I gave Julia the rice and beans. “There should be enough food here until I get back on Sunday. Keep the door bolted.”
“Don’t worry, Mano. Those punks won’t come around again.”
I drove through the Almendares tunnel to Miramar and out Quinta Avenida. Before getting on the Carretera Central, I pulled over and took Hernán out of the trunk. When the pediátrico upgraded to a synthetic skeleton last year, Hernán had so many broken bones that it wasn’t worth holding onto him. Director González wanted to stay out of trouble with Palo Monte by giving him to someone trustworthy, so Hernán fell to me. The Lada’s back windows are tinted, but the license plates are state. That means I have to stop if hailed by the yellow-shirts. When they see an empty seat, they pounce into the break-down lane and flag you over. Even after making it past prominent stops like La Novia del Mediodía, there’s always the chance that one of those vultures will spring out at any point along the highway from the shadow of a parasombra, throwing my happy solitude into a headlock. I didn’t feel like being forced to pick up a hitchhiker, so I propped Hernán in the passenger seat wearing a hooded fútbol shirt and Mickey Mouse sunglasses. In case I should ever get pulled over, I keep a letter from the director in the glove compartment to prove Hernán’s not stolen.
In the reservoir at the outskirts of Havana, neumáticos fish from floating inner tubes. You know you’re getting into the provinces when the organ pipes of the sierra appear on the right-hand side of the horizon. On the median, bare-chested boys in tattered shorts hoist platters of guayaba con queso over their shoulders. Everyone slows, mulls it over: a fat slice of sweet guava and a wedge of homemade cheese for a few pesos. Pull off the road and they’ll run a half-minute hundred meter with their ten-pound platters. I pulled over. The last boy raced up and showed his guayaba y queso. Before I was done dealing with this one, another kid ran up with a great braid of garlic over his head. I bought a little bit from each and pulled back on the highway, leaving them both gawking at famished Hernán.
At kilometer seventy-five the road began to curve directly into the setting sun. Estábamos en provincia. At the entrance to the city, I drove past the statue to los Hermanos Saíz, then through Pinar, and out to Viñales.
I didn’t want to leave the Lada down at the mural prehistórico, where any unattended cars arouse suspicion when they close the gates at sunset, so I parked in town and put Hernán back in the trunk. A few trucks pulled up to offer rides, but I prefer to follow the road from town to the dark side of the valley on foot, three kilometers up a shadeless, steady slope. It helps me get in the right frame of mind. The poinsettias grow enormous on either side of the trail. Later in the summer, a river runs between these rocks and I can’t climb this way without getting covered in mud. I passed over streams and between farms and started up the spine of Abuelo’s mountain. Pinareños know how to make use of every part of the palma real. The bark becomes walls, the pencas and yaguas finish the roof and also make the best cigar boxes. Take the natural tint from the stones of the mogotes to paint bohíos or henhouses.
Abuelo sat in his chair in front of his wooden house. “I saw you coming an hour ago.”
I kissed my grandfather’s cheek. “You’ve got the eyes of an eagle, Abuelo.” He is also named Manolo, although ever since becoming a grandfather, everyone, his own children included, has called him Abuelo. My uncle Manolito, who is a month older than me, was dubbed diminutively because, as Abuelo’s son, he had been born to another Manolo. When I, the city boy, first visited Viñales in the summer of my tenth year, I was called Manolo to keep things easy for Abuela, although most of my father’s family still calls me Mano.
Something smelled good. Going to Viñales, there’s actually food. Guajiros always scrape something together. In the bohío Abuela and Lydia were already at work on lunch. I kissed them both and gave Lydia the garlic, Abuela the bit of guayaba con queso. They don’t have Havana’s metropolitan walks en provincia, but there’s always a bit of pork and a garden supply of coffee. I thought about how much Julia would like it here.
I went back out to sit with Abuelo. “I brought you a little chocolate. It’s Belgian, el mejor del mundo.”
“You never forget about me, Mano.”
Abuela brought us café and we watched a pair of hawks spin their sunset shadows into mesmeric lace on the mountain. They rose on the updrafts without a single flap of wing. When we heard the ox low from the valley trail, Abuelo said, “Viene Manolito.” My uncle Manolito was coming up from the field. Wild Manolito can climb the mountains like a tiger. He believes that taking the trail is lazy if you don’t have a mule or ox to mind, so wherever possible he goes right up the steepest rocks. I told Abuelo I would surprise Manolito and got up to hide with the hens.
