Havana Lunar (7 page)

6 August 1992

O
n Thursday I got home from my shift at the pediátrico and sat at the kitchen table to look at my medical journals. I was too distracted, really, to call it reading. Having Julia in the attic was reminding me of the last woman I lived with in this small apartment.

“I asked around the jineteras in Vedado,” she said. “Why don't you ever sleep with any of the girls you test?”

“It's immoral to trade sex for money or services.”

“It's like biting the bullet for you, isn't it, doctor, this moralistic discourse on sex?”

“What do you mean ‘biting the bullet'?”

“¿Eres hombre, no? You want to sleep with me, but you don't dare.”

“No. I don't want to sleep with you.”

“What are you afraid of? Is it that you don't find me attractive or that you really are a maricón?”

“I'm going down to sleep in the clinic.”

I went downstairs but I didn't sleep. I was thinking of someone all the time, and it wasn't Julia, and that's what terrified me. I hated giving credence to this superstition of a curse, but something about my animus was sealed inside those photos. I couldn't blame Elena for taking them. I had given them to her.

On Friday after my shift I took my pay to the bolsa negra and picked up a bottle of chispe tren and some rice and beans. When I got back to the attic I packed an overnight bag for Pinar del Rio.

“If it's all right with you,” Julia said, “I'll just stay here another day or two.”

I wasn't sure how I felt about her staying, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her to leave. What was the point of this liason? A search for love? No. She was simply a remarkable girl. She seemed to be sharpening everything that had become dull and indifferentiable in the fog of lust that accompanied my relationship with Carlota.

I gave Julia the rice and beans. “There should be enough food here until I get back on Sunday. Keep the door bolted.”

“Don't worry, Mano. Those punks won't come around again.”

I drove through the Almendares tunnel to Miramar and out Quinta Avenida. Before getting on the Carretera Central, I pulled over and took Hernán out of the trunk. When the pediátrico upgraded to a synthetic skeleton last year, Hernán had so many broken bones that it wasn't worth holding onto him. Director González wanted to stay out of trouble with Palo Monte by giving him to someone trustworthy, so Hernán fell to me. The Lada's back windows are tinted, but the license plates are state. That means I have to stop if hailed by the yellow-shirts. When they see an empty seat, they pounce into the break-down lane and flag you over. Even after making it past prominent stops like La Novia del Mediodía, there's always the chance that one of those vultures will spring out at any point along the highway from the shadow of a parasombra, throwing my happy solitude into a headlock. I didn't feel like being forced to pick up a hitchhiker, so I propped Hernán in the passenger seat wearing a hooded fútbol shirt and Mickey Mouse sunglasses. In case I should ever get pulled over, I keep a letter from the director in the glove compartment to prove Hernán's not stolen.

In the reservoir at the outskirts of Havana, neumáticos fish from floating inner tubes. You know you're getting into the provinces when the organ pipes of the sierra appear on the right-hand side of the horizon. On the median, bare-chested boys in tattered shorts hoist platters of guayaba con queso over their shoulders. Everyone slows, mulls it over: a fat slice of sweet guava and a wedge of homemade cheese for a few pesos. Pull off the road and they'll run a half-minute hundred meter with their ten-pound platters. I pulled over. The last boy raced up and showed his guayaba y queso. Before I was done dealing with this one, another kid ran up with a great braid of garlic over his head. I bought a little bit from each and pulled back on the highway, leaving them both gawking at famished Hernán.

At kilometer seventy-five the road began to curve directly into the setting sun. Estábamos en provincia. At the entrance to the city, I drove past the statue to los Hermanos Saíz, then through Pinar, and out to Viñales.

I didn't want to leave the Lada down at the mural prehistórico, where any unattended cars arouse suspicion when they close the gates at sunset, so I parked in town and put Hernán back in the trunk. A few trucks pulled up to offer rides, but I prefer to follow the road from town to the dark side of the valley on foot, three kilometers up a shadeless, steady slope. It helps me get in the right frame of mind. The poinsettias grow enormous on either side of the trail. Later in the summer, a river runs between these rocks and I can't climb this way without getting covered in mud. I passed over streams and between farms and started up the spine of Abuelo's mountain. Pinareños know how to make use of every part of the palma real. The bark becomes walls, the pencas and yaguas finish the roof and also make the best cigar boxes. Take the natural tint from the stones of the mogotes to paint bohíos or henhouses.

Abuelo sat in his chair in front of his wooden house. “I saw you coming an hour ago.”

I kissed my grandfather's cheek. “You've got the eyes of an eagle, Abuelo.” He is also named Manolo, although ever since becoming a grandfather, everyone, his own children included, has called him Abuelo. My uncle Manolito, who is a month older than me, was dubbed diminutively because, as Abuelo's son, he had been born to another Manolo. When I, the city boy, first visited Viñales in the summer of my tenth year, I was called Manolo to keep things easy for Abuela, although most of my father's family still calls me Mano.

Something smelled good. Going to Viñales, there's actually food. Guajiros always scrape something together. In the bohío Abuela and Lydia were already at work on lunch. I kissed them both and gave Lydia the garlic, Abuela the bit of guayaba con queso. They don't have Havana's metropolitan walks en provincia, but there's always a bit of pork and a garden supply of coffee. I thought about how much Julia would like it here.

I went back out to sit with Abuelo. “I brought you a little chocolate. It's Belgian, el mejor del mundo.”

“You never forget about me, Mano.”

