Stabs at Happiness (3 page)

Coca-Cola remains Leonora's favorite drink. She sips it through a straw. The sun above is hot, bright as an atomic dime. The ice in the drink is nearly all melted. The only respite from the heat comes from a fitful breeze that blows in from Havana harbor, cooling and soothing one now and then, the more now than then as the afternoon goes on. She could have waited until Justo arrived before ordering, sure, but she doesn't like this habit he has of always being fifteen minutes late. He has many faults, she thinks, and she would not put up with any of them if her real boyfriend, Lieutenant Angel Santamaria, would get rid of his North American mistress. Leonora picked up Justo to get even, to make Angel jealous. So far, though, the strategy has not worked.

She says to the waitress, “I don't like sweet pickles. Would you bring me some dill?” She's starting to feel cross.

Then Justo arrives, wearing sunglasses, a white shirt, light blue pants, the scraggly beard he's been trying to grow for more than a month without success. He acts like he's in a hurry, like he's just come from some important errand. She thinks he's probably made up some lie to explain why he is late.

“I'm going to the Sierra,” he announces, dramatically, temporarily removing the sunglasses to reveal the courage in his eyes.

“I'm going to join Fidel.”

“Oh, I see. You don't know what you're talking about.”

“No, I'm not kidding. I'm going to join the guerrilleros.”

“Why? What for?” She's scornful, widening her eyes.

Justo shrugs. “Ask your lieutenant,” he says.

“He's not ‘my' lieutenant. I told you all about that.”

“I wish you'd never have anything more to do with him.”

“It's not your business. Besides, he's never done anything to you.”

“He's a Batistiano,” Justo says. “He's done things to my brothers. That's as good as doing things to me.”

“Your ‘brothers.' That's such shit.”

Justo doesn't really want to argue with her. She should have acted like she took him more seriously when he said he was going to join Fidel. He smokes a cigarette, sunglasses on again, and then, after a sufficient pause, he changes the subject.

Saying, in a lighter tone of voice, “I heard that Batista paid a witch doctor to throw the seven shells for him… you know, to tell the future. He thinks his voodoo might be changing, going bad on him: he needs to sacrifice some more chickens or something. Hey, just wait—in about a month there'll hardly be a chicken left in all of Cuba. They'll all have run to the Sierra; Fidel will be the only one on the whole island who's able to make chickenhead soup.”

Leonora laughs, and Justo is happy. He's smitten with her. He tries to resist it because he's so afraid of Santamaria. He only said that he was going to the Sierra to see if Leonora'd be impressed. He doesn't think she respects him enough as a man.

The North American woman is insatiable. After hours of love-making she remains avid; orgasms do not seem to tire her or drain her in the least.

Angel wonders if he's being slowly devoured. In order to demonstrate, even if only to himself, that he's the one in control, he enacts small cruelties and perversions so that she must bend, even if only superficially, to his will. It's not a question of love. It never has been.

She's ten years older, thirty-eight, but still tender and firm. Her husband, an executive in the United Fruit Company, married her for her looks. To Angel, of course, the idea of cuckolding such a Yankee is delicious. All he had to do was snap his fingers: there she was, spread for him, wanting him, needing it bad.

“You've got such beautiful skin,” she says, caressing him, and he takes the compliment for granted, although once upon a time, growing up in Santiago de Cuba, he had been thin and awkward and shy.

His mother, Elena, who was widowed at nineteen (through the agency of a knife fight over dice), had had a difficult time of it for a while, until she met a susceptible mafioso named Gino, a simple heart, who worked at one of the big casinos in Havana. He fell for her hard. If it had not been for Gino, with his money and influence, Angel and his brother Miguel might well have ended up, like so many others, cutting cane out in some hellishly hot field, having nothing to look forward to but more of the same.

