Havana Noir

The dinner by Carolina García-Aguilera

Flores

1992

Señor Luis, I walked all over Havana, I promise, I went everywhere, all over — but nothing!” Eladio Martínez was close to tears as he stood wringing his hands on a rag of a handkerchief that was once beautiful, beautiful linen. “I couldn’t find any!”

Eladio reached out for the railing around the terrace, balanced himself, and then slowly raised his feet — first one, then the other. He wanted his employer to see that the soles of his shoes had eroded almost completely, so much so that the paper he’d lined them with was also worn through in places, and the balls and heels of his feet were walking directly on the ground.

“Just like the other times, Señor Luis, nothing!”

“Thank you, Eladio, I know you tried your best — it’s not your fault. As always, I appreciate all your work.” Luis Rodríguez-López looked down at the shoes and shook his head in sorrow. Lifting his head then, as if it were heavy, he gave Eladio a wan smile. “I’m so sorry about your shoes. I’ll see what can be done; maybe get you a new pair to replace those.”

Even if Luis had been able to afford to purchase a new pair of shoes, it would be highly unlikely he would find them, as footwear was either in very short supply or priced out of reach in present day Cuba. Life in the Special Period was brutal, a never-ending struggle for survival. Both men knew that Eladio’s loss in trying to accomplish what Luis had asked of him was permanent.

Eladio raised his right hand, and then slowly, as discreetly as possible, dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief. Even in such extreme heat, gentlemen did not show sweat. But in the steaming air — and wiping with a bit of fabric worn to a fragile lace — fresh sweat continued to pour down his face.

“I would appreciate that, Señor Luis,” Eladio replied, though he knew there was no chance that the señor would be able to fulfill his promise. “New shoes would be nice.” They had both been living such a duplicitous life, pretending all was as before for so long.

Luis nodded. “You look so very hot and tired. Please, go inside the house and drink some water, and rest.”

“Thank you, Señor Luis, I will.” Eladio bowed — the habit was ingrained. “Before I go inside, is there anything I may do for you?”

“No, Eladio, I don’t need anything right now, thank you very much. I think I’ll stay out here a bit longer myself. But you go now, before the heat and your exertion make you ill.”

Eladio had worked for the Rodríguez-López family for more than forty years, but the relationship between the two old men was more like friends, especially as he had not been paid for the last thirty years. Still, a sense of rank remained, and manifested itself in their formality with each other.

At this point in their lives — they were both seventy years old, their sunset years — Eladio and Luis were so similar in appearance that one could easily have been mistaken for the other. They had both once been over six feet tall but they had each lost a few inches with age. And, as was the case with most ordinary Cubans — because they never had enough to eat — they were both quite thin, and their clothes hung loose on their slight frames.

Ever since 1959, when Fidel Castro’s revolutionary army swept into Havana, life in Cuba had been difficult for both of them. For the past three years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, life had become almost unbearable. The Soviet government had kept Cuba afloat with fuel, food, and supplies for decades; its demise left the people of the island to cope as best they could. Power shortages and blackouts occurred daily, worsening the situation. The Cuban government was no longer able to feed its citizens — the most basic needs were unmet — and as a result, Cubans had to fend for themselves and scrounge for food.

Castro tried to rally his compatriots by proclaiming, “Socialism or death!” but both were a hard sell. Rather than choose Socialism, a number of Cubans had hurled themselves onto rafts and taken their chances on the high seas, risking drowning or sharks, rather than continuing to struggle at near-starvation.

But Luis and Eladio had managed to escape some of the ravages of time and privation, though: The eyes of both men still sparkled with intelligence.

On this exceptionally hot July afternoon in 1992, Luis had spent most of the afternoon outside, sitting in his favorite wicker rocking chair on the terrace of his family’s house, fanning himself, trying to escape the oppressive heat. For the past three hours he had been awaiting Eladio’s arrival, wanting to hear his report. He knew what the other man was going to tell him, but the truth was he had nothing else to do.

The Rodríguez-López house, which was located in the Flores section of the city, had once been beautiful and majestic. Unfortunately, it had fallen into such disrepair that it was difficult to imagine what it had once been. To those few individuals who still visited, the sad state of the house and its grounds brought to mind an aging but still beautiful woman: She had good bones and erect carriage, and one wanted desperately to do something, anything, to help her regain at least part of her once famous beauty. Whatever paint was still on the walls was so faded that it was impossible to tell what its original color had been. The deadly combination of neglect, mold, and mildew had caused chunks of plaster to fall from the walls and ceilings with terrible consequences. The few treasures — items of only personal value, mainly Luis’s photo album — were kept wrapped in layers of old newspaper. Even in such dismal circumstances, there was the hope that the house wasn’t too far gone to be restored to her former life.

Although Eladio dusted and swept several times daily, his efforts made no noticeable difference, as there was always a white layer of fine dust everywhere. He kept on, with as much fresh energy and vigor as his seventy-year-old body would allow.

With the passing years, the physical deterioration of the house was such that gaping holes would appear all over, creating bizarre, puzzling patterns in the walls and the floors, as if whoever had built it had run out of materials to finish the job. There was nothing Eladio could do about that either, except to watch it happen.

And it wasn’t just internal damage that had caused so much destruction. In earlier times, only hard, sustained rains could cause the ceiling to leak; but because the structure had been so weakened, lately even the lightest rain would cause damage, adding to the slow wrecking of the structure.

The large garden surrounding the house was now a clutter of broken fountains, toppled stone statues, overgrown bushes, and fallen trees sunk in the tangle of weeds. Throughout the years, so much debris had dropped into the swimming pool, filling it to the rim, that sometimes the residents of the home forgot it had ever existed. For them, the state of the house and garden was heartbreaking, and it was difficult to believe that the property had been featured in magazines as being one of the most beautiful of pre-revolutionary Havana.

Although the house was very large, only three individuals — Luis Rodríguez-López, his wife María Eugenia, and Eladio Martínez, their servant — had lived there for more than forty years. It hadn’t always been that way, however. All three could still clearly recall the days prior to the Revolution, when the house had been filled with noises from the kitchen, with the clacking of ladies’ shoe heels against the marble floors — the times when it had not been unusual to have thirty or forty family members come over for Sunday lunch, after the noon mass at Santa Rita. The house, built in the Napoleonic style, had been in the Rodríguez-López family for more than one hundred years, and if the current owner had his way, would continue to be so for the next hundred.

The fact that Luis believed so strongly that the house should remain in his family was the primary reason he had refused to go into exile with his family when they had all left Cuba in the early ’60s. For him, the house was much more than just a structure; it represented a way of life that he refused to let go of — for Luis, to leave the home would mean forfeiting his family’s history.

As the Castro government would immediately confiscate — without any form of compensation, of course — the homes of any Cubans who fled the country, Luis knew the only way to keep the house in Rodríguez-López hands was to stay and protect it. Even so, remaining in the home was no surefire guarantee that the three of them wouldn’t be evicted, or be forced to open the house for others to move in with them. He’d heard stories of that happening to other families, and each case had made him more determined than ever to avoid those scenarios.

Staying was better, Luis believed, than just walking out. As if losing their properties were not enough, those owners who left Cuba were forced by law to hand over the keys to the government upon their departure. Fearing that one day he would need the knowledge, Luis had become increasingly obsessed with the laws that governed all aspects of Cuban property rights under the Castro regime. Since he, María Eugenia, and even Eladio lived in the house for more than three years, supposedly they could not be evicted. Eladio, by virtue of having lived there so long, had the same rights (in other countries, those were referred to as squatters’ rights) as the actual owners of the property. In truth, as long as the three continued living there, they could feel reasonably secure — or as secure as anyone could be under the present regime — that they wouldn’t find themselves out on the street, homeless, especially since they were all over sixty-five years old, the cutoff age for eviction. Yet knowing how mercurial and arbitrary the Cuban government could be, Luis worried nonetheless.

He knew he could make some extra money by renting out some of the bedrooms — an illegal but commonly practiced activity of the cash-strapped residents of Havana, especially those who lived in or near tourist areas. Luis feared, however, that this might jeopardize his ownership of the home. Suppose whoever he rented to would not move out after three years and became another owner? Also, the idea of strangers living in a house that had been the home of eight generations of the Rodríguez-López family was truly distasteful to him. Special Period or not, he knew his ancestors would turn in their graves if he were to do that.

María Eugenia hadn’t originally been as attached to the house as her husband. It hadn’t been her family’s home, and she had only lived there, in the old times, for a few months as a bride. Still, she had married Luis for life, and if “life” meant staying in Communist Cuba with him and saying goodbye to her family and friends, then that’s what she would do. She knew that nowadays her husband mostly lived in the past — even while looking forward to the future, for the day when the nightmare that was Castro’s Cuba and this wretched Special Period would end and a more civilized, refined life would return.

As the Rodríguez-López family had not been blessed with children, the couple was on their own, except for Eladio’s assistance. Eladio had never married — he had gone to work for the family as a young man, rising from junior assistant in the kitchen to chief butler, his position when Castro came into power — and so he too had no children, at least none that he was aware of. Like his employers, he was on his own.

Of course, all three had numerous friends and relatives, but most had long ago left and gone into exile in different countries. Visitors to the house were few. The only ones who still came around were Luis’s three oldest friends: Roberto Cruz, Ricardo Mendoza, and Eduardo Menocal, all of whom, for various reasons, had chosen to remain in Havana.

In pre-Castro Cuba, members of certain upper-class families had been friends for generations, and their offspring were expected to continue the tradition, even if they loathed each other. The difference in the case of Luis, Roberto, Ricardo, and Eduardo was that they genuinely liked each other.

From kindergarten through high school, they had been classmates at Belén, a Catholic school for boys in Havana — ironically, the same one Castro had attended. And because they had been outstanding students, they’d gone on to Ivy League universities in the United States: Luis and Eduardo to Harvard, Roberto to Yale, and Ricardo to Princeton. Since the colleges were all located in the northeast, relatively near New York City, it hadn’t been difficult for them to get together frequently. They were as close as brothers, and had been ushers at each other’s weddings and, on occasion, gone into business together.

They would often discuss their friendship while lounging on one of their boats, after having tossed aside their on-land seriousness and consumed many beers. They had decided somewhere along the way that the strong bond they enjoyed could be attributed to their mutual love of the ocean. As Cuba was surrounded by the beautiful waters of the Caribbean, it was not surprising that children — those of the upper class, at any rate — learned how to swim almost as soon as they began to walk. The four friends dabbled in almost every sport that related to the ocean, but their two favorites were fishing and crew.

This choice was no surprise to anyone who knew them, since they each had a strong competitive streak. The four of them rowed so well as a team that when they trained and entered competitions — even as schoolboys they crewed against grown men — they invariably won. The more they won, the more they enjoyed rowing. They tried to stay in the best shape possible, training after school and on weekends.

For practical reasons, they couldn’t keep up that schedule — though they wanted to — during the four years they were away at college, but they still fit in rowing during vacations. Being overly serious — apart from their water adventures — none of the four had much of a social life, so they used that free time to dedicate themselves as much as possible to the sport.

For members of the Havana Rowing Club, their sports club, there was no higher achievement than the coveted gold medal given to the team that won the regatta which, in the Olympic spirit, was held every four years. The friends knew that if they were to win the medal, they would be looked at differently: Instead of bookworms, they would be recognized as athletes, as jocks. Because they were as ambitious as they were talented, the friends set their sights on winning the race, which would be in August 1950.

It took a lot of early morning hours of rowing practice, but not only did they win the medal, they did it in a shell — a boat — they had built themselves. In the years prior to the race, they’d endured the comments of others who made fun of them and their boat. But confident that one day they would prove their detractors wrong, they persevered — and they were vindicated one cloudless morning when, at the age of twentythree, they were awarded the medal.

They won not only because they were superb athletes but because they had faith in each other, and in their boat. That day, in the summer of 1950, when they came in first, was, and remained, the most important day of their long lives. They would never admit it to anyone else, but having won that race meant more to them than anything else — wives, children, family, professional successes. It had been a perfect day in an increasingly imperfect world.

Whenever they’d gotten together in the forty-two years since the race, Ricardo, Roberto, Eduardo, and Luis would relive that one glorious morning when they had defled all odds and set out in La Milagrosa — the boat they had lovingly, patiently, and reverently built with their own hands — and passed the finish line far ahead of those who’d laughed. That day, they had celebrated their victory by throwing a huge party at the Rodríguez-López house, feasting on seafood heaped on enormous platters: lobster, shrimp, Moro crabs — all of which they had caught themselves the day before. For, in addition to being outstanding rowers, the friends were exceptional fishermen.

Through the years, as often as time permitted, they would meet — early on weekend mornings, just as dawn was breaking — at the marina where their boats were docked, and jump onto whichever vessel was next in their rotation, and motor out to different diving spots. They would drop anchor and jump off the boat, emerging only when they were holding a lobster, or a crab, or a net full of shrimp.

Sometimes they wouldn’t wait to get back to land to eat their catch — usually the hapless lobsters were first choice. They would break out the bottles of rum, and then, properly lubricated, they would drop the live creatures into a big pot of boiling water they had prepared earlier. After eating the fresh lobster meat out on the rolling sea, they would return to Havana by 11 o’clock in the morning — happy, laughing, sunburned, and slightly drunk.

The race, with the celebratory meal that had followed it, was the one memory that had allowed them to survive all that they’d had to for the past half-century. The friends considered that day to be such an important milestone in their lives that each year for the forty-two years since they’d commemorated the occasion — come hell or high water — by getting together and eating the same exact meal: lobster, shrimp, and crabs. Afterwards, they would take out the album in which they’d chronicled their adventures, and look again and again at the photographs.

As time passed, and life in Cuba became ever so much more difficult, those once-a-year gatherings became the centerpiece of their lives. Their importance could never be overstated — in the hardest times, it gave them each a reason for living.

