Havana Lunar (8 page)

When the roast was ready, Manolito gave me the first taste. “Isn't this the most succulent little piggy you've tried in your life?”

“It's delicious.”

“I feed them all coconut husks. The sow's milk is sweet enough for you or me to drink.”

Manolito stumbled off to his bohío, and soon my cousin Emilio arrived in his coast guard uniform. After he had showered and put on clean clothes, Emilio pulled two chairs out onto the patio and produced a small bag of marijuana. He crumbled up a bud and fashioned a big twist with a square torn from a brown paper sack. “Where do you get this stuff?” I asked. He smiled but didn't answer. We smoked. We could hear Manolito and Lydia yelling at each other in the bohío. “Such an unhappy marriage,” I said. “That's redundant, Manolo.
All
marriages are unhappy.”

“What about Abuelo y Abuela?”

“They don't count.”

“Why not?”

“They're from another time.”

I thought about what Emilio said and realized that there's no way to explain what actually makes me shack up with someone. It hasn't happened with enough women for me to identify a common quality. Something in the eyes contributes to it, but something different every time. In Elena it was that pure clarity. In Carlota it was smoldering lust. And Julia? She simply wanted to sleep with me, and it showed in her eyes. Why me? Maybe she had a little bet with her friends that she could get me. Good for her. Maybe she had a thing for my lunar. I should let myself enjoy this teenage girl, ¿no?—a reformed, or at least reforming, sex worker who wanted nothing more than to entertain me up in my little crow's nest above this Socialist island adrift. I knew that one way or another, if I let her get her hooks in me, all I would want is to press our bellies together—again and again.

12 August 1980

W
hen I first came to Pinar del Rio at age eleven, I was in awe of what a different world existed on this island. All I had known before was Havana, a crumbling city of stone like a necropolis for the living. In Viñales all was green, and sugarloaf mountains hulked around the valley like slumbering elephants, sheltering the soil of tobacco country.

My cousin Emilio met the bus where it let me off at the mural prehistórico, and we wound our way between the rows of tobacco plants across the valley and up the side of our grandfather's mountain. At the top, Abuelo sat in his chair in front of his house. “I saw you coming an hour ago.”

I kissed his cheek. “Tienes los ojos de águila, Abuelo.”

Abuela emerged from the bohío and pressed me to her breast. “Pobre Manolo, tu mamá en el cielo y tu papá mas lejos que eso.” When Abuela said my father was further away than heaven, she meant Miami.

Together with my uncles, aunts, and cousins, our number breached a dozen, but somehow Abuela managed to seat the entire family in two shifts and feed us all in under an hour. Abuelo had made the table out of the remains of one of the last trees he had cut for the walls of the bohío.

For the first serving with his eldest sons, Abuelo sat at the head, where one leg was a little shorter than the rest. Abuelo kept it this way because if he had to make a point, one thump of his rock fist served to upset every dish down the entire length.

During the second sitting, a stray pea or garbanzo rolled off someone else's plate and into my domain. The instant I shoved the legume into my mouth, Manolito hollered, “¡Pendejo, Mano! ¡Ese era mi frijol mágico!” Unfazed, I gobbled up the tidbit. Manolito then expanded on his patent outburst with sadistic little remarks like, “Todo el día mientras sudaba en la cosecha, guardaba ese frijolito aquí en mi culito.” My cousins shrieked with glee and collapsed all over each other, troubling the tippy table with volcanic tremors. Abuela whacked the back of Manolito's skull with a serving spoon. “¡No seas sucio!”

Abuelo typically ignored Manolito's comments on my lunar, but when he heard Manolito say that I probably wouldn't be wanting cake on my birthday, Abuelo turned savage, lunging halfway down the length of the table and hammering his youngest son with a closed fist, cutting off the customary hyperactivity and leaving all the cousins sullen.

My first girlfriend was a Pinareña that first summer in Viñales. She lived in town. I don't remember her name or how we met. She said I could come over at 9 o'clock and watch the novela on TV.

