“That’s a good sign. You know how much he loves you.”
“Yes, I love him, too. Thanks, Ricardo. I really appreciate what you did.”
“You know how I feel about the family.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Welcome back, Mike,” Ricardo said as he left. “Let’s see if he gets better.”
Early the next morning, Paulino was making coffee in the kitchen. The water boiled in the beat-up enamel saucepan, and the coffee grounds rose to the surface. After he moved the pan to the side of the charcoal burner and let the coffee mixture rest for a few minutes, he poured it into a flannel funnel stained by previous infusions. He filled two small cups with the strong, bitter coffee.
He knocked at Don Miguel’s door before he entered, put the cup on the small night table, and opened the windows. The sunlight filled the room, illuminating old photographs of family members at weddings, baptisms, on horseback, at black-tie parties at the Habana Yacht Club. In a few pictures, taken in the 1920s, the men wore English boots, ties, and Smith & Wesson .38 revolvers, and posed with lovely girls with short hair and shorter dresses. As Don Miguel stirred, Paulino said, “Good morning.”
“Good morning, Paulino. We’ll have breakfast in the dining room at seven.”
“Yes, sir.” He led Mitzi out of the room with her tail between her legs, cocking her head sideways up at him, ready to eat.
Mike’s door was closed when Paulino knocked and opened it. Mike was already up, wearing an old Sulka silk robe, bought by his mother in Paris for his father when sugar prices were high and a bottle of champagne cost less than a dollar. The richness of its color and the sensuousness of its fabric contrasted with the masculine starkness of the room. The furniture was dark: a big mirror over the dresser, a massive mahogany rocking chair in the corner, and two night tables with brass lamps. An old Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio, its chrome gleaming against the black leather of its case, was placed in a bookcase filled with books in English and in Spanish, from the adventures of Tarzan to an illustrated Jules Verne story and bound volumes by Kant, Kafka, Papini, Maugham, and Marti. More family photos hung on the wall. One showed Mike at Varadero Beach with a goat, another with a big black rubber inner tube.
“Good morning, you look rested. I didn’t want to bother you last night. I knew you had to be tired.”
“Thanks, Paulino.” His face changed as he signaled to Don Miguel’s room. “Say, I’m still upset about Father. He looks well, but both Lustre and Ricardo are worried. What do you think?”
Paulino nodded in agreement. “He’s not himself, but we can talk later. Remember, your father likes to have breakfast at seven in the dining room.” Paulino placed Mike’s coffee on the night table before turning to leave, whistling a tune from his repertoire of décimas, sones, guarachas, boleros—songs about birds, cages, and love, about hearts and men that depart, never to return.
Paulino considered his current job but a short detour in his life’s journey. He was born in Cienfuegos, a southern city with a French park with elaborate lampposts and rococo cast-iron benches. The girls walked there in the afternoons, while the boys walked in the opposite direction so they could better enjoy the girls.
Paulino’s father, Pablo, had immigrated to Cienfuegos from Asturias, Spain. As a young man he worked at a small bodega near the house where Dolores, Paulino’s mother, worked as a maid and, later, as the cook. Pablo was first the delivery boy, and when he began to work behind the counter, Dolores stopped placing orders by phone and walked to the bodega. She told Luisa Abreu, her employer, that the bodega’s phone was always busy and that she could choose the best products if she went there. Pablo liked the way she flirted with him, her eyes full of mischief every time she came to the bodega to order groceries. Dolores knew that the Asturiano liked her. The bodega was small, but it supplied the essentials for houses in the neighborhood: cans of condensed milk, rice from Siam, black and red beans from Mexico, Campbell’s soup, and bars of soap with locks printed on the package—the brand that advertised on the radio novellas in the early afternoon. Dolores found reasons to make extra trips to the bodega, for the odd can of peanut oil, petit pois, or a slab of jerky.
Dolores loved to dance. She would have liked Pablo to take her to the dances at the Casino Español, but because she was half black and half Chinese, she was not welcome. She went to the other Saturday dances to drink beer, to dance, and to hear her favorite orchestra, which had numerous bongo drums and trumpets and a conductor who played a silver flute. Pablo liked a cheap date—a fried hamburger at the end of the day and maybe a Cuba Libre or two while the orchestra took a break.
