It was a cool November night when I realized Elena had taken down the photos. Winter had come early. Anticipating a numbing dinner together with our mutual disenchantment—a malaise that had begun to take such definite shape in mind’s eye that I set an imaginary place for it to my right—I uncorked the sticky seconds of a Chilean Cabernet that Director González had found not quite to his taste. Elena and I sat in brooding camaraderie through our paltry, home-prepared dinner: arroz con mango, just like the joke. It spooked Elena that, for the better part of our two years together, the whole country had been going to shit. She was scheduled to leave for Africa at the start of the new year.
“Elena, what happened to the photos?”
“What photos?”
“The ones of me you kept above your vanity.”
“I loaned them to my palero.”
“What for?” It was a casual question. I didn’t know enough about Palo Monte yet to guess anything other than my wife might want to show her santero friend what her husband looks like.
Elena brimmed with chilly charm. “So that when I leave, you will never love anybody again.”
Elena left in January and I began the residency at the pediátrico. At the beginning of the summer she gave it to me in a letter. I have to hand it to her: She broke it off cleanly. She wrote that she was in love with a local, happier than ever. I had too much pride to write back.
I took Elena’s letter with me on the ferry, but I already knew the palero would tell me he couldn’t help. Nevertheless, I had to make the journey. The boat docked in Regla and I asked after the right place. The old woman who begs in front of the church remembered Elena the moment I described her eyes. “¡Qué bonita era! ¿Es tu esposa?” When I mentioned the separation, the beggar frowned as if to say: If your wife went to see the palero, it’s already too late. She pointed a bony finger to his rooftop. For good luck, I threw a five-peso coin on her plate. The old woman turned away.
“Buenos días. Soy—”
“I know who you are,” the palero said. He was a muscular old prieto dressed in white. “Nothing supernatural, doctor. I’ve seen your picture, haven’t I? Come in. Sit down.” The palero told me he was a specialist in romantic revenge. We sat in his small solarium and he showed me the little shrine where he invested objects with spiritual powers. “The photograph is consecrated to a diety who uses the image as an index,” he explained, “capturing a lover’s spirit and rendering it a prisoner of the paper. Offerings of fruit, money, tobacco, and coffee nurture the image in its process of becoming a powerful idol. After a few days, the lover’s destiny is completely absorbed in the material image, and the palero tenders the idol to the supplicant, who may do with it—and with the lover—as he or she pleases. In your case, the photographs have probably been hung upside-down somewhere: the prescription for holding captive someone’s heart. I did tell her that the charm’s power would be more effective if she hid the pictures near where the lover sleeps. But there is nothing I can do about it now. The job is out of my hands.”
He stood up. I thanked him for his time and rose to go. At the door I lit a cigarette and hesitated.
The palero read my thoughts. “You don’t owe me anything, compañero, but I’ll give you one last piece of advice: You should get help from another palero. There is something very dark at play with you. This trabajo of mine is nothing by comparison.”
Back in Vedado I looked for the photos in cluttered closets, taped to the backs of drawers, beneath the shelf paper inside the kitchen cabinets. No luck. Suspecting Beatrice’s complicity, I waited until she was out and picked the primitive lock on her apartment. I took apart framed photos of her homely parents, sisters, neices and nephews. A few of the mattes were backed by smiling portraits of a man whose wickedness must have been obvious to all in the very narrowness of his mustache—obvious to all but Beatrice, at least for a time. I returned to my attic empty-handed. I thought about what Elena’s palero did with those photos and wondered if I would ever love again.
4 August 1992
In the morning I took a walk down the alleys behind the Riviera and bought a bunch of bananas for twenty pesos. When I returned to the attic the girl was asleep on the sofa wearing just a white tank top and a purple thong. The sheet was twisted down around her legs. I bent over the pile of laundry to pick out clean scrubs for the morning. Warm lavender radiated from her sleep and her blue eyelids fluttered. Reaching for the uniform, I lightly brushed her wrist and my heart skipped a beat. From his perch above the sofa, El Ché brooded: “¡Qué cogido!”
I took two bananas and left the rest for her on the coffee table. I wished there was coffee, wished there was more than bananas to eat. Congris would almost have cut it, if there had more than two beans to add to a cupful of rice.
When I got home after my shift I bumped into Beatrice on the front step. I bowed my head and said, “Buenos días.”
She blocked my way and picked in the nest of hair beneath her bandana for a small box of matches and a filterless Popular. “Do you mind if I smoke, doctor?”
“No, but I have to discourage it for the sake of your health.”
“For my health?”
I answered on the party line. “It’s been years since El Comandante quit smoking.”
“What does it matter to you what El Comandante does?” She smiled around her cigarette. “You forfeited the party’s injunction to join the directorate.” Beatrice has a way of turning up one corner of her mouth when she spouts out doctrine picked up piecemeal and reassembled in her petty, paranoid head: this recent article in Juventud Rebelde, that obscure “Año de los Diez Millones de Toneladas” speech by Fidel, or another dusty Martí discourse from La Edad de Oro.
