Havana Noir

by Achy Obejas

  If he bends to get the blade in front of Yako, those Nike 48s are gonna leave footprints all over his face. Maybe at that moment his liquored mind decides to shit on the shitty summer heat that makes it impossible to wear long sleeves and hide the steel, and he imagines a special strip of leather for his wrist so he can carry the blade like the gangsters in the Saturday night movies. Or he doesn’t think at all, cuz in any case he’s got the broken bottle. So it’s fairly certain that the attack from top to bottom with the glass flower will come from a twist of the wrist, it will scratch but not kill, the product of alcohol and instinct and resentment, not from the former prisoner’s guts or smarts.

  Yako sees the glass coming for his eyes and he knows it’s the red bridge’s sentry. El Patio sees the bottle coming in slowmotion and the whole world explodes in screams, cuz the fight’s real now, like those little whirls in the dust in the midday heat. It can end the same way, just like that, and it can all go back to being dust, even with a little bit of blood.

  Yako says every life comes to a red bridge.

  That’s a joke I like, and him too, so he says it like ten times a day. Yako, the red bridge philosopher.

  Maybe he read it in some Chinese book, though he doesn’t read much. It sounds like the kind of philosophy that comes from people who dress in silk and drink tea, with a whole lotta time on their hands to watch the carps feasting on bread. Like at the Japanese Garden, where we went the last time—him, Silvia, and me—and I heard them arguing in the arbor and I pretended I was in my own little world but didn’t miss a word. He to her: Fuckin’ whore. She to him: You knew it, and anyway, what right do you have to say anything to me, you lazy delinquent good for nothing? This is a common exchange between Cuban couples these days, an inevitable refrain if the couple’s from El Patio. It’s another way of saying, I love you, baby; I love you, too, Daddy.

  The red bridge is a blood decision, a bullfighter’s choice, a gentlemen’s agreement. You enter it cuz somebody’s pushed you, and you exit only by crossing and killing, or chickening out and playing guitar, doing a faggot’s twirl. Yako has given the matter a lotta thought, up in clouds of pure weed, which always give me a deadly cough: If you kill, everybody knows you crossed the red bridge, and you realize it’s not so easy, but there’s no going back. Cuz on the other side is the tank, and in there men aren’t men anymore but beasts, and the lyrics from that song about Moncada is a lie—a crocodile will in fact eat its own. And if you chicken out, you may as well climb on a raft and leave the country, and maybe even that won’t matter, cuz a man with a yellow stripe down his back can be sniffed out by his sweat, whether in El Patio or China. Once a coward, always a coward.

  We argued about this a lot.

  Yako and Silvia and me, by myself as always, we went to see Lord Jim, the Peter O’Toole movie, cuz I’d read the book. Yako liked it, though he said that no one comes back from a sea of coward’s shit, that there’s no redemption and no second chance. But later, Yako, who doesn’t read, asked me for Conrad’s book. Even for him, it must be nice to realize that somebody else has already laid down in black-and-white the ideas that have been making rounds in your head without quite landing. Must be nice to know you’re not alone in your thinking, that’s all.

  The thing with the red bridge isn’t too bad. It’s like Moby Dick was for Ahab, or Hamlet pondering what to do with his whore mother and his bastard uncle after they killed his father. And, of course, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It’s always the same shit.

  Yako bends and rolls on the floor like a big, gangly, but still very agile spider. That’s why the ragged end of the broken bottle only slices through his Benetton sweatshirt and barely draws blood from his shoulder before his legs collide with Humbertico the Piranha and they both get tangled up. Red’s rushing now, El Patio shouts in a single voice, like at the cockfights, dogfights, or some adolescent brawl where they beat each other purple then turn up as buddies the next day, for the pure pleasure of throwing punches and then forgiving each other later. But everyone already knows this one won’t have such a sweet ending. Although with all the screaming it does seem rather like a sport, like a game, and a couple of smart-asses even place bets. It’s just that Tension, like a couple of springs in the air, doesn’t actually scream, doesn’t actually stand, but rather sits there next to Death, polishing her nails at the domino tables, cuz they know that something’s gotta happen, and even what it is, but they’re not saying.

