by Marcial Gala
Nobody seemed to believe him, but two days later a Lada from the DTI stopped at the entrance to the alleyway, and they carried off Pork Chop. He sang more than Pavarotti, and they gave him twenty years. They told Gringo over the phone. I think Nacho Fat-Lips was the one who told him. Don’t come around Cuba anymore, they know everything.
GRINGO
I hated her smile full of teeth that looked perfect and turned out to be fake. I hated her son Jimmy, a middle-aged lazy ass who looked at me over his myopic glasses and confused Cuba with Haiti. I hated her little daughter Evelyn, too, even though I fucked her, I hated her from the start. When I seduced her that afternoon of barbecue and country music, here in Texas, at her husband’s ranch, I fucked her every which way. I had to put my hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t yell. “Blanca puta, blanca puta,” I whispered in her ear. She loved that, she had taken a Latin American literature class in Philadelphia and spoke a little Spanish, she was pretty the way Americans are, long legs, a sad doll’s face, and no behind whatsoever, her lack of a posterior was worrying. But her tits were enormous and she knew how to show them off when she came up to me, on the arm of her husband, that meathead John Gordiner, an attorney, apparently.
“What did you study in Cuba, Richard?” Gordiner asked me that first time we saw each other at his ranch, Blue Bird, and I thought, This guy’s a maricón, only a maricón thinks of calling his place Blue Bird.
“Construction technician,” I replied, and smiled at the same time as if to say, I’m the stupid black guy, you fucking gringo, who’s going to enjoy your mother-in-law’s money right here, that money saved up by the late Brian S. Pound, illustrious physician.
“Are you two thinking of getting married?” the daughter asked me, in the most blatantly gossipy way, looking at her mother and me in a way that made me feel like I was still in Punta Gotica, talking to some old biddy in the neighborhood.
“We’ll think about that later,” my old lady replied, then laughed her laugh, like a giraffe in heat, that made me want to smack her.
I can’t stand Americans and I knew it from the first, they’re so full of themselves. Bullshit, second-class people are what they are.
I knew I was going to screw Evelyn, ever since she’d asked me, “Do you like literature? I have a lot of novels in Spanish and could lend you some.”
“I love to read,” I said, because American TV was horrific, and to get away from my old lady, Mrs. Elsa Pound, whose maiden name was Elsa Williams, I would do anything, I was so repulsed by her smell. That smell and the way she repeated “My God, my God!” when we screwed. Those would have been reasons enough to kill her; nevertheless, she didn’t have a single freckle, her skin was white, smooth, and without many wrinkles, and she wasn’t really very fat, at least not so much as to smell in that way that reminded me of fucking Piggy, who, according to what Nacho told me on the phone, broke and ratted me out, screwing himself in the process. They didn’t execute him, but he did get twenty years. That Piggy will die a miserable man, never getting far, after all.
BERTA
Given subsequent events, it seems strange, but it’s not strange since we’re talking about the Stuarts. I started reading a lot. Because my house was too small, Araceli and I would go to Martí Park and take several books, almost always poetry, but also novels. One day I’m alone at the park, reading Marguerite Yourcenar for the first time in my life (Araceli was hiding, her ex-husband was in Cienfuegos, looking for her, and until he left town, she had rented an apartment close to the police headquarters in the Tulipán neighborhood), when I heard someone approaching me. I lifted my head and there was Prince.
“Introduce me to your teacher.”
“Okay,” I said, and that Saturday I went to get him early and took him to the Dionisio San Román bookstore and introduced him to the other aspiring poets and to Ian.
Ten months later, he published his first poem in a Havana literary magazine, before me and everyone else. Of course, he had always been a reader, and a writer, too. While I was still listening to ballads in English and playing with dolls, he was already trying his hand at verse.
All his poems were about the same thing, death.
The Deacon, that’s what we called him in the workshop, even Ian sometimes called him that. Something clerical about him didn’t go with his age. Even if things hadn’t gone in that direction, so sordid, Prince would have still gone mad.
