“A Spaniard was killed?”
“Didn’t you hear? Now, that was a ruckus. They nearly arrested me because he’d been here the day before he was murdered.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“He was a millionaire from Spain, owned all kinds of companies over there, and loved Cuba. He’d been coming here on vacation for years, would spend months at a time. Then, about two years ago, he retired and bought a house, a big huge mansion in El Vedado. He would come by the bookstore in his car and stay for hours talking about books and eyeing the guajiros while his driver waited outside. To see him you’d think he was a saint, but in actual fact he had a thing for criminals, the lowest of the low. He’d head out to the parks, and El Chivo beach, all the worst places at night. Then, yeah, one day they found him stabbed to death in the shadows of Centro Habana. So here is my advice to you: avoid the dark spots. Best to stay in the well-lit spots.”
“The dark spots?”
“When they investigated the murder, they found out that he used to come here all the time, had been here the day before he was killed. So they came to interrogate me, thinking I must be his lover or partner in lust. They didn’t believe me when I said he just came here to buy books, and I was never with him, never went into the dark spots with him. Since they didn’t believe me, I had to go to court and testify. The good thing is, they found the guy who killed him and haven’t been back here since. But they’ve got their eye on me and could come at any time. On the bright side, I’ve got a police officer to watch over me. Isn’t that right, Reinier?”
“Ey,” Reinier said with his little grin.
“Just imagine if the police come and find another police officer. I’d say, ‘Why are you here to see me if a police officer’s already here?’”
Reinier crossed his arms, as if posing.
“Be careful out there,” Eliezer said to me. “Someone’s killing gay men. A few months ago, they found Tony Díaz, a famous theater director, knifed to death in his own home. They say it was a robbery, but I don’t believe it. As a foreigner, you need to be careful . . .”
“Anyhow, Eliezer: it’s late. Besides, it’s time for me to take a walk in the dark spots,” I said before giving him a hug and heading out to stroll down La Rampa.
A few days later, as I was preparing my class—a seminar on urban culture in Cuba for a group of Princeton students at a café in El Vedado, I had an idea. What if I took the students to the bookstore and asked Eliezer to give them a lecture? Eliezer loved to talk, and the kids could have a firsthand experience of the Cuban baroque.
I arrived at the bookstore one day in February with a group of fifteen American twentysomethings. The night before, I had asked Eliezer to clear a path through the mountains of books, so the students could congregate in the back of the house, in the roofless room. The students piled out of the van—wearing shorts, T-shirts, and running shoes—and, following Eliezer’s instructions, crossed the living room in single file, passing between piles of books, into the hallway.
“Careful: don’t step on the pregnant dog!” Eliezer shouted.
Between two stacks, I noticed a dog the same color as the floor, sound asleep, not fussed in the slightest by shoes passing dangerously close to her head. The fifteen students zigzagged between the mountains of books, stepping on copies Eliezer had placed strategically on the only path through this bibliographic jungle: La agricultura en Cuba, by Fidel Castro; Diarios de guerra, by Raúl Castro; the speech by Comandante Ernesto Guevara at a ceremony to mark the second anniversary of the Union of Young Communists. As each student walked by, the books were subject to yet another stomp that broke their spines, ripped covers off, undid their stitching, and scattered pages all over the house. The university convoy left a battleground in its wake, printed cadavers and moribund tomes attracting the dogs’ attention. Nachi walked over to one wounded notebook, sniffed it, lifted her leg, and emptied her bladder on the mess of papers.
Out in the roofless room, the students gathered around Eliezer. Nachi had followed him in and lay down at his feet. Reinier leaned against the doorjamb, as if guarding the entrance, adopting his usual cross-armed pose.
