by Marcial Gala
I saw the dead man again yesterday. Aramís showed up in my apartment in Old Havana and told me I should move, since a hurricane was coming. He hadn’t changed at all. He was still the same naked white guy, and the wound on his neck still bled.
“So when will I meet the love of my life?” I asked.
“Man or woman?” Aramís said with that sad irony of the dead, and I understood that he couldn’t forgive that Araceli and I had been lovers.
“The gender doesn’t matter,” I told him, “but I want to be truly loved, to be loved like she loved me.”
“But it didn’t last.”
“Nothing lasts.”
“They killed the man who took my life,” he said suddenly. “He wanted to come see you, but I didn’t know if you’d consent.”
“Gringo was executed?”
“His appeals ran out, first the governor of Texas, then the Supreme Court said no; he took it badly, but he wants to know if he can come see you.”
“Gringo is a dark soul and I don’t want him near me … I need brightness, your brightness.” Then I said to Aramís for the hundredth time, “Forgive me for what happened between Araceli and me, it was something we couldn’t avoid. The thing is, Cuban men were hell to deal with, none of them were affectionate with us, they all wanted the same thing, to stick their dick in you and that’s it; we got tired, we needed affection, the real kind, not pretend, so forgive me, Aramís, and rise up, ascend at last to the sidereal regions where the luminous beings like yourself await, don’t let yourself get tangled up in the trash that took your life, stay away from Gringo.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I try to rise, but something prevents me, it keeps me here hovering over the ground like a fumigation biplane. It’s that I’m in an Nganga. Gringo told me so. ‘I was bad, Aramís,’ he told me. ‘I couldn’t just kill you and sell your meat, I gave your skull and bones to my Padrino in Palo, he’s the old gray-haired guy keeping you as a slave, who forces you to do things that you don’t remember later.’”
“I know who he is,” I told him, “and I’m going to save you so you can rise up.”
“Thank you, Berta,” Aramís said, and was erased like a drop of water falling into water.
Last year, three people from the Mecenas publishing house came here, to Havana, to commission from me an anthology of Cienfuegos poets born after ’59. I would have liked to decline the honor, but I needed the money, so I signed the contract and got to work. They didn’t agree to include Prince. He doesn’t seem representative; after all, he was born in Camagüey, they reasoned at first. What about Michel Martín? Or Edel, the thin one, Pereira? Or Ian? Cienfuegos poets, really from Cienfuegos. Jesús Candelario, I suggested to them, and then they claimed they didn’t think it was appropriate to include Prince. He’s a monster, they said, including him would be a disservice to the poetry of Cienfuegos. It’s enough that we’ve got that eyesore of a temple his father built in Punta Gotica.
They did include Araceli.
GRINGO
I had to leave Mía because something in her triggered too much in me, her smooth skin filled me with bad desires, made me want to kill her; for nothing, Mía didn’t have a dime, but I wanted to eat steaks made out of her, and that scared me. It’s one thing to do something in the struggle to get ahead, and another thing entirely to become a filthy pervert who can’t be with a woman unless it’s to ingest her with a side of fries. The day I told her we should end it, she got depressed and was on the verge of moving me with her tears.
“It’s because of that old whore.”
“Yes, it’s because of her.” I told Mía to go to hell.
The dead were inciting me to eat Mía, especially the guajira Amarilis, because like a fool I still kept a piece of her skull and her other bones in the safe of my apartment in Louisville.
