“They’re from Hamburg — Germans,” El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, informed her with a smile meant to throw off those who didn’t understand Spanish.
“I swear, that blond King Kong would rather have a hamburger with cachú —”
“Ketchup,” he corrected.
“— and lots of cheese, you,” she exclaimed in rapid, exaggerated Cuban Spanish, Cuban-Cuban, so there wouldn’t be any chance that they could understand her, and she gave another smile for the same objective.
“We are very happy,” El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, said in English, and he gazed at Salma with an endearing, sweet, happy, loving look, explaining to her in an undertone, “You’re going to have to put up with that disgusting-fat-old-Nazi-from-Hamburg, my little whore — the guy’s loaded with bills that have all the zeroes you could imagine.”
She returned his affectionate smile and smoothly replied, “You’re a son of a bitch, Negro, a disgusting, rotten shroud.”
“A son of a bitch who’ll lift you out of poverty,” he replied tenderly.
“You’ll wear me out with this lousy miserable life!” she insisted with just as much apparent adulation in her voice. “If I keep on going to bed with these German and Turkish gorillas, I’ll end up preferring women, chinito.”
“That’s what I’m here for, to keep you from losing your taste for men, little girl. And let’s stop talking Spanish — it’s very bad manners, because these gentlemen are European and therefore very well mannered.”
“If they have good manners, then I’m Princess Martha Louise of Norway, you — go fuck yourself, what the hell language do you want me to speak, my pimp?”
“Just shut up and smile, that clever tongue of yours is meant for other things. The only language you need, you can smile and speak it with another mouth, my love,” he said, smoothly, and he filled their glasses with rum and improvised toast after toast, like a perfect Muscovite.
“Go see if you can find me something to smoke,” threatened Salma, who didn’t smoke, “because no sober woman in her right mind would touch that King Kong or the prosthesis between his legs.”
Meanwhile, the Germans — enchanted, astonished, affable — were gazing at them with the faces of expeditionaries who had just disembarked in some godforsaken landing in the Amazonian jungle; faces of how-can-it-be-that-these-natives-speak-like-humans; in sum, Baron von Humboldt faces. On the stage, a contortionist was mistreating her body to the rhythm of a guaracha with a disco beat. She was forming bizarre figures with her feet, and with her mouth she was taking the dollars handed to her by the generous and respectable members of the drunken public. The Fat German rested his heavy arm on Salma’s naked shoulders; she sank into her seat in embarrassment. Furious, she breathed the piercing smell of sweat from his Aryan underarm: a smell that she knew well, a smell that, for reasons she did not understand, was shared by every single European she had been unfortunate enough to have.
“Yes,” Victorio admits, “I know that smell: piercing, ancient, the smell of Alexander the Great, of gladiators, of Vikings, of Kublai Khan, of Louis XIV, a smell that has haunted their armpits since the fall of the Roman Empire, since the Middle Ages and the Crusades. In a strange, obscure way that smell is related to the Dawn of Humanity; it’s also that, since they have been eating good meat, sausages and hams, and drinking excellent wines and dark beers, from the invention of the wheel up to our own day, the smell of those European underarms has achieved a pinnacle of intensity and absolute stench.”
Salma is not listening to Victorio’s reflections. She is telling how El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, then draped his arms over the shoulders of the other two Germans. Of course, she knew El Negro very well, and she was certain that he was wearing Lapidus in his beatific armpits. The exquisite Europeans stank like stables; the third-world Chinese-mulatto smelled of celestial fragrances.
Meanwhile, the Fat German was giving Salma his own glass to drink from, and squeezing her against him. She felt herself sinking into a filthy, wet mattress. The conversation was all in English. Salma explains to Victorio that she would laugh whenever she guessed that she should laugh, and nod whenever she guessed she should nod. She appeared interested, and of course she looked ridiculous for laughing and appearing interested. She was sober and tired: a fatal combination. The tiredness sharpened her senses. She drank as little as possible. She couldn’t bear alcoholic beverages. She found alcoholics even harder to bear. She profoundly hated drinkers and smokers. El Negro Piedad shared her ethics; he never drank, under any circumstances; he didn’t smoke tobacco, much less marijuana; he didn’t snort coke, and didn’t go for any of the artificial paradises. He could be happy without resorting to artificial means, as he would almost humbly say. And the truth was that, when he left the cabarets, the clubs, the hotels, the discos, El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, led a radically austere life of physical exercise, meditation, asanas, yin-yang, incense, healthy diets, and things like that. An Afro-Cuban Buddhist, he liked to call himself, serious and smiling.
