Cubop City Blues

by Pablo Medina

  When he entered the university, he braved the dangerous streets of the red-light district. There he consorted with prostitutes who showed him their extremities for a fee. Of all he saw and touched and reveled over, none was as well formed as Martica’s. Soon he ran out of money and concluded he might have better luck with regular women. He went out with dozens and became serious with those few who considered as a matter of course his habit of looking at and caressing their feet and who enjoyed the novel way in which his lips sucked and his tongue curled around their toes.

  Olga, dark-haired queen of the dance floor, played him like a yo-yo. Her curvaceous and free-flowing body more than made up for her flat, undistinguished feet. She made him do the dog walk, the high-wire act, the loop around the world. All the tugging and pulling made him dizzy. Older, more experienced than he, she taught him many things, most important, that without being vulnerable one cannot entertain mystery, the most profound of which, after death, is love. When she ran off with the singer of a rock band, he felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He still feels it sometimes when it rains. His Jesuit teachers had been priming him to enter the order, but after Olga, St. Ignatius didn’t stand a chance. He recently found her letters in an old trunk filled with papers and was surprised at how maudlin love can be from a distance.

  The singularities of life and the accidents of circumstance led him to Irene, the black-Irish girl who was taller than he by three inches. Toes splaying in all directions, her feet were batrachian, of the sort that stick to walls and ceilings. Her humor, which was sharp and furious, saved her. No one, not pundits, priests, or proselytes, escaped the poison darts that flew from her mouth. With him she was careful and made sure that the barbs that came in his direction were lined with felt. Reluctant to have sex, she finally succumbed in the family room of her parents’ Scarsdale home.

  Berta, from the Dominican Republic, was sexual and insatiable with smooth cinnamon skin and smart luminous eyes. They went many places together but always wound up in bed when the day was done. He didn’t ask many questions, nor did she. There was something about the way she moved up and down his body, something about her smell and her taste that made him think of redemption. Berta pushed him deeper in. It was the end of the sixties. He’d been in the United States not quite ten years. Life was a cabaret, life was a Lucumí chant, life was ten tons of metal on the back of a dump truck headed east on the BQE. Domesticity led him to drown in the ocean of his obsession. He could never have enough of Berta. So he left. Crawled out of the muck and moved to the suburbs, which offered a dullness he confused for peace of mind.

  Vanessa used to sing boleros before she met him. Afterward, she didn’t sing a note but mumbled incoherencies while the adorer of feet sat in rapt contemplation of hers. They were calloused and bunioned with corns growing on all her toes, which were very beautiful but smelled like rotten cheese. After hearing him whimper on the rug by their bed, she grew ashamed and wrapped her extremities in burlap, which did not help her infections but did wonders for her self-esteem. She sang him a final bolero and told him, Eres un enfermo, vete a la pinga—two Cuban expressions that can communicate many things but in this particular case meant he should get as far away from her as he possibly could.

  The succession of women that followed was notable because of their sameness. There was Amber, Eloisa, Sandra, and Susana, whom he married for her mind, a deadly mistake; Anne, whom he also married and with whom he had two daughters. There was Olympia, who was, in contrast to her name, petite; two Nancies; and one Michelle, dull and viscous and feral. They were all the same to him, devoid of individuality and, therefore, in the end, boring. No more poring over podiatry textbooks, no more hours wasted surfing the Internet. He grew despondent and was without a woman for eighteen months. His hands began shaking at odd moments, and he woke at night in cold sweats, which could only be cured by drinking substantial amounts of alcohol. He suffered stomach ailments and muscle cramps; his temples grew gray, his voice weak and distorted; yet, despite the maladies, his writing acquired an acumen it never had before. As a result he began publishing his work with regularity and he received invitations from many universities to lecture and read his fiction.

  Angel heard from relatives that Martica had married an Albanian building superintendent and moved to a far-off borough of Cubop City. Imagine his surprise and delight! He called Martica and went to see her that same afternoon. On the long subway ride out he sang and laughed to himself and gave money to three different panhandlers, only one of whom seemed in dire need.

