Made in Saturn

by Rita Indiana

  Motherfuckers, Argenis yelled with a strength he didn’t have. When she realized that she’d been caught, Susana struggled to free herself, but the doctor held her firm and increased the speed of his hip thrusts until he pulled out his already-shrinking penis and came, his cum thick as a strand of fresh pasta. Argenis tried to get up out of bed as Susana fought with Bengoa, but like the little stars that go around Donald Duck’s head when they whack him, the Reebok Classics, Bengoa’s feet, and his father’s tailor’s gold tooth were whirling around his brain. His rage filled him with a strange vigor. He went out to the living room, dizzy but decisive. Bengoa was buttoning his pants with a little smile as vulgar as his hairy chest and Susana was crying in the kitchen, her clothes on all wrong. Argenis seized Dr. Bengoa’s neck, but Bengoa was bigger and he wasn’t sick. He extricated himself from the improvised noose with one hand, and foiled Susana’s attempt to help Argenis by throwing them both to the ground. He punched his patient’s ear, grabbed him by the T-shirt, opened the front door, and threw him out.

  With the sun hidden, the stairway was in shadow. A modest erection foretold the end of the abstinence syndrome. As Argenis lay there on his side on the freezing cold floor, his ears buzzing, he remembered the tailor with his measuring tape, coming over to him with an anise candy in his hand to say, “One day, when you’re big, I’ll make you a suit.” He touched the modest erection under his pants, put his hand inside and grabbed the little car. It was the car Santa had brought him that one Christmas, the little red “Made in China” car that his father, new plastic-wrapped suit over his shoulder, had made him choose from a display case full of old, dusty wholesale toys on Mella Avenue.

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  Instead of a nose he had a trunk. A disgusting, bleeding trunk. That’s why it smelled like blood. Or vomit. A Pepto-Bismol-colored glue with which they’d stuck him to the floor. They had fused his eyelashes to the bronze of the art nouveau railing. When the next thief showed up to rip off a piece with a hacksaw, he was going to get a surprise. A man had been fused to the stairway railing. That, or the line for rice came this far. Old sidecars without motorcycles came this far. Pregnant guerrilla fighters, with their throats slit.

  Something like the torment of a crown of thorns pressed into his temples. This was no Bible, this was pre-revolutionary architecture. Dr. Bengoa read his thoughts; he was his mother’s gynaecologist. A glimmer of actual light made him notice the makeup of the images: they were made of air, like music. They shook him about. He had fallen asleep in front of the TV watching Rocky III and his dad had carried him to bed. His dad wearing lipstick. Vantroi wasn’t his dad. Vantroi was Vantroi was Vantroi was Vantroi and he was Argenis, being funneled to wakefulness, to the unfamiliar bedroom where he had awoken, naked between white sheets.

  He felt relief, no nausea, no pain, and sat up on a bed with a backboard of laurel-shaped metal leaves. The world had stopped spinning. He looked at his hand, his arm full of old track marks, swollen like ant bites, staring at the incredible length of his fingernails. The memory of what had happened during the days when sickness had him bound and gagged came to him from far away, as if through an IV. Someone had set the cleaned and folded Police T-shirt and jean shorts on a green plastic chair. At the foot of the chair sat the Adidas sneakers, inviting him to put them on. He opened the door, covering himself with the sheet, and confirmed he was at Vantroi’s place when he saw the TV and the tower of VHS tapes. The apartment was empty. He went into the bathroom. Photos cut from black-and-white magazines completely covered the walls. As he peed, Mickey Mouse, Fred Astaire, Sônia Braga, Boy George, Marcello Mastroianni, and of course Janet Jackson, fixed their famous eyes on him. He got into the shower. The morning sun had warmed the water in the tank. He stood under the stream of water with his eyes open, as if to clean them from the inside. Not even if he yanked his eyes from his head could he ever forget Bengoa’s penis entering Susana.

