Havana Lunar

by Robert Arellano

  I awaken to the sun high above the rooftops. Yorki’s living room window is open to the squeals of children playing in the street below. I reach for the phone and call Emilio’s, letting it ring for a long time.

  A key suddenly turns in Yorki’s front door and I put down the phone. It’s Yorki, alone. “¡Coño qué susto!” He shuts the door and puts his sunglasses on the shelf. “Are you all right?”

  “What day is it?”

  “Friday.” Friday: three days underground without food or water. Tomorrow Emilio will be heading out on his solo patrol. “You look awful. Sit down. Let me get you some coffee.”

  “You have coffee?”

  Yorki disappears into the kitchen and comes back with two tasas of strong, sugary café, cold. “I’m heating up a new pot. ¡Coño! You look even worse than usual.” He cracks the door and peeks down the hall, then closes it and says in a low voice, “Why haven’t you come forward to defend yourself?”

  “It’s not true what they’re saying. I’m being set up.”

  “The PNR came by yesterday to question me. And the CDR has been watching this block. It’s not safe for you to be here, Mano.”

  “I just need until dark. Por favor …”

  “Of course. Forgive me, Mano. Don’t think about it. You’ll get this thing straightened out. The important thing is that you’re okay. We were worried about you.”

  “¿Como está Carlota?”

  Yorki looks out the window. “Pretty shaken up. Her neighbors are saying crazy things. She told Pablo you went to Miami for a vacation. He wants you to bring him back an apple.”

  “He’s always wanted to try an apple. Yorki, do you have any cigarettes?”

  “Sure.” He takes a pack from the table and lights one, hands it to me.

  “Marlboro. Terrible.” I take one puff and stub it out. “Do you have anything to eat? A little rice?”

  “I’ll heat up some chícharo.” Yorki disappears into the kitchen.

  “You don’t have to heat it.” I lie on the sofa and let my gaze drift out the living room window all the way to the Microbrigade Buildings, the ugly ex-Soviet embassy towers in Miramar. A mother calls names in the street: ¡Vladi! ¡Niurka! ¡Manuel! Feeling dizzy, I swirl my tongue around the bottom of the coffee cup to lick up the last of the sugary grounds. I realize the street has gone silent. The children have stopped playing. “Yorki?” He doesn’t answer.

  I get up from the sofa and peer into the kitchen: empty, and Yorki has left the window open onto the street below. A small posse of women has gathered outside the entrance to the apartment house. Seeing me, one of them cries, “¡Allí ’stá!” I duck back inside and turn the bedroom doorknob, but Yorki has locked himself in. Hijo de puta betrayed me without even looking me in the eye.

  I grab Yorki’s sunglasses from the living room shelf when the front door sways open and my stomach tenses. A sturdy man stands in the doorway. “Doctor? I’m here to help.”

  Another man holding a baseball bat comes up behind the first. “You’re a prize catch!”

  “You’ll go straight to the hospital and they’ll fix you up. Our government is fair. You’ll get a trial.”

  “Just like Ochoa did,” says the man with the bat.

  I won’t let them lock me up again. I dive head-first out Yorki’s window onto the roof of the front portal. The men come after me and I jump twelve feet to the grass, the shock stinging my legs, a few feet away from the knot of neighborhood women. “¡Cuidado! ¡Es él!” one of them cries.

  “That’s right,” I growl, “I’m the murderer. And I’ll kill you like I did that chulo.” The women scatter. I hear the shouts of the men clambering down the front stairway and run around the back of the building. I hop on Yorki’s moped, run it down the alley, start it with a kick, and weave through the back streets of Vedado, leaving the man with the baseball bat swinging in the dust. I slip on Yorki’s sunglasses and ride down Paseo ahead of the shouts echoing from the balconies.

  Shaking from the adrenaline, I hide the moped in the ruins of an abandoned building behind Cine Chaplin. During the darkness of a crowded matinee, I enter through the broken back door of the theater and collapse in a front-row chair: Fresa y chocolate.

