by Rita Indiana
According to the contract, Giorgio and Linda, or, actually, their gallery, Menicucci / Contemporary Art, would keep forty percent of the art sold by the artists, who would be represented exclusively by the gallery. Giorgio opened the studio curtains so the morning light could come in through the window. When he saw the space, Argenis felt ashamed at not having signed earlier and feared Giorgio would retaliate by sending him back to the city on the midday bus. Billy, who always trailed after his master, sniffed the corners of the studio before doing the same to Argenis, who feigned a quick pat of the dog and quickly signed with the A and L he used to mark his paintings. Just then a huge guy, black as coal, came into the studio. He was wearing cutoff jeans, a Dodgers cap, and a Tommy Hilfiger polo with a faded collar. His belly was hard and prominent, although his arms and legs had the muscle definition of an ex-athlete. He and Giorgio hugged like little girls. “Maestro,” Giorgio said to Argenis with a deference he really wanted to sound sincere, “this is the next global star of performance art, Malagueta Walcott, another of our artists.” Contact between two men, and so near to him, always made Argenis uncomfortable. “Can we go down to the beach?” he asked, wanting to get away from the proximity of the bed.
Up to her waist in the still pool the reef formed at Playa Bo, Linda was filling test tubes while another gringo introduced what looked like a thermometer into the water. “James is an oceanographer from UCLA. They’re running tests because we want to turn Playa Bo into a sanctuary,” Giorgio explained. “We have to protect the sea or…” he said, making a gun with his hand and pointing it at Argenis’ head before shooting. Argenis could not give three fucks about their environmentalist passions. But Linda, in her wetsuit, struck him as the best part of the project. He imagined jerking off between her breasts while Giorgio talked about coral species. He had to recall the ice cube Yeyo had put down his back to avoid an erection.
That night, around the teak table on the big terrace, Argenis met the other participants, Elizabeth Méndez and Iván de la Barra. She was a video artist who’d gone to school with him at Altos de Chavón and had never once said a word to him. Iván de la Barra was a Cuban curator, a “critical piece of the experiment,” according to Giorgio’s introduction, which he gave as he served a finger’s worth of Bordeaux in his cup. Iván tasted the wine and nodded, playing as though he were a customer at a restaurant and Giorgio was the waiter. They both laughed when Giorgio finished filling the cup, which Iván turned to one side, spilling a few drops on the ground to satisfy the thirst of the dead and to ask for “material and spiritual development for the neophytes.” Malagueta pulled out a notebook and asked for the meaning of “neophyte.” Argenis was embarrassed for him. Iván explained: “A neophyte is a novice, a person who’s just integrated into the community. You’re a neophyte.”
In spite of the sweet sea breeze, the quarter moon hovering over the horizon, Giorgio’s pesto, and the curator’s enviable talent at holding forth on history, philosophy, and popular culture, Argenis could feel a sour gas rising in his esophagus: Fucking Cubans, now this cocksucker is going to come here to show us how to A-E-I-O-U? And this damned nigger, so stupid with his little notebook, he couldn’t just look up the word in a dictionary? Everybody loves them because of their goddamned revolution but how long is that good for? You only have to be Cuban to get invited to Spain, to Japan. What’s this layabout going to show me? I mean, people back in Cuba give their asses for a tube of toothpaste. There he goes: blah blah architecture, blah blah film. I don’t care, here we got salami with rice and beans. Go wipe your own butt, you cocksucker…
The next day, Iván detailed the program for them on the second floor of Argenis’ loft. It had a digital projector, several armchairs, and a blackboard on which the Cuban had just written the word PINAKOTHIKI. Everyone had brought a notebook except Argenis. “While we’re here, we’re going to learn that the creative process is art in itself, and along the way we’re going to question the shape and content of our work.” Iván talked as he walked between the armchairs, like a professor. He was a slender man, with an aquiline nose, deep waves in his hair, and youthful acne. He loved to savor his Cuban accent, using it to charm his audience into accepting everything he was saying. He wasn’t wrong often. And he had a wicked sense of humor. “Mr. Luna, why do you want to be an artist?” Iván didn’t wait for Argenis to answer and was already off again, now pontificating about the instinct to preserve art and the artist’s instinct to preserve an idea in time, to manifest a mental image, a sensation, a philosophical conclusion. But Argenis wasn’t listening anymore, because the question had stirred thoughts of his father, who, now that the party had lost, was living off what he had been able to accumulate during four years in power and preparing little skirmishes so they could win the next elections. Argenis had been lucky to get Giorgio’s invitation. Jobless and with his father out of the Palace, he wasn’t going anywhere. He looked over at Elizabeth, who had a good ass and little tits with big nipples you could see through her braless T-shirt. He entertained himself by imagining Malagueta sticking it to her on Iván’s desk, with his balls, which must have been blue, swaying to the rhythm.
