Latin Moon in Manhattan: A Novel

by Jaime Manrique

  A lovely, cool breeze caressed my face and I looked again at the night sky. I closed my eyes and in the camera obscura of my brain an old reel began to play. I saw myself and Stick and my sister when we were children. It was late in the afternoon and we were on our way to play hide-and-seek. We were ascending a long, steep street that led to the mountains above Bogotá; crossing Carrera Séptima, we entered the grounds of Javeriana University. Instead of walking across campus, we hiked up a mossy, unpaved trail that led to the shantytowns above the city. It was dusk. The sky above Bogotá was charcoal-colored, and the pallid sun had sunk in the horizon, buried behind the clouds. Beneath us, the city lights were beginning to go on, and, in the distance, the tall downtown buildings lit their skinny silhouettes against the ashen background of the mountains in the south. The mountain peaks were swathed in fog, and the ground was moist and cold. We walked until we reached a promontory, at the bottom of which rose the back of the building of the school of medicine; it looked deserted. Since the previous year, when the government had ordered a curfew, all evening classes had been canceled. We made sure that there were no guards around, and then raced down the pebbly hill. One of the windows on the ground floor was ajar. I went in first and Stick helped Wilbrajan. Inside it was dark, cold, damp, and reeking of the strong chemicals used for embalming. This was the morgue, a big, high-ceilinged room with four rows of slabs crossing it, whose walls were fitted with refrigerators stuffed with fresh corpses and loose organs in plastic bags.

  “I hate this game,” Wilbrajan whispered.

  “Then why don’t you go home,” I said. “Nobody invited you.”

  We sat on the cold tiles with our backs against the wall.

  “Okay, let’s play now,” Stick said. “Who will hide first?”

  “I will,” I said.

  Wilbrajan offered to count.

  “You count too fast. Let Stick count.”

  “He can’t count in Spanish.”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t know the numbers,” I said.

  Wilbrajan and Stick turned to the wall, covering their eyes with their hands. Stick began to count to a hundred. I tiptoed down the aisles. Most of the corpses were covered with yellowing, stained sheets. Usually I’d climb onto an empty slab and cover myself with a sheet, or I’d lie next to a corpse and hide. There weren’t too many hiding places. I heard the count of sixty-eight; I’d better hurry. I decided to try something new; I opened one of the huge refrigerators in the back of the room and stepped in. The door closed behind me. I realized it couldn’t be opened from the inside. A small frosted lightbulb lit the interior of the icebox, revealing two corpses hanging from hooks, one male, the other female. In the dim light, their skins looked greenish. The man’s body was old, skinny, its flesh corrugated; the woman’s was young. Her face was smashed and caked with blood, and her red teeth appeared in a horrifying grin. Her eyelids were opened and she had no eyeballs. Her skin was taut, translucent, and her fingers stretched out, as if she were ready to jump on me. Seized with terror, I lunged against the door, and started banging on it and kicking it. I slipped on the icy floor and, as I fell backward, I grabbed the woman by a leg, knocking her off the hook. The corpse landed on me. Her breasts were on my face. I put my hands on them to push her away from me—her breasts were hard, cold, sticky like ice cubes. I realized I was running out of air, that I was beginning to freeze. I screamed: white smoke came out of my mouth. The echo of my scream ricocheted off the walls of the refrigerator. “Oh, God, I promise to be good,” I said. “I promise to make my mother baptize me and I’ll have my first communion and I’ll go to mass every Sunday. I promise to obey my mother.” I felt dizzy, slipping into unconsciousness. I couldn’t get the woman’s breasts off my face. When I touched her, it felt as if I were being glued to her corpse. Now I saw that her throat had been slit, and the insides were brownish-red, like guava paste, and the edges blackish, rotting. Her face grinned inches away from mine. I tried to remember what I knew of the Lord’s Prayer. It was useless; I didn’t know it. Suddenly, I heard a tremendous pop; the door of the refrigerator opened, and I heard voices calling my name, and hands pulling me by my sneakers, and I knew the devil that my mother had threatened me with so often was finally here to drag me to hell.

  6 Just Say It

  I woke up Sunday afternoon with a major hangover. I showered, shaved, dressed, and took a couple of Tylenols before going downstairs. I had decided to leave that afternoon. I was quite worried about Mr. O’Donnell.

  “Buenos días,” Mother greeted me. Then correcting herself, “Good afternoon. I just woke up myself. What a rumba. Have a cup of coffee,” she said pouring me a full cup of tinto.

  “Good morning, good morning,” Simón Bolívar screeched as I sat down.

  “Mother, make him shut up, will you,” I said, giving Simón Bolívar a nasty look.

  “I can’t,” she said flatly, sitting at the table. “He loves to talk for breakfast.”

  I had never seen Mother so dishevelled. She had no makeup on her face, and her hair was completely out of shape.

  “Have you seen Gene?” I asked.

