by Marcial Gala
“Of course they’re coming with us,” el Ruso said, “but before then, I’ll adopt you so Margot doesn’t blow up on me, and you’ll be one more among my little black children; besides, you can’t refuse me this, I want you to join the Orthodox Church.”
Hot damn, I thought, this girl from Guantánamo, becoming Orthodox and everything.
GUTS
I wander around Las Ramblas slowly, as if I were carrying something fragile, and that fragile something is my own life. Today there is all kinds of shouting, Real Madrid has fallen in an embarrassing way, and people from all over are coming out and beeping their horns and shouting, “Barcelona, Barcelona!” When Las Ramblas is like that, I feel like the loneliest man in the world. I get to my house and my wife hugs me, her skin is white like I always wanted, and when she laughs, she reveals all those teeth so white they seem fake, but they’re real, and she has green eyes like Yusimí, the woman I never tried. Not because I was afraid of el Ruso, but because that black girl has a cloud over her head, and I wasn’t going to let her ruin my life. Then in come Juan and Aitana, my children, the twins, and they also hug me and call me negro. In Barcelona, I like to be called that, as long as it’s said with affection, not like in Cuba, where I was always defending myself as a mulato. I like finding myself here in Catalonia, so far away from all that, and when I get homesick, I go see Gaudí’s cathedral and remember Cienfuegos, the neighborhood, and the Stuarts. I remember how those sons killed their own father. Yes, I remember, and sometimes, when I’m in the mood, I say, “Those locos!” And I limit myself to thinking of things like that, or sometimes I think that behind all that happened, there has to be an explanation we’ll never understand because our brains can’t process it. To kill your father and your mother to save your brother from AIDS, that’s crazy. I always knew that Cricket hated old man Arturo, that he hadn’t been able to forgive him for that time he almost died because of all the blows he took to the head when he caught him spying on that crazy Maribel, who must be a nasty old thing now. But, Jelly? No one ever did anything to him. He didn’t get so much as a rose petal raised against him. He was always the beloved son. The best dressed on the block. Gringo even left him his motor scooter when he took off. I don’t understand it. The other day, here, in Barcelona, I saw Guido, the Italian guy who was Johannes’s first husband, and I asked him. “I don’t know,” he said. He was wearing a checked shirt and a pair of shorts, riding a Harley-Davidson that yelled rocker, with some young chicks almost half his age. “Don’t talk to me about Cuba and its black people, all of that is dead to me,” he said to me, and I was about to punch him in the mouth, but I held back. That was around Diagonal, so I got back in my car and slammed down on the accelerator, getting as far away as possible from that Guido. Death has that way about it. It attracts you like the most perfect white woman, not one from Barcelona, but a British one. It attracts you and takes you wherever it wants, and when it has you there, it laughs. What happened to them was like what happened to me, who was going to take a guy out just on the basis of Gringo’s advice. You gotta kill an old kingpin, Guts, get yourself a reputation, he said to me, and that was enough for me, I went to find the subject at his house and tried to get him to come out onto the street so I could knife him. That was enough for me. So I think that was enough for them, too. The morning, or afternoon, when Cricket went to see Prince to tell him he’d injected himself with AIDS and he was scared, and they both went to see Prince’s Palo Padrino for advice, and he told them what they had to do: a ceremony that involved the blood of the oldest person to whom they were related; that morning, everything was written as if in stone, a type of indelible writing, and if I stop and think about it, I’m sure that the Padrino didn’t think that they would really do it. He told them one of those things you say during a steamy August when you want to rest and someone comes to interrupt you. Do this, the Padrino said in his tremendous, goddamned naïveté, thinking he was dealing with adults, after all, the two of them were easily taller than six foot two each, but they were children, wicked children like all of us, children without a childhood, the sons of trouble and evil.
