Havana Noir (24 page)

But there is a God in heaven: You, Yako, your blood makes the blade slip from his fingers, now white from pressing so tight, and it bounces and clinks on the hard ground muddying with sweat, blood, and fear. And you grab him by the neck, walnut-brown mulatto shivering under your white forearm with black hairs, and squeeze and squeeze…and everybody’s screaming, and I say,
Coño,
and run.

I run inside, to his house, searching for the key under the cactus pot, and when I go in I topple the chair and don’t have the time or inclination to say anything to whoever’s there, looking at me from behind the partition, still sort of taking a nap, maybe just waking up cuz of the scandal outside, maybe accustomed to it all from so many years of living in El Patio. I search under the mattress, find what I’m looking for, and rush back with my tongue hanging out, praying that what I left seconds ago hasn’t ended badly…

On time. Cuz Humbertico the Piranha has gotten loose and is struggling to retrieve the spoon and its blade. And he’s gonna get it, Yako can’t stop him, he wiggles and wiggles…

Breathless, feeling like an s.o.b., I threw it at him: the horn-handled blade from Albacete province given to him by Gema, that Spanish girl he fucked last year. The one I wanted to fuck and didn’t have the guts to face. The pitch turned out okay: There went that
Made in Spain,
already open and everything, spinning on the ground, right into his hand. There was no way he couldn’t get it, and the rest was automatic.

We grew up together and he was cut and all the blood on the ground and on his clothes was his and all I’d wanted to do was help him…

That’s what everybody said later, during the runaround and the ambulance and the squad car and the questions. That’s what I told them.
Yes, I threw it at him, I wanted him to have a chance cuz he was my pal, but what happened wasn’t all my fault,
I told the mustached lieutenant who was taking the report as the paramedics carried the body off, now a knot under the red-stained sheets. Tears started to fall. Without lament, with a tightness in my chest, the way men cry when they have no choice and there’s an overwhelming impotence and there’s nothing more that can be done. The way we cry in El Patio. The way Yako was crying when they took him away.

I cried until the mustached lieutenant, from Santiago like so many of these patrol car guys, but good people unlike most of them, took me aside and put his hand on my shoulder as if I were his son, cuz I was young enough to be his son, and said to me in a low voice that life is fucked and things just happen. He said he wished he had friends like me…

If things were looked at right, it wasn’t Yako’s fault either, since he was a big guy and wasn’t used to fighting with a knife, and he used the spearpoint instead of the blade, the way you do when you think you might lose the weapon if it gets stuck in the wound, and he had such bad luck, or such good aim, that the blade shot right into Humbertico’s eye and into his brain.

Simply put, it was the Piranha’s day, that’s all. Bad luck…If it’s your turn, it’s your turn. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Everybody knew it was going to end badly. You don’t mess with knives, that’s what the elders said. And his poor sister…now nothing can save her from whoring.

According to the lieutenant, they weren’t gonna be very hard on Yako. He only had a few little things on his record, mostly peer pressure stuff like stealing jeans from laundry lines. Humbertico was already a jailbird, a bad egg, destined to return. And he’d attacked first, so it would be self-defense anyway, with a bunch of eyewitnesses to boot. It had happened in the heat of battle, Yako had been overtaken by passion…

That’s what the lawyer said at the trial. So did Manolito the Tripod, and Alfredo who went in his marine uniform, and even Babas.

Petra didn’t cry for her dead brother or make a scene during the trial.
He brought it on himself, the fool, for trying to come on so tough, for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, cuz I know how to take care of myself,
she was heard to say, and the women in El Patio wrote her off after that, cuz you can be a whore if you want, but blood is blood, even if it’s the guy who took your virginity who spills it.

I also gave testimony, right after a test I had to take, and that also influenced things. As soon as the sentence was declared, Yako, with tears in his eyes, told me that I was his only friend and that he’d never forget it. That he’d get out, that in the end it was only one dead guy. But I knew he was lying, and he did too. There’s a greater distance between zero and one than between one and infinity, and he was now on the other side.