Of all the Stuarts, the only one who could have passed for normal was Johannes, who also wrote poetry. A few months ago, when I was at the Rome Book Fair, at a gallery near the Cuba stand, I saw one of her paintings, perhaps the best-known one, Cathedral, it’s called, and it’s an interpretation of her parents’ temple. I knew that after what happened, happened, she had changed her name. Judith, she’s called now, another biblical name, it’s crazy, right? At three in the afternoon, my book was being presented and I would have liked to invite her, but she didn’t recognize me, she didn’t even seem to see me, although we were the only two young black women in that entire modern art gallery.
She was dressed like a Hollywood actress and was with her husband at the time, Vicenzo Albertino, the Naples soccer player, a blond guy who didn’t seem like much to me, despite having shoulder-length hair and light-colored eyes. Vicenzo was her third or fourth husband, I don’t know, I’m not keeping track. Now she’s a renowned painter, but the true genius in that family was Prince, only he was mad.
BÁRBARO
I don’t know why I was getting so curvy, but Piggy comes to me one day and says, “We have to talk about something very important, come to my room so we’re both comfortable.”
Until then, I had only talked to him maybe twice, at most, and I blurted out, “What’s wrong with you?”
But he didn’t get too worked up, and said, “Come by and knock five times tonight, so I’ll know it’s you, and open the door quick.”
I waited until ten at night, and what happened, happened. When I got there, Salvador had a bottle of Havana Club, two little cans of soda, and a glass of ice on top of the table. He put on music on a small CD player and asked me to unwind. I agreed, he served me a drink with lots of soda in it, like I like it, and I drank it, then he asked me to dance.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said when the song was over, because I felt a little dizzy.
“Don’t go down the toilet,” he said jokingly, and when I came back to the living room, he had his cock in his hand.
“Take a look and see if you like it,” he said, and I liked it, so I knelt down.
But before sucking it, I said, “Don’t come in my mouth.”
BERTA
That he was in love with his sister, I don’t believe that. Cubans are like that, always looking to put a melodramatic shine on everything; after all, we grew up steps from a temple that they never finished building, and besides, if it had been built, what good would it do? Another monument to nothingness, although, of course, I’m not the best person to talk about Cricket. After he left home, I barely saw him, I wasn’t crazy enough to go over to el Ruso’s bar, perhaps the most infamous place in Cienfuegos.
GRINGO
It’s hard for me to pinpoint the exact moment I started to get sick of my old lady, but one day I asked myself how long I could put up with her, and the answer was that I couldn’t anymore, I had to free myself of her. We had settled in Houston, and I had started working with my stepdaughter’s husband, I was something like the foreman or one of the shift managers at that scrap-processing plant of which Elsa was one of the main investors. I had to wake up early every day, get dressed, and go to work, but beforehand, of course, I had to get the old lady off. My only real distraction was running, I’d gotten big on exercising, and every afternoon, after work, I would put on my special sneakers and go out to run around the outskirts of the city. I read a lot, my stepdaughter kept supplying me with books. With Evelyn, I did like screwing. We would use a variety of excuses to go out to Blue Bird and we would do our thing there.
Sometimes I had fun calling Cienfuegos, pretending to be someone else. Once, I had Maribel waiting for a package that turned out to be an extra-large vibrator. “Have yourself some fun,” I put on the paper I sent with the box. Maribel sold it to el Ruso, since the vibrator was one of the good ones, and our tovarish needed it to get more money out of his girls, Berta later told me, she still didn’t know about my dealings with human flesh since Piggy hadn’t broken yet and I was still looked up to in the neighborhood. Not even in Houston was there a bar like el Ruso’s, so satisfying, although it’s true I should admit that the girls here, at first glance, were better, almost all of them blond with big tits, but in the end those tits were filled with silicone and many of them weren’t even women. Here, you’re forced to be careful about almost everything.
