by Karla Suárez
Honestly, up to that point I hadn’t been sure what should be done with the document. Both in the pact I’d made with Euclid and my current pact with Ángel, I’d never got past the recovery stage of that blessed scrap of paper. What came next was unknowable, and that was perhaps why I hadn’t stopped to think about it. Nevertheless, Euclid seemed to have included everything in his calculations. And his plan was logical. The museum on Staten Island was definitely the best place to talk about the manuscript. That was elementary. What surprised me just then wasn’t this line of reasoning, which I’d also have followed at a later stage, but that Euclid was sharing it with me, and even showing me the address of the museum, scribbled on a piece of paper that he’d already added to his Meucci folder. So, let’s think it through. If Euclid was in possession of the document, why was he telling me all that? What did he want from me? He wanted me to get the information from Leonardo in order to complete his file. Agreed. Then I didn’t understand why he’d show me the address of the museum. Of course, I didn’t understand at that moment; but I soon would.
I spent Monday at work, longing to finish my classes so I could see Ángel. I told the director that my stepfather was ill, so I’d need to make calls every so often. She allowed me to use the phone in her office. During the morning, I attempted to call him hundreds of times, but all I got was a weird ringing tone: no answer. To hell with it! When I finished work I decided that, as had happened so often before, his telephone was out of order, but there was no way I was going to miss telling him the latest stuff about Euclid in person. I almost raced from the Tech straight to his building, ran up the stairs, knocked on the door and when it was opened... Wham! There was Barbara looking out at me.
I guess I must have looked like someone in a cinema watching a film, when suddenly the projectionist loads the wrong reel and, instead of continuing with the same plot, a scene from another movie appears, one you know nothing about. That kind of thing. Like when you’re working on the computer, you haven’t saved your document, there’s a power cut and you’re left staring at a blank screen, not yet able to grasp that all your work has gone down the drain. I stood there, frozen to the spot, but you should have seen how pleased Barbara was. She smiled, said how delighted she was and invited me in. I went in. She told me that Ángel had gone out to buy food because she was hungry; then she said that it was great to see me, asked if I wanted a coffee, told me she’d just made some, that she really liked Cuban coffee, and that we could have a cup while we waited for Ángel. All this was said as she moved around like a queen, while I followed her into the kitchen and watched her take down a couple of cups and pour out the liquid as if she were in her own home.
The coffee was good. It was the real thing. We drank it in the living room while she talked, because Barbara needed to talk, in that strange, comical accent that somehow felt familiar to me; I don’t know... likeable. If she hadn’t been such a chatterbox, we might have sat there like a couple of dummies who can’t work out what the other is doing in the same room as her. But Barbara needed to talk, and then, when we’d run out of all the usual superficial topics, and given that Ángel had apparently gone to the other end of the planet for food and there was no coffee left, she enquired if she could ask me a question. I replied that of course she could, no problem. She gave a silly giggle and said she wanted to ask me something woman-to-woman. She actually said that, ‘woman-to-woman’, like in one of those crappy cantina songs. She went on to say that she knew I was Ángel’s best friend and that was why she’d plucked up the courage to ask me, because she had no one else to talk to and she needed to unburden herself. Then she sighed and confessed that she thought she’d fallen in love with Ángel, that from the first time they’d gone out together, when he’d taken her hand during the May Day march, she’d been feeling something very different. And then... then everything had been weird until the trip to Cienfuegos, a really pretty city, with that lovely Prado and the beautiful bay, the ‘pearl of the south’ he’d said they called it, and everything went on being weird until, standing there by the sea, he’d put his arms around her and crooned that song by Benny Moré in her ear: ‘How did it happen? I can’t tell you how it happened. I can’t explain how it happened, but I fell...’ and then she couldn’t bear it any longer. No one knew that they were together; no one besides me. And she needed to talk to someone. She was confused, she’d heard plenty of stories about Cuban men who had ulterior motives for falling in love with foreign women, but she was feeling very strange things, not just in her body. She asked if I capichi-ed her, and I nodded robotically. Then she said that what she wanted to ask me was if she could trust Ángel, and she begged me to tell her the truth, told me that she trusted me.
Barbara trusted me and wanted to know if she could trust Ángel. Funny ha-ha, right? I believe that it was there and then that I got the urge to kill. Not Barbara, logically, because that poor Italian woman was just looking at me, waiting for an answer, the answer Ángel’s best friend could give her, woman-to-woman. I exhaled a long, slow breath, then replied: He hasn’t told me about you two, but if you really want the truth... I know that he’s in love with someone else. Barbara pretended to smile, dipped her head, bit her lip and swallowed; she raised her head again, looked up at the ceiling, sighed, returned her head into a normal position and put two fingers to her eyes to stop the tears, which seemed to be ready to flow. Then she thanked me and got to her feet. I followed her to the balcony, where I saw her lean over to gaze down on the avenue I loved so well. From the door, I muttered a sorry and she replied that I wasn’t to worry, it was always better to know the truth, even if it hurt. She turned around and, looking me in the eyes, told me how grateful she was. I asked what she intended to do, and she said that she didn’t know, the thing was that she didn’t live here, was just on holiday, and that it was probably no big deal, would soon pass. I nodded, repeated my apology and announced that I had to go. Of course I couldn’t tell her, but I honestly had no desire to see Ángel in those circumstances. Barbara accompanied me to the door and put a hand on my shoulder, repeating her thanks and hoping she could go on being my friend; she needed a friend, and she knew from Ángel that I was a special person. She jotted down her phone number on a scrap of paper and asked me to do the same for her. But I had no telephone, so I promised to call her. Sometimes not having a telephone is like not existing.
