Last Flight of José Luis Balboa

by Gonzalo Barr

  The island was the second-most traveled spot in the Caribbean after Havana. New money built hotels and casinos. In 1956, Xavier Cugat’s or chestra flew in to play two sets in the grand, salon of the Hôtel Caraïbien to a standing-room-only crowd. Ugo’s mother showed him the black-and-white picture of his father in a white dinner jacket sitting at a table with the maestro and a buxom blonde. His father was an executive in the family bank, which sponsored the event. He was not yet thirty, but already he was handling millions of dollars for the government at a time when a million dollars was enough to set you up for life, she said.

  The new monied people launched the island’s first television station and a second newspaper to compete with the establishment press. Matters that were once settled behind closed doors appeared on its front pages. Reporters competed to write the most scandalous story, and headlines tested the limits of good taste. Then someone discovered irregularities in the treasury. For twelve years, the government had wired tens of thousands of dollars each, month to an account in the New York branch of the family bank. The account belonged to the Argus-Tortuga Engineering firm. The minister of the treasury, in the first live television interview of a government official, claimed that the money went to a prestigious firm of engineers who would design a hydroelectric plant in the hills, but no plans were discovered. The firm had only a post office box in Brooklyn, and the two men who were listed as signatories to the account were rumored to have fled to Panama.

  The minister of the treasury was jailed and later released. The president was forced to resign and went into exile in Quito. Both newspapers ran front-page stories about the scandal and named the persons who were involved. Ugo’s father fled to Miami. He had planned to make his way north by train to New York, sail to Europe, and settle in Paris to wait out the crisis, but that was before he met Ugo’s mother.

  It was the late fifties. Most English speakers in Miami pronounced the name of the city My-ah-mah, and the only time you heard Spanish spoken on the street was when Cuban Castro sympathizers gathered at the entrance of the Tivoli movie theater on Flagler Street and Eighth Avenue to collect donations for the revolutionaries, who were still in the hills then. Nobody locked his door at night. The Rat Pack flew in to sing at the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc on Miami Beach. Ugo’s mother worked as a model for a couturier on Lincoln Road and dreamt about applying for a job as a stewardess with Pan American, seeing the world, and marrying a rich executive. “Imagine,” she told Ugo once, “if I’d done that, I would have never met your father and you wouldn’t exist.”

  Ugo’s mother and father met on a Friday evening. Another of the couturier models invited her to the Fontainebleau for drinks. They sat at a small table in the Boom-Boom Room where, instead of the Rat Pack, a Latin crooner sang boleros, accompanied by a four-man band. When Ugo’s father came over to their table, she almost died. Those were her words, “I almost died. He was so handsome, I thought he was a movie star.” The feeling was mutual, she told Ugo, because his father proposed to her before she had finished her second brandy Alexander.

  When Ugo was four years old, his father went out alone on his yacht and did not return. The coast guard found the unmanned boat drifting north in the Gulf Stream. The last ten pages in the logbook and even the endpapers were filled with one word—noia, “boredom” in Italian—neatly printed in his father’s hand.

  Ugo’s mother sold the yacht and kept the logbook, which Ugo found and hid when he was eight, along with a picture of his father taken when he was in his twenties, slipping the key into the door of an English roadster. His father looked slim in a linen jacket and pants. He wore loafers without socks. Every few years, Ugo took the logbook and the picture and examined them, as if they could tell him something.

  Bettina Alvarez returned a week later and rang the doorbell. Ugo put down the book he was reading (Erasmus this time, on passion and reason) before he stood to answer.

  “Let me in,” Bettina said over the intercom. “We’re celebrating.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “You won’t know that unless you let me in.”

  Ugo went to the front of the house and opened the door.

  Bettina handed him two bottles of champagne. Her black hair was pulled away from her face by a shiny tortoiseshell band. She wore a short dress. Even in flat shoes, she was tall. “What were you doing?”

  “I was reading.”

  “You’ll go blind.”

