Havana Noir

by Achy Obejas

  At those times, I’d hold the phone away from my ear, lean back in my chair, and light a cigarette. Sometimes I’d get up. I’d leave him there, talking to himself, without hanging up or letting him know. I’d go to the kitchen, pour myself a whiskey on the rocks, and return to the bedroom at my leisure. When I got back on the phone, he’d be going at it at the top of his lungs, threatening to strangle me with my own intestines, but not before tearing out my liver and eating it, among other lovely things. In the midst of his fits, he never noticed my absences. Or who knows—maybe he just didn’t want to let on. He was egocentrism itself. I’d happily get comfortable again in my chair, or on the bed among the big pillows, with my whiskey on the rocks and my cigarettes. I’d listen to plans for my future murder, which would be quite atrocious, while contemplating the Havana night. Then he’d finally calm his nerves, or surrender to exhaustion, or ejaculate. He was always the one who would say goodbye, until the next one, hope you have horrifying nightmares, etc. He’d hang up indignant, absolutely furious, telling me that I was a piece of shit, a goddamn cactus, a frigid neurotic, an insensitive bitch, a monster! And he just couldn’t talk to me anymore. Those farewells were never avatars of anything even vaguely healthy. Generally, the next day, or a few days after that, the mangled cadaver of some girl would be found in some tenement slum, or in a ditch, or in the bathroom at the bus terminal, or in a dumpster, or floating down the Almendares River. Not much time would pass before he’d call again, to brag about his latest prank.

  Even as he gave the impression of being an inveterate narcissist, the fact is he never described himself physically. Not seriously anyway. One night, I asked him what he looked like, only to see what he’d come up with, because I never thought he’d be honest about it. (People who describe themselves physically on the phone, or on the Internet, generally don’t tell you what they look like but what they’d like to look like.) Then the guy quite delightedly swore that he was basically green, that he had three fluorescent yellow eyes, two reddish antennae, and a few exquisitely violet dots.

  “Oh, and a twelve-inch cock,” he added, with great pride. “You want some…?”

  “Hey, stop that. I’ve told you, I can’t right now. But don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll let you know. And watch that flying saucer so they don’t steal it, okay? The streets are nasty these days.” “The flying…? Ha! Ha! Very funny! I looooove it when you try to be sly, foxy, all-powerful! Trying that with me…Ha! Ha! As if I didn’t know you!”

  “That’s right, I love you too.” I blew him a kiss. “You’re my favorite martian.”

  “Really? Then tell me what you’re wearing right now. Tell me! I need to know before I go out to…well, you know. C’mon, whore, tell me!”

  “What I’m wearing…hmm. Quite the little question. Let’s see…”

  I imagined him younger than me. Not an adolescent, but almost. Let’s say, some young thing in his twenties terrified of growing old. Somebody who’s, say, a miserable twenty-three but gets totally offended if you miscalculate and suggest twentyfour. Of course, when I asked him how old he was—and, let it be said, I did so with the utmost care—he told me I was a crone—ha! ha!—and old enough to be his great grandmother. That’s how he was, a vile clown. He hardly ever answered anything seriously, maybe out of self-importance, or to come off like a tough guy, or to compensate for the utter dismay he felt because I wasn’t afraid of him.

  I imagined he was white. Not white in that apocryphal fashion in which so many Cubans are white, but really white, from the roots, with all European ancestors. Immaculately white, maybe blond or red-haired. I also imagined him college-educated, or at least well-read and well-traveled, with a comfortable economic situation (not like me, because I struggle and work, but something of a fortunate son. Everybody knows what I mean: nomenclature, upper class, elite. In other words, the truly privileged in this country—those people who manage mixed enterprises, hotels, and franchise stores, who have Swiss bank accounts and spend their vacations in the Bahamas), and the look of every mother’s son, the face of an angel, and a pianist’s hands, very clean, a bit shy, elegant, with impeccable table manners, a genuine gold Rolex on his wrist, without a police record—except, perhaps, a little fine for speeding like a madman—a loner, nocturnal, bored, and a habitual user of cocaine and hardcore porn.