That Monday, I made my way down Calle 23 with the very odd sensation that the city had turned black and white; in the blink of an eye, the colours had disappeared and I was walking through an old movie. Around me, people were strolling by and bicycles were moving along asphalt that was melting in the sun, but they all seemed weary, and the voices of people and the horns of the few cars blared with a slow echo. I had the sense that no one, including me, wanted to be there, that I was laboriously dragging myself along as if I were hunched over, carrying the huge weight of a steel sheet on my shoulders. And so I went on. If it had been a film, the background music wouldn’t have been Ángel’s ‘Soul of Mine’, but another song from the same album he used to listen to, the one that goes: ‘Goodbye happiness, I hardly knew you, you passed by casually, not thinking of my suffering, all my efforts were in vain...’ Maybe it had been my own efforts that had given colour to the city during that depressing year, and so that day everything returned to black and white. Walking, walking at a fast pace, I descended the avenue until I reached the Malecón. I wanted to see the sea, which always calmed me down, although I was unable to stop and sit on the wall because of my need for acceleration; my blouse was sticking to my back, but I needed to discharge all my pent-up energy. I continued walking. Walking and thinking. Sometimes thinking is a way of maintaining the acceleration.
Ángel, my angel, was a sonofabitch, a shit-faced bastard, an arsehole. He was the biggest sonofabitch I’d ever known. I mean, you had to have seen Barbara’s face as she told me how she’d felt when he took her hand during the May Day march. The film could be called Prolet
arian Love, or How a Daughter of Capitalism Achieves Class Consciousness Amidst the Patriotic Fervour of the People. The final scene would be sublime: an aerial shot of Plaza de la Revolución showing the parade and, in the crowd, the big strong hand of the young proletarian clasping the dainty hand of the youthful capitalist, while flags wave victoriously all around them. Everything perfect, marvellous, except that the young proletarian had had the balls to tell me that on May Day he was at his father’s house, dealing with his sister’s trauma. And while I was imagining him busy with all that, he was playing the tourist guide, showing a foreigner the exotic spectacle of a revolutionary march on the workers’ very own day. I could almost see him holding a small Cuban flag. I was well acquainted with the flag Ángel had offered Barbara. The sonofabitch. And then there was the trip to Cienfuegos. That was the last straw. I’d heard the version of the considerate brother comforting the poor little traumatised girl and, yes, he was comforting someone: he was a tropical comforter of Italian women. I could have diced him into little pieces! I swear I went from astonishment to fury at the speed of light.
I walked practically the whole way to Alamar that day. I was hyper, but the worst of it was that my fury gradually degenerated into sadness. I arrived home when the telenovela was on and found Mum and my stepfather on the sofa; his arm was around her shoulder and she was resting against him. My brother was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room with my sister-in-law behind him, shaving his head while he watched TV. It was a lovely scene of family harmony, everyone gathered together in the place where I slept. They greeted me and Mum said that dinner was in the pot. I didn’t feel like eating so went to the kitchen for a glass of water and drank it on the balcony. At that hour no one’s in sight, not even looking out of windows or standing on balconies, because they’re all watching the telenovela. My rage-cum-sadness and I were alone. Suddenly I wanted to cry. That’s right, I really did want to cry an ocean, to flood my neighbourhood, the whole city, until my tears merged into the sea. What I hate about that kind of situation isn’t the desire to cry, or even doing it, because crying is good, it’s healthy, and if you don’t cry you explode, and it must be horrible to explode and cover the walls with the remains of your lunch. No, what I hate about those situations is not having a place to cry. I had nowhere to shed all those tears. If I went to my mother’s bedroom, she and my stepfather might come in, Mum would be concerned and ask what was wrong, and the truth is that I honestly didn’t feel like telling her that I’d fallen in love with such a prize specimen. If I opted for my brother’s room, he or my sister-in-law might turn up and then – just like when we were kids and I used to sob during a film – he’d start calling me a sniveller, say that he didn’t know what my problem was but I should take my snotty nose out of his bedroom. There was always the option of locking myself in the bathroom and muffling the sound of my tears with the noise of the shower, but the water was off. It was Sod’s Law. And that’s why my fury-cum-sadness, which had become sadness-cum-desire-to-cry, was already turning into desire-to-cry-cum-fury. Back to the point of departure: fury.
