by Marcial Gala
GUTS
Sometimes I take to wandering Las Ramblas, and without realizing it I go for blocks and blocks, and when I stop, I find that I’ve gotten far from my house, then I sit down in a small bar called Monserrate and I ask for a Cuba Libre, which never tastes the same as the ones in Cienfuegos. The owner of the bar is Chilean, his name is Agustín and he admires General Pinochet; when he gets to talking about that, I tell him to be quiet. Cubano, he says to me, what you guys need is a Pinocchio to make you shape up. I don’t say anything, I stick to watching him and think that at another time I would have crossed the bar to slap him across the face for being fresh, because I was like that, always looking for someone to rough up. Sometimes I remember the Stuart brothers, and get a load of this, I think I would have liked to get to know Prince better, maybe we would have gotten along, but over there, you have fixed ideas, you think things can only be a certain way, and when they’re not, you get scared.
That Prince, after Gringo took off up North, got into literature, it was the strangest thing in the world, suddenly, he became a poet or wanted to become a poet, because when you’re born for something, you can’t escape your fate, and he was born to be bad, to be wicked. Bertica, Araceli, and he went together to a literary workshop run by some hairy dude who sometimes stopped by el Ruso’s bar to have a few drinks and see those nymphos shake their tits back and forth. I know because el Ruso, otherwise known as Antón Abramovich, was the one who gave me a job when I got kicked out of my house for not going to school or working. I was staying with Nacho Fat-Lips, my imprisoned brother, and I went right to Abramovich’s office and asked him for a job, and he told me no problem, and the next day I started with something easy. Then I made it to collecting bets for dogfights, and I had to break more than a few bones, among them Salvador Piggy’s, he owed two thousand pesos. I went to see him in that filthy place he called his room, and when I laid into him with the first hit and threw him to the floor, he told me that if Gringo were there, I wouldn’t have the courage to do what I was doing. “I could give a fuck about Gringo,” I whispered low to him, and then I kicked him a few times in the ribs, I took out my dick and pissed on his face. Back then, I was solid, I was already six foot two, and even though I was kind of skinny, I was really sinewy, I would have been the tallest in the neighborhood if not for Cricket. Cricket was almost six foot five and had a terrifyingly large cock, everyone in the neighborhood knew it.
El Ruso was looking to expand his business and called me over one day and said, “Listen, Yohandris, I want to put together a porno show for tourists. I already have the girls, but I need a guy who looks good, is tall, and who has a really big one.”
“A really big one?”
“Yeah, he has to be well-endowed, truly well-endowed.” El Ruso made an eloquent gesture.
I went to see Cricket, who, as always, was taking a beating from his father and working on that cathedral that seemed endless, and I said to him, “Oye, chavo.”
“What’s up?”
“You wanna earn some cash? Like real cash.”
“What do I have to do? Because if it’s cracking skulls, I’m not made for that.”
“Don’t worry, your part is easy, all you have to do is fuck.”
“Fuck? Up the ass? Nah, that’s not for me.”
“What do you mean up the ass, Cricket? Do I look like a queer to you or what? Fuck some chicks that are really hot, the best kind of whites, blondes, beauties, mulatas, your favorite … even Yusimí, the black girl with green eyes.”
“Yusimí the pretty one? Doesn’t she have some kind of kidney disease?”
“She’s already been operated on, I think. Besides, what do you care? You should be happy, you’re going to get to stop jerking off, you’re going to be the most admired guy in this whole shithole, your dick’s going to wear out from so much fucking.”
“That’s a sin.”
“Sin, my ass, man. You peep, you jerk off, you rub up against girls on the bus … One more sin isn’t going to kill you.”
“Yes, but those are venial sins, this other thing you’re asking me to do is really something, Guts, it’s putting the health of my immortal soul in jeopardy.”
“The hell with your soul. I don’t even have a soul, and look how great things are for me, with the best clothes and a harem of white women after me. You’re still at school and getting whatever crumbs you can. How long can you do that, Cricket?”