Pablo liked Dolores’s smile, her delicate form, and her feline movements. When they danced, he felt the rhythm of the music in her body. Her arms and all the rest of her moved smoothly as the music transformed her into a desirable beauty. One evening Pablo took her to a dance hall to hear a famous orchestra from Havana. They had a singer who had recorded many hits that they had heard on the radio. The band was famous for their slow boleros and for their new takes on classic songs. Dolores let Pablo kiss the lobes of her ears, but she objected when he tried to kiss her on the mouth. That night on the way back to her house, he asked her to sit on a park bench under a big laurel tree. Dolores, pulling at Pablo’s hand, laughing, and teasing him gently, ran toward her house, but not too fast. Her simple dress was tight at her hips and showed the outline of her small breasts. She stopped at her garden gate, smiled again, and left the gate half open as she sauntered into the garden. It was long past midnight. Pablo followed, excited, as if he were in a Grecian mythical chase. Dolores laughed as Pablo kissed her and held her tightly. In that garden, under a luxuriant tree, Pablo lost his virginity.
After that, he was Dolores’s nightly visitor. They tried every bench at the park, went to dances, took long walks, and glanced at the windows of furniture stores. When Pablo had extra money, they rented a room for a few hours at an inn. Within a few months, though, Dolores became nervous; she had missed two periods, and the smell of frying fish croquettes made her vomit. The other servants, with whom she shared a small bedroom, teased her. She took herbs as recommended by a curandera, but it was too late. Paulino was born. Dolores, like many mulatas before her, gave her son a Spanish name—Paulino Rodriguez. Pablo recognized him as his natural son at the Civil Registry, but he did not marry Dolores. It was fine to have a mulata as a mistress, but to marry her—that was different. As soon as Paulino was old enough to walk, Dolores sent him to live with her mother in Santa Clara. She visited him once or twice a month. Pablo forgot about his son, but his son never forgot him, and neither did the boy’s grandmother, who reminded him that his father was a “businessman,” building up his pride. Paulino’s coloring was light brown, paler than his mother’s. He inherited his father’s square build and his mother’s lithe movements and ability to dance and sing.
When Paulino was six years old, his grandmother died. Dolores received permission from Luisa, her employer, to move with him into a small room in the garage. Dolores cared for her child, cooked for Luisa’s family, lost her figure, danced less, and drank more. Paulino, as soon as he was old enough, started to help around the house by running errands, and went to the nearby public school. The teachers liked him: He was bright, resourceful, and learned quickly. Dolores taught him to brew coffee, clean shoes, polish silver, and run to the drugstore for aspirin or cough medicine. He played baseball in the street with Luisa’s children and their friends. A lamppost marked first base, a big laurel tree second, and third base and home were marked with chalk on the pavement. At first they played with discarded tennis balls, then later with the real thing—a hardball made of horsehide—until they broke a neighbor’s window. When Luisa bought a new bike for her older son, she gave Paulino the old one, a red one with wide tires. Paulino soon was gazing at magazines he found in the boys’ room with pictures of vedettes with scanty clothes, big cheeks, and bigger bosoms. At night in the kitchen, he sat with the servants at
a rectangular marble table, eating leftovers from the main table with beans and rice. They listened to the soaps and news on the radio. When he grew older, he rode his bike to school, the Instituto de Segunda Enseñaza, in the center of town. In his group, he was the only one who owned a bike; the poorer kids had to walk or ride on the dilapidated buses. He wore Luisa’s sons’ old clothes. He went with them to the twenty-five cent matinees in the movie theater next to the park. The best families of Cienfuegos knew him by his first name. “Such a nice boy,” they’d say to their children. “Please be as well mannered as Paulino.” His schoolmates thought that he was stuck-up and called him “mariconcito” behind his back. Paulino read, and his books gave him other worlds to live in and belong to. After four years he finished his studies and became a Bachiller. At the age of eighteen, he had an education and dreams to improve himself. He went to see his father, now the sole owner of the bodega. Pablo stood squarely behind his ornate cash register. In back of him, bottles of beer and liquor from many different countries stood at attention and a dirty mirror reflected the cars and people passing in front.
