Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  It is everything I can do not to choke him when he says that. Drunken fool. It was he who let my mother die. Do not try to twist your conscience to feed the hatred that you abandoned us both to feed, the hatred you traded your family and your life for. Do not tell such a contemptible lie. I say, “I’m going to Eckerd for some cigarettes. Do you need anything?”

  My father does not hear me. He has fallen asleep on my sofa.

  I think about it on the walk to the intersection. What to make of 26-9? At first I did not see it, only memorized it. Outside of Eckerd there’s some graffiti on the wall and it hits me: it may be a date. I might not have thought of it were it not for the 26, the first part of the graffiti that before 1959 could cost a Fidelista his life. If you were caught writing it on the side of a building, you would be accused of supporting the 26th of July Movement: M-26-7. If the numbers do mean September 26, that is just two weeks away. But José Martí? The name on my lips is reverent as only José Martí can be to both exile and barbudo alike. Could it be a cynical code name for the mercenary?

  I think before I make the call. When will it be safe to evacuate? Should I walk straight to the rendezvous? No, in the morning I will make the follow-up call, and, according to the instructions, only if there is a message will I walk to José Martí Park. This is when I realize what is meant by José Martí. It is not the man. I almost forgot what all has been named, on both sides of the Florida Straits, after our patriot, both before and after the Revolution. Not José Martí the name. José Martí the place. It is the airport named José Martí. José Martí Airport is the most crowded place in all Havana every day from five a.m. until midnight. Surely Mendoza has this in mind; he knows a deadly airport bombing will destroy tourism in one blow.

  I enter the phone booth in the alcove, insert a quarter, and push the buttons. The line clicks, the tone bursts, and I whisper into the mouthpiece. I could be a doctor reciting notes on a patient’s chart into a dictation machine, including an estimate of expenses (except that Cuban doctors take their own chart notes, and patients do not pay): “E-mail draft, 26-9, José Martí, 4,500.”

  If the person answering the phone doesn’t know, Pérez and Caballero will. José Martí: the airport. September 26: two weeks away. 4,500: three bombs.

  * * *

  When I get back to my father’s apartment, he is still passed out on my sofa. I want to say, We could have taken it the other way, Papá. It could have become us against Beatrice. Maybe Mamá would have made it. The cancer could have gone into remission. The witch to make us stronger. In the morning I will meet my father’s friend on the medical board and begin the immigration process. I will have to renounce my Cuban citizenship. I will go through the motions until then, but when the voice mail announcement indicates it is time, I will evacuate. Rather than sleep in my father’s bed, I recline in the lounge chair across from him and fall into a fitful sleep.

  * * *

  I am walking down the steps to my mother’s room. She is not dead, but living in this city where the streets are deserted during the day. She is out, and while the door to the apartment is not locked, I have to put my shoulder into it to get it open for the mountain of mail and unread papers that has piled up beneath the slot. Although my mother comes home every night, she must just push over them as I have just done, spreading the mess even further as stack after stack of unread correspondence gets shuffled and crumpled. I have more to add, because I borrowed two newspapers just the other day, knowing she wouldn’t read them anyway. Someday, maybe, if she starts feeling better. And so I drop them back onto the pile, including today’s paper, which I bought with my own dollar. I’ll leave her my paper. Maybe she’ll see it when she comes home. I have to go now. Soon she’ll be back.

  SÁBADO, 13 SEPTIEMBRE

  It is early morning, before dawn, when I awake to the ringing of the phone in my father’s apartment. The sofa is empty. I am cramped from sleeping in the chair, and I pick up the receiver and mutter, “¿Oigo?”

  “Getting your beauty sleep?” It is my father. “Can you come down to the pharmacy and help with some boxes? The store got an early delivery and it’s Coroalles’s day off.”

  I walk down a quiet Calle 8 and get to the pharmacy in less than fifteen minutes. It is still dark outside, but the service door is unlocked. Emerging from the storeroom, I discover the store lights are out except for over the pharmacist’s counter, where my father has poured himself a good rum, Bacardi Añejo. He pours me one in a nice glass. We sit side by side in chairs where customers usually wait for prescriptions to be filled.

