“You came here as an enemy. Nevertheless, there is something that I wish you to understand. Not speaking as your father—because who can claim fatherhood with three decades of absence?—but as a man, a serious, moral, free man, I say of these people you work for: they took our lives away. You have become a human sacrifice for Communism: you rendered your life worthless for this. And what have they done for you? Twenty years of brainwashing, plus eight more of a worthless career in medicine where you get paid less than a cab driver. And now that you are no longer useful to them, they leave you here to rot.”
It may sound delirious to him, but I must exert my focus to speak. My voice is hoarse: “I was there at the Copacabana. I was powerless to help him. He was thirty-two years old, just four years more than me.”
My father shakes his head. He pays no attention to my raving.
“A chunk of ashtray pierced his carotid. I saw him bleed to death on the floor of the restaurant. Y ahora . . .” I think of the ones to come. Hundreds of innocent victims. Tourists as well as employees—Cubans without a penny to their names sleeping in the basement. I am trying to say that one of them is my patient and she’s pregnant, but I cannot form the words. There are other things I’d like to say as well. You and Mamá on your honeymoon. Three days and two nights at the Havana Libre. Carlos is standing right outside the doorway, listening, and I have difficulty saying it. Finally, I hear myself say, “Tú y Mamá. Tres días y dos noches—”
“¡Cállate la boca!” he shouts savagely.
Carlos glances in for a moment. Between us with his back to Carlos, my father looks at me very strangely. This is the first time he has locked eyes with me, and I have a flash of dread similar to when I watched as the young Italian’s life was extinguished. “You know, Manolo, in the beginning stages of dehydration a person loses a lot of body mass, 10 to 15 percent, just before the greatest risk.” He swivels to look into the mirrorless medicine cabinet. Carlos returns to his post to pretend he’s not listening. Clearly but dispassionately, like an automaton, my father says, “Este baño me recuerda el baño en la casa de tu madre.” This reminds me of the bathroom in your mother’s house.
My father turns and leaves the bathroom without giving me a last look. Carlos shuts the door and turns up Radio Mambí.
SÁBADO, 13 SEPTIEMBRE
Mercedes
The encounter with the tourist leaves Mercedes with a terrible feeling. She wonders if she should tell the management. Would they offer to replace the shirt for him if she brought it to their attention? Or would they take the cost of a new dress shirt out of her own salary? Surely it would cost as much as her first month’s wages. She looks at the shirt. With a scrub brush, some bleach, and a minor miracle, she could get the spot out.
Merecedes considers how strange it is that the tourist managed to get the kind of stain a man makes when he absently inserts an uncapped pen into his breast pocket, but that the shirt still has the creases of folds straight from the store. It is a ruined shirt that has never been worn.
MIAMI: THE ROOM
Waiting, raving, for hours through the night. A jumble of impressions. The flies. The smell of day-old shit. The cacophony of Radio Mambí. This bathroom. Why would my father say, This reminds me of the bathroom in your mother’s house? It is actually nothing like that bathroom, which is now Beatrice’s bathroom, with its claw-foot tub, its double sinks, its ornate fixtures, and the large closet with the laundry chute. And he never called it your mother’s house, even that day when we first spoke over lunch at the Habana Vieja restaurant, a day we still trusted each other.
I am outside the door trying to get in. There are two voices in there, two versions of my father.
We’re coming, they say.
Come now, I tell them.
It will be soon, hold on.
Not sure I can hold on.
The sun shines so hot on my back, which part of me knows is impossible in the shady hallway, but I reason to myself that the roof has been torn off. The sun beats hot on my back and I am in so much pain, every wiggle of a finger sends agony ricocheting all through my central nervous system. I would do anything to get out of the sun. Take off my own skin and use it as a blanket to cover my head. But I am too, too weak. If I can wake up, fully wake up, I might be able to stand, reach the knob, turn it, go in. Well, I can wake up. I can feel it. I can fully make myself awake. Fully awake. And with a great exertion of focus and what faculties remain, I do.
