by Pablo Medina
At this point Pedro had a coughing fit and he had to stop. When Angel asked him if he should get the nurse, Pedro waved his hand dismissively and took several sips of his Orange Crush until he settled down.
All the city newspapers fulminated against police incompetence. Politicians’ switchboards lit up with calls from worried citizens. Finally, at the urging of the First Lady, who became convinced no woman was safe as long as Manolito Rivas roamed the streets, the president himself demanded immediate action. That’s when the police chief called Pedro, whose honesty and peculiar adherence to the law had won him the respect of his peers. Pedro had been whiling away his time in Vedado, an upper-class neighborhood of Havana, where he arrested petty thieves, gave them a good beating, and sent them home with the warning that next time he would not be so lenient. Vedado was a highly coveted assignment in those days as the residents were fond of tipping the police generously to take special care of their properties. Pedro came home every night with wads of cash stuffed in his pockets, making Zoila the happiest woman on her block. Pedro, however, had not joined the police force to be rich but to be respected. And so, when the police chief offered him the Manolito Rivas case, he jumped at the opportunity.
At this point Pedro pointed at his throat and made a grimace. He got up from his chair, lay down on the bed, and promptly fell asleep. Not wanting to return to the nursing home, Angel waited for a while hoping that he would wake, rested and ready to continue his story, then resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to come the next day.
That night, after too many drinks, Angel asked his father what he remembered about Pedro. His father poured himself a whiskey and said that Pedro seemed intent on ridding Havana of undesirable elements and was always running after some criminal or other, sometimes not coming home for days at a time. When he did, he was usually too tired to talk to his children, instead changing into his pajamas and going straight to bed without so much as a hello or a good-night. He was not a good father, his father said and asked Angel why he was digging all this up now. I’m writing a story about him, Angel said, and his father responded that he’d rather he wrote a story about someone not in the family. Family matters are private. Then he changed the conversation to a real-estate deal he had just closed in Hialeah.
Angel awoke the next morning with a bad headache and a worse disposition and waited until the middle of the afternoon to return to the nursing home. Pedro was not in his room and for a moment Angel worried that he might have died during the night. It was not a worry he entertained very long. Angel found him in the recreation room surrounded by a group of residents. With his Orange Crush can next to him on a table, Pedro stood in front of his aluminum walker telling them jokes. His audience sat in their wheelchairs as if transfixed, but on closer look Angel realized that most of them were barely conscious. Only one of them was smiling, permanently, a string of saliva dripping down onto a plastic bib.
When Pedro saw Angel he smiled and waved him over. His voice was less scratchy that day, and he proudly introduced Angel to the group as his grandson, the famous writer. There was no response from any of them except for a small fellow in the back who started hiccupping and was soon led away by one of the nurses.
You want to tell them a joke? Pedro asked his grandson.
He said he wasn’t good at jokes.
It doesn’t matter, Pedro said. Their minds are gone. They can’t tell the difference between a joke and a sermon.
Now Angel was on the spot. His headache was returning and his mouth was as dry as chalk. Angel told the one about the two drunks who think they are climbing the stairway to heaven but are merely crawling on a railroad track. Not even Pedro cracked a smile.
You weren’t kidding, he said. Are you sure you’re my grandson?
They went back to his room, where, without any prodding on Angel’s part, Pedro continued the story.
Manolito Rivas was as slippery as an eel and blatant as a foghorn. No sooner did you think you had him cornered than a mist of uncertainty would surround you. He was here, he was there, he was everywhere. One day you heard he was in El Cerro entertaining the neighbors by singing boleros with a street band; the next someone had caught sight of him miles away playing dice at a bodega in Jaimanitas. Finally, after many weeks of work, I found Manolito in a rented room in the Colón district as he was dressing to go on his evening rounds. I showed him my badge and pointed my gun right at his heart. Manolito smiled, one leg in his pants, the other out, and said, I am a real criminal and I am not surrendering. You are a real cop. Shoot me.
I did. End of story.
Angel had heard from both his uncle and grandmother when she was alive that Pedro had spent weeks searching for the killer, disguising himself as a bourgeois matron, a streetwalker, even a nun, in hopes of catching Manolito in the act. Pedro had become a regular at several bordellos that the criminal was rumored to frequent, leading Zoila to exclaim that it was more than his duty that her husband was performing. Angel’s uncle added that when Pedro ran out of leads, he would ride trolleys from one end of the city to another at all hours, hoping to catch sight of the killer. Once, Pedro disguised himself as a guajiro, a country bumpkin, replete with straw hat, leggings, and machete, and took his two sons, then seven and eight years old, to La Concha, the public beach where he had heard Manolito Rivas would sometimes go for a swim, and there the three of them spent the day frying in the sun.
When Angel asked Pedro why he did all of this, he shook his head and dismissed it with a wave of the hand.
Part of the work, he said. Part of the work. The important thing is that I caught and killed him.
Did you feel any remorse about shooting him? Angel asked.
What kind of question is that?
Well, you killed a human being.
Pedro looked at Angel as if he were mentally deficient. I killed a crocodile, he said.
