“No problem, take your time. I go to bed late.”
Doesn’t everybody in Havana? I guess it’s because none of these people have real jobs.
“I’ll be back before midnight. I only want to stretch my legs.”
“Sure. Ah, a word of advice: leave your backpack home and don’t take anything valuable with you.”
“Are people mugged here often, Román?”
“Not every Monday and Thursday. But foreigners stand out, so be careful. Better safe than sorry.”
Matt put thirty dollars in his pocket and checked the name and the address on the card that Taty had given him. “San Lázaro 177, Vedado.”
Something had changed in the street. The breeze coming from the ocean was charged with stronger aromas. The people Matt encountered, women and men, looked at him with a marked curiosity or a veiled aggression that he had not perceived before. A female voice called to him, “Oye, chico!” but he pretended not to hear. A young guy on a bicycle got so close that Matt could smell the man’s sweat. He felt eyes upon him. Havana had turned into a different city, more mysterious, seductive—and dangerous.
Café Arabia was full. Matt had to wait ten minutes outside until a “table for one” was ready. Finally, he settled on the cushy chair that the hostess had assigned him and started to cough at once. Smoke was everywhere: hanging over the tables, on the stage like some kind of special effect, and around the patrons’ mouths. It billowed in the air, forming a bluish veil that wrapped them in a mist of cigar smoke and alcohol fumes.
Though he had come from a poorly lit street, it still took Matt a few minutes to adjust his eyes to the dark room. Once they did, and after the coughing fit stopped, he noticed that more than half of the customers in the bar were women. There were long-haired, scantily dressed girls with high heels and purple lips that shone under the flickering lights, and heavyset, mature ladies wearing humungous wigs of impossible shades. He wondered if Taty had directed him to a jinetera nightclub. His suspicions increased when two women tried to attract his attention, smiling and making subtle and not-so-subtle gestures, one inviting him to her table, the other offering to join him.
Matt ignored them. He didn’t want company—that kind of company, anyway. A waitress, pretty and perky, with dark tresses that brushed her butt, came to take his order. She brought a fake candle and showed him a wine and beer list laminated and glued to the table’s surface. Matt pointed to a classic mojito—he wasn’t particularly fond of them, but they appeared more innocuous than other concoctions with names like “Cuba Libre On Fire” or “Dark and Stormy.”
He hadn’t come to Café Arabia to get drunk or find women. In truth, he didn’t know why he was there. So as not to crawl in bed too early, to escape from memories and self-recrimination, to forget that he had passed, in a matter of hours, from confident American fiancé to cuckold Yuma and “person of interest” to the Cuban police. He tried not to think of Yarmila but she was very much with him. This wasn’t the kind of place they would have visited together, though. She didn’t seem to enjoy the nightlife.
With me, at least.
A show was about to start. A spotlight fell on a small platform at the back of the room. Music began to play and the light cascaded over a woman who had stepped onto the rudimentary stage through a red curtain. Her moves were slinky, feline. Sultry. She blew a kiss to the crowd and it went wild.
“Diva!”
The song was “On the Radio,” an oldie from the eighties that Matt hadn’t heard in years. The singer, impersonating a young Donna Summer, wore a bikini top that showed her small breasts and a miniskirt that glittered with silver sequins. She looked good but sang badly. Her pitch was too high and the English words were unintelligible, strung together in a haphazard way. She missed the beat several times. After a while, she came down from the stage and started to walk around the tables. She was around five foot eight and her high heels made her tower over the audience.
“Bravo, Donna!”
She blew more kisses and wiggled her butt. Someone yelled, “Perra! Perra!”
The crowd erupted. “Perrísima!”
Matt had the vague impression that he had seen her before. But the response from the public baffled him.
Are they calling her a bitch?
Based on the approving looks and cheers, he figured that perra had a positive connotation, at least in the hazy context of the clandestine bar.
Yes, she reminds me of someone. Yarmi? A Tijuana street vendor?