When the ceiling spins into focus, I see I am inside already. Oh, that’s good. But where is my father? I hear the blaring of the radio, and I remember. There is someone out there who will gladly give me a thump on the head if I even touch the doorknob. I can hear him breathing in the break between songs.
Reminds me of the bathroom in your mother’s house. He was calling my attention to it. I want to tell you something before I leave. Enough! I am only confusing myself, when all that is left is to give them the words José Martí Park, or to quietly let myself disappear—probably both. I will die, and she will die. And all of a sudden, I am struck by a crazy idea. An absolutely crazy idea.
DOMINGO, 14 SEPTIEMBRE
The Tourist
He has been patient. There is a convergence of conferences the week of the fourteenth, and by Monday morning the hotel will be at maximum occupancy. The coke courses through his aorta, and his conscience has never been cleaner. There is a utility corridor in the subbasement that runs along the entire north side, the downhill wall of the hotel. Two charges is all it will take to sweep the hotel’s legs out from under it. Like felling a tree, the entire building will collapse downhill.
It will make a spectacular sight for anyone fortunate enough to be in a position to see it at this early hour. A couple of workers at Coppelia, perhaps, churning ice cream or cleaning in preparation for opening, or the projectionist at Cine Yara, who has arrived early to prepare the week’s reels, might hear the explosion and look up. Immediately after the explosion, it will be silent for a few seconds, and then the entire structure—he estimates from reading construction manuals more than a million tons of concrete, glass, and steel—will groan and list gruesomely in the direction of el Malecón and fall like a thirty-story domino. The lobby and everything down to the subbasement will be decimated, and the upper twenty-seven floors as well as ten surrounding blocks of Vedado will also be destroyed by the fall.
He looks out the window. Most guests at the Havana Libre look straight to the ocean and say, What a beautiful view! He pulls his chin to his chest and looks straight down at Calle M. The soundproof glass makes the children playing and the old people leaning from their second-floor windows look like the first shot of a silent film. He counts up the streets and makes an educated guess. The room he is sitting in right now should fall just about on Calle P, on the roof of that house with the peeling red paint. He turns to look at the bed, wonders who will be sleeping in it Monday morning. A Spaniard? A Canadian? Another Salvadoran? A sympathizer, he reminds himself, whatever the nationality. The guest who will be here that morning will wake with a start. Did he hear thunder? And then he will feel his bed lurching slowly to the right. He will be rolled out of bed, but it will not be his bed’s fault.
He closes the curtains and bathroom door, lays all the materials on the bed again, and makes the final preparations with the TV turned down low. He unfolds the diagram and spreads it on the bed. The bedcover is an awful pattern of green and gold squares that remind him of the chambers of a honeycomb. They invoke thoughts of the necessity of interlocking structures—and of the fragility of architecture when engineers cut corners. There is the floor plan of the sublevel along with the plinth, crosshatches made with red felt-tip marker at the two points indicated by the client.
Next he takes out the two travel alarm clocks. He is meditative, almost in a trance, placing them at the top corners of the diagram. He wants to visualize this spatially, in microcosm. He takes the detonator pins and bell and attaches two wires to the ends, and the other
ends he twines around the terminals on a nine-volt battery and caps with black tape.
Finally, he takes the two banana-shaped sections of gray putty and rolls them into neat balls of equal size, placing them alongside the two travel clocks. Here on this rough fabric, on a space no more than three meters square, rests the fate of hundreds upon hundreds of human lives. It could be more than a thousand. The body count will be a measure of his success.
The feeling he gets is tremendous when he contemplates what he knows in his heart: how a man, a Salvadoran man, can kill Communism. Comunista—he hates the word. Kill them. He has already killed Communists, and now he will kill Communism. He laughs out loud, convulsing with a brief sob he catches in his throat: not sorrow, but another emotion, something more akin to scorn or contempt for how easy it is, with a little bit of plastic and a ten-dollar travel clock, to alter history. To show the world. To beat the devil. To bring in a new world. To deliver the fatal blow.
