Made in Saturn

by Rita Indiana

  Argenis then counted how many women were in front of them, omitting the children, men, and old folks, in order to calculate the probability his mother had of getting a sewing machine. He noticed Etelvina was praying again, this time to get one of them. They could see the first few lucky ones walking away with dolls, basketballs, and plastic machine guns. A very tall man was happily carrying a tiny blue bicycle, a teenager – childishly holding the hand of her albino grandfather – carrying a gigantic kitchen set, and behind her an older woman, black as night and assisted by two grandchildren with shaved heads, was carrying a sewing machine with the word BALAGUER printed on its little drawer. It was the kind that needed no electricity, with a metal pedal and a varnished wooden table. It was the same kind Etelvina’s mother had used in La Vega.

  A gentle murmur came down the line and then the shout of “They’re giving out machines!” unzipped the precarious order the police had been trying to impose for hours. A stampede of creatures in skirts, hair rollers, heels, and housedresses came down Máximo Gómez Avenue, dumping babies into strangers’ arms, pulling off shoes, swearing, and giggling as they made their way toward the truck from which they were unloading the president’s glorious SINGER machines.

  Infected with the euphoria, Argenis and Etelvina had run and pushed their way up to within a few meters from the truck’s open mouth, where three men drenched in sweat lowered machines toward the whirlpool of arms, toward the agitated, ferocious heads of an agglomeration of bodies that pushed to occupy the same space. With a few strides and his six-foot height, Papi would have snatched the Singer from the hands of these men, Argenis thought, just before a fist in his stomach knocked the wind out of him. The pain didn’t last long, anaesthetized as he was by rage. He elbowed his way through the crowd, crying, until he managed to get close to his mother again, her hair now falling out of her neat bun and her arms covered in scratches. She was alone and it didn’t matter if they saw her, her friends, her ex-comrades – they were all a bunch of shit-eaters.

  She wanted that machine to make a few extra pesos, to save for her children’s college education, to shove it in José Alfredo’s face and say, “Even Balaguer does more for this household than you. You shit, you freeloader, you thief; parasite, scoundrel, jerk.” Argenis raised his delicate hands so they could pass him one, but the constant motion of the whirlpool dumped him on his ass next to his mother at the edge of the riot. Etelvina stood up once more to throw herself, eyes closed, into the vortex, but a hand on her shoulder stopped her, the hand of an elegant mulatto offering her water in a little plastic cup. Asking no questions – he had seen it all – the man led them to the front end of the truck, which was cordoned off by black-helmeted police and a metal barricade. Argenis was sure that what had saved them was the fact that his mother was white; white and pretty. A woman with dyed orange hair motioned for them to pass. The woman was wearing a red T-shirt with the party logo on it. It read, LO QUE DIGA BALAGUER, “Whatever Balaguer Says,” in letters deformed by her obesity. “Are you for Balaguer?” she asked Etelvina, passing her a form on which she was supposed to write down her name, identification number, and address. Argenis saw how Etelvina’s hands were trembling as she signed the paper resting on her new machine and how her writing, always so neat and straight, came out as ugly as one of her second-grade students’ on that piece of paper.

  That day’s human blender had disheveled her insides. It was almost twenty years ago and Argenis was sure that the Etelvina of today, the one that wouldn’t take shit from anyone, had been born in that line. The experience had also solidified a link they had always had, one his mother didn’t share with anyone else. He really loved her, and now that he saw her aging before his eyes, even as she sipped her coffee as noisily as ever, that love hurt him a little. Before they said their farewells, while she was writing down Ernesto’s work address on one of the Post-its Niurka had piled up next to the telephone, Argenis understood that some of his talent for drawing came from the capital letters with which his mother decorated the beginnings of her sentences and proper nouns.

  “Go see your brother,” she requested, and authoritatively stuck the little paper into his shirt pocket.