In the last few months, I’ve dreamt now and then of Yako’s face telling me,
Brothers forever
. And the blade, with its bent horn, zigzagging on the dirt, and later shining like a needle in the air. The cops kept it, of course, as evidence. It’s too bad cuz it was a good knife, with a fine edge, firm and steady.

I still visit Yako now and then, but not as much as during the first few months. Those are the rules, everything’s a waste, so they gave him four years; it’s a lot…Silvia only went with me the first two times, and she never requested a conjugal visit with Yako.

I haven’t seen her since. Well, there was that one time, from afar, in that little hotel at the CUJAE, she was with a French engineer who was attending a conference there. She pretended she didn’t see me, of course, and I didn’t even say hello. I’d fucked her a couple more times while Yako was awaiting his sentence, but she wasn’t interested after that. The feeling’s mutual. I’m not surprised, I knew it from the start. It was all cuz she was his woman and I was his pal. It may have been another way of getting even more of him, of entering his childhood, that little piece of his life which had never been revealed. Yako before he was Yako, before he thought about the red bridge that he feared and desired and ultimately crossed.

On a visit, the second one, he told me that someone had ordered him killed. Maybe it’s not just paranoia. He thinks it was Petra, the Piranha’s sister, and I didn’t say anything one way or the other. Who can understand women anyway—one day lots of kisses, then the next they drive a stake through your heart. It’s not true that they’re all bad; some are worse.

Two guys attacked him in the bathroom: He had to be cool, he was hit by metal tubes, they broke his arm, but he got one of them in the eye, a fat, bald white guy sporting Santa Bárbara tattoos. Now nobody fucks with him, but they gave him two more years for blinding the guy. Between that and what he did to the Piranha, they’ve started to call him The Ophthalmologist. He laughs when he tells the story, then he puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me again how I’m really his pal. And what a blast we’re gonna have, what a fucking blast, once he gets out. For now, he’s pretty much okay: He has things to do, like surviving and watching his back, and climbing the cellblock’s hierarchy. He’s gotten it in his head that he wants to be a cellblock chief.

He’s no longer afraid of losing his life. Maybe there’s value in that: that absolutely nothing matters at all anymore. Now everything’s easy, he doesn’t hafta think much. He doesn’t read anymore. Anvil or hammer. To hit or be hit, to kill or die. He knows the rules now, and he plays accordingly. Living on the other side of the red bridge is not so hard. He told me maybe he’ll get a tattoo, old-school prison style, by hand, with a sewing needle and ink made from burnt shampoo. Maybe he’ll get a Santería emblem, or a kimyankela, a one-eyed spirit with one leg, one arm, to impress the black hordes in the tank. He’s using five necklaces now, never mind that he didn’t believe in any of it.

In his own way, Yako’s happy. I go along with him and tell him how things are on the streets, and we make plans together, even though we both know it won’t be the same. Never again. Maybe that’s real freedom, knowing the limits. The red bridge isn’t so bad. What’s worse is being in the middle, or on the other side, knowing you still hafta cross it, but not knowing when…

At first, in spite of everything, I envied him a little. Not now. I’ve crossed the bridge too…my own bridge, more green than red. After I threw that blade his way that afternoon, everything’s been easier, as if I’d always laid low, in the shade of the hill it took so much to climb. You could say that El Patio’s fate has finally caught up with me, but I live ten times better than before: I bought a color TV for my old girl, and I have as many women as I want—me, the shy one.

It wasn’t even my idea but now the trap is well-greased: port-transportation-domestic economy. Petra lures them from in front of the hotel or when they’re trying to hitch a ride, and she brings them to my house, where I offer them PPG, cigars, rum, as if it were all mine to give. Alfredo the ex-marine has his contacts and procures the product. There’s always something for me, for being the face of the operation. Everything cuz I gained the guy’s trust by throwing the knife to Yako when he needed it.