“Fair enough,” he said.
I took him to the bar, and when he saw the girls up close and smelled their perfume that el Ruso had people bring him all the way from Paris and saw how the girls sprayed it on like water, the dumbass nearly lost his mind and the girls noticed, and I think they got a little scared of him, all of them except Yusimí, the black girl with Indian features who really thought she was some kind of panther, because even though she was el Ruso’s favorite, she went over and said to Cricket, “Take it out, we want to see it.”
GRINGO
I gave him his half and told him, all serious, “Listen, Salvador, I’m going to Sagua to plan the trip. You, keep doing your thing so no one gets suspicious, but don’t have a single drink, and if anyone asks about me, tell them I’m on a spiritual retreat because of my Christian faith.”
“Okay,” Piggy said, “no problem. When are you coming back?”
“Soon.”
I got to Havana and went to see my cousin Osiris and told him to find me a contact, the kind with connections to guys running speedboats, since I had an urgent need to leave the country.
“Do you know how much that costs?” Osiris asked. “Ten thousand big ones. Don’t tell me you have that much money because I won’t believe you.”
“I don’t, but my brother does.”
He told me that he knew an individual who could take me to Mexico, but to not even think of pulling one over on him because those people wouldn’t be understanding; I might be someone in Cienfuegos, but I wouldn’t be worth as much as a flip-flop to the Mexican Mafia. Okay, I said to him, and right there, I dropped fifty CUC on him for doing me that favor, then I gave him the address of Ana Lidia, my girl from Centro Habana. Three days later, Osiris came to see me.
“Everything’s ready, tomorrow at two a.m. you should be at a place on the coast, near Santa María, and try to get there on time because they won’t wait for you. They’re going to flash their lights twice, then you’ll jump in the water and swim over to the cigarette boat. Is that clear?”
“Clear as can be.”
“Listen, buddy, the guys on the cigarette boat demand some cash in advance to prove that you’re serious and that they won’t need to send your pretty fingers to your brother in Miami to release the money, like they’ve had to do other times.”
I gave him two hundred dollars.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“Three, but why are you worried about that?”
“No reason, primo, no reason.” To reassure him, I added, “I just don’t want them to decide to throw me overboard.”
“Don’t worry, they’re serious guys and they’re not going to risk their business for ten thousand lousy dollars. Besides, you’re lucky, on this trip, you’ll be the only passenger, so you’ll have the whole cabin to yourself.”
“How’d that happen?”
“They didn’t explain it to me, but it must be that someone dropped out.”
“What luck.” I sighed.
“That’s right.” Osiris asked if I was taking my lady friend with me, since he had taken a look at Ana Lidia at one of her shows at the cabaret, which was precisely where she was at that moment.
“Where the hell am I going to get another ten thousand dollars from?” I said. “If you want, I’ll write her a letter from over there telling her all about you.”
“No, you’d better not.”
When he left, I opened my backpack, took out my gun, unloaded it, cleaned and oiled it, and confirmed that it was in good condition.
Whatever I k
now about weapons I learned before I dedicated myself to the fast life, when I was in the Special Forces. They also taught me how to use all kinds of sharp weapons: bayonets, switchblades, sabers, machetes, although my favorite were the knives.
For Ana Lidia, I left fifty dollars on top of the night table and wrote her a letter. I also wrote to Piggy, sending him to hell for being a pendejo and recommending that he not say a thing because he was going to screw himself over, and to Prince, to whom, in addition to saying goodbye, I was leaving my motor scooter and everything he could take out of my house before the police came to make their inventory and keep it all.
I closed my backpack, where I only carried a piece of Amarilis’s skull, bones from her fingers and toes, three pairs of underwear, a shirt, soap, an electric razor, toothpaste, and a toothbrush.
The gun I put away in my pants, strapping it in with my belt, so it would be easy to grab when needed. The switchblade I put in the sock of my right foot.
