The Black Cathedral

by Marcial Gala

  At shower time, Cricket had just entered the showers when Piggy jumped him with a fork.

  “Sala’o!”

  “Careful, Cricket!” somebody yelled.

  He reacted quickly.

  Just one punch and they had to pour water on Piggy’s hooves to revive him. Cricket didn’t kill him because he didn’t want to. He stopped at pissing on his face. Of course, at bottom Piggy is a nobody, not even a useless piece of shit, and now, with Gringo dead, if Piggy were younger, I’d have him sucking my cock, but that punch made an impression. Piggy weighed about 280 pounds and it wasn’t all fat.

  To me, Cricket was crazy, and he missed black Yusimí, who he shared with el Ruso even though that European chick bribed the guards to come and see him, so much that he couldn’t take it anymore and said to himself one day, I have to get out of here. Saying that kills a man little by little, it dries him up inside, leaves him soulless, turns him into a zombie. I have to get out of here, he said to himself, and that was the only way he saw to do it, how naïve, what an idiot. He didn’t think that with AIDS, Yusimí wouldn’t even look at him, not even in a picture. I know that Yusimí. I’ve seen nude photos of her and I don’t know what others see in her. She’s just a black girl with light-colored eyes, in good shape, that’s true, but too skinny. That Yusimí was a real she-devil. More people are here, in prison, because of her than for attacking tourists. The first of all of them, Piggy, lost his money trying to fuck her and was left with blue balls, what madness. If I ever find myself out on the street—it’s an expression, because I don’t get any passes, I’m practically part of the furniture here—I’ll go over to el Ruso’s den to see what kind of woman she is. And I’ll go to see the Black Cathedral.

  SIMÓN ROGER DUEÑAS, inmate

  I’m an example of how not to be in this life, a dreamer, that’s why they did me in, for not being weak willed like so many people who follow along like sheep, for themselves, only for themselves—because I always wanted to share, to be a musketeer, a D’Artagnan of the Caribbean. Ever since I was in elementary school, I’ve been like that. I gave everything away from my snack to pencils, notebooks, everything, and they took advantage of me. Since I’ve always been this way, small and thin, my friends used me to climb in the principal’s window to steal tests and student records. They used me. Another thing I’ve always been good at is dancing, it’s a shame I’ve always been feminine, too much so for the art-school teachers, who, although the majority of them were as big of fairies as I was, didn’t accept me, they said I lacked virility, and since I couldn’t become a contemporary dancer, I wanted to be a choreographer, but I didn’t have a good memory, and to be a choreographer you need a scary good memory, I would blank out on the choreography tests, and I had no other choice than to start working as a performer at the only cabaret in Cienfuegos that allowed a transvestite show. I was known as Edith Piaf at that show, not because I looked anything like the French diva, she was ugly as all hell, but because I always wear a sad face, even when I smile, I look sad, and that’s because when I was still a child, my father died of cancer. That cabaret, El Costa Sur, was my point of no return. Foreigners like transvestites! And they liked me best of all, I’ve always been an admirer of good manners, and of history, because that’s my truest interest, history, and if it’s medieval European history, even better. Before all of my clothes were even off, I was already talking to them about Otto the Great, Pepin the Short, and Cnut the Great, the Danish conqueror of the British Isles. They were astonished as they listened to me. One of them was the one who gave me AIDS, an Austrian, by the looks of it, like Hitler, since then I can’t stand Germanic types, I hope they lose every World Cup ever. Of course, when I think of it, it was my fault, I should have told him to put on a condom, that’s pretty basic. But I’ve always had a weakness for those blonds, and this one with his shiny yellow hair and blue eyes fascinated me the minute I saw him. He looks like Tristan, I said to myself when he got out of the Nissan and came over to greet me in good Spanish, then asked me if I wanted to go for a spin.

  “Of course,” I said, and linked my arm with his.

