The Black Cathedral

by Marcial Gala

  “Of course,” I said. “Chambas, Ciego de Ávila, it wouldn’t be Chambas, Piggy’s Backside.”

  “You’re so funny!” She looked at me with her brown, fat-girl’s eyes. She wouldn’t be half-bad if you took off those hip-high pants and the too-tight blouse that didn’t suit her body at all.

  “Do you want a beer?” I asked her. “Tarugo, open the fridge and take out a lager for each of us.”

  “So you’re selling an air conditioner,” she said. “One of the big ones?”

  “Enormous. LG with a remote control and everything.”

  “Is it white?”

  “Like a coconut.”

  “So how much are you asking?”

  “Well, this one cost me seven hundred CUC, I can’t give it to you for less than six-fifty.”

  BERTA

  He said, Come on, Berta, go look for the gold, don’t take any longer ’cause the guy is about to come back, tell Araceli not to pack anything, that there are better clothes for sale in Cienfuegos anyway.

  “But I can’t leave just like that, imagínate, I have to talk to my husband first. I’m sure that if I leave, he’ll call the police, and they’d be willing to go look for me and bring me back, you don’t know what the guajiros around here are like.”

  Leave him a note, the dead man told me to say to her, and I said so and she looked for a pencil and paper.

  “What do I write?” she asked.

  “Write anything,” I said, but Aramís said, Write: I don’t love you anymore, Alcibíades Ferreiro, it’s over between us because you are too violent a man for me and you will never understand a sensitive woman like me, who loves art and poetry. Goodbye, Alcibíades, don’t look for me.

  “If I write that down, he’ll go out looking for me with a machete, and then there will be one more person dead.” She put the pencil on the table and burst out crying.

  There’s no time to cry, the dead man said, do what I tell you, he’s not going to look for you because he is in love with Elisa.

  I told her.

  “Elisa, that whore?” she said, but then she got angry and picked up the pencil again.

  Once she finished the letter, the girl took the notebook with her best poems, her newest bras and underwear, a brand-new pair of jeans, and the picture of her recently deceased mother and put it all in a backpack.

  “Wait for me here,” she said; she went to the house next door, asked to borrow a shovel and spade, and we went to look for the gold.

  It was where the dead man had told us it would be, a crate inside which was an old canvas bag with twelve gold rings.

  We took a taxi to Cienfuegos and became friends on the way. We had so many things in common that it was incredible. She had just turned seventeen, which made her much older than me; nonetheless, compared to me, she was like a little girl. She held the backpack where we had put the gold on her lap, and I would say to her, “Relax, Araceli, relax.”

  “Aren’t you Ferreiro’s wife?” the driver had asked when we got to the house, in front of which was one of those Cubataxis that only accepts CUCs.

  “I left him.”

  “Ferreiro’s going to kill you.”

  “Ferreiro’s a dumbass,” Araceli said, still worked up and full of anger. “If you see him, tell him that I said to take Elisa to the house. From now on, she’ll be the one who washes the clothes and tends to the goddamn ulcer on that goddamn foot on that shitty diabetic who doesn’t take care of himself!”

  “I’ll tell him,” the taxi driver said with a sigh, then scratched the part of his chest peeking out of his open shirt. “So who’s this?”

  “My lover,” Araceli said, and the taxi driver got very serious and said he wasn’t on the clock and couldn’t take us, and he was sorry but he’d have to tell Ferreiro.

  “How much to Cienfuegos?” Araceli then asked.

  “It’s fifty dollars, but if you give me a hundred CUC over that, I’ll leave you right at the door of the house, and if it’s a hotel, I’ll take you one by one up to the room and sing you a wedding march.”

  “That’s not necessary.” She took out the money, along with an extra ten dollars that she gave to the driver so he would keep his mouth shut.