The power to kill not just Communists, but Communism itself. And, of course, he is aware of the power that money brings—the money that will come to him out of this will be enough to start a business in San Salvador. No longer just the son of a lowly pupusa vendor, he will have more power than Cruz Abarca, the car dealer/bomb-broker who hired him. He will be as powerful, among Salvadorans, as the unknown men in Miami who fund it.
He emerges from his reverie when he realizes that the TV has been carrying a report on his failed compatriot. He catches only the last part: . . . ha confesado de haber puesto la bomba en la Copacabana . . . The Cubans have finally acknowledged it was a bomb, and Rambo has confessed. Before he can learn more, the newscaster is on to the next story. He is so excited that he decides to go down to the lobby right then and see whether it is also in the newspapers. He puts the sign on the door: No Molestar. He is wearing the tennis shoes, not the boots.
All of Havana is alert to the danger of public spaces, and he has learned over the past week that his hotel is no exception: A suitcase is left unattended and hotel security flocks to the scene with their cheap suits and earpieces. Or something as simple as somebody leaving a hamburger uneaten, and the entire restaurant staff goes on high alert—what could have happened? Is somebody complaining to a manager?
There is a heightened awareness that comes with his assignment, but he knows he can use this to his advantage: How many complaints does each employee get pardoned? Who is keeping track? It would be easier to track who is not keeping track. Nobody. Nobody wants to be at the bottom with their neck sticking out when the time comes for a sacrifice to management. No severance. No pension. Do not be the one they make an example. They are thinking about how quiet it is, and how suddenly this quiet can be ripped like silk by lightning on a sunny day. Their hearts are already pounding with thunder.
He notices these things. He counts the occupants and the employees. He takes note of these numbers dispassionately. He exercises his capacity for indifference. This tourist might not be staying here tomorrow. This housekeeper likely will still be here. It makes no difference to him. The client wants it to be on Monday the fifteenth, when 630 rooms will be at capacity, in the early-morning hours.
In the lobby, potted palm trees create an indoor jungle. There are newspapers from London and Madrid as well as the ubiquitous Granma. He finds a short report in the Cuban newspaper that covers up at least half the story—how the captured Salvadoran would have killed many more, for instance, had he not been so inept. The article rushes to point the blame at Cubans in Miami, which of course is legitimate, anybody could have told you that, but now they have a Salvadoran’s mouth to put it in, and it’s not just Castro and Robaina frothing at the teeth as usual.
The photograph of Rambo is precious. ¡Qué guaje! That, the tourist says to himself, is how a coward makes the news. Today is Sunday, September 14. Tomorrow, they are planning a television confession. Poor Rambo will be shitting his pants under the stern gaze of the director of State Security, the man the tourist knows must right now be looking for him. He delights in the certainty that before they can show their pathetic television confession for the clumsy job that Rambo made—lucky that he killed one Italian—there will be news of a much bigger impact.
MIAMI: THE ROOM
The moon is almost full, and I examine the cabinet by the light coming through the frosted glass. The box is approximately ten centimeters deep. An adult at his most dehydrated, his most emaciated, is thicker than this. With just ten centimeters, my skeleton alone would get stuck. But I have to consider that the shelf depth is probably only half the space of the cavity in the wall. There would have to be room for the pipe chase or for the back of another cabinet to butt up against this one. Twenty centimeters, then. I might never have considered breaking glass to hurt myself, but by taking the mirror off the front of the cabinet they gave me the idea of using the pipe chase to escape. This makes sense: an American two-by-four plus room for the pipes—eight inches, maybe. Twenty centimeters of space to work with.
There are only six nails keeping the cabinet from getting pulled off its ledge, and I am easily able to back these out of the drywall. Now I should be able to slide the cabinet out of its box in the wall—
Stop! Put the nails back! They could come any time, and if they look closely they might see that I have tampered with the cabinet.