  We spent a marvelous six months together, he took me to Soroa, to the Viñales Valley, to Baracoa. I had never been to those places. He was jealous and insisted I leave the transvestite show, and when he went back to Austria, he sent a maid to help me, who also spied on me, then he would bring me first-rate clothing, fancy underwear and sophisticated dresses. Not that shit that whores wear, nothing like that. He also brought me history books, man, monographs about Frederick Barbarossa, Thomas Aquinas, Giotto, Paracelsus. I later had to sell all of that, books and dresses, because I was left without a cent when he started to change. He became like all men, a liar. He would say one thing to me, and then I would find out the opposite, and so on.

  In the end, he broke up with me. He gave me AIDS and broke my heart. I’m in prison because of him, because when I found out he was maintaining another relationship in Punta Gorda, with one of those femmes who think they’re somebody because their parents went to med school, I went to see her and made a scandal and pulled a knife on her, and I lost control and cut her cheek. I didn’t do anything to her, it was just a scratch, but they sent me here anyway, to Ariza. Here, when they tested me, was when I found out I was infected, I spent three months in the infirmary, and they would have set me free, but things got complicated: the femme in the bed next to mine, to whom I had recounted my love story with the Austrian, ended up mocking me. When I finished telling him, he said I was just a pathetic whore and that it was all a lie, that I was too skinny and ugly for anyone to love me. Shut up, I warned him. But he went on and on. The nurse had forgotten a pair of scissors on the little metal table, and I lost control. I grabbed the scissors and stabbed the maricón in the throat. I really did behave poorly toward him. He was whispering, Help me, Edith, help me, but I was furious, so furious that I didn’t even remove the scissors, and when the nurse came, the fairy had already died. So then I got twenty years, and here I am, in charge of the ward of homosexuals with AIDS. Nothing happens here without my consent, so when the so-called David King, better known as Cricket, needed an infected needle, he came to see me. I was sitting in the common area, in front of the TV set. There was an educational show on about the crusade of King Saint Louis, and no one was interested in it, so it was just me and another prisoner there.

  I feel like I can still see him, an enormous kid, practically a giant, wearing expensive cologne, the kind you can barely get in Cuba, wearing, besides, a pair of those Adidas sneakers that cost more than a hundred dollars, that kids kill to have. He looked more like an athlete than a convict.

  “Edith, I have to talk to you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I need the stuff.”

  “For?”

  “What do you mean ‘for’?”

  “Allow me to explain something to you about AIDS, pimpollo. HIV is divided into strains; there are stronger ones that are very dangerous, others are weaker, like a cold, those are the ideal ones if you want a long life, but they’re harder to find. Months and months can go by before a lab detects you’re sick. Do you want the stuff to give it to some guy as revenge, or to give it to yourself and spend a little vacation in the infirmary?”

  “The second one.”

  “Okay, you need a strain like mine, which is pretty severe, but is quickly detected, and if you take the medication regularly, it’s like a chronic illness, like diabetes or something like that … That’ll be fifty dollars and ten cartons of cigarettes.”

  “Okay, when?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, but don’t change your mind later.”

  “I won’t change my mind.” He stood by my side.

  “What cologne is that?” I asked when he was already leaving.

  “Chanel No. 5.”

  BERTA

  All that is left of the Stuarts’ time in Cienfuegos are the ruins of the cathedral, some early work or other of Johannes’s, and Prince’s poems. The
mother went back to Camagüey, I think. She was the most innocent in this story, and the one who lost the most. A while ago, I was about to go see Prince at the psychiatric hospital. I called on the phone first.

  “This is not only a hospital, but a penitentiary as well … This patient is a dangerous murderer, ma’am,” the person who answered the phone said to me, after identifying herself as Dr. Ania Teresa Pereira.

  I was about to ask her if Prince had changed much, if he was still a beautiful man, but I didn’t. I only thanked her and hung up. Prince’s illness is called hebephrenic schizophrenia. I know because I read it in a digital magazine about psychiatry published by the University of Havana. In short, Prince is crazy.

