The Black Cathedral

by Marcial Gala

  Was it worth it, all that effort to educate them? I thought that afternoon when Samuel Prince appeared on the TV with his brand-new book, published in Havana, in his hands. I even thought he was going to mention me: I was the principal of his school in his early years of developing as a poet. If not for me, his teachers wouldn’t have authorized him to go to the province library to read during school hours, but he didn’t mention me. Instead, when they asked him about his influences, between Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Lezama, Rimbaud, and Valéry, he named a Pablo, who was his Palo Padrino. That big black guy with a hundred beaded necklaces who could unleash evil all by himself.

  GRINGO

  I shouldn’t have gone back to Texas. But on one of those days when you can’t be outside in Portland even with three coats on, and you go out to shovel the snow and clear the door, Lucy said to me, “Let’s go to Dallas, there’s a fair with auto parts from all over the country, from fucking Mexico, and you can find wonders.”

  Of all the women I met in this country, including Nadine the Indian terrorist, Lucy was my favorite, although the bitch, after she found out all about me, she left me and divorced me through her lawyers. She never faced me again, but I have to admit that there was something about her, she was mulata, short, thin, with a nice ass, and she didn’t look American. She was always jumping from side to side as if she had springs instead of bones. Sometimes she used to worry about where I got my money, but at a certain point, when we had just screwed and were still in bed, I had to tell her I was a secret agent, that I was telling her because I trusted her and she shouldn’t share that information with anyone.

  “Something like Bond,” she said, and hugged me tight because even though we had the heat on, she was always cold and wanting to fuck. She fucked more than Cuban women and was nasty in bed. She learned each and every perversion she found in those ladies’ magazines and later applied them to me. Do this to me, she would say, and then, Do that. I loved to please her, and I thought that since Johannes was never going to be mine, Lucy wasn’t a bad option. I had married her, not to take all her dough, but because I needed to be with someone who seemed like she was from over there, from Cuba. She was the daughter of a doctor of Jamaican origins, who had fought in the Vietnam War like fucking Colin Powell, and of a Greek woman, much younger than him. Lucy was the closest thing to any little mulata walking around Cienfuegos looking for someone to stick it in her. I liked the old Jamaican man, he played basketball well enough, and although he was religious, evangelical, he wasn’t as caught up in all that bullshit as the Christians in Cuba, who spend all day spouting idiocy and thinking they know the divine will. I am sure that’s not how it is, because if anyone knows his will, then God must be an absolute moron. If I knew his will, I would have done better to go to New York on a trip, and not what Lucy and I did, which was pack up the back of the Ford pickup and drive to Texas, without knowing that in that damn state of cowboys, Indians, and Mexicans, an FBI agent, Robert Smith, one of those guys with an insatiable lust for resolving cold cases, was looking for me. He was looking for me because of what happened to Elsa and what happened to Margaret, he had subordinates asking around in Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Waco, and in Kentucky itself. Not satisfied with this, he had put a photo on the Internet in which I appeared with Elsa’s children, all of us happy, standing at the bar at Blue Bird ranch. If I had obeyed my instincts, I wouldn’t have gone back to Texas even by force.

  We spent a week getting there because we had money. I had twenty-four thousand dollars in cash, and Lucy’s generous father, convinced of his daughter’s uselessness, lent her his Gold MasterCard.

  It went well for us along the way, we made the most of the network of small hotels for newlyweds that this country is full of and fucked like crazy. We were also drugged up, but no one noticed: Lucy graduated from a good college, and although she tried, she didn’t talk like one of those crazy black girls. She spoke like a university graduate, the kind who are convinced they deserve everything, and sometimes I couldn’t stand her petulance. But when we were in sync, it was bearable and even pleasing that my wife knew so much about books, art, and so much that was useless in the end, because she needed my help to so much as fry an egg. That, the thing about the books, was the only thing I liked about Lucy having gone to college. I still couldn’t stand American TV, and as far as Latin TV goes, what a load of shit. Sometimes, I thought that that Carlitos Otero and the ass-faced blond presenter from Caso Cerrado had left their brains in lovely little Cuba. So I kept reading, struggling with books, even ones written in English. Lucy helped me to understand the secrets of prose. Sometimes I think that what I needed was time, that if they hadn’t caught me so quickly, I would have made amends and would have stopped being Gringo, Satan, or the diabolical predator as the newspapers in Miami called me, and now I would truly be Albert Rodríguez, an exemplary citizen, a writer, by all accounts, because that was my dream, to start writing someday, to make more realistic stories than most of the others, that don’t teach you anything about life. Another thing I could have been was a singer. That’s what Lucy would say to me when we were driving. We went fast in my brand-new Ford. We would go a hundred miles an hour and I would sing a song by that Joaquín Sabina, who Berta liked so much. She listened to him all the time, I remember.

  “Querías hacer turismo al borde del abismo,” I would sing.

  “Translate it for me,” Lucy would beg, “and look at the road or you’re going to get us killed.”

