by Manuel Ramos
When we finally took off from Solís’ hovel, Marita sat in front with Juanito, Lourdes stretched out in the back and I had the middle seat.
The ride from Havana was long and exhausting, but quiet, uneventful, a surprise to all of us. I finally saw Cuba the country instead of Cuba the crime scene. Groups of students dressed in school uniforms lined sections of the highway, waiting for buses. Hitchhikers were waved off by Juanito with a cupped hand signal, which I learned meant that his taxi was full. Horse- and ox-drawn carts competed for space on the highway shoulder with massive billboards that urged the people to “NEVER FORGET THE REVOLUTION”. Small villages would appear suddenly along the way, populated with free-roaming chickens, farmers leading goats and dogs, and laughing women sitting in the glassless windows of thatched shacks and unpainted cement buildings. About every five miles, fruit and vegetable vendors hovered around less-than-full tables of produce. An occasional hand-painted sign announced a restaurant inside one of the houses. Traffic was thin but consistent: generally noisy, smoky trucks, taxis in various shapes and colors, and the periodic, packed tour bus that sped past us as though we were parked.
Juanito listened to music through a set of earphones that he hooked up to an antique pocket tape recorder.
Marita Valdés looked tired, washed-out, but still beautiful. If I hadn’t known better, I might’ve described her as a melancholy angel. She wore a sweatshirt she’d borrowed from Solís, jeans and boots. No make-up. She looked straight ahead, not talking, not really moving.
Lourdes fell asleep and about an hour into the drive we all heard her snoring. Marita turned and looked toward the back of the van. Her eyes moved to me, she smiled. I couldn’t help myself, I smiled back at her. I told myself to be cool with the widow.
“You are a long way from home, Mr. Corral,” she said in uneasy English.
“Yeah. Cuba is nothing like Denver.”
She twisted in her seat to look more directly at me. The van’s motor was loud, and the road was rough. We shook and rattled like a covered wagon on the Santa Fe Trail. I wasn’t sure I would hear all that she said, so I leaned forward.
“Denver? Where Kino lives? Not a coincidence that you work for Lourdes.”
I wasn’t sure how much I should tell her. I nodded.
“Tell me, Mr. Corral.” She paused, searching for the right words.
I imagined what she would say. I was wrong.
“Did you know my husband was going to be killed last night? Did you have anything to do with his death?”
I lost whatever cool I had left. I shook my head, twice. I tried to come up with a few words that made sense. “We were all targets last night, including Lourdes. That’s what I know, señora.”
“Yes, I saw your brave act, your saving of Lourdes. Too bad no one could save Miguel.”
“You think that somehow Lourdes was involved with the death of your husband?’
“It is not a secret that Lourdes and Miguel were enemies. At least, no secret to me. Their lives have been mixed up for years.”
She looked again to the back. Then she turned her bloodshot eyes on me. “You don’t know. You couldn’t know.” Her eyes bored deeper into mine. “They were lovers, once. Not that long ago.”
She paused. Her eyes blinked a tear away. “There is no greater hatred than the one that grows from a love destroyed by betrayal or guilt. Lourdes knows that only too well.”
“If that’s true, it’s still no cause for murder.”
I wanted to ask more, to dive through the whirlpool at the heart of the history of the Machaco and Almeida families. The love affair, the death of the younger brother, Claudio, the repayment of a debt that had caused more deaths, more pain. But I couldn’t do it. Not with Lourdes in the van, not with the grieving widow staring at me with her tragic eyes.
“You’re talking like a child,” she said. “Love is the perfect cause for murder.” She turned to the front and curled up in her seat.
“We have to work together,” I said. “The death of your husband hasn’t stopped this . . . whatever it is. Your friend, detective Solís, believes we are all in danger. He sent Lourdes and you away from Havana because of that. If we don’t watch out for one another, we might not ever get back to Havana.”
She didn’t respond. I gave up trying to talk to her.
We traveled slowly, primarily because of the rough condition of the highways. We had to take a detour along an indirect route because of a washed-out bridge, and that cost us another hour. We stopped twice to eat and to use restrooms at tourist rest stops that were clean and attractive and offered souvenir trinkets such as Fidel keychains and books in Spanish about Ernest Hemingway.
