Cubop City Blues

by Pablo Medina

  Juan Antonio grew serious and felt himself stiffening again. He was facing a barbarian of the first rank. What took you there?

  My solidarity with the people. To experience the island before it is modernized and turned into an American playground.

  Juan Antonio took a deep breath and continued with the preparations. When he was done, he passed a demitasse to Spellman and took the other in his hands. The space between the two men was steeped in the aroma of the best coffee in the world. Juan Antonio waited for Spellman’s reaction.

  My God, said Spellman, this coffee’s incredible!

  Have you had coffee like this in Cuba?

  No. Not even my girlfriend’s mother makes it this good.

  Girlfriend? In Cuba?

  Yes, Spellman said. He was holding the cup around the sides, ignoring the handle.

  Ah, Juan Antonio thought. So that’s the solidarity.

  She’s fifteen, Spellman said. But in Cuba that doesn’t mean anything. In Cuba age is relative.

  Of course. We Cubans have liberated ourselves from those antiquated notions. He did not allow Spellman to continue. She’s probably dark skinned, too, he said. What we call a mulatica, not yet a mulatona.

  What’s the difference? Spellman asked. Apparently he’d not visited Cuba enough.

  About fifteen years and forty pounds. Then you won’t be able to handle her. She’s a handful as it is, no?

  She’s vivacious, yes.

  And in bed you’ve never had better. With her mother’s blessing and your dollars. Afterward, her mother gives you coffee, which she cuts with ground chickpeas so it’ll last longer. Americanos can never tell the difference.

  Are you implying that Yareli is a prostitute? A faint blush of anger crossed Spellman’s forehead.

  Not exactly. She’s a survivor. We call them jineteras. We’d do the same thing if we were in her shoes—or her mother’s.

  Juan Antonio poured a little steamed milk into his coffee to make a cortadito and took his first sip. He closed his eyes and hummed with pleasure. The coffee reminded him of his mother, who died believing that manners and morals are inextricable. In this case, manners had almost made him forget that the young Dr. Spellman had interrupted his morning without so much as a phone call announcing his visit.

  And to what do I owe this surprise call, Dr. Spellman? Surely not to let me know that you’ve read my poetry.

  I’ve just moved into the building, Spellman said. We’re neighbors.

  Really, Juan Antonio said, barely keeping his horror at bay.

  I’m planning an anthology of Cuban poetry in translation, Spellman continued. I thought you might consider contributing a poem to it.

  Juan Antonio threw a laugh up to the ceiling. I gave up that silly practice years ago. I have nothing to give you.

  Merely saying that relieved him. He did not want to resurrect that part of his life, when he still had hope of being more than a mere academic critic, a backseat driver. He felt a pinprick of nostalgia inside just thinking about those days, when he wrote poetry to his lovers and the world burned with energy. It was the same pinprick he felt when remembering his childhood in Cuba: his mother’s hands parting his hair in the morning as she readied him for school, the steaming cup of café con leche the maid prepared for him in the afternoons, the tropical clouds rolling across the cerulean sky of Havana.

  Well, I found one published in 1985 in the magazine The Yellow Egret. It’s called “The Architecture of Princes.” Perhaps you recall . . .

  I do, I do, Juan Antonio said, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. He very much wanted Spellman out of the house now. It’s an old piece. I cannot honor your request.

  Spellman seemed confused by Juan Antonio’s reaction and offered to show him the proposal he’d submitted to the editors. Juan Antonio was steadfast.

  Thanks for the coffee, Spellman said. I wish you’d reconsider. The poem is quite good.

  Is it really the best coffee you’ve ever had? Juan Antonio asked as he accompanied the young man to the door.

  My taste buds are still jumping, Spellman said walking out.

  When he closed the door Juan Antonio realized that he was prouder of his coffee than his poetry. Had he missed his calling? There was a time when his food was celebrated by his guests and he was known as a witty host. Now he had no visitors. His friends had scattered to other parts of the country or preferred to spend their time with children and grandchildren. One by one they dropped away until the last, Ofelia Sánchez de Ortelio, the first lady of Havana society in exile, too, stopped coming, felled by a hiatal hernia that kept her at home dining on dry toast and tea and shriveling up like a yellow prune.

