San Juan Noir

by Mayra Santos-Febres

  * * *

  My father’s drinking increased and his foulness and nastiness with it.

  I heard the sound of flesh smacking flesh late one night, bestial groans from my father’s throat. I knew damn well what was going on. My mother was being beaten and raped by the man she had vowed to honor and obey until death undid them apart.

  She could no longer hide the bruises on her arms, legs, and face by combing her hair or by wearing long-sleeved blouses. I took all of this, just like my mother did, with silence. And after school every day—behind the latrine—I mended my father’s machete.

  And I planned.

  The beatings my mother got nightly began to take their toll. She became a frightened and defeated creature. There was no shadow left of the woman I had loved so much. Her tears were my tears. Her pain was my pain. We became shells, spiritless shells.

  * * *

  As the coquís sang their sweet lullabies and the small town slumbered in a peaceful sleep one night, I slipped away from the house and went straight to the latrine. I’d planned for days and weeks. I waited for the bastard to come around the bend, on the familiar road where trucks drove by in the mornings and were chased by little boys.

  I saw his silhouette under a weak moon, a black smear staggering along the road. I waited, hunched behind bushes, where I found some sugarcane forgotten by the boys.

  I heard his boots dragging on the road, sending small pebbles skidding into the bushes. One of them tumbled, jumped into the air, and hit the raised machete blade.

  I could smell the sweat and alcohol seeping out of his pores, even from there. I could smell his breath that came in and out in halting hiccups and loud, disgusting burps.

  His bloodshot eyes popped out from their sockets when the sharp blade—his precious blade—slashed him along his neck, slicing his throat open. Blood shot out like a busted water pipe, and he pressed his fingers to the wound.

  He staggered backward, then sideways, and the momentum knocked him forward. I swung the machete again, slicing half his face off. His knees buckled and he landed hard, still holding onto his throat and making gurgling sounds—for with severed vocal cords there were no screams of death. I buried the blade into his black heart with one final thrust and ran like a demon.

  * * *

  The morning sun rose above the mountains and the wind brought the aromas of a new day with it. Grandpa’s rooster flapped his tired, old wings and stretched his scrawny neck—he crowed. I could hear soft snoring coming from my mother’s room.

  The peaceful sleep she had been denied for too long.

  I smiled. She will sleep better from this day forward, I told myself.

  Sirens approached from the distance, and I could hear the chattering of a nervous crowd gathering at the bend in the road. I pretended I was still sleeping when the first knocks came urgently on the door.

  Originally written in English

  SWEET FELINE

  by Alejandro Álvarez Nieves

  El Condado

  I’d been told that the security office at the Majestic was a labyrinth, like the ones in the movies. So when they took me there—handcuffed, held by the arm, disgraced—I lost myself in that sea of monitors and Internet servers, until I was left sitting in that little room. That’s when I woke up to the reality of the situation: they were going to kick me out of the Majestic, after seventeen years working my ass off for this fucking hotel. The shift manager showed up fifteen minutes later, with his characteristic mafioso air, face serene and eyes unhinged. He entered the room and sat down facing me. A few seconds went by and he didn’t say anything. I was quiet too. Like a gangster, he removed a cigarette from his pack and offered me one. I was scared shitless, so I started to blubber excuses: “My bad, man, she tricked me, I didn’t see it coming.” I was always careful, stuff like that never happened to me. He just wanted me to tell him everything before that dumb-ass Hermann showed up with a police officer. Because part of that whole theater would be meeting with the director of Security and an agent from the CIC—the night manager always wanted to be told everything, no matter what it was. If you stepped up and told the truth, he’d also step up and support the staff. If you didn’t support the staff, the hotel was screwed. I won’t lie, I didn’t trust my boss, man. Because all of that sounds nice, camaraderie among men, that bullshit about not sticking your nose in anyone else’s business—until someone sticks a knife in your back.

  “Relax, Papi. Tell me everything. And then repeat the story in front of Hermann and the agent. I’ll be with you the whole time. I got your back. Don’t worry,” he said.

