by Rita Indiana
“I thought you’d never come,” Loudón mused, offering Argenis a chair across from his sewing machine, a white plastic chair like the thousands that had, with their geriatric, potty-seat appearance, superseded artisanal wicker chairs of woven palm fronds. The tailor was wearing a red polo shirt and black pants, and thanks to the polo he looked younger than he had in the eighties. The rigid little mustache was still in place and he kept his nails spotless, though, like a guitar player’s, they were a few millimeters longer than was usual. Argenis silently wondered, Does he really remember me? and Loudón responded, “You look just like your dad, but you have a better build and color, because José Alfredo is dark-skinned, and fat besides.”
For months he had been silently cursing his father, calling him a cocksucker out loud when no one could hear him, but when Argenis heard the other man insulting José Alfredo he felt bad and wanted to defend him. “Genes are everything,” Loudón jabbered on from the other side of the machine as he lit another cigarette from the butt of the previous one. “You know they can get your DNA off that disgusting collar,” he said, pursing his lips toward Bebo’s jacket, and then, blowing smoke through his nose, he added, “One goes around leaving bits of oneself all over. Keep that in mind if you’re going to kill someone.” And his laughter, which burst out without warning, was sharp and mocking, like that of a shameless old whore.
When he saw Loudón get out of his seat and grab a yellow measuring tape that hung with a few others on the back of his chair, Argenis opened his mouth: “I want a suit.” “Why else would you have come?” Loudón said, gesturing for him to get up as he opened an old, battered school notebook. Without asking his name, Loudón wrote “Argenis Luna Durán” with a red Paper Mate at the top of a page before sticking his arms out like Christ on the cross so that Argenis would do the same. Then, without using his hands to smoke the cigarette between his lips, the tailor proceeded to take his new client’s measurements. After each measurement Loudón wrote the result down next to the body part.
From the neck to the shoulder, so much.
The chest, so much.
The waist, so much.
Shoulder to shoulder, the width of the back.
From neck to waist, from shoulder to wrist, the circumference of the wrist.
The length and circumference of the arm.
The hips.
The length of the leg.
From the waist to the groin and from the groin down the length of the leg again.
Using these measurements, Loudón would cut patterns like the ones he had tacked up on the door and then he’d use them to cut out the selected fabric. Those tissue paper patterns reminded Argenis of the flayed hide of a cow – shadows snipped by scissors, just as light casts shadows from a body onto a wall. With those shadows, the tailor would work his miracle on the basis of his clients’ tastes and aspirations.
After closing the notebook Loudón bent over a pile of magazines and pulled one out. He flipped through it and showed two pictures to Argenis. The first portrayed a male model in a navy-blue sports coat with gold buttons, one hand resting on the sail of a catamaran; in the second an older man crossed a European street in a formal black suit. Argenis chose the second.
“What is this suit for?” Loudón asked him as he stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe and tossed it out the window. For a second Argenis thought of telling the truth: “To take revenge on my father, to make him feel guilty, so he’ll pay what he owes me.” He knew he would go to visit him, elegantly dressed, but he wasn’t too clear on the details of his plan.
He asked the tailor, “How much will it cost?”
“Your dad has brought in a lot of people, good clients, so this one’s on the house.”
Orestes Loudón accompanied him to the waiting room where his other clients were grumbling, though he didn’t appear to notice. When they reached the doorway he pinched one of Argenis’s cheeks as one does a child’s and then suddenly completed his caress by pulling out a couple of facial hairs. Argenis jumped back in pain and the tailor, looking at the black hairs between his fingers, said, “Come back Friday and do me the favor of throwing out the beggar’s clothing you have on.”
He was thirsty. As he calculated what a Presidente might now cost at Luis’s bar, someone yelled his name and honked a horn three times. Argenis turned around to look and recognized Charlie Catrain, his bosom buddy, in a Nissan Xterra with a longboard on the rack. “Get in, man!” Charlie requested, lowering his window and pouring a welcome blast of air-conditioning onto the sidewalk and onto Argenis.