The items chosen for the menu now were the same they had always fished for in pre-Castro Cuba. That had been a happy time, a carefree time, a time of plenty, when the waters around their beloved island had not been overfished to produce a bounty — denied to its citizens — reserved for tourists. Eating the seafood was a luxury that transported them back to that time when they’d actually looked forward to a future. Castro may have taken everything else away from them, but he could not take away the memory of that glorious day.

At their yearly dinner, the old friends would take out their identical sets of photos — which Luis’s mother had given them — and examine each one, discussing the circumstances under which it had been taken, recalling every detail as clear as if it had just happened. Years ago they would disagree about some of the details, but they had long since arrived at a composite memory that satisfied them well. Instead of being four old men sitting in the dark in a decayed house crumbling around them, their too-loose clothing hanging on their skinny frames, they were the triumphant young men in the pictures, holding a trophy high over their heads, their boat clearly visible in the background.

As the years passed and their situation became worse — their health was deteriorating, food was scarce — putting on such a dinner became more and more difficult, not just physically, but emotionally as well. Although the subject was not discussed, it was apparent that soon not all of them would be around for the following year’s meal. As each get-together might be the last one for any of the four, the dinner took on even greater significance.

One of the only legal means of acquiring food under the system instituted in 1962 was through government-issued ration cards. But acquiring seafood — absent on the ration card — was close to impossible. With the celebration held annually, each man’s time to serve the meal came around every four years. For the host, making sure the dinner was as perfect as conditions would allow took on an almost supernatural charge: the sense that their future, the future of their families and their homes, was at stake.

For each one of them, bringing the meal to the table was what pride and manhood required. How else could they tolerate their situations and live with themselves?

The year before, when it was Ricardo’s turn, he had served white flakes of meat picked from the poorest sort of fish scraps, with barely a bite of lobster. The quantity was so meager that there had only been a few spoonfuls of food on each plate. His guests, of course, had left bits of food on their plates — even though they had been close to famished — insisting they were so full that they could not possibly eat another bite. The Special Period was consuming them slowly, and not just physically.

Since women were not allowed at the dinners, María Eugenia had to rely on Luis’s descriptions of what transpired on those special nights. For the first few dinners, the ones that took place in pre-Castro Cuba, the wives were miffed — after all, they were friends as well — but as the years passed and the items for the meal became scarcer and scarcer, they recognized it was best for all concerned that they not insist. And it wasn’t just the difficulty of acquiring food that stopped their asking; it was also sad to see their husbands drunk, reliving their glorious youth while looking at photos of themselves when they were handsome and vigorous. The women, sometimes more practical than their husbands, preferred to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on themselves — and that was a luxury they did not often have.

After the dinner the previous year at Ricardo’s house — as always, on August 10, the anniversary of the race — Luis told his wife that the host said he’d had trouble assembling all the seafood for the meal: Hell, for the first time in forty years there’d been just one tiny lobster served. María Eugenia became alarmed and made a few discreet inquiries as to what, exactly, Ricardo had had to do to acquire even the meager meal he’d served his friends. She was told that Ricardo had been forced to sell his beloved portrait of the great Cuban patriot, José Martí — a painting that had been in his family for generations — to get the money for the meal. This news had so upset her that she locked herself in her room and cried copiously, an indulgence she thought she had given up years ago. If María Eugenia had ever needed proof of how much the dinners meant to her husband and his friends, this sad event provided it.

This year it was Luis’s turn to host the meal. For months, he had agonized about how and where he was going to find the seafood. Time was running out. With one week remaining before the dinner, the only item that Luis had been able to procure was rice. He wasn’t too worried about the eggs for the flan, as he had a neighbor who raised hens and sold eggs on the black market, so he could probably buy some from her.

As a longtime veteran of the ration system, Luis hadn’t been surprised that neither he nor María Eugenia nor Eladio had been successful in finding the other necessary items — scarcity was the norm and not the exception in the Special Period.

He had once heard that an American economist calculated that a ration book’s monthly allotment would last — that is, if all of the items were available, an event that was a rarity — between a week and ten days. This same economist had compared a citizen of Havana’s pre — Special Period monthly beef allotment, a half pound of meat, to a McDonald’s Big Mac. Now, three years after the Special Period had begun, even that meager amount seemed an overabundance. Few in Havana had tasted meat in three years — at least not from the ration book.

When the Rodríguez-López family had needed anything, they would sell some of their belongings: jewelry, furniture silver, clothes, etc. After forty years of doing that, they were out of things to sell, and had so few possessions left that they often worried how they could live out their lives.

Their old friends who were parents — those few who had chosen to stay in Cuba — were better off, as they had children who looked out for them. The fortunate ones were those who had sons and daughters outside Cuba to send them money — cash — which made all the difference. Roberto, Ricardo, and Eduardo were among these fortunate few, which was why — although they’d had difficulty giving the yearly party — they were still able to procure through the black market enough to make a minimal meal. But now, even they had trouble paying for seafood, as it was nearly impossible to find — and the fines for getting it illegally were exorbitant.

Luis had too much pride to let his friends know of his difficulty. Four years earlier, when it had been his turn to host, he’d been forced to sell his gold wedding ring — the last of his jewelry. The Patek Philippe watch that had belonged to his grandfather had been sold years before that. María Eugenia still had her wedding ring, but they had vowed that would only be sold if they were truly starving.

As the months passed and the date for the dinner approached, Luis supposed that he could either serve a different main course or cancel the dinner altogether. But being able to serve his lifelong friends the exact same meal they had been eating for the past forty-two years had become as important to him as breathing. And he did not want to be like Ricardo, who didn’t have enough food for his guests. It was all or nothing for Luis.

María Eugenia and Eladio watched helplessly as Luis descended into a deep depression. Nothing they said or did could pull him out of it. The situation had become so dire that now even María Eugenia, who seldom left the house, had ventured out and visited a couple of long lost friends and acquaintances to see if they might know of any source of seafood, even remnants of the cheapest of bottom fish. No one knew where to look, which couldn’t have been surprising to her, as everyone was in the same situation.

María Eugenia still had her gold wedding ring, but because of the pact that she and Luis had made, she could not sell it (though being a realist, she knew that day was not far off). Although it would have saddened her to part with it — she had sold her diamond engagement ring years before — she was so worried about Luis that she would have sold the gold band in a heartbeat. As the time for the dinner grew closer, María Eugenia repeatedly offered to do exactly that, but Luis would not even contemplate it. For him, selling the ring would be admitting there was no hope left, none at all. Castro would have essentially stolen the symbol of his marriage, and this was unacceptable to him.

Eladio scrambled to see what he could do to help his employer, and he too came up empty. Unlike the couple, he had no valuables to sell, but throughout the years he had made a bit of extra money here and there by working at odd jobs — running errands, fixing appliances, repairing old machines, so he had been able to contribute a small amount of cash to his keep. But now, because not even his considerable skills and ingenuity could keep forty-year-old machines running, even that little money had dried up.

However gifted a mechanic and handyman, his real skill was making a palatable meal out of the scarce and low-quality government-issue foodstuff available. With herbs he grew in the garden he lovingly cultivated in the rear of the Rodríguez-López property, he was somehow able to turn even the tasteless three-quarters of a pound of soy blend that was each individual’s monthly allotment into a succulent roast.

Although he had never received any formal training as a chef, he instinctively knew how to bring out the best in everything he was given to work with. Over the years, he’d developed such confidence in his abilities that he was able to successfully transform certain foods — items that conjured up repellent images in most people’s minds (chicken feet, fish cheeks, etc.) — into meals that people would not only eat, but which actually tasted delicious. Sadly, in spite of all his abilities, Eladio was not able to come up with the most important ingredient: seafood for the dinner.

In spite of not having received a salary in more than three decades of working full-time as butler, maid, handyman, and family cook, Eladio considered himself fortunate to have a roof over his head. He knew that he was considered a member of the family, so his fate was their fate.

And although life had been difficult for all three, by combining their resources they had managed. They had never really undergone the worst privations of the Special Period. Until now, that is — since this dinner was upsetting a very fragile equilibrium, bringing Luis close to a physical and mental breakdown.

The important day was now less than forty-eight hours away, and what should have been a happy occasion had turned into a dreaded event. It was obvious to María Eugenia and Eladio that Luis had totally forgotten the original reason for the dinner, and was instead fixated on what food he was going to serve his guests.

Early that morning, after eating what passed for breakfast — at this point, not even Eladio’s culinary inventions could hide the fact that they were always hungry — Luis told Eladio that he wanted to speak with him privately, away from María Eugenia’s hearing. They decided the best place for such a conversation would be at the back of the property, near Eladio’s herb garden. María Eugenia would not question them going there. It was part of their daily ritual.

As he followed Luis, Eladio was taken aback at how thin and fragile-looking his employer had become. How was it that he hadn’t noticed the change in Luis’s appearance earlier? Had it occurred so slowly that it was difficult to see, or had it come over him quickly as a result of his preoccupation with the dinner? Eladio, saddened by what he was seeing, could not tell.

Making their way across the property was difficult, as Eladio had not had the strength lately to tend the grounds. After long minutes of carefully stepping in the overgrown tangle that was once flowers and shrubs, they reached the area beside the herb garden. Luis immediately headed for the wrought iron bench and sat down.

Luis was flushed, Eladio noticed, and breathing hard from all the exertion. Alarmed and not quite knowing what to do, Eladio stood a respectful distance from Luis while he waited for his employer’s command — much as he would have done in pre-Castro Cuba. Although he did not look directly at Luis — his eyes were pointed at the ground — he still had enough peripheral vision to see Luis reach into his sweat-soaked shirt, presumably to take out one of the few handkerchiefs he had left to mop the sweat from his face. But much to Eladio’s surprise, Luis instead took out three photographs. Luis slowly studied each of the them, smiling at the images of himself and his three friends, laughing, sunburned, drunk, sitting on the stern of one of their fishing boats, eating from the enormous platter of seafood in front of them.

“Eladio, how long have you been with our family?” Luis asked abruptly, peering up. “Around forty years by my calculations, right?”

“Forty-one, Señor Luis. Forty-one last March,” Eladio replied, a bit warily. As far back as he could remember, neither Señor Luis nor Señora María Eugenia had ever brought up the length of his employment. A terrible thought occurred to him. Was he about to get fired? Where would he go? What would he do? Now it was Eladio’s turn to begin to breathe hard.

“Yes, I’m sure you’re correct.” Luis leaned back, resting his body against the bench, and closed his eyes. He sat motionless for so long that Eladio began to think he had fallen asleep. Suddenly, he opened his eyes and sat up. “Eladio, I’ve lived a long, long life — some of it good, some of it not so good. Now I’m close to the end of it.”

“Oh no, Señor Luis, don’t talk like that!” Eladio had never before heard his employer discuss his mortality. “You have many, many more happy years ahead with Señora María Eugenia. Things will get better, señor, they will improve. This Special Period is only temporary.”

“Well, I’m not so sure about that, Eladio, that’s why I asked you to come out here, to have this talk with me.” Luis turned to look at him with a stern expression on his face. “I need your help with something — it’s a big favor.”

“Of course, Señor Luis, ask anything you want of me. As always, I am at your service.” Eladio struggled to speak in a normal tone of voice.

Luis waited for a few moments before speaking again. “You know how important the dinner — the dinner with my friends — is to me.” Eladio nodded. “Well, this favor I am going to ask of you has to do with that.”

During those years, Eladio had come to both love and hate the dinners. He loved them because they gave Luis something to look forward to. For weeks before the event, Señor Luis would discuss with great animation how wonderful it was that he would be getting together with his oldest and best friends, what a blessing it was that, although they were old, they were in reasonably good health and could still recall “the good old days” when they were young and had their lives ahead of them.

For weeks before that night, Eladio would watch as his employer took out the photo albums and pored over the pictures, searching each one for details he especially cherished — an expression in the eyes of Ricardo, the way the salt spray made Roberto’s hair coarse like a scrub brush. He studied them as a detective might examine a crime scene. Luis would always dwell longest on the same three photographs, the ones of him and his friends on his fishing boat, eating the seafood they had caught.

Eladio hated the dinner for the exact opposite reason that he loved them: the get-together with the childhood friends would remind Luis of the sadness, the hollowness, the despair of the lives they had led for the past forty years. The photographs were taken when Luis and his friends were in their early twenties, at the beginning of their lives. It was when looking at the photos in the season of each year’s dinner that Luis felt it most strongly: that all hope was gone, and suffering and indignities, hunger and old age were the only things ahead of them. None of their ambitions had been realized, and none were going to be. Their lives had been wasted. Now all they had to look forward to was more suffering.

This dinner was so much more than just a meal. Eladio was willing to do just about anything to make it as successful as it could be.

“Señor Luis, I am happy to go back out again to try to find the seafood.” Relieved to hear that the request from Señor Luis was nothing more serious than that, Eladio spoke quickly.

“No, Eladio, I’m not asking you to go look for any more lobster, crab, or shrimp. You’ve looked, María Eugenia has looked, I’ve looked.” Luis shook his head slowly. “There’s none to be found anywhere, we know that.” Luis stood up and took a few steps forward, until he was only a foot away from Eladio. “No, Eladio, the favor I am going to ask of you is much more serious, more important.” Luis put his hand on Eladio’s shoulder.

Eladio felt his body turn ice cold, and he began to shiver almost uncontrollably. Eladio could not recall a single time when his employer had touched him in all of their years together. “What is it, Señor Luis?”

“Eladio, I am going to ask that you do something for me that I have no right to ask of you, but I am going to ask it anyway, because I think you understand why I have no choice.” His grip on Eladio’s shoulder became so tight that it was starting to hurt. “If I cannot serve my guests a proper dinner, I cannot continue living. The shame will be such that my life will be over. For me, admitting that when it came to be my turn to host the dinner, I could not deliver what was expected of me — this is something I cannot contemplate. I can live with the humiliation of life as it is now — but shame is something I cannot accept, will never accept. I will not be the first one of my friends to fail to properly host the dinner when it was my turn. I cannot!” Luis took his eyes off Eladio and looked away into the distance. “The Rodríguez-López family is a proud one — 150 years ago, we fought for our freedom against the Spaniards, the bastards, and we paid dearly for that stand. So many young men died — but it was the only honorable choice we could make.”