I went out to the street, took the bus to the outskirts of the city, and walked to the place Osiris had specified. I got there around twelve at night. I had eaten before I went out and I’ve never been a big eater, but I was already hungry when, at nearly three in the morning, I saw the blinking of lights in the sea’s darkness.
As soon as I got on the speedboat, I figured out that the only opponent of any size was the shortest of the Mexicans; you could tell by the determination in his voice. He asked me if the thing about my brother was true, because, if not, he would throw me in the water right there and not have to do it in the middle of the shark-infested Gulf.
“As true as the fact that I’m going to die one day,” I said to him, and only then did he shake my hand, and then the Cuban and the other Mexican also greeted me.
The cigarette boat was manned by the Cuban and it really flew. The guys offered me a beer and put on music, none of this reggaeton or salsa. Real music. Pure symphonic rock is what these fucking guys listened to.
I liked them, actually, but it was them or me. I was sure that my brother wasn’t going to send any money to keep me whole, since he most probably didn’t have ten thousand dollars, so when one of them, after I told him how girls from Cienfuegos like to fuck, told me we were almost there—“What you see over there are Mérida’s lights”—I asked, “Where can I take a piss? This beer has my bladder all swollen.”
“The bathroom is downstairs, in the cabin,” the other one said to me, the less squat one. “Although if you want, cuate, piss in the sea, but be careful not to fall. Even if you drown, your brother is still going to have to pay us the ten thousand dollars.”
I entered the bathroom.
I prepared the gun.
First, I shot at the toughest one, who almost got his weapon out, but I got him in the head; the other one was stunned, looking at me, he didn’t make the least gesture, I don’t know how he decided to start trafficking people since he had no courage. The Cuban one, focused on steering, hadn’t heard the shots: the engines were loud, the boat was almost thirty-three feet long, and the deceased men and I were close to the stern.
I came up behind him and shouted to him, “Listen, compatriota, the charros fell in the water.”
“What?” But when he saw the gun, he understood quite clearly; first he thought I was a State Security agent—imagine that, really.
He had to explain to me how to operate the cigarette boat, which is actually simple, like a car, except you have to be careful with the waves. Together, that Cheo and I went along the Mexican coast, leaving behind Mérida, Campeche, Coatzacoalcos.
I ended up killing him when we were parallel to the U.S., near a town I later learned was called Brownsville. I threw him overboard. I had thrown the Aztecs overboard before, after taking the money out of their pockets. I also threw over the gun and the knife, and I cleaned the blood off the deck. I navigated until I was relatively close to the coast. I jumped and went swimming to the shore, leaving the cigarette boat adrift.
I could only butcher enough English to lure in some Canadian tourist, but in Brownsville, there were lots of Mexicans. I showed my ID card and claimed asylum under the Cuban Adjustment Act.
With tears in my eyes, I clarified that I’d arrived there in the bed of a tractor, and the sharks devoured my two companions, one of whom was just fifteen years old, and I have a relative in Miami, living right in Little Havana.
They sent me to Florida, not on an airplane, but on a bus. I had my pockets bulging with all the money I’d taken from those three goons, so when I got to Miami, I went into a store and bought clothes so that my brother and the neighborhood’s folks would find me presentable and not a total mess.
