Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  There is nobody else at the bar, but I keep an empty stool between us. “That’s very humble of you, colonel. Anyone who reads Granma knows who you are.”

  “What will it be?” the bartender asks.

  “Do you have wine?”

  “I’ve just uncorked a very good five-year-old Chilean Cabernet.” The bartender shows me the ornate label. “Or if you prefer I’m chilling an excellent Pinot Grigio de Venezia.”

  “The Cabernet will be fine, thanks.”

  The bartender places a glass before me and pours a generous serving. I take a taste, but the pounding of my heart and a sour flavor in my mouth keep me from enjoying it. “Tell me, Colonel Perez, what interest could the chief homicide investigator of the PNR possibly have in a pediatrician with the national medical service?”

  He sips the fresh-poured beer. “I’m looking for a teenage girl wanted in connection with the murder of a chulo named Alejandro Martínez.”

  “¿Cómo?”

  “The young woman in question spent a week at your apartment, and the victim came over and threatened both of you a few days before his body got tangled up in some fisherman’s nets at the mouth of Havana Harbor.”

  “Could it have been accidental, a drowning?”

  “There were signs of struggle: lesions on his arms and chest. Of course, the exact cause of death has been difficult to determine as we still haven’t found his head.”

  “Carajo …”

  “He was not especially popular among the girls.” Detective Perez takes off his gloves. His fingers are exquisitely manicured. Only once before, when I was starting medical school, have I seen such hands on a man. They belonged to the cadaver inside which I saw my first organs.

  “Severing the cervical vertebrae requires both the right instrument and great force,” I say, “not to mention a strong stomach and a lot of nerve. A girl couldn’t have done that.”

  “Young ladies come from all over the island to work in Havana, doctor. Some will spend a few months, others a year or two, do a few dirty things, and usually they will go back to their villages and shack up with campesinos, have kids, lead normal lives. But there is another type. Surely you know the constitution: the solipsist. No matter what she gets in this life, she believes she deserves more.” Perez swallows the last of his beer and rises to go. “If you see the girl again, I’d like you to contact me. Come back and talk to Samson, the bartender.”

  “You choose unusual locations to conduct your inquiries, colonel.”

  “Stay reachable for a few days, doctor. Don’t leave Havana.” Perez parts the drapes and is gone. I wait a minute before leaving, neglecting to finish my glass of wine. Samson does not look up.

  I return home to Vedado and pull Aurora’s old rocking chair close to the French doors, parting the curtains onto the corner of 12 y 23: the bored soldiers, the old Chevys, the people going by and, across the street, a black Toyota with dark windows, a curl of smoke emerging from the passenger side. Taking the service stairs down, I back the Lada out of the garage and leave it parked in the alley. When I check on the basement clinic, the broken window-pane has already been replaced.

  31 July 1992

  Two weeks ago, my Friday shift at the pediatric hospital was almost over when Director González stepped around the curtain and handed me an envelope with my week’s pay. “Rodriguez, you have tomorrow off, don’t you?” Director González has always cultivated a studied, comfortable air toward my mark.

  “Sí, señor.”

  “Would you stay over? Portuondo’s bus was canceled.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  The admitting nurse briefed me on the next patient. “Una niña, ten years old, complaining of fever and an earache; high temperature, blurry vision, and slightly slurred speech.”

  Holding her mother’s hand, the girl sat on a bench in the sala de examinación, a four-by-five compartment partitioned by plastic curtains strung up in the hot, drafty lobby. “First the earache,” said the girl’s mother. “Then the fever started. We waited a few days to come in.”

  “How many days, exactly, since the onset of the fever?”

  “Four.”

  “Cuál es tu nombre, amiguita?”

  “Me llamo Tonia.”

  I asked Tonia’s mother, “Does your daughter have a speech impediment?”

  “No.”

  “Tonia, can you tell me how many animals you count on the curtain there?”

  “The light hurts.” Her slur was pronounced. She focused on the mark beneath my right eye. “What’s that on your face?”

  “A bird dropped it on me.” I turned and asked the mother, “Is anyone else with you?”

  “My husband is in the waiting room.”