Manolito the Tripod and Alfredo fuck Petra now and again…I don’t get it: She looks good but she’s cold as the wind. I gave her a couple of turns but I got bored. Her clitoris is about the size of a plantain seed…except they don’t really have seeds. All that flaunting, all that heating up, and then she has to fake it. Pity all those foreigners who believe it…

A few days ago, she asked me if she could go see Yako, if she could get a conjugal visit with him. Life is full of surprises…true love, or maybe she just really wants to fuck him and pay him back for the Piranha? I hafta think about what I’m gonna say to her.

I imagine Yako never cared whether Petra could come fucked up the ass or whether she was frigid. It was all about appearances, about not letting panties walk by without getting in them, and about daring the Piranha, with the invisible sign on his head advertising him as a tough guy just outta the tank. The challenge. Yako the mothafucka, the hard one, the guy from the red bridge.

Who cares. Life is shit, from shit we come and to shit we shall return, and between shit and more shit, there are a few shitty dollars from the black market which we’ll spend buying more shit or horrible liquor for fighting, until one day it’s all over, with blood and dirt or with sheets and intensive therapy. Then somebody, like so many others, will say,
Alive
.

For the time being, I’ve dropped outta school. I asked for a leave and they gave it to me without questions. It was my third year, but to hell with it. I don’t plan on going back. What’s a white boy from El Patio doing wasting his time at the CUJAE anyway, studying for an engineering degree which isn’t gonna do shit for him? With so much business and so many whores and so much life waiting out here—in El Patio or beyond—it’s all the same.

Even so, I can’t forget that afternoon, the fight, the dash to get the knife, my pitch, and the horn-handle on the ground, the hit and the burst of blood from the Piranha’s eye. I’ve lived it a thousand times in my memory. And each time I’m more sure of why I did it…but a lot less sure of
how
I did it. If I did it on purpose, or if I made that up later.

Yako on the red bridge. I saw him fighting but didn’t feel his fear. He was gonna win—he was big and he was winning, he would have won cleanly anyway. He was blond and had light eyes and played basketball pretty well, he fucked Silvia without having to hide and she had more fun with him and his drunkenness than she ever did with my desire. He had eight inches on me, and he’d always been better at everything. That I was studying toward a degree and read a lot and knew that someday I could suddenly leave El Patio if I wanted to didn’t matter. It wasn’t books about exotic places or incredible cold-blooded adventurers in monstrous heat that mattered at the moment of truth. It was him and not me. That was real life, sweat and blood and guts and brawls, and he lived them and I didn’t. And he was on the red bridge, on the ground in a fight in which only one would come out alive, even if neither actually died. Dying? Everything ran smoothly until…it was like a nuclear explosion, like when Uranium 238 boils until it hits critical mass.

My decision—if it was a decision—was spontaneous, without premeditation, not the way I once insinuated to Silvia during a fuck, in fact the last time we fucked. You can take a lot of shit when you have a half bottle of bad rum inside you.

It was a lie—I didn’t contemplate it for weeks beforehand, eating my liver while fueled by old envy and resentment; I didn’t plan it all ahead of time; I didn’t talk Yako into fucking Petra; nor did I pay her all my savings to open her legs to him, knowing full well what Humbertico the Piranha would do. It wasn’t me who told him, and I didn’t throw the knife knowing that Yako always talked about a Florentine-style stabbing: eye-brain-death. It simply happened that way, and I took advantage of the timing, the situation, the sinister series of linked coincidences, the circumstances. I’m not that much of a sonovabitch or that Machiavellian.

Or maybe I am…?

The fucked-up part is that I can’t be sure. Maybe God exists, and if he exists…I’m afraid that just thinking about it is enough.

In El Patio they say I’m an educated guy cuz I read and I went to school. Everybody says there are answers to everything in the Bible. I went leafing through it for the first time a coupla days ago. There was once a Jacob who saw a ladder to heaven and fought with an angel. But it doesn’t say anything about a red bridge. Nor about a horn-handled knife, of course.

