Havana Lunar

by Robert Arellano

  A shout came up from the street: “¡Oye, Mano!” I pulled on a pair of pants and opened the French doors to look down. On the back of his moped sat Yorki, my best friend since el pre-universitario. While I had gotten interested in medicine, Yorki burned up jet fuel for fútbol. He played such good soccer en el pre that they compared him with a famous striker from the Czech team. All over Havana people still call him El Checo. I’d become a hard-up doctor and Yorki a sex-obsessed dishwasher, but he makes more money reselling fish the neumaticos catch along the Malecón than I do doctoring. Yorki peered up at me over his designer sunglasses. “Want to go for a walk?”

  Walking: the one thing everyone can afford in the Special Period. When I walk alone, some people, mostly children or rude adults, can’t help staring and sometimes commenting on my mark. Although for the most part the people of Vedado know and respect me for running the clinic, walking out of my neighborhood always brings new strangers. Once a Japanese tourist took a photo right in my face. There are also the regulars with their superstitions. One wide-bottomed mama with a jet-black dye always calls her children inside when I am coming down the crumbling sidewalk. But Yorki makes such an exhibition of himself with his running commentary that it eclipses my lunar.

  We trotted along the sea wall while Yorki cast piropos at women young and old, beautiful and ugly, Spandexed and army khakied. “If you cook the way you walk, mamasita, I’ll lick the burnt rice from the bottom of the pot.” I was hustling to keep up. Without slowing, Yorki turned and said, “Ayer me comí un sabroso jamón con queso,” touching five fingers to his lips to show me just how good that ham and cheese was. At the stone jetty across from General Machado’s statue, we came upon a crowd of jineteras—rubia, morena, mulata, prieta. Yorki cried, “¡Mira esas nalgas!” but these girls had priced themselves out of his market.

  Coco taxis tumbled around the statue of Máximo Gomez. Tourists were taking pictures of the billboard of enraged Uncle Sam. The tracheotomy case in the cane hat was leaving live fish flapping on the sea-wall sidewalk to bait conscientious tourists, imparting a solicitous grunt through the hole in his throat. Across from la Oficina de Intereses, Yorki clapped his hands together to signal joke-telling mode.

  “Pepito walks in on his mother in the bath one day. ‘Mami, what’s that?’ ‘This?’ she says, covering up. ‘It’s just … whatever.’ Later some guests arrive and Pepito’s mother asks if they’d like anything special for lunch, and the guests say, ‘Oh, just make whatever.’ Pepito hears this and pipes up, ‘If we’re having whatever for lunch, please do me a favor and pluck the little hairs from mine!’” Walking with Yorki is like walking around with a radio tuned, for once, to an interesting station, lively and perverse.

  One of the jineteras on the Malecón recognized me from my basement clinic: “Oye, doctor, buy yourself some pants that fit you.” She threw an American quarter at my feet, and I didn’t get to decide whether or not I had too much pride to pick it up before a ratón del Malecón—a boy of seven or eight, shirtless in Chinese tenis—scrambled out of nowhere to scoop up the shiny limosna and hopped over the sea wall to the rocks ten feet below.

  Yorki called over his shoulder to the teenage streetwalkers, “I’ll be back later in case any of you delicious pastries doesn’t get a date!” He said to me, “Nunca me casaré. If only to keep a clean license to grab a pair of nalgas como esas now and then. You’ll never get married either, Mano.”

  “Except for when I already was.”

  “¿Quién? ¿Elena? That one doesn’t count. That woman was a lesbian, but I could have converted her. ¡Cuidado con los tarros!” I ducked my head just in time to avoid catching my horns on a Solo Ciclos sign. Yorki’s mission was to keep me on my toes and out of a second slip into the marriage trap. His philosophy: “Life, like the second half of a game of fútbol, is too short. Score often and from a variety of positions. And when the goalie leaves you a gimme at the net—by all means, brother, shoot!”

