The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

  That was the last thing she remembered before falling asleep. By the time they got to Piedra Negra the next morning, the inside of the cab smelled like the sea.

  They arrived well after the roosters had tired of crowing and the cows had been milked and the vendors had passed, hawking leftover fruit as they returned to their shacks by the marsh. Elena threw herself out of the truck and entered the house barely touching the ground. Tomás Gutiérrez waited in the cab smoking a cigarette.

  She came back out a few minutes later with Soledad astride her hip, followed by a flustered Cándida, who wanted to contact the funeral home so that arrangements could be made for the viewing and burial of her husband. Tomás Gutiérrez smacked his lips and said that was a bad idea. The funeral director would have to alert the authorities.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Cándida said.

  “How will you explain that your husband died in Havana but was brought here in the back of a refrigerated truck?” Tomás Gutiérrez’s smell, a blend of alcohol, tobacco, and sweat, wafted out of the cab and made Cándida wince. “We will all wind up in jail.”

  “What do we do, then?” Elena asked.

  “Bury him as he is,” Tomás Gutiérrez said, “before he thaws.”

  “Without a casket?” Cándida asked. “Without a funeral Mass?”

  “Mama,” Elena said. “Papa doesn’t need a Mass. Tomás is right.”

  “Someone is bound to make inquiries,” Cándida said.

  “People disappear from this island all the time,” Tomás Gutiérrez said. “One moment they’re walking down the street. The next moment they’re in Miami, driving a late-model Buick. If somebody asks, tell them he got on a raft and left for the United States with a saucy mamacita.”

  Cándida raised her eyebrows and said, “My God, what a vulgar man!”

  The fact was Fermín José had few friends. No one would ask about him or wish to see him laid out in a casket. Leaving on a raft was as plausible a reason for his disappearance as any, especially if he left with a woman. Tomás Gutiérrez declined Elena’s request to help dig a hole in the backyard, saying he had to deliver the goods to the Russians. The best he would do was carry Fermín José into the house quickly, without the neighbors noticing. Elena suggested he drive around to the alley in the back where hardly anyone went, except for, on occasion, one of the veterans sleeping off a hangover.

  And so it was. Tomás Gutiérrez carried the blue-cocooned body inside and propped it against the wall of the distillery room. Elena put Soledad down in order to pay him. He refused her, saying it had been taken care of back in Havana.

  “By whom?” Elena asked as they walked back to the truck.

  “Your adorer,” Tomás Gutiérrez said with a knowing smile. He got in the truck and waved goodbye.

  Obviously, he was referring to Daniel, but she had other matters that consumed her attention and kept her from pondering what Tomás Gutiérrez insinuated. Most important, her father needed to be buried, which meant that she and Cándida would have to wait until nightfall and hope the body wouldn’t thaw. Cándida said they should ask Pedro for help in digging the hole.

  “Pedro el Cruel? Never in my life. I’ll do the digging,” Elena said.

  “Elenita,” Cándida said. “You can’t do it, not with your bad hand.”

  “By God I will,” Elena said, and left the distillery room.

  Waiting for dark to come, she went in search of Soledad and found her in the same bedroom where she’d been conceived, sitting on the floor with a doll between her legs. Behind her on the bed was a woman hired to take care of the girl who made no move to greet Elena. Soledad held the doll gently one moment and the next banged its head on the floor. Then she tore the head off and tried unsuccessfully to jam it back on. In frustration, she threw it against the wall. Elena picked it up and handed it to her. The girl threw it on the floor and crawled to the hired woman. The woman picked her up and Soledad buried her face in her breast.

  The woman’s hair was a dark, thick mane and her skin was ashen in color. She had a beaked nose and the narrow face of one of those Canarians who had settled at the edge of the marsh. She was shifty too, the way marsh people were. The dirty hand running through her daughter’s hair infuriated Elena most of all.

