The great star Tongolele, who announced Sensat oil, found him in his boudoir.
“Hello!” she exclaimed, disconcerted. “Were you here?”
Quasimodo saw her lift her leg and undo her garter straps. She was then barefoot on the rug, and walked around the room, with her zipper down.
She turned toward Quasimodo then, and with an air of indifference, she took off her bra. Quasimodo contemplated her tits shaking freely and threw himself on them.
“What are you doing, you monster!”
He trapped her between his hands. He could feel his heart beating at the tip of his phallus. His gigantic, eighteen inch phallus.
Tongolele fell, definitively conquered, onto the grass of his boudoir. Quasimodo violently entered that soft body, listening to the crunching of membranes and the squealing of organs. Tongolele’s organs, the great star of Sensat Oil. The woman with the fabulous tits who —
Suddenly, he shuddered.
Inside his head came an unexpected somersault.
He felt that something inside him was coming loose.
Something was being unleashed after having been shut up for thousands of years. New. Unknown. Something that shook him to the marrow of his bones and caused strong shudders of pleasure.
Something had erupted from his deepest insides. And now in a grandiose stupor, he looked at his hands.
Thick, white lava.
Sticky lava like the saliva from a cold.
Like paste itself.
He understood everything at once during that decisive moment. With an unfamiliar calm, he stood up and went to the gate of the yard.
Then he said, solemnly and seriously: Ladies and Gentlemen.
As if before the Grand Jury of Public Opinion.
And he started running forever.
The sun was beating down hard on the wild rosemary, and its rays were melting over the countryside in purple and greenish lights. And from a wall, a lizard took out its red tie in the intermittent signal of “danger,” “danger,” “danger.”
HAVANA, 1968
THE MAGIC STILL
THE DEVIL AND THE NUN
They called her La Baudilia, because she was the exact female version of her brother, that famous Baudilio Cartablanca, who later ended a long career as a Venezuelan revolutionary, dying a renegade. She had the same sharp nose, the same bulging eyes, and the same measured and gentle way of speaking that hid, or tried to hide, a naive self-sufficiency.
I met her at the Quintelas’ home, in the Apolo neighborhood, and I quickly hit it off with her because of her open and aggressive spirit, and the fact that she was a great storyteller.
One of those stories was about her own life.
She said she had come to know love late in life because, as a girl, her brother scared off her boyfriends. She said it with a smile, although with a distant note of bitterness. The last of her suitors was a young man, Consolación, from her town, who dressed very elegantly, and always showed up with a handful of roses, smelling of French cologne. He seemed like one of the knights of old. His relationship with her did not go beyond an inoffensive clutching of hands and a whispering exchange of songs. Their courtship lasted three months, until the day on which Baudilio, her ferocious brother, came home early from a political meeting and confronted the young man with a disdainful expression.
The suitor was a refined young man. He crossed his legs in the English manner and spoke with the voice of a provincial poet. Baudilio looked him over, found out he was a symbolist poet, touched the feeble muscles of his arm, and at last said mockingly, “So this is the little fag you found for yourself.”
It was the end. The young man wanted to protest, but he couldn’t. Instead of daring to respond to the insolence with a strong word or a punch in the mouth, he left the house in shame, tears in his eyes, and never returned.
“Right there, I decided to become a nun.”
She decided it in silence, counting on her Roman Catholic and Apostolic mother’s complicity. First, she was put in a convent on Calle 23, in the heart of Havana that didn’t let in sunlight or even the sound of swallows chirping.
Her brother Baudilio went there with four drunk friends to rescue her and bring her back to the outside world. But the nuns refused to open the doors; they didn’t let him see her, and everything ended when her brother, sauced with rum, unloaded the cartridge of a machine gun on the convent’s old wall and left, cursing the priests and swearing he would return one day to remove her by force.
