Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  MIERCOLES, 3 SEPTIEMBRE

  Manolo

  In the morning my mind is still roiling when I open the clinic. I have barely slept, and here comes that same fat old alcoholic wife-beater complaining of pains again. He collected compensation from a faked fall on a Spanish construction project and used it to start a secret pizzeria out of his back patio. He refuses to serve anyone without a Yanqui dólar—especially not the doctor who wrote a note to the union representative warning that the patient’s complaints of chronic pain seemed to be (I couched his exposure in the most merciful terms) at best psychosomatic. He stokes his brick oven with wood he pays the neighborhood kids to drag away from collapsed mansions in Old Havana, lumber impregnated with lead paint and other chemicals that choke the neighborhood with noxious fumes also laced with the delicious odors of tomato sauce (a stolen case of Mexican ketchup he waters down) and melted cheese (soy that his silent, skittish wife curdles in five-gallon buckets in their dirty apartment). When sooner or later he succumbs to heart disease, there will be a brief mourning, and then someone else will come along to pick up the slack in the neighborhood’s fast-food offerings. He believes that eventually I will yield and proffer up some of that secret stash of ibuprofen I must be hoarding if he returns once a month with that most unspecified of symptoms, “chronic pain.” He is correct about the yielding—my intestines convulse disagreeably every time I see him coming, and I would give every last fula in my wallet and a bottle of my uncle’s best country wine just to make him go away, but I assure him that he is wrong about the secret stash—no ibuprofen, not anymore, no end in sight.

  Then there is the nice lady from next door who cannot stop talking. She needs some salve for the demented grandmother, whose house they still occupy, who is stuffed in a back room with the grandchildren so that they may rent out the front bedroom to tourists. And the matriarch, her perception wracked by dementia, balbuceando todo el dia, moaning and howling while her daughter—now a grandmother herself—smiles and asks tourists from Sweden and Germany staying in this showpiece of collapsing opulence, Would you like more café? She takes the hundred dollars they give her for three nights (breakfast included) and immediately turns it around to buy a twenty-pound bag of flash-frozen Brazilian chicken quarters that somehow found its way to her back door between the InTur distribution center and one of the hotels, and then she offers those quarters at ten dollars a pound through word-of-mouth in the neighborhood. They sell out in less than an hour, and she has doubled her money, buena capitalista en que se ha convertido. What to invest in next?

  I close up briefly at noon and use my lunch hour to take my ration book and buy myself some beans and rice from the neighborhood mercado. They come in two half-pound paper bags with the tops torn off. The proprietor uses the excess paper for writing figures.

  * * *

  Sometimes running my family clinic is a little like being the school nurse. In the afternoon I get an eight-year-old girl with a knee scraped up from a bike injury. Her mother cannot stop blabbering about the recent bombings: “No me siento segura caminando por los hoteles.”

  “Por favor . . .” I cock my head in the direction of her daughter while applying antiseptic to the abrasions.

  “¿Y qué?” says the mother. “This is reality, doctor. She has to know to stay on alert around those places.” I cannot argue with the mother. I do not wish to say it aloud, because there is a child nearby, but I am also nervous near tourist hotels.

  Eighteen months ago, two of our MiG fighters shot down two Cessnas belonging to the exile group Brothers to the Rescue that had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace, killing four men. For the anti-Castro extremists who funded the group, their response has been a terrorism campaign targeting tourist spots. Havana has been on edge since the brutality of this summer’s bombings. There have been a half-dozen explosions at hotels already this year, and while miraculously there have been no fatalities, everybody in Havana is uneasy.

  The last patient of the day walks in as I am preparing to close up the clinic. Sometimes this is a sign. The egocentric patient will try to get at the neighborhood doctor just when he is about to get off work. An unscrupulous physician might prescribe whatever is requested a bit more freely in order to dispense with the last-minute consult. However, in this case I believe showing up at the last possible moment was just her luck.

  “Buenas tardes.”

  “Buenas.”

  Her ripped jeans and black T-shirt emblazoned with the dark album art of a German metal band identify her as a rockera, but her coal-black eye makeup is smudged beyond the rockeros’ usual display of antisocial disenchantment. She has been crying. Blond hair, pretty face, light skin, and Eastern European features. I can tell from the way she talks she is a Pinareña.

  “¿Ya estaba cerrando?” she asks.

  “No importa. Siéntate.” I invite her to sit across from me at my desk. I do not go straight to the exam room unless the patient is in pain or is a regular with whom I have established a rapport. I prefer taking new patients on with a casual conversation. In first-world medical communities, physicians do this in order to bill a quick additional consultation to the insurance companies before practicing any actual medicine. In my case, it is a simple matter of making patients feel more comfortable than they would if I went straight to poking them with instruments and examining them.

  However, it is vain to speak of a difference between the office and the exam room, because they are in fact sections of the same small basement separated only by a flimsy curtain.

  “I haven’t seen you around before. Are you from the neighborhood?”

  “I’m new here. My aunt died and I have to clean out her apartment. Acabo de llegar de Pinar.”

