by Paul Monette
With that they fell into step beside each other and sauntered down the dock like a couple of swells out for an outing. The hundred men who’d have fled in terror at the look on Tony Montana’s face would have learned something very important about him if they’d watched his meeting with Manolo Ray. For it wasn’t just when he pulled a trigger. Montana went blank like a man disarmed when he cared about somebody. Just for a second, all his panther manner disappeared. He was defenseless. If someone had only seen it, he would have had something on Tony Montana. But nobody saw it.
“What boat we on?” Manolo asked him, as they sat on a coil of rope and watched the convicts file onto one vessel after another. Montana nodded out to the harbor, where the battered trawler rode the sluggish tide, waiting its place in line. Manolo, who had been staring greedily at the yachts, winced with sudden dismay. “Huh? You gotta be kiddin’.”
“Better to be with a mob,” Montana said, figuring the trawler would hold a couple of hundred easily. “We don’t want to stick out.”
“Well, I hope you can swim, amigo, ’cause that thing looks like it already sank.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get there,” Montana replied, his jaw set grimly as he gazed out over the water, past the harbor light.
“What the hell we gonna do when we get there?”
“Get rich,” said the other quietly. An astonished look was in his eyes, as if he’d never spoken such a thing out loud. Perhaps he didn’t know it till he said it.
“Hey, I’m with you,” cried Manolo Ray, clapping his hands three times and thrusting a fist in the air in a gesture of triumph. “Hey, Cousin Tony, we gonna get us a yacht?”
“Everything, pal,” said Tony Montana, his eyes still fixed on the far horizon. The chaos around him had vanished. He smiled at the open sea like an admiral. He clapped a hand on Manolo’s shoulder. “We’re gonna get us every fuckin’ thing there is.”
They weren’t really cousins. They grew up in the same Havana slum, in tarpaper shacks that lined an alley indistinguishable from a thousand others. The two boys were drawn together because neither one had a father. Both men had died in the revolution. Died on the right side, at least, in bloody guerrilla skirmishes high in the mountains. Their widows were due a string of medals and a proper pension, but only the medals had ever arrived. The slum alleys didn’t look any different under Castro than they had under Batista. It was still just rice and beans, with now and then a hunk of dogmeat. The history they taught in the schools was changed, but nobody from the alleys ever went to school. The only thing a slum kid could aspire to be was a soldier. The good money that had filtered down in the old regime—to the pimps, the hustlers, the whores, the pickpockets—was gone with the gringo tourists and the high-roll gamblers.
When he was ten years old, Tony Montana loved nothing better than to sit in his mother’s tiny kitchen, listening to his grandfather talk of the old days. The old man had worked as a doorman at the Cristobal Beach Hotel. When he spoke of the playboys and chorus girls, the Bentleys and the diamond chokers, he went into a kind of trance. He held up his head in a lofty way, and his gestures were grand, his manner elegant, as if he too had swept in every evening to lose a fortune at baccarat. Had Castro had spies in Mrs. Montana’s kitchen, they would have arrested the old man as a genuine anti-socialist. Tony knew it had to be a secret between him and his grandfather. But his head grew full of visions, and he knew even then he would never rest till he found that lost and magic world again.
By the time he was twelve he had started to learn his trade. He and Manolo would take the bus to the garden quarters of the city, where the bureaucrats and the generals lived in the houses of the rich who’d fled the revolution. The two boys would talk their way into somebody’s house, pretending one of them was sick. While the lady of the house administered bicarbonate of soda to Manolo, Tony would dart through the rooms and pick up whatever he could stuff in his shirt. The two boys came home from the suburbs laden down with bud vases and china figurines, little madonnas and cigarette boxes. Now and then Tony would bestow a trinket on his sister Gina, six years old, but he knew his mother would have turned him over to the local priest for punishment if she’d ever found out. So he horded his loot in the crawl space under the shack, counting it up like a king in his treasure-house, till he outgrew childish things.
