Havana Noir (5 page)

When I visited one evening, I came loaded down with provisions. They locked the old man in his room, Reinita lit some incense, and we all got drunk. Lucecita drank too much and started toasting the swallows that flew alone at dawn above the water—that’s how inspired she was. At midnight on the dot, we uncorked a bottle of champagne and Reinita pushed me into the girl’s room. Lucecita kept talking to the swallows and I was so scared that I started stammering, as if I’d been smoking weed. She begged me to never take off my glasses.

“They make you beautiful,” she said. And so I lay down next to her, barely touching her. “It’ll be our secret that we embrace only with our spirits,” she said conspiratorially.

That dawn, in a spectacular robbery that left Havana completely in awe, the studio at Masón and San Miguel was taken apart piece by piece. Reinita told me that they’d found the night guard fast asleep and that there would be a no-holds-barred investigation. The city would be dredged up like a minefield.

“There’s so much hate,” she said.

Nobody gave me a second thought. They even interviewed the studio janitors, but no one thought to ask me squat. It was as if I didn’t exist.

“I’m invisible,” I told Lucecita.

“Thank your lucky stars,” she said. “Maybe precisely because of that I’ll love you someday.” Pascualito met me at Rosendo Gil’s house and told me that the Great Grail sent its congratulations. He added that the Supreme Chief would give me a medal, and that I could ask for whatever I wanted. I didn’t know what to say. It was actually Pascualito who suggested the idea of the restaurant.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

“Nothing, just live and look out for the Grail’s share.”

It was easy to convince Lucecita to let us build the restaurant at her house. We worked hard during those days. From the sewers came tables, tablecloths, the goods for the meals, everything. The only condition I laid down was that my friend Jeremías would be the sole supplier for the new business. He just radiated happiness. Reinita Príncipe reacted the same way, and I’ve often wondered if he had conquered that poor and faded star’s heart.

And as it turned out, Lucecita did grow to love me. I don’t know if her love came from pity or because we were making so much money, but one night she told me to stop acting like a fool. I made love to her like never before, so that daybreak found us still in bed, and after that, at least for a little while, I became the hardest working man in the city.

My restaurant was always full, open twenty-four hours and decorated with posters from our heroic period. There’s nothing a foreigner likes more than somebody else’s heroism. They went crazy staring at the posters of a worker’s fist held high, or that one in which the gears of a machine smash the bureaucracy. Lucecita’s father got in on the act too. The tourists would go into his room and hear the tales of his travels to KGB headquarters and that afternoon when he saw Vaclav Havel under the falling snow in Prague. The old man would tell his life story with pride, wearing his old military uniform and showing the map of Havana which he used to repeat his conspiracy theory. He never tried to charge a fee. Nonetheless, Reinita always left a dollar on a silver ashtray to try and inspire the tourists.

It was during this time that my mother died. I had her frozen and brought from my hometown to Havana, where I buried her in one of the niches in the Falla Bonet mausoleum, between bags of aspirins and cough syrup. My mother could never have imagined her eternal sleep on Carrara marble.

A few days later, Lucecita and I got married in a church. It was a sumptuous wedding and I wore a new black suit and turquoise tie. Five months later, Pascual Jeremías was born.

You’re a winner!
my mother had written to me in a letter shortly before her death. That’s how I felt too, proud, so much that I’d forgotten I was cross-eyed, I’d forgotten my suffering, I’d forgotten the injustices. I’d begun to look at life as an endless spending spree. There was no one taking care of my heart, no one to give me a wake-up call.

Soon, however, laziness was catching up with me. Little by little, Lucecita had been taking over the reins of the business. She knew exactly how to fix the day’s receipts, and with great care she’d divvy the Grail’s share, the money for the inspectors, money for bribes to keep everything quiet, and, of course, money for us.

“With the extra money, we’ll be rich,” Lucecita told me one night.

“What if they find us out?” I asked fearfully.

“How will they find out?” she replied, as she kissed my waist and took my glasses off for the first time. “Are
you
going to talk? Am
I
going to talk? Is
Jeremías
going to talk…?”

