Although I still feel tired, these details finally convince me that she is fine. All the people in and around the Havana Libre are fine, and I finally believe it. Everyone is safe.
“We were getting chatter about José Martí from several sources. More than half of our agents were at the airport. It was incapacitating: daily searches of the facility, from top to bottom, not to mention all the air traffic and passengers passing in and out. There were of course small teams at major tourist centers, but with over two hundred hotels and restaurants in Havana, we were spread very thin. Once we received credible intelligence that the target was the Havana Libre, we were able to deploy two bomb squads just in time. They quickly determined the locations of the devices, which were crude but could have been lethal—massively lethal.”
“How did you get the intelligence in time?”
“A voice mail.”
“When I called, there was a recording that said the number was disconnected.”
“The message came in the night. We had the number disconnected after we knew we had the right information about the target.”
“¿Pero cómo? ¿Quién?”
Pérez fixes my gaze. “It would appear it was your father who left the message.”
“Cóño . . .” I let that sink in. Dazed, I tell Pérez, “He helped me escape.”
“I suspected that might be the case.”
“How did he know the number of the voice mail?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you. Was there a time he would have seen you dial it or seen it written? Maybe when Mendoza made you call that time . . . ?”
“He watched me push the buttons; he watched Carlos write it.”
“His message, partially, was, Hotel Havana Libre, very soon, early this morning, I think. This was immediately relayed to Havana, and we had a bomb squad at the hotel within minutes.”
“Will he be okay?”
“Your father left the message from a pay phone.He made it to Tampa, two hundred miles away, at the time of your escape. Did you leave behind any evidence that could implicate him?”
I took the flashlight, the T-shirt, and the coconut water. I am still wearing the Nikes. And Carlos heard our entire conversation. This reminds me of the bathroom in your mother’s house. “I don’t think so.”
“Good.” Pérez does not hesitate with his calculations. No doubt his analysts have provided him with thirty-seven possible scenarios for what might happen next. “A certain asset you have, doctor, is that you know nothing of Giro or la Red Avispa.”
“You’re saying there’s an entire network?”
Pérez ignores this. “Mendoza learned nothing new, and we crushed what should have been the Revolution’s death blow. He will keep what has happened to you a secret for as long as it is convenient, and until we can get the recruiter, so will we.”
I swoon with vertigo from a flash of what Pérez might be getting at. “How long do I have to stay on this boat?”
“Just a few more hours, until your flight lands.”
“My flight?”
“Your return from the approved trip to Tampa.”
“What am I supposed to tell people about the conference?”
“Unfortunately, you got food poisoning. You hardly left your room.” True enough, I reflect with bitter satisfaction. “Here, for your cousin—you got these at the Miami airport before your return flight.” Pérez gives me a small stack of American magazines: soccer, motorsports, and boating.
“If this is as close as I am ever likely to get to an apology from you, colonel, I would like to tell you that in no way do I accept it.”
“Listen, Manolo, I know that our trust has been compromised, but I would like to offer you something to assure you of my personal confidence in you. It’s classified. To be quite honest, Caballero instructed me that under no circumstances was I to discuss this detail with you. Your father also left a brief personal message that seems to be intended for you.” He has my attention. “In its entirety, the exact transcript of the recording was: Hotel Havana Libre, very soon, early this morning, I think. Tell him to listen to the Bola.”
Pérez is such a considerate gentleman with me, his staked goat, that he knows the resultant curiosity must lead to a strong impulse—the yearning to get the record and try to figure out what the message means. Then he says, “I apologize for keeping you here all day.” The way he says this makes me appreciate that all along he has been calling the shots: whether to send me to Miami, how to allow me to get captured, whether to attempt a rescue or let death take me. And I do not take it in the least personally, because I apprehend that the only way to make decisions in his position is with the calculus of massive fatalities. But just because I don’t take it personally does not mean that I hate him any less.
I hear footsteps on deck and look up the wooden ladder. Pérez rises to leave. I see her coming feet first. If I had stood up I would have fallen over.
“How was your conference?” she says.
My head feels heavy when I wheel to face Pérez. “She knows?”
Doctora Hernández answers the question: “In fact, Doctor Rodriguez, it was my objective to evaluate you and your fitness for this mission.”
I feel dizzy and try to cast my memory back. Has it been ten days or a thousand years since Hernández’s first shift at the hospital? She wore this same cool demeanor and these same snug jeans, but all I see in my mind’s eye is Director Gonzalez’s simpering grin. Why hadn’t I seen it at the time? He had been on a sycophantic high. Some minister threw him a table scrap and told him to hire this hotshot new psychiatrist. Who cares that what the pediátrico really needs is surgeons and ER staff? If someone higher up at the Ministry of Health wants it, it’s good for Gonzalez. Meanwhile in the break-room broom closet, Hernández sized me up with her hijacked skills of psychoanalysis for a desperate and double-blind counterespionage job that had a high probability of failure. In baseball, I would be called a sacrifice fly. And Gonzalez, without knowing it, had set me up. Hijo de puta este Gonzales.