That night as Angel sat in his father’s backyard drinking a Materva and waiting for the heat to abate, he considered what Pedro had said. For him, being a policeman, whether apprehending a burglar or shooting a criminal, was a matter of duty. Simple. Why couldn’t Angel think that way? Why couldn’t writing be his duty? He avoided the issue by calling Luli, a former lover of his he hadn’t seen in five years, and asking her to have a drink with him. She’d been supportive of his work back then and he thought she’d be supportive of it now. He needed something simple. As they shared mojitos in Coral Gables, Angel asked her what she thought of him as a writer.
I think you’re a two-timing hijo de puta.
As a writer, damn it!
Do you know what you put me through?
Yes. But if you can put that aside for a moment . . .
Of course she couldn’t. She downed her third mojito, picked up her purse, and left the bar. His instinct was to run after her and apologize. Despite her forty-plus years, her body was still shapely and her face glowed with sensuality. He was lonely. He remembered their days of passion and glory when they made the bed levitate and angels and demons dance cheek to cheek around them, but he stayed at the bar and ordered another drink. It would never happen again. Whatever they could recover would dissipate like smoke the moment he entered the house and fear took over, fear of entanglement, fear of having to repeat forever the anticipation that leads to lust, fear of the habits that couples fall into in order to disguise the loss of desire.
With the aid of the mojitos he was able to reconsider the possibility that he wasn’t good enough, that he should give up his writing career in favor of something more lucrative, maybe join his father in the real-estate business or go to law school. As his grandmother told him a few months before she died, You’re still young. You can do anything you want. That’s what grandmothers always say. After his fifth drink his will wavered and he envisioned his two books, standing at a doorway like forlorn children whose father is about to abandon them.
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The next morning Angel was at the nursing home promptly at nine. He found Pedro in his room shaving. He was wearing a pajama top but no bottom. His legs were wrinkled and veiny and his testicles hung midway down his thighs. For a moment Angel saw himself in his place and considered the awful fate that awaited him.
Grandfather, he said, addressing him for the first time in the familial way.
Aren’t you a little early? he said looking at Angel through the mirror.
There are a few details I need to know for my story.
I told you all there is. Angel could hear the double razor scratching at the bristles on his neck, going over the scars where the surgeons had gone in.
Some things don’t add up, Angel said, having no idea what he was referring to but sensing that Pedro wasn’t telling him the whole story.
I don’t want to suffocate to death.
What?
I had a dream last night that I was drowning. When I woke I couldn’t breathe. I called the nurse and she gave me oxygen.
Angel didn’t know at the time, nor did Pedro, that the cancer had spread to his lungs and he was, in effect, drowning in his own fluids.
Today, I want you to take me out to breakfast.
Once he was done shaving Angel helped him with his pants, which he held up with suspenders over a blue long-sleeved shirt.
They drove to a Cuban cafeteria on Calle Ocho whose owner Pedro had known for six decades. The owner sat behind the counter smoking a cigar.
Come in, come in and drink a chair, because the water zero’s coming, he said, translating a Cuban phrase into thickly literal English.
Albenio, Pedro said. This is my grandson. He is a famous writer and he’s writing a story about me.
Not exactly, Angel wanted to say but he didn’t have the opportunity.
Your grandfather, Albenio said, was the best cop in Havana. He caught and killed Manolito Rivas and received a ten-thousand-dollar reward. In those days that was a fortune.
Angel looked at Pedro. It was the first time he’d heard about the reward.
I want fried eggs, bacon, Cuban bread, and café con leche, Pedro said. I’m sick of that shit they feed me in the nursing home.
What about the reward? Angel asked. Grandmother must have been happy about that.
Pedro shrugged his shoulders and ordered a cold beer. That was something Angel had seen his father do, drink beer in the morning.
I bet she was, Albenio said, speaking through a half smile as if he were keeping a secret.
Pedro waited for the beer and drank some of it looking out the window at the traffic going by. He and Albenio spoke of other matters, friends they had in common in Havana, most of them dead or dying—Panchito Cantera, who had owned a car dealership and was now a living corpse; Alberto Torres, the artist, who’d lost his legs to diabetes; Humberto González, who sold pharmaceuticals and had more bypass surgeries than you could count; and others in wheelchairs, on life support systems, bedridden, under the ground—a catalogue of morbidity that made Angel’s hair stand on end.
There is Miami, Pedro said. And then there is an underground city where all the old Cubans are buried with their memories and dreams. That is where the real Havana lies. Upside down. One hundred years from now, when all the Cubans are gone, that city too, will disappear.
Unless the memories are written down, Angel said stupidly.
Written memories are ossified memories.
Have you heard the one about the Galician couple whose baby falls out a third-story window? Albenio asked.
A thousand times.
Just then the food arrived. Pedro picked at his eggs and ordered another beer. He was done in fifteen minutes. Albenio refused to accept payment, claiming sixty years of friendship was payment enough.
In the car on the way home Angel asked Pedro again about the reward money. He admitted that Zoila never saw a penny.
What happened to it?