El Negro had advised (ordered) Salma never to drink while she was working. She had no need for such a recommendation; drinking made her very queasy, so, like him, she pretended to drink and pretended she was getting drunk. “They call that ‘playing dead to see what kind of funeral you’ll get,’” Salma says sarcastically. If the Germans, Spaniards, and Italians hadn’t been concentrating so hard on their own pleasure, they would have noticed that the level of the rum in Salma’s and El Negro’s glasses never varied. They would have noticed, moreover, that there was something fake about their cheerfulness. Sometimes El Negro’s could even seem like a real drunk — delirious, grinning broadly, making clumsy moves. Salma, who knew him, admired his histrionics and would tell him, “You should have been an actor.” You could see his intelligence, the clarity of thought in his eyes, because his eyes were always watchful. Without losing their cheerfulness and childish grace, his eyes observed, measured, calculated. Sometimes Salma thought that his eyes never came into play, not even at the moment he was making love with her — another thing that he accomplished, according to Salma, with unparalleled virtuosity.
“The Afro-Cuban Buddhist,” she says, “can prolong his pleasure or cut it short according to his whims. He has total control over his body and his emotions, you; every one of his members, including the vigorous manhood between his legs, responds to his will. I’ve never known a man who was so unbreakable, so invulnerable, so confident of himself and of the path he’s on.”
As soon as the “clients” went away, El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, would regain his composure. At those moments he seemed almost melancholy. Salma could have sworn that under his libertine appearance lurked the soul of a Quaker, or something even more serious and mysterious and unknown.
“I don’t know, you, I don’t know who he is, who’s hiding behind the unbeatable body of El Negro Piedad.”
At that very instant, while the Fat German, the one with the strong smell under his arms, was squeezing her against him, Salma in turn sneaked a peek at El Negro sitting, playful and affectionate, with the other two Germans from Hamburg; generous, eager to please, he let himself be admired ingenuously, humbly, as if he didn’t understand why they were admiring him.
The contortionist had disappeared from the stage to make room for a fat and hideous bolero singer, her hair done up in a bun with golden ribbons, wearing a lame dress that was also gold and spangled with sequins, wearing so much makeup she could barely move, with beads of sweat on top of the makeup. Thank God, the bolerista’s voice was imposing, extraordinary, sweet, caressing, between declamation and singing. Electrified by the singer’s voice, the audience fell into a churchly silence. All eyes were on the hideous fat lady, because their eyes were not “seeing,” their eyes were “hearing,” along with the rest of their senses. Salma took advantage of this to run off to the bathroom; she had been peeing in her underpants for some time. She walked
past the bar — crowded, bustling. She was about to cut through to the hallway leading to the bathrooms, when a tall, lovely black woman, dressed all in blue like the Virgin of Regla, stopped her by her arm: “Don’t go,” she ordered.
“Is the fox on the loose?” asked Salma, knowing full well that the answer would be in the affirmative.
“And how, china, so get lost!” the woman replied.
Salma noticed that, yes, there was a certain commotion around the ladies’ room. Yep, the police had started up their harassment again. They were doing it without inviting people’s attention, so as not to alarm the tourists. But once you got inside the bathroom — Salma knew from experience — they’d shove you, insult you, mistreat you, take away your identity card, and you’d spend the night on a gray, gray granite bench in a police station, and given a fine and police file. “Go ahead, honey, run tell the others,” demanded the beautiful black woman in the blue dress.
Salma went up to the first table she saw, pretended that she knew the young woman who was enjoying a good time there, and whispered in her ear, “Listen, girl, the fox is on the loose.”