  Am I crazy since I speak with ghosts and, at the age of thirty-five, I still dream of meeting the man or woman of my dreams? Am I crazy? I don’t know. Prince thought that by sacrificing his parents, he would be able to save his brother, David King, from illness and death and acted accordingly. I don’t know why he did it. Did he love his brother that much or did he hate Arturo Stuart and his wife to the extent that he would use this as a pretext? I don’t know, and I very much doubt I ever will, especially now that Cricket is dead and only Prince remains, locked up forever in a psych ward. Does it matter that much to know why we are so bad, so heartless and lacking in scruples? I don’t know if it does, I can’t answer my own question.

  When it happened, Prince had just published his first book, and a piece had come out in the paper by a journalist given to rhetoric, who called him “the prince of Cienfuegos and Cuban poetry.” I remember the reception they organized in his honor at the Union of Writers and Artists. He wore an elegant cream-colored suit, and never again as on that night did he look like Michael Jackson before he bleached his skin. They invited me to that dinner at the last minute. Araceli and I were no longer lovers, so I called Marcial, the prose writer, on the phone, and he agreed to accompany me. A half hour in, Araceli arrived, dressed all in white, in the company of an Argentine guy, a medical student. We looked at each other with hate, she and I, but we looked at each other, after all, and we looked at each other again when Prince started to read, since the poem was undoubtedly about us, it was something so moving that as I tell it now, I have to dry my eyes.

  “Forget about her,” Marcial said to me, and I appreciated that.

  Prince seemed to have his whole life ahead of him at that moment, and I felt like my life was ending, and nonetheless, everything seemed so different, I think now, so fucking—irritatingly—different. Lucky for me, now I am here in Havana, living in an apartment that’s not bad at all, although the dead man told me I have to move because it will soon collapse, I’ve won prizes and published books that I’m not completely satisfied with, but what am I going to do when I was born in Punta Gotica in a tiny little room and sometimes all my mother and I had was just one avocado to split between the two of us? I’m alive, I tell myself in the morning when I open up the balcony and look outside, at the people in La Víbora, who look like ants as they go to work. I’m alive and I’ll meet someone, I tell myself, but first I’ll go to that fucking Pablo’s house, that damn Palero, and take Aramís’s skull away from him so that Aramís can rise up and find the peace he so needs. The peace we all need and without which there is nothing. The peace Prince didn’t have when he spilled his family’s blood, and perhaps in another era, he would have been Rimbaud, Ulrich von Hutten, François Villon, but in this twenty-first century, he’s nothing more than a fucking mental case.

  I’ll shut up now. I look at myself in the mirror and go silent. I’ve made a living from words, and now I hand them over, they are no longer mine, they belong to the air, they belong to the cathedral that will remain there in Cienfuegos when none of us are left—to that, my words belong to the Black Cathedral.

  EMILIO SÁNCHEZ VÁZQUEZ, director of Ariza prison

  We applied the protocol that by law and national guidelines is applied to every inmate who tests positive for HIV. This protocol includes a transfer to the prison’s hospital, which is of course less strict than Ariza 2, the so-called Shark. He managed to escape from there. It’s not anyone’s fault since his case wasn’t one of the worst. With good behavior, he would have been free in five years, more or less, so that escape was confusing for everyone. They say that compañera Sira Gómez, one of the shift nurses the night of the events, was involved. But what is certain is that during the investigation, nothing was proven, and this compañera was able to take up her work again without any problem. In the time that said David King Stuart Álvarez was imprisoned in Ariza 2, his behavior could be classified as dreadful. He had a brawl with a longtime inmate and caused several group fights because of his rebellious behavior. He was incapable of staying in line.

  YUSIMÍ CABRERA

  Cricket came to see me to say we should leave together, since Luisa, his Spanish girlfriend, was willing to get married and then a brother of hers was going to write me a letter of invitation so the three of us could arrive in Madrid together, and we would settle there, because the bars in Madrid are the best in the world, as Joaquín el Sabina says in so many songs.