IBRAHIM
Later everything clouded over. The temple was no longer good, everything clouded over. God didn’t want it. God didn’t want that temple, and everything started to get confusing. Good people died because God does not love human arrogance, the psalms say so, but if I start to cite them now, I’ll never finish. Arturo Stuart died, and we disbanded like only the tribes of Israel can, and then we understood that we were a tribe, the lost tribe, and the cathedral was left alone, challenging the wind, serving as a gigantic nest for the birds. It was abandoned like a rocket ship that never took off, and the black Americans stopped donating money, and the Poder Popular stopped helping us with its building brigades, its trucks and cranes, and for a time only we remained, preventing the theft of stones, cement, sand, in case another sign from God arrived and told us to continue.
MARIO GARCÍA PUEBLA, policeman
It was about 6:05 in the morning. I had just gotten off my shift. I had had to take a captopril under my tongue because my blood pressure was sky-high. Irene, my wife, comes to me and says, Mario, phone. I went to the living room and picked up the receiver. Then I hear a voice that hits me with Come over here, they’ve wiped out old man Stuart. I thought it had been those people with that scabby blond vulture, el Ruso, Abramovich. But when I got to the station, they told me there was a witness. That witness was the wife of the deceased, Carmen Álvarez. She confirmed it was her own children, the sons. The daughter was studying in Havana. Get over to Punta Gotica and process the crime scene, the chief said to me, and I went to the alleyway where the deceased’s neighbors and religious confreres were all wound up: they wanted to lynch anyone who struck them as suspicious. We were forced to call in for police backup to clear the place so we could focus on our job. At 10:00 a.m. we were able to process the crime scene.
The deceased was in the master bedroom, naked from the waist up. He had just one wound in his neck, caused by a sharp-edged weapon that seemed to have pierced his aorta. After a superficial examination, his body temperature and the blood deposits indicated that the death must have occurred between three and four in the morning. Finally, I told the photographer to take the obligatory photos and proceeded to lift the corpse.
The kids were found by the search brigade and captured close to the coast when they tried to hijack a boat to leave the country. They had $20,163 on them.
People wanted to hang them, so we had to request the army’s cooperation to transfer them to the headquarters of the technical investigation department. From the beginning, they admitted their guilt.
ANIA MARTÍNEZ SAINZ, National Revolutionary Police officer
She was in a nervous state that is impossible to describe, and it’s no wonder, she had witnessed her sons, the beings she’d brought out of her womb, killing their father and tying her up to kill her, too. I am a woman and a mother, besides being a police officer, and I wouldn’t want to imagine anything similar happening to me. Classy, rather pretty despite her age, she couldn’t speak coherently, even though she tried. She had to interrupt herself to cry and would then start over from the beginning. Her statement lasted almost two hours. She told us that at around two in the morning, Samuel Prince Stuart Álvarez, her younger son, had arrived with the other one, the inmate, David King Stuart Álvarez, and they looked high. Then they killed the father, Arturo Stuart, before he managed to try anything. Especially because he loved Prince very much and couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Did that one put this into your head?” was the only thing the deceased was able to ask before Prince jabbed the knife into his neck, shouting, “Die!”
They tied her up. She escaped because they had taken pills. Without a doubt, they had taken pills, and the knots weren’t tight. She escaped while the two of them did satanic incantations around the old man’s body to take away David King’s AIDS.
“It’s not their fault,” the w
oman finally said. “They were possessed by demons.”
Then she burst out crying and no one could make her continue her statement.
PABLO ARGÜELLES LARA, the Padrino
I didn’t tell him to kill anyone, that’s a lie. I didn’t even know his brother had AIDS. I only told him how the dead would remove a wrong as bad as that, and I told him because he asked. I don’t have anything to do with the murder. That girl, the writer, that Berta, she came here from Havana and offended me. She demanded the skull of an Aramís, or else I’m going to the police, she said. I don’t have anyone’s skull, but I can’t go around taking things out of the Nganga, either, or else the efumbe will go through me and could even kill me. “I’m the Padrino to lots of people, not just Gringo or Prince, what fault is it of mine that these two turned out to be criminals? What fault is it of mine?” I said to her.