Translation by Achy Obejas

LA COCA-COLA DEL OLVIDO

BY
L
EA
A
SCHKENAS

Centro Habana

S
he was a fifty-four-year-old light-skinned black woman, a technical engineer at the H. Upmann Tobacco Factory by day, and under the cover of darkness, a black market beautician prowling the poorly lit alleys of Centro Habana, trimming beards and plucking eyebrows for those too elderly to do so for themselves, giving pedicures and cleaning pores for those too young and too vain to see past their own noses.

She hadn’t always been this snide. Once, she too had believed in beauty, revered it even. As a child, she had chosen her career because of it. This was back in the days of Batista, when she had noticed that all the beautiful people in La Poma, that bottleneck of chaos and corruption and color that has forever been Havana, were professionals—doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers.

When the Revolution triumphed on the eve of her tenth birthday, she had been immediately caught up in its spell of social justice, its promise of education (the path to professionalism) for everyone. When the Literacy Campaign came in 1961 and she was only twelve, too young to go into the countryside to teach the guajiros how to read, she volunteered to tutor illiterate workers at a factory in Havana. At eighteen, she accepted a scholarship to study in Moscow, emerging eight years later with her PhD in engineering. She returned home in 1975 and in less than a year secured a job at the tobacco factory, met Manrique, a flautist with the National Symphony Orchestra, and got married. When Marisol was born two years later, everyone declared her to be the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen.
Una hija de Ochún
, they said as she grew into a striking adolescent, her skin a milky brown, her hair a long curled black with sun-streaked highlights of red-gold. She was an artistic youth whose vibrant, wildly distorted paintings of the neighbors entertained everyone.
She will be successful, just like her parents
, people said.
Qué familia
, they said. When the babalao next door prophesied, at Marisol’s tenth birthday party, that the three of them would live a happy and fruitful life, everyone had nodded their heads in envious agreement.

Sixteen years after that flawed prediction, Beatriz lived alone in a crumbling five-story apartment in Centro Habana. Several years before, the buzzer system had broken. Now when her friends came to visit, they knew to call out her name from the street. They stood just far enough away from the balcony so she could see them, but still close enough so they could catch the key when she tossed it down from the third door.

Unfortunately, Beatriz had yet to encounter such a simple solution to the many other malfunctions of her apartment. The bathtub faucets worked only infrequently. The refrigerator froze up and then defrosted at will, leaving soupy puddles around the icy mangoes and spilling a sweet, sticky syrup onto the floor whenever she opened its door.

Her TV was color when Manrique bought it ten years ago, but now it produced only a grainy black-and-white image on each of Cuba’s two stations, both government-run. If Beatriz smacked the shelf beneath the television really hard, sometimes a streak of magenta would flash across the screen, but it always faded. To hear the sound, she had to connect it to the stereo she’d given Marisol for her quinces.

Beatriz still remembered how everyone had danced that night, more than twenty tightly packed bodies swirling around her, sweat streaming down their foreheads, the living room gallery of Marisol’s paintings blurring before their eyes. They had kept dancing even after the lights went out and the stereo stopped (Manrique tapped out the rhythm with a spoon and a frying pan), signaling the start of the daily apagones at the height of the Special Period, those spare years of sugarwater tea and salt-water baths immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Looking back now, Beatriz felt an unexpected tenderness toward that time when, despite the difficulties, they had managed to pull through. Together. As a family.

It was only 7 in the evening, but already a dreary, drizzly darkness enveloped Centro Habana as Beatriz stepped out into the grime of Industria Street, turning left at the corner of Virtudes. Lately this intersection, where she had lived for forty-six years and never given much thought to the meaning of the street names, had begun to seem rife with metaphor, with irony. She had always been industrious, but in the last two weeks, virtue had felt further from her reach than ever before.

