Made in Saturn

by Rita Indiana

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  The second time Susana came to clean, she came alone, and Bengoa sent twelve vials of Temgesic along with her. Argenis didn’t know if he’d done it out of negligence or an excess of confidence, because he’d only been in the apartment for a week and he was supposed to take one a day. In any case, it was perfect. He’d been taking the double dose for a couple of days and had only two left, which with the twelve Susana brought added up to the fourteen needed to square off the happy weekly mathematics of his consumption.

  It was about ten a.m. and he was still in bed, since the dose from the day before had helped him to sleep late. Susana had a copy of Bengoa’s key, and she peeked into the bedroom with a bucket in her hand. Argenis had just gotten up, having heard the front door open, and he rubbed his eyes with an intense feeling of grogginess. “Good morning, Mr. Luna,” she said, and he told her to call him Argenis as he scratched his balls on his way to the bathroom and breathed in the baby cologne she used by way of perfume.

  “You want coffee?” she asked from the kitchen, and he remembered the coffees his ex-wife Mirta had brought him years ago before she left for work in the morning. They had agreed that while she was working he would prepare his first solo show. Instead he would snort a half gram of coke while watching videos of black men with barely legal white women and make a few scribbles in a sketch book an hour before she came home, just to have something to show her – the sketches for a supposed future “monumental” piece.

  Susana served her overly sweet Cuban coffee on the balcony in old porcelain cups, along with some toast Argenis smeared with the Maggi mayonnaise his mother had bestowed upon his luggage. They spoke of his parents, his brother Ernesto, his studies at the School of Fine Arts. She listened with interest, not saying anything until – since Bengoa had told him she’d studied art history – Argenis asked who her favorite artist was. “Of all time?” she asked nervously, as if her response could save her life, and then said “Goya” without moving her eyes from the toast she was eating, and without him moving his from her orange-flecked lips, from the clavicles split by the narrow straps of her top, from the feet whose shoes had been left by the front door. That day, he helped her make the bed and wash the dishes, and when it was time for lunch he delved into his suitcase to share a can of beans with her, opening it as if it were a bottle of champagne. When it was time for her to leave, a time that coincided with that of his injection, Susana pulled a little book from her wrinkly fake leather purse and put it in his hand. “It’s a gift for you, Argenis.” It was a guide to the collection of the Hermitage Museum, in Russian and with a very dilapidated cover. She left before he could thank her, and as he listened to her footsteps going down the stairs, his heart crumpled in his chest like a rejected sketch in the hand of its draftsman.

  Sitting on his bed preparing the syringe, he watched through the window as a woman in the next building hung up clothing in her bedroom. Pink pants, a blouse, athletic socks. Things acquired a distinct thickness in the few seconds preceding the injection. The intense anticipation melted down material objects and their subatomic reality became evident: the orange blouse and the woman’s hand were made of the same stuff – uncertain particles, the ideas of things. He thought of all the trouble monks went to, in order to feel something similar. In the stupor of the first few hours of his high, he paged through Susana’s booklet as if a secret message was hiding in those pages, a message he’d have to decipher. After plenty of speculation he closed the gift, noticed the dirt under his fingernails and went to the bathroom to clean them with a toothbrush and a drop of shampoo. When they were done he shaved the beard he hadn’t trimmed since getting to Chinatown, and then did the same with the hair on his head. He was wearing it in a short Afro that he first had to trim down with a little pair of scissors his mother had put into a transparent plastic bag, along with other toiletries. Then he shaved his head completely, nicking himself a few times. As he went over the back of his neck with the green plastic Bic razor, he felt something like the pleasure his mother must have felt, imagining him regularly using those implements. He washed off the specks of blood and doused his head and face in Old Spice aftershave, his father’s favorite.

