by Rita Indiana
Iñaki’s house reminded him of the Gazcue neighborhood of his childhood. It was practically identical to the villa that had housed his elementary school, a school for children of leftists and feminists, an experimental school where his mom worked so that she would only need to pay half-tuition for him and his brother Ernesto. Both the Vedado house and the one in Santo Domingo’s Gazcue had been built in the thirties. They belonged to the well-to-do that had migrated north in the second half of the twentieth century – those from Havana to Miami, and those from Santo Domingo to the outskirts of the city; the former fleeing Castro and the latter fleeing a proletariat that had made enough money in New York to buy and mutilate the old edifices, turning them into boarding houses, corner stores, beauty salons, and internet cafés.
Like all buildings in Cuba, Coribantes had to contend with a lack of materials for repairs. Time had traced an intricate series of cracks all over the salmon-colored walls. The porch, spanned end to end by an arch, sprouted a rounded marble staircase along whose edges bannisters descended like rivulets of condensed milk and spilled over the cement cookie at the stairway’s base. Asymmetrical chunks missing from the marble of the staircase sullied the house’s old-man smile. The ferns and lenguas de vaca in the front yard were the only sign of life in the whole ensemble.
The door was open and from it emerged two anorexic young queens carrying a papier-mâché Venus de Milo. Inside, the vestiges of a chic past – furniture, lamps, rugs, and designer ashtrays – looked much newer than the filthy exterior walls. The long mahogany bar bore witness to the parties held there before the guys with beards forbade fun. From the bar hung a sign with the word CORIBANTES in gold sequins on silver fabric. A spiral staircase led up to the second-floor bedrooms, and on the mezzanine below a stage with a dressing room occupied what must once have been a music room. They dragged the suitcase up onto the stage and behind the curtains to the dressing room, but when they tried to open its zipper, the fabric ripped from one end to the other. A gold chain, a cow’s horn, a femur, and a black rumbero sleeve its owner had claimed once belonged to Kike Mendive spilled through the wound. Vantroi had pulled the chain off a neighbor’s door, received the cow horn as a gift from a santera who had used its shavings in certain particularly aggressive spiritual cleansings, traded a clandestine butcher a tiny perfume sample for the pig’s femur, and acquired Kike’s shirt sleeve from an ex-lover who had been a grandson of the illustrious rumbero.
Armed with a staple gun, Argenis occupied himself with draping the columns and uppermost beam on the stage with black fabric. It was really discarded hospital sheets they’d dyed with Wiki-Wiki, though the blood and shit stains eluded all efforts at cleaning; the ink had seeped into the stained parts less forcefully, creating a streaked appearance. From the top of each column he used wire to hang human skulls provided by a student at the University of Medical Sciences. Strips of wine-colored cloth, part of the interior upholstery of his suitcases, emerged like vomit from the mouths of the skulls. From the central beam he hung bits of bone, eyeless doll heads, and spiny bougainvillea stems he’d painted red, like mobiles of horror. The backdrop, made from another recycled and dyed sheet, was covered in splatters of red paint, abstract scribbles, and spiky symbols.
When the stage was ready, they went out onto the patio to eat a few boxes of rice and pork Iñaki had brought for them. They sat next to a drained swimming pool in the shade of an enormous mango tree whose rotten fruits were being pecked by a black chicken at the bottom of the pool. The pork was cold and possibly spoiled, but Vantroi swallowed it almost without chewing. In Santo Domingo Argenis would never have put such a thing in his mouth, but he was hungry and so he held his breath. For the first time he felt the urge to shoot up, and he calculated how many Temgesic vials he would be able to get in exchange for one of the Johnny Walker bottles he’d seen behind the bar. He lay down on the floor on his back and relaxed, detaching himself from the desire to use, understanding the means by which it had arisen, until little by little he rid himself of his anxiety. With eyes closed, he went over the costume he’d designed for his friend: the military pants dyed black, his cousin Juani’s black boots, the chain belt. The red scraps of curtain that would cross the dark face makeup and torso like dried blood, the lipstick outlining the soft, womanly mouth that would hide teeth covered in aluminum foil, the black rumbero-sleeved shirt, and a beret like Che’s from whose center sprouted not a star but a cow’s horn, like Dagoth’s magic horn in Conan the Destroyer. He had filled the beret with stuffing so it wouldn’t lose its shape, so it would stay fixed in place during the choreography and could thus crown the monstrous revolutionary cadaver Vantroi would become.