They give me a moment to recover.
“Are you okay?” Hernández finally asks.
“Cabrón,” I say.
Doctora Hernández gives me a little smile. They know I am referring to myself, and we leave it at that.
A slight readjustment of her shoulders to indicate her resumed role, and Hernández repeats, “How was your conference?”
I take a deep breath. “Boring. I had to stay shut up in my room the whole time.”
“The whole time? That’s a very American exaggeration!”
“Diarrhea, dehydration. First chance to visit la Yuma, and I get food poisoning.”
“Food poisoning? I thought the Americanos had eradicated such ailments.”
“If that were the case, there would be no more need for doctors.”
“No, verdad?” Breaking character, she says, “When you’re back at work, you can ask me on a date.”
“Is this part of your objective?”
Pérez interrupts: “Along these lines will do fine. Do it again Wednesday at the pediátrico.”
LUNES, 15 SEPTIEMBRE
Manolo
Night. Havana. The moon is full. When I return to Vedado, the blackout has not stopped the nightly domino game in front of my apartment. I take a long, cold shower in the dark.
After the electricity returns, I find the record: Bola de Nieve, Este sí es Bola. In the upper left, the logo and motto: Sonotone, el sello de los grandes éxitos. The record slips into my hand, but there is nothing unusual about it. Printed in the center are the songs and composers, fourteen tracks between the two sides, and the year the disk was recorded: 1960. I have flipped past the dust jacket hundreds of times. On the cover there’s a clever photograph, a portrait of el Bola, famous for his blackness, and so Rita Montaner nicknamed him Snowball: his face is almost indistinguishable from the black background, except for the unforgettable smile.
The jacket art is so black that nobody, not even
with a long passage of time, would notice the discoloring effect of the adhesive showing through the cardboard. I part the edges of the dust jacket: inside, the cellophane tape, yellowed with age, is affixed to all four edges of the folded sheet so that slipping the record in and out will not dislodge it. Tell him to listen to the Bola.
I delicately peel back the tape, thinking, If he’d left the message in the Beny Moré instead, I would have found it long ago.
The letter is dated one month before I was born.
12 July 1969
Mi querido hijo o hija,
What does one write to a son or daughter whom one might not meet until they are seven, or twenty, or never? You have to know that I will be far away, and I will be apart from you for a long time. I am leaving at a difficult period in our country, when each man and his neighbor are enemies. You will have the privilege of living in another era, and you have to be worthy of it. You must strive to be the best in school, better in every way. You know what I am trying to say. Forget me. There is something Bola de Nieve sings:
In your life I’ll be the best
Of the fog of yesterday.
When you learn to forget,
Better: like that verse
That neither one of us can remember.
In closing, I want you to know that I did not abandon you maliciously or willfully. Many thousands before me have made similar decisions over the past ten years. I think you should always be proud of your father, as I am of you.
Take care of your mother.
Juan Rodriguez
I put the record on my father’s old tocadisco and listen. The lyrics Juan Rodriguez copied in his letter before I was born are from the end of the fourth song on side A, titled “Vete de mi.” Earlier, Bola de Nieve sings:
You, who fill everything with happiness and youth,
And sees ghosts in the night of twilight,
And today are the perfumed song of blue—get away from me.
Do not stop to look at the dead branches of the rosebush
That go away without flower;
Look at love’s landscape,
That is the reason to dream and to love.
I, who have already fought against all evil,
Have ruined my hands so from holding on
I cannot hold you—get away from me.
MARTES, 16 SEPTIEMBRE
Manolo
I drop by the Havana Libre to see Mercedes.
“Buenas tardes, doctor. ¿Cómo fue la conferencia?” I try to make out the delicate curve of her abdomen beneath the maid’s uniform. She looks good, like she is starting to put on weight from the employee meals here.
“Terrible. I was shut up in my room the whole time.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, no es mentira.”
“¿Qué te pasó?”
“Un virus del estómago.”
“I’m so sorry, doctor. Your first trip . . .” Like me, she is probably thinking, Your only trip.
“It wasn’t so bad. I watched TV in a comfortable bed and took hot showers every day . . . So this is where you work?”
“Yes, they have me in the hottest room. But I drink plenty of water, and the food for employees is very good.”
“¿Y tu apetito?”
“Healthy. I saw the obstetrician. It’s too early for kicks, but sometimes I feel flutters.”
“¡Qué maravilla!”
“Mira, se está moviendo.” I feel her growing. She takes my hand and puts it on her belly. The maid’s uniform is made of rough, durable polyester, but beneath is soft, warm, and alive. Mercedes says, “I start break now. Want to go for a walk to el Malecón with me?”
“Absolutamente.”
While she changes out of the maid’s uniform, I wait in the hall clutching the eighteen dollars in my pocket.
Our walk takes us past Cafetería La Rampa, Cine Yara, and the lines outside Coppelia ice cream parlor. Mercedes wears cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, and I notice that she has the wide, careful gait of someone from the provinces. It is pleasant walking beside her and letting approaching men pass us appraisingly.