  Relax? . . . How do you get to Jayuya? Take the back road—that’s what my grandpa always said. You get it? I had to make sure that the night manager would have my back, you know. It wasn’t the first time that Security had interrogated me, nor was it the first time that a police detective had questioned me during an investigation. Being interviewed in the manager’s office and being handcuffed and interrogated in a bunker are not the same thing. For the first time, I was the subject in question, and I had to know if this guy was going to have my back. It really fucked with me not knowing for certain that no matter what I said and what happened, the next day I’d head to the bellhop room, punch in, and go to work. That’s how I earn a living, and I couldn’t let any manager get in the way of that. So I had no choice but to tell him.

  * * *

  Her name was Candy, or that’s what she said, you know, and she’d been staying in the Ocean Suites for three days. A blonde with a tight body, one of those rare girls from somewhere in the Southwest US: tall, blond, green eyes. Not more than twenty-five. Always in tropical clothes, but elegant, with a small tattoo of an infinity symbol on her right wrist and an Egyptian cross on her left. A sea of freckles sprinkled across her tits. From the time she stepped through the arch of the main entrance, she was throwing cash around left and right. Thirty bucks for Antonio to go get her luggage, three hundred as an appetizer for the girl at reception to give her an exclusive suite facing the sea. A hundred for Ortiz to bring up her luggage. Come on, the girl, being Southern, was a gravy train. When they dropped off her luggage, she just sat down on the balcony chair and called down to order a bottle of Cristal and some strawberries dipped in chocolate. Fifty bucks for room service, easy.

  To top it off, she was nice. She smiled wide, her cheeks pocked with dimples. She strolled all around the terra-cotta marble of the lobby. She inspected the details in the wood, the lights, the assortment of orchids with a captivated expression, like some kind of hippie Indiana Jones—you know the way some women are, the way they act kind of dumb, but then all of a sudden they pull out the whip or put a bullet in you, eyeing you up and down like an aborigine. She talked to whomever she wanted whenever she wanted, guest or employee, it didn’t matter. She asked about everything, from what your job was to how many kids you had, putting on an interested face. It was impossible to tell if she was really paying attention or if she was possessed by the coldest cynicism on the planet.

  Something didn’t add up, man. Nobody can be that happy. This was a twenty-something girl, swimming in cash, traveling alone to Puerto Rico, never having been there, not speaking a lick of Spanish. Spending like there’s no tomorrow in the hotel stores, tossing cash around as if she were selling lottery tickets. And later, the evening transforming her into a sports car on the highway of youth. Out all night partying with the waitresses from the lobby, who were in her pocket before nine p.m. the day she arrived. Asking Antonio to bring bags of blow to her room. Who the hell snorts blow on their own like that? Renting a Ferrari to take a spin around Condado. Fuck, not even the old perverts who come down here twice a month do that. I don’t know, brother, but all that craziness didn’t add up for me, it made me look at her funny. The ones with fangs are always smiling, my old man used to say. So much courtesy smells fishy. And she must have noticed the mistrust on my face, because the only person that Candy Smith paid zero fucking attention to was me. What the fu
ck?

  I figured this out on the afternoon of the fourth day of her stay. Three days of working. Three days in which I never got to bring her anything, three days without her even calling me at the bellstand to ask for the newspaper or to have her dirty clothes taken to the laundry. Fuck, I wasn’t able to even take a pencil to that she-devil! Three days of not reaching my quota: a hundred bucks in tips. That’s the minimum I need to be able to cover my bills for my apartment, car, the monthly fee at the school, and child support to my three kids. Three days in which I didn’t even get to fifty. It was mid-September, the hotel was almost empty, and the only gravy train didn’t even look at me by mistake. At one point she passed in front of the bellhop room and I swear on my mother that she stared right through me. But she didn’t smile at me, not even a twitch of her lips to indicate she knew I was there, just the cold look of her green panther eyes. Thirty-four years and I still can’t resist a pair of green eyes.