“Good morning, Pablo,” said Paulino.
“Good morning. How can I help you?”
“Don’t you know me? Have you forgotten? I’m Paulino, Dolores’s son. I’m your son,” Paulino said indignantly. “I want to leave Cienfuegos and go to Havana to attend the university. I need you to help me.”
Paulino was tall and muscular with short, straight black hair and his mother’s feline mannerisms. Pablo recognized Dolores’s almond-shaped eyes, blue in Paulino’s face, the same blue as in Pablo’s mother’s eyes. Nearby, a customer nursed a beer. The radio played a danzón.
“Come,” Pablo said, “let’s go in the back. We can talk freely there.”
They walked out onto a big open patio with empty wooden boxes and two large papaya trees.
“Do you want anything to drink?” Pablo asked.
“A beer,” Paulino said.
Pablo went back and brought two bottles. A black cat moved lazily among the empty boxes. He gave one bottle to his son, took a gulp from his, and asked,“What do you want?”
Paulino answered, “I want to leave Cienfuegos. Here, I’ve learned everything I can.”
“Does your mother know that you’re meeting me?”
“No.”
“Shouldn’t you ask for her opinion?”
“No.”
Pablo considered the request. What had he been working for, after all? To return to Spain and try to have another son, one he would never abandon? He was a practical man and went to the cash register and took out two hundred pesos.
“Here, this will give you a start,” he said as he tossed the bills on the countertop.
“Thanks,” Paulino replied happily as he took and held them in his fist.
“Good luck, but don’t come back,” Pablo said, and turned his back to his son to wait on a new customer.
Paulino promptly left, having sold his patrimony for two hundred silver coins, enough to pay the rent of a small room and feed him for a few months. He took detours on his way home, past the mansions near the water, where round glass globes hung like grapes from the lampposts. He gazed into small gardens with roses of different colors and palm trees planted in straight lines. He smelled the sea breeze and heard the waves beat against the piers. He arrived late at the house. His mother asked, “Where have you been?”
“I went to see my father at his bodega.”
She was surprised. “Why?”
“I didn’t want to tell you. I was afraid it might upset you. I asked him for money to go to the university in Havana.”
Dolores sat down heavily and looked at the floor.
“I have excellent grades. My teacher told me I should. I can find a job. I saved a little bit of money and the cabrón gave me two hundred pesos. That will tide me over for several months. I was afraid that you would get mad.”
Dolores, with her eyes full of tears, shuffled her feet. “When?”
“Maybe tomorrow, maybe Monday, I don’t know, but very soon.”
Paulino retreated to their room, sat on his cot, and glanced around before returning to the kitchen to fetch two cardboard boxes. In one, he packed his clothes, in the other, his few books: poems of Marti, a Neruda poetry collection given to him by a friend, and an old book, Platero y Yo, a collection of stories about a donkey and a boy, which he had earned as a prize in school.
The following day, he took a bus for Havana. He settled in the area near the university, and soon found a job as a busboy in a bustling café, where he slept in the back room. Paulino always kept a smile on his face, and earned tips so large they exceeded his meager salary. He quickly became friendly with the regulars, and soon knew all the political jokes. He laughed at the ones the customers told; then in his small room behind the café, he embellished them, adding new twists. He would then go from table to table, and as he poured the hot coffee and milk, recite his new version with gusto.