On my way back to her house, I stuck to the shoulder of the unpaved road, popping coffee beans in my mouth, cracking them between molars to release their oil and essence. It was gritty. The taste was wicked, like the burnt raspas Abuela would never serve, like dark chocolate but more bitter. I brewed pure espresso in my own juices, straining brown water through my teeth, spitting the grounds when they had given up most of their flavor. The buzz was beatific. I didn't feel the five-kilometer walk. Darkness, so firm and affirming a master on a night of new moon, enfolded me—my world, the valley—in a magnificent wing. The underside was spotted with sentient stars, at the center: the ox and plow. An oil lamp flickered here or there at a hacienda, but it might have been a star instead. Darkness cloaked the mogotes, those immortal leviathans, for a billion nights over their lifetimes of prostrate rumination.

The wing abruptly lifted and blades of light flew under and in. I kept my head down and focused on the jagged line between grass and packed earth. A truck roared past spitting dust, and the driver shouted an insult. I didn't turn when they came up from behind. I didn't want anyone to stop and offer a ride. The wing settled again and the night nestled in. The quiet. The crickets. Houses with broad and inviting porches stared each other down across the narrow avenue.

I was invited in to sit in front of the box with the entire family—luckily she had no brothers to tease me—and none of them paid any attention to us since
it's starting! it's starting!
The novela that night was one of the worst: bad actors baldly trying to upstage each other with camp dialogue shouted across dislocated scenes. Plus, it was Argentine. All the actors lisped. I touched my date's hand and she jumped in her rocking chair, darting a vacant look at me. I'd torn her out of the world of la tele; she had forgotten I was there. I told her I had to go back to the bohío. She whispered to come see her the next night, to meet in the yuca patch after the house was dark. Nobody in the family noticed me slip out.

A moonless wandering up and down the avenue, agonizing over an alienation originating entirely within myself but aggravated by the novela, blaring accusations—“
Yo sé que me traicionas”—
and insinuations—“
Te quiero, Raul. Aunque me mate, te quiero”—
from all the houses in the town, from all across the island.

The next morning Manolito boasted over breakfast that, if he wanted, he could climb all the way up to the Tope de Viñales. When my uncle Antonio called him a liar, Manolito jumped up from the table without finishing his milk and roared, “Take a good look at me, brother, because I want you to remember what I looked like.” He stormed out the door with my aunts clawing at his clothes. Abuela followed onto the patio and yelled after her youngest son, calling him caprichoso. Silently sipping his café, Abuelo ignored the outburst.

When he went rolling like thunder down into the valley, Manolito was wearing rubber boots, his green work pants, a faded red pullover, and a ragged palm hat.

Trying to keep spirits up for the rest of breakfast, Antonio bragged about his own prowess plumbing the caves, but everyone except for Abuelo was glum. Even Tío Antonio had sensed a haunting portent in his brother's final declaration. We children passed that day in gloomy anxiety, certain that we'd never see Manolito again. For the sisters, brothers, and the young cousins, Emilio and me, the mantle of sadness was heavier even than when Tía Sevilla had passed away. At least then we'd had the body to wail over, Sevilla's cold, captive beauty to console us. We went through our morning chores like a pack of walking zombies: sweeping the patio, feeding and tending to the animals, readying the places for lunch in dubious hope that Manolito might return. At midday there was an empty setting at the table. After lunch we all wrestled with siestas in the heat and fierce sun of the early afternoon. I dreamt of a lioness pouncing from the mouth of a cave and clamping her jaws around my leg. Her raw vise took hold and I heard Manolito's laughter reverberating from deep inside the mountain.

The sun accelerated in its precipitous descent toward the near peaks, which hulked over Abuelo's vega like a supine giant. I thought my own heart might extinguish with it. Abuela, in her supper preparations, was stoic. I couldn't tell whether she was in shock over the loss of her youngest or merely resigned to providing for the surviving eight. We all went in to eat, and suddenly, as if nothing about that day had been unusual, Manolito was there at his place in a clean shirt. Emilio and I fluttered around him, twittering, “¡Tío! ¡Tío!” Manolito was silent, stonefaced but for the perpetual wild look in his eye. He refused to rough-house with us or discharge his usual hyena whoops. What was wrong? Had something awful happened after all? Was this really our uncle? Antonio sat across from him and didn't dare open his mouth. We kids piped down. Manolito gobbled down his chícharo like a horse. Abuelo seemed to be suppressing a slender grin, a rare expression for him.

