Cubop City Blues (16 page)

For what? Chano thought. He smiled at the man, but inside he felt like a hen that couldn't lay an egg. He remembered the panther and how it had climbed on him at the restaurant and he had to shake it off. He ignored the warning and kept walking into the night. One hundred yards away he was a small figure amid the whiteness; two hundred yards away the forest shut behind him. What you create is yours. Drunk on palm wine, Obatalá, the saint of the north, made twisted children.

Chano saw the red neon light spilling onto the snow before he saw the place. He wanted to get some satisfaction from Cabito, then go to his gig. Without honor there's no music and the drums sound dead; without honor you might as well be like a million other fools shitting their pants from the cold. Chano looked through the window into the Río. El Cabito was sitting at a corner table with two other men, drinking beer and eating croquetas. Having a good time, laughing a lot.

Chano entered and headed straight for their table, unsmiling. He wanted to settle the matter so he could play his drums. It was that simple.

Cabrón, he said to El Cabito. You sold me chicken-shit and I want my money back.

Still sitting, El Cabito smiled and said, What I sell is what I sell and no one complains. Ask your girlfriend about that.

What did you say? Chano said. There was nothing he could see but that mocking smile, the gold tooth glinting with the overhead light of El Río.

She's had my stuff. Ask her.

The two men he was sitting with moved away. They saw the forest close in around Chano and El Cabito. Only one of them was coming out.

Chano pushed aside the table and went for him, throwing a wild punch that grazed his shoulder, then a straight right to the head that caught El Cabito on the cheek and threw him against the wall. El Cabito was stocky but quick. In one motion he ducked to avoid Chano's left hook and pulled a gun from his belt.

When the first bullet hit him, Chano felt as if he'd walked into a brick wall. He tried to force his way through it and take another swing at El Cabito. His arm flailed and dropped to his side. He looked down at his chest but couldn't see where the bullet entered him. Then he heard two more shots and felt them thumping into him. His legs weakened and he couldn't get enough air in his lungs. All sounds in the restaurant stopped. He wanted to see beyond the forest, go back home and lie down, but he had no strength left, and so he sat down on a chair, just to rest a little, get his breath back. The next shot hit his heart. Chano's head slumped and he dropped to the floor, where El Cabito put three more bullets into him. After that all you could hear was Changó's laughter coming out of the forest.

Sixty blocks away in midtown, Cacha was sniffing a sample of perfume on her inner wrist and chatting by the counter with two friends about men and their ways, how much like boys they are, how they sometimes try to fool others but are only fooling themselves. Like Chano, Cacha said. He doesn't realize it but that man is in my hands. Ese negro tá pa mi. She grew quiet a moment and turned inward, her forehead clouding over with dark thoughts. What if he isn't? What if he goes back to his wife? Then she heard something like Chano's drumming, and the cloud passed as clouds do. She'd get him to divorce that woman in Cuba; she'd get him to marry her and live in the proper way in a big apartment with rose-colored walls and silk brocade curtains, he with his music, she with her children, drinking the milk of Ochún. She turned to one of her friends and said she felt warm inside. No matter how cold it was outside, she was always feeling warm.

NATIVITY

B
leating like a purple bloody lamb, afflicted with all that air and sound and smell, all those new creatures, all the to-do of nurses and doctors around him, Angel crossed the Rubicon that divides nonbeing from being.
Puer iactus est
. He was swaddled in blue sheets and a heavy cotton blanket, then nestled on the crook of his mother's arm, and from that position he discovered an enormous fleshy fruit with a chewy center. He immediately took it in his mouth and bit into it with his gums until it released the intoxicating juice that settled and satisfied him. During this time he forgot all other aspects of the new, multifarious world into which he'd been cast and concentrated not on the taste (what did he know about taste?) but on the quantity of fluid filling his mouth and belly and dribbling out the edges of his lips. All the while he was surrounded by the tones of teary moans coming from his mother and, a few minutes later, the laughter of his father, who was allowed to enter the room in order to observe what he had made by a simple, spasmodic release of sperm.

Is he all there? he asked, turning to Dr. Abreu, the high priest of the birthing altar. Angel's father meant, no doubt, to ascertain that the boy was a fully formed male.

The doctor, who had heard the question from anxious fathers a myriad times, had gained a reputation for his competence and was in high demand in the city among middle-class mothers with social ambitions. It was no small matter of pride to answer, when asked, that Dr. Abreu had delivered the child at the Centro Médico, where ladies of the highest estate went to have their babies. Consequently, he was becoming immensely rich as he populated the ranks of the classes who could afford him. He was, however, bored by his profession, which he considered not much more than midwifery with an advanced degree, and by his beautiful wife, a former nightclub dancer who was as frigid as a cod in winter, at least toward him. All of Havana knew that he'd much rather be big-game hunting in Africa with his good friend Hemingway or deflowering Indian maidens in the deepest parts of the Darien with his other good friend Graham Greene.