Perhaps that was why the convent’s superior decided to send La Baudilia to Madrid, to a convent on San Cosme and San Damián Street, where they worked hard and only spoke of essential matters. That was where La Baudilia’s crisis of conscience began. Why was she there? Why should she hand her life over to God in such an absurd way? She endured some very agonizing days due to the immensity of her doubts. She even doubted Saint Teresa, who was her inspiration on dark nights. On one of those nights, she couldn’t take it anymore and went to the convent’s altar, seeking an answer.
The altar was dark, only a small candle at the feet of a plaster Saint Teresa shed a little light.
La Baudilia fell in desperation before Christ on the cross and said:
“Lord, take pity on me. If you are real, if you exist, show yourself right now and give me the strength to follow this path.”
But God did not show himself, nor was his voice heard, nor did any light flicker strangely.
Then she turned toward the darkest part of the chapel and spoke thus:
“Satan, I am not afraid of you. If you truly exist, turn yourself into flesh and blood so I can see you and be your eternal servant.”
But the devil didn’t appear either. Nothing.
The next day, she packed her belongings, dressed in lay clothes, and went straight to the airport to return to Cuba, to her brother, and to the revolution.
That was her story.
“None of it exists,” she said to us, at last, leaning against the front door. “God, the devil, it’s all a lie.”
And she left. Rosa and I leaned out the window to see her walk off down Calle Mariel. She was wearing men’s jeans, a Caribbean cruise shirt that was too large for her, electrician boots, a hairstyle like a cocky Frenchman, and her gait was aggressive and shameless like a tough guy from the Pogolotti neighborhood.
Then, the Quintelas and I looked down at our hands in silence, looked in each other’s faces again in silence, and understood, in silence, how terrible it was. How terribly and expertly the devil worked.
AN AXE TO THE SIDEBURNS
The door to Alipio’s barbershop opened first thing in the morning and a man with a thug-like face entered, dressed in a blue security guard uniform with a holster full of bullets from which hung a Star handgun in its case. Alipio saw him arrive and felt a chill rise up through his legs and take root in his heart, which skipped a beat.
It was him. Alipio had not forgotten that ocher-colored face, the hairy ears, the gold tooth, the thin mustache that had been so in vogue back in the 1950s. It was him. Thirty years was not enough to change his basic characteristics. It was him. Here, in Miami, he was the security guard of some cemetery or clothing store; over there, in Cuba, before the revolution, he was Captain Ovidio Samá of the Military Intelligence Service with an evil, ferocious, and mean reputation.
For the first time in a long time, Alipio thought again about his son. He would have been forty-eight years old, and with the gift he’d had for numbers, he would perhaps now be an excellent economist or a brilliant accountant. That was what he was studying at the University when they killed him. Accounting.
“Do you want to sit down?” Alipio asked. “There’s another barber, but he gets here at ten.”
“I just came for a shave.” The man said in a raspy voice that matched his looks.
“Then sit down. I’ll be with you right away.”
The man sat down in Alipio’s chair and closed his eyes as if he were about to sleep.
“Yes.”
Alipio took his razor and began to sweep it along his leather apron. He had spent many years looking for this man who he now had in his hands. He had gone to Jacksonville because they told him he lived there. Later, they told him he was in New Jersey, but there, they told him he had gone to Kansas to be a nightclub security guard. He ran around Kansas with a gun and a long sharp Sevillana knife. He visited every bar, pool hall, and seedy den, asking about that damned Ovidio Samá who in 1957 had killed his son during a university protest. Later, he stopped looking for him, since the latest reports said he was drug trafficking in Venezuela.
But now, fate placed Samá in his hands. A son. His only child. What he had most loved in his life. And this abominable man had emptied a machine gun into his son’s body, leaving him almost unrecognizable.
“Do you want me to clear out your blackheads?”
“Don’t worry about that. I just want a shave.”
“Has it been a long time since you came over?”
“Almost thirty years,” he replied. “I was one of the first ones to leave. How about you?”