Eladio, of course, had heard the stories for years. “Señor Luis, what is this big favor you want to ask of me?” Even though he was fearful of the answer, he felt he had no choice but to ask.

“Eladio, as you know, I’ve been giving the situation a lot of thought, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve exhausted all my options. There is no seafood in all of Havana — in Cuba, for that matter — for my meal. And with the celebration only two days away, we’re unlikely to find any.”

Eladio shook his head. “Señor Luis, no, don’t give up, I can try again. We can all try — you, Señora María Eugenia, me.”

Luis smiled. “No, Eladio, you’re wrong. The only way I can get through this predicament — the only way I can free myself from my obligation — is by dying.”

“No, Señor Luis, no!” Eladio was horrifled. “No! What you serve at the dinner is not what matters. The important thing is that you get together with your friends. They want to be with you. You can serve something else, anything! They don’t care what they eat. Or cancel the meal.”

“You’re wrong again, Eladio,” Luis said. “This dinner is that important. It is the reminder of what I once was! Not to do it and do it well would negate everything that my life was. I can’t control the events around me, but this — this is the one thing I can control.” Luis took a deep breath and let go of Eladio’s shoulder. “No, Eladio, this dinner — doing it right — is more important than what remains of my life.”

“Señor Luis, please, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but you are not thinking clearly,” Eladio ventured. “The other señores, they will understand — everyone understands — life is so difficult now for everyone. Your friends, they just want to be with you.”

“That may be so, Eladio, but it’s not the way I think.” Luis spoke in a calm, measured voice. “I know what has to be done. The only way to resolve this situation with honor is for the dinner to be canceled because of my death.”

“Your death? No, there has to be another way.” Eladio was close to tears. “Señor Luis, with all respect, I don’t think you’re well. I’m going to fetch Señora María Eugenia.”

With unexpected strength, Luis grabbed Eladio and pulled him close. “No, you are not going to do that — she cannot be involved.”

“Señor Luis, please let me go and get the señora.” Now in tears, Eladio was pleading with his employer. “You are sick. She can help you.”

“Eladio, listen, you have to do this for me. I’ve watched you, I’ve seen how you’ve killed chickens, pigeons, that suckling pig we had for Christmas years ago. You twist their necks — you do it quickly and without the animals feeling pain. It’s fast and painless.”

“You want me to kill you? Señor Luis, are you crazy?” The two men stood by the wall in the garden facing each other for what seemed like hours. Each was desperate — Luis needed Eladio to follow his final orders, and Eladio, who for the last four-plus decades had always done as his employer asked, for the first time ever, would be defying him.

It was Luis who broke the silence. He knew his window of opportunity was closing fast, and he had to convince Eladio to do his bidding, otherwise his plan would not work. “Eladio, it’s the only way, trust me. I know that I am asking a lot of you — it’s not right, and it’s not fair. If there were another way, I would not ask this of you. But I’m seventy years old, I’ve lived a full life, and this is the way I want it to end — with honor, without shame, not a failure because I could not deliver the meal to my friends. But to do it, I need your help.”

“No, Señor Luis, I cannot do it.” Eladio looked down at the ground. “I understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t matter. I still cannot grant you your request. I cannot. It’s not right. No meal is worth your life.”

By then, it was close to midmorning and the August sun beat down on them, making the air sizzle with tropical heat. Luis decided that the only way to get Eladio to do as he asked was to act in an authoritative manner. Decades of following orders would take over, he was sure of that.

“This is what you are doing to do. Right now, right here, you are going to twist my neck — the way you do the animals. Quick and painless. I’ve already been to see Father Antonio, and I’ve confessed my sins to him and asked for his blessing. Of course, I didn’t tell him what I was going to do — he wouldn’t allow it. The Catholic Church condemns suicide — I couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground, which would kill the señora. So my confession omitted this one matter. Afterward, I stayed in the church and prayed for forgiveness, and prayed for you, what I’m asking you to do.”

Eladio stood speechless. All that was sinking into his brain was that he was supposed to kill Señor Luis — in this moment, to put his hands around that neck and head. It was too much for a simple man to understand.

Luis continued outlining his plan. “After you kill me, you will go to see the señora and tell her that we were out in the garden getting some herbs for the dinner, and that I collapsed, I fell down on the ground, but I did not want you to leave me to run to get help. I dropped dead — you think it’s a stroke; maybe the heat brought it on, maybe the stress about the dinner, but my last words were for her not to notify the authorities of my death, so they would not take the house or move strangers here to live with you. Everything has to stay the way it is, for the future, when, God hopes, this madness will stop. She knows how important this house is to me — so she’ll agree to that. Tell her also that I asked you to bury me in the back, by the wall, so that no one knows I’m gone.”

“Señor, no, please! Please, I beg you, don’t talk like that!” Eladio put his hands over his ears so he would not have to hear what Luis was saying. Luis, ignoring him, started laughing, not in his normal way, but manic laughter — the sound frightened Eladio even more.

“Listen to me, Eladio. So that all is not lost, you can use my body for fertilizer. You’re always looking for compost for your garden — at least I can help you out some.” Luis smiled at his own feeble joke. Then, seeing the stricken look on Eladio’s face, he shook his head slowly, raised his arms, and reached over, removing his employee’s hands from his ears. “Eladio, whether you help me or not, I will still take my life. I promise you that.” He took a step closer. “You know that we Cubans have the highest suicide rate in the Americas, don’t you?”

Eladio’s eyes grew so large that for a moment it looked like they might pop out of his face.

“Yes, well, that’s true,” Luis said, laughing bitterly, “it’s the one thing we can do correctly: kill ourselves. But you wouldn’t want to see me add to that statistic, would you, Eladio — make that number grow by one? You don’t want to see if I can kill myself correctly, do you? And if I botch it and end up with bigger problems than I have now?” Luis got a cunning look in his eyes, an expression that Eladio had seen on a couple of previous unpleasant occasions, which meant that his employer was going to use an argument he knew would win. “And after I kill myself, how would you explain a suicide to the señora? How do you think she would feel if she knew I killed myself?”

“No! No! Señor Luis!” Eladio was babbling in an almost incoherent manner. Sweat was pouring down him, dripping off his body in such copious amounts that soon he would be completely dehydrated.

Luis continued giving instructions, so that there would be no mistakes, no unforeseen eventualities. “Tell her I asked you to contact my friends to cancel the dinner — that’s important, you cannot forget that part.” Then Luis added, smiling, almost as an afterthought, “Tell the señora also that I love her — those were my last words.”

“Señor Luis, please, don’t make me do that, please.”

At this moment, Luis knew that Eladio would do as he asked. And Eladio knew Luis well enough to be certain that if he, Eladio, did not do as ordered, his employer would do as he threatened and find another way to end his life. But Señor Luis was clumsy with tools and his method wouldn’t be as quick or as painless as what Eladio could deliver.

With much reluctance, Eladio crossed himself several times and prepared himself to carry out his employer’s wishes. He kissed Señor Luis on both cheeks, then knelt on the ground, head bowed, and asked for Luis’s blessing.

At his advanced age, Luis Rodríguez-López was so frail and thin that twisting his neck was as easily and quickly accomplished as with the chickens, maybe even easier. Blinking back the tears that were flowing down his cheeks, Eladio looked at his employer lying at his feet and realized for the first time: He had really loved the man.

As Eladio stared at the body of the man who had meant so much to him, he could feel in his own heart the reason that Luis had asked him to end his life — not just because he could not serve his friends a proper meal, but because he had become tired of living. Luis had felt it was his time to leave this earth, and he had wanted to do it on his own terms. He needed to be able to control something, and the end of his life was the only thing left. And Eladio was the only person he trusted to do the job properly.

After taking the photographs from Luis’s hands, Eladio carefully laid the body down on the garden bench, arranging his employer’s features in such a way as to make him look as comfortable and peaceful as possible. He wanted María Eugenia to see her husband in the best way, so she would be assured he did not suffer in his last moments. He waited until he felt composed enough to get her and then, with one look back at Señor Luis, headed up to the house.

“Señora María Eugenia!” Eladio called out as he ran toward the house. “Señora María Eugenia!” No response. He called her name again. Now he was frightened, his heart beating so fast he thought it would explode inside his chest.

Eladio went into the main quarters of the house and looked everywhere, to no avail. The house was deserted. He went room to room again, this time searching more carefully. The only thing he noticed amiss was that the photo album was nowhere to be found. Had Luis taken it? He’d had only the three photographs with him in the garden. Where was the album?

Not knowing what to do, he went back outside to the terrace and sat in Luis’s rocking chair. He did it as a reflex, an impulse: It was suddenly the right thing, to take this seat. He remained where he sat, in the chair that belonged to Señor Luis, for the better part of the day, with terrible thoughts coursing through his brain about what he had just done, and fears of what horrible fate could have befallen María Eugenia. Making matters much worse was the fact that the day was exceptionally hot, and knowing how heat affected corpses, he kept having visions of what was happening to Luis’s body.

Rocking in the chair, he felt he was going mad from worry when, finally, he heard the familiar sound of the front gate. He jumped from the chair, ran over to the entrance of the house, and almost wept with joy when he saw María Eugenia slowly making her way up the path. He saw she was carrying the photo album.

“Eladio, hola!” María Eugenia cheerfully waved to him. “I’m home!”

It had been a long time since Eladio had seen María Eugenia in such good spirits. “Hola, señora,” Eladio replied. “I was worried about you, you left without letting us know you were going — you’ve been gone all day.” He knew it was not his place to scold his employer’s wife but he’d been so concerned about her that he was past caring about behaving in a proper way. This day had devastated him.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry, Eladio, but I had to run an errand. I needed to do something that I did not want Luis to know about, and I didn’t want to have to tell him a lie. So I slipped out of the house. I’m sure he’ll be happy when he sees what I’ve done.”

María Eugenia stepped closer to Eladio and took one of his hands in hers. She looked so happy, with her eyes sparkling and a huge smile on her face. “You know how worried Luis has been that he can’t find the seafood to serve his friends?” she whispered in his ear, as if telling him a secret, and waved the photo album.

Eladio thought he was going to pass out. It took all the self-control he could muster not to fall to the ground. How could he say to her that her husband was dead? Oh God! He wished it was him lying on the bench in the garden, not Señor Luis!

“Yes, Señora María Eugenia,” he replied. How was he going to tell her? He couldn’t bring out the words; this was worse than what he’d already done. It was starting to get dark and Señor Luis had been lying outside on the garden terrace for close to ten hours.

“Well, I wasn’t supposed to do it,” she said, “but knowing how important it was for Luis to make this dinner perfect, I sold my wedding ring! We were saving it for a time when we had nothing at all to eat. But I knew that this crisis was, for Luis, even worse than starvation. You want to know what I did with the money I got for the ring? It was worth more than I had thought — it was white gold, Eladio, not just regular gold. Luis never told me it was white gold!”

María Eugenia held out the photo album and began turning the pages. “You see, Eladio, I’ve been thinking about the dinner, and all that seafood — the lobsters, the crabs, the shrimp — and how there is nothing to be found in Havana.” She began to laugh triumphantly. It was so strange to hear the señora laugh that all Eladio could do was watch her helplessly. He should have told her immediately, the moment he saw her. It was a mistake to wait. “Well,” she said, “I thought and thought about where Luis was going to get the seafood for the dinner. He would never consider serving anything else, he’s stubborn, we both know that, no?” She leaned over to Eladio and — looking around, as if to make sure she was not being overheard — whispered, “You know Ricardo had to sell his family’s painting of José Martí to pay for last year’s dinner?”

“Yes, señora, I heard that,” Eladio muttered. “Very sad.”

“Well, we don’t have anything like that — only my ring — so I had an idea.” María Eugenia opened up the photo album and looked up at him. “You know, there are three pictures missing — maybe Luis took them — I have to ask him about that when I see him.”

Eladio jumped back as if the pictures he had slipped in his pocket earlier that day were burning a hole. “Yes, señora, I know those pictures,” he mumbled.

María Eugenia looked so happy, so pleased with herself, that now Eladio felt suicidal. For a fleeting moment he wondered if it was possible to wring his own neck.

“I decided,” she said, “that since Luis and his three friends were great fishermen, why couldn’t they fish for the seafood for the dinner themselves? I know it’s against the law for Cubans to fish for lobster, crab, and shrimp — but, Eladio, they know the waters around the coast of Havana like they know the backs of their hands. After all, that’s where they used to fish!

They would be too smart to get caught!” María Eugenia was so thrilled with her solution to the dilemma of what to serve for the dinner that she was beside herself with joy. “Don’t you see, Eladio? Fishing for the meal is the perfect answer! They would feel young, happy, and resourceful! They could drink the rum you make — just like in the photos!”

“But, Señora María Eugenia, what about your ring? You said you sold it for the dinner. I don’t understand.”

“Oh, Eladio, you’re right — I’m sorry — I forgot to tell you the most important thing!” María Eugenia seemed years younger as she almost sprinted away. “I sold the ring and bought a small boat with the money — I went to the pier by the old Yacht Club, you remember, where the señores used to row? Luis told me there were old boats for sale there. I traded the ring for one of the boats, not a very big or fancy one, but it won’t sink — I made sure of that. It needs some work, but it’ll do!” María Eugenia placed the photo album on a table and began to walk away, the smile on her face making her look like the young girl Luis had married forty years before. “It’s the Special Period, you know, Eladio, everyone wants and needs something — everything anyone has is for sale — so it wasn’t very difficult to buy. And now all our problems are solved! The dinner — with seafood — will take place... I’m going to find Luis and tell him not to worry anymore.” She turned to Eladio. “Where is he?”

He couldn’t answer. He only could shake his head as she walked past.

He didn’t follow. Instead, he took his seat again in Luis’s chair, knotting and unknotting his hands. She would find his body. It was better that way, because if he spoke, she would know he was lying.

