Havana

Chapter 30

"And another thing wrong with you," Papa said, "you're lazy. You're evilly lazy. You lie around all day dreaming. You are incapable of doing a man's work. Additionally, your bathing habits are the source of much laughter. I labored so hard for so long to produce this? What a sorry specimen you are. Are you a cabrone? You are not a homosexual, are you?"

"Papa," he said, "I am not a homosexual. I am a masculine man."

"You are not masculine at all. A masculine man is dynamic. He makes things happen by will and effort―"

"And by licking the boot of the North Americans of United Fruit."

"Yes, it's true, I worked for them, but only to acquire money to buy land and build this place and marry and bring all you worthless children into the world. And to borrow tractors from. Without their tractors, where would we be? Senor Jennings, he smiled when the tractors disappeared and he never took them back until the plowing was done."

"The generosity of the Americans is wonderful. They come to our island and steal and degrade us and you are grateful they let you borrow a tractor now and then!"

"Bah! A man knows gratitude. He feels it. He is not ignorant and petty and selfish and vain. You are all of them. I should have worked you harder. That was my mistake, to my shame. You never had chores. I should have worked you like a dog and made you into a man. Instead, you are womanly."

"I am not womanly. I am between opportunities, but I swear to you, I am a man of destiny."

The house was large but crude. It was full of dogs and guns and cats and chickens and dirty boots and crumpled clothes and books and blankets and horse tack. It was really a barn with rooms and beds, and it suited Angel the father perfectly, for it is exactly what he'd wanted to build in the world, from the raw jungle, and he had done so. Animals more or less roamed through it, and its shabbiness was worn proudly, as if to say, true people of the earth live here. Savagery was everywhere; even his wife wore a gun and when she called the younger children to dinner, it was with a gunshot.

Outside, not everywhere but in a certain direction, the jungle loomed, and beyond the jungle the peaks of the Sierra Maestra penetrated the clouds, remote and forbidden. You could hide an army up there and no one could get you out.

"What did you do today?" Papa demanded. Papa loved to fight. It was his amusement. He worked, he fought, he made children and then ignored them. That was his way.

"Papa, I told you, it's a vacation. I relaxed."

"You could have helped the boys weed around the cane."

"I am a lawyer and a thinker. I am not a sugarcane worker."

"Your mother says you swam in the morning and played beisbol in the afternoon."

"I am a superb baseball player. Why should I not do what pleases me? The children love me."

"You tell them lies, and you are always the hero in those tales but in no other."

"I will be the hero, father."

"Bah, heroes."

"Tomorrow I will fish and in the afternoon, I will borrow a rifle and hunt. Tomas tells me there are boar by the Sierra de Mayari."

"Meanwhile, I worry about the price of sugar and the campesinos and the health of their families and whether or not the generator will last another year and what to do if the price of fuel goes up and the North Americans develop a cheaper chemical sugar, and all you do is sleep and hunt and drink! God himself would be ashamed of such a son."

The old man spat into the fireplace, but missed.

He fished, he hunted. He caught sixteen sea bass with the old campesino Jose, who'd been there so long he claimed to have witnessed the Americans running off of San Juan Hill and used to amuse the kids with those stories when they'd been young. In the afternoon, he hunted, and the dogs drove a boar into a bog and he shot it with an old cowboy rifle. It squawked and shivered and shat while it died, but die it did, and rather swiftly too, for the young man did most things with casual elegant precision, and shooting was but one of them.

The boar butchered by he himself: knifing and peeling, and reaching into the bloated guts and pulling them out with his fingers so they oozed with shit and food and blood and filled his fingernails as he yanked. The gutpile abandoned for others in the jungle, he brought the hollowed thing home slung over his shoulder, like a cape that oozed blood down his body. He was a magnificent red god, man as savage, gone to jungle, killed in jungle, and returned with meat. His papa did not look twice at him as he trudged with the animal's carcass into the farmyard. But that meat fed the family one night and the fish another, not that there was any shortage in the larder, because Angel Ruiz Castro was a man of importance and substance, even if he browbeat anyone who came within his range, unless they were North American.