The singer strutted around, waiting for her fans to place bills under her miniskirt or inside her top. Sometimes she would press her pelvis against their backs. She wrapped herself all over an older woman and kept at it until the woman tipped her. Matt felt repulsed but also, despite himself, shockingly aroused. She sauntered toward him, a grin splashed over her made-up face. He looked for a one-dollar bill, but only found fives and tens in his pocket. Then she stopped at a nearby table and he felt momentarily relieved—and disappointed.
By the time the singer got to his side, Matt was feeling bolder and ready to engage her. He caressed her hard, tight, muscular butt, but didn’t dare to meet her eyes. She played with his hair and he blushed like a teenager. He placed the five-dollar bill close to her pelvis, wishing she would go away and at the same time that she’d stay close to him.
“Thanks, mister,” the singer purred.
Matt’s jaw dropped. He stared at the fake Donna Summer, who had already moved on to the next table, and he finally recognized in the short, dark, knotted fingers that held the microphone the stonemason’s hands of Taty.
Waves of embarrassment swept over Matt as he drank what was left of his mojito. He berated himself for having been so blind, so naïve, such an unsophisticated pendejo. Café Arabia was a gay bar and all the women present, or most of them at least, were transvestites.
What was I thinking? What kind of an establishment could Taty have invited me to, for crying out loud?
He waited until the song was over. Taty bowed coquettishly and disappeared behind the curtain after a final curtsy. The stage lights went off and the music was turned down. The crowd broke into a round of applause.
“Awesome, perra!”
“You are divine!”
Matt requested his bill, which came to seven dollars even. But before he could pay, the performer was back on stage and he was forced to stay. Taty was still wearing his diva attire, but had taken off the shoes. His big feet and strong legs offered a striking contrast with the silky and slinky miniskirt.
“Hi, queridas! Thanks for your appreciation, locas. You know how much work I put into my shows so every little clap matters.
“Sorry I can’t keep my shoes on but they are killing me. It’s not easy, I swear, to be standing on my poor patas all day long, at the beck and call of my owner, ahem, employer, at La Caldosa.
“When I used to work for the state, I pretended that I was working, my boss pretended he was paying me and everyone was happy. But La Jefota is paying me real money, dollars and CUCs, and she expects me to be her slave.
“That’s the problem with capitalism, loquitas. You have to plug away! And let me tell you, we are headed in that direction. If we don’t go there willingly, they’ll drag us. We start with a paladar here and a paladar there—and in two years you’ll be ordering from a McDonald’s menu.
“Ay, Virgin of Charity! I forgot I am not allowed to make political jokes. My other boss—El Jefe here at Café Arabia, who is terrific, not like La Jefota . . . are you listening to me, Flores?—Flores has told me to be careful. ‘Niña, don’t go around opening your big yap or you’ll get us in trouble: one thing is to be clandestine and another one is to be against You Know Who.’ But we are all for You Know Who!” He winked, stroking an imaginary beard. “Even that handsome Yuma over there.”
He looked at Matt and everybody’s eyes followed Taty’s. Giggle
s spread across the room. Matt wanted to hide under the table.
“Now, talking about paladares, McDonald’s, and bares clandestinos isn’t making political jokes, eh,” Taty went on. “I’m only using the political economic terms that I learned in my Marxism classes when I was a little pioneer back in Las Villas and the only jokes I knew were Pepito stories. You know, the best economist in today’s Cuba is Pepito.
“So the teacher asks his students to define capitalism. ‘It’s a trashcan filled with glittery things, hamburgers and fast cars,’ Pepito says. The teacher is very pleased. ‘Excellent, Comrade Pepito. Now define socialism.’ ‘The same trashcan,’ Pepito says, ‘but empty.’”
Laugh, applause and cheers erupted. Taty took a bow.
“Diva, you are too much!”
“Tell the story of Pepito and the fisherman!”
“No, Pepito, the jinetera and the almendrón driver!”
“What about another song?”
