Havana Noir (23 page)

Humbertico the Piranha, a little rat since he was a kid, old-time hustler, jail meat, and brownnoser to every black section chief there ever was in La Cabaña, knows he has a chance when Yako bends over to wipe the spit off, but he seems afraid of the ballplayer’s big hands, and he hesitates. He may not be too smart or have much to lose after getting outta the tank, but he has doubts, he has to be afraid and have his doubts. You don’t dick around with death, and after all he’s said to Yako, it’s gotta be face to face, fuck or get fucked, no slapping, first blood, and they break them up, cuz in El Patio you can smell when it’s
gotta
go to the very end, and not even God’s gonna come between these two now. When there’s a little sister’s broken hymen on the table, honor demands death even more than blood. Now Humbertico the Piranha, drunk and all, realizes there’s no going back, and he’s probably cursing the moment he decided to deal with this…He may be gambling a shitty life, but it’s his and it’s the only one he has.

* * *

Sometimes Yako says,
My second surname is Salieri.
And then he goes off on this philosophical turn, very elegant, very erudite. For him, the great cosmic joke, the great fuck, is not being a genius, nor a fool, and knowing it or not knowing it, and living contentedly like Babas, with his idiocy, happily pushing his cart from one end of El Patio to the other all the live long day, no matter who’s laughing at him. The chaos, the living end, the tragedy, is being in the middle: having the desire, knowing exactly what constitutes greatness, and not having any of it yourself. Salieri. Not the worst, just another good one. Not even among the best. Not the crackerjack, the number one, the top guy, the man, but maybe the guy who carries the main man’s bag. And that can be the same whether you make it to the palace guard or not, or whether you have a career, or whether you ever play in the NBA with Michael Jordan, or even Team Cuba. Or whether you were born in El Patio, feral Lawton, half alley, half tenement, instead of Haiti or Switzerland. It’s always being the midpoint, one more little mark among the statistics…and knowing it. Realizing it, that’s the hard part. Some people get it, some don’t, but everybody nods their heads and says,
This white boy speaks from the soul, with power in his words, brains, yes siree
. And then there’s another drink, to forget what shit we all are, and just in case that Salieri…

Humbertico the Piranha doesn’t have a piece, they’re fifty bucks each and he doesn’t have that kinda cash, he’s just gotten out and he hasn’t made his connections yet cuz Alfredo the ex-marine doesn’t want ex-cons near his video thing.
Sorry bud, it’s not like before, now you’re branded.
What the Piranha has is a sharp, filed-down spoon, strapped to his hairless ankle with a rubber band. Ever since he was in that brawl with that fat black guy at La Tropical and he got out by the skin of his teeth, when he had to cut the guy and the razorblade broke in his hand, he hasn’t had any confidence in switchblades. Or in any knife.

His hand knows by heart the sound of the filed-down spoon against the stone floor of the cell. Nobody knows how he got it out, maybe wrapped in brown paper stuffed up his big asshole, so used by the cellblock chief, or by dropping dimes on the guards, since that’ll make anything happen. It’s his treasure, and he doesn’t like to show it around too much. The spoon is Chinese, you can still see the letters on the handle, dull from so much handling. Sometimes he has to squeeze it to fall asleep, and he cries then, in his slumber, just like back then. The wiseguys say his little rosy asshole misses a certain big horse cock, that he wants to go back to being its mare, like the loyal wreck fish he is. The truth is that having it close gives him courage, helps him feel complete, and to remember he’s still a man and that he never
actually
gave his ass up to anyone in the tank, although the story goes that a coupla times he took advantage of Damián the Sewer from Cellblock 4. But that’s not too terrible, cuz being without females is tough, and you’ve gotta get what you can.

If he bends to get the blade in front of Yako, those Nike 48s are gonna leave footprints all over his face. Maybe at that moment his liquored mind decides to shit on the shitty summer heat that makes it impossible to wear long sleeves and hide the steel, and he imagines a special strip of leather for his wrist so he can carry the blade like the gangsters in the Saturday night movies. Or he doesn’t think at all, cuz in any case he’s got the broken bottle. So it’s fairly certain that the attack from top to bottom with the glass flower will come from a twist of the wrist, it will scratch but not kill, the product of alcohol and instinct and resentment, not from the former prisoner’s guts or smarts.

Yako sees the glass coming for his eyes and he knows it’s the red bridge’s sentry. El Patio sees the bottle coming in slowmotion and the whole world explodes in screams, cuz the fight’s real now, like those little whirls in the dust in the midday heat. It can end the same way, just like that, and it can all go back to being dust, even with a little bit of blood.

