The Black Cathedral

by Marcial Gala

  Pork Chop would say, Nah, you’re here because you were born bad, see how in the land of gringos they don’t call you Gringo anymore, now they say you’re Satan. You could have been the wiseguy who went furthest in the neighborhood if not for the Stuart brothers; although you were the one who taught Jelly, and he was the worse of the two.

  That’s what fucking Piggy would say, and it’s a lie, I wasn’t anybody’s teacher, I only wanted to help him earn respect because I saw potential in him, he was the one who asked me one day, “What about those cuts on your arm, what are they, Ricardo? Can you explain them to me?”

  We were sitting in the living room at his house, his mother was puttering about the kitchen. Neither his father nor Johannes nor Cricket were at home, but I delayed a second anyway before I answered, “The thing is, I’ve been initiated into Palo, Prince, into Palo.”

  “What’s that, Ricardo? Explain it, please.”

  “I’ll tell you, Prince, if you promise not to tell anyone, especially not your parents, or Johannes.”

  “Not even Johannes?”

  “Not even her. Your sister kind of looks down on me, and, my man, it weighs on me.”

  “She’s like that, don’t mind her. Come on, tell me, I promise not to say anything.”

  “Okay. Look, Palo is the natural religion for us black folks because, Prince, listen, there’s a spirit in everything.”

  “Do you think so? My father says there’s just one God, and that not even a hair on my head moves without His authority.”

  “And you believe him? Your father isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, he spends all day covered in grease and sawdust. Look at me: young, everyone calls me sir, I’ve got a motor scooter and a pile of cash and tons of chicks chasing after me … Speaking of chicks, I don’t want you to get mad, young Prince, but are you a queer or not? Tell me, and believe me, if you say yes, I’m not going to care, everyone moves to his own beat.”

  “No, I’m not a queer, at least, I don’t think so.”

  “So then, you should know that to get girls, you have to let go of all that nonsense.”

  “I know, that’s why I want to keep studying, so I can get away from all this shit.”

  JUAN PABLO SOSA ROMERO, painter and engraver from Cienfuegos

  Around then, I started dating Johannes. Ever since she started at the school, I’d noticed her, I liked how her hand moved quickly over the paper as she outlined a drawing, I liked the way she talked, and that in addition to being pretty and talented, she wasn’t full of herself, rather, she was simple, sometimes too simple. What I didn’t like was her weird family, her father and mother with God always on the tips of their tongues, and those brothers … From the beginning, they seemed certifiable. I was really leaning toward sculpture, but to be closer to her, I started spending more time on oil painting. We had a teacher, Juan Francisco, who was very sociable, and sometimes when almost everyone else had gone, we would be left alone with him, each of us at our respective easels, and although we barely spoke, I felt at peace.

  ROGELIO

  She took to hanging out with a white guy who had long hair, jeans that were ripped at the knee, and tattoos on both arms. Ever since the father saw him, he said the kid was satanic, and that if she kept hanging out with that little roquero, he would take her out of art school, he’d never agreed with her being there anyway, what a young woman should study is something practical, economics or to be a secretary, artists starve to death. Arturo Stuart himself told me all this the afternoon we were laying down the concrete for the new church.

  GRINGO

  He asked me, “Why do they call you Gringo?”

  “Because I wear threads that only Americans wear, brand-name clothes, so people respect me, and when they see me, they say, ‘There goes a classy black man,’ instead of ‘There goes a black man with no class,’ you get it? If it weren’t so damned hot here, I would walk around in a suit with a silk tie, like Denzel Washington, because I’m not some lowlife, Prince, not some lowlife, I’ve got a name.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I get respect.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you want to get respect?”

  “Sure.”

  “Not sure. Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to start now when you’re still just a boy, because to be respected, you have to learn a lot. Go where men are, not those church mice, and stop being such a sissy.”

  “Okay, take me.”

  “First you have to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  “Promise.”

  “And what did your sister say?”

  “Nothing. That she likes you, but she doesn’t want a boyfriend now.”

  “What would she like as a gift for Valentine’s Day?”

  “I don’t know … a visual-arts book, by Leonardo da Vinci, maybe…?”

  JUAN PABLO

  One day she said to me, “This is over,” and that was it. That’s why I say she was like her father, decisive. I didn’t understand, she could’ve explained to me, she could’ve told me that neither of us was getting much out of it. My family had come to accept her, they didn’t care that her skin was so dark. My ma was already dreaming of having a pair of beautiful biracial grandchildren, tall ones, because Johannes and I are tall and slim. I think her father pressured her, and that crazy guy, Gringo, who gave me dirty looks, even though I told him I was only going to Johannes’s house to study. Now I understand that I was lucky as all hell because that animal would’ve killed me just like he killed those people. In sum, I think that what most influenced the end of my relationship with Johannes were two other things: first, that we didn’t jive sexually, the four or five times we slept with each other, she didn’t orgasm. I wasn’t man enough for her, I realize, and Johannes is the kind of woman who, you might not think it, needs to be fulfilled in bed; that’s why, when they told me that she married her first Italian for ulterior motives, I didn’t say a word; at the end of the day, I’m a discreet man, but I thought they were mistaken, very mistaken. Back when we were dating, I was already living in this big house, in the middle of the Prado in Cienfuegos, with just my parents, and she could have perfectly well come to live with us, my mother would have welcomed her perfectly. But no, she preferred to keep living on that alleyway in Punta Gotica with her two brothers in addition to their parents, a place where she practically had to use the roof in order to paint because there was so little space, all because she didn’t love me enough, at least not as a boyfriend, since we remained friends until she left … and that last reason is the second and, to me, most important cause for our relationship’s failure, the fact that she always knew she was going to leave all this shit behind and she didn’t want any sad memories.

