Made in Saturn

by Rita Indiana

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  They were screams that pushed outward, bulging into the present like blood into a welt. He too had screamed like that before. In 2001, during an artistic residency on the coast, he had started to have visions of mutilated cows and headless buccaneers. His own screams had woken him in the night. He’d been kicked off his scholarship-funded stay because of those screams, screams like these ones, empty of fear or indignation – shrieks that asked for, begged for, mercy.

  He got up from his new bed, Niurka’s living room sofa, and walked along the hallway to his aunt’s room, navigating like a bat by the sound of her screams in the darkness. He opened the door and found her lying rigid, faceup, with her fists and eyelids closed with a force that had nothing to do with rest. A bit of frothy saliva could be seen at the corner of her mouth. The full moon cast stripes from the window’s security bars onto the sheets. Down the street, a motorist was dragging cans tied onto his concho to celebrate the inauguration of the Dominican Liberation Party, his father’s party. It was the same technique baseball fans used to celebrate their champions.

  With a forced delicacy that did not come naturally to him, he shook his aunt by the shoulder. “Aunt Niurka,” he said, “it’s just a nightmare.” She opened her eyes and let out one last scream, much softer now. She got up, slowly and quietly. “You were screaming,” Argenis told her. “Are you OK?” “I’m great,” she said, using her feet to search for her slippers without turning on the lamp. She threw the sheet over herself, flattening down her rounded shrub of frizzy hair, and walked to the kitchen with Argenis following behind. She took a bottle of Barceló Imperial rum from the cabinet like it was a gallon of milk for breakfast, turned on the kitchen’s light bulb, and poured two glasses. Argenis emptied his without waiting for her, and then she did the same, looking him in the eye for the first time.

  “What were you dreaming about?” Argenis asked. “The same thing as always,” she responded, downing a second glass to smooth the furrows the screams, tractor-like, had left in her voice. “And what is it that you see?” She opened a button on her housedress and pulled her left breast out. A tit without a nipple. A few seconds were enough for the diagonal scar over her areola to be burned into her nephew’s retina, for him to see its centipede shape projected on the walls for many minutes after she had covered the breast again.

  Argenis downed a second glass, feeling the heavy atmosphere of the hour of intimate revelations closing over his head. Involuntary, stuttering images of what he felt sure Niurka was about to tell him rolled through his head like an abstract trailer for a horror film.

  “I wasn’t a communist or anything. Your dad was always the hothead. But he has the luck of the devil, and after the purges of 1971 they weren’t able to catch him again. I used to collect the pictures of the martyrs that came out in the paper: Orlando Martínez, El Moreno, Tingó. Like picture postcards. I liked to look at them there in the shoebox. They were dead and I was alive. Alive with all my secrets inside, secrets that had nothing to do with Balaguer or with Castro. They were asking for it, as Renata used to say. They wanted to die. They went around in the streets tempting the devil with their slogans and planning attacks that never amounted to anything. The rebels were a bunch of amateurs, but Balaguer’s assassins were professionals. They’d take you down just for having a university degree. I didn’t want to overthrow any government. What I wanted was to go out dancing, but José Alfredo wouldn’t even let me listen to music in English. That fucking man only started listening to the Beatles in the eighties because Tony Catrain played them for him. If it wasn’t for Tony, he’d still be listening to Niní Cáffaro.”

  Niurka smiled sadly as she said “Cáffaro” and put her hand on her pajama just where her breast was, for a second, as if shutting a folder with a click. Then she poured herself a third drink, looked at the contents of the glass, and tossed it down her throat like a bucket of dirty water onto the street. Argenis breathed a sigh of relief, sensing that the story of the tit had been put off for another night. He couldn’t allow a woman to beat him at drinking, though, so he imitated his aunt’s move with a last drink, even though the two previous ones were already scratching up his insides. The clock that hung above the picture window showed four a.m. Niurka stood up and walked toward her room, turned off the main lights, and without looking at him said, “Go and lie down – take advantage of the few hours you have left.”