But there was one more thing he would do for his employer of more than forty years. He would push out to sea in the little boat, dive for crab and lobsters, haul a net for shrimp until he had found all he needed and more. Then he would serve that dinner, and he would make it a feast. The three friends would eat his catch and drink his rum — they would drink and grieve — and they would toast the eternal honor of Señor Luis.

Johnny Ventura’s seventh try by Pablo Medina

Jaimanitas

On September 23, 1995, Johnny Ventura settled into the bow of the Ana María, a fifteen-foot launch he built expressly for the voyage, and took his last look at the city of Havana, illuminated dimly by the first rays of dawn. It was Johnny’s seventh attempt at crossing the Straits of Florida, and having consulted a babalao in Arroyo Arenas, he was certain that the Ana María would land him in La Yuma, if not in Miami, then somewhere along the Florida Keys, where he could claim his right to political asylum. He had spent six months in jail after his previous attempt when the raft he’d put together in the back room of his mother’s house had fallen apart in rough water three miles from shore and he and his two companions had been forced to swim back, landing on the Malecón just as a patrulla drove by. If he failed again, he was certain the authorities would make him rot in jail. That is why he had been extra careful, consulting the babalao (not that he believed in any of that Santería nonsense) and paying a hefty amount, in fulas, for a Russian outboard motor that sputtered and smoked the two times he started it but otherwise ran beautifully.

Despite the care he took in building the boat from plans left behind by his grandfather, Alepo Rodríguez, the great shark fisherman who had been swallowed by the waves off Jaimanitas in 1952, and despite the babalao’s blessing, Johnny had already acquired a reputation as a salao, a fellow forever mired in the salt of bad luck. Crossing the Florida Straits was serious business. If the storms and sharks didn’t get you, the Guarda Costas would and they’d put you in the same jail cell with a gang of pathological pederasts. The several friends he approached who were as desperate to leave the island as he refused to join him. The most circumspect simply kept the secret of Johnny’s voyage to themselves. At least two, however, spread the news around the neighborhood, and when Cacha Manguera, the head of the neighborhood Committee for Defense of the Revolution, heard that El Salao was at it again, she gave a big, raucous laugh and didn’t bother reporting Johnny to the higher-ups or paying a visit to his mother to ask the usual impertinent questions. Only Obdulio Martínez, the dim-witted son of a garbage collector who lived down the street, agreed to accompany him.

Johnny ignored the neighbors’ comments, the sly halfsmiles as he walked by, the occasional shout, “Bacalao Salao,” coming from one of the balconies overhead, and went about his business with the aplomb of a seasoned old sailor. Mornings he waited in the rationing line to get whatever food he and his mother were entitled to — split peas one day, dried mackerel the next. On a good day they might have some eggs, cheese, or a half pound of rice. Afternoons he’d go to his aunt’s house in Lawton to meet up with the pork man. Black market vendors required dollars, however, and if he didn’t have any, he’d simply head in the direction of the Malecón and walk along the seawall, looking at the ocean as it stretched all the way to the horizon and beyond where the Promised Land lay. Everyone was leaving the island. Why couldn’t he? He was home by 6 usually, when his mother served him rice and beans or, on bad days, which came all too often lately, watery split pea soup. After 8 o’clock, when his mother went to sleep, he’d leave the house again and walk through the streets of Havana, never taking the same route twice in a row, to the old garage where his Uncle Berto hid his 1956 Chrysler Imperial, waiting for the day when the nightmare of the Revolution was finally over and he could drive it proudly down the street like the old-fashioned capitalist he fancied himself to be. The garage was about thirty feet deep and the Chrysler was all the way in the rear, up on blocks and quietly rusting away. In the front, unbeknownst to anyone but Obdulio the dimwit, Johnny would work through the night building the Ana María, a boat so sturdy nothing but the most extreme act of God would sink it, and even then, Johnny would think while taking a cigarette break, the Old Man would have a real struggle on his hands.

And so, building the Ana María made Johnny a creature of the night. Often he could hear, or thought he could hear, a faint but comforting susurrus settling over the city after midnight. Off in the distance a dog barked or a radio played; outside the garage two lovers spoke.

“My love, did you bring the banana?”

“Yes, darling. It’s ready for you.”

Johnny listened to them while Obdulio slept in the backseat of the Chrysler and salivated, whether from lust or old hunger he didn’t know. All conversations in Cuba somehow devolved into matters of food.

“Give it to me, papi.”

Johnny dropped the hammer he was holding against a metal bucket and made a loud noise.

Obdulio woke with a start. “Qué pasó?” he said, sitting up and looking through the rear window.

“Nada. Go back to sleep,” Johnny answered, and kept on working until his eyes closed involuntarily and he dreamed of Miami Beach nightclubs and gorgeous tanned women with large, shapely breasts.

Johnny, it must be said, had a wife, but she was one of those women who consider sex an unpleasant marital duty to be performed twice monthly without abandon or fanfare, like getting an injection. In the three years they had been married, Johnny’s wife had grown dull and morose, feeling betrayed that Johnny had not made good on his promise to get her pregnant. She was subject to fits of resentment that took the form of burning Johnny’s coffee so that it became undrinkable, or salting his food to such a degree that he had to spit it out. When she finally went to live with her sister in Cotorro, Johnny was overjoyed. In fact, he celebrated that night by drinking a bottle of rum and running the Russian motor until it whined and rattled like it wanted to die.

“A Mayami me voy, a Mayami me voy,” Johnny chanted, dancing round Obdulio, who hooted and leaped like an African warrior about to wrestle a lion.

In six months the Ana María was finished and it was such an exemplary visage of a seagoing vessel that Johnny entertained the thought of selling her for a thousand dollars and staying in Havana until the son of a bitch Fidel died. With a thousand dollars he could fix up his uncle’s Chrysler. With a thousand dollars he could approach that girl with the long legs and jet-black hair who lived on the corner of Manrique and Lagunas streets and call up to her, “Come on, sugar, let’s take a drive around the city.” With a thousand dollars he’d be a big man in this godforsaken city.

But those thoughts stayed with him only two nights. By God, he said to himself on the third night, I’ll make it to La

Yuma or die. With a renewed sense of purpose he went off to Jaimanitas, a little fishing village in the outskirts of Havana, to observe what time the patrullas passed by; he did so for two weeks, hiding behind a stand of sea grape, swatting at mosquitoes, and recording the times in an old notebook.

Rather than tell his mother directly, he decided he would leave a letter for her stating that he was sorry but he had no option and reassuring her that he would send for her as soon as he was settled. She still loved El Comandante as she had loved Johnny’s father, who abused her and disappeared for weeks at a time, showing up to take her money and beat her up again. “Fidel is the most wonderful man in the world,” she would say, raising her eyes to the ceiling as people sometimes do when contemplating Jesus. After reading the letter, his mother would cry for a day, then go downstairs to gossip with the neighborhood ladies and forget about her son. At least this is what he told himself.

In preparation for the voyage he had been gathering provisions any way he could, buying some, borrowing others, and, when he had no choice, stealing the rest. In the forward compartment of the Ana María he stored ten liters of water, several bags of stale bread, a block of farmer’s cheese, and seven cans of Russian meat. Carefully balanced along the sides of the boat he placed a flashlight (stolen), two oars he had borrowed from his uncle, a fishing line with several hooks and sinkers that Obdulio’s father had given them, a knife that had seen better days (taken from his mother’s kitchen), a compass and an ancient sextant, both stolen from the Naval Museum in La Cabaña, and sixty liters of gasoline that had cost him several hundred dollars. Also on the boat, well hidden from view for now, was a small American flag he hoped to wave once he got within view of La Yuma. In a frivolous moment he decided to take the leather backseat of the Chrysler, cracked and brittle with age, and glue it down on the deck of the boat with marine epoxy so that Obdulio could sleep comfortably on the way across.

At midnight of the appointed day, Johnny and Obdulio waited for Obdulio’s father, Manolo, to arrive with the garbage truck he had commandeered to transport the Ana María to the little cove in Jaimanitas. At 12:30 Johnny grew worried; at 1 o’clock he was desperate. At 1:15 Obdulio’s father finally showed up, not in the twenty-five-footer with a canvas cover he had promised, but in a small Moscovitch pickup with a sixfoot bed. Johnny’s heart sank to a level it had never known before. He sat on the front fender of the Chrysler and felt tears welling in his eyes, but he contained them.

“Manolo,” Johnny said to Obdulio’s father, “how are we going to load a fifteen-foot boat on that cockroach?”

“Don’t worry, asere,” Obdulio’s father said. “We’ll do it. I brought enough rope so we can tie it securely on top. No problem.”

Obdulio’s father was determined to have his son in the United States so he could send remittances home.

“What are people going to think when they see a Moscovitch with a boat twice its size tied on top?”

“Nothing, asere,” said Manolo. “Because there isn’t anybody out at this time of night. You think this is Nueva York?”

“I thought you were going to bring a big truck,” Johnny said.

“Asere, what happened is somebody else took it for the night. But don’t worry so much. This is going to work, you’ll see.”

It took the three of them an hour to load and tie the Ana María onto the Moscovitch. Johnny thought for sure the shock absorbers would give way but he was wrong. The pickup merely lurched and groaned and finally settled nicely six inches from the ground. The Ana María lay upside down, its prow extending six feet beyond the cab and blocking all but a six-inch band of windshield. Manolo reassured Johnny that he could drive the streets of Havana with his eyes closed. Given that the government shut down the city’s electric power at night, that was pretty much what they’d have to do: drive in the dark with the headlights turned off.

“One pothole and there goes the front axle,” Johnny said.

Manolo once again tried to calm him, then reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out a bottle of chispa de tren that he passed to Johnny. Johnny took a swig and gave it back to Manolo.

“That’s for the trip,” Manolo said, pushing the bottle away. “Make sure you make an offering to Yemayá before you push off.”

They drove in silence and darkness without hitting a single pothole and reached the turnoff at 2:45 a.m., with plenty of time to ship out by 3:27, when Johnny had determined no patrullas passed by. As Manolo negotiated the sandy road that led to the cove, the Moscovitch waddled and almost tipped over a couple of times, then hit a rut where the wheels spun themselves into the sand and lost traction.

Manolo smacked the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. Johnny cursed God and all the angels, and both left the cab simultaneously, walking around the truck to gauge how deeply the tires were embedded in the sand. Manolo dug around the two front tires while Johnny stood by the passenger door and looked at Obdulio, who was sleeping soundly inside. What he wouldn’t give to sleep like that! He had already resigned himself to going back to the garage to wait for another day, when Manolo stood upright and proclaimed that they would have to take the boat off the Moscovitch. He would let some air out of the tires and that would do the trick. “Easy,” Manolo said. Easy, Johnny thought, momentarily feeling sorry for himself. Nothing had ever been easy for him.

Suddenly he sensed someone next to him, and when he looked to his right he saw a round bristly face peering up at him. Johnny’s blood turned cold, the back of his neck tensed up.

“Señor, what’s the problem?” The man was being overly formal given the circumstances.

“Nada,” answered Johnny, too nervous to say anything else.

The man looked at the truck’s wheels sunk halfway in the sand, then back up at Johnny.

“It looks like something to me.”

Manolo came over and asked the man what he was doing there at such an hour.

“The same thing you’re doing, trying to get off this shitty island.”

He led them on a path through a stand of sea grape to the water where a boat, or what passed for a boat, was waiting to shove off. The man called to two others who were helping some women and their children board, and between the five of them — Obdulio remained blissfully asleep — they were able to unload the Ana María and drag it across the sand to the water’s edge. The three men were impressed by Johnny’s launch and wanted to tie it to their ramshackle vessel, an old wooden boat with no motor but a sail made out of two bed sheets sewn together. Four empty oil barrels, fastened on either side, kept the boat from sinking. Johnny said no. “We have women and children with us,” one of them complained.

Johnny had heard of men fighting over provisions out in the open sea and pushing the weaker ones overboard. Besides, the Ana María could move faster without dragging the boat. He said that he and Obdulio were going it alone. One of the men made a threatening move in Johnny’s direction but Manolo intervened, thanking them for their help and offering the men four liters of water and a few cans of Russian meat for their efforts. Two of the men finally went back to their boat. The guy who had first approached them remained behind.

“Who do you think you are?” he said to Johnny. “This is a Socialist country.”

Johnny waited until the other vessel was well out to sea and out of his sight before pushing the Ana María into the water. She bobbed a few times; then her prow settled squarely against the waves. She was a good boat, he thought with no small amount of pride. After feeling the bottom with his hands to check for leaks and finding it dry as bone, he helped Obdulio on board.

Johnny shoved off and took their leave of Manolo, who stood on the sand with his shoulders hunched and his large hands dangling helplessly at his sides. Johnny heard him crying and assured him that his son would soon be sending a thousand dollars home every month. Manolo’s weeping grew more pronounced, then stopped altogether. Obdulio waved at the darkness and sat on the leather car seat, giddy with anticipation.

Once the Ana María was in deep enough, Johnny lowered the Russian outboard into the water, opened the throttle, and gave a pull on the starter rope. The motor sputtered and died. Johnny yanked several times, each time harder than the last, until he was out of breath. Stupid Russians! They can’t even build a good motor. No wonder the Soviet Union fell apart. Then he heard a dim voice through the gloom, “Ta hogao. It’s flooded. Let it rest.”

At first he thought it was Manolo; then he realized it was Obdulio’s voice, which was like his father’s but younger and rougher. Johnny found the bottle of chispa de tren wedged under the seat and spilled some on the water as an offering, then took a drink. He offered the bottle to Obdulio, who refused, saying, “Eso eh’ el diablo.” Now he sounded less like his father and more like Bola de Nieve, the singer.

After listening to the water lap the sides of the boat for what seemed an eternity, Johnny tried again. The motor coughed and started, releasing a burst of burnt oil smoke that smelled like the perfume of his dreams.

“Hold on, Obdulio,” he said, and revved the engine as high as it would go. The Ana María lurched, gained speed, and was soon skimming the flat sea like a flying fish.

