Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  What is happening to me? I have just turned twenty-eight. Is this what it is like to become an old man? If I could break my resolution about collaborating with Pérez, I might forgive myself for falling for a patient again. I need to get away for a time. It could not hurt to put some distance between her and me. What way to feel more chaste than spending the time undertaking a brave and selfless mission? How better to make myself feel noble? I get ready for my drive to Pinar del Rio and go down to the Lada. The flat has been fixed, and when I start the car, I notice that the tank is full.

  I never met Juan Rodriguez, who left a few weeks before I was born in ’69. Around my tenth birthday he stopped writing, and my mother stopped living. There has been not so much as a postcard in nearly twenty years. So many left in the early sixties that the neighborhood was empty for a while. This was a time of relative peace, but for those remaining from the old families it was terrible anticipating what must be coming. By ’61, the expropriations of foreign-owned property were underway, and Reforma Urbana had worked out their draconian redistribution plan. It felt like a free-for-all, a new nightmare every week: people moving into the neighborhood from East Havana and the provinces. The people from the provinces were okay. They were humble, but unaccustomed to others living on top of them.

  The ones from East Havana were the worst. Many of them hated Rodriguez unreservedly. Their contempt for the few good families remaining had been pent up all their lives. Moving into Vedado was a kind of revenge: take over the mansions of those snobby Habaneros; throw trash in the alleys and shit in the well water. They called this freedom. These were his new patients, and the idiots from MINSAP told Rodriguez that he had to treat them for free.

  These were the people that the criminal and illegitimate government told Rodriguez he had to sacrifice his private practice for, and they abused and exploited the services. After all, everything these dumb doctors did was free! Rodriguez became a puppet of the ignorant and entitled masses, held at gunpoint by the equally uneducated and exploitative soldiers, taking orders from the devil—Fidel—and that shit-eating Argentine who called himself a doctor. By 1963, half of the country’s six thousand physicians had left.

  It was 1965 when everything blew up in his face. First, Beatrice stopped paying rent. Doctor Rodriguez tried to be dignified about it; the lease would be up soon. He did not renew the lease, and still she did not move out. He paid a server to deliver an eviction notice, and in return he received a notice from the Ministry of the Interior that Beatrice Amarilys Zequeira was petitioning for tenant’s rights. The way the wheels of injustice were turning, the Ministry of Interior would be the new landlord, and she would pay them rent from now on, and there was nothing he could do about it. By ’69, he told Abuelo he had put up with the Revolution for ten years, and that was long enough.

  * * *

  In Pinar City, everyone is watching the rerun of Diana Spencer’s funeral, and if they do not have TVs they’re listening on the radio. Once in Viñales, I prefer to follow the road from town to the dark side of the valley on foot, three kilometers up a shadeless, steady slope. It helps me get in the right frame of mind. The poinsettias grow enormous on either side of the trail.

  The rains came in May. Now that it is late summer, the river that usually runs between these rocks has gone dry. From June to August, there are times you cannot climb the back way without getting covered in mud. I make my way through groves of palma real, and I can hear Abuelo’s voice from when I was a boy: La palma real is the perfect tree. Con las tablas se puede cubrir la casa completa por afuera y se pueden usar hasta para las paredes. Las pencas se usan pa’l techo, y las yaguas pa’ guardar el tabaco y p’arriba del techo. Hasta los palmiches engordan a los puercos.

  When I reach the summit of his mogote, Abuelo is sitting in the chair in front of his house. “I saw you coming an hour ago.”

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

  “Tardaste mucho en subir. ¿Todavía tienes esa gripe?”

  “No todavía, Abuelo: otra vez.”

  “Cúrate, Manolo.”

  “Me voy, Abuelo. Me voy a curar con el agua.”

  I sit with Abuelo, watching a pair of hawks spin their valley shadows into mesmeric lace. The updraft under those broad, efficient wings lets them soar and rise to the sky without flapping a feather. I rustle inside my mochila for the plastic sack and, although Abuelo does not divert his eyes from the hypnotic patterns of the hawks, a discernible tremor in the flesh of his temple makes me smile.

