The Black Cathedral

by Marcial Gala

  “Congratulations, your store has a lot of style.”

  She looked me in the eye, then she looked at my clothes, you could tell she was thinking something like Who the hell does this asshole think he is? I almost liked it, actually, on her own she was nothing special, thin as a rail, but she had an ass, not much, but for an American it was something.

  I could have told her I was African and that I was part of my country’s nobility, but I thought that athletes love other athletes, so I casually mentioned that I played baseball, and she wrinkled her cold little nose and made a sigh of disdain. She hates blacks, I thought, but then she asked if what I had on my wrist was an ildé.

  “Of course, I’m a Babalawo.”

  Margaret rolled up the sleeve of her black jacket and showed me her forearm, around which she also wore a blue-beaded ildé.

  “Yemayá,” I said, and she opened up to me like a flower. She took me to the shop’s bar, and there, surrounded by the images of motorcycles that had won a bunch of championships and rallies, she started to tell me about the time she had spent in Bahía, where she had practiced Candomblé, some sort of Brazilian witchcraft, since she was married to Enzo Campeiro, a Formula One racer she’d met in Morocco at a championship organized by the king, and who was later one of the thousands killed on September 11, 2001.

  “Ever since then, you hate Arabs,” I interrupted her, but she said no, that what she was afraid of, terrified of, were extremists, no matter where they came from, and that Bush and all of his super-Christian and Republican buddies got her out of sorts.

  “They’re turning this country to shit,” she said.

  She was talking and I was taking sips of vermouth and nodding my head yes, trying to avoid sticking my foot in my mouth again, since this kind of woman can be hell to deal with if you start talking nonsense. You can’t deny this about American women, they’re classy, even if ultimately they’re all the same. They spend their days doing things for other people, helping black Haitians, or collecting money for unhappy Thais, et cetera, et cetera, that’s how they are; in the end, Margaret was something special, it was a shame I’d met her when she was already so old, since in the pictures decorating the walls, she looked like a movie star, riding on her Harley with a smile ear to ear and a flower wreath around her neck: CHAMPION OF THE CASABLANCA–RABAT RALLY.

  “The accident happened after that.” She told me about her fall, not from a motorcycle, but from a car going over ninety miles an hour on the French Riviera, days after finding out that Enzo had died. “They operated on me in Seattle.” She looked at me with wide eyes.

  While looking into her gray irises, I couldn’t help but inquire with a sigh, “And then?”

  “I had to get a prosthesis.”

  She rolled up her tight pants and showed me her leg, not a plastic one like a doll’s, like the kind you see in Cuba, where almost all the lame go around on just one leg, and if they’re lucky, they get a stiff prosthesis, but rather a sophisticated robotic extremity made of carbon fiber.

  I was happy that Margaret was missing a leg.

  I had exactly $175,493 left, and that’s nothing here, it’s practically condemning you to become a pizza delivery boy; besides, I had to pay for a new identity, I couldn’t go on being the widower of the deceased Elsa Pound, since these yumas don’t forget, and credible papers that you can show without trembling in your boots are expensive.

  ILEANA

  I had to deal with that Johannes for over ten years, and when I say deal with, it’s because we started at the Basic School for Visual Arts in Cienfuegos, the Benny Moré School, and later we continued at the ENA, and in the end we were at the ISA, and all that time, we thought we were something like friends. Although I now ask myself what our friendship consisted of, since Johannes only had time for one thing: her work. From the beginning, she was an anointed one. When we were still at the Basic School, she spent more time on her creations than any of the rest of us. At the ISA, that quality became more pronounced; we two were the only ones from Cienfuegos in our year, but nonetheless, we interacted very little. I’ve always been a conceptual artist, with little interest in the artisanal, and I was interested in what was contemporary. But I still hadn’t defined my way of approaching art. Johannes already knew what she wanted. She had a method she called anti-Kacho: it consisted of submitting herself to laborious work that began with her writing in a notebook, going on to a photography phase, then she sketched, and after that, on to the canvas, where she applied what she called layers of reality. Those layers of reality were made of oils superimposed with such refinement that, when Johannes finished a painting, what came to mind were the great masters of the late Renaissance. When Johannes decided to show you some of her paintings, you’d think of the Venetian school. Due to that almost mannerist quality of her creations, she was criticized by the faculty at the institute. The teachers didn’t understand the need, in these times of high-definition photography, to paint in such detail. They criticized her so much, but she never gave up her creative method. In the end, she ended up being accepted. Imagine, she participated in the Havana Biennial when she was only in her second year, and at Arte Cubano magazine, one of their most important critics took the trouble to publish a review of her work, along with photos. I still have a copy of that magazine, since Johannes gave it to me. It was one of the few nice things she did for me.