  I said I imagined him, but that’s not very exact. Back in the days when we talked freely on the telephone, before they arrested him, I didn’t imagine anything. No, that’s how I knew things were, no more, no less, and there was no way they could be any different. I didn’t need him to explicitly confirm anything for me to be certain of it all, regardless of prior promises in the service of truth. I mean, his way of speaking, his allusions, even the slightly faggy way he pronounced certain words, the insults and the threats, as if he were trying to be the wicked wise guy or the neighborhood tough guy, the big spender, street expert, and supreme connoisseur of women of the night—everything about him seemed to indicate unequivocally that I was right.

  He never told me his name. When I asked him during one of those telephonic chitchats, he assured me in his unique style that his name was Ted Bundy. Ha! Ha! He also said I needed to become a police inspector, since I obviously enjoyed interrogating sinister suspects. I didn’t pursue it. What for? I never pressured him about anything. It’s possible I may even have laughed a bit. The big shots in this country, in order to distinguish themselves even more from the average joe—so they confide when they’re in trusted company, or when they think they are—never give their kids extravagant names like Yoandrys, Plastidio, Inkajurel, or Amón Ra. No way! So the sinister suspect had to be named Fernando, Ernesto, Camilo, Rafael, or something like that. And just like he didn’t tell me his name, he didn’t ask for mine. He didn’t need it. He always called me “you,” just “you.” That’s not counting the expletives, of course.

  A little before his arrest, a photo of him ran in Granma and other newspapers. Well, not of him. The guy in the photo wasn’t him, it couldn’t have been him. The press release that went with it warned the citizens of Havana to remain vigilant, ready for combat. And to collaborate by providing any pertinent information that might help the biggest manhunt ever to catch the most dangerous criminal our country had known in these last few years of revolutionary struggle against crime and blah blah blah. Very grandiose, that little press release. So much so that I almost called them at one of those numbers they give to let them know they were after the wrong guy, and that if they persisted on that path, the biggest manhunt ever would be a miserable flop. In fact, I did call. One, two, three times. But I could never get through. The lines were always busy. Apparently, there were a lot of people wanting to call in with pertinent information. I recovered my senses after a while—thank God!—and I stopped calling.

  Soon word got out that the image wasn’t an actual photo but a police sketch created on a computer according to a description by a witness, his latest victim, who, by some miracle, had managed to escape into the thicket around the Prince’s Castle. Ah, well, that explained the mistake, I told myself. The poor girl had been, quite understandably, a nervous wreck, and had lost her sense of reality. That’s why she hadn’t described the real assailant but rather some demonic being sprung from her imagination or from popular mythology, like the Man With the Backpack, the Fat Guy, the Rascal on the Run, or whatever; nobody who actually exists. That explanation struck me even then as a little convoluted, a bit of a stretch, but it gave me a certain relief, I don’t know why.

  I was waiting for the guy to call me so I could hear his version of what had happened on the night of the unfortunate incident by the Prince’s Castle. Curiosity coursed through my veins. Although, I admit, I was also looking forward to the malevolent fun of mocking him. As far as I knew, until that incident, none of his “meatballs,” as the stupid pig called his victims, had gotten away before.

  “You’re losing your touch, baby,” I was going to whisper in a cold, cruel tone. “Ha! H
a! You’re on a slippery slope, going straight down. You’re practically finished. Why, you can’t even take the dog out for a walk on a leash! Don’t you see that at the end of the day, no matter what you do, the babes are going to beat you? Don’t you see, you fool, that we’re better than you? Oh, Ted Bundy, you have no idea how much I pity you. You know, if I were you, I’d retire. Don’t get mad, man, but with your utter lack of street smarts and that microscopic little dick, you’re not going anywhere. You know what I think? You should get yourself a husband, that’s what! A really brutish macho, with a real twelve-inch super dick who fucks you up the ass the way you deserve and makes you see stars and…”

  I was really quite inspired. I spent various nights waiting for his call, very excited, smoking cigarette after cigarette, with all my lights off and my gaze turned on the sky above Havana—one of the darkest in the world—as I went through my burlesque speech in my head, making it even more hurtful, sadistic, and devastating. I really wanted to fuck with this guy, to offend him, humiliate him, and chew him up and out. I confess that there are times when I have very violent impulses toward others, but I contain myself. I am, after all, a civilized person. But when life’s crazy turns bring me in contact with someone who doesn’t repress those impulses in himself…well, then the walls crumble, there’s no point to being civilized, and we willingly go deeper into that wild and tenuous territory where everything is up for grabs. And when I say everything, I mean exactly that: everything. So I was really sharpening my claws, ready to dig them where they would most hurt my nocturnal interlocutor as soon as I got my chance. Ah, but woman proposes and God disposes! That bastard son of a bitch never called again. And because I had no way of getting ahold of him, I was left on my own. What a drag.