  “Te traje un poco de chocolate, Abuelo. Es Bélgico—el mejor del mundo.”

  “Nunca te olvidas de mi, Manolo. Nunca!”

  I help him unwrap the bit of chocolate Director Gonzalez gave me. We sit quietly and watch the hawks. I listen to the sound of their wings and my grandfather’s breath.

  Emilio always told me, “When your father was young, people from all around the valley would search him out on the first of January . . . Not just because he’s a Juan, but also the son of the most respected man on any of the mogotes, and so must be the luckiest to greet for New Year’s luck.”

  Ramón is the strong one. Bernarda came next, but nobody calls her that; everyone calls her Mima. Then Arturo, and Gloria, whom everyone calls Yoya because when Manolito was little, this was all he could say. Sevilla was beautiful, with a face so pretty pink she looked like a delicate rose blossom. She died giving birth to her second child, which nobody has quite gotten over. And then there’s Manolito, casado con Lydia, and their two daughters—they live with Abuela and Abuelo. Abuela had children from the time she was sixteen until she finished with Manolito at forty. And if she had known what she was bringing into the world, she would have stopped at Sevilla, a family joke for more than twenty-five years which has become ossified: it is now funny because it is so not funny.

  A crazy whoop that would shame Tarzan echoes up the trail from the valley: Manolito is coming home.

  Now that Abuelo is so old, it has fallen to the youngest to run the small rancho because he was the last to be born and never left the house. Manolito sees it as his duty to take care of them. Or maybe Abuelo and Abuela knew that the wild streak in Manolito made it important for him to stay close, so they told him they needed him to stay. Who can say? It has become an essential arrangement.

  I remember when he landed Lydia. I remember her standing quietly in the threshold the first time he brought her over, with her nicest dress and her pretty legs in her chancletas, and he spread his arms wide like a carnival hawker in an old movie and shouted, as if to drill it into her head and make it her own thought, “¡Mira, una casa con piso y to’!” as if all she could want in this world would be built on that house with a floor and everything.

  I almost wished she would wise up and break it off, but he rushed the wedding and got her pregnant before she realized what she had gotten into. She was awestruck by his cockiness—which she mistook for confidence—and his brazenness—which she attributed to intelligence. In reality Manolito is just an ignorant guajiro so crazy as to shout at the world, even as he drinks himself deeper and deeper into a hole to hide from the ever-multiplying fears of all that he misunderstands. It is an unspoken certainty that she would, could, and probably should leave him—were it not for the old folks. Otherwise, not even their two beautiful daughters would be a force strong enough to stop her. Nobody doubts she would take the girls with her, and she would be completely justified, for the love a mother bears her children and for their own safety, carajo. Nobody would fault her. Manolito is crazy, just plain crazy. Poor Lydia—could she have known what she was getting into? But something about the larger constellation has conspired to keep her there. Manolito manages the farm and takes care of his aging parents, who in turn help with the girls, and all the while Lydia somehow manages to half-tame wild Manolito. A perfect arrangement for everyone, except for miserable Lydia.

  “¡Mi sobrino se va pa’ la Yuma!” he shouts as he approaches. “¿Y ahora eres revolucionario? �
�Singa’o! ¡Esto no tiene nada que ver con esos hijos de puta en la Habana y su jodío comunismo!” This has nothing to do with those sons of bitches in Havana and their screwed-up Communism. A brief explosion, but one that doesn’t even make my heart race anymore. Como los huracanes de Agosto en la Habana, I know that as long as you diminish your own reaction, it will blow by and the streets will be dry before anyone has time to go inside for an umbrella.

  First Manolito looks in on his mule to make sure she made it home from town all right. He has no reason to worry, because it was she who carried him, but it seems right and proper to him to check her feet for stones and her ears for any new nicks or bite marks. “Buena, buena Moronga.”