  We made the better half of the Malecón—from 1836 to Paseo del Prado—in ninety minutes. Between Perseverancia and Campanario, Yorki hopped down to the rocks and peered over the top of his sunglasses to see what the divers had caught. They held up two small lobsters. Yorki whipped out a couple of bills, and the divers, flashing their knives, cut the tails off and gave him the bodies. “Coge.” Yorki handed me the clipped lobsters, half-dead and writhing. He had trouble boosting himself back up the wall. Yorki is no longer the muscular teenager who can charge kids twice his size and rocket the ball into the net while the goalie dives in the wrong direction. Havana has lost a lot of weight over the past year and a half, and Yorki, clawing at the stone ledge, was stubborn and hungry like the rest. Gasping for breath he took the lobsters. “Those tails would have cost me la pinga.”

  “Are you going to sell these?”

  “They’re for me and my date.”

  “Who’s the lucky lady who gets to try your famous sopa de langosta this time?”

  Yorki, scanning the horizon through his shades, ignored this. The first time Yorki prepared a romantic dinner with lobster, he had to jump up shortly after dragging the girl to bed, the bisque coming out both ends.

  “Remember to take out la tripa this time.”

  We walked back to Vedado and Yorki took off on the moped with his prize. I headed over to Cine Chaplin and snuck in through the broken door from the alley. After killing a little time napping through the second half of a bad ICAIC film on its third run, I walked to Centro Habana to flip through dusty old Egrem recordings at the music market before heading to the pediátrico coctail party.

  In the penthouse apartment of a modern building on Avenida de los Presidentes, Director González greeted me at the elevator that opens onto his foyer. “Rodriguez, why didn’t you bring a date?”

  “I’m separated.”

  “I know. But I thought for sure you’d have a girlfriend by now.” I was the first to arrive, so the director asked me to go down and buy some cigarettes. “Marlboro, por cierto. Four packs at the Riviera. Don’t worry about the concierge. You look Criollo enough that he’ll think you’re a Spanish tourist. The tobacconist is through the doors and to the right.”

  I returned with the smokes and a dollar change. Director González said, “Keep the dollar, Rodriguez—cómprate un café mas tarde. ¿Quieres un cigarro?”

  “Gracias, pero yo fumo negros.” I pulled out my own cigarettes and my father’s silver lighter, lighting first the director’s Marlboro and then my own Popular.

  “¡Qué mal huelen!” the director said, frowning at my pack of Populares.

  Colleagues began arriving with husbands and wives. The promised refreshments were brought out, and we guests checked ourselves to keep from looking too hungry while getting our share of the humble spread of salami sandwiches and Havana Club con Tropicola. The party was full of sycophants after a promotion, but late in the evening, over cigarettes and Mexican brandy, Director González pulled me aside.

  “I’d like you to consider transferring to Sancti Spíritus, Rodriguez. The Revolution can market you. You’re young and handsome, for a doctor. Madres españolas would pay ten times your current salary for you to take care of their little hypochondriacs, fix a few hairlips.”

  “No gracias, señor. I prefer practicing at the pediátrico.”

  “Very funny, Rodriguez. You don’t have to kiss my ass, you know. You’re Plan G.”

  The one opportunity for escape, available to only a few physicians who, like me, are Plan G, is a job in medical tourism. Vacationing patients are the new pillar of the economy, replacing the Soviet sugar trade. I could leave crumbling Havana and live in a new condominium by the beach at Sancti Spíritus, but then I would have to practice at the health center for foreigners, pampering fat tourists with their penchant for prostitutes. I have gotten to know several pediatricians who cultivated Director González’s favor and got transferred. They set up elaborate dialectics to ease their consciences: “Doctors can better serve the Revoluti
on by hastening our assimilation into the modern, international economies …” But the Revolution educated our generation on a solid foundation of ideology. I didn’t swallow all of it, but it was better than what motivates medical students in capitalist countries. Should we trade our principles for a condo on the beach, a light docket of consults, and an affair with a grateful mother or two?

  “No, señor directór, I’d rather not go.” There’s a saying: Que no van lejos los de alante si los de atrás corren bien. Repeating this—Don’t go too much farther if the ones behind work harder—has occasionally brought me into conflict with those in charge. Today I see medical tourism as a government machine like any other. El Comandante ulimately reaps the spoils of each physician’s exploited specialty, making doctoring no different from the vocation of the reckless Panataxi driver or the indifferent waiter at the Habana Libre cafeteria, his left cuff caked with dried egg yolk.

