His car was parked in its new, cheaper spot in the southeast corner of the garage. Luisa had been appalled when he’d driven home the mustard-colored Cadillac with its black leather interior—a killer bee, she’d called it—but it’d been on clearance and was heavy as a tractor. He felt secure in the car, as if the industrial heartland had been welded into its every inch. Besides, his father had always bought Cadillacs. Goyo turned on the ignition, twisted his torso, and draped his arm over the seat as he backed out. Then he steered the behemoth down the narrow, twisting ramp and into the obliterating Florida sun. With a push of a button, the air conditioner roared to full blast.
As he cruised down Crandon Boulevard, Goyo took note of the civic improvements on Key Biscayne: newly planted palms in the median, a refurbished playground, the traffic light that had supplanted an obstructed stop sign. Even the community center had a fresh coat of paint. Such evidence of progress buoyed Goyo, gave him hope that, against all odds, people could work together for the common good. He regretted his own missed opportunities to make a difference. His daughter was right, he thought glumly. No worthwhile epitaph would ever be chiseled on his tombstone.
Vilma was waiting for him, posing beside her orange Honda. She wore a clingy beige dress decorated with a V-shaped cluster of rhinestones that looked like a flock of migrating birds. Vilma loved flash, exulted in it. Coño, just look at how she sashayed toward his car! Her locomotion was a form of genius particular to Cuban women, expressly designed to torment every male beholder. Watching his mistress move toward him on high heels, gathering force like an impending hurricane, made Goyo roll down his window and release a slow whistle.
Vilma slid into the passenger side of his Cadillac.
“Your place, querida?” he crooned.
“I can’t. Mami is playing dominoes with her friends.”
“To the beach then?”
Vilma pulled the seat belt across her voluptuous hips and breasts. There was a stretch of the state park that would be deserted this time of day. Goyo turned down the road strewn with pine needles and found their preferred spot. He kept the engine running for the air-conditioning and turned on an oldies station that featured Cuban classics from the forties and fifties. A bolero scorched the close air of the Cadillac. Soy ese vicio de tu piel que ya no puedes desprender, soy lo prohibido / Soy esa fiebre de tu ser que te domina sin querer, soy lo prohibido . . .
Vilma slipped off her rings and bracelets, tucking them into the glove compartment, and unpinned her dyed blond hair. Then with a swift flick of her wrist she unzipped Goyo’s trousers and deftly massaged him to life. Ay, the woman was sublimely dexterous! Goyo closed his eyes as they kissed, picturing Vilma as an eight-armed Indian goddess bestowing her lusty pleasures upon him. At this moment he wasn’t the least bit concerned whether his mistress was after his money, or expected him to put her half-wit son through chiropractor school, or pony up for her aging mother’s mounting medical bills (la pobre had Alzheimer’s). In her merciless beige dress, so tight it looked like a lusciously dimpled second skin, Vilma could ask nothing of Goyo that he wouldn’t willingly, gratefully, give.
An hour later Goyo was back at La Carreta buying roast pork and desserts for his son. He felt vaguely ashamed, as he often did after an assignation with the sexpot bank teller. Fortunately, none of his meager thespian skills had been required to consummate the act. Luisa had often accused him of being attracted to trashy women, and he couldn’t deny it. Shame was erotic. He had the Jesuits to thank for that. But Goyo was also blessed with a good lover’s ample sense of what was beautiful. To him, every woman had something: a graceful neck, fetching knees, sultry lips. Even as a young man, he’d preferred his lovers maduritas. In his opinion, women were at their best after forty.
The bakery counter girl at La Carreta’s—boyish, with cartoon orange hair and smelling of pound cake—talked Goyo into buying bread pudding, coconut flan, and enough flaky guava pastries to feed a baseball team. Carefully, she packed everything into a glossy white box, then penciled her number on the back of his receipt.
“I’m sure you’ll be happy with your selection.”
“Señorita, I already am.”