  Juan Antonio went to his desk and rifled through his file drawer until he found “The Architecture of Princes.” He read it silently first, then a second time aloud, noting its iambic meter, its careful use of end stops, enjambments, and caesuras, and was impressed by how well it was constructed, how resonant of the deepest music of his soul. He spent the rest of the day tinkering with the poem, and by nightfall he had a new draft, solid enough that he was tempted to call Spellman and offer it to him. Festina lente, he thought. Hurry slowly. One shouldn’t act too rashly in these matters.

  When Monday came he reread his revision before his morning class and found the poem awful. He spent the day avoiding Spellman, who rushed from class to class with the energy of a mongoose and, after lunch, held court with eager students on the sidewalks under the faculty offices, where he smoked and laughed with them as if they were his cohorts. Later that week a student came to Juan Antonio extolling Spellman’s virtues as a teacher—how passionate he was, how friendly, telling wild stories about his year in Prague. He’s brilliant, the student added. Juan Antonio nodded, forced out a smile, and quickly took his leave.

  He went home feeling outdated. He’d never been to Prague. London was his city, which he’d visited twice with the reverence due a holy site. He was not interested in any music after Edward Elgar, and the little contemporary rock he had heard sounded like glass cracking under a steamroller. He believed professors professed; they didn’t chat, and they didn’t share their tobacco with their students. When he entered his apartment and looked in the full-length mirror facing the door, he saw that too many years in the city had given his skin a whitish pallor that his gray suit accentuated. His aquiline nose, which he’d once considered evidence of his aristocratic ancestry, had thickened with age and now drooped over the features of his face like a half-furled jib. His hair had become wispy, like grass sticking out of the snowy dome of his skull, and his eyes had lost the glitter of youthful petulance. More than tired they looked marooned in a sea of irrelevance.

  He sat at his desk and looked at the poem again. In the afternoon light it didn’t seem so bad; there were moments of grandeur after the volta, and the final couplet, though metrically weak, was a fitting closure to a sonnet Mallarmé might have dreamed of but never written. Mallarmé? To dare think of the French master in connection to this poem was hubris. But why not? There was no one to stop him, only the dim visage of Spellman in his ripped jeans and sneakers, ignoring the past as casually as he ignored the sartorial protocols of the academy.

  Unsatisfied with the closing of the poem, Juan Antonio sat at his desk for two hours, refusing to stand until a better one occurred to him. None came, and then, as the afternoon lengthened, he felt the tide of dusk flood the living room until he was an island, utterly alone except for the hum of his Smith Corona electric and the lamp that illuminated the sheet of paper. Along with the shadows came a longing for the past that he was, most days, successful at avoiding. He thought of the ceilings of his childhood house, of the cool tile underfoot where he’d race his toy cars, of the back patio, where he’d play cloak-and-dagger games with imaginary musketeers. He thought of his father scurrying in and out of the house
like a shame-ridden mouse, and of his mother, grand and smothering, feeding him cod-liver oil and raw eggs with honey. From her rocking chair she commanded the servants with the authority of a prime minister. He recalled his uncle Pepe, who lived with them because he was mysteriously incapable of work.

  On such evenings, Juan Antonio envisioned the geometries of the eternal summer of the tropics, the lines of sun and shade that held all his memories in place, more constant and alive now than they’d ever been. How he longed for the arms of someone who might restore that warmth and that clarity into his crusted heart. His heart, which he’d protected from harm all these years, he now wanted torn, ravaged, plundered. And just as he was drowning in his awful nostalgia, the eyes brimming with tears, the throat choking with grief, the doorbell rang.

  It was Spellman come to inquire about the poem. Juan Antonio was grateful and asked him in, insisting he stay for coffee. Spellman said he couldn’t stay long. He seemed nervous, and there was a note of desperation in his voice.

  Perhaps something stronger. I have some sherry.

  Spellman did not reply. Juan Antonio took his silence as assent and brought him the sherry and a plate of chocolates. He poured himself some and raised his glass in a toast.