  ‌

  “Why did you come? To ask Dad for money? To worry Mom? You were in bad shape over there, doing your junkie thing. Like always. Embarrassing us. Dad stopped sending money because the Cuban intelligence agency called to tell him that Bengoa was giving you drugs. So you’re an idiot, then? Fucking stupid. Retarded. You think Dad has no friends? Dad has friends everywhere, you imbecile. Why is it so hard for you to do what’s right? Does nothing matter to you? ‘Fuck Dad, let him lose his position in the party, let Mom die of worry. Just let them die.’ Right? That’s what you want – for them to rot. Two heroes who went through all kinds of horror for this country of ingrates, just so you can come back and make things hard for them. Piece of shit.”

  Ernesto never stopped. Dressed in a mustard-colored Prada suit that was too small for him, he was cleaning his nails with the tip of a letter opener as he spoke. He said the words without anger, with a feigned delicacy, as if he were talking to a little girl, his feet up on a desk covered in folders and papers.

  Argenis didn’t know how his brother paid for this office full of Le Corbusier furniture, with picture windows looking out on Naco and Piantini. On its walls hung minimalist drawings by some current Dominican artist, some ex-schoolmate of his from Fine Arts, some lucky asshole with much less talent than he had. How much had Ernesto paid for each drawing, he wondered, dropping himself onto the metal skeleton of one of the armchairs.

  Ernesto broke off his attack to take a call and Argenis moved on from the drawings to look at his older brother’s shoes, which were black and pointy with a supernatural shine. They were there on the table for Argenis to kiss, for Argenis to caress the creased surface of their soles with his extended tongue, just as his brother had made him do when they were kids and Argenis had lost some bet. Because Ernesto always won their contests. He was the first to reach the top of the pine tree on the corner, and his green gobs of spit made it onto the neighbor’s patio while Argenis’s just hung there on their own blinds.

  Ernesto was better at sports, better in school, better at everything. He knew how to say the things that made their father happy, something Argenis could never manage, no matter how hard he tried. Their father had taught Ernesto card tricks, had shown him old maps in the encyclopaedia and told him war stories that he never shared with Argenis. Their father also praised Ernesto in front of people: for his successes as a catcher in the baseball league, for his outstanding grades, for his even teeth, for the way he would sing Silvio Rodríguez’s “Playa Girón” with tears in his eyes.

  Argenis thought he could see the fruits of those envied moments in the ample pride that kept his brother’s spine erect, his chin pointing out some spot on the horizon, his chest puffed out like a fighting cock’s.

  Ernesto got up from his enormous armchair, took three steps around to the front of the desk, and made a little backwards jump to sit on it. He was as white as their mother Etelvina, but had inherited their father’s appetite: he was much shorter than Argenis and a spare tire was starting to encircle his midsection. His feet hung down like those of a plucked chicken and Argenis could see the colorful checked socks he wore under his pants. Ernesto swung his feet as he inspected his nails. “You know what this is?” he asked, putting one hand on top of the mountain of paper. “It’s the future. Projects, investments, capital. Contracts we’re giving to people. Investors who come to put money into your country. The president brought me from Argentina to evaluate them. You could have a slice of the pie, too, except that you’re a retard.”

  Another call demanded Ernesto’s attention and Argenis dared to serve himself a whiskey from the designer minibar in the corner. There he looked at himself in the mirror that covered the wall. He was wearing Bebo’s brown pants and a cotton shirt his Aunt Niurka had given him. He didn’t look so bad, excep
t for the overly long toenails that peeked out from his leather sandals. In the background a man who shared his blood, wearing a designer suit too tight for him, was seducing one of his lovers in a loud voice.

  A driving rain began to beat against the windows and Argenis imagined the scene as part of a Dominican musical. In it, his brother, wearing the designer suit and a Che-style starred beret, danced under a downpour of government contracts for building bridges, highways, and medical clinics. Ernesto shared his pie with other choreographed scoundrels, most of them fat and bald and in linen suits, who spun in place while smiling up at the sky from which a deluge of paper and liquid shit was falling. With sadistic pleasure, Argenis filled Ernesto’s mouth with that shit until he was forced to swallow it, to savor it, with a smiling, stupid face.