AMARILIS
And that’s how my life escaped me at thirty-one years of age, when I had so many things left to experience. All because of an air conditioner that, when I think about it, I didn’t even need, since at my house we had no shortage of fans, but my mother insisted, Amarilis, tell that cheap husband of yours that we need an air conditioner, there are people in the neighborhood who already have one and we can’t fall behind everyone else, and I went to look for it in Ciego like I was a goddamn mule, but in Ciego de Ávila there weren’t any. But in Cienfuegos, my cousin who lives there told me on the phone, they’re all over the place, since it’s the best city in Cuba after Havana and might even be better, and my husband: I don’t have money for that, while I: If you don’t give it to me, I’m leaving you, Eduardo, I’m leaving you, what are one hundred and fifty dollars to you, which is what I need to round out the six hundred, and he looked at me from the bed with those disconcerted eyes, and then he went to the bank and gave me the rest for the air conditioner, and I went to Cienfuegos, to my cousin la Pepa’s house, and you see how everything turned out, I couldn’t see my daughter grow up or celebrate her fifteenth birthday with her as I’d dreamed; a good-looking mulato slit my throat and then abused my corpse. I couldn’t attend my own burial. That night when I didn’t arrive, la Pepa informed the police and called Chambas to tell my husband I was missing, and even though we were midharvest and tobacco requires a lot of care, my husband hired a gypsy cab and headed to Cienfuegos, but no matter how hard they looked, I didn’t show up, eighteen months passed and they gave me up for disappeared, for an illegal immigrant via Mexico, there were also rumors that I’d fled with another man, and my parents and my sister Sabina and even la Pepa, who knew me as if I were her daughter, clung to that hope and already imagined me in concubinage with someone out by Minas de Zaza or harvesting apples in Delaware or somewhere else in the Yuma. Eduardo did take me for dead from the beginning, he knew I would never leave our daughter, because ever since she’d turned six years old, I’d been dreaming of celebrating her quinceañera, so he found it strange that I wouldn’t reach out at all, not send a single e-mail, nothing, and when those bloodred boots he’d bought me for my twenty-fifth birthday showed up in a secondhand shop, he hugged them and told the police that now he was sure I was dead.
On May 10, 2009, my husband organized a symbolic burial, and in an empty box they placed my favorite dress, the boots, and a photo from my wedding.
Almost all of Chambas went to the cemetery.
MARIBEL
I saw them arrive. Now Bertica’s really fucked, I thought. She’s become a lesbian. At first, I thought that Araceli was American, she was so white and had that I-didn’t-do-it face that gave me the creeps, but later when I went to investigate, she turned out to be just another starving Cuban, although that starving part is just a saying, because the girl had cash and loads of it, and with money, everything can be smoothed over, and Aurora, Bertica’s mother, adjusted quite well to the girl’s presence even though they only had one room and people were talking. Not me. People. It’s like a cathouse over there! they would say. In there, it’s all the same if the mother sleeps with the daughter, if the mother is with the daughter’s lesbian lover, if all three of them do it at once, anything goes over there at night. They talked, but in reality, no one knew anyt
hing, and then one afternoon, I saw two well-dressed and well-put-together young women come out, and when I asked where they were going, Araceli told me they were going to Ian’s workshop.
“Whose workshop? Are you going to fix a radio or a stove?”
“Poetry,” they said. “We’re going to learn poetry.” And then I discovered that poetry can be learned.
I thought that those things couldn’t be learned, that you’re born a poet and that’s that, but, no, I was floored by that, and later Prince joined them, since he was lonelier than the Devil ever since Gringo had left, and it wasn’t enough for him to give sermons in front of that deranged cathedral that his father and the rest of the crazies never finished building. “The Black Cathedral,” the people of Punta Gorda called it mockingly, the bastards. So fine, that favorite son also got into poetry and went out every Saturday with the two girls to the poets’ workshop instead of devoting himself to his father’s trade, as if there weren’t already an artist in the family: that Johannes, who at the time was studying at the ISA in Havana and had an Italian boyfriend, a young guy, with long hair, tattoos, and pants that were ripped at both knees, who, still, was a nice guy and even went with the father as an equal to build the goddamn Black Cathedral. One time, I asked to borrow twenty dollars and he gave them to me without skipping a beat and told me not to repay him, not like that Johannes, who thought she was all that and never looked at anyone.
