The contractor was on the sidewalk, shouting into his cell phone. He flung out his arms in exasperation.
“Where’s Víctor?” Goyo asked.
“Inside with his fucking feather duster. Listen, we got business to discuss.”
Goyo’s temples ached, and the pain was spreading to the back of his skull.
“Hey, you don’t look so good.”
“Son of a bitch,” Goyo managed to gasp.
“Let’s get you upstairs. I got the elevator fixed.”
Johnny helped Goyo inside, then up to his apartment, where Víctor put him to bed. Goyo was sweating so profusely that his clothes left stains on the coverlet. It couldn’t be another heart attack, he reassured himself, because his chest didn’t hurt. He closed his eyes and tried to steady his breathing, to tamp down the anxiety he felt. Víctor propped Goyo’s feet on a pillow and pressed a cool cloth to his forehead. A swirl of colored dots swam beneath his eyelids before he passed out.
When he awoke hours later, it was dark out and a mug of chamomile tea steamed on the nightstand. This meant that Víctor was nearby, probably watching reruns of Gaucho Love and wearing one of Luisa’s old bathrobes. A votive candle flickered on the dresser. Goyo shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts and prepare himself for the day ahead.
Víctor entered quietly and handed Goyo an envelope addressed to him in an old-fashioned script. It was from Adelina’s son, the tyrant’s namesake, now nearing retirement as an ophthalmologist. He’d enclosed a letter from his mother, writing from another century, a suicide note, hidden from him for almost seventy years. There were two things Adelina wanted Goyo to know: first, that she loved him (ay, his singing, aching heart!) and had been a fool to leave him; second, that the tyrant may have seduced her but she’d never cared for him, not for a second. Goyo pressed the letter to his chest. His grief strained every muscle in his back and groin. The tyrant had seduced Adelina, stolen his one great love, disgracing her for any other. And Goyo’s own arrogance had prevented him from saving her. He folded and kissed the letter—a fragile, transparent blue—and slipped it into his wallet. Then he hobbled to the bathroom and began the day’s ablutions.
Simón and Naty
NATY:
We are the unofficial hosts for artists’ parties in Havana. Everyone who’s anyone comes to our rooftop.
SIMÓN:
Bunch of freeloaders.
NATY:
I think of our place as a Paris salon except we’re in the tropics.
SIMÓN:
Don’t think it’s easy playing host to these queens. They don’t trust their own mothers. They never tell me what I need to know.
NATY:
The other night, the singing and dancing got so out of control that our neighbors demanded to be let in! We ran out of ropa vieja!
SIMÓN:
It’s my job to keep tabs on these sons of bitches. Who’s meeting whom, who’s going abroad and why. They avoid my questions, drink our whiskey and rum, and then they—
NATY:
We’re living in a dream, a beautiful dream . . .
En Route to New York
There were sixty-three people in El Comandante’s entourage, all on the same flight. Fernando had argued against this, fearing that a single act of sabotage could take out the island’s top brass. But if he was going down, the tyrant retorted, then every last bastard was going down with him. He regarded his fellow travelers. Many of the faces were unfamiliar to him, a new generation of bureaucrats and ass lickers. Not a true warrior among them. He squinted at an enormous negrito four rows back. His face was a beefy blue, his chin a shelf of bone. The man returned El Líder’s stare with a respectful nod. For all he knew, this giant could be anyone from the minister of health to the baritone chosen to sing Cuba’s national anthem at the United Nations.
El Comandante desultorily thumbed through his speech. He hated reading from scripts. Nothing was more boring than knowing exactly what he was going to say next. It was only after Fernando had shown him a video of himself rambling incoherently at a recent rally that he’d agreed to consider a few talking points. What he needed now was a nap; just a short nap and he would wake up on the razor’s edge again, his legendary memory intact.