  An assistant had entered with lunch on a silver tray. Ernesto had ordered from some menu a half hour earlier. Without offering anything to Argenis, he went back to his chair and took the metal covers from the steaming plates. He placed the telephone next to the tray and turned it onto speaker. A flirtatious woman’s voice on the other end asked about the color of some rugs. He cut the fish with knife and fork and put a huge piece into his mouth. His eyes gleamed with something empty and monstrous, like Saturn devouring his son in the Goya painting. Content in the belly of the Titan, he imitates his gestures, thought Argenis.

  As he chewed, Ernesto took out his wallet and grabbed three or four thousand-peso bills. Argenis had just put the empty glass back in the corner minibar, and again he saw the mirror reflecting a pale man, marked by adolescent acne, pulling money from a wallet. He knew what was coming, but this time he was prepared. Ernesto offered him the pesos, speaking with his mouth full, but Argenis had already opened the door and was walking toward the exit on the way to the elevator. Spurned and angry, his older brother followed him to the lobby with fork in hand, and right there in front of the receptionist he said, “Mirta left you for a woman, didn’t you know? Yes, Papito, a dyke stole her from you. A lesbo. She looks really happy going around with her dyke, and with a little boy who looks just like you.”

  He was already in the elevator when Ernesto said “just like you.” The doors closed and the machine started its slow descent to the street. In his guts he felt the same pain he had felt in Havana when he quit using the synthetic morphine. Some absurd desire to vomit, even though he had nothing in his stomach, made him lean against the wall. When they separated, Mirta told him she had aborted a baby boy. His baby. And if that baby was alive? And he had a son? He felt panicked thinking about what was waiting for him down there, when at last the elevator doors opened. Suddenly everything gained an absolute and absorbing depth. The news of his successful reproduction had turned his world – a Paleochristian, naive, two-dimensional mural – into a Da Vinci painting, three-dimensional, wide-screen, in vivid perspective.

  A line of taxis was waiting for customers at the exit of the office building. Inside the cars, dented eighties Japanese models, the drivers ate Chinese food over their newspaper or slept with the driver’s seat in a horizontal position. Under a light-blue tarp tied to a flamboyán tree a street vendor sold cigarettes, sweets, and coffee from a rusty thermos. Argenis bought a pack of Nacionals and smoked one while looking at the pink waffle cookies on the cart, listening to the gravel-crunching sound of the taxi drivers’ radios. The rain had stopped and an asphyxiating steam was rising from the asphalt. Niurka had given him a few pesos so he could get around, so he could look for work. His aunt had also loaned him a little pay-as-you-go cell phone, which she kept for foreign friends who came to visit her. He hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Mercado Modelo. On the way he dialed a number – one of the few he still knew by heart: Rambo, his heroin pusher.

  Rambo was not in the habit of taking calls from unknown numbers, so he didn’t hit redial. He calmed down as he anticipated the peace that soon, very soon, he would be feeling. Imagining the needle pushing it into him gave him goosebumps and filled his heart with a childlike euphoria. He avoided all thoughts of failure: that Rambo might have moved, that he wouldn’t be home, that he could be traveling, or dead. He also avoided thinking about his Aunt Niurka and her good intentions, about the genuine affection she showed him, and about the offers of work she had made him. Giving art classes to abused women or to violent offenders wasn’t his idea of happiness, but at the NGO where Niurka worked they could get him a studio and materials so that he could restart his career, once and for all.

  Rambo lived on a street next to the market and Argenis, since he didn’t really need the drugs, decided to walk to Little Haiti behind it before going up to knock on the door. When he was a student at Fine Arts he used to buy artifacts from other eras there for just a few pesos – used clothing a Haitian woman sold from a pickup, Ben Sherman shirts from the sixties, brightly colored polyester pants, even the motor from a remote-controlled car he had used to create a homemade tattooing machine. Most of these treasures came from the Duquesa dump. It was trash rescued by the dumpster divers who would later lay out the screws, picture frames, and faded plastic lunchboxes on a towel to sell.

