“Come, hijo, we have work to do.” Goyo led his son back to the Cadillac and popped open the trunk. They could use the tire iron to break the ground and maybe the base of the jack to scoop out the dirt for a shallow grave.
Goyo watched as his son dug, scraped, sweated, and cursed, all the while crying out to the luminous moon for pity. “Remember how he used to chase rabbits in his sleep?” Goyito’s legs shook as he worked. The air was slippery hot, as if saturated with cooking oil. The bees, the birds, the ants did their day’s last chores. It took Goyito an hour to dig the two-foot hole, disturbing the earth to bury his dog’s giant, tender body. Goyo was overcome with a sense of futility as he and his son finally dragged the 150-pound beast to his resting place. His flanks were dank with flies, teeth still bared, as if in self-defense, the stubby tail inert and sad.
When they were done shoveling the earth over Rudy’s stiffening corpse, the moon was high in the sky. A few drops of rain fell from a wayward cloud. Goyito stretched out on the grave and settled in for a nap. It was useless to argue with him. His pale face looked almost peaceful; the gray tufts of his hair stuck up in every direction. His breathing was normal and deep, and Goyo remembered the few times he’d gotten to tuck his son into bed when he was a boy; a beautiful boy he’d been, too, before the madness kicked in. Sí, Goyito had slept like a baby. The problems began when he woke up, restless for adventure. But to love what was lovable wasn’t truly love, Goyo thought; only suffering made love worthy. By the time his son stirred from his nap, Goyo’s joints were painfully stiff.
Goyito yawned and announced that he wanted to go to a motel to “grieve in private,” but Goyo was nervous about dropping him off anywhere but a hospital. They were just seventy-five miles from New York City, and he wanted to get there without delay. As they cruised up I-95, Goyito began pounding on the passenger door to be let out. What choice did Goyo have? His son would be sixty years old in two months. There was nothing he could say to him that he hadn’t said a million times before. If Goyito wanted to be dropped off at a motel in the middle of New Jersey, then Goyo was helpless to stop him.
The next exit had several choices of accommodations. Goyo handed his son the $220 in his pocket and wished him good luck. He noticed Goyito spying the bar on the frontage road with the blinking, half-lit neon martini. Diesel fumes from the passing trucks poisoned the air. Goyito seemed impatient for him to leave. If only he could kiss his son’s eyes, wash his feet, take away his suffering, ease his inexhaustible heart. But Goyo knew none of it would do any good. Goyito had endured prison, watched men raped and shanked, and somehow managed to survive. Nobody had dared touch him, Goyo didn’t know why. He held his son for a moment before letting him go. It was all too sadly familiar. Who knew? Maybe the best of Goyito was yet to be born.
The sun rose as Goyo crossed the last stretch of New Jersey, its foliage a blinding, end-of-summer green. In his heyday, this would’ve been a normal time for going home after a night of drinking and whoring with his brothers in Havana. Once in 1957, Goyo had spotted Senator Kennedy at the Palette Club cozily nuzzling Bobby de Milanés, the notorious drag queen. If only Goyo had had a camera, he might’ve changed the course of history, singlehandedly stopped that traitor from becoming president and sabotaging the Bay of Pigs.
He called Víctor Ticona, his employee of twenty-seven years, Ecuadorian and reliable as day. He spoke an amalgam of Spanish and Quechua that nobody but Goyo understood. Víctor had put nine children through high school in Cuenca, where he’d also built a palatial home. In New York he mopped hallways, changed lightbulbs, and took out the garbage, but back in Cuenca, Víctor Ticona was a king.
“Víctor!” Goyo shouted into his cell phone. “I’m arriving this morning.”
“Bueno, Jefe. I’ll have your apartment ready.”
The early commuters were out in force, sensible men and women going to their sensible jobs in the suburbs—employees of banks and insurance firms, optics laboratories, the telephone company. How many other lives he might have led . . . rancher, chemist, singer, clarinetist. He’d wanted to marry Adelina Ponti, too, but that hadn’t happened either. Goyo toyed with the idea of wooing back Carla Stracci, his sexy mistress from the United Nations. How might he impress her after all these years? It was for women like her that men went to war, behaved like fools.