One of the benefits of being old and rich in Miami was that the social odds were decidedly in his favor. At his wife’s funeral, a couple of her covolunteers from the Red Cross had had the audacity to jump-start their flirtations. To his credit, Goyo had remained a chaste widower for nearly three months before taking up with the irrepressible Vilmita. Mentira. He’d made an exception for Mrs. Anderson, a former Rockette who’d shown up at his condo eight days after Luisa’s burial wearing a sequined pink leotard and fishnet stockings under her mink coat. God bless Mrs. Anderson.
Goyo settled into his Cadillac, checked the mirrors, and sidled into traffic. In the four and a half seconds that it took him to straighten his wheel, a black Camaro with tinted windows slammed into him from behind. The impact jolted his spine and sent his Cadillac crashing into the air pressure pump of the Shell station. The pain radiated from his sternum, where the seat belt had struck. His sacrum flared with needle points. Blood oozed from where he’d bitten his tongue. Goyo’s fists stiffened on the steering wheel, and his right foot was stuck to the brake, as if a curse had frozen it there. The driver of the Camaro jumped out, swearing a blue streak.
The ambulance arrived, sirens wailing. Against his protests, the attendants lifted Goyo onto a stretcher and slid him into the back of the ambulance like a corpse. They checked his blood pressure, injected him with who knew what, and strapped his legs down, all the while discussing the prospects of Los Crocodilos, the city’s second-string baseball team, a source of heartbreak to its many violence-prone fans. There’d been talk of pitting Cuba’s national team (an all-star lineup that included Bobby Relleno, a once-in-a-generation pitcher who’d be cleaning up in the States given half a chance) against an American one, but exile leaders had put a stop to that tentative thawing of bilateral relations.
As the ambulance sped across the causeway that connected Key Biscayne to the steaming maze of Miami’s streets, the pain seared through Goyo’s body. He tried to distract himself with baseball memories. In Honduras, he and his friends had played with broomsticks and bottle caps that they’d bundled together with rubber bands. Later, he played on his school teams in Cuba and in Canada, occasionally distinguishing himself with outfield heroics: leaping into the bleachers to intercept a ball, and once pulling a Willie Mays over-the-shoulder catch (before there was a Willie Mays) to triumph over the execrable Montreal Moose.
Goyo was growing drowsy. The attendants must’ve given him a sedative. Through the back door windows he spotted a pair of herons, elegant against the blustery Miami skies. As he slipped into unconsciousness, he began to dream that he was wandering around a sepia-toned city wearing Old Testament robes. His left big toe was blackened with fungus and his wife’s perfume suffused the air, a floral amalgam so potent that it’d made his eyes water in close quarters. “Luisa, is that you? I’ve come to join you, mi amor!” He might as well cover his bases. Goyo missed his wife, but he wasn’t looking forward to meeting up with her in the afterlife, not after today’s boisterous romp with Vilma.
A tropical island floated into view, chalked with cumulus clouds. He longed to reach it, but there was no cliff to leap off, no sea to traverse. Then as if propelled by a giant spring, Goyo found himself streaking through the clouds like a cannonball. Coño, I’m flying, he thought loud enough to hear. He raised his arms to temper the turbulence, but a whacking pressure kept them at his sides. His robes ballooned in the wind, and Goyo realized, to his mortification, that he wasn’t wearing so much as a jockstrap. An enormous bird—a raven or a vulture, he couldn’t tell which—with feathers so sleekly black they looked oiled, appeared out of nowhere and cruised beside him. Goyo tried to wave, hoping it was friendly and disinclined to peck at his vulnerable flesh. A row of hooked umbrellas, also pitch-black, droned by.
“Dad!” Goyo felt t
wo sharp slaps against his cheeks. His head felt like a pile of broken bricks. Slowly, his eyes fluttered open to find his daughter’s large-pored face hovering uncomfortably close to his own.
* * *
1. People got violently ill from that Chinese soy. One of my neighbors even went blind! Only the dogs seemed to like the stuff, but the dogs here will eat anything. If it says HECHO EN CHINA, I don’t touch it. Punto final.
—Héctor López, meat inspector
2. What a joke! We’ve never not been in a Special Period!
—H.L.
