King of Cuba

by Cristina Garcia

  Goyo felt unending shame when he thought about his wife, partly due to the guilt she’d induced in him over his affairs with their diner’s siren waitresses; for gambling away a million dollars in the stock market pursuing a “bulletproof” strategy advocated by his hotshot ex-broker, now incarcerated; for not defending her against the barrage of insults by his mother early in their marriage. The shame, however, was most piercing, most unendurable, when Goyo revisited what he considered his principal failing: surrendering his children to his wife’s violence and unreasonableness.

  His son, Goyito, now pushing sixty, lived on disability in the Florida panhandle, his brain irremediably fried by cocaine and further addled by the medications he took by the fistful to prevent him from killing himself. Alina, six years younger, was troubled in her own peculiar ways. Ever since she’d come to live with him—ostensibly to help him recover from precipitous widowerhood—Goyo had suspected her motives. His daughter had no visible means of support, had taken up long-distance swimming (he could spot her now, porpoise-like, making her way along the horizon), and when she wasn’t swimming, snapped her fancy cameras in his face.

  The other day Alina had the nerve to ask him to pose nude for her. Goyo was the first to admit that he didn’t have much in the way of artistic inclinations, but pose nude for his daughter? This was perversity, plain and simple. He’d heard from one of the garage attendants that Alina had asked the same of other retirees in his condominium, embarrassing Goyo to no end. He had half a mind to kick her out for this alone. Within the hour, if she hadn’t drowned or been eaten by sharks, Alina would walk through the front door tracking in rivulets of sand and disturbing him with the strange configurations of seaweed plastered to her manly shoulders.

  Goyo wondered whether El Comandante suffered such troubles with his own children, a veritable tribe at this point, if the reports he’d read in El Nuevo Herald were even half true. Some years ago, one of the tyrant’s illegitimate daughters had written a tell-all memoir about growing up on the island, neglected and suffering from bulimia, an all-but-unheard-of disease among her hungry fellow citizens. The book had made her a celebrity in Miami for one short-lived season.

  Unlike his compatriots, Goyo wasn’t a blind believer in exile gossip. He’d spent too many years in Manhattan honing his cynicism and reading the New York Post. Goyo took pride in his ability to distinguish fact from fiction, the honorable from the crooked, the deal from the scam. Yet this skill seemed increasingly irrelevant at his stage of life. It was all a fiction, he decided, a pliable narrative one could shape, photographs one could freeze at selected junctures, then engage in speculation and pointless deductions. Wasn’t that what El Comandante had done? Bent history to his will? Cunningly divided and spliced it into a seamless whole?

  The sea was calm, mocking the agitation Goyo felt inside. He was weary of the excuses he’d made for sitting on the sidelines of life, the never-ending rationalizations that choked him like a fetid mangrove swamp. What would he say to El Comandante if they ever met again? Or would they immediately resort to insults and blows? What would they have in common anymore besides arthritis and diverticulitis? Like the tyrant, Goyo had spent his early childhood in the countryside, had two brothers and a Spanish father—Galician, too—who took years to formalize relations with the mother of his children. In short, they were both bastards.

  Goyo’s mother wasn’t Cuban by birth but Guatemalan. After she’d borne three sons by her itinerant Spanish lover, the young family moved to coastal Honduras, the headquarters of Arturo Herrera’s burgeoning shipping business. Goyo lived on a beach where he once watched the sea recede for a mile before a tidal wave destroyed their town. Undeterred, Arturo relocated his family to Cuba and finally married Goyo’s mother, who was seized thereafter with a sporadic religiosity incited by her gratitude for her good fortune. By then Papá had become very wealthy and Goyo’s days on the beach were supplanted by a stint at a Jesuit boarding school in Canada, where he learned Latin, played baseball and the clarinet, and fell in love with chemistry. To this day, the delightful symmetry of the carbon cluster C60 moved Goyo to tears. He’d also closely followed the efforts of chemists to make the polyhedral hydrocarbon dodecahedrane (C20H20), a challenge they finally achieved in 1980.

