Cubop City Blues

by Pablo Medina

  He was here yesterday afternoon, she said. Sat on the couch talking. You know how he is, like he owns the world. Then he started dealing and I told him to leave. Here, in my house, you don’t do drugs. You hear, Chano? Cabito’s no good. Don’t trust a man with a gold tooth.

  Chano reminded Mama he himself had two.

  Two is not one, she said.

  She picked up her cigar box and stood slowly. She was a big woman, made bigger by the loose housedress she wore. Se acabó lo que se daba. Party’s over. I’m going to bed. Be careful. El Cabito was in the war. He killed a lot of men. Oggún, the saint of weapons, is on his side.

  I’m a son of Changó, Chano said.

  That saint is fickle.

  Chano gave a quick laugh. He’d never been afraid of anyone in his life, and when you’re unafraid you have every weapon at your disposal. There was a nice-looking mulata, whose boyfriend was smoking reefer out on the street. She smiled at him. That was the boyfriend’s fault. You never left a beautiful woman like that at a party like this, especially when Chano was around. He was devoted to women and he had the talk. Chano was tempted but he didn’t bite.

  There was one more place he could check tonight, El Río Café, but that was way uptown and the cold was getting to him. His teeth were chattering and the wind went right through the lined gabardine with a leather collar he’d bought more for style than warmth. He needed to return to his apartment to warm up and rest before his gig.

  When he got there Cacha was gone. Instead he found the panther again, panting like a bellow. Chano took off his shoes, which were wet and stained along the sides with dried salt, and lay on the bed. Tonight he wanted to smoke those drums, get them talking the language of the forest and make sure Cacha heard it in midtown, where she’d gone with her friends. That woman could move her hips to the music like Ochún, the saint of romance and flirtation. She had skin the color of honey and golden eyes, and Chano loved her the first time he saw her. For a long time he tried to get her to come with him, but she refused because he had a woman back in Havana, and so she went off with a trumpet player to New Orleans. He followed after her and talked her into coming to Cubop City and moving in with him, making many promises they both knew he’d never keep. She was sensational and danced her way through all the clubs in the city. Divórciate, mi negro, she would say to him. It is me you love. She was right. Chano loved Cacha, but he didn’t trust himself. He loved a lot of women. He fell asleep thinking of her.

  It was close to seven o’clock when he woke, and the apartment was in deep shadow. He lit a cigarette and lay back in bed, flicking the ashes on the floor. Cacha wouldn’t be home before he left and that unsettled him. Everybody’s busy in this town, everybody’s after one thing or another. He hoped for a good audience; snow never kept people away, or the cold. This was Cubop City, just like Havana, except bigger and richer. Before leaving he rolled a joint, sat on the easy chair, and smoked it. Good stuff, not the crap El Cabito sold him last week. He saw the forest in all its clarity, every tree delineated, each leaf apart from every other leaf, each vine twirling around itself, each bush growing in its proper place, and all together a dense green mass: the smell of the air, the damp earth, the birds squawking overhead. There was no sign of the panther.

  He was impervious to the cold and he walked up Lexington toward El Río, determined to find El Cabito. A block away he saw a lone figure under a streetlight. It was not a night for strolling. Maybe it was someone who couldn’t stand to be in the house with his family. Winter will do that. He was dressed in green and yellow and was chewing on a chicken bone. Chano knew the sign: Orula, the oldest and wisest saint. When Chano was a few steps from him, the man stopped chewing and spoke: It’s a hard night. He wore a scarf around his face that hid his features and gave him the look of a monk. There was an underlying hum, like that of a machine, coming from the vegetable world, where the santos lived. Chano was at the border of a dream, about to enter and be mounted again. He struggled with Changó, he couldn’t let it happen now, and the saint got angry and abandoned him. The man’s voice seemed to come from the sun, the dark inside the sun that only appears at night. Prepare yourself, he said.

  For what? Chano thought. He smiled at the man, but inside he felt like a hen that couldn’t lay an egg. He remembered the panther and how it had climbed on him at the restaurant and he had to shake it off. He ignored the warning and kept walking into the night. One hundred yards away he was a small figure amid the whiteness; two hundred yards away the forest shut behind him. What you create is yours. Drunk on palm wine, Obatalá, the saint of the north, made twisted children.

  Chano saw the red neon light spilling onto the snow before he saw the place. He wanted to get some satisfaction from Cabito, then go to his gig. Without honor there’s no music and the drums sound dead; without honor you might as well be like a million other fools shitting their pants from the cold. Chano looked through the window into the Río. El Cabito was sitting at a corner table with two other men, drinking beer and eating croquetas. Having a good time, laughing a lot.

  Chano entered and headed straight for their table, unsmiling. He wanted to settle the matter so he could play his drums. It was that simple.

  Cabrón, he said to El Cabito. You sold me chicken-shit and I want my money back.

  Still sitting, El Cabito smiled and said, What I sell is what I sell and no one complains. Ask your girlfriend about that.

  What did you say? Chano said. There was nothing he could see but that mocking smile, the gold tooth glinting with the overhead light of El Río.

  She’s had my stuff. Ask her.