He will lead a good life, the doctor said, pulling off his surgical gown.

Had anything been seriously wrong, the boy's father would have been immediately consulted about what measures to take. For, the good doctor's success was not just due to his medical talents and his Harvard education, but to his willingness to consider solving the complications of birth in the most discreet and expeditious form possible at quadruple his normal fee, especially if he was in the midst of planning a trip.

To the doctor's question, Do you want him circumcised? his father could only mumble an incomprehensible answer, which the hunter doctor must have taken as a sign of severe parental distress, and so he did what he would have done had the boy been his own and left him with prepuce immaculate, a decision for which Angel would remain grateful for the rest of his life.

Angel's birth was a great moment in the history of his family: firstborn of the firstborn. Celebrations planned and dominated by his paternal grandmother lasted for days to the chagrin of his parents, who would have preferred to celebrate by themselves in the cocoonlike serenity of parental bliss. On the first day came forty-five members of the immediate family, who drank, sang, and danced until dawn of the following morning. On the second day were added close friends and lost relatives and a five-piece charanga band hired by Angel's uncle. On the third and fourth day, as news spread around the neighborhood and beyond, strangers showed up, among them three off-duty policemen, two kleptomaniacs, who stole a number of his grandmother's tchotchkes, and an ambulating chiropodist, who offered his services free of charge to any woman under thirty. On the last day, when Angel's grandmother lay in bed exhausted and all the other relatives had long gone to their homes to rest their vocal chords, their feet, and their livers, a coal seller with his face and hands smudged black from his labor sat on the porch eating leftover pork and drinking the last of the rum, and a woman in a black dress, believed to be the amiguita of the charanga's trumpet player, leaned against the trunk of the poinciana in the backyard, weeping copiously for no apparent reason. A dark portent? No, his grandmother said as she spied the woman from her bedroom window. A simple accident of fate. She directed that Eulipio, the neighborhood taxi driver, should be hired to take the woman where she wanted to go, and she declared the celebration over. Coño, Angel's father said when he heard her pronouncement. Praised be God!

THE PALACE
OF CRYSTAL

I
n one of Amanda's stories, titled “The Palace of Crystal,” a teenage boy having lunch at a diner overhears a conversation between a man and a woman seated in the booth behind him. They are discussing the nature of tenderness. The boy assumes the man is older from the way his voice strains at the end of each statement. The man believes that tenderness is insecurity disguised as physical generosity. Love me tender. The woman, who is upset by the man's comment, tries to disagree with him. She is on the edge of anger, but her response is controlled.
Love me tender
means to love with something other than the lust in your mind. There is no love without lust. The boy is eating a hamburger and french fries, and he sides with the man, though he doesn't fully understand what the disagreement is about. It appears that the man and woman have had this conversation before.

It's a biological matter. Darwinism at work.

The boy, who is still a virgin, thinks about sex constantly. He would like to see what the woman looks like, but he doesn't want to give himself away by turning around. He imagines her with black curly hair and dark eyes, slim but shapely with round firm breasts.

What does
tender
mean anyway?

To offer, the woman says.

To hold, the man says. Greed, that's what it is, disguised as affection.

The boy wonders what they're eating, whether they had sex this morning, whether she screams or moans or whimpers. It's a slow day, a Friday without school and his parents at work. His friends? He hasn't any.

The story then shifts to the man and woman. They're not married, though the man would like to be. The woman is not sure. He is twenty years older and not eager to have children. He likes sex, often and constant and lustful. She is twenty-eight and has waited patiently for the right man. As if the age difference is not enough, he is Catholic—educated by Jesuits, no less—and Cuban, two markers that will not sit well with her family, who are secular but nonetheless committed Jews. At times he gets rough and says things that offend her. If there is tenderness in him, it is hidden under the sloppy, groaning venality she recoils from. Still, she is in love with him, or has convinced herself she is, and so she hesitates to end the relationship. If courage is abandon, she is a coward. So is he, but for different reasons. What if she misses this opportunity and no other comes along?

And so she engages in the discussion, hoping to find some common ground at last, a little sliver of an intellectual sandbank on which the two might stand as the waters of life rush past. That will be enough, no? Then on to other differences, which multiply daily.

The relationship between the man and the woman at the diner is not rigidly structured. It is constantly in motion, mutating, growing, and diminishing. It can be extinguished, it can cease to exist, and the man and the woman who fed it will walk away from each other. After some time, a month, a year, or five, their time together will be a mere wisp of a memory, a frisson, an embarrassment even, without the fixity or permanence of geometry.

