by Achy Obejas
“I … I’m sorry,” Usnavy said right away, his mind back to the day’s revelation about Reynaldo. Oh god, he thought, be careful what you wish for—what if Nena heard him or sensed his whim, even if it was only fleeting and facile? What if his carelessness provoked some errant angel to take her away? That would be worse than anything, that would be worse than seeing her singing Christian songs or standing at the traffic lights at the Malecón, stopping strangers in cars.
He would have gone on thinking this way were it not for the fact that, to his amazement, Lidia pushed him away, hard, with both hands, refusing his apology and turning from him.
“Lidia …” he whispered to her.
She remained firm, her arm outstretched, as steady and implacable as his invisible giants. He leaned on her but she was unmoved.
“Lidia, please,” he said, but she refused him again, taking to the bed with Nena, her back against her daughter’s in perfect alignment, and now using her own legs to keep her husband from coming any closer. Lying next to her, Nena—clearly awake now—stiffened. Her schoolbook toppled to the wet floor with a tiny splash.
“I didn’t mean it, Lidia,” Usnavy whispered, picking up the textbook and trying to dry it off with his shirt. He glanced up at the magnificent lamp and its blinding light, for a second distracted, scanning the brilliance for the telltale signature he’d recently learned about. “It’s just … it’s been a horrible day, a horrible day.”
“You’re salao, Usnavy,” his wife rasped with finality. “And because of you, we’re all salao too.”
III.
The next day Usnavy woke up to a ruckus in the courtyard. In the black of his crowded room, he turned, covering his eyes with his forearm, pleading for more darkness, more sleep. The lamp overhead was numb, a vague cloud. He heard Nena and Lidia rustling under the bed sheet, rearranging their limbs. The air in the room was sour. Outside, there was yelling and fighting, but Usnavy couldn’t quite tell over what. In the background, there was a flickering of something else: a kind of laugh, but he didn’t recognize it right away. It was weightless and slick. It lacked the full-throated gaiety of his neighbors, the sardonic undertone of his friends. It was not a Cuban laugh.
Usnavy sat up, startled. He pulled on his pants and cracked open the door. The light outside was blinding, a white wash with only the slightest bits of color or form.
Everyone’s faces appeared distorted, their mouths red ovals, eyes shaped in the same feline fashion as the magnificent lamp that remained unlit in his room.
Usnavy closed his own lids tight, imagining his neighbors’ faces as Kwele Gon masks, their wearers anonymous and immune, using fear to their advantage and taking matters into their own hands: justly re-distributing food, gasoline, even the space in the tenements, ending all of their troubles in one carnivalesque performance. I believe, I believe, intoned Usnavy, though he never got more precise than that these days.
But, of course, when he opened his eyes he was not in an idyllic Ginen, but here, where it was just another day in a traumatized Havana.
“What’s going on?” Usnavy asked a boy standing outside his door, leaning on the water barrel. He thought he recognized the boy, a sapo from the domino games.
Usnavy could see to the center of the courtyard where a group of men were laughing. One of them, Jacinto, was holding his penis in his hand through the hole in his boxer shorts. He and another guy, a foreigner, were slapping each other around, giddy. By the casually faded wear of his jeans and elaborate but dirty sneakers, Usnavy pegged the tourist as American.
“Jacinto was trying to neutralize a curse his ex-wife put on him—you shoulda seen it, old man, that woman piled a dead chicken and this black powder and all kinds of brujería right at his door,” the boy said breathlessly. “But Jacinto, he just comes out and pees all over it.”
“Uh huh,” Usnavy nodded as Jacinto tucked his member back in his shorts and extended his unhygienic right hand to the American, who was still so amused, or so drunk or high, that he thought nothing of shaking it.
Usnavy knew that Jacinto’s mother would have been horrified by her son’s behavior. But as Usnavy surveyed the crowd and didn’t see her anywhere in sight, he remembered she’d been sick the last few months. She needed a certain vitamin, Jacinto had told him, which they couldn’t find, even on the black market, something foreign-made and as elusive to them on the island as air to a drowning man. Since Jacinto had moved in with her after the nasty separation from his wife, he’d been doing little more than trying to take care of her.