I had to crack a smile a little like hers. “M’importa todo. It matters to my job, my freedom, my Cuba.”
“I have always known you to be resistant to integration, doctor, but I never expected this.”
“Expected what?”
“Do we really have to tap dance around the ideological details?” She took a deep drag. “The young lady who stayed at your place last night is a known prostitute.”
“What my patients do for money is none of my business.” I nudged past Beatrice and climbed the stairs to the attic.
When I opened the door I heard the shower running. It was good to know there was water. “Aren’t you going in there with her?” said El Ché. I ignored him, kicking off my shoes. There was a sharp knock at the door. I opened and was surprised to see not Beatrice but a young man, black, slick-groomed, dressed in pantalones cortos and new tenis Americanos.
“We need a doctor. The neighbors said there’s a doctor who lives up here.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“It’s him,” the boy called down to the landing, and two more teenagers, one black and the other white, scrambled up the stairs. When all three were inside, the third boy—pale, thin, with effeminate movements—shut the door behind him. He was so underweight that his small, striped T-shirt bunched at his chest. His green eyes glowed with a cool hatred I had seen a number of times before among young men on the sea wall.
I said, “No tengo dinero.”
“Relax, Hipócrates, we’re not here for your money.” I instantly understood what they had come for. El Ché’s expression said, I told you she’d be trouble.
The boyfriend Alejandro said, “Where is she?”
“I’m here alone.”
“That’s her in the shower, right, doctor?”
The black boys began bouncing on the balls of their feet. They were true black, prietos, brothers—not twins, but only a year or two apart—each one’s face with its own language of scars and lacerations. The younger one glared at me with a jealous hostility. The older, the more scarred, avoided my eyes, my face, perhaps recognizing our blemished kinship. Both brothers were pretty big for undernourished times.
Alejandro said, “Man, you sure are one ugly maricón. She told me about the spot on your face, but I didn’t believe it
could be so fucking big. Now I know why you became a doctor. It’s the only way you can get into a girl’s pants.”
“The CDR captain for this block lives right downstairs,” I said. “She’s probably already calling la patrulla. Why don’t you leave? You haven’t even been here.”
He looked me in the eyes and said, “I would so love to see you get cut up.”
The girl stepped into the living room in my ratty brown bathrobe, the belt tied above her hips. “Get out of here,” she hissed at him.
“You were supposed to be taking a little time off,” said Alejandro. “The other girls have started talking.”
“Fuck them.”
“‘¿Qué pasó con la rubia?’ they whine. ‘She abandoned us for that doctor of hers.’ ‘Does that little puta think she can be a nurse?’”
“What the girls say doesn’t mean shit to me.”
“But it matters to me. The other chulos get talking and it’s not so nice: ‘Trouble holding onto your putas? If you’re going to survive you can’t just let your investment walk away.’”
“¡Vete al carajo!”
Alejandro pouted like a girl. “I could imagine you coming to me and saying, ‘I want out of this game.’ I might accept that. But I haven’t heard you say that.”
“I’ll say it: I want out.”
“But now you’re just saying it to spite me in front of this faggot. You don’t really mean it.”
“Leave me alone, hijo de puta! You’re psychotic!”
“Psychotic? So now you’re Doctora Jinetera? Did this ugly maricón teach you some Freud?”
I stepped between them. “Oye, compañero—”
“Go to hell, mariconcito!” he spat. Alejandro said softly to the girl, “Do you really not want to come back?”
“I don’t. I hate it.”
“Do you want more money?”
“¡Vete al carajo, bestia! ¡Vete de aquí!”
He crossed to the door and said to me, “She makes fun of you, you know.”
The younger black brother hit me on the side of the head with a fist like a club. I went down on the braided rug and the brothers followed Alejandro out the door. He called from the landing, “Even the ones who pay for her have to give her back when they’re finished.”
The girl locked the door and got a wet towel for my head. “I’m so sorry, doctor.”
“No te preocupes.” After I got over being stunned, my head didn’t hurt too much. I crawled over to the sofa. The sun went down and there was another blackout. The girl dug around in the cabinets by the light of the stove burners. She took out the old tins and pried off the lids to find a hardened block of sugar and enough stale flour to make bread with the bananas I had bought that morning. We pulled the sofa cushions to the floor and turned it into a candlelight picnic.
“Julia, doctor—that’s my name,” she told me. “It was my cursed luck he was at Coppelia that day. ‘Do you want some ice cream?’ Of course I did. He was so sweet that first week. If I had asked around, I might have found out I’d taken up with the most sadistic chulo en la Habana. But in the beginning the other jineteras were like sisters, and the work was kind of fun.”
“So you would pick up men along Quinta Avenida after midnight for fun?”
“For fun, yes, and sometimes money. But I wasn’t a prostitute. I was a jinetera. There’s a difference. I didn’t sleep with anyone I didn’t want to, and I didn’t set a price. That kind of business is a barbarity of capitalism.”
“Jinetera socialista y revolucionaria. Interesantísimo.”
