by Rita Indiana
Bengoa greeted him affectionately, complimented his clothing, and told Argenis that the care he’d put into dressing was a sign of health. “You’re as good as new,” Bengoa told him on the way to his office, where he always performed the injection in front of Saturn. Argenis got nervous during the checkers game and Bengoa offered him a Popular and a swig of his Havana Club. He wet his mouth with the rum and waited to finish the cigarette before telling the doctor they had to discuss something. “What’s up, Argenis? Is Susana not doing a good job?” “It isn’t that,” he said. “It’s just that I think I can manage my own money.” Bengoa got serious, and put the yellow marble he was holding down onto the board at random, ending the game.
“What money are you talking about, Argenis?” the doctor asked with his head at an angle, like a dog trying to understand human speech, and Argenis explained he was talking about the money his father sent every month.
Bengoa stood, walked over to the dusty record player, turned it on, and put the needle down on Beethoven’s Pastoral.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked in a tone of voice that was new for him.
“It’s Beethoven,” Argenis replied. “Symphony no. 6.”
“No.” And he lowered the volume before sitting down in front of the checkers again. “It’s the sound of greed.”
The joyful notes from the opening of the Pastoral grated against the doctor’s short tone. “This house you see here, Fidel gave it to me. Fidel himself. He gave it to me in one piece in 1962, just the way the gusanos had left it when they fled the revolution, when they ran away from justice, like the worms they were. I left this room just the way it was given to me. I’ve never taken the record from its place. It was the last thing those rats heard. It reminds me that people like you exist, people who believe they deserve it all.”
Bengoa stood again and informed him: “José Alfredo hasn’t sent anything for a month and a half. I’ve been taking care of everything – the apartment, the medicine, everything.”
Argenis was suffocating, soaking in sweat. He wanted to die. Bengoa went over to the record player and took the needle off the Beethoven. Argenis followed him to the door in silence, and there he concluded: “You can stay in the apartment one more month, because I have great respect for Comrade Luna. But you’ll have to find a way to pay for the medicine, because I can’t keep taking it from the clinic for free.”
Two vials for a pair of socks. One for a used T-shirt. Six for the pack of Fruit of the Loom underwear. He had already taken Bengoa the cans of tuna and beans, a pack of Santo Domingo coffee, a towel, and a bar of Protex soap, along with the Bic razor blades, a pair of jeans, and two Tommy Hilfiger polo shirts. He didn’t want the belt because he was a lot bigger than Argenis and it didn’t fit. One good day, he’d gotten three vials for a container of baby powder and four for the half-bottle of Old Spice aftershave.
Each day at noon, Argenis would stand in front of the suitcases and select the next currency to be exchanged. Susana cursed Bengoa and tried to convince him that quitting the Temgesic would be a lot more productive. She didn’t know what withdrawal was, and Argenis had no intention of explaining it to her. She had stayed with him in spite of the fact that Bengoa was no longer paying her, and that every day took them further and further from the life they had been planning with those 500 dollars, a sum of money that was as imaginary as his studio and his career as an artist. They ate whatever she brought from her mother’s house, because everything Argenis’s mother had sent was now sitting in Bengoa’s pantry. When he gave Susana the Case Logic full of CDs to exchange for money to call his father from the Hotel Nacional, she came back with canned ham, five pounds of rice, and a box of plums. The only thing they had left was the boom box.
You never know what you have until you lose it, Argenis thought. Lacking both money and Temgesic, his pockets were bursting with clichés. He took the boom box downstairs, planning to ask no fewer than twenty vials for it. They would let him endure another ten days, but after that, unless a miracle occurred, he’d have to get clean. He eyed the bronze bannister and calculated the force that would be needed to rip a piece of it off, like other desperate neighbors had already done.
He lit up a Popular to give himself something to do on the way. The city was looking particularly empty. The occasional slow-moving cars hardly made a sound, and from the enormous silence the squeaking of Chinese bicycles rose up like a witch’s cackle. No smell of food, no perfume, no fruit-scented cleaning product wafted through any open door that afternoon. Only the bony faces of older women in housedresses, cooling off in a breeze that blew ferociously in their minds.
Argenis had taken longer than necessary to decide. In the absence of other options, the boom box – and the CD still inside, the greatest hits of the Allman Brothers – had become an extremely important source of well-being. Susana cried when she saw him unplug it and he promised that soon, after he had talked to his parents, they would have a much better stereo.