“I came later.” Alipio said. “I believed in it at the beginning, but later became disillusioned.”
“That happened to a lot of people.”
They didn’t talk anymore. Alipio applied the shaving cream, brushed it on, and with his razor in hand began to outline the right side burn. This would be the right time. A little bit of pressure in his arm and that head would fall lifeless over the white sheet. But, then what? No one would believe it was an accident. No one would understand that revenge that had lasted for thirty years. Alipio swept the razor clean across the man’s right cheek, then he noticed a cyst on his chin and it took all his self-control to avoid it.
The man remained silent, with his eyes closed, as if intensely enjoying the coolness of the cream and the pleasant cutting of the razor. From now on, any moment was right for Alipio. Thirty years. Thirty years. He moved to the other cheek and shaved him in three precise motions.
“Your mustache, do you want it like that or shorter?”
“It’s fine like that,” the man said. “I’ve always worn my mustache like Clark Gable.”
Nonetheless, Alipio took the scissors and cut some hairs from the mustache and the nose, in addition to trimming the customers’ bushy eyebrows. He couldn’t. Now he realized that he couldn’t. No one would understand his story. He would spend the rest of his life in jail and, worse still, he would see the blood run, albeit the blood of a thug, but blood that would be weighed just the same when the time came in Heaven for a final account of his life.
Alipio finished. He dried the man’s face with a clean towel and removed the sheet from his chest. Then he held out a mirror and the man looked at himself for a few seconds.
“Satisfied?”
“More or less,” the thug said.
“That’s three dollars.”
The man took out a wallet and removed a five dollar bill.
“Keep the change,” he said.
“Thank you,” Alipio mumbled, a shadow falling over his face.
The man went over to the barbershop’s big mirror and adjusted his shirt collar and tie. Then he said: “I came here because they told me you wanted to find me and kill me. But now you realize it’s not so easy to kill.”
THE ILLUSTRATED WOMAN
Taking license with Ray Bradbury
If you ever pass through Citrus Park, I recommend that you not enter Miss Roberta Donovan’s bar. Keep going, at full speed, and try not to listen to the siren’s song of the women tattooed on that enormous madam. I had the bad luck of stopping in Citrus because my car broke down there. The radiator, the spark plugs, who knows what went wrong with my old ’69 Mazda. Today it’s gone forever in the sands of that ghost town.
Because, gentlemen, Citrus Park is a ghostly town. There are no garages, no markets, no pharmacies, no cafés: nothing. One glance is enough to understand that it’s completely uninhabited, perhaps due to those hurricanes in the early part of the century that beat the Florida coast with unusual fury. The houses are in ruins, the streets are made of white sand, and millions of giant red ants crawl over everything in search of scarce shrubs found around the periphery. They’re enormous ants, perhaps the world’s largest, and they attack humans, leaving enormous terribly itchy welts.
But that’s where I ended up. Woodland, the closest town, is eighteen miles away, and I was too tired to make the journey by foot. So I decided to spend the night there, in Citrus Park, and to leave for Woodland first thing in the morning. The heat made me take off my shirt, and curiosity led me to wander the streets of that sad town, in search of a human face. I called out among the uninhabited houses, and then I pissed in the middle of the street, but no one showed up to reprimand me. All I saw was a red lightbulb go on. A solitary red lightbulb in the door of a crumbling bar, whose window announced Coors beer.
I wish I had never entered. I’ve gone through some difficult moments in my life, but none like that adventure in Donovan’s bar. I pushed the door open and went inside. There, the sand from the hurricanes covered the counter and the tables, and the giant ants sought out ivy and purslane to satiate their hunger. There also was the very fat Roberta Donovan, bending over the counter near the cash register that didn’t seem to have worked since the 1930s.
Behind the counter was a round stage with a microphone in the center, and on a corner of the curtain hung a sign that read: “Sex at Six.” I asked for a Budweiser.
