Domingo stuck his head out of the kitchen’s back door for relief from the steaming dishes. Tonight Venus was in her usual yellow nest, and Mars still reigned as god of war. Even with the freakish moon and the miserable ration of stars, the view of the sky comforted him. His mother used to compare the planets to the santos. Venus was Ochún. Mars was Changó. And Saturn with all its rings of knowledge was the serene Obatalá.
It hadn’t been easy since he and his father had left Cuba last winter. Those first November weeks, Domingo could’ve sworn that someone had put the sun in cold storage, that the wind was blowing inside him—he’d never been so frozen in his life. And his father had gotten thin enough to seem to be vanishing altogether. Then both of them had come down with the flu and didn’t leave their apartment for days. They’d spent Christmas Eve collapsed on their salvaged-from-the-street sofa, wrapped in towels, a searing ache in their bones.
But now it was summer, and New York was far more hospitable. Domingo loved roaming the city on his days off—along its slate-colored rivers, beneath its granite towers, down its neon-loud avenues— watching the women. Manhattan was a glorious jardín de mujeres. Brown girls. Pink girls. White and yellow girls in every soft-fleshed shape and size. When the sun was out, they were everywhere in their skimpy dresses (some made of disposable paper!). They wore white vinyl go-go boots and armfuls of plastic bangles and frosted lipstick that reminded him of the coconut ice cream cones he’d loved in Guantánamo.
Domingo rated the fountain at Lincoln Center as his top lookout. At lunchtime, he’d settle there with a hot dog and a potato knish (just like a square croquette, he thought) and follow the high-ribbed ballerinas hurrying across the plaza. In his own neighborhood, there were dozens of women to consider. The unkempt Barnard girls with their nice teeth and unfettered breasts. The big-bottomed waitress on 108th Street who let the college boys feel her up for the price of a Sprite. The Puerto Rican mamitason Amsterdam Avenue.
The dishwasher broke down in the middle of the dinner rush, and so Domingo had to wash everything by hand. He couldn’t work fast enough to please the waiters, irascible old Chinese men like his father who’d left Cuba after the Revolution. “¡Mas platos! ¡Mas cubiertos!” Domingo scraped and rinsed plate after plate of house specials—breaded steak with onions, fried rice, and tostones—until his stomach flip-flopped with disgust.
After work, he headed downtown to see Ray Barretto’s late show at the Village Gate. Domingo knew it drove his father crazy that he spent all his money on concerts and clothes. But what was he supposed to do? Save for his retirement? Of course, he’d bought one of those cool knit shirts everyone was wearing and blue-tinted sunglasses to match. When he’d put it together to show his father, Papi had just stared back at him from his chopping block.
“But Papi, it’s El Watusi Man!” Domingo had whined. How could anyone put a price on that? But his father kept chop-chopping his cabbage in silence. Papi was preparing stir-fried cabbage with dried shrimp. He’d soaked the shrimp in boiling water before dropping them into the smoking wok. They popped and sizzled when they hit the oil, filling the apartment with a sharp ocean scent.
The nightclub was jammed, but Domingo talked himself into a seat up front, next to a washed-out little nurse with a mole on her cheek. El Watusi Man was hitting the skins like a dialect freaked by thunder. Smoke-sounding rumbero. De otro mundo. Domingo felt the timba as if the Man were playing his own bones. Ashé olu batá. He closed his eyes and let loose, felt the groove, a deep reverie, the pulse of his own peculiar birth.
“Hey, where you from?” the nurse asked him when the music finally stopped.
Domingo wanted to answer her, to say that his blood was a mix of this and that. So how was he supposed to choose who he wanted to be?
“Cuba,” he said. “I’m from Cuba.”
Then Domingo followed the little nurse to her apartment in Chinatown and made love to her on her dead mother’s bed (doilies scattered everywhere like desiccated snowflakes). The nurse told him that she usually dated only white men but she’d make an exception in his case. Domingo knew then that he couldn’t love the little nurse, but he still felt tenderly toward her.
It was dark when Domingo left the nurse’s apartment. A faint drizzle coated the last rim of night. Already, Chinatown was coming to life with vendors and bargaining customers. The fog from the river seemed to remold everything. A mist-veiled widow became a scurrying bride. A dangling row of red-roasted chickens saluted each passerby. And everywhere he went, frantic little dogs barked messages from the dead.
