by Karla Suárez
I’m not sure how many days I was incommunicado due to the damned telephone in the Tech and then as soon as it started working again the director decided to limit its use. She said the phone was in her office, that it was essential for her work and, therefore, teachers were only allowed one short personal call apiece, two in cases of an emergency, and zero international. Stupid witch. I was forced to choose between phoning Euclid or Ángel and, naturally, I chose the latter because I wanted to see my angel. I could talk to Euclid during our regular Saturday meeting.
I think I arranged to see Ángel on the Thursday of that week. Yes, that’s right, because something else happened on the Friday. So, it was Thursday when I went to his apartment and found him a little out of sorts because he had nothing to offer me for dinner and no money for food. The only good thing he had left was, he said, a little rum, but I wasn’t interested in rum, and so announced that I’d take over the cooking that night. It was a simple menu of rice and cabbage fried with onions; healthy and nutritious, like the meal we’d had in the Japanese Gardens. You could say we were all getting thinner by the day, but ‘more slender’ sounds better.
That was the first time I cooked at home for Ángel and I have to say that, as experiences go, I liked it. I felt we were a real couple, me in the kitchen and him sitting in a chair with his feet on the table and a glass of rum in his hand. A normal couple talking about normal stuff: the dumb things my boss did, the crisis, Dayani. At some point I remembered Ángel’s idea about renting a room to Barbara and asked him what had happened. He replied that he’d called to suggest it, but she hadn’t wanted to leave her current place. She must be paying practically nothing, he said, because he’d offered a really low rent, for which she’d thanked him without accepting. I then commented that I’d seen her.
The fact is that I wanted to talk about Margarita, or rather the family legacy that included the document, and so I brought up the subject of Barbara in order to then mention Leonardo and get onto the subject of Meucci. It’s funny, but every time Ángel talked about his ex, I felt slightly uncomfortable; yet I was the one who wanted to broach the subject that day. I wanted him to continue the story of the lost legacy in case any piece of information, however trivial, might turn out to be useful. There was nothing wrong in that, it was just a matter of accumulating data, squeezing lemons dry. Do you see?
While we were setting the table, I started talking about the readings at the home of Leonardo’s friend. Ángel commented, a touch caustically, on my growing friendship with Leonardo and twisted his mouth in that way that made me stop the world, swallow and count to ten so as not to jump on him and tear off his clothes. Instead, I smiled, asked if he was jealous and he replied no. How was he going to be jealous of someone like Leonardo? We sat down to eat, poured a glass of water each and continued our conversation. According to Ángel, Leonardo wasn’t worth anyone’s jealousy; he was an inoffensive sort of guy, if a bit weird for his tastes at times. Then he launched into a wild, truly delirious monologue. He said Leonardo wasn’t completely human, that he belonged to the race of the new centaurs. Haven’t you noticed that instead of legs he has a pair of wheels? I burst out laughing. Ángel went on, claiming that Cuba had reached a high level of technological development and was experimenting with new creations, future beings. Among them, the latest were the new centaurs, who lived on diced soya and sugar water, perfect creatures that didn’t need petrol for transportation and utilised the minimum of battery recharge to stop them falling to their knees. As far as Ángel was concerned, Leonardo was one of those creatures that wheeled rather than walked, pedalling smoothly along. Even when he was sitting on a sofa, you could see he wasn’t comfortable because he didn’t know what to do with his legs. They were like body parts that had evolved from a symbiotic fusion with the bicycle and now can’t even remember their former function. There’s no doubt about it, he said, the future Cuban will be legless; he’ll have a tiny stomach and two wheels. What do you think? he asked before taking a mouthful of cabbage and chewing it savagely.