“I appreciate your bedside manner, doctor … He started me out on the beach in Guanabo, and the first two times it wasn’t bad—timid guys: a Spaniard, then a Swede. The Swede was funny because he couldn’t speak any Spanish, but I understood what he wanted all right. After the Swede there was a cruel, tattooed Colombiano. Alejandro never weeds out the abusives. I only did it a few weeks, but some of the rougher chulos threaten the girls if they try to quit before paying back the investment. The police protect them, you know. They take Alejandro’s bribes. He works for one of the higher-ups …”
When the migraine came and I wasn’t able to keep my eyes open any longer, I found a sheet and a bundle of old scrubs for a pillow and fell asleep on the braided rug.
5 August 1992
On Wednesday I woke up with a post-concussion headache on top of the migraine. I left Julia asleep on the sofa and walked to the pediátrico. In the afternoon I got home from my shift and was on my way up to the attic when Beatrice handed me the phone. It was Cousin Emilio calling from Pinar del Rio.
“Hola, primo. How’s the house? Is that embittered solterona on the second floor still crowing for your cock?” Emilio thought this was doubly funny because Beatrice, who had just handed me the phone, was probably eavesdropping at that very moment.
“Every night. But I prefer masturbating along to my Celia Cruz records.”
“Are you coming out to the rancho this weekend?”
“Sí, primo.”
“Oye, Mano, if everything works out, we’ll have ourselves a little boating excursion on Saturday. I’m scheduled for a solo patrol.”
“I’m supposed to look forward to that? I get seasick on the Regla ferry!”
“I’ll see you this weekend.”
In the attic Julia made tea with leaves that she had found in the cupboard from Abuelo’s garden in Pinar del Rio. We sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and ate the last of the banana bread.
“I have to go to visit my family in Pinar this weekend,” I told her.
“Let me ask you something, Mano,” she said. “Do you think a person can ever really change her life?”
“It’s never easy, but yes. We have to hope so.”
“If you change, do you leave what you were behind, or do you always carry it with you?”
“My grandfather says, ‘Minds change long before lives.’”
“What I want to know is: Can a person leave an old life behind so that there’s no stain?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes a piece of your past doesn’t want to let go.”
“Guilt. Conscience.”
“Or just memory. The replay of memory. Good memories turn sour with too much remembering.”
“And bad memories?”
“They turn better, maybe.”
“No. Not so far.”
“Maybe there’s always an echo, a residue. But you have to fight. Fill your life with something new.”
She said, “I want to change. I want to figure out something good I can do, like you … Don’t look at me like that! I know I’ll never go to medical school, but I could be a teacher. I could take care of children and teach them things, the difference between right and wrong.”
“I believe you could,” I said, standing. “I’m going out for a while with a friend.”
“A girlfriend?”
“No, just a friend. We walk the Malecón. Do you want to come?”
“I better not go there till things settle down with Alejandro.”
Walking the Malecón cooled my juices and I told Yorki about Julia. “Why don’t you sleep with the girl, Mano? Split that melon open from above! Lather up that beard! Stick it in her culo, if she’ll let you. Hell, do it whether or not she lets you! She’ll love it once it’s in. ¡Tengo ganas de darte tremenda cabilla!” That last was for a brown-skinned girl in a very tight white T-shirt and a vinyl miniskirt with a split that went right up to her G-string. She chased after Yorki and he had to jump to dodge her, almost losing his sunglasses.
“You must be careful with those dirty mulatas. They always grab your balls.”
When we got back to Vedado it was already dark and I opened the clinic to sleep on a cot.
6 August 1992
On Thursday I got home from my shift at the pediátrico and sat at the kitchen table to look at my medical journals. I was too distracted, really, to call it reading. Having Julia in the attic was reminding me of the last woman I lived w
ith in this small apartment.
“I asked around the jineteras in Vedado,” she said. “Why don’t you ever sleep with any of the girls you test?”
“It’s immoral to trade sex for money or services.”
“It’s like biting the bullet for you, isn’t it, doctor, this moralistic discourse on sex?”
“What do you mean ‘biting the bullet’?”
“¿Eres hombre, no? You want to sleep with me, but you don’t dare.”
“No. I don’t want to sleep with you.”
“What are you afraid of? Is it that you don’t find me attractive or that you really are a maricón?”
“I’m going down to sleep in the clinic.”
I went downstairs but I didn’t sleep. I was thinking of someone all the time, and it wasn’t Julia, and that’s what terrified me. I hated giving credence to this superstition of a curse, but something about my animus was sealed inside those photos. I couldn’t blame Elena for taking them. I had given them to her.
On Friday after my shift I took my pay to the bolsa negra and picked up a bottle of chispe tren and some rice and beans. When I got back to the attic I packed an overnight bag for Pinar del Rio.
“If it’s all right with you,” Julia said, “I’ll just stay here another day or two.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about her staying, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her to leave. What was the point of this liason? A search for love? No. She was simply a remarkable girl. She seemed to be sharpening everything that had become dull and indifferentiable in the fog of lust that accompanied my relationship with Carlota.
Havana Lunar Page 5