  Aware it would do no good to pry the girl off the hired woman’s lap or coax her away with soft words, she sat on the cool tile floor and put the head back on the doll, combing its hair and straightening its rumpled clothes. Soledad lifted her head off the woman’s lap and looked at her mother, who stood the doll up between her legs, telling her daughter how pretty it looked now and how she would take the two of them on a walk around the plaza the next day. Soledad’s mood changed quickly. She gave a little hop and brought her hands to her face, trying to cover up her excitement with mock shyness. Elena picked up her daughter, who submitted to her mother’s firm grasp, and told the hired woman she was free to go.

  Later that night after dinner Elena began digging. It was hard at first, but once she broke through the packed surface, the shoveling became easier and she established a steady rhythm that she broke only a few times to stretch her back and wipe her face. By one in the morning she was done. The kerosene lamp she had used to illuminate her work was flickering out, and Cándida, who had pulled out a rocker and sat on the concrete patio to keep her daughter company, had fallen asleep with Soledad in her arms. Elena climbed onto the patio, and as she did so, a current of pain shot up from her legs through her lower back. She gasped, took a few deep breaths, and went into the distillery room, where her father’s body lay, already thawing. She grabbed hold of one of the ropes and tried pulling the body out the door. She had no idea the dead could be so heavy.

  “Wait,” she heard Cándida say behind her. “I’ll help.”

  Between the two they pulled the body out through the door and down into the garden where the hole was, nicely dug, about four feet deep.

  “I heard a grave should be six feet deep so the wolves don’t get to the body,” Cándida said.

  “Mama,” Elena said, “there are no wolves in Piedra Negra.”

  Elena gave the body a push with her foot, and Fermín José came to rest with a loud, dusty thud at the bottom of the hole. The sweet, sickly smell of decay wafted up from the grave, and without any pause, Elena began the process of burying her father. Cándida left and returned with another shovel. The work went quickly and they were done by 2:30 in the morning. Cándida crossed herself and said they should put a cross at the head.

  “No one can know he is buried here,” Elena said. “No one, do you hear?”

  Cándida was too flustered to argue with her daughter, and they both went to bed exhausted and sweaty. They were awakened later that morning by a knock at the front door. It was the hired woman, who entered the living room with the air of someone for whom the world has no limits and said, “Like death this house smells. It does.”

  “It must be a dead mouse,” Cándida said, and offered her coffee as a way of distracting her attention. But the hired woman would not be distracted.

  “I remember when we laid out my mother,” she said. “Of worms the living room reeked for weeks. Death your daughter has brought into your house, she has.”

  In the afternoon, while she was sweeping the patio, the hired woman noticed the mound of dirt in the backyard and came into the kitchen, asking Cándida about the upturned earth.

  Cándida said the first thing that came into her mind: “Elena is planting tomatoes.”

  “It must be very strong fertilizer she is using,” the hired woman commented. She said nothing more and resumed her sweeping.

  When Cándida told Elena what she’d said to the hired woman, Elena complained that now she would have to find tomato seeds to plant, not an easy thing in a town that hadn’t seen a tomato plant in years. Many Piedra Negrans still held on to the archaic belief that tomatoes were poisonous and eating them would cause your intestines to burst. She knew Spaniards were abundant consume
rs of tomatoes and went to Antúnez the Asturian shopkeeper, who sold her six fruit and said all she needed to do was put them in the ground, water them, and they were sure to sprout, or so he thought. The truth was that he, being a man of business, had never planted tomatoes in his life, or anything else for that matter. Elena did as she was told, making sure she did the planting in the presence of the hired woman, who again made mention of the strong fertilizer and said the plants would grow as tall as mango trees.

  The hired woman had two grown children who visited the house at least once a day to get a free meal or help themselves to a bottle. The daughter looked like her mother except she had a milky eye and a long scar running from her temple to her chin. The son was short and stocky with a face like a snake’s and a gold tooth that glinted even in the deep shadows of the house. They entered with the same impunity as their mother and ignored Cándida and Elena, speaking among themselves in the barely intelligible argot of the marshes. Some days the Canarians went out back and took a chicken or two for their evening meal; other days they picked the best avocados right off the tree. It was only a matter of time before they carted away the furniture. Elena realized what was going on and confronted the hired woman, letting her know what she thought of her and her family—they were lowlifes who cared only for themselves and they should go back where they belonged. The Canarian was impassive, but at the last moment she gave Elena a malevolent look that would have melted lead and then gritted her teeth and shook her index and little fingers at her. Elena recognized it as the Curse of the Twin Tines.