  ROGELIO

  Someone started to say it one day, and by the time we tried to stop it, it was too late. The rumor was growing even more quickly than the building, it got away from us. The situation became favorable for us; suddenly from all over Cuba the donations poured in, and we were able to install marble instead of the granite I’d planned on. In addition, the bureaucratic machine turned strangely permissive and gave us one permit after another as if it had decided, just like that, on benevolence toward the congregation of the Holy Sacrament. Arturo was of the opinion that it was simply God’s influence that was on our side, but I always knew it was something else, and one day my wife confirmed it for me. “Everyone is saying,” she said, “that in Cienfuegos they’re building the Black Cathedral.” I was struck dumb, listening to her. I had to sit down. She poured me a glass of water, and then I understood why so many had become understanding, and even helpful, why that multitude of neighbors was working with us, why the temple itself seemed to overflow, to make itself larger, to the point that it seemed like a schizophrenic building; why I myself put aside what was planned, chalking it up to the influx of money, so where there was once a sixteen-foot gap between columns, I now tried to make it twice as big. I understood it all. I understood that the temple was cursed, corrupt, that it was a praise song not just to the very concept of people with a lot of melanin in their skin, but that it was called the Black Cathedral for those with darkness in their hearts, and nothing could dissuade me from that idea. So I made the final modifications to dozens of plans and I went to see Arturo Stuart. “This is as far as I go,” I told him, and handed over the sketches. “Find someone else,” I told him. His whole family was there, Johannes was sitting at the living room table sketching a horse, and the mother and the two boys were watching television. Arturo Stuart didn’t flinch. “Do you want more money?” he asked right there, in front of his family, as if I were a damn salesman.

  “It’s not the money.”

  “Then what?”

  It seemed so irrational to declare that the temple was cursed, that we were erecting the cathedral of evil, that it was a cursed angel who had suggested its shape in my dreams, that I had to tell him:

  “I have my reasons, but I prefer not to make them known; ultimately, you no longer need an architect as much as a civil engineer, someone who can bring a comprehensive end to the mad factory that’s now come of the temple we once saw as restrained, rational, practically a return to the principles of Le Corbusier … But, unfortunately, the temple is sick, and I don’t have the medicine to cure it, nor am I a Gaudí to go on with this madness, I have to save myself.

  “I have to save myself,” I repeated, and now it all seems a little crazy. When you resolve to say what you’re thinking, you say things that leave you in shock; my only way to achieve renown, to be remembered, I now understand, was that building, and I threw it away, I gave it up like it didn’t matter to me.

  I was kind of crazy then, I understand, too many sleepless nights, too much coffee, too many demands, and even too much money, for a building that grew, that overflowed, that half-finished was larger even than the Catholic cathedral of Cienfuegos, the one that seemed to regard us with mistrust from Martí Park.

  IBRAHIM

  The temple began like an airplane taking off, to become an ally of the air, master of the winds. “We’re making a book, this is a book in stone,” Arturo Stuart would say to us, and you looked into his eyes and could believe what he was saying because we really were building a sacred book. The cathedral was growing and, with it, our longing to love, to follow the example of real Christians, we were creating the temple of end times, the New Jerusalem was now beginning to rise up in Cienfuegos, we felt that nothing could stop us, we sang on our way to work, we the humble ceased to be h
umble, and nothing could stop us. “We’re making a book,” Arturo Stuart said to us, and he spoke to us of Gothic cathedrals erected in the time of Catholicism, that were actually songs to God, he spoke to us about our church being something like that, a true song to God, and when he said so, we all stood up in praise.

  “This temple has no head or tail,” my wife said to me when I told her about it. “You can’t begin to fry a fish and, halfway through your meal, pray for it to become chicken. Fish or chicken? One or the other … At the beginning, they started with something modest, so that the congregation would have somewhere to meet, and now it’s not like that, now they want to amaze Cienfuegos, and with this city, the world. The authorities won’t allow it, you can bet on that.”

  My wife is a woman of little faith, I’ve been married to her for twenty years and she’s my cross to bear, I haven’t managed to make her settle her affairs with Christ, I respect her because she’s the mother of my children and she is concerned for me, but she should be careful about what she says.

