The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

  The rain began again and thunder pealed around her. Elena put the book down and waited for the last squall to pass, then descended to the street for a walk, eager to see her new surroundings. First she went south, where the ocean breezes didn’t penetrate and the steamy heat was dull and heavy and few people ventured outside. She passed a policeman keeping guard and a lone, winsome man at a street corner waiting for God knows what. Voices came from behind closed doors—a child crying, a woman screaming something unintelligible, a man singing an old bolero. Every street had its smell—garbage, standing water, damp mortar, crumbling brick—the odor of old buildings that had stood against pirates and hurricanes and were now encountering the wrecking ball of time. She turned west, where the buildings were newer and the streets wide and desolate. There was evidence of some past splendor—empty nightclubs, restaurants, bars—but the splendor was gone and had left behind the whisper of a nostalgia that wasn’t hers. Music or poison? What would Daniel Arcilla think? After several blocks, she went north to the edge of the sea, which was gray and frothy from breaking against the seawall after the storm. She stood before it a long time, hoping the sea would speak to her in some fashion, but it remained indifferent. The sea refused to render meaning.

  On her return she noticed two men playing chess on a stoop several blocks from Mirta and Juan’s building. Here was something recognizable: the board and the pieces, the concentration on the faces of the players. She greeted them and told them her father played.

  “That’s a good thing,” the older man said. He was chewing on a cigar stub and had long, veiny hands. She’d seen hands like that on the cigar rollers of Piedra Negra. “Is your father from around here?”

  “No,” she said. “He lives in Piedra Negra.”

  “You don’t speak with that accent.”

  “I’m here because I won the National Poetry Prize.”

  That didn’t mean anything to the man. He simply shrugged his shoulders.

  “Would you like to play?” he asked. His voice came from deep in the throat, rough and uneven, a cigar smoker’s voice. “After I’m done with this kid, that is,” and he motioned with his head to the young man he was playing, who looked up and gave him a nasty look.

  “Maybe I’ll win and she’ll have to play me,” the young man said.

  “I don’t know how,” she said.

  “Your father didn’t teach you?”

  “No. He plays only with himself.”

  The young man snickered and shook his head.

  “Don’t mind him,” the older man said. “He has a head full of dirt. I’ll teach you the basics if you want.”

  Elena said yes enthusiastically. Finally she’d be able to unravel the intricacies of her father’s game.

  “What’s your name?” the older man asked. His face was smooth and shiny like old leather.

  She gave it reluctantly. To give your name to a stranger was to surrender a part of yourself.

  “Mine is Capanegra. Maybe tomorrow, Elena, I will teach you.”

  The young man made a quick move and slapped his thigh.

  “I’m always here at this time,” Capanegra said. Then to the young man, “Mate in three moves.”

  The young man looked down at the board a few moments, playing out the moves in his head, then shook Capanegra’s hand and said to Elena, “Watch out for him. He’s the devil.”

  “You know a better person to learn from?” said the old man, smiling the devil’s smile and sliding the cigar stub from one side to the other of his mouth.

  “Tomorrow,” Elena said, and moved on toward the university.

  Walking down San Lázaro, she felt she was being followed, and at the next corner she turned around. The boy Edmundo was about twenty paces behind. Elena waved for him to come closer and asked what he was doing.

  “You might get lost, miss,” he said.

  “I’m not lost. I don’t need you to follow me.”

  “If you tell me where you’re going I can show you a shortcut.”

  “I’m not going anywhere in particular. Today is Wednesday. How come you’re not in school?”

  “I don’t like it. It’s boring.”

  He had on the same clothes he was wearing when he came to the apartment, wanting to learn about pigeons.

  “And what do you want to be?” she asked, and immediately realized it was the same stupid question people asked of teenagers when they had nothing else to say to them.

  He thought a moment, then said, “A mountain climber! I’ll climb Mount Everest and plant the Cuban flag on the top.”

  It was a smart reply and she was caught off guard by it. “Go home, Mr. Alpinist.”

  “What if you’re attacked by a ruffian? I can protect you.”

  “I don’t see any ruffians around here, Edmundo. Just students.”

  “Ruffians are invisible until they appear.”

  She relented and allowed the boy to walk with her. Edmundo led her through a series of alleys and back streets that put them on the Malecón by Manrique Street. Before crossing the avenue she bought six balls of fried dough from a street vendor, which they ate while sitting on the seawall, looking out to the blue horizon. When they were done, Edmundo jumped down to the rocks below, called dientes de perro, or the teeth of dogs, because they were sharp and jagged and could tear you up badly if you fell on them. He encouraged Elena to do the same, and just as she got ready to climb down, a wave broke over the rocks and engulfed Edmundo in spray. Elena laughed and the boy laughed too, wet and happy. Now the sea was speaking in the language of Yemayá, goddess of the waters, and it was made of foam and salt spray and an instant rainbow that appeared as the waves drew back and the spray lingered in the air.