No, I tell myself, careful in my near-delirium not to speak aloud, there is no turning back. Cheap construction; cheap American construction—or was it that they have already been loosened? It seems possible: they might have been removed with a hammer claw, then replaced with slightly smaller nails reinserted in the holes loosely enough to pull free with the fingertips.
My heart in my throat; I pry at the sides and the cabinet shimmies out of the wall. When it is free of the framing I concentrate on lowering it gently to the floor. I cannot let this cabinet drop, and I am afraid to look because I know that any remaining hope depends on what I find lies behind.
I look inside the box and let out a sigh of despair. The rectangular hole left by the cabinet is approximately forty-by-fifty centimeters, about the dimensions of one of those family-sized boxes of cereal my father likes to buy, and the space behind the two-by-four construction is about as deep as the box of Raisin Bran I ate. It cannot be more than twenty centimeters deep.
Fifteen percent of body weight in just three days. That would put me from sixty-three kilograms to fifty-five. Hard to believe, but possible. Now that I have begun, there is no turning back. There is no way of putting the cabinet back without them noticing the damage to the drywall.
When I stand up on the sink to get my feet in position to step backward into the darkness, I see a flashlight beam pointing up the pipe chase from the basement. I shrink back in fear, but a flicker of understanding turns to revelation. The light is not moving. The reason the beam is so still is that it is propped up on the floor inside the wall. It has been left there to shine the way. My father is two hundred miles away in Tampa on purpose. I silently say, Thank you, and like a boy spying on his depressed and bedridden mother from the laundry chute in her bathroom, I step inside the wall.
The human head is close to twenty-five centimeters long, but just eighteen wide, so I have to choose a direction to face sideways if I am going to be able to slide down. I go in face-right. Goodbye, room. Goodbye, shit smell. If there is one thing that propels me feet-first into the hole, it is this image I hold of Mercedes.
DOMINGO, 14 SEPTIEMBRE
Mercedes
It’s a good thing that the ink was blue and the shirt was bright white so she could use bleach. Although it is as good as new, she never got the room number of the guest. He may have even checked out already. While she is trying to decide what to do with the shirt, she gets the idea to ask the head of housekeeping. Maybe the man, who was so irritated by losing his shirt, did make a complaint, and the head of housekeeping will remember and know how to find him, return the clean shirt. She takes the shirt with her and rides the service elevator up
to the main level to a little windowless room where the head of housekeeping, armed with a telephone, a two-way radio, and a computer connecting her to the front desk, manages to get all the rooms cleaned before check-in time, four p.m., on any given day for arriving guests.
When Mercedes peeks around the corner, however, the head of housekeeping has stepped away from her desk, and so as not to call attention to herself she turns quickly to return to the subbasement, but when she looks across the lobby—qué casualidad—she sees him, the guest, in the lobby, near the garden, reading the newspaper. She hesitates and glances behind the front desk. The desk captain, a pretty black woman, is tapping something into a computer keyboard and has not yet noticed Mercedes. She is not helping a guest.
Consistent with Yorki’s advice and her own first few days’ experience, the desk staff have proven haughty and contemptuous to everyone in service except for the head of housekeeping. Clutching the shirt on a hanger, Mercedes comes to a decision.
To get the desk captain’s attention, she says. “Perdóname—”
“Haven’t you learned to use the subfloor entrance?” the desk captain interrupts.
“Excuse me. I just wanted to return this shirt, but the guest forgot to give me his room number.”
“And this is my problem how?”
She points through the palms. “That’s him over there.”
The pretty desk captain looks slyly at Mercedes, one woman to another. “How long have you been in Havana?”
Intuiting her implication, Mercedes looks down at the floor. “One week. Soy de Pinar.”
“Mm. It shows. Well, he’s been here almost two weeks, traveling alone. Unusual last name: Salvadoran, starting with a J.” She types something into the computer to jog her memory. “Yes, here he is. Room 1317. Go hang it in his closet.”
“Thank you, but I’m down in laundry. To gain access to the room I would have to find the head of housekeeping.”
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