  With all of that, I thought it was mere coincidence that she’d ignored me. Forget it, calm down. It’s just that according to the laws of probability, fucking Candy would have to order something to her room, and I would be first in line to take it to her. Ah, but everything bad comes in bulk all at the same time, my old lady used to say. That afternoon I was first in line. And how could my knees not shake when that tigress appeared in the gallery on the way to the elevators, and suddenly I saw her coming toward me, her humble servant? It nearly gave me a heart attack when she turned to look at me for a few seconds with her feline eyes and then jerked them away. She went past, put something in Ortiz’s hands, and whispered in his ear. I wasn’t about to allow this to continue right in front of me, so I got technical: “That’s mine, it’s my turn.” Ortiz knew it, and made a move as if to give me what he had in his hand, but she stopped him. “Not you, him!” the she-devil said, fixing me with those two backstabbing emeralds. Just like that, she turned and left. Fuck Candy—fuck Jolly Ranchers, Charms, Smarties, Hershey’s, and M&M’s! Fuck your mom’s gofio. That little fucking gringa was guarding me worse than LeBron James, and she just threw a massive block. That night I went home with barely twenty bucks.

  The night before she went back to Gringolandia, I showed up with smoke coming out of my ears. I knew that panther was taking off and I’d be left without any gravy. Everyone flaunted the loot they’d mooched off that ridiculous woman, and I was empty-handed. I even went around the lobby with my shirt unbuttoned, that’s how much I wanted to be working that Saturday. I did my rounds. I went to the front desk and saw that less than ten rooms had been filled all afternoon and night. The housekeeping and maintenance boys went up to the presidential suite at seven to watch the Yankees game—they were in first place and the season was ending. “Bring some beers.” I checked in with Security, but there was only one girl working, the same one as always. I went by housekeeping to see if the Colombiana was on that night, but she’d called in sick. A boring shift awaited me, broke and horny. No cash and left hanging. No way.

  The call came late, around two in the morning, an hour before the end of my shift, while I was looking at the centerfold in Primera Hora with Ortiz in the bellhop room. It was Ortiz’s turn, he was working the overnight shift, so I didn’t even pay attention to the sound of the phone. He says it’s for me. I go to the phone, laughing sarcastically. In hotels nobody calls you unless it’s your wife, your ex, one of your bosses, or a family emergency. Everyone else comes by in person, to keep from being monitored. Turns out it was the lovely Candy. She called me by name: “Hi, Danny.” She asked for two grams of blow, and for me to bring them to the room. I go see Antonio, the doorman. I put in the order. I wait for the call and say the password of the week.

  I am crossing the pool area by the beach and it’s deserted, too empty. No guests fooling around hidden by the vegetation, no employees groping each other behind the bar, which was closed at that hour. It wasn’t surprising. September was the time of skinny cows. But the Security staff weren’t at their posts, and that wasn’t quite so normal. Probably went up to watch the game too, dead as things were. Could be. Still, my internal alarms were going off. She hadn’t invited any men into her room the whole time she’d been there. I found that out from the boys. This wasn’t good. Even if it would’ve been cool to leave my mark on the sweet panther, all the bad vibrations had me on edge.

  I arrived at the Ocean Suites complex and knocked on the door of room 223. Candy opened quickly, looked me up and down. She smiled at me for the first time, placing me under the spell of the dimples in her cheeks. My friend, she was wearing nothing but a bra and panties, made of that cloth that looks like tiger skin. What do they call it? Animal print. Exactly. Because the girl is animal print. At first I stayed there in the doorway, like a vampire waiting to be invited inside, not realizing that it was my blood that was going to be sucked. I don’t know, I was enchanted by her jade eyes, and the next thing I remember is that I was beside her on the living room sofa drinking champagne and lifting a bump of coke to my nose on my car key. Then I proceeded to use the master key to cut out real lines. I lost count after the fifth hit. Then the heavy petting began, first an amazing kiss, then I went down her neck, down both arms, happily to her tits, starting to bite them softly. You know, that little game with the teeth somewhere between sucking and biting? Try it, man, it takes them right to the edge. It seemed like it was going well, because all of a sudden that Yankee grabbed me like a bear, lifted me, and threw me onto the bed like a lucha libre move. In two movements she took off my uniform and underwear. She lay down beside me and gave me another dose of the green magic, then stretched back and whispered in my ear: “Get on. Get on, cabrón.”