  The two men he was sitting with moved away. They saw the forest close in around Chano and El Cabito. Only one of them was coming out.

  Chano pushed aside the table and went for him, throwing a wild punch that grazed his shoulder, then a straight right to the head that caught El Cabito on the cheek and threw him against the wall. El Cabito was stocky but quick. In one motion he ducked to avoid Chano’s left hook and pulled a gun from his belt.

  When the first bullet hit him, Chano felt as if he’d walked into a brick wall. He tried to force his way through it and take another swing at El Cabito. His arm flailed and dropped to his side. He looked down at his chest but couldn’t see where the bullet entered him. Then he heard two more shots and felt them thumping into him. His legs weakened and he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs. All sounds in the restaurant stopped. He wanted to see beyond the forest, go back home and lie down, but he had no strength left, and so he sat down on a chair, just to rest a little, get his breath back. The next shot hit his heart. Chano’s head slumped and he dropped to the floor, where El Cabito put three more bullets into him. After that all you could hear was Changó’s laughter coming out of the forest.

  Sixty blocks away in midtown, Cacha was sniffing a sample of perfume on her inner wrist and chatting by the counter with two friends about men and their ways, how much like boys they are, how they sometimes try to fool others but are only fooling themselves. Like Chano, Cacha said. He doesn’t realize it but that man is in my hands. Ese negro tá pa mi. She grew quiet a moment and turned inward, her forehead clouding over with dark thoughts. What if he isn’t? What if he goes back to his wife? Then she heard something like Chano’s drumming, and the cloud passed as clouds do. She’d get him to divorce that woman in Cuba; she’d get him to marry her and live in the proper way in a big apartment with rose-colored walls and silk brocade curtains, he with his music, she with her children, drinking the milk of Ochún. She turned to one of her friends and said she felt warm inside. No matter how cold it was outside, she was always feeling warm.

  NATIVITY

  Bleating like a purple bloody lamb, afflicted with all that air and sound and smell, all those new creatures, all the to-do of nurses and doctors around him, Angel crossed the Rubicon that divides nonbeing from being. Puer iactus est. He was swadd
led in blue sheets and a heavy cotton blanket, then nestled on the crook of his mother’s arm, and from that position he discovered an enormous fleshy fruit with a chewy center. He immediately took it in his mouth and bit into it with his gums until it released the intoxicating juice that settled and satisfied him. During this time he forgot all other aspects of the new, multifarious world into which he’d been cast and concentrated not on the taste (what did he know about taste?) but on the quantity of fluid filling his mouth and belly and dribbling out the edges of his lips. All the while he was surrounded by the tones of teary moans coming from his mother and, a few minutes later, the laughter of his father, who was allowed to enter the room in order to observe what he had made by a simple, spasmodic release of sperm.

  Is he all there? he asked, turning to Dr. Abreu, the high priest of the birthing altar. Angel’s father meant, no doubt, to ascertain that the boy was a fully formed male.

  The doctor, who had heard the question from anxious fathers a myriad times, had gained a reputation for his competence and was in high demand in the city among middle-class mothers with social ambitions. It was no small matter of pride to answer, when asked, that Dr. Abreu had delivered the child at the Centro Médico, where ladies of the highest estate went to have their babies. Consequently, he was becoming immensely rich as he populated the ranks of the classes who could afford him. He was, however, bored by his profession, which he considered not much more than midwifery with an advanced degree, and by his beautiful wife, a former nightclub dancer who was as frigid as a cod in winter, at least toward him. All of Havana knew that he’d much rather be big-game hunting in Africa with his good friend Hemingway or deflowering Indian maidens in the deepest parts of the Darien with his other good friend Graham Greene.

  He will lead a good life, the doctor said, pulling off his surgical gown.

  Had anything been seriously wrong, the boy’s father would have been immediately consulted about what measures to take. For, the good doctor’s success was not just due to his medical talents and his Harvard education, but to his willingness to consider solving the complications of birth in the most discreet and expeditious form possible at quadruple his normal fee, especially if he was in the midst of planning a trip.

  To the doctor’s question, Do you want him circumcised? his father could only mumble an incomprehensible answer, which the hunter doctor must have taken as a sign of severe parental distress, and so he did what he would have done had the boy been his own and left him with prepuce immaculate, a decision for which Angel would remain grateful for the rest of his life.

  Angel’s birth was a great moment in the history of his family: firstborn of the firstborn. Celebrations planned and dominated by his paternal grandmother lasted for days to the chagrin of his parents, who would have preferred to celebrate by themselves in the cocoonlike serenity of parental bliss. On the first day came forty-five members of the immediate family, who drank, sang, and danced until dawn of the following morning. On the second day were added close friends and lost relatives and a five-piece charanga band hired by Angel’s uncle. On the third and fourth day, as news spread around the neighborhood and beyond, strangers showed up, among them three off-duty policemen, two kleptomaniacs, who stole a number of his grandmother’s tchotchkes, and an ambulating chiropodist, who offered his services free of charge to any woman under thirty. On the last day, when Angel’s grandmother lay in bed exhausted and all the other relatives had long gone to their homes to rest their vocal chords, their feet, and their livers, a coal seller with his face and hands smudged black from his labor sat on the porch eating leftover pork and drinking the last of the rum, and a woman in a black dress, believed to be the amiguita of the charanga’s trumpet player, leaned against the trunk of the poinciana in the backyard, weeping copiously for no apparent reason. A dark portent? No, his grandmother said as she spied the woman from her bedroom window. A simple accident of fate. She directed that Eulipio, the neighborhood taxi driver, should be hired to take the woman where she wanted to go, and she declared the celebration over. Coño, Angel’s father said when he heard her pronouncement. Praised be God!