  Director González said, “If this has to do with getting passed over for South Africa last year, forget about it. That was regrettable. If I’d been on the committee, you never would have had any problem. The Revolution is much more integrated today. Talent is not wasted on account of a nuance of ideology. If you work hard and you work well, you’ll get the promotions you deserve. The choice is yours, but if you ask me you’re wasting your talent.”

  “Wasting it on the children of Cuba?”

  “Noble response, Doctor Rodriguez. Let me put it this way: You’re wasting the Revolution’s talent. Anybody can fix a sprained wrist. But you have extraordinary gifts. The income you could generate for the Revolution would help many more Cubans—adult, elderly, and children.”

  “And the common people of Havana would end up swallowing the sacrifice.”

  “The pediátrico would find a replacement.”

  “Either an inferior intern or someone else who will eventually be invited to cross over. Besides, people in my neighborhood have come to depend on me at the clinic.”

  “There are other clinics. Vedado would get along without you.” Seeing me to the door, Director González said, “Take some chocolate, Rodriguez. It’s Belgian, the best chocolate in the world.”

  “No, gracias. I’m allergic to chocolate.”

  “¡Qué raro! Y desafortunado …” Director González made me take the chocolate anyway, as well as a little leftover salami and a half-bottle of wine. “For a girlfriend. You should get yourself another lady, Rodriguez. You can imagine how parties like these, a little bit of rum and some sandwiches, are useful for heating up a courtship. They have a staff party every month at the institute in Sancti Spíritus. You could probably land yourself a rubiecita, if whites are what you like.”

  I walked up La Rampa, where only turistaxis sped by at that hour. There was a foot-cop on every block, but I walked with enough purpose not to arouse their sixth sense of paranoia. I was so hungry I could have eaten the salami there on the sidewalk, but I didn’t, because I did have another lady now, didn’t I? I couldn’t fool myself anymore about Carlota being a creature comfort in the aftermath of Elena.

  At the top of La Rampa, I remembered that there was a dollar in my pocket, so I headed to the Habana Libre to buy myself a café, a strong black one so that I could stave off the headache. I used to drink café the night before medical exams, and I aced most of those with ease. Then why was I shaking on this night, as if convinced I was fated to flunk the latest test of just one question and the best-odds option of answer: yes or no?

  I raised a finger for service. “Compañero.” The waiter stood at a distance and glowered, looking from my lunar to my cheap Chinese tennis shoes. I was not supposed to be in here. I was no longer his compañero. With his arrogant stare, the waiter impelled me out the door and back onto the street without my café.

  I took the long way home on Carlos III, an avenue that has been darker than ever since the beginning of the Special Period. This is the spine of Havana, and inside a thousand shuttered houses from el Monumento de la Revolucíon all the way up to el Capitolio, the city was starving. She was sleeping, but it mitigated none of her hunger as she briefly dreamed, sometimes of pollos, lechones, tortas, empanadas, sometimes of adventures in America, sometimes of her own hunger. She would awaken to the same privations, each day collapsing into a heap of unnumbered others of scarcity and emptiness, and there was no practical guess at how many more would have to drop on this pile before she starved to death or was otherwise redeemed.

  I walked past the pediátrico. The neon sign outside admitting reads:

  VALE, PERO MILLONES DE VECES MAS, LA VIDA DE

  UN SOLO SER HUMANO QUE TODAS LAS PROPRIEDADES

  DEL HOMBRE MÁS RICO DE LA TIERRA.

  El Ché’s quotation, burning like that on the wall of the hospital, was dated before the workers even flipped the switch. Now half the neon is out, and doctors joke that it really reads:

  THE TALENT OF A SINGLE JINETERA IS WORTH A

  MILLION TIMES MORE THAN ALL THE POOR DOCTORS

  OF HAVANA.

