The Black Cathedral

by Marcial Gala

  “All clear, then?” he had the gall to ask.

  “Yes,” I said to him. “Don’t say anything to Margaret. I don’t want her to hate me.”

  “Okay.” He smiled.

  I spent a whole week wondering how I would enter his home. Coincidence helped me. One day, I discovered that the guy hid his key under the welcome mat so a Colombian maid called Lourdes could come in and clean. The maid went every other day: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. The other days, this Giscard had the key with him. The Colombian got there around nine in the morning. I took a risk. I prayed that no neighbor would see me, got to the front door of the Frenchman’s house, lifted the mat, and copied the key on a piece of clay I’d bought at a toy store for kids. The next day, I took a bus to New York. On a Brooklyn street, I found a Puerto Rican locksmith. Everything else was easy. On a Tuesday, at three in the afternoon, I entered Giscard’s residence. I put a silencer on my .45 and waited for him on the sofa. He took about two hours, but I finally heard some light steps, at first, then the key entering the lock. He opened the door. He put his briefcase on the steel-and-glass table, then lifted his head and saw me. He managed to take off his glasses. I didn’t let him speak. I shot him in the face. I didn’t do it out of revenge, I even liked him, he was a classy guy like me and had a way of carrying himself that reminded me of Prince, but one of us was enough.

  I opened his closets and dressed in one of his track suits, all Nike, branded all the way down to the drawstring. I covered my head with an authentic Yankees cap. I put my own suit in a backpack. Then I took the keys to his car, a new Volvo. I put the corpse first in a plastic bag, then in an enormous black suitcase I’d brought with me. I went down the stairs with that suitcase and shoved the deceased in the trunk of the Volvo.

  I went back to the dead man’s home. I turned on the laptop I’d found on the table. I opened a Word document and wrote out a plot to murder Margaret O’Sullivan for being a slut and a bitch, and Ricardo Mora, alias Richard, for taking advantage of her.

  BERTA

  We played with words, I now recall; we pronounced one and it was like the syllables stayed in the air until we said more, and then they popped like soap bubbles. We played with words. It’s a way of approaching the poetic, Ian the teacher would say, and we, Araceli and I, would take the words to the dock facing the sea, the part of Cienfuegos we liked most, and continue the game there. Lapis lazuli, I would say, and Araceli would respond with the word transparency. We played with words, and sometimes Prince came with us, but he didn’t play. The sea seemed to be enough for him. He would go mute looking off into the distance, he would seem old, an old age that transcended us, an ancestral old age. He wasn’t happy, perhaps that is why his poems were so good. We were happy. We couldn’t help being happy. We were in love and my mother was starting to realize it. “Wouldn’t it be better,” she would say, “if Araceli started looking for her own place to live already? The two of you spend a lot of time together.”

  We played with words.

  GRINGO

  I killed her the following morning, I recall that a light rain was falling, the harbinger of fall. I already had in hand the passport and driver’s license that claimed my name was Albert Rodríguez, an American citizen of Costa Rican origins. Those papers had cost me sixty thousand dollars, but they were of such good quality that I was able to use them to buy the .45 with which I did away with first Giscard and then my wife. I let her die doing what she liked so much, riding her perfect Harley-Davidson. I was on the Ducati. We stopped at an intersection for a stoplight. I was a few inches behind her. I took out the gun.

  “Goodbye, my love,” I whispered, and shot at the base of her skull. I didn’t care about the traffic cameras at every stoplight in this country. I saw her fall over like a bird, and I took off without waiting for the green light. In my backpack, I had exactly $750,000 that I’d taken out of the safe.

  I put away the motorcycle she’d given me for my birthday and the .45 in a barn on the outskirts of the city. Pierre Giscard’s corpse was already there. I set the barn on fire, but beforehand, I took the guy’s Volvo out, and as I drove it, I said goodbye forever to Louisville and to Ricardo Mora, alias Gringo. Or so I thought.