  The soap bar was almost used up and it was full of kinky hair. He pulled the hairs out with his nails, cursing Bengoa and marveling again at how his nails had grown, at this raucous biological drive, immune to human disappointment. Nothing stops nails, he thought, scrubbing himself violently. He washed his armpits, his ass, his balls, rinsed his mouth, turned off the shower and dried himself with a wine-colored rag that had once been a towel. He remembered the blue towel he had shared with Susana during their time together. She would bathe in the morning so that it would be dry when it was his turn in the afternoon. He tried to remember a Lezama Lima poem about Havana’s corrosive power as he dried off. Returning to the bedroom he put on his T-shirt and shorts, but not the shoes, and went out on the balcony.

  From the eaves, from which he had imagined descending to steal the Adidas no time at all ago, Vantroi had hung a mobile, a little homemade Calder of wire and circular pieces of plastic milk jugs. It made him want to paint that little solar system onto the indigo band of the Atlantic in the background, onto the amalgam of crumbling cement rooftops, the most frequently painted ruins of all the Antilles, worn away daily by a ridiculous proliferation of directors of mediocre music documentaries.

  If he thought about the city rather than himself he could decipher the outlines of his new solitude, forcefully detached from his Temgesic dependence, from Bengoa, from romantic love, from his father. He did not feel any self-pity; he was floating in space under little plastic planets with the names of gods. There was already a star named Vantroi in his personal galaxy – not the Vietnamese communist, but the neighbor who had sheltered him. A stray breeze brought to his ears the new jack swing of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”, which was playing out on the rooftop terrace. Vantroi had moved his rehearsal upstairs so as not to bother him.

  He climbed the stairs, following the rhythmic shouts of the beginning of the song. Vantroi was dancing on the little pink stage, blasting the music on an old, battery-powered tape recorder. Argenis ducked behind the water tank like an urban guerrilla and from there spied on his neighbor. He remembered the choreographies he’d put together with Charlie, Tony Catrain’s son, in the schoolyard. It was 1990 and house music was bursting out from all speakers. It was all steps they’d seen on MTV videos, just before discovering the Doors and Led Zeppelin. Vantroi threw sparks of sweat into the air as he executed the rigid, symmetric movements from the video. He was wearing boots that could only have been a present from his cousin Juani in Chicago, together with the hot pants he’d had on the first time Argenis had seen him peering into the water tank. He wore no shirt, as was his custom, and the contracted muscles of his torso reflected light from the sky like a living Rodin.

  Resonant metallic beats like clashing swords punched Argenis in the stomach, and he felt the same intense desire to dance that at thirteen had moved all his friends whenever they heard Technotronic. It was a powerful sensation, the same one that makes fingernails want to grow, he thought, marking the rhythm with his bare feet. In his mind he ran through a short sequence of what Vantroi was breaking into four-counts. He saw himself as part of the dark underground army in the video: a fin-de-siècle Black Panther dressed in leather with stainless-steel insignia, fighting a musical battle against psychological complexes and bad memories. Not even Bengoa’s penis could rob him of the desire to move to the beat of that song.

  Vantroi saw him and burst out laughing. “Boy, you’ve got good rhythm,” he said, weaving his words together with his deep and contagious laugh. He had a space between his two front teeth, like Madonna, and a little pink button nose well suited to transvestism. He came down from the stage with the tape recorder in his hand and passed it to Argenis to hold as he drank water from a metal jug in the shadow of the tank.

  “You’re looking better. How do you feel?” he asked. “Much better,” said Argenis. “Thanks for—” Vantroi didn’t let him finish. “Thanks for nothing, boy. What was I going to do – leave you there shitting yourself in the stairway?” They went down to Vantroi’s place and Argenis couldn’t help listening for Susana’s voice
in the apartment that had formerly been his. “She came to see you before she left, but you were asleep,” Vantroi said as he opened the door, showing him the empty red suitcase Susana had left in a corner of the living room. “Do you have anyone here in Cuba?” he asked from the kitchen as he put coffee grounds into the pot.

  “No, no one. Just my doctor.” When he said “doctor” Argenis made air quotes. His host closed the coffee pot and, lighting the stove, said, “Boy, that guy’s a creep. We’ll have to find you something – what can you do?”