And who is this boy? Why should he care about these two people, arguing over words? He would give anything to be with a woman. He doesn't care the least about love, its complications, its convolutions, how it tethers you to illusion, how it liberates you from the dull accumulation of time, the day off, the greasy hamburger, the lack of friends. He finishes his lunch, pays the bill, and goes outside. A cold wind hits him in the face and he walks down the empty main street of the small New Jersey town where he lives. He is wearing a T-shirt, a light jacket, and no hat and he enters a newly opened book and gift shop. The store is empty except for the attendant, a blonde college-age girl, who smiles kindly at him and goes back to scribbling in a notebook. The boy browses the shelves, mostly self-help books. There will come a time when he will read a dozen of these seeking ways of coping with his unhappiness, but now they seem miserable, pathetic texts. To the side, on the wall perpendicular to the bookshelves, is a glass shelf with New Age talismans—dream catchers, prisms, rocks of different shapes, small silver unicorns, and several crystals that catch the light from the track lighting on the ceiling and reflect it back at the boy. Illuminated, he remembers days when the sea shone back at him like that.

Can I help you? asks the girl. She has walked over and is standing next to him.

Na, says the boy. Just looking.

It's cold out today, she says.

He nods and says yeah under his breath. Real cold.

You're not dressed for it, she says.

I thought it'd be warmer. He is looking beyond her at the cars on the street, trying to avoid her eyes.

What's your name? she asks in a friendly enough way.

The boy hesitates. He's not sure what name to give her. Tadeo, he says. They call me Tad at school.

He begins to get an erection, which he tries to hide by bending slightly at the waist.

What shall I call you? asks the girl, who's noticed Tadeo's strange posture.

I hate to be called Tad, he says.

Okay, Ta-de-o, she says and walks back to the counter.

He turns his back to her and concentrates on the objects on the shelves. He waits until the erection subsides, then goes to the counter where she is sitting, pen in hand, notebook before her.

What's your name? he asks.

Amanda is my given name. My mother calls me Eye-fur.

Eye-fur?

Yeah. She claims I have an eye for everything. She laughs heartily.

Oh, he says, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, feeling like a tree about to crash in the forest; then, rummaging deep into himself—his shyness is excruciating—he finds enough courage to ask what she's writing.

I'm writing a story, she says.

What about?

People. What they do and why. For example, I just wrote that a boy entered the store and you did.

Oh, he says. He can't tell if she is kidding or if she really is some sort of clairvoyant. He looks down at the glass case, which houses some silver jewelry, opals, and many types of crystals. Are you in school?

I graduated college this past January. I'm trying to save up for graduate school. What about you?

There is no way a college graduate will have anything to do with him, and he is tempted to lie but decides against it. I'm a junior at the high school.

No school today?

No. Teacher-training day.

You have an unusual name, Tadeo.

It's Spanish for Thaddeus. I was born in Cuba.

You're the second Cuban I know.

I'm the only one I know.

And your parents?

They're Polish, but they're still in Cuba. I have American foster parents.

At this point the door jingles and a middle-aged man walks in. Amanda greets him effusively and plants a furtive kiss on his lips, which makes the man stiffen noticeably. From his voice Tadeo identifies him as the man from the diner. He senses more than a friendly relationship between the two, and he is right. Not long ago they were lovers. There remains a strong attraction between them, and they speak in the code of love, or former love, a wisp of smoke escaping from the embers. This is what Tadeo intuits, in their words, their body language, the way they move in relation to each other in a dance only they know the steps to. The man, it turns out, is Amanda's former college teacher. Their affair began when their eyes locked in an elevator, then through several classes until they moved in together—what else was there to do?—and lived in a cabin on the hill, surrounded by tall grass and wildflowers. In his imagination. The reality was something else. Quite romantic, to tell the truth, but all romance begins to sallow; all passion fallows. The fire on the lake dies down. The oily water once fed tall flames that lit the forest and the meadows. Now it is stagnant. The lake was a sea stretching beyond the horizon. Myopic to consequences, they couldn't see an end to their love. Amanda fought indifference as much as she could. She loved the man, admired him, but in the end the cabin became a prison and she went away.

The man suffered. Every piece of furniture, every floorboard spoke of her absence. Grief can envelop and encrust the writer's imagination, and it did the man's for a long time. To this day he is unable to write. He still lives in the cabin, now with the woman he was with in the diner.

Tadeo is about to leave the store, but then he hears Amanda introducing him to the man. This, she says, is Tadeo. He is Cuban, too.

What is a Cuban doing in this godforsaken town? the man asks.

Tadeo doesn't know how to answer the question. He's here because he's not anywhere else. This is where I was sent.