The plane shuddered as it banked between stormy clouds. Even with the best mechanics on the planet, these old Russian planes held up poorly. They looked decent enough—spiffy with the island’s flag freshly painted on their tails—but the engines coughed like consumptives and frequently stalled in midair, causing precipitous drops that had a man chewing his own ass. El Comandante bit his tongue as the plane dropped a thousand feet. He focused on his toes to keep from throwing up. They were pinched in fancy Italian shoes that sported brass buckles instead of laces. If he could, he’d trade them in for a solid pair of hooves.
El Conejo appeared at his side, his complexion tinged green. He hated flying, and suffered from motion sickness on even the shortest of flights.
“You look a mess, hombre.”
“Thank you for your concern, Jefe.” El Conejo pulled a perfumed handkerchief from his vest and dabbed at his perspiring hairline. “There are a few, eh, security matters I wish to discuss with you.”
“Who’s trying to kill me this time?”
“An old faction of Omega 7 is mobilizing for your visit.”
“Pathetic bastards. They haven’t done a goddamn thing since the seventies.”
“They’ve taken on younger recruits, expert marksmen, veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” The adviser, nostrils flaring, pressed the handkerchief to his cheek. He stared at his boss like a forlorn dog.
El Comandante was losing interest. “More security, right.” He tilted his seat back, shorthand for This conversation is over and bring it up again at your peril.
The stewardess approached them in her snug carnelian uniform. She’d competed in the 2006 Miss Latin America pageant and came in second only to Miss Venezuela, who’d undergone head-to-toe plastic surgery. El Comandante wasn’t averse to a pair of inflated tits, but he hated how artificial they felt. Years ago, he’d ruptured a Mexican soap opera star’s rack during vigorous foreplay.
“Cafecitos, gentlemen?”
“You’re too generous,” the tyrant flirted.
The stewardess waited until he finished his espresso, then placed his cup on a silver tray. El Conejo’s eyes bulged from the caffeine. Soon they’d be flying over Miami. El Líder was inclined to order the pilot to empty the latrines over his enemies’ liver-spotted heads. He adjusted the ventilation fan, which emitted the faint, unmistakable scent of borscht. It stoked his appetite for the lunch that everyone but him was getting—lechón with rice, beans, and fried plantains. He got a goddamn salad topped with two shriveled strips of chicken.
The pilot announced that they were flying through an electrical storm and everyone, including the stewardesses, needed to take their seats. When Mamá visited the tyrant during thunderstorms, she mostly complained about her inability to track down Papá in the afterlife. “He’s hiding from me,” she would grumble, adjusting her slack, ghostly breasts. “Probably shacked up with some cualquierita.” The despot had hated hearing about his parents’ marital problems when they were alive, much less so posthumously.
El Comandante plucked a loose thread from his sleeve. His uniform drooped on his shrinking frame. He’d had the waist taken in to the measurements of his youth, but he’d refused to have his pant legs recuffed, and so they dragged along the floor collecting dust. Fernando even had the nerve to suggest that his brother wear the same ridiculous elevator shoes that he sported. The tyrant still regretted allowing his tailor of thirty-six years to emigrate. After his departure, dozens of other tailors vied for the job, but none had a fraction of the talent of Amado Cantún.
A pinkish crane flew by his window. El Comandante followed its flight path until it vanished south. He wrenched his neck trying to see if anyone else had spotted the spindly bird. But everyone was in a postpra
ndial stupor, with the exception of a sole workaholic hunched over his laptop. The tyrant racked his brain for any omens he may have received concerning cranes, but none came to mind. A wise man in the Niger had once predicted for him “a fiery death in the skies.” Could this be the time? What none of the many auguries had foreseen was the brutal truth: his rage at a canicular old age.
• • •
In New York, the skies were drizzling and gray. El Comandante descended the ramp of the Soviet plane and was met by a sea of black umbrellas. He had the disconcerting feeling that he’d landed in the wrong city, in the former Eastern Bloc, perhaps, on a typically dreary day. Not until he had both feet on the tarmac did he smell the danger, unmistakable as carrion.
“Fernando!” he bleated like a lost boy.
“Aquí, hermano.” His brother raised his arm and waved him forward.