  I take a small sip. It is very good, as smooth as Havana Club, but without a certain musty antiquity I associate with the taste of real Cuban rum. “What are we celebrating this morning?”

  “La vida,” my father answers, “just like every morning.”

  “To life, then.” I savor the second sip. From the way my father knocks it back, I expect he has already had a few.

  He says, “You know, I used to work in the OR.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “It was my residency. Calixto Garcia emergency room. Double and triple shifts.” The way his hands are shaking, it is hard to picture that this man was once capable with a scalpel. Slouching back in the chair, he refills his glass and takes another swallow. “There are times a surgeon walks into an emergent situation with a severe trauma of some kind—a knife wound, auto accident, or a bad fall—and he knows the patient is not going to make it. Certainly, you know what I am talking about?” I can think of at least a half-dozen occasions, and I am just waiting for the day when there are more than I can count on both hands. “And there is a human inside here,” he says, tapping his head, “who knows, despite all the protocols and oaths, who just knows the right thing is not to attempt heroic measures, and so he takes his time applying the tourniquets. He hesitates.”

  My father is right. I now have no doubt that he once worked in an OR, but I am nevertheless uncomfortable with the direction this conversation is taking, so I try changing the subject: “What about those boxes?”

  My father lowers the sunglasses. His eyes are very red. “What I am trying to say is this: you and I are both men who have looked horror in the face, and once you have locked eyes with horror, without turning away, you never look at the world the same again.”

  Coroalles enters from the front of the store and my heart races. It was supposed to be his day off. He carries a handheld recorder. It still bears the sticker from the store advertising that it is Voice-activated! I feel the burning rum I just swallowed rising in my throat, and I have to choke it back to say, “Where did you get that?”

  Coroalles says, “$39.99 at Eckerd.” The simplest traps.

  My father says, “Cóño, Manolo. How could you have been so foolish? Everyone knows everyone in Little Havana. When you ask the cashier for quarters and he sees you using the pay phone outside, he’s got to mention it to Mendoza.”

  Coroalles adds, “I wondered, who could you be calling that you would not ask one of us to use the store telephone? Last night I noticed you flipped Mendoza’s laptop shut, so I hid this inside the phone booth.” Coroalles presses play and I hear the sound of my own voice come out. It is soft and tinny, but unmistakably mine: “E-mail draft, 26-9, José Martí, 4,500.”

  Precisely how I could have been so foolish becomes a secondary consideration when I hear the service door swing open in the back of the storeroom and three figures appear behind the pharmacy counter: Mendoza and the Rivera brothers. Before I can stand up, Yuyo has made his way past us to block the door to the front of the store. Carlos walks up to me, grabs me by the throat, and I gag, “Qué cóño—” when Yuyo sticks half his fist in my mouth and scoops his fingers against the back of my glottis. I stifle another hot ball of nausea welling up in my esophagus. They have watched too many James Bond movies, assuming I carry cyanide clenched in the back of my mouth.

  Yuyo takes his hand out of my throat and a Rivera on either side pins a wri
st to the arm of my chair. The world tilts and a shudder passes through me. My body becomes no longer my property. All these years of hardship, and the past few weeks of fear weighing on me like an old man, radiate from my sore bones. Mendoza says, “¿Tú no pensaste que estábamos esperando algo así?”

  Of course I thought they would be looking out for something like this.

  He takes the cordless phone from its cradle on the pharmacist’s counter and pushes it in my face. “A ti te gusta hacer llamadas por teléfono. Vamos, llama a tus jefes.”

  Call my masters. I glance at my father and he looks down at his glass. He is already drunk, and he pours himself another. And why not? How could anyone do this sober? I understand he is as much a prisoner as I am.