The Holland Tunnel was a nightmare. Goyo sat in its rush-hour fumes for over an hour. He scanned the news stations again but turned the radio off in disgust. In an age of continual information, who really knew a goddamn thing? He concentrated on ignoring his bladder and his fear about what Goyito might do next. When he emerged onto Canal Street, Goyo ran smack into a circus parading up the West Side Highway. Elephants in feathered headdresses lumbered along the Hudson, as if this were their natural habitat. Goyo was careful to avoid the bicyclists and skateboarders, the homeless man trying to wipe his windshield with a filthy rag. A gigantic coffin rolled down the middle of the avenue, narrowly missing his Cadillac.
It was just another day heating up in New York.
Island Blogger 2
I want to bring your attention, Dear Readers, to an editorial in The New York Times regarding the fate of Arab strongmen. The argument, applicable to our own situation, is that despots stay in power only when they can continue rewarding the loyalists entrusted with carrying out their regimes’ repressive tactics. Decrepit, bankrupt leaders are particularly vulnerable to being overthrown. Why? Because their henchmen can’t count on the bribes lasting indefinitely. Citizens, our resources have run dry. Cerraron la bolsa. The time has come for revolt . . .
SEPTEMBER 8–10
TROPICAL FORECAST: Skies mostly cloudy in the western and central regions, with showers, electrical rains, and storms. Maximum temperatures between 30 and 33 degrees Celsius, higher in the eastern south portion. Marine breezes in the afternoons with speeds up to 20 kilometers. Depressions, disturbances, and cyclones are still possible. We’re in the dangerous season, compays, so stay tuned. Tu Capitán de Corbeta, el último meteorólogo en La Habana.
15.
Lilies
New York City
Eighty-six years old and he could still get it up good and hard when the occasion warranted—and without pharmaceutical help. But what occasion was this? Goyo closed his eyes and tried to coax back the dissipating dream. He flipped his pillow to the cooler side and pressed it against his forehead. No luck. He wanted to squeeze in another hour of sleep, but a panoply of bodily torments prevented it: raging hemorrhoids (a souvenir from his long drive north), a crippling pain in his neck, his aching lower back. Goyo threw off the pillow and sheets and opened his window shade onto the hallucinations of Second Avenue: the corner newsstand floating off the curb, squabbling pigeons swollen as overfed geese.
Today was his sixtieth wedding anniversary and the feast day of Cuba’s patron saint—La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Before her untimely death, Luisa had been planning another party, more extravagant than their fiftieth. She’d even been toying with the idea of hiring Enrique Chia to play at their bash. At least Goyo had dodged that exorbitant bullet. He looked up at the ceiling, hands positioned for prayer: Perdóname, mi amor, I’m merely relieved, given my many expenses, that . . . Oh, never mind. He’d stuck his foot in it and might not get out of this alive. The last thing he needed was to take on the dead as well as the miserable living.
A chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling onto his bed in a puff of dust. Goyo sighed. His work here was never done. The brownstone might look sturdy from the outside—geraniums on the windowsills, an unimpeachable air of permanence—but below the surface, all was decay. Cockroaches and rats infested its deteriorating walls and had overrun the basement, where Goyo kept his archives: letters his father had sent to him at boarding school; a photo of Adelina Ponti playing piano; his moldering clarinet music; the birth certificates of relatives near and far; and, most important, the titles to the Herrera properties in Cuba.
Twenty-three years ago, h
e and Luisa had sold their old apartment, a spacious three-bedroom in Turtle Bay, and crammed the bulk of its contents into these thousand square feet of now-collapsing building. His wife’s devotion to the baroque was evident everywhere—in the gilded Florentine boxes and porcelain figurines, in the crystal decanters half-filled with watered-down scotch. Every overpriced knickknack and silk-upholstered chair, every chandelier and lamp, down to the fringed one on the nightstand to which a spider had attached its web, murmured: “I am Luisa Miyares de Herrera . . .”
A flock of sparrows rushed in a slanting mass toward the East River. A jogger, probably from another time zone, pounded his way north. Goyo reached for a tissue and trumpeted away the night’s accretion of mucus. How his younger self would’ve recoiled at the hoary vision of him now, with his back brace and bifocals, his bruised and bleeding gums, his lamentable sag of balls. His eyes felt sticky, too, as if they’d been smeared with honey. Sometimes he pictured himself growing wild in old age: his shoulders upholstered with mold, his lungs wheezing like a leaky bassoon. Only infirmity or impending death truly showed people what tedious organisms their bodies could be.