  When they saw each other he and Martica embraced. He pulled her to arms’ length and saw that she had filled out and was not as unattractive as he imagined. Life had done interesting things to her face. Beside himself with anxiety and disregarding any sense of decorum, he confessed to her that he had become enthralled with her feet. He exaggerated and said that every waking hour since they had last seen each other he had thought about them, keeping them alive in the fire of his memory until such time as he found a like pair to replace them. But he hadn’t.

  She was shocked and brought her hand to her mouth, where it rested obliquely. She was about to walk away when she realized his anguish and offered a smile. She pointed down and there at the end of her legs was a pair of brown orthopedic shoes, tied on the side, that looked like two loaves of rustic Albanian bread.

  My feet, she said, have been the source of much pain over the years. I’ve had many surgeries. They are mutilated beyond recognition. I wouldn’t show them to anyone.

  On the inside he swooned and almost fell into a maelstrom of despair. On the outside he was kind and familiar. He kissed her again on the forehead and left her apartment as soon as prudence allowed. He never got to meet her Albanian husband, never got to see her again. In his mind Martica was dead and her feet had gone to hell.

  ORGIES

  Have you ever participated in an orgy? Amanda asked him two weeks after they met.

  No, Angel answered, resisting the temptation to lie. By previous agreement the postcoitus tolerated only total honesty. Have you?

  Not quite.

  What does that mean? You either have or you haven’t.

  He was lying in bed with his eyes closed and the covers up to his chest and wanted very much to sleep, but he fought the urge in order to hear about Amanda’s experience.

  It happened last summer when Sandy and I were in Naples.

  Sandy was Amanda’s best friend from childhood. They were on a European trip, paid for by Amanda’s parents as a graduation gift. Angel had met Sandy once in passing and had briefly entertained the fantasy of being in bed with the two of them, a satyr with two nubile nymphs whose combined age was forty-two. Picasso of the written word! The thought pleased him enormously. He was convinced he could satisfy two young women at the same time.

  Sandy met two Italians on the street and came home with them, Amanda said. The three of them were drunk. Gino and Paolo. I think they were lovers. Sandy had a plastic container with a roast chicken inside. She carried it under her arm like a football. Dinner, she announced, and lifted the chicken over her head. The boys brought wine, which we drank straight out of the bottle. I turned on a small radio I’d brought with me and we danced. Then we took off our clothes.

  Amanda got out of bed and went to the bathroom. When she came back his eyes were open again and he’d lost all desire to sleep.

  So?

  So Sandy is really looped by now and she starts dancing around the room by herself, chewing on a piece of chicken. Gino was smoking a cigarette and laughing at her. Paolo was sitting next to me on the couch getting increasingly annoyed, his erection drooping to the right. Finally Sandy plopped down on the easy chair and passed out with chicken fat all over her face and the half-eaten chicken leg on her belly. The two Italian boys got dressed and left.

  Is that it? he said bolting up in bed. He wanted so much more.
It felt like a truncated dream.

  I told you it was an almost orgy. Nothing came of it.

  Do you still want to be in one?

  Only with the right people. Those boys were strange. So is Sandy, but I knew that all along. Do you?

  Do I what?

  Do you want to be in an orgy?

  What defines an orgy?

  Four or more people, Amanda said with a superior tone that annoyed him. He felt the urge to go to the bathroom but he didn’t want the conversation to stop.

  Too many for me. How about three people?

  That’s a ménage à trois. Two women or two men?

  He felt offended that she should even ask. Two women, of course.

  You old goat! she said, giggling.

  Don’t you think I can handle two?

  I have no doubt. You’ve handled me and I’m worth at least two.

  Now he really had to go. He rushed out of bed and stood over the toilet forcing out the pee, not like the old days when he urinated with the exuberance of a stallion. As he pushed out the last few spurts he looked at himself in the mirror that lined the wall. He could do it, no? Go on a romp with Amanda and Sandy? It would be good for his prostate if nothing else. Not a young stallion, he, but an old goat about to pipe his ultimate tune. He flushed, turned off the light, and went back into bed where Amanda lay, softly sleeping.