  À votre santé.

  Spellman drank his in one gulp, an act Juan Antonio found charming.

  I was working on the poem when you rang.

  My editors want the manuscript by next week, Spellman said. There seemed to be none of the tensile energy in his voice that Juan Antonio had heard before. He thought he saw Spellman’s jaw tremble as he spoke. He poured another glass.

  Too much mind, not enough class, Juan Antonio thought. And when the mind failed him, what was poor Spellman left with? Dirty fingernails, a wrinkled shirt.

  You’ll have the poem by the deadline, he said, sitting in a rocking chair that had belonged to his mother. I’m having trouble with the metrics.

  It was fine the way it was, Spellman said, momentarily distracted from whatever ailed him.

  To you perhaps.

  The young theorist lowered his eyes and grew pensive.

  Dark cloud.

  What? Spellman said.

  There’s a dark cloud in your eyes and it has nothing to do with the poem. You can confide in me.

  Spellman leaned back on the couch and brought his hands to his face.

  My girlfriend.

  Your Cuban girlfriend?

  Yes. When I called last night her mother answered. She said Yareli was engaged to someone else and hung up. I called again several times and the phone was off the hook.

  Spellman dropped his hands and let them rest on his thighs. His eyes seemed helpless, as if he were looking out from the bottom of a well from which there is no hope of escape. Juan Antonio had been in the bottom of that well twice in his life and so he felt a closeness to him, but it was not the closeness of compassion. He fought the urge to sit by him and hold him. A brilliant flame flared in his heart and glowed there a moment before disappearing. He reacted to it by forcing Spellman to swallow the truth like a spoonful of cod-liver oil.

  She found herself a European, Juan Antonio told him, most probably a Spaniard, middle-aged and approaching retirement. He promised to bring her and her mother to Spain. There’s nothing you can do. Women, especially Cuban women of the present period, are fickle. They’ll do anything for a dollar, a euro in this case. Why don’t you find yourself someone closer to your background?

  Juan Antonio knew that Spellman had no recourse against the scourge of love. He was, after all, a barbarian, without style, and ignorant of the pleasures of dressing in the morning, making his coffee, buying good sherry, and keeping it for occasions such as this in order to counter the devastating effects of paradise lost. Juan Antonio served Spellman another glass.

  Better yet, Juan Antonio said, why don’t you start taking care of yourself?

  What do you mean? Spellman’s eyes lost their bovine expression momentarily.

  When was the last time you bathed?

  I don’t know. Two, three days ago.

  How can you stand yourself? This mild reproof had the intended effect of awakening Spellman’s vanity. Juan Antonio could see it in the way he straightened his neck.

  Start by taking a shower. Let the water run over you and breathe in the steam. Buy yourself expensive soap.

  Juan Antonio went on, and by the time he was done speaking, he had Spellman dressed in a silk bathrobe, smoking English cigarettes, and smelling like the lord chief baron of the Exchequer. Spellman became ensnared in the web of Juan Antonio’s vision. The young theorist squirmed this way and that on the couch trying to free himself.

  Tomorrow, Juan Antonio said triumphantly, we’ll go to Barney’s and you will buy yourself a suit that fits your station in life.

  I can’t afford Barney’s, Spellman said timidly.

  But you could afford to keep a hot mulatica in Havana, and her mother, and her whole family, as well? Spellman, Juan Antonio implored in a low whispery register as he leaned over the coffee table. Save yourself!

  Under it all, under the gentility of this man of grace and belles lettres, a note of anxiety had sounded, dissonant and flat, and it took all his effort to keep it from coming to the surface and drowning out his advice, his clothes and demitasses, his fine sherry, his porcelain memories of the childhood of privilege he never really had in Cuba.

  With a look of terror Spellman stood and rushed out the door, making only a cursory reference to the poem he had come to retrieve. Juan Antonio was at first surprised—he would have used the word dismayed—then he convinced himself that Spellman’s sudden exit was evidence that his words had hit the mark. I must be cruel only to be kind, he thought, and started cleaning up, placing the dishes and the two sherry glasses on a painted wooden tray of Russian origin that his last lover had given him. How long ago was that, seven, eight years? He was a twenty-year-old Slav with strong muscles and hands calloused by manual labor, but he was a kitten in bed.