I know, of course, that life’s adventure is filled with big risks. But our good fortune went out with the old man; it was flushed right down the toilet. We did everything we could so that he wouldn’t talk. But the old man put off his antagonism toward the dwarves long enough to send them messages. He saved every jar of mayonnaise, every bottle of mustard, every container we threw away, and he sent them down with every flush of the toilet, each one stuffed with a letter that told about our various transgressions.

The first warning came the Monday that Jeremías disappeared. I tried in vain to find him. I went to the Packard, searched his room, then checked out every corner of the Prado where he made his conquests. Nobody had seen him since Friday. I visited Pascualito at his spot in front of the train station. I tried to hug him but he held back. He talked about a moon so cruel that it poisons men’s hearts. He told me about how certain waters can wash shame away.

“Something strange is going on,” I told Lucecita when I got home.

“Jeremías is in love and Pascualito is a neurotic dwarf,” she responded, trying to calm me down.

“Dark times are coming,” I said.

“No, our son won’t be subject to the same struggles as you and me.”

“Dark times are coming,” I repeated.

And I was right. At dawn, we were attacked by a horde of dwarves. Within minutes they’d taken everything. A bigbreasted female dwarf snatched Pascual Jeremías from his crib. Then they took Lucecita and Reinita Príncipe. They took the old man too, wrapped in his map of Havana. I was left without the strength or will to act.

That’s when Pascualito came in and repeated what he’d said about the cruel moon and signaled for me to pick him up. I kissed him on the cheek, and I don’t remember anything after that.

I woke up in a shed made of ice deep in a cave. My body shivered. My good friend Jeremías approached me. And, my God! He was now a despicable dwarf! Jeremías had short legs, an old double-breasted coat over his tiny body, and his ears were mangled. He was wearing flannel boots instead of two-toned shoes, and he seemed so resigned that I was terrified.

“I don’t exist anymore,” he said, helping me up.

My scream chilled the cave even more. I too was a dwarf! I too was a dwarf with lips twisted in confusion, a dwarf without eyelashes.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said like a priest, and then he talked about Christ’s commandments, about punishment and absolution. He said Pontius Pilate was our wasteland’s patron saint.

“How long will we be like this?” I sobbed.

“Forever,” was his reply.

Today there was a slaughter. The slaughterhouse is next to this freezer and from dawn through the rest of the live long day, the cows’ mooing has been tormenting me. I wonder if cows think about life and death. But those are subtleties that don’t really matter. My tragedy is double: I no longer breathe Havana’s air and I’m despised. The dwarves—I still talk as if I’m not one of them—have a unique standard of beauty. They love their short bodies and the familial shine in their eyes.

I have to do the worst jobs: carry boxes, cut out cow livers, cremate their bones, and slice off bull’s tongues.

“The Big Show’s about to begin,” Jeremías tells me. He’s still my good friend.

I’ll finish up these notes right now and sit myself in front of the TV—it’s the only entertainment allowed—where I’ll be face to face with Lucecita. It’s a show produced just for underground TV. They’ll introduce her as the World Famous Vedette. She’ll play up her underappreciated sensuality. When I see her, I’ll forget all about the real woman, the lover I so desired, and merely ask myself if my Pascual Jeremías was able to save himself like his mother.

Jeremías yells at me that the show is starting. I’d give anything to stop hearing Glenn Miller, that same melody that always comes over the loudspeakers! I want to have wings and fly, to escape with my son as if he were a sacred feline and climb the mountain that’s Havana, and be a man. My Lucecita sings the show’s theme song and I travel through space and light, to the dream on the screen, and love her.

Translation by Achy Obejas

THE LAST PASSENGER

BY
E
NA
LUCÍA
P
ORTELA

Vedado

I
t’s well known that the guy never confessed. But neither did he ever deny the charges that were leveled against him. The night he was arrested, he said, “Fuck you, dick heads, I shit on the whore who birthed all of you motherfuckers!” Or something like that. And after that initial statement, he never uttered anything vaguely coherent again. Once he was at the police station at Zapata and F streets, between the braying and the shrieking, he got obsessed with a certain clattering caused by the vermin whose little feet galloped up his spine—
plick! plack! plick! plack!
—and dicked with him all night—
the bastards!
—not letting him sleep, driving him crazy—
hee! hee! hee!
—crazy, just fucking wacko…All of a sudden, he’d howl frenetically, roll his eyes back, and hit himself on his temples with his fists; he’d even foam at the mouth. It was quite the spectacle!