“Hot or cold?” the fat woman asked me in a languorous voice.
“Cold, of course.”
“It’s a matter of taste. Some people prefer it hot because it has a different effect.”
“Give it to me cold.”
The fat woman opened the fridge and rummaged around amid bottles and cans, and after much searching placed a beer right in front of me.
“Are you thinking of staying around here long?” she asked.
“Until tomorrow. First thing, I’m on my way to Miami.”
“Then you’ll have time to see the show.”
“What kind of show?”
“Ladies. The most exciting and most shapely ladies of any bar in the country.”
“Where are they?” I wanted to know.
“Here, with me. You’ll see them soon.”
We didn’t talk anymore. I drank a Miller, a Coors, and another Budweiser. It was a quarter to six when fat Donovan served me a last beer. Then she disappeared behind the red curtains.
Citrus Park. How is it possible for someone to live in such a place? That fat woman Donovan had to be either crazy or completely antisocial. How did she feed herself? What food did she eat to maintain that 300-pound body?
I pondered this mystery, until she reappeared before me dressed in a sequin-covered pink cape.
“You want to know what I eat, right?” she said, leaning over the counter again: “well, this.”
And she picked up three or four giant ants with her fingers and brought them to her mouth, then chewed them with great pleasure.
“At first, it takes work, but then they end up tasting as delicious as pork rinds. What time is it?”
“Six,” I informed her.
“Well, keep your eyes on the show, it’s the most unique show on the entire American continent.”
She went over to the stage and put on a record by Barry White and his Love Unlimited Orchestra. Little by little, she began swaying her hips slowly while undoing the pink cape button by button.
She ended up naked, and yet there was not an inch on that colossal body that wasn’t tattooed. Tattoos of naked women that seemed to move lasciviously to the beat of the slow and exciting music. I thought they were moving as a result of my incipient drunkenness, but when I took a good look, I noticed they were moving on their own, with their own lives, showing their asses, ardently kissing each other, rolling around in twos all over Ms. Donovan’s m
onumental body. It was a lesbian orgy. One of them was whipping another with a riding crop, while another practiced cunnilingus on a blonde with exuberant breasts. Others kissed passionately, united at the pubis.
I was perplexed — even more, I was turned on to the point that my penis wanted to break through my underwear. Suddenly, fat Donovan turned off the turntable. She came over to me slowly, and confidently taking me by the hand, led me to a small room behind the curtains. There, she fell on me like a lustful elephant. But I wasn’t looking at her, all of my attention was fixed on the dozens of tattooed women, who kept rolling around with each other, showing off their perfect asses, their divine breasts, their monumental legs. Thus, watching that overwhelming show of hot lesbians, I made love to the very fat Donovan. How many times? Two, three, five; until the tattooed women began to stay still, as if sleeping, and fat Donovan, beyond all tiredness, also fell asleep on top of me. Carefully, I wriggled out from under the weight of her body until I was completely free. Then, an enormous exhaustion came over me, and I fell asleep next to her, facing her enormous back.
I slept very little, it’s true, because the giant ants were attacking my feet with canine fury. At two in the morning, I opened my eyes and noticed that fat Donovan was still sleeping and snoring, despite the giant ants. Her back, her enormous sumo wrestler’s back, was the only place on her body without any tattoos. I looked at her white back as if into a mirror for a long time, and little by little, I noticed figures start to appear that had not been in the show. One of them was me in the room, naked and sprawled out asleep, and the other one was fat Donovan, who with a sickle was chopping off my penis all in one stroke.
I sprang quickly from the bed. Very carefully, I put on my pants and shoes. I left the room on tip toe and headed quickly to the wide intercoastal highway that would lead me to Miami.
I quickened my pace. My heart pounded. There, in the distance, I could see the lights of a town. Woodland, maybe. Or perhaps Alexandria. I didn’t know, the only thing I knew for sure was that I had to be in that town, or any town, by break of day.
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