by Rita Indiana
As soon as Bengoa was gone, Susana stuck her head out of the kitchen and said, “Don’t pay any mind to that asshole.” With a knitted brow she rummaged through the bag the doctor had brought, as if it were full of shit. “They’re paying him to take care of you, Argenis, not to shame you.” When she tossed the bag and its contents onto the table she didn’t look anything like the person who had run downstairs, smiling, after giving him the book the week before. “What is it you feel when you use it? What is it about it that you like?” she asked. No one who wasn’t an addict had ever asked him that. “I feel good,” Argenis said. “When I shoot up I don’t need anything else.” She had no advice, just looked at him free of judgment, as if he had told her his shirt size. Standing, she pulled her hair into a ponytail and went back to the kitchen. A few minutes later the pot whistled, and they drank the coffee with toast smeared with the peanut butter from a jar he had opened just for her. Then he put on Crosby, Stills & Nash, and she liked it almost as much as the peanut butter. She spoke to him about things she’d seen on her way there, unimportant things like the stuff his mother had told him as a kid to keep his mind off a skinned knee. Argenis examined her face in feigned tranquility, searching for a hint of contempt in her empathy. But Susana wasn’t like that. She came from a reality light-years away from his, one where his addiction was just another phenomenon, and not a scandal.
As Argenis gathered up the breakfast plates, which Bengoa was paying Susana to wash with his father’s money, he said he didn’t want her to clean anymore today and invited her to take a walk instead. Without thinking twice, she slung her purse over her shoulder and put on her shoes. They went down the five flights in an uncomfortable silence that Argenis broke when they got to the street, to offer her a cigarette. They took the route Argenis used each day to go to the Malecón and she told him her father had gone to Florida in the Mariel boatlift and she’d never heard from him again. Susana had studied art history because she loved art but had no talent for drawing. “Neither do most contemporary artists,” he said, and she laughed with her mouth open, choking a bit and throwing her head back. She stopped all of a sudden, as if something about Argenis had been revealed to her mid-laugh, then asked him, “Why don’t you paint anymore?”
“Painting is over,” he explained. “What people want now are Japanese toys, video loops on twenty walls, women who stick barbed wire up their asses.”
The laughter returned, and then, her face serious again, Susana said, “I understand about the public, but what about the pleasure?” The pleasure of painting: the pleasure of dipping a brush, of smearing it onto the canvas, of wetting, crushing, spreading, filling, of smelling something coming to life, the physical exertion of stretching canvas across a frame.
He missed his School of Fine Arts days, when he was living in the overly hot studio across from the cathedral Etelvina had managed to convince José Alfredo to rent for him. He missed the beautiful rituals that preceded the actual painting – the trips to Chinconchan, a suffocating den of a store with rolls of paper reaching to the ceiling, the stops at the carpenter’s in Santa Barbara, who’d make little frames for him from leftover pieces of wood. He missed the ice-cold beers and the stories he had shared with the old painters in the Cafetería El Conde. But most of all he missed feeling hopeful, blessed with a talent that continually manifested itself in sweaty painting sessions, always applauded by his teachers at the stultifying fine arts school. That was before he went to Altos de Chavón, the school where he learned that painting had been out of style for decades and that for many of his contemporaries it was an obsolete craft, like macramé.
“Pleasure?” Argenis repeated, playing for time, and then, as a sort of answer, he asked, “Pleasure without others?” In the face of his question, Susana made the same gesture Bengoa’s cabbage and oatmeal had deserved and said, “You’re the expert on that topic.”
The rest of the way to the Malecón, Argenis was a whirlwind of ideas. He thought about heroin, about the paradigm of individual gratification. He had sacrificed everything – family, work, health – for it. But painting, something that had made him happy since childhood and which didn’t harm anyone, terrified him. Or rather, he was terrified of doing something considered outdated. He was afraid of rejection, of being made fun of, criticized. They were the fears of a child wearing old shoes that his classmates would laugh at. While he was thinking, Susana maintained a strange silence, as if she could read the effect her words had on him, as if she had access to his mental processes and, with an invisible hand, were guiding him toward a more productive conclusion.
Before crossing the avenue to sit on the Malecón wall, he stopped to look at her. A strong wind swept some strands of hair into her face. The salt air dampened the asphalt and the walls; they breathed in iodine. A bit of hair stuck to her mouth and as she pulled it out with one hand Argenis took the opportunity to grab the other one.
There are gestures that never end, whose expanding shock waves destroy several nearby galaxies. For the few seconds it took them to cross the Malecón’s six lanes, their interlaced fingers had that effect on Argenis’s universe. He let go on the other side, so that the blast wouldn’t kill them both, and asked if she wanted to go have an ice cream at Coppelia, as if nothing had happened. She agreed with a nod, though she was as disconcerted as he was, while hailing a cocotaxi for the two of them.