Do you like it? the man asks. His voice sounds winded, defeated.

It's okay, I guess.

Where do you live?

With the Aldersons, answers Tadeo, uncomfortable with the interrogation. He's not interested in finding out about this man's life and wishes he would go away. Then he could have Amanda to himself.

The Aldersons are good solid citizens of the town, at least they appear that way. The truth is that Mr. Alderson is a cross-dresser, and he likes to parade around the house in women's clothes when no one's around. Tadeo saw him once when he got home early from school, and he was so embarrassed that he went to his room and wouldn't come out for three days. At the end of the third day, Mr. and Mrs. Alderson sat him down in the living room and explained that he shouldn't judge Mr. Alderson unfairly. Cross-dressing is a perfectly normal activity, Mrs.
Alderson said. Many people do it, and it doesn't mean that Mr.
Alderson is a homosexual. Tadeo remained unconvinced.

Amanda's story is becoming more complicated than she wants. Her marginal notes indicate that she has to integrate the man into the story. She should have left him out from the beginning. She's written that Tadeo and the man are both from Cuba. Now she will be forced to have them interact, and she doesn't know the least bit about being Cuban, except for black beans and rice. What will they say to each other? Will they speak in Spanish? She's seen Spanish speakers use their hands when speaking but never with Americans present. She was hoping to be done with the story; then she could go on to something different, but she can't yet. So, they are Cuban. The man will ask Tadeo where in Cuba he is from. Havana—she knows no other Cuban cities, though it would be easy enough for her to check a map, do a search on the Internet. The rest of Cuba is a blur to her.

What part? the man wants to know: a further complication. So, she will have to go to the Internet after all and find a suitable neighborhood where Tadeo's parents might reside. Once that is solved they will go on to talk about the parents. His father is an engineer. He and Tadeo's mother left Poland for Cuba in 1970 to help build a power plant. They liked it so much they stayed. Tadeo, reticent by nature, provides the merest amount of information. In parting, the man gives Tadeo his phone number. Make sure you call me. We'll have you over for dinner. Amanda feels left out, but she can't very well invite herself
.
The man is living with that other woman, the woman in the diner, who doesn't believe in lust.
The man pecks Amanda on the cheek, shakes Tadeo's hand, and leaves. There, Amanda writes. Case closed.

Will you teach me about Cuba? she asks Tadeo.

What do you want to know?

What your neighborhood was like, what you did for fun, that sort of thing.

We lived in an old house that was divided into apartments.

Do you miss your parents?

My father's sick. He's got pleurisy. We played chess together. My mother takes care of him.

Is it a nice apartment?

No. It's falling apart. All of Havana is falling apart. Not like here. Here the houses are in good shape. They're fixed up. The power never goes out. The plumbing works. My parents will never come to this country. My father says he wants to die in Poland. My mother laughs at him. She says Poland is too cold. Do you live with your mother? he asks, feeling a slight flicker of confidence.

She lives in California. I live by myself, in an apartment. As she writes, Amanda feels increasingly attracted to the boy. She's never known anyone so awkward, as if he were blind and had never learned facial expressions. He cannot keep from cracking his knuckles when he talks or moving his arms in random patterns. He is sincere and needy, and loneliness seems to ooze out of him. She wants him to be smart, a chess prodigy, perhaps, but he's not the type. Besides, she's sure she'd find a chess prodigy boring.

What's your apartment like?

It's okay, it's very small. It's okay. Would you like to see it?

Yes, he says so softly it is barely audible.

I get off at seven tonight. It's only two blocks away.

There's a break in the story here, and scribbled in the margins are notes about finding a way of transitioning from the scene at the store to the apartment, and from there to her bed, for that is where she wants to take Tadeo, make love to him, rid him of some of the neediness. Maybe he'll meet her at the store at seven and they will walk together. Maybe he'll show up at the apartment door with a bottle of wine. What does a teenager know about wine, and where would he get it? No. Everything between now and the bed scene is irrelevant. After the note, the story simply jumps.

Tadeo is awkward in bed but not so awkward that he doesn't kiss her softly, then more ardently, biting her lower lip and playing with her tongue. He comes in a quick shudder followed by a thrust that reaches the deepest parts of her. After a few minutes he wants to do it again, and that's when Amanda realizes that she's breaking the law. He's only fourteen. Lying in bed next to him, she thinks perhaps she should go back into the story and make him older, legalize him, and avoid another complication that would take several pages to straighten out, then decides to hell with it. She likes him as he is. He's a virgin and she's deflowering him. It wouldn't take much for her to love this boy much as she might love a pet or a favorite plant. She can watch him grow, turn into something, go off somewhere where he might become a chess champion or a car salesman.