What I liked best from my whole time in Houston was meeting this Indian chick who used to run along the same road I did, and who I saved from some useless piece of shit. I just had to kick the guy’s chest so he would leave, and she repaid me with sex. She hadn’t yet turned twenty-five, she was kind of skinny and had no ass, but she had these small tits with purple nipples that fit perfectly in my mouth, knew how to speak French, and read me Bukowski poems. I liked that. I also liked that she considered me a refined, classy guy and thought I had gone to college. Just because I’d read Vargas Llosa and Javier Marías, she thought I was an intellectual. Nadine, that was her name, and she believed that the United States needed to disband, and when she got to talking about that, she would go on and on as if it were the worst place in the world. She was proud of being Apache, although you could tell she wasn’t pure-blood, her mom was from Quebec. Sometimes when we had sex, I would yell in Spanish at her, “¡Gran jefa india yegua salvaje!” She understood the joke and would laugh. If I had had money, I would have stayed with Nadine, but to see my plans through, I needed to take my old lady, Elsa Pound, away from Houston, out of Texas even. I started talking to her about Kentucky and its blue fields, and saying I wanted to breed horses, and through looking on the Internet, I even found a good, cheap ranch for sale, near Louisville.
Now, as I think of that, I wonder how someone that old—Elsa had just turned sixty-six—could be such a fool, and I have no answer. To think that such a young man—I was only twenty-eight years old—had fallen in love upon seeing her in a grocery store is naïve enough, but to take out a life insurance policy in that young man’s name and then leave the place where all of your properties are, where your husband of many years is buried, and move far away from your only family, requires a healthy dose of idiocy or an out-of-control taste for black dick. It almost inspired pity. But you’ve got to live, I said to myself, and when we moved, I let two years go by when I practically became a cowboy from riding horses so much. My favorite one was a mare called Boise, whose nimble gait and jet-colored pelt reminded me of Johannes. For a while, I also became a fan of races and even saw the Derby. The horse breeders didn’t have any respect for me; they thought, rightly so, that the only mare I had tamed was Mrs. Elsa Pound.
One summer afternoon, I said to her, “Darling, I need to go to Miami to see my brother. I’m going in six days, but I’ll be back right away.”
She didn’t feel well, diabetes was doing quick work on her, so she agreed.
“I’ll stay with Melody,” she said. “Do not worry.” Melody was the maid, a Vietnamese girl who was almost invisible, she was so small and thin.
“Okay,” I said, and on the Thursday of the trip, I left in one of the cars in the direction of the airport.
I got about five hundred or so yards from the house. I made a U-turn. I jumped the fence. The dogs, since they knew me, didn’t bark. I climbed to the second-floor bathroom window, which I had left open to get in, and made the most of the fact that my old lady, at that hour of the day, tended to relax in her Jacuzzi listening to music, and I pushed the small CD player into the tub and she was electrocuted. Then I went out the window again. I took the car. I got to Louisville. I left the car in a lot near the airport and I boarded the plane headed to Miami.
The next day, Melody, blabbering in an English that was difficult to understand, informed me by cell phone that I was a widower and had to return urgently to Sweet Grass, that was what our ranch was called.
The burial was in Houston, and from the beginning, when they saw the size of the insurance policy, they suspected me, although they limited themselves to giving me dirty looks and making it clear I wasn’t part of the family. They didn’t understand how my wife could have thought to leave me $150,000 hard cash; in addition, she left me the ranch. To Evelyn and her brother, she left everything else: the shares in the scrap-processing plant, the enormous suburban house, and an apartment right in Manhattan; still, that wasn’t enough for them.
After the funeral, I rented a room in one of the city’s best hotels and called Nadine.
I spent my time screwing to forget my pain. I would have taken her with me, but in my absence, Nadine’s inclination toward terrorism had increased and she talked about killing thousands of “federal fucking pigs” and of snuffing out some immigrants through a bomb she’d place at Houston Stadium.
“I already have the C-4 for it, but I just have to get the cell ready. Help us, Richard, I can tell you know about weapons, what do you say?”
“Annihilating immigrants like me?”
“Not like you.”
“You’re a crazy bitch,” I said, thinking that I, who had only wiped out four people, was nothing but a snot-nosed boy explorer compared to her and her minions.
A week later, I’d cashed out my policy and left for Kentucky to sell the ranch to the only one of the other landowners I liked: an old guy, the son of an Austrian Jew who’d been gassed under Hitler. The hardest thing was saying goodbye to my mare Boise.