  That night she felt the weight of the world on her body, and the air around her became viscous and hot. It burned her lungs to breathe and she couldn’t sleep. She had visions, too, of the world caving in and swallowing her and her family. The devil’s horns had been pointed at her and any number of calamities would befall her and Soledad if she didn’t reverse the curse immediately. In the capital there were any number of people who could undo the spell using an herbal antidote, but in the backwaters of Piedra Negra, the only person she knew who had the power to deal with such things was Eulalia la Santa.

  Cándida warned Elena that she should not travel alone to see Eulalia. It was a trip full of dangers through difficult terrain. Elena dismissed her mother’s warnings and rented a mule. She made the difficult journey to the marsh, made more arduous by the heaviness she felt on her shoulders, the thick air she had to force into her lungs, and the reluctant gait of the mule, who sensed, with the foreknowledge given only to mules, that it was about to go on the greatest travail of its life. Elena brought with her three ham sandwiches, two canteens of water, and four bottles of firewater she hoped would induce Eulalia into one of her trances.

  She reached La Sabrosona at dusk. The front porch roof had buckled and blocked the door, and Elena had to walk through the overgrown weeds around the side of the house to the back where the kitchen was located. The empty space on the wall where Las Meninas once hung was etched by soot and grease, and the wooden table where she had sat to eat the eggs her father cooked had warped and split apart. The ceramic countertops Eulalia’s father had had custom-made in Mexico were piled with dirty dishes and blackened pots on which a city of insects was feasting. Elena’s aversion to insects was extreme and she almost walked out. Just then she heard a noise coming from inside. She became afraid and part of her urged her to turn and leave, go back to Piedra Negra, but she’d have to travel at night and that scared her even more. She slowly made her way out of the kitchen, through the dining room that held an antique table that had once belonged to a viceroy of New Spain, and into the cavernous living room. Eulalia’s rocking chair stood in the same place Elena remembered, facing a battery-operated radio that sat on a narrow wooden table. The large red Eveready batteries had leaked and formed a crust around the base. Elena heard another sound coming from the master bedroom, and she called out Eulalia’s name several times, walking slowly toward the room. She stopped before the half-open door and called for her again. This time there was a response, a sigh as faint as the sound of curtains rustled by the breeze.

  She pushed the door open and entered. Standing in the corner was an old man dressed in a long white shirt that hung down to his knees. He had a bony face half hidden by matted gray hair that grew below his shoulders and a beard that reached his chest. “Ay,” he said, and hopped from foot to foot as if he had stepped on something hot. Perpendicular to the wall on the other side of the room was a metal bed and on it, covered in dirty bedsheets, was Eulalia, tiny and nearly transparent with age. Her face was diminished by her large ears and a nose streaked with veins. Had it not been for her eyes, which glowed with the energy of the saved, Elena would not have recognized her.

  “Eulalia,” Elena said quietly.

  She went closer to the bed and put her hand on Eulalia’s forehead, which was cold and damp. She smelled like a wet hog and Elena had to fight back a gag reflex. The old woman gave her a faint smile and looked beyond Elena to the man.

  “Diego,” Eulalia said.

  “Ay,” the man said, and hopped again. “Nomemate, nomemate, nomemate.”

  Eulalia smiled and said, “Sobrinita,” and grabbed Elena’s good hand. The skin of her palm was dry and flaky, her fingernails bitten to the quick.

  Elena looked at the man then down at Eulalia. “Are you my aunt?” she asked the old woman.

  “Sí, sobrinita.”

  “And who is that man?”

  “He’s your father, Diego Velázquez.”

  “The sodomite?” Elena asked.

  “Yes. The great artist,” Eulalia said.

  “Ay, ay.” The man hopped some more and turned to face the wall.

  “My father was Fermín José Blanco,” Elena said. “He’s your cousin.”

  “He’s my cousin,” Eulalia said. “He’s my brother. He’s my father. He’s my cousin.”