  When Juan Antonio reached the kitchen his body began to tremble. The tremor spread from his torso down his arms until he could no longer hold the tray, which went crashing to the floor. He couldn’t catch his breath and his chest spasmed with each attempt to draw in air. For a moment he thought the end had come. Slowly his long body slid down the door frame to the floor, where it came to rest surrounded by shards of porcelain, sharp jags of crystal, and pieces of dark Belgian chocolate. Then the weeping came, profound and unfathomable, like a flood of black water. He was twelve years old. He was lost in a room without walls. He cried a long time, and when he had no more tears in him, he noticed a finger smudge on the refrigerator door that he had missed on his last cleaning. He stared at the smudge, thinking he needed to wipe it off but making no effort to stand.

  He was too old for this, too old to fall apart over a young fool who had not yet found the limits of his talent, too old for melodrama. There was no such thing as saving yourself. There was only the awareness of the moment of your decrepitude. Your head is an empty gourd, a teacher once told him. Fill it. Juan Antonio tried, with every bit of knowledge he could find. He could feel the emptiness, not just in his head, where all that knowledge had turned to smoke, but in his heart, croaking with need. He could hear the wind rushing through the conduits of his blood. He could hear the bellow of a distant bull, a lone cricket chirping, a dove cooing at the edges of a field smoldering with wasted love. Finally he stood and went to the window as the city lights came on and people in their heavy coats rushed home, indifferent to human sorrow but carrying it within themselves like a seed that would sprout in the most unlikely moment, just when they thought they were beyond it, when they thought they had saved themselves. No help for the young barbarian, no help for the old belletrist. His gourd was rattling with the broken husks of beautiful letters.

  S
TORYTELLER

  She did it out of shame, she did it out of rage, vertigo, romance, ambition, disdain, indifference, selfishness, self-loathing—torch singer, hah—wanting to erase her mistake and get the little monster of her lust flushed out with plumbing fluid. Why didn’t she get an abortion from a proper doctor or leave me at the front door of an orphanage, wrapped in swaddling clothes? Because she wanted to live a bolero. I found her old diary under her bed after she died, and from it I learned Papa was not my father. She did it because not doing it meant raising the child as if it were her husband’s. In the end that’s what happened. My real father was a handyman, a young buck from the country, just this side of manhood, with those country eyes that could be sad or wise or stupid or impenetrable and that he didn’t know how to avert. But it could have been anyone: the gardener, the grocer, the itinerant barber who worked the neighborhood. She snared the handyman and he was too afraid or humble or hungry to say, No, Madam. Thank you, but no. If I do this there’s no telling where it will lead.

  She led him to her bed, where she spread herself out for him, ample and open. She had her way with him. I feel no urge to find him. I am content making him up: Gomercindo, Fajardo, Longino—she didn’t write the name. Curly black hair, skin cured by the sun, smooth hairless chest, wiry, veiny arms, and hands cracked from day labor, smelling of hard earth, soft water, and the breeze sifting through sugar cane.

  Nothing to do with love. She shoved the boy away when she was done, told him to go back to his miserable town and never contact her again. The boy’s seed took and sprouted. What to do? Lock her shame in pleasure? Go with the boy, find him, let him do with her what he wanted. It was a bolero without escape. The bottle of liquid lye in the garage: for lead pipes, for sewers. She poured it into herself, bathed me in the stuff, let it burn like hell potion. For three days her womb sizzled and sputtered, sending forth red foam and stench. Her husband wept and screamed and pleaded to call the doctor. No, shaking her head. He’d bring a santera, a babalawo, anyone. No, sweat like beads of sin on her forehead, her insides melting. No. On the fourth day there was no pain, just a cold fluid in her veins that made her shiver and go into spasms, her body stiff like wood, her tongue rolling out of her mouth. Then indifference, then a kick inside and another, the creature still in her alive, knocking.