In the Parque de la Fraternidad, at the exit from Chinatown, Argenis saw an old man sitting on a bench, using a toothpick to fish around in one of his molars for some bothersome residue, a bit of meat or a grain of rice. The scene took him back to the recurrent memory of Argenis’s grandmother Consuelo. She was cleaning the rice in a punch bowl, in the kitchen of the house where she’d worked her whole life. She took out the husks and the rotten grains and threw them away. Then she pulled out a rock with two fingers.
A rock had saved Zeus from being devoured by his father, a rock concealed in clothing, which Saturn ate thinking it was his son. His mother knew what José Alfredo was capable of and she had filled Argenis’s suitcases with rocks for Saturn. Bengoa was the mouth his father had used to chew him up. If Argenis remembered the legend right, someday he would manage to defeat him. He’d get the Titan to vomit up everything he had swallowed, starting with the boom box.
It was the sort of toy car Santa Claus would bring you for Christmas when your parents couldn’t afford a remote-controlled one. A little sports car with a hole in the back, through which you had to stick a plastic strip that made the wheels go round when you pulled it out with the movement you’d use to start a boat motor. Then you’d put the car on the floor and it would move forward, losing speed until it stopped completely. Argenis could see the details of that car as if he held it in his hand. Red, with a black circle around an orange flame on each side. Neither the doors, nor the hood, nor the trunk would open, and through the glassless windows you could see, right where the seats should be, the rudimentary mechanism that made the thing go. A cheap toy, made in China, the kind they sold in the wholesale shops along Mella Avenue.
When he saw himself stick the little plastic snake in the toy and pull it out again, an intense pain filled his intestines, throat, and nostrils, as if a giant version of the same strip had been poked in and out of all his orifices. It obscured everything, including the little car, in a long, hot stabbing which dissipated in bursts that grew further and further apart. He opened his eyes and saw the face of Che Guevara on the poster that had been hung on the closet door with four rusty thumbtacks. He concentrated on the star on Che’s black beret like on the light at the end of a tunnel. He counted the whistles of pain as they got further and further away, like a train behind the mountains. Then he felt relief and the thirst he would quench by drinking, if he had the strength to reach it, from an aluminum can full of water that smelled of burnt gasoline, like everything in Havana.
The cursive font on the poster read, “Words instruct, examples lead.” He breathed deeply and noticed a slight smell of vomit on the pillowcase. Janet Jackson’s “Nasty Boys” could clearly be heard through the wall. He could also hear the worn-out soles of his neighbor Vantroi’s Reebok Classics squeaking on the tiles as he rehearsed Janet’s choreography for one of his drag queen shows. Made useless by the withdrawal, Argenis had spent the last week in bed, but whenever he managed to find the strength h
e went out on the balcony for a little air. He had seen Vantroi leave the building a couple of times and he was never wearing the Adidas Argenis had given him.
Now that he had nothing left to trade for a vial of Temgesic, he saw those Adidas in a new light. Eyes closed and breathing deeply, the way he had learned to postpone the next wave of nausea and cramps, he speculated as to how many vials he could get for the sneakers. A disembodied hand opened in front of him with three, five, two, one vial. Again, he could smell the scent of newness the shoes had given off that afternoon when, like a junkie Mother Theresa, he gave those treasures away to a transvestite.
Would they look really used now? The question destabilized the slow breaths that kept his malaise at bay, filling his hands with sweat and something else. It was a little car. Santa Claus had brought him it at Christmas. He hadn’t asked for it. The car was Chinese red and the flame adorning each side was poorly executed with stencil and spray paint on the plastic body. He knew what would happen next: he would put the band inside the toy’s rear end and pull it out violently. He knew that the imaginary car would not move, and that it would disappear with the arrival of a pain that would lock him in a fetal position under his filthy sheet.
What was Bengoa’s shoe size? Would he accept the Adidas in exchange for a box of vials?
Argenis had seen Bengoa’s feet once, when the doctor was washing his brick-colored Russian car in front of his house. Like the rest of his anatomy, his feet were hairy and square, like wolf paws. The symmetry of his false teeth also reminded Argenis of an animal, although he didn’t know which one.