According to what I’ve been told, there was no human way to get him off that. They interrogated him without rest for hours and hours, for whole days. They showed him photographs of his victims, exactly how he’d left them (if the facts I have are true, those photos are even more hair-raising than the ones of the Tate-LaBianca murders), they smeared the photos under his nostrils, they threatened to crack his head open like a pumpkin and even gave him a few good slaps—and nothing. The guy never responded. Maybe he was making up the stuff about the galloping vermin so as to avoid responsibility for his actions, maybe it wasn’t so much that he was pretending, or that he was bald-face lying, but that…heck, who knows! The forensic psychiatrist concluded there was nothing insane about him, that the guy was fine in the head—more precisely, that he was perfectly capable of distinguishing right from wrong when he did what he did.

Yet they never called him to testify during the trial. The psychiatrist testified, of course. But not the guy. I remember him sitting on the front bench on the left side of the courtroom, immobile, wearing a brownish-gray suit, still handcuffed, quieter than an oyster at the bottom of the ocean. Had he seen me? I don’t know. I don’t think we ever made eye contact. He seemed dazed, lost in thought, far away, as if the proceedings in Criminal Court #7 of the Provincial Court of the City of Havana had nothing to do with him. Had they sedated him so he wouldn’t make a scene in public? Hmm. Maybe. Because in the end it wasn’t really necessary that this guy tell about each one of his exploits in any kind of detail. There were eyewitnesses, a preponderance of evidence, and the results of a DNA test, which, from what I’m told, is infallible. Everything was very dramatic, as the relatives of the victims were in attendance. There were screams, sobs, one or two people fainted. As was to be expected, the prosecutor finished his argument vehemently demanding the death penalty. Later, I heard that this particular prosecutor was affectionately nicknamed “Pool o’ Blood” (although I must recognize that, at least in this case, the accused could also be called this). The defense attorney, for his part, limited himself to asking for clemency.

That’s when I raced home. I was dying to throw up and, though it may sound strange, to laugh as well. I had never witnessed a trial before and I hope, in what’s left of my life, that I never will again, because in American movies—and in the TV series
Law & Order
—I find them fascinating, but in real life, not so much. I don’t know if a legal system with twelve jurors is more efficient than this one, where the verdict is determined by three professional judges, but it’s certainly more pleasant. Two days after the trial, it was announced publicly that the Provincial Court judges had found the accused guilty on all counts and had sentenced him to death by firing squad. The sentence was upheld later by the Supreme Court.

A few months have passed since then. No one talks about it much out on the streets anymore, and I think it’s been awhile since the newspapers have published anything. Now the guy’s on death row. It’s probable that they’ll never execute him, because of all the fuss around human rights. As far as I know, after the international hullabaloo because of those fast-track executions back in the spring of 2003, they haven’t executed any other civilians.

Me, I just go on with my same routine, like always. I sleep, or at least I try, almost all day long, and then come alive at night. To sleep, I drink chamomile or valerian root tea, or I take diazepam, trifluoperazine, chlordiazepoxide, haloperidol, or some other pharmaceutical. The important thing is to sleep. Although there are days when nothing works and all I want to do is bang my head against the wall or throw myself out the window. I live alone in an apartment with a view of the sea, on the ninth floor of the Naroca building on Paseo Avenue, around the corner from Línea Street, in Vedado. Little vermin with galloping feet don’t come this high. Nothing gets up here; nothing stays for long up here either, not even a mosquito. It’s just that I suffer from insomnia. Why? Ufff, I have no idea! I’m thirty-three years old, I have twentyfive thousand cucos deposited at the Banco Financiero, pretty legs, and I’m white (well, to be frank, I just pass for white in this country, in fact I’m Jewish), divorced, a smoker, Sagittarius, I like film noir and noir stories, black clothes, Johnnie Walker Black, darkness, Rachmaninov, and Russell Crowe’s brutish face. I loathe Caribbean summers (so humid and muggy), salsa orchestras, rum, radical feminism, encounters with many kinds of people, Ayn Rand’s aesthetics, and being called “privileged.” It’s been a long time since I stopped asking myself the why of things.

