Pig's Foot
Para Berta y tía Lucía
,
ambas victimas de la misma enfermedad.
Y para Charlotte y Aila
To the roots goes the honest man. A radical is simply this:
a man who goes to the roots
José Martí
There is beauty in the breakdown
Frou Frou
Contents
A Few Important Details About Me
How to Conquer a Woman According to María
The Long-awaited Confrontation
The Biggest Maggot in the World
Pig's Foot
is set in a fantastical alternate version of Cuba inspired by the landscapes, the different cultures, the rough magic and the turbulent history of my country. Inevitably it is peopled by historical figures â politicians, dictators, boxers, architects and philanthropists â whom I have taken the liberty of treating as fictional characters. Just as I have Melecio create the Bacardà Building in Havana (actually designed by architects Rafael Fernández Ruenes, Esteban RodrÃguez Castells and José Menéndez), so too I have him spontaneously declaiming verses, among them âDeseos' by Salvador DÃaz Mirón. I am indebted to him, to all the authors I have read and to all those who have inspired me.
Â
Carlos Acosta
The Village
A Few Important Details About Me
Bueno
. . . OK . . . the first thing you need to know about me is I never knew my mother or my father, in fact I only found out their names a couple of months ago. My memories begin on the day I came home from primary school dragging a dead cat by the scruff of the neck. I must have been about seven at the time, and I remember the cat had eaten my lunch. My grandma grounded me – obviously – and I wasn’t allowed out to play for a week. She told me it was no reason to go round strangling things. I tossed the remains of the cat on the ground, then punched the front door so hard I fractured my wrist. All this stuff I remember as clear as day. But before that is like an empty space inside my head. Sorry, maybe I’m not making much sense; what I mean is I don’t have any memories of what happened before. I was a pretty normal kid, just like the other
chiquillos
in Barrio Lawton as far as I remember, though my grandparents always insisted I was different. They told me I had been born in a place called Pig’s Foot –
Pata de Puerco
– in the deep south of Cuba on the far side of El Cobre. According to them, I slid down my mother’s legs into the mud like a slug. Can you imagine? Like a slug. And that as soon as my mother plucked me up out of the muck, I started howling like I’d been stuck with a fistful of needles. Pig’s Foot sounds to me like one of the weird recipes Grandma used to concoct, but from what I was told both my grandparents and the parents I never knew were born there and one day I would have to go back.
‘Mark my words,’ my grandpa used to tell me all the time, ‘no man knows who he is until he knows his past, his history, the history of his country.’ ‘The old guy’s losing his marbles,’ I thought, ‘the first sign of old age!’ But then one day I suddenly found myself utterly alone. It’s impossible to imagine the man you will become when you find yourself alone. I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying. Take me, for example: years ago it would never have occurred to me to set foot in Santiago, let alone to hang on every word I ever heard my grandpa say, as though somehow his words might be the cure for my affliction. That’s how I came to build a world around a tiny village called Pata de Puerco, a place I’ve never been but one I inhabited through the memories of that poor old man, the memories Commissioner Clemente wheedled out of me in the course of a long and painful interrogation, the memories I’m happy to relate to you now, no hard feelings.
Before we get started, I should point out that Clemente, the short, bald prick with the big ’tache who calls himself a doctor, is actually Grand Wizard of the Cuban branch of the Ku Klux Klan. I suppose you think I’m making this stuff up, but I swear to you that even in 1995 there are evil people in Cuba. And Commissioner Clemente, with his gang of whiteshirts, is one of them – whenever I see him it’s like I have a rock in my stomach. That’s why when he asked, instead of telling him my real name – it’s Oscar Mandinga, in case you’re wondering – I said:
/
.
I answered the son of a bitch in Arabic. After that, what happened, happened; Commissioner Clemente brought the darkness, hammering me with questions until he literally split my skull in two.
So like I said, my name’s Oscar Mandinga – pleased to meet you – now, back to the hazy past that was my childhood. The only thing I knew about my grandparents was that years earlier they’d moved from Santiago de Cuba to a
barrio
called Lawton in the city of Havana and opened a laundry business that brought in just enough to put food on the table. I have no problems remembering ‘
El Buen Vivir
’ – The Good Life laundromat – since I worked there as a kid, but even back then, I never heard any stories about my grandparents, never saw any photos of them when they were young. As far as I knew my grandparents had been born old, because the day I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a tall, black, toothless old man – my grandpa – and a little grey-haired old woman with shy, sandy eyes – my grandma. They were sweet, affectionate old things for the most part and I’ve got to say they brought me up well. At The Good Life they taught me the meaning of hard work and thanks to them when I was little I learned to cook, to clean, to take out the trash, in short to be methodical and reliable. But that’s no use to me now because that bald bastard Commissioner Clemente won’t give me any work. Though what with the ‘special economic period’ in force these days in Cuba, no one’s got any work.
For all I know you’re one of those ignorant morons who thinks books are for timewasters. If so, let me tell you straight up that I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think because I love reading the classics – though to be honest, I’ll read pretty much anything from
Sputnik
magazine to the cartoons in
La revista pionero
. Art is my life, and it’s such a pity that in Cuba it’s gone to the dogs in the ’90s. Round here, people say that when you’ve made enough good art you’ve earned the right to turn out bad art. Bullshit! You used to be able to go to the theatre in Havana, but these days there’s bound to be a power cut right in the middle of the ballet or the operetta. Everyone’s permanently worried and constantly complaining – everyone, that is, except my grandparents, who still insist the Revolution – power cuts, rationing, shortages and all – is the best thing that ever happened to this country. When I say it, I sound like a fruit loop.
Anyway, back to the important stuff, to Pata de Puerco and its origins. This is the story of my ancestors exactly as I told it to Commissioner chrome-dome Clemente before his band of whiteshirts turned up and took the sun away for ever.
In the 1800s, Pata de Puerco was just one small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre. My grandpa used to say a passing stranger would have thought the tocororos in the trees had just learned to sing. The Accursed Forest and the surrounding swampland teemed with crocodiles that roamed around like tame dogs, having not yet decided that mud was their favourite place to wallow. It was a lush, green place surrounded by picturesque bowers of twisted trees and jungle creepers, which created grottoes where it was possible to walk for miles without seeing a ray of sunlight. The earth was so red people said it was not soil, but the spilled blood of Indians dried by the sun. Deer and hutias scuttered through the grasslands and wild dogs had learned to live in harmony with man, whose numbers were so scant in this far-flung corner of Cuba it seemed like the last place God made.
The Santisteban family arrived here in 1850. They were looking for a place to live, an idyllic, out-of-the-way place far from the metropolis. As everyone knows, the Santistebans were a powerful slave-trading family who, with the Aldamas and the Terrys, controlled the sugar trade the length and breadth of the island. They owned a workforce of more than fifteen thousand slaves, in addition to the railroads, the stores and the credit houses they possessed.