Several hours into the drive, Lourdes told Juanito to pull over into one of the parks along the Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. She wanted to stretch her legs. Juanito did as she ordered, and in a few minutes, we sat on a rocky ledge over blue-green water that covered the horizon for as far as I could see. I was familiar with the history of the bay, and I wasn’t surprised when Lourdes said that a museum existed up the road in Playa Girón that was devoted to the battle and the defeat of the CIA-sponsored invasion. I told her I’d catch it next trip.
About fifty yards from where we parked, a group of young people gathered around a shack that sold beer and bottled water. Music could be heard from a player of some type on the back wall.
Lourdes and I walked to the stand. Marita stayed with Juanito near the van.
I ordered a Bucanero, Cuban beer. Lourdes asked for papaya juice. The drink stand’s workers, two young men and one young woman, played checkers and listened to Yankee rock ‘n roll. When the Ritchie Valens’ rendition of La Bamba started, I heard the young people sing along. I joined them, best as I could anyway. When the song ended, I thought I’d explain why Richard Valenzuela changed his name. They were familiar with Ritchie and his sad story, and it didn’t take them long to figure out that I was a pocho Chicano who spoke broken Spanish. They knew about Chicanos in the States. They started giving me an “órale” for this and an “ese” for that and a “qué pasa, güey” for something else. They laughed every time one of them said “güey.”
A 1956 Nassau Blue and India Ivory Chevy Bel Air parked at the stand. From the way the driver was greeted, with cheers and hugs, he had to be a member in good standing of the drink stand’s regular crowd. The main bartender pointed at me, then said something about a mexicano from los Estados Unidos.
The driver, whose name appeared to be Patito, eagerly shook my hand and asked if I’d ever been to Los Angeles. I said, “Claro,” and then he proceeded to brag about the original equipment on the beautifully maintained car: taillight lenses, hubcaps and a few other small items. The interior looked to be covered in leather, but Patito shook his head when I asked. He also explained that the engine was from an Isuzu, the transmission from a Peugeot. He asked if I would like to go for a ride.
I turned him down just as Lourdes waved at me to return to the van. The workers exuberantly wished us a good trip. When I shouted, “Ay te watcho,” they looked at me like I’d spent ten minutes too long in the Cuban sun. I’d taken the Chicano thing as far as it could go on the road to the Bay of Pigs Museum in Playa Girón.
— Chapter 15 —
EL HOTEL FRANCÉS
The drive from Havana lasted ten hours, which seemed like a very long time for three hundred and fifteen kilometers, but Lourdes thanked Juanito for doing a good job, bought him a pineapple and a bunch of plantain as a tip, and no one complained about the time.
The hotel in Trinidad lived up to Solís’ description, and then some. At one time, probably in the 1940s, El Hotel Francés must have been elegant. Lourdes told me it had been the home for Batista relatives. It was a high-ceilinged mansion with intricate iron work, frescoed angels and small rooms that barely held a bed. The huge square-shaped building featured an open, sunken courtyard in the middle of the square. The cracked steps to the courtyard were covered with potted ferns and tongu
e-flicking lizards. Vines and agave plants snaked up the stained walls.
The three of us—Lourdes, Marita and me—were the only guests. After Juanito unloaded us, he drove the van away without a second glance. Lourdes said he would stay with relatives. We met the owner, Margarita Durand, found our rooms and cleaned up.
We sat down with Margarita, Solís’ cousin, for coffee in a cluttered room with a long table and a bed. Huge, purple drapes hung on barred windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Margarita said the bedroom was her office.
She had long, gray hair and dressed only in silk pajamas: torn, faded and thin, but silk, nevertheless. Pale, glassy skin stretched over a reedy frame and gray eyes folded in on themselves. Margarita loved to talk and before an hour had passed I learned, among many other things, that Margarita’s mother, Constancia, suffered from dementia, that the elderly woman roamed the hotel at any hour of the day or night, looking for Jacques, her long-dead husband, an émigré from France. She said, we should avoid the marketplace nearest the hotel and do business only with the artists around the town square. She also said that although she called herself the owner, la dueña, ninety percent of what the hotel earned went to the government, “like any common tobacco farmer or éleveur de chèvre.” We stared blankly. “Goatherder,” she explained.
