Flight from a Firing Wall

by Baynard Kendrick

  I threw him a brace of jotas just for luck by asking for a pastilla de jabón, a cake of soap, for a joven— young man. He came right back at me, dead pan, by saying if I wasn’t from police headquarters—jefatura de policía, he had some shaving cream that made a very good lather—jabonadura. Was there anything else he could do for me?

  “I’m very anxious to get in touch with a Dr. Arturo Maciá, an old friend of my father’s. I’m Primer Teniente Gabriel Alvarez, from Santiago.”

  “Oh. Where are you staying?”

  “Nowhere, yet. I just got in town and haven’t checked in to a hotel.” I started to mention the Plaza, but didn’t. Instead, I said, “I’m sort of looking around for a place that isn’t too expensive, and I thought that Dr. Maciá might advise me. This is my first trip to Havana.”

  He looked up at a clock on the wall. It was twenty minutes to five. “I can tell you where to go but it’s not to a hotel. Did you ever hear of Sloppy Joe’s?”

  “The bar? Who hasn’t?”

  “Well, go and wait in Sloppy Joe’s. If the doctor doesn’t show there before five-thirty, don’t wait any longer. He’s not coming. You’ll have to make another try tomorrow.”

  I said, “Thanks,” and started to go.

  He said, “Wait a minute, Compañero Teniente! What about that shaving cream and a nice bottle of our stinking perfume as a gift for your lady friend? I only have to charge you four pesos and they’re easily worth one.”

  I said, “Well, there actually isn’t any young lady—”

  “Then you’d better invent one fast. You don’t drop in to fararmacias just to pass the time of day. Particularly not this one. You come in to buy things, and there is a young lady who will be very much interested in what you bought.”

  “A young lady who knows me?” I asked, thinking of Milagros.

  “She will know you if you walk out of here carrying nothing, and I have no sales slips to show. I’m talking about that bitch with the machine gun that just passed the front door.”

  I was learning fast. He wrapped up my purchases and gave me change from a five-peso bill. As I started out he said, “Don’t try to drink that perfume, and don’t ever try to smell it. It’s distilled from sugar cane, pig-crap and horse-pee.” The enamel of his dead-white face cracked with the ghost of a smile. He stuck out his right arm in a stiff salute and said, “Heil Hitler!”

  I went over a block and walked up busy Zulueta, deliberately avoiding passing my father’s old office on the Prado. I hastened by a barren florist shop, a toy store with half-a-dozen pitiful rag dolls in the window, a shoe store with four pairs of used children’s shoes on display, each marked with a sign “30 pesos.” Two weeks’ work at a national minimum wage of two pesos a day.

  Through the window of a haberdashery called “Unity 200” I could see shopping couples fingering cheap cotton men’s shirts at 14 pesos. The customers were obviously Russians judging by their Slavic appearance. In an ex-Woolworth store, women were queued up to check out small bundles of shoddy-looking clothes and textiles.

  Yet the girls I passed looked neat and well dressed and were sporting silk stockings. The lottery vendors were out in force, their long narrow boards hanging by their kiosks with lucky numbers on display. There was another dose of propaganda exhibitions hung on the pillars of the arches outside of Sloppy Joe’s. As I went inside the bar I thought of a civilization composed entirely of little boys who wrote dirty words on walls.

  The joint certainly wasn’t jumping as it used to in those halcyon days when it entertained such luminaries as Gary Cooper, Roz Russell and Alice Faye, whose pictures were still on display. About a dozen people stood at the long bar that could accommodate fifty. At best it had always been a tourist trap that left me cold. Now it had all the atmosphere of dropping in for a quickie on the lower level of King Tut’s tomb.

  Two of the ubiquitous militia girls were drinking beer at the end of the bar. One had forgotten her uniform or hadn’t had time to put it on, for she was wearing slacks, high-heeled shoes, and her hair was in curlers. She had remembered her tommy gun though, and was making points in an argument with her uniformed companion by waving it indiscriminately around the bar. Her girl friend was just as argumentative, but her weapon was pointed the other way.