Goyo hoisted himself out of bed, steadied his cane, and hobbled past his wife’s bric-a-brac to the bathroom. He kept a shelf of Marcus Aurelius and José Martí above the toilet paper dispenser. Goyo could always count on them to provide a modicum of solace. He’d memorized many of Aurelius’s most famous quotations: “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambition.” “And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou does every act of thy life as if it were the last.” “Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.” Aurelius had died at fifty-nine after ruling the Roman Empire for twenty years. Martí was even younger when he perished, saddling up in the name of Cuban independence and charging into his first—and only—battle at forty-two.
Twenty minutes later, the toughest part of Goyo’s day was done. He took extra care with his morning ablutions, maneuvering his tongue to plump out his cheeks and upper lip while shaving his face to an impeccable sheen. He brushed his teeth—they were holding up better than the rest of him—and doused his solar plexus with cologne. What was left of his hair he smoothed back with a soft-bristle brush. Goyo was fond of his old mutt’s face, no matter its devastations, particularly his chin with its still handsome, beckoning cleft. How the ladies had loved that cleft!
At 7:00 a.m. Víctor Ticona knocked on his door, regular as a rooster. He set out Goyo’s breakfast in silence—sliced papaya, multigrain toast, café con leche. Goyo dictated the day’s tasks, which included purchasing black support hose and spying on the Turks for any breaches of kitchen regulations (Goyo was compiling evidence to evict them). The taciturn Andean could be provoked to garrulousness only with regard to his hated in-laws, whom he blamed for turning his wife against him. Occasionally, Goyo joined in with complaints about Luisa’s family, who’d chosen to remain in Cuba and had devoted their lives to fleecing him at every turn.
Goyo inspected the contents of his closet and chose his linen suit and two-toned shoes. Back in the day, his ensemble would’ve been regarded not as foppishness but as a stylish gentleman’s summer wear. After checking his appearance in the foyer mirror, Goyo adjusted his Panama hat, then swung open the front door. The dust hung thick in the corridor. He extracted a handkerchief from his breast pocket and covered his mouth. Esposito had been charging Goyo triple his initial estimates, certain that he wouldn’t risk switching contractors in midconstruction. Now the elevator was broken, too. With Víctor’s help, Goyo gingerly descended the three flights of stairs.
“I’ll be back by noon,” Goyo said. “I’m counting on you, Víctor. We need to evict those Turks one way or another.”
“A sus órdenes, Jefe.”
Goyo hailed a cab (he rarely drove in New York anymore, keeping his Cadillac safely stored in a midtown garage) and asked the driver, a Haitian, judging by his name—Henri Jean-Baptiste Dorcelus—to take him to the Brooklyn shipyards in Red Hook. In Havana, he and his brothers had grown up with chauffeurs. When they got old enough to drive, they borrowed the family Cadillacs and cruised them up and down the seawall, flirting with the pretty girls. Back then piropos were high art, not like the coarse come-ons of today. The challenge was finding the perfect balance between worshipful and provocative. Too crude, and the ladies wouldn’t give you the time of day. Too proper, and they stifled a yawn. The best flirtations were respectful but had a seductive edge. For example, if a woman had a florid backside and a tiny waist, one might say: Mujer de guitarrón es un viento de ciclón.
The taxi coasted across the Brooklyn Bridge. To the south gleamed the East River, emptying into the widening expanse of sea. What was the point of sending satellites into space, Goyo thought, when the greatest wilderness on the planet lurked at the edges of its shores? If he were young again, he might become an oceanographer like that French underwater explorer from the sixties who nobody remembered anymore. Goyo rapped on the glass partition dividing him from the taxi driver.
“Have you heard of Jacques Rosteau?” Goyo asked.
“Mais oui, ” Henri said, surprised. “He was my great-uncle on my mother’s side.”
“How’s that?” Goyo leaned forward.
“He fell in love with Maman’s youngest aunt. She was his companion for many years. In Paris, they lived. In a grand apartment on the Rue Bonaparte.”
“Is she still alive?”
“She drowned herself in La Seine after Jacques died.” Henri shook his head.
Goyo was convinced that the world’s greatest love stories remained hidden behind scrims of propriety.
