Havana Noir (17 page)
I turned off the radio. “Now do you get it? If we don’t leave now, we’re going to be stuck here for weeks until they get this mess straightened out. I promised your dad I would get you back to the city. Once you’re there you can do whatever you want. You can get on the next plane and come back to join all your revolutionary amigos, for all I care. Although I have a feeling they won’t wanna have a junkie yanqui on their side just now.”
“Papi, listen to the man,” said Raquel. “Please.”
“So either you come willingly or I’m going to have to do it the hard way,” I added.
David rubbed his face with his hands as though in deep concentration—or disgust. “All right, all right, you win. Let’s go.”
“Oh, papi, you are so good!” said Raquel, hugging him to her chest. I looked away, opened the front door.
“Vamos.”
At Marina Barlovento, Esteban was jumping around the trawler as though the deck was on fire. He waved his raggedy porkpie hat at me when he saw me trooping down with David and Raquel.
“C’mon, c’mon, chico, they’re here already!” he said, hurrying to cast off the dock lines.
“Who?”
“The muchachos from the Directorio, they’re trying to stop people from leaving. Look at those guys over there.”
He waved his hat at a group of men with rifles and machine guns boarding a large yacht three piers away. “They’re checking all the papers, they say nobody can leave without authorization. Por suerte, the harbor master is not here, so once we’re out in the water…Coño, what the hell is wrong?” The engine stopped its chug-chugging, coughed, then died. “Carajo!” cursed Esteban as he opened the engine cover by the stern and peered into the well. He cranked the engine, which let out a wet, sloshing sound.
“What was he saying?” asked David.
“Fidel’s people are trying to stop all the Batista people from leaving; they’re checking papers and whatnot…What’s wrong with the engine, Esteban?”
The captain shook his head in desperation, slamming the motor with his hat. “Jodida mierda, coño,” he cursed, “this piece of shit just flooded. I can smell it.”
He raced over to the controls by the wheel, turned off the choke, then returned to the engine well, opening the throttle. He cranked the engine, which sputtered but refused to turn over.
“We’ve gotta go, tell him we’ve gotta go right now,” urged David.
“I know, I know, what’s
your
sudden hurry?” I asked.
“Jesus, are those them, those guys?” He pointed at a group of four men approaching the pier, led by a skinny redhead who looked familiar.
That couldn’t be him
, I thought.
“Yeah, I suppose, what’s the problem? Aren’t you in good with these guys?”
“I gotta go, I gotta go,” said David, terrified. He moved as though to jump in the water but I grabbed him, wrestled him down, pinning his shoulders with my knees.
“Jesus, will you fucking settle down?”
“You don’t get it, do you? I didn’t come here to help Fidel’s people; I came here to bring weapons to Batista!”
“What?”
“Yeah, you moron. The State Department froze all arms shipments to Cuba last fall. Through a friend of mine I got ahold of some old surplus rifles and brought them down here. The Directorio people found out and they’ve been looking for me for the last week. What the hell did you think I was doing hiding out at the Shanghai?”
“But before—”
“I was whacked out of my mind, idiot. I couldn’t tell my ass from a hole in the ground. But now I know what’s coming and I don’t want it!”
I let go of him and sat down on the deck, thinking fast. Then: “Hurry down below. I’ll handle this.”
David scurried away on all fours, slamming the door to the cabin behind him. I got up, whispered quickly to Raquel, and walked out to the dock, just in time to be greeted by my now old friend Cubela.
“Nice day for a cruise, Mr. Blue,” said Cubela, while his four minions craned their heads, looking around the boat. Soon their eyes were fixed on Raquel, who walked out to the bow, where she proceeded to strip off her dress and sunbathe in her underwear.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking, Rolando.”
“You know, strangely enough, after we parted, I received information from my compañeros that the gentleman you are escorting back home is wanted by our people.”