My plan was to come jumping out of the henhouse just as my uncle arrived, but while Manolito tied up the ox at the edge of the vega he was already hollering, “¡What cabrón is hiding with my hens?” Manolito’s dogs got to barking and I came skulking out with my bottle of Ron Mulata.
“How did you know, Tío?”
“Muy fácil … I smelled you.” Manolito’s whoop carried out across the valley and echoed off the mogotes, hysterical laughter that always reminds me where that phrase reir a carcajadas comes from: sides-plitting, ear-splitting, tree-splitting laughter. They could probably hear him all the way in Havana.
My uncle and I shared a bear hug, Manolito almost crushing one of my ribs. Un grito: “¡Mono!” Monkey, he calls me.
He tied up the mule so she wouldn’t eat green leaves and get too fat. “Mules will eat anything, just like goats: maíz, palmiches, hasta café.” She drank from the same bucket he used to wash her hide. He said to her, “Drinking soapy water, that’s what you like. Mira qué mujer es esa mula.” Then Manolito sent up a shout: “¡Hay hambre!”
From the bohío Lydia called, “Ya está listo.”
This eased my uncle’s mind. There was still work to do, and we took a minute to give the chickens feed corn. Manolito broke hard kernels off the cob with the heel of his hand. He gave the husks and cobs to his pigs. “You’ve got such pretty hands, Mono, like a lady, but nothing except your belt to hold your pants up.” Manolito himself has no belt, but his muscular hips hold his workpants on his ass even when he shimmies up the trunk of a royal palm.
We all crowded around a table to eat. Abuela is too old now to do the actual serving, but she refuses to eat until Abuelo is finished. It has always been this way, but she has slowed down, passing serving duties along to Manolito’s wife now that the rest of her children have left. Abuela said, “Why do wives today have to talk and talk and talk so much at their husbands? He’s the father of her children. She should serve him. What does talking and complaining accomplish? In sixty years of marriage, Abuelo has never had to hit me. Not once.” Abuelo is peaceable at the head of his table. He inhabits a place perceptible only to nineteenth-century patriarchs. The universe, his universe, of nine children and, according to Abuela, between sixty-five and seventy grandchildren, really does revolve around him. He is at its locus, although many orbits, like my father’s, have set off so wide that the arc is almost unrecognizable.
Abuela said, “Todavía no te has casado, Manolo?” She meant remarried.
“No.”
“Don’t you want to have children?”
“You got started young, Abuela.”
“Y tu muy tarde, y todavía.” Lydia cleared the plates and I lit a cigarette. Abuela frowned and placed coffee before me. Abuelo is almost fifteen years older than her. Watching Abuela sweep the patio, I considered how here in the countryside nobody thinks twice about the age difference.
After eating her own merienda in the kitchen, Lydia began work on la cena. I told her to put me to work, and Manolito came over to see what we were doing. “¿Qué coño estás haciendo aquí?”
“Separating the garbage from the rice.”
“Leave it. That’s woman’s work.”
Manolito spent a minute or two
inside the pigpen sadistically teasing the fat young sucklings. “¿Quién será la que me quiere a mi?” Whenever I show up in Viñales, Manolito insists on killing a piglet. “¿Quién será? ¿Quién será?” He knew the one he wanted. He’d had his eye on her all month. But, glowering into their frightened eyes, he took a minute to rile them up, slapping asses and tweaking corkscrew tails. “¿Quién será la que me dé su amor? ¿Quién será?” He caught the fattest one, raised her face to his, planted a sloppy kiss on her snout, and yowled in her ear. “¿Quién será? ¿Quién será? ¿Quién será? ¿Quién será?” He dragged the squealing animal out of the pen and across the patio to the foot of a tree. The dogs barked ravenously in anticipation of their take. With the jerk of a lightbulb chain, he pulled the knife across her bristling throat. Her squeals ceased and the dogs leapt. Gutteral grunts grew softer as she drowned in her blood, the dogs lapping up the red mud. Manolito dragged the piglet to the bohío. When I strayed too close to the sow she lunged at the end of her rope. “¡Cuidado, Mono! That mama is a mean one.”
