‘If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I never forget a face,’ he said finally.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said my grandfather.
‘I’m talking about thirty years ago. You and your wife had just arrived in Havana. My uncle gave you a lift in his cart. I’m Pilar, the kid who was sitting next to you. Remember?’
‘Of course I remember. Just as I won’t forget that you had your uncle murdered.’
The man took a deep breath and tossed the cigar out the window.
‘Yes. I know,’ he said. ‘It seems nobody forgets anything. I’ll never forget the beatings my uncle gave me, or the sweets your wife gave me. You’ll never forget that I ordered men to kill your friends. And Masferrer will never forget you knocked him out with a single punch.’
When Grandma Gertrudis saw us arrive back in the car, she rushed over and hugged me.
‘Thank you, señor. Thank you for bringing them back safe and sound,’ said Grandma, sobbing. From his pocket the man took another panatella and lit it. Then he turned to Grandpa Benicio. ‘Now that no one owes anyone anything, I’d advise you to get out of here.’
‘Is that what a man has to do to live in peace? Go somewhere else?’ said my grandfather, still cradling me in his arms.
‘I don’t know,’ said Colonel Pilar García. ‘You could try. Go somewhere else, go back to the country, go back to Oriente. Hide in a cave if you have to. But don’t trust to hope. There’s no hope left in this country.’
Having said this, Pilar García climbed back into his car and took off with a squeal of tyres down the Calzada Dolores.
We buried Augusto and the Jew in Colón cemetery. They were solitary men, with no family, no friends, and so the only people at the wake were my grandparents, Gertrudis and Benicio, and me. We went on living in Augusto’s house since we had nowhere else to go and no heir came to claim it. Batista fled Cuba in the early hours of 31 December 1958 after a farewell cocktail party as the revolutionaries were marching into Havana. Gradually, American businesses were nationalised and eventually private property was abolished. The Bacardís moved their rum business to Puerto Rico. Masferrer was blown up by a bomb placed in his car in Miami in 1975. Pilar García died of cirrhosis of the liver.
I remember none of this. The psychologists diagnosed me with elective amnesia, a defence mechanism used by people to forget traumatic events. I don’t remember Augusto or El Judío or the day they were riddled with bullets before my eyes. All I remember is that time when I strangled the fucking cat. That I remember only too well.
The Biggest Maggot in the World
This is where I begin . . . but before we get to my part of the tale, you need to know that it’s difficult to tell a story and be objective when you’re locked up in a dark room. What I mean is it’s not the same as telling the story lying on a sandy beach with a mojito in your hand. It’s difficult not to talk about depressing things when you’re strapped to a bed in a bare cell and have whiteshirts – who, like I told you earlier, are really members of the Cuban Ku Klux Klan – come by every two days and split your skull in two. Commissioner Clemente says that not only did I make all this stuff up, but he even insists that I don’t exist. Imagine if someone told you that you are not who you think you are, that your grandparents, your neighbourhood and everything you’ve ever known is a fiction, that you’re a ghost, a head case, a fabulist who goes through life spouting fairy tales and bullshit. The bastard has tried to convince me that I’m mad and that’s what really pisses me off. It’s enough to make you want to kill somebody.
But that’s what that damn fool Clemente said to me when he interrogated me. I’m not going to bore you with all that shit though, or with stuff about when I took my first steps or what my first word was. The story about the cat is simple, there’s nothing else to add to it except that the cat ate my lunch: fried chicken, vegetables, rice, black beans and guava jelly. The bastard cat only left the guava jelly. ‘I’ll get you,’ I thought. I went back into class and after the last lesson, at about six o’clock, I came across the cat, rummaging though a garbage bin. I went over and held out a piece of bread. The cat came over to me. It started eating the bread and I stroked its back. When I got it to trust me, I grabbed it by the neck and strangled it. All the way home, I gripped it tightly. People were staring at me and shouting, ‘Leave that poor cat alone.’ But I ignored them. I kept on walking. Grandma jumped when she saw me appear in the doorway. I told her what had happened and she yelled at me, told me that was no reason to strangle a helpless creature. I tossed the cat on the ground, the head came off the body and rolled across the pavement. Then I slammed my fist into the front door so hard I broke my wrist. And that was that for the quadruped.