Out on the bow of the boat Raquel turned and displayed her best assets to the gunmen, who walked up to her and began a no doubt learned conversation on buoyancy, Archimedes, and fluids displacement.
“Really? I didn’t know Dr. Castro was so concerned about drug fiends.”
“Well, Dr. Castro is concerned about the welfare of all people. But he is particularly interested in arms smugglers who help Batista’s torturers.”
Now even Cubela himself sneaked a look at Raquel, distracted by her charms. As though constrained by ecdysiast duty, she stood and removed her top.
Esteban glanced up from the engine well, gave me a furtive thumbs-up. I nodded. He cranked the engine, which awoke with a roar.
Cubela turned his head back to look at Esteban, but at that very instant I grabbed the machine gun out of his hand and threw my left arm around his neck in a stranglehold. Placing the barrel of his gun on his shoulder next to his neck, I fired a warning shot over the heads of his men. Cubela squealed from the noise in his eardrum and the burning hot barrel against his skin.
“Tell your men to throw their weapons in the water, now!”
A moment passed, a gull flew by, and I wondered,
Is this all there is?
Cubela nodded, gave the order. The men cast their rifles into the bay, the weapons bobbing in the water for a few seconds before starting their descent into the blue-gray depths.
“Now tell them to move back up to the pier. Slowly.”
“You know we will find you,” warned Cubela as the men passed by us, hissing with contempt.
“I’ll be waiting. But first, you and I are going to walk to the boat very slowly and you are going to board with me. Understood?”
“Perfectly.”
We took small steps to the boat, then, with the barrel of the tommy gun still to his neck, we stepped onto the splintered deck of the
Buena Vista
.
“Cast off, Esteban.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Blue.”
The boat shuddered and trimmed in, still powerful even after forty years of service. The pier quickly receded as we headed out for the open water.
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Cubela.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, letting go of him to hold onto the gunwale momentarily as we bumped into a wave.
“Well, I have!” said David, who had come out from the cabin upon realizing we were heading out. Without warning, he pushed Cubela off the stern into the water. David stood on the transom, waving his fist at the bobbing head of the revolutionary. “Go get fucked, you damn Commie!”
I glanced back at the pier and saw that another group of Directorio people had come down from the dock. One of them raised a rifle.
“Get down! Get down, you fucking idiot!” I shouted, just before the sharpshooter fired and the bullet tore through David’s windpipe, slamming him to the deck.
“No, no! Dios mío, no!” cried Raquel, who threw herself on the boy with the voracity of the lonely and the dispossessed. I bent down, took a cold look. I’d seen a lot of people like him in Inchon, when the Chinese attacked our positions and the guys fell like flies. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him from dying, he was choking on his own blood.
“What should we do, mister?” asked Esteban, looking worriedly down at the boy.
“Keep going. He’s beyond saving.” I knelt down next to him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. He grabbed at my hands, gurgling hoarsely, wanting to let me know one last thing, one final message. I put my ear to his mouth as he said his last word, then he seized up and died.
I let Raquel cry over his body for hours until she grew tired and worried and I reminded her she was carrying his child, and that seemed to comfort her some. I told her I’d make sure she would get her share of the old man’s money, and I laid her down to sleep in the galley. Esteban and I cleaned the deck as best we could and then placed the body on ice down below.
It wasn’t until the sun was setting out by the Tortugas, just about an hour from Key West, that Esteban put the boat on cruise, popped open a Polar. I took a swig, the bitterness in my mouth making the beer taste almost sweet.
“So what did he tell you, mister? What did he say at the end?”
I lit another Chesterfield, watched in silence the deep blue of the Gulf begin to meld with the green waters of the shallows by the Keys. Esteban was still looking at me, waiting.
“He said
Shanghai
,” I answered, tossing out my cigarette.
“Shanghai? What does that mean?” asked Esteban.
I contemplated that for a moment, then I thought I should say,
It’s the city of dreams, it’s the city of sex and drugs and revolution and pleasure never ending
, but I realized that wouldn’t do, so I answered the only way I knew how: “Yo qué sé.”