  ANTÓN ABRAMOVICH, a.k.a. EL RUSO

  When I was young, I looked like Prince Andrew, small in stature and good-looking. I’ve never had a belly or a jiggly body, but back then I had the body of an ephebe in classical Greece. I’m from Tula, where the best weapons were made in the time of the czars, and where the great Leo Tolstoy is buried. My father was a professor in Tula University’s History Department, but during the Great War, he fraternized with an American friend who loved archaeology and everything medieval. The conflict ended, and my old man and the American made the mistake of continuing to exchange letters, and that wasn’t good at all for the Soviets. My papa was expelled from his chair at the university and was this close to being sent off for a spell in Siberia. Fortunately, Stalin died, and my father moved to Ukraine. The five of us moved into a building on the outskirts of Kiev: my parents, my two sisters, and me, when I was only five years old. At eighteen, I wanted to be a pilot, but it wasn’t meant to be. With a father like mine, the authorities didn’t think it appropriate to lend me one of their planes—The best in the world, they would say. I had to settle for industrial engineering. Since then, I promised myself not to ever place my trust in any state again. I’m going to make money, I told myself.

  I got to Cienfuegos in the eighties, seven years after graduating, surrounded by other bolos, most of them Russian, but there were also Ukrainians, Moldavians, Byelorussians, Kazakhs, Armenians, and everything else. I learned everything here, to bathe regularly, to use deodorant, to truly enjoy a woman, and, something important: I learned that you can’t be afraid. If you’re afraid, buy a dog, as the Cubans say. Here, I confirmed something I’d already suspected: that I’m black. I suspected it because from a young age I liked jazz, the blues, salsa, and when I came to know the black woman, I fell hard and married Margarita, an English-literature student. My Queen Margot, I would call her. Things were going well for us because I was paid in rubles. Money was made to fill my pockets. Later, the Soviet Union turned to dust, my father died, and three years on, my mother also died. I stayed in Cuba and reaffirmed my purpose of becoming someone, un negro ruso de salir, as the Cubans say. Then, when I already had my bar, which drew the most select clientele from Europe, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, anxious to enjoy all kinds of sexual perversions in good company, I met Yusimí, a black girl with Indian features, with long hair, green eyes, tall, thin waisted, and with a nicely shaped behind. Her own aunt, a woman called Maribel, introduced her to me.

  “Look,” Maribel said to me. “The girl came from Guantánamo and has a really bad situation at home, she’s willing to do anything as long as she can make a buck.”

  “Anything? Let me try her.” That was my mistake, I went to bed with Yusimí, who was only fifteen years old then, and I wasn’t able to be true to myself and buy her a house and reserve her for my personal use; no, I gave her to the dogs, human ones as well as ones on four legs, I got a lot of money out of her, but it hurt me when someone touched her. It hurt me as if someone was putting needles under my fingernails. It hurt me, but the money, the dinero, the bucks, the dough, the kopecks, the lettuce, the pesetas, the drachmas, the kroner, these are everything in life, the only thing you can believe in. Falling in love is shit; if Yusimí hadn’t bewitched me, I wouldn’t have wasted time messing with the Sacramentalists, I would have left that old madman Stuart alone, but I wanted to prove something, I needed to. I needed to prove to Yusimí that I was an alpha male, that here in Punta Gotica not even a leaf moved without my permission, and I ruined myself.

  GRINGO

  Five days later, they were talking on CNN about the extermination of Margaret O’Sullivan, former world motorcycling champion, first woman to participate in the Casablanca–Rabat rally, and of her good-looking husband, the Cuban
-born athlete Ricardo Mora, dead under circumstances that had yet to be clarified, because while Margaret O’Sullivan had been finished off by a shot to the head while riding her Harley-Davidson, the charred corpse of Ricardo Mora was found in a stable on the outskirts of Louisville. Said barn had been deliberately burned down. Supposedly, the police possessed a recording from a traffic camera. Said recording implicated a certain young man of Brazilian origins turned French national, Pierre Giscard, who had been going out with Margaret O’Sullivan before she met Ricardo Mora. The police hadn’t been able to find Giscard, who hadn’t returned to his apartment since the night of the events. Ricardo Mora was the owner of a Ducati, a gift from the deceased, and the remains of a motorcycle were also found at the stable, besides the tire marks left by a pickup truck. But what most implicated the aforementioned Giscard was a murderous plot found on the hard drive of his laptop.

  All this I heard and watched as I drank a Cuba Libre, lying in bed in a Hilton in Chicago.

  GUTS

  El Ruso made a mistake, I think now as I stroll down Las Ramblas, a mistake, but he was like that, especially if Yusimí with the green eyes was nearby. He had to show off.