Yako says every life comes to a red bridge.

That’s a joke I like, and him too, so he says it like ten times a day. Yako, the red bridge philosopher.

Maybe he read it in some Chinese book, though he doesn’t read much. It sounds like the kind of philosophy that comes from people who dress in silk and drink tea, with a whole lotta time on their hands to watch the carps feasting on bread. Like at the Japanese Garden, where we went the last time—him, Silvia, and me—and I heard them arguing in the arbor and I pretended I was in my own little world but didn’t miss a word. He to her:
Fuckin’ whore.
She to him:
You knew it, and anyway, what right do you have to say anything to me, you lazy delinquent good for nothing
? This is a common exchange between Cuban couples these days, an inevitable refrain if the couple’s from El Patio. It’s another way of saying,
I love you, baby; I love you, too, Daddy
.

The red bridge is a blood decision, a bullfighter’s choice, a gentlemen’s agreement. You enter it cuz somebody’s pushed you, and you exit only by crossing and killing, or chickening out and playing guitar, doing a faggot’s twirl. Yako has given the matter a lotta thought, up in clouds of pure weed, which always give me a deadly cough: If you kill, everybody knows you crossed the red bridge, and you realize it’s not so easy, but there’s no going back. Cuz on the other side is the tank, and in there men aren’t men anymore but beasts, and the lyrics from that song about Moncada is a lie—a crocodile will in fact eat its own. And if you chicken out, you may as well climb on a raft and leave the country, and maybe even that won’t matter, cuz a man with a yellow stripe down his back can be sniffed out by his sweat, whether in El Patio or China. Once a coward, always a coward.

We argued about this a lot.

Yako and Silvia and me, by myself as always, we went to see
Lord Jim,
the Peter O’Toole movie, cuz I’d read the book. Yako liked it, though he said that no one comes back from a sea of coward’s shit, that there’s no redemption and no second chance. But later, Yako, who doesn’t read, asked me for Conrad’s book. Even for him, it must be nice to realize that somebody else has already laid down in black-and-white the ideas that have been making rounds in your head without quite landing. Must be nice to know you’re not alone in your thinking, that’s all.

The thing with the red bridge isn’t too bad. It’s like Moby Dick was for Ahab, or Hamlet pondering what to do with his whore mother and his bastard uncle after they killed his father. And, of course, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It’s always the same shit.

Yako bends and rolls on the floor like a big, gangly, but still very agile spider. That’s why the ragged end of the broken bottle only slices through his Benetton sweatshirt and barely draws blood from his shoulder before his legs collide with Humbertico the Piranha and they both get tangled up. Red’s rushing now, El Patio shouts in a single voice, like at the cockfights, dogfights, or some adolescent brawl where they beat each other purple then turn up as buddies the next day, for the pure pleasure of throwing punches and then forgiving each other later. But everyone already knows this one won’t have such a sweet ending. Although with all the screaming it does seem rather like a sport, like a game, and a couple of smart-asses even place bets. It’s just that Tension, like a couple of springs in the air, doesn’t actually scream, doesn’t actually stand, but rather sits there next to Death, polishing her nails at the domino tables, cuz they know that something’s gotta happen, and even what it is, but they’re not saying.

Yako doesn’t deserve Silvia, even if she turns tricks, and the three of us know it. But she’s too much of a woman for Yako to leave her, and I’m too nice, too naïve, and too easily fooled for an ambitious street-smart girl from Bayamo like her, who’s also determined to get some distance from her race, being a mulatta ashamed of her naps. I’m white too but dark-haired, short, with dark eyes. I’m no competition. That’s the triangle in which I don’t belong even when I’m present, in which I have no weight and won’t have any even after I graduate as one more mechanical engineer, a grease monkey at some sugar mill, cleaning spark plugs, crucifled for life unless I get on with some corporation, otherwise I won’t have a chance to even sniff a bill from afar, no matter how many books I read, or how much weight I lift at the gym that Manolito the Tripod built under that same ackee tree from our childhood. It’s not the same tree anymore either: During the storm of the century, it lost its smoking branch, which fell on Cachita’s she-goat, out looking for who knows what, and killed her.

Maybe what Silvia seeks in Yako, or him in her, is just Salieri, to settle and that’s it, just shit and a bridge that might be pink for women, pink or black lace with the smell of hotel air freshener, a fat Spaniard, Salsa Palace, Cayo Coco, and a passport to go abroad. Even I couldn’t say what I’m looking for in my pal Yako’s woman, cuz if he ever caught me I’d be dead meat, but truth is I always fall in her same trap even though there are so many little cheery student whores wandering around the CUJAE housing. Maybe it’s cuz they’re always giving me a hard time about my street style, no earrings or long hair, cuz in El Patio they don’t put up with that fag crap…or maybe it’s cuz we always like the challenge, the bridge, death escaping from the shithole even as we sink deeper.