  My first task of the second shift was to convince Tonia’s father that the girl’s ailment was a lot more serious than a simple ear infection. Both of the girl’s parents sat across from me at the desk I shared with four other pediatricians. “Your daughter has to stay here tonight.”

  The father stared suspiciously at my mark. “Come on, doctor. Just give the girl a shot and we’ll be gone.”

  “She might have a cerebral abscess. She needs to be under close observation. This could require massive antibiotics.”

  “We live right around the corner in the Máximo Gomez apartments.”

  “You can spend the night in her room, if you’d like, but Tonia has to stay.”

  The father stood up and left the office, slamming the door behind him. The mother looked at me. “Do you have any children, doctor?”

  “No,” I said. I try to take care of every patient as if she were my own child, but to tell a parent this would just irritate the situation.

  “If you let my baby die, you will be killing me too.”

  “I will do everything in my power to help your daughter.”

  “Imagine if your own mother had lost you, how she might feel.”

  There is no more powerful antidote than a mother’s will for her child’s survival. Sometimes this takes the form of a bitter pill, a country woman suspicious of all the gleaming machines and of their handlers, the doctors and nurses. Then there are those who trust modern practices. Either way it is a welcome medicine when a parent’s stubbornness overpowers a child’s fear.

  I gave the nurse instructions to admit Tonia to intensive care and asked an orderly to set up a cot for the mother beside the girl’s bed. Then I walked down the hall to the physician’s lounge, a small, windowless closet with a bare bulb on the back wall and a dusty jug of water for refreshment. The coffee-maker had been stolen during the second week of my residency, and nobody had bothered filing a report because it had been a year since they had stocked coffee. Sometimes, in the middle of a double shift, I’ll go there to stretch my legs across two plastic chairs and catch a short nap.

  Tonia’s father pushed the door open without knocking. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Taking a siesta.”

  “Nothing is happening. Why can’t I take my daughter home?”

  “Please, get some sleep yourself. They made up an extra bed in her room.”

  “I don’t like a bed. I sleep on a bench.”

  A nurse interrupted. “Doctor Rodriguez, venga pronto.”

  I pushed past the father and ran down the hall to Tonia’s bed. I had been planning to order a CT scan in the morning, hoping there would still be time to go with a sequence of antimicrobials, but now Tonia’s condition had become critical. The abscess was hemorrhaging. I told the head nurse to prep the OR for emergency surgery and went in to scrub up.

  After the anesthesiologist put the girl under and the intern shaved the area over the abscess, I made an exploratory incision with the scalpel. Fortunately, I found the mass near the surface and completely encapsulated by membrane. Excision was completed quickly and without complications. I took a culture of the residual fluid with an aspirator and asked the intern to sew the patient up and send her on to post-op. Then I requisitioned the biopsy exam and
wrote up a preliminary convalescing plan, treatment to be adjusted upon identification of the infecting microorganism.

  By the end of the shift, Tonia was stable in the ICU. I informed Tonia’s parents that surgery had been successful and that I expected the girl’s complete recovery in a matter of days. Candelario arrived to relieve me for the graveyard shift.

  When I left the hospital toward midnight, there was a teenage girl in new blue denim jeans and a powder-blue top standing beneath the neon sign outside. She had a pretty face, light skin, and the dirty-blond hair of a true rubiecita. Our eyes met and she walked over to me. Casually overlooking the mark on my cheek, she handed me a sack. “It looked like you were never going to get a break, so I brought you something.”

  Inside the sack was a malted milk and a sandwich. “Where did you get this?”

  “At the Habana Libre cafeteria.”

  “They let you in?”

  “A friend picked it up for me, a foreigner.”

  “Thank you. Let me pay you.”

  “I won’t take your money, doctor. That girl you operated on tonight is my closest cousin.”

  “Please, share this with me.”

  “No thanks. I already ate.”

  I bit into the sandwich: ham and cheese on bread that wasn’t stale.

  “You’re a lifesaver. I haven’t tasted anything in twelve hours.”

  We talked about the heat while I finished the sandwich and the malta. Then she looked me in the eyes and said, “Pardon me, doctor, but a girlfriend told me you have a clinic where you can do the HIV test and keep the results secret.”