  The flickering screen and the breathing of the other moviegoers momentarily soothes my rattled nerves. I am here among other people, where I belong. I am not a monster. I am a man, a doctor. Maybe it would have been easier if my mother had taken me down that hole with her. It probably would have been much easier.

  Eyelids grow heavy and begin to shut, but I can’t allow myself to sleep here. When the credits roll I head to the bathroom to sit in a stall before the lights go up. When the next showing begins, I dig in the trash and find a can with a little cola left and a paper cone with a few peanuts. I return to my seat, chewing and sipping slowly.

  I wait agonizingly through four screenings, keeping an eye on the glowing clock on the wall. When I leave the theater at 11:30, I ride Yorki’s moped east along the Malecón to the end. The skies over the straits are dark with ominous stormclouds. The moon and stars remain hidden. I hide the moped between tall stacks of loading pallets and slip through a gap in the fence that circles the Port of Havana.

  This side of the harbor is an iron graveyard. Hulking boxcars blackened with soot lie dormant on disused tracks. If this is where she’s hiding out, it’s been as poor a way to pass the week as my own. “¿Hola?” The sound of tide washing over dead coral. Distant laughter carries across the channel from a cruise ship bedecked with colored lanterns. “Julia?”

  She steps out of the shadows carrying a purse. When I walk toward her she holds a finger to her lips. Standing a few inches from her, I can smell her skin. “I’m in trouble,” I say.

  “You’re in it deeper than me.” She gives me a peculiar smile. “A girlfriend told me about the sorts of things they’ve been saying around Vedado since you got locked up.”

  “You knew I was down there?”

  “Tito got the word out through the girls in Havana that you didn’t have any water and would probably die within seventy-two hours. He was playing cat-and-mouse to try and get me to come out. But today he got a tip to look for me here.”

  Laughter reaches us from the cruise ship and Julia pulls something from her purse. My throat catches. She is holding a small Russian pistol. “Where did you get that?”

  “He came ready to defend himself against a knife, but it never occurred to him that I might have Alejandro’s gun …”

  I almost step on him, legs sticking out from behind the last boxcar. It’s dark, but it was dark down in the crypt and I recognize the sneakers and pants of the man who held me captive. A wave of nausea washes over me. Tito’s head lies severed on the other side of the rail.

  “I’ll need your help dragging him the rest of the way.” She lifts his feet and nods for me to take the shoulders. “He’s heavier than Alejandro.”

  I have to call upon a reserve of surgeon’s equilibrium to speak. “No.”

  “¡Carajo, Mano! You can’t do things halfway.”

  “Stop this, Julia. You’re sick.”

  “There were two ways this could have ended, but you’ve given me no choice.” Her face contorts the way it did when she hit me with the ashtray, except that now she’s pointing a gun at me. “A wealthy foreigner is going to get me out, a diplomat.”

  “One of your johns?”

  “Shut up. You’re in no position to judge me. All the jineteras spoke of the doctor who’d give the test for AIDS without asking their name, but you never slept with them. Why is that? You pretend it’s for your socialismo, pero I knew better before I even met you. You’re sentimental: You believe in love. En fin, you’re stupid. All I had to do was shake my tail in your face long enough and I knew you’d break down.”

  She levels her hand and points the pistol straight at my gut.

  “Wait, Julia!”

  “Go to hell. You don’t even know my real name.”

  I stagger to
the sea wall and jump at the crack of the first shot—the shock of the water and I don’t know whether I’ve been hit. More shots, and I dive, swimming beneath the surface until my lungs burn.

  When I come up for air, I see flashing lights in the railyard. I climb out on the rocks and all four doors open on a dark Mercedes parked at the sea wall: three men in olive-green and Perez in an overcoat. “Hello, doctor. Get in.”

  I sit shivering in back between two of the khakied guards. When Perez puts me in prison, I’ll make it a short stay. I learned in medical school that it’s not very difficult to end your life with a few simple tools: a plastic bag, a shoestring, a damp cloth. I won’t ever let them lock me up again.

