Tomb Song

by Julián Herbert

  We settled ourselves on the porch, in the shade of the awning.

  “No one has to tell me about Román Guerra Montemayor,” he began. “I saw it. Such a red-faced little gringo, but he had balls.”

  After these preliminary declarations, he went on to tell me the story of his life: the rascally youth; his marriage and widowhood; the constant disappointment with his two children, until they converted to Martin Cruz Smith–style Chicano Protestantism; the kidding around at work; the minor bliss of retirement; the delicious eroticism afforded to well-groomed males who reach a patriarchal age … Curiously enough, the majority of his glorious anecdotes had nothing to do with the railways movement, or with his youth or middle age. Almost the whole story was set in the eighties and nineties: the era he clearly considered the happiest period of his life.

  Around an hour and a half later, I tried to channel his ramblings.

  “What about the railways movement? How did the strike start?”

  His reply left me speechless:

  “There are plenty of books about that, compradito. Didn’t you know …? I don’t think you need to go pestering an old man to get information without giving something in return.”

  He continued his egocentric monologue for a couple of hours more; he spoke again and again of his unfailing marital fidelity, talked of the stream of girlfriends he’d had after being widowed (all kids: not one of them reached seventy), described his various illnesses in detail:

  “One day, I stopped to take a piss, and this sort of coffee powder began to come out of my dick. Not powder: more like sludge. The wall separating my bladder from my intestines had perforated.”

  It was getting close to the time of my date with Renata.

  “I have to go now, compradito. I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Well, be off with you then,” said Daniel Sánchez Lumbreras with a frown, not looking me in the eyes.

  Standing near the gate, I made one last effort:

  “And there’s nothing more you’d like to tell me about the death of Román …? Nothing special you remember?”

  His eyes clouded.

  “Like I told you, compradito. There are books about that. What more can I say? Have you ever had a friend die?”

  I nodded, recalling David Durand and Cuquín Jiménez Macías.

  “Well, it’s the same thing. It’s just that for me they dirtied Ramón. Not the soldiers: good, worthy people like you, who insist on reviving his memory as an example of a union martyr. As far as I’m concerned, it’d have been better if his name had rotted next to his body by the side of the road, with a broom handle jammed up his ass.”

  It was getting late. I opened the gate, stepped onto the street. Behind me, not far away, I heard the sluggish brakes of a train sliding on the railway line that crosses the heart of Monterrey.

  “What did you expect me to say, compradito?” said Daniel Sánchez Lumbreras, laboriously getting to his feet and finally looking me in the eyes. “That they fucked my friend …? They fucked him. They made him take it up the ass. And then they made the rest of us take it up the ass too. Because we got cold feet. They got what they wanted: we were afraid. We were afraid and we said to hell with the movement. What did you expect me to say, compradito? That I’m about to turn seventy-six and I’ve had a happy life because some son of a bitch torturer gave me a lesson about Mexican justice, buggering the body of the purest man I’ve ever known …? I’m telling you, compradito. I’m telling you.”

  “I’m very grateful to you, Don Daniel. Really,” I said from the sidewalk. “But I have to go.”

  “You well-read people don’t know the first thing,” he answered with a look of weary mockery. “That’s the only thing I agree with the oppressors about. You all believe the Revolution was a pure soul, like the Virgin of Guadalupe. Good luck to you, compradito.”

  I’m certain I’ve never before made such unpleasant love as I did that evening: I couldn’t rid my skin of the sensation that my prick was a broom handle and Renata’s ass Ramón Guerra Montemayor’s body. I was raping her, not in the flesh, but in the spirit: I’d never been able to fornicate with her freely, uninhibitedly. I always saw her as the prostituted ghost of niceness. My attitude, as I discovered while ejaculating, was the most perfect example of ignorant, middle-class egoism: converting the sublime into the centerpiece of a table. Conversing with the irrational powers of beauty in the language of a weather forecast.

  I never wrote the literary crónica about Ramón Guerra Montemayor.

  I never again saw Renata, the weather-forecast girl: the spitting image of Venus coming out from the water.