At noon they had lunch out on the terrace. Argenis thought if they were going to eat together every day he would have to put a bullet in his brain. And then Linda asked if they wanted to go snorkeling later that afternoon. “It’s beautiful, there are so many fish, and it’s super relaxing, isn’t it?” she asked Billy, who barked in response. “What do you say?” she asked Argenis directly. Instead of taking the gesture as a friendly invitation to try and bring a melancholy and distant character into the group, Argenis began to put things together: She’s mine! She’s not gonna give it away to the nigger and Iván must be a faggot. She wants me to fuck her.
During dessert, the Cuban kept eyeing Elizabeth’s CD rack, which was full of dance music—Daft Punk, Miss Kittin, Cassius. That’s how Giorgio had met her: Elizabeth went to all the parties in the city, in abandoned basements and hotel discotheques that hadn’t changed since the sixties. The crowd was small and diverse, and people came for the music and the ecstasy. Argenis had never been to one and never popped a tuerca, as Giorgio very naturally referred to pills, and all he could imagine was a provincial atmosphere, like the discos his female friends went to in high school to dance merengue and look for boyfriends.
At the beach, Linda distributed wetsuits and snorkels, dove in first, and signaled for them to follow her along the coral reef that enclosed the row of dogteeth encircling the pool at Playa Bo. They swam their way around schools of mackerel until they reached a giant rock with a hole about three feet in diameter and a tunnel of blue light from which emerged a little group of damselfish and a parrotfish. Argenis thought everything was very beautiful, but he wanted to see Linda’s pussy and Malagueta’s big head was always in the way. Linda went through the hole in the rock and the rest of them waited for her to come back. Hesitating, Argenis saw his chance and went after her. It took all of them to bring him back to the surface, vomiting water and with anemone stings and scratches everywhere. “He didn’t get very far,” said Malagueta, “and he’s, like, burnt on his back.” He was laughing nervously, a hand over his mouth as he recalled how Argenis had spazzed as soon as he went in the hole. “Like a fish on a hook,” said Elizabeth. “Shit, man. What a bad trip.”
Condylactis Gigantea
When she left Esther’s house, Acilde had avoided official taxis and the metro, where cameras would follow her, and taken a ride in a public car. These old jalopies—Japanese models from the early years of the century—were still on the streets in spite of government efforts to pull them from circulation. Their reasonable price and privacy made them ideal for fugitives and the undocumented. The drivers knew the alleys up in the high part of the city and would detour from their routes for a bit more money. Villa Mella, where she’d asked the driver to take her, was the cradle of the evangelical terrorist movement that had emerged after President Bona
had declared the 21 Divisions, with its blend of African deities and Catholic saints, as the official religion. The Servants of the Apocalypse, as the enemies of all that was not biblical called themselves, liked to place explosives and kill people almost as much as speaking in tongues. Acilde figured the police wouldn’t take long to finger her and that she’d only find refuge for a few days among those who thought Esther Escudero was an object of demonic adoration and deserved to die.
In the Kemuel commune, an assembly praised God’s name with loudspeakers and encouraged believers to help bring about Armageddon on the island. Acilde bet they’d probably already seen her on the Web, where her photo would have been shown next to Morla’s, and blamed her for the crime. She approached two girls wearing tangled braids and floor-length skirts and asked to be taken to one of their leaders. Melquesidec, a pastor with sausage-like fingers, had an office nearby with a desk, two folding chairs, and some faded and stained cushions on a bed of newspapers, from when they still used to print on paper, that was serving as a couch. On the wall, hanging off a single nail, there was a belt with a mountain knife. Next to it, a poster read: “And the angel threw his sickle to earth, and harvested the vine of the earth, and threw the grapes into the great winepress of God’s anger.”