  All that shaving business in the windowless bathroom had made him sweat, and he decided to shower. The water was cold and he counted to three and closed his eyes before taking the first step. The memory of his grandmother Consuelo came to him, sitting on the bench in the kitchen where she was cleaning rice in a punch bowl, teaching him how to remove the stones, husks, and rotten grains with his fingers. Argenis opened the suitcase full of clothes – he still hadn’t managed to put his things into drawers – pulled out a pair of khaki Dockers and opened a package of Fruit of the Loom undershirts. The new clothes looked good on him and smelled like they came from far away. The smell of American merchandise was a common one in Santo Domingo, but in Cuba the embargo and limited mobility had transformed that smell into a magical essence.

  He went to the room he’d been imagining as his studio and placed Susana there, too, sitting on a wooden bench, her legs crossed the way he’d seen her sit. She shared a cigarette with him and he dared to get closer, to speak tenderly to her, to kiss her. This must be how Cubans dream up mental banquets, he thought, meals with appetizers, main courses, and desserts, on abundant tables made of desire. The difference was that they did it out of necessity, and Argenis did it out of cowardice. He was afraid to paint in the real world, to fail again, to go out, to be judged, to accept that he had felt something for Susana, and afraid to do anything about it.

  He opened the door with his heart going a mile a minute, and went down the stairs – toward the outside, the street – in threes, at the risky speed with which children run downhill, knowing that if they fall they’ll break their teeth. The night had swallowed all ugliness, and what the scarce light from isolated lampposts revealed instead was instances of sublime beauty: architectural fragments, snippets of style arranged like a collage on black cardboard.

  He headed north on Campanario Street, letting himself be guided by the little neighborhood map Bengoa had made for him. Neither his simple clothes nor his sandals nor the dark skin inherited from his father gave away the still-apprehensive foreign tourist wandering the streets of Havana that night. The restaurants were to the right, but he didn’t want to spend the little money he had, so he kept going. He didn’t know how many blocks separated him from the sea, but he shared with Cubans the certainty that, after a certain number of steps in any direction, you will always find a shore.

  His throat quickly filled with the particles of salt that traveled on the wind. When he came to Virtudes Street he thought he could hear the slap of the waves against the cliffs, but it was only the rumbling of a black Buick hidden in the shadows. Its owner was trying to get it to start, holding a flashlight between his teeth. There were no children, nor any businesses in sight. Leaning against the frames, a few shirtless men peered from darkened doorways while the laughter of old folks, Latin pop music, and a vague smell of cooking oil emanated from other doorways lit up by electric light and conversation.

  The feel of salt in the breeze intensified to the point of dampening his shirt, his arm hair and his cheeks. The Atlantic placed its hand on him like a delicate lover, pulling him toward the street by the sea, the Malecón, toward the ends of the earth. When he arrived, he saw several couples sitting on the wall and sharing long kisses, always followed by a whispered secret or the meeting of foreheads, while on the other side of the wall, on the reef, a big-bellied man was fishing with a string tied to his index finger.

  He felt like he was in his element. He felt, at least for a moment, grateful to life. Not to his father, whose attentions were always subtitled, but rather to life itself and to the opportunity he thought he still had, to free himself definitively from his opiate dependence. When would the treatment be over? He ought to ask Bengoa. Did Susana know he was an addict? What was her relationship to the doctor? Did she have a boyfriend?
What did her relatives do? Did he have a shot with her? Question after question spilled from his guts with all the persistence of the waves’ ebb and flow. All of a sudden there were so many of them and they were so unending that he felt dizzy. He lay on the wall looking up and watched how the wind erased the clouds from the sky to leave a flaming yellow moon in its center.

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  Susana would return in a few days, Argenis supposed, so in the meantime he naturally fell into a pleasant routine that made the waiting a little easier. After a breakfast of coffee and toast with mayonnaise, he would go out for a walk with the Asimov book in the back pocket of his jeans. It was an old paperback edition and he had to be careful when he pulled it out, so as not to drop any loose pages. The ad-free walls and signposts on the way to the Malecón surprised him. Aside from the government’s anachronistic propaganda, Havana was a naked city. The painted slogans and heroes found here and there seemed as rustic and naive as the tattoos etched by hand onto the arms and backs of prisoners. Although the paint was almost always recent and often even fresh, you could see from their outlines that the designs were old and the brushes had only been there to touch them up.