  BIG BABEL

  Paralyzed some days. Other days you waited for the bus and others still you trembled like a deer caught in the headlights of the dump truck of language. Quizás no tenga amor la eternidad. That old bolero. Eternity, however, doesn’t wait for anyone. Eternity has nothing to do with language. Standing in midtown Cubop City you tried to unravel yourself from the skein—Spanish, English, or both, each thread leading back into itself. The light turned many colors and you were kept from crossing the street and going where you had to go. It got quite hot. Anonymous, odorous hordes passed by you, and you, too, were anonymous, sweaty.

  A man, quite possibly from the Southern Cone, asked you with great difficulty, in an English so broken it sounded like a lost tongue, how to get to the East Village. You affected the posture of the lost, for you, too, were that, though in a different way, and answered him in English, but with a Slavic accent, to walk down Broadway all the way to big park that calls itself Union Squares. To south and east all being East Willage. Large Sicilian place in the old days around Ninth Street and First Avenue, and around Sixth Street and Third, big Ukrainian. Not now so much anymore at present, but big weirdo area and teenager tattoo people from Jersey with needles in noses. Too expensive to live there no more for regular people who speak in other tongues. Queens is good—Astoria, Sunnyside, that’s where everybody goes, except old ladies in babushkas. Shit, they wear black stockings and pee in their panties. Russkies living in Brighton Beach by the sea, like Odessa. I got relatives there, drive limo. Blacks in Harlem or in jail. Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, Dominicans in Washington Heights—Quisqueya—and the Colombians in Flushing, around there. The Medellín cartel, the cocaine, that kinds of things. Indians all over the place and Jamaican nurses in hospital and the Chinese delivery boys and the Mexican dishwashers. All the rich people live on Park Avenue and the Jews on Long Island. Liberals in the Upper West Side. They make to believe they like the aliens, but in their secret they wish everyone to be like them with Birkenstocks and beards. They no patient. Cubop City big Babel, big bagel, big apple. Take a bite. Ha ha.

  The man was more lost now, and over his face came a pained look, as if he would never find the East Village. He wished he were back in Asunción, you were sure, but you wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of speaking Spanish to him, which you could easily have done, and put him at ease a little bit. No, señor. You were not in Midtown, intralanguage paralysis, to make anyone feel comfortable, least of all yourself. That is not what Cubop City is about. You want comfort, you go to Terre Haute, Indiana. Cubop City is about feeling foreign all the time and staying awake nights wondering where your language went and where your grandparents are from and why you feel so different from everyone else that walks past you on the street. Like that little guy from Montevideo, who was desperately trying to find his way to the East Village. Why did he want to go there, anyway?

  That night you couldn’t sleep. You tossed this way, that way. You drank three glasses of water, then had to void your bladder as many times. You thought you should make it up to the fellow from the Southern Cone, but how? You had no name, no address. You didn’t even know what country he was from. All you had was a face contorted by anxiety and the question, Güer to Iss Billage? compounded by your own unwillingness to speak to him in his language, which was your language. You’d never done such a thing before. According to psychology, at the core of human behavior is the trauma of birth and infancy and your parents’ trauma and their parents’ trauma. The sins of the parents shall be visited upon the children. Actually, that’s the Old Testament, but then Freud was an Old Testament kind of guy. What sin of your parents was now rearing up like a ball-peen hammer about to strike?

  It all went back to language. You had two at your disposal the day the man from the Southern Cone came to you seeking succor. You decided to use a disguised form of English and throw the poor man off track, as if he weren’t off enough already. You left him wondering what planet of the solar system he had just landed on. It had nothing to do with early childhood trauma, nothing to do with your parents’ suffering. It was the fear of revealing yourself. As you say this, you tremble and your stomach churns. Language is your mask to fashion at will, from native-born Cuban to foreign-born Slav—Ruthenian, to be exact. You fooled that man into thinking you a creature quite unlike you are. You are master of your identity, not he who made the mistake of asking you a simple directional question. He may as well have asked where paradise lay. The answer came as layered as a mil hojas cake. Only in Cubop City. Only in yourself.