  He could recognize cocaine that had been cut with acetone. Come up with excuses. Sponge off others. Prepare a syringe full of heroin. Shoot up. He could cook rice, rice that was hard and flavorless. He looked at his hands, huge and bony, with yellowed palms, much lighter than the rest of his body. They itched. “Do you have a pencil and paper?” he asked Vantroi. His host opened a kitchen cabinet and pulled out a stub of a Berol Mirado and a piece of manila paper on which someone had written a list of materials that included Wiki-Wiki black dye and baseball caps.

  “Stand over there,” he told Vantroi, pointing toward the balcony, so that the tender light of a sky just starting to cloud over would hit his profile. He flipped the page over to use the blank side and his fingers closed around the inch of pencil like the petals of a cayenne flower when night falls. Then he made the graphite dance over the paper almost effortlessly until he had turned his savior’s flesh into a beautiful convergence of dark lines.

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  Vantroi’s mother was a huge woman with fists of steel who had exhorted her son to “Be a fag, but not a pussy.” When he came home from school with his first bruise, she hit him with a belt right on the mark and threatened to kill him if he let them hit him again. From then on, he defended himself from the world tooth and nail, sure that if he didn’t the woman would keep her promise. Brígida had died when she was hit by a car during the Special Period, as she was bringing three pounds of ground beef home in her skirt. On the wall of Vantroi’s apartment hung a youthful photo of her dressed in a military uniform in 1962, part of a group who was laughing at a shirtless Che’s jokes, as he carried out voluntary labor with a shovel in his hand. Vantroi had his mother’s smile, and the muscles and honey-colored eyes of his father, a musician from Matanzas who had died before Vantroi turned four.

  That body Vantroi had inherited was posing on the rooftop stage in a G-string, so that Argenis could fill bits of cardboard with drawings of it. His hand was practiced, despite it having been a long time since he’d last worked, and the lines came out sure and inspired, except when he asked himself what Susana would think of the sketches. Then a certain melancholy would infiltrate his steady hand, a melancholy that populated his curves with tiny vibrations. The morning sun gushed over his model, who changed position every ten minutes, laughing and commenting on all the failures Argenis recounted for him, the sequence of clusterfucks that, deserved or not, had followed him ever since he had left the Altos de Chavón art school.

  Having accumulated a number of sketches, Argenis asked Vantroi to come down from the stage and sit by him. Over the top of those bodies, he drew various outfits and accessories, triangular forms that emulated the heads of Wifredo Lam creatures, the post-apocalyptic armor of Mad Max, and the magical signatures of the Palo Mayombe religion. He was aiming for a heavy metal/rumba aesthetic, as he ate some mashed potatoes Vantroi had brought up in a saucepan. A George Michael cassette that a pen pal had sent to Vantroi from Prague in the eighties played in the background. Next to the TV and the VHS tapes in the living room Vantroi had two boxes full of letters he’d received from friends all over the world, with whom he shared his literary and musical interests. Sometimes they sent gifts: colored pencils, stickers, photos of artists torn from magazines. Many of them arrived already open. “They read them before they give them to you, as if you’re going to plan a coup by correspondence,” Vantroi told him. “Like it’s the fifth century or something.”

  Argenis tried to imagine the dimensions of that kind of claustrophobia, but he couldn’t. His friend had been asking permission to leave the country since he was twenty-one. Now he was thirty-seven. He surprised himself by making plans to get Vantroi out of Cuba, but all of them involved his father, José Alfredo, who still spoke of the Cuban Revolution as if it were a living thing, a good thing, clinging to the worn-out luster of a few social achievements on top of which repression in all its forms had been piled. How easy it was to hang the framed photo of the comandante in the living room of an apartment in Naco, its refrigerator full of imported cheeses, fresh vegetables, and ten pounds of churrasco meat his father would consume rare with a bottle of Marqués de Murrieta several times a week, ever since the PLD’s first win in 1996, when he’d taken a couple of classes in etiquette and manners. He thought of his Aunt Niurka, his father’s sister, who had never boasted any militancy whatsoever, but who gave everything she had to others on a daily basis. After graduating in Madrid with a degree in psychiatry, she had dedicated herself to helping abused low-income women. He’d have to get the money together to call her and ask for a plane ticket or some cash.