With a prearranged signal, four bodyguards in bulletproof vests surrounded El Líder and lifted him toward the terminal. A Caribbean steel drum band was in full swing. Die-hard leftists from around the region erupted into applause as he entered. The dashing revolutionary they’d all hoped to see was a decrepit viejito, but they were pleased to welcome him nonetheless. The tyrant inched forward, his mind empty of everything but the suspense of surviving another attempt on his life. This was the last real power left to him: to thwart his enemies to the bitter end.
As the crowd clamored for their hero, a hail of bullets shattered the huge terminal window. People shrieked, scattering and falling to the floor. Fernando’s men wrestled the assassin to the ground—some buzz-cut punk with crippled Spanish insulting El Líder at the top of his lungs. How the boy freed himself nobody knew, but he managed to jam a handgun into his mouth and blow out his brains. The tyrant took a deep breath and turned his attention outside. A flock of cormorants had gathered in the skies like a jumble of ideograms, endlessly diving and lamenting in their old women’s voices. Then as if on cue, the birds screeched out to sea, toward the equator, to a distance measurable only by light.
17.
The Works
El Comandante
The tyrant was unfazed by the attack, a lamentable occupational hazard. It might’ve meant something for someone to have killed him in his prime, but to knock him off when he was already at death’s door? What triumph could there be in that? Fernando was extremely agitated by the disruption. He never kept his cool in a crisis. The only time he ever felt in control was pointing a gun at the head of a bound and blindfolded man.
“Let’s walk up Fifth Avenue,” El Comandante suggested.
“That’s imp-p-possible,” his brother sputtered.
“It’s your job to make it possible.” He wanted to show these lily-livered leftists how a real leader behaved under fire.
On their procession uptown, someone procured a wheelchair for him, but the tyrant refused to occupy it, finding the strength to walk on his own. The brush with death had invigorated him, recharged him to life’s purpose. As they made their way past astonished shoppers, not everyone recognized El Comandante. Had he changed so drastically? Some idiot shouted that Qaddafi’s ghost had come back to haunt Manhattan. Another brayed in a nasally accent: “What, that bastard’s still alive?” To which the despot contested: “Yes, and there is no greater victory.”
El Comandante stopped on the northeast corner of Forty-Ninth Street and ordered a hot dog with the works. Onlookers cheered when he took a bite dripping with sauerkraut, relish, onions, mustard, and ketchup. New Yorkers loved anyone who loved their hot dogs. Never mind the gastric repercussions, he couldn’t buy this kind of publicity. The image of the oldest living dictator eating a hot dog went viral and ended up on the front page of the next day’s New York Post with the headline TYRANT WANTS THE WORKS!!!
Next he demanded to be taken to the planetarium. A prickly Fernando and El Conejo flanked him in the backseat of the limousine. These two detested each other from way back. Neither uttered a word, but El Comandante sensed their displeasure with his impromptu street diplomacy. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he joked in between coughing fits. At the planetarium, he watched with great interest a film on the life cycle of stars. The tyrant sympathized with the supernovas, which, upon expiring, took entire galaxies with them. He was distraught to learn that the sun would burn out in five billion years. He, too, felt the life ebbing from him, as if it were trickling from some unknown hole. Why struggle so hard to have it all end in eternal nothingness?
After the movie, El Comandante paid a visit to the dinosaur hall. By then a motley group of municipal officials was trailing him, chatting inanely about baseball and hurricanes, as if these were Cuba’s only exports. He examined the remains of an Apatosaurus and an impressive skeletal reproduction of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Behind the beast hovered that Vásquez fellow, a wispy crown of smoke over his head. The tyrant’s knees buckled as he reached for his pistol. Around them, everything froze.
“You’re not going to try that again, are you, Jefe?” Vásquez cleared his throat. “I’m disappointed. I thought we’d ended our last visit as friends.” He produced a bowl of guavas from behind his back, peeled ones that looked like wobbling, bloodshot eyes. “Have one,” Vásquez offered. “I brought them for you.”
El Comandante picked up a slippery fruit and popped it into his mouth. The sweetness coated his tongue, shot through his veins. He ate another one, then another. Bits of pink pulp trickled down his beard. As he slurped up the last one, a saluting Vásquez slipped through a porthole in the exhibit’s west wall and ascended into the tempestuous skies.