When the meal was almost over, Abuelo asked, “¿Y qué hiciste hoy, hijito?”

Shoveling the last of the beans from his bowl, Manolito replied, “The tope. I split the tip of that bitch in half.” Antonio couldn't suppress a snort.

Abuelo got up from the table before café, something I'd never seen him do before, and went into his bedroom. He emerged with his sailor's spyglass, which he would take out only for special events like meteor showers and during the fiesta de San Juan to take in all the parties of the valley. Abuelo walked outside to the lip of the patio, and one by one we followed, leaving food on our plates. It was that half-hour of the day when the sun, so near to setting behind the giant's shoulders, irradiates the Tope de Viñales with all the brilliance of projected cinema.

Abuelo let Juan, the oldest, look first. “No veo nada,” he said after a full minute.

“P'allá'riba, en la cima, a la altura del árbol.”

Nearly a minute more and Juan said, “¡Coño!” Abuelo let us take turns, from oldest to youngest. We couldn't believe our eyes. At the heights of the Tope de Viñales, atop a tree that grew at the very summit, an unmistakable flag of pale red fabric: the shirt Manolito had been wearing when he left that morning. Back inside, Manolito threw back his coffee as he always did when he finished his meal at the end of a day of hard work.

That night I left the bohío wearing two pullovers. In the small garden behind my girlfriend's house, I took off both shirts, unraveling the one underneath and laying it out on the humid soil between rows of yuca. I put the outer shirt back on. She met me in the canopy of the yuca plant, which gives forth such extravagant foliage to thrust a humble plug of sustenance into even the stoniest earth. We greeted each other with our eyes. A smile: a smile. Great green fronds fluttered above us in the breeze, tickling her bare shoulders. I sat down among the stalks of rough, scaly bark and she stood over me. I saw the outline of her slim hips through the sheer fabric of the white nightgown. It was with a one-two flick that she stepped out of her underwear. She clutched them in a closed fist and fell forward, pushing my shoulders as she descended, knees clamped around my lower ribs, the undershirt a narrow blanket to keep her shins out of the dirt. She tugged my shorts to my knees.

Then she raised her gown. A delicate scallop of dark hair bearded the cleft between her legs. She parted the tuft with two fingers, sliding her vagina over my erection. Eyes rolled back beneath my closed eyelids, and she placed a cool finger to my lips. I moaned within. She did most of the work. It was quieter and more efficient. I was the sea and she was the ship.
Los hombres marineros,
I sang inside my head, lending a touch of absurdity to the erotic atmosphere so as not to explode before the lips of her mouth parted and she released the sweet breath of nectar she was learning to distill. She bent forward, covered me, and gave me an ambrosia kiss. Now she drank it back into herself. She saved it for the man she would marry, maybe.

She stood up, pulled on her underwear, and crouched beside me in the dirt. She planted a dry kiss on my cheek, right on my lunar, then turned and walked back to the house. Now I was allowed to finish myself, but I didn't. Where would I have put it? Imagination had made me hard. Imagination helped me lie there alone in the cold. I was lying on my back in a yuca patch in Viñales, and in my mind I had just done sex with Ojitos Lindos eight hundred kilometers away.

When I returned to school at the end of the summer, I found out Ojitos Lindos had left Havana. Her mother was from the other end of the island, so the widow had taken her child back to grow up among the soft-spoken, slow-moving guajiros of Oriente. Although my grandmother remained in the house, a teacher advanced me early to el pre-universitario, where I slept in a dormitory on the bunk above Yorki's. I often thought about Ojitos Lindos and wondered whether I'd ever look into those eyes again.

Eight years after our first encounter at the cemetery, I saw Ojitos Lindos when she returned to Havana to go to medical school. The eyes were unforgettable. By way of reintroduction, I identified myself in the library. “La Mancha, remember?” She smiled, her eyes flashing. I asked her to a movie. She surprised me by saying yes. I reminded her that my real name was Manolo, Mano for short. Her real name, I remembered, was Elena.