  I learned later that the casualty lists of innocent bystanders, including children, accidently killed and wounded throughout Cuba by these careless, ferocious females was appalling and steadily growing day by day. Complaints against them were futile, since the courts always gave a verdict of “accidental injury or death caused by a member of the militia while in the performance of duty.”

  I found a place as far away from them as possible at the other end of the bar and ordered a Bacardi. I was advised to try the Habana Libre Hotel where the rum didn’t run out every day at noon. I ordered beer, which I noticed then everyone else was drinking. It was good and cold, and the bartender very proudly told me that they had some ham and could make me the best sandwich in town if I was hungry. The memory of that lousy lunch in Jovellanos still lingered and I passed with thanks.

  The blaring radio forced its attentions on me, giving details of the dinner at the Libre. It seems that by putting everybody over two years old out harvesting, that with the good weather the sugar crop had been boosted from four million tons last year to six million this June. The Castro brothers were to be there in person along with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the Commie head of the land reform program, to deal out the Hero Medals in person to all the big wheels who had sat in their offices and ordered the sugar cane to grow.

  A note of patriotism was introduced when the announcer yelled: “¡Viva la Revolution Latinoamericana!” and a canned chorus responded with “¡Patria o Muerte!” This was followed by a musical interlude featuring the sugar crop song “How Sweet the Cane Is,” with lyrics by guess who? Yep! Maestro Fidel. I don’t even like egg in my beer, let alone syrup. How could anyone on the island be hungry with that much corn?

  An elderly man with a wrinkled face and a prominent nose came in to stand beside me and order a beer. He had on a Panama hat, a starched guayabera with a black bow tie, rumpled gray slacks and white shoes. He drank half his beer in two quick gulps then took out a box of those short unlightable wax matches that smell like putrefying candles. He bent three of the little stinkers double trying to light a cigar.

  The radio finished playing “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” and did a stint more of red flag waving followed by a veritable rash of remonstrances made in Moscow.

  The old man tried a fourth wax taper. It lit, bent, and burned his thumb. Covered by the radio, and under his breath, he swore in vicious English: “Holy jumping Jesus Christ!” He went on in the same breath and without a pause, “Half a block. Animas. Five minutes. Green car.” He finished his beer, tossed a coin on the bar, and stalked out. Maybe I couldn’t speak or understand English, but it was hard to miss that profanity with the double J.

  It was five-fifteen. I paid my check for my two beers and sauntered out. Animas was parked solid from Zulueta to the Prado, but halfway down the block I spotted him in the green Chevrolet. It was about a ’58 two-door sedan. I got in and closed the door. The motor was already running.

  We turned left on the Prado, and I said, “I’m Primer Teniente Gabriel Alvarez, on leave from Santiago, and I only know enough English to catch the J’s when people swear in a bar.”

  We passed the Capitol and the Parque de la Fraternidad, and turned right on Reina before he spoke. Then he said, “I speak Spanish, too. There’s no use your craning your neck to peer in the rearview mirror. There’s nobody following me or you.”

  “Then why all that cloak-and-dagger performance in the bar?”

  “I’m a doctor,” he said, “and I have to be careful of the company I keep. But nobody needs to follow you in Havana, Tony. Day or night they always know where you are.”

  “Tony!” I repeated. “You certainly seem to have me pegged.”

  “You’re my baby,
chico. How are your bullet holes? I wasn’t able to get the slugs out, but the afternoon you spent in my office five years ago drew me a sentence of thirty years in La Cabana. I served a year and I’d have been there yet, except for the kindly offices of Comandante Ernesto García, your father-in-law.”

  28

  What words can you find in any language to express how you feel toward a man who has saved your life and been rewarded with a thirty-year fall? I decided that utter and absolute trust was the least I could give him to demonstrate my gratitude. We were driving slowly out Rancho Boyeros toward the airport and for fifteen minutes I covered five years, telling him all.

  He was still chewing ruminatively on that unlighted cigar. He took it out of his mouth and put it in the upper left-hand pocket of his guayabera. “Isn’t it odd how much we resent being jolted out of a routine that we have resigned ourselves to?” he asked me.

  “Do you feel that I’m bitter about leaving the safety of Miami in exchange for the last few days of frightened hell I’ve been through?”

