Made in Saturn

by Rita Indiana

  On their drive, Havana was looking glorious and desperate, an old woman with legs open, brazenly displaying her wide and empty streets – streets that reminded Argenis of an amusement park; no cars, buses, or trams. The people who were coming and going wore an anguish on their faces he could recognize as his own: it was the anguish of having to hustle for everything on the black market, just as he’d hustled for heroin in Santo Domingo.

  The routine at La Pradera had been good for him. He felt strong and self-sufficient. “This is a new era,” he told himself. As he helped to take the suitcases out of the trunk, he was conscious of the eight pounds of muscle mass he’d gained thanks to Bengoa’s attentions. The renewed capabilities of his body surprised him as they carried the bags upstairs together. As if going through a second puberty, his insides swelled with something resembling the awkward happiness he’d felt when his childish cheeks were newly populated with dark hairs.

  The uneven beard that had started to grow when he was thirteen was his first triumph over his brother Ernesto, who at fifteen already had two definite callings: kissing their dad’s ass and making Argenis’s life impossible. Ernesto was the best student in his year, besides being class president, and he had already had a couple of girlfriends. But that summer, while Argenis stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying out shaving with his mother – since José Alfredo had already left them for Genoveva – his older brother’s hairless white face was colonized by the nastiest acne case in history. Traces of blood and pus stained every pillow in the house.

  Their father had boasted a splendid beard from a young age. He proudly pointed it out whenever he showed them pictures from his militant stage: pictures of him at protests sporting an untrimmed Afro and thick-rimmed sunglasses. He was a different person back then, a person who knew less than Argenis did about the dark phenomena that would turn him into the hypertensive, clean-shaven, permanently suited guy who defended his party, the Dominican Liberation Party, in the newspapers.

  The paint on the stairs going up to Argenis’s new home was surrendering to the extreme humidity. Flakes of it hung down like the petals of an enormous funeral flower. The bronze spiral bannister decorated in art nouveau motifs had been recently polished, although here and there pieces had been hacked off by some thief or other. When they reached the fifth floor, his T-shirt soaking wet, Argenis felt like a man again and not like the shadow that had loomed over the untidy property of his best friends for the last few months.

  From the apartment’s entryway you could see a balcony about three meters long, and a lovely breeze was blowing in from it. He dropped his bags and walked over to see if the view of decrepit buildings, rooftops, and laundry lines had the same contagious harmony as the rest of Havana. It wasn’t his first time in the city. In 1992 he had come to a summer camp for young revolutionaries from all over Latin America. His impression then had been the same as now: a heartbreaking mix of need and beauty. Standing out on the apartment’s balcony, he felt like a humble eighth note in a grandiose symphony whose sounds, audible only to the soul, greatly surpassed the appearance of its score of colonial architecture, dirty water, and ideology.

  Standing with him on the balcony, Bengoa was speechifying on the history of the neighborhood, on Chinese immigration, on the old folk who used to stand in their doorways smoking opium – stories that he would embellish when he felt they were too short in the telling. Then he drew a little map of the best restaurants, in case Argenis wanted to blow the twenty bucks he was going to leave him, and Argenis supposed that, just as he had considered it appropriate to trust him with the administration of his own medicine, the doctor would eventually let him manage the money his dad sent, too.

  Bengoa had equipped the kitchen with coffee, sugar, bread, eggs, rice, and a couple of potatoes, stuff he pointed out while opening the cabinets with the smiling gestures of a magician showing the inside of a box in which his assistant has been pierced by swords. Then he showed him the apartment’s two bedrooms, and Argenis mentally converted one of them into a painting studio. He saw himself there looking robust and inspired, putting the finishing touches to a monochromatic nude of a headless woman.

  “Can I trust you?” Bengoa asked, passing him a key chain sporting a cheap medal of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, and Argenis said yes, of course.