Rolling around on the ground is Humbertico the Piranha’s thing. He bites with the slightly bucked teeth that earned him his nickname, kicks, scratches, twists, he’s got monkey arms and octopus tentacles. He’s happy cuz so long as the big guy doesn’t get up, he can always win, and he plays dirty too; with luck he’ll get him in one of those strangle holds every one of El Patio’s native sons learns practically before he learns to walk, and that way he doesn’t hafta kill him. But size imposes itself. Yako turns in the dust, gives a couple of big thrusts with his shoulders, manages to kneel, and covers the Piranha’s face with his giant hand, screaming like he’s outta his mind. He grinds his neck on El Patio’s dirt, like he’s finishing off the memory of his having fucked Petra. And in that moment Humbertico remembers what he knew from the start but had hoped to forget: that he has to go for his sharpened spoon so the decision can finally be made, like that night in Cellblock 3 when he had to gamble his life with Saúl the Albino for the right to get any kind of scrap, and the big black chief just looked on to see who he’d get as a foot soldier and who he’d give up to get fucked by the others.

Even if he goes back to the tank, he has to do this, cuz whoever’s survived there can’t resist a fight, no matter what. Humbertico knows that every fight is about more than who wins and who loses, but also about what you’re risking, what you win, and what you lose, which is why he finally twists his hand down for the spoon and tentatively searches for Yako’s beer-filled guts, to cut him or rip him or win God knows what from him.

The red bridge is a fixed idea that hypnotizes. A path from which no one returns, a crossroads with no way out. A lot of people have known it, or know it, and they may call it something else. It’s the shady street in gangster movies. The door. The throne of blood in one Kurosawa film. For Conan Doyle it was the Brazilian cat, the night spent next to the beast, which turns your hair white and leaves you limping and changed forever, but alive.
The Driver
, that old Ryan O’Neal movie in which he’s like a maniac behind the wheel, crashing cars to prove he was a tough guy. Or Matt Dillon in
Rumblefish
, looking for traces of his troublemaker brother and finally glad when the Motorcycle Boy dies and frees him. It’s the bridge over the River Kwai. All that and nothing really, that’s the red bridge. I’ve thought about this, but not as much as Yako. It’s an obsession with him. To imagine what it must feel like to kill—realizing that you’ve violated a worldly law and that no one up high is gonna punish you for it, that Nietzsche was right, that God died outta sheer boredom, and that if other men don’t take you up on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, there’s no bolt of lightning that’s gonna strike you down to purge the sin. So then to hell with morality: It’s the law of the jungle that counts, fuck before you get fucked. The cops and the laws don’t have any more right than their force and cunning, like everybody else.

God died by drowning in shit. Silvia and I fucked like crazy at the beach house, next to a drunken Yako, friend and lover, doing it just to do it, just cuz we shouldn’t have, risking it all, doing it without love, practically without pleasure, knowing too well what would happen if he knew, imagining that in fact he already knew, all the while wanting him to know and to react, so that all the façades and the masks could go to shit.

Yako sees the spoon coming, wanting to scoop out a new navel for him, and he stops it by some miracle, his fingers all cut up now. I practically feel his pain, and I tense up wanting to help him, as if I were him, my heart beating open-mouthed.

It’s at moments like this that all the Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal and Jackie Chan movies are revealed as indisputable lies. In real life, a blade is fear, cold, stinks of danger and death, adrenaline runs like a river, your muscles tense and you freeze cuz you’re so scared, and there’s no choreography for a ballet of kicks nor Jean-Claude Van Damme swiveling in the air. Or maybe you don’t freeze, you can move but like in a dream: You wanna run but you can never run as much as you want, you wanna do a quick slip like in the movies but instead you cut your fingers, not even all the way, just about to the bone, so that they bleed and hurt. Slow and clumsy the slice, not like a samurai whose sword demands a clean swipe which sends a hand flying. You wanna come on with a chest-splitting suki chop but you just slap and fall back from the force of the rebound; this is a fight of handless morons and frail epileptics, and there’s dirt and noise and you know you’ve gotta do something but you don’t know what. There’s a voice that tells you,
Yako’s gotta come outta this no matter what,
and there’s Humbertico the Piranha’s rabid bite on his fingers.