  He wondered whether the unflagging permanence of those signs was inversely proportional to the faith people still put in them. What would his father, the José Alfredo Luna of today, think about all this? Time had extracted those slogans from his mouth like decaying molars, replacing them with the good teeth he and his party friends used to consume lobster and Black Label on a daily basis. When Argenis was little, his father had used those slogans to complete his thoughts and as greetings. Che Guevara’s “Hasta la victoria, siempre!” was his favorite. As well as the Revolutionary Dictionary, he had made Ernesto memorize Che’s farewell letter to Fidel, which was the source of that phrase, his most famous one. His brother would recite it with a practiced fervor, with which he milked his parents for years. José Alfredo didn’t have time to teach Argenis these things, nor did Argenis want to learn them. They seemed as boring, mysterious, and as completely foreign to him as the prayers to Archangel San Miguel his grandmother Consuelo would sing as she rested her hands on his head. Both were liturgies from a distant planet.

  He knew he was an illiterate in the strange communist atmosphere. He took slow baby steps across the ideological surface, interested mainly in its effects on people – the small obsessions, the oblique explosions of silent desperation in their eyes.

  Years before, when he was still pursuing a career as an artist, he had hated what he called “Cuban opportunism.” In his opinion the revolution and the U.S. embargo that followed were interesting issues that Cubans exploited as artists, issues that gave them an edge, and he considered the ease with which they could petition for political asylum an injustice, the networks they created to publicize and distribute their work when they managed to leave Cuba a mafia. But these inventions were really the product of his envy, since Havana was and still is the one and only New York of the Caribbean, the Paris of the Antilles, the New Delhi of the West Indies. Envy ate him alive: he envied their delicious eloquence, their Wifredo Lams and Gutiérrez Aleas, their Lecuonas and their Alejo Carpentiers. He even envied them their hunger and their suffering.

  On some streets, after he had stopped multiple times to ask directions on his morning walk, people began to recognize him. His Dominican accent was funny to them. “You sound like you’re from Oriente,” they’d say, and he knew that they thought people “from Oriente” spoke as bad as all fuck. In spite of their economic hardship, people still had enough energy to put on the reggaeton, balada, or salsa music that poured from houses at the pathological volume used for listening to such things in the Caribbean.

  Sitting on the Malecón, he would read a few pages of his disintegrating book until a high-school escapee would pull his attention away from it and toward her shapely legs and girlish shoes, or until the breeze would snatch a page from his negligent hands and he’d have to run a few meters to reach it. Then he would walk to Galiano Street and, after resting a few minutes in front of the Bellevue Hotel, walk the ten blocks back southwards to Chinatown.

  He always arrived home dying of hunger, and then he’d put on a Cream CD while he prepared the cup of white rice he’d eat with ketchup. He’d drink another coffee, smoke a Popular, and, sitting on the living room sofa as he waited the last few hours until his injection, he’d plan his outings with Susana, choose the songs he’d play for her, deliberate which Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood he should take her to, even though he still hadn’t been to any of them.

  The plastic hand of the wall clock neared four p.m. at exactly the same time as the needle with his daily 6mg neared his arm. Under the effects of the Temgesic he needed no entertainment. Listening to an entire King Crimson album in the rocking chair on the balcony was enough to feel sated for the rest of the day. Sometimes he’d draw in his mind – fugitive lines inspired by the music, abstract objects formed by the melodies, waves that repeated to the beat of the percussion. He would miss this creative calm when drugs were definitively out of his life.

  When neither Bengoa nor the medicine nor Susana had appeared by the seventh day after her previous visit, the landscape of Argenis’s placid routine filled with black clouds. He had one dose left, which is to say two vials of Temgesic, and on the other side of their consumption lay only the awful abyss. He wasn’t familiar with the ill effects of abstaining from Temgesic, but because of the similarities between the two drugs he imagined they’d be similar to those of heroin. He understood that Bengoa had given him the extra vials in case he couldn’t come, and Argenis, of course, had used all of them. He prayed for Bengoa’s return with an intense but disposable faith, the kind he always had when he knew he was fucked. He jabbed the needle in nervously, hurting himself a bit in the process, but not even the enforced tranquility of the chemical could settle his insides. Bengoa had left a number to call if anything was wrong, but he’d have to borrow a neighbor’s phone and he didn’t know how to explain to the doctor that he’d upped his dosage without asking.

