Havana Noir (10 page)
They spent four hours chatting. I spent the time sitting back on my mother’s lounge chair, with her pad and her pillow, trying to see our view of the city through her eyes. I imagined her opening her eyes in the hospital or in some other house. And then I closed my own eyes firmly to shut out this image.
After the priest’s visit, my mother slept for forty-eight hours straight. I think the absence of telephone, electricity, and neighbors helped. I don’t think it rained, or that the north wind blew, that humid breeze that smudges the windows and gives Vedado an air of impatience and cosmopolitanism. I think that after this dialogue with God, my mother began preparing herself to die.
Now, with tonight’s deadline approaching, I hear her say in a weary voice that she’s very tired. It’s midnight and she doesn’t even have the strength to stir in bed. Anyway, there’s nothing to see outside. Nor inside either. I’m going to find the battery-powered lamp in the kitchen so I can look at the calendar, the one that reminds me that we must leave the building tomorrow and that my mother still has two weeks of life.
I come back with the lamp and she’s fallen asleep, complaining through her dreams. What must it be like to never get relief, even from sedatives? Or to close your eyes and not open them again? Or to spend your last days in a strange place?
I start to fix the syringe. I do it very slowly, and it’s not because I’m clumsy; I’ve actually gotten quite agile with this business of giving shots. I review all the decisions I’ve made in the last few days. After my mother passes, I will not go to San Francisco; there’s nothing for me there. It’s possible my presence would disrupt my brother’s biorhythm and inhibit his successful life as a designer.
Nor will I go to Paris to look for the poster man. A person who’s incapable of writing two lines to ask about my sick mother is not anyone I can trust. In any case, I’ve got my presentation written. It doesn’t matter to me if it gets published. It felt good to write it. It was like old times, as if my brother and mother were out on the terrace with me, with our toy soldiers, dolls, or jigsaw puzzles, depending on the day.
Now I hold the syringe in my right hand. I make sure the needle can spit out the first few drops, which indicate all is well, and I make my way to the bedroom. I don’t need the lamp. I’ve gotten to know my mother’s body well in these dark but blissful days. I should move out of the building tomorrow. With my free hand, I go to the calendar and mark off my mother’s dying day. And then I go to her.
Translation by Achy Obejas
I
t’s been two hours I’ve been staring at the sun. I like to look at the sun. I can look at the sun for an hour straight, without blinking, without tears.
I’m still staring at the sun, leaning against the wall at the corner, listening to the old women as they come out of the bakery, complaining about how shitty the bread is but eating it anyway cuz they’re dying of hunger. On this corner, you can smell the smoke from the buses as they pass by on the avenue, the stink from the many dogs who think they’ve found something in that awful piece of bread, the bitter stench of desperation, like in that shitty song my mother likes. It’s a disgusting corner and I think I like it even more for that very reason; I spend huge chunks of time here, waiting for something to come along, just staring at the sun. I’m singing a little bit of that song and don’t notice when Alexis comes up.
“Hey, man, what’s going on?” he asks.
“Nothing. You?”
“Hanging.”
“Cool,” I say, looking at Alexis. I suppose Alexis is my best friend. We’ve known each other from before we even went to school, from when his father and mine worked together at the Ministry. Later, they fucked over Alexis’s dad, but not too much, cuz he had good friends. They didn’t even take his car, although they did relieve him of his gun. That, yeah.
“Let’s go get a liter,” he says.
“Who’s got some?”
“Richard El Cao.”
“C’mon,” I say, and I forget about the sun and the bitter vapors…Fuck, it’s actually the bitter taste of desperation. Same shit.
El Cao always has liquor. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes he also has pills. He gets them easily: He steals a script from his mother, who works as an administrator at a hospital, and he signs her name, and then they give him the best pills at the pharmacy. Easy, right? But there are no pills today. We took the last ones yesterday, with four liters of liquor. Yesterday was fucked up.
Now we’re drinking, not talking. It’s always like this: At first, you hardly talk. It’s as if your brain goes dead for a while. Later, we talk a bit, especially if we pop some pills. Alexis and El Cao talk the most.