What do I know.
W
hat am I going to do? T
hat’s what I keep asking myself over and over as they lead me through the airport.
“We have a problem, sir,” the secretary at the law school had said. “You can’t take the state’s graduating exam because we found you have penal antecedents, a police record. It’s been more than twenty years, so you can ask that they be erased and then you can take the state exam,” he added in a conciliatory tone.
Of course I knew this; that police record had made a pariah out of me, without the right to study the career of my choice, without the right to seek a better job, or to have any kind of social acceptance. For more than twenty years I’d been walking around socially and politically castrated, and I’d been hoping that the University of Havana would never find out about my past if I just denied it.
“There was a mistake and it’s been rectifled,” the legal adviser to the Ministry of Justice said this time, months later. “When you were tried and sentenced, you were a minor and so you should have never had an adult police record.”
You’re telling me this now, after decades of ostracism, you fucking legal adviser to the ministry?
But it’s never too late to start again. So I graduated from law school and decided not to practice, since the profession doesn’t actually allow the defense of those accused of ideological crimes such as thinking aloud. I can’t even defend myself. Under what law, and with what proceedings? I think back and I regret that I was so dismissive of that court-appointed lawyer who didn’t bother to mount a defense for me back when I was seventeen years old. Where could he be now? Has he been imprisoned for thinking without hypocrisy, has he deported himself, has he allowed himself to be debased?
After two or three hours of pedaling my bicycle, sweating my guts out, I can’t find my way home: Night has come too soon, and the stars are on vacation as it rains nonstop on this new moon. For those without direction or hope, there are no sadder nights than those that are moonless. And it won’t matter how much I plead, the moon will not so much as peek.
The last time that I couldn’t distinguish day from night was when I’d just turned seventeen and was locked up in a police cell during two weeks of questioning. The cell was windowless and it was impossible to tell the difference between dawn and the most intense noon hour. They wanted to reeducate me so that I would not only confuse day for night but so that I’d learn that good and evil were relative concepts.
I was frequently dragged from that nine-by-six cell that I shared with three other inmates and asked about my terrible crime: wanting to leave my country. Days before, the overloaded boat in which I’d hoped to row hundreds of miles had gone down near a fishing dock; we’d barely even started out on that moonless night. Nobody knew anything and there was no evidence, but a word from the political police was enough to label it a Crime Against the Integrity and Stability of the Nation. A military tribunal passed judgment on this civilian, a minor, with a court-appointed lawyer who stayed quiet, trembling, while the political police’s prosecutor presented a fantastic story that steered clear of the truth. Of the four-year sentence I was given, I only served one, in labor camps where there were also moonless nights.
The police are not very efficient, or they’re really so preoccupied with trying to deal with the miserable problems in their own homes, which they have in common with every other Cuban, that they really don’t care about doing a good job of investigating crime. They never bothered to find out how Victor, my fourth-floor neighbor at 503 La Rosa Street, died. The octogenarian passed away three days after being hospitalized. Nobody bothered to find out how he’d hit himself so many times against the wall. But all the neighbors heard him, in the silence of the blackout, and Juana the mulatta, sixty years his junior, violently shaking him.
Victor and Juana had married four years before for the exclusive benefit of the young domestic servant, who would soon inherit the apartment and a juicy widow’s pension. Now Juana and the three kids she had while married to Victor could finally enjoy a better life. Victor had been resigned to those kids, black babies who arrived one after the other without a smidgeon of their presumed father’s Caucasian DNA.
Everything might have been more believable if on the night of the wall-banging and Victor’s subsequent hospitalization, their door hadn’t been furiously kicked in by Francisco, Juana’s nocturnal lover, who arrived and couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let him in.
Each night, Francisco, a thieving dipsomaniac from the neighborhood, would fornicate with Juana while Victor slept a few steps away. As soon as Juana became a widow, Francisco installed himself in the apartment and continued with the only things he knew how to do in his life: stealing and drinking.
