Cubop City Blues (10 page)

He went home feeling outdated. He'd never been to Prague. London was his city, which he'd visited twice with the reverence due a holy site. He was not interested in any music after Edward Elgar, and the little contemporary rock he had heard sounded like glass cracking under a steamroller. He believed professors professed; they didn't chat, and they didn't share their tobacco with their students. When he entered his apartment and looked in the full-length mirror facing the door, he saw that too many years in the city had given his skin a whitish pallor that his gray suit accentuated. His aquiline nose, which he'd once considered evidence of his aristocratic ancestry, had thickened with age and now drooped over the features of his face like a half-furled jib. His hair had become wispy, like grass sticking out of the snowy dome of his skull, and his eyes had lost the glitter of youthful petulance. More than tired they looked marooned in a sea of irrelevance.

He sat at his desk and looked at the poem again. In the afternoon light it didn't seem so bad; there were moments of grandeur after the volta, and the final couplet, though metrically weak, was a fitting closure to a sonnet Mallarmé might have dreamed of but never written. Mallarmé? To dare think of the French master in connection to this poem was hubris. But why not? There was no one to stop him, only the dim visage of Spellman in his ripped jeans and sneakers, ignoring the past as casually as he ignored the sartorial protocols of the academy.

Unsatisfied with the closing of the poem, Juan Antonio sat at his desk for two hours, refusing to stand until a better one occurred to him. None came, and then, as the afternoon lengthened, he felt the tide of dusk flood the living room until he was an island, utterly alone except for the hum of his Smith Corona electric and the lamp that illuminated the sheet of paper. Along with the shadows came a longing for the past that he was, most days, successful at avoiding. He thought of the ceilings of his childhood house, of the cool tile underfoot where he'd race his toy cars, of the back patio, where he'd play cloak-and-dagger games with imaginary musketeers. He thought of his father scurrying in and out of the house like a shame-ridden mouse, and of his mother, grand and smothering, feeding him cod-liver oil and raw eggs with honey. From her rocking chair she commanded the servants with the authority of a prime minister. He recalled his uncle Pepe, who lived with them because he was mysteriously incapable of work.

On such evenings, Juan Antonio envisioned the geometries of the eternal summer of the tropics, the lines of sun and shade that held all his memories in place, more constant and alive now than they'd ever been. How he longed for the arms of someone who might restore that warmth and that clarity into his crusted heart. His heart, which he'd protected from harm all these years, he now wanted torn, ravaged, plundered. And just as he was drowning in his awful nostalgia, the eyes brimming with tears, the throat choking with grief, the doorbell rang.

It was Spellman come to inquire about the poem. Juan Antonio was grateful and asked him in, insisting he stay for coffee. Spellman said he couldn't stay long. He seemed nervous, and there was a note of desperation in his voice.

Perhaps something stronger. I have some sherry.

Spellman did not reply. Juan Antonio took his silence as assent and brought him the sherry and a plate of chocolates. He poured himself some and raised his glass in a toast.

À votre santé.

Spellman drank his in one gulp, an act Juan Antonio found charming.

I was working on the poem when you rang.

My editors want the manuscript by next week, Spellman said. There seemed to be none of the tensile energy in his voice that Juan Antonio had heard before. He thought he saw Spellman's jaw tremble as he spoke. He poured another glass.

Too much mind, not enough class, Juan Antonio thought. And when the mind failed him, what was poor Spellman left with? Dirty fingernails, a wrinkled shirt.

You'll have the poem by the deadline, he said, sitting in a rocking chair that had belonged to his mother. I'm having trouble with the metrics.

It was fine the way it was, Spellman said, momentarily distracted from whatever ailed him.

To you perhaps.

The young theorist lowered his eyes and grew pensive.

Dark cloud.

What? Spellman said.

There's a dark cloud in your eyes and it has nothing to do with the poem. You can confide in me.

Spellman leaned back on the couch and brought his hands to his face.

My girlfriend.

Your Cuban girlfriend?

Yes. When I called last night her mother answered. She said Yareli was engaged to someone else and hung up. I called again several times and the phone was off the hook.