Months ago, on the way to the airport in Santo Domingo, his dad had said to his mom, “Bengoa is a brother in arms,” referring to their old revolutionary fervor. Sitting quietly in the back seat, Argenis had listened to them celebrating the brilliance of Chávez and the achievements of the Dominican volleyball team and its new Cuban coach. The divorce was ancient history and they now chitchatted like old friends, talking about Argenis in the third person. Bengoa and Susana had talked about him in the same way as he had twisted in pain in that broken bed. As if he didn’t exist. “Did he drink any water?” “How many times did he go to the bathroom?” In his mind, Argenis offered Bengoa the T-shirt he was wearing, a Police T-shirt the doctor had once complimented him on and that now smelled of various secretions, in exchange for 1cc of Temgesic.
Bengoa came over almost every afternoon to see how he was doing. He’d take his pulse, check his blood pressure, make cruel jokes about diarrhea and nausea. “This will make you a man,” he’d said, “a real, honest-to-God man.” Then he’d ask Susana for coffee or a soda and both would leave the room. Argenis would follow the doctor’s tenor voice through the apartment, his disorderly laugh, the way he dragged the chairs before sitting in them, until the apartment’s front door would shut and Susana would again enter the room, to get him to drink a broth she’d made from the garlic and plantains Bengoa had so generously brought.
Unlike those invalids in books who lose all sense of time, Argenis knew perfectly well how many days it had been since his last fix. When he was free from the vision of the car, he counted the minutes on the plastic wall clock he had moved to his bedroom the day the vials ran out, knowing that after a certain number of days the withdrawal syndrome would end, but the minutes were long, being, as they were, full of pain and holograms on repeat.
Vantroi finished rehearsing and Argenis heard him rummaging through his dented drawers for lipstick and nylon stockings on the other side of the wall. That night Vantroi would be Janet Jackson at a makeshift club at a house in Vedado. Argenis would take advantage of Vantroi’s absence and, filled with miraculous health, go up to the roof of the building, slip through the neighbor’s balcony, and take back the sneakers, for which he meant to get a month’s worth of vials from Bengoa.
Lacking energy, he ran through the operation in his mind. Barefoot and dressed in jean shorts and the tattered Police T-shirt, he would go up to the roof, burning his feet on bricks that were hot enough to fry an egg. He would slither to the edge of the eaves overhanging his neighbor’s balcony and lean his head and torso over, holding on with both hands, hanging there for a second like a bat on the darkening Havana horizon. He would enter the transvestite’s house, listening to his own pulse hammering against the walls of reinforced concrete. When he got to the bedroom he would be surprised by the cleanliness with which Vantroi countered the deterioration of the furniture. He would open the wardrobe and find women’s high-heeled shoes and men’s moccasins. He would not find the Adidas, now that they were part of the Janet Jackson costume, but rather Vantroi’s stinking Reebok Classics.
They were the same model of Reebok Classics Argenis had asked Santa for when he was eight. Half of the boys in his class at the Nuevo Amanecer school already had them, while he was still wearing “kukiká” sneakers, which is what his classmates called cheap, fake, or Chinese brands. His parents were still together back then, and when his mother had seen the yellow report card with his improved grades that December of 1985, she had said to Argenis, while winking at his father, that Santa would certainly be bringing him the sneakers he wanted so badly.
That Saturday José Alfredo had taken him along to sell the Vanguard of the People, the newspaper of the Dominican Liberation Party, an organization to which he dedicated all his spare time and whose ascent he would preach throughout the barrios of Santo Domingo in his cream-colored guayabera and the dated bell-bottom pants which embarrassed Argenis whenever he came to pick him up from school. In some of the houses they were welcomed with coffee and cookies, dulce de leche, or buttery caramels with which Argenis would fill his pockets. But on that day, when they reached the driveway of Tony Catrain, his dad’s best friend, the man, dressed in a modern sports suit, greeted them without a glance and carelessly tossed the ten newspapers José Alfredo had brought him into the back seat of his SUV.