After we’ve been drinking awhile, Alexis says, “There’s a fight today.”
“At El Hueco?” El Cao asks.
Alexis nods.
“I don’t have any money,” El Cao says.
“Me neither,” I say.
“I do,” Alexis says, and since he’s been drinking, he tells the whole story of how he got the cash: There were about twenty liters of oil, the good cooking kind, in the trunk of his father’s car, and he stole three. He sold them, so he has money. Three hundred pesos.
“Let’s go,” says El Cao.
“Let me finish,” says Alexis.
We drink a little more. This liquor’s pretty good. When we finish drinking, that’s when we leave.
When we arrive, the fight hasn’t started yet. We’re told today it’s Yoyo’s stanford against Carlitín’s boxer. I like the stanford. His name is Verdugo and he’s won like twenty fights. He almost always kills the other dog. The boxer is also somewhat famous: His name is Sombra and they say once he clamps down, he doesn’t let go. There are already twelve people here, waiting. There are two black guys, with their gold teeth and Santería necklaces around their necks. They must be Carlitín’s friends. He’s always hanging out with black guys like that. He has business dealings with them, and sometimes he pulls jobs with them too.
The betting begins. Alexis puts his three hundred pesos on Verdugo. I tell him to set aside fifty, for another liter in case he loses. But he says no, that there’s still plenty of cooking oil in his father’s car and Verdugo’s gonna win.
They set the dogs. And everybody’s screaming. Myself included. They let them loose. Verdugo sinks his teeth into Sombra’s shoulder, drawing blood on the very first bite. It’s practically black, this blood. Drops of this practically black blood swirl around Verdugo’s mouth and drop on the ground. Then the screaming intensifies. Sombra starts to turn and gets ahold of Verdugo’s paw. He’s gonna tear it off. Verdugo’s gonna leap right over him and Sombra’s unaware. Then Verdugo hits his neck. Carlitín and Yoyo jump in to separate them but Verdugo won’t let go, and neither will Sombra. They jam sticks in their mouths to control them. Sombra lets go first but comes around the side; Verdugo still won’t let go. Yoyo finally pries his mouth open and Sombra drops: Two streams of blood pour from his neck, even blacker and thicker. The boxer’s dead. Everybody’s still shouting and the losers start to pay up. Carlitín kicks his dead dog. Alexis gets his winnings, two hundred pesos, and tells one of the black guys to pay the hundred they bet. The black guy says the fight was bullshit. Alexis says he doesn’t give a shit about that, what matters is his hundred. The black guy says he’s not paying shit. Alexis says he can stick it up his ass. The black guy pulls a piece and sticks it in Alexis’s face.
“What you say, you little white shit?” the black guy asks, then hits his jaw with the gun’s butt.
Alexis doesn’t say anything. The other black guy has a knife in his hands and is looking around at everybody else. The two black guys laugh. Nobody moves. Should I do something, given that Alexis is my friend? I make my move.
“Let it be, bro,” I yell at the black guy. “Alexis, forget the cash.”
“Fine, big guy, you win,” Alexis says, and the black guy pushes him and laughs. The other black guy joins him. They leave without turning their backs. I like black guys less and less all the time. I swear to God that’s true.
Alexis talks even less than usual. And he drinks more. Between him, me, El Cao, and Yovanoti—that’s what we call Ihosvani now—we’ve downed two liters and a third’s almost gone. There’s one more. Here, on El Cao’s roof, there’s no fear: We’re encircled by a Peerless fence and, even if we get drunk, no one can fall off. Then somebody calls El Cao from the street corner.
“Richard, Richard!” a woman shouts. Or two women.
It’s two: Niurka and Betty. El Cao tells them to come up. They come up. They already know the black guys hit Alexis, cuz the whole neighborhood knows. They’re thirsty so we start the fourth liter.
“Either of you got anything?” I ask, but they play dumb. These two love to play dumb. “Don’t play dumb,” I tell them.