As soon as the sketch was over, Matt paid his bill and hurried outside. He inhaled the putrid waft that came from Malecón Drive. He felt dirty and confused, but still hot and bothered. He walked fast toward Villa Tomasa, avoiding other passersby, lost in a memory he thought he had forgotten until Taty’s touch had suddenly awakened it.
Chapter Four
The Living Light Mission
In 1980 Matt was twelve years old, a freckle-faced Ohio transplant living in a remote Peruvian village. His parents were Methodist preachers who had settled in the Ayacucho region to “evangelize the natives.” They founded La Misión Luz Viva, Living Light Mission, a small church frequented by a dozen people on Sunday mornings and an even smaller group on Wednesday nights. The couple, in their Southern-accented Spanish, urged their neighbors to walk on the path of salvation. They soon found out that the path a number of Ayucuchans had chosen to follow had nothing to do with the Biblical one.
At first, however, the prospects had looked promising. The Catholic Church had lost ground in the area during the seventies while an assortment of Protestant churches flourished, particularly if they were based in El Norte. La Iglesia Americana, as people called these churches regardless of their particular denomination, attracted young Peruvians who favored the ministers’ easygoing manners over the priests’ guarded standoffishness. The American churches could afford to be generous and distributed scholarships to attend conferences in the United States. Converts flocked to them. But the political climate was charged. The Shining Path, started as an obscure insurgent guerrilla movement, had gained footing in the Andean highlands. By the end of 1981, the Peruvian government had declared the region an emergency zone.
Matt’s classmates talked about the senderistas, the rebels, with a mixture of fear and admiration. That February, a Shining Path group had attacked a neighboring town and killed the mayor and five men who were accused of belonging to “the bourgeoisie.” Matt knew one of them—a Bostonian painter who had lived there for thirty years and who had never been involved in politics.
“That’s Maoism,” some said, while others called it la revolución.
Whatever it was, Matt’s parents were getting nervous. Gringos (nobody called them Yumas in Peru) ranked high among the rebels’ targets. They were labeled “enemies of the people” and executed summarily when the senderistas took over a town. A handful of locals were rumored to be among the senderistas or at least to sympathize with them. One was the school teacher, Señor Barreras, who, without openly defending their actions, railed against the injustices that condemned native people to a slow death by poverty and malnutrition. “At least the Shining Path firing squad works fast,” he said once.
He didn’t mention that, in order to save bullets, the rebels often stoned their prisoners to death. They left their bodies in the plaza for everyone to see. María, who worked as a maid at Matt’s house and sometimes attended the services, described the scene in gruesome details.
“When I got to the plaza, the muertitos were still there because people were afraid of touching them,” she told Matt’s mother, crossing herself. “They had lost their eyes and their brains were scattered on the dirt. Some savages, these senderistas! I hope they never come here.”
Matt started to have nightmares about eyeless and brainless corpses. The day his parents got news from the church headquarters that they would be leaving the mission soon, he slept soundly for the first time in weeks.
María feared the senderistas, but her husband Jorge, a silent, short, muscular man who always carried a machete with him, rooted for them. He didn’t attend the Luz Viva services, though he and his wife lived on the property, and he went out of his way to avoid the Americans. Matt’s mother didn’t like him and would have asked him to move out if it hadn’t been for María. But Matt’s father, el Pastor, had a soft spot for Jorge.
“We’ll eventually win him over,” he’d say. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
In mid-March, a current of dread and mistrust still ran through the town. Matt felt it at school, in the cold shoulder he received from some classmates, and in Señor Barreras’s allusions to “the greedy imperialists,” which he couldn’t always decode. In a vague and not totally conscious way, he knew that he and his parents would always be outsiders—the ones who, if push came to shove, would be stoned by the senderistas while most people looked the other way. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t know what Maoism was or what la revolución stood for. He was relieved the day their plane tickets finally arrived. The family would be traveling to Lima in a few days. From there, they would fly to the States.
