by Pablo Medina
It was about two miles out that Johnny turned and looked back at Havana. From that distance the city looked like a mirage, nestled in a soft gray light that made it float over the sea, over the land, over all material things. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. Havana was the world to him, heaven and hell and purgatory combined, and he understood that he was leaving it behind for good. Even as he was reaching this realization he started turning the boat around until it was pointing back to shore. Obdulio sat calmly at first, like a prince enjoying a ride on his private launch, and slowly he became aware of what Johnny was doing.
No, no, he said. Coño, ¡no!
Johnny woke from his reverie and headed back north. When he reached the approximate spot of the first turning, he remembered his mother, whom he had abandoned. This time he slowed down the boat and made a broader arc, and when the city came into view, Obdulio said, I want to go to La Yuma, his overgrown child’s voice cracking. Johnny kept turning until the boat completed a full circle. This time he thought of the girl on the balcony with the pearly skin and beautiful black hair. How could he abandon those delights? Now Obdulio was screaming and it sounded to Johnny like a high-speed circular saw cutting through a dry log. He turned again. The Ana María circled six times. Every time Johnny thought of someone or something he was leaving, he pointed her in the direction of Havana; then hearing Obdulio’s scream over the sound of the motor, he turned the boat northward. As he was about to circle yet one more time, the sun appeared over the eastern horizon, red and massive, spreading its rays until the sea, the city, and the sky grew indistinct and they were suspended in a blaze so pure and ubiquitous it was directionless. Johnny screamed louder than Obdulio, louder than the Russian motor, and passed the point of his turning, weeping for what he had left behind and racing full speed ahead into the future.
EATING PIG
When Angel was alone, which was all too often, it was memory that brought him to the feasts of his childhood. Always there was a pig and always a man cooking it in the backyard, hired for the purpose. The cook drank rum from the moment he arrived at dawn, and he had the same name, Joaquín. It took all day (no way to fast-cook pork, especially on the bone) so that the pig would be ready by five. Always it was sunny and Angel was surrounded by cousins, mostly older, some younger, whom he liked in varying degrees based on their ability to allay the loneliness he dreaded even then. The men played cards in the bohío. His aunts and his two grandmothers cooked huge pots of pig’s feet and tripe. Many memories or one memory repeated with variations around the pig, spread-eagled over the coals and Joaquín basting, always basting, the pig skin crackling, sweating out the fat that dribbled to the fire, making it sputter and flame. Its eyes half-closed, its eyelashes wispy and dreamful, its snout curling upward as it cooked. Joaquín usually kept the head. The cheeks are the best part, he’d say, taking a bite.
Angel did not remember the taste, or what happened afterward, whether people left or stayed for days, whether the scene was a permanent state or a temporary condition. Ser or estar. Heaven or hell. Beyond that day there were bombs exploding all around the city, torturers torturing, corpses on street corners, mouths full of ants, mothers weeping, fathers wailing. Always was not always. Family members leaving, family members left behind, some in prison, some outside. The island itself a prison, the smell of tropical rot floating over the grass, the trees. The white sand of the beaches and the sun the only permanence. Forget the feast and the family, forget the dancing and the card playing. His grandmother dreamed of being a bird, his mother of being a fish. No one dreamed of being a worm, but that’s what they all became, burrowing into the dung heap, then trying to burrow out. Eating pig, is there anything as fulsome and healthy? The moment, the cooking, the weeping, the wailing, the memory, the memory.
THE QUEEN OF
THE MALECÓN
You left no stone unturned, wanting so to be part of a history that denied you, made you puny to the point of disappearance. He who left is always leaving, they told you. He who is silent doesn’t know the limits of his isolation. What? you asked. They provided no clean answer, no certain way for you to accept their neglect. History is like that: You leave through the door of exile and you won’t ever know, will you, how your life would have turned out. It’s your problem. Nobody else’s.