  We’re speeding down the Malecón when the driver turns at 23rd Street. He parks in front of my house. “Such a pity,” Perez says, turning to face me from the passenger seat of the Mercedes, “a house like this in your family so long. It must have upset you awfully when they gave the best part to that spy downstairs.” The guard to my right gets out of the car. Perez explains, “I’ll take you to the hospital, if you wish, but you’d probably rather get out here.”

  “You’re letting me go? But all of Vedado thinks I’m a killer.”

  “No te preocupas. Your neighbors have been informed.”

  “Informed?”

  “We’ve told the CDR woman of your innocence. A false lead made you a suspect. By morning all Havana will know we caught the real killer—the jinetera. Come by the PNR tomorrow night and we’ll take your testimony.”

  I am dropped off to a blackout. I climb the stairs and lock the attic door. No running water, but I have enough in three-gallon jugs to bathe with a sponge. Before I can dry off, I collapse on the sofa in absolute exhaustion and sleep.

  22 August 1992

  In the morning the rain starts falling and the attic is subject to the glares of everyone in the neighborhood. Between cups of chamomile tea and fits of sleep, I crack the door and hear Beatrice talking about me on the phone, que siempre era raro, un médico perverso. Nobody will ask how I got the lunar anymore. It will be associated with something else. Even if I’m not going to rot in jail, I’ve ruined my personal and professional reputations. Everything: my record as a pediatrician, the attic apartment, the roll of American twenties—everything is worthless.

  I make tea and tune into Radio Reloj. “Meteorologists are closely monitoring the first major tropical storm of the season …” The city is bracing for a hurricane and the blackout might stretch for days. I lie down again and sleep through the afternoon.

  * * *

  Night arrives with a violent wind as the rain becomes a drenching downpour. Everyone has taken shelter inside. I turn up the collar of my raincoat and head down the service stairs. I walk to the filling station on Malecón, buy a liter of gas, and press on through the crashing waves to Miramar. I find the Lada where I left it and drive it across the Puente la Lisa, splashing through the flooded streets of Vedado to PNR headquarters.

  Perez sits across from me at his desk. I tell him everything I know, but he already knows it all and much more. “After you pulled that trick with the skeleton in your window,” Perez says, his gray apparatchik eyes wearily twinkling, “I exerted a bit of psychological pressure on Tito by arresting his brother as a prime suspect. I held Jochi because he’s older and can get the maximum penalty—that’s what I told Tito. But also because Jochi was clearly the weaker-willed brother. All I needed to do was ask Tito if he had seen you because I hoped you could lead us to the jinetera. But he surprised me by disappearing himself—hiding out at the necropolis, it turns out.” The buzz of the air conditioner seems to get louder when Perez adds, “Yesterday we found Alejandro’s head in a vat of acid at a Palo Monte church.” He pours me some brandy from a decanter. “They struggled, fought, and she stabbed him repeatedly with the scalpel. The girl dragged his body a little more than five meters and laid his neck under the wheel of the last boxcar on a freight train. Then she uncoupled the car from the end of the freight and released the brake, same as she did to Tito after she shot him last night. Friday afternoon my men were at the railyard collecting evidence, so the response was quick when gunfire was reported just before midnight. It turns out the foreigner who had been sheltering her is a rather high-ranking diplomat.”

  “What will happen to him?”

  “There are many varieties of crime, doctor. I make it my profession to puzzle over just one.” Perez turns away and gazes out the windshield at the Swiss Embassy. “I’ll transfer her to the juvenile justice division at the end of the week. If you want you can see her first.”

  I don’t know whether it’s more morbid to say that I do or I don’t. If I do, it’s because I want to look at the face of a teenage girl who could have done what she did. If I don’t, it’s because I want to preserve unspoiled the image of an innocent jinetera I laid down with. She was right about some things. Sentimental people are easy to fool.

  At home alone in my attic, I light a cigarette and turn on the TV. They are showing Memorias del subdesarrollo on Canal 6. I treat myself to a Shiraz that Director González dropped off while I was out. I glance at El Ché but he still isn’t speaking to me. There is a bitter, bilious taste on my tongue, and the wine doesn’t seem quite right. I flick the knob before Corrieri can stick his head in his wife’s forsaken stocking, and I fall asleep on the sofa.