“I took a vow of poverty,” Eliezer said, “and live here with these books. I sleep on that table you saw by the entrance. There’s no bathroom or kitchen. It’s a form of protest against our leaders—who live in their mansions with their gardens and pools, and hold obscene dinner parties—to show what has happened to the people. It’s also a way to protect myself: when State Security has come, when the police have come, they walk in and see this clutter, and think surely no political activity can go on in this dump. Then they see me and think I’m crazy, and they leave me alone. Although that’s dangerous, too: they could cart me off to an insane asylum, commit me against my will. All they need is for the neighbors to sign a paper saying I’m nuts and, since they hate me, it would be a piece of cake. But that hasn’t happened yet. There’s a reason behind everything you see here. Why are there no bookshelves? You might think it’s ’cause I’m messy, but that’s not it. If I had shelves, and the books were organized by author or title, and State Security were to come here one day, they’d arrest me for possessing banned books. This way, they can come and they’ll never know what I’ve got, never find all of the books by exiles and dissidents. And since everything smells of dog, they’re not going to want to dirty their hands digging through these piles. This is a country that has wanted to control everything, but they’ll never be able to control this bookstore. Chaos has been my protector.”
“What kind of classification system,” a short plump girl began, “do you use?”
Eliezer looked at her with his impish smile. He brought his index finger to his temple and tapped several times.
“The entire classification system is here in my head. Nothing’s written down. I don’t use a computer, or a phone, or a cell phone, or any technology. The only way to speak to me, to know whether I’ve got a book, is to come here. That’s another form of protest. You’ve all heard of Yoani Sánchez, the dissident, with her blogs and her Internet accounts and all that? One day she came here wanting to write about the bookstore and to present me as a dissident. I told her she was wrong, that I worked for State Security—because she’s the one who works for them—and she left in a huff. Can you imagine? She puts me up on her blog as a dissident, and the next day Security comes and shuts me down.”
“Could I ask you, sir,” a pale reed of a girl with long legs began, “why there are no women in your bookstore? You’re male, your assistant is male, and the customers I’ve seen are male. It’s like an all-male world.”
“Of course, it’s a male world. I can’t hire women, for all kinds of reasons. First, if they see a woman working here, they’ll say she’s a whore and arrest me for being a pimp. Second, you can’t trust women. Third, have you seen how big the piles of books are? I need people to help me pick up a pile, move it, carry it from room to room, and a woman can’t do that. That’s why the guys that work here have to be strong, like the police officer watching over us,” Eliezer said, looking at Reinier.
Reinier still had that little smile on his face.
“I want to know,” the blondest of the blondes began, “why the Afro-Cuban community isn’t represented here at your bookstore.”
“You want to know why there are no blacks? Imagine if State Security were to come one day and find me with a house full of blacks. Can you imagine? That’s why I don’t hire blacks: to protect myself. Better to have this blond policeman here.”
“In your opinion,” a Puerto Rican, the brightest student of them all, began, “how will the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States, as announced by presidents Castro and Obama, affect your bookstore?”
“I need to prepare to receive the number of people who’ll be coming to the bookstore. Once the documentary comes out—a kid from the film school came here last year—it’s going to be a problem: I don’t have enough space
for everyone who’ll come. I need to get a whole army to fix the place up. Here in this room, I want to have an art gallery and also a space to screen the documentary, but that’s going to cost a lot of money. I’ve got to redo the roof and repair the other rooms. This won’t be just a bookstore: it’ll be a cultural center.”
“Tell us more about the documentary,” I said to Eliezer.
“Nothing, just one day this kid showed up and said he wants to film me, with my books and my dogs. He came with his camera and wandered around. I was afraid he might be State Security, but then I saw he really did know about making a movie, so I let him film me. He wanted me on-screen with Nachi, so she made her acting debut. Like this, see.”
Eliezer lifted Nachi up high, and the dog began to howl, her snout pointing to the sky, as Eliezer repeated the same scene as before, saying, “You’ll never snitch on me, right, Nachi?” And Nachi howled as if she could imagine the persecution.
Wooow wooow wooow wooow, Nachi bawled.
“Can I take photos?” a freckled redhead asked me, holding up her iPhone.
“When he saw this,” Eliezer continued, “he said this thing Nachi and I do is a performance. Can you imagine? A performance? I said no, it wasn’t a performance but a perroformance—get it, with my dog, my perro? He loved it, said he’d put it in his documentary. I thought that was a great name. Look, I even printed some flyers. Hey,” he called to Reinier. “Find me a couple of those leaflets we printed.”