They graduated to picking pockets. Manolo would sit on a bench in the fountained park in front of the shuttered art museum, sobbing as if his heart would break. When somebody stopped to comfort the child, Tony would slip out of the bushes and lift a wallet or snatch a purse. They made a fair amount of money this way, enough to keep them in beer and cigarettes, but somehow it never satisfied Tony. If he was going to steal, he wanted to steal from the rich. Pearls and gold watches and thick folds of cash—that’s what he itched to grab hold of. He wasn’t long for a people’s republic.
When he was fourteen and Manolo was twelve, they joined a gang. Tony was kind of reluctant, but he knew he would end up a victim if he had no affiliation. They were mostly fifteen and sixteen, these kids, and what they specialized in was random violence. They would break a hundred windows at the Ministry of Agriculture. They slashed the tires on a fleet of Jeeps behind the army barracks. They lit smutty fires in back doorways. They threw live cats on the power grids, so as to throw whole neighborhoods into darkness. They loved nothing better than being caught in the act and chased through the streets. They called themselves The Devil’s Cousins.
If someone had told them they were anarchists, undermining the revolution, they would have laughed till their sides hurt. The revolution had nothing to do with them. It was a delusion of their parents. They themselves were engaged in a far more serious matter, the business of not growing up.
By the time he was sixteen himself, Tony had grown more and more restless. He had long since proven himself as daring and destructive as the others, once almost losing an arm when a bottle bomb exploded too fast. The gang respected and included him, but only Manolo was close enough to tease him and make him laugh. Only to Manolo would Tony express his contempt and dissatisfaction. The Cousins were going nowhere, Tony said. He didn’t want to end up drunk and married and dead before he was thirty. He had bigger plans.
“Hey, chico,” he said, shadowboxing as he and Manolo made their way home one evening, “you think I wanna spend the rest of my life here? Hey, you gotta be kiddin’. I’m goin’ where the money is. I’m gonna find me a princess and live in a fuckin’ castle.”
“Lotta princesses right around here,” retorted his friend, eyeing a girl in the window opposite, lazily brushing her long dark hair.
Tony snorted contemptuously. “You think too small, chico. That’s your problem.”
Manolo wasn’t listening. He’d caught the eye of the girl in the window, who smiled at him coyly as she pinned up her hair. Manolo hitched his thumbs in his belt loops and leaned casually against a lamp post, affecting a studied indifference.
Tony noticed none of this. He looked off into the middle distance like a seer in a trance. His fists were clenched, his forehead beaded with sweat. His voice quivered with passion as he whispered: “I’m talkin’ princess, chico. You understand?”
He’d been spending time down on the docks, talking to the old fishermen about life in Miami. Everyone told him the same thing: Don’t go over poor. Poor in Miami was just as bad as poor in the slum alleys. Don’t go over without connections, or you’d end up picking lemons for a dollar a day. Tony listened carefully, filtering out the anti-American bullshit. He knew it wasn’t hard to get across the ninety miles to Florida. An able-bodied man could make it with a forty-horse motor and a rowboat. But the more he listened, the more he realized he needed a stake. He had to have money to bribe his way in, or he’d just be another illegal alien, like some dumb Mexican farmworker.
So he hustled around on his own for a while, looking to make a connection. He only went out with the gang one or two nights a week, and they didn’t like it, but Manolo m
anaged to keep peace. Tony sniffed out the bar where the loan sharks gathered, the numbers runners and the bookies. This whole class of con men had been driven deeper underground by the ascendancy of Castro. They no longer sported in linen suits and Panama hats, with gold-handled canes and foot-long cigars. They had to dress down like everybody else. The flash went into the closet. But they made as much money as ever, because they provided essential services.
And they still needed runners and bagmen.