  Yako doesn’t deserve Silvia, even if she turns tricks, and the three of us know it. But she’s too much of a woman for Yako to leave her, and I’m too nice, too naïve, and too easily fooled for an ambitious street-smart girl from Bayamo like her, who’s also determined to get some distance from her race, being a mulatta ashamed of her naps. I’m white too but dark-haired, short, with dark eyes. I’m no competition. That’s the triangle in which I don’t belong even when I’m present, in which I have no weight and won’t have any even after I graduate as one more mechanical engineer, a grease monkey at some sugar mill, cleaning spark plugs, crucifled for life unless I get on with some corporation, otherwise I won’t have a chance to even sniff a bill from afar, no matter how many books I read, or how much weight I lift at the gym that Manolito the Tripod built under that same ackee tree from our childhood. It’s not the same tree anymore either: During the storm of the century, it lost its smoking branch, which fell on Cachita’s she-goat, out looking for who knows what, and killed her.

  Maybe what Silvia seeks in Yako, or him in her, is just Salieri, to settle and that’s it, just shit and a bridge that might be pink for women, pink or black lace with the smell of hotel air freshener, a fat Spaniard, Salsa Palace, Cayo Coco, and a passport to go abroad. Even I couldn’t say what I’m looking for in my pal Yako’s woman, cuz if he ever caught me I’d be dead meat, but truth is I always fall in her same trap even though there are so many little cheery student whores wandering around the CUJAE housing. Maybe it’s cuz they’re always giving me a hard time about my street style, no earrings or long hair, cuz in El Patio they don’t put up with that fag crap…or maybe it’s cuz we always like the challenge, the bridge, death escaping from the shithole even as we sink deeper.

  Rolling around on the ground is Humbertico the Piranha’s thing. He bites with the slightly bucked teeth that earned him his nickname, kicks, scratches, twists, he’s got monkey arms and octopus tentacles. He’s happy cuz so long as the big guy doesn’t get up, he can always win, and he plays dirty too; with luck he’ll get him in one of those strangle holds every one of El Patio’s native sons learns practically before he learns to walk, and that way he doesn’t hafta kill him. But size imposes itself. Yako turns in the dust, gives a couple of big thrusts with his shoulders, manages to kneel, and covers the Piranha’s face with his giant hand, screaming like he’s outta his mind. He grinds his neck on El Patio’s dirt, like he’s finishing off the memory of his having fucked Petra. And in that moment Humbertico remembers what he knew from the start but had hoped to forget: that he has to go for his sharpened spoon so the decision can finally be made, like that night in Cellblock 3 when he had to gamble his life with Saúl the Albino for the right to get any kind of scrap, and the big black chief just looked on to see who he’d get as a foot soldier and who he’d give up to get fucked by the others.

  Even if he goes back to the tank, he has to do this, cuz whoever’s survived there can’t resist a fight, no matter what. Humbertico knows that every fight is about more than who wins and who loses, but also about what you’re risking, what you win, and what you lose, which is why he finally twists his hand down for the spoon and tentatively searches for Yako’s beer-filled guts, to cut him or rip him or win God knows what from him.

  The red bridge is a fixed idea that hypnotizes. A path from which no one returns, a crossroads with no way out. A lot of people have known it, or know it, and they may call it something else. It’s the shady street in gangster movies. The door. The throne of blood in one Kurosawa film. For Co
nan Doyle it was the Brazilian cat, the night spent next to the beast, which turns your hair white and leaves you limping and changed forever, but alive. The Driver, that old Ryan O’Neal movie in which he’s like a maniac behind the wheel, crashing cars to prove he was a tough guy. Or Matt Dillon in Rumblefish, looking for traces of his troublemaker brother and finally glad when the Motorcycle Boy dies and frees him. It’s the bridge over the River Kwai. All that and nothing really, that’s the red bridge. I’ve thought about this, but not as much as Yako. It’s an obsession with him. To imagine what it must feel like to kill—realizing that you’ve violated a worldly law and that no one up high is gonna punish you for it, that Nietzsche was right, that God died outta sheer boredom, and that if other men don’t take you up on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, there’s no bolt of lightning that’s gonna strike you down to purge the sin. So then to hell with morality: It’s the law of the jungle that counts, fuck before you get fucked. The cops and the laws don’t have any more right than their force and cunning, like everybody else.