Reinier plunged into the mountains of books and came back with a few sheets of paper in hand. Eliezer passed them out to the students: each page bore a photo of him carrying Nachi, followed by the line “Librería Perroformance” and the address.
“When the documentary airs,” Eliezer went on, “people from all over the world will come, and State Security won’t be able to do a thing about it. With so many foreigners in the gallery, I’ll be well protected.”
“Do you have any banned books?” the short chubby girl asked.
“Raúl Castro recently declared that there are no banned books in Cuba. ‘We have never banned a single book in this country,’” Eliezer mimicked Raúl in a shrill voice. “Can you believe it? They used to jail you for playing the Rolling Stones record, let alone reading dissidents and counterrevolutionaries. But I take precautions. That’s why Reinaldo Arenas’s books are hidden well away. I’m the only one who knows where they are. Not even my policeman knows. Ever since I was robbed, I don’t trust anyone.”
“You were robbed?” I asked.
“There was this guajiro from Holguín working here. I helped him out, gave him a job, and one day, when I took my pregnant dog to the vet, the ungrateful bastard disappeared with five Reinaldo Arenas novels. You can’t trust anyone anymore, not even the guajiros. Can you believe it? Someone brought me those books from Spain. They cost a fortune, and he knew it. He thought he’d be able to sell them in the Plaza de Armas. And you know what? His name was Alejandro. When I discovered he’d stolen from me, I remembered that Alejandro was the code name Fidel used when he was hiding out in the Sierra Maestra. I thought, Shit! It’s as if Fidel has come back to fuck me all over again in 2015. The kid didn’t think I’d report him, didn’t think I’d tell the police because the books were banned, but he was wrong. I just had to think very carefully about what to report so as not to get in trouble, and to keep them from locking him up, because if they threw him in jail he’d for sure rat on me. So that’s what I did, and they found him, and brought my books back, and now I’m the only one who knows where they are.”
“But the books are banned, so why did the police give them back?” asked the Puerto Rican student.
“Because that’s their modus operandi,” Eliezer replied.
Every time I went to the bookstore, it seemed as though the helpers had changed: sometimes it was Reinier; other times a tall guajiro, with sunburnt skin, who rarely spoke but was fascinated by every little thing (“From Mexico!” he said once. “Shit! From Mexico! Mexico!”); still other times I’d find some down-and-out, smelly, marginal types sitting out on one of the low walls, guys who would never speak to customers.
“You’re going to love this,” Eliezer said with an exceptionally impish smile one day when I had been walking around El Vedado with Antón Arrufat and we stopped in the bookstore to browse.
Eliezer didn’t plunge into the bookish mountains this time, didn’t pull out a banned novel or a catalog from a censored exhibit: he went into the living room and came back out with a good-looking young man. He looked like Tintin, thin, with a boyish face. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
As an introduction, Eliezer said, “This Leonardo DiCaprio is from Bayamo and newly arrived in Havana. He has a girlfriend and a son, and you wouldn’t believe what a hit he is with the foreigners. Ever since he started working here, the store is overrun by Spaniards and Italians. The bad thing is they don’t always buy books: they want to buy him, but he’s not for sale.”
“Alberto,” the young man said in a steady voice as he shook my hand.
Antón was watching all of this. He would pretend to look out into the street or at the books, but he was taking sidelong glances at Alberto.
“If this young man were to come to my house every afternoon, and sit for me for a couple of hours, oh, how I could write! I’d be done with my novel within two months,” Antón said under his breath as he continued to look out at the street.
A glint flashed in Eliezer’s eyes, the way it did whenever he found something amusing. Alberto, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice and began to tidy the books on the table.
“If you could see the way his girlfriend watches his every move,” Eliezer said. “She calls him all the time, and if he doesn’t answer because he’s with a customer or carrying a pile of books, she gets mad and throws a fit when he gets home. ‘What are these numbers in your phone?’ she asks. And that’s my fault; since I don’t have a phone, I ask him to save customers’ numbers in his. Then, when she checks his phone, she imagines the worst and loses it. Hey,” he called out to Alberto. “Come here and show us that video of your son.”