  This is the purgatory of all things, thought Argenis. Stuff that doesn’t reach the heaven of antique shops and stuff that escapes the hell of Duquesa, here is where it all ends up. Maybe it’s up to me to redeem one of them and elevate it to an eternal life in my bedroom. He felt generous and much calmer, and before getting to the end of the street where the dumpster divers had arranged their knickknacks, he proposed a stupid game to himself: if I find an object in the shape of a cat, it means I shouldn’t shoot up. Renouncing all responsibility in this way, he already felt more optimistic. The cat thing was incidental; it was just the first animal that entered his head, and the occurrence brought to mind the little blue porcelain cat his mother had had in their home when he was little. His eyes skimmed over the edge of the sidewalk, stopping at pieces of iron, lead, and bronze of unknown origin, beach toys, ceramic plates, baskets, hardware, telephones, napkin holders, belts, forks with bent tines, and on top of a mountain of threadbare wigs, a black cat missing an eye. He picked it up to examine it. The remaining eye was a plastic emerald. Around its neck it wore a collar of silvery lace from which hung a stone that matched the eye in shape but was ruby-red, and its velvet fur, although a bit bald in places, was shiny and very dark. It was a very old toy, maybe from the sixties. Maybe from the Trujillo era. He took out a fifty-peso bill without asking the price and handed it to the diver like he used to do back in the day; the guy put the money in his pocket without lifting his gaze from a steel apparatus he was trying to loosen with a screwdriver. As soon as the cat was his, Argenis forgot the deal he’d made with himself and walked with a quick step to Rambo’s apartment. He pressed the animal to his chest and felt the hard stuffing inside it, either rice or sand, as he asked in a soft voice, “Little cat, little cat, who threw you in the trash? What sins could have kept you from reaching eternal glory?”

  In twos, he went up the narrow steps of a stairway smelling of piss and beer. His friend’s fourth-floor door sported a sticker from the last census and a deep groove made by some kind of blade. He pressed the bell and listened to the commotion of someone hiding whatever they could because they were always expecting the police. Rambo, an olive-toned mulatto, turned white as snow when he opened the door.

  “Man, what you doing here? Get out of here, man. Leave me alone.” Rambo was shitting himself with fear, and if Argenis hadn’t stuck the cat between the door and its frame, he would have shut it in his face. With something like resignation in his sunken eyes he opened it again but didn’t let Argenis enter. Behind him, a woman in an oversize T-shirt was lighting a cigarette from a stove burner in a dark kitchen.

  “What’s up, Rambo? You smoking crack? What kind of paranoia is this?”

  “No paranoia, buddy,” the pusher said, scratching his arms nervously with both hands. “Your dad came by with two thugs and stuck a Beretta in my mouth before sending you off to
Cuba. I can’t sell you anything, man. Get out of here. Don’t call me. You don’t know me, you never knew me, and I don’t know you.”

  ‌

  He had nothing left, not even a pusher. He flopped back onto Niurka’s sofa bed and looked at the ceiling. He tried to remember the number of Hans, another pusher who had gotten heroin for him, but then he remembered Bebo had said Hans was in jail. Aunt Niurka is a psychiatrist, he thought. If I tell her, maybe she can get me some Valium, some lorazepam, something. In his mind he heard “priorities of a junkie,” just the way his ex-wife used to say it. He went to the kitchen and served himself two shots of Barceló Imperial one after the other, returned to the sofa, lit a Nacional, and thought about how Susana had fucked Bengoa so that he could shit himself comfortably during his withdrawal syndrome. He thought about the son that, according to Ernesto, he might have, and again the memory of his grandmother came to him: Consuelo sitting on the bench in her bosses’ kitchen, cleaning rice.

  What was the meaning of that memory? Why was it always coming back, like a hip-hop loop? It was a living image, in color, which filled his nose with a mixture of smells that included the Vicks VapoRub Consuelo rubbed on her knees, the old wood of the cabinets, and the sofrito seasoning for the meat in the pot. He made an effort to recall more details, moving about inside the memory like in a virtual reality game, turning his head and walking around her house, traveling in time. He put out the cigarette, closed his eyes, and tried to relax. He voluntarily drew the image toward him: his grandmother Consuelo, not yet fifty years old back then. She had had his father very young. She is missing one of her first molars. Her long pianist’s fingers delve into the rice, as if, instead of cleaning rice, she is picking the fleas from a dog. The space where her molar once was can be seen when she opens her mouth to say something. What is she saying?