The young woman got up and went in turn to another table, while Salma continued with the cheek-kisses and the whispers: “Listen, girl (or boy, depending), the fox is on the loose.” A general mobilization of boys and girls followed, all kissing others, whether they knew them or not, and declaring that the fox was on the loose, while the bolerista intoned in her enchanting voice,
Habrá paz y felicidad en nuestro querer…
Our love will find us peace and happiness…
Salma sank back into her seat. El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, already suspected the news. “The fox?”
“Ugh, loose,” replied Salma in a sigh mixed with anger, exhaustion, loathing, even a desire to cry “The fox is loose and no rest for the prey.”
Sacredshroud didn’t even blink.
She repeated her gesture of annoyance: she was sick of the police always running after them, as if they were the cause of the problem.
“It’s the same old story,” Salma explains to Victorio, “like the guy who threw out the sofa where his wife had committed adultery.”
“Come on! Let’s go!” Without losing his composure, El Negro Piedad directed the Germans in his delicious English; she saw him smiling, fascinating, handsome, sure of himself, tipsy from all the rum he hadn’t drunk. Salma couldn’t imagine what fib he was inventing; she knew that they stood up and that, in the company of the Germans (Salma has never been able to understand how such horrendously ugly people could allow themselves the luxury of being racists), they left the Sweet Feeling Cafe, and the “fox” couldn’t stop them.
“In Cuba, you know, Triumpho, in Cuba-la-Bella, the greatest-of-the-Great Antilles, the most-beautiful-land-seen-by-human-eyes, the Heart-of-Our-America, the First-Free-Territory-of-America, we Cubans have always been third-class, or fourth-class, or fifth-class citizens,” Salma observes without lowering her voice, since inside the ruins of the Pequeño Liceo of Havana there is no point in being afraid. “You know,” and she points at Victorio with an admonishing index finger, “that hotel rooms are off-limits to us Cubans, whether it’s a luxury hotel or a mediocre dive.” Her eyes are gleaming with bitterness. “Not even with money,” she insists indignantly, “not even with money! We can’t rent a room in any hotel that has more than half a star.”
El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, clever as he is, kept two rooms permanently rented in the house of Kyra Kyralina. She couldn’t really have been named Kyra Kyralina, of course; no one knew the real name of the sad Rumanian soprano who was married to a Cuban who had studied chemical engineering at the University of Bucharest. She had been living in Havana for more than thirty years, directing a choir called Danubian Nights, Aficionados of Bel Canto. No one knew how Kyra Kyralina had come to live in a penthouse with nine bedrooms, rooftop terraces, a swimming pool, and ocean views, which before the revolution had belonged to a poet of agreeable love verses who came from a moneyed family, an obsolete modernist, enormously popular among the readers of Vanidades, an undistinguished rival of Jose Angel Buesa. Kyra Kyralina had set up the two rooms in the former servants’ quarters for rental, and they had no reason to envy the rooms of the Hotel Nacional or of any of the Meliá hotels that were springing up every day in ever-greater profusion all around the city. Black porcelain bathrooms, curtains, air conditioning, first-class furniture, round bed, strategically placed mirrors, telephone, minibar, cable television, framed reproductions of paintings by Dutch masters, and music from Radio Taíno, the tourists’station. The only detail that spoke of the owner’s origins was, on the night table, a small bronze statue of Nicolae Ceausescu.
Kyra Kyralina received them with an arpeggio of laughter; her soprano voice was very feeble now, and she endeavored to make her “Rumanian” Spanish seem italianate instead. The expected gold tooth shone in the back of her mouth, a sign of Slavic or Soviet influences; she wore her hair saffron red, her fingers weighed down with rings, and her nails so long and blackened that they seemed false; a black velveteen ribbon hid the wrinkles on her neck; her incredibly high heels contrasted with her silk house robe with enormous flowers in an astonishing yellow. She always made this operatic kind of entrance.
While Salma walked into one room with the Fat German, she saw Sacredshroud entering the other room with the other pair. “That was the first time,” she reveals to Victorio, “that I saw El Negro go off with a man, much less with two.”