Mercedes says, “I have already saved seven dollars in tips. To celebrate my first week, I went out to Coppelia.”
“Your first time?”
“Sí.”
“¡No me digas! I hope you didn’t pay in dollars.”
“Of course not. I used pesos and waited en la cola Cubana. I went early so the wait was only ninety minutes. I was seated up in the big flying saucer on the side facing away from the Havana Libre. It was a beautiful day in the park. You should come with us next time.”
“What flavor did you order?”
“Vanilla.”
“That’s my favorite.”
“Really?” She lets me have a priceless Pinareña smile. “Hers too.”
“And you’re so sure she is a girl?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
For the remainder of our walk to the sea, there is no need for conversation because we are both Pinareños.
When we get to el Malecón, Mercedes says, “You didn’t think about staying?”
“¿Dónde, en la Yuma? ¡Qué va!”
“I wondered. Whenever anyone gets a visa for a brief visit, we always have to wonder.”
“No need to wonder with me. My principles are solid.”
“I want to go for a swim.”
I take the eighteen dollars out of my pocket and tuck the money up inside a rolled-up shirtsleeve to keep dry. Mercedes slips off her shirt to reveal a modest black bra. She climbs over to the sea wall to the rocks on the other side in her Chinese tenis and cutoff jeans, and I follow. Mercedes stands between the open ocean and me, smiling at some faraway secret.
The author is grateful for the enduring support of Jodie Jean Arellano, Ed Battistella, Gloria Maité Hernández, Miles Inada, Tyler McFarlane, Kasey Mohammad, Michael Niemann, Aaron Petrovich, and Johnny Temple.
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Excerpt: Havana Lunar
Also available by Robert Arellano from Akashic Books
About Robert Arellano
14 August 1992
It’s Friday, and when I get back to the attic I see that Julia hasn’t returned. I sit on the sofa, light a cigarette, and turn on the radio, tuning out the noise of the neighbors with the hollow metronome of Radio Reloj. “Did you know that good nutrition can be obtained from greens you can grow in your own solarium … ?” I don’t want to be up in the hot attic with the tedious banter and the beginning of a migraine, so I go downstairs and let myself into the clinic to lie on a cot. When my grandmother Mamamá died, the Reforma Urbana “reallocated” the lower floors of my father’s house: the first to a family from the provinces and the second to Beatrice, the block captain for the Comité de Defensa de la Revolución, whose eye, as the CDR symbol suggests, is always open. I had to set up a community polyclinic in the basement just to dig my heels in and hang onto the attic. Three weekends a month, legitimate cases of arthritis and herpes vie for attention with the usual complaints of mysterious pains and aches from patients who believe the only remedy is a shot of painkillers. It makes them feel a little better when they hold a doctor’s attention. I listen, letting them speak for the adrenal rush it gives them, and then I explain for the thousandth time that it is the Special Period: There is no more morphine, not even aspirin.
Alone in the empty clinic at dusk, I am resting in one of the curtained compartments when a thunderstorm breaks the heat. The shower passes quickly, briefly taking my migraine away and leaving the street outside quiet, clean, and fragrant of motor oil and rotting leaves.
I am listening to the dripping trees when I hear the crack of glass. A gentle pressure like a cold hand causes the hairs on my neck to stand, and I experience a surge of obscure fright. I part the curtain to peer at the front door of the clinic, where a gloved hand reaches through a broken windowpane and releases the lock. ¿Qué carajo? It’s common knowledge the neighborhood doctors don’t have a
ny more drugs, but a heavyset man in a dark overcoat is breaking into my clinic. He makes straight for the metal file cabinet, and I lie still, watching around the edge of the curtain. The man flips through the charts for a few minutes and leaves the clinic without taking anything, closing the door behind him. I go out through the alley and come around the front of the building to see him walking away up Calle 23. I follow him at a distance through the rain-slicked streets.
There is a hush over Havana. The moon, almost full, is rising above the bay. It is high summer, when the palms drop curled fronds that pile up on side-walks like brittle cigars. Sidestepping them, I keep the overcoat in sight. I follow the man up Infanta all the way to La Habana Vieja and down one of El Barrio Chino’s narrow, nameless alleys. He disappears through an unnumbered entrance. No light leaks from the door glass, painted black.
I slip inside the corridor and push apart the dark drapes onto a small drinking establishment. A black bartender pours beer from a tap. Sitting at the bar with his back to me, the man in the overcoat says, “Give Doctor Rodriguez one on me.” Surprised, I step out of the shadows. The man who broke into my clinic casts a glance over his shoulder to confirm my identity, looking blandly at the contusion beneath my right eye, a port-wine stain the size of a twenty-peso coin. His deep lines, pale complexion, silver hair, and mustache mark him as an autocrat of the Fidelista generation. The gray eyes and dark brow could almost be called handsome if his expression were not so stern and inscrutable. “Please have a seat, doctor. My name is Perez.”
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