I hardly slept that night, as always happens when I’ve got something on my mind. That’s the way I am; there are people who, even when they have problems, fall exhausted into bed, but not me. I have a brain that doesn’t seem to have been designed for rest, because it takes the slightest worry as a justification for working all night long.
Hours before dawn, I’d already decided to take the day off work. My students could go fuck themselves. It’s not as though they would miss my maths course. Just after eight, I rang the director to say that my stepfather was still in a bad way and I needed to take him to see a doctor. When I returned home, everyone else had gone to their respective jobs and I had the apartment to myself. I undressed, put on a dressing gown, slipped a Roberto Carlos cassette into the tape deck and sat on the sofa to finally cry. I bawled my eyes out, using all my strength and every nerve in my body, every muscle and bone, digging my nails into the palms of my hands, slapping my legs, stamping my feet, shouting the name Ángel all around the apartment, asking the walls why. I cried until I couldn’t go on, until the well of my tears ran dry, the snot stopped running and my nose was sore.
There was something ridiculous about the whole story Barbara had told me. Somehow it felt grotesque to imagine Ángel creeping up slowly behind her, like a tiger after its prey or the worst sort of Latin lover, to sing ‘How did it happen?’ I mean, how dumb! Apparently the courtship rituals of the higher species have no limits; anything goes so long as the prey surrenders, and then days later she’s still asking herself how it happened. He hadn’t needed to sing a bolero to me, much less take me to Plaza de la Revolución; those were tactics employed when the prey wasn’t a national product. But his relationship with me had been stuck on amber for centuries. I mean, days and days, rains and rains, had gone by before we first slept together, even though I fell for him just about the minute we met: oh, that angelic face, that long, fair hair, and that innocent little boy air, I think even Mother Teresa of Calcutta would have fallen for him. Yet it was my fate to have to wait for him to make the decision. How long had Barbara waited? Not long at all, practically no time.
Up until then, I’d thought our relationship was special because it had developed slowly but deeply. Little by little, I’d entered his life, come to know intimate family details, the story of Margarita, even the stranger’s videos. At great personal expense, and very gradually, Ángel had allowed me into almost every area of his life, and that’s why I found it hard to believe that someone so cautious would, at the drop of a hat – or the wave of a flag – get involved with another woman. Of course, it was Barbara who had said they were an item, that’s to say sleeping together, but sleeping together didn’t mean having a window open into Ángel’s inner life. Yet for me, simply getting as far as his bed had been hard going. For me, everything was complicated, while for her it was all so simple. It was like a cruel joke. Do you get me?
When I don’t understand something, I mean when things don’t seem logical, I get jittery. Every problem has a solution, and if I can’t find the definitive solution, I at least have to discover a path to follow, something, a halfway solution, because otherwise this brain of mine goes crazy. I must admit that the worst of it was that if I didn’t understand then, it was because at heart I was refusing to see the obvious. There was a small difference between Barbara and I that set us poles apart: she wasn’t Cuban.
In those years an Unidentified Foreign Object was an obscure object of collective desire and, despite the pain it caused me, I finally had to consider the possibility that Ángel wasn’t what I had imagined, was merely one more of the many Cuban men who sought out foreign women for a basic exchange of goods. I imagined him offering his tropical flesh for the price of a delicious meal, clothes, presents, anything; maybe if the bottles of rum that appeared in the apartment or some of our meals had been paid for by that Italian woman. Shit!
The problem was that I loved him. Do you see? I liked him too much, plus I was determined to leave Alamar behind and live with him in El Vedado. It was that simple. The whole thing with Barbara would ruin all my plans and dreams, and I wasn’t going to tolerate that. It had cost me too much effort to get where I was just for that woman to come along with her boobs hanging out and destroy my equilibrium. By that moment, the fury, the sadness, the urge to cry had all been completely overcome by shock. I loved Ángel. I loved him, it was almost an obsession and there was no way I could bear the idea of losing him, particularly not to some dumb tourist. Forget it!
It was then that what I imagined to be a brilliant plan occurred to me. If Ángel had betrayed me by sleeping with Barbara, well, he’d get his comeuppance at some point. She’d have to find herself another native specimen to liven up her holiday; there would be no lack of applicants. And in the meanwhile, I’d continue working on my objectives. Naturally, to achieve all that I needed a little collaboration, and only
one person could help me, someone who, given the right incentive, would lend me a hand. I had the incentive, so, without giving it a second thought, I began to dress to pay Leonardo a visit.
14
When I told him that we needed to discuss something important, Leonardo smiled and peered at me over his glasses. He asked what the mystery was and I replied that there wasn’t one, but that I’d prefer not to talk in his office, with so many people coming in and out. Walls have ears, I added. At which he smiled again. It was almost time for him to leave, the only problem was that he had to get his skates – or rather wheels – on because he’d arranged to pick up a cake for his son’s birthday before six o’clock, and the place was near his home. He suggested that I come with him and then he’d treat me to a glass of lemongrass tea and we could talk. Wonderful idea.
