Havana Noir

by Achy Obejas

  “He said Shanghai,” I answered, tossing out my cigarette.

  “Shanghai? What does that mean?” asked Esteban.

  I contemplated that for a moment, then I thought I should say, It’s the city of dreams, it’s the city of sex and drugs and revolution and pleasure never ending, but I realized that wouldn’t do, so I answered the only way I knew how: “Yo qué sé.”

  What do I know.

  MURDER AT 503 LA ROSA

  BY MOISÉS ASÍS

  Ayestarán

  What am I going to do? That’s what I keep asking myself over and over as they lead me through the airport.

  “We have a problem, sir,” the secretary at the law school had said. “You can’t take the state’s graduating exam because we found you have penal antecedents, a police record. It’s been more than twenty years, so you can ask that they be erased and then you can take the state exam,” he added in a conciliatory tone.

  Of course I knew this; that police record had made a pariah out of me, without the right to study the career of my choice, without the right to seek a better job, or to have any kind of social acceptance. For more than twenty years I’d been walking around socially and politically castrated, and I’d been hoping that the University of Havana would never find out about my past if I just denied it.

  “There was a mistake and it’s been rectifled,” the legal adviser to the Ministry of Justice said this time, months later. “When you were tried and sentenced, you were a minor and so you should have never had an adult police record.”

  You’re telling me this now, after decades of ostracism, you fucking legal adviser to the ministry?

  But it’s never too late to start again. So I graduated from law school and decided not to practice, since the profession doesn’t actually allow the defense of those accused of ideological crimes such as thinking aloud. I can’t even defend myself. Under what law, and with what proceedings? I think back and I regret that I was so dismissive of that court-appointed lawyer who didn’t bother to mount a defense for me back when I was seventeen years old. Where could he be now? Has he been imprisoned for thinking without hypocrisy, has he deported himself, has he allowed himself to be debased?

  After two or three hours of pedaling my bicycle, sweating my guts out, I can’t find my way home: Night has come too soon, and the stars are on vacation as it rains nonstop on this new moon. For those without direction or hope, there are no sadder nights than those that are moonless. And it won’t matter how much I plead, the moon will not so much as peek.

  The last time that I couldn’t distinguish day from night was when I’d just turned seventeen and was locked up in a police cell during two weeks of questioning. The cell was windowless and it was impossible to tell the difference between dawn and the most intense noon hour. They wanted to reeducate me so that I would not only confuse day for night but so that I’d learn that good and evil were relative concepts.

  I was frequently dragged from that nine-by-six cell that I shared with three other inmates and asked about my terrible crime: wanting to leave my country. Days before, the overloaded boat in which I’d hoped to row hundreds of miles had gone down near a fishing dock; we’d barely even started out on that moonless night. Nobody knew anything and there was no evidence, but a word from the political police was enough to label it a Crime Against the Integrity and Stability of the Nation. A military tribunal passed judgment on this civilian, a minor, with a court-appointed lawyer who stayed quiet, trembling, while the political police’s prosecutor presented a fantastic story that steered clear of the truth. Of the four-year sentence I was given, I only served one, in labor camps where there were also moonless nights.

  The police are not very efficient, or they’re really so preoccupied with trying to deal with the miserable problems in their own homes, which they have in common with every other Cuban, that they really don’t care about doing a good job of investigating crime. They never bothered to find out how Victor, my fourth-floor neighbor at 503 La Rosa Street, died. The octogenarian passed away three days after being hospitalized. Nobody bothered to find out how he’d hit himself so many times against the wall. But all the neighbors heard him, in the silence of the blackout, and Juana the mulatta, sixty years his junior, violently shaking him.

  Victor and Juana had married four years before for the exclusive benefit of the young domestic servant, who would soon inherit the apartment and a juicy widow’s pension. Now Juana and the three kids she had while married to Victor could finally enjoy a better life. Victor had been resigned to those kids, black babies who arrived one after the other without a smidgeon of their presumed father’s Caucasian DNA.

  Everything might have been more believable if on the night of the wall-banging and Victor’s subsequent hospitalization, their door hadn’t been furiously kicked in by Francisco, Juana’s nocturnal lover, who arrived and couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let him in.

  Each night, Francisco, a thieving dipsomaniac from the neighborhood, would fornicate with Juana while Victor slept a few steps away. As soon as Juana became a widow, Francisco installed himself in the apartment and continued with the only things he knew how to do in his life: stealing and drinking.

  They’d met at the bar adjacent to our building, at the corner of La Rosa and Ayestarán, a sad little place where lost souls would fill their bladders with alcohol only to empty them later in the neighborhood’s recesses. It was a little after the man moved in that my life became more miserable, and I decided that killing him could be rationalized as an act of justice for the greater good of society.

  I should be used to these interminable blackouts, omnipresent since my early childhood. If sunlight is a gift from God that has accompanied us always and will be with us forever, electric light is also an intangible miracle that doesn’t depend on us but on a group of men who tell us day in and day out that we must save what they squander, who make the blackouts coincide with the hours in which the radio and TV broadcasts from the United States to the Cuban people are most intense. Or worse, the blackouts drag on when I need to write or study or when friends come over. The drunken thieves from the adjacent bar take advantage of the darkness to make off with what they can. It seems to me that the blackouts are a punishing reality that haunts us daily, from infancy to our deaths.