  “¡Dios mío! Not that, Tony. From the day that you were born to a Cuban father and an American mother, with a few assists from a Connecticut prep school and a dose of tutelage from the kindly Dr. Jorge Villaverde, Cervantes couldn’t have found a better model for the perfect Don Quixote.”

  “So I may have been tilting at windmills, working with Luis Martínez in the AFAO, but I certainly wasn’t conscious of resenting anything.”

  He pulled to the right as a guagua (wah-wah) went by, cut in sharp ahead of us and discharged a hapless passenger in a flying leap without stopping. It made me feel better. The guaguas were those fussy little buses that I had delighted in as a boy. They skittered over Havana like sand fleas, racing recklessly between two approaching streetcars (now gone), twisting madly through traffic jams, and occasionally slicing off the corner of a curb as they turned into some narrow street.

  They had signals of one, two, and three bells. One bell was for an active boy or man, and slowed them down just sufficiently to let the acrobat board or leave on the fly. Two bells were for the ladies who could board or leave while the driver hesitated, providing they were spry. Only three bells stopped them in their mad, mad course to nowhere. Three bells announced a mother with babe in arms, or little children. Then the driver might get out himself and feed the baby or change a diaper, before resuming his hair-raising journey.

  Nobody ever seemed to know where they were going or where they came from, and nobody seemed to care, but whatever your destination in the city a guagua would eventually get you there. In a hurry too. I had never heard of one crashing a car, or in juring a pedestrian. The guaguas were La Habana to me! Now this one was the first I had seen when they used to be everywhere.

  Maciá must have seen my grin. He said, “There are not so many left running now, Tony. They’re cannibalizing them since they can’t get parts, robbing one to keep another running. They would have liked to liquidate them, I’m sure, but they didn’t dare.”

  “So Don Quixote, who is so unrealistic as to believe that common humanity is governed by ideals as imaginative as his own, has to seize on a guagua as an emblem to convince himself that anything remains of his former home. Except the shade of his wife, now called the Red Queen.”

  “Sure, there’s something gnawing at your vitals, Tony. Would you like a quick analysis from old Doc Maciá? Or have you reached a point now where you don’t really care?”

  “You know perfectly well that I care.”

  “Certainly I do. Otherwise, I would think that I was wasting my time. I was wondering about the anger in your voice when you mentioned the Red Queen.”

  “I came here to get her out of this, didn’t I?”

  “Nothing like it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You came here because you were burned to a crisp because her father and Soledad Harrington had shattered love’s young dream. You were pleased to think that your prime motivation was bringing medicine and help to that grand old man, Jorge Villaverde, who knows more medicine than you ever will and who has survived more traps than you’ll ever know. Laudable, Tony, but untrue. Nor did you come here to help the Cuba that is gone. Something that you know that no one man can do.”

  “One man took it over and ruined it.”

  “Fight talk, Tony. You’re off the beam. Just let me finish about Milagros and I’ll show you where you’re wrong. For five years you have had to adjust your life to the memory of your one great love, to your one short moment of peacefulness and passion. Every day you’ve had to convince yourself that if you plunged deep enough into other activities you might wipe out the pain by numbing yourself with the realization that she was actually dead and gone.”

  “I’d convinced myself of that.”

  “Sure you had. That was the trouble. With every waking moment you had built up the thoughts of her beauty and charm, the warmth of her kisses, and the feel of her body against you. With every breath, the rightness of your young man’s fancy had to be justified, and your visionary love for this idol had to be bolstered and become more strong. So, suddenly with a single word she is resurrected and turned into Reina Roja, a Russian pawn. You couldn’t see your perfect plaything shattered, Tony. That’s what brought you to Cuba.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” I was bitter enough now. “Help me find her and get her back, and I’ll prove that everyone’s wrong.”

  “Merciful heavens! That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, Tony. Everyone is actually no one. You came here to justify the brilliance and the brains, the love and the perspicacity of young Dr. Antonio Carrillo. You came here to assure yourself that such a model young man never could pick anything but a winner, and that he’d caught the brass ring when he married Señorita Milagros García, because any lad with all his great attributes simply couldn’t be wrong.”