“So then this yuma comes out from Yamilet’s room and, you know, her husband Chachi, he sees Jacinto with his dick in his hand and he starts yelling at him, that he’s gonna freak out the foreigner, that he’s some kind of underdeveloped ape, but—get this—the American, he sees Jacinto peeing on the dead chicken and the black powder and stuff and, like, maybe he’s still silly from whatever Yamilet did to him, right? Because he gets this big grin on his face, like this is the most amazing thing he’s ever seen, and when Chachi notices that, he changes his tune and he’s begging Jacinto to pee some more, cause the foreigner’s into it. Of course, Jacinto holds back a little when he sees what’s going on … he just stands there, shakes his dick a little, like to let Chachi know he’s got more, but that if Chachi and Yamilet are getting some fula from that foreigner cause he’s peeing over a dead chicken, then they’d better share. Then—and this is wild—the yuma just cracks up and starts clapping and slaps Jacinto on the shoulder and hands him a five-dollar bill and Jacinto sprays the whole damn courtyard!”
“Five dollars!” exclaimed Usnavy. “Five dollars for peeing in public?”
“Yeah,” the boy said, “over a dead chicken!”
Everything’s in flux, thought Usnavy: Yesterday the city was beautiful, the sea cradled the island in a warm embrace. But now the city was Nubia, Napata, Kush—there was water everywhere but in the pipes, in the plumbing where it should be a veritable river. Water in millions of muddy puddles on the streets, water bringing down whole buildings, water crashing malevolently all along the shores. There was water right under Usnavy’s bare feet.
Stepping outside his door while pulling on his sewed-up shoe, Usnavy couldn’t recognize Jacinto, the Angolan War hero, in that moment of forced folklore out in the courtyard. For months now he hadn’t been able to figure out Chachi and Yamilet, both former teachers; everyone knew she jerked off the local cop to keep him off her back about everything she and her husband were doing.
The island’s frustrated experiment and those ninety miles of endless water suddenly made all of them so desperate that Jacinto could pull a stunt like that, and an old man like Obdulio could forsake his whole life for the chance at something as banal as driving a car.
“I need some coffee,” he muttered to no one in particular. “I need to sit down.” The boy who had told him what was going on had vanished.
Usnavy walked through the tenement, leaving Lidia and Nena still in their bed, past the jovial neighbors, past the funnel of flies that was the bathroom, out to Tejadillo through the huge arch of the door he knew had once (long ago) belonged not to this slum but to a glorious mansion, a castle of a house where he would have never been welcome. As the day began in earnest, somebody somewhere in the tenement let loose an explosion of music, cymbals crashing and horns blaring from an imported stereo.
“Aaaaah …” Usnavy groaned, holding his head. He walked faster and faster, hurrying away, every joint jabbing with pain.
He was cursed, too, with remembering, with having fresh in his mind the pulverizing poverty of Caimanera and Guantánamo, of his mother’s humiliations, of panhandling (though he’d never, ever, told anyone in Havana, not even Lidia) as a young boy outside the bars and brothels where the Yankee soldiers hung out, his gummy fingers outstretched, the coins heavy in his hands.
He was also cursed with remembering the exhilaration, the euphoria of 1959, and the struggles that he gladly signed onto with the idea that
no Cuban boy would ever have to hold out his hand again, that no Cuban woman would ever have to sit still in a room with foreigners and laugh at their stupid jokes or pretend to find their boorish antics charming.
In his torment, Usnavy kept walking and walking, ignoring the invisible giants who stepped aside when he went by. As he rushed past the Malecón, a commotion drew his attention. This was now Casablanca, where illegal goods were bought and sold and legal ones bartered; men and women shivered in their dealings, then turned their eyes quickly away; they all ran as soon as the sale was concluded.