  10

  Once, when we were children, at dinnertime, Mamá said out of the blue:

  “If we ever have enough money to go and live in another country, I’d love us to go to La Habana. In Cuba the poor are happier than in any other place in the world.”

  It was the era when we were beginning to live like real people: 1980. Our house in Alacrán was acquiring its first flowerpots.

  Soon afterward, when we were watching the opening ceremony of the Moscow Olympics on our first television set (we all adored Misha), Mamá noted thoughtfully:

  “We could go to the USSR as well … But they say it’s cold as hell there. And I wouldn’t feel like going out to work at night.”

  From which it can be inferred that, in her thirties, my mother was a dreamy armchair communist, hated the cold, and had an anthropological intuition sharper than Fidel’s: she knew revolutions also need prostitutes.

  11

  “I don’t know what we have to reproach Cuba for,” I said to Bobo Lafragua.

  We were having a negrón in the Callejón de Hamel. It was before noon.

  “This island stood at the very heart of our times,” I went on. “Porn and failed revolutions, that’s all the twentieth century was able to give the world.”

  People were starting to arrive.

  A couple of days before, my friend had sought official permission to improvise a performance in Hamel “with the intention of offering an homage to the greatest exponent of colloquial language in Latin American poetry: the only poet capable of amalgamating, on a single page, negritude, revolutionary sentiment, and music.” Enraptured, neither the censors nor the journalists who later covered the event asked the name of the poet in question: they all assumed it was Nicolás Guillén. I, who know my people, was aware from the start that Bobo was referring to Guillermo Cabrera Infante, then living in exile in London. That’s the thing with Bobo: he always manages to make you feel perfectly at ease right before getting in a jab.

  He responded, enumerating on his fingers:

  “And music, and nerve, and colors, and a riot you can’t just shoot down, and fornicating till you split in four: your Catholic and Aztec ancestors never fucked that way … Yeah: I don’t know what we have to reproach Cuba for.”

  We sat in silence.

  Then Bobo added:

  “It’s provocative, that idea of yours. Simplistic but provocative. I like it. I’m going to do a digital piece called The Marriage of the Cuban Revolution and Porn. A kitsch Photoshopped graphic showing a big mulatto woman in leather sucking my nipples, and Plaza de la Revolución in the background, in a composition taken from a William Blake print. It’ll sell like hotcakes, you’ll see. Especially among leftist imperialists.”

  The authorities arrived. An assistant approached my friend and indicated it was time to start. Bobo got to his feet and went inside the small bar to change. A few minutes later, he emerged dressed in an impeccable white dinner jacket, identical to Rick’s in Casablanca. He was carrying a megaphone in one hand and a daiquiri in the other. The dark rings of several nights’ partying gave him a sublime Bogartian air. It wasn’t even lunchtime. Bobo raised his daiquiri in his left hand as if making a toast, and began to address the crowd through the megaphone:

  “Showtime! Señoras y señores, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the great, friendly, collective myth, bienvenid
os al gran mito colectivista y afable, our socialist and tropical Noche de los Tiempos, our Shadows of Time … Prepare yourselves for what’s coming: the autumn of the patriarch. Prepare yourselves to be offered hospitality by a nation of princes. To face its horrendous discourtesy, its venomous beauty. To soak up the last murmur of a Cuban beat between venerable Chinese residents and the subtle dispatchers of cocaine who follow you discreetly to the door of the bank, whispering, ‘Mexico, Mexico.’ Prepare yourselves to sit among more slender guests, being fattened for the kill with masses of pig meat. Prepare yourselves to be welcomed everywhere with all the show of respect a gangster can muster by use of his Visa card. Prepare yourselves to be segregated in a wooden outpost of the Coppelia ice cream parlor. Prepare yourselves to bribe. Prepare yourselves for the sea again. Prepare yourselves too for getting into the pool: the dental floss of a mulatta who’d pass as a virgin if this wasn’t paradise. Prepare yourselves to be courted by the most fearsome harem of girls. Prepare yourselves for Elvis Manuel drumming up trade between radioactive beauties.” At this point Bobo Lafragua sang: split my tuba in two, split my tuba in three, when I fuck you I’ll give you, ay, three of sugar and two of coffee. And then he went on, in imitation of Lezama Lima: “Ah, you jump out a second floor window to get away from this reggaeton.”