  “We’re going to let you go,” says the bureaucrat who has just given me the approval to leave Cuba. “We’re going to let you go because your soul is no longer in this country, you don’t think or feel like us. You haven’t matured enough to forget the idealism of your youth. You have not taken advantage of all the opportunities we’ve given you.”

  I am left dumbfounded, trying to figure out what these opportunities were that I didn’t learn from or appreciate. But in this moment of joy, I mentally thank him instead, for not torturing me with a long delay in approving the leave for my family and myself.

  The dark of the blackouts pursues me while I work, during dinner, trying to read or attempting sleep under the heat’s caress, hauling buckets spilling water up and down the stairs, waiting in interminable lines to buy something to eat, as I make love, or during a funeral, healing or teaching others, trying to heal myself or trying to learn. I should be used to this since it’s been the same thing since childhood, when the city of Havana began to lean on crutches.

  I live in what could be called the clitoris of the Ayestarán neighborhood, which was built in the mid-twentieth century between the old colonial district of El Cerro and elegant Nuevo Vedado. My apartment is in a part of the neighborhood that looks like a giant vulva right in the middle of Havana; it’s south, at the perineum of the intersection of Ayestarán Road and Rancho Boyeros Avenue. To the north, both avenues stretch for various blocks like thighs inserted in the city’s hips, crossed on the west by 20 de Mayo Avenue, parallel to La Rosa, and headquarters to the National Library, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Economy, and other public buildings.

  The worst part of pedaling incess
antly in the dark isn’t the actual darkness or not being able to perceive the difference between the street and the sky, the asphalt or the pit. It’s not the fact that you see the same thing whether you raise or lower your eyes, whether you look ahead or to the side. The worst isn’t even having to go slow enough so that you can jump off when the bike’s wheels slide into the ditches, invisible because of the water. Nor is it getting lost, but rather losing your life, if this can be called a life.

  For some time now there have been rumors about events which the mass media obscures: dozens of adolescents and adults have been killed while riding their bikes on the darkened streets. Following the bikers, the murderers hide behind the giant ocuje trees then bash them with baseball bats, or they trip the bikers by stretching a nylon cord from one side of the street to the other, which they then pull quickly and violently around their necks, before the bats deform their craniums. Life is the price of a bounty that is nothing but a pair of used shoes and a cheap, obsolete bike. And, of course, the police don’t investigate; they can’t be bothered with the everyday.

  The domestic battles between Juana and Francisco began a little after they started living together. They always ended with vociferous screaming and Francisco getting kicked out. Apparently, he didn’t steal enough to support the young widow and her three children. Soon, the lightbulbs from the building’s common areas began to disappear, and more than once the motor that pumped water up to the higher floors vanished.

  We all suspected Francisco, and I wanted to punish the crook who had me carrying dozens of buckets of water up the stairs every night: Francisco would leave the building and find a bottle of rum in the same hiding place where he always hoarded his alcohol; Francisco would be unable to resist taking a mouthful of rum, and a little later he’d be vomiting, having convulsions, his extremities stiffening involuntarily, then he’d finish off with a respiratory collapse and cardiac arrest. Sodium monofiuoracetate, also known as Compound 1080, dissolves in water, is colorless, tasteless, and without odor. Francisco’s fate was sealed.

  I am going around and around the puddles and I can’t seem to find my home. If only there was a star to guide me! In the distance I see a very bright building, the Palace of the Revolution. Now I can orient myself; I’m going in the wrong direction so I turn right, go straight. I soon feel like I’m falling off a precipice, there’s no asphalt anymore but an enormous emptiness, and my bike and I smash against the rocks below. Can anyone see me or hear me from here?

  Once, during Yom Kippur, I felt the same way. I had begun my fast well before what was religiously necessary. It was unavoidable. I walked and walked toward the synagogue, dead tired, hallucinating, not from the incipient fast but because my body could no longer tell the difference between one day and the next. I saw the synagogue filled with well-dressed people and I imagined, as in a dream, that I was a dybbuk who sexually possessed a beautiful young woman I’d never seen before. What terrible thoughts for the Day of Atonement! I was enraptured by the hazzan’s voice flying high with the most impressive of melodies and words: Kol Nidre…ve’esare…vecherame…vekoname…

  The melody abruptly stopped when someone sat down next to me. That’s when I opened my eyes and saw that the synagogue was actually almost empty, only seven people attending the service, there was no hazzan, there was not then and there never would be a Kol Nidre, that young woman and hundreds more had been living abroad for years and who knew if they were even dead or alive.

  If this pit is anywhere near where I live, I should be able to hear Quimbolo, my nearest neighbor. Quimbolo is the only Cuban who is allowed the privilege of screaming improprieties against our absolute Big Brother without anybody ever thinking of locking him up for the rest of his life. Quimbolo’s real name is Everardo and he’s mentally retarded.