ROGELIO
Now they say to me, You gave that up, the possibility of becoming a genius, like maestro Gaudí, and I reply, Yes, I gave it up, but then, I think, you’re born a genius. If it had been in my destiny to finish this, the cathedral of evil, it would be done; besides, I never aimed to be a genius, I always wanted to be one of those anonymous beings you see sitting in the park reading the paper and later don’t remember having seen, I wanted to be one of those people, that’s all. It’s what I am now and I don’t regret it; it’s true that sometimes I take my bicycle, although my wife shouts at me, Rogelio, remember your prostate, you’re going to kill yourself, please, I go over to Punta Gotica and stand staring at the ruins of what could have been my cathedral, a badge of honor, if you will. I close my eyes and think that things could have been different. Now, when the University of Cienfuegos finally has a department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, the dean, who studied with me in Santa Clara, sometimes invites me to give a lecture. “So you can earn a few pesos,” he says condescendingly, affably, lording it over me. When I’m in front of the students, I start talking about Cuban architecture from the year 2000 to now, anxious and simultaneously wanting them to inquire, to ask about the cathedral, and perhaps at last a hand is raised and some young woman is interested:
“And how would we define the Black Cathedral, profe?”
“As madness, genius, or both?” some other young person asks.
I expand. I practically make a compendium of the history of architecture, I go back to the Mayas, mention the Assyrians, then I jump and I’m already in the early European Middle Ages, and they look at me, knowing I am being evasive, that I’m afraid to respond.
“I gave up being great,” I tell my brother Felipe when we’re both drunk. “I gave up being great although an angel showed me the path; it was an angel without wings, so I should have always suspected it was an evil angel, a demon.”
“Don’t get depressed.” My brother studied psychology but didn’t finish his degree, and every day he has to go work as a bookkeeper at one of those little dime-a-dozen food-supply companies, until he retires like me. I’m already retired, and although I spent thirty years working as an architect, my pension isn’t enough to cover anything, I have to draw up some little plan for any old builder to more or less get by. To think that when we were Sacramentalists, Arturo Stuart paid me two hundred pesos a day to build his church.
“Yes, but it was the evil cathedral,” my brother repeats what I myself have told him hundreds of times. “So don’t get depressed.”
“The hell with the evil cathedral,” I say. “Look at the state my house is in, it’s falling apart.”
I should have gone to Europe when I was young, or to the U.S., everything is there. There they still build on a large scale, individual-led architecture still exists there, not like here where everything comes in a Chinese, Brazilian, or Indian catalog, and you can’t do a thing about it.
“Don’t get depressed, let’s talk about baseball.” My brother sighs and takes one of those long sips that only old men take when they’re already drunk.
GRINGO
She was older, but had something delicate and classy about her. The first time we slept together, she taught me how to remove her carbon-fiber-and-plastic leg, then she disrobed, and naked, she was much better. She was no hag, she had fifty-seven years under her belt, but they’d been put to good use. As I fucked her, I looked at that robotic leg that had been left on a shelf, and it was like looking at a strange alien gadget, that turned me on. I also liked racing on those Ducatis, the best thing Italy has given the world since the Renaissance, better even than her Harley-Davidson, which was a classic and all, but too heavy.
I thought she’d never ask me, but after spending nearly a year together, two days before my thirty-first birthday, Margaret asked me to come live at her house, just like that, simply, the way she did almost everything, as if she were the man. Then she noted that she had consulted her Padrino in Candomblé, and he had said I was the right man. What a fucked-up Padrino, I thought, and I acted as if I were praying for a while so she wouldn’t notice anything.
GUTS
&n
bsp; Acting like Arturo Stuart was going to let go of his cash as if he was another black-market pizza vendor, that was El Ruso’s mistake, and on that September afternoon, when Antón Abramovich sent me and Gordo Gris to get the money, the end of his empire began.
GRINGO
We were too visible, even for this country full of outlandish people: a fiftysomething with hair so pale it looked white, who dressed all in black leather, and a young, thin black man wearing Armani, both on a pair of supermodern motorcycles, crisscrossing the county’s local roads at high speed, were attention-grabbing as all hell, and Margaret and I often heard the beeping of patrol cars demanding that we pull over because we were going over the speed limit. We found it funny, all that heat from the police, and sometimes I played el niche: playing el niche was to talk with a pronounced accent, to get a laugh out of it. I liked that about her, she was always ready for a joke or a fight. So many times, I had to fight guys who had looked at her with pity or had offended her in some way. She would jump on them and hit them, that was really something because in the Yuma, any old weakling is over two hundred pounds of muscle, and at my heaviest, I’ve never weighed more than a hundred and eighty, so I was forced to act quickly and directly, always aiming at the chin. Always willing to take out my gun, too, just in case. Sometimes she and I came out losing, but seldom.