The ideas Ángel came up with! I pointed out that since we didn’t have wheels, we were unfortunately on the road to extinction. He laughed aloud, saying that I shouldn’t worry because Cuba was a country of mutants with a talent for survival: if we didn’t develop wheels, we’d convert ourselves into something else to prevent our extinction. The weird thing is that he was right. After Year Zero, it’s my belief that we did all become something else. Although we have difficulty admitting it, we’ve changed. There’s a before and after. As I said, it’s like war; and now the bombs are no longer falling, we’re in a sort of post-war period that has unleashed each person’s most basic instincts, the need to survive. And here we are, for better or worse, like cockroaches that, to avoid dying out, develop a resistance to poison, and are even able to devour it with relish.
Ángel continued talking about Leonardo in the same contemptuous tone, saying that he hadn’t read anything he’d written and had no intention of doing so, that it wasn’t for him to say who I should and shouldn’t hang around with, but he’d always been suspicious of Leonardo’s sudden friendliness to me, that invitation to the gathering in his home and to the readings. Julia, my dearest Julia, he said, I believe that what the guy really wants is to get close to me. I didn’t understand what he meant and it must have shown on my face. Ángel smiled and stabbed his fork into the dish a few times without spearing any cabbage. Then he stated that Cuba was a small island, and Leonardo was aware that he didn’t like him much but, for reasons of his own, he did all he could to get close to him. Ángel asked if I remembered the story of Margarita’s family legacy, and I nodded. It turns out that as Margarita was a good friend, Leonardo was aware that the legacy contained a document written by that Italian telephone man and, naturally, wanted it for his little novel. The problem was, Leo believed that Ángel had it. At that point, it was as if a door, a window or something had suddenly been opened, letting in bright light: he’d just confirmed my intuition that the author did indeed know about the document. Do you see? I remained silent, but raised my eyebrows, pretending that I was interested in nothing more than the story, and Ángel continued. He said that Leonardo had given up on ringing to ask for the document, having received nothing but a polite refusal for his pains, and was evidently attempting to use me to get closer. But he was well and truly fucked because Ángel didn’t have the document. He wasn’t the one who’d appropriated something that didn’t belong to him; that scrap of paper was part of a legacy that belonged to his ex-wife, and when he managed to recover it, he wouldn’t be giving it to Leonardo; it would be sent to its rightful owner so as to close that chapter of his life once and for all. My angel sounded a little annoyed, and I could understand why, but there was no way I was going to waste this opportunity, so, adopting a neutral tone, I asked: Who does have it, then? His shoulders drooped. Your friend Euclid, he said, sinking his fork into the dish. And before he put that miserable cabbage in his mouth, he added: Margarita’s father.
Fortunately, I had nothing in my mouth or I would have choked on it. Margarita’s father. Euclid was Margarita’s father. I can see you’re thinking exactly what I was at that moment: Why the hell hadn’t he told me? I was furious, not as furious as I would be later, but still furious because I couldn’t believe my ears. Euclid in the role of Ángel’s wife’s lover made sense, but her father? What do you mean, her father? I asked, and he swallowed his cabbage before confirming that it was true: the father, the progenitor whose seed had spawned his ex was also the father of a friend he used to hang out with and through whom he met the sister, Margarita, who passed from being his friend’s sister to his girlfriend and then his wife and ex-wife, so that his friend’s dad became his father-in-law and then his ex-father-in-law. I didn’t mention it before, he went on, because a few days after we all met in the street, Euclid phoned, asking him not to tell me about the situation, arguing his close friendship with me and saying there was no need to ad
d his daughter to the mix since it was a painful subject. The thing was that, when Margarita settled in Brazil, she paid for her brother to come to join her, and that was a hard blow.