  “Are you crazy?” I said to him. “Antón has connections in Spain, if you didn’t know; if you do this, you’ll find out how powerful the Russian Mafia is in the world.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’m el Ruso’s slave.” I again showed him the scorpion that el Ruso had tattooed on all us girls so we wouldn’t forget who we were, and I also told him that el Ruso had promised to poke out my eyes if I left him, and who’s going to love a blind black girl?

  “I’m going to love her. Besides, el Ruso can kiss my ass, he’s not anybody anymore. Look at how my father finished him off, if not for me, who went in his place, he’d be in the Shark now, living like Cain, because the one in charge there is Nacho Fat-Lips, and he could give a shit about el Ruso.”

  “Speaking of, what are you doing on the street? Did they give you parole?”

  “I escaped.”

  I got up from the bed, and naked just like I was, I asked him to leave, I didn’t want any more trouble than I already had. “I’m sorry,” I said to him, “but don’t come around here anymore … El Ruso found another big-cocked mulato and there’s no sense in our continuing to see each other.”

  He looked at me from the bed with the disconcerted eyes of a child who has just had a toy taken away, and I felt bad for him, a little. I recognize that I was tough on him, but to survive in this concrete jungle, you’ve got to be made of steel, and I don’t regret having treated him that way, especially when I later found out he had injected himself with HIV and had the nerve to come and see me, the real son of a bitch. He ruined my life because even though he wore a condom, some people think I have AIDS and give me dirty looks, and, well, I’m from Oriente and can’t go back home just like that. Things are bad in Guantánamo, and even though I have some savings, I’ve spent a lot in taking care of these four walls that el Ruso finally allowed me to have.

  When I told him to leave, he made as if to hit me, but held back in time. Even though he was big and all, if he laid a hand on me, I would have cracked his skull. Not even Antón hits me, and he took care of me when I got here and needed to get a leg up. So Cricket, when all he’s ever done for me is screw me? What we had was about pleasure, pure pleasure and business. Actually, people from Camagüey and people from Oriente don’t have anything in common. During the Wars of Independence, there were more troubles between the troops of Carlos el Manuel de Céspedes and those of Ignacio el Agramonte than between the Spanish and the pro-independence mambises.

  When he was leaving, he told me that if I didn’t love him, he was going to put a rope around his neck.

  “Do what you want, but remember that real men don’t do that, and mothers suffer more than we do from that kind of madness.”

  “Give me my brother’s book.”

  “No, you gave it to me.” But then I started thinking, and it wouldn’t have been good for me to have h
im make a scene, so I took the little book of poems and gave it to him, and I told him that, after all, they were selling it at the bookstore and I didn’t need his gifts, and I went and grabbed all the dresses and watches he had given me and threw them at him, and he grabbed me and kissed me on the mouth by force, and I shouldn’t have let him because that damn maricón had AIDS, but I didn’t know it, although now I’ve come to the conclusion that HIV is like a cold, at the end of the day it’s a virus and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t. “I’m leaving,” he said later, “see ya never,” and he left through that door and never came back. What I know of him has been through the TV and through letters. Because when he was at the end, at the end because he refused to take medicines, he wrote me a goodbye letter, the most beautiful thing anyone has ever written me, I still keep it with me and read it only if I’m depressed, I mean, really depressed.

  I didn’t go to the burial, el Ruso didn’t let me, he told me it wouldn’t be appropriate. I would have liked to go so he wouldn’t enter into death as alone as he had lived. I know what that’s like, that at your burial there’s not a single face of anyone who held you in the slightest consideration. They say that inside the casket, he was unrecognizable, skinny and battered like a mummy’s skeleton. I feel so bad for him but life is like that, harsh like real vodka, not that shit they sometimes sell at the shopping center. I might go to Russia, el Ruso promised me that. But Russia, I said, not Ukraine or anything like it.

  Antón el Abramovich, who still has a lot of dough even though the police shut down a lot of his businesses, said to me, “No problem, we won’t stop until we get to Moscow, you’re going to love the Kremlin and the white nights in Saint Petersburg.”

  “What about Margarita and your children?” I asked, because I’m not an asshole, I know how to respect the other woman.