Even after Gino was killed, falling prey to the ubiquitous machine-gun, his boss and friends continued to look out for Elena, to help her with her boys. When he was of age, Angel got a commission in the army, impossible without influence, while Miguel was given a job as a school teacher—the best deal of all, because he's never actually had to teach a class. Since teachers appointed by the Minister of Education have lifetime tenure, he can never be fired. All he has to do is kick back a portion of the salary they pay him to do nothing. Miguel is supposed to be a math teacher: the only numbers he knows are the ones on money or dice.

“Roll over, Romeo,” says Sally. “I want to see what you've got there. Are you hiding something from me? You're a bad boy, aren't you?”

“Don't call me Romeo.”

“Yes sir. Is that how I should address you from now on, Lieutenant-sir? Shall we keep things military?” She speaks to him in a babyish ‘love-voice' that Angel finds unsympathetic. That last daiquiri has made her drunk.

He sighs. His fingers are in her hair. He shuts his eyes tight, and thinks of Leonora Christina. Then Brigitte Bardot. Then Leonora Christina again, helpless, in distress. It excites him. He doesn't know why, but it does.

He opens his eyes. Sally seems lost, her own eyes closed, in a devotion that Angel, rightly or wrongly, identifies as greed.

“Pancho Villa was drunk all the time,” says Fidel, drinking from a bottle of white rum. “And look what he got done.”

Che laughs, and says then maybe they too should be drunk all the time—who knows? He's only kidding, he hastens to add. Fidel laughs again, in another of his unpredictable moods.

Next to the campfire, they talk about the French Revolution of 1789. It's interesting because of all the actions and reactions, each victory lasting only a couple of months before the next coup and associative purge.

Che speaks of Robespierre's ‘Republic of Virtue,' which he admires as the first big attempt to found a secular religion. Fidel interrupts him by making a joke, he can't resist.

“In Havana, we already have our Virtue Street. It's where all the whores hang out, you know, waiting for gringos.”

Che laughs, but he wants to continue with his point.

Justo goes to see his friend Ulpiano, who makes bombs. Some of these don't do any damage or kill anyone, they just make a lot of smoke and noise. Ulpiano, who is black, offers Justo a warm bottle of Coke. They talk for a long time then about all of the things they'd like to see changed.

Betting eleven eleven eleven, eleven eleven eleven, seven and then six, always red, according to a system based on the astrology of the Mayan Empire, I lose again and again, in the black of bluest night, trying to hang on to the shreds of my cool.

“It's painless,” I say to myself, only the briefest flicker of disappointment betraying me, as I watch some American woman bet on zero, like an asshole—and win.

I can read a sign. I turn away from the baize and go to the bar.

I order a drink, mentally calculating my finances. It would not be cool to take my money out and add it up in public, so I try to remember all of my bets. Obviously, I missed noticing an omen.

Behind me, the bitch shrieks again, as if having an orgasm. I wouldn't be surprised.

“Tell me, is there anything worse than a Yankee?” I say to the bartender, who gives me a slow-developing, collaborative smile.

“Two,” he says, and I agree.

The music, that music… echoes and is magnified inside of Lieutenant Santamaria's head. His body is flushed with warmth. He's high.

The air-conditioning isn't working very well, and Leonora Christina is perspiring, in her blue x-ray dress. Tan nylons that Angel knows are held up by a garter belt, lacy panties, and—oh, he wants her, there's never been any doubt about that. But lately their lovemaking has been contaminated and corrupt. Something is wrong. Where they used to share secrets, now they conceal them.

The saxophone shrills, like some kind of exotic talking bird. In black and white and then, in a spurt of musical blood, the deepest of reds.

The moment passes. Some girl begins to sing, in English, “Fly Me to the Moon.” She was hired for the size of her breasts; her dress is made to show them off.

“Look,” says Angel. “See that guy with the little mustache? He's the biggest pusher of reefer in the world.”

“Does he pay protection?”

“Of course.”

“What's your cut?” asks Leonora, looking at Angel half-mockingly, as though she knows the score but will put him through his paces nonetheless.

“Three reefers a week,” he says, keeping a straight face. “Sometimes four.”