  “To Havana?” I asked the first time she said that to me.

  “No, away from here. I’m going to really leave.”

  “Let’s leave together, I have an aunt in the U.S., I’ll talk to her and she’ll claim me.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going to lift boxes for some shop or take care of old folks or work as a waitress, I’m not cut out for any of that. I’m going as a painter, I’m going to make it as an artist, and for that, I need to be alone, I don’t want anyone distracting me.”

  She laid this on me three days before definitively breaking up with me, and I thought she was dreaming, because few artists in the world manage to make a living from their creations, but later it turns out that I was the one who was mistaken, now she’s famous. Yesterday, while looking at used books, I saw a magazine from last year where they talked about the future marriage of the well-known Italian artist of Cuban origins, Judith Alonso, to a soccer player from Naples, a Vicente or Vicenzo. In the article, it specified that this guy had just signed a contract with Real Madrid, and the tifosi, who were not happy at all, vowed to go to Monte Carlo, where the nuptials would take place, to make trouble; regarding the visual artist, they didn’t say much more, but, paying attention
to the photo, I again saw Johannes, she was still very much like she was here in Cienfuegos, just lighter, discolored, she could almost pass for olive skinned. “You can tell she doesn’t get any sun,” my mother said to me, since I bought the magazine and took it to her so she could see where the girl who could have been her daughter-in-law ended up. “But she’s thinner,” my mother kept saying, and that her dress didn’t suit someone her age, she wasn’t a princess or anything of the sort. I know my mother said this last thing to console me since Johannes looked beautiful, and although I didn’t love her anymore and don’t even know if I ever did love her, or if all there was between us was puppy love, she had achieved her dream and I was still stuck here, making sculptures of ballplayers and old musicians, works of drab realism that brought in money for me but didn’t take me anywhere, participating in second-rate contests and aspiring to be remembered one day and to receive the Machete of the Southern Mambí or la Roseta, symbols of the city of Cienfuegos.

  GUTS

  “Have you spied on your sister, Cricket?”

  “That’s a sin.”

  “Says who? Your dad? That geezer’s a fairy and your brother is also a fairy and you’re also kind of a fairy.”

  “Don’t fuck around or I’ll cut your dick off.”

  “It’s a joke, Cricket, but you really haven’t spied on Johannes?”

  “Of course not, she’s my sister.”

  “If she wasn’t your sister, would you spy on her?”

  “I don’t know, maybe … Do you spy on your sister, Guts?”

  “Yeah, of course, and I jerk off; after all, she has no idea.”

  “You’re a sicko and a sinner.”

  “Yeah, but I enjoy it … Let’s go spy on her, come on, come with me.”

  “I said no, it’s a sin.”

  “Not your sister, or mine. Berta, who’s coming home from school now and bathes nude in the corridor behind her house, you’ll see what kind of snatch she has.”

  “But what if we get caught?”

  “We’re not going to get caught.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. Let’s go up to the roof of your house and you’ll see that we won’t get caught.”

  “But what if we get caught? If my mom tells el puro, the old man will kill me … Look what he did to me.”

  “Damn, your old man is crazy as hell, and that’s with him being a Christian.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “What’d he do that to you with?”

  “With his belt. Can’t you see the shape of his belt buckle?”

  “Fuck, if that were me, I’d kill him.”

  “He’s my father.”

  “Well, that’s on you. Do we go spying or not?”

  “Let’s go.”

  MARIBEL

  I would hear her shout, Arturo, let him go. Arturo, please, that’s enough! That was only sometimes, since usually all I could hear was a muffled sound like someone shaking out a rug, that and the kid whimpering. He never hit the other one, Jelly; it was the strangest thing in the world. Once I dared ask Carmen if the three of them had the same father.

  “Of course,” she said, “whose would they be?”

  “So why does one of them get so many beatings while the other doesn’t see as much as a rose petal lifted against him? Even the girl gets smacked every once in a while, but Prince … it’s not like he’s a saint.”

  “You just happen to know what goes on at my house?”

  “No, Carmen, I’m sorry.”

  She gave me that dead little mosquito face that didn’t affect me at all.

  This one has her wits about her, I thought. What could they have done in Camagüey? Because it had to have been something major for them to run away from that city and end up burying themselves here in la cuartería, these squalid rooming houses, something major.