Fearing that her refrigerator would completely conk out any day now and feeling desperate for money to buy a new one, Beatriz had begun rubber-banding so many cigars around her thighs and calves at work that she had to wobble her way out of the factory at the end of each day. Each evening, she stashed her loot at the house of her friend Clara, a schoolteacher who no one would suspect of having access to stolen cigars. In three weeks, once she’d acquired (the word Beatriz preferred to describe her actions) enough cigars to fill seven boxes, she would pay Clara ten dollars for her help, and then, for thirty-five more dollars, she would hire her friend Orestes, a wood-worker extraordinaire, to make the cedar boxes. Orestes had once produced the drums for Havana’s most popular percussion band, Los Sobrevivantes. But then the members had gone to New Orleans for a performance and never returned. Orestes’s wife, the lead drummer, had promised to file the paperwork for him to join her, but soon she’d stopped responding to his letters. Now, whenever Beatriz asked Orestes if he’d heard from her, he’d invoke that old Cuban aphorism of abandonment, blaming his wife’s silence on the lure of her new capitalist life in La Yuma. He’d shake his head and say,
La Coca-Cola del olvido
—the Coca-Cola of oblivion.

As far as profitability went, Beatriz’s cigar-selling business was a good negocio, bringing in eighty dollars for each pungent package she hawked to the tourists hanging out along the Malecón. But the risk of getting caught—and the shame of losing her job—had convinced Beatriz that this would be a one-time deal. She felt much safer with negocios unrelated to her official work, even if they didn’t bring in such big profits. She felt safer outside of the factory, and in the streets.

At the intersection of Virtudes and Consulado, Beatriz stepped over a puddle of doggie diarrhea and narrowly missed being splashed by a stream of wastewater dripping down from an overhead balcony. In the street, a game of pelota was in progress. The players had created baseball diamonds from the negative space, and ran to invisible bases between the bici-taxis and the stationary, not-abandoned yet not-functioning automobiles that pushed up against the deteriorating sidewalk.

Beatriz’s first stop tonight was the ciudadela where Marilys lived. A one-family mansion in pre-Revolution times, it now housed five families, each of which lived in what had formerly been one large room. In an attempt to make it feel like a house, the inhabitants had built in bathrooms and kitchens and barbacoas, makeshift lofts that doubled as bedrooms, jutting out in the middle of living rooms and cutting the head space in half.

Outside of Marilys’s ciudadela, a group of teenage girls in spandex body suits stood surveying the street scene.

Inside, Marilys was where she always was (in front of the TV, watching that interminable Brazilian telenovela,
El Rey del Ganado
), wearing what she always wore (a gauzy yellow mumu), sitting as she always sat (in her rocking chair). Her wrinkled face glowed in the blue light of the television, and Beatriz invited herself in.

Marilys smiled, pleasantly surprised by the company, and asked, “What brings you here?”

“It’s time for your eyebrow pluck,” Beatriz replied. “Remember, you asked me to come by sometime tonight?”

Marilys looked suddenly worried. She raised a veiny hand to her nose, her fingers between her eyes. “Oh my, I’d forgotten,” she said. “I’m actually okay now. Do you think you can come back in another week?”

Beatriz nodded. Sometimes it went this way with los viejos, their memory not what it used to be.

As Beatriz turned toward the door, Marilys called out, “Since you’re here, would you like to join me for the telenovela?”

“Ay, mi vida, no,” Beatriz said, softening her voice so as not to appear irritated. “I have a lot of work to do tonight.”

* * *

The word on the street was that things were supposed to have gotten better after the worst of the Special Period ended in 1994. But for Beatriz, this was when the built-up stresses really began to take their toll. Within a year, her husband left her, claiming incompatibility, and her parents, who had shared their two-bedroom apartment with them and whose constant bickering over finances had certainly not helped the situation, died within days of each other. Although Marisol, age seventeen and at the height of her teenage angst, had frequently argued with all of them, she nonetheless cried for a week straight. Her paintings went from colorful cubist portraits to dark post-modern smears of varying shades of gray, and then over time, she just stopped painting altogether.

Two years after her grandparents died, and against her mother’s objections, Marisol accompanied Beatriz to the Colón Cemetery. It was their pre-assigned time to retrieve the bones, making space for the bodies of the newly deceased. When the caskets were opened, the half-decayed corpses Marisol saw—rotting flesh still clinging to their bones as an other-worldly stench swirled around them—made her want to run away. She told Beatriz she wanted to flee not just the cemetery but also the island itself, where everything—from buying milk after the age of seven (when it was no longer available through rationing) to purchasing paper and paints for artwork—was a struggle, and rest, even after death, remained elusive.