  “The few hours I have left,” Argenis repeated in a loud voice, tossing himself onto the IKEA sofa bed with his head at the foot and his feet on the cushions, adding, “Sounds like a death sentence,” although his aunt couldn’t hear the joke. In that position, thanks to the light from the street, he could see the photos Niurka had hung on the wall over the sofa. Niurka at her first communion, with her frizzy hair smoothed out under the white veil and her gray eyes that were really green. Niurka at her first birthday, with Don Emilio and Milito next to a cake in the shape of a horseshoe. Niurka all bundled up and happy, in the Retiro Park in Madrid in the early eighties. Niurka’s mom, his grandma Consuelo, on the patio of Renata and Emilio’s house, where she worked, laughing about something to the photographer, her hair now gray, wearing the light-blue servant’s uniform that neither Niurka nor José Alfredo had managed to get her out of.

  On the other walls hung prints by Bidó that Niurka had inherited from Renata and some laminated fliers for concerts at Casa de Teatro. Next to the entry was a framed vinyl LP of the Beatles and, above the doorway, a little rag doll dressed in an outfit of denim jacket and jeans. She had brought the furniture over from her apartment in Spain, and she had just bought the stereo system – the best thing in the house – in Plaza Lama, along with the ceiling fans and the refrigerator.

  Looking at the photos and the house, one might think that his aunt was and had been happy. But now, the centipede on her breast was superimposed on that landscape. Why had no one ever spoken of that breast? Did everyone else know that Niurka’s nipple was missing? Did they know her screams could be heard down Bolívar Avenue at night?

  It was clear that he was wide awake, and that his wakefulness would swallow up the few hours left to him like his aunt had swallowed the rum from the cupboard. He went over to the bookshelf in search of something to do. Turning on the reading lamp next to the sofa, he found a dress hanging from one of the shelves on a plastic-covered hanger, the kind that comes from a dry cleaner or a tailor shop. The outfit was green and red and as he got closer he could see that its skirt was made up of strips, like a Spartan soldier’s. He lifted the plastic and confirmed that it was some kind of costume, a soldier’s outfit, or an angel’s. A sword and some sandals lay on the floor next to it. The sword was golden and said TOLEDO on the hilt. The sandals were made of rustic leather, with long straps, the kind that crisscross the shin. Argenis had first seen them in a picture a very long time ago, along with the rest of the outfit.

  He would have been about three or four and he was paying his obligatory Sunday visit to Renata and Emilio’s house, where his grandmother was still a servant. His brother Ernesto was Don Emilio’s favorite, and his father’s, too. José Alfredo had prepared some questions about recent Dominican history – the April Revolution, the Mirabal sisters, Orlando Martínez – which Ernesto answered eloquently, to the delight of Don Emilio. Meanwhile, Argenis slipped away to his grandmother’s room, a dark, damp room whose only light entered through a square foot of window that looked out onto the street and was covered by a Persian blind.

  There, on top of a little table lit by a candle, coconut and sweet-potato candies and bottles of carbonated beverages sat in front of a picture of Archangel San Miguel, who presided over the table with his sword, his scale, and a headful of blond ringlets. Beneath the angel’s feet lay a black man with horns and claws who seemed to be part of the very earth, which was also black and aflame. The angel was about to split the head of that man with his sword, an eternal threat that would never come to pass.

  Hypnotized by the atmosphere of
that cave of unpainted walls, of mirrors under the bed, of sharpened corks that floated in a gourd bowl full of water, of colorful handkerchiefs tied to a chair, of bottles filled with herbs, of woven threads under the pillow, of sandals laid out in the shape of a cross, of bitter smells, half-smoked cigars, bells, and plastic saints, Argenis had reached for the sweets and a bottle of soda. The candies were rancid and the soda was warm. He returned the half-nibbled candy to its place and took a second sip to unstick the burnt sugar from his molars. Consuelo entered unannounced and dragged him out to the patio by one ear. “Damned boy! That belongs to Belié.” “Don’t tell Papi, Mamina,” he begged his grandmother, with crumbs of coconut still stuck to his lips. She felt sorry for him and hugged him to her small breasts that smelled of pine-tar soap. The old candy and the soda began to take effect and Argenis got an attack of cramps. They laid him down in the room that had first been Milito’s and then Niurka’s before she left on scholarship for Spain.