  I looked over my shoulder—nobody. “Yes, but when it’s necessary I recommend treatment and counseling.”

  “I’m not going to one of those sanitoriums.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself. My polyclinic is on 12 y 23 in Vedado. There are open consultations this Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 to 5:00. I close for an hour at midday.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” she said. The girl walked off into the night.

  * * *

  Back at the attic, I flipped on the light and said to El Ché, “The sun through the French doors has been sucking the color from your face.”

  El Ché replied, “You look like hell yourself. Even if there’s not much to eat, you should at least keep clean-shaven.”

  “I can’t buy a razor anywhere. And who are you to talk, barbudo?”

  “My beard is different. It’s symbolic.”

  “I’ll say: totemic.”

  I flipped on Radio Reloj. “Economic aggression from North American reactionaries has not dampened the spirits of the volunteer brigades picking cucumbers in Varadero …”

  There are certain advantages to occupying the third floor, like fewer encounters with the CDR and other people of the street. It’s quieter up en el tercer piso and cooler in the breezes from the Florida Straits, and although there are relocados downstairs, none trudge overhead. For the past few years, I have resigned myself to every six months seeing all that sustains me—the real value of my salary, my ration of food and coffee, my allowance of sex, and the square footage of the house I can call my own—cut in half. I have a galley kitchen where I make coffee (when there is coffee) and slice whatever scraps of vegetables I can find on the bolsa negra with a dull scalpel salvaged from the pediátrico. The bathroom is tiny with a toilet, a basin under an iron tap, and a shower three feet square. In the living room there’s a braided rug where I throw my dirty work clothes, three walls of books, and a sofa where I sleep beneath a poster of El Ché. I got rid of the bed after Elena left. The saving grace of this attic—added during pre-revolutionary days less for the servant-occupant’s enjoyment than to appease the façade of proportion at the time—is a pair of French doors that open onto a shallow balcony facing the sea: a living blue movie where imagination paints ninety-mile-away views of that most unobtainable peninsula. On good days I get up and put Beny Moré on my father’s old tocadisco. I open the French doors and let the ships’ whistles blow in from Havana Bay. On bad days I awaken too early, hours before dawn, and stay on the sofa with my eyes squeezed shut but getting none of sleep’s reprieve.

  I lit a cigarette, brand Popular: black tobacco packed in sweet rice paper, ten cents a pack on the ration card, but that’s for just one pack a week, and everybody who smokes Populares craves at least a pack a day. Now two packs of Popular go for an American dollar on the black market, so nobody who gives up smoking ever surrenders his weekly ration. Most people I know who have recently quit did it so they can go on eating. Coffee can help the headaches, when there is coffee. I use the grounds four or five times, dehydrating them in the window between infusions and preserving them with a bit of plastic in the refrigerator. Then again, coffee can be the cause. Neurons become greedy for caffeine, and when abruptly there is no more caffeine they become confused and send messages to the pain center. Coffee can hurt or coffee can be a remedy. When I was interning thirty-hour triples, I could try to plow through the migraine, but lately the pain has been making me dizzy. There’s no more aspirin or ibuprofen. I’d have to steal it from the pediátrico, and that would mean directly from the patients’ provisions. I won’t stoop that low. Not yet.

  There was no coffee, not even tea, but as a psychosomatic tactic I got an empty cup from the kitchen and took imaginary sips. Sometimes it stems the migraine. Every day is pervaded by headaches. Hunger headaches, heat headaches, just missed the bus and have to wait four more hours for the next one headaches. Berliners on la tele chiseling chunks of concrete to sell to American collectors headaches. Desperation headaches. Headaches of locusts pealing invisibly from saw grass and palm, of shrill locusts flying smack into your eye and crunching under your feet. Headaches that make your jaw ache. Headaches that begin between midbrain and cerebellum and rise, pausing to rock the pons, and shudder back down the spinal cord through the medulla oblongata. Headaches that settle into one shoulder or the other. Headaches that make you vomit. Headaches that make music, their very own music, broadcasting on low-frequency radio waves that shake the bowels of passersby.