  He tells me for the hundredth time, “Se llama Moronga, pero el Chino le dice Lapinga.” El Chino needing no explanation as another of his drink-drank-drunk buddies from town who finds it funny to call everything a variation on a near-homophone to penis.

  In Pinar there is food. We grow yuca, guanábana, y matas grandes de flor de pascuas que vendemos en el pueblo pa’ las fiestas. Malanga, tabaco, arroz, frijoles. In Pinar my family shares modest meals, but as Abuelo says, there is always food for a feast. Abuela and Lydia go about preparing one in my honor. There is puerco asado, congris, and fried yucca seasoned with garlic and lime. There is café from the garden for everyone but the youngest cousins, who get a splash of coffee in their milk. Manolito gives my littlest cousin a two-liter bottle to go around to the neighbors and see who is selling wine—“Que sea de platano, o de guayabita, o de caña”—even if it is made out of wood.

  Hovering over Abuelo’s shoulder, Abuela repeats her litany for my sake, but of course Lydia, washing pots, is within earshot. “Why do wives today have to talk and talk and talk so much at their husbands? He is the father of her children. She should serve him. What does talking and complaining accomplish? In sixty-nine years of marriage, Abuelo has never had to hit me—not once.” Lydia might not hear every word, but she is certainly familiar with the timbre of this matriarchal grievance.

  Abuela is too old now to do the actual serving, though she refuses to eat until Abuelo is finished. Lydia does most of the work, but Abuela insists on leaning against the counter or a high stool the entire time and remains standing while the men are served. It has always been this way, yet I only notice now since she has slowed down and passed the serving duties along to Manolito’s wife. The rest of her children have gone, and her self-exile from the meal is clearly less out of necessity than deference. Abuela interrupts herself: “¿Todavia no te has casado, Manolo? ¿No quieres tener hijos?”

  “Abuela, you got started young.”

  I will be the first of her immediate family to travel outside of Cuba, but that does not count her firstborn son. Rarely is mention made of my father. This is Abuelo’s preference, his seldom-spoken resolution of disownment, and it is also my preference. He first deserted this family when he left for Havana, and then he abandoned his pregnant wife to go to Miami, and now Abuelo knows he will never see him again.

  The wine arrives—banana, mercifully. Manolito wants a party. It is a party for the first of his cousins to go to los Estados Unidos. He pours two glasses and I sip slowly, but he goads me, prying my mouth open and tipping my chin back if he has to. He pours it right down my throat from the bottle. Lydia begins preparing a pot of ajiaco.

  After we are good and drunk and Manolito passes out, my cousin Emilio arrives. He gives me a hug and goes in to change out of his coast guard uniform. When he comes back he smells the remains of the home-filled bottle of banana wine and winks at me, “That’s going to hurt tomorrow, primo.” He crumbles up a bud and twists a joint with a tobacco leaf he borrowed from one of the curing houses. We smoke.

  “Emilio, quiero preguntarte una cosa sobre mi padre.”

  “¿En qué tú estás pensando, Mano?”

  “¿Por qué él se fué?”

  “When your father left, it was not by boat, or raft, or in the dark of night. It was a milk run, a common hopper flight that connected Varadero with Miami.”

  Emilio takes some more Colombian marijuana and tells me the story while rolling the first roach into another joint.

  “The only reason Doctor Juan Rodriguez and his young wife rented out the first floor of the house in Vedado was to get the medical practice started. It was their intent to live up on the second floor and attic for a time, and leave the first floor to a tenant, Beatrice. When his practice got on its feet and was making a modest profit, once he paid off some of the loans he had taken to make it through medical school, and once they had children and needed more space, he would be cordial and professional, and would notify the renter that he was not going to renew the lease, and then he would wish her well. First came the Reforma Urbana, when they were after his country place in La Lisa. Then the nationalizing of medical care. It didn’t stop him from marrying your mother in 1967. No elaborate honeymoons in those days, but the government gave them a discount voucher for three days and two nights at the Havana Libre.”

  Hearing this surprises me. For the first time I think of Juan Rodriguez not as an absent father I never knew, but as the man who was present with my mother at the time of my conception.