What the gesture meant or what it had done to them didn’t matter. All that mattered was its power, and their desire to feel it again. They ate their ice cream at a little table much like the wrought-iron one in La Pradera. Mentioning that resemblance allowed Argenis to fill the crater their joined hands had left in the conversation with insipid facts about his hospital stay, facts he let fly without raising his eyes from the ice cream. It went down his esophagus like razor blades due to the approaching hour of his dosage, his habitual anxiety intensified by the possibility of a close encounter with Susana. He watched her put her spoon in her mouth and taste the residue on it, the bowl now empty, and he knew that he would do whatever it took to fuck her. “Shall we go?” she asked, reading his mind, and he didn’t even try to bargain with the taxi driver when he asked for Argenis’s last ten bucks to take them back to the apartment.
“Women with sugary cunts,” the old painters in the Cafetería El Conde had called them during the conversations about art, sex, and politics they had had every day after Argenis came out of art school. “Women who turn your cock into a tongue that can taste their exquisite honey.” The first time he penetrated Susana there on the kitchen table, Argenis prayed to those honorable sages, who, now that he had met that woman, had been elevated to the category of prophets.
Bengoa’s house in Habana Vieja was a smallish nineteenthcentury mansion whose furniture had been new in the fifties. He had hung up a few unframed still lifes by some mediocre student in the family, cheapening the neoclassic style of the home. From the living room ceiling hung a crystal chandelier from which bits of rust and flakes of paint constantly rained down. Bengoa was divorced and when his daughters weren’t around dirty plates stacked up in the sink. His only efforts at cleanliness were devoted to his car and the little hair that remained on his head, which he perfumed excessively.
On his first visit, Bengoa gave Argenis a tour of his home. The living room and dining room were enormous, with fifteen-foot ceilings and floors of creole tiles in green and yellow geometric patterns. Two blue, poorly painted Ionic columns held up the arch that separated the two spaces. Another set of arch-topped columns led from the main room to another living room with a Persian rug and Arabic-style suite that sat in front of a beautiful mahogany case filled with a huge collection of classical music on vinyl. Although the LPs looked as dusty as the rest of the furnishings, Argenis guessed Bengoa did listen to them, since the record player’s cover was open and inside sat a record of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
A long hallway led to three bedrooms with enormous carved wooden doors Beng
oa didn’t bother to open. At the end was an interior courtyard leading to a separate room Bengoa called his office, which had been the servants’ quarters in the house’s youth.
In there, Bengoa had a desk, two folding metal chairs, a cabinet with a glass door, and a framed poster of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son on the wall. It was a souvenir from the Prado, whose name was printed on its edge, which Bengoa had brought back from his only trip off the island. Argenis felt a bit dizzy and told Bengoa so, hoping he’d hurry the operation a bit. The doctor opened the cabinet with a skeleton key and pulled out two Temgesic vials. The afternoon was cool, and after the injection Bengoa invited Argenis to drink an orange juice in his courtyard next to the ruins of a stone fountain. He also proposed a game of Chinese checkers, which Argenis asked to put off to the next day, since Susana was expecting him.
On his way home, Goya’s hungry Saturn alternated in his head with images from the real world, like in those movies where they crosscut the principal character’s actions with fragments of some classical painting, zooming in and out to create suspense or even terror. He knew that painting like the back of his hand. What had the famous portrait of Father Time touched in him?
When he got back to his apartment, Susana was frying potatoes in the kitchen, and he told her what had happened. She took the potatoes out with a spatula and divided them equally between two plates already holding a fried egg each. As they ate, Susana told him that Goya had painted his Saturn on the wall of his dining room at the Quinta del Sordo, one of his last homes. Argenis could recall a bit about it but didn’t interrupt because Susana was telling it all with such a pleasing familiarity. “In the late nineteenth century they removed it, along with the other Black Paintings, and transferred them to canvas.” With her mouth full, she explained the process: “They used a very delicate glue to stick the painting from the wall onto Japanese silk paper, pulled off the layer with the picture, and transferred it onto the canvas.” Her words came out naturally, but with a distinctive tone, and Argenis intuited that she hadn’t read this in a book or on the internet but had received it from the lips of one of her teachers.
When Argenis was six years old, Tony Catrain, his father’s best friend, had given him a book called Myths and Legends. It was a huge yellow hardback with delicate watercolor illustrations of the Greek and Roman gods and heroes. That book accompanied him to the School of Fine Arts, where some cocksucker stole it from him along with his lunch bag. In it he’d read the story of Kronos, Saturn to the Romans, for the first time. Like most of the ancient gods and heroes, he receives a troublesome prophecy: that one of his children will dethrone him. To avoid this fate, he eats his children as soon as they are born. His wife, made desperate by the macabre barbecue, hides their sixth child (Zeus/Jupiter) on an island and in his place gives Kronos a rock for lunch. Later, the adult Zeus, with the help of a cosmic conspiracy, gives his father a medicine that induces vomiting, and all his siblings come out again, alive and well.
