to go, Friday night was shaping up to be a long, hot migraine session sprawled on the sofa to the accompaniment of a sour stomach.
A shout came up from the street: “¡Oye, Mano!” I pulled on a pair of pants and opened the French doors to look down. On the back of his moped sat Yorki, my best friend since el pre-universitario. While I had gotten interested in medicine, Yorki burned up jet fuel for fútbol. He played such good soccer en el pre that they compared him with a famous striker from the Czech team. All over Havana people still call him El Checo. I'd become a hard-up doctor and Yorki a sex-obsessed dishwasher, but he makes more money reselling fish the neumaticos catch along the Malecón than I do doctoring. Yorki peered up at me over his designer sunglasses. “Want to go for a walk?”
Walking: the one thing everyone can afford in the Special Period. When I walk alone, some people, mostly children or rude adults, can't help staring and sometimes commenting on my mark. Although for the most part the people of Vedado know and respect me for running the clinic, walking out of my neighborhood always brings new strangers. Once a Japanese tourist took a photo right in my face. There are also the regulars with their superstitions. One wide-bottomed mama with a jet-black dye always calls her children inside when I am coming down the crumbling sidewalk. But Yorki makes such an exhibition of himself with his running commentary that it eclipses my lunar.
We trotted along the sea wall while Yorki cast piropos at women young and old, beautiful and ugly, Spandexed and army khakied. “If you cook the way you walk, mamasita, I'll lick the burnt rice from the bottom of the pot.” I was hustling to keep up. Without slowing, Yorki turned and said, “Ayer me comà un sabroso jamón con queso,” touching five fingers to his lips to show me just how good that ham and cheese was. At the stone jetty across from General Machado's statue, we came upon a crowd of jineterasârubia, morena, mulata, prieta. Yorki cried, “¡Mira esas nalgas!” but these girls had priced themselves out of his market.
Coco taxis tumbled around the statue of Máximo Gomez. Tourists were taking pictures of the billboard of enraged Uncle Sam. The tracheotomy case in the cane hat was leaving live fish flapping on the sea-wall sidewalk to bait conscientious tourists, imparting a solicitous grunt through the hole in his throat. Across from la Oficina de Intereses, Yorki clapped his hands together to signal joke-telling mode.
“Pepito walks in on his mother in the bath one day. âMami, what's that?' âThis?' she says, covering up. âIt's just â¦
whatever
.' Later some guests arrive and Pepito's mother asks if they'd like anything special for lunch, and the guests say, âOh, just make whatever.' Pepito hears this and pipes up, âIf we're having whatever for lunch, please do me a favor and pluck the little hairs from mine!'” Walking with Yorki is like walking around with a radio tuned, for once, to an interesting station, lively and perverse.
One of the jineteras on the Malecón recognized me from my basement clinic: “Oye, doctor, buy yourself some pants that fit you.” She threw an American quarter at my feet, and I didn't get to decide whether or not I had too much pride to pick it up before a ratón del Malecónâa boy of seven or eight, shirtless in Chinese tenisâscrambled out of nowhere to scoop up the shiny limosna and hopped over the sea wall to the rocks ten feet below.
Yorki called over his shoulder to the teenage streetwalkers, “I'll be back later in case any of you delicious pastries doesn't get a date!” He said to me, “Nunca me casaré. If only to keep a clean license to grab a pair of nalgas como esas now and then. You'll never get married either, Mano.”
“Except for when I already was.”
“¿Quién? ¿Elena? That one doesn't count. That woman was a lesbian, but I could have converted her. ¡Cuidado con los tarros!” I ducked my head just in time to avoid catching my horns on a
Solo Ciclos
sign. Yorki's mission was to keep me on my toes and out of a second slip into the marriage trap. His philosophy: “Life, like the second half of a game of fútbol, is too short. Score often and from a variety of positions. And when the goalie leaves you a gimme at the netâby all means, brother, shoot!”