My grandparents said that they used to have to take me by the hand and lead me to school because otherwise I’d head for any river or marsh or swampland along the way. Can you imagine? You have to remember that I took the stories Grandpa Benicio told me very seriously. He used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. One day he told me about the brave feats of Martí and Antonio Maceo, the same tales his father had told him when he was a boy. The next day, I came home with a face covered in bruises, two black eyes and my nose bent out of shape.
‘Oscarito!’ said Grandpa Benicio. ‘What on earth happened to you?’
Well, what had happened was during the game of marbles we played every day in La Loma del Burro park in Lawton, this boy named Enrique – everyone called him ‘the Terror of Lawton’ – took some other boy’s marbles. None of the other kids had the guts to stand up to him because Enrique wasn’t called the Terror of Lawton for nothing. But the story my grandpa had told me convinced me that I too had been put on the earth to free mankind.
‘If you don’t give Congo his marbles back, I’m going to kill you with my stone axe,’ I told the Terror of Lawton. When he heard this, fifteen-year-old Enrique drew himself up to his full height and launched himself at me. Then he blacked both my eyes, covered my face in bruises and broke my nose.
Grandpa Benicio angrily asked me who I thought I was to go round saving people.
‘José Martí would have done the same thing,’ I said.
‘Martí didn’t go round killing people with a stone axe,’ said my grandfather, then burst out laughing. I can remember that like it was yesterday. The reason I remember it so well is that the next day Elena enrolled in my school, in my class, and soon we were inseparable.
The first time I took Elena to bed, she warned me that it was nothing serious, that she didn’t want me getting the wrong idea. I liked Elena a lot, so didn’t tell her that she was the one who had to be careful because I was the most cynical guy she would ever meet. I just told her that I would let her decide the boundaries of our relationship and that I would respect her decisions. I knew she’d been with other guys, I’d even met some of them because she always introduced me to them and I introduced her to my ex-girlfriends like it was some sort of competition, like the Grand Prix for who had fucked more people. All the same, I was taken by surprise when Elena referred to our first sexual encounter as ‘satisfactory’. I knew that ‘satisfactory’ was way short of the mark after the eight-hour non-stop rollercoaster of sex I’d given her. We met up again a couple of weeks later and it was even better, but this time Elena didn’t say anything, she just kissed me on the cheek and left.
Sometimes I would call her, usually in the afternoon when she was involved in Party meetings and all that political bullshit, and we’d chat for five or ten minutes about what had happened that day. It was only when she called me that we would arrange to meet up, always at her place, an apartment in a cooperatively built micro-brigada block on the Calle Jesús María where doctors and lawyers lived, several dentists and a couple of university professors. Our encounters always followed the same pattern. I would go up the stairs, knock twice on her door, she would open it and we would greet each other with a kiss, but without touching each other. In Act Two we’d sit down and
drink rum, stare out at the neighbouring buildings, dark hulks in the faint evening light, made darker by the grimy glass of the window, and we’d talk about the Revolution, about the new edition of Sputnik and about school stuff. We’d watch the movies on Veinticuatro por Segundo or La comedia silente with Armando Calderón. Then, without any preamble, we’d go into her bedroom and fuck for hours. When we were finished, she’d put on a cream-coloured cotton bathrobe and go for a shower. By the time she came out, I’d already be dressed and sitting in the living room staring out – not at the buildings, but at the bicycle on her balcony. The silence was absolute. Sometimes there would be a party in one of the neighbouring buildings; we would stare at the lights and at the people down below walking past or going up and down as though guided simply by the smell of the food or the music spilling out from somewhere. Elena would say nothing and sometimes I would have to suppress the urge to ask her questions. Or tell her things about my life that I’d never told anyone, things like that fact that I’d never known my real parents. Then she would remind me that it was time for me to leave, that her father would be home soon – he was the only member of her family still in Cuba, all the others had left for Miami. I’d leave without giving her a kiss and a couple of weeks later we would meet up again and everything would be exactly the same. Obviously, there weren’t always parties in the neighbouring buildings, and sometimes we didn’t or couldn’t drink rum, but the faint flickering lights were the same, she always took her shower, and the gathering dusk that enveloped the buildings all around never changed.