Whenever he actually made the effort, something of the images called up through his art would transfer into reality. During the show, the smell of the dead pig and the rotten mangos on the patio stuck in his nose. His creation pounded the stage with nineties steps to the beat of “Rhythm Nation.” The creature was far from anything you’d see in a typical drag show, but the audience of foreigners, Cuban artists, and queers of all types clapped to the beat of the song. In spite of the enthusiasm, the atmosphere was charged. What forces were that dark death’s mask drawing to it? A man’s hand broke through the wall of smoke surrounding the stage to approach the dancer with a few dollars, putting the bills in the horror of a mouth. The devil bit the money violently, as if it wanted to pull off the fingers of his fan, whom Argenis recognized when one of the spotlights illuminated his face. It was Bebo Conde, a Dominican and a former classmate at Altos de Chavón, where Bebo had studied graphic design and Argenis fine art. Back then Bebo hadn’t yet come out of the closet, and he’d fucked all the women Argenis dreamed of having. Years later, after the divorce, his expulsion from school, the loss of his scholarship, the whole debacle, it was Bebo who had gotten him to try heroin for the first time, one morning after they left a rave at Playa Caribe, as they watched the sun rise while lying on the hood of an old Honda CRX. The unrepeatable intensity of that first pleasure was the yardstick against which he measured everything in life. His addiction was really an eternal pursuit of that momentary abolition of guilt, need, responsibility, and introspection.
Bebo Conde’s apartment was dark, except for the lighting kit Bebo had taken without permission from the film school at San Antonio de los Baños, where he’d come to study. The spotlights illuminated the back of the living room, where he had hung a green cloth that smoothed all the angles of the wall and the floor. In front of the improvised green screen, an Asian girl in a bikini and a Vietcong rice farmer’s hat danced provocatively, without music. Samanta wore a straight-haired blonde wig and fake eyelashes in the same color, which opened like the teeth of a carnivorous plant around her eyes. Bebo was directing her from behind a fat German who manned the camera and Argenis wondered what the girl’s little yellow tits would taste like. He walked to the kitchen, without greeting a couple of students involved in various production details, opened the refrigerator just as he would have in Bebo’s Santo Domingo home, and took out a bottle of Perrier. He had to do some acrobatics to avoid tripping over the boxes full of cans of beans, toilet paper, and Barilla toothpaste Bebo brought every other month from Santo Domingo, which he used to pay his classmates for their work on the improvised set.
“Did you bring the shit?” Bebo asked, pulling him by the sleeve to show him a laptop playing animations he’d add behind Samanta in postproduction, a series of concentric circles in different colors that Argenis, nodding, judged as better suited to a screen saver than a music video. Bebo called time on the shoot and the team dispersed onto a little open terrace, led by Samanta, who’d covered herself with a very fluffy wine-colored terrycloth robe. Bebo might be a fag, but he was surely doing it with la china, Argenis thought. They walked to Bebo’s bedroom and locked the door. Argenis pulled a strip of Temgesic vials from his pocket as Bebo tore open the packaging of the disposable syringe with his teeth. Lying on his side on the bed, he of
fered it to Argenis, who stuck it into the ampoule, then felt for Bebo’s vein under his athletic socks. They touched each other with the familiarity of addiction, a familiarity Argenis shared with no other man. Bebo had recently cleaned himself up in a private clinic in Santo Domingo, but both of them would have found it suspect or offensive if the other hadn’t asked if in Cuba there was any “H”, which is what they’d called heroin whenever they shot up listening to Lou Reed in Bebo’s parents’ music room.