  Ugo walked into a sitting room and showed Bettina to an old leather sofa. From a cabinet, he reached for two flute glasses. The rim of a glass struck the cabinet door as he took it down and rang in a clear, sustained note. He opened one of the bottles and poured the champagne.

  “We are celebrating the fact that the judge entered a restraining order against my ex-husband,” Bettina said. “He can’t come anywhere near my house. If he does, all I have to do is call my attorney. Not only will he be found in contempt, the judge told him that she would personally call the bar and file a complaint against him.”

  Ugo nodded, though many of the words, used in this context, were new to him.

  “You should have seen my ex-husband in court. He looked like he was going to pee in his pants. The great Bud Alvarez, with a silver tongue and gold-lined pockets, silenced and scared.”

  “Here’s to your retraining order,” Ugo said.

  Bettina laughed into her glass. “You’re cute.” She drank the champagne in one gulp.

  Ugo refilled her glass slowly. Her cell phone rang, a few bars of Chopin’s “Marche funèbre.”

  “I can’t believe this!” Bettina pulled her phone from a slit pocket in her dress. “Whad’you want?” She looked at Ugo and raised her index finger. “What part of the court order didn’t you understand, you guava head? You want me to call Leona right now? You want me to ask her to find you in contempt?”

  She sat straight and put both her feet on the floor.

  “Fine, so it’s the judge who finds you in contempt,” she said, standing. “It’s still Leona I’m calling. And she can get the judge to find you in contempt. And while she’s at it, she can also get you to pay her attorney’s fees, which I wouldn’t be incurring if you weren’t acting like a bona fide asshole.”

  Bettina threw the cell phone against the wall so hard that it broke into several pieces. One of its keys slid across the carpet and landed at Ugo’s feet. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes.

  “I’m in a safe place,” she said under her breath. “I’m in a friendly place.”

  “I have some herbal tea that is supposed to be good for you. My mother brought it back from one of her trips. Would you prefer some of that?” Ugo asked her.

  But she stayed quiet, her eyelids fluttering. When she opened them, she saw the pieces of her cell phone scattered on the carpet and the mark where the phone had struck the wall. She examined the mark closely. “I hope I didn’t ruin the wallpaper. Did it come with the house?”

  “It’s always been there,” Ugo said.

  She ran her hand against the wall. A small piece of the wallpaper tore off.

  Bettina sat again, close to Ugo. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “That was my ex-husband, but I guess you figured that out. It’s just that he makes me so mad. It’s bad enough that he still calls me, but it’s like I can’t get away from the man. His picture’s everywhere—on buses, bus benches, the Yellow Pages. There’s even a banner—’Alvarez Accident Attorneys,’ it says—that streams behind a propeller plane that flies over downtown. His ad comes on at least fifty gazillion times every afternoon on all the TV channels, on radio too. ‘Have you been seriously injured?’ That’s how the ad used to start. When he wasn’t getting enough calls, he dropped the ‘seriously.’”

  “Are you sure you don’t still have feelings for him, maybe?” Ugo asked.

  “Buddy was a stage in my life. I’m over him. Besides, he’s too jealous, a real nut case. He used to go through my purse. He had Spyware installed on my computer
. Every time I sent an e-mail, a copy of it went secretly to him.”

  “What was he so afraid of?”

  “What do you think he was so afraid of? He thought I was going to cheat on him?”

  “And did you?”

  “You know, for such a polite little nerd who never gets out, you sure know how to ask a direct question. No, I never cheated on him. How could I? He tracked my every movement 24/7. He was jealous of everybody, even my girlfriends. Four of us went out to lunch once. These are girls I’ve known since high school, OK? What do you think he does? He calls my cell phone every fifteen minutes. ‘Where are you? Who’re you with? What’re you doing?’ The same three questions. Finally, I just turned the phone off. When I got home, all my clothes were gone. I never found out what he did with them, probably dumped them somewhere out of anger. His little temper tantrum cost him big-time, though, because I made him buy me a whole new wardrobe.”

  “So you came out all right.”