The truth is that I’d never wanted a woman the way I wanted Elena. I fucked her endlessly in every position that exists or ever will exist, I yanked her hair, I spat on her, I spanked her arse because she liked her sex down and dirty. But Elena was insatiable. Sex with her was like running a marathon. Sometimes I was surprised by her capacity to screw. She fucked like it was a matter of life and death. On more than one occasion I almost said she didn’t need to make so much effort, that a five-hour fuck would be just as good, but when it came to sex Elena was practical and efficient. She’d suck from me my last drop of semen, my soul, what little life I believed I had left in those moments of pleasure.
Sometimes, when I hadn’t seen her for several days, I would get to thinking about how different we were. She liked art; she could watch a ballet or look at a painting and recognise the painter or the choreographer. She read books I’d never heard of and although I liked the music she listened to, after a while it made me want to close my eyes and sleep. I tried to fit in with her, or rather to fit in my new situation with her, and sometimes I’d listen to Mozart or Beethoven. But I’d always wind up falling asleep and I’d have to put on NG La Banda to wake me up again because, unlike Elena, that was the music I’d always preferred.
Back then, Elena, like everyone else, was involved in the revolutionary process. She went from patrol leader in the Young Pioneers to head of the Student Collective at school and she was one of the first kids at school to get a membership card for the UJC – the Young Communist League – and as you know, back then being a member was the greatest thing in the world. It was every student’s greatest wish . . . The Revolution was young, changes that kept everyone busy were taking place every day. The programme of agrarian reform had been enacted and land confiscated from private owners now belonged to the government who in turn transferred it to farmers so they could work the land. Illiteracy had all but been abolished and infant mortality had declined; more importantly, everyone now had the right to study whatever they wanted, and get treated in hospitals and clinics for free. Basically Cuba had already become what it is today. Well, not what it is today, because these days it is something else. Let’s say it had become a beacon of hope, an example to Latin America and the world: a tiny island that had stood firm against the arrogance and barbarism of Yankee imperialism, as people put it.
Truth is, even an anti-Communist maggot like me has to admit that a whole bunch of good things were done back then that brought with them a whole bunch of illusions. I remember when I used to take Elena out for a stroll, back when – I’m sure you remember – back when the Cuban peso was actually worth something. A pizza cost $1.20, something even the poorest people in my barrio could afford, and the spaghetti at Vita Nuovo too. Elena always liked the ice cream at Coppelia which only cost $1.50 and I was always happy to attend to her whims.
Elena was a beautiful mulatto girl tending towards white, with thick lips that were wet as though constantly moist with dew, crowned with a beauty spot as coal-black as her piercing eyes. The most beautiful thing about her was her eyes, humble eyes that knew how to persuade. I loved to see her laugh, and I did everything I could to please her without asking for anything in return since I never believed in love – that’s the truth – though I have to admit that Elena made my life as a cynic impossible.
Sometimes, in the evening, we would stroll down the Calzada Dolores to the little park just before the Diez de Octubre. I would hold her hand and we would silently immerse ourselves in the spectacle of Lawton which, back then, was nothing special, being one more outlying district of Havana with few houses and a vast number of ruined buildings and ramshackle hovels. It smelled of bread and guava cakes, of basil and rosemary. I would take her to the park and sometimes, during carnival season, even early in the evening, we would run into a line of drunks or some transvestites heading down Dolores to catch a bus to the Malecón. Thinking about it, I can say in all honesty that I was happy back then. Not always. Only when I was with that infuriating woman named Elena.