  But the highways of this damn country are glorious, not like Cuba’s, all full of potholes. I would think about the people in the neighborhood, and Berta. I would have married her if I’d had a different life, if it wasn’t for that Johannes coming to fuck up my life.

  You do sing very good, honey, Lucy would suddenly say, and I would smile, satisfied, and every once in a while, if we didn’t see a patrol car nearby, we’d open the cooler and drink some beer, German or Dutch, as it should be. In sum, I was happily going a hundred miles an hour on a highway smooth as a calm sea without knowing that in Houston, Texas, an Indian Fed, apparently a Sioux, was asking around about me, putting together loose ends, finding clues, convinced that something wasn’t right about the late Elsa Pound’s Cuban widower.

  My arrest was simple. When we were already in Texas, near a little town called Dalhart, we stopped at a gas station, and while Lucy went to the bathroom, I got out to stretch my legs. Then two police came up to me and asked for my identification. It was as if we were in Cuba, where it’s normal for a policeman to see a black man and pounce on him with his claws out, saying, “Carné de identidad.”

  Since I didn’t look like an immigrant, my clothes were of the highest quality, and my new pickup truck exuded comfort and status, I understood that something dire was going on.

  “What is wrong, officers?” I asked, trying to imbue my words with that liquid quality, without consonants, that I learned by hanging around with classy American women, and that without a doubt is a sign of distinction and good English.

  It didn’t do anything for me.

  “Identification,” the police demanded.

  One of them was a Chicano of medium build, while the other one was a tall, strong redhead. They both had their hands close to their weapons. In addition, I was somewhat stoned and drunk, so my movements were slow and I wouldn’t be able to act quickly enough. All that went through my brain while I leaned over and looked in the car’s glove compartment for my driver’s license with the name Albert Rodríguez on it.

  The sun was starting to set, one of them looked at my documents while the other didn’t stop watching me.

  Then the Mexican said, “You have to come with us, Mr. Albert.”

  Lucy despaired when she saw them putting handcuffs on me. She thought I was being arrested for drug consumption and claimed she had connections in Chicago, since she was friends with the wife of the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama, and if they didn’t let me go right then, she would mak
e a scandal like they’d never seen … There will be consequences.

  “We’re saving your life, señora or señorita,” the Chicano cop said in Spanish, mistaking Lucy for one more Latina, and she didn’t understand a word.

  “Don’t you worry, my love,” I said naïvely, thinking that everything could be fixed, since my Padrino’s dead and my own dead woman would know how to get me out of the jam. But when I got to Houston, the FBI agent Robert Smith was waiting for me. Evelyn, Elsa Pound’s daughter, was with him.

  She recognized me right away, of course, although I pretended it was the first time I’d seen her.

  GUTS

  He wasn’t home. It was already six in the evening, and Prince told us that he must still be at the temple. I would have waited for him, but Gordo Gris said to me, “Let’s go look for him there,” and I said, “So let’s go,” and we went.

  GRINGO

  Did I become a hummingbird, or am I still waiting for these people I harmed so much to watch me die? In any event, when the lethal solution fills my veins, I’m going to go to Cienfuegos, I’m going to enter through its bay, I’ll leave behind the neighborhood of Punta Gorda, the port, Martí Park, and I’ll go back to where I was born, Punta Gotica, to be born again. I’m going to be born again and I’ll try not to be a bad guy. I’ll start as someone else. I’ll start by asking forgiveness, first from Elsa, then Margaret, and finally Mía: three women who welcomed me in this cold country and who later I murdered. I’d also ask for forgiveness from Aramís, from the second guajiro whose name I never knew, and Amarilis. Perhaps I should go even further back and ask my mother for forgiveness for the pain of being born from her womb. Even ask God for forgiveness for not having allowed him to make me be born a bird or an insect or an inanimate rock. Ask everyone for forgiveness, ask that fat Billy Holden, who’s carefully drying his tears because he doesn’t want anyone to see that he’s crying for me, for Satan, the murderer of women.

  IBRAHIM

  I saw those two representatives of the Leviathan on earth arrive, those two archdemons who thought they were something because they were armed. The mulato walked ahead, then came the fat one, who seemed like a sperm whale. They were coming to interrupt the Lord’s work. They weren’t able to perceive the host of angels surrounding us. Ignorant men. They arrived and addressed brother Arturo, and he lifted his hammer and brought it down on the head of the fat man, who fell, senseless, and then, looking into the mulato’s eyes, he said to him, “Pick up your companion and go in the name of the Lord.”

  “Amen,” we all said.

  The mulato, a young man with an unpronounceable name who everyone in the neighborhood knew as Guts, crouched down alongside the fat man and said that unfortunately that’s not where things would end, that el Ruso would take the appropriate measures. We all began to laugh. We knew who el Ruso was, a creature worse than a pig’s bite, but we weren’t afraid of him, we were Sacramentalists, the keepers of Christ’s shroud. Who then prevailed over us? No one but God.