  “¡Radio Reloj! Son las doce de la noche.” I lit another cigarette and turned on la tele, thinking there might be something good on Cine de Medianoche. There was: Oliver Stone’s Jota-éFe-Ka. But just as it was beginning—¡ñó! Otro apagón. Blackouts follow schedules as faithfully as the Friday-night features.

  12 August 1979

  “¡Qué calentico y rico está!” Aurora bounced me in the furrow of her glorious thighs, off-key harmonizing with the man mamboing down 23rd Street. “¡Ya no se puede pedir mas!” With her ebony-smooth skin and pendulous breasts, it was the housekeeper, Aurora, who was the light of my young life. Not Mamá. Mamá was downstairs in her room, shutters closed against the heat of the Havana afternoon. She stayed in bed for long periods of time, days sometimes. My father had left for Miami in ’69, two months before I was born, and now it was my tenth birthday and Mamá was dying of cancer. Aurora would insist Mamá hug me like you would entreat a sick person to eat: “Un abrazo, señora, por favor …”

  After school I had gone straight up to Aurora’s attic to play with dominoes until that twilight hour when the peanut vendor breezed by. As soon as we heard the call come up from Calle 23—“Cacerita no te acuestes a dormir …” and by cacerita I knew he meant Aurorita; she was his little housekeep—Aurora scooped me up, shifted me to her hip, threw open the French doors, and lowered the line with a peso in the basket. She reeled the basket back in and Machado, my pet dog, stood on his hind legs. Aurora swatted him. “¡Mendigo!” She stuffed the hot nuts in the front pocket of my overalls.

  “Aurita,” I said, “what’s the man singing about that’s so hot and tasty?”

  “Algo que tu tienes en los pantolones.”

  “¿Y qué es eso?”

  Yanking the paper cone from my pocket, Aurora cried, “¡Maní!”

  Aurora unraveled the cone and poured me two handfuls. It was hot. It was
good. I knew what the man meant. You really didn’t want to go to bed without a little something hot in your belly. That afternoon Mamá seemed to be feeling okay, so Aurora took the evening off. Mamá baked us a cake and we had the world all to ourselves.

  After Mamá died, I developed a small hemorrhage beneath my right eye. Many photos and X-rays were taken. Dermatologists and neurosurgeons first diagnosed that, if the hematoma were to burst, I could suffer a massive and likely lethal stroke. I carried a time bomb in my head. Should they schedule surgery? Would it do any good, or would it just trigger the detonator? Although I was allowed to leave the hospital in a few days, I had to return daily for medical observation. After two months the doctors decided that the thrombus was benign. Although the only thing the lab-coats did was figure out to leave me alone, my case was considered a milestone for Socialist medicine, a great prognostic step. The chief pediatrician was flown to Gdansk and Stockholm and Mexico City for conference presentations, complete with slide projections. An intern pointed out that the macula was shaped a little like Havana on the map. The custodians of Communist health care came up with a term for my infarctus incubatus, indexed in medical textbooks throughout Cuba, China, East Germany, Russia, and Angola: Havana Lunar.

  My grandmother Mamamá moved into the house, but she grieved so deeply for Mamá that I was left in Aurora’s care. In this way things were not much different from before. I did not play with other children. I would look in the mirror, wondering why the mark shows up on one side of my nose in photos, the other in the glass. I worried that I didn’t really know which side to hide from strangers. What most disturbed me about someone seeing it for the first time was not the steady stare, the curled lip, or the involuntary “¡Qué raro!” or “¡Qué asco!” It was the follow-up among those brazen enough to ask aloud: “How did you get that?”

  Aurora would take me to Cemeterio Colón, the necropolis, to visit Mamá. We passed the monument to the firemen, dozens of them who perished in a great conflagration at the turn of the century. On each corner of the tomb, a stone mourner bowed her head. I tried to peer up under the shrouds at their eyes, but these statues were never given sight. We passed the tomb of La Milagrosa, and Aurora told me the story of this famous resident of the necropolis. The woman died delivering a stillborn child. They were buried together, the child’s corpse laid to rest between the mother’s legs as was the custom in the early part of the century. Years later, when the widower requested that his late wife be moved, the remains were exhumed and they found the infant skeleton cradled in the mother’s arms. Pilgrims visit her grave every day, requesting her intercession in all kinds of family matters.