Alberto left the books on the table and walked over to us. He pulled out his phone, slid one finger up the screen, then two, and opened a video of a one-year-old wearing shorts and a T-shirt, dancing—though he could barely stand—and wiggling his hips, some trees in a park in the background. A voice off camera—likely his mother’s—was saying, “Rey, un pasito, un pasito pa’ cá, un pasito pa’ llá. Shake your little hips, Rey.”
“You’ve got to see this,” Eliezer said.
And the video continued of the little boy who had clearly just learned to stand on two feet rather than crawl on all fours.
“Rey,” the voice came, now clapping along to the boy’s moves. “Let’s see, Rey, one, two. Come on, Rey, baby, show your little belly, go on now.” And Rey, teetering, lifted up his little T-shirt with one hand as he wiggled his hips, revealing his tummy and belly button. “Pull it higher, pull it higher,” the voice said, and Rey kept lifting his shirt until his little nipples were exposed.
“Did you see that?” Eliezer asked, amused. “Cuban mothers teaching their kids to hustle. A one-year-old male stripper.”
Alberto seemed more interested in the video than in Eliezer’s comments, his proud-papa eyes never leaving the phone.
“Do you see just how far hustling goes in this country? From the time they can walk, they’ve got them out flashing in parks.”
A customer arrived and put an end to the show. Eliezer went off to greet him, plunging into the mounds of books in the living room.
“So how did you come to Havana?” I asked Alberto.
“That,” he replied, turning back to his work tidying up the table, “is a very long story, one I’ll save for another day.”
Seeing him so focused, organizing books into a grid, Antón said: “Young man, tell me: do you like to read?”
“No,” Alberto said. “I don’t have time.
There’s always so much to do here: put everything out front away before we close, pack it in boxes, and put it all back out the next day when the store opens. Then, during the day I need to help Eliezer pick up books and deliver orders.”
“Why don’t you try poetry? It only takes a minute to read a poem, and you can do that whenever you take a break,” I proposed.
“Especially if it’s a poem like The Iliad or The Odyssey,” Antón said.
Alberto looked at me, intrigued, as if I were speaking of a far-off land.
“Look,” I said, walking over to one of the shelves near the entrance, glancing at titles until I came across Dulce María Loynaz’s Obra poética. I picked it up and opened it to a page at random.
“Here’s a poem by Dulce María Loynaz,” I said. “See how short it is? We could read it right now, while waiting for Eliezer to come back. This one’s called ‘Si me quieres, quiéreme entera.’ It’s a love poem.”
Alberto looked at the page with interest.
“That’s not a love poem: it’s a horror story, especially here, in the midst of all these dogs,” Antón said.
I stood shoulder to shoulder with Alberto and began to read aloud:
“‘If you love me, love all of me / not only the parts in light or shadow . . . / If you love me, love me black / and white. And gray, and green, and fair, / and dark—’”
“Gray and green?” Antón interrupted. “What was Loynaz thinking? Have you ever seen a gray and green woman walking down the street?”
“‘Love me day, love me night . . . / And early morning in the open window! / If you love me, don’t fragment me: / Love all of me . . . Or don’t love me at all!’”
“God, she’s demanding. You can’t love that woman in bits and pieces,” Antón said.
Alberto took the book in his hands and reread the poem, silently, absorbed, his lips moving, forming the syllables and words in every verse, without speaking. As I watched him, I remembered that passage in which Saint Augustine describes Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading in silence, and it seemed so strange to him to see this gentleman bent over a book, engrossed in reading, not speaking or making any noise, because at the time everyone read aloud. “His eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent,” wrote Augustine. That’s what Alberto was like, as still and as mute as Ambrose: he looked like a child learning to read, stumbling, forming syllables, words, clipped phrases that seemed to be made more of sound than meaning, until, all of a sudden, out of the gibberish came a recognizable phrase, which he would repeat clearly and fluently. We stood like that for some time, watching Alberto as he sounded out the syllables in silence: if . . . you . . . love . . . me.
Cuba on the Verge Page 24