  God died by drowning in shit. Silvia and I fucked like crazy at the beach house, next to a drunken Yako, friend and lover, doing it just to do it, just cuz we shouldn’t have, risking it all, doing it without love, practically without pleasure, knowing too well what would happen if he knew, imagining that in fact he already knew, all the while wanting him to know and to react, so that all the façades and the masks could go to shit.

  Yako sees the spoon coming, wanting to scoop out a new navel for him, and he stops it by some miracle, his fingers all cut up now. I practically feel his pain, and I tense up wanting to help him, as if I were him, my heart beating open-mouthed.

  It’s at moments like this that all the Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal and Jackie Chan movies are revealed as indisputable lies. In real life, a blade is fear, cold, stinks of danger and death, adrenaline runs like a river, your muscles tense and you freeze cuz you’re so scared, and there’s no choreography for a ballet of kicks nor Jean-Claude Van Damme swiveling in the air. Or maybe you don’t freeze, you can move but like in a dream: You wanna run but you can never run as much as you want, you wanna do a quick slip like in the movies but instead you cut your fingers, not even all the way, just about to the bone, so that they bleed and hurt. Slow and clumsy the slice, not like a samurai whose sword demands a clean swipe which sends a hand flying. You wanna come on with a chest-splitting suki chop but you just slap and fall back from the force of the rebound; this is a fight of handless morons and frail epileptics, and there’s dirt and noise and you know you’ve gotta do something but you don’t know what. There’s a voice that tells you, Yako’s gotta come outta this no matter what, and there’s Humbertico the Piranha’s rabid bite on his fingers.

  But there is a God in heaven: You, Yako, your blood makes the blade slip from his fingers, now white from pressing so tight, and it bounces and clinks on the hard ground muddying with sweat, blood, and fear. And you grab him by the neck, walnut-brown mulatto shivering under your white forearm with black hairs, and squeeze and squeeze…and everybody’s screaming, and I say, Coño, and run.

  I run inside, to his house, searching for the key under the cactus pot, and when I go in I topple the chair and don’t have the time or inclination to say anything to whoever’s there, looking at me from behind the partition, still sort of taking a nap, maybe just waking up cuz of the scandal outside, maybe accustomed to it all from so many years of living in El Patio. I search under the mattress, find what I’m looking for, and rush back with my tongue hanging out, praying that what I left seconds ago hasn’t ended badly…

  On time. Cuz Humbertico the Piranha has gotten loose and is struggling to retrieve the spoon and its blade. And he’s gonna get it, Yako can’t stop him, he wiggles and wiggles…

  Breathless, feeling like an s.o.b., I threw it at him: the horn-handled blade from Albacete province given to him by Gema, that Spanish girl he fucked last year. The one I wanted to fuck and didn’t have the guts to face. The pitch turned out okay: There went that Made in Spain, already open and everything, spinning on the ground, right into his hand. There was no way he couldn’t get it, and the rest was automatic.

  We grew up together and he was cut and all the blood on the ground and on his clothes was his and all I’d wanted to do was help him…

  That’s what everybody said later, during the runaround and the ambulance and the squad car and the questions. That’s what I told them. Yes, I threw it at him, I wanted him to have a chance cuz he was my pal, but what happened wasn’t all my fault, I told the mustached lieutenant who was taking the report as the paramedics carried the body off, now a knot under the red-stained sheets. Tears started to fall. Without lament, with a tightness in my chest, the way men cry when they have no choice and there’s an overwhelming impotence and there’s nothing more that can be done. The way we cry in El Patio. The way Yako was crying when they took him away.