It was about two miles out that Johnny turned and looked back at Havana. From this distance the city was nestled in a soft gray light that made it float over the sea, over the land, over all material things. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. Havana was the world to him, heaven and hell and purgatory combined, and he understood that he was leaving his world behind for good; yet even as he was reaching this realization, he started turning the boat around until it was pointing back to shore. Obdulio sat calmly at first, like a prince enjoying a ride on his private launch, but slowly became aware of what Johnny was doing.

“No, no,” he said. “Coño, no!”

Johnny woke from his reverie and headed back north. When he reached the approximate spot of the first turning, he remembered his mother whom he had abandoned. This time he slowed the boat down and made a broader arc, and when the city came into view, Obdulio said, “I want to go to La Yuma.” His childish voice cracked with plaintiveness. Johnny kept turning until the boat completed a full circle. This time he thought of the girl on the balcony with the pearly skin and beautiful black hair. How could he abandon those delights? Now Obdulio was screaming and it sounded to Johnny like a high-speed circular saw cutting through a dry log. He turned again.

The Ana María circled seven times. Every time Johnny thought of someone or something he was leaving, he pointed her back in the direction of Havana, then hearing Obdulio’s scream over the sound of the motor, he would turn the boat northward. As he was about to circle yet one more time, the sun appeared over the eastern horizon, red and massive, spreading its rays until the sea, the city, and the sky grew indistinct and became suspended in a blaze so pure and ubiquitous it was directionless. Johnny screamed louder than Obdulio, louder than the Russian motor, and passed the turning point, weeping for what he had left behind and hurtling faster than his longing toward the new.

Shanghai by Alex Abella

Siboney

1959

The Chinaman lurched violently to the left, the impact of the slug blasting open his blue silk robe, drenched by the gush of blood out his side. Dropping his knife, he felt his ribs, his features distorted into a mask of incomprehension, as though it was inconceivable that he, of all people, should be on the receiving end of my smoking .45.

He stumbled backwards, bumping against the rickety wall, arms flailing, knocking down the porcelain vase with the tulips, the long clay opium pipe, the little smiling Buddha. The framed scroll with the hand-painted tigers fell on his lap as he eased down to the floor, his eyes wide in the knowledge of swift death.

It was only then that I heard the girl screaming. Dressed in the pasties and g-string of her chosen profession, Miss Raquel La Pasión’s full mocha breasts were aquiver with the emotion closest to lust, terror. She pointed at the dying Chink and let out a loud string of Spanish curses as she cowered behind the shirtless tow-haired boy. Tall and lanky, with the soft features of the country club set, the boy held a.38 in his trembling hands. He fired, the bullet smashing into a fruit bowl. I jumped over the settee, grabbed the gun out of his limp hands, and then I slapped the girl, hard.

“Cállate!”

She whimpered, hid behind the boy.

“David Souther?” I asked, as I slipped his gun into my jacket pocket. The show tunes from the theater above had stopped, the clatter of footsteps on the stage booming in the stillness.

He turned to me slowly, his eyes still hazy from the drug. “Who the fuck are you?” he drawled.

“Jason Blue. I’m a private detective. Your dad sent me to get you out of Havana. Let’s go!”

“Hey, fuck you, man. My old man can’t tell me—”

Drug fiends are like dogs, either you pull rank right away or they run away with you. I took my .45 and whipped him one across his baby face, then jammed the gun in his skinny ribs.

“You do what I say or I’ll break every fucking bone in your body. Put your shirt on now!”

The boy blinked twice, wiped away the trickle of blood from his nose with the back of his hand, and slipped on a soiled striped shirt.

“And Raquel?” he said, jerking his chin at the girl. “I’m not leaving without her.”

I hesitated for a moment, debating how much fight the kid still had in him, then grabbed the lacy dress from the Chinese canopy bed and threw it at the heaving hussy.

“C’mon.”

The opium den was at the far end of a warren of rooms under the Shanghai Theater in Havana’s Chinatown. I held my gun out in front, finger on the trigger, and quickly glanced down the corridor, barely lit by a yellow light dangling from the cobwebbed ceiling. No one around.

Coming down I had looked into all the other cubicles. All were empty except for the very last one, where I had found David Covenant Souther IV, of Woodside, Princeton, and Pacific Heights, heir to the Souther Chemical and Mellenkamp Frozen Food fortunes, wrapped up with a colored bimbo and a pipe of dope, staring at an enraged Chink intent on loping off the boy’s privileged, aquiline, and so very American proboscis.

“What are we waiting for?” asked the boy now. He stood right behind me, his breath a sour mix of rotting teeth and sweet opium perfume.

“The main chance, sonny.”

I counted four doors on either side of the hallway. At the far end, thirty feet away, an old wooden circular staircase led up to backstage. From there it was another long forty feet to the double exit doors — forty feet past dressing rooms with showgirls, bathrooms with drunken patrons, and offices with goons and gunmen, before finally getting out of the building and down the alley to my rental DeSoto. A friendly Cuban dishwasher had snuck me in through the side, but I couldn’t count on his generosity anymore — he was probably still knocked out in the closet where I’d sapped him. The hundred-dollar bill in his pocket would buy a lot of ice for his headache.

“When I say go, you run right behind me, you understand? Don’t stop no matter what.”

I translated for the bimbo, who nodded vigorously. At least she had the good sense to recognize that the big Chink’s death could not be good for her business. Besides, she had her ticket out of the Shanghai life right in front of her, the wobbly befuddled kid who for once was using his brain — and arriving at all the wrong conclusions.

“Hey, man, dig, this is too much.”

“What?”

“Hey, you just, you just shot that cat, man. Maybe we should call the police. Yeah, let’s call the American consul, man, he’ll get us out of this. This is Cuba, man. The dollar is almighty here. I’m an American, I want my consul, man. I mean, I didn’t shoot him, that’s your problem.” The kid sank down to the floor, crossing his arms and legs. “I’m not moving, man, I’m sitting down for my rights.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Yeah, man, I demand to see—”

“Aw, shit.”

This time I broke his nose. I gave him my handkerchief, told him to hold his head up and press down to stop the bleeding.

“If I have to bring you back in a full body cast, that’s what I’m going to do, David. Get off the fucking floor.”

The kid stretched out his long legs and got up, holding onto the girl for support.

“You’ll pay for this, Blue.”

“Get in line. Now, at the count of three. One, two...”

We rushed down the corridor and up the staircase, the girl pushing the boy up behind me, calling him estúpido, cobarde, and a thousand other endearments.

At the landing, I thought I was home free — I could see the exit doors open to the alley — and then I saw shards of brick fly in front of me and heard the loud report of the gun in the hallway.

“Down! Down!” I shouted at the boy and girl as I rolled away, taking cover behind a Chinese sarcophagus prop. I fired back at another Chinaman in a white suit. The shooter hid behind a piano when I returned fire, then stood up with a shotgun, blasting away at the quickly splintering casket in front of me. Where is everybody? I kept thinking, even as I told myself this was not what I had in mind when I took on the job.

You understand, pulling crybabies out of jams is one thing. I don’t mind doing that so much; in fact, probably about half of my business in San Francisco consists of clean-up work. Make sure the pictures disappear, make sure the witness doesn’t remember, make sure the society columnist is well-greased, make sure the police blotter gets misplaced, make sure the recording wire nails somebody else. It’s what society detectives do, and in five years solo I’ve carved out quite a little practice for myself. Not quite orthodox detective work, but then, I don’t do divorces or children — I got two of each and they’re not experiences I particularly want to relive. However, I’m not in the market to be somebody’s carnival sitting duck either, particularly in a foreign country undergoing a revolution.

The call from the kid’s father was not that surprising. I had just brought a couple of society chickees back from New York, where they had deluded themselves into thinking they were beatniks in love with a Commie juvenile delinquent. This little feat had drawn the attention of a host of Peninsula and City families, who were also struggling with the weird choices made by their money-addled offspring.

My office is on Market Street, down from Lotta’s Fountain and across from the old Souther Chemical Building. “The progress of mankind is measured by the advancement of science,” reads the company’s credo, etched in ten-foot letters on the limestone front. Pretty classy for an outfit founded by an alcoholic French chemist who made his fortune by accidentally mixing up the tailing samples of an abandoned silver mine in Reno with those of a played-out hole in Virginia City, leading a disillusioned miner to kill himself and the chemist to file a claim for the dead miner’s bonanza.

When Lorraine, my secretary, handed me a slip that old man Pierre Souther wanted to meet me in his executive dining room at 4 o’clock sharp, I knew it wouldn’t be for old sherry and stale walnuts. In any event, he was almost done eating when I came to discuss the job.

He waved me to a cushy leather chair in the vast room at the far end of his penthouse. Milky sunlight eased through the stained glass window behind him, illuminating the company’s coat of arms, a chemist raising a test tube next to a knight on a white steed killing a dragon, while an empty cross bearing the sign Lux floated above them both.

“Are you hungry?” He gestured at a steaming bowl of creamed spinach. “It’s about the only food I can hold down. We get it from the little old ladies at Searle’s. Best in town.”

“No, thank you, the only green I like is the kind I fold and put in my pocket.”

“So I hear.” He blew on his spoon, slurped the soup. Rail thin, with deep-set gray eyes, Souther seemed like a defrocked priest, eating seminary food to remind himself of his transgressions. “That divorce cost you a bundle, didn’t it?” he said.

“The house, the ranch, and the Cord, if you want to know. I was hoping you’d help me make it up.”

“Maybe I can,” he said. He pushed aside the half-full bowl, lit a filterless cigarette, and dropped the match in the soup. He blew out a cloud of smoke. Then: “You love your children, Mr. Blue?” He gazed at me with cold curiosity.

“Is that a trick question, Mr. Souther?” I replied. “Because if it is, nothing I say will please you.”

“I just want the truth.”

“That’s all I’m going to give you, and this is it: Sometimes I love them more than life itself; sometimes I could wring their little necks and jump for joy. But it’s always a real emotion, there’s nothing fake about my feelings for them. Don’t ask me about their mother.”

“Do you miss them?”

The twenty questions game was over. I got up, picked up my briefcase. “Since you obviously had me investigated, I don’t need to tell you that I see them twice a week and every other Sunday and it’s never long enough. Whoever it was you had on me should have told you I don’t like to waste time — mine or anybody else’s.”

“Sit down, Mr. Blue. There’s twenty thousand dollars in this for you. Half now, half on delivery.”

“Delivery of what?”

“My son. My only son. He left for Cuba six months ago for some revolution nonsense and now he’s refusing to come back. I want to see him before I go.”

“Even if he doesn’t?”

“Love knows no bounds, Mr. Blue. I was fifty when I had him. His mother died when he was little and I didn’t know what to do with him. I sent him away to boarding school. He’s always hated me for that. I can take his hatred. I just can’t take his absence.”

He put out the cigarette on a large crystal ashtray bearing the inscription, Lux et Veritas.

“Bring him back, Mr. Blue. He’s the only one I want.”

The object of old Souther’s affection now raised his head from the floor of the Chinese theater. Who knows what half-assed vision of valor was going through his head at that moment, but he decided to make a run for it. Grabbing hold of his girl by the hand, he bolted for the door at the same time that the Chinaman came out from behind his piano. I aimed, but the bullet that dropped the shooter wasn’t mine. He fell forward on his chin, the impact shattering his jaw, a couple of teeth tumbling out of his mouth like liar’s bones on the worn wooden floor. I doubt he felt anything given the gory hole the rifle bullet had opened in his back.

Presently four college student types in short-sleeved shirts bearing armbands with the letters 26-7 came in from the hall, pointing their hunting rifles at us. I threw my gun down right away. The oldest in the group, a skinny redhead Cesar Romero look-alike, waved at his cohorts to put their weapons down — but he kept his tommy gun aimed squarely at my chest all the same.

“Turistas!“ I shouted, hoping they’d buy it. “Muchos problemas de policía.”

Cesar Romero laughed.

“No shit, Jack, everybody’s got a problem with coppers down here,” he said in a thick Bronx accent. “What are you fishing for?”

Obviously, the stupid Yankee bit wasn’t going to get me far with this gent. I figured I’d take my chances.

“The kid and his girl. I gotta get ’em outta here.”

“How comefi”

“I’m a private dick. His old man paid me to get him back to San Francisco, in California. El viejo se está muriendo.”

Cesar looked hard at me, trying to decide if I was telling the truth. I was sweating, hoping he’d buy my song and dance.

Finally: “You picked a fucking fine time to get him out. You know what just happened?”

I shook my head no, even though I had a fairly good idea of why the crowds outside were shouting, “Viva Fidel!” full blast when twenty-four hours before just whispering “Castro” was enough to get you thrown in the slammer.

“Batista left at midnight. He hightailed it out of here with his buddies and ten million in cash.”

I gestured to put my hands down, take out a cigarette. He nodded, eased down the barrel of his gun.

“Congratulations,” I said, as two of Cesar’s minions brought Souther junior and his doll, kicking and heaving, back into the hall. “I assume you were no fan.”

“Are you kidding? Son of a bitch had my brother killed in one of his prison cells. Cut his balls off.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I said, lighting my thirtieth Chesterfield of the day. “No offense, but what business do you have with a Chink theater?”

Cesar’s expression changed to hurt pride and I wondered for a moment if I’d overstepped the bounds of Castilian etiquette — the kid’s skin was whiter than mine, after all. I was also gauging how fast I could wrest the gun out of his hand and clear our way to the car. Fortunately, something somewhere in his troubled Cuban psyche kicked in and he let a sly smile out.

“We just thought we’d come see the girls. Verdad, muchachos, venimos por las jebas?”

Lots of embarrassed grinning and jostling here. Then Cesar was all business again. Damn mercurial Cubans.

“We’re also here to close down the place. This is un antro de vicio y prostitución, a, a...” Suddenly his perfect English went south on him.

“A den of vice and iniquity is the usual phrase back home.”

“Sorry, it’s been five years since I left Bronx Science.”

“Hey, man, you speak English!” shouted David at Cesar, “I demand to see the American consul. I’m an American citizen!”

Cesar looked at him with awe, then back at me. “Jesus, where did you get this monkey?”

I shrugged.