Once they were in the room, the Fat German’s plan was to kiss her. She turned aside — coquettishly, of course, so as not to offend him. “First, a spot of rum,” she asked, with a fille malgardée look on her face, and since she could see that the fellow didn’t understand her, she tried to use her English: “Primero, ferst yoo an mee, wee dreenk ron oll rye?”
The German couldn’t restrain his laughter; his swollen belly leapt and vibrated as if it were pumped full of some kind of explosive gas. He understood what she needed, however. Salma prepared a drink of rum and, on the sly, as she had seen it done in so many movies, dropped in two diazepam pills. Dear Virgin, make him fall asleep quickly, she prayed. She let the pills dissolve. She pretended she was drinking, and gave the German several sips, using all the charm she could summon. “Bebe rápido, mye mann, hurree hurree drinkit queek, mye hansohm mann.” He obeyed; he was drowning in laughter. Salma laughed, too. She began the slow game of stripping his clothes off of him. The German’s body boasted an unreal whiteness, so white he was almost pink, like a species of pig, Salma thought. His protruding tits fell on top of his equally protruding belly. The German was a sweaty, hairless hulk that roused her to a sudden hatred, which she attempted to convert into greater sweetness. His pelvis, too, was nearly hairless, and the few short hairs he had were blond, nearly white. She was surprised, and not unpleasantly (the truth be told), by the enormous magnitude of his virilely Prussian member, so youthful and impertinent that it seemed to have nothing in common with the rest of his obese body.
“His member attained a rare state of perfection, of beauty,” she exclaims.
“They say that’s how Germans are, that there’s a similarity between pure Germans and pure blacks. Let’s see what the fans of racial discrimination have to say about that,” Victorio replies.
Lying down, the Fat German looked like one of those volcanic islands that erupt in the middle of the ocean. “Closs yoor ice,” she told him in her daintiest voice. He understood her and closed his eyes. She began to knead the German’s splendid masculinity. Between his age, his exhaustion, and the alcohol he had drunk, Salma wasn’t able to make the prodigy completely hard. Luckily, she thought. She still thinks. She caressed his equally enormous, healthy, handsome balls. She petted him affectionately as a dove. Her hand ran without malice over his thighs, his calves, the slenderest parts of that body; over his monumental belly, his arms with their gangly muscles. Her sweet hand was attempting not to excite him but to
make him drowsy. At last, at some point she heard his regular, deep breaths, turning into snores. With great relief, she rose from the bed, looked at herself in the mirror, sad and contented, anguished and happy. “This has been a great day, Salma, my little Salmita,” she tried to assure the disconsolate image in the mirror. She heard his perfect, harmonious, sonorous German snores and got ready to leave. She quietly opened the door. Outside in the hallway it seemed silent enough. The darkness made her feel safe. She turned back to look upon the volcanic island in the white, round ocean of the bed. She saw the clothes lying in disarray on the carpeted floor. A sudden idea hit her. She closed the door. She went to the Fat German’s pants and looked in his back pockets for the billfold. There it was, big and made of high-quality leather. She opened it. It was stuffed with credit cards and hundred-dollar bills. Salma took two of the bills. She stood there for a few seconds, uncertain. She returned one bill to the billfold and hid the other in her shoe. She went back to the door. The fat old European was sleeping delightfully, his mouth open, his eyes not entirely shut. Salma left the room in absolute silence. She reached the elevator door with her heart pounding. It took centuries for the elevator to arrive. She entered, feeling certain that someone would call out to her or grab her by the arm. Kyra Kyralina might sing a middle C of alarm. Nothing happened. The elevator brought her calmly down to the bottom floor, to the parking garage. Agile and silent, Salma made it to the sidewalk. She ran to the corner. Finding herself free and blessed by the streetlamps on Calle Linea, she looked up at the dark night sky and said, “Forgive me, dear Virgin, he has more than I do.” It was an attempt to justify herself before that immensity, animated by uncountable galaxies.
Distant Palaces Page 16