  My impulse is to say, Tengo familia en Pinar, but I know better than to get personal with a patient too soon. Nevertheless, our encounter is now imbued with a kind of understanding, even if it is only I who recognizes it. Certainly I know this girl. The girls of Pinar City are like this. They want to smile and please, but something more is going on behind the eyes.

  “¿Quién era tu tia?”

  “Marilyn Delgado.”

  “Lo siento,” I say, leaving it at that. I remember la viuda Delgado—a solitary woman, widowed ever since I was a boy. When she died in the spring, some of the neighbors raided her furniture. It’s a good thing the family finally sent someone to protect what was left. The next-door neighbor went so far as to begin renting out one of her rooms to European tourists, the type with the big backpacks who will sleep anywhere in order to save their money for jineteras. There is no way the government will let the apartment go to a single young woman from the provinces. They will come in and apportion it.

  “¿En qué te puedo servir?”

  She does not stare at my lunar. She has too much on her mind. “Do you do the HIV test in this clinic?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to know, but I don’t want to be sent to a sanatorium.”

  “I will keep it confidential.”

  Her name is Mercedes Delgado. She is twenty years old, October birth date, and her ex-boyfriend is HIV-positive. “He is a friki. He wanted to go to el sanatorio.” There is something to this brief pause at mentioning him, whether it is discomfort at their unmarried status or something more. She is thinking of someone else, someone not far from her, but someone who has already passed through a door. Just sitting with me is conspiring against him.

  “Did you have unprotected sex?”

  “Yes, a few times.”

  “How long has it been since the last time you had intercourse?”

  “Two months.”

  “A full two months?”

  “Yes, eight weeks.”

  Drawing her blood in silence, I inhale the faint fragrance of jasmine from her skin. Internally I annotate: Anxiety, possible mood disorder, check glucose. Mercedes Delgado is telling me much more than her request for a blood test. I wonder what Doctora Ana Luisa Hernández would do. Her influence is alrea
dy rubbing off on me. I tell the patient, “Moving is always difficult, even more so when you go to a new place where you don’t know anybody.”

  “Yes, I feel much better just speaking to someone about it.”

  The only prescription she needs today is a human to listen to her, a sympathizer, in the absence of a friend, which is lucky, because sympathy is the only thing left in my supplies, though I also feel like there is still something more we have not touched on. “You can come back the day after tomorrow for the results. In the meantime, is there anything else you require?”

  She is feeling better, so she remembers something. “Yes, there is just one thing. Can you tell me where there might be a mercado around here?”

  “Of course, you just arrived.” I go to the shelf where I keep my personal items when the clinic is open. “Here.”

  “What is this?”

  “A pound of rice and beans. A first-night package for newcomers to Havana provided by the Ministry of Health.”

  “Is this customary?”

  I act surprised. “I would have thought you knew, coming in on your first day. Do you need any oil?”

  “No, I can manage.”

  “In the morning, you can make la cola for the market on 12 y 17 to pick up a bit more with your ration book. Is there anything else I can do to be of service?”

  She hesitates and says, “Me da pena decirlo.”

  “There is no shame in telling your doctor what’s troubling you.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Pinar. I want to stay here in Havana.”

  I do not have to ask her why. I can tell: it is because she wants distance from the ex-boyfriend. “What will you need to get on your feet? I’d like to help you resolve this, if you will permit me.”

  “I do not wish to be a bother.”

  She has given me my opening. And I know I need to meet her humility halfway with my own. “No, please, it is absolutely no difficulty whatsoever.” I stop short of saying, In fact, you’ll be doing me a favor, because I trust I have already been obsequious enough.

  There is no guile in it when she says, “¿No me puedes resolver un trabajo por ahí?” You couldn’t help me find a job somewhere around here?

  This is in the realm of the reasonable for a médico de familia to consider. Even Doctora Hernández would back me up on this one. “I’ll see what I can do. Come back day after tomorrow. I get home around five.”

  “Home?”

  “I live in an apartment upstairs. We can meet down here in the clinic.”

  * * *

  When I close up, a waxing crescent is setting over Havana Bay. It has cooled off, and Morro Castle is half-cloaked in clouds that, silver and black, portend rain, but not before morning. With the rising barometer, the city will be relatively hushed tonight.

  Going up the stairs to my attic apartment, I become conscious that I feel better than I have in weeks. With the balance and focus that Mercedes has given me, I should be thanking her. I sleep well for the first time since I can remember.

  PINAR DEL RIO

  Mercedes

  She retraces the twists and turns that led her out of captivity.

  She walked down Calle Real in Pinar and everything about the city was charged with significance. The main street had been named José Martí since the Revolution, but all the locals still call it Calle Real. This was her city, noisy today, but she knew it would get sleepy at night. It was the last time Mercedes would see it for a long time.

  She turned right on Calle Colón and already smelled it. The entire block around the terminal reeked of urine, from years of ill-mannered men spreading their territorial stench. La Terminal de Ómnibus de Pinar del Río is a two-story building. On the first floor there is a small sala de espera and the parqueadero for the buses. The entire second floor is another open, crumbling waiting room, along with the taquillas where they sell the bus tickets. The line for the taquillas winds up the ramp between the two floors. The walls were blue, once. Now they are defiantly dirty, as if to say, Look at what the Yanquis are doing to us with their embargo! The chairs, with their assortment of broken backs and seats, are stained and uninviting, but los Pinareños waiting the three or four days it takes to buy a ticket guard them jealously for the tortuous little snatches of sleep they afford off of the urine-soaked floor.