“I’ve got two parkisonil left,” Betty says, so I ask her for them. They’re two little white pills. I think I wanna have one. But I give them to Alexis, who swallows them with a gulp of liquor.
“Stop thinking about those black guys,” I say.
“I’m gonna get them back,” Alexis says, then lays down on the ground, closes his eyes, shakes a little, and starts to fly. That little parkisonil is a rocket when it’s fueled by liquor.
It’s nighttime and, since there’s no sun, I stare at the moon. I don’t like it as much, but it’s better than nothing. Betty is still sucking me off, and though I’m hard and the head is red hot, I don’t feel like coming. Sometimes it’s like that: It just feels swollen. Alexis is still sleeping on the floor while El Cao is sticking it up Niurka’s ass and Yovanoti rests. I think he’s singing, softly. I have the seventh bottle from our ordeal in my hand and I take another swallow. Suddenly, I don’t wanna be sucked off and I take it out of Betty’s mouth.
“Get on all fours,” I say, and I start to fuck her up the ass, and I think about movies in which men are sticking it up the ass of some woman. But nothing happens anyway; I’m not gonna come tonight.
“Here, my man,” I say to Yovanoti, and he comes over and Betty sucks him.
I start to look at the moon again, take another swallow, and fall asleep.
When I open my eyes, I see the sun. I’m alone on the roof.
I don’t know why there are days I like to come to church. Not to pray or to think about God, cuz I never learned to pray and I was spared the whole speech about God and the saints and the angels. I just like to come. My parents don’t care anymore if I come, cuz it’s not seen as a bad thing anymore. A few years ago it was really bad, and they didn’t like it when I came here. You don’t believe in squat, they said to me. Don’t you know that could get us in trouble? What the hell do you think you’ll find in church anyway? they asked. I just shrugged: I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Well, I do know one thing: I like it cuz I feel calm. But I don’t pray or think about God. I just look at him, nailed up there.
This car runs really well. El Kakín spends the whole day cleaning it, tuning it up, putting little things on it. Whenever El Kakín’s father’s abroad, he gets the car all day. Sometimes he lets us know.
Everybody, go to the beach
, and then we all go to the beach. Like today. Alexis is still pissed off about what happened with the black guys. He doesn’t even wanna get in the water. He just drinks rum and every now and then mutters, Fuck those black guys. Me, El Kakín, Yovanoti, and El Cao all get in the water. The water’s wonderful today. We get out and drink a little rum, and then I go back in the water and shit and the turd follows me around. But we go back in. Then we go back out, drink more rum, and Vivi and Annia show up. Since we’ve been drinking so much, we talk for a while. Annia says she’s leaving for La Yuma
1
, her and her entire family. Some people from a church—Jehovah’s Witnesses—got them the visas. They go to that church once a week. They sing, they pray a lot, and everybody thinks they really believe in all that, now that they don’t smoke, or drink, or curse, or harbor ill will in their hearts, as Annia says. But my brother’s always losing his temper, she says later. Well, it doesn’t really matter that they don’t believe in Jehovah, since what they want is to get to La Yuma, just like a bunch of other people I know. Not me, though. They say there’s everything over there, but you have to work like a dog. El Cao says he doesn’t wanna go either; he does fine with moonshine and pills no matter where he’s at. El Kakín wants to go: He wants his own car, with five-speed transmission, four-wheel drive, eight cylinders, diesel motor, hydraulic suspension, cruise control. He knows that car like he already owns it. Alexis says he wants to go too: He says you kill a black guy over there and they give you a thousand dollars. He’s obsessed with black guys.
But the one who likes La Yuma most is Yovanoti. He’s always talking about it, about how well everybody lives over there, about his brother who owns the racing track in Miami, and that other cousin who, just two months after arriving, was already sending his mother a hundred dollars a month, and about his ex—brother-in-law who has a restaurant, I think, in New Jersey. He says if he ever gets there, he’ll give up alcohol and pills and marijuana, even cigarettes, so he can earn a lot of money. Then he takes another chug of rum. And he talks some more.