  “Go back,” he said to us, “and tell him that Antón Abramovich doesn’t talk to the same person three times.”

  It was a mistake, but since Yusimí was looking at him with those eyes of hers that were as vacant as her head, had her legs crossed so you could see the edge of her panties, and was also caressing that Alaskan husky he’d brought himself from Russia, you couldn’t say to him, Listen, Ruso, you’re making a mistake, because he’d replace you quick as a rocket. So Gordo Gris and I drank the cognac remaining in our glasses, stood up, and went to see Arturo Stuart, knowing it was a mistake of the most serious kind, the kind you can’t easily recover from. Arturo Stuart had connections, real connections: with the American church, with the Cuban government, and God knows who else, and the Sacramentalists in Cienfuegos numbered more than twenty thousand and were fanatics. Besides, Stuart was fearless, a black man of steel, and although he was courteous to us the first time, he was clear: “I don’t want to see you around here again. Please, tell Antón Abramovich to try to build his synagogue, we’ll know what to do.” Abramovich didn’t at all like that Stuart was calling him Jewish. “That fucking black bastard,” he said, and Yusimí was present, so he repeated, “Go see Stuart, but go prepared,” and Gordo Gris and I went to la cuartería where Arturo Stuart still lived with his wife, his younger son, Prince, and his only daughter, Johannes, when she came back from the ISA.

  GRINGO

  You’re forced not to leave any loose ends, you have no choice. I had been living in Chicago for two years when I hear a woman’s voice drop:

  “Ricardo Mora Gutiérrez.”

  I had just gotten out of the car and was in the parking lot of one of the city’s main jewelers, where I’d gone to buy a Rolex. I turn around and there’s Mía. This country is 3.8 million square miles big and she picked the same city as me.

  She was dressed in a depressing way, a miniskirt and a red jacket that matched the garish color of her boots; in addition, she was wearing so much makeup on her mouth and around her eyes that it turned my stomach.

  “Ricardo,” she repeated, and hugged me. “Everyone in Louisville was sure you’d burned up, but I knew it wasn’t like that … I knew you were alive.”

  “Are you working the streets?”

  “Yeah, what do you want from me? Life is hard.” She burst out laughing and crying at the same time. “You know? I’m offering myself for seventy dollars an hour, me, who once charged a thousand bucks for one night.”

  She was no longer the little mystic Chilean from her time in Louisville. Now she was skinny and pale, she looked like death. It wasn’t good for me to be seen with her, and I was about to brush her off, but then she told me that the police hadn’t bought it, they’d interrogated everyone I knew, but she hadn’t said anything.

  “Are you using?” I asked.

  “Yes. Angel dust.”

  “Why didn’t you go back to Chile?”

  “Nobody wants me in Santiago, I wrote to my older brother and he said that if I went there, he’d kill me … They found out I was a whore here. Berenice wrote to them.”

  Berenice was her cousin, a fat little woman who didn’t look anything like Mía and worked as a nurse.

  “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing, he was right, I’m a whore … Please buy me a coffee.”

  Mía started crying, she was really down. I took her to my house and gave her five hundred dollars. She wanted to pay me in sex; I didn’t want to, but I gave her some advice.

  “Get lost, leave Chicago, and don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

  But she didn’t leave. Two weeks went by and on a rainy Thursday when I was coming back to my house, I noticed someone sitting on one of the steps to the front door. It was her.

  It was spring, but in Chicago, it was cold out; in addition, she was wet, she smelled like vomit and cheap-whore sweat.

  “Come in,” I said, and she sat down on my new sofa, without any concern for her wet clothes.

  I wouldn’t have wanted to harm her, really, but in the U.S., there are 300 million inhabitants and when you’ve just arrived, you think it’s easy to get lost, but it’s not like that, everything is tracked here, and the papers I had in Albert Rodríguez’s name had cost me a lot and I wasn’t willing to lose it all because of a junkie like Mía, who was surely going to talk about me, if not right away, then when she was high. I had to do it, I liked her and she was a very good fuck, but it was her or me. I had no choice.

  “How did you get so low?” I asked, when I served her some coffee, and she told me that after I’d left her, she met an artist, a painter from Soho who was a poet like her, and they’d gone to Peru together and had climbed up to Machu Picchu, but the painter had gone mad. She didn’t share any more details, only added that this guy had stolen more than ten grand in jewelry and had purchased a painting under the impression that it was van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

  “Have you told anyone about me?”