Spellman dropped his hands and let them rest on his thighs. His eyes seemed helpless, as if he were looking out from the bottom of a well from which there is no hope of escape. Juan Antonio had been in the bottom of that well twice in his life and so he felt a closeness to him, but it was not the closeness of compassion. He fought the urge to sit by him and hold him. A brilliant flame flared in his heart and glowed there a moment before disappearing. He reacted to it by forcing Spellman to swallow the truth like a spoonful of cod-liver oil.

She found herself a European, Juan Antonio told him, most probably a Spaniard, middle-aged and approaching retirement. He promised to bring her and her mother to Spain. There's nothing you can do. Women, especially Cuban women of the present period, are fickle. They'll do anything for a dollar, a euro in this case. Why don't you find yourself someone closer to your background?

Juan Antonio knew that Spellman had no recourse against the scourge of love. He was, after all, a barbarian, without style, and ignorant of the pleasures of dressing in the morning, making his coffee, buying good sherry, and keeping it for occasions such as this in order to counter the devastating effects of paradise lost. Juan Antonio served Spellman another glass.

Better yet, Juan Antonio said, why don't you start taking care of yoursel
f
?

What do you mean? Spellman's eyes lost their bovine expression momentarily.

When was the last time you bathed?

I don't know. Two, three days ago.

How can you stand yoursel
f
? This mild reproof had the intended effect of awakening Spellman's vanity. Juan Antonio could see it in the way he straightened his neck.

Start by taking a shower. Let the water run over you and breathe in the steam. Buy yourself expensive soap.

Juan Antonio went on, and by the time he was done speaking, he had Spellman dressed in a silk bathrobe, smoking English cigarettes, and smelling like the lord chief baron of the Exchequer. Spellman became ensnared in the web of Juan Antonio's vision. The young theorist squirmed this way and that on the couch trying to free himself.

Tomorrow, Juan Antonio said triumphantly, we'll go to Barney's and you will buy yourself a suit that fits your station in life.

I can't afford Barney's, Spellman said timidly.

But you could afford to keep a hot mulatica
in Havana, and her mother, and her whole family, as well? Spellman, Juan Antonio implored in a low whispery register as he leaned over the coffee table. Save yoursel
f
!

Under it all, under the gentility of this man of grace and belles lettres, a note of anxiety had sounded, dissonant and flat, and it took all his effort to keep it from coming to the surface and drowning out his advice, his clothes and demitasses, his fine sherry, his porcelain memories of the childhood of privilege he never really had in Cuba.

With a look of terror Spellman stood and rushed out the door, making only a cursory reference to the poem he had come to retrieve. Juan Antonio was at first surprised—he would have used the word dismayed—then he convinced himself that Spellman's sudden exit was evidence that his words had hit the mark. I must be cruel only to be kind, he thought, and started cleaning up, placing the dishes and the two sherry glasses on a painted wooden tray of Russian origin that his last lover had given him. How long ago was that, seven, eight years? He was a twenty-year-old Slav with strong muscles and hands calloused by manual labor, but he was a kitten in bed.

When Juan Antonio reached the kitchen his body began to tremble. The tremor spread from his torso down his arms until he could no longer hold the tray, which went crashing to the floor. He couldn't catch his breath and his chest spasmed with each attempt to draw in air. For a moment he thought the end had come. Slowly his long body slid down the door frame to the floor, where it came to rest surrounded by shards of porcelain, sharp jags of crystal, and pieces of dark Belgian chocolate. Then the weeping came, profound and unfathomable, like a flood of black water. He was twelve years old. He was lost in a room without walls. He cried a long time, and when he had no more tears in him, he noticed a finger smudge on the refrigerator door that he had missed on his last cleaning. He stared at the smudge, thinking he needed to wipe it off but making no effort to stand.

He was too old for this, too old to fall apart over a young fool who had not yet found the limits of his talent, too old for melodrama. There was no such thing as saving yourself. There was only the awareness of the moment of your decrepitude. Your head is an empty gourd, a teacher once told him. Fill it. Juan Antonio tried, with every bit of knowledge he could find. He could feel the emptiness, not just in his head, where all that knowledge had turned to smoke, but in his heart, croaking with need. He could hear the wind rushing through the conduits of his blood. He could hear the bellow of a distant bull, a lone cricket chirping, a dove cooing at the edges of a field smoldering with wasted love. Finally he stood and went to the window as the city lights came on and people in their heavy coats rushed home, indifferent to human sorrow but carrying it within themselves like a seed that would sprout in the most unlikely moment, just when they thought they were beyond it, when they thought they had saved themselves. No help for the young barbarian, no help for the old belletrist. His gourd was rattling with the broken husks of beautiful letters.