Eventually, Margarita led us to the dining area where she fixed a light dinner of chicken soup and mango salad. The room faced the courtyard, and I felt as though we were more outside, in the courtyard, than in the hotel. The place had the feel of space and airiness, and the town’s smells and sounds floated down to us.
Margarita chatted while preparing the meal and didn’t stop when she served us. Lourdes added a little to the conversation, but most of the time we listened to our host’s tales of government corruption, which robbed her of a “basic standard of living,” or, in contrast, government heroes who stayed at the hotel since the Revolution. She spoke fondly of Che, Camilo, Barbaroja and Aleida, but she left the impression that she was not a fan of Fidel.
Occasionally, I saw an elderly bent woman mumbling to herself as she glided by in the background. That’s when I realized the full implication of the fact that I was on my own. I didn’t know these people, not really. I worked for Lourdes, and I’d been given a form of the third degree and almost killed because of my relationship to her, but I didn’t know any details about her. I knew less, a lot less, about Marita, Margarita and the ghostly presence that roamed the dark hallways of the hotel.
I’d lost my cell phone days before, along the way, maybe when I rammed the ox, but service was limited anyway, so it didn’t really make a difference. I needed to talk with Jerome or Corrine, or Kino Machaco. But I had no way to contact them—no easy way that wouldn’t attract the attention of local police or anyone who might be looking for us.
There I was, a lone Chicano detective in Cuba, bumping up against old feuds and older secrets, not sure what to do for my next move. The feeling was familiar. Except for my location, I could have said, “Same old, same old.”
— Chapter 16 —
THE WORM AND THE PATRIOT
When we finished eating, Marita excused herself and shuffled to her room. Lourdes and I stayed with Margarita. We drank wine and coffee while we listened to her stories of the famous and infamous guests she’d entertained at the very same table where we sat. Margarita offered me a cigar, which I declined. She insisted that I take it anyway. I stuck it in my shirt pocket. The mother flitted by a few times, and I heard her curse in Spanish and French and ask an unseen listener if he enjoyed the stew.
Shadows slowly crept into the hotel along the pale-yellow courtyard walls. Brown ferns and sparse vines drooped from thirst. The lizards clung to the ground, unable to move, or not wanting to. Margarita’s face was half in darkness, half in light from an early moon. Her skin looked thin, parched. Lourdes stared with black-ringed eyes. I was surrounded by decay and stagnation.
Margarita turned on a few dim lamps and, again, the Cuban night washed over us with soft, golden light.
Rhythmic dance music filtered into the hotel from jamming musicians on the steps near the square. The ever present noisy trucks lumbered through the streets with squeaky brakes and rough gears, and I thought I heard the growl of a wild animal.
The feeling of solitude wouldn’t leave. The mix of wine and coffee fueled my inherent paranoia. I worried about Lourdes and the money. I even worried about Marita and her grief. I imagined gunmen storming through the massive wooden doors of the hotel, or an intruder prowling our rooms, waiting. But at the heart of my worry were thoughts of what else might happen to me, what else could happen to me? And I struggled against the idea that I might never get off the island of Cuba.
Alberto Machaco showed up around midnight. He traveled with Lourdes’ man, Virgilio Licona, who wore a conspicuous shoulder holster under his jacket. The two men stumbled into the hotel, red-eyed, hungry and jittery.
Licona said only a few words. He answered Lourdes’ questions about the trip and confirmed that no one had followed them from the hospital. He mentioned that Solís had arrested the woman I knew as “Eddie,” Eduarda Ventura, but that’s all he knew about the small-time thief. His voice was rough, and he smoked constantly. He excused himself to the courtyard when he lit a cigarette, so he was often away from the group.
Alberto looked especially bad. The cool, confident man I’d met in the Los Angeles airport now appeared lost, unsure. He walked on crutches; a metal brace supported his right leg. He appeared to be in intense pain.
“You sure you should be out of the hospital?” I asked after everyone found a chair and held a drink.