To get Bengoa to open the door, he’d had to show the fifty-dollar bill Bebo had given him for the errand through the window. Bengoa sold him thirty-five dollars’ worth of Temgesic, Argenis had given him an extra five as an incentive, and he’d kept the remaining ten. That five-dollar tip he’d given the doctor had made Argenis feel quite comfortable, so much so that he asked, in a voice too nasal to be natural, if Bengoa was still nailing Susana. “You’re such an idiot,” Bengoa said, counting out the vials. “She only did it for you, so that I’d bring you food and medicine.” The revelation had hit him like a ton of bricks. He was still trying to get it out of his body when Bebo, ready as ever, closed his eyes so that Argenis could inject him in the orange afternoon light by which they always did these things.
Under the effects of the synthetic morphine, Bebo was even more beautiful. His muscles, toned by sports like the tennis and swimming he’d practiced in his parents’ backyard, were covered in a soft, smooth, golden fuzz. Whenever they were open, the fleshy mouth and gypsy eyes stood out from his face. Bebo also had a telephone, one of those devices that in Santo Domingo you’d only find in the Little Haiti flea market behind the Mercado Modelo, and from which no international calls could be made.
He was tempted to take a vial himself. A burst of pleasure traveled down his spine just thinking about it. He glanced at the ones that were still lying on top of a Cuban edition of Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares on the nightstand. Injecting Bebo without injecting himself was the proof that he was healthy, that this time he was clean for real. He had displaced the desire and that desire had been transferred to his friend’s body so that Argenis could keep feeding it there, like a father responsible for his ex-wife and children. He had a thousand reasons to start shooting up again but an even more powerful one for not doing it: his Aunt Niurka, who was expecting his call. His Aunt Niurka, who had promised to help him. The memory of his Aunt Niurka playing “I Spy” with him on the way to Boca Chica in the minivan she’d rent whenever she visited the DR with her Spanish friends who smoked like chimneys.
I spy with my little eye. What do you spy? A thing. What color is it? Gold. What size? Small. What’s it made out of? Metal. Iron? No, gold. Your rings? Your earrings? And so on, for half an hour.
A clue? It’s in the hand of an angel. Argenis searched for an answer in the giant clouds in the sky on both sides of the highway. Later, tired, his gaze fell unaided on the little holy card of Archangel San Miguel that hung from the rear-view mirror. In his right hand the sword, raised over a demon ablaze under the boot of the celestial soldier. In his left, the golden scale of divine justice.
To call his aunt he’d have to walk to the Hotel Nacional and pay an arm and a leg for just a few minutes. Bebo’s wallet and passport were on the nightstand. Without asking, Argenis picked up the turquoise leather wallet and looked inside. A wad of dollars in various denominations stopped it from closing completely. Using two fingers like tweezers, he pulled out eighty dollars and returned the wallet to its place, thinking that the privileges his friend enjoyed could serve as proof of reincarnation just as effectively as those children with flies in their eyes on the UNICEF ads. He brought the new bills to his nose. They were so new that he could have cut a slice of ripe papaya with their edges. Bebo must have been a saint in his previous life and he himself must have been Trujillo, at the very least. Blessed by abundance, money was just an abstraction to Bebo, a concept lacking in that curly head his barber always cut in the style of a Roman emperor.
Bebo asked for a blanket. At this point, all of his plans for the day were canceled, except for reading the poem “7:00 on the Nose” by Virgilio Piñera, which he recited like a rosary every night at the time of the title. Argenis handed him a pink blanket that was hanging on the back of a chair and Bebo wrapped himself in it from head to toe. Under the blanket Argenis found a cream-colored sport jacket, hung there so it wouldn’t lose its shape, a jacket Bebo wore with Bermuda shorts and white T-shirts, and which, like everything he wore, fit as if he had been sewn into it. The label, embroidered in wine-colored thread on the garment’s neck, attracted his attention. He picked it up and read the name of the tailor: Orestes Loudón. The name sounded familiar. “You’ll have to wake up a little more,” Bebo recited from inside the blanket, deciphering Piñera with a tiny flashlight. Argenis put the jacket on, looking at himself in the mirror Bebo had set across from the bed to enjoy the reflection of his lovers. Argenis’s Police T-shirt gave an edgy touch to the blazer, but not the cut-off jeans. He peeled off his shorts and looked for something in the closet to wear, deciding on some brown cotton pants. “Remember it in the midst of your hell,” Bebo whispered from inside the blanket as Argenis put them on. “It is your compass to the final north.”