  “Look at how skinny you are,” she continued. “You’ve spent nearly six years tangled up in the building of that church, it’s not like it’s a volunteer microbrigade and we’re going to get our own house in return for your work; there’s no oil for cooking here, there’s nothing, Elsa has no shoes, I’m sending her to school in her dress-up sandals and I can’t take it anymore … I curse the day that you dedicated yourself to Jehovah.”

  “Yahweh,” I told her, because Yahweh is the true name of God, and I took it as a teaching moment. “One day, you’ll get close to Christ and then you’ll see that every sacrifice was worth it, that nothing was in vain, that day will come.”

  “Why didn’t you devote yourself to the lottery?” she said. “It would have been better for you to run numbers, then we wouldn’t be wanting for anything in this house. I don’t know what I’m going to do, really, I don’t know, they’re going to make cuts to our staff and since I’m the newest one there, I’m practically on the street, and, well … Tell Stuart to give you something, to pay you. Too many dollars come into that church for you to keep working for free. You working hard and them living like Croesus … How long, Árabe?”

  “Shut up, woman.”

  GRINGO

  When I got to Portland, there were almost no Latinos and even fewer Cubans, so from the beginning they thought I was a black American. I had to start speaking black, not that English whites speak where they put do in front of everything. No black man says Do you want to drink? like they showed me at school in Miami. They come out with Yuguandrink? And that’s that, and if you even dream of speaking any other way, they think you’re putting on airs, that you’re a damn Ph.D., or something like that. The one who got me excited about running out to Portland was my brother. When I met up with him in Little Havana, he took me to his tiny apartment, and after treating me to several beers, a gift of a hundred dollars, and two outfits, he told me he was a pizza-delivery guy and that it was going well for him.

  That made me laugh. “You came from so far away to deliver pizzas. No one is going to believe that. I came here to be a winner.”

  “Well, there’s no work, and taxes are killing me, you pay them for everything here.”

  “So why don’t you become a mobster?”

  “You’ve seen too many movies. Here, the law is king. Here, to be a drug trafficker or do anything under the radar, you have to have connections, you don’t just wake up and decide to do it. Listen, we’re not in Cienfuegos, look out that window and see the skyscrapers. You can’t get around by foot here; if you don’t have a car, you’re screwed like you can’t believe, imagínate … Mobster? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Well, I came here to get ahead, if I wanted to be some nobody going from house to house, I would’ve stayed in Cuba.”

  From her chair, my brother’s wife—a little mulata with an oriental face who later turned out to be Salvadoran—gave me a crazed look, anxious for me to leave and stop corrupting her man.

  “So how’s everyone from the neighborhood?” he asked me.

  “How do you think? Same as always, you can imagine,” I said to him, and took a long sip. “The last one I saw was Piggy, he wanted to come, but he started drinking and lost part of the dough at el Ruso’s bar with a new whore, a Yusimí.”

  “Yusimí Cabrera?”

  “I don’t know, Yusimí something.”

  “A mora with green eyes?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Well, well. Salvador is still a drag, but maybe it’s better that he stayed there. You’ve got to work a lot here and not leave anything to the state, it’s not like Cuba here.”

  “It’s worse here,” I told him. “In Hialeah, some Puerto Ricans came up to me to sell me drugs.”

  “It’s the clothes you’re wearing,” my brother said with a disapproving stare. “You’ve spent nearly all the money you brought from Cuba on looking fancy. Besides, those boricuas have connections, you don’t do anything here without connections.”

  “How am I supposed to get ahead looking like shit?” I asked my brother, and looked at the Salvadoran woman, who, although her body wasn’t much, wasn’t all that ugly. “I could’ve stayed in Cuba if I was going to keep wearing cheap little shirts.”

  “You’re not cut out for Miami; Chicago, New York, or something like that is more your thing,” my brother said, and I took another drink, and he talked to me about Portland, he told me he had gone on vacation there and liked it, but he was allergic to the flowers, besides, it got cold there, an arctic cold, the kind that chaps your ears, and the sky was gray, and you had to go around wearing a mountain of clothes not to freeze.