“I said I am an American citizen and I—”

In a lightning swift motion, Cesar lifted his tommy gun and fired over David’s head, missing him by scant inches.

“The next time is right between the eyes, comemierda!”

David grew deadly still, his eyes bulged, and this time he nodded quietly. I had to grin.

“Just get them out of here,” said Cesar. “Guys like him never learn, they think being American makes them better than anybody else.”

“I understand. May I?” I gestured at my gun on the floor. “I have a feeling I might need it.”

He nodded. “You might. Everything’s closed down. You got a car?”

I bent down, picked up my .45. “Around the corner.”

“Make sure you got gas. Things are going to be pretty hairy the next few days, until Fidel comes down from the hills. Now beat it.”

“I didn’t catch your name.” I offered my hand.

He shook it, warmly. “Rolando Cubela. And you?”

“Jason Blue.”

“Well, Mister Private Detective Jason Blue, if I’m ever in California, I will give you a call. But you and your friends better fly the coop now.”

The crowds were all going at it as we drove through Chinatown up to the house in Siboney. An angry mob had surrounded the police station on Zanja, down the street from the theater. I caught sight of one lone officer still in his blue uniform thrown down the steps, kicked, and beaten with shoes, sticks, and brooms. All the stoplights had been shot out of commission, traffic piling up as pedestrians and cars swarmed the streets. Fireworks — Roman candles, rockets, firecrackers — exploded in Chinatown, celebrating a new year like no other. Bands of teenagers in convertibles leaned on car horns, waving giant flags with the black and red of Castro’s party, and the lone star Cuban flag, singing the national anthem and some other military song about libertad. Every so often I would also catch the strains of the “Internationale,” accompanied by riffs of machine-gun fire. On every street, men and women were attacking parking meters with the ferocity they wished they could have shown to Batista’s henchmen. Swinging sledgehammers, they struck until they beheaded the meters, coins spilling like so much blood on the ground, which people would scoop up in a little triumphant dance. I suppose a little craziness is to be expected when a dictator meets his end.

In the backseat, David had passed out on top of Raquel. She hugged him to her abundant chest like a mother while she worriedly looked out the window, taking in the chaos all around.

“Mister,” she said in Spanish, “are you sure you’ll be able to get us out of here with no trouble?”

“I don’t know about the trouble, but we have a boat waiting for us. In a few hours, at the muelle.”

“No aeropuerto?”

“Sure to be closed,” I said, still in Spanish. I know it sounds funny, but at that moment I wished that I spoke better Spanish. Now that I had gotten a good look at her in the rearview mirror, I realized what a magnificent specimen of femalehood she was. I wanted to comfort her in all the ways a man can for a woman, but all I could do was say it would be okay and drive on.

We parked at the corner of 180th Street between 15th and 17th in Siboney without incident. The hubbub was now worlds away, back around the capitol building, shining ghastly white with the floodlights turned on, as people streamed in and out, taking files, artwork, boxes of papers. I had never been in a revolution before, but in Korea I had seen how, when authority suddenly vanishes, it’s every man for himself. I figured with the usual snafus there wouldn’t be a single port or customs officer on duty to stop us.

Raquel helped me carry David inside. We laid him on the bed of the coach house I’d rented from a Canadian I’d met at the Bodeguita del Medio the night I got into town. The coach house — clearly the servant’s quarters — was behind a two-bedroom white house of fairly recent construction, modest by neighborhood standards. She lay down with him and I went to the kitchen to make myself some coffee. It was going to be a long night. I had told the captain of the boat to meet me at the dock at 7 in the morning with a full tank and food for the trip to Key West. It was now close to 3 and the efforts of a whole week of searching for David were finally beginning to take their toll.

I had eaten all my meals out since coming into town, so I had no idea what the Canadian’s kitchen contained. I strolled across the grass to the empty house. There was a fence around the property and bushes taller than me. I walked in through the terrace to the kitchen and opened up a few cupboards, uncovering crackers, a jar of pickled herring, and a bag with a log of dried meat called pemmican that smelled suspiciously of old socks. Finally, in the refrigerator, behind two bottles of Big Rock Ale, I found a can of finely ground coffee. However, hard as I looked, I could not find a percolator anywhere in the place.

“Te puedo servir?” asked Raquel from the kitchen door. She’d apparently followed me over.

She leaned her head on the doorframe, her wide doe eyes slightly closed from fatigue and sleeplessness. It wasn’t her eyes I was looking at, but her full figure, like a Maidenform bra ad, barely covered by the flimsy crocheted lace dress she’d thrown on at the Shanghai.

“I have coffee but no coffee maker,” I said in Spanish.

“It’s right there,” she said, entering the kitchen. She slid next to me, her jasmine perfume as intoxicating as Tennessee moonshine. She grabbed hold of a metal conical object with a lid. She opened it, took out a piece of cloth shaped like a windsock, then turned, displaying it like a model at a fancy department store.

“This is how we do it in Cuba,” she said, dumping the dried coffee grounds in the garbage and rinsing the cloth under the faucet. She bent down, picked up a small pot, put it under the faucet to fill.

I came in close behind her, pressed myself against her back, breathing in the smell of her body, her perfume, her excitement. She didn’t move away, she just extended her arm to place the pot on the stovetop.

“You see, we have to wait until the water boils and then we put in the coffee.”

She turned to face me, her head cocked sideways. “Maybe you have a light?”

I dug in my pocket, pulled out a box of waxy matches, and lit one. She took my hand, guided it to the burner under the pot, then turned to me again, still holding my hand in hers. The match was burning down to my fingertips but I didn’t care. She brought it to her lips and blew it out.

“Pobrecito,” she said. “You burned yourself.” She kissed my fingertips then stuck them in her mouth, softly suckling them.

I took my fingers out of her mouth and put my tongue in there instead. She suckled that too and soon we were down on the kitchen floor, her dress over her head, her arms held together as though by a lacy rope as her full breasts with her big brown nipples bumped against my chest while I entered her, and soon we were both riding a wave of light that filled the room until it burst like a balloon and we were back on a grimy tile floor in Havana waiting for the boat to get us to a better place.

I lit a cigarette while she went to the bathroom down the hall, the overhead water tank of the toilet clanging like a fire bell when she yanked the chain. She came back into the kitchen, put the coffee in the boiling pot, and was soon serving me the inky sweet concoction Cubans call a cafecito. She sat at the table, knees together like a schoolgirl, unsure of my reaction. I said nothing and simply stared. I was waiting for her request and it didn’t take long in arriving. No free lunch in this world, my daddy always said.

Raquel looked toward the coach house where David was still passed out on the bed. “He sleeps a lot when he takes the drugs,” she said in Spanish. “He’s always trying to run away from himself.”

“Y tú?” I asked her. “What about you? What are you running away from?”

She gazed back at me, weighing her response, then took a cigarette out of my pack without asking. I would have slapped her hand but sometimes you have to be tolerant to get where you want to go. I even lit the cigarette for her.

“Me, I am running away from Camagüey. From my old man’s hut, the son of a bitch, from this fucking crazy country.”

“Is that why you’re with the kid?”

She cracked a hard smile. “A little American boy comes in looking for easy love and revolution? Sure. You understand. You know what they call us? Las putas del Chino.” She stopped to make sure I understood. The Chinaman’s whores. I nodded.

“I hate fucking Chinamen. They smell of rotten fish. But that’s what I had to do, until David came around.”

All of a sudden she dropped her cigarette, grabbed her stomach, put her hand to her mouth. “Ay Dios mío!” she said, rushing to the bathroom, barely making it in time to upchuck something green and brown and vile. I blew concentric rings of smoke watching her from the door as she flushed, rinsed her beautiful mouth, straightened out her flimsy clothes. She saw my reflection in the mirror and she knew her game was up.

“What month?” I asked her.

She stared back, put on some ruby red lipstick. “Cuatro.”

“It hardly shows,” I said.

“It’s a good thing, otherwise I...” She turned to me, her doe eyes pleading with a mixture of fear and pride. “You’re not going to tell him, are you?”

I shook my head. “No. But I’m curious: What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

“I don’t know. But eventually, I guess I would have told him.”

“Do you love him?”

She shrugged, came up to me, kissed me lightly on the lips. “What is to love?”

I saw my own reflection in a mirror above the stove — my crooked nose, the scar on my forehead, the wide-set blue eyes that were the only thing my father left me.

“Sí,” I repeated, “what is to love?”

We didn’t say much after that. There wasn’t much to be said. We understood each other. She wanted out and so did I. The boy in his opium-induced dream in the bed was our ticket and we had to baby him. She did it her way, I did it mine.

Raquel returned to lie with David for a while as I waited for the sun to come up. I went out to the terrace and sat on an ornate iron bench, staring out at the sky, at the lights revolving madly above the fence and thick fortress of trees. The noise was far away now and dew was alighting, a low gray mist that seemed like a sponge wanting to wipe the whole town clean of the past, of the wrongs that had been done, of the hearts that had been broken. Or maybe it was just wiping it clean for the next round, I pondered, as I thought I heard a cry for help followed by a yelp of pain followed by the echo of a shot or two followed by silence.

The sky was a riot of mauve, purple, and red, the sun rising like an orange ball over Marina Barlovento when I walked down to the docks. The streets were eerily empty, but Siboney — in spite of its concentration of diplomats and foreigners — had woken up as fiercely revolutionary as before it had been cravenly Batistiano. The banners of Castro’s 26 of July Movement hung from windows, while above doors a few sycophants had already put up signs announcing, Fidel, esta es tu casa. Fidel, this house is yours.

The prospect of a five-hundred-dollar payout had been enough to rouse the old black capitán from his house in nearby Jaimanitas, enough to make him venture out, load the supplies, and chug-chug his creaking boat out to the pier.

“Viva Fidel!” I said as I stepped on the Buena Vista, a trawler that had last seen a varnish job when it was a rumrunner’s boat docking in the rushes of Cedar Key. It had absolutely nothing in common with the sleek yachts parked at Barlovento.

“Sssh! You want to get shot at?” said Anselmo in his low, slurring speech. “There’s a lot of Batistianos here desperate to get out. No se habla de la soga en casa del ahorcado.” Don’t mention rope in the home of the hanged. “Look, there goes Ventura’s boat!”

He pointed at a gleaming Chris-Craft churning its way through the gray waters, carrying on board the once feared head of Batista’s secret police.

“Sic transit,” I muttered.

“Qué?”

“May lightning strike him... You will be ready for us?”

“Sure, chico. Just make certain to return within the hour. Fidel’s people and the boys from the Directorio are already taking over City Hall. I’m sure they will be here soon and who knows how long before they let people out again. They are out for blood today, compadre.”

I turned the shower on in the coach house, dousing the still sleeping David. The water came out brown at first, but by the time it had cleared David was up and on his knees, gasping for air. I turned off the faucet, threw him a towel.

“Let’s go, sleeping beauty. Time’s a wasting.”

Looking like a wet retriever, David took a few bumbling steps out of the tub, then heaved into the toilet.

I stepped outside and waited until he came out and drank the coffee Raquel had brought in for him from the main house. He looked around, taking stock of the place, obviously not remembering how he had gotten there. He smiled at me, still silent, then nodded in greeting. I nodded back and was lighting a cigarette when he dove for the window. I managed to grab him by the waistband.

“What the fuck is wrong with you anyhow?” I said, heaving him back inside and slapping him around a couple of times. He sat on the floor, Raquel hugging him.

“I told you, I’m not going back to San Francisco,” he replied, rubbing his face where I’d landed my punch.

“Are you crazy? You want to stay here and do what? Do you know what just happened last night?”

“What?”

“Listen up, you idiot. Batista just left.”

I turned on the old shortwave radio by the window. The plummy voice of the BBC announcer cut through the moist air: “Here is the news. The President of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, has fled the country, his government in ruins, in the face of a relentless advance by the rebel army led by a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, Fidel Castro. Thousands of Cubans took to the streets in celebration this morning as word spread of Batista’s departure for the Dominican Republic in the early hours of this day. There are reports of looting in Havana. Hundreds of slot machines from casinos have been dragged into the street and smashed. One casino has been looted. President Batista handed over power to a military junta before he left. They ordered a cease-fire and appealed to the rebel forces of Dr. Castro for cooperation. Dr. Castro, however, announced this morning on rebel radio that operations would continue. ‘The triumph of the Revolution must be complete,’ he said.”

I turned off the radio. “Now do you get it? If we don’t leave now, we’re going to be stuck here for weeks until they get this mess straightened out. I promised your dad I would get you back to the city. Once you’re there you can do whatever you want. You can get on the next plane and come back to join all your revolutionary amigos, for all I care. Although I have a feeling they won’t wanna have a junkie yanqui on their side just now.”

“Papi, listen to the man,” said Raquel. “Please.”

“So either you come willingly or I’m going to have to do it the hard way,” I added.

David rubbed his face with his hands as though in deep concentration — or disgust. “All right, all right, you win. Let’s go.”

“Oh, papi, you are so good!” said Raquel, hugging him to her chest. I looked away, opened the front door.

“Vamos.”

At Marina Barlovento, Esteban was jumping around the trawler as though the deck was on fire. He waved his raggedy porkpie hat at me when he saw me trooping down with David and Raquel.

“C’mon, c’mon, chico, they’re here already!” he said, hurrying to cast off the dock lines.

“Who?”

“The muchachos from the Directorio, they’re trying to stop people from leaving. Look at those guys over there.”

He waved his hat at a group of men with rifles and machine guns boarding a large yacht three piers away. “They’re checking all the papers, they say nobody can leave without authorization. Por suerte, the harbor master is not here, so once we’re out in the water... Coño, what the hell is wrong?” The engine stopped its chug-chugging, coughed, then died. “Carajo!” cursed Esteban as he opened the engine cover by the stern and peered into the well. He cranked the engine, which let out a wet, sloshing sound.

“What was he saying?” asked David.

“Fidel’s people are trying to stop all the Batista people from leaving; they’re checking papers and whatnot... What’s wrong with the engine, Esteban?”