  As he descended the stairs back to Vantroi’s apartment, hands full of sketches, he felt a pleasurable sensation of calm. With those bits of cardboard he could pay Vantroi back for the roof over his head and the food he’d been offered. For the first time in his life, he could live off his art. The overly salty potatoes the Cuban Vantroi shared with him were bombshells of friendship, of a nameless brotherhood constructed around creativity and beauty.

  He arranged the drawings on the floor in the light coming off the balcony and imagined them as monumental paintings, murals on the sides of Santo Domingo’s modern buildings. He felt the breeze that would buffet him up there on the tall scaffold, the tension in his hands as he moved a roller that would spread the paint along the hair on a huge, black head.

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  Vantroi walked on ahead, wearing his tattered pre-washed jeans, turquoise high heels – executive-secretary-style – a sleeveless silk blouse the color of a zapote fruit, and, over his head and shoulders, a threadbare yellow pashmina. Argenis followed behind over the thirty or so blocks, dragging one of the red suitcases with which he’d arrived in Cuba, currently full of all the costumes and scenery needed for Vantroi’s next show. He regretted having been so creative, now that the weight of all the materials they’d gathered on errands all over Havana was making his balls swell. The temperature suddenly dropped and Vantroi arranged the pashmina to protect himself from the wind with a gesture borrowed from Claudia Cardinale, if Claudia Cardinale were one half of a duo of artistic beggars. As they passed by the parish church of the Sacred Heart the scene was complete: it was the living image of the Five of Pentacles in the Rider-Waite tarot deck. On the card, a pair of mendicants pass by a church’s stained-glass window: a woman walks ahead, cloaked in a rag, and a crippled man follows her on crutches. It was the card of poverty, of bankruptcy caused by emotional instability. In 2001, Argenis had worked as a psychic on a telephone line that offered personalized readings all over the United States, and he knew the cards by heart. No one there possessed any special powers, but they made them learn the meanings of the oracles, how to improvise and do free association. He didn’t need his cards dealt to know that he had become the Minor Arcana of poverty.

  As they left the temple behind, one of the wheels of the suitcase fell off and Argenis bent down to fix it, without success. He’d have to carry the bag the rest of the way. In silence he begged, God, give me a break, and sped up, with the heavy suitcase in his arms as if this demonstration of vigor and determination were a substitute for faith. The effort brought an avalanche of sadness down upon him and he dropped the bag to sit on the curb and cry. Vantroi offered him the pashmina to blow his nose on. He couldn’t get the image of Susana out of his head, inconsolable and half-naked in the kitchen the day he’d caught her with Bengoa. He looked at the hand that had been dragging the suitcase, the fluid-filled blister on th
e thumb. As he poked it with a finger to make the bubble burst, the church bells tolled six o’clock. The peals were so weak and distant that Argenis wondered if the ringing was real or if he was imagining it. He had been confusing certain sounds ever since his brother Ernesto had convinced him to put a piece of Lego in his ear when he was three. The memory of the little blood-stained block in the doctor’s tweezers still made his eardrum hurt.

  When would he be able to go back to Santo Domingo? What would he go back to? After years of conscientiously descending the rungs of the food chain, he’d finally reached the bottom. He saw himself pushing a shopping cart full of trash, beer cans, and dirty stuffed animals along Lincoln Avenue, wearing shoes made of trash bags and fly larvae in his beard. The image of his mother in a housedress came uninvited and put a wrinkle in his pessimism. Etelvina was beating him with a broom, shouting, “You turd, you piece of shit,” hitting him with the broom handle in the parking lot of the building where he’d grown up, in front of all the neighbors. The idea made him laugh. He stood up and caressed the handle of the red suitcase. It was all he had left. That, Vantroi’s friendship, and the promise they’d made to share the money they’d earn from their Rhythm Nation show in Coribantes, the event space into which Iñaki, a young Spanish architect, turned his Vedado mansion every weekend.