Before the smoke coming out of his mouth could dissipate, Charlie passed the bong to Argenis for him to light the weed in the bowl and take a drag. The lighter had a woman with huge, pink breasts printed on it and the water in the bong’s base made a blub, blub, blub sound. In the background, the album “Nice Guys” by Art Ensemble of Chicago was spinning on Charlie Catrain’s record player. Next to the record player, on a polished teak table, sat some other analogue devices from the seventies. Opposite it a stone Buddha’s head was smiling stupidly.
He had known Charlie his whole life. Charlie’s dad, Tony Catrain, and Argenis’s father had sent them both to Cuba for the first Latin American Communist Youth Conference, a kind of summer camp whose slogan was “Be Like Che.” The food tasted like shit, and the discussions about the new color for the pioneers’ berets were a drag. The female hosts, however, were really hot, and they were in charge of the afternoon swimming lessons in the pool. One of those afternoons Charlie took him to an empty building in the camp complex and there, on a stinking mat, he made him lose his virginity to a girl from Matanzas who was very thin and pale, and who he had convinced to open her legs for a package of nail polish which Charlie’s mother had made him pack as a gift for his female revolutionary friends. Argenis stuck his dick into that bony pussy and came without thrusting even once. Then Charlie, with the bag of colorful polish in his hand, made the girl suck him off on her knees, telling Argenis, “Next time think of your grandma so you won’t come so soon, maricón.”
“So what’s your plan?” his friend was now asking, as Argenis remembered Charlie’s juvenile penis decorating the Cuban girl’s face with spiderwebs of semen like a Halloween skull. Waiting for a response, Charlie took off his shoes and passed the bong to Argenis again, as if to encourage him.
“I have a plan,” Argenis said at last, dry-coughing from the weed.
“What is it?” Charlie asked again, getting up from the L-shaped white sofa on which, from time to time, he’d still pay for someone to suck him off.
Argenis took the bong and inhaled as he kept up his own old habit of answering questions only in his mind. Charlie went over to the kitchen table, combing through his black curls with his fingers, and took a ball of cocaine the size of a baby’s fist out of a little wooden box. The bleachy smell of the cocaine ran all the way down into Argenis’s guts. He could already taste the line he would soon be snorting when Charlie passed him his American Express card, in an invitation to use it like a razor blade.
Charlie again sat down beside him, barefoot, but with his pearl-gray Hugo Boss suit pants and blood-red tie still in place. A few minutes earlier, he had balled up his jacket as he entered the apartment and tossed it onto the dining room table. Argenis supposed he must have more than enough of them, given all the care he’d taken to crumple it up. Unlike his father – how he had cared for the first suit Loudón had ever made him! Whenever he’d come in off the street he would immediately remove it and hang it up on the balcony to air out, then walk through the house in his underwear asking if dinner was ready, while his mom silently smashed green plantains with an aluminum cup under the yellow kitchen light.
Argenis chopped the coke with the edge of the card, making two lines for himself and two for Charlie on the glass coffee table. Charlie used a rolled up thousand-peso bill to inhale the unadulterated drug he’d got through some Venezuelan friends of his father’s. Ton
y Catrain was the black sheep of a wealthy family of lawyers. He had studied in Italy and come back to Santo Domingo in 1972 to enjoy the company of the Dominican political and artistic avant-garde, who he entertained every weekend at his house in Las Terrenas. The house was deserted in those days, making it both ideal for social experiments and invisible to Balaguer and his henchmen. At the time of his revolutionary splendor José Alfredo had impressed him, but in the eighties Tony had dumped him, resuming a friendship based on mutual interests when José Alfredo had been installed in the National Palace together with his party.