  A week after the police sketch was published, news of the dangerous criminal’s arrest came with much fanfare, followed by effusive praise for the wisdom, heroism, and selfiess work of the National Revolutionary Police, the party, the government, the community organizations, and, more generally, the people of the capital, who had remained firm in their resolve, without allowing themselves to be distracted by the enemy, blah blah blah…

  As incredible as it may sound, I didn’t tie any of these things together. For me, it was clear—clear as day—that the scarecrow in the photo didn’t exist. For me, if they’d caught anybody, it could only be the real him, the psychopath with the lethal blade, the bastard who so reveled in his telephonic chitchats with me, and who had, unexpectedly, stopped calling. And, as I said, that’s when I panicked. I freaked out. It’s not that I had done anything terrible, nor that I felt responsible for the guy’s deeds. No way! Looking coldly at the facts, what could I be accused of? Of accepting calls from a serial killer at nearly midnight all summer long? Of having heard on numerous occasions the detailed plans for a crime from its perpetrator? Of never having run to turn him in? Well, I suppose that is also a crime, a very serious one. Of course, I could swear and swear again until the end of days that I never believed a word uttered on the phone by that guy, that I always believed those florid and malicious narratives pouring into my little ear were never more than nocturnal jokes, just jokes. Jokes in supremely bad taste, of course. Cruel, stupid, macabre jokes, but no more than that. Regardless of whether the police inspector believed me or not, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove the contrary. But I was terrified just the same. Just thinking about it, my hairs stand on end.

  The last thing I wanted in this life was to raise the police’s suspicions, to be investigated, to have them sticking their noses in my personal business. I didn’t want them to know I don’t work for the state, that I don’t belong to my block’s Committee for Defense of the Revolution or to any other community organization, that I barely deal with the people in my neighborhood, that the people in my building think I’m weird, that I frequently cheat on my taxes, that my parents live in Israel, that I have an illegal Internet connection, that my brother is gay and lives in New York, that I sometimes do drugs to go to sleep, that my ex-husband is a former political prisoner and now lives in Miami, that I have a nine-millimeter Beretta (which is extremely illegal in this country) stashed in the top drawer of my night table…Basically, I had an abundance of reasons to be scared of the National Revolutionary Police noticing my existence. My anguish was such that, for the first few days after the guy’s arrest, I was utterly paralyzed. I didn’t even try to get rid of the gun. In the end, that turned out to be a good thing, since no one ever came to arrest me, or to attempt to search my apartment, or even to ask me anything about the case, nothing.

  To be frank, I have no idea why I went to the trial. At that point, I was pretty serene, completely—or pretty much—recovered from my fright. I wanted to take a look at the guy, even if it was from a distance. What for? Well, maybe just to see the incontrovertible proof that I was right (and not the stupid Granma and the other little newspapers) in terms of what the guy looked like, and then leave the whole terrible story at that. Or who knows—maybe deep down I just wanted to add a little more suspense and drama to my life, since by going I ran the risk that the guy would recognize me and let slip—in public!—all that had been carefully withheld until then. But I wasn’t really sure that he could identify me. I never knew how the devil he’d hit on me, whether by just dialing numbers randomly, or from a phone book stolen from a mutual friend, or by following some numeric or cabalistic criteria, or via some other mysterious formula that I couldn’t decipher. It’s probably unnecessary to state that the guy never bothered to explain any of this to me. He assured me I’d caught his eye—those were his words—a million times, at the movie theater on La Rampa, at Coppelia, at the cafeteria on the first floor of the Focsa building, on the seawall at the Malecón, in an open-air bar across the street from Colón Cemetery…In other words, all places where any Havana resident has been at least once in her life, so that mentioning them didn’t mean anything. One night, I told him I had splendid tits, that I’m a size thirty-eight, and he thought that was great. In fact, he really got into that detail. He loooooved it, as he liked to say. Too bad it wasn’t true! I do have a good ass, but tits, no way. The sad truth is that I’m a size thirty-two, and that’s stretching it. Of course, none of this means anything either. Maybe the guy was just going along with me exactly like I went along with him about his twelve inches.