Both brothers studied at the high school right in the city, it wasn’t like before when students were forced to go to the countryside to become real men. You could see the Stuarts coming back in the afternoon and each going off to do his own thing: Cricket was good friends with Guts, who back then wasn’t just jerking off anymore but spent his time exercising, he had a body that not even that Arnold Swazz-a-nayer could match. When I saw him, I would say, “Mijito, there’s no food for all of this, the only muscle we women need is right down here,” and I would look right at his fly and he would laugh, but one day, he knocked at my door, and I said, “What do you want, Guts? What’s up?” And he went, “We’re alone, Maribel, tell me now what that muscle is that women like,” and I went, “You could be my son,” and he went, “But I’m not, and I know every detail of your body,” and I went, “Oh, yeah, Peeping Tom! Well then, what if I call the police?” And he went, “I could give a fuck about the police,” and then he came close and I let him kiss me on the mouth, and then we fucked, but I didn’t like it because he was too green for me, he was just a kid. The one I could have had a delicious screw with was Cricket, you could tell he had a really big one, that he had a terrifyingly large cock like my first husband, may he rest in peace, but Cricket didn’t notice me, he was always kind of in love with his own sister. A really sad story, lovesick as a dog for Johannes, no one knew it then, but when what happened, happened, everything came out, and people started to put two and two together and said … they said lots of things, that there was a reason his father beat him, that this or that, but I know they’re wrong, things aren’t that simple. Cricket loved his sister, but silently, a platonic love like they say in romance novels, nobody knew it, the one who hinted at it to me was Guts, who told me, Cricket jerks off thinking of Johannes and sometimes steals her underwear and wraps it around the head of his cock. Guts told me this after Cricket was already working at el Ruso’s bar, charging foreigners, especially the lot of Russians who suddenly began to come through Cienfuegos, as much as he wanted to play out their sexual fantasies with Yusimí. The whole neighborhood knew what the kid was involved in when he started to wear expensive clothes and gold chains and slather himself with cream, shave off all his body hair, get manicures and his brows done; everyone in the neighborhood except for old Arturo Stuart and his wife, the latter because she was kind of a space cadet and the former because he was so focused on his cathedral that he barely noticed anything. When he found out, it was already too late, old Arturo wanted to give his son a beating like the ones that used to leave him stunned, but although Cricket continued to be sinewy, like a stick, it was no longer possible, Cricket was much taller than him, strong, and not afraid of him, and Cricket didn’t believe in anything, less still in God and in that crappy building they called a temple that never finished being built. Arturo threw him out of the house. Leave, he said to him, you’re not my son anymore, cursed be the moment I conceived you. What father says something like that to his son without considering the consequences? The kid took off, but he had money; also, el Ruso gave him a little room in the back of the bar for him to sleep in, a little room with an air conditioner, close to the girls’ room, he only told him not to get involved with Magali since she belonged to Gordo Gris, and Gris wasn’t understanding. “I’m not into men,” people say Cricket replied. She’s had an operation and now even has an ID card with a woman’s name, el Ruso said. Once a man, always a man, Cricket kept saying and, with that, didn’t leave it open for further discussion. No one knew about the human meat yet, so Salvador Pork Chop was still a well-regarded guy in the neighborhood, and since he won the lottery twice in a row, he was getting too big for his britches and didn’t even look at black girls. He didn’t even want light-skinned mulatas. He moved into the room Margot and her mother sold when they moved over by Martí Park and started bringing Punta Gotica’s oldest and dirtiest white women there, whites and homos or transvestites as they’re called, because Piggy was always a hell of a bugarrón, and while his boss, Gringo, lived in Cuba, Piggy held back, but now that Gringo wasn’t there anymore, it was a free-for-all. He lost his looks when Guts beat the hell out of him. He got him in the middle of the alleyway, and there were blows any which way, and then he took out his prick and pissed on him in front of everyone. “El Ruso says to take him what you owe him,” Guts said, and when he left, Piggy, without wiping the urine off himself, began to brag. I’m really something, he said, and came out with My buddy Gringo and I had half of Punta Gorda eating dead person.