The truth: After thirty-eight years nothing is left of you there. The lie: that you have any claim to that place, that culture, that language. The in-between: the big city that offered you respite. There it didn’t matter how you acted or dressed, what you said in what language, when you came or went, what rough beast lay inside you waiting to be born. The women didn’t care; the bosses who hired you didn’t. But you had to leave the big city, and once you started leaving you couldn’t stop. Off you went into another exile and then into another narrower one, and to yet a smaller one until all you could do to get through the needle’s eye was disappear, leaving behind no trace, not in the towns you visited, not in the places where you lived, not in the children you fathered. Your friends quickly forgot you. Your lovers went off into the realms of matrimony, divorce, depression. In a few years no one ever heard of you, not in the cities of your exile, not in the island of your birth. You were a breeze, a wisp; you were a molecule bouncing back and forth in the ether. You were the ether. No one.
Nearing the age of fifty, you resolved that if you didn’t return immediately, you never would and so you did. In the city of your birth you stayed with a third cousin, the only family remaining, all the rest having died or left the island. Nine days of no feeling, of a stone lodged in your gut, of throwing yourself into the waters of the past and sinking into tropical darkness. What could you do? You walked Havana from north to south and east to west finding no solace. You recognized many things but were welcomed nowhere. Rum, lots of it. You were a ghost. No. You were a cartoon, healthy and well fed, lacking nothing in your life you couldn’t buy. Even breathing was difficult.
Then you met Tania, the queen of the Malecón, who walked like the waves and laughed like the wind. She had a glorious body and the eyes of a blackbird. One look was enough. She licked her lips and they glistened with the sunlight coming off the water. She needed no jewelry, she told you, just money. She’d do anything for money. Still, you bought a bracelet from a man by the cathedral, made of God-knows-what metal the seller swore was gold. She wore it for two days and then no more. What happened to it? you asked. I sold it. Five dollars, she said. I paid fifty. Bobo. You know what I can do with fifty dollars? Next time give me the money.
You were ready to offer her anything. You had three more days. You didn’t want to leave, afraid that all that Tania gave you would evaporate, and she would take up with someone else who’d give her more, take her places, make her feel like the world was bigger than the miserable island she was trapped on. And leave for what, the disappearing act, the exile inside the exile inside the exile?
You have to be either very brave or very stupid to stay in a country everyone else is dying to leave, and you were neither. The sense of being watched was real. It was she, you found out, who went to state security and let them know what you did and didn’t do. I hooked a writer, she must have said. She insisted you go to the hotel room in the Nacional, the one with the beautiful view and the hidden cameras. Now your lovemaking is in the state security archives. How many men had Tania lured into that sordid trap? What did she gain by it? Money, of course.
The lie, the truth: When you received a copy of the tape in the mail, you didn’t have the will to be outraged. It was grainy and poorly lit and showed two people, one obviously you (they made sure your face was clearly in focus and your voice audible, especially when you moaned), engaged in mostly normal missionary coitus. Only your unusual interest in Tania’s feet might be cause for concern. The archivists were disappointed at not finding anything more lurid than that. Still, they sent it as a warning to stop writing against the government. They could have a
rrested you while you were on the island, but you weren’t important enough. Your articles never made it to the mainstream media. You put the tape behind some books and forgot about it, something you couldn’t quite get yourself to do with Tania, the queen of the Malecón. Ten years later you returned, promising yourself not to look for her, but after a fitful night in the hotel that brought back too many memories, too much longing, you went in search of her. A family of six were living in her old apartment, a tiny room in a cuartería in Centro Habana. None of them knew Tania. They’d taken the apartment after the previous tenant, an old lady who’d been rich before the revolution, was found dead on the rickety bed. They had to wash the apartment with kerosene to get rid of the stench.