They’d met at the bar adjacent to our building, at the corner of La Rosa and Ayestarán, a sad little place where lost souls would fill their bladders with alcohol only to empty them later in the neighborhood’s recesses. It was a little after the man moved in that my life became more miserable, and I decided that killing him could be rationalized as an act of justice for the greater good of society.
I should be used to these interminable blackouts, omnipresent since my early childhood. If sunlight is a gift from God that has accompanied us always and will be with us forever, electric light is also an intangible miracle that doesn’t depend on us but on a group of men who tell us day in and day out that we must save what they squander, who make the blackouts coincide with the hours in which the radio and TV broadcasts from the United States to the Cuban people are most intense. Or worse, the blackouts drag on when I need to write or study or when friends come over. The drunken thieves from the adjacent bar take advantage of the darkness to make off with what they can. It seems to me that the blackouts are a punishing reality that haunts us daily, from infancy to our deaths.
“We’re going to let you go,” says the bureaucrat who has just given me the approval to leave Cuba. “We’re going to let you go because your soul is no longer in this country, you don’t think or feel like us. You haven’t matured enough to forget the idealism of your youth. You have not taken advantage of all the opportunities we’ve given you.”
I am left dumbfounded, trying to figure out what these opportunities were that I didn’t learn from or appreciate. But in this moment of joy, I mentally thank him instead, for not torturing me with a long delay in approving the leave for my family and myself.
The dark of the blackouts pursues me while I work, during dinner, trying to read or attempting sleep under the heat’s caress, hauling buckets spilling water up and down the stairs, waiting in interminable lines to buy something to eat, as I make love, or during a funeral, healing or teaching others, trying to heal myself or trying to learn. I should be used to this since it’s been the same thing since childhood, when the city of Havana began to lean on crutches.
I live in what could be called the clitoris of the Ayestarán neighborhood, which was built in the mid-twentieth century between the old colonial district of El Cerro and elegant Nuevo Vedado. My apartment is in a part of the neighborhood that looks like a giant vulva right in the middle of Havana; it’s south, at the perineum of the intersection of Ayestarán Road and Rancho Boyeros Avenue. To the north, both avenues stretch for various blocks like thighs inserted in the city’s hips, crossed on the west by 20 de Mayo Avenue, parallel to La Rosa, and headquarters to the National Library, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Economy, and other public buildings.
The worst part of pedaling incessantly in the dark isn’t the actual darkness or not being able to perceive the difference between the street and the sky, the asphalt or the pit. It’s not the fact that you see the same thing whether you raise or lower your eyes, whether you look ahead or to the side. The worst isn’t even having to go slow enough so that you can jump off when the bike’s wheels slide into the ditches, invisible because of the water. Nor is it getting lost, but rather losing your life, if this can be called a life.
For some time now there have been rumors about events which the mass media obscures: dozens of adolescents and adults have been killed while riding their bikes on the darkened streets. Following the bikers, the murderers hide behind the giant ocuje trees then bash them with baseball bats, or they trip the bikers by stretching a nylon cord from one side of the street to the other, which they then pull quickly and violently around their necks, before the bats deform their craniums. Life is the price of a bounty that is nothing but a pair of used shoes and a cheap, obsolete bike. And, of course, the police don’t investigate; they can’t be bothered with the everyday.
The domestic battles between Juana and Francisco began a little after they started living together. They always ended with vociferous screaming and Francisco getting kicked out. Apparently, he didn’t steal enough to support the young widow and her three children. Soon, the lightbulbs from the building’s common areas began to disappear, and more than once the motor that pumped water up to the higher floors vanished.