  2 August 1992

  On Sunday afternoon I closed up the clinic and put the liter of gas in the Lada to drive out to Carlota’s. It was Pablo’s birthday and Carlota intercepted me at the curb. “Tell him we’re going for a little birthday drive pa’ tomar aire, then let me duck into Tío Tirso’s on a pretense.” Carlota told me there was a rumor going around Marianao of bread—fluffy white flour rolls, not tough pan integral, and fresh, made the day before. But she didn’t want to disappoint Pablito. We would keep it a suprise in case the lead turned out to be false, or if they were just the usual sawdust-textured cakes made of harina integral.

  Pablo climbed in back and I told him, “Feliz cumpleaños, viejo.”

  We cruised across Puente de la Lisa over the trash-strewn riverbed, where ancient trees born before José Martí breathe new oxygen on the breeze. I pulled up at Tirso’s and Carlota climbed out with an armful of magazines and her awful poker face. “I’ll just be a minute. I’m loaning Manuela some old Mexican TV Guides to reread.”

  “¿Qué pasa aquí?” Pablito protested from the backseat, only six but already wise to a woman’s engaño. “Why is my mother acting so strangely?”

  “It takes two hands to count your age now. You figure it out.”

  Eyes twinkling, Pablo said, “I could use toes too.”

  A minute later Carlota emerged with a grin on her face and her bag bulging, but she wanted to keep it a surprise a little longer. “Let’s make it a short drive. How about we turn around at the edge of La Coronela?”

  Pablo cried, “Oh, that’s no birthday drive at all!”

  “I know, but I forgot to turn off the water and Tirso and Manuela are coming over.”

  “¿Por qué?”

  “Because I brought them the wrong magazines.”

  Pablo said, “Algo muy raro está pasando aquí.”

  Back at the house, Carlota bustled in the kitchen. She had managed to get some cheese and, together with the bread and the salami española that Director González had let me take home from his cocktail party, that meant real bocadillos. Manuela arrived and helped lay it all out in the comedor. I distracted Pablito on the solarium by blowing up surgical gloves into five-fingered balloons.

  When the sandwiches were ready, Carlota called, “Pablo, ven para tu congrís.” Rice and beans. He pretended not to hear. Pablito was past complaining.

  “¿No oíste?” I said.

  Pablo ignored the question. “Show me how to make a knot so the air doesn’t escape.”

  “¡Pablo, ven! ¡Pab-LO!”

  Pablo went into the dining room and saw what was really for lunch. “¡Mami! ¡Pan!”

  “¡Feliz cumpleaños!”

  Pablo was ecstatic: bread for his birthday. But it was like a bad movie on El Cine de las Ocho when Tirso rushed in seconds before we could sink our teeth into those beautiful sandwiches. “¡No! ¡Echaron vidrios en la harina!” I slapped Pablo’s hand before the sandwich could get to his lips. Pablo saw real fear
in my eyes and began to cry.

  “Please, Pablito. There might be glass in the bread. There are bad people out there.”

  Tirso said, “The government did it to sabotage the black market.”

  Biting his lower lip, Pablo proposed, “We can try it, and if we feel something in our mouths we can spit it out.”

  “You don’t feel it, Pablito. And it’s not your mouth you have to worry about.” I tied the bread in a plastic sack and put it in a metal trash can to keep the dogs from getting at it. We rinsed off the crumbs and rationed the salami and cheese in silence.

  3 August 1992

  At the beginning of my Monday shift I stopped by the lab to drop off the jinetera’s blood sample. When I picked up the report at the end of the day, I was relieved to see that the results were negative.

  Back at the attic El Ché complained of his nephew, who had been profiled in an enemy magazine for playing in a rock ’n’ roll band that criticizes the Revolution. In the photo, the young Guevara had pasted a dollar bill on the front of his guitar. “¡Descarado! I appreciate his spunk, but did he have to blow it on a cheap pander to the Americans by prostituting himself to the Time photographer? If I were around I’d break that guitar in half.”

  “If I ever bump into him, I’ll do it for you.” There was a buzz from down in front and I opened the French doors. The jinetera looked up from the side-walk. “Hold on.” I came inside and got the spare key.

  “Who’s that?” El Ché asked.

  “You’ll see soon enough.” I went back out on the balcony and dropped the key.