I still couldn’t believe it, and Ángel must have noticed my confusion, because he took my hand and told me that it was the truth, and that Euclid must have had personal reasons for hiding it from me. Their relationship wasn’t good, he explained; Margarita had stopped talking to her father long before leaving for Brazil. Ángel had been a witness to all those years of conflict; Margarita was very close to her mother, and the truth is that Euclid sometimes behaved very badly, cheating on his wife. His daughter wasn’t going to stand for that. It seemed that Euclid was an attractive man and had a lot of success with women, particularly his students: both Ángel and Margarita had heard rumours of his many conquests at the university. I also knew about the conquests but, of course, held my tongue. Ángel was looking like someone who’s just made a gaffe and is trying to justify it. He understood Euclid, he said, and to some extent he could understand his request not to mention Margarita, because she’d been the apple of his eye when she was younger. Take a look at this, he added, going to the bedroom and returning with a shoebox in which he kept things belonging to his ex. I saw a photo of Euclid standing beside three small children and another of him with the baby Margarita on his shoulders. Ángel was tactful enough to spare me the sight of the adult Margarita, although her image must surely have been in one of those packets of photos.
When they first met, he said, the relationship with her father was already going downhill. According to Ángel, Euclid was too involved in his own life, the university, his affairs, and didn’t want to admit that his daughter was growing away from him until it became all too evident. She shunned him, gradually expelled him from her life. Ángel had witnessed it all: Margarita’s concern for her mother, the outbursts against her father, the conversations with her brother. That, he said, was why such a strong bond had sprung up between Margarita and Dayani; it was as if they recognised each other, as though they saw themselves reflected in the other’s eyes, the younger one seeing her future and the elder seeing her past, or perhaps they were imitating each other.
The last straw, by which I mean what finally prompted Margarita’s mother to get a divorce, was the time she came home unexpectedly and found her husband in bed with a younger woman. That was the limit as far as she was concerned, and the same was true of Margarita, who decided never to speak to her father again. Naturally, Ángel continued, that event was added to Euclid’s midlife crisis. A family friend had seen him in Las Cañitas, smooching with a young girl who was undoubtedly one of his students, one of those tarts that go around seducing their tutors to get better grades. That’s exactly what he said, and I felt a stabbing pain in my guts, leaving me short of breath and only capable of mumbling: In Las Cañitas? Exactly, replied Ángel. When Margarita heard of it, she hit the roof, although she didn’t have the courage to confront her father.
I swear I thought I was going to die, because the tart in Las Cañitas was me, but I had no need to try and inflate my grades since I’d managed good ones without anyone’s help; I wasn’t after anything, anything at all, I was simply the lover of a man who satisfied me and I was happy to be spending his fiftieth with him: it was his family life that was chaotic. So there I was, wishing the ground would open up and swallow me, and that Ángel would stop talking. But my angel continued his story.
That incident had caused a deep wound in the family, a wound that still hadn’t healed the day my friend was found in the marriage bed with a girl. According to Margarita’s mother, the bitch in her bedroom was the same one seen in Las Cañitas years before, but Margarita maintained that her actual identity was irrelevant. The problem wasn’t the woman, it was Euclid. It was her father who was lying. I didn’t know where to put myself, I was nodding, not knowing what to say about that whole scene Euclid had spared me, and I was feeling guilty. Even though, in the end, it wasn’t my fault, I felt bad, very bad, and I had the urge to run out of the apartment and hug Euclid, tell him how beautiful it was that our friendship had survived in spite of everything. That’s what I wanted to do, but Ángel went on speaking.