These days, I’ve been seriously considering the possibility of visiting the convict. Do they allow visitors on death row? Who knows! In any case, I don’t think I’ll go. They’ll want to know who I am, what my relationship is with the guy, etc., and I couldn’t explain without getting in trouble. I can just see it: “I’m the enchanting unknown woman who the asshole psychopath would call in the middle of the night to talk to about his ups and downs, fears, successes, frustrations, and plans for the future.” Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

As I said, I’m not going. No way! Deep down, I’m grateful that the asshole psychopath didn’t tell the police about me (and didn’t write my number down anywhere). I confess that I’m surprised by so much discretion on his part. I always assumed he was a bit of a wuss, a hack, someone who wouldn’t be able to take the slightest pressure and would give it all up right away, not stop talking until he’d spilled everything. As soon as they nabbed him, I thought all was lost. I assumed they could come for me at any minute and accuse me of harboring a fugitive, or complicity, or instigation, or God knows what craziness. Those were hellish days, nights of furious anxiety. But no. False alarm. The son of a bitch didn’t turn me in. Hmm. How weird. Even today, I can’t explain it. Well, the truth is that there are a lot of things about this nefarious situation which I can’t explain.

Sometimes I have no choice but to be out during the day—as much as I hate that. I’ll need to go to the bank to get money, since everything here has to be paid in cash, or to sign for the wire transfers sent from Europe. I also need to pay the electric bill, the phone, the water, buy groceries for the week (never forgetting the pharmaceuticals nor the whiskey), return the videos, rent new videos, take a little stroll by my dentist’s office, go to the hairdresser at the Cohíba or the boutique at La Maison, or deal with the process of taking a trip abroad, which involves a head-on crash with the world’s most grotesque bureaucracy, among other needs. I hate to walk in the sun around other people. It’s true that my neighborhood is pretty safe compared to the disaster of Centro Habana, for example, or Alamar, or El Hueco in Marianao, where tourists don’t go even by accident. But Vedado also has its black holes, of course, tucked away behind the pleasant façades. Perhaps it’s my own problem, but I frequently think the streets stink. They stink of misery, of desperation, of violence. Basically, the streets are bad. If it were up to me, I’d never go out.

I can’t stop thinking about the guy, about the incredible surprise I got the first time I saw him. It was at the Provincial Court, during the trial. Until that moment, I’d only heard his voice on the phone. A low voice, beautiful, boyish, although it had something metallic about it, and sometimes even squeaky, especially when he had fits of hysteria or threatened me by describing how pretty I’d look once he’d gutted me—
swish! swish!
—with his lethal blade (that’s actually how the fool expressed himself), or when he screamed about how females, those degenerates, those shitty whores, weren’t worth a hill of beans, and I—the most disgusting of all!—was guilty of who knows what.

At those times, I’d hold the phone away from my ear, lean back in my chair, and light a cigarette. Sometimes I’d get up. I’d leave him there, talking to himself, without hanging up or letting him know. I’d go to the kitchen, pour myself a whiskey on the rocks, and return to the bedroom at my leisure. When I got back on the phone, he’d be going at it at the top of his lungs, threatening to strangle me with my own intestines, but not before tearing out my liver and eating it, among other lovely things. In the midst of his fits, he never noticed my absences. Or who knows—maybe he just didn’t want to let on. He was egocentrism itself. I’d happily get comfortable again in my chair, or on the bed among the big pillows, with my whiskey on the rocks and my cigarettes. I’d listen to plans for my future murder, which would be quite atrocious, while contemplating the Havana night. Then he’d finally calm his nerves, or surrender to exhaustion, or ejaculate. He was always the one who would say goodbye, until the next one, hope you have horrifying nightmares, etc. He’d hang up indignant, absolutely furious, telling me that I was a piece of shit, a goddamn cactus, a frigid neurotic, an insensitive bitch, a monster! And he just couldn’t talk to me anymore. Those farewells were never avatars of anything even vaguely healthy. Generally, the next day, or a few days after that, the mangled cadaver of some girl would be found in some tenement slum, or in a ditch, or in the bathroom at the bus terminal, or in a dumpster, or floating down the Almendares River. Not much time would pass before he’d call again, to brag about his latest prank.