  “Finally in ’68, Fidel gave that endless speech on the Revolutionary Offensive: Con la revolución, todo; sin la revolución, nada. It looked like they would expropriate his private practice. The frustration became too much when la segunda Reforma Urbana started sniffing around your mother’s place in Vedado. All he could talk about were the thieves and parasites who had taken everything from him, and how much he hated what Cuba had turned into. Your mother couldn’t take it. In the last few weeks, it was hard to sit around the table with him. Before he left he came to Pinar and Abuelo blew up at him, told him if he abandoned his wife that Abuelo would no longer consider him a son.”

  The rooster’s crow cleaves my splitting headache. “My father’s pharmacy in Miami, do you have the telephone number?”

  Emilio squints at me. “Are you planning on coming back, primo?”

  “I just want to call him from the conference,” I assure him. Thanks to the emergent hangover, I think it sounds just pathetic and credible enough.

  Emilio shakes his head. “Forget it, Mano. Some questions have no answers.”

  * * *

  In the dawn hours, Manolito seems to be snoozing, blacked out, but I know better. Emilio has managed to miss the self-destructive drunk, and therefore also the hangover. “Don’t be fooled. You should never get too close to him when he gets like this.”

  “Believe me, I know. Get me a stick.”

  You could argue I should just let him sleep, but it will only make things worse. He will get so deep into his hangover that he’ll awaken without wanting a drink, and then it’s two or three days of dark, dangerous moods. Better to wake him now and keep him drinking so that he can remain a semifunctioning farmer and we can get some jobs done before I have to head back to Havana.

  “Dip the stick in sugar water and hold it to his lips.” Sure enough, he sucks the stick, and in a minute is on his feet.

  I think about the way Manolito walks, before all the banana wine made him assume a constant, comical jig; a clownish saunter I presume started as a cover for his chronic inebriation, but gradually assumed a life of its own as his way of navigating the world of the sober. Awake, only a little hungover, and just about to get drunk again: this is Manolito at his finest, the sweet, gentle uncle I love, who as a teenager once made it on foot all the way up and back from the Tope de Viñales in one day. I saw it with my own eyes, aided by Abuelo’s binoculars.

  Deliverance comes served in a plastic cone. Lydia reserves this receptacle exclusively for the morning-after restorative stew. Men sitting around all crudos cannot be trusted with plates, bowls, or even spoons. You cannot set the cone down to rest until you have emptied all the contents, so focusing on holding it upright helps fend off the vertigo. Manolito and I each get an inverted clown’s cap to clutch beside th
e coals of last night’s fire, and we sip the only potion known to remedy our hammering headaches. Ajiaco is a wonder that defies medical explanation, a steaming thick broth, chunks of malanga, and every last cut of pig. I find myself chewing on a bit of gristle, and when I pull it out of my mouth I have to choke back a gag when I find it’s the snout.

  Manolito asks, “¿Tú sabes lo que dicen de los puercos, Mano?”

  “¿Qué?”

  “You can eat every part of the pig except the—” a pounding assault on my head as Manolito maniacally squeals.

  It has been this way since the summer I turned eleven and I started calling Viñales home: ajiaco served in plastic cones. And when I turned fifteen and my uncles first got me drunk, I learned how to clutch the cone against la cruda, and Tio Manolito has always been here to nurse me, sadistically, through the hangover. We come back to the bohío and Lydia has oranges for us, floating in cool water in a metal bowl I once brought her from Havana. Manolito takes his tarnished knife and spins the peel off in one long corkscrew that he throws to the chickens, and then he splits it and gives me half. While I separate the sections the way I was taught en el pre, he squeezes his half straight into his mouth and, using his front teeth as a shovel, scrapes back over the pith and sucks out the fruit. Manolito gives Lydia a slap on the ass and bellows a great “¡CóÑOOOOOO!” and I laugh, and I love my uncle again.

  “Ten cuidado por ahí,” Abuelo says as I prepare to leave.