On Mott Street, garbage lined the streets like wildflowers. A crack in the sidewalk mimicked the curve of a maple branch. The Wall Street skyscrapers loomed arrogantly to the south. At a cutlery shop, dozens of knives were on display: pocketknives encased in red enamel, serrated ones for cutting bread, carving knives and meat cleavers and in the back row, six subtly carved daggers inlaid with bone.
In front of a seafood shop, a broom-thin woman was objecting to the inhumane treatment of amphibians. Turtles chopped and decarapaced alive. Pitiable frogs in overcrowded tanks. The protester shouted, stirring the fog with her placard. Behind her, long rows of lobsters lay dully on mounds of crushed ice, their claws held shut by rubber bands.
Around the corner Domingo found a cafeteria that served dumplings for breakfast. The waiter said that he could read the future in the pinch and tuck of the dumplings’ folds, lucky numbers for that week’s lottery. “Just fifty cents extra,” he said. But Domingo politely declined.
The hot tea burned through him. He lowered his face over the steaming cup, then watched as vaporous bits of his features beaded on the low-slung ceiling. He poured sugar directly into the pot. It dissolved easily. To work the sugarcane fields, his father had told him, was to go wooing mournful ghosts. The chain gangs of runaway souls, ankles ulcerated and iron-eaten and wrapped in rags. Or the luckier suicide ghosts who’d killed themselves dressed in their Sunday best.
Domingo poked the shrimp dumplings with his chopsticks. There were no obvious messages for him, at least none that he could see. The dumplings were hot and juicy with just enough scallions.
Outside the cafeteria, everything seemed to be falling, washed away by the morning rain. Domingo tasted the salt in the air, the pyramids of ginger and stacks of watercress, the seared flesh of the ducks in their rotisseries. He recalled how after every rainstorm, snails had appeared like jewels in their garden in Guantánamo, snails in iridescent colors and rainbow stripes. They were so beautiful they should have been toxic, but in fact they were quite delicious. He and his father had collected the snails, gently tugging them off leaves or the trunks of palm trees. Stir-fried snails with sugar peas was one of Papi’s specialties.
It was only seven o’clock, but dozens of people streamed past Domingo. He made his way to the subway station on Canal Street. A blind man was climbing the steps and counting—eighteen, nineteen, twenty—as Domingo descended. A gust of warm air swept up from the station. The platform was noisy with Chinese schoolchildren in starched blue smocks. They were on their way to the zoo, Domingo overheard one of them say.
Before the Revolution, his father had taken him to the traveling circus in Santiago de Cuba to see the foreign curiosities: the American monster horse, the incredible Gorilla Boy, the Erudite Pig from London. The pig, Domingo remembered, had held a dictionary between its hooves while solemnly nodding its head.
The light from a bare bulb was terribly bright. Domingo felt a pain in his eyes, like the times he’d stared too long at the sun as a child. He heard the electricity ticking in the thick wires of the station, doing its invisible math. Sparks flew from the wheels of the train on the opposite tracks. Then his own train pulled in.
A half hour later, Domingo got off at 110th Street and walked to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. There were scaffolds everywhere. Men in overalls were repairing the ceiling and the Gothic turrets. Domingo dipped three fingers in the marble basin of holy water and crossed himself twic
e. It was confusing inside, the light distorted by the vast expanses of stained glass.
Near the front of the cathedral, to the right of the altar, was an alcove for the Virgin Mary. Long-stemmed roses were wilting on a bed of ferns at her feet. Domingo sat in the third pew and brought his hands together. He wanted to pray, but he wasn’t sure what to ask. Mamá had told him once that the Virgin was partial to ascetics, outcasts, and forgotten men but that she would take on lesser cases if pressed.
Domingo stared at the Virgin and wondered whether she ever longed to join the everyday fray of the ordinary. Were transcendent beings even capable of envy? Maybe on earth she would go bad—hold up convenience stores, steal packets of sugar-powdered doughnuts for the road. Or gang up with her sisters and form a posse of murderous virgins from Guadalupe, Lourdes, Regla (La Virgen de Regla was certainly a looker in black and blue). ¿Y por qué no? Domingo imagined them in leather jackets and wraparound shades, boots to there, crows on their shoulders instead of the Holy Ghost.