  “What are you trying to do, Doctor, crucify me?”

  “Far from that, chico. I’m trying to make you able to live with yourself for the rest of your life, if we happen to find that Milagros is gone.”

  “Gone where?” I sat forward on the edge of the seat.

  “Where did ‘Che’ Guevara go?” A car was loitering along in front and he gave it two toots of the horn. “Once there was a big Red King, named Sergei Mikhailovitch Kudryavtsev. He was the Soviet Ambassador to Havana. He said that Cuban Communism was pachanga— a wild party. He’s back in Moscow. That’s where he’s gone. Then there was another Red Queen named Anibal Escalante. She was an old-time Communist Party member. Fidel took her apart on a radio-TV broadcast for having brought chaos to all the country, and having tried to create an apparatus to pursue personal ends. Russia agreed. She’s now a refugee behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. That’s where she’s gone.”

  “But Milagros was—”

  “On our side, but playing with the Russians to create more chaos for Fidel. Maybe Teresa knows where she is, but I don’t and frankly I’m worried. Who knows what she did or what she said, and with her one protection, her father, ill in Miami, who knows where she’s gone?”

  “Villaverde wanted me to take a look at Teresa, if you didn’t mind. He said she was quite ill and I might be able to help.”

  “Mind?” He laughed. “Jorge knows I’m a marked man with my office in my hat. No lab and very little medicine except what I can get through Justino. I have about fifty patients that I’m doing my best to help, and I have to visit most of them through the back door. There’s a guard on the Plaza around the clock. We’ll have to kill time until two a.m. when a man comes on who will unlock the service door for me. If anyone knows the whereabouts of Milagros, it’s Teresa—and don’t think I’m not glad of all the help you can give me.”

  We pulled into a parking place and stopped outside of the Rio Cristal. I remembered it as one of the finest eating places in Havana, advertising itself as un pedacito de cielo— a little bit of heaven, which it had always been to Milagros and me. You dined surrounded by gorgeous t
rees and flowers, to the tinkling cascades of the river which gave the place its name.

  I said, “I didn’t know there was anything like this left in Cuba today. Can you really get a drink here and eat?”

  “Here, and a hundred other places in Havana. Things are more tranquil and normal than they have been in three years. Fidel’s throwing a fish to us Habaneros in the way of some material concessions, to shut up our nasty mutterings. Of course, if he isn’t able to keep them up, they’re liable to cost him dear.”

  “They told me in Sloppy Joe’s that the rum ran out this noon and they had nothing but beer.”

  “That’s because the manager isn’t a Party Member in good standing. Here that means being in good standing with Fidel. Castroism is whatever Fidel at the moment says that it is, and he never stops talking. Anyway you wash it, it’s a one-man show.”

  “You just got through telling me that I was wrong about one man taking over Cuba and ruining it.”

  “Certainly you were wrong. Just as wrong as those political writers who think this is a peasant revolution, spearheaded by an underprivileged group. Every element in Cuba has been ripe for a revolution, ever since we won our independence from Spain. Dr. Castro just lanced the boil, let it erupt, and then carried on. To my mind, all of us pedigreed doctors and our parents are probably the most to blame.”

  “Where did you get that idea that we doctors are to blame?”

  “I learned to be a Monday morning quarterback in La Cabana. To save my sanity, I had to. Look at the picture: Our trade union officials were very efficient and remained true to liberal and democratic social principles. That’s why Fidel kicked them out. But the unions had always been politically ridden and technologically backward in consequence. So today we have the Russians. It was American technicians and money a few years ago.

  “Let’s don’t look at the army. It has always been rotten to the core, or the Comandante couldn’t have attained the rank he now holds. As for the church: the majority of our priests were not Cubans, but were imported from Spain. We called them Falangists after the members of the powerful Junta Politica created in 1937 by Franco in Spain, or bodegueros— grocers. According to the Vatican, 598 priests were forced to leave the country, leaving only 125 to minister to the entire population of the island. Duck soup for Fidel! What was that pitiful handful of priests, no matter how brave, going to do?”