Unlike Marisol, who had not lived through the Revolution, Beatriz knew that it was important to stay put, to be patient and prepared for the inevitable sea change that, however slowly, was on its way, for the day when professionals would once again be paid their worth (instead of the measly twelve dollars per month she earned as an engineer) and the world of negocios would be a thing of the past. Beatriz tried to share this wisdom with Marisol. She encouraged her to return to her painting, to pursue it professionally by applying to El Instituto Superior de Artes, but Marisol would have none of it.

“I’m young, mimi,” she protested. “I don’t want to spend my life sitting around, waiting for change.”

Instead of El ISA, Marisol applied for el bombo, the Cuban lottery that gave one hundred and twenty thousand Cubans permission to move ninety miles north to La Yuma each year. And then Marisol waited, biding her time by befriending visiting foreign boys who, blinded by her beauty, did whatever she asked of them. To their surprise, it never involved a ring.

Marisol wanted out, she was quick to tell people, but she wanted it on her own terms, not on the arm of a man she didn’t like much to begin with. The foreign boys were good for their fula, however, and Marisol didn’t turn down any of their offers to take her out for fancy meals or buy her presents, all of which she handed over to her mother. Since the departure and deaths of the rest of her family and the passage of her moody seventeenth year, Marisol had transformed into a dutiful daughter. Like a cat with its proud catch of a mangled bird, Marisol brought her greasy-haired Italians and beer-bellied German men back to the house to bestow Beatriz with groceries like cheese and eggs and fresh fatty cuts of pork that she never could have afforded on her engineer’s salary. And then, with an airy goodbye kiss, Marisol would shoo her surprised suitors out the door.

Five years after she’d applied for el bombo, Marisol’s number had finally come up. Now it had been three years since she’d moved to Miami, and six weeks since Beatriz had last heard from her, the longest they had ever gone without communicating. Usually, Marisol called for a fifteen-minute check-in on the first Sunday of each month, and also, at some point each month, Beatriz received a letter with twenty-five or fifty dollars sent via a visitor Marisol had met in Miami. But this month there had been no phone call, and without Internet or even a way to dial the U.S. directly, Beatriz had been unable to contact Marisol on her own. She’d tried calling collect a few times, but Marisol was never there—she worked odd hours, a different schedule each week at an all-night restaurant whose name Beatriz couldn’t remember.

People tried to reassure her that everything was all right. It was just the distractions of Marisol’s new life, they would say. It was just la Coca-Cola del olvido.

Beatriz had suffered through so many secondhand stories of good-kid-turned-selfish-capitalist-pig that she’d wanted to scream. Each time, she’d shaken her head and recounted how, through all Marisol’s travails of the past three years, she had always managed to call, to send some small amount of money home to help out.

But this is how it is with la Coca-Cola del olvido, Beatriz’s friends had told her, as though this were not just an expression but the name of some unpredictable, incurable disease. It happens without warning, they said.

To occupy her mind and time, and to make up for her absent allowance this month, Beatriz had taken the remaining twenty-five dollars of Marisol’s last remittance and, through an extensive network of friends who could acquire the objects at their workplaces, had invested in some sharp scissors, a small plastic squirter, bottles of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, some shaving cream and aftershave, a pair of shiny metal tweezers, a nail clipper, three bottles of nail polish (red, purple, and pink) and some nail polish remover, a file, a fine-toothed comb, and a pack of six razors. She’d practiced on a friend next door, and then she’d begun her black market beautician tour where, by shaving one face each night and performing one eyebrow pluck for just eight pesos each, she could earn twice as much as she made each month at her engineering job, which she felt obliged to keep so as to not provoke suspicion. And, of course, to maintain her professional status for when the next revolution came, after which, she was certain, Marisol would return.