He lowered his head guiltily, half expecting to see a cadre of outraged saints marching over to show him the door. Then he stole another glance at the Virgin. He noticed her left foot crushing the head of a hideous snake, presumably Satan. Her toes were plump and painted red. He wanted to suck them.
Domingo thought of the time his older stepsister had fondled him on a visit to Guantánamo. Mariana Quiñones still played the harp for the Municipal Orchestra of Oriente. With her plink-plinky voice and her calloused fingertips, she’d expertly coaxed Domingo’s pinguita from his short pants. He was only eight, but he’d sworn to Mariana that he knew how to keep a secret.
Domingo’s building was only a few blocks away. He climbed the four flights to his and his father’s apartment. The walls of the stairwell were painted a dirty internal pink. There was a stench of meat in the hallway. No doubt that vet down the hall was pan-frying his weekly supply of beef. The vet said he’d eaten nothing but hamburgers since he’d returned from Vietnam, 100 percent USDA.
There were other vets in the neighborhood. Thin howls of men who spooked anyone who looked their way. Críspulo “Crispy” Morán came back from Danang missing both legs and a chunk of his skull that he tried to hide with an old bebop hat. Domingo wondered whether Crispy still had his balls, but he didn’t have the nerve to ask him. Crispy liked to shoot pigeons in Morningside Park, then stuff them with his mami’s yellow rice. Sometimes he snorted cocaine off the edge of his wheelchair until his brains were fried and all he could say was, The sky there is fuckin’ bigger than here.
Papi had left early for his job at the ice factory in the Bronx. He would be angry with Domingo for making him worry. But Domingo was tired of having to take care of his father. Papi refused to buy groceries or wash his clothes, and he needed constant reminding to take his pills.
Domingo showered with the almond soap Mamá had given him before he’d left Cuba. The hot steam concentrated its scent. He remembered the boleros she’d listened to while delivering babies, the rum she’d drunk in the same green tumbler night after night. In the mornings, Mamá would be in a sour mood and she would reach for a shoe or the stout black umbrella to teach Domingo a lesson. He’d never understood for what.
Domingo changed into his uniform for his early shift at the Havana Dragon. He liked how his name was embroidered on his shirt in red script, clean and raised as a fresh scrape (just another affectation, Papi had sniffed). Domingo combed his hair straight back, no part, and clipped his fingernails. Then he wrote his father a note and left it on the kitchen table. He double-locked the front door and raced down the stairs, taking care not to touch the grimy, swaying banister. He was ten minutes late for work.
His boss was waiting for him at the restaurant. Guiomar Liu had been in New York for thirty years, but Domingo, after nine months, spoke better English. Domingo took ESL classes at a public high school twice a week. He was particularly fond of English verbs, the way they lined up regularly as sheep. His teacher, Miss Gilbert, said Domingo gave English an unusual cadence. He’d add a brush of the guiro here, the pa-pa-pá of the bongos there, the happy clatter of timbales.
Languages you acquired, Domingo decided, didn’t have the same memory-packed punch as the mother tongue. But did you have to dissolve one language to accommodate another? Back home, Domingo had wanted to study marine biology. He’d known the names and habits of every fish and mollusk, crustacean and sponge for miles around. Of what use was any of it here?
Last month, Liu had begun opening the Havana Dragon for breakfast. He’d plastered the windows with hand-lettered signs: two eggs with ham and coffee, ninety-nine cents; a Spanish omelet with roasted peppers, a dollar more; pancakes and bacon with a free glass of buttermilk. But business remained slow. When Domingo was a boy, he’d chosen foods more for their texture than their taste. Slippery foods were the best: avocados, tomatoes, spaghetti with butter. Maybe one day he would open his own place and serve nothing but oysters.
His father had worked for seventeen years as a short-order cook at the American naval base in Guantánamo. Once a year he used to bring Domingo to work, usually on the Fourth of July. The Americans had looked gargantuan to him, another species altogether. Still, he’d liked their uniforms and their parades and the chocolate-filled lollipops everyone gave him. At the PX, Domingo had been impressed by the walls lined floor to ceiling with cans of peaches in heavy syrup.