I liked that about my old lady Margaret; what I didn’t like was her playing at politics and thinking so much about the poor only to go and drink a five-hundred-dollar bottle of Chivas Regal.
IAN RODRÍGUEZ, Cienfuegos poet and writer
I met the Deacon on a day that looked like rain, so few people came to the workshop because of that. Araceli and Berta brought him. I recall that when I asked him about his literary preferences (I usually interrogate everyone who is starting, to confirm their reading background), he talked to me about William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, poets he was quite dedicated to at the time, although later his manner of understanding poetry had little to do with the work of those American authors. When I stop to think about it, the Deacon’s poetry was similar to that of Rimbaud and San Juan de la Cruz. Perhaps peppered with a tendency toward the postmodern, which suited him. When he joined the workshop, he already had a few things written, with the mistakes you’d expect to find with a beginner, but not bad at all. Many poets with published books would have envied that stack of poems written in a notebook, scrawled quickly by hand, like a trail of ants. That’s why I would say to him, I don’t understand that, read it to me, and he would raise his clear, virile voice that contrasted so sharply with his thin body and its fragile appearance.
He was a natural. He had been born with poetic instinct and was all over the place; sometimes that conspired against the harmony of much of his work. I would say to him, “Inspiration is a wild horse, you can’t allow it to always run free, at the right moment, you have to tame it.” He agreed with me, but taming that tendency toward psychic automatism was difficult for him. Even in the book that ended up receiving the Pinos Nuevos prize, in some poems you can see that accelerated lyricism.
He always came to the workshop in the company of those two girls. The relationship between them seemed to be beyond mere literary camaraderie. I was sure that they were lovers, and I thought that the Deacon was lucky since the young women were very pretty.
Of the two of them, although she was lazy about writing poetry, leaning more toward reading and contemplation, Araceli was the more gifted. She liked hendecasyllables, and her sonnets were rather good, but they didn’t seem like they were written by someone so young. Berta, on the other hand, worked hard on some long, free-verse poems, laborious and stylized, but I always saw that the narrative form was a better fit for her, to be honest. Now that she is such a well-known novelist, when she comes to Cienfuegos on some Casa de las Américas jury or something like that, I recall how sad she got when I recommended she go see Marcial, the one with the bike, or to make the most of Atilio’s being in Cienfuegos, and talk to one of those two. “But I don’t have anything written in prose, what am I going to show them? My tits?” she replied with that hint of sarcasm that could be a bit tiring at times, and that characterized the three of them, especially the Deacon, which I forgave him because I sensed his need to protect himself from society. Many looked down on them because, as I already said, they acted as if they were a trio of lovers. When they came into the bookstore here where I lead the workshop, the employees kept looking at them and went on and on about how that white chick from Santiespíritu landed in Cienfuegos out of nowhere and the little mulata let her stay at her house, and who brings someone into your home if it’s not out of interest, sexual in this case? And that the Deacon, son of that crazy pastor from Punta Gotica who has spent years and years making a cathedral that’s never finished, and it’s so big that one day we’re going to be able to see it from the bookstore doorway without having to raise our heads, he’s also in the middle of it and fucking them both, although the mulata might not know he’s also with the other one, because when she doesn’t come to the workshop because of x or y, look how that little white girl grabs on to the Deacon’s arm, and when class is over, they don’t go to Punta Gotica, but go up the Boulevard, and one day, I saw them go into one of those love hotels where people only go to fuck.
That’s what I heard people saying about them, the times that I was looking for some book or another and was by the bookshelves without them noticing.