Margarita warmed the soup and served two bowls to the men.
“No choice.” His subdued voice almost disappeared in the late-night sounds of the town.
“Solís said he couldn’t guarantee my safety. His men are chasing down every lead on who the shooter at the restaurant was working for. The killing is a huge embarrassment for the government. Solís talked about how it was bad for business.”
“He told us the same,” I said. “He must be getting a lot of heat.”
“I don’t trust that man,” Virgilio said.
It was the first time I’d heard him speak without being asked a direct question.
“You mean Solís?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because Federico’s a policeman,” Lourdes said quickly. “Virgilio has his prejudices.”
“Call it what you want.” His raspy words were difficult for me to understand. “I feel better for you, Lourdes, that you’re away from Havana and out of the reach of Solís.”
“I don’t care about all that,” Alberto said. “What’s next? I only want to leave this damn island and return to my home.”
His words echoed my thoughts and they visibly upset Virgilio, Margarita and Lourdes.
“You call that country your home, after all the suffering the U.S. has caused for your people, for us?” Lourdes said.
“I owe nothing to Cuba or the so-called Revolution,” Alberto answered, with more force than I thought he could dredge up. “Any suffering is either the fault of Castro and his criminal government, or you yourselves for letting the communists control your lives.”
Virgilio grabbed Alberto’s sleeve. I jumped to my feet—Alberto was part of my job, too.
Before I said or did anything else, Lourdes tapped Virgilio’s shoulder and he released his grip on Alberto. He walked towards the courtyard, pulled a cigarette from a wrinkled pack, but then put it away and returned to us.
I sat down.
“You island Cubans amaze me,” Alberto continued. “You complain about the lives you are forced to live, and yet, you forget why that is so, and you are willing to die for that man and his so-called Revolution.”
“Yes, Alberto,” Lourdes said. “We still love our country. We still believe in our country”
“And the Revolution,” Virgilio added. “No matter what you gusanos say.”
Alberto raised his palms as a sign of peace. “We won’t settle our disagreement tonight. It’s an old conversation. I shouldn’t have said anything and I apologize.”
Lourdes and Virgilio nodded their agreement.
“The money? It’s safe?” Alberto asked.
“Yes,” Lourdes answered. “As safe as we are.”
“And Marí?”
“Sleeping,” Lourdes said. “She’s not in good shape.”
Alberto took a deep breath. He leaned forward, off-balance. Lourdes helped him sit against the back of the chair. They made an interesting pair: gusano y patriota, the worm and the patriot.
He found enough energy to ask another question. “I still need to know what’s next. Where do we go from here?”
They all looked at me.
— Chapter 17 —
ALL THIS DEATH
Meaningful sleep again eluded me. I nodded off for maybe an hour, woke up, tossed and turned for twenty minutes. Eventually I dozed off again for another hour. The bed was too soft, the blankets too bulky, the room too small. Tropical darkness closed in on me, my throat tightened, and I couldn’t shake the sensation of suffocating.
Around four in the morning, I stood at the window. I wore only a T-shirt and boxer briefs, yet my skin was hot and sweaty. My three-day-old beard scratched my neck. The whiskers were hard as wire. Music continued to echo from the impromptu concert in the town center. A rooster crowed although the sun had not yet broken through the night.
A wild thought formed in my sleep-deprived brain. Which of my fellow travelers could I really trust? As if I expected the answer to be revealed, I pulled back the heavy drapes and stared at the courtyard through a thin sheer curtain. A light was on in Marita’s room. I watched for five minutes. I thought she might also have trouble falling asleep. I imagined her crying over the murder of her husband. Maybe she prayed. Maybe she hoped to drink away the memory.
The door to her room opened. Alberto inched out of the doorway. He made sure no one else was in the courtyard, then he took Marita’s hands in his own and rubbed them as though they were cold. They hugged, quickly, without emotion. He limped as quietly as he could, but I could hear him shuffling through the courtyard. He passed Lourdes’ room, paused, raised his hand to the doorknob, changed his mind and finished walking to his own room. A light turned on, then out seconds later. The light in Marita’s room faded about a minute later.