  Then, with shameless gestures reminiscent of a good-natured, cockroachy gringo professor of sociology giving a lecture in an auditorium in some third world university, he paused for an instant to take a suck on his daiquiri. He raised the megaphone again and resumed his spiel:

  “Prepare yourselves to be moved by the slogans of your youth: Patria o Muerte Venceremos, Homeland or Death. We Will Not Be Defeated. Imperialist ladies and gentlemen, we fear of you not / and the photos of George Bush / and Posada Carriles / with vampire canines / by a scandalized Statue of Liberty / in an unashamedly bourgeois spectacle. / Prepare yourselves / for the animal sound / of the 138 black flags.”

  Here, Bobo threw his megaphone to the ground, sucked on his straw again, and shouted at the top of his voice, moving in a way that reminded a frivolous militant like me of characters from an old classic Cuban cartoon:

  “Prepare yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, madams et monsieurs, señoras y señores, for the great film of the future: Ghosts in La Habana.”

  And he emptied in a single gulp, without the help of the straw, the rest of his daiquiri, although all that ice clearly gave him a headache for the next few minutes.

  Taking advantage of the audience’s perplexity and confusion, Bobo came up to me, put an arm around my shoulder, and, loosening his bow tie and pushing me between the chairs toward the end of Hamel that leads onto the university steps, said:

  “Let’s go.”

  We were off like shot.

  “We have to lie low for the rest of the day,” he said, “and take full advantage of what’s left to us of the island. ’Cause tomorrow at the latest, we’re gonna be deported.”

  Bobo hunched over slightly and, playing air guitar, imitated the voice of chattering magpies, without diminishing the elegance imparted by his dinner jacket:

  “When I left La Habana, God help me …”

  On the university steps a couple of kids were playing pelota. We watched them for a while. Then we went down Infanta to Doña Yulla, where we ordered Polar beers and oyster cocktails in a glass. Not long afterward, Armando, one of the drivers from the provincial office of the Ministry of Culture, arrived. For a moment we thought he’d been sent to find us, but his manner was completely natural: he sat down beside us—his pockmarked face and honey-colored eyes almost identical to mine—and, without greeting us, told the waiter:

  “Give me whatever these guys here are having. Two orders, just for me. To catch up with ’em.”

  He smiled, looking at us from the corner of his eyes.

  Bobo took out his wallet and paid for our host’s order in advance. They gave him the change in Cuban pesos, which were about as useful to us as toy money: no one accepted them anywhere.

  “This is fucking awful, Armando,” said Bobo. “I want something else.”

  Armando shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m off duty and I’ve got the van here. If you like, I’ll take you to Regla or Santa María del Mar, or to the Zonas.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon cruising around with him. First, we went on through the tunnel to the Zonas, but there was nothing there: tumbledown apartment blocks whose chaotic arrangement (F next to B; H next to M) only accentuated the nightmarish sensation the city was beginning to inspire in us. Then we went to Santa María del Mar: desert sands, locked restrooms, empty government warehouses. Bobo Lafragua took off his loafers and socks, rolled up his pants, and let the waves caress his feet.

  “You see, Habaneros don’t go to the beach on Tuesdays,” apologized Armando. “Transportation isn’t easy, and we’re hardworking people. But you wouldn’t believe how lively it is here on Sundays.”

  He made us walk to the end of the beach to show us what he described as “a historic site”: a pair of natural pools in which the sea broke against the black rocks.

  “This is where the rafts set out to sea during the Special Period. This is where I said farewell to half the people I love.”

  Bobo’s buzz was starting to wear off, a situation that usually makes him crotchety. As he attempted to retie his dickie bow, he responded:

  “Yeah, great, but don’t worry: they’re gonna put us on a plane and deport us. Know what I’d like now? I’d like to get my hair cut. Shorn. I’m gonna go all the way.”