Charlie had taken a doctorate in international law, but like his father he now defended corrupt politicians of all parties. Charlie was twenty-seven, like Argenis, and he had a son with a Chilean ex; a photo of the boy in Valparaiso, wearing a soccer kit, was stuck on the fridge with a magnet that was also a bottle opener. Charlie’d had no trouble turning into a charming version of his own father. He looked satisfied and tranquil. Argenis, on the other hand, had long been fighting against the irritating resemblance the mirror cast back at him, and he thought that he had done everything up to that point only to sully that reflection, to cover the face of his father with stains, to disfigure it with failures. When he was little, he had been proud of that resemblance – it was the only thing he had on his brother Ernesto, who had their mother’s light hair and skin.
At some point after that first, long-ago visit to the tailor, when the two of them had looked into the mirror in Loudón’s shop, his father all dressed up and he himself saying a final goodbye to jingle bells, he began to hate that face, to hate those familiar gestures.
A few hours later, the kitchen table had turned into a modest laboratory, covered with smoking pipes, Ziplocs full of hydroponic marijuana, pills, and lines of coke belonging to Charlie’s guests, ex-students from the progressive school Argenis had attended as a child, as well as children of members of the party who had just won the election, like him. Dioradna and Fifo were no longer those Greenpeace members soliciting signatures on El Conde Street: now they were bureaucrats who preferred to talk contemporary art rather than politics. The suffocating competition between various brand-name fragrances hung in the air. They didn’t know or pretended not to know about the crossroads at which Argenis stood, and they asked him about his art, his paintings, the next exhibition, as if nothing had happened since he graduated from Chavón. They were the spitting image of their progenitors, but without the ideological baggage their parents had used to plan attacks. They looked contented, not at all naive, grateful for the battles their parents had fought against Trujillo and Balaguer but lacking any interest in perpetuating the struggle. They knew the reason for their current solvency. It had nothing to do with education or progress – all the plenty was the product of a pact. The PLD had made a pact with Balaguer and won the elections for the first time ever in 1996. In a final sacrifice for their country, their parents had signed a deal with the murderer of their comrades. Thankful for their privileges, free of contradictions and excuses, this was the new Dominican nobility.
A strangely good mood sank into his bones and he lied with very specific details about an exhibition that he had been preparing for months. In his mind’s eye he saw the pieces in that exhibition already finished and hung in a large, well-lit gallery, along with the reviews in the papers and the orange stickers with the word SOLD stuck just next to the pieces. The table paid him the kind of attention Argenis hadn’t received in years and he felt something inside him start to let go, to relax, to get comfortable with the inherited resemblance which sat so easily with his companions, to take advantage of his genetic circumstances: looking like his old man, being like him.
He opened his eyes on Charlie’s sofa, a designer sofa he was afraid he’d drooled or sweated on. Charlie served him some toast and coffee in the kitchen before dropping Argenis at his Aunt Niurka’s house on his way to work. It was summer and there were no parents blasting their car horns on the way to their children’s schools. Under the morning light the scars that population growth had left on Santo Domingo looked less aggressive, like grime on a peacefully sleeping beggar. Argenis’s head hurt a bit when he got out of the car. He said goodbye, and from the gate of the building’s parking lot he saw his mother pressing the intercom button to go up and see him at Niurka’s place. He had asked Niurka not to say anything to Etelvina yet, but the request had been in vain. He hid behind the wall and took a second to calculate the effects the rough night had had on his appearance. Mami will think I’m shooting up, he thought as he went down the street, shaking his head to empty it of the guilt he felt at leaving Etelvina there, dreaming of seeing him, ringing the bell of an empty apartment.
He walked as far as Máximo Gómez to kill time, bought a coffee from the thermos of a paletero selling frozen treats and sat down on a low wall outside the Supermercado Nacional. He was still running from his mother’s gaze, like a teenager. He didn’t want to hurt her anymore, he didn’t want to deceive her. But he also didn’t want to answer her questions about Cuba. What could he tell her about? Susana? Bengoa? Vantroi? Now that he really thought about it, though, she wasn’t going to ask him about the past. The only thing that mattered to her was the future: what plans he had, how he’d make a living, whether he’d go look for work the next day. He went into the supermarket. He had a few pesos left from what he’d taken from Bebo. He bought milk, passion fruit juice, and a few plantains. On the way to Niurka’s he stopped twice to fix his shirt in a car window and to confirm that the bags under his eyes were not as big as he’d thought. When he got to the parking lot he found Etelvina leaning on the hood of her car, talking on her cheap little cell phone. When she saw him, she hung up without saying goodbye and walked toward him with open arms. He put the supermarket bags on the ground in order to return her hug, happy with the effect his little bit of theater had had on her.