  Goyo pricked his finger to read his blood sugar, which was a little high but nothing to panic over. He reached for his pills but forgot which tablets were for what and washed down a random handful with a glass of diluted orange juice. His ailments had accrued faster than he could keep straight, upsetting the color-coding medications system his wife had devised. In descending order of importance, Goyo suffered from heart disease (he’d had a triple bypass four years ago), crippling arthritis in his lower spine and both knees (he walked at a thirty-degree angle to the floor), borderline diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, and intermittent impotence. Perhaps the impotence should’ve topped the list. It certainly would have in his prime, when he could screw a dozen times in a day and still roar for more.

  The flotilla had rounded the southern edge of Key Biscayne, returning to the yacht club’s docks. In his boating heyday Goyo and his wife had motored around the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean for weeks at a time, usually in winter, when the weather was best. Once he came dangerously close to trespassing Cuba’s boundary waters. He’d been fishing for marlin, and the efforts of those magnificent fish—each one battled ferociously for its life—had dared him to try. Goyo got as close as twelve miles off the northeast coast of the island, close enough to imagine the scent of ripening sugarcane, to recall the prance of his best Arabian horse, Velóz, on their weekly inspections of the ranch. The days when he was still a master of real things: land, horses, cattle. Twelve miles. A scant twelve miles from his past. Only Luisa’s hysterical threats (“Are you out of your mind? They’ll chop you up for shark bait!”) made him turn around.

  Sometimes Goyo liked to fantasize that he could see, telescopically, back to his homeland; zoom in on his archenemy. What living hell could he concoct for that despot? For inflicting a plague of grief on millions of his countrymen? Goyo’s first order of business would probably be to tape the bastard’s mouth shut. Next he’d turn off his flat-screen televisions and deprive him of watching the news. (It was said that El Líder compulsively channel-surfed for even a passing mention of himself.) Last, cattle prod in hand, Goyo would force the son of a bitch to listen to a taped litany of every victim, living and dead, whom he had wronged. Goyo could keep this up for eternity, since it would undoubtedly take that long.

  His daughter often accused Goyo of staying alive for one purpose only: to celebrate the news of the tyrant’s death. He couldn’t deny it. Goyo subscribed to an exile website—Hijodeputa.com—that charted, hourly, the Maximum Leader’s body temperature (it was 99.6 degrees the last time Goyo checked, at 7:00 a.m., the apparent result of a minor ear infection). Inside operatives, the website assured its followers, had infiltrated the National Palace, hovered by the dictator’s bedside, worked as cooks and gardeners in his multiple homes. But if the bastard actually had died as many times as had been prematurely proclaimed, he would’ve lived more lives than Hemingway’s polydactyl cats.

  The truth was this: El Comandante had fossilized into a monstrous constant, into time itself.

  Frank País’s Shoes

  I guard the room at the Museum of the Revolution that contains the shoes that Frank País wore on the day he was executed. I stare at those shoes a lot, eight hours a day most days, and I’ve grown—what is the word?—not fond of, exactly, but identified with those shoes, heavy and large for a man neither heavy nor large, and whose life was snuffed out—paf!—like a breath extinguishing flame. There are other items in my room at the museum. You might recall, if you’ve been here, the torture instruments used by Batista’s henchmen to pull out prisoners’ nails. Other contraptions for this and that. But to me, the only things that matter are Frank País’s shoes. Oh, I’ve dreamt about those shoes, and the baby-faced man who
wore them—a legitimate hero of the Revolution. Who talks about him anymore? Like his shoes, the memory of Frank País has faded, and I am left wondering what it would be like to try them on, to fill the shoes, as it were, of this great, forgotten man. Let me confess: I am in love with Frank País, this dead man, this once-vibrant hero, who I imagine would’ve been a tiger in bed. You know, I like my men dominant, bien machos. Take me, tell me what to do, a slap or two, and I’m happy to serve. My husband is too weak for me, too gentle. Sometimes, I think, if only he could wear Frank País’s shoes for one night, to bed, with me, I would die of happiness . . .