When he and Margarita decided to hitch up, she wasn’t talking to her father, but as it was a wedding, she decided to visit him to give the news and smooth things over. It seems that after a long conversation, when it looked as if things might return to normal, Euclid asked about the family legacy. He was aware that his daughter would inherit it and that it included the document by the Italian telephone man. And the thing was that Euclid had also been interested in the document for quite some time, but Margarita’s mother had never been willing to give it to him during their marriage. Can you guess what Euclid’s idea was? Ángel asked. Well, he wanted Margarita to sell it to him. She was getting married, the money would come in handy and he’d just been paid for an article he’d published in a Colombian scientific journal. For Margarita, that was like a glass of cold water in the face at three in the morning in midwinter, so she told him to go to hell and stay there forever. Of course ‘forever’ was too long a time, because Margarita had a big heart and she did later attempt a reconciliation. She met him once, and he sometimes came to visit there in the apartment, and on one of those visits he managed to get his hands on the document. He stole it, Julia. He took her legacy without her knowledge. Do you see? That’s what Margarita had tearfully told him in São Paulo, and that was why Ángel wanted to get it all back. To him it seemed unjust: no one had the right to steal another person’s life. Take a look at this, he said, rummaging among the papers in the shoebox: it only contained a small part of her life, a few photos, school records. Look at this, he repeated, extracting a page torn from a magazine she’d kept as proof of the crime: it was the article Euclid had published in Colombia, for which he’d received the money he’d hoped to use to buy that damned Italian’s document. I took the sheet of paper from him, looked at the colours, the title, my friend Euclid’s name in large letters. Then, as I started to read, the world ground to a halt. I mean it: the Earth suddenly stopped turning and I felt as if a fire had been lit around my feet and was rising upwards, circling my body and burning me as I read the text at incredible speed, as if I didn’t need my eyes, could easily have closed them and recited the article published under Euclid’s name. And the reason was that what the article explained, what the distinguished Cuban professor demonstrated, what was original about his argument, the mathematical proofs, its small contribution to world science, the well-developed idea, had been written by me. You’ve got it: it was a summary of my university thesis, that paper which had cost me many sleepless nights and for which I’d received congratulations and a degree in mathematics but which had never been published anywhere; it was just a pile of paper I kept as a souvenir in a drawer of the family home. Euclid had stolen my brain. And my brain is my life.
Do you see what I’m saying? I think, therefore I am, and everything else can go to hell.
10
I’m certain I hardly slept that night. When I closed my eyes, sensing Ángel breathing beside me, images of Euclid floated before me. His expression as he listened to my explanations while I was writing my thesis, his smile in Las Cañitas, his hand taking mine to kiss it before he put his lips to mine, the look in his eyes, his praise of my intelligence, his questions, his naked body. Everything was Euclid, my greatly admired tutor, my good lover, my wonderful friend. Euclid, the liar who was sure to be sleeping peacefully as I tossed and turned, listening to the angels snore. Euclid, the thief, because that’s what he was, a miserable thief, and at that moment I was completely indifferent to the soap-opera drama of the father-daughter relationship, the man who cheated on his wife, the children taking sides, the divorce, depression and tears: all that was a heap of shit in comparison with what he’d done to me, because he’d stolen my ideas, betrayed me by publishing something that didn’t belong to him under his own name, earni
ng money at my expense. Do you see? Just thinking about it still makes me furious. So there was no way I was going to sleep. I got up, poured myself a glass of water and went to stretch out on the balcony, from where I could see the street I loved so dearly. I needed to think things through.
There were a few details that remained unclear in Ángel’s story, but I’d avoided asking about them since it would have been unwise at the time. Ángel was a nice guy who had fallen madly in love with a woman and clung to the idea that only by closing the cycle of that relationship would he be in any condition to start afresh with another story. The other story was me and, logically, I was deeply interested in the closure of that cycle. And for that closure to come about, it was imperative that my angel recover the family legacy, which included Meucci’s damned document. Once he’d got it back, Ángel would be able to proceed to the final stage of his plan, send the whole thing to Margarita, feel that he’d cleaned the slate and then be able to dedicate himself to me. And there was no doubt in my mind that the first thing I’d do was to move permanently into the apartment in El Vedado with him and so inaugurate a new period in my life, a period that would be more interesting, with much better prospects than I had at present. Judging by what he’d said that evening, his greatest worry was that Euclid had managed to appropriate the legacy. He couldn’t even imagine what use his former father-in-law had for the scribbled notes and sketches on yellowing paper, but he was sure that Euclid would never give the document up because he’d been on its trail for years. Which, therefore, made it very hard for Ángel to come up with a means of getting his hands on the legacy.