STORYTELLER

S
he did it out of shame, she did it out of rage, vertigo, romance, ambition, disdain, indifference, selfishness, self-loathing—torch singer, hah—wanting to erase her mistake and get the little monster of her lust flushed out with plumbing fluid. Why didn't she get an abortion from a proper doctor or leave me at the front door of an orphanage, wrapped in swaddling clothes? Because she wanted to live a bolero. I found her old diary under her bed after she died, and from it I learned Papa was not my father. She did it because not doing it meant raising the child as if it were her husband's. In the end that's what happened. My real father was a handyman, a young buck from the country, just this side of manhood, with those country eyes that could be sad or wise or stupid or impenetrable and that he didn't know how to avert. But it could have been anyone: the gardener, the grocer, the itinerant barber who worked the neighborhood. She snared the handyman and he was too afraid or humble or hungry to say, No, Madam. Thank you, but no. If I do this there's no telling where it will lead.

She led him to her bed, where she spread herself out for him, ample and open. She had her way with him. I feel no urge to find him. I am content making him up: Gomercindo, Fajardo, Longino—she didn't write the name. Curly black hair, skin cured by the sun, smooth hairless chest, wiry, veiny arms, and hands cracked from day labor, smelling of hard earth, soft water, and the breeze sifting through sugar cane.

Nothing to do with love. She shoved the boy away when she was done, told him to go back to his miserable town and never contact her again. The boy's seed took and sprouted. What to do? Lock her shame in pleasure? Go with the boy, find him, let him do with her what he wanted. It was a bolero without escape. The bottle of liquid lye in the garage: for lead pipes, for sewers. She poured it into herself, bathed me in the stuff, let it burn like hell potion. For three days her womb sizzled and sputtered, sending forth red foam and stench. Her husband wept and screamed and pleaded to call the doctor. No, shaking her head. He'd bring a santera, a babalawo, anyone. No, sweat like beads of sin on her forehead, her insides melting. No. On the fourth day there was no pain, just a cold fluid in her veins that made her shiver and go into spasms, her body stiff like wood, her tongue rolling out of her mouth. Then indifference, then a kick inside and another, the creature still in her alive, knocking.

¡Pinga! she yelled. ¡Coño! And then she passed out, seeming dead to the husband, who rushed out and got the first doctor he could find, a veterinarian who lived down the block.

Lye, the vet said. She's got lye in her system but the fetus is alive. Fetus he called me. I was. That's what I heard in my mother's pages. Animals don't do this, he said, making a scientific observation, which he meant literally but the husband interpreted to mean his wife was lower than an animal and threw a punch at him, missing the vet's jaw and landing squarely on the wall. He screamed and doubled over holding his right hand.

Or that, the vet said. Ever the man of science, he checked the husband's hand for broken bones, and finding none, he wrapped it in gauze, for the placebo effect, and left the house.

B
lindness is a labyrinth. Once you're in you can't leave. You walk. You stand. Everywhere is the center. On the other side of the room, across the river and into the trees.

Mama inserted the plastic bottle into herself and squeezed. I lived. Bleared, blind, born. Went from one labyrinth with walls to another without, birth my sin. She was at the center, waiting for me. She sang boleros only I heard, in the hallways of the new labyrinth. I tried to find a way out, my hands stretched out into the gray fog, reaching for a door. I told stories. Every sentence leading farther in, every word bifurcating, in the center the monster, pawing the bed, spewing fire out of her cunt. She had sex with a young hot bull, she had sex with an ass, she had sex with a toad, a fish, a worm, a beaky bird. She tried to kill me before I was born. She looked back. How do you leave the only thing you've known? She bore me. I bore her. We were each other's sin, each other's hatred. When she died, she clucked like a sorry hen, then fluttered. When she died I didn't shed a tear. Not in me, not out of me. I entered another labyrinth, an acid wind cutting through. Lye. Havana was a labyrinth. Cubop City was a labyrinth where all doors lead in or out. I heard the roar of her breathing, the pounding of her heart. No walls. Deeper in I go.