  Maybe this was his big opportunity. To quit Temgesic. Get clean. Suffer the withdrawal symptoms like a real macho. He wasn’t addicted to heroin anymore, but it was clear that a hand just as strong was now clenched around his will. Maybe he could get Temgesic on the street. Maybe if there wasn’t any Temgesic, he could get a little heroin. He had twenty bucks and a lot of experience asking strange questions in bad neighborhoods. He could already see himself heating up the spoon with blameless pleasure. Maybe it was destiny. After all, he’d never wanted to give up heroin. They had kidnapped him, made him do it. He was ready to go and ride it out, he was standing by the door, but then he saw the bottle of ketchup Etelvina had put in his suitcase, the one he used to flavor his lunches of plain rice, standing on the kitchen table.

  When Argenis was little, that red sauce was the only thing that could get him to eat. It was the camouflage his mother used to hide the flavor of eggs, plantains, cabbage, beans. Back then he was a restless skeleton with a closed stomach, a kid who only really liked to eat sausage links and drink Nesquik. His brother Ernesto had their father’s appetite, and whenever Etelvina gave up on Argenis she would add his eternal and abundant leftovers to Ernesto’s plate.

  The smell of his mother’s apartment in Santo Domingo reached all the way to Havana. It was the smell of a kitchen always in use, the smell of her students’ uncorrected papers, and the smell of Anaïs Anaïs she sprayed over her clothing before leaving for work. Like a red ink pen, the Baldom ketchup bottle had drawn a line straight back to those years, just before his parents’ divorce, when Etelvina was working like a dog both in and out of the house in order to pay the bills for Argenis, Ernesto, and José Alfredo, who was just about to take off with Genoveva.

  Argenis felt in his bones the tiredness that his mother had felt on those afternoons, scrubbing the dishes with dark sweat stains in the armpits of her tailored suits. Back then he always spat those dinners back out o
nto his plate, the dinners she’d come all the way back home to make, riding there in a stinking concho in the break between two classes at the university. Something akin to empathy, sadness, or responsibility overwhelmed him and he realized that his mother had extended her sphere of influence to touch him through the squeezy ketchup bottle she’d put in his luggage. She had injected him with some of her patience, the same patience she’d pulled out from under some rock back then so she wouldn’t shoot herself in the head. He decided to wait until the next day to make any decision, and instead spent the afternoon on the balcony finishing the Asimov book, which that piece of shit had ended on a cliffhanger so you’d have to buy the next one.

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  “Asere, this is communism. You think I get those vials from a bottomless tank?” Bengoa was on his knees, complaining about the mistake Argenis had made, about the extra Temgesics he’d consumed, about the trouble this would make for him, as he searched the kitchen trash bag for the used syringes and empty vials that would confirm the details of Argenis’s confession.

  All this was pretty far from his stupid plans with Susana, who was cleaning the kitchen, eyes on the floor, while the doctor scolded him. If she didn’t already know it, Bengoa had now made it clear to her. Argenis was a junkie. A big, fat junkie. Such a junkie that he had gotten hooked on the medicine meant to detox him. As if that weren’t enough, when Bengoa saw Argenis fiddling with the sugar bowl on the kitchen table, head hanging, the doctor changed his tone and spoke to him as if he were a child: “Argenis, son, you have to take advantage of this opportunity. Think of your dad, spending all this money on you. You can’t let him down.” Argenis considered telling him what he thought of his father, but it wouldn’t have helped him any. He wanted the doctor to leave, but he also didn’t want to be left alone with Susana. “From now on you’ll have to come to my house for your injections, every afternoon at four.” He left him the two vials for that day and put the ones he’d brought with him back into his fanny pack. He pointed out a bag of oatmeal, powdered milk, and cabbage he’d brought and said, “Tell Susana to draw you a map to my house,” before taking off without saying goodbye or leaving any money.