  “He left just right before you came down. He got tired of waiting for you. He seemed in a hurry. He said he was going by his job to quit. Why couldn’t he wait till tomorrow, it beats me. I was happier with him working. I don’t know what he’s going to do if he’s free all the time. That boy needs a father, Sammy.” Mother frowned and finished her coffee. She left the kitchen, and while I was having my second cup of coffee and beginning to feel the effects of the Tylenol, I heard strange chanting in the other room. Mother entered the kitchen holding a burning stick of palo santo, singing in some ancestral African dialect. She seemed in a trance, as she walked to the counter where she opened the jar that contained my grandmother’s ashes. Next she painted a cross on the floor. Since Mother had been into santería ever since I can remember, there was nothing odd about this, although I wished she had waited until after I had left for Manhattan. She lit a bunch of aromatic crystals in the incense burner and placed the burner at the center of the cross; with the smoking palo santo, she approached me and made the sign of the cross over my head. Mother grabbed my hand. “Walk over the incense,” she ordered me, “and make the sign of the cross.”

  “What the hell is going on?” I snapped.

  “It’s a despojo. You need to cleanse your aura. Bad spirits are following you.”

  “What?” I yelled. “Are you exorcising me? I refuse to go along with this bullshit. Stop it right this minute, Mother.”

  Simón Bolívar mimicked me, “Mother, Mother, Mother.”

  When I refused to walk over the incense burner, Mother started zigzagging around the kitchen as if she were having an epileptic seizure, and began chanting, “Yemayá, Yemayá, Quimba, quimba, quimbará.”

  “He, he, he, he,” Simón Bolívar giggled hysterically, flapping his wings. Too hungover to do anything, I sat down to wait until she finished.

  This was the first time she had tried to exorcise me. I was too flabbergasted to comment on her performance. My feelings toward her were very antagonistic. I knew that some kind of breakthrough psychological unraveling had taken place this weekend and I wanted to run away and confront her about it, all at the same time. She was an old woman now and she was actually getting to the point where she would be needing my support to help her navigate through the passages of her old age. And yet, I was angry not at the old woman she was, but at the beautiful Gaugin goddess that had given birth to me; the first and only woman I had ever loved.

  “I’m really pissed,” I said, feeling the plug that held my feelings removed and a lot of steam beginning to blow out uncontrollably.

  “What? What have I done wrong this time?”

  “Mother, this whole Claudia thing is … insane. I’m not going to marry Claudia now or ever, is that clear?”

  “But why, Sammy?”

  “Because I’m homosexual and Claudia is a lesbian, that’s why. Because
I’ll never love a woman that way.” I couldn’t believe I had actually said those words. I was shaking. For many years now I knew Mother knew, as she had known about Bobby since we had been kids; as she had always accepted our friendship, even when as boys we were probably in love with each other; when it had been adolescent romance. But the word homosexual had never been spoken, never been said in her presence, nor in connection with me. It was as if as long as it was unspoken there was still room for things to change some day, to declare that everything had been a passing fancy. As long as I didn’t admit to it, there was hope that I would eventually marry like all good Colombian boys. Bobby used to say that the main difference between Colombian and American men was that all Colombians were gay until they married, whereas most Americans first married and then came out.

  Mother looked crushed, deeply hurt. She seemed to be shrinking in front of my eyes. She began to cry, softly, delicately. “I just don’t want you to die like Bobby. That’s all, Sammy. I’m not stupid. I know about you and I don’t care.” The pain she felt must have been so severe that it left no room for histrionics. The moment was actually quite peaceful, serene. I wanted to put my arms around her shoulders; I wanted to say to her that I, too, loved her; and that I wanted to forget the past and to forgive. And yet, I couldn’t. Perhaps in the future, I thought. Perhaps one day when all these feelings and revelations have been sorted out, I will be able to embrace you as a son, Mother, I thought.

  An hour later, I found myself at the train station waiting for the number seven to take me back to Times Square. Clutching the shopping bags with clothes and food, and the valuable cache of cocaine I was smuggling into Manhattan, I thought about everything that had happened that weekend. As ridiculous as it sounded, I had come out to my mother in my mid-thirties. Perhaps because of this I felt freer, more liberated, than I had just a couple of days before. I was reeling with new knowledge that I trusted would lead me with clarity into the mature years of my life. Looking into the direction of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, I realized that for the first time they didn’t look to me as the land of dreams, but the place where reality awaited me, at long last.

  PART TWO

  THE CAT, THOUGH IT HAS NEVER READ KANT, IS, PERHAPS, A METAPHYSICAL ANIMAL.

  Philosopher or dog? Machado de Assis——

  7 The Cat Who Loved La Traviata

  Nothing seemed to have changed in Times Square, and I found the familiar squalor somehow reassuring. As usual at this time of day, shoeless Muslims knelt on green towels, praying to Mecca in front of subway posters for Broadway shows. Squatting on the stairs leading to the street, begging aggressively for quarters, was the same woman I had seen for months, with the same shrinking baby, wrapped in a bunch of grimy rags. Nearby, bored cops chatted idly, petting their police dogs.