GRINGO
Sometimes you have to kill someone even if you don’t want to, it’s something that eats away at you, a disjunctive, as they say; that happened to me with Margaret, my second wife, I would have wanted to spend my whole life with her, but in Louisville, that infamous small town, the game was starting to sour for me. Some people knew me, ranchers who’d seen me with Elsa, who wouldn’t like to see me marry another old American woman, so I told Margaret that we should move to the Big Apple or at least Chicago, because I was a bit sick of the blue prairies and of horses, but she wouldn’t agree. She felt like the alpha female.
“My life is here, darling,” she said, then corrected herself. “Our life.”
Fuck, I thought, I have to lift something off her and get far away, I can’t end up a widower twice over, because these Americans aren’t as dumb as they seem at first.
Besides, I’d grown to feel affection for her, and a guy like me can’t afford the luxury of loving someone as sharp as Margaret, who, deep down, didn’t love anyone. All you had to do was look at the surveillance cameras she had installed to watch the shop’s employees, and how poorly she treated them at those meetings she sometimes asked me to attend.
There’s no such thing as a good cripple, I would think, watching her act as if she was God’s own cousin, thinking so highly of herself because she stayed thin while most women her age were a mass of pudding.
What convinced me was running into another black guy just like me. One day, I’m about to get into my Ferrari when I notice I’m being watched with hostility. I turn around, and a mulato with light eyes who was more or less my size, and with an accent laden with r’s that I disliked from the start, said to me, “You and I need to talk.”
He was Pierre Giscard and he had been my old lady’s lover, according to what he told me when we were sitting at a Starbucks with our espressos in front of us.
He spoke like a gigolo, a guy who thinks he can get anyone to do anything. He had just come back from Toronto, where he’d been sent to train a racing team, and he had just found out the news: Margaret O’Sullivan was now spoken for. I listened to him with the hint of a smile on my face, without taking him too seriously, but suddenly he said his money was running out and that he’d been investigating me and knew something about the strange death of my former wife, and I really didn’t like that.
“I’ll give you something,” I said to him, “so you’ll keep quiet.” I said to him, “How much?” And I took out my checkbook and pen.
He shook his head.
“Do y
ou accept cash?” I asked, playing along, but I had already decided to bump him off, and the total prick told me that, no, what he wanted was for me to leave Margaret alone, she wasn’t the woman for me, and the proof was that they had continued to see each other, and if I didn’t believe it, he had videos of it.
“Well,” I said. “You win … You’re Haitian, right?”
“French,” he said arrogantly. “I’m not Caribbean like you … Leave now, while you can. I have a whole file I’ll give to the police, so you know.”
Then he stood up and the son of a bitch dared to hold out his hand to me. I shook it and smiled.
When he left, I got in the Ferrari and turned on the computer in the car. I went on the Internet and Google described Pierre Giscard as a former Formula One champion who, following an accident, was left with a head injury that caused erratic behavior and kept him from driving race cars.
He was a fool. If he had been the slightest bit sharper, he would have realized he couldn’t take me on. Perhaps then he and Margaret would be alive, but he made a mistake, he thought I was a guy like him, the kind who trusts in laws and lawyers. That night, when we had just gone to bed, I asked Margaret if she knew a certain Pierre, and she got tense. She avoided my gaze when she said he was a friend, that was all, an unhappy kid who was as wounded as she was, even though you couldn’t tell.
She’s up to something, I told myself.
I spent three weeks watching the guy. I became an expert on him. I came to know where he lived and what his habits were. He didn’t have friends, except for another Frenchman, a chef at one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants, and Margaret, my wife, whom he usually visited when he assumed I wasn’t home. I also avoided running into him. It only happened once, at the same Starbucks, and I told him that, yes, I was leaving, but he had to give me some time to get my affairs in order. The guy believed it, sighed loudly, and again shook my hand with his—thin, muscled, but lacking in energy. It was like shaking a dead bird.