“¡Que vá!” I say. “Next you’re going to say you can tell what I’m thinking.”
“No, that’s a psychic. There is a slight difference. But I will tell you what I believe some of my new colleagues must be thinking. Something along the lines of: To what does she owe the privilege of this assignment?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because the pediatric hospital needs more real doctors, no? Physicians and surgeons.” Although I personally do not believe this, it is difficult to conceal the fleeting reaction on my face: yes, this is probably what many of her new colleagues are thinking. “Therefore,” she contines, “I will also tell you what I believe the director is thinking, and in this he and I see eye to eye. Over the past seven years, one consequence of the Período Especial has been economic hardship in the countryside, and there have been annual increases in the rate of relocados from the provincias. An exponential growth of migration into Havana.”
“These are the statistics, yes, as well as my personal experience of my neighborhood in Vedado. Many adolescents who have no savings to get started become jineteros and jineteras, some as young as twelve years old. Even those who do not become prostitutes for tourists are at risk of exploitation by Habaneros.”
“These children, some of them barely in their teens, as you say, have become our domestic refugees, and the pediátrico is the place to confront the threat.”
She is correct, and pediatric specialists such as myself have been at a loss to address the full spectrum of our patients’ afflictions. As crisis responders, we ourselves have been working in crisis mode for too long. The triage at admitting has no protocol for our patients’ emotional states; the emergency room is unprepared for such situations. I can set a broken arm or perform an emergency operation to excise a hemorrhaging abscess, but while checking on the patient’s cast or monitoring the postsurgery convalescent I hear stories of persistent trouble in the lives of young people who are not safe in their homes, or who have no fixed home, and I am helpless for how to manage the spectrum of conditions emergent in an ever-increasing caseload, nor am I trained in the prognoses or therapies for these conditions.
Relishing her clarity and articulateness, I have to smile. “I cannot tell you how long I’ve wished for a colleague like you—a licensed psychiatrist.”
“And yet, why do you already look at me with faraway eyes?” The way she says this surprises me for how closely it echoes my internal monologue.
“Are you asking me what I am thinking? If so, I will tell you.”
“Please do.”
“I am wondering how long you’ll stay. This place wears on people. Most new physicians pass through in a year or two.”
“It sounds like you are really telling me something about yourself.”
“Maybe so, but it is something I dredge up only when I meet someone like you.”
“And what am I like?” she asks.
I hesitate to answer, not because I cannot think of the word, but because it is so sad: Someone who will move on before too long.
Doctora Hernández places a hand on mine there on the arm of the chair—she could be taking my pulse—and turns her analytical instrument on me. “You were a prodigy, no? One of the youngest ever to complete Plan G, verdad?” I cannot speak for the lump in my throat, and there is no modest way to say aloud, In fact the youngest ever. She continues, “Maybe you wish to feel too good for a place.”
“An elegant analysis . . . but not very materialist of you.”
“Because you would not know what to do with yourself without your companion.”
“What companion?”
“Self-pity. Could you imagine Doctor Rodriguez being just another average doctor among a cohort of the country’s most talented physicians? Or maybe you have imagined in great detail. This would be completely alien to practically every defense you have assembled for yourself so far: youngest in medical school, first in Plan G, most precocious physician at the pediátrico. Perhaps you thrive on the self-alienation of the prodigy, and you feed off the envidia of your resentful colleagues, whom you know to be righteous in their resentment . . .” She takes her hand away but not before giving my wrist a little squeeze.
Still semi-prostrate, I say to myself, I probably could have used you back in the 1970s. And her eyes seem to be saying, I wish I had been there to help you. She is already walking away when I say aloud, “Is this how you end all of your sessions, Doctora Hernández? With a light touch and an admonition?”
Disregarding my lame comment, she throws a smile over her shoulder and delivers the coup de grâce: “Who could blame you, with all you have been through?”