José Alfredo didn’t open his mouth in the concho the whole way to Ciudad Nueva, or as they walked along El Conde while black, white, and red Reeboks smiled through the shop windows of Los Muchachos and Calzados Lama. He took little Argenis to a colmado, a corner store where four men were smacking their dominoes down onto a square table, with sardine cans and Brugal bottles lined up on shelves behind them like sailors in the February 27 parade. They sat on a bench and his father ordered a small bottle of Ron Macorix and a Pepsi. He opened the rum and gave the Pepsi to Argenis. They toasted and drank the contents of both bottles too fast. When his father set the empty rum bottle on the counter, he was crying. “Son,” he said, squeezing the boy’s shoulder, “today is a special day. I have to tell you something because I can’t bear you being lied to. Do you know who Santa Claus is?” Argenis said he did. “It’s me,” said José Alfredo, slapping his chest with a slight tremor on his lips. “I use my money to buy the stuff you ask for. The Yankees invented Santa Claus,” he said, looking out on the street with its high, sunny sidewalks. “They invented him to make people buy junk.” Argenis knew his father didn’t have a job so he imagined his mom in the red suit and beard coming down a chimney. He felt an enormous desire to protect the man whose nose was running the way his own did in the schoolyard when they teased him about his cheap sneakers.
“The world is changing and your dad is getting left behind,” his father said and ordered a roll with white cheese, which he tore in two. “My friends go around in nice clothes, and here I am in these old rags.” His father looked at him steadily, with bloodshot eyes and a little bit of cheese on his mustache. “Do you see that over there?” he asked, pointing to a sign that said TAILOR. “There, they could make an elegant suit your dad could use to get ahead.”
Without letting go of his empty Pepsi, Argenis asked, “And why don’t they, Papi?” “Because Papi has no money,” José Alfredo responded, stroking his son’s head in short, repetitive motions, like Aladdin with his famous lamp.
They left the colmado and José Alfredo took his hand to cross the street. Now, i
n the tailor’s doorway, looking at the ground and grimacing, he said, “Your mom gave me money to get your sneakers. What brand was it you wanted? I forget.” With a sense of duty that hardly fit in his body, Argenis purged himself of the need of a pair of brand-name shoes, of his fear of the jokes his friends would continue to make as they pointed at his sneakers, and pulled his trembling father into the tailor’s.
They entered a narrow space at the rear of which a table was stacked to the ceiling with fabric. The memory of the hot, clean smell of that place invaded his room in Havana. It was the steam an iron brings out of the starched cloth of a shirt. Next to the table a doorway led to a workshop. There, two dark-skinned young men, their gazes fixed on sewing machines, were finishing something that looked like a costume. One was decorating the edge of a pair of pants with ribbon, the other was completing a fuchsia vest. Argenis thought of the outfits of the bands of Tony Seval or Aramis Camilo. A short man in gray cashmere pants and a pale-gray shirt bustled about with his back to them, a measuring tape around his neck, an iron in his hand, and a cigarette in his mouth. When he turned around to greet them, smiling, Argenis could make out the glimmer of a gold tooth in place of one of his canines under the very black, triangular mustache.
His father’s suit was already finished. When José Alfredo saw it he let go of Argenis’s hand to try it on, and there, in front of everyone, shed his clothes as fast as someone with only twenty minutes to cheat on their wife. It was a dark-blue two-piece suit. Once it was on, his dad made a James Bond face in the mirror on the wall, not seeing the boy who watched him from a palm-wicker chair in the corner of the reflection.
After recovering the memory of this event Argenis hated Vantroi’s old shoes even more, but he didn’t have the energy to maintain his hatred of them for even a minute, much less to get to the actual wardrobe. He was still in the bedroom of an apartment painted in watered-down pink. On the wall was another poster, one on which Castro stood gesticulating on a podium, over the phrase “Patria o Muerte, venceremos!” Eighties sneakers had aged better than these slogans, thought Argenis, hearing the soles of Vantroi’s marking the beat of a song. It seemed that Vantroi was still rehearsing, producing that rhythmic scuffing. The sound became more defined and Argenis could now hear it throughout his apartment. But Susana would never allow Vantroi to practice in the living room. He stretched his leg out, full of tracks where he’d occasionally injected himself to give his arm a rest, and he stuck his big toe into the crack to open the door. At the end of the hall in the living room, Bengoa was fucking Susana on the rattan sofa. He was sticking his sausage-colored penis in from behind, holding her by the waist, both of them facing Argenis’s room and lying on their sides on cushions patterned with tropical flowers. The doctor’s khaki-colored balls were hanging to one side and, still wearing his glasses, he was sticking out a long, red tongue which he used to touch the little round pink one Susana offered him.