Abuela brought us café and we watched a pair of hawks spin their sunset shadows into mesmeric lace on the mountain. They rose on the updrafts without a single flap of wing. When we heard the ox low from the valley trail, Abuelo said, “Viene Manolito.” My uncle Manolito was coming up from the field. Wild Manolito can climb the mountains like a tiger. He believes that taking the trail is lazy if you don't have a mule or ox to mind, so wherever possible he goes right up the steepest rocks. I told Abuelo I would surprise Manolito and got up to hide with the hens.

My plan was to come jumping out of the henhouse just as my uncle arrived, but while Manolito tied up the ox at the edge of the vega he was already hollering, “¡What cabrón is hiding with my hens?” Manolito's dogs got to barking and I came skulking out with my bottle of Ron Mulata.

“How did you know, Tío?”

“Muy fácil … I
smelled
you.” Manolito's whoop carried out across the valley and echoed off the mogotes, hysterical laughter that always reminds me where that phrase
reir a carcajadas
comes from: sides-plitting, ear-splitting, tree-splitting laughter. They could probably hear him all the way in Havana.

My uncle and I shared a bear hug, Manolito almost crushing one of my ribs. Un grito: “¡Mono!” Monkey, he calls me.

He tied up the mule so she wouldn't eat green leaves and get too fat. “Mules will eat anything, just like goats: maíz, palmiches, hasta café.” She drank from the same bucket he used to wash her hide. He said to her, “Drinking soapy water, that's what you like. Mira qué mujer es esa mula.” Then Manolito sent up a shout: “¡Hay hambre!”

From the bohío Lydia called, “Ya está listo.”

This eased my uncle's mind. There was still work to do, and we took a minute to give the chickens feed corn. Manolito broke hard kernels off the cob with the heel of his hand. He gave the husks and cobs to his pigs. “You've got such pretty hands, Mono, like a lady, but nothing except your belt to hold your pants up.” Manolito himself has no belt, but his muscular hips hold his workpants on his ass even when he shimmies up the trunk of a royal palm.

We all crowded around a table to eat. Abuela is too old now to do the actual serving, but she refuses to eat until Abuelo is finished. It has always been this way, but she has slowed down, passing serving duties along to Manolito's wife now that the rest of her children have left. Abuela said, “Why do wives today have to talk and talk and talk so much at their husbands? He's the father of her children. She should serve him. What does talking and complaining accomplish? In sixty years of marriage, Abuelo has never had to hit me. Not once.” Abuelo is peaceable at the head of his table. He inhabits a place perceptible only to nineteenth-century patriarchs. The universe, his universe, of nine children and, according to Abuela, between sixty-five and seventy grandchildren, really does revolve around him. He is at its locus, although many orbits, like my father's, have set off so wide that the arc is almost unrecognizable.

Abuela said, “Todavía no te has casado, Manolo?” She meant
re
married.

“No.”

“Don't you want to have children?”

“You got started young, Abuela.”

“Y tu muy tarde, y todavía.” Lydia cleared the plates and I lit a cigarette. Abuela frowned and placed coffee before me. Abuelo is almost fifteen years older than her. Watching Abuela sweep the patio, I considered how here in the countryside nobody thinks twice about the age difference.

After eating her own merienda in the kitchen, Lydia began work on la cena. I told her to put me to work, and Manolito came over to see what we were doing. “¿Qué coño estás haciendo aquí?”

“Separating the garbage from the rice.”

“Leave it. That's woman's work.”

Manolito spent a minute or two inside the pigpen sadistically teasing the fat young sucklings.
“¿Quién será la que me quiere a mi?”
Whenever I show up in Viñales, Manolito insists on killing a piglet.
“¿Quién será? ¿Quién será?”
He knew the one he wanted. He'd had his eye on her all month. But, glowering into their frightened eyes, he took a minute to rile them up, slapping asses and tweaking corkscrew tails.
“¿Quién será la que me dé su amor? ¿Quién será?”
He caught the fattest one, raised her face to his, planted a sloppy kiss on her snout, and yowled in her ear.
“¿Quién será? ¿Quién será? ¿Quién será? ¿Quién será?”
He dragged the squealing animal out of the pen and across the patio to the foot of a tree. The dogs barked ravenously in anticipation of their take. With the jerk of a lightbulb chain, he pulled the knife across her bristling throat. Her squeals ceased and the dogs leapt. Gutteral grunts grew softer as she drowned in her blood, the dogs lapping up the red mud. Manolito dragged the piglet to the bohío. When I strayed too close to the sow she lunged at the end of her rope. “¡Cuidado, Mono! That mama is a mean one.”

Manolito sent my ten-year-old cousin to the neighbor's with an empty two-liter bottle for some wine—distilled from cane with a touch of guanábana for color. Manolito poured two glasses. I sipped slowly but he goaded me, prying my mouth open and tipping my chin back if he had to. He poured it right down my throat from the bottle, so by the end we had both drank about the same amount.

“Manolito, you spend the whole day working beneath this sun and then immediately start drinking this awful wine. Why don't you rest a bit?”

“That's what I'm doing, Mono: resting. That's why we're drinking.”

“What I mean is, why don't you rest a bit from the drinking?”

“What do you think I am, Mono, a vagrant? If I fall asleep after a hard day of work, I won't have time to drink before it's tomorrow already and I have to go back to work. I'm a man. I've got three duties: to work, to drink, and to fuck.”