His parents emptied the house, giving away tools, chairs and tables to their parishioners. A young couple promised to take care of the mission, meet every Sunday, read the Bible, and hold study groups, but los pastores didn’t feel optimistic. The deacon didn’t plan to send more missionaries any time soon and none of the Luz Viva members were interested in attending the Lima-based United Methodist seminary.
“They are more likely to join the senderistas,” Matt’s mother remarked, bitterly.
She and her husband had grown tired and disillusioned. Above all, they were fearful. They wanted a vacation from the Lord’s work.
Though he had lived in the village for almost a year, Matt had made few local friends. It wasn’t that the kids hated him or picked on him. They liked him well enough in the classroom, but there was always a barrier, partly caused by the language—less so as he learned Spanish—but mostly due to his americano status. He participated in school events and baseball games yet was seldom invited to other children’s homes, except by those whose parents were involved with Luz Viva: a grand total of two.
The previous year, while they rehearsed a Nativity play (Señor Barreras had assigned Matt the role of Herod) he got a crush on a girl from his class, a brunette named Esperanza who played a shepherdess. They snuck out together to Cremería Sabor, an ice-cream bar whose main attraction was a soda fountain. But Ayacuchan girls were as old-fashioned as the device itself. Esperanza hadn’t allowed him to hold her hand, much less kiss her.
“You can visit my home after asking Papa for permission,” she said.
He had been too shy to approach her father, a tall, imposing, mustachioed gentleman who dropped his daughter off at school in a blue Cadillac. By January, Esperanza had an official boyfriend, a local teenager who talked about “beating that gringo to a pulp.”
Matt tended to hang out with the Wilsons, the only other American kids in town. They were the children of an engineer who worked for a lodging company. Blair, the oldest of the Wilson brothers, was the first one to tell Matt about the local prostitutes, las putas, and initiated him in the pleasures of voyeurism. The novelty wore off as soon as Matt realized that real women’s bodies didn’t look quite like those on the glossy Playboy pages that Blair treasured. But that didn’t prevent him from secretly following María to a hut known as la casita del baño whenever she took a b
ath and his parents weren’t around. The casita, located in the same compound where the church and the house were built, was connected to the main waterline. The housekeepers’ cabin, though only a few feet away, didn’t have a water supply.
Matt would tiptoe out of the house after making sure that his parents were busy or gone. While still in the honeymoon period with the mission, before the senderistas’ attack, they traveled for two or three days at a time, entrusting Matt to María’s care. Holding his breath, Matt would find his favorite spot and look hungrily at María as she got naked and poured cans of water over herself. Then he would masturbate quickly, convinced that his actions were sinful and he would be punished for them somehow, someday.
But even at that time, and despite, or maybe because of his parents’ lectures about heaven, hell and doctrine, his faith was minimal. He couldn’t stand Wesley’s sermons. The Methodist rituals put him to sleep. He found the Catholic rites more appealing and colorful, with the bombastic organ and lively choir where some of his classmates sang. He’d have been happy to join the well-dressed people, like Esperanza’s family, who attended Sunday Mass at la Iglesia de Santa María de Los Angeles. Though the senderistas and Señor Barreras proclaimed that Americans were first-class citizens everywhere—and more so in poor countries like Peru—Matt thought that his parents’ religion, with its mechanic recitation of psalms and a barren room without one single image of a santo, was very second class.
“Even God would get bored there,” he told Blair.
Some Catholic saint days were also public holidays, celebrated with processions and street parties that lasted until dawn. Protestants, Matt complained, didn’t have patron saints, much less feast days. That wasn’t fair.
It was a saint’s day when the unnamable happened to him.
That warm Friday afternoon Señor Barreras had dismissed the class early. It was the feast day of the town’s patron saint, San José, and there would be a procession in the evening. Matt’s parents were making farewell visits and had ordered him to stay home. He was bored, sitting by the window and munching on the snack that María had prepared for him: sweet caramel cookie sandwiches called alfajores and a glass of milk. Then he saw her, dressed in a flimsy muumuu, walking toward la casita del baño.
Death Comes in Through the Kitchen Page 10