But anyway, like I said, it was a different time. A time when you could go to the beaches at Varadero and see hardly a single tourist. Sometimes, we’d check into the Hotel Nacional and pay in pesos cubanos, something no one would be allowed to do these days because, as you know, these days, Cubans are forbidden from going into hotels. I remember when we were back in primary, the school used to take us to Tarará. I don’t know if there was something like that in Santiago. But anyway, it had never occurred to anyone to fill a campsite, which was really more of a holiday resort, with thousands and thousands of kids. Elena and I had great fun on the fairground rides in the amusement park, in the freshwater pools and at the concerts every night, and the food was, well, it was amazing, with flavoured yoghurt for breakfast, chicken, pork and all sorts of salads for lunch and dinner and, lastly, the best thing about the place was it was completely free. Excuse me for banging on about the food, it’s just that I’m absolutely starving . . . And those fucking whiteshirts won’t give me so much as a dry cracker.
So anyway, everyone left Tarará thinking the Revolution was the coolest thing, and, in a way, it was. Years later, when everything went to hell in a handcart, Elena and I would remember those years as the most magical of our childhood. No one knows exactly when things started to go wrong. I don’t know what you think. Elena was convinced that it started with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in ’89. According to her, that’s what triggered the ‘special economic period’ that led to people eating cats and turkey vultures and steaks made out of dishrags, pizzas made with melted condoms instead of cheese, and micro chickens, which never grew, that you could get in stores, there were power cuts twenty hours a day and I don’t know what all. Nitsa Billapol’s recipe for grapefruit steak became a delicacy in our house. Every day we’d sit around the dinner table and force down this experiment in silence, I felt like screaming my frustration from the rooftops but at the same time I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of my grandparents who, to the bitter end, maintained their dignity and their undying faith in the Revolution.
But my generation was different, something I tried to tell my grandparents a million times. We didn’t know anything about the olden days; our only frame of reference was the terrible years we had to live through. To be honest, I think things started to fuck up a long time before the Russians turned their backs on us. I say that, because even
back in the eighties I was already what they call a gusano – a maggot, a fully fledged anti-Communist Cuban – even then I had no illusions. Obviously, I did my best to bite my tongue so as not to ruin the illusions of my grandparents who were always telling me about all the injustices before the Revolution we’ve already talked about, but the minute I stepped out the front door, I went right on being disillusioned and I thought shit, things today are even more of a clusterfuck. This was my story, it was the story of Elena, of my whole generation.
My disillusionment started with the whole business with UMAP – the military units set up to eliminate bourgeois and counter-revolutionary values. I was still in primary school when they were going round arresting every kid with long hair. They’d pile them into the back of a truck and take them God knows where. They took Ricardito, my neighbour. Besides having long hair, he listened to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and any other rock band he could find. Sometimes, in secret, he played them for me on his battered RCA Victrola. I thought they were horrendous.
‘Cool, right?’ he’d say, smoking shave grass and pretending it was marijuana. ‘It’s really cool, man.’ He was a quiet kid, and good-looking too, the bastard. They snatched him off the street, shaved off his hair, tossed him in the back of a truck and took him God knows where. Big mistake. And still no one said anything, because Tarará was still open, education was better than ever, healthcare was free, the streets were safe, there were hundreds of things to be proud of, something my grandparents never tired of reminding me.
Ricardito showed up again a year later. A lot of his friends tried to get him to talk, to tell people what had happened. But tell who? Who was the guilty party, who was he supposed to tell, and what was the point? No one ever apologised to him, no one ever said, ‘Fuck, Ricardito, I made a mistake.’ I mean nobody’s perfect, everyone makes mistakes, so I don’t understand why people won’t just stand up and say ‘I made a mistake’. I don’t know about you, but I think they’re afraid. Afraid of losing everything, that’s why their instinctive reaction is to keep their mouths shut. I mean here I am telling you all this stuff and honestly I’m shitting myself. For all I know you could be with the Security Service, in which case I’m truly fucked.
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