  She never talked about her family, and less still about the cathedral. I have always lived in Punta Gorda, which is the better part of the city, by far. I seldom went to Punta Gotica; for me, like so many other people in Cienfuegos from good families, the city ended to the left of Martí Park. You’re not missing much over there, my late father, may he be in glory, would say, and he boasted that he’d never been to Punta Gotica. But when the church of the brothers of the Holy Sacrament, the Black Cathedral, as the people called it, started to take shape, I would ride my bicycle out to see what had always seemed like the best work in the city of Cienfuegos to me: an exceptional piece of visual art. At that time, I was with the guy who would later be Johannes’s first husband. His girlfriend without our ever having seen each other. I met Guido in one of those many chat rooms on the Internet, and after several virtual meetings where we found out we had many things in common, from our love of rock and heroic fantasy novels to German expressionist films, I sent him a photo and he wanted to come add a physical dimension to our electronic empathy. Okay, I said, and a week later, Guido set foot in Cienfuegos. He was tall, about thirty years old, narrow in the hips, with good pecs, a mango, as you would say these days. I introduced him to my family and they loved him. They especially liked that he wasn’t Neapolitan, they have such a bad reputation in Cienfuegos, but rather, he was from Lombardy. Guido was from Milan itself, the most industrialized city in Italy. When I took him to see the Black Cathedral, he was fascinated. He took a thousand pictures and told me that we Cubans were crazy. Guido worked as the manager at a bank, and he was like that, so expressive, that he seemed Cuban. I introduced him to Arturo Stuart, he was there with the other workers, working shirtless, and Guido was surprised by how his muscly torso contrasted with his gray hair and wrinkled face. He looks like an old mercenary, Guido whispered to me, when the old man, after wishing us blessings, shook our hands and went back to his work laying bricks. He’s the father of a friend of mine from school, I made the mistake of saying. He wanted to meet her, and when we were back in Havana and I took him to the ISA dorms and introduced them, everything ended between us. He liked Johannes. She had that quality that attracted a lot of foreigners, especially if they were European. To many Cubans, Johannes was just one more black girl, pretty enough, but too dark for our tastes. With outsiders, everything was in her favor; she was so proud, she seemed like an Egyptian princess. Many people thought she was a dance student, not a visual artist. To sum things up, she took my boyfriend. She did it her way, as if she didn’t realize it, making herself to be innocent. He invited her out and she went. Later, if I asked her, s
he would say, looking at me with those brown eyes of hers, We were talking about art, he wants to buy a painting from me. Hypocrite. One day I was resolved and asked her to fight. I said, Look, black whore, let’s make the most of it being Sunday and no one being at the school, let’s close the dorm and hit each other until we decide who Guido belongs to, because you’re not going to ruin my damn life. I said all of that, and she, cold as she was, told me that she had taken karate in her early teen years, over there in Camagüey, and a fight wasn’t in my best interest: I’ll knock you into outer space, and as for Guido, you can have him with a side of fries, it’s not my fault he’s chasing after me. When I heard all this, I pounced on her, but they pulled us apart. Later, we spent a long time without speaking to each other. Guido left for Europe. Six months went by, and when I wrote to him, he was cold toward me. In the end, I wrote him an e-mail clarifying that I wasn’t anybody’s leftovers and telling him to go to hell. He replied that was fine.