  “No I did not come out all right because no wardrobe is worth going through what I did. He made my life miserable.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Three years. I tried to make it work. I didn’t want another divorce. My family gave me hell the first time around. You expect your own family to back you up, give you moral support, then they turn on you.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.” Ugo stood and walked to the window. He separated two slats in the blinds and peered through the opening at the sunlit garden. “I have no brothers or sisters. My mother prohibited all contact with her own family and my father’s family too.”

  Bettina walked behind Ugo and put her hand on his shoulder. “How odd.”

  “Not really. She hated my father’s family because they rejected her, and she was ashamed of her own because they were poor.”

  “She told you that?”

  “I overheard her.”

  “I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by people. I don’t know what I would do without noise. This Bates Motel thing you have going on here is spooky. No offense. Listen, I’m doing all the talking here. The least you can do is top me off.” She raised her glass. ”More shahm-pahn-nyuh, if you please.”

  Ugo refilled her glass. Bettina took it and drank.

  “I am really sorry about the wallpaper,” she said, “Maybe I can find someone to repair it, paint it or something, make it lock good as new.”

  “You needn’t worry, no one is going to see it.”

  “I think I’ve had enough champagne. Do you mind if we sit by the pool? I need to look at the bay. It’ll calm me down.”

  They left the champagne and glasses in the sitting room and walked through a long hall with dark oak paneling. On the walls were oil paintings, canvases with dollops of bright blues and yellows, hanging in thickly ornamented gold frames.

  “Does your ex-husband want to go back with you?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I told you I’m over him. I need to move on.”

  They turned into another hall. At the end was a door with a large window through which they could see the bay. Ugo opened the door to the patio and let her through. “Maybe you were never in love with him,” he said. “I mean never really in love.”

  Bettina stopped. “What do you know about love?” She walked past Ugo and stepped outside.

  The remains of their lunch from the previous week was on the table. Two plates and a glass were shattered on the tiles. One corner of the linen tablecloth was chewed and frayed. A chair lay overturned. Bettina walked to the edge of the pool and saw a bottle and the cooler at the bottom.

  “You still don’t have any staff?” she said.

  “I haven’t gotten around to it,” Ugo said.

  “You are truly a case. Don’t move,” Bettina said.

  Within minutes, five maids came from her house and collected the plates and glasses, and they cleaned and put the iron furniture back in its place.

  “Living like this is unnatural,” Bettina said. “I’ll find you a maid.”

  Over the next few weeks, she called housekeeping services and interviewed the maids herself. The first maid she hired stole two pairs of cuff links and some silverware. The second maid sneaked her boyfriend in late at night. Ugo was awakened by music a little after 3:00 one morning. He followed the sound to the patio, where he found the maid and a young man embracing in the pool. Bottles of wine stood empty on the tiles. The air smelled of marijuana. The third maid cleaned better than the other two and could prepare simple dishes. But she also made long-distance calls to a village in Guatemala, which Ugo found in an old atlas in the library, the phone bill in one hand, the other tracing over the long indigenous names.

  Then there was Paola. She was in her early thirties, not much younger than Ugo himself, and she had Felipe. In less than a week, under Bettina’s direction, Paola cleaned, washed, or polished every object in the house. The furniture even smelled of fresh lemons again.

  Ugo’s mother did not remarry after his father’s death. “Great wealth brings with it great responsibility,” she told him. “You can’t mix with just anyone.”

  Until Ugo was eight, he slept with his mother. They shared the bighouse with their two servants. Ugo liked it when Mrs. Norcross polished the furniture and it smelled of fresh lemons. Mr. Norcross drove the old car and kept it shiny. He also oversaw the gardeners who came once a week in the summer. From his room, Ugo watched the gardeners ride their tractor mowers over the grass until he could not see them in the distance.

  Ugo went everywhere with his mother. Her hairdressers played games with him at the salon. He clung to her when she went to the bank. A serious man in a dark suit escorted them through the vault door, to the back, where they kept the safe deposit boxes. The muted light and the dark blue carpet made everything quiet. There were tiny rooms too that reminded him of confessionals. The man carried the safe deposit box inside one of the rooms and left. His mother locked the door before lifting the lid of the box on the table in front of her. Ugo stood next to her, his arm on the back of her chair.