3. I come to Cuba to be a man. In France, I cannot afford to keep mistresses, or live like a king. Here I have two women. My Margarita is black and simple and she knows how to please me. She smells like fresh, clean earth. My other woman is more beautiful and light-skinned but she hustles me for this and that. Each dip in her boyito has its price. Margarita takes what I give her with dignity and gratitude. I don’t love her, but I should.
—Michel Durand, tire salesman
7.
Prime Time
Havana
Fernando strode into El Comandante’s room without knocking. He was in full military uniform after his meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The lot of them had been ordering an immoderate number of cut-rate tanks and artillery from North Korea. With 10 percent of the island’s population employed by the armed forces, Fernando considered these purchases a necessary bulwark against unrest. His goal: to keep the Revolution rebellion-proof by achieving the perfect ratio of military personnel to civilians. Unfortunately, he was less interested in other aspects of running the country. The economy was in a shambles, the hospitals had no aspirin, and nobody got what their ration books promised except for their monthly quotas of sugar and rum.
“You had an accident?” Fernando asked tentatively.
“¡Que tonto! You think I deliberately set myself on fire?”
“Cálmate, hermano. Who did this to you?”
“Have you seen the news?” Reports of the conflagration had been immediately broadcast on the Miami exiles’ news stations.
“Same old lies.” Fernando smoothed his mustache.
“How did they know about this in ten fucking seconds?”
“I’ll look into it right away.”
“I want everyone investigated.” The tyrant felt the stirrings of another conspiracy afoot, and he wanted it quashed before it got out of hand.
Fernando’s back was ramrod straight. He was a veritable fountain of youth next to his ailing older brother. By nightfall, he would find out who was behind the news leak and have them arrested.
“How the hell am I supposed to relax when their spies are watching me take a crap and smoke my last cigar?”
Fernando’s eyes drifted to the wall clock.
“I want to talk to the people tonight. Clear out all other programming.”
“Do you think that’s advisable?”
It was Thursday, and there’d be complaints over the cancellation of the wildly popular telenovela from Argentina. The lead actress, a callipygian hellion from the Pampas, played a nymphomaniac chef who wielded a meat cleaver like a martial artist.
“What excuse can you give me, Fernando? That our people would rather watch Gaucho Love than listen to me?”
“I don’t like seeing you so agitated. You need to rest.”
“I’ll be fucking resting for eternity!”
Fernando had suffered countless of his brother’s tantrums over the years. To say anything else at this point would only invite more abuse.
“The people need to know that the Revolution must go on, with or without me.” El Comandante pulled at his beard. “Those gusanos will undo everything, change the street names, tear apart our history.”
“That won’t happen, I promise you—”
“Who’ll take over once we’re gone, Fernando? When we die, so will the Revolution.”
“The Revolution will never die. The people will—”
“The people will sell us out for a bar of soap!” the despot cried, spittle flying.
During the worst of the Special Period, after the Soviet Union collapsed and its five billion dollars in annual subsidies to Cuba along with it, when basic necessities were scarce and the plumpish populace lost, on average, twenty-two pounds (statistics were kept on such matters), what Cubans complained about most bitterly was the lack of soap. The Revolution was brought to its knees, its citizens forced into prostitution (often for a few hotel toiletries), because the government couldn’t keep them squeaky clean.
“You underestimate them—”
“Or a cell phone. Or a plate of dichoso pork chops! We might convince everyone on this island that the sea is red, but let’s not deceive ourselves!”
“If I believed you, I’d put a bullet in my head.” Fernando lowered his voice. “You’re overexcited. Let me take care of this.”
El Comandante shifted onto his right hip, then changed the subject. “And what’s this I hear about plans to build luxury casinos in Varadero?”
“It w-will attract a higher caliber of tourist.” Fernando stuttered when he was nervous. He didn’t dare tell his brother about his preliminary talks with the Mexicans.1
“We’re not that desperate yet. Cancel it.”
“But—”
“I said cancel the casinos. We’re not goddamn Monaco here! Whatever happened to going green, anyway?”
