by Mariné, Lola
Soon after, Billie turned thirty-five, and Armando promised her a very special gift.
As she and Nicolás and Armando walked over to meet Tatiana and Matías so they could all head over together to the restaurant where they would celebrate her birthday, Billie kept noticing that her son couldn’t hide his nervous laughter or the complicit glances he kept exchanging with Armando. She wondered what the two could be plotting.
Once they joined their friends, she became even more convinced that they were all scheming something, but she had no idea what it could be. On the way to the restaurant, Armando insisted on passing by the Dixieland for a minute. As they drew near, he asked Billie to close her eyes and led her by the hand to the door.
“You can open them now,” said Armando.
Billie opened her eyes and found herself at the door of the club. Not seeing anything out of the ordinary, she turned back to Armando and looked at him, a confused expression on her face.
“Look again,” he insisted.
Billie looked again and still didn’t see anything unusual.
“Look up, Mama. You don’t get it!” Nicolás exclaimed impatiently.
Then Billie lifted her eyes and discovered a new sign above the door. It read Havana Jazz Club. She turned to look at Armando again, her mouth agape with surprise.
“We’re partners now,” he declared, smiling. “We’ve all been arguing about what to rename the place, and we thought you’d like this. What do you think?”
“What do I think? Partners?” Billie was still in shock.
“That’s right,” Armando confirmed. “The documents are on the bar, you just have to sign them.”
“But … have you lost your mind? What made you think of doing such a thing?”
“You don’t like the name?” he asked with a teasing smile. “If you want, we can change it to the Malecón. That was the one Nicolás liked best.”
“I love the name! But … I just don’t understand …”
“But it’s very simple, partner. You’re a businesswoman now. We share all the responsibilities.”
“At your command, boss!” Matías said, bowing before her and saluting, after which he let out a guffaw and kissed her on both cheeks. “Congratulations, Billie. I hope you won’t fire me …”
“Congratulations, Billie,” Tatiana said, hugging her excitedly.
“Awesome!” Nicolás exclaimed. “Now I can tell all my friends that my mom owns a bar, and we can come drink here every night.”
“Not so fast, my boy,” Billie said, laughing. “You’re still not old enough to drink.”
She turned to Armando and smiled.
“I don’t know what to say … This is too much …”
“Come here,” Armando said, opening his arms to hug her. “I want the place to be yours and for you to sing here for many years. I’ll be at your side, but I’ll take it a little easier.”
“Thank you,” Billie said as she sank into his arms.
“The truth is,” Armando whispered in her ear, “I couldn’t think of a better excuse to work a little less.”
“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m dying of hunger,” Matías said.
“Well, then no more talking!” Armando said. “Let’s eat!”
And with that, they all headed to the restaurant to celebrate.
CHAPTER 26
Soon thereafter, Armando and Billie went to a lawyer to initiate the divorce proceedings with Orlando. The first hurdle came when it was impossible to locate Orlando to deliver the divorce papers. Though many years had passed, his name should have appeared on some register or official document that could give a clue to his whereabouts. But it was like the earth had swallowed him whole. Armando decided to take a trip to Madrid to make a few inquiries.
The first step was to go to the New York and speak with Gregorio, who had been employing Orlando when Billie left.
It had been years since Armando had last visited the place. He hadn’t been back since Billie appeared in his life. The bar had aged badly. It was just as he remembered it: there was the same small, cramped stage where he had first seen Billie and become drawn to her beauty and her voice. Now a door next to it had a flashing sign advertising “Live Sex.” The same tables and chairs, once luxurious, now looked rickety and worn. The men and women who filled them, entangled in their pathetic games of seduction, seemed grotesque and vulgar to him now. The New York had lost any hint of glamour it had once had and become a dump that reeked of mold and sex.
He discovered Gregorio in his usual corner. He was alone, sitting at one end of the bar with his eternal cigar in one hand and a glass in the other. The cabaret owner had aged as well.
Armando walked over and introduced himself.
“It’s been awhile!” Gregorio exclaimed, hugging Armando with exaggerated enthusiasm and slapping him on the back as if he had just reunited with an old and dear friend. “Lemme guess. Some bitch snagged you and put an end to everything, right?”
“Something like that,” Armando replied, disturbed by Gregorio’s laughter and the hard slaps he was landing on his back.
“Nice, man, nice … I’m so happy to see you. Order whatever you want—we have to celebrate this. Girl!” he yelled to the half-naked waitress serving drinks behind the bar. “Give my friend whatever he wants!”
“I see nothing’s changed,” Armando said, just to say something, as they served him a drink.
“We’re doing the best we can,” Gregorio said with a resigned sigh. “It’s not what it once was, pal. Now every chick takes her panties off the first chance she gets, and that’s not good for business. There’s not as great a need as before. You know what I’m saying?”
Armando nodded, suddenly uncomfortable. This man repulsed him, and he was ashamed to have once been one of his best clients.
“But you have your ways,” he said with a complicit wink. “You switched the waiters in bow ties for topless girls, and now you’re offering another type of show that’s much more … daring.”