For the rest of my shift, I think about Doctora Hernández. It always comes down to this with someone new: the fact that I never know quite what to say to the ones who are good. They arrive con muchas ganas, but if they have any talent, they hardly ever stay. The pediátrico has struggled, while SERVIMED hospitals for tourists like Sancti Spíritus soak up the resources. The turnover is exhausting. Just when you have finished training someone and started really getting to know them, you learn that they are moving on. The pediátrico might even be cultivating this way station for the up-and-coming. I should ask Director Gonzalez sometime whether this is by design. I would rather ask Ana Luisa Hernández what she thinks, in private. While finishing my rounds, I also find myself thinking of what Pérez said about my conference request: he told me he could get my exit visa approved on time.
* * *
When my shift is over, I exit the pediátrico through the emergency room into the inferno of Havana at four p.m. A sharp hiss from the afternoon shadows stops me on my way across the ambulance parking area. “Pss! Rodriguez, don’t be a fool.” Virgilio Candelario brushes past me on the way to his shift. In medical school, Candelario wanted to be Plan G, but a professor had raised questions about his final exam. A copy had gone missing from department files two days before the test, and while cheating could not be proven incontrovertibly, the quality of Candelario’s answers was inconsistent with his previous performance. He got the grade, but not the appointment to Plan G. He turns now to scowl at me. “Why don’t you go to la Yuma?”
“Because they would shut down the family clinic in Vedado.”
Candelario has an irritating habit of staring at my lunar instead of looking me in the eye. “They would find some young doctor to take it over. He’d move into that attic apartment of yours.”
“No, Candelario. There would be no replacement physician. The Ministry of Health would close the family clinic.”
“You should consult with that sexy new psychiatrist. You can’t be sure that famous clot of yours didn’t clog your common sense.”
“The clinic is not like the pediátrico. There’s not even a nurse to help.”
He gets up in my face and does not bother trying to cover his foul breath. “You mean a nurse to get in the way. In Havana they are such stupid bitches!”
“You’re going to work drunk.”
Ignoring this remark, Candelario continues, “Turismo Medico sends all the hot nurses to Sancti Spíritus. They are probably just as incompetent as here, but at least they have been handpicked for good looks. They should call it Plan T—for tetas.”
“The way you talk, you remind me of my friend Yorki.”
“A doctor?”
“No, a dishwasher.”
I take the long way home to walk out the anger Candelario has stirred in me. Trudging over the hill between the fallout tunnels and the empty playing fields of the university, here it comes again: the nagging doubt resuming its refrain of what should have been, what could have been, what would be different in another place, another time, another life . . . ? Regret is a noxious weed. Drop it, even on rocky soil, and it will take root and begin to send out shoots.
Have the first thirty-eight years of the Revolution been just a series of dreams? First, the dream of the 1960s, before I was born: the Yanquis on the run while los ricos fled for Miami,
and lower-class Cubans experienced the temporary improvements that come with a 180-degree conversion to socialism. Fidel, Camilo, and el Ché all ascendant—until the second and third died under questionable circumstances, and the first became untouchable.
The 1970s, the Days of Food: long, happy afternoons with Aurora and Machado, and then The Accident, which is what Abuela calls my mother’s suicide.
Then the early eighties: membership in the Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas and Beisból Juventud, summers in Pinar del Rio and my first infatuation. 1988: Plan G, medical school camaraderie, my compañeros and I dedicated to doctoring the common man, woman, boy, and girl. 1989: my marriage to Elena, the move upstairs, preparing for the exam that would send me and a few select interns to train medics in Angola, and then came the reality shock of watching Germans on television looking through a hole in The Wall.
Suddenly there were shortages of food, clothing, toiletries, cosmetics, and medicine; the abrupt disappearance of professional opportunity; and the gradual, growing suspicion that all which had happened before that scorching autumn day when nobody could believe their TV—that everything Cubans born since ’59 remembered was just a dream.