On 125th Street, thousands of people came out to welcome El Comandante. There were Mexican and Central American faces in the crowd along with blacks and a notable contingent of whites. He felt less a prodigal son than a prodigal grandfather to this younger generation of admirers. Former president Clinton waved to him from the top step of a brownstone, his face fat and ruddy as a Russian barmaid’s. Make way, brothers, make way! The crowd parted and the two leaders embraced like old friends.
Clinton tried out his twangy Spanish, to the amusement of the native speakers, and El Comandante dragged out his beggar’s English—“Good to see you, mister!”
“You old warrior, you!” Clinton thumped him on the back. If he was shocked by the tyrant’s deterioration, he didn’t show it.
El Líder fake-punched the ex-president’s gut, to the delight of onlookers. Clinton wore jeans and a checkered shirt. With a straw hat, he could pass for a guajiro.
“Tell me, hombre, how do you stay in such good shape?” Clinton bellowed.
The tyrant was down to 146 pounds—the least he’d weighed since his high school basketball days.
“The embargo, mi amigo,” he answered slyly, patting his stomach. Clinton’s eyes turned to flint. Fuck him, El Comandante thought. He needed nothing more from this impostor.
He pushed eastward toward the Hotel Marisa. Fernando had arranged a fund-raiser in the hotel ballroom for longtime supporters. Why did his brother insist on such stultifying gatherings? More and more, his old comrades had died off, and the younger activists, stupid from TV and computer games, had no real clue about Cuba’s history. El Comandante looked around at the four hundred strangers, then peered down at his plate of fried chicken. At the head of the table, a bespectacled man was linking civil rights to the Revolution. “We are indebted to you, Comandante,” he said with genuine feeling, “for lighting the way during the darkest days of our struggle.”
El Líder waved back noncommittally. He felt ill at ease, exhausted. Another fit of coughing took hold. With some effort, he stood up and excused himself. Fernando caught up to him at the exit.
“I don’t give a damn!” the tyrant exploded before his brother could say a word. “Tell them whatever the hell you want. I’ve had enough.”
El Comandante went to his suite and lay down on the lumpy bed. Gas cramped his belly. He felt weak, wasted by insomnia and an excess of grease. The air conditioner pumped freezing gusts into his room. H
e hated air-conditioning, considered it a waste of valuable energy, but he let it blast to help drain—symbolically, at least—the Yankees’ bottomless resources. In the alley below, a chorus of dogs howled. It was the last sound the tyrant heard before falling asleep.
Goyo
Tyrant . . . son of a bitch . . . descarado . . . assassin . . . atheist . . . thief . . . Goyo spat out the list of insults as he methodically scoured himself with a brick of yellow deodorant soap. And seducer. Adelina’s seducer. He attacked one underarm then the other, his neck, the crack of his ass. After rinsing off, he dried himself with a monogrammed towel and reached for his bathrobe, also monogrammed. He wiped a circle of fog from the bathroom mirror and examined his face, pulling at the corners of his mouth to inspect his gums. Fans of wrinkles and delicate, purplish pouches padded his eyes. His cratered nose had been scraped of carcinomas more than once. He clipped the errant hairs from his nostrils, twirled cotton swabs in both ears, then snapped a mental picture of himself.
“Adiós, cabrón,” Goyo saluted himself. “La historia te llama.”
Víctor brought him a cortadito, perfectly made. He’d already pressed Goyo’s white linen suit, polished his shoes, and reshaped his Panama hat, as if he understood the significance of the day. He’d set out a pale blue shirt, also freshly ironed, a matching handkerchief, and a silk tie from his Miami haberdasher. What was civility, Goyo thought, if not endless ritual? He didn’t bother checking his blood sugar. What for? He reminded himself to call his children and his brother, Rufino; transfer gratitude money to his mistress Vilma’s account; leave a sizable check for the saintly Víctor, who’d spent another sleepless night watching over him. And for Carla? What could he do to repay her?
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