The one who was really to blame was the late Arturo Stuart, he wanted to mock nature and the gods, and his own God turned his back on him. I don’t know why you’re coming to see me. I just told Prince what I told the police, and that I would tell anyone who asks. The formula to escape a terminal illness is to bring blood from your closest relative, I would say, the orishas created it in the darkness of time. Who am I to change that? I said that and will say it again anytime I’m asked.
ARACELI
But what Berta will never know is that Prince and I were lovers, that I was with him at the same time that I was with her, that sometimes I would say I had to go somewhere, and it was so I could see Prince, together we went to the few cheap hotels in Cienfuegos, and sometimes the expensive ones because I still had some money, and he would steal from his father, he didn’t tell me so, but I know he stole from his father, Berta will never know that, unless the dead man tells her, poor Aramís, who, after he died, never wanted to talk to me, as if I were to blame for everything, as if I had said to him: go to Cienfuegos and buy yourself a motorcycle, as if he had forgotten that the only thing I asked of my little guajiro who died so long ago was that he save me from Ferreiro, my husband, but that’s life, it’s exasperating. I haven’t written anything else. When I left Cienfuegos I was burned out; besides, it’s going well for me on television. You have a pretty face, people say, and I heard it so much that I ended up believing it, now I’m getting older and every day someone younger and prettier comes along. I wasn’t born to be a lesbian. I’ll never again face the circumstance of being another woman’s wife. I was born to be with men, not even foreigners, I was born to be with Cuban men. Perhaps I’m a masochist and I like to be mistreated, but that’s how it is. My current lover is a truck driver who comes to see me every time he comes back from Santiago, where he works, and he hits me, not hard, and not my face, but he does do it. I like that he hits me, but not hard. I like that no one at the TV station can stand my man and they ask me, Araceli, how could someone like you, so classy, get together with a brute like him? Then, when I feel like it, I tell them to go to hell, Cienfuegos-style. “Go fuck yourselves,” I say to them, and then they understand that there’s nothing classy about me, that I’m quite ordinary. I like for them to know so they’re prepared. I like for no one to have any expectations of me. I’m nothing special, I tell them when they say that one of the last poems I wrote appeared in a given anthology. I didn’t authorize it, I say, and it’s because, in a fit of sexual fervor, I gave all my poems to Berta, and she’s the one who publishes them in my name. She’s so crazy, I think, because I haven’t read any of her novels and don’t plan to in the future. The only thing that mattered to me about her was her as a person, the same as Prince, his self. Although I knew he was bad, worse than a pig’s bite, as they say in my town. He pissed on my face once, and it wasn’t when we were fucking. I was sleeping and I felt a hot stream on my cheek, and it was Prince urinating on me as if I were a goddamn toilet. It was at the Jagua Hotel, in a room paid for by my money, I had just sucked him off to make him happy, something I don’t like, ever since I was little, I’ve always hated to put things in my mouth, and despite this, to show me his great love, his esteem, he had to piss on my face. It’s that he knew I was also Berta’s lover, and that she loved my face, that’s why he did it, to humiliate her. He was a bad guy, I’ll repeat it, if not, he wouldn’t have committed that horrible act when he had the whole world ahead of him. At that point, Prince was the god of poetry, I can say that because even though I don’t write anymore, I read a lot. He didn’t care about the future because he hated himself. It’s a lie that he loved his brother so much, that madman who injected himself with AIDS in prison to go see a cheap whore like that Yusimí, and then when she rejected him, he didn’t have the courage to face it, to say to himself, I’m going to live HIV positive with all the dignity in the world, and he went to see his brother to get him out of the bind, and what did they do? They tightened the screws: they killed their father and drenched their mother in blood to cure AIDS, isn’t that just the lowest.