“You have to keep up with the times!” the impresario said, throwing him an astute look and elbowing him in the ribs. “And you can’t deny that all the girls I have are pretty hot. I choose them for the size of their breasts,” he confessed with a cackle. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t even know what their faces look like. If I passed them on the street, I wouldn’t recognize them. Unless they were naked, of course.”
He accompanied these last words with another snicker and slapped Armando’s back so hard it almost knocked him off balance.
“I see,” he said, forcing a smile.
“And the couple that performs …” the impresario continued, letting out a whistle. “You have to see them. The bastards fuck right on stage! You can tell having people watch turns them on, because when they’re not performing, they spend all day fighting. You wouldn’t believe the arguments they have in their dressing room! I can’t even imagine what it must be like at their house. Their neighbors must be thrilled, between the fucking and the fighting.”
Armando nodded, smiling stoically as the owner celebrated his own ingenuity with another cackle. He endured another friendly slap on his back, hoping it wouldn’t happen again.
“I remember a waiter you had when I used to come here …” Armando said, as if the thought had just occurred to him. “He was a very alert boy. Cuban, if I remember correctly.”
“Don’t even mention that Cuban bastard!” Gregorio said, suddenly growing serious. “What an asshole!”
“What happened?” Armando asked.
“What happened?” Gregorio’s face twisted with indignation. “The little son of a bitch robbed me. He got involved with one of the whores, and one fine day, they both disappeared with everything in the register. That’s what happened. I trusted him. He worked hard, took over everything, and gained my trust. Until he screwed me, the son of a bitch.”
“Did you report him?”
“Of course I reported him. And if they had nabbed
him, I would have wrung his neck with my own bare hands. But the little bastard vanished.”
“They never found him?”
Gregorio turned to him with a malevolent smile.
“You reap what you sow,” he said. “I later heard he was being held in Algeciras. By the looks of it, he had been involved in drug trafficking. He was a pusher, you know. They picked up his trail because he attacked the woman he left with, and almost killed her. The poor girl was in a coma for a few days—at least that’s what I heard. Serves him right, what an idiot. Nasty piece of work, that Cuban! He ended up right where he belonged when they put him in jail, and I hope they gave it to him where it hurts the most, you know what I mean.”
“And he’s still there?” Armando asked, trying to sound casual.
“I have no idea. But I imagine they gave him quite a few years, between one thing and another. He was a real peach, the goon.” Gregorio looked thoughtful for a few seconds and then turned back to Armando. “You know I never heard what happened to that black girl he brought with him. What was her name … ? You took her to your hotel. Do you remember? She was nice. You fucked her, eh?” Armando’s body tensed, and he barely registered the complicit elbow in his ribs, which he ignored. “Well, she was another one who disappeared without a trace. Boy, was the Cuban pissed! He must have come down pretty hard on her. He said if he found her, he would kill her. I knew they were involved. They pretended not to be when they were here, but I’m an old dog and nothing gets past me. That one was an ungrateful little whore too …”
Armando’s jaw clenched as he tried to contain his indignation.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat. Gregorio couldn’t give him any more information, and he wanted to get away from him and out of this dump. “I have to get going.”
“Already? Have another drink, man!” Gregorio cried. Armando was afraid of another friendly pummeling, but the impresario put his arm around his shoulders and drew him in to whisper in a confidential tone, “The show is starting in just a minute. You’ll see. It’ll drive you wild.”
“Maybe some other time,” Armando said, pulling out of Gregorio’s grasp. “I’m beat from my trip today, and I have a lot to do tomorrow. I just wanted to come by to say hi.”
“You’re missing out, man! But I appreciate the visit,” Gregorio said, squeezing his hand. “It was great to see you, pal, really. I hope you come back soon. I’ll introduce you to a good chick to clear out the cobwebs. Cause you already know that once you get married …”
“I promise I’ll come back when I have more time,” Armando lied and hurried out.
Back in the street, he took a deep breath and thought of Billie. He knew that at this hour she would be behind the bar at the Havana, serving the customers with her warm smile, or enchanting them with her voice under Matías’s attentive gaze. He smiled tenderly at the image.
With the information Gregorio had given him, it wasn’t difficult to follow Orlando’s trail to the Central Penitentiary of Algeciras. However, what he discovered there left him stunned.
Orlando had indeed been detained, judged, and sentenced to several years in prison. But his stay there had been brief. He’d had a brawl with a fellow prisoner that ended with a knife in the Cuban’s chest.
On his way back to Barcelona, Armando wondered how to break the news to Billie and how she would take it. He knew that she had once been very much in love with the man, but he could tell that Orlando’s behavior had somehow immunized her against that kind of blind love. Billie wasn’t prone to showing her emotions, maybe because she had learned early on that it made her vulnerable and exposed her to the risk of getting hurt. So it was difficult for Armando to guess her true feelings. He suspected, however, that her resistance to opening herself up to love again had its roots in the idealized memory of that sun god, as she called him sometimes, whom she had fallen madly in love with when she was still a child. That suspicion took on a glimmer of reality when he learned that Billie had relayed her best memories of him to Nicolás. She had painted the image of a selfless, kindhearted father, obligated by circumstances to stay away from them but always worried about their well-being, and remembering them fondly.