The captain shook his head in desperation, slamming the motor with his hat. “Jodida mierda, coño,” he cursed, “this piece of shit just flooded. I can smell it.”

He raced over to the controls by the wheel, turned off the choke, then returned to the engine well, opening the throttle. He cranked the engine, which sputtered but refused to turn over.

“We’ve gotta go, tell him we’ve gotta go right now,” urged David.

“I know, I know, what’s your sudden hurry?” I asked.

“Jesus, are those them, those guys?” He pointed at a group of four men approaching the pier, led by a skinny redhead who looked familiar. That couldn’t be him, I thought.

“Yeah, I suppose, what’s the problem? Aren’t you in good with these guys?”

“I gotta go, I gotta go,” said David, terrified. He moved as though to jump in the water but I grabbed him, wrestled him down, pinning his shoulders with my knees.

“Jesus, will you fucking settle down?”

“You don’t get it, do you? I didn’t come here to help Fidel’s people; I came here to bring weapons to Batista!”

“What?”

“Yeah, you moron. The State Department froze all arms shipments to Cuba last fall. Through a friend of mine I got ahold of some old surplus rifles and brought them down here. The Directorio people found out and they’ve been looking for me for the last week. What the hell did you think I was doing hiding out at the Shanghai?”

“But before—”

“I was whacked out of my mind, idiot. I couldn’t tell my ass from a hole in the ground. But now I know what’s coming and I don’t want it!”

I let go of him and sat down on the deck, thinking fast. Then: “Hurry down below. I’ll handle this.”

David scurried away on all fours, slamming the door to the cabin behind him. I got up, whispered quickly to Raquel, and walked out to the dock, just in time to be greeted by my now old friend Cubela.

“Nice day for a cruise, Mr. Blue,” said Cubela, while his four minions craned their heads, looking around the boat. Soon their eyes were fixed on Raquel, who walked out to the bow, where she proceeded to strip off her dress and sunbathe in her underwear.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, Rolando.”

“You know, strangely enough, after we parted, I received information from my compañeros that the gentleman you are escorting back home is wanted by our people.”

Out on the bow of the boat Raquel turned and displayed her best assets to the gunmen, who walked up to her and began a no doubt learned conversation on buoyancy, Archimedes, and fluids displacement.

“Really? I didn’t know Dr. Castro was so concerned about drug fiends.”

“Well, Dr. Castro is concerned about the welfare of all people. But he is particularly interested in arms smugglers who help Batista’s torturers.”

Now even Cubela himself sneaked a look at Raquel, distracted by her charms. As though constrained by ecdysiast duty, she stood and removed her top.

Esteban glanced up from the engine well, gave me a furtive thumbs-up. I nodded. He cranked the engine, which awoke with a roar.

Cubela turned his head back to look at Esteban, but at that very instant I grabbed the machine gun out of his hand and threw my left arm around his neck in a stranglehold. Placing the barrel of his gun on his shoulder next to his neck, I fired a warning shot over the heads of his men. Cubela squealed from the noise in his eardrum and the burning hot barrel against his skin.

“Tell your men to throw their weapons in the water, now!”

A moment passed, a gull flew by, and I wondered, Is this all there is? Cubela nodded, gave the order. The men cast their rifles into the bay, the weapons bobbing in the water for a few seconds before starting their descent into the blue-gray depths.

“Now tell them to move back up to the pier. Slowly.”

“You know we will find you,” warned Cubela as the men passed by us, hissing with contempt.

“I’ll be waiting. But first, you and I are going to walk to the boat very slowly and you are going to board with me. Understood?”

“Perfectly.”

We took small steps to the boat, then, with the barrel of the tommy gun still to his neck, we stepped onto the splintered deck of the Buena Vista.

“Cast off, Esteban.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Blue.”

The boat shuddered and trimmed in, still powerful even after forty years of service. The pier quickly receded as we headed out for the open water.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked Cubela.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, letting go of him to hold onto the gunwale momentarily as we bumped into a wave.

“Well, I have!” said David, who had come out from the cabin upon realizing we were heading out. Without warning, he pushed Cubela off the stern into the water. David stood on the transom, waving his fist at the bobbing head of the revolutionary. “Go get fucked, you damn Commie!”

I glanced back at the pier and saw that another group of Directorio people had come down from the dock. One of them raised a rifle.

“Get down! Get down, you fucking idiot!” I shouted, just before the sharpshooter fired and the bullet tore through David’s windpipe, slamming him to the deck.

“No, no! Dios mío, no!” cried Raquel, who threw herself on the boy with the voracity of the lonely and the dispossessed. I bent down, took a cold look. I’d seen a lot of people like him in Inchon, when the Chinese attacked our positions and the guys fell like flies. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him from dying, he was choking on his own blood.

“What should we do, mister?” asked Esteban, looking worriedly down at the boy.

“Keep going. He’s beyond saving.” I knelt down next to him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. He grabbed at my hands, gurgling hoarsely, wanting to let me know one last thing, one final message. I put my ear to his mouth as he said his last word, then he seized up and died.

I let Raquel cry over his body for hours until she grew tired and worried and I reminded her she was carrying his child, and that seemed to comfort her some. I told her I’d make sure she would get her share of the old man’s money, and I laid her down to sleep in the galley. Esteban and I cleaned the deck as best we could and then placed the body on ice down below.

It wasn’t until the sun was setting out by the Tortugas, just about an hour from Key West, that Esteban put the boat on cruise, popped open a Polar. I took a swig, the bitterness in my mouth making the beer taste almost sweet.

“So what did he tell you, mister? What did he say at the end?”

I lit another Chesterfield, watched in silence the deep blue of the Gulf begin to meld with the green waters of the shallows by the Keys. Esteban was still looking at me, waiting.

“He said Shanghai,” I answered, tossing out my cigarette.

“Shanghai? What does that mean?” asked Esteban.

I contemplated that for a moment, then I thought I should say, It’s the city of dreams, it’s the city of sex and drugs and revolution and pleasure never ending, but I realized that wouldn’t do, so I answered the only way I knew how: “Yo qué sé.”

What do I know.

Murder at 503 La Rosa by Moisés Asís

Ayestarán

What am I going to do? That’s what I keep asking myself over and over as they lead me through the airport.

“We have a problem, sir,” the secretary at the law school had said. “You can’t take the state’s graduating exam because we found you have penal antecedents, a police record. It’s been more than twenty years, so you can ask that they be erased and then you can take the state exam,” he added in a conciliatory tone.

Of course I knew this; that police record had made a pariah out of me, without the right to study the career of my choice, without the right to seek a better job, or to have any kind of social acceptance. For more than twenty years I’d been walking around socially and politically castrated, and I’d been hoping that the University of Havana would never find out about my past if I just denied it.

“There was a mistake and it’s been rectified,” the legal adviser to the Ministry of Justice said this time, months later. “When you were tried and sentenced, you were a minor and so you should have never had an adult police record.”

You’re telling me this now, after decades of ostracism, you fucking legal adviser to the ministry?

But it’s never too late to start again. So I graduated from law school and decided not to practice, since the profession doesn’t actually allow the defense of those accused of ideological crimes such as thinking aloud. I can’t even defend myself. Under what law, and with what proceedings? I think back and I regret that I was so dismissive of that court-appointed lawyer who didn’t bother to mount a defense for me back when I was seventeen years old. Where could he be now? Has he been imprisoned for thinking without hypocrisy, has he deported himself, has he allowed himself to be debased?

After two or three hours of pedaling my bicycle, sweating my guts out, I can’t find my way home: Night has come too soon, and the stars are on vacation as it rains nonstop on this new moon. For those without direction or hope, there are no sadder nights than those that are moonless. And it won’t matter how much I plead, the moon will not so much as peek.

The last time that I couldn’t distinguish day from night was when I’d just turned seventeen and was locked up in a police cell during two weeks of questioning. The cell was windowless and it was impossible to tell the difference between dawn and the most intense noon hour. They wanted to reeducate me so that I would not only confuse day for night but so that I’d learn that good and evil were relative concepts.

I was frequently dragged from that nine-by-six cell that I shared with three other inmates and asked about my terrible crime: wanting to leave my country. Days before, the overloaded boat in which I’d hoped to row hundreds of miles had gone down near a fishing dock; we’d barely even started out on that moonless night. Nobody knew anything and there was no evidence, but a word from the political police was enough to label it a Crime Against the Integrity and Stability of the Nation. A military tribunal passed judgment on this civilian, a minor, with a court-appointed lawyer who stayed quiet, trembling, while the political police’s prosecutor presented a fantastic story that steered clear of the truth. Of the four-year sentence I was given, I only served one, in labor camps where there were also moonless nights.

The police are not very efficient, or they’re really so preoccupied with trying to deal with the miserable problems in their own homes, which they have in common with every other Cuban, that they really don’t care about doing a good job of investigating crime. They never bothered to find out how Victor, my fourth-floor neighbor at 503 La Rosa Street, died. The octogenarian passed away three days after being hospitalized. Nobody bothered to find out how he’d hit himself so many times against the wall. But all the neighbors heard him, in the silence of the blackout, and Juana the mulatta, sixty years his junior, violently shaking him.

Victor and Juana had married four years before for the exclusive benefit of the young domestic servant, who would soon inherit the apartment and a juicy widow’s pension. Now Juana and the three kids she had while married to Victor could finally enjoy a better life. Victor had been resigned to those kids, black babies who arrived one after the other without a smidgeon of their presumed father’s Caucasian DNA.

Everything might have been more believable if on the night of the wall-banging and Victor’s subsequent hospitalization, their door hadn’t been furiously kicked in by Francisco, Juana’s nocturnal lover, who arrived and couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let him in.

Each night, Francisco, a thieving dipsomaniac from the neighborhood, would fornicate with Juana while Victor slept a few steps away. As soon as Juana became a widow, Francisco installed himself in the apartment and continued with the only things he knew how to do in his life: stealing and drinking.

They’d met at the bar adjacent to our building, at the corner of La Rosa and Ayestarán, a sad little place where lost souls would fill their bladders with alcohol only to empty them later in the neighborhood’s recesses. It was a little after the man moved in that my life became more miserable, and I decided that killing him could be rationalized as an act of justice for the greater good of society.

I should be used to these interminable blackouts, omnipresent since my early childhood. If sunlight is a gift from God that has accompanied us always and will be with us forever, electric light is also an intangible miracle that doesn’t depend on us but on a group of men who tell us day in and day out that we must save what they squander, who make the blackouts coincide with the hours in which the radio and TV broadcasts from the United States to the Cuban people are most intense. Or worse, the blackouts drag on when I need to write or study or when friends come over. The drunken thieves from the adjacent bar take advantage of the darkness to make off with what they can. It seems to me that the blackouts are a punishing reality that haunts us daily, from infancy to our deaths.

“We’re going to let you go,” says the bureaucrat who has just given me the approval to leave Cuba. “We’re going to let you go because your soul is no longer in this country, you don’t think or feel like us. You haven’t matured enough to forget the idealism of your youth. You have not taken advantage of all the opportunities we’ve given you.”

I am left dumbfounded, trying to figure out what these opportunities were that I didn’t learn from or appreciate. But in this moment of joy, I mentally thank him instead, for not torturing me with a long delay in approving the leave for my family and myself.

The dark of the blackouts pursues me while I work, during dinner, trying to read or attempting sleep under the heat’s caress, hauling buckets spilling water up and down the stairs, waiting in interminable lines to buy something to eat, as I make love, or during a funeral, healing or teaching others, trying to heal myself or trying to learn. I should be used to this since it’s been the same thing since childhood, when the city of Havana began to lean on crutches.

I live in what could be called the clitoris of the Ayestarán neighborhood, which was built in the mid-twentieth century between the old colonial district of El Cerro and elegant Nuevo Vedado. My apartment is in a part of the neighborhood that looks like a giant vulva right in the middle of Havana; it’s south, at the perineum of the intersection of Ayestarán Road and Rancho Boyeros Avenue. To the north, both avenues stretch for various blocks like thighs inserted in the city’s hips, crossed on the west by 20 de Mayo Avenue, parallel to La Rosa, and headquarters to the National Library, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Economy, and other public buildings.

The worst part of pedaling incessantly in the dark isn’t the actual darkness or not being able to perceive the difference between the street and the sky, the asphalt or the pit. It’s not the fact that you see the same thing whether you raise or lower your eyes, whether you look ahead or to the side. The worst isn’t even having to go slow enough so that you can jump off when the bike’s wheels slide into the ditches, invisible because of the water. Nor is it getting lost, but rather losing your life, if this can be called a life.

For some time now there have been rumors about events which the mass media obscures: dozens of adolescents and adults have been killed while riding their bikes on the darkened streets. Following the bikers, the murderers hide behind the giant ocuje trees then bash them with baseball bats, or they trip the bikers by stretching a nylon cord from one side of the street to the other, which they then pull quickly and violently around their necks, before the bats deform their craniums. Life is the price of a bounty that is nothing but a pair of used shoes and a cheap, obsolete bike. And, of course, the police don’t investigate; they can’t be bothered with the everyday.

The domestic battles between Juana and Francisco began a little after they started living together. They always ended with vociferous screaming and Francisco getting kicked out. Apparently, he didn’t steal enough to support the young widow and her three children. Soon, the light bulbs from the building’s common areas began to disappear, and more than once the motor that pumped water up to the higher floors vanished.

We all suspected Francisco, and I wanted to punish the crook who had me carrying dozens of buckets of water up the stairs every night: Francisco would leave the building and find a bottle of rum in the same hiding place where he always hoarded his alcohol; Francisco would be unable to resist taking a mouthful of rum, and a little later he’d be vomiting, having convulsions, his extremities stiffening involuntarily, then he’d finish off with a respiratory collapse and cardiac arrest. Sodium monofiuoracetate, also known as Compound 1080, dissolves in water, is colorless, tasteless, and without odor. Francisco’s fate was sealed.

I am going around and around the puddles and I can’t seem to find my home. If only there was a star to guide me! In the distance I see a very bright building, the Palace of the Revolution. Now I can orient myself; I’m going in the wrong direction so I turn right, go straight. I soon feel like I’m falling off a precipice, there’s no asphalt anymore but an enormous emptiness, and my bike and I smash against the rocks below. Can anyone see me or hear me from here?