  Just in case, though, I decided to alter my appearance a bit before going to the trial. I straightened my hair and dyed it brown. I dropped a black beret on my head and wore a long leather coat, all the way down to my ankles, and donned a pair of dark glasses with smoky lenses. And to make myself look interesting, I applied a vivid red lipstick. Dressed like a character out of The Matrix (or whatever the hell), I took a taxi to Old Havana and showed up fifteen minutes before the start of the trial at the Provincial Court.

  Ufff, they almost didn’t let me in! Outside the building, on Teniente Rey Street, there was an unusual crowd of people, and there was a lot of pushing, kicking, punching, yelling, and a ferocious stink of human flesh in the air. My God! No doubt I’m a warrior, though. I refused to budge. I had to practically break an arm to push my way through the tumult, get in the actual building, and, finally—a little worse for wear with my hair out of place, sweating, and with the beret crumpled into one of the coat’s inside pockets—I arrived at Criminal Court #7. I was in luck: I managed to get a magnificent seat, not too far from the bench where they’d soon sit the most famous criminal of the decade.

  When I saw him, just a few meters from me, first face to face and then in profile, I couldn’t believe my eyes. No, no, no. No way! It wasn’t possible. I remember I took my glasses off so I could see him better. Mother of God, what was that? I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Jesus Christ! I couldn’t get over it. I elbowed a man sitting to my right and asked him if that was really the guy, the one in the brownish-gray suit, if he was the accused, the one who had allegedly committed a dozen or more murders. And it turned out that, in fact, it was
him. Wow! The way he looked had nothing—I mean nothing—to do with what I’d thought he’d look like based on our phone calls. He was identical to the police sketch! Everybody knows now: a light-skinned mulatto, with very light naps, a flat nose, and very big round eyes, like a frog’s, and a total thug look. He appeared to be in his fifties, although he was probably younger and life had just treated him badly. It was easy to see he was a lowlife from a million miles away. He looked less like a laborer than an outcast, a ratty vagabond or beggar, maybe an alcoholic or pot smoker, hungry, brutish, a dumpster diver, totally awkward in a suit…And then…his name! That was the worst of all, at least for me. They referred to him as citizen Policarpo Meneses Landaeta, alias “The Beast from Macagua 8.” Oh! I don’t know what hurt more, Policarpo or the Beast! Of course, on this island we can’t hope that a rapist will be called Peter Kürten, alias “The Düsseldorf Vampire.” You can’t ask for pears from an elm tree. Which is not to say that Policarpo, topped off with the Beast (not to mention that Macagua thing, whatever that was, followed by its enigmatic little number), wasn’t taking things just a bit too far.

  No one else in that courtroom seemed the least bit perplexed. All around me, people were making faces: of disgust, of anger, of fear, of satisfaction, of justice served and morbid curiosity. But none of surprise. I suppose that for most Cubans, it must be a relief that a murderer should reflect back what they think a killer should look like. That is, that he should be black, ugly, on the older side, badly dressed, and look like a dork. And the fierce Beast of Macagua 8 certainly fit the bill. He was practically typecast! Only I couldn’t imagine him saying that he loooooved anything; or that the night before he’d had a stupendous Cabernet Sauvignon from a particularly good year; or that, now that psychoanalysis was no longer in vogue, men could fall in love with their mothers again without fear of being called fags; or that he was basically green, with antennae and all the rest; or that he was a much better poet than Jim Morrison, that blockhead; or that this or that film by Pasolini struck him as too eschatological—that it was impossible to get to the good part, the part with the torture, without your stomach turning and a strong desire to slap the director and run him over—ha! ha!—with a flaming Ferrari Testarossa…among other things. Truth be told, I simply couldn’t connect these and other comments he’d made in the dead of night with the mute ghost in front of me now. In the end, I told myself, though I pride myself on knowing human nature, that I’m just another superficial person, filled with prejudices, and very depressed. I looked disapprovingly on the malevolent Policarpo, sighed, and went out to smoke a cigarette. But I didn’t stay out of the courtroom long, and I was right to come back, I believe, because that trial held many other surprises for me.