Havana Noir

by Achy Obejas

  Somebody else can take care of the thief at 503 La Rosa Street. I could never get my hands on even two drops of sodium monofluoracetate, and I could never actually kill another human being. Perhaps they would have never found me out, but I’m glad that crook Francisco lives on and can still hope to change. I will, from here, far from Cuba, try to reconstruct my soul from its own sense of hope, which is only possible where there’s light.

  MURDER, ACCORDING TO MY MOTHER-IN-LAW

  BY ARTURO ARANGO

  El Cerro

  for Achy, guilty

  Her name was Lucrecia, they called her Pupy, and my mother-in-law couldn’t stand her from the moment we met because it was rumored all over the neighborhood that what she liked most were black men. Whenever her name came up, my mother-in-law would make a face and say, “That pig.”

  Arguing with my mother-in-law is one of my favorite pastimes.

  As far as we knew, the black men that popular opinion attributed to Pupy came down to just one: Guillermo, the father of her younger children, a strapping, smiling man who had once been a police officer, and with whom Pupy lived a few blocks from our house.

  “He is a great guy,” I’d tell my mother-in-law.

  “He’s better than her,” she’d concur. “But she’s still a pig.”

  Pupy’s oldest boy, whose father we had never met, had blue eyes and lived with his grandparents, right across the street from our house.

  I was at the stadium the night “it all happened,” as my motherin-law says, always reluctant to actually let out of her mouth words such as cancer, or murder, believing that by not pronouncing them, she can keep these misfortunes from herself and her family.

  To live in Havana and say “the stadium” means only one thing: the Latinoamericano, an ancient structure that’s been renovated over and over, and which, in extreme cases, can hold up to 150,000 people. At my age, I prefer the comfort of the rocking chair and the TV, with coffee in hand during the breaks, and the bed nearby for when a game gets boring. But during each playoff series, I keep a ritual of going at least once to that place which is both circus and temple, to become part of the spectacle that takes place in the bleachers.

  The championship was being decided and the same two rivals were facing off as always: the most arrogant of teams, the one that can’t stand to not make it to the postseason, the one that’s so worshipped, protected, spoiled—and whose name will never come out of my mouth and I will refer to only as Las Ratas—and Santiago de Cuba, in which I always place my hopes, and always support.

  Luis Lorente had been calling me since Friday night to remind me that Santiago would not be back again to play at the Latino after this because Las Ratas had very little chance of reaching even the quarterfinals that year. The stadium might be closed until November, at which time the next tournament would begin.

  Saturday morning, I returned his call: I’d go by his house an hour before the game. After talking to Luis, I agreed to another duty I found considerably less pleasant: I took my mother-in-law grocery shopping.

  Markets make me weary, and my mother-in-law says the same things week after week when she gets back in the car with a handful of scrawny scallions and a pale pumpkin. It’s true that prices keep going up and that she’s the one who cooks for the whole family, but living through those Saturday excursions—watching her make faces when she squeezes the avocados or cabbage, or the anxious way she pulls the wrinkled bills from her wallet, without any certainty about what she’s actually handing the cashier—it’s like sinking in an endless swamp.

  There were a few other things she wanted to buy (cooking oil, a can of pimientos for Sunday’s chicken and rice), and so on the way home I took a detour to the Villa Panamericana. Coming down the main avenue, I looked over at what used to be called Plaza de las Banderas (a string of empty flag posts pretends to justify the name) and saw some of the players from my team who were staying at a nearby hotel in that fairly new and somewhat pretentious neighborhood. I thought that if Luis Lorente had been there, I might have gone over to talk to them. But it’s not especially easy for me to approach people I don’t know (or, more precisely, people who don’t know me).

  I let my mother-in-law go into the store by herself and asked her to come get me when she was done at the place on the corner, a small glass square, like everything in the Villa, where they sold beer by the liter. There were two people waiting to be served. I did my duty and asked who was the last in line: The mulatto who turned to respond struck me as familiar. He looked back, searching for the table where some folks were waiting for him, and I recognized his features from TV: Orestes Kindelán. I felt my shyness challenged. It was like being next to Babe Ruth, or Pelé, or Michael Jordan. I asked how his team (my team) was doing for the final (though his answer was never in doubt).