Susana’s mythological knowledge was less rudimentary than that of Argenis, and she described Saturn’s symbolic attribute, the sickle, for him as they drank coffee on the balcony. In the background “I’m Your Captain” by Grand Funk Railroad was playing, which Argenis had put on that morning and which she had asked him to play again. “Saturn castrated his father, the Sky, with the sickle. The sickle represents time, which defines our dimension, our mastery of the planetary movements, according to which we plan our harvests here on Earth.” Her words were no longer a copy of some teacher’s, nor were they lines she’d memorized from a book – they were her own, improvised out of a talent for poetry that Argenis attributed not only to her personal abilities but also to the geographic coordinates of her birthplace. A few days later, he asked her to bring her things over and she showed up with a very old beige fabric suitcase, which, once emptied, he installed as decoration in the room that would someday be his studio.
During those first weeks, Argenis could feel the tiny seeds of good in him reaching up toward Susana’s sun. He loved talking to her as much as he enjoyed fucking her and they did both things each morning, since in the evening, thanks to the Temgesic, his penis wasn’t good for much. After sex they’d go out for a walk and Susana would fill him up with historical and aesthetic details about their surroundings, about the exuberant colonial edifices and the unfeeling revolutionary monuments, about the age of the mahogany trees, about witchcraft in wartime, the reasons for the name of a plaza or the title of a hundred-year-old piece of son music. Susana took a sentimental X-ray of the city and Argenis tried to make out the spots of the cancer of disillusionment on it. One day, as they prepared a plantain stew, Argenis asked, “Why don’t they just kill Castro?” She went pale, as if Castro himself had overheard and was on his way to eat them alive. Sitting down on the living room sofa she said, very softly, “We don’t know what to believe anymore.” She sat there with watery eyes, looking at the coffee table until the stew was ready, and Argenis regretted having opened that door. He felt frivolous and ignorant, like those American tourists who say “ándale, ándale” like Speedy Gonzales whenever they get drunk in Latin America.
After lunch, she would read him bits from Lezama Lima’s Paradiso in bed and he would descend those motley steps into an hour-long nap. Sometimes he would dream of Santo Domingo with all its noise and trash, or that Rambo the pusher had come to Havana all dressed in red and brought him some Afghani heroin with serious balls, or that Susana had given birth to blond twins with scary-looking eyes clouded by glaucoma.
In the afternoons he’d visit Bengoa and play a round of Chinese checkers with him in the room with the vinyl records. The Beethoven LP continued to wait silently inside the record player and Argenis didn’t dare ask its owner if it was because he liked it a lot or because he was too lazy to return it to its sleeve. Bengoa never made an effort to put on music. Instead he would whistle Silvio Rodríguez songs, tell dirty jokes, and confess how hard it was to support his two daughters, even as a doctor with a degree. Argenis wanted to believe he was sharing his economic woes with him to justify the fact that, beyond the rent for the apartment and the boxes of oatmeal and potatoes, he never saw a cent of the 500 dollars José Alfredo sent every month, money that Susana said would allow them to live like royalty.
One afternoon, as he returned from his appointment with Bengoa, Argenis saw his neighbor Vantroi dancing in his apartment, through the door he had left open to let some air in. The apartment was light on furniture. The only items Argenis could see were something that looked like a park bench against one wall, and a small table. In the middle of all this space in front of a twelve-inch Sony Trinitron TV connected to a VCR, Vantroi, clad in bike shorts, was copying Janet Jackson’s moves in the “When I Think Of You” video.
Argenis remembered that video, made so that it would look like it had been just one take; they used to play it on Channel 2 between programs. On his feet Vantroi wore a pair of Reebok Classics, so dirty that they existed only in mummified form, thanks to countless strips of duct tape. Argenis was feeling generous after his Temgesic, and went into his place to get the turquoise-blue Adidas with orange stripes on the sides, which his mother had bought in Carrefour. He had never once worn them and they smelled fantastic. He poked his head round his neighbor’s door and tossed the shoes in for him to try on.
“Who recorded the videos for you?” Argenis asked, since he knew there was no MTV in Cuba, and Vantroi answered, “Juani, my cousin in Chicago,” as he moved his feet along with the video, staring down at the Adidas. Without stopping the rhythmic movements of his shoulders and head, he came over to the door to tell Argenis, “I just really admire Paula Abdul’s work as a choreographer,” and added, still following exactly what was happening in the video, “that mix of jazz and street.”
At dinner, when she’d learned of Argenis’s extreme solidarity, Susana looked at him with a mix of tenderness and disapproval, and then asked if he had told either Bengoa or his father to give him the
500 dollars directly. Argenis said no, that he was waiting for the right moment. In fact, he had had no contact at all with his father aside from a signed photo José Alfredo had sent of himself with the newly elected president, and he felt a bit bad about firing Bengoa from his most lucrative side job. The next morning, as she bounced up and down on his balls, Susana made him promise her that he would talk to Bengoa about the 500 bucks that afternoon, moaning as she asked. Argenis came inside her to seal his promise and after a cold shower and a good lunch, he put on a button-down shirt with the khaki pants and leather moccasins his mother had chosen, in case some special occasion ever presented itself in Cuba. Susana kissed him before he left, something Mirta had never done, and he went down the stairs like a proud provider.