  Forty-second Street was thick with a Sunday crowd of black and Latino teenagers looking for cheap thrills. Mormon-looking tourists with cameras strolled, sticking close together while taking in the scene. They were offered sex of all kinds, pot, Colombian coke, smack, hash, ecstasy, uppers and downers, designer drugs and, of course, crack.

  It was one of those rare, mild late afternoons at the end of July when the air was like silk and Manhattan felt like an island. The multicolored neon marquees of the movie theaters advertised life-sized photographs of seminude porno stars in sexy poses. A naked man, looking stoned out of his mind, wandered out of a peep show. Halfway down the block, a young woman dressed in Salvation Army uniform and armed with a megaphone, was stationed under the awning of a sex palace, preaching to the depraved and indifferent denizens of Times Square. Two preppies stopped in front of her, swayed, twirled, wobbled on their feet and collapsed, overdosing on the sidewalk.

  “You don’t have to get high on drugs,” the woman blared. “Jesus will get you high. You’ll be so high on Jesus you’ll never want to come down.”

  Waiting for the light to change at the corner of Forty-second and Eighth, I looked over my shoulder: the skyscrapers of midtown had bloomed. The Chrysler building caught the reflection of the setting sun; its silver top reminded me of a minaret crowned with a long, shimmering sword. Crossing Eighth, I saw the sky beyond the Hudson, which looked as if all the nuclear reactors from Hoboken to Key West had exploded, setting the air afire. Yet the color was not that of natural combustion, but synthetic, like the orange of a hot burner on an electric stove.

  I live on the west side of Eighth Avenue, above O’Donnell’s Bar, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets, an address formerly nicknamed The Minnesota Strip. The good old days had ended when the famous Greek restaurant The Pantheon closed due to lease problems. Since that time the short block—which comprises a Citibank at the corner of Forty-third, O’Donnell’s Bar, the Pantheon building, a porno joint (Paradise Alley), a Gyro coffee shop, the Cameo (a beautiful old theater now turned XXX movie house), and a four-story building at the corner of Forty-fourth, formerly a whorehouse and now a shooting gallery—had been taken over by crack addicts, who conducted their business on the premises of Paradise Alley. Now I looked back with nostalgia to the days when young hookers (for all tastes) decorated the block around the clock. …But wait a minute, not that young, I thought, standing on the east corner of Forty-third, as I spotted a tiny hooker standing in front of the door of my building. She looked about seven years old, maybe seven and a half. I had seen teenage hookers and hustlers, but this was a child. This was real depravity and decadence—no doubt a product of the crack epidemic. In spite of her spike heels, she barely reached the doorknob. She wore a vinyl miniskirt and red satin tank top. A pink plastic purse was strapped across her shoulder and her belly button was plugged with a blue stone. Her hair was streaked gold and punked-out. Long rhinestone earrings framed her cheeks and above the false eyelashes her eyelids were painted purple and sprinkled with gold glitter. Her tiny crimson lips were done in the shape of a heart. I stood in front of my door, open-mouthed, dangling the keys, waiting for her to move.

  In her childish voice she said, “Want a date?”

  I recoiled, aghast. Now she placed her baby hand on her hip and crossing one leg behind her knee she reclined lewdly against the wall. “Cheap blow job,” she offered. I noticed now that her voice, though squeaky and reedy, had a sultry timbre. She was not a child—she was a midget hooker. I breathed a sigh of relief, “No, thank you,” I said. “I live here.”

  She gave me a blank look, but made enough room for me to open the door. I ran up the stairs to my apartment on the fourth floor. I was worried about Mr. O’Donnell. The six months the vet had given him to live were over and even though Mr. O’Donnell seemed fine, I felt anxious when he was alone. Inside the apartment I set down my shopping bag and went to the closet to hang up my new suit. I was walking toward the living room calling Mr. O’Donnell’s name when the phone rang.

  “Santiago, is that you upstairs?” said Rebecca, my downstairs neighbor.

  I picked up. “Hi, Rebecca. I just got here but I can’t find Mr. O’Donnell.”

  “I’m so relieved it’s you. I thought it might be a burglar. Mr. O’Donnell is down here with me.”

  “I’m coming down to get him. Is that okay?”

  “Come on over. I’m so glad you’re back.”

  Rebecca met me at her door. Her eyes were wide open, as if she had just had a major fright. Locking the door after I came in, she said, “Can I offer you a beer, iced tea, a glass of lemonade?”

  “The lemonade sounds delish, but no thanks. Where’s Mr. O’Donnell?” I looked around the room for him.

  “I don’t know whether we ought to disturb him right now. He’s in my bedroom listening to side two of La Traviata.”

  Rebecca had discovered that Mr. O’Donnell would revive from his periodic bouts of listlessness by listening to Monserrat Caballe’s rendition of Violeta. He’d lie still, smiling, his ears pricked up until the opera was over.

  “Is he in bad shape?”

  “I didn’t want to call you at Lucy’s, b
ut when I went upstairs Saturday morning to feed him, he was more dead than alive. He refused his Kal Kan, so naturally I was worried. I went to Barkin’ Fish for some catfish since he likes it so much. I practically had to force feed him, but he ate one fillet, a teensy bitty bit at a time.”