  —Fidelia González, museum guard

  2.

  A Dangerous Season

  Miami

  More and more, Goyo lost himself in daydreams of revenge. As a group, Cuban exiles were ridiculed, dismissed as right-wing crackpots. Yet who knew better than they the truth of what that despot had perpetrated on their island, the lies that had calcified into history? To Goyo’s dismay, his daughter was a blatant liberal who argued against the “futile” trade embargo. Every utterance of hers was an apologia for a moribund regime long sustained by the depth and breadth of world ignorance. Alina, like so many others, supported the oppressor while deriding the oppressed.

  “Hey, Dad, how’s it going?” His daughter entered the kitchen dripping seawater. Sand cascaded off her thick limbs and clicked onto the spotless tile floor. She yanked open the refrigerator door, scanning the shelves for animal protein. Alina latched on to a packet of boiled ham from which she rolled bright pink slices, wolfing them down with no evidence of mastication. “Want some?” She held out a floppy slice. His daughter attacked a cupboard next, pulling down a can of tuna, noisily opening it, and proceeded to dig out chunks with her briny fingers.

  After seven months of living with his daughter, Goyo had nothing more to say to her. Once he’d been her sun and she a tiny, eager planet in his orbit. Now their differences were entrenched, defended like a Maginot Line drawn jaggedly through his luxury condominium. Alina was his flesh and blood, but she might as well have been a rhinoceros, a species Goyo barely understood. She had no regard for her safety, was indifferent to appearances, and was incapable of harnessing language to any socially appropriate use. How different she would’ve turned out had she been raised in a free Cuba. Ay, it sickened Goyo to think of the what-ifs. Dreams held too long and unfulfilled grew desiccated, pathetic.

  Evidence of Alina’s complexity surfaced only in her photographs, which, for a time, had made her highly sought after by magazines worldwide. Goyo remembered the fourteen-page spread she’d had in National Geographic two decades ago, a series on the Penitentes, a secret sect rarely photographed, whose members reenacted the crucifixion in the remote high deserts of northern New Mexico. What drew his daughter to such grotesqueries? Not once had Goyo seen her moved by ordinary beauty—a rosebud, the innocent face of a child, a pretty landscape. And now she was intent on chronicling every wart and wrinkle of his failing body!

  Dark clouds billowed in from the southwest, from Havana, where Goyo’s youth remained trapped. He recalled one particularly bad hurricane. It’d been late in December, already past the dangerous season, and he was home from Canada for Christmas vacation. The roar and force of the wind had sucked out his very breath. Goats and chickens—even a trotting pig—tumbled in the air around him. At Papá’s ranch, a magnificent grove of date palms was uprooted like a bed of measly seedlings. Not a single lamppost was left standing in Havana. Ocean fish and algae draped the rooftops. For weeks the island had the drowsy, luminous air of an aquarium.

  Goyo spread his hands on the kitchen table and tried to push himself to standing. How useless his hands had become, reaching out for nothing and nobody most of the time.

  “Let me help you.” Alina encircled his waist from behind and lifted him out of his chair. “Where to, caballero?”

  Goyo felt the heat of his daughter’s tuna-breath on his ear. She was taller than he was now by six inches. It humiliated him to have to count on her for the simplest tasks. “To my office,” Goyo croaked, burdened by the weight of his carcass on his deteriorated knees, his tumescent ankles.

  “The doctors say you shouldn’t be sitting in front of the computer all day—”

  “I have legitimate business to take care of—”

  “Reading crazy exile vitriol. You’ll get another heart attack on top of everything!”

  “Not that it would concern you but my building is—”

  “Why don’t you watch something other than Fox News—”

  “Collapsing. Leftists were running the media long before that Herbert Matthews—”

  “Made El Comandante out to be a hero. Uh-huh.”