  GUTS

  “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to see you around here anymore?” he said to us before we said anything, and he again broke one of the bricks with his small sledgehammer, adjusting it to the necessary size.

  “You’ll forgive us, Arturo,” I said, “but el Ruso says—”

  “El Ruso can kiss my ass and God’s, you know?”

  “Stop sucking so much cock, you fucking loon, fucking black monkey, what the fuck do I care about your God, cojones,” Gordo Gris said.

  The old man let him finish. He let him slap at him and get close enough to push him in the stomach, and for a moment he seemed to turn tiny, as if he’d become afraid of Gordo’s three hundred pounds on his six-foot-two frame, but then he smiled.

  “You’re too fat for God and for me,” he said, and went at him quickly with the hammer, so quickly that I was left stunned, and if I had time, actually, I’d go see what this Arturo Stuart did back in his Camagüey days, I would investigate, but I’m not going to leave Barcelona for lovely little Cuba to find out about the habits of a dead man. I saw Gordo Gris fall like a building coming down, and suddenly more than a thousand Sacramentalists were surrounding us, lifting their arms and singing hallelujahs, they were the same people who had always lived in the neighborhood, but now they weren’t afraid of el Ruso, and less still of me. I’ve got to get out of here, I thought, and I already had a Catalan girlfriend, who passed herself off as a photographer and enjoyed taking pictures of me and had as her only demand “Shave your head, Yohandris mío.”

  “So I can look like a damn black tube of deodorant?” I would ask, and she would tell me, “Grow some dreadlocks,” and I would say, “Enough, I’m not a fucking Rastafari,” but I didn’t explain that for my job with el Ruso, I had to look as normal and as elegant as possible.

  PART THREE

  NACHO FAT-LIPS

  I had been in prison for ten years already when el Ruso sent me the message that a young man was coming to the Shark, the high-security ward here at Ariza, and that my job was to take care of him and I’d have everything squared away when I got out. Who is it? I asked the messenger, and when he said the name, I remembered Cricket and how we would do headers with soccer balls that we went to steal from Punta Gorda. Yes, I remembered, and I remembered how Guts and I peeped at his sister, Johannes, and at his mom, too, who was hot. It hurt me to think of my pal Guts. He had left for that Spain that’s over in the Europes, in other words, far as fucking hell, without saying goodbye to me. Yes, I remembered, and even though I could give a shit about el Ruso—after all, whatever he was out there in the street, I was twice that here in the Shark—I said to tell him, “Okay, nothing will happen to your kid, who fucks yumas and little white chicks, nothing at all, don’t worry … I already know he’s in prison because of you.” The piece of shit, I thought, because I don’t do anyone’s bidding. I know the number on the Cuban president’s ID card, so how could I be afraid of anyone? “Let him come,” I said to tell him, “nobody’s going to touch him ’cause he was my childhood buddy, but he has to do everything I say for this to work, is that clear?”

  “Yes, Nacho,” the messenger said.

  “Yes, Nacho what?”

  “Yes, Nacho Fat-Lips.” He looked at my lips with mistrust, as if he was afraid I was going to kiss him.

  I’ve got to get respect.

  He came the next day. He looked more like one of those Brazilian athletes who play for Real Madrid. His girlfriend from the Europes had supplied him with good stuff. He was smiling from ear to ear, he was tall and strong, a bodybuilder, used to eating meat every day and popping cherries whenever he felt like it, he didn’t seem to realize that it was obligatory here to follow my rules, since without me, he was nothing. He thought he deserved respect. He laughed at Piggy, who was a bugarrón and all, but a tough guy who had been Gringo’s pal, and Gringo is the only person I ever really respected and respect. Not because of his dead—after all, I’ve racked up more bodies than him—but because of how he looked at you.

  If Gringo had been here, it’s certain we would have had epic fights. We would’ve left a mark on this slave pit.

  Cricket was nothing more than el Ruso’s puppet. A guy who can only do another’s bidding, I didn’t like that.

  When he said to me, “I’m going to inject myself with AIDS so I can make my way and have my sentence reduced, and show these guys I’ve got balls,” I said to him, “Go on ahead, get to it, there’s no use going backward.”

  I didn’t think he was as crazy as all that.

  You see every kind here; some inject petroleum into their own hand so the arm will rot and they can take a vacation in the hospital.

  The ones who have AIDS sell infected needles, but the only people who buy them are just fools or they need to take revenge.

  This kid, Cricket, was no regular fool. He had a chick from the Europes and was protected by el Ruso. In addition, his sentence was twelve years, and that time goes by quickly; besides, hi
s sentence was sure to be reduced. He knew how to fight. He handed out some blows you could respect. One day, I egged on Piggy to try out Cricket, to see if he was a real man or a sewer rat.

  “Piggy,” I said to him, “if you keep letting Cricket get away from you, you’re going to have to answer to me, even if you were Gringo’s pal, so now you know…”