  In the eighties, Niurka would return every other year with the nurses from the psychiatric hospital where she worked, and on these trips they would rent the house of Tony Catrain, José Alfredo’s best friend, in Las Terrenas. It was a three-bedroom, alpine-style cabin on the idyllic and solitary Playa Bonita. His dad would drive him and Ernesto there to see their aunt while Etelvina remained at work in the capital, thus giving José Alfredo space to enjoy the Spanish women who sunbathed in the nude in front of the house by day, and went with him into the dark water by night, none of them checking if the children had already gone to bed.

  Argenis picked up the sword and found it was no toy. It was heavy and as sharp as a razor blade. He thrust it into a shadow in his mind, a shadow made of ocher stains that gradually grew more and more defined, like a Polaroid. It was his father, with no protection against the sword other than the grotesque jowls that were gaining terrain in the photos of him that appeared in the papers.

  You are getting older and uglier every day and I bet you can’t even get it up anymore, Argenis thought, as he tried out a series of movements with the weapon. He repeated the detailed choreography several times as the outer world began to fill up with the noise of motorcycle taxis and male voices announcing the destinations of the conchos and minibuses. The sound of his aunt in the shower interrupted him and, as he returned the sword to its place, the golden detailing around the neck of the costume caught the first light of day and attracted his gaze. In a few seconds he had made a mental list of the paints and brushes he would need to reproduce on canvas the effect of the light hitting the sequins. The pictorial recipe came to him like a reflex, a side effect of his artistic education.

  When Niurka came out of the bathroom, Argenis had breakfast ready for her: toast, eggs over hard, and coffee. Along with a few questions. She was wearing a short linen dress with red and white stripes, and had gathered her hair into a bun. With no Afro to compete with, her green eyes gathered up all the light in the room. He had already eaten and was looking through the yellow pages for Orestes Loudón’s tailor shop. “What are you looking for?” she asked, spreading orange marmalade onto a piece of toast. “A tailor,” he replied, tearing the page from the phone book and sticking it in his pocket. “You’ve never been one to go around in suits,” she said as she took too big a bite. “There’s a first time for everything,” he said, glancing over at the San Miguel costume that had sparked his curiosity, postponing his questions about it for another time and getting up to put another pot of coffee on the stove.

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  “The park,” Argenis requested, handing the coins for his fare to the driver of the concho. Without turning his small head, the man took the payment with a hand extended backwards, taking advantage of the red light to tell someone on the other end of his cell phone call to put six eggs on to boil and get a couple of rolls ready.

  Argenis imagined the woman on the other end of the line peeling the hard-boiled eggs and mashing them with salt and oil until they turned into a bright yellow paste that she’d spread on a couple of white rolls recently delivered from the colmado. The imagined scent made him hungry, but the various stenches with which passengers had cured the vinyl of the car seats were much stronger.

  The door was missing its window pane and Argenis stuck his head out to breathe some fresh air, but outside it smelled like spoiled milk, and like the bitter, liquid scent of rotting vegetables. It smelled of human shit, of layers of sooty sweat, of the dust raised by Haitian workers’ drills. It smelled like dead rats, like a congregation of sick pigeons, like a drunk’s vomit, and of the green stew of water that had been standing in the ditches for months and months. The woman on the other end of the call scraped a layer off this mixture with her knife, like scraping a stick of butter. Argenis could see pieces of human fingers with dirty nails compacted inside that stick, and then the driver scarfing the disgusting sandwich down into a nearly toothless mouth.

  “Artistic ability,” Professor Herman had called the involuntary ease with which her student mixed reality and invention, repeating it to calm him when, three years ago now, she had come to the mental health ward of the UCE to bring him books and cigarettes. She had pulled these gifts from a Hermès bag, smiling behind her huge, expensive sunglasses. Now that the Dominican Liberation Party had won, she would soon be named director of the Museum of Modern Art. Her training and career meant she deserved the post, but they would have given it to her even if she were illiterate, just because of her mother’s position in the party.