  Goyo stopped to catch his breath. He was halfway across the living room, with its vast windows and rotating ceiling fans. In another thirty feet he’d be sitting comfortably in his office, its messy towers of paperwork mitigated by the beam of classical music that filtered in from a vintage radio. Goyo stayed hunched there for hours, messaging his online cronies, among them his older brother, Rufino, who’d been living in the same dilapidated bungalow in Coral Gables since 1966. The two of them got together once a year, at most. Their solidarity online rarely translated into sympathy in person; in person, fortified with a little Spanish rioja or a tumbler of rum, they fought like the bitterest of enemies. They rarely spoke about their younger brother, Marcos, except to agree that he’d been a dreamy, sickly boy who’d loved science fiction. Both Goyo and Rufino had been surprised when he’d volunteered for the Bay of Pigs.

  “We need to talk, Dad.”

  Rufino’s children hadn’t turned out any better than his: the oldest boy had been killed by a London bus when he’d crossed against traffic; his daughter had gotten pregnant at fifteen and lived in Puerto Rico with her great-grandchildren; his younger boy, the most promising, had gone to medical school but became a psychiatrist, of all useless things, and married a browbeating, horsey-faced girl from Hackensack.

  “Dad!” Alina snapped her fingers in front of his face.

  “¡Qué carajo!”

  “I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last five minutes. You went off into one of your fugue states.”

  “What is it you wish to know?” Goyo regained his composure. It was his best defense in the heat of battle. He’d had ample practice during the eternity of his marriage to a certifiable hysteric.

  “We have to discuss your finances.”

  Not again.

  “I don’t have a clue what to do if something were to happen to you. I’m not after anything, I just want to help you get things in order. Like it or not, I’m all you’ve got.”

  Goyo refused to have this conversation. He didn’t want to have it today, or last week, or the countless times Alina had brought it up since her arrival.

  “What will happen to Goyito? Have you made arrangements for his care?”

  “Provisions have been made, Alina. Now that’s enough.”

  “Why is this such a taboo subject, anyway? It’s not like any of us are immortal. Not even El Comandante.” Alina patted her father’s sweating forehead with a paper napkin reeking of tuna fish. “Here, sit down on the sofa.”

  Goyo felt feverish. The pressure in his bowels intensified, no doubt the result of the slow-cooked steel-cut oatmeal he was obliged to eat for breakfast. “Help me to the bathroom, hija,” he rasped.

  Alina tucked him under a burly arm and sprinted to the master bathroom, which his wife had retrofitted with a porcelain bidet and the plushest of cushioned toilet seats. After his daughter left him propped there, Goyo unfastened his pajama bottoms and settled in with the latest ¡Hola! magazine from his wife’s ongoing subscription. Forty minutes later, he was caught up on the European royals (including details of the Duquesa de Alba’s disastrous marriage to a man decades her junior) and the latest celebrity gossip. At least he wasn’t reduced to wearing bedtime diapers like the tyrant.

  Goyo heard the dista
nt, tinny ring tone of “La Bayamesa,” Cuba’s national anthem. It was his son calling for the first of what would probably be a dozen times before noon. Poor Goyito. His bad luck had begun in utero. Bedridden for the last trimester of her pregnancy, Luisa was the antithesis of a blooming, expectant mother, and her condition only worsened after Goyito was born. She had no interest in holding or nursing their son (nursing wasn’t customary in their social set, in any case), and she handed him over to an indifferent wet nurse for the first year of his life. The truth was that Luisa never loved Goyito. It was one of those miscarriages of nature for which there was no solution.

  Alina knocked hard on the bathroom door, jolting Goyo. The door creaked open, and her forearm slid into view, waving his cell phone.

  “Por Dios, Alina, I’ve told you not to bother me when I’m in here!”

  “It’s Goyito.”

  “I know damn well who it is.”

  Her arm slid down the doorjamb and sent the phone skittering across the marble floor. It stopped a quarter inch from his lifted heel. Alina should’ve been a professional lawn bowler instead of a photographer.

  “Hello, hello?” Goyo demanded, his lower back pinching.

  “It’s me.” His son’s voice was a dull, flat line.