They started Tony small, selling reefers in the alleys. He had to carve out his own territory, and he worked on a fifty-fifty split, fifteen cents on a cigarette. Within six weeks he was dealing a couple of hundred a day, five hundred a day a month later. Most of his competition was old dopers who weren’t looking to make much more than an easy buck or two, as long as they got their dope for free. Meanwhile, Tony was working the schoolyards. He worked out a special deal with an army corporal, splitting his own percentage so as to be the main conduit to the city barracks. He worked the chain gangs doing road work down by the harbor, selling in bulk to the prisoners. Then he cut the guards in and doubled his volume.
The wizened old crooks in the bar could hardly believe it. Marijuana was a small-time operation, scarcely worth the trouble of keeping the traffic flowing. It was more of a public relations gesture between them and the barrio, where they made money hand over fist on gambling and loans. So they saw right away that Tony Montana was somebody special. They offered him a bagman’s slot in the numbers racket, where he’d have a good deal more responsibility and a lot less running around. They even implied that if he kept his nose clean, there might be a spot one day in the protection business. If a man could make a territory his and no one else’s, he stood to make a fortune.
They were stunned when he turned them down. They might have even got angry, except Tony was a real smooth talker, even then. He knew the old con men were just like his grandfather, sighing for a lost world. All he had to do was tell them, very serious and man-to-man, that he only planned to work till he had a stake, that he wouldn’t rest till he’d had a shot at Miami. What could they do? They understood that a man with talent had nowhere to go in Cuba. Crime needed freedom. The States was the only place in the world where any man could grow up to be a President Carter, or an Al Capone at least.
So he worked for a couple of years in the streets selling reefer, moving ounces to his serious customers and a kilo every two weeks to the corporal. He brought in Manolo for the nickel and dime work, and he took a week’s trip up into the mountains late one August, to watch the harvest and see how the crop was moved across the island to Havana. They were all just peasants at the growing end. He realized that if he had his own foreman in the fields, he could double the output next season. Then he’d take the plants right to the ocean and bring them around by boat, rather than rely on the cumbersome fleet of trucks that the mob had used for twenty years. But he kept his ideas to himself, so he wouldn’t get overcommitted. He wanted to leave in a year. He mustn’t get tangled in power.
By Christmas he had six thousand dollars saved. It was hidden in a biscuit tin in the crawl space underneath his mother’s shack. The con men would have banked it for him, but he didn’t trust them for a minute. His goal was fifteen thousand. He knew it would cost that much to buy ten thousand American dollars on the black market.
For her thirteenth birthday he bought his sister Gina a gold cross on a chain, for they were still Catholics, no matter how much the state disdained it. Gina wore the cross when she came into the kitchen for her birthday dinner. Her mother ripped it off her throat and flung it out the window into the open sewer that coursed through the alley. Nobody said a word. Tony brought no more presents home.
He figured he’d be able to leave by the following summer. Unlike Manolo, who spent every penny he made on the black market, buying American jeans and pointed shoes, Tony bought nothing for himself. It didn’t even bother him. He had no eye on the present any more. Once he had made his place in Miami he’d dress like a prince—the waiting was almost pleasurable. No wonder he was such an easy target. He walked to the barracks that morning in February, the lemon trees heady with scent in the winter drizzle, a flour sack over his shoulder stuffed with weed. He walked like nothing could touch him. The gods’ mouths must have watered, he needed to fall so bad.
He stood with the corporal in the stockyard between two trucks, counting out money. On the other side of the stockade fence was the riding ring. As the two men split up, Tony happened to glance through the fence. A spotted horse was trotting by, with a woman riding. She wore cream-colored jodhpurs and boots that gleamed. The silk scarf at her neck floated behind her like a trail of mist. Her sleek black hair tumbled to her shoulders. Tony stepped to the fence and gripped the chain links and stared at her. She passed without so much as a glance, patting the horse’s neck and murmuring endearments. She seemed to have ridden out of a dream—or out of the past Tony had only heard about in stories. His knuckles went white as he held the fence, desperate as a prisoner, even as she turned the horse in a circle and trotted back toward him.