We made the better half of the Malecónâfrom 1836 to Paseo del Pradoâin ninety minutes. Between Perseverancia and Campanario, Yorki hopped down to the rocks and peered over the top of his sunglasses to see what the divers had caught. They held up two small lobsters. Yorki whipped out a couple of bills, and the divers, flashing their knives, cut the tails off and gave him the bodies. “Coge.” Yorki handed me the clipped lobsters, half-dead and writhing. He had trouble boosting himself back up the wall. Yorki is no longer the muscular teenager who can charge kids twice his size and rocket the ball into the net while the goalie dives in the wrong direction. Havana has lost a lot of weight over the past year and a half, and Yorki, clawing at the stone ledge, was stubborn and hungry like the rest. Gasping for breath he took the lobsters. “Those tails would have cost me la pinga.”
“Are you going to sell these?”
“They're for me and my date.”
“Who's the lucky lady who gets to try your famous sopa de langosta this time?”
Yorki, scanning the horizon through his shades, ignored this. The first time Yorki prepared a romantic dinner with lobster, he had to jump up shortly after dragging the girl to bed, the bisque coming out both ends.
“Remember to take out la tripa this time.”
We walked back to Vedado and Yorki took off on the moped with his prize. I headed over to Cine Chaplin and snuck in through the broken door from the alley. After killing a little time napping through the second half of a bad ICAIC film on its third run, I walked to Centro Habana to flip through dusty old Egrem recordings at the music market before heading to the pediátrico coctail party.
In the penthouse apartment of a modern building on Avenida de los Presidentes, Director González greeted me at the elevator that opens onto his foyer. “Rodriguez, why didn't you bring a date?”
“I'm separated.”
“I know. But I thought for sure you'd have a girlfriend by now.” I was the first to arrive, so the director asked me to go down and buy some cigarettes. “Marlboro, por cierto. Four packs at the Riviera. Don't worry about the concierge. You look Criollo enough that he'll think you're a Spanish tourist. The tobacconist is through the doors and to the right.”
I returned with the smokes and a dollar change. Director González said, “Keep the dollar, Rodriguezâcómprate un café mas tarde. ¿Quieres un cigarro?”
“Gracias, pero yo fumo negros.” I pulled out my own cigarettes and my father's silver lighter, lighting first the director's Marlboro and then my own Popular.
“¡Qué mal huelen!” the director said, frowning at my pack of Populares.
Colleagues began arriving with husbands and wives. The promised refreshments were brought out, and we guests checked ourselves to keep from looking too hungry while getting our share of the humble spread of salami sandwiches and Havana Club con Tropicola. The party was full of sycophants after a promotion, but late in the evening, over cigarettes and Mexican brandy, Director González pulled me aside.
“I'd like you to consider transferring to Sancti SpÃritus, Rodriguez. The Revolution can market you. You're young and handsome, for a doctor. Madres españolas would pay ten times your current salary for you to take care of their little hypochondriacs, fix a few hairlips.”
“No gracias, señor. I prefer practicing at the pediátrico.”
“Very funny, Rodriguez. You don't have to kiss my ass, you know. You're Plan G.”
The one opportunity for escape, available to only a few physicians who, like me, are Plan G, is a job in medical tourism. Vacationing patients are the new pillar of the economy, replacing the Soviet sugar trade. I could leave crumbling Havana and live in a new condominium by the beach at Sancti SpÃritus, but then I would have to practice at the health center for foreigners, pampering fat tourists with their penchant for prostitutes. I have gotten to know several pediatricians who cultivated Director González's favor and got transferred. They set up elaborate dialectics to ease their consciences: “Doctors can better serve the Revolution by hastening our assimilation into the modern, international economies ⦔ But the Revolution educated our generation on a solid foundation of ideology. I didn't swallow all of it, but it was better than what motivates medical students in capitalist countries. Should we trade our principles for a condo on the beach, a light docket of consults, and an affair with a grateful mother or two?