We all suspected Francisco, and I wanted to punish the crook who had me carrying dozens of buckets of water up the stairs every night: Francisco would leave the building and find a bottle of rum in the same hiding place where he always hoarded his alcohol; Francisco would be unable to resist taking a mouthful of rum, and a little later he’d be vomiting, having convulsions, his extremities stiffening involuntarily, then he’d finish off with a respiratory collapse and cardiac arrest. Sodium monofiuoracetate, also known as Compound 1080, dissolves in water, is colorless, tasteless, and without odor. Francisco’s fate was sealed.
I am going around and around the puddles and I can’t seem to find my home. If only there was a star to guide me! In the distance I see a very bright building, the Palace of the Revolution. Now I can orient myself; I’m going in the wrong direction so I turn right, go straight. I soon feel like I’m falling off a precipice, there’s no asphalt anymore but an enormous emptiness, and my bike and I smash against the rocks below. Can anyone see me or hear me from here?
Once, during Yom Kippur, I felt the same way. I had begun my fast well before what was religiously necessary. It was unavoidable. I walked and walked toward the synagogue, dead tired, hallucinating, not from the incipient fast but because my body could no longer tell the difference between one day and the next. I saw the synagogue filled with well-dressed people and I imagined, as in a dream, that I was a dybbuk who sexually possessed a beautiful young woman I’d never seen before. What terrible thoughts for the Day of Atonement! I was enraptured by the hazzan’s voice flying high with the most impressive of melodies and words:
Kol Nidre…ve’esare…vecherame…vekoname…
The melody abruptly stopped when someone sat down next to me. That’s when I opened my eyes and saw that the synagogue was actually almost empty, only seven people attending the service, there was no hazzan, there was not then and there never would be a Kol Nidre, that young woman and hundreds more had been living abroad for years and who knew if they were even dead or alive.
If this pit is anywhere near where I live, I should be able to hear Quimbolo, my nearest neighbor. Quimbolo is the only Cuban who is allowed the privilege of screaming improprieties against our absolute Big Brother without anybody ever thinking of locking him up for the rest of his life. Quimbolo’s real name is Everardo and he’s mentally retarded.
He wanders down the street in utter filth and repeats the rich and profane lexicon that drunks have taught him. I’ve never heard anybody scream
Pinga!
so stridently, so forcefully and sonorously.
Pinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnga
, drawing out that
N
until the middle of oblivion. I remember hearing that word many times in the dark and at dawn like a war cry. For years, there wasn’t a child born within three blocks in any direction who learned to talk by first saying
Papá
or
Mamá
, but rather by repeating Quimbolo’s word.
One day Quimbolo was diagnosed with diabetes, I’d forgotten. His ulcerous legs got dirty and he died, amputated and septicemic, depriving the neighborhood of its most obscene crier.
“It looks like he had a heart attack! Run and call an ambulance or a doctor!”
“There are no doctors at the polyclinic?”
“The man is dead!”
People scream around Francisco’s body. Now he’ll never again steal the lightbulbs from my building or the motor to pump water. There will no more thefts in the building. One thief less.
I’m not afraid to come out of the pit in the middle of the street. This huge trench must be the hole at the corner of Ayestarán and Lombillo, in front of the dilapidated pharmacy, with its empty shelves. So I’m only a block from home. I crawl up the rocks until I believe I’ve reached the surface. I paw at the loose stones around me that should indicate wet asphalt. There’s no sign of a bus or car that might illuminate me and possibly hit me; bikes pass in the distance. I crawl and carry my broken bike with me, its wheels destroyed. Now there are only three more flights to go up in the dark…a few more steps…a breather, twelve more steps…another pause. I take care not to hit what remains of the bike against my neighbors’ doors. This stairway is such torture! I place the key at the same height as my navel, and this makes it easier to find the lock.
It was much harder to find the key to graduating from law school. It had been an incredible sacrifice to study at dawn, after each blackout, beating back sleep with abundant quantities of bitter tea.
From my balcony, the buildings and the street and the sky around me all seem beautiful, black like a great ocean of ink. That’s also how I see my future, and that of my family. Why not try and find a bit of light, even if it’s not so early in life?