On weekends Papi had brought home sirloin steaks, buckets of mashed potatoes, and buttered peas from the officers’ events. Domingo used to wait for his father on the porch of their whitewashed cement house off Parque Martí, rubbing a lucky fish vertebra in his pocket. That was before the Revolution. Afterward, Mamá refused to eat any of the Yankees’ food—even when Papi donned his chef’s hat and grilled cheeseburgers for Domingo’s tenth-birthday party. Domingo often fell asleep to his parents’ bitter arguing.
When revolutionary officials had ordered his father to give up his job with the Americans, Papi had refused. Working the grill had made him a traitor? No amount of haranguing from the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution could convince him of that.
On his afternoon break, Domingo took a walk along the Hudson River. The sky was low and dark with clouds. Lush smells seeped up from the soil, stung with unexpected perfumes. He watched as two sailboats glided by in opposite directions. Domingo had used his father’s contacts at the U.S. naval base to get Papi and himself out of Cuba. Finally, they’d left the island behind like a rainy season. But what was their world now? What belonged to them? Was it possible, Domingo wondered, to be saved and destroyed at once?
He wasn’t sure that he regretted leaving Cuba, but he still missed it, including its more ludicrous thefts. Last year, his Tío Eutemio had been forced to give up his congas. The authorities in Guantánamo had decided that the drums were cultural artifacts because they’d once belonged to Domingo’s great uncle, the legendary El Tumbador. Now the congas were on display at a folklore museum where el pueblo could admire them but never hear their boom-tak-tak-a-tak again.
On Domingo’s mother’s side, most of the men were congueros and batá drummers from way back. In Cuba, the name Quiñones was synonymous with rhythm. His uncles and cousins were in demand for the toques, holy ceremonies that coaxed the gods down from heaven. When their drums started talking, all available deities would stop their celestial bickering and drop in for dancing and good times.
Domingo had no aptitude to play, but he was an ardent listener. In Guantánamo, the drums were everywhere: on street corners and in carnival bands, at parties and fiestas de santos. Kimpá, kimpá, kimpá. His mother said that drumming was for blacks who didn’t work and drank too much, meaning, of course, her brothers and uncles. But Domingo paid her no mind. Tinkitín, tinkitín. When he listened to the drums, he felt right in his own skin.
Business picked up at dinnertime. A crowd of customers rushed in to the Havana Dragon after a movie let out down the block. It was raining and people shook themselves
dry like dogs. The humidity steamed up the windows. Pinkish bolts of lightning lit up the sky. Domingo loved lightning, especially when he woke up to it in the middle of the night. It reassured him to know that nature soldiered on while he slept.
After the storm subsided, a famous trumpeter dropped in for cafesito and a slice of pound cake à la mode. The man had fronted one of the best bands on the island until he’d defected in 1962. The trumpeter was wearing a shabby suit and a woolen cap pulled low on his forehead. His fingers were long and translucent. Ash from three cigarettes slowly collected on his plate.
Que te importa que te amé Si tú no me quieres ya? El amor que ha pasado No se debe recordar . . .
At eight-thirty, two policemen walked into the Havana Dragon looking for Domingo. He watched them confer with Liu before they moved toward the kitchen. The shorter one took off his cap. His hair was flaming red and cut so short it stood on end. The sound of him cracking his knuckles gave him even more of an electrical air. The policeman said that Domingo’s father had jumped off a subway platform on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. A dozen people had seen him jump, including the conductor of the #4 train. There were two bruises on his head, not much left to the rest of him. Could Domingo accompany them to the morgue to identify his father’s remains?
Domingo felt every nerve in his body converge in his throat. He wanted to say something, but all he could think of was the questions he used to ask Papi as a kid, the ones that had made his father laugh and shake his head. What does distance look like? Who discovered time? What is sound made of? Does everyonefeel pain the same?
His father had been alive yesterday, Domingo thought. In the morning Papi had shuffled toward the subway station on Broadway, his lobster fists in children’s mittens, his thick-socked feet stuffed into cheap canvas shoes. He’d returned home that afternoon, his hands chapped scarlet, his body shrunken. He’d made stir-fried cabbage with dried shrimp for dinner. Before Domingo had left for the late shift, he’d undressed his father for bed like a baby.
Monkey Hunting Page 4