  I hold the phone in shaking hands and it strikes me with alacrity that Mendoza is correct about one thing: all I have is a number, but he does not know it is an untraceable voice mail, and Eduardo told me never to leave a message from anywhere but a pay phone. Making this call from my father’s pharmacy could be my only chance to indicate that I am in trouble. I push the buttons slowly, my hands shaking. Carlos watches and copies the number onto a pad of yellow paper.

  When I am done dialing, Mendoza takes the phone. The line clicks, the tone bursts, and Mendoza listens. After a few seconds of silence, his face contorts in disgust. He presses the button to end the call. “Who did you signal? Is it Giro?”

  “No sé.”

  “Mentiroso sinvergüenza.” Mendoza grabs my throat. “Fidel is breeding these wasps like so many worthless pesos. You are disposable, hijo de Rodriguez.” To Yuyo he says, “¿Ya está listo el cuarto?”

  “Listo.”

  The room is ready.

  Part III

  Havana Libre

  MIAMI: THE ROOM

  All basic freedoms must begin and end with bodily freedom: freedom from isolation and incarceration, freedom from torture and cruelty, even freedom of thought. The lies about free enterprise vs. free health care, free choice vs. free education—to the educated citizen, these are afterthoughts. Bodily freedom is first, last, and indispensable.

  They take me up the stairs to the hallway of the vacant apartment, where a radio is turned up very loud on a gusano talk station. Yuyo tells me to take off my shoes. I have heard of prisoners getting shoelaces taken away to forestall attempts at suicide by asphyxiation, but in my case they leave me barefoot altogether. When Yuyo takes away the right shoe, I remember that my cousin Emilio’s fifty-dollar bill is in there. They also take my belt and tell me to remove my black T-shirt.

  Carlos pushes me into the small room and they lock the door behind me, leaving me in darkness. I am trapped in the bathroom of an empty apartment. My surroundings consist of a sink, a shower-tub, and a toilet. I try flipping on the light but nothing happens. When I reach for the faucet and turn it, the vacuum backfills with a whoosh of air from the room. I try the valves under the sink, but it’s no use: the line has been shut off downstairs and the pipes have been purged. With the shower it is the same. The toilet is drained of water and both seat and lid have been removed. And when I lift the top off the back to feel in the dark tank, I find the float on the dry bottom.

  * * *

  At dawn, enough light comes through the high window for me to see two brass screws holding the thick trim of the single pane flush to the frame. I touch the edges of the frosted glass, a chicken-wire pane about fifty by forty centimeters. The futility of my situation makes me swoon. I am numb with the rum of the night before, but without any of the pleasant effects of intoxication.

  Situation analysis. Reconstruct to my best ability the past forty-eight hours from the captor’s perspective: My father suspected me, and he did not hesitate to betray me before I could him. Mendoza aided him to lay a trap on his computer, and Coroalles set the recorder in the phone booth. Maybe my father feigned being drunker than he really was. Coroalles went out and retrieved the recorder while I slept. Perhaps he had been trying to warn me when he said I would have been better off had I gone to Catholic Relief Services, but they are not bombing hotels in Havana, so nobody in Cuban intelligence—my jefes, Mendoza calls them—cares what’s happening at Catholic Relief Services, not enough to try sending spies inside. Mendoza heard my voice telling of the airport, the dates. They discussed what to do. They decided on the empty apartment. They prepared my prison. They captured me easily. They said come to the store. This is Mendoza’s building, in the heart of Little Havana. He is the king of Little Havana. The bathroom easily made into a jail cell. The objective seems to have been to get me into captivity as quickly as possible and to make the conditions as uncomfortable as possible. No food, no water. Although I do not yet feel parched, I am thirsty. I have experienced severe dehydration before, and I do not wish to again.

  Triage. In my early days as a medical intern in Cuba’s national health-care system, pulling double and triple shifts, days which never really ended as the conscientious physician still works twice and three times as hard, I had to constantly inventory my resources and assess my options. Despite the narrow probability that it would serve me for much more than a psychological diversion, we must do this as physicians and as Cubans. Now, in my current predicament, I fall back on it as an only alternative to surrender, a stratagem for self-preservation against complete collapse. I must focus my faculties and attenuate: deliberating conscientiously either on the biggest problem, the most soluble problem, or some combination, before the onset of soreness, hunger, and complete exhaustion. Right now, while I am still reasonably conscious. Who is Giro? What does Mendoza mean by wasps?