They have another car set aside for me, and when I sell this shitty Polish Fiat, I’ll finish getting the money together to buy it. The money I have now has been given to me by several salsa and reggaeton bands so I can promote them on my program. It has taken me four years, but I have almost fifteen thousand dollars. Any day now I’ll go to the car lot and acquire a Peugeot or an Audi, I don’t want any of that Chinese shit that’s flooded the market. I want an elegant, European car to rejuvenate me. When I buy it, I’ll go see Berta, and if I’m in the mood, I’ll let her kiss me, and if I’m still in the mood, I’ll let her sleep with me and take out all of her novelist’s frustrations on me. She has so many published books but never has enough money and still lives in that little apartment in La Víbora. I’m going to let her talk, but when I get tired of being her wailing wall, I’ll tell her, Don’t you remember when you went to go see me with your cheap little shoes and your starving face and those bugged-out eyes that made you look crazy, to tell me about what a dead man wanted? Don’t you remember? You always were low class, I’ll conclude, to see if she gets worked up and smacks me, it’s been a long time since anybody hit me real hard. Even the truck driver is scared of me, since the last time I told him that if he hit me again, I would break his ass. Prince hit well. He hit like he meant it, and since he didn’t like to be called Michael Jackson, I would shout, “Help! Michael is killing me!” And he would get furious. One day we went to a certain Edgar’s home. He had a rented room in one of those apartments on the Boulevard in Cienfuegos, and after fucking, Prince fell asleep, so I took that notebook where he kept his poems and I burned it. “That’s for pissing on my face,” I told him when he woke up. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t explain that he had copies, but he stopped sleeping with me. It was as if I’d turned invisible. He didn’t see me, and to take revenge I started sleeping with Héctor, an Argentine medical student, and the one I ended up punishing was Berta, because it’s what we all do, we initiate some action and nothing happens, everything is suspended in the air. My name is Araceli and I haven’t gone to Cabaiguán in such a long time that I feel like I was born in Cienfuegos, the place where I arrived when I was seventeen years old already and married to a brute who oversaw a warehouse, and the lover of a young guajiro, who a big mulato they called Gringo killed just because, he hadn’t done anything to him, a little guajiro who wanted to buy a motorcycle in Cienfuegos and ended up in the bellies of the residents of Punta Gorda, that exclusive neighborhood, where Berta and I went so few times, Prince and I went when we were lovers, and they would call her and me bread with pasta and call him and me chocolate and vanilla, because I’ve always been so pale. I would call him heart of evil.
I would say to him, “Prince, you’re a heart of evil and you don’t love anyone.”
“It’s true, I don’t love anyone.”
“Not even me?”
“Not even you.”
“What about your mother and your father?”
“Not them, either.”
“Your siblings?”
“Less still.”
“What about poetry?”
“Poetry is some shit that with a little bit of luck will earn me a living.”
“You think so? No one makes a living from that.”
“I will,” he would say.
When I was tired of playing, I would ask him seriously, so much so that the muscles of my face would flinch, “What about God, Prince, do you love God?”
He would usually get quiet, but one day he answered clearly, “God less than anyone else.”
Was he already crazy? I don’t know, I simply don’t think so, but he had something of Achilles in him, he was fatalistic, and he knew he was going to get screwed like Gringo, his friend, his pal, and he wanted to get screwed big-time, in that pragmatic, mad way that he had. He was the most beautiful man I’ve slept with, although that’s not saying much because I like ugly men. I like for women to be beautiful, like Berta when I met her at fourteen, with her svelte body and that curly mulata’s hair framing her face, or like Johannes, the famous painter coming to Cuba for the first time in twenty years to receive the National Culture Prize, what madness. Aren’t we all mad? I’m sure they’ll bring her to my show and give me orders like a dog, Interview her, Araceli, of course I’ll do it, that’s what they pay me for, and, well, I’ll tell her one silly thing or other and then I’ll ask her as I look into her light brown eyes, Don’t you remember me? If she says no, I’ll have the pleasure of saying, even if I get thrown off TV, Well, I do, your family built a cathedral in Cienfuegos that’s the maddest thing there ever was, and your brother, Prince, a poet and murderer by the looks of it, was my lover, I want you to know. It doesn’t matter to me if they shut down my show; after all, I have the money for my car, and I’ll go see Berta, and we’ll go off together, for a spin but nothing more, I’ll repeat, I’ll never again have the courage to accept myself as another woman’s woman.