In 1990, Angola is scrapped, along with almost every other intern program except for pediatrics and medical tourism. Cuban coffee—¡café, carajo!—becomes scarce. At first, a few imported instants are available as substitutes. Then, in an international insult, even Sanka gets too expensive for common Cubans, and there aren’t too many uncommon Cubans, those higher-ups who orbit within the pull of el Barba’s inescapable gravity. Raul, Ricardo, and a few dozen other top ministers get their coffee from Kenya, scotch from Edinburgh, caviar from Leningrad—correction: St. Petersburg. When el Comandante’s delicacy jet touches down, the world’s seven races all prepare their wares. Meanwhile, for regular Cubans, every reduction in rations hits like a fist in the belly. And in 1990, to top it all off for me, Elena leaves.
By 1991, there is nothing but rice and beans, a pound of each per week for a grown man. Pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children get an additional egg and a small box of Cerelac, some weeks two eggs. What I miss most is bread: thick, wide loaves of bleached wheat. I am lucky if once a month I get one small, stale roll of pan del gobierno—a euphemism for baked sawdust. Years go by without improvement and Cubans tighten their belts, punching extra holes to keep up. Each time I punch a new notch I hear a voice in my head say, I might have thought . . .
I might have thought that I would be married by now, with a son or a daughter too. I might have thought that I’d be back in the main part of the house on 12 y 23. I might have thought that I either would have resigned from the pediátrico or passed the clinic along to someone else. (I always believed I would still be practicing medicine, but I hadn’t thought that it would be possible to still be juggling both jobs, not this long, not for so little in return.) Instead I visit the penitentiary for young women with whatever I have gathered that month from the black market or Abuelo’s garden. I do not ask to see the prisoner, but I always leave a couple of buns of pan integral or a small bunch of carrots with the guards. It has to be something easy to inspect. I believe that some of it makes it through, after the guards take their cut. She might guess who is behind it, but I never send any message. If I keep things strictly business, we will both be better off.
Fidel gives a speech in ’96 and declares the Special Period over, but if that’s true then it’s only for the hotel workers, taxi drivers, and jineteras. The rest of us have to scrape by with our ration books and pesos and whatever we can pick from the kitchen waste behind tourist paladares. It would be comical if it were not so depressing.
I might have thought that I’d be dead now. But my lunar still looks down upon me from the mirror—a mute, indifferent crescent—and refuses to reveal the exact date of its inevitable collapse; or whether it is indeed the grim detonator all the doctors agree that, at least without a very risky surgery, it must be; or how long it will take if it eventually does burst to do its work. I think all these things not in any clear, conscious way of seeing the outcome, but with the grim conviction of a vague double negative: I cannot think of nothing different.
I might have thought it impossible that my misery would continue. I could not conceive of holding it together so long. I could not see myself still in this attic, a crow’s nest barely above the constant chaos and cacophony of Vedado. I could not imagine the Período Especial going on this long. I could not imagine Havana. Yes, the aspirin and the hypodermics Pérez sent over made my family clinic popular again, however briefly. For a while, the women would say, “¡Ay, esa cosa con la jinetera!” and wave it away. Even Celia had been so impressed that one of the highest-ranking commanders in the PNR had bothered to come to the building and arrange for the supplies that she settled back from her blockade to a cool embargo: You keep to your business . . . Running the family clinic kept me in the apartment, and I remember thinking that if the situation ever changed I might get the whole house back, adiós a Beatrice. Now that we are the better part of a decade into the Período Especial, some of my neighbors are beginning to get their properties appraised for sale to investors from Europe, the US, and Latin America. To me this seems, to put it lightly, overly optimistic. And through it all, I have known that any moment it could be over thanks to my lunar. A badge, a stain, a watermark as emblematic and recognizable from afar as the silhouette of el Ché.
Contrary to what a drunk and famous poet said, not everything falls apart. Like the crumbling mansions looking hollow-eyed over el Malecón and across the Florida Straits, a thin and yellow film of paint peeling from their stone walls that barely hold up against the buffeting salt water and stinging wind of the Caribbean. If you look at one of those houses funny it could collapse, but other ruins around it prop it up, shoulder to shoulder, the entire stretch along el Malecón a shambling fortress of remorse. The Revolution: the world’s longest-running nation-mistake. We are stuck with this mistake because we are already running on fumes and we can’t afford the gas to start again. Things barely stick together. The center somehow holds.