  In the morning you walked out the building a little lighter, your heart a little cleaner. You went west with the warmth of the sun at your back. This neighborhood now often feels like the city twenty years ago before all the hipness began to invade it: old-fashioned coffee shops, bagel stores, greasy Chinese takeouts, a dry cleaner and a cobbler next to each other, several Irish bars within a couple of blocks. You know it well. Some days you feel like you’re going to drown in the backwardness, the lack of nouvelle cuisine and smart people sitting at sidewalk restaurants, but today, today is different. You’re in disguise, and you know it, and all around you, the old ladies creeping along hunched over their aluminum walkers, the butcher and the fishmonger and the cop and the optometrist and the ditchdigger and the young woman in high boots and sunglasses waving for a taxi and the fellow pissing against the wire fence of the school, everyone’s in disguise, passing one another, avoiding one another’s eyes, until the moment comes when someone stops you for directions and then the disguise is in danger of falling away. You react quickly, spontaneously, and hold it up, change it if need be in order to deflect the stranger’s attempt at communication. I Slav, you say, I Ruthenian from Carpathian Mounten, and you stop the man dead in his tracks.

  The morning was dim city light falling on the streets full of people: grand dames of Cubop City, politicians, drivers of armored trucks, cooks and waiters and tax collectors and yoga teachers and stripteasers and Goth teenagers, and you, bilingual loafer among them. Who could imagine such fortune? Who wouldn’t give everything he owns to be in your sneakers, central and ubiquitous, denuded and invisible, omnivalent, fractal, momentary, copacetic?

  AMATORY PURSUIT

  But this is Amanda’s story. She’s the one for whom the daily bread rises in the oven and the waterfalls sing on the rocks and the clouds pass by morphing into the creatures of dreams. She’s the one. Ask anyone who knows her; ask the sands that spread from the ocean to her house; ask the house as it listens to the waves sliding up on shore, c
rying, Amanda, Amanda; and the sun at dusk like a big mouth sucking up the light; and the labyrinth of Amanda’s heart that no one yet has broken; and the minotaur inside the labyrinth that awaits those foolish enough to enter. It bellows through the night and paws the ground when it hears the wind rushing through the infinite chambers.

  Angel met Amanda before she took up hammering and before she learned about Christian colonics. Everything was gray and dirty. Dog feces with bottle-fly mountain climbers lay on the sidewalk, Styrofoam cups like white Turcoman fezzes plugged the sewers, the subways roared and clanged, half-eaten slices of pizza stewed in the summer sun, and garbage overflowed on all the corners of the city, where it was flattened by the passersby and smashed into postindustrial paste. He was watching the end of the world on television, he was bathing in a tub filled with the tepid water of serenity, he was reading a book about the musculature of giraffe tongues, he was being an Ur-realist and consorting with oopy-poopy frumpy academics. She came into the room and her eyes fixed on him. Quiet, unprepossessing, young, she sat among the tweedy toads, the chokers of metaphysical swans, and absorbed all the light in the room. It was her eyes he couldn’t let go of, her eyes that wouldn’t let go of him. He lost his thought and let it run away into the highest pinnacle of intellectual obfuscation. He gagged. Nothing meant anything anymore except for that young woman who walked out of the room as obtrusively as she had entered. Was she bored, disinterested? Who wouldn’t be, listening to the harrumphing intellectuals of the new millennium? But now: The room was an airplane crash, the city was spinning out of control, the world was fleeing into a cosmic soup of mystery, death, and desire. He forsook his role among the postmodernist flatulents and ran after her, but she had disappeared into the crowds that filled the streets with their terrorized silence. Afterward, when the crowds had thinned, he searched for her up and down avenues and alleyways. His life had changed and he couldn’t reach the agent of that change to thank her, to curse her.