“I know you,” she said with a teasing smile. “You’re the boy with the drugs. You got any pills?”
Tony shook his head.
She sighed. “I can’t sleep,” she said, tossing her hair because it was hot, pulling the scarf from her neck. She said no more. The horse had scarcely broken stride, and now she clicked her tongue, and they loped away across the ring. It was five minutes before Tony let go of the fence.
He spent the whole day trading favors, till he found a pharmacist with a back door. He showed up at the riding ring the next morning at exactly the same time, and when she trotted by he held up a little bottle and shook it like a castanet. They grinned at each other. She leaned down and took the bottle through the fence.
“What else do you do?” she murmured.
“Everything,” said Tony.
“Behind the stables,” she whispered, not a moment’s pause. “Three o’clock.”
He was there by two, dressed in a fancy shirt of Manolo’s. He paced the dusty road behind the stables, cursing himself for being a virgin. She drove up in an old Mercedes, and when he got in she said nothing, but started to laugh as they sped away. He thought she would never stop laughing. They passed through a neighborhood of old estates, many of them now given over to government operations. At last she turned in at an open gate in a high stone wall, and Tony got suddenly nervous when he saw the wide lawn and the great colonial mansion. Her laughter had dwindled down to a purr in her throat. Tony opened his mouth to speak.
“Don’t ask anything,” she said, not turning her head.
She led him through high cool rooms, the light kept out by wine-dark velvet drapes. The heavy old Spanish oak looked like the furniture of a palace. Up a spiral flight of marble steps, they came into a peach silk bedroom, with a canopied bed and a balcony overlooking a pond, where a pair of black swans drifted back and forth. She tore off Tony’s clothes and then her own. She sucked him all over, biting and panting, and then drew him into her and rode him until she was screaming. There was no time to be a virgin.
And when it was over they took a long hot bath and did it again on the white-tile floor. She dropped him back at the stables at five o’clock. “Don’t ask anything,” she had warned him, and he followed it to the letter, as if the sorcery would break if he stepped outside the circle. He asked no questions even of himself. He told no one. He rearranged his schedule so he saw his major customers at night. And he was there at the stables every afternoon at three. She came to pick him up perhaps twice a week. He never knew which days it would be.
For weeks they didn’t exchange a word, except what they groaned in bed. Every now and then he would bring her a gift—a scarf, a bracelet, a bottle of scent. She smiled like a child, wide-eyed, when she opened each package. She laughed with delight, no matter what it was. Yet Tony never saw any of his presents again, not on her boudoir table, not on her dres
ser, not in her closet. It was as if she was hording them somewhere.
Tony didn’t ask.
Six months went by, then a year. He had his fifteen thousand saved. Was he going to Miami or not, Manolo kept asking, who had taken over half the deliveries now. In a month or so, Tony would say. It wasn’t that the dream was any less real; he stood ready to go on a half day’s notice. But it was as if he drew a blank every afternoon at three, and he could not leave till she’d released him. She had become his dark angel, and how he finished it with her was how he would finish the past. Not just his own. His grandfather’s too, and his country’s.
Nothing seemed any different, that rainy Friday in March. He brought her a cameo, which she held against her cheek with the same abstracted smile. She folded it back in the tissue and laid it on the chaise. Then they ripped off their clothes and went at it, seething and moaning. There was always a kind of rage about it, as if they were both groping to escape the questions they swore they would never ask. And then they lay in the bathtub, idly stroking one another’s face. Because it was always the same, it had become a kind of dream.
So when he knelt on the white-tiled floor, kissing between her thighs as she rubbed his hair dry with a towel, he knew it was just the final beat of their wings. In a minute they’d have to fly. It was twenty to five; the clock was in his heart. So why, when he stood up and moved to the stool where his clothes lay in a heap, did she reach for his hand and draw him back toward the bed? The queerest, calmest smile was on her face. Wasn’t it time that he asked that question? Why did he just go with her, and lay in her arms doing nothing while the minutes swarmed like hornets?