THE DEATH OF CHANO POZO
Chano Pozo was the greatest rumbero who ever lived. He could play in one rhythm, sing in another, and dance in a third. People would go see him at La Conga or the Spotlite and listen and watch and be converted: Chano Pozo was good, but even the good can be better, and sometimes they can be the best. In music you can’t be the best all the time—everyone knows that. Sometimes your head isn’t right or your spirit has crawled up a tree and refuses to be coaxed down. Sometimes—it’s that simple—you had too much stuff the night before and you can’t play what the music demands of you. But when it happens you can blow the roof off the place and send the audience into orbit. With Chano it happened so frequently people thought he could call a saint to mount him at will and then he’d be off, racing into the forest, his hands turned white from the speed and complexity of the rhythms. When he came out of the forest, he was on the edge of life itself, and his eyes, if you looked at them directly, were lit by Changó’s lightning. Possessed, con el santo encima, as they say, Chano was like a horse. For hours he raced up and down mountains, across endless plains, into a night so thick only the saints could enter.
A few days before the feast of Changó, Chano dreamed that a panther was about to bite his neck. In the dream was a sound of someone laughing. Across the street the beasts of the forest were pacing back and forth, contained by the dense vegetation that divides the past from the present. The forest is a fearful place. Everything bad happens there, and everything good, too, though many times you cannot tell for years. If you make a million dollars, is it good or bad? And if you find a good woman? And if you cut a man’s throat because he dishonored you? Only the saints know beforehand, and they won’t reveal the truth easily. Chano could hear the roar of the beasts and he could hear their bodies as they moved through the foliage.
The panther came after Changó had left Chano and gone back to his lair in the forest. The beast stood over Chano’s body, looking at him with yellow eyes, hungry but leery of biting flesh as black as his. When he woke, the panther leaped through the window. Next to him Cacha was sleeping soundly. He got up, walked over to the window, opened it, and looked down at the snow-covered sidewalk. A set of human footprints led from one end of the street to the other, then disappeared around the corner into the empty avenue. Chano lit a cigarette and watched the snow come down, heavy and white like wet cotton. Nothing like this in Havana, nothing this white or pretty. He couldn’t remember playing the drums last night, but he knew he had from the tingling in his fingers and the rhythms filling his head like thunder inside trunks of hollow trees.
No, it wasn’t thunder, it was the heart beating inside Cacha’s chest—cu-bop, cu-bop. That’s what he heard all the time now, whether he was uptown or downtown, whether he was playing or sleeping or eating or making love to another woman. It was Cacha in his ears, in his head, in his blood. She’d told him the same thing happened to her: She could hear his playing, she could feel his hands on her skin no matter where she was.
When he was finished smoking, Chano flicked the butt toward the snow and went back to bed. He needed the rest. That night he had a gig at La Conga, but first he had to find El Cabito, the dealer who’d sold him the bad weed, and square with him. He didn’t want that bad energy lingering while he played. The panther appeared three more times, and each time Chano woke, distraught and confused, wondering what it meant: bad or good? Snow came down more thickly and no cars passed, no one was out. Asleep he’d heard the panther make a deep purr, then the panting again that smelled like raw meat. In one dream the cat had placed its paw on the bed and sniffed around his throat, and still in the dream Chano invoked Yemayá, saint of the sea, and the beast moved away into the depths of the forest so that he could see only its yellow eyes.
Of course there’s a forest in Cubop City. It’s everywhere, and every tree, every creature has a santo, an orisha, if you prefer the Yoruba name, even that stunted tree surrounded by dog shit that grows outside your building. The moon has a santo, the sun has a santo, the cockroach scurrying across the floor of your living room is a santo’s snack. The santos eat them like pork cracklings, then smack their lips. Remember that the next time you step on one.
Around noon that day, after Cacha left the house, Chano finally roused himself from bed, got dressed, and went to La Palma for breakfast. It had stopped snowing and the sun was out, but the temperature had gone down to the single digits and the wind blew down the avenue like a train. The heat inside counters the cold outside, he always said to his friends, but that maxim didn’t keep his ears from stinging on his walk to the restaurant.
He sat at his favorite seat, the middle stool at the counter, and asked Simón, the cook, if he’d seen El Cabito around, but Simón avoided a direct answer, figuring he wasn’t in this world to inform on people’s whereabouts but to cook their food. In the case of Chano it was two fried eggs, a large slice of pressed Cuban bread with butter, and a café con leche with three sugars. A side order of ripe plantains. Like a South American. That’s what he liked.