Paulino registered as a student and attended several classes during the day. He read Camus and Sartre on the recommendations of other students and of his customers in the café. He also read Kafka, discussed Nietzsche and Hegel, and learned the poems of Dario, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Mistral, and Guillen. He started to go to nightly meetings to discuss books, theater, and music. He wrote articles for the university newspaper. Once, one of his letters was published in the communist newspaper, Hoy. He was an author. Paulino went to the political demonstrations on the broad steps of the university. The bronze statue of the alma mater opened her arms to all students: Some accepted her embrace and studied, others showed up because they wanted to change the government. The demonstrations were frequent and popular. The president sent the police to break up the demonstrations, and the police and students played cat and mouse games. The students barked speeches on loudspeakers, skipped classes, and finally went on strike, taking a symbolic page from the past, when rebellious students wielded true power, as in the thirties, when they had helped tumble the presidency of Gerardo Machado. Even the professors, not wanting to be called reactionaries and trying to support democracy, joined the strike. The formal educational process ground to a halt, but not the meetings, the committees, the banners, the speeches, the brandishing of guns, the letters to the newspapers, and the manifestos. Soon after, late one night, two men knocked at the door of the small room where Paulino slept, wearing only his shorts. The men carried him by force out into a tan Oldsmobile and drove to the west of town. They crossed the big bridge over the Almendares River, passed the Columbia army barracks, and stopped at the bucolic lake by the country club, where they made him drink a massive dose of castor oil. They tossed Paulino from the car and left him, sick from the castor oil to shit and pee in his shorts. Early the next morning, a taxi driver, who had decided to take a shortcut after dropping off customers at the Playa, saw Paulino’s slumped body near the lake and took him to the university’s hospital. Paulino was not the first, nor would he be the last. His stomach hurt. His ribs hurt. His pride was hurt. His ass hurt. He decided to put some distance between himself and his unwelcome new acquaintances at Batista’s Army Intelligence Force, the feared G2.
Paulino had met Mike at a Sunday salon, where they had discussed the problems of the world until the early hours of the morning, and now he called him for help. Mike gave Paulino a letter of introduction to his father, and in short order, he became the manservant at the farm. He was removed from danger—but also from his dreams. Four years had passed since that day. Walking back to the kitchen, carrying the farm’s big silver coffee service, Paulino thought bitterly, “I can still read, I still can write, I can still laugh, I can still walk, but I’m not free.”
— 2 —
The Black Stallion
MIKE OPENED HIS armoire and smelled the musty odor that comes from clothes hanging too long in a humid climate. He chose an old pair of blue jeans, a long-sleeved guayabera, and paratrooper boots that a distant uncle had giv
en him. He stuffed a few Vuelta Arriba cigars in his guayabera, and refilled his engraved Zippo lighter. Mike was not too tall, about five feet nine. He was muscular and had brown hair that he wore in a military-type haircut. His brown eyes were expressive. He briskly brushed his short hair and left the house. He headed toward the show barn with its guano-thatched roof and sides made of small timbers unsuitable for anything else: It looked like a stockade with a large straw hat.
As Mike slowly walked through the horse stalls, he remembered that one summer his father had made him work at the barn, insisting, over the strong objections of his mother, that Mike had to learn the business from the bottom up. He had cleaned the stalls, fed, and watered the horses. His hands bled from the rough pitchfork used to muck out the stalls. On the first day, an older worker ordered Mike to haul bucket after bucket of water to fill a large trough. When Mike had almost finished, the worker went to a nearby shed, and moments later, he walked out, holding a water hose. Laughing, he topped off the trough, his eyes full of disdain.
The work was hard, but Mike liked it, and he vowed on that first day to work harder than anyone else without complaint or expectation of special treatment. During that summer, Mike came to know the farm workers in a new way. They worked side by side, shared meals, and spoke of work, women, and their families. Mike came to appreciate and even take part in the workers’ ritualistic taunts to each other. Yet that didn’t stop him on some days, when he was tired of flies buzzing around his face and sweat clouding his vision, from dreaming of water-skiing behind a speed boat at Varadero and laughing with his friends.
Now Mike stopped at the stall of a dark bay horse, a son of the stable’s black stallion. The colt had a small head; dark, intelligent eyes; a mane braided with small pieces of red cloth to protect it from the evil eye; and a long, braided tail. At horse shows, the tail was tied to a black leather and silver criollo saddle that had two pistol holders on each side of the pommel.
My Lost Cuba Page 2