  It seemed hopeless at first. Eulalia had gone to another world, but Elena hadn’t traveled all day on a jerky mule to go home with the Curse of the Twin Tines still on her.

  “Why come you?” Eulalia asked.

  “Someone put a curse on me,” Elena said. “The Twin Tines. I need a cleansing.”

  Eulalia arched her head up on the grimy pillow and giggled. It sounded more like a mare’s whinny.

  “The devil’s horns,” she said, then intoned one of her long, nonsensical litanies, which ended with an invocation to Saint Michael to rid Elena of Satan once and for all time.

  “Ay, ay,” the old man wailed.

  A thick froth came out of Eulalia’s mouth, her stomach gurgled loudly and expanded like a balloon, and then she let out the loudest fart Elena had ever heard. It was a scandal of the air. It made her cheeks flutter and the bed shake. Eulalia messed herself then fell asleep.

  Elena had no way of knowing whether this was the cleansing she was looking for or Eulalia being Eulalia. Whatever it was, she felt that something had lifted from her. The air was easier to breathe despite the pestilence that lingered over the old woman, and things came sharply into focus. The sun was almost down. She’d have to find a light, a bathroom, a bed, and tie the mule up in the overgrown field in front of the house.

  As for Diego, he slid down the wall until he sat on the floor with legs outstretched.

  “I ask for clemency, O Holy Queen,” he implored Elena. “I call myself Diego Velázquez. I am a painter of some renown. I will do your portrait, Santa Reina. Will it be your Highness’ pleasure to sit for me?”

  Whatever she said to Diego would be a drop in the bucket of his ruined mind. He stood suddenly and rummaged through a pile of imaginary junk next to him until he had pulled out an easel and set it up with the facility of someone arranging a real one. He did some more rummaging and found a canvas, mixed the paint, got the brushes ready, and assumed a painter’s posture, head held back, one eye squinting, tongue between his lips, which were barely visible through the thick mat of his beard.

  “No, no,” Elena said. “I have no time fo
r this,” then realized there was no this—no easel, no canvas, no paints.

  Diego replied that he would be at her disposal any time she might be available.

  She lied and said she would be happy to sit for him the day after tomorrow after two in the afternoon. She had already decided she would leave at first light the next morning

  “It will be my privilege to fix Your Highness some dinner. It will be a light repast perhaps.”

  She looked at Diego’s stained shirt and his grimy hands and declined, claiming her exhaustion was greater than her hunger.

  The many rooms of La Sabrosona were filled with broken furniture and discarded clothing. Thick cobwebs hung from the ceiling like the filaments of time, and dust covered all the surfaces. Finally, Elena came upon a bedroom clean enough to sleep in. She sat on the mattress to eat one of the sandwiches, and when she was done, she went outside to tie up the mule and fill up a bucket with water from the well for the animal to drink; then she went back to the room she had chosen and fell on the unmade bed. Still fully clothed, she closed her eyes and didn’t wake until the sunlight hit her squarely in the eyes. She had no idea what time it was. After a moment of confusion, she sat up, put her shoes on, and went out to ready the mule for the trip back.

  The rope Elena had used to secure the animal to one of the front porch posts snaked on the ground and disappeared into the tall grass. There was no mule anywhere. She let out a curse and felt the urge to urinate, which she hadn’t done since early the night before. With no one around, she raised her skirt and squatted where she stood. The urine came out of her in a strong, odorous stream, which sprinkled her calves as it hit the ground. As she stood she saw Diego and Eulalia on the mule, which was trotting away fifty yards to the left where the field banked toward the marsh. Diego was holding a naked Eulalia, thin as a twelve-year-old girl, in front of him. Elena heard him whooping, and under that she could make out Eulalia’s mousy giggle.

  She ran after them across the grass and down the embankment, determined to reach them before she lost them forever. The mule was old and slow, and before long she was running alongside it. She grabbed hold of the reins and pulled, which made the mule turn tightly, and Eulalia slid off the saddle and fell. Elena worried she might have killed the old lady, but the grass had cushioned the fall and Eulalia lay on the ground, her arms raised to the sky.