Manolito sent my ten-year-old cousin to the neighbor’s with an empty two-liter bottle for some wine—distilled from cane with a touch of guanábana for color. Manolito poured two glasses. I sipped slowly but he goaded me, prying my mouth open and tipping my chin back if he had to. He poured it right down my throat from the bottle, so by the end we had both drank about the same amount.
“Manolito, you spend the whole day working beneath this sun and then immediately start drinking this awful wine. Why don’t you rest a bit?”
“That’s what I’m doing, Mono: resting. That’s why we’re drinking.”
“What I mean is, why don’t you rest a bit from the drinking?”
“What do you think I am, Mono, a vagrant? If I fall asleep after a hard day of work, I won’t have time to drink before it’s tomorrow already and I have to go back to work. I’m a man. I’ve got three duties: to work, to drink, and to fuck.”
When the roast was ready, Manolito gave me the first taste. “Isn’t this the most succulent little piggy you’ve tried in your life?”
“It’s delicious.”
“I feed them all coconut husks. The sow’s milk is sweet enough for you or me to drink.”
Manolito stumbled off to his bohío, and soon my cousin Emilio arrived in his coast guard uniform. After he had showered and put on clean clothes, Emilio pulled two chairs out onto the patio and produced a small bag of marijuana. He crumbled up a bud and fashioned a big twist with a square torn from a brown paper sack. “Where do you get this stuff?” I asked. He smiled but didn’t answer. We smoked. We could hear Manolito and Lydia yelling at each other in the bohío. “Such an unhappy marriage,” I said. “That’s redundant, Manolo. All marriages are unhappy.”
“What about Abuelo y Abuela?”
“They don’t count.”
“Why not?”
“They’re from another time.”
I thought about what Emilio said and realized that there’s no way to explain what actually makes me shack up with someone. It hasn’t happened with enough women for me to identify a common quality. Something in the eyes contributes to it, but something different every time. In Elena it was that pure clarity. In Carlota it was smoldering lust. And Julia? She simply wanted to sleep with me, and it showed in her eyes. Why me? Maybe she had a little bet with her friends that she could get me. Good for her. Maybe she had a thing for my lunar. I should let myself enjoy this teenage girl, ¿no?—a reformed, or at least reforming, sex worker who wanted nothing more than to entertain me up in my little crow’s nest above this Socialist island adrift. I knew that one way or another, if I let her get her hooks in me, all I would want is to press our bellies together—again and again.
12 August 1980
When I first came to Pinar del Rio at age eleven, I was in awe of what a different world existed on this island. All I had known before was Havana, a crumbling city of stone like a necropolis for the living. In Viñales all was green, and sugarloaf mountains hulked around the valley like slumbering elephants, sheltering the soil of tobacco country.
My cousin Emilio met the bus where it let me off at the mural prehistórico, and we wound our way between the rows of tobacco plants across the valley and up the side of our grandfather’s mountain. At the top, Abuelo sat in his chair in front of his house. “I saw you coming an hour ago.”
I kissed his cheek. “Tienes los ojos de águila, Abuelo.”
Abuela emerged from the bohío and pressed me to her breast. “Pobre Manolo, tu mamá en el cielo y tu papá mas lejos que eso.” When Abuela said my father was further away than heaven, she meant Miami.
Together with my uncles, aunts, and cousins, our number breached a dozen, but somehow Abuela managed to seat the entire family in two shifts and feed us all in under an hour. Abuelo had made the table out of the remains of one of the last trees he had cut for the walls of the bohío.
For the first serving with his eldest sons, Abuelo sat at the head, where one leg was a little shorter than the rest. Abuelo kept it this way because if he had to make a point, one thump of his rock fist served to upset every dish down the entire length.
During the second sitting, a stray pea or garbanzo rolled off someone else’s plate and into my domain. The instant I shoved the legume into my mouth, Manolito hollered, “¡Pendejo, Mano! ¡Ese era mi frijol mágico!” Unfazed, I gobbled up the tidbit. Manolito then expanded on his patent outburst with sadistic little remarks like, “Todo el día mientras sudaba en la cosecha, guardaba ese frijolito aquí en mi culito.” My cousins shrieked with glee and collapsed all over each other, troubling the tippy table with volcanic tremors. Abuela whacked the back of Manolito’s skull with a serving spoon. “¡No seas sucio!”