  Just outside the door, the radio’s ceaseless onslaught. The hosts’ hollered diatribes and occasional conversations with callers; advertisements for grocery stores, car dealerships, and impossibilities such as fat-reducing pills and get-rich-quick schemes with a maddening machine gun of disclaimers crammed into five seconds at the end of each—such is the orthodoxy of Little Havana that no neighbor would call in a noise complaint against Radio Mambí, WAQI Miami 710 AM. There hardly ever passes a beat of silence. Not only does the dissonance keep me from trying with much enthusiasm to cry for help, it will also deprive me of sleep.

  The room lightens and all I have is porcelain tile, talk radio, and sleep deprivation. I perceive that there is no shower curtain or rod for one above the bathtub, and the bar for the towel rack is gone too. No easy way of hanging myself, should I elect the only option for exit. Anything metal that was not fixed in position has been removed. Even the drain covers in the sink and tub are gone. I cannot imagine what mischief they thought I might stir up with these.

  Something else I did not recognize in the twilight, but now makes perfect sense: they have removed the mirror-faced door from the medicine cabinet. There is no glass to shatter and cut myself with. There are no shelves inside the cabinet itself, empty except for a small object I notice on the bottom ledge. They have left me a thermometer. When I recognize it is an oven thermometer, my stomach tightens like a fist. The needle rests at the bottom, where the temperature starts at 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Hopeless schemes spin through my half-awareness. My screwed-shut window: break it, squeeze through, drop to the alley below . . . Even though I know that, at about 0.2 square meter, there would be no way for more than a small child to fit through. There is no hardware to hang a curtain, nor is there an edge to hang some scrap of fabric and keep out the direct sun. I have to block these thoughts and stop the spiral. It is useless. It is burning up what cognitive energy I have left.

  I really need to shit, but I hold it. Without water in the toilet, there will be no pressure to flush. I pee down the bathtub drain because the P trap is behind the wall and not in the middle of the room and it could keep bad odors down, depending on how long I am in here. I experience severe abdominal pangs. My intestinal contortions are redoubled by the absurdity of the configuration: locked in a room with a toilet, but no way to go. The sun shines directly onto the tile floor through my window. The
morning drags on and by midday the temperature reaches 130 degrees.

  It is no longer possible to hold it and I have no recourse. I sit on the toilet and let myself go. Naturally there is no paper. I take off my black T-shirt and tear it into strips to wipe with, throwing the rags in the dry toilet on top of the shit. In my prison-oven, the stench remains close in my throat. By early afternoon, the radio says it’s 95 degrees outside. Inside the bathroom, the oven thermometer says it is 140.

  Nothing happening, nobody else is in the apartment except for the person guarding my room right outside the door. In the split-second breaks from the radio’s cacophony I hear him flip the pages of a newspaper or magazine. I think it is currently Carlos because when he shifts in the chair it creaks louder than it did this morning. He is taking alternating shifts with Yuyo. While the temperature inside rises, their job is to mind the oven. Whoever it is, he does not want to look at me. He does not want to smell me. By midafternoon it is 150 degrees.

  * * *

  They finally come and get me. Yuyo hollers, “Woo! It stinks in here!” He guides me shirtless across the hallway to the bedroom. Carlos is there, and there is a single metal folding chair in the middle of the room. Yuyo says, “Siéntate,” and we wait. It is a cool break, although from the sweat stains on the Rivera brothers’ shirts it is probably still close to 100 degrees in here. The empty bedroom is not on the south side of the building and its dark curtains are closed. When Mendoza enters I notice he has changed his shirt since this morning. Maybe he has had a rest. The Rivera boys remain, but my father is conspicuously missing.