  23 August 1992

  By midnight the edge of Huracán Andrés is upon the island. Lightning flashes illuminate the curtains, but the howling wind drowns out the thunder: wet, dark gusts at the edge of a storm a hundred miles wide. Radio Reloj says I should get down to street level, but I’ve weathered several major storms up here in the attic with just El Ché and the spirit of Aurora. The light of the gas stove will be enough to read by. I’ll pass the hurricane in the middle of my room, crouched at the edge of the sofa, sipping pretend coffee in the dark, reveling in the symphony of the winds.

  There’s a rapping at the French doors. I am ready to pin it on the gale, but it continues, rhythmically. I touch the latch and feel it jiggle. I jerk away my trembling hand. My nerves have been shot since the time in the tomb. I light a cigarette. Even as I try to assuage my alarm with reason, I struggle against the impulse to throw open the doors, let in the wind and rain, expose the balcón. I am inches away from the source of the rapping. Cold water leeches in under the French doors and my feet are naked. The wind suddenly blows the doors open with a slam and books and clothes fly out the window in the vacuum. I stumble backwards and the edge of the coffee table catches the back of my skull. Blacking out, I see a figure on the balcón silhouetted by lightning. All is absorbed.

  24 August 1992

  Twelve resounding clangs as the bell of the old Episcopalean church marks the forward march of hours—or is it tolling backwards?

  “You got knocked out. What a mess!” Director González stands over me straightening the books on the shelf. He sizes up the small attic, shakes his head, and says, “This is a place where wine is drunk in swigs.”

  “¿Qué?”

  “Those empty bottles in piles by the door. They all have the corks plugged in them.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “I just arrived. But the storm is almost twelve hours gone.” Director González reaches into his pocket for a metal flask. “Want some whiskey?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  He says, “Go ahead, Rodriguez,” and so I do. “Sorry about the awful trouble you went through. And now this …” Wet clothes, books, and papers are strewn all over the floor.

  “What’s the damage like down there?”

  “What you’d expect: many trees and poles blown down, trash all over the streets, flooding along the Malecón. If you’re feeling all right you should get downstairs. There are people waiting outside the clinic, many distressed and some with minor injuries. A few will need sedatives. Most just want ibuprofen. Get yourself some too.”

  “The clinic doesn’t have any of that.
”

  “It does now.”

  “How?”

  “Colonel Perez took care of it.” On his way out the door Director González says, “Get down there, Rodriguez. Vedado needs you.”

  I head down and open the clinic. On the street everyone is talking about Andrés and its aftermath. All are glad to be outdoors. Nobody likes being trapped, even in his own home, even for one night. Radio Reloj says that Cuba was spared the worst. The eye tore right across Florida and Miami has been devastated. There is no way of knowing the total casualties at sea, but it would have been very hard for anyone out on the Florida Straits in a small craft.

  * * *

  For two straight days I see walk-ins at all hours and monitor trauma patients in the cots overnight. On the third day, a nurse spells me for a couple of hours and I walk through flooded streets along the Malecón. The houses and apartments of Vedado had already been in ruins—roofs corroding, balconies crumbling, unpainted walls riddled with cracks that sprout hideous branches and vines—and after a flood leaving behind only moderate additional damage, everything somehow looks more vibrant than before.

  There’s no contact allowed in the interview room at PNR headquarters. She wears a gray uniform, looking tired, drawn, nothing like the girl who brought me a ham sandwich from the Habana Libre.

  “I didn’t mean to kill Alejandro.”

  “I know.” I light a cigarette and look over at the guard. He nods and I hand it to her. Her touch, briefly lingering, feels dead to me. I light another cigarette for myself.

  “While you went to visit your family in Pinar, he sent another jinetera over to arrange a meeting at the bottom of the Malecón, where they dock the ships. I was supposed to pay him off. He wanted needles, pills, whatever I could get from your polyclinic. There wasn’t anything, but I brought the scalpel—the one you used in the kitchen—to scare him and to protect myself. He said very cruel things and we fought. He laughed when I showed him the scalpel. I cut him just once in the neck. But the blood—it was awful.”