  “The blacks that live there are starting to get pale,” he said, “and when they go to Cuba, they almost pass for white.”

  “But there is a lot of work to be found there,” the Salvadoran woman butted in, and I told both of them I’d think about it.

  “Take advantage while it’s summer,” he said, and then I told him that, yes, I was going to fly on a plane for the first time in my life, and within a month I was first in Seattle, then in Portland.

  In Portland, I met my first American lady. Her name was Elsa Pound and she had diabetes, so she went to the grocery stores to buy sugar-free cookies and Diet Coke. She saw me at one of these stores when I was about to return to Miami, and it was as if she bought me. She talked to me and I understood her quite well because she spoke a very correct English, like in the movies. I already had experience working on women like that, self-important fat women with college degrees: in Cuba, I’d had a fortysomething who worked at the Housing Department and thought she was so great because she could take any poor sap’s house away from him. I fucked her any which way as long as I could stay at her apartment and get out of the neighborhood for a while, since the police were looking for me back then for the “illegal sacrifice of major livestock,” as they call it.

  Speaking of livestock, my first dead man, Aramís, came to see me on my Padrino’s behalf, since he remains in the Nganga working for him, and although he’s an enslaved dead man, he thinks he’s all that. I thought it was somewhat amusing. I said to him, “Guajiro, want me to sell you a motorbike?” And he didn’t say anything, he smiled to himself, since he knows I’ll soon be dead, too. “But at least no one’s going to stick me in anyone’s pot,” I said to him. The other one, the one who wanted the plasma TV, that one hasn’t come to see me, I can tell my Padrino wants him for some special job. The one who screwed me up was the dead woman I brought from Cuba, I shouldn’t have listened to Piggy, I should have let the little fat woman go, but she was so anxious to buy her air conditioner that when I started to pull back and to offer buts—Maybe this won’t work out because those units turn out badly and you’ve got to give me the money right now, and besides, I don’t offer any kind of guarantee—she got up from the chair, took me first by the arm, then opened her purse and showed me her money.

  “Look, it’s all here,” she
said.

  No one can just show me that much money, as if I were a meek little dove, I thought once I’d slit her throat. She drowned in her own blood right away and fell like a baby chick. She had skin as smooth as if it were brand-new. You could tell that guajira bathed with special soaps and then slathered creams all over herself. She smelled good, a light fragrance, nothing overpowering. Piggy helped me undress her, looking at her with hungry eyes, thinking I would let him fuck her, but I said to him, “None of that, to fuck you’ve got to do the job well, and who the fuck told you to bring a woman, huh, goddammit, Piggy?”

  “But you killed her.”

  “I didn’t have any choice.” Then I noticed that I’d gotten hard looking at the dead woman, her fat woman’s skin, fat woman’s rolls. I could never love one of those white women, one of those fat women, my ideal was Johannes, an athletic black woman, proud as a princess, but Johannes didn’t love me, and this Amarilis had something about her. So I told Piggy to go get the instruments. When I was left alone, I took a rag and cleaned the blood off the guajira and then I fucked her. I shouldn’t have done it: it’s one thing for someone to kill you and sell you as food out of necessity, and another for them to also abuse your mortal remains. “Take your time,” I’d said to Piggy, and when he returned, I was already turning her into little fillets.

  That dead woman ruined me, I should never have brought anything of hers up North, I should have given her to my Padrino or left her in peace in Cienfuegos, but back then, I didn’t know about how the dead long for revenge, I thought they were just slaves.

  Piggy saved himself big-time because I was going to snuff him out, not because I had anything against him, but so as not to leave any loose ends. Piggy would have been a useful dead man, principled, noble, he would have warned me, he would have told me not to stop in Dalhart, and I wouldn’t have gone down like such a dumbass, that afternoon that they caught me. Texas, the state of the brave. Texas can go to hell with its grass, its horses, its brave men, along with this whole country and its black president.