  With difficulty, Argenis waited for four p.m., the time the doctor had indicated he should inject himself. To deal with the anxiety, he eyed the vial that was lying on the decorative flowers of the rattan sofa in the living room, smoked a Popular, and drank the coffee he had made in the blue greca pot that came with the kitchen. The coffee came from one of the five packages of Café Santo Domingo that Etelvina had put in the suitcase. Each time he saw them he loudly asked, “Why didn’t you also pack me five cartons of Marlboro Lights?” as if his mother could hear him.

  When only a few minutes remained, he sat down on the rattan sofa and laid all his instruments out on the coffee table. It was all much easier now that there was nothing to light. He put the needle into the vial and filled the syringe.

  Bengoa hadn’t left him the rubber strap, so he took off his belt, and as he tied it around his bicep the Janet Jackson song “Escapade” emerged from some place in the building. Its first notes, in this setting strange and at the same time familiar, made Argenis think about the Cubans’ obsession with eighties’ synthesizers, those bland keyboards that for them are the essence of modernity, the things with which Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel made millions.

  Millions.

  With the relief the injection brought, he savored the idea for the first time. If he had millions, he would buy all the heroin he’d need for the rest of his life. The purest goddamn smack in the world. He would live a tranquil life, not bothering anyone, disciplined and satisfied with his daily ration of happiness, as triumphant as a worker on a Soviet poster, a syringe in one fist and a giant spoon in the other.

  ‌

  The Bible says that God saw man was lonely, so he made him a woman from his own flesh. Argenis’s father, lacking such superpowers, sent him a boom box with a CD player. Bengoa brought it over, and Susana with it, “to clean your apartment.” Susana had curly dark brown hair, a perfect belly button, and beautiful toes with pink polish peeking through her plastic sandals. She had brought a cheap cloth apron, which she put on immediately in order to attack the dirty dishes piled up in the sink. The water made refreshing sounds as it splashed on the plates, though Bengoa insisted on interrupting them with his praise of Sony, the makers of the boom box.

  “This is what I call aerodynamic design, Argenis. If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” he said with childlike enthusiasm as he plugged the apparatus in and stuck his hand without permission into the Case Logic, which was lying on the counter. He rooted around until he found a CD by Joan Manuel Serrat that Argenis never played but which the doctor apparently loved. Then he sat on one of the rocking chairs and took a swig from the flask of Havana Club he always had in his back pocket, and which he’d sometimes used to spike their coffees at La Pradera.

  Susana was cleaning Argenis’s room with a broom and a mop she had found in the kitchen. He could hear her clanking around in the closet and prayed she wouldn’t find any dirty underwear that hadn’t made it to the laundry basket. Bengoa, now standing in front of Argenis, took another swig from his bottle, grimaced, and then puckered his lips as for a kiss, looked toward the room where Susana was working and, while pushing his fat middle finger in and out of the circle he’d made with his other hand, said loudly enough for Susana to hear, “Susana studied art history, Argenis. You’ll get along very well.”

  Later, when Susana came out to clean the living room, the two men moved onto the balcony so she could finish. Bengoa was humming along to Serrat, and Argenis, feeling a mix of arousal and annoyance, was quiet until they both left. After checking from the balcony that both of them had gotten into the Lada, he turned off the Serrat, ran to the bathroom, and lowered his pants to inspect the
modest erection the episode had given him.

  Thanks to the heroin he had spent many months without any desire for sex, and he was happy to see that, in spite of the Temgesic, his penis was returning to life. He touched himself to test the hardness of this rebirth and then jacked off – simply, nothing fancy. After he came he got into the shower, but there wasn’t any water. Susana’s cleaning had used up the contents of the rooftop tank. He put his jeans on to go up to the rooftop and look it over, see if he might at least get enough to fill a plastic jug to throw over himself. The tank was enormous, metal, homemade, and painted in red and white. When the water got low you had to fill it up with a pump you connected to the water main in the street. In Cuba, everything required a major operation. “You do it at night,” Bengoa had told him. “Vantroi, your neighbor, has the pump.”