  As he got out of the car in front of Independence Cemetery and looked through the iron gate, Argenis saw a chubby woman lighting a black candle placed next to a blackened pot of rice and beans on top of a tomb. Behind her, two fifty-something mulatto men held the same color candles and prayed, eyes closed, shirts stained with sweat. The woman caught Argenis’s gaze, raising her eyebrows like she would raise her arms to challenge an opponent in a street fight. Then she brought a bottle of gin to her mouth, took a swig, and blew, spraying it over the food they were offering to the Baron of the Cemetery. Under the rays of the sun the atomized liquid momentarily formed a little rainbow in the air. The red plastic Casio watch Niurka had given him showed it was noon; vendors were crowding around outside the cemetery to sell their dusty lottery tickets.

  Susana had warned him on that Havana balcony that the only thing that had changed since the Middle Ages was technology. Worldly flesh continued to be imprisoned by the same old superstitions. Next to the cemetery gate, old men and women besieged the vendors with money in their hands, requesting specific numbers they had dreamed the night before. A black dog was number four, a motorcycle taxi was a two.

  The light of the white-hot sun left nothing to the imagination. The pockmarked walls and the impressive rust on gates and gutters surfaced like lines of text highlighted by a fluorescent marker. When he got to the Padre Billini Hospital, Argenis was sweaty from head to foot and for the first time he thought that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Next to the entrance to the hospital, red plastic bags were piled in a heap as tall as him – red because they contained organic waste, bloody gauze, and used syringes. The mountain of trash emitted the same disagreeable energy as the queue of patients next to it, waiting their turn for a consultation or for the delivery of some medicine. They all looked terminally ill, and some were praying. The line reached all the way to the corner, and there on the corner was the store at which, twenty years earlier, his dad had revealed the mysteries of Christmas.

  Inside, the son of the man from Baní who had waited on them that day was preparing Cuban sandwiches to add to his wares. Argenis had to commemorate the return of the hateful memory, so he ordered the same thing his dad had way back then: a small bottle of rum and a Pepsi, which he mixed in a Styrofoam cup with ice and half a lime. He was getting good at making Cuba libres, and this one slid down his throat like an ocean breeze. Without stepping out of the shade of the store’s eaves projecting over the sidewalk, he checked out the latest-model SUVs that were parked outside Oreste
s Loudón’s tailor shop across the street, and decided to cross, netting a three-point shot with the empty cup into a nearby trash can. The drivers waiting for their bosses, wetting their Doritos with red sodas, watched as he walked in unannounced.

  Just inside the door, they had added an Italian sofa, on which the owners of the SUVs were waiting to be attended. This little waiting room was now divided from the workshop by a heavy crimson curtain. The walls, which before had been bare, were now painted in a creamy biscuit color that failed to hide the hundred-year-old cracks in the Spanish masonry. Behind the sofa hung an enormous painting by some Guillo Pérez imitator. Argenis thought it was horrible. He pulled back the curtain and once more saw the table covered in rolls and snippets of cloth at the back of the shop and a flat-screen television on which two of Loudón’s helpers were watching La Opción de las 12 while sewing on their respective machines. The door to the little room beside it, where Loudón took his measurements, was closed. The assistants turned to look at him and then each other, before going back to their comedy show. He couldn’t understand why the tailor hadn’t taken advantage of his success to get out of that place; it still looked like a dungeon, even dressed up with expensive-looking objects.

  Argenis could smell cigarette smoke coming from behind the door. When he opened it, the tailor smiled and, recognizing the jacket he’d made for Bebo and which Argenis now wore, reached his dark fingers out toward the lapel, smoothly taking it from him. “Never wear another man’s clothes,” he said, pausing a second at the sweat stain on the collar as he put the jacket on a hanger and hung it from the handle of a Persian blind.