“We’ll never be in the black by going green,” Fernando quipped.
“Cojones, you sound like a captain of industry.”
“Hermano, we are the captains of industry here.”
His brother had been succumbing to too many bourgeois indulgences of late—Rolexes, hot tubs, golf, and now casinos. Some Communist ideologue he’d turned out to be. El Comandante didn’t bother asking about the disastrous real estate reforms already under way.
“And the Bay of Pigs reenactment?”
“We’re having trouble getting those old planes to work.” Fernando avoided his brother’s gaze. “Besides, no one wants to play the bad guys.”
“Who the hell gets to decide what they want to do around here?” El Comandante struggled to sit upright. “Listen to me, Fernando. Everything must be perfect. Down to the combatants’ stinking underwear. Do you hear me? The eyes of the world will be watching us again.”
“I’m on it,” Fernando whined, then turned around and left.
Let him sulk, the tyrant grumbled. The Revolution’s party days were over. The sooner Fernando realized this, the better. The two were overly attuned to each other’s moods. It’d begun when they were boys and Fernando inexplicably stopped talking. For eight months he relied on his older brother to speak for him, to say Fernando hurt his knee, or needs to take a shit, or wants vanilla ice cream. One day they snuck into a neighborhood cockfight, and the favored rooster swiftly decapitated the other and plucked out its eyes in the first round. “Puta madre, did you see that?” With those words, Fernando rejoined the ranks of the articulate. Now cockfighting was making a comeback in the capital. The best ring, by all accounts, was in Regla. Fernando wanted to shut it down, but the despot advised him to wait and strike when the ring was more flush with cash.
A pair of dazzling peacocks strutted and shrieked in the gardens below. The birds had been shipped from Madagascar at his wife’s request. El Líder studied their tremulous, iridescent plumage. These two had been impressing each other for years without a single female to distract them. When he’d complained to Delia about being surrounded by maricones, she’d nibbled on his ear and said: “Mi amor, you know as well as I do that boy animals are prettier than the girls.” Who was he to argue?
A stack of fresh reports was piled high on his desk: annual nickel production, last winter’s lobster harvest, revisions to the elementary school curriculum, tobacco exports to Switzerland, illegal marijuana production in Oriente, the trade imbalance with Mozambique, an exposé on the cross-dressing babalawos of Camagüey, another on Baracoa’s illicit mo
onshine operators. (Five people had died from the sweet potato liquor.) How the hell did he know what was true anymore? People told him only what they thought he wanted to hear. Nobody had the nerve to say that this plan was unsound, or that most government employees didn’t bother to show up for work on any given day. Cuba was riddled with corruption, hustlers, parasites; plagued by a culture of sinecure, amiguismo, back-scratching, ball-scratching. If you didn’t lie, cheat, or steal2 you were considered stupid or incredibly naïve. If you happened to be a genuinely honest, hardworking revolutionary, you came under the worst scrutiny of all: accused of being a spy, a sellout angling for some negligible advantage over your neighbor.
Seagulls soared along the shore, peering down at the glinting sea for fish. El Comandante took a swig of cognac from a flask hidden in his nightstand. It disheartened him to be so infirm and uncommanding. If only he could resuscitate the spirit of the early days, when the literacy campaign had taught a million peasants to read. Or figure out how to become a martyr, if he wasn’t already too damn old for that. In the fifties, Orthodox Party leader Eddie Chibás had shot himself in the stomach on his weekly radio show over a stupid political embarrassment and had become an instant saint. How Cubans loved their martyrs, roasting them over the fires of memory like suckling pigs!
The tyrant fixated on a crack in the ceiling. It looked, dispiritingly, like the state of Florida. For decades he’d ruled the country by jeep, traveling to its remotest corners to oversee the installation of electric generators, or the building of sugar refineries, or to slap the back of every last worker at a copper processing plant. His tireless work used to inspire his people. Not anymore. He felt cheated. So much effort, and for what? To watch his island sink into mediocrity and wholesale thievery? Each brick filched from a construction site, each vial of medication sold on the black market was a slap to his face.
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