“He needs a father figure,” Billie said, when Armando conveyed his doubts about whether it was a good idea to fill the boy’s head with these fantasies. “If I don’t, then what can I tell him when he asks me?”
Armando had said nothing, though he didn’t really agree with Billie on this point. On the one hand, Billie was right: What else could she tell the child when he asked about his father? She thought an idealized father was better than none—and certainly better than either of those heartless swine she had had the misfortune to cross paths with. But if he was honest with himself, Armando was hurt that she hadn’t accepted him as the father of the boy and the male figure he could identify with.
“He knows that you’re a very dear friend,” Billie said. “But he also knows that you’re not his father. I don’t want to confuse him any more than necessary.”
Nicolás loved Armando and accepted him as part of his family, but he didn’t consider him to have any authority over him. If Armando scolded him, or even just took Billie’s side in an argument between mother and son, Nicolás would snap that he wasn’t his father and had no right to get involved, that he had a father who would return one day. Armando sometimes felt wounded by the boy’s attitude. After all, he had watched Nicolás be born, and he couldn’t have loved him more if he were his own blood. But Billie brushed off her son’s behavior and urged Armando not to pay it much attention. Kids were cruel sometimes, she said, and they don’t take half measures when it comes to beating an adult in an argument. They have a special instinct for knowing what will hurt the most. Armando could only agree. She and Nicolás were everything to him, and he wouldn’t hesitate to offer his own life for either of theirs, but he had to accept that he wasn’t anything more than a guest in their little family. He was grateful that they welcomed him into the family at all. Nicolás was a smart boy. He intuited Armando’s feelings, and sometimes abused his goodness and devotion.
Billie went pale when Armando explained what he had found out on his trip. Wrapped in a hermetic silence, the distress drawn on her face, she sat in a chair looking pensive for a long time. Watching her, Armando sensed that every memory she had shared with Orlando was coming back to her like an old movie that, until then, she had only seen little clips of. Orlando had been everything to her at one point, Armando knew, as he watched Billie’s impassive face, her hands clenched in her lap, the dark night that lived in her eyes blacker and more inscrutable than ever. When Orlando had taken possession of that innocent soul on the Malecón in Havana, he had scarred her permanently.
After a while—what may have only been a few minutes but which to Armando seemed an eternity—Billie sighed and looked at her watch.
“I’m going to make dinner,” she said in a neutral tone. “Nico will be here soon.”
Armando didn’t say anything. As pots began clanging in the kitchen, he swallowed his words of advice and withstood the urge to go after her and wrap his arms around her, to feel her crying a widow’s tears. Because he was sure that Billie suddenly felt like a widow, somehow a little lonelier now that the invisible link holding her, in some small way, to Orlando was broken forever.
Billie never mentioned Orlando’s name again.
CHAPTER 27
Nicolás was a very intelligent and alert boy. But, at fifteen, he had no interest in his studies. Instead he was irresistibly drawn to everything forbidden. He was always coming up with the most outlandish ideas to satisfy his thirst for adventure and adrenaline. School was more of a testing ground for him than an education center, a place that offered him hundreds of opportunities to show off his cleverness and new ways of defying authority. It was also where he recruited accomplices and disciples.
When Billie watched him from the window when he left for school every morning, she was both disgusted and sadden
ed to see that he already had a cigarette between his lips by the time he reached the corner. He walked with a swaggering, cocky gait that she deeply disliked. He was no longer the charming, kind little boy who had gotten along with everyone, Billie thought, as she watched him moving away down the street. Though she knew that he attended his classes, she had no idea where he spent his free hours later in the day.
She couldn’t confront him directly anymore. Criticizing his behavior and punishing him the way she had when he was little only made him angry. So she and Armando tried to straighten out his behavior through subtler methods. They pointed out the negative consequences of certain actions in other young men like him and tried to convince him that he needed a good education if he wanted to get a good job and enjoy life in the future. But Nicolás simply snapped back at them that knowing history and Napoleon’s great deeds was never going to help him get a good job. Why spend hours trying to untangle complicated mathematic equations if he had no intention of working in a profession that had anything to do with numbers?
“Studying math speeds up your brain and helps you solve all kinds of problems, even if they’re not calculus,” Armando tried to explain.
“I already know how to solve my problems. I don’t need math or any of the other stuff they teach us in school,” Nicolás said insolently.
“Well, you use numbers every day much more than you think,” Armando insisted. “We’re always doing math, without even realizing it.”
“Then what are calculators for?” the boy shot back.
“Sweetie,” Billie said. “I understand it seems boring to you now. But someday you’ll realize that your studies are important. It’s hard to find a good job these days, and you have to be very qualified.”
“Don’t worry, Mother. All I want is to start working as soon as possible and earn some dough. I’m tired of wasting time at that stupid school every day.”
“But you’re only fifteen, so you have no choice but to go. You may as well take advantage of it,” Armando pointed out. “If you studied more, you wouldn’t be so bored.”