  THE PALACE

  OF CRYSTAL

  In one of Amanda’s stories, titled “The Palace of Crystal,” a teenage boy having lunch at a diner overhears a conversation between a man and a woman seated in the booth behind him. They are discussing the nature of tenderness. The boy assumes the man is older from the way his voice strains at the end of each statement. The man believes that tenderness is insecurity disguised as physical generosity. Love me tender. The woman, who is upset by the man’s comment, tries to disagree with him. She is on the edge of anger, but her response is controlled. Love me tender means to love with something other than the lust in your mind. There is no love without lust. The boy is eating a hamburger and french fries, and he sides with the man, though he doesn’t fully understand what the disagreement is about. It appears that the man and woman have had this conversation before.

  It’s a biological matter. Darwinism at work.

  The boy, who is still a virgin, thinks about sex constantly. He would like to see what the woman looks like, but he doesn’t want to give himself away by turning around. He imagines her with black curly hair and dark eyes, slim but shapely with round firm breasts.

  What does tender mean anyway?

  To offer, the woman says.

  To hold, the man says. Greed, that’s what it is, disguised as affection.

  The boy wonders what they’re eating, whether they had sex this morning, whether she screams or moans or whimpers. It’s a slow day, a Friday without school and his parents at work. His friends? He hasn’t any.

  The story then shifts to the man and woman. They’re not married, though the man would like to be. The woman is not sure. He is twenty years older and not eager to have children. He likes sex, often and constant and lustful. She is twenty-eight and has waited patiently for the right man. As if the age difference is not enough, he is Catholic—educated by Jesuits, no less—and Cuban, two markers that will not sit well with her family, who are secular but nonetheless committed Jews. At times he gets rough and says things that offend her. If there is tenderness in him, it is hidden under the sloppy, groaning venality she recoils from. Still, she is in love with him, or has convinced herself she is, and so she hesitates to end the relationship. If courage is abandon, she is a coward. So is he, but for different reasons. What if she misses this opportunity and no other comes along?

  And so she engages in the discussion, hoping to find some common ground at last, a little sliver of an intellectual sandbank on which the two might stand as the waters of life rush past. That will be enough, no? Then on to other differences, which multiply daily.

  The relationship between the man and the woman at the diner is not rigidly structured. It is constantly in motion, mutating, growing, and diminishing. It can be extinguished, it can cease to exist, and the man and the woman who fed it will walk away from each other. After some time, a month, a year, or five, their time together will be a mere wisp of a memory, a frisson, an embarrassment even, without the fixity or permanence of geometry.

  And who is this boy? Why should he care about these two people, arguing over words? He would give anything to be with a woman. He doesn’t care the least about love, its complications, its convolutions, how it tethers you to illusion, how it liberates you from the dull accumulation of time, the day off, the greasy hamburger, the lack of friends. He finishes his lunch, pays the bill, and goes outside. A cold wind hits him in the face and he walks down the empty main street of the small New Jersey town where he lives. He is wearing a T-shirt, a light jacket, and no hat and he enters a newly opened book and gift shop. The store is empty except for the attendant, a blonde college-age girl, who smiles kindly at him and goes back to scribbling in a notebook. The boy browses the shelves, mostly self-help books. There will come a time when he will read a dozen of these seeki
ng ways of coping with his unhappiness, but now they seem miserable, pathetic texts. To the side, on the wall perpendicular to the bookshelves, is a glass shelf with New Age talismans—dream catchers, prisms, rocks of different shapes, small silver unicorns, and several crystals that catch the light from the track lighting on the ceiling and reflect it back at the boy. Illuminated, he remembers days when the sea shone back at him like that.

  Can I help you? asks the girl. She has walked over and is standing next to him.

  Na, says the boy. Just looking.

  It’s cold out today, she says.

  He nods and says yeah under his breath. Real cold.

  You’re not dressed for it, she says.

  I thought it’d be warmer. He is looking beyond her at the cars on the street, trying to avoid her eyes.

  What’s your name? she asks in a friendly enough way.

  The boy hesitates. He’s not sure what name to give her. Tadeo, he says. They call me Tad at school.

  He begins to get an erection, which he tries to hide by bending slightly at the waist.

  What shall I call you? asks the girl, who’s noticed Tadeo’s strange posture.

  I hate to be called Tad, he says.

  Okay, Ta-de-o, she says and walks back to the counter.

  He turns his back to her and concentrates on the objects on the shelves. He waits until the erection subsides, then goes to the counter where she is sitting, pen in hand, notebook before her.