  I cried until the mustached lieutenant, from Santiago like so many of these patrol car guys, but good people unlike most of them, took me aside and put his hand on my shoulder as if I were his son, cuz I was young enough to be his son, and said to me in a low voice that life is fucked and things just happen. He said he wished he had friends like me…

  If things were looked at right, it wasn’t Yako’s fault either, since he was a big guy and wasn’t used to fighting with a knife, and he used the spearpoint instead of the blade, the way you do when you think you might lose the weapon if it gets stuck in the wound, and he had such bad luck, or such good aim, that the blade shot right into Humbertico’s eye and into his brain.

  Simply put, it was the Piranha’s day, that’s all. Bad luck…If it’s your turn, it’s your turn. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Everybody knew it was going to end badly. You don’t mess with knives, that’s what the elders said. And his poor sister…now nothing can save her from whoring.

  According to the lieutenant, they weren’t gonna be very hard on Yako. He only had a few little things on his record, mostly peer pressure stuff like stealing jeans from laundry lines. Humbertico was already a jailbird, a bad egg, destined to return. And he’d attacked first, so it would be self-defense anyway, with a bunch of eyewitnesses to boot. It had happened in the heat of battle, Yako had been overtaken by passion…

  That’s what the lawyer said at the trial. So did Manolito the Tripod, and Alfredo who went in his marine uniform, and even Babas.

  Petra didn’t cry for her dead brother or make a scene during the trial. He brought it on himself, the fool, for trying to come on so tough, for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, cuz I know how to take care of myself, she was heard to say, and the women in El Patio wrote her off after that, cuz you can be a whore if you want, but blood is blood, even if it’s the guy who took your virginity who spills it.

  I also gave testimony, right after a test I had to take, and that also influenced things. As soon as the sentence was declared, Yako, with tears in his eyes, told me that I was his only friend and that he’d never forget it. That he’d get out, that in the end it was only one dead guy. But I knew he was lying, and he did too. There’s a greater distance between zero and one than between one and infinity, and he was now on the other side.

  In the last few months, I’ve dreamt now and then of Yako’s face telling me, Brothers forever. And the blade, with its bent horn, zigzagging on the dirt, and later shining like a needle in the air. The cops kept it, of course, as evidence. It’s too bad cuz it was a good knife, with a fine edge, firm and steady.

  I still visit Yako now and then, but not as much as during the first few months. Those are the rules, everything’s a waste, so they gave him four years; it’s a lot…Silvia only went with me the first two times, and she never requested a conjugal visit with Yako.

  I haven’t seen her since. Well, there was that one time, from afar, in that little hotel at the CUJAE, she was with a French engineer who was attending a conference there. She pretende
d she didn’t see me, of course, and I didn’t even say hello. I’d fucked her a couple more times while Yako was awaiting his sentence, but she wasn’t interested after that. The feeling’s mutual. I’m not surprised, I knew it from the start. It was all cuz she was his woman and I was his pal. It may have been another way of getting even more of him, of entering his childhood, that little piece of his life which had never been revealed. Yako before he was Yako, before he thought about the red bridge that he feared and desired and ultimately crossed.

  On a visit, the second one, he told me that someone had ordered him killed. Maybe it’s not just paranoia. He thinks it was Petra, the Piranha’s sister, and I didn’t say anything one way or the other. Who can understand women anyway—one day lots of kisses, then the next they drive a stake through your heart. It’s not true that they’re all bad; some are worse.

  Two guys attacked him in the bathroom: He had to be cool, he was hit by metal tubes, they broke his arm, but he got one of them in the eye, a fat, bald white guy sporting Santa Bárbara tattoos. Now nobody fucks with him, but they gave him two more years for blinding the guy. Between that and what he did to the Piranha, they’ve started to call him The Ophthalmologist. He laughs when he tells the story, then he puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me again how I’m really his pal. And what a blast we’re gonna have, what a fucking blast, once he gets out. For now, he’s pretty much okay: He has things to do, like surviving and watching his back, and climbing the cellblock’s hierarchy. He’s gotten it in his head that he wants to be a cellblock chief.