Even as he gave the impression of being an inveterate narcissist, the fact is he never described himself physically. Not seriously anyway. One night, I asked him what he looked like, only to see what he’d come up with, because I never thought he’d be honest about it. (People who describe themselves physically on the phone, or on the Internet, generally don’t tell you what they look like but what they’d like to look like.) Then the guy quite delightedly swore that he was basically green, that he had three fluorescent yellow eyes, two reddish antennae, and a few exquisitely violet dots.

“Oh, and a twelve-inch cock,” he added, with great pride. “You want some…?”

“Hey, stop that. I’ve told you, I can’t right now. But don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll let you know. And watch that flying saucer so they don’t steal it, okay? The streets are nasty these days.” “The flying…? Ha! Ha! Very funny! I
looooove
it when you try to be sly, foxy, all-powerful! Trying that with me…Ha! Ha! As if I didn’t know you!”

“That’s right, I love you too.” I blew him a kiss. “You’re my favorite martian.”

“Really? Then tell me what you’re wearing right now. Tell me! I need to know before I go out to…well, you know. C’mon, whore, tell me!”

“What I’m wearing…hmm. Quite the little question. Let’s see…”

I imagined him younger than me. Not an adolescent, but almost. Let’s say, some young thing in his twenties terrified of growing old. Somebody who’s, say, a miserable twenty-three but gets totally offended if you miscalculate and suggest twentyfour. Of course, when I asked him how old he was—and, let it be said, I did so with the utmost care—he told me I was a crone—ha! ha!—and old enough to be his great grandmother. That’s how he was, a vile clown. He hardly ever answered anything seriously, maybe out of self-importance, or to come off like a tough guy, or to compensate for the utter dismay he felt because I wasn’t afraid of him.

I imagined he was white. Not white in that apocryphal fashion in which so many Cubans are white, but really white, from the roots, with all European ancestors. Immaculately white, maybe blond or red-haired. I also imagined him college-educated, or at least well-read and well-traveled, with a comfortable economic situation (not like me, because I struggle and work, but something of a fortunate son. Everybody knows what I mean: nomenclature, upper class, elite. In other words, the truly privileged in this country—those people who manage mixed enterprises, hotels, and franchise stores, who have Swiss bank accounts and spend their vacations in the Bahamas), and the look of every mother’s son, the face of an angel, and a pianist’s hands, very clean, a bit shy, elegant, with impeccable table manners, a genuine gold Rolex on his wrist, without a police record—except, perhaps, a little fine for speeding like a madman—a loner, nocturnal, bored, and a habitual user of cocaine and hardcore porn.

I said
I imagined him
, but that’s not very exact. Back in the days when we talked freely on the telephone, before they arrested him, I didn’t imagine anything. No, that’s how I
knew
things were, no more, no less, and there was no way they could be any different. I didn’t need him to explicitly confirm anything for me to be certain of it all, regardless of prior promises in the service of truth. I mean, his way of speaking, his allusions, even the slightly faggy way he pronounced certain words, the insults and the threats, as if he were trying to be the wicked wise guy or the neighborhood tough guy, the big spender, street expert, and supreme connoisseur of women of the night—
everything
about him seemed to indicate unequivocally that I was right.

He never told me his name. When I asked him during one of those telephonic chitchats, he assured me in his unique style that his name was Ted Bundy. Ha! Ha! He also said I needed to become a police inspector, since I obviously enjoyed interrogating sinister suspects. I didn’t pursue it. What for? I never pressured him about anything. It’s possible I may even have laughed a bit. The big shots in this country, in order to distinguish themselves even more from the average joe—so they confide when they’re in trusted company, or when they think they are—never give their kids extravagant names like Yoandrys, Plastidio, Inkajurel, or Amón Ra. No way! So the sinister suspect had to be named Fernando, Ernesto, Camilo, Rafael, or something like that. And just like he didn’t tell me his name, he didn’t ask for mine. He didn’t need it. He always called me “you,” just “you.” That’s not counting the expletives, of course.