  When he returned from Italy, he was already Johannes’s boyfriend. He would go pick her up at the dorm and they would kiss practically in my face, and, well, it was so enormously disrespectful that one day I put a Nirvana song on the MP4 and took some pills so I could just float away. Some roommates saved me. I spent a fair bit of time seeing a psychologist at the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital and ended up understanding the serious mistake I was about to make, ending my life because of those two thoughtless people, especially her, who was supposed to be my friend. I’ve already forgiven her; after all, she has suffered enough, despite being a millionaire. Money and fame don’t take anyone’s pain away, that much is clear to me.

  GRINGO

  I had gotten hooked on nightlife. I liked a little Chilean whore, Mía, who had been an acrobat in the Cirque du Soleil, and now she had classy and selective customers. I wasn’t a customer to her, I was something like a lover, but she had even more expensive taste than I did, and although she insisted on paying, many times I was the one who dropped the dough, so she wouldn’t think I was a pazguato, and to uphold my country’s honor here with pride, so far away from lovely little Cuba, in this Louisville, the northernmost city in the South, where everyone just thinks about horses and fancies that they’re from the Wild West. I had become sophisticated, I, who had spent my childhood in flip-flops. I covered my whole body in the moisturizer recommended by a famous actor, and I got a manicure once a month, and I went to races and bet, very little, but I bet all the same, all to rub shoulders with loaded women, so that I knew the hippest places in Louisville and was known in them, since I’ve always been a generous tipper, so when the waiters saw me come in with Margaret on my arm, they bent over backward to serve us, some covertly winked at me, the idiots, since Margaret, although she looked good for her age, was a hag in comparison to me, who spent my days running and at the gym, boxing with a trainer who protected my face.

  I really did like that little Chilean chick; actually, she had turned thirty already and was depressive, sometimes she would cry since she was very Catholic and she was ashamed of having sunk so low, that was why she wasn’t going back to her country, so I told her to lie like everyone else does, to say she was a crocodile hunter in the swamps of Zapata.

  “And where’s that?”

  “In Cuba, but while they work out where it is, they’ll start getting used to the idea that you were a whore.”

  BERTA

  Sometimes we got out of the workshop early, and Prince would invite us to have ice cream. The line was very long, so Araceli, he, and I would sit on the Prado to wait and we’d talk. I didn’t love him anymore and could look at his face without feeling those old butterflies. Now I admired him a lot. He seemed destined for great things, especially if he managed to focus, make poetry the center of his life, and forget about preaching at that crazy church of his father’s. Those were beautiful days. Araceli had told me she loved me. She said it one afternoon when we were alone at my house, reading Ángel Escobar, and I didn’t know what to say. I’d never had relations with any woman, but her mouth smelled like almonds, and smells are important to me. I had spent a lifetime suffering the bad breath of my neighborhood’s various drunks. I had promised myself never to kiss anyone who smelled like alcohol, cigarettes, indigestion, or cavities.

  Araceli was perfect. Despite having been married and even having cheated on her husband, she had something virginal, innocent about her that was even reflected in her poems, the majority of them written in prose. Poems that the teacher would critique a lot since they weren’t urbane, nor did they seem like they were created by someone so young. I really do like Araceli’s poetry, including the majority of her work as a teenager. When we’ve seen each other again, now she works in television, I’ve asked her about her early writings and she hasn’t known what to say. It has been easier for her to propose—Sleep with me, please, I need it so, so much—than to talk about her poetry. That’s normal in Cuba, your light goes out and then you’re afraid to turn it on again. One day, we’re going to write a novel together, she proposed, the last time we saw each other, there in the TV studio where her program is broadcast from. She was made-up to go on air, that’s why her face reminded me of a geisha’s.

  “A novel that covers everything, from the cathedral to the Stuart brothers, including our love, because we really loved each other, right? I never imagined I would love a woman and less still one named Berta; meeting each other changed our lives, right?”