And then the boy took a trip. His destination was Cueto, the railroad town that ran up to Antilla and was larger than the muddy shanties of Biran. He knew a certain lady in this town. If she was not there, he would visit her sister. It wasn't that he wanted to do this thing, it was that he had to. A man has certain needs and they can't be satisfied always in matrimony. What is a man to do when he is far from his home and waiting for the clarification to set in?

She was not there; nor was her sister. But a neighbor was. He was big and handsome with that Spanish nose and those imperial ways that all commented upon. He moved gracefully, and had once been elected the greatest high school athlete in Cuba. Had not a war and then a political awakening occurred, he might have been a great beisbol player. He could use the money to finance a fight against the North Americans who paid him; what a wonderful idea!

Anyhow, this lady's husband was away in Santiago for his American-owned company, Dumois-Nipe, a subsidiary of United Fruit, and so the young man's dalliance had a double-meaning: he was screwing her and he was therefore screwing Dumois-Nipe. In bed, he was magnificent, a tiger, an athlete again, and the sheets grew heavy with the sweat of his labor and the woman sang, and the birds fluttered and the clouds parted. Like a matador, he worked her slowly, turning her this way, then that, encouraging her, partaking in her power, until the two were joined in a dance that was both spectacular and tragic. He rammed in for the kill.

"Oh," she said afterwards, "I had forgotten what a young man can do. You look so tender with those warm eyes and that soulful smile, and yet you are so strong. What a man you are!"

He sat back, lit a cigar and loved the wonderful warm wash of afternoon light, the smell of sex and sweat and cigars, the nearness of the jungle with all its savagery, the farness of the Sierras, cool and remote and vast and beckoning, as if they knew secrets.

"Will I see you again?"

"Of course. But only for a while. Soon I must go back to Havana where a destiny awaits me."

"I assume you will marry a rich girl and join the country club and learn to play golf and drink with the Americans."

"That is where you are wrong. I will take the rich girl's money and give it to many poor girls, I will turn all the golf courses into agricultural collectives and I will frighten the Americans back to America."

"Don't let them hear you talk like that, my hero. They don't like it, and they have their ways."

"I have my ways, too," he promised.

And that is how he waited for his clarification. He played the beisbol with the youngsters in the morning and fished or hunted in the afternoon. Then he wandered to Cueto and had a coffee and read the Havana papers. The furor over the violence of El Colorado and the swiftness of the justice had worn down somewhat, he determined, and he wondered how soon he could head back, with his many new ideas. He was ready for action.

Then, being ready for action, he went and found that action at the Senora Fugolensia's, and a good time was had by all. If the neighbors knew, they never told, for that is not the Cuban way. And if Senor Fugolensia, the assistant district manager for Dumois-Nipe, ever found out, there was no drama, no gossip, no fury. Everything was pleasant and relaxed, because everyone understood how it was in these matters. So the young man had a wonderful time, really, growing fat and sleek and lazy, until Havana seemed just a bad dream. He knew he would go back but, well…maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not until next week or the next, and when it came to pass that he was discovered, the agent of his betrayal was not a spy or a snitch or a traitor or an American gofer, but simple chance. One day the next week, Captain Latavistada and Frankie Carbine happened to be driving through Cueto, as they had been driving through all the dusty towns around Mayari, including Guaro and Alto Cedro and Felton and Antillas, and it was Frankie who happened to be looking a certain direction. He saw the young man sitting in a cafe.

They followed him.

Who could have predicted it? And the young man was laughing and tickling his older lady and wondering also when all this would be finished, and he didn't even notice the captain getting the Mendoza 7mm light machine gun out of the trunk of his car, while Frankie checked the magazine in the Star machine pistol. The young man was too busy thinking of love and destiny.