Has it all been a series of dreams? Better I should ask myself the question: why is it that I allow oafs like Candelario to get me started? I have to shut off the broken record in my head, but when I get back to the apartment, Cine de las diez is running a Charlie Chaplin film festival, and I relate too closely to the Little Tramp to want to abide all over again his hours of misery, which remind me of other summers I would sooner forget. I don’t want to listen to the same Beny Moré record as always, so instead I put on one of Yorki’s mixtapes. The first song is AC/DC, “Hell’s Bells.”
Has living alone made me crazy enough that nobody could bear to live with me ever again? You shall never escape Havana, Rodriguez, nor will you ever escape being Doctor Rodriquez. Like Cuba, I am stuck, embargoed, blockaded. Aloud I admonish myself, “Enough of your self-pity, get some sleep.”
MIERCOLES, 3 SEPTIEMBRE
The Tourist
Four blocks to the corner of Misión, then left one bock to Agramonte. He could have taken a bus, but the communal taxis leave more frequently, and they’re cheaper: forty pesos, about two dollars, if you don’t mind riding con los Cubanos.
All the Chevies are there, and the tourist seeks a taxi particular going to Guanabo, Santa Maria del Mar, the last beach on Playas del Este. The driver takes them through the tunnel under Havana Bay and they hurtle eastward on the road to Matanzas. It is the closest thing he has seen to the traffic of San Salvador, with cars following each other perilously close on the highway. Once they make it the thirty kilometers into Guanabo, the traffic starts to thin.
He knows he is taking a risk, but it is worth it. It will give him focus and conviction. Chávez Abarca does not know about it, and he does not need to know. It is essential to the success of his mission, and that is all that matters to the client. Communism is dying a slow death. It has already been eight years. And now they are preparing to deliver the
deathblow.
He sits in the beach chair that he rents for five dollars and watches the locals walk by. He does not have to look for the boy—the boy will find him. After less than half an hour, here comes one in a thong bottom, eyeing him while his friend scans the beach ahead. He can’t be older than fourteen. Is it the same boy as last time? He’s not sure, but it doesn’t matter. He can tell by the swagger and the way he holds his arms close to his sides.
The boy’s friend walks ahead and positions himself as if admiring the beautiful women sunbathing down the beach, but he’s really keeping a lookout for the police. The boy walks up to his chair smiling and says in one breath, “Buenos días. ¿Buscas algo?”
Looking for anything? He knows that he and the boy are probably thinking the same thing, but he will not be drawn in to saying it first. “No sé. ¿Como qué?”
If it isn’t the same boy as last time, he has to know this beach well enough to be certain that he is dealing with a real tourist and there’s nothing to worry about, because he cheerfully, quietly says, “Coca.”
Convenient that if need be he can claim he was talking about a cola. “Es posible.”
“Veinte dólares. Ponlo aqui en la arena.”
With his slender right foot, the boy traces a circle in the sand beneath the beach chair. Like last time, the tourist is ready and already has the bill in his hand. He drops the crumpled twenty in the sand. The boy pivots, pinching the money with his big toe, and in the same movement lifts his armpit while he spins away: a fat little plastic bindle of white powder, maybe three grams, drops into the sand. Walking away, the boy reaches down to scratch his foot midstride, transferring the money to the cavity of his armpit.
The tourist covers the packet with his shirt. Now he has it in his hand. All he has to do is go somewhere he can safely snort it. And yet he savors the moment—he is already high. This is the feeling, the rush of blood through his aorta like a blast of fuel injection, a hundred shots of café Cubano, an orgasm without the attendant shame or mess. His heart rate goes straight to fifth gear, ninety miles an hour, and it stays there. He is going to do this. He is going to show Castro. He will show the world.
Havana Libre Page 3