A lot of people come around here, Simón said. They like my cooking.
When? Chano asked.
I know there’s trouble between you two. Why should I tell you?
Chano gave a quick laugh that didn’t hide his anger. El Cabito cheated me, he said. I’m not going to let him get away with that.
You’re a hothead, Simón said. Forget it.
If you weren’t so old, I’d break your neck for saying that.
Go ahead and break it, Simón said. You’d do me a favor.
As Chano ate, the panther came back, blacker and more threatening than in his dream. This time it was behind him and had its front paws on his shoulders trying to push him down. Chano straightened his back and said a prayer to Changó. Still, he was bothered that a dream animal had made its way into reality and was now stalking him. Maybe it was a message from the spirit world to slow down, become a son of Obatalá, the saint of the north, and be virtuous, eat rice pudding, drink coconut milk.
Just as Chano was finishing, Juan Pedro walked in and sat next to him. Juan Pedro was a braggart and a dandy, but Chano tolerated him because they’d both grown up in Cayo Hueso, the Havana neighborhood that was so tough not even the police dared to enter. It was that neighborhood Chano carried inside and Juan Pedro had the habit of reminiscing about those days. Remember Chicho el viejo who used to walk backward? And the crazy woman who lived on the upstairs floor, screaming for the death of the dictator Machado? Remember the boy who called you maricón and you beat him up so bad you almost killed him? Chano remembered. He was eight years old and the boy was three years older and a head taller. Dropped him with a combination hook and upper cut. When the boy went down, Chano kicked him in the face, the ribs, the groin. Chano would have killed him had not a man pulled him away. The boy stood and Chano noticed the tears coming out of his eyes, the snot smeared on his cheeks, and shame trembling on his lips. It was almost like sex, seeing the boy like that. Chano tried to break free of the man and go at him again, but the grip was strong, and the santo had already dismounted. The fight led to the first of many stays at the boys’ reformatory. Nobody called him maricón again. Once you enter the forest, you can’
t leave, not for long.
Chano asked Juan Pedro about Cabito. Juan Pedro told him there was a three-day party at Mama Mandinga’s place. Chano was sure to find him there, selling weed.
Chano paid his bill and walked into the biting wind of the avenue. He tried to warm himself by thinking of his mother’s bed. While she was out earning a living, he’d get under the covers and smell the lilac cologne she wore after her bath, which lingered in the sheets mixed with her own womanly scent. Many afternoons he spent hiding there, watching the shadows lengthen and the dark gather at the corners until he heard the front door open and her voice calling him. He was not one given to nostalgia, but on frigid days like this he was frustrated with the life he had and wanted a different one, a nice apartment downtown, a house in Havana, lots of money and a brand-new Cadillac—un Colepato. He could have that life if he kept playing his drums, making his music. Eventually he could get his own band, like Machito and Dizzy and Cugat.
In those days Mama Mandinga held parties in her house and charged a cover. It was a way of making a little money, a way of keeping the spirits up. There was a live band and lots of liquor and food, but the people came for the dancing, which went on from the moment Mama opened the door till she threw the last partiers out. By the time Chano got there, there were five couples left and the band had stopped playing, except the guitarist, who was strumming the chords to a bolero. Jeva music, Chano called it, not in a derogatory way. Women like boleros. A bolero is a perfect way to end a party if you score. If not, that music can crawl inside you and make you miserable.
Mama was sitting in the foyer, her haunches spilling over the sides of a wooden folding chair, and she greeted Chano like a prodigal son. She refused to take his money. Mama wanted Chano to get to the drums and play a set to send her clients on a happy note, but Chano refused, saying he didn’t want to waste himself. He told her he was looking for El Cabito. Mama misunderstood, thinking Chano wanted drugs, and scrunched her face, her lower lip curling around a curse word she decided to keep to herself. She looked down briefly at the cigar box where she kept her money. No one but Mama touched that box.