  He wanders down the street in utter filth and repeats the rich and profane lexicon that drunks have taught him. I’ve never heard anybody scream Pinga! so stridently, so forcefully and sonorously. Pinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnga, drawing out that N until the middle of oblivion. I remember hearing that word many times in the dark and at dawn like a war cry. For years, there wasn’t a child born within three blocks in any direction who learned to talk by first saying Papá or Mamá, but rather by repeating Quimbolo’s word.

  One day Quimbolo was diagnosed with diabetes, I’d forgotten. His ulcerous legs got dirty and he died, amputated and septicemic, depriving the neighborhood of its most obscene crier.

  “It looks like he had a heart attack! Run and call an ambulance or a doctor!”

  “There are no doctors at the polyclinic?”

  “The man is dead!”

  People scream around Francisco’s body. Now he’ll never again steal the lightbulbs from my building or the motor to pump water. There will no more thefts in the building. One thief less.

  I’m not afraid to come out of the pit in the middle of the street. This huge trench must be the hole at the corner of Ayestarán and Lombillo, in front of the dilapidated pharmacy, with its empty shelves. So I’m only a block from home. I crawl up the rocks until I believe I’ve reached the surface. I paw at the loose stones around me that should indicate wet asphalt. There’s no sign of a bus or car that might illuminate me and possibly hit me; bikes pass in the distance. I crawl and carry my broken bike with me, its wheels destroyed. Now there are only three more flights to go up in the dark…a few more steps…a breather, twelve more steps…another pause. I take care not to hit what remains of the bike against my neighbors’ doors. This stairway is such torture! I place the key at the same height as my navel, and this makes it easier to find the lock.

  It was much harder to find the key to graduating from law school. It had been an incredible sacrifice to study at dawn, after each blackout, beating back sleep with abundant quantities of bitter tea.

  From my balcony, the buildings and the street and the sky around me all seem beautiful, black like a great ocean of ink. That’s also how I see my future, and that of my family. Why not try and find a bit of light, even if it’s not so early in life?

  In the months that followed, the streets remained littered with craters, ever darker, covered with trash, reeking. People walked by aimlessly, their eyes blank, resting in line after line, going from frustration to frustration.

  Cats and dogs almost reached the point of extinction as adolescents discovered their flesh was edible, and the only ones seen on the streets were the most famished, abandoned pets dragging along their torn tufts of skin.

  A girl faints next to me on the bus, a woman drops to the sidewalk one morning as I’m looking out my balcony. I’m told about an elderly woman who committed suicide because she couldn’t take the cries of her little grandson begging for another piece of bread, even as the radio broadcasts announced that ours is the best fed nation on earth, with the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy. My friends and acquaintances are dying so quickly, at early ages.

  “We’re so lucky to live in this country,” my young daughter says to me as she watches the haunting images from the rest of the world on our TV.

  But I can’t believe it when I see two neighbors dive into a dumpster to scavenge through the fermenting garbage that had been feasted on by a myriad flies. Why is it that this country’s fertile soil is so sterile? Why don’t women want to give birth and why don’t young people want to live? What makes people support so euphorically that which they in fact hate? Why do they work against themselves? Why do they seem to experience such joy as they dig hopeless tombs for their grandchildren?

  Sodium monofluoracetate is infallible. Its chemical formula is CH2F-COON and I’ve read that it takes less than a tenth of a teaspoon to kill a degenerate like Francisco.

  But what if the police perform an autopsy? They probably won’t, though; there aren’t many doctors left in this country now that the majority has been contracted out to Venezuela and other places. And those left are overwhelmed with work, so they’re more likely to determine it was a sud
den cardiac arrest and not expend limited resources on an autopsy.

  I’ve read that this poison interrupts the Krebs cycle, that it alters the citric acid in the body. The poison turns into fluorcitrate, creates a citric concentration in the veins, and deprives the cells of energy. Cellular death is slow and painful.

  The cops aren’t going to waste time over whether some guy like Francisco died from a cardiac arrest or a few drops of sodium monofluoracetate. The cops have highly qualifled experts and forensic doctors working with them who can find traces of the poison lingering in the liver, the brain, the kidneys, hair. But what if the morgue technician removed Francisco’s liver and viscera and sold them on the black market as beef liver, beef viscera? Did other families die—children too—poisoned by Compound 1080 residue in meat?

  * * *

  The police officer who asks for my documents, for my passport, has a threatening expression. Behind me, the giant automatic glass door is closing forever. The glittering lights blind me. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so much artificial illumination. The airport’s hallways seem so beautiful, even though they have nothing by way of decoration other than their cleanliness and tang. I walk. I go very fast so that the doors won’t close anew. I run to the escalators, then run again until I reach the counter where there’s a man with a quizzical but apathetic expression.

  “Your documents are in order but you cannot be completely admitted to the United States until you prove that your soul came with you; your body has arrived but you’ve left your soul in Cuba,” the immigration official at Miami International Airport says coolly. “What are you going to do?”

  What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I ask myself over and over as I leave the airport. I’ll start over, that’s what. I’ll transform my hopes into a new soul until I can recover the lost soul that they tell me here I left in Havana, and which in Havana they say I brought here.