  Armando cackled. He walked over to his Chinese van, drove it to where we were standing, gestured to us to get in, and drove off westward, to Habana Vieja. A few blocks before the Plaza de Armas, he said:

  “Go straight on past the Casa de México. Two blocks after the Casa de Poesía, take a left. You’ll find a barbershop the blacks use there.”

  He winked at us through the rearview mirror.

  We all got out of the vehicle, and Armando said good-bye. He was holding a white paper package, with a label stamped very crudely in blue ink: it looked something like a two-pound packet of wheat flour. After hugging us both, he handed the packet to me.

  “Tobacco. Not Cohiba or Montecristo, but very good: what we smoke. Take good care of it, Mexico, you’ve no idea what I had to do to get my hands on this without having it entered in my ration book. Smoke it right away, you won’t be able to take it with you.”

  I put my hand in my pocket in search of my wallet.

  “Come here, real careful. It’s a present,” he said with a smile, and then nodded toward Bobo Lafragua, who was already crossing the avenue to order a mojito at one of the stalls on the Malecón. “So you remember your brothers, the ghosts.”

  There was a hell of a row going on in the barbershop. The Santiago Reds had come from behind and were giving the Industriales a thrashing. The series was tied at three games each, and it was the evening of the decider (days later, I read in the press that Santiago had taken the championship). The barber and his assistant were cheering on the Blues. A policeman and two other clients came from Santiago, as does half of Habana, so the hullaballoo was going to last a while longer. Everyone inside the nine-by-twelve-foot fishbowl of the barbershop was shouting. They were so passionately absorbed that, instead of asking what they could do for us, or just cutting our hair, they ceded us the barber chairs and passed the aluminum jug from which they were taking turns drinking a robust, homemade cane sugar liquor.

  After an hour or so, convinced we weren’t going to be attended to, but gratefully tanked on the aguardiente, Bobo and I got up from the barber chairs and made for the door.

  “Wait, Mexico,” said the policeman. Everyone in Cuba knows you’re Mexican as soon as they see your paunch. “Come over here, just tell me one thing: who are you rooting for?”

  I’m an honest drug trafficker. In honor of the sacred opium stone (by then nothing but pure nostalgia for my respiratory tract) I
was carrying with me in order to bring down the dictatorship of the Revolution, I said:

  “Like there’s a choice? Industriales.”

  The uproar broke out again. Bobo and I took advantage of the noise to sneak out the door and set off in the direction of Centro Habana. The sun was going down.

  We wandered the streets for a while, lost in the darkness. The only things to be seen were stray dogs, very small, tame, and more than one with mange. From time to time we passed an open door with light inside: some kind of establishment. As with any other capitalist city, the Habana night has its stores. The difference isn’t spiritual, but materialist and historical: the counters and shelves of Centro are—except for the very occasional bottle of unlabeled rum—empty. Walking along like that, evading sellers of pirated customs stamps, and following really hot, fat, black, braless women with our eyes, we came upon the junction of three streets with names that could easily pass for I Ching hexagrams, or symbols on an Aztec sacrificial altar: Zanja, Cuchillo, and Rayo; Grave, Knife, and Lightning. The Barrio Chino.

  “Forget it,” said Lafragua, “it’s Chinatown.”

  We entered the narrow, winding alley of restaurants. Bobo chose the most expensive-looking one. He straightened the lapels of his dinner jacket and, holding out a twenty-CUC bill to a diminutive hostess with Asian features and dress, said:

  “We’d like the executive salon, please.”

  The hostess bowed and led us through the tightly packed tables, all crammed with customers, to the back of the room. We climbed the stairs and passed through one set of doors, then another. The executive salon occupied half the upper floor. It consisted of a dinner table with seating for eight or ten, a tiny balcony, and a small entertainment room equipped with a leather sofa and a twenty-four-inch flat-screen television.

  Bobo Lafragua dove for the remote and switched on the TV. The only option offered on the screen was an interminable list of C-pop, edited for karaoke.

  “I’ll send a waiter with the menu at once,” said the hostess in an angelic accent.