Henri swerved from the bridge onto Tillary Street, driving through downtown Brooklyn and its newly gentrified neighborhoods toward the abandoned shipyards. With Goyo’s guidance, he pulled up to a chain-link fence that partially hid a building with a battered tin roof, exposed pipes, and tangles of rusted wiring. Once this had been the crown jewel in Papá’s archipelago of offices throughout the Americas—Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Panama City, Veracruz. All this from a boy who’d herded sheep in the mountains of Galicia. Papá liked to recount the time he’d fattened one of his sick sheep with bloating grasses and sold it for top dollar at the farmers’ market. His lesson: to strike a bargain with the Devil himself in pursuit of a profit.
Goyo recalled a visit to these Brooklyn offices when he was twelve and en route to the Jesuit boarding school in Canada. It was a September during World War II, and his father was nattily dressed, his gold pocket watch linked by a fine chain to his belt loop. Behind him, a rose-throated Cuban parrot preened its feathers in a bamboo cage. Papá’s executive secretary was a dead ringer for the Italian starlet Assia Noris, with her perfect brows and lush, wavy hair. Goyo watched as the secretary touched his father’s wrist, delicately, as if she were brushing away crumbs. Nothing was ever said, of course, but Goyo grew up to become, like Papá, a chronic philanderer.
In 1961, as panic over the Revolution skyrocketed, the Herrera ships were transporting people along with their usual cargo of sugar, tobacco, and coffee. The going rate for a spot on a northbound ship: three thousand dollars per man, woman, and child. Passengers accused Papá of extortion, but later, after his suicide, Goyo received dozens of letters from exiles claiming that Arturo Herrera had saved their lives. On that last voyage from Havana, Goyo was cheek by jowl with Cuba’s elite like so many peasants on an immigrant ship. The socialites hid their jewels in unmentionable places, and their impudent children wore three and four outfits at once. These days, a reverse flow of goods trickled into the island via returning exiles bearing aspirin, tires, panty hose, and cheap Chinese sandals for their relatives.
Goyo wondered how many of those same exiles had taken their lives after the catastrophe of the Revolution. His father had lived for the promise of return but soon became a man with no country, a homeless man. He killed himself one Sunday afternoon when Goyo was due for supper. Papá had left a simple meal on the kitchen table: a Spa
nish omelet with a side of still-steaming white rice, a salad cooling in the refrigerator. Goyo imagined his father slipping his 1927 Detective Special, the one he’d had inlaid with a mother-of-pearl handle, into his mouth; imagined him, unflinching, as he pulled the trigger.
Across the river, the lower Manhattan skyline brooded. It’d never looked right to Goyo since 9/11. The towering twin ghosts still hovered there like gigantic phantom limbs. He’d been uptown when the planes hit, lingering, dry-mouthed, in the luscious Carla Stracci’s bed after a night of drinking champagne and smoking pot (it was the one and only time he’d tried it) and nursing a splitting headache. None of his family was in town: Luisa was in Miami, Alina on a photo assignment in the Serengeti, and Goyito in a Jacksonville county jail for petty larceny—all safe, thank goodness.
The driver leaned against the hood of his taxi, smoking a cigarette. Goyo was inclined to join him with the cigar in his pocket but decided against it. Everything had its time, its place, its appropriate level of reverence. It was too early in the day for his puro. The traffic back to the city was bumper-to-bumper. Men and women bound for Wall Street trekked across the Brooklyn Bridge. Goyo was glad that he hadn’t spent his life slaving away at a big corporation. He’d been a slave all right, but to the demands of his own business.
On an impulse, Goyo had the driver stop at a Korean fruit stand on Thirty-Seventh Street and bought a bouquet of lilies for Carla. Then he instructed the driver to drop him off at the United Nations, where his ex-lover still worked as secretary to the Italian delegation. Goyo was anxious to see her, longed to bury his head in her magnificent breasts. The Russian security guard, a hulking vestige from the Cold War, was on duty as usual at the north entrance for visitors. Poor Yuri’s face looked like badly baked bread: lumpy cheeks, sagging chin, a crusty, split upper lip. Over the nearly three decades that they’d been friends, the Russian had proved an invaluable resource to Goyo, briefing him on potential paramours and arranging catering opportunities in exchange for roast-beef-and-horseradish sandwiches and multiple quarts of borscht.
King of Cuba Page 17