  Văn Trỗi. Argenis had heard that name for the first time during a Holy Week vacation at the beach house belonging to Tony Catrain, his father’s best friend. He and his brother were maybe eight and ten, and Ernesto was playing a game with his father that they called “Revolutionary Dictionary.” José Alfredo had made him memorize a communist hero for each letter of the alphabet and at any time and any place he might say a letter to Ernesto, who would respond like a dog hoping for a biscuit. “Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, fighter in the National Liberation Front of Vietnam,” Ernesto had said that afternoon, standing out of respect, as his father had demanded, since almost every person he had had to bottle up in his mind was dead. Ernesto said it beautifully, against a picture-postcard orange sunset, but José Alfredo was waiting for the next paragraph about the fighter and Ernesto couldn’t recall it. José Alfredo had been drinking with his friends all day, and he said, “This boy is such a shit. He always makes me look bad.”

  Văn Trỗi had been captured as he placed explosives on a bridge that was soon to be crossed by McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense. After months of torture, they finally shot him on 15 October 1964. Argenis never forgot that fact, because later that night, as they were getting into the tent Tony Catrain had fixed up in the living room for his son Charlie, Argenis, and Ernesto, Ernesto kept repeating it as though he were praying to scare off a monster.

  How many children had been named for figures in his father’s and Ernesto’s dictionary? How many knew the stories behind them? Did they care? Had any of them honored their memories with a warlike act, with the pursuit of an ideal, with a revolutionary deed? Those children, marked by their parents’ ideological passion, who were they now?

  The polished bricks of the rooftop’s floor, with its little pink cement stage in the middle, added color to a picturesque scene in which the water tank, which resembled the shell of a Soviet rocket, was the star. A pair of prize-worthy legs crowned with extremely short jean shorts was stood on a wooden crate, so that their owner could peer through the hole at the top of the tank. They were the legs of a sixties Italian actress, just rounded enough yet still far from Rubenesque. Only the calf, thanks to the high-heeled clogs, displayed a timid muscle that directed the gaze down a pleasing slope to the ankle. The comrade’s torso was wrestling inside the tank like an alien with the stalled motor of its spaceship, and the struggle was such that at times her feet came off the box that supported them and hung in the air. Without warning she removed her torso, arms, and head from inside, spattering water about and gasping for air with an open mouth. A kind of hook was in her right hand, but it was no she – it was a lanky mulatto guy. He had no shirt on and was wiping the excess water from his ripped pecs with his hands, which sported long, fake, purple nails. His back was that of a welterweight boxer and, seen in this context, his shaved legs completed the ensemble. “I fixed the tank, niño. I’m Vantroi, your neighbor,” he said. Argenis made an effort to put his hand into the one Vantroi extended to him, and Vantroi shook it with a coarse virility that was in perfect harmony with the tough appearance of his clogs’ heels.

  When at last he was under the shower, washing away the traces of masturbation, of Vantroi, and of the Havana heat, the brief uneasiness that preceded his daily dose intensified. The echo of the conflicting halves of his neighbor’s body, Bengoa’s alcohol-fueled gestures, the incessant yelling that came from behind the miserable walls, and his own recent history reached a fatal level, as if someone had suddenly cranked up the volume on negativity. He emerged from the bathroom drying himself nervously, thinking about how bad his mother must have felt when she saw him that morning stinking of shit, unshaven, and incoherent. His heart was racing and he threw himself on the bed with his eyes closed, as if this could stop the images of the past three years of his life from sloshing over him, like crap in a toilet. He opened his eyes and a widened field of vision now included a Quaker Oats calendar that had been tacked up next to a poster of Che Guevara on the closet door. Seen together there, Che’s face – the same one plastered onto hats and stickers all over the world – and the happy Quaker were the two sides of a grotesque yin-yang, on the one hand a socialist ideal turned into merchandise and on the other a contraband capitalist brand that sustained the biological functioning of the revolution against all odds.