Every night, this is where the journeys begin, thought Usnavy, where the first steps are taken, where someday I’ll be left alone, all alone, staring at those distant lights …
But as Usnavy went over to the crowd, the usually anxious vendors, buyers, and barely disguised balseros were all bent over the edge of the Malecón, peering at the water. Usnavy craned his neck, stretched it up like a periscope to see empty overalls, the kind the sparkly man had worn that day at Lámparas Cubanas, the bloody extremities shredded by spiny shark teeth, the beast now surely satisfied and humming somewhere in that dreadful sea as the remains floated up to shore.
That day, Usnavy was late for work. Of course, he hadn’t gone his usual straight route, wandering instead. There, at an unfamiliar park, seniors were stretching and breathing Tai Chi. They held their weightless arms out from them, flightless cranes futilely aiming for the sky. He wasn’t even thinking about work until he suddenly found himself so far from his neighborhood that he had to hurriedly grab a taxi back.
It was one of the unofficial ones—in fact, illegal (Lidia had scoffed at them once but he realized he no longer knew what she’d think)—the kind that sneaks up slowly on its customers while the driver whispers his services. Under normal circumstances, Usnavy wouldn’t be a potential customer; wind-swept on his bike, he’d be spared the dilemma of having to even consider whether to ride or not.
But he was late; he could tell by the position of the sun in the hazy sky, by the harshness of the light. Reluctantly, he waved it down, climbed in, settled his spine and stretched his legs. The taxi was a big, roomy Chevy, lathered with sea-blue house paint on the outside, held together by duct tape and rope on the inside, its motor wheezing like an old lion. The air coming through the opened window blended with the fumes and smoke. It was not refreshing, it was not liberating.
“My bike,” Usnavy moaned, but the driver, engulfed in his own thoughts, paid him no mind.
The few pesos to ride would have been a bit of a luxury for Usnavy, but since the cab ran out of gas and coughed to a stop before quite reaching Old Havana, he got away with giving the dismayed driver a couple of Cuban coins—and only because he felt kind of sorry for him. Who knew when and from where fuel would come?
He left the driver pounding on the hood just off the Museum of the Revolution, filled with display case after display case of bloody clothes and guns; the guards there turned their faces away from the scene with the dead cab. Back when the museum was the presidential palace and Mr. Tiffany and the sparkly man’s grandfather were doing the interior decoration—chandeliers and marble busts of the hemisphere’s heroes (including Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juárez), mahogany chests and ebony tables—who would have predicted revolution, who would have predicted any of this chaos now?
As Usnavy walked to the bodega, he couldn’t help but notice all the new turistaxis lined up at the Seville Hotel, mostly Japanese makes, with their tinted windows hiding the drivers and the simpering foreigners inside, including whole new hordes of Spaniards and illegal Americans. He wanted to kick at something—anything—but he wasn’t sure his sewed-up shoe would survive the impact.
“Hey, mister,” a voice called to him from just past the park where the yacht Granma was on permanent display. It sat in a cage of glass panels, obscured and inaccessible.
Usnavy laid his eyes on a reedy boy with an original English-language Stephen King paperback in his hands and a worn green satchel at his side. The boy patted it lightly with his hands. “I got eggs,” he said, “fresh country eggs.” He quickly looked over his shoulder, making sure the sentries guarding the landlocked boat were far enough away so as not to hear him. Usnavy shook his head and the boy shrugged, indifferent or exhausted, and kept walking.
When Usnavy finally arrived at the bodega, the business day had started without him. They’d had an unscheduled delivery of masa carníca—a smelly, whitish meat paste the government was promoting for its nutritional value—and the lines curled around the block with people holding out their weathered ration books and used plastic bags. He saw his neighbor Rosita, surely there not for masa carníca but to get yet another blanket.
A couple of art students, with their long hair and haughty expressions (just like Reynaldo when he was a teenager), shared a book by Michel Foucalt in French while waiting, the pages torn and taped together. They went back and forth from Foucalt to a generic French-Spanish dictionary, equally beaten. A young boy in line with his mother played a handheld surely-imported-through-an-exiled-relative computerized war game.