Since I haven’t taken any pills in two days, I’m gonna have fun now. Vivi has a very narrow little ass. At first, you don’t think you can get it in, but she opens up good, tickles herself with her finger, and then takes a deep breath and says, “Put it in me.” And then you just push a little and it goes in all the way. The downside is that I wanna go a little longer before coming but I come really fast, and then I can’t get it back up. El Cao always gets it up: He’s come twice in Vivi and once in Annia. I don’t know how El Cao can come so much. He hardly ever eats. Alexis didn’t wanna do anything. He wants a pill. It looks like he jerked off and drank some rum so he wouldn’t get bored.
“Look,” Alexis says, and he shows me a strip of pills.
“Where’d you get that, man?” El Cao asks, dazed.
“I stole them from my grandmother.”
El Cao cracks up. “Man, what if something happens to the old lady?”
“She can die, for all I care,” Alexis says, and he takes two with a chug of liquor.
He gives me two and hands two over to Richard El Cao and two for Yovanoti and he keeps two more for himself.
The good thing about pills is that you really don’t have to keep drinking. They multiply what you already have in your belly, I think, by, like, ten. They’re also good cuz if you’re not drunk, then you wanna talk, fuck, listen to music. Well, for a while at least. Alexis starts talking.
“I need you to lend me your old man’s piece,” he says to me.
El Cao cracks up again. “You’re gonna kill those black guys over one hundred shitty pesos?”
“Yeah, one hundred shitty pesos and cuz they’re mothafuckas, those shit fuckin’ black faggots. I need the gun,” he says.
“You’re crazy, Alexis,” I say.
“Fuck crazy. You gonna lend it to me or not?”
“Trouble, man.”
“No trouble. Bring it tonight and in three hours I’ll have it back to him.”
“You don’t even know where those black guys live.”
“I’ll find out—where they live, where they drink their beer, where they bet on cockfights, where they play the lottery, where they smoke pot, where they steal hens. They’re two dead black guys. Just lend me the fucking gun. Look,” he says, and he sticks his hand in his pocket and pulls out six bullets. He takes another chug of the rum with the last two pills.
“You’re crazy, Alexis,” I say, but I don’t think he hears me.
Yovanoti got a movie and we’re gonna watch it in his room on the VCR. First, there are two blondes. It looks like they just got home from work, cuz they’re carrying purses and that sort of thing. But they start undressing each other right away and they get a really good lezzie thing going. Just when they’re getting hot, a mulatta comes in, pushes them apart, and joins them. The mulatta has a red pussy which is practically hairless and must weigh about ten pounds. The two blondes lick the mulatta all over, until one of them pulls out a dildo and straps it on. She sticks it in the mulatta until she comes. While all that’s going on, El Cao is the first to take out his dick and start jerking off. Then me. Then Alexis. Then Yovanoti. Then the other blonde in the movie, so she’s not left with nothing to do, starts jerking off too. The worst part of all this is how it smells like jism in the bedroom now.
I keep thinking about the mulatta’s pussy. Just for a while. Cuz now another movie has started and El Cao has brought out a bottle of liquor. I wake up during the night. I think I’m still in Yovanoti’s room. Alexis is still sleeping, on the bed now. Vanessa is naked and sleeping too. El Cao and Yovanoti are gone. Vanessa, the blonde, is between Alexis and me. That seems odd cuz Vanessa never fucks us, much less without protection. She says we’re savages, that we’re all gonna die from AIDS and that we leave bruises and what she wants is a Yuma to give her dollars and let her live in Paris. I don’t know what her deal is with Paris. But that’s Vanessa, and the truth is she’s hot. She’s got a little lock of blond hair on her fat pussy and two tits that are even hotter. All of a sudden, I get a hard-on. I touch Vanessa but she doesn’t even flinch. I stick a finger inside her and realize her crack is all slippery. It seems to be jism. I rub my finger on my dick, to get it wet. Then I shove it in her. She remains the same. How’d she get like this? I keep on fucking her until I get bored and then I pull out. I suck her tits for a while. She laughs, asleep, and I stick it back in her and this time I come. But not much.