  But I am faithful to the Puerto Rican technique, so I spread her legs and began feeling around for that little bean that would get her squealing like a fat pig. The trembling and arching of her spine alerted me that I’d found it. The little bean that’ll give her pleasure and get me even on my bills. So now I go to put my tongue down there; I play with it, I rub it, I tease it, as if it were a cherry limber, a cherry Jolly Rancher, taking my revenge on the sweet feline. And the she-devil moans, writhes, and floods like a broken dam. I keep punishing her, and she keeps on contorting until she can’t take it anymore and asks for it with a shriek. “Stick it in, motherfucker!” You gotta stick it in when they ask for it, you know. And so it goes. I jump up, raise her legs, wind up, and head for home. Slow at first, so she feels how it goes in and knows what’s coming, so she melts like the cheap candy she is. Then, little by little, I pick up the pace. I put my hand over her mouth while moving up and down with more and more intensity. She grabs two of my fingers and sticks them in her mouth, trying to grab the headboard with her other hand. And suddenly she springs forward and rips her nails across my spine like a cat on its back. I shake her off and push her down. I feel the blood running across my back. This always happens to me with the skinny girls, they all scratch when they fuck. Now that I have her like this, I say vengefully: “¡Ignórame ahora, puta! ¡Pasa de largo ahora, pendeja!”

  It was like she knew Spanish, because the Yankee pulled back and gave me such a crack to the jaw that I fell back on the bed. “Fuck you! Leave me alone! I said no!” she screamed, and grabbed me around the neck with such force that I had to climb back on top of her. She slammed another fist into my jaw and I fell facedown on top of her. I was so embroiled in what was happening that I didn’t realize someone was knocking on the door. Suddenly it opened and there they were, watching me.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, crazy bitch? Turn around and let me show you who’s in charge here.”

  Those were the words that the three security employees and the night manager heard from my mouth while standing witness to that cabaret show.

  “Get him off me! He’s raping me!”

  That was when I felt them dragging me out into the living room. Then they gave me my clothes and uniform so I could put them on in the bathroom, where they locked me in for half an hour. No big deal.
Candy fucked me over—she said she’d called me to collect her dirty clothes and that I came in and raped her without saying a word. At least that’s what I heard from the other side of the wall. Obviously I could’ve asked them where the bag of dirty clothes was, where the order was. But there’s no margin of error here, man. Even if something isn’t your fault, you get screwed over. Tell me how you could possibly explain that to the hotel manager, to a fucking cop. There was no catching a break, the axe had fallen. Hotels are a reality show—it’s not what happens at home, it’s whatever the producers put on for people to see. And what they saw was me on top of a guest, with marks of violence on my body. I was fried. They cuffed my hands behind my back right there and took me to Security through the entrance to the restaurant that opened onto the pool. The last picture I have in my mind of Candy Smith is the little smile of triumph at the corners of her mouth, and the green that sparked from her eyes when the night manager told her in English not to worry, that all of her expenses would be covered by the hotel. “We’re going to take care of you, miss.” Fuck all candies. I’ve never had a sweet tooth.

  * * *

  It was clear that the cabrón night manager wouldn’t have my back. I don’t even know if I should tell you that none of this is personal. Hotels are run like the mafia, everything for the good of the business, not for the good of those occupying it, not for the good of those who enjoy it. They’re all guinea pigs. What matters is how much cash you make them and how much cash the guests spend. The rest is bullshit. Turns out the dumb-ass Hermann isn’t such a dumb-ass. He was in the next room watching my “confession” on a video monitor. When I stopped talking, he opened the door and came in with an employment termination form in his hands. They didn’t let me quit, the fuckers. If I’d quit, at least I would’ve been paid seventeen years’ severance. I didn’t find out anything else about the girl. Nobody tells me anything. Everyone from the hotel avoids me. This was a month and a half ago. And here I am, waiting for my paycheck.