  On their way back Edmundo pointed to a decrepit building that seemed about to fall in on itself and identified it as the place where he lived.

  “Are your parents home?” Elena asked.

  “No, miss, I live with my grandmother.”

  “Is she home? I would like to meet her.”

  “My grandmother is always home.”

  “A boy like you shouldn’t be out in the streets like a truant,” she said, disliking the tone of her own voice.

  “I know the streets,” he said.

  “Yes, you do,” she said, “and that worries me.”

  The door to the building hung partially off its hinges. Edmundo jerked it open just enough for the two of them to slide through into a solar, a kind of tenement common in the city. The Revolution was supposed to tear them down, but social engineering couldn’t do away with those repositories of people on the way up or, more likely, on the way down. Beyond the door was a narrow alley, which was gloomy and hot, the air heavy with the smell of frying oil. There were electric wires running crosswise overhead and clotheslines in between. The impression was that of a series of webs rigged in haphazard fashion over the alley so that the sky was barely visible. They passed a half-starved dog, which raised its head and gave a weak bark. They then entered an exposed hallway that opened to a patio around which were a number of doorways, some with actual doors, others with curtains across them. Weeds grew in the center of the patio and there was a nonfunctioning fountain topped by a prancing cherub someone had painted blue. The paint was peeling, giving the angel a sickly appearance. They walked around the patio to the opposite side and reached one of the doorways. Edmundo didn’t bother announcing himself before pulling aside the curtain and leading Elena in.

  The grandmother was sitting against the wall next to a card table, smoking a cigarette, inhaling the smoke deeply and blowing it upward through her painted lips. Her face was long and her blue eyes were bleared with cataracts. On her neck she wore several bead necklaces, and the skin, so white it was almost transparent, stretched over the tendons and veins. She brought the hand holding the cigarette across her body to an ashtray on the table and then diverted her eyes to Edmundo.

  “What did he do this time?” she asked.

  “Edmundo has been leading me
around the city so I don’t get lost,” Elena said.

  “You’re not from the school?” the woman said. Her Spanish had a faint European accent that Elena couldn’t place. She enunciated each syllable, so different from the speech of people in the capital, who spoke frenetically and wound up dropping the sounds at the end of words.

  “I am a neighbor,” Elena said. “Well, not exactly.”

  “Either you are or you aren’t,” the grandmother said, putting out her cigarette and lighting another.

  Edmundo interrupted and explained that she was visiting the capital. “They say she’s won some sort of poetry prize from the government.”

  “That is true,” Elena said, and was about to continue when the old lady interrupted.

  “You’re a poet?”

  “Yes,” Elena said. She gave her name, followed by her town, as was the habit in Piedra Negra, and offered her hand.

  The grandmother shifted the cigarette from right to left and took Elena’s hand. “I’m Delia Müller, from Stuttgart.”

  The capital was full of surprises. Elena had never seen a white person, especially a foreigner, live in such destitute conditions.

  Delia offered Elena a seat and told Edmundo to go next door and borrow some sugar. She stood with difficulty and moved to the far corner of the room, where there was a double gas burner and, on it, a coffeemaker. She was tall and very thin and wore a faded pink bathrobe, an article of clothing from another place, another era.

  Next to the burner was a small sink in which she washed out the coffeemaker. She rinsed the bottom pot and filled it halfway with water, then topped the aluminum funnel with coffee grounds and slid it into the pot. Over that she screwed the upper pot that received the liquid. In Piedra Negra they still used the old sock method, which Elena preferred. The sock was not really a sock but a funnel made of wool into which the grounds were placed, then boiled water was poured through it. Though the coffee usually came out lukewarm, it was fuller and richer, particularly if the sugar was added to the water before boiling.

  “You’re German,” Elena said.

  “No, I’m Cuban, but I was born in Germany. My parents brought me to the island when I was five and put me to work as a dance prodigy. I danced in all the nightclubs and beer halls, even before President García Menocal in the Presidential Palace. I was a famous child performer. Both my parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and I didn’t even get a cold. I was eighteen, fully a woman. A bandleader took me under his wing and tried to make me a singer, but I wasn’t a singer. I was a dancer, destined for great things.”

  Elena did not know about the epidemic and she asked what that was about.

  “Millions of people died all over the world. It all went downhill very fast.”

  “That couldn’t happen now,” Elena said.

  “Oh, it could,” Delia said, “especially in this city where we are packed together like sardines.”

  She poured the coffee into demitasses, one of which was missing the handle, and brought them to the table before lighting another cigarette. She asked Elena what had happened to her hand, and Elena explained how she got it caught in a sugar mill while thinking about poetry.

  Delia smiled and said, “Art has taken a piece of you.”

  Elena lowered her bad hand to her lap. She blew on the coffee and took a sip. It was bitter and strong. She said she thought the boy was very smart and perhaps he should be in school and not out on the streets, where he might get in trouble.

  Edmundo’s upbringing was really none of Elena’s business and Delia let her know. She said the boy was too intelligent for school and that she gave him books to read and taught him European culture.