Melquesidec ordered her to sit. Lies, thought Acilde, are like beans, they have to be well seasoned or no one will swallow them. She made up a dream with a lamb on an altar whose blood formed the letters of Esther Escudero’s name. She added things she remembered from the Sunday school her aunt had made her attend as a child. The minister who’d taught those classes oozed the same social resentment as Melquesidec; his dealings with girls of twelve and thirteen had put a price on his head. Melquesidec fixed his reddened eyes on Acilde with an otherworldly lust that made her feel more sorry for him than for her clients at El Mirador. “Little sister, the Lord has anointed you and I must protect his work,” he said, scratching a nipple with the nail of his pinky. He ordered Brother Sofonías, a young man with a mild case of Down syndrome, to make her feel at home. Before Acilde could stand, Melquesidec had stuck a spit-covered finger in her ear.
Sofonías was very tall, and his tiny eyes were shiny with a false happiness; like everyone else in that place, he smelled like a dirty toilet. The commune took up several blocks, with improvised housing made of wood, zinc, and, sometimes, cement. They had irregular water and electricity, just like in all the neighborhoods outside the central circuit, where not even the collectors bothered to come. He took her by the arm to a one-room shanty with a dirt floor and pushed her inside. He closed the three-plank door and locked it from the outside. She heard him drag a plastic chair over to the front of the door and drop into it with a deep sigh. Inside, alone, Acilde looked around without taking off her backpack, in which she was carrying the anemone. The room would have been perfect for keeping a dog or a frightened woman. Acilde tested a plank of plywood at the back of the room and without needing to be kicked twice, the rotted wood fell apart, creating a hole she could escape through without too much noise. All the while, Sofonías sang: “To the battle march with firm conviction/ behind Christ, our Captain/ our hearts swollen with manly ardor/ to defeat Satan’s army.”
Leaping over streams of black water, she ran away from the fanatics’ commune until she reached an avenue where a group of little kids was selling crack to the cars lined up to buy. She went up to the youngest in the group and, using money as bait, got him to take her home with him. He lived with his pregnant sister, who was sitting in front of a pedestal fan eating a plate of rice and salami when they arrived. “I’m not gonna fuck anybody, Joel, I’m eating,” Samantha said, hitting the plate with her fork. Without mentioning the bills in his pocket, Joel stuck his hand in her plate and grabbed a piece of sausage. “Just looking for a place to crash,” he said.
Acilde saw there was a tablet on a little table in the middle of the room. As soon as she’d left Esther’s house, she’d disconnected her data plan so she couldn’t be located, but now she needed to reach Eric, the only person who could help her. The tablet was an old model that ran on an independent plan only offered on the city’s periphery. Samantha made a move to grab it back but Acilde explained, typing on the screen, that she only needed it for a few minutes. “What, now we’re a five-star hotel, asshole?” asked the girl as she disappeared with a plate of plantains behind the little curtain that separated the kitchen and the sitting room. Joel showed Acilde the only bedroom, which had a twin bed. “And your sister?” Acilde whispered, busy with the tablet. But Joel was already in the kitchen, serving himself whatever had been left on the stove.
Acilde sent Eric a picture of a monkey. Eric sent back a photo of the Titanic. Acilde responded with a photo of the Titanic at the bottom of the sea and a photo of a rainbow. After a minute of more photos, Acilde had sent him one of Pancho Villa, one of Matías Mella, another of Mama Tingó, and one of a postcard of a sunset on the beach from back when the sea reflected the sky and wasn’t just contaminated chocolate. The monkey was still the most well-known call for help. Even the police knew what it meant. Eric got the message: Acilde was in Villa Mella, in deeper than the Titanic, she had the sea creature with her, and she would return it to him in exchange for Rainbow Brite. She’d wait for him around the Mama Tingó metro station after dark.