  The previous months’ pages had been torn from the calendar, and the days of April 2004, the month in progress, stood out from the background, orange against dark blue. In a few weeks there would be elections in the Dominican Republic and according to all the polls his father’s party, the PLD, was going to win again. Until that moment he hadn’t asked himself why his father was trying harder than ever before to care for him, even if it was in Cuba and through Bengoa. It didn’t take long to reach the obvious yet painful conclusion that José Alfredo had sent him to Havana less out of concern for his son’s mental health than for the health of his own political career. A junkie son is a gift from heaven for anyone engaged in a dirty campaign, the kind of campaign that got dirtier the closer it got to the election. His father had freed himself of his problem and at the same time he had, in the eyes of the world, done a good deed for his son. On his way to the living room, Argenis, still naked, spit on the poster of Che as if it were José Alfredo’s face. “You’re a son of a bitch, but I’m an even bigger son of a bitch. You put me here because you’re ashamed of me, but I’m doing just fine with your money, cocksucker.” He took out two Temgesic vials instead of one and mentally rehearsed an excuse for Bengoa: “I needed something stronger, I had a panic attack.” He filled the syringe completely with 6mg of the stuff and shot up, contentedly imagining his mom and dad watching him through a peephole and seeing how his eyes rolled with pleasure on his way to the stratosphere.

  ‌

  He still couldn’t motivate himself to go outside. Everything that happened on the other side of his apartment door seemed menacing and strange. He preferred to read Foundation and Empire, the Asimov book Bengoa had loaned him, to listen to his CDs, and to limit his outings to the balcony, where he’d lean out like an old gossip for hours, watching the confident comings and goings of others. There, he learned the intimate rhythms of his neighborhood: its rush hours, its secrets, the catalog of tonalities the light extracted from all things. The street bubbled over like a pressure cooker, full of unfamiliar gestures, of struggles and issues, of small aggressions, of possibility, of events Argenis pretended he could calculate before confronting them. Everything he needed, Bengoa brought. His little zone of control and its small disasters – power outages or water shortages, things also common in Santo Domingo – made him feel secure and calm.

  For the first week, he shut himself in the bedroom he didn’t use for sleeping, put Lou Reed on the boom box, sat on the floor and, in his mind, converted the space into an extraordinary studio. It was really Philip Guston’s studio, which he’d seen in a documentary, although it was his own paint dripping down the canvases in the imaginary workshop. There were unpainted and half-finished works all over the place. On top of a large metal-topped wooden table were several plastic buckets full of brushes, some soaking in water and others brand new, with their bristles pointing up
. They were good brushes, like the ones his father had bought on his trip to France with Genoveva to congratulate Argenis on getting into the Altos de Chavón art school. Mirta must have thrown those brushes out, he thought, because he’d never gone back to collect them after the divorce. The table had a shelf below it full of cans of acrylic paint, like the ones Guston used. Strange and mistreated objects from other eras, the kind he used to buy in Little Haiti behind the Mercado Modelo in Santo Domingo, adorned the corners. When the room was ready, he lit a Popular on this side of reality and, eyes closed, contemplated the piece he was working on in that magnificent place. The air smelled of paint, sweat, piles of cigarette butts, and the soot of the street.

  I have to be careful with this, he thought one morning. I can’t let things end up the way they did with the grant.

  Three years ago he had received a grant from some gallery owners on the north coast. All he had to do was paint and accept the advice of a famous curator who had been contracted to guide him and two other Dominican artists along the ambiguous path of contemporary art. Argenis had just gotten divorced and was trying to give up cocaine. Still immature, he thought he was the next Goya. He started playing around with the idea that in another life he had been a buccaneer. He imagined his days in that life, with ample details, and then painted them. It was a very intense and attractive process, but what began as a creative game ended as a psychotic breakdown, and he was committed to the mental health wing of the UCE for several weeks. Not even his mother had come to see him, and he didn’t blame her. Back then she was fed up with his nonsense, his insomnia, his obsessions. Argenis couldn’t make anything work, despite not wanting for opportunities. He hadn’t been born on a sugarcane plantation like his father, nor had they confiscated his paintings, tortured, and deported him, as had happened with half of his parents’ friends in the seventies. What the hell was wrong with him?