  “Good,” he said. “We’ve just started training.”

  I should have said something else but my mind was too slow. Until that moment, I had supposed that training was a daily routine for all the players. As my glass was being filled, I said something like, “Good luck,” and followed him with my gaze. In his huge hands, he was carrying six glasses spilling foam. There was a table waiting for him on the terrace: two other ballplayers and two women. One of them was Pupy. Next to her was the only white guy who played on the team: tall, reedy, big-nosed. He was a pitcher nicknamed El Torpedo because of his lightning fastball, and he was slated to play that night.

  It bothered me that he was drinking beer. Hours later at the Latino, I’d be following each one of his pitches breathlessly while his own breath would still have an alcohol residue. The game, it’s true, really wasn’t that important to Santiago, but to beat Las Ratas at the Latino was a matter of honor.

  I told my mother-in-law that I’d seen Pupy with the ballplayers, next to a white guy. This time, my mother-in-law defended her, but in her own unique way: Guillermo, Pupy’s husband, had been inside the store arguing about the price of some product. Perhaps the sixth glass of beer had been meant for him.

  My mother-in-law actually placed more significance on the presence of the other woman, Olivia, who was also with the ballplayers. She lived two doors down from Pupy’s parents but we didn’t know they knew each other beyond the natural comings and goings of the neighborhood.

  The one who liked Olivia was my wife. When we first met her, she was studying for a degree in geography, which she received with honors. But no sooner had she begun her professional career than she went to work at the Villa Panamericana’s hotel. My wife considered that career change practically an act of treason.

  At the hotel, Olivia was in charge of public relations, and according to what my mother-in-law related once I’d told her I’d seen the woman at the table with the ballplayer, she was so good at her job that people in the neighborhood were beginning to feel sorry for her husband. While Pupy was all vulgarity and cockiness, Olivia, whose father was a journalist with a weekly radio program, pretended to be an elegantly plain woman. (I once made the mistake of commenting in front of my wife a bit too enthusiastically about Olivia’s undeniable poise, her graceful walk, the way she moves; my wife has never forgotten the words I used, comparing her to a gazelle…)

  However, Javier, Olivia’s husband, was untouchable as far as my mother-in-law was concerned: Shortly after we moved to the neighborhood, my son, who must have been three or four years old, fell, hit his head, and was left dazed, pale, and barely conscious. My mother-in-law was alone in the house. She went out in desperation and practically ran into Javier, who did not hesitate for an instant and pulled his old Pontiac from the garage to drive my son to the hospital.

  “I see things as they are,” my mother-in-law said on the way home from shopping, “and if one’s a slut, the other one must be too.”

  When I went by Luis’s house to pick him up, he was already outside, waiting impatiently on the sidewalk. Next to him was a tall, thin man, dark with green eyes. Luis introduced him as Azúcar, a friend from the neighborhood, a
Ratas fan, and asked if he could come with us to the Latino. The deed was done but it had its upside. Azúcar had two principal occupations: He played basketball (although the gray hairs dotting his clean scalp indicated he was close to my age) and he sold auto parts. “Whatever you need, bro, you know…” His occupations were manifested in a narrow half-block corridor on 23rd Street between B and C, where there’s a state-owned store that deals in auto and motorcycle parts. On the sidewalk right in front, on the corner of B, there’s a basketball court.

  The two of them had bought a bottle of rum which, as was required, had been poured into various plastic receptacles so as not to be discovered by the stadium ushers. I told them I’d seen El Torpedo drinking beer.

  “Well, Artur,” responded Luis, “what do you want him to do?”

  Azúcar’s comment made me sorry I’d accepted his company for the day: “Those hicks are always drunk. I don’t know how they manage to win.”