  Mercedes was not able to pay someone to wait for her. The resellers’ prices go up to one hundred pesos for a seven-peso ticket, so she allots three days, possibly four, for la cola, a long process of getting in line to take a number, to then be assigned to another line, to finally buying your ticket. Waiting in line to get a place in line . . . At night the whole place is a sad, murky, frightening vigil between strangers. She heard some of them go to the bathroom in the dark corners around the salas de espera. It made her wonder how the ticket sellers could stand the smell by day. Didn’t it stink as much inside the taquillas, or had they figured out a way to freshen the air behind their plexiglass windows? A small bag with soap, toothbrush, and a few changes of clothes was her only pillow. She brought her own meager supply of stale crackers and cooked cassava because the terminal cafeteria opens rarely and randomly, and when it does it is only to sell some tasteless bread with a “croqueta” inside, some unknown something that Andrés told her was ground toenail clippings held together by a little lard.

  On the third day she finally got a ticket. The bus to Havana was a ruin, with seats falling apart and no air-conditioning, but after several hours of warm air blowing over her through the open windows, Mercedes had almost gotten the smell of urine out of her head. She was hungry, but she was happy. She was moving away from Andrés at high speed. She was starting to feel free.

  At the halfway point, they stopped to go to the bathroom by the autopista, and briefly she found herself in line again with the same strangers from the past four days. When you begin approaching Havana, things change a bit. You start seeing more concrete structures, people, and buses. On the outskirts of the city, the buildings grow taller. A few passengers asked to be dropped off in Marianao before reaching Vedado. Mercedes looked out the window at the fancy vans printed with names of hotels on the side, shuttling tourists to and from the airport.

  Bus journeys from all over the island end on the border of Vedado and El Cerro at the Terminal de Ómnibus de la Habana. Others who were used to this route from Pinar del Rio were already gathering their packs before they reached the terminal to jockey for position in the aisle and be the first to get off the cramped, sweltering bus, but Mercedes remained in her seat and looked out at the majestic Teatro Nacional. She had seen many television programs of concerts by Silvio Rodriguez and ballets with Alicia Alonso that happened inside. She saw el Monumento de la Revolución y la Biblioteca Nacional, but all these familiar place names, famous in her imagination thanks to the stories of cousins and friends who had come back from adventures in the big city, meant nothing to her personal locative scheme. Her spatial computer was empty. In a boundless metropolis teeming with millions of hungry people, her only point of reference was herself, and she felt infinitesimally small among the murderers and rapists, priests and paleros, and, somewhere out there, in the middle of everything and nowhere at all, Fidel.

  Now she would have to find her own way walking to the center of Vedado. She did not want anyone to know this was her first time in Havana. When her school took the class trip to el Zoológico Nacional and Parque Lenin, she had been recovering from an appendectomy, and after no other opportunity presented itself she became stubborn, cultivating a grudge throughout her teenage years. She would never go to the city, and that was fine with her. She was busy taking care of her mother in Pinar. Now, with her mother’s only sister gone and this problem with the apartment, travel had suddenly become imperative, and she wished she hadn’t been such an intransigent country bumpkin.

  “We’re like a couple of pack horses.” She heard an old couple making their strategy for how to carry their bundles; they were going to Vedado via Paseo. She follo
wed them at a short distance to la Plaza de la Revolución, where the Ladas and taxis made their endless circles around the monument to José Martí. The pack horses did a quarter-orbit, and the revolution ejected them up a broad avenue Mercedes knew must be Paseo, and she gained new confidence: she had found her axis, and she believed she could keep her bearings on her own.

  She headed down Paseo past the theater and the park. Mercedes was always good at math, and her mother had taught her about Vedado: the odd streets run one way intersecting the even, with Paseo being the even Calle 0, although nobody calls it that, and counting down from 29 to el Malecón, which would be the odd 0 since after that you’d be underwater.

  She crossed busy Zapata. Even with the soldiers on the corners, she never saw cars so opposed to slowing down. The next street was Calle 19, and she knew 23 couldn’t be far. The camellos went up and down Zapata, blowing their air horns and coughing exhaust. They did not have these in Pinar, and nobody had warned her about them before she left for Havana. The first one she saw frightened her. Why were these people stuffed inside this three-tier monstrosity pulled along by a tractor? Was something terribly wrong? Were they being evacuated for some reason?

  She decided to turn up 25 because she could tell it would be quieter. After the ordeal across Zapata, she wanted to approach her aunt’s apartment from behind and see how the regular neighborhood looked. Like they told her, casas particulares were popping up almost every block along Calles 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. The legal ones hung out their hand-painted signs: La Casa de Angla, Casa MartaAna, Casa Dora. Who knew how many more unauthorized hostels hid among these crumbling mansions and dilapidated apartment buildings? Even her poor aunt’s had been one for a while after she died.