In the meantime, the workers scooped and measured what little there was beyond the meat paste. More frequently they just shook their heads and lowered their eyes, like the guards at the museum/palace. The scarcities were a daily shock that no one could get used to. The bodega had no eggs.
“Is everything okay?” asked Minerva, an elderly woman who’d been there with him every day since she’d started six years ago. They’d become friends instantly, bound by their devotion to the Revolution. She was one of the few good people left, Usnavy had remarked to Lidia not long ago. She understood her role, she understood her duty.
“Far more important than a good renumeration is the pride that comes from serving one’s neighbors,” she had said to him, quoting Che, when people began to scoff at them for their commitment, their adherence to the rules.
Now Minerva waited for him to answer but he was too distracted by recent events, by the turmoil in his belly and heart.
The truth was, Usnavy had never been late, had never been anything but early to any job, no matter how degrading or difficult. Even in Oriente, he’d always arrived long before the Americans showed up for their drinking and carousing, early enough to scout out his own position, to psych himself up.
Usnavy nodded at Minerva out of courtesy, even gave her a sallow little smile, but nothing was okay. He hadn’t had his usual bite of bread, and not even that drop of coffee he’d needed so badly when he stormed out of his courtyard (now he figured the noise in his stomach would have to nourish him, his own saliva would have to satiate his thirst); he hadn’t washed or shaved or brushed his teeth and he hadn’t changed his underwear.
Most importantly, he hadn’t talked to Lidia, hadn’t patched things up with her from the night before, which made him vaguely nauseous. Because he’d left so quickly after getting up, he had no idea if she’d awakened with the intention of forgiving him, or at least pretending to have forgotten what had happened. Now he feared his silent departure would make her think it was he who was still angry. It would be more difficult now, he knew, to get over this unpleasant moment between them.
“How is Nena?” Minerva asked him.
“Nena?” Usnavy gasped. Did everyone already know?
Minerva nodded. “Yes, well, I was worried,” she said a bit uneasily.
Usnavy retreated. His hands shook as he struggled to open a customer’s plastic bag.
The rest of the day went by in a blur, until the line of customers became a sad trickle, the other workers went home for the afternoon break, and Usnavy was left by himself, sitting on a stool at the counter, his stomach tangled, staring at the foot traffic on the dusty street outside.
The world was sepia, warm but colorless.
Usnavy remembered when Jacinto first returned from Africa, how he was full of stories about wild animals and the flushed palette of the jungle. Then one night in a drunken stupor, when he was la
menting how his ex-wife had never understood him, Jacinto dropped a hand on Usnavy’s knee and told him how, long ago in ancient times, Shaka, the Zulu king, encouraged his soldiers to have what they called uku-hlobonga—thigh sex—in order to keep them strong.
In Angola, Jacinto said, he had had extraordinary, energy-surging intercourse with a South African transvestite, only he didn’t know at first she was a man.
“She wasn’t like the locas here,” Jacinto said. “She had lived like that all her life. Where she came from, in her tribe, if she acted like a woman, if she really believed she was a woman, well … she was … except for … you know …”
Thinking about young Reynaldo, who was always getting caught in women’s dresses or in strange circumstances with older men, Usnavy had wanted to know more about how this could happen, how believing so much could transcend something so real, but Jacinto’s fingers on his knee were beginning to travel and Usnavy had no interest at all in that. He took down the final swig of his own beer and, pretending he hadn’t even noticed, stood up, causing Jacinto’s hand to roll off.
“Aw, c’mon …” Jacinto whimpered.
It was 3 in the morning; Tejadillo echoed with a loneliness that Usnavy knew could be devastating. But there was nothing he could do to help his friend except give him a light punch on the shoulder and wish him easy dreams.
Now a drowsy Usnavy propped his head up with his hand, his elbow naked on the bodega’s scratched and empty counter, stiff at the joint. Technically, the bodega was closed until 4 o’clock, but Usnavy was exhausted. He broke open The Old Man and the Sea. His hands hurt even as he turned the book’s yellowed pages. His feet were burning and so he slipped off his shoes under the counter.