  Like us, thousands of people had also thought it might be the penultimate game of the season, and when we went in we actually had a hard time finding three good seats. Perhaps the Latino’s greatest charm is its cosmopolitanism, the way the city’s demographics are reproduced in the stands. If you sit behind first base, you can be sure that those around you will be fans of the visiting team. The rest of the stadium (the gardens, the third base line, behind the plate) will be jammed with spectators, with small clusters of opponents, but these will be isolated, overwhelmed by the local joy.

  It had been a year and a half since Luis and I had set foot in the stadium and we were surprised to see that about half the seats in our area behind the plate (the best, because of their excellent view of the playing field) were empty, and police officers stood in the aisles to close off access.

  “They’re for foreigners,” explained Azúcar.

  “What a waste,” said Luis, seeing, even as a voice called out “Play ball!” to begin the game, that nearly a hundred seats remained empty.

  Azúcar kept eyeing that area. I thought he was looking out for the opportunity to switch seats to that more neutral territory, some distance from the scandalous crowd around us cheering for the boys from Santiago. But just as the first inning was ending, a throng of tourists showed up, the majority dressed as if on safari, or as if we’d gone back a century or so and were attending one of those games that marked Cuba’s belle époque: straw hats, felt hats, baggy white linen pants, huge fans, colored handkerchiefs around the necks, and, as if to indicate contemporary times just a bit, a beret here and there.

  The blue that characterizes Las Ratas (and the New York Yankees, their supposed equals) shone brightly on the head of a woman who I thought I recognized. Was that Olivia? It was impossible to tell, the lighting in the stands was tenuous and a brim covered her forehead; my neighbor wore her hair long so I assumed it had to be tucked into the hat. But there was a way of moving when she came down the stairs, just like a gazelle, which certainly resembled hers. If Olivia was at the Latino, if those tourists were guests at the hotel, just like the players from Santiago, then her presence next to Kindelán and El Torpedo made more sense than Pupy’s: Pupy, and not Olivia, was the stranger, the upstart. Was one as much of a slut as the other? I figured I’d ask my mother-in-law over breakfast the next day.

  But I forgot about Olivia pretty quickly: Suddenly, it was as if the entire stadium had entered another dimension, as if we’d been completely covered by a veil of silence. The arm with which El Torpedo was pitching seemed to belong to God. Inning after inning, the zeros were adding up on the electric scoreboard. In the fifth, Orestes Kindelán hit a high one, and the ball fell among fans way up in the highest stands of the central gardens. Among us, there was much applause, hats in the air, and high-fives. After Orestes Kindelán was congratulated by his teammates and the scoreboard reflected the run, the only (and miraculous) score by Santiago, the silence returned, even deeper now.

  Luis taunted Azúcar, who wasn’t spared from the muteness that had fallen over the spectators. Whoever might be strolling by outside the Latino could never have imagined that there were forty thousand people in there, their hearts in their throats, entranced. What mattered now wasn’t the score, but the spectacle offered by El Torpedo, his super fastball doing arabesques, lines breaking on the inside, on the outside, balls that dropped in flight as if fleeing from the batter, who was left dumbfounded, looking ridiculous on the third strike and forced to make that walk to the bench behind third base with his head down, the bat landing uselessly on the red sand.

  In the seventh inning (they call it the lucky inning, because that’s when pitchers start getting tired or the batters start figuring out pitches that had defled them before), El Torpedo opened with a walk, the only one of the game. The guy on first was a fast runner and, on the pitch, he sprinted toward second. In the meantime, the batter hit into the infield, where the defender had abandoned his position, and the play ended with men on third and first, with no outs. About two-thirds of the stadium awoke from its stupor. The other third debated the play. The batter had been right-handed, so the infield players should have never left their posts. Just one run ahead, the team on the field could screw up one of the best games of El Torpedo’s year.

  I looked at the clock: It was just 10 o’clock at night. I thought about the pitcher’s fatigue, about the beers from this afternoon.