  “Yes. What about Aramís? Will Aramís be in your novel?”

  She didn’t reply since at that moment the producer came over to tell her only three minutes were left. She blew me a kiss and said, Later we’ll definitely see each other, wait for me, we’ll go in the car to see the Carlos Varela concert.

  “Okay,” I assured her. Later didn’t happen, I left.

  But that afternoon on the bench in the Prado in Cienfuegos with our dreams almost intact, waiting our turn at the Coppelia ice cream shop in Cienfuegos, we would listen to young Prince and it seemed like everything was going to be different. Now I understand that was one of the few peaceful periods gifted to us by life: Araceli’s husband was no longer hauling himself out to Cienfuegos with the sole purpose of killing her for being a whore and a lesbian. Prince was far from being the monster he would later become; my mother was alive; and I was happy. Not in a thunderous, showy way; I was quietly happy little by little, in small pieces, almost without being aware of it. I read a lot. The three of us read a lot, and truly, I didn’t worry about how I would soon start to like women. I loved feeling Araceli’s breath on my face, bathing in that breath, everything else slid off of me.

  GRINGO

  She talked a lot for an American. By the second date, I already knew her parents’ names and that she had a brother who also raced sports cars, who lived in Monte Carlo. She talked, but she watched you with inquisitive eyes, penetrating you, assessing each of your words, and barely gave you the chance to touch her. Three weeks went by before she would let me graze her lips with mine. The thing was, she had a complex about our notable age difference and her being lame.

  “I found my twin soul in you,” she confirmed at last after our first tongue kiss, and I looked at her with just a smile and a nod. Later, when I was alone, I devoted myself to looking up facts on the Internet so that my ignorance wouldn’t be so obvious. I’ve never been an idiot, really, and if it weren’t for that English teacher I seduced in the ninth grade, perhaps I would have been a model kid, since I liked studying and spent hours and hours consulting Wikipedia and Encarta and a variety of digital newspapers and magazines, all to ensnare Margaret. Mía, the little Chilean woman, was a great help in this. She knew a lot about American and even European literature; we would go to New York and look in used bookstores there. Sometimes I felt like staying in the Big Apple with Mía and forgetting all about provincial Louisville and Margaret the skinny motorista, but that woman had become a challenge. She knew I was a widower, of an older woman like her, also American, and coincidentally al
so a bleached blonde. That seemed strange to her. Honestly, it would have seemed strange to me, too.

  BERTA

  My love for Prince drained like water when you remove the plug from the sink, and the three of us could sit on the same bench in the Prado. Prince would sit between the two of us, and Araceli would caress my right hand without him noticing. At the time, Prince had already sold the motor scooter he’d inherited from Gringo, so we would go back to the neighborhood together after. He was still beautiful, although he didn’t seem as delicate as before and didn’t have his brother’s animal attractiveness. He looked like a model since he wore the clothes that Johannes’s foreign boyfriend used to give him. He always went around with a blue notebook that had his poems in it, but also the drafts of his sermons, and some homework assignment or other. Araceli, meanwhile, used a sophisticated notebook that zipped up, on which she had carefully inscribed the word POETRY in all caps. I also had a notebook solely for my writing. I don’t know what could have happened to Prince’s poems. If I see Johannes again one of these days, I’ll ask her. At the time, they seemed good to me, and daring, not for their form, which was rather conventional, but for their ideas. At the workshop, we three also sat together, so some smart aleck gave us the nickname the Punta Gotica Crew. Since they didn’t know Prince was Arturo Stuart’s son, they would talk about the cathedral and the crazy man who’d thought of building it, and how the authorities were even crazier to allow it. Prince didn’t say anything. He used to laugh. He had even white teeth and his hands … I’ve never again seen a man with hands like that, beautiful with delicate, long fingers. They made you want their caress. Could he be homosexual or does he not like people of his own race? I would think, trying to catch his eye, since I knew I was pretty and, since Araceli and I still had gold left, we dressed well.