Abuelo typically ignored Manolito’s comments on my lunar, but when he heard Manolito say that I probably wouldn’t be wanting cake on my birthday, Abuelo turned savage, lunging halfway down the length of the table and hammering his youngest son with a closed fist, cutting off the customary hyperactivity and leaving all the cousins sullen.
My first girlfriend was a Pinareña that first summer in Viñales. She lived in town. I don’t remember her name or how we met. She said I could come over at 9 o’clock and watch the novela on TV.
On my way back to her house, I stuck to the shoulder of the unpaved road, popping coffee beans in my mouth, cracking them between molars to release their oil and essence. It was gritty. The taste was wicked, like the burnt raspas Abuela would never serve, like dark chocolate but more bitter. I brewed pure espresso in my own juices, straining brown water through my teeth, spitting the grounds when they had given up most of their flavor. The buzz was beatific. I didn’t feel the five-kilometer walk. Darkness, so firm and affirming a master on a night of new moon, enfolded me—my world, the valley—in a magnificent wing. The underside was spotted with sentient stars, at the center: the ox and plow. An oil lamp flickered here or there at a hacienda, but it might have been a star instead. Darkness cloaked the mogotes, those immortal leviathans, for a billion nights over their lifetimes of prostrate rumination.
The wing abruptly lifted and blades of light flew under and in. I kept my head down and focused on the jagged line between grass and packed earth. A truck roared past spitting dust, and the driver shouted an insult. I didn’t turn when they came up from behind. I didn’t want anyone to stop and offer a ride. The wing settled again and the night nestled in. The quiet. The crickets. Houses with broad and inviting porches stared each other down across the narrow avenue.
I was invited in to sit in front of the box with the entire family—luckily she had no brothers to tease me—and none of them paid any attention to us since it’s starting! it’s starting! The novela that night was one of the worst: bad actors baldly trying to upstage each other with camp dialogue shouted across dislocated scenes. Plus, it was Argentine. All the actors lisped. I touched my date’s hand and she jumped in her rocking chair, darting a vacant look at me. I’d torn her out of the
world of la tele; she had forgotten I was there. I told her I had to go back to the bohío. She whispered to come see her the next night, to meet in the yuca patch after the house was dark. Nobody in the family noticed me slip out.
A moonless wandering up and down the avenue, agonizing over an alienation originating entirely within myself but aggravated by the novela, blaring accusations—“Yo sé que me traicionas”—and insinuations—“Te quiero, Raul. Aunque me mate, te quiero”—from all the houses in the town, from all across the island.
The next morning Manolito boasted over breakfast that, if he wanted, he could climb all the way up to the Tope de Viñales. When my uncle Antonio called him a liar, Manolito jumped up from the table without finishing his milk and roared, “Take a good look at me, brother, because I want you to remember what I looked like.” He stormed out the door with my aunts clawing at his clothes. Abuela followed onto the patio and yelled after her youngest son, calling him caprichoso. Silently sipping his café, Abuelo ignored the outburst.
When he went rolling like thunder down into the valley, Manolito was wearing rubber boots, his green work pants, a faded red pullover, and a ragged palm hat.
Trying to keep spirits up for the rest of breakfast, Antonio bragged about his own prowess plumbing the caves, but everyone except for Abuelo was glum. Even Tío Antonio had sensed a haunting portent in his brother’s final declaration. We children passed that day in gloomy anxiety, certain that we’d never see Manolito again. For the sisters, brothers, and the young cousins, Emilio and me, the mantle of sadness was heavier even than when Tía Sevilla had passed away. At least then we’d had the body to wail over, Sevilla’s cold, captive beauty to console us. We went through our morning chores like a pack of walking zombies: sweeping the patio, feeding and tending to the animals, readying the places for lunch in dubious hope that Manolito might return. At midday there was an empty setting at the table. After lunch we all wrestled with siestas in the heat and fierce sun of the early afternoon. I dreamt of a lioness pouncing from the mouth of a cave and clamping her jaws around my leg. Her raw vise took hold and I heard Manolito’s laughter reverberating from deep inside the mountain.
Havana Lunar Page 6