  “Of course not, Ricardo,” she said. “Besides, here in Chicago, I only have you; I don’t know why, but now customers run away from me, me, who used to charge a thousand dollars a night.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to leave the city?”

  “Yes, but where was I going to go, Ricardo, with your filthy five hundred dollars?”

  “Don’t call me Ricardo anymore, use Mauricio.”

  “Okay, you’ll be Mauricio,” she said. “Did you really kill her? The witch, I mean.”

  “No. I just don’t want any trouble.”

  “You don’t have anything to fear with me.”

  “Of course not, you’re my little Araucan princess.”

  I stood up from the armchair and sat on the sofa with her. First, I took her right hand and brought it to my lips, then I caressed her cheeks; she purred like a kitten, then I moved on to her neck and squeezed it until she died, with barely a moan. I buried her in the yard. I was sure no one had seen her. My block is quiet. Nonetheless, I later learned there was a witness: an old American woman saw me go inside with a very thin woman and later saw me burying a large heap in my yard, but she didn’t say anything, she didn’t want any trouble, I think.

  I moved to Portland.

  MARIANO MESA GUILLOT

  The intelligent one was the other one, the younger one, Prince, so I wasn’t surprised at all when at only seventeen, he won the Pinos Nuevos prize for poetry, and one day, my wife and I saw him on television, sitting across from the newscaster Raquel Mayedo to answer questions as if he were a movie star. He was much taller, at least six foot three, but he still had that angel’s face he’d always had and seemed less nervous even than the newscaster, as if he’d been born for the camera and knew it. He read one of his poems, it was about the only subject that he had ever found interesting, death. His voice sounded clear and virile. The voice of a pre
acher of lies. The voice of someone as false as a wooden nickel. “He’s evil,” I told my wife, “he may be promising, but he’s evil.” I don’t want to come across as an oracle now, but you could tell, I said it without knowing how evil he could be. I’m sure that the other kid was just a victim of circumstance. To have such a terrible illness while so young must alter anyone’s brain.

  But who am I to judge anyone? I’m a rather mad old man who spent his life trying to cultivate the young, without success. What’s true is that when someone talks to me about that, about the new man, I want to scream. The efforts other educators and I made were enormous, and they practically all turned out bad. Even the good ones aren’t like we expected. I would call them the Black Cathedral generation, if you asked me. Look at Berta, a kid with a talent for words who carried out her dream of becoming a writer. So what? She left her city. She lives in Havana, and that she’s a native of Punta Gotica, the most modest neighborhood of Cienfuegos, barely figures into her novels. Regarding the others, Yohandris lives in Barcelona, the only thing he was good for was to bounce balls off his head during the intermunicipal soccer tournaments, and in the end, he turned out the best because he didn’t go to prison and he helps his aging father financially. He sends him everything from over there, but he doesn’t come to Cuba. Johannes, the only sane one among the Stuarts, is famous now and even shows up in contemporary art books, and according to gossip magazines, she just bought herself a little island in the Mediterranean. I’m sure she’ll meet a bad end. That whole family is destined for a bad end. They’re cursed; I don’t like to use that word because I’m a materialist and I don’t even believe in my own mother, but it’s the truth, those people are cursed. Gringo, well, I’d rather not talk about him, but in the end they gave him a lethal injection. A good way to go for a murderer like that, but I knew him, I was his teacher and I still remember him. I remember his smile and how he was interested in math, and how he sang patriotic songs at school activities, how respectful he was, and how his mother, the late Clara, cared for him. All just to wind up with Salvador the Pig, selling human flesh to the whole neighborhood of Punta Gorda, making them so notorious as cannibals to the neighborhood’s residents that even though years have gone by, when you say, “I’m from Punta Gotica,” they give you a dirty look, and if they’re daring enough, they say, “Ah, the cannibal neighborhood?” Nacho Fat-Lips, that one has spent his days in jail. He has his reputation, as he says, and when he gets out … well, he’s about to get out, it has already been twenty-five years, and he’s been locked up since he was a teenager. Bárbaro, my nephew, is lost, and not because of his homosexual condition, but because he goes around dressed like a woman at the age of forty-five and he throws up such a fuss over any little thing that you want to run and hide, like the child he never was. Something has happened to this generation, I don’t know.