  “This is getting good,” said Luis, who only really cares about the stakes and the beauty of the game, not about any one team.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Azúcar, and then we saw him in the aisles behind home plate.

  A gasp (of surprise? admiration? reproach?) went through the stands when El Torpedo decided to release the next pitch facing home, and not from the side, as the unwritten rules of baseball demand. The man on first took off immediately, stealing second. The next batter was a power hitter (“This guy could do some damage,” said Luis, not to me, but to a little guy devouring a pizza next to him) and I thought the pitcher was going to go for an intentional walk. But the three consecutive outs that El Torpedo managed were humiliating for Las Ratas and their fans: a silly fly ball to first base, a strikeout, a ground ball caught with his own hands, each one cheered on by the five or six thousand spectators around us (I was on my feet, clapping wildly for each of those outs).

  Later, after the danger had passed, it wasn’t El Torpedo’s pitches that caught our attention, but his composure, the dignity with which he took the pitcher’s mound, serene, smiling. Azúcar returned to his seat at the beginning of the eighth inning.

  “My condolences,” Luis said, and Azúcar told him to go to hell. Chewing on his cigar, eyeing his friend sideways, Luis was having as great a time as me, and he made fun of my earlier apprehensions. “I told you, Artur, those guys drink beer the way you and I drink water.”

  My greatest happiness occurred on the way out of the stadium, when I heard Las Ratas fans praising El Torpedo.

  “He’s a genius,” Luis declared.

  “He’s a motherfucker,” Azúcar responded.

  It was a great game, though it lacked any real significance for either team. Sometimes glory is wasted. I remember it now for other reasons.

  At dawn the next day, it was my mother-in-law who first opened the front door. I was in the kitchen preparing coffee. She called me to come look: Two squad cars were parked in front of Pupy’s parents’ house and various cops and neighbors were standing on the porch, their faces worried. My motherin-law crossed the street. I remained at the front door, waiting for her. I saw her put her hands on her head, then hug and kiss Pupy’s sister and go into the house. When she came back, she looked like she’d been crying: Pupy had been found murdered in the women’s bathroom at the Latino. Guillermo was a suspect.

  All day, news kept coming in waves that were often contradictory: The body had been found during the eighth inning and not at the end of the game; no, it was found during the ninth; actually, it was two hours before the lights were turned off at the stadiu
m; she’d been strangled; she was stabbed; it’d been a devastating poison; the body was stuffed in a closet; it was left in the parking lot; it was found sitting in the bleachers and she looked like she’d fallen asleep; they’d found her because Guillermo had called the police; Guillermo had left the Latino without the slightest concern about his missing wife (“Were they actually married?” my mother-in-law asked, astonished).

  Shortly after lunch, we saw the new widower arrive. I asked my mother-in-law to go back and get more information (she could always take some fresh coffee over, since the flow of visitors had not ceased all day long). But she was embarrassed. She thought I wasn’t dealing with Pupy’s death the way I should. She mentioned the newly motherless children, the pain her parents must be experiencing.

  They released the body that night (that’s how they said it in cop speak, and that’s how the neighbors repeated it: Her possessions had been retained, examined, and now they were free—to satisfy the rituals of death? So as to actually have peace in death?) and though my mother-in-law insisted we go to the funeral home right away, I refused to go until the next day. The burial was slated for 3 in the afternoon and there would be plenty of time to offer condolences.

  There wasn’t room for one more soul at the funeral home. There were two squad cars outside (the cops inside sweating through their heavy gray shirts, were they her husband’s old colleagues? Or were they still investigating the murder?). As soon as we went in, my mother-in-law made her way, as expected, to the viewing room where she found Pupy’s parents, children, and sister. She distributed kisses and approached the casket, peering at Pupy’s face, which I imagined pale and dark around the eyes (as if she hadn’t gotten sleep in the morgue). She strolled among the other neighbors huddled throughout the funeral home. I did not see her greet the widower, who was talking nonstop, surrounded by about a dozen people.