Admiring his new look, Argenis remembered his father, that morning in front of the tailor’s mirror, trying on a custom-made suit he would pay for with his son’s Christmas money. The smell of cigarettes and new fabric came to him, together with the name of the little man who was winking at him while his dad counted the bills out onto the sewing table. That same Loudón was the only witness to the debt his father had incurred with him that day, the memory of which Argenis had recovered during his illness, like a crumpled receipt in the bottom of a pocket. It was a memory much more valuable now than a suit. It was a debt that had accumulated interest, and Argenis was ready to collect on it.
He left the room and found the house as empty as the box of toilet paper that had been violently ripped open; Bebo’s buddies had claimed their daily loot: the silky Charmin. Before Bebo had saved him from giving his ass to a Spaniard, he had already been scratching himself for months with Cuban toilet paper, a thin, rough paper that didn’t protect your fingers from the shit at all.
He went down in an elevator lined with mirrors in which his head, a squarish but attractive head, was infinitely reflected. He felt a certain amount of pleasure and security allotted by Bebo’s clothing, as if the costume he wore might throw his complexes off track. He pictured himself in a custom-made suit at the opening of his first solo exhibition. He pictured himself selling all his pieces, and some newspaper dedicating the front page of its culture supplement to him.
When he got to the Hotel Nacional, a security guard poked his chest with a sharp finger. “No nationals allowed here, buddy.” Buddy, my ass, thought Argenis, as he took out his Dominican passport, a passport that would have brought him only trouble in half the world, but which here, thanks to the stupidities of the revolution, was as good as a Swiss one.
“Pardon me, sir.” Apologizing, the guard pointed the way to the upholstered phone booths full of foreign voices from which he had called his Aunt Niurka for the first time a week ago on Bebo’s dime. When his aunt picked up he could hear the sound of the Friday-evening traffic jam in front of her building in Santo Domingo on the other end of the line. She had returned from Europe not long ago and was renting an apartment on Bolívar Avenue, in the same Gazcue neighborhood Argenis was once again comparing with the dying Vedado.
Argenis missed those sounds: the swearing drivers, the frenetic tackiness, the trash besieged by thousands of flies on the curbs, the cell phone chargers, the plantains and loofahs, the swollen hands of Haitian beggars. He missed its filth. From time to time in the midst of the crowds you could feel something beautiful. A light that shone on everything, a color and a light that gave the commotion a secret meaning. Like a double-entendre song, only this time the song was vulgar and its hidden meaning sublime.
“So what doe
s the artist have to say?” Niurka asked in a happy voice. “Whatever’s left of him, you mean,” Argenis responded. “Surprise! I bought you the ticket!” his aunt shouted. “Praise be,” he said. “Did you go to Cuba to be born again?” she asked over the raucous honking of conchos and minivans. “The revolution works miracles, and so does Papi, the son of a bitch,” Argenis said, chuckling a bit. Niurka knew the call was expensive, so to move things along she told him, “I have the confirmation number – do you have something to write with?”
Argenis stuck his head up over the cubicle and made the universal sign for writing, joining his thumb and index finger to draw a letter in the air. A German in Coke-bottle glasses passed him a black Sharpie and with it Argenis wrote the airline ticket confirmation number on his forearm. After hanging up, he left the hotel quickly so he wouldn’t have to return the marker. Painted in darkness, Havana recovered something of its former glory, like an old whore when the lights are off. He would use these last hours to walk through it like a tourist. He’d admire the baroque architecture, the centuries-old ceiba trees, the wide European sidewalks, without any trick questions about anyone’s lack of anything, nor about the imminent collapse of infinite ruins deposited like leftovers on a Titan’s plate.