  ROGELIO

  He looked like a stick, I mean his body, all fiber and bones; his face also looked like a stick, with that grimace of disgust that seldom changed, like you owed him something. Blessings, he would say as his only greeting, and it seemed as if the one doing the blessing was him, not God. He gave off a sense of violence, although at first glance, he seemed like a gentle guy, very gentle. He almost always had his Bible in his hands, as if the Gospels were his shield. He was the one who decided on the location of the church, over my criteria as an architect. He drew Basulto in and filled his head with smoke. I told him:

  “Basulto, this is the Church of the Holy Sacrament for all of Cienfuegos, not just the neighborhood of Punta Gotica; I’ve been an architect for twenty years, and if you’re not going to listen to me, find someone else.”

  I left the architectural plans on the dining room table, grabbed my bicycle, and went home. There was a knock at my door an hour later. Blessings, a voice said dryly.

  “Blessings,” my wife said. “Come in, Arturo. Would you like some water?”

  “Yes, please, it’s so hot.”

  My wife went to get the water, and I came out of my room and shook Stuart’s hand. Then we sat down in the rocking chairs, and when he’d drunk the water, he started to tell us how important it was for a neighborhood like Punta Gotica, a neighborhood of forgotten black people and desperate white people, to have that church right in the center, where everyone could see it; then he got straight to the point:

  “Two hundred pesos per day,” he said, looking around at my large but run-down house.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me.”

  That’s how he was, always with God on the tip of his tongue, but convinced that everything could be resolved through money and demagoguery. He was pretty talkative. Almost everyone who worked on that temple did so for free, as volunteers.

  GRINGO

  “Listen,” Piggy said to me when I’d just gotten to el Ruso’s bar. “They’re asking around about a certain Aramís Ramírez.”

  “What’s that to me?”

  “He’s from Cabaiguán.”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “A mulato in a checked shirt who looks like a cop.”

  “Let him ask. Give him some space to ask about whatever he wants, he’s not gonna know which end is up, no one here knows a thing.”

  “No, not here, but lots of people in San Lázaro must have seen that big guajiro when you took him to my house.”

  “Nobody remembers that, Piggy, don’t be a drag.”

  “The thing is, while you’re out there on your motor scooter doing favors for the church, I’m the one who has to face the issues.”

  “Are you high or what the fuck is wrong with you? Watch how you talk to me.”

  “The thing is, the money ran out, Gringo, and I’m in the fuácata. Throw me a bone, come on.”

  “I’m starting to think you eat cash for dinner. Start saving, asere, start saving.”

  ROGELIO

  The unfinished temple of the Holy Sacrament is the only remnant of Arturo Stuart’s time in Cienfuegos, and it’s enough. I’m proud of that temple; sometimes when I’m in the mood, I get on my bicycle and go see it. It’s in ruins, but continues to be a beautiful building. The only fruit of my twenty years of labor as an architect. There isn’t a single piece of marble or bronze stating the name of the architect who designed it; in another twenty years no one will remember me, and it will be as if the temple erected itself; perhaps that’s fair, because that cathedral is cursed.

  I don’t walk with God anymore, now I go it alone, I no longer tell anyone that an angel without wings suggested the shape of the temple to me. He said, My church will be like this, and he lifted me on his back and I saw the Cienfuegos of the future, a beautiful city, full of elegant buildings, and cleaner than ever, and in Punta Gotica, I saw a futuristic building, with many stained-glass rose windows, and that was the temple. Cienfuegos is the celestial Jerusalem, I thought, awoke, and my wife had to wash the sheets; I had wet the bed like when I was a child.

  The next day, I ar
rived with my architectural plans at Stuart’s house. Basulto was there, along with many members of the congregation and, of course, the owner of the house.

  GRINGO

  Every neighborhood where poor people live looks the same; in fact, they are the same: sewers that overflow when it rains, streets full of potholes, and walls papered over with advertising. The six months I spent in downtown Miami felt as if I’d never been able to leave Punta Gotica, so one day I said to myself, “I didn’t get myself out of Cienfuegos to keep being a second-class citizen.”

  I spoke basic enough English, but had too strong an accent, so I spent some of the dollars I had left on perfecting my language. That was during my first days in America, as the yumas call that fucking country.

  Yesterday afternoon, a journalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, came for me to tell him my life story; he was going to pay me ten thousand dollars up front, and if the book sold well, we’d both end up millionaires because these are the kinds of stories that Americans like. “Start from the beginning,” he told me.

  I had to laugh. “What do I need money for when I’m already on death row?”

  He asked me whether I didn’t have a relative in Cuba, or in the U.S., to whom I could leave the money.

  “No. I don’t have anyone, just Lucy, my ex-wife, and that damn bitch hasn’t come to see me a single time.”

  “Well, then…,” the journalist pressed on. He was a short, kind of fat guy, of Salvadoran origins, according to what he’d told me before. “The book could be in your best interest. You know how the Americans are, maybe they’ll sympathize with a childhood like yours, plagued by hardship, and pressure the state’s governor, I don’t know…”

  “How do you know my childhood was plagued by hardship? Are you psychic?”

  “It’s always like that. Childhood makes us what we are.”