  As Elena stood to leave, Edmundo showed up with a small envelope of sugar from the neighbor. When he realized that they’d already had their coffee, he tilted his head and emptied the envelope into his mouth. Some of it spilled on his cheeks and made a ring of crystals around his wide street boy’s smile.

  Elena remembered eating handfuls of unrefined sugar as a girl. Cándida would warn her that too much sugar would make holes in her stomach, but to Elena the sugar grains were like stars bursting in her mouth. “Mama,” she would say, “I’m swallowing the Milky Way.” Elena’s love of sugar led her to swirl Soledad’s pacifier in a jarful in order to calm her, usually obtaining the opposite result. When the sugar was gone, Soledad was as restless as ever, falling into explosive fits of anger until she got more. Elena had only recently learned that sugar was not good for children and made a mental note to write her mother that she’d been right about the effects of sugar and to keep Soledad from having more than necessary, no matter how ill-tempered she became.

  The next afternoon Elena went to see the old man who offered to teach her chess, but he wasn’t there. Instead, the young man who’d been playing with him the day before was engaged in a game with a teenage boy. The young man told her the devil had taken sick that day but that if she was willing to wait until the game was over, he would teach her a few things, unas cositas, he said, using the Spanish diminutive. As he said this he exchanged a knowing look with the teenager and they laughed. What a stupid boy, she thought and walked briskly away, concluding that a game in which the ultimate goal is to kill your opponent was not for her. Checkmate indeed.

  Idling in front of the building was a Lada, one of those Russian cars that had been brought into the country by the government. In the driver’s seat was a somber man whose eyes followed her as she passed and entered the building. Even from the landing, she could hear a voice coming from the top floor, which she recognized as Daniel Arcilla’s baritone reciting a poem by Quevedo about a man with a large nose. Daniel was sitting at the dining table across from Mirta, who listened intently.

  He noticed Elena standing by the wall behind him and recited another poem, which began,

  After I met you

  nothing else mattered:

  not the sun that lit the day,

  not April with its roses.

  And that was followed by three more, and he fell so in love with his own talent for remembering and declaiming verses that he almost forgot he had before him the reason for his visit, Elena herself.

  “Beautiful, maestro,” Mirta said after the fifth poem, for she had had enough of poetry, as everyone does in due time, except for poets, who often think too highly of themselves because no one else does.

  Daniel had come unannounced to take Elena to the Writers’ Union, where there was a meeting to plan for the press conference and subsequent reception celebrating her book. Press attachés and cultural officers from all the embassies had been invited, as well as African writers on a solidarity mission to the island. Members of the politburo and the heads of several cultural departments would be in attendance; also a famous existentialist philosopher, who was due to arrive from France over the weekend. Daniel said that he wanted to make sure Elena received all the exposure befitting a poet of her talents.

  She became flustered and started rubbing her temples nervously with her hands. She’d never met a press attaché or a cultural officer and had no idea what either did. She knew only Spanish, a bit of bookish French, and had taken a couple of years of English in school. Daniel reassured her that Spanish was all she needed, and someone at the Writers’ Union was already working on a translation of her poems into English. Her intestines started rumbling and she feared another attack of nerves such as she suffered in Piedra Negra before coming to the capital.

  Mirta, still doubtful of Daniel’s intentions, offered to accompany her to the meeting, but Elena declined the offer. As she drank the lime-blossom tea Mirta prepared to calm her nerves, Elena was able to gather her thoughts: she had been awarded the most important literary prize on the island, which is why she had come to the capital, and sooner or later she’d have to confront things herself without anybody’s help. She finished the tea and in half an hour she was settling into the rear seat of the Russian Lada that had brought the famous poet to the apartment.<
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  A few minutes into the drive Daniel asked Zacarías, the driver, to stop somewhere along the Malecón. Zacarías gave a quick glance through the rearview mirror and drove to the equestrian statue of Antonio Maceo, the hero from the War of Independence.

  The two poets strolled by the seawall while the driver leaned against the car smoking a cigarette. There wasn’t a moment when his attention was distracted by the indigo glow of the sea that day or the pretty girl crossing the street or the group of young people who strolled past, joking and bouncing against one another with the exaggerated enthusiasm of adolescents. His focus on his boss was uncompromising.

  “Zacarías was a child soldier during the revolutionary struggle,” Daniel said. “He was rewarded for his efforts with a job as a driver and a chivato.”

  “In Piedra Negra, when the Revolution triumphed, we shaved the chivatos’ heads and poured ice water on them,” Elena said.

  “I’m surrounded by them,” Daniel said. “Zacarías and my assistant write reports about me every day that make their way to the desk of the minister of culture. If the minister sees anything unusual, he passes the report on to the Office of State Security.”

  All the while Daniel was pointing here and there, pretending to show Elena the sights: Morro Castle at the mouth of the harbor, the Hotel Nacional on a knoll overlooking the sea.