  He was allowed to play in the fitting area of the couturier at which his mother had stopped modeling and was now one of the biggest clients. It was there that he first saw a woman other than his mother undress. The louvered door to one of the fitting rooms was open. A broad-backed woman slipped out of a gown and handed it to an assistant. The woman stood in her underwear, looking at herself in the mirror. Then the assistant turned, saw Ugo looking, and shut the louvered door.

  At home, his mother read to him while he drew pictures in bound sketchbooks that she ordered from Florence, using colored pencils made in Belgium. Ugo started school when he was six years old. His mother walked him to the headmaster’s office on the first day of class. She adjusted his bow tie, tugged his jacket, kissed his forehead, and left. The other boys made fun of the lipstick marie on his forehead and nicknamed him “Romeo.” The first week, he cried every day. But soon, he made friends. Arid though the boys still called him Romeo, they began to include him in their games. Two years later, when Ugo was in the third grade, his mother received a note from the headmaster observing that Ugo might get better grades if he paid attention to the teacher. The headmaster thought Ugo should be moved behind one of the better students.

  Mayra Bonnet was the daughter of a prominent Cuban family who had owned three sugar mills and a distillery in Oriente Province, where they made a rum so strong that the bottle had a separate label warning of fire hazard. In 1961, when Castro expropriated the family’s properties, they boarded a Pan Am jet to Miami. They lived off the interest on millions of dollars banked in New York, Geneva, and, it was rumored, a promissory note signed by the Vatican.

  Mayra was slim and quiet. She had very white skin, black hair, and green eyes. With the unconditional approval of Ugo’s mother, the headmaster ordered the teacher to move Ugo closer to the front, behind Mayra, who was a model student, in the hope that he would learn good study habits.

 
His heart jumped when he first saw Mayra up close, carefully guiding her pencil over the paper. He fell in love with the thinness of her wrist, the back of her neck, her ponytail.

  When Ugo tried to get her attention, she complained to the teacher that he was distracting her. The teacher warned him to be quiet. Mayra turned in her desk, looked at Ugo, and smiled.

  When he tried to sit near her during recess, she complained to Mrs. Griffith, who wore her hair in a beehive and whose only job at the school was to watch the children and sell them snow cones. “Little beys do not bother little girls,” Mrs. Griffith told Ugo. Mayra laughed.

  This was also about the time that Ugo broke his front tooth. It happened during afternoon recess. Two groups of boys played tug of war. Ugo joined in. Unaccustomed to physical exertion, he lost his footing and fell face-forward. His mouth would not stop bleeding, even after the school nurse arrived and applied a compress. “Oh dear,” the headmaster said, when he saw Ugo’s bloodied mouth.

  The dentist fitted Ugo with a temporary cap over the broken tooth and promised his mother that he could have a permanent one when he was older. Though the temporary cap remedied the fearsome appearance of the jagged front tooth, it also felt as thick as a finger and smooth like varnished wood. And it throbbed.

  Back in class the next day, Ugo rubbed the back of his hand against Mayra’s sweater, just to touch something that belonged to her. The teacher could be talking about the longest river in the world or the capital of Mongolia, but Ugo was in the land of Mayra.

  Two weeks later, he was finally alone with her. It happened during morning recess. Mayra walked in the girls’ line, next to Ugo. She tugged on his elbow, and asked him if he wanted to sit with her. Ugo nodded, though he was unable to find his voice.

  Mayra bought a cherry snow cone from Mrs. Griffith. Ugo did too. “Cherry is my favorite,” she said. They sat on a bench under a large oak tree, where it was shady. He watched her take a small bite of the ice cone. When he did the same, using his front teeth, he felt a sharp pain, like a nail being hammered through his upper gums into his nose. Ugo cried out, dropped the snow cone, covered his mouth with his hands, and fell to the dusty ground.