Eric had taken care to come in a public car, a 2007 Honda Civic, which still preserved the original ash gray paint job twenty years later. The Cuban climbed out of the car and pulled a suitcase from the trunk. He looked wasted and shaky and Acilde rushed to help him with the luggage. She brought him up to date as they strolled through the plastic garbage-laden puddles on the way to Joel’s. Once there, Eric gave Samantha two hundred dollars and ordered her and Joel to leave. “Go find someplace else to stay for a few days. You won’t want to be here when the cops come.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Acilde said as soon as they were alone.
“That’s not important now. I’m going to help you with the shot. You can’t do it yourself.”
Acilde was surprised by this reaction; maybe his illness had finally done him in. He pulled out five IVs, gauze and clamps, several bottles, and a piece of cascarilla Esther had used to trace white lines on doors and in the corners of her apartment.
He ordered Acilde to give herself an enema, take a bath, and shave her vulva and head. She did everything with a little shaver, thinking all the while: This guy’s a doctor, he knows what he’s doing. He made her lie down on the bed, over which he’d erected a kind of white tent to keep the space around her body sterile. There was a plate of uncooked rice at the foot of the bed. “You’re getting pretty folkloric,” Acilde said, anxiously watching as Eric pulled a sealed metallic envelope out of a jacket pocket. He tore the envelope with his teeth. “They’re offerings so everything will go smoothly,” he explained, showing her a vial with about two inches of a white and viscous liquid in it. “It’d better work, cuz it cost me my right ball,” he said as he filled a syringe that danced in his hand. When he showed Acilde some latex belts, she sprang up from the bed. “I’m just following instructions,” he said and cackled like a chicken to test her courage. Defiantly, Acilde lay back down and let him tie her with the belts. “Try to break loose,” he said. She struggled but couldn’t move.
Before beginning, Eric took a quick look at the jar where the sea anemone rested. It was in bad shape, like him, and he’d have to act fast. As soon as the Rainbow Brite entered her bloodstream, Acilde began to convulse. I’ve killed her, thought Eric. They sold me rat poison! But she soon stabilized and he checked her vital signs at intervals. Two hours later she complained about the heat and later still told him she was burning alive. When the bed began to shake from her tremors, Eric gave her a sedative. At midnight her small breasts began to fill with smoky bubbles as her mammary glands consumed themselves, leaving a wrinkled web that looked like gum around her nipple, which Eric removed with pincers so it wouldn’t get infected. Underneath grew a masculine skin. Her
cells reconfigured themselves like worker bees around her jaw, her pectorals, her neck, her forearms, and her back, filling up to become hard where before there were just soft curves. It was daybreak when the body, confronted with the total annihilation of the female reproductive system, convulsed again. With contractions that made her lower abdomen rise and fall, she expelled what had been her uterus through her vagina. Her labia sealed in a cellular fizz and quickly formed a scrotum, which would give birth to the testicles, while her clitoris grew, making her stretching skin bleed. Eric removed the old skin as he had done around her nipples, sterilizing as he went along, as the makers of Rainbow Brite advised. At noon the next day, Acilde Figueroa was wholly a man. Eric protected his designer body, still encased in raw flesh, with layers of antiseptics and cotton.
Eric sat in a plastic chair next to the bed and battled sleep by contemplating his own death. He thought the scene where death would find him was amusing, and this, his last act of caring for a patient, seemed straight out of the mission statement of the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba, where he’d graduated. “Science and conscience” was the mantra at the school, which had been founded to create an army of white-robed doctors in service to the most needy, and whose Third World missions the Castros used to excuse everything that had gone wrong with the revolution.
At sunset the Servants of the Apocalypse screamed verses into loudspeakers that the wind blew right into the room: “He had seven stars in his hand, and from his mouth emerged a sharp double-bladed sword.” Eric was astonished as he watched the powerful drug accelerate the healing process. The metamorphosis was reaching its conclusion: the skin that would forever protect this masterpiece now covered every altered centimeter of flesh. In contrast to this body’s robust health, Eric’s was deteriorating. His fragile lungs, already filled with liquid, began to hurt more than he could bear. He’d made a mistake, but at least he was on the verge of finishing the job for which he’d been put on earth.