I gave it to Manolito’s mother. The only good thing Manolito Rivas ever did was take care of his mother. I killed him. The least I could do was make sure she was provided for.
How about Zoila? Angel said, his temper rising. After his grandfather left her, Zoila suffered one privation after another, living in tenements across Havana and working as a washerwoman and maid for several well-to-do families.
What about her? In the end we all wound up broke and in exile. That’s the way things are. Pedro grew pensive and looked out the window.
In the realm of the heartless the generous man is a fool, especially he who gives blindly. Angel understood two things then: First, his grandfather was a generous man; second, his grandfather had been heartless. The two qualities had somehow joined in him and become one, or, better yet, both lived in him simultaneously. Nothing else could be said about that, despite any familial allegiance Angel had for his grandmother and father, who had suffered so much at the hands of this heartless, generous man.
When they got to the nursing home, Angel parked on the front driveway. He went around to the passenger side and helped Pedro walk to the door.
I’ll go from here, he said, waving his hand in a way that was both a dismissal and a farewell.
Leaning on his walker he took small shuffling steps to the elevator and waited there until the door opened. He looked quickly in Angel’s direction and offered a smile that came from the depths of his misery. Then he disappeared.
THE MAN WITH THE HANDLEBAR MUSTACHE
Two months after meeting her, Angel moved in with Amanda. He was tired of bony females and jagged angles, tired of their clacking as they turned over in bed. He wanted the softness of clouds, the keening of inner organs trapped in flesh, a body like laughter, the breeching of whales in an icy fjord. Amanda wore caftans and heavy silver jewelry on her arms that jangled loudly when she moved. He could hear her in the kitchen, he could hear her in the bathroom, and he could hear her in the hallway outside the door even before he could see her. She was devoted to necromancy and had a gift for communicating with the dead, asking them questions the answers to which came in code. If she asked, Will I be able to pay the rent next month? the answer might be, The effervescence of golf balls afflicts a pretentious entity. Which might mean yes or no depending on the position of the stars at the moment the question was asked and on the amplitude of her imagination, which matched her body’s.
When Amanda spoke, underground springs burst from her voice, and when she breathed she blew a hot southern wind that brought with it the nostalgia of tropical forests. She was the best lover Angel ever had. She had no scruples, and the word no did not exist for her in bed. Once, after a particular session in which the firmaments blew open and the oceans parted, she told him that his mother had communicated with her and told her the name and address of the man who had knifed him. He laughed, not believing her, in any event, not wanting to know so many years after the incident who it was who had almost caused his demise. Vengeance has its statute of limitations. He nodded and stared at the ceiling, thinking about muse spiders. She added that the attacker had a handlebar mustache and five daughters and lived in their neighborhood. He nodded again and pretended to fall asleep.
What was he supposed to do, find the man, confront him, and seek retribution of some sort? Not worth the effort. He had healed fully, the only evidence of the knifing a small scar on his belly where the blade slipped through. Amanda liked to lick the scar. Like a little worm, she once said, a slimy sugar worm floating on the milk of his belly. He was lucky. It could have been an anvil dropped on his head from a fifth-floor window. It could have been a drunk driver jumping the curb and crushing him against the liquor store. It could have been something less obvious but no less lethal—an aneurism, a massive coronary.
For a long time he wished the knifer would die a horrible death. That wish was still hiding in a recondite part of
his mind, but he was no longer willing to act on it. His will had been diverted to other pursuits. So when Amanda told him what his mother had revealed to her, he was upset, not because it brought back that awful night and the months of recovery, but because he was expected—expected himself—to act on the information.
He sat up in bed and said, I won’t do it.
Amanda asked, Do what?
Find the man with the mustache and the five daughters. There must be more than one man in this city who wears a handlebar mustache and is the father of five daughters.
Who lives in our neighborhood? Amanda asked.
How do we know you weren’t dreaming.
I was dreaming, she said.
How do we know the information is reliable?
It came from your mother, she said.
It could have been a demon in disguise. You’ve said sometimes demons trick people by assuming the identity of a loved one.
This was no demon. It was your mother.
Are you sure?
Her maiden name was González.
He left the house that morning and walked around
the neighborhood reluctantly with the word retribution stuck in his head like an iron spike. What is a neighborhood, anyway? Three, four, five blocks? He walked ten and saw no one with a handlebar mustache, except for Isidore, the eighty-year-old former waiter who lived on the sixth floor of their building.
He could have done it, Amanda said.
Isidore is a sweet gay man, Angel said, his exasperation rising, and he walks with a cane.
That day Angel went about his business—he’d promised Amanda he would wash the windows and do the laundry while she attended her necromancy meeting. Nevertheless, the matter stayed with him if for no other reason than to heed his mother’s message to find his attacker. He didn’t have the faintest idea what he would do once he confronted him. He went to the Tenth Precinct and asked for a copy of the police report, which he read carefully twice. It said nothing he didn’t already know, except that given the uneven edges of the wound, the perpetrator most probably used a serrated knife with a one-inch-wide blade. He filed away the paperwork along with other documents relating to that night and went to sleep, too tired to wait up for Amanda.