“Mijo, how handsome you look,” she said, her eyes tearful, still holding on to his arm as they climbed the stairs.
“Thanks, Mami. You look really good, too,” he said, and kissed her head. In reality, he thought she looked much older. New and deeper wrinkles, for which he felt responsible, had appeared by her eyes and mouth.
Now, in Niurka’s apartment, they put on the coffee and drank it while eating some garlic casabe, as Argenis recounted some anecdotes about Cuba’s general poverty. His mother had abandoned all her Castroist dreams long ago, one of the many dreams that had died during her relationship with José Alfredo Luna.
Etelvina believed in nothing and he had only seen her praying once. It was 1987, and against all predictions Balaguer was president once again. Bundled up against the strange Caribbean cold of the start of the year, fathers, mothers, grandparents, and children were all waiting their turn in the annual Epiphany toy handout at the president’s house. His mother had asked him to go with her, because this year they were going to give out sewing machines to the first 500 mothers in line. His father cursed it as “disgusting Balaguerist alms,” so they agreed not to tell him.
Etelvina was praying she wouldn’t be seen; not by her friends, or her leftist ex-friends, not by anyone. The line was long – it reached all the way to the National Theater, even though the sun wasn’t yet up. Every year, there were injuries. Mothers who came to blows over a bicycle, old men capable of poking each others’ eyes out to grab a rubber baby doll, children who were crying because they only got an inflatable beach ball. Argenis and Ernesto didn’t want toys anymore: they asked Etelvina for clothes, brand-name sneakers, cash; things that she would get for them by saving up the little extra money she got from tutoring. Her schoolteacher’s salary was only enough for what was absolutely necessary. She had been promised a position as a professor in the Autonomous University, and although she didn’t believe in anything, she prayed that she would get it, as she waited in this line that smelled of the fried salami sold on the sidewalk.
“They’re Singer machines, good ones,” a friend had told he
r, because Etelvina had mentioned that during her childhood in La Vega she helped her mother sew pajamas and nightgowns for children, curtains and pillowcases, simple things that they would sell in her father’s colmado. She remembered her embroidered name on the little labels her mother put into the necklines, like a brand. ETELVINA, the label read. Etelvina hated her name. A damned ugly name. Etelvina was a servant’s name, an illiterate’s name. It was a name that bestowed on her everything Etelvina wanted to cleanse from the world: poverty, ignorance, filth. Argenis was convinced that in spite of her militant Marxist past she hated the poor. She hated them for their bare, worm-catching feet, for their rags, and for the X they had used to sign their bills in her dad’s shop in her childhood.
Argenis’s grandfather, a Spanish republican who had gone into exile in 1937, had taught her to read and add when she was just five. He’d also explained to her some things about a man named Marx, and she had understood. These people, hardened by poverty and resignation, people who came to them to buy a pound of sugar and bottle of oil on credit, would one day have enough water to bathe in, to brush their teeth. Those monsters who smiled with rotten teeth and bloody gums, those with chewed, greenish nails and rounded, calloused fingers, with skeletal calves, purplish from the leeches in the rice fields, had to be educated so that they could escape from the yoke of their oppressors. Socialism smelled of laundry soap and new textbooks. It was the magic potion against the ugliness of the world. Not against injustice, but against the aesthetic inequality of men.
Around nine in the morning the doors of Balaguer’s house opened and total chaos ran down the line along with the news. A policeman dragged a young pickpocket who had tried to take an older woman’s purse onto the sidewalk across the street. He was jabbing his baton into the boy’s ribs and the people were yelling “Kick his ass,” and things like that.