Once, during Yom Kippur, I felt the same way. I had begun my fast well before what was religiously necessary. It was unavoidable. I walked and walked toward the synagogue, dead tired, hallucinating, not from the incipient fast but because my body could no longer tell the difference between one day and the next. I saw the synagogue filled with well-dressed people and I imagined, as in a dream, that I was a dybbuk who sexually possessed a beautiful young woman I’d never seen before. What terrible thoughts for the Day of Atonement! I was enraptured by the hazzan’s voice flying high with the most impressive of melodies and words: Kol Nidre... ve’esare... vecherame... vekoname...

The melody abruptly stopped when someone sat down next to me. That’s when I opened my eyes and saw that the synagogue was actually almost empty, only seven people attending the service, there was no hazzan, there was not then and there never would be a Kol Nidre, that young woman and hundreds more had been living abroad for years and who knew if they were even dead or alive.

If this pit is anywhere near where I live, I should be able to hear Quimbolo, my nearest neighbor. Quimbolo is the only Cuban who is allowed the privilege of screaming improprieties against our absolute Big Brother without anybody ever thinking of locking him up for the rest of his life. Quimbolo’s real name is Everardo and he’s mentally retarded.

He wanders down the street in utter filth and repeats the rich and profane lexicon that drunks have taught him. I’ve never heard anybody scream Pinga! so stridently, so forcefully and sonorously. Pinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnga, drawing out that N until the middle of oblivion. I remember hearing that word many times in the dark and at dawn like a war cry. For years, there wasn’t a child born within three blocks in any direction who learned to talk by first saying Papá or Mamá, but rather by repeating Quimbolo’s word.

One day Quimbolo was diagnosed with diabetes, I’d forgotten. His ulcerous legs got dirty and he died, amputated and septicemic, depriving the neighborhood of its most obscene crier.

“It looks like he had a heart attack! Run and call an ambulance or a doctor!”

“There are no doctors at the polyclinic?”

“The man is dead!”

People scream around Francisco’s body. Now he’ll never again steal the light bulbs from my building or the motor to pump water. There will no more thefts in the building. One thief less.

I’m not afraid to come out of the pit in the middle of the street. This huge trench must be the hole at the corner of Ayestarán and Lombillo, in front of the dilapidated pharmacy, with its empty shelves. So I’m only a block from home. I crawl up the rocks until I believe I’ve reached the surface. I paw at the loose stones around me that should indicate wet asphalt. There’s no sign of a bus or car that might illuminate me and possibly hit me; bikes pass in the distance. I crawl and carry my broken bike with me, its wheels destroyed. Now there are only three more flights to go up in the dark... a few more steps... a breather, twelve more steps... another pause. I take care not to hit what remains of the bike against my neighbors’ doors. This stairway is such torture! I place the key at the same height as my navel, and this makes it easier to find the lock.

It was much harder to find the key to graduating from law school. It had been an incredible sacrifice to study at dawn, after each blackout, beating back sleep with abundant quantities of bitter tea.

From my balcony, the buildings and the street and the sky around me all seem beautiful, black like a great ocean of ink. That’s also how I see my future, and that of my family. Why not try and find a bit of light, even if it’s not so early in life?

In the months that followed, the streets remained littered with craters, ever darker, covered with trash, reeking. People walked by aimlessly, their eyes blank, resting in line after line, going from frustration to frustration.

Cats and dogs almost reached the point of extinction as adolescents discovered their flesh was edible, and the only ones seen on the streets were the most famished, abandoned pets dragging along their torn tufts of skin.

A girl faints next to me on the bus, a woman drops to the sidewalk one morning as I’m looking out my balcony. I’m told about an elderly woman who committed suicide because she couldn’t take the cries of her little grandson begging for another piece of bread, even as the radio broadcasts announced that ours is the best fed nation on earth, with the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy. My friends and acquaintances are dying so quickly, at early ages.

“We’re so lucky to live in this country,” my young daughter says to me as she watches the haunting images from the rest of the world on our TV.

But I can’t believe it when I see two neighbors dive into a dumpster to scavenge through the fermenting garbage that had been feasted on by a myriad flies. Why is it that this country’s fertile soil is so sterile? Why don’t women want to give birth and why don’t young people want to live? What makes people support so euphorically that which they in fact hate? Why do they work against themselves? Why do they seem to experience such joy as they dig hopeless tombs for their grandchildren?

Sodium monofluoracetate is infallible. Its chemical formula is CH2F-COON and I’ve read that it takes less than a tenth of a teaspoon to kill a degenerate like Francisco.

But what if the police perform an autopsy? They probably won’t, though; there aren’t many doctors left in this country now that the majority has been contracted out to Venezuela and other places. And those left are overwhelmed with work, so they’re more likely to determine it was a sudden cardiac arrest and not expend limited resources on an autopsy.

I’ve read that this poison interrupts the Krebs cycle, that it alters the citric acid in the body. The poison turns into fluorcitrate, creates a citric concentration in the veins, and deprives the cells of energy. Cellular death is slow and painful.

The cops aren’t going to waste time over whether some guy like Francisco died from a cardiac arrest or a few drops of sodium monofluoracetate. The cops have highly qualified experts and forensic doctors working with them who can find traces of the poison lingering in the liver, the brain, the kidneys, hair. But what if the morgue technician removed Francisco’s liver and viscera and sold them on the black market as beef liver, beef viscera? Did other families die — children too — poisoned by Compound 1080 residue in meat?

The police officer who asks for my documents, for my passport, has a threatening expression. Behind me, the giant automatic glass door is closing forever. The glittering lights blind me. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so much artificial illumination. The airport’s hallways seem so beautiful, even though they have nothing by way of decoration other than their cleanliness and tang. I walk. I go very fast so that the doors won’t close anew. I run to the escalators, then run again until I reach the counter where there’s a man with a quizzical but apathetic expression.

“Your documents are in order but you cannot be completely admitted to the United States until you prove that your soul came with you; your body has arrived but you’ve left your soul in Cuba,” the immigration official at Miami International Airport says coolly. “What are you going to do?”

What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I ask myself over and over as I leave the airport. I’ll start over, that’s what. I’ll transform my hopes into a new soul until I can recover the lost soul that they tell me here I left in Havana, and which in Havana they say I brought here.

Somebody else can take care of the thief at 503 La Rosa Street. I could never get my hands on even two drops of sodium monofluoracetate, and I could never actually kill another human being. Perhaps they would have never found me out, but I’m glad that crook Francisco lives on and can still hope to change. I will, from here, far from Cuba, try to reconstruct my soul from its own sense of hope, which is only possible where there’s light.

Murder, according to my mother-in-law by Arturo Arango

El Cerro

Her name was Lucrecia, they called her Pupy, and my mother-in-law couldn’t stand her from the moment we met because it was rumored all over the neighborhood that what she liked most were black men. Whenever her name came up, my mother-in-law would make a face and say, “That pig.”

Arguing with my mother-in-law is one of my favorite pastimes.

As far as we knew, the black men that popular opinion attributed to Pupy came down to just one: Guillermo, the father of her younger children, a strapping, smiling man who had once been a police officer, and with whom Pupy lived a few blocks from our house.

“He is a great guy,” I’d tell my mother-in-law.

“He’s better than her,” she’d concur. “But she’s still a pig.”

Pupy’s oldest boy, whose father we had never met, had blue eyes and lived with his grandparents, right across the street from our house.

I was at the stadium the night “it all happened,” as my mother-in-law says, always reluctant to actually let out of her mouth words such as cancer, or murder, believing that by not pronouncing them, she can keep these misfortunes from herself and her family.

To live in Havana and say “the stadium” means only one thing: the Latinoamericano, an ancient structure that’s been renovated over and over, and which, in extreme cases, can hold up to 150,000 people. At my age, I prefer the comfort of the rocking chair and the TV, with coffee in hand during the breaks, and the bed nearby for when a game gets boring. But during each playoff series, I keep a ritual of going at least once to that place which is both circus and temple, to become part of the spectacle that takes place in the bleachers.

The championship was being decided and the same two rivals were facing off as always: the most arrogant of teams, the one that can’t stand to not make it to the postseason, the one that’s so worshipped, protected, spoiled — and whose name will never come out of my mouth and I will refer to only as Las Ratas — and Santiago de Cuba, in which I always place my hopes, and always support.

Luis Lorente had been calling me since Friday night to remind me that Santiago would not be back again to play at the Latino after this because Las Ratas had very little chance of reaching even the quarterfinals that year. The stadium might be closed until November, at which time the next tournament would begin.

Saturday morning, I returned his call: I’d go by his house an hour before the game. After talking to Luis, I agreed to another duty I found considerably less pleasant: I took my mother-in-law grocery shopping.

Markets make me weary, and my mother-in-law says the same things week after week when she gets back in the car with a handful of scrawny scallions and a pale pumpkin. It’s true that prices keep going up and that she’s the one who cooks for the whole family, but living through those Saturday excursions — watching her make faces when she squeezes the avocados or cabbage, or the anxious way she pulls the wrinkled bills from her wallet, without any certainty about what she’s actually handing the cashier — it’s like sinking in an endless swamp.

There were a few other things she wanted to buy (cooking oil, a can of pimientos for Sunday’s chicken and rice), and so on the way home I took a detour to the Villa Panamericana. Coming down the main avenue, I looked over at what used to be called Plaza de las Banderas (a string of empty flag posts pretends to justify the name) and saw some of the players from my team who were staying at a nearby hotel in that fairly new and somewhat pretentious neighborhood. I thought that if Luis Lorente had been there, I might have gone over to talk to them. But it’s not especially easy for me to approach people I don’t know (or, more precisely, people who don’t know me).

I let my mother-in-law go into the store by herself and asked her to come get me when she was done at the place on the corner, a small glass square, like everything in the Villa, where they sold beer by the liter. There were two people waiting to be served. I did my duty and asked who was the last in line: The mulatto who turned to respond struck me as familiar. He looked back, searching for the table where some folks were waiting for him, and I recognized his features from TV: Orestes Kindelán. I felt my shyness challenged. It was like being next to Babe Ruth, or Pelé, or Michael Jordan. I asked how his team (my team) was doing for the final (though his answer was never in doubt).

“Good,” he said. “We’ve just started training.”

I should have said something else but my mind was too slow. Until that moment, I had supposed that training was a daily routine for all the players. As my glass was being filled, I said something like, “Good luck,” and followed him with my gaze. In his huge hands, he was carrying six glasses spilling foam. There was a table waiting for him on the terrace: two other ballplayers and two women. One of them was Pupy. Next to her was the only white guy who played on the team: tall, reedy, big-nosed. He was a pitcher nicknamed El Torpedo because of his lightning fastball, and he was slated to play that night.

It bothered me that he was drinking beer. Hours later at the Latino, I’d be following each one of his pitches breathlessly while his own breath would still have an alcohol residue. The game, it’s true, really wasn’t that important to Santiago, but to beat Las Ratas at the Latino was a matter of honor.

I told my mother-in-law that I’d seen Pupy with the ballplayers, next to a white guy. This time, my mother-in-law defended her, but in her own unique way: Guillermo, Pupy’s husband, had been inside the store arguing about the price of some product. Perhaps the sixth glass of beer had been meant for him.

My mother-in-law actually placed more significance on the presence of the other woman, Olivia, who was also with the ballplayers. She lived two doors down from Pupy’s parents but we didn’t know they knew each other beyond the natural comings and goings of the neighborhood.

The one who liked Olivia was my wife. When we first met her, she was studying for a degree in geography, which she received with honors. But no sooner had she begun her professional career than she went to work at the Villa Panamericana’s hotel. My wife considered that career change practically an act of treason.

At the hotel, Olivia was in charge of public relations, and according to what my mother-in-law related once I’d told her I’d seen the woman at the table with the ballplayer, she was so good at her job that people in the neighborhood were beginning to feel sorry for her husband. While Pupy was all vulgarity and cockiness, Olivia, whose father was a journalist with a weekly radio program, pretended to be an elegantly plain woman. (I once made the mistake of commenting in front of my wife a bit too enthusiastically about Olivia’s undeniable poise, her graceful walk, the way she moves; my wife has never forgotten the words I used, comparing her to a gazelle...)

However, Javier, Olivia’s husband, was untouchable as far as my mother-in-law was concerned: Shortly after we moved to the neighborhood, my son, who must have been three or four years old, fell, hit his head, and was left dazed, pale, and barely conscious. My mother-in-law was alone in the house. She went out in desperation and practically ran into Javier, who did not hesitate for an instant and pulled his old Pontiac from the garage to drive my son to the hospital.

“I see things as they are,” my mother-in-law said on the way home from shopping, “and if one’s a slut, the other one must be too.”

When I went by Luis’s house to pick him up, he was already outside, waiting impatiently on the sidewalk. Next to him was a tall, thin man, dark with green eyes. Luis introduced him as Azúcar, a friend from the neighborhood, a Ratas fan, and asked if he could come with us to the Latino. The deed was done but it had its upside. Azúcar had two principal occupations: He played basketball (although the gray hairs dotting his clean scalp indicated he was close to my age) and he sold auto parts. “Whatever you need, bro, you know...” His occupations were manifested in a narrow half-block corridor on 23rd Street between B and C, where there’s a state-owned store that deals in auto and motorcycle parts. On the sidewalk right in front, on the corner of B, there’s a basketball court.

The two of them had bought a bottle of rum which, as was required, had been poured into various plastic receptacles so as not to be discovered by the stadium ushers. I told them I’d seen El Torpedo drinking beer.

“Well, Artur,” responded Luis, “what do you want him to do?”

Azúcar’s comment made me sorry I’d accepted his company for the day: “Those hicks are always drunk. I don’t know how they manage to win.”

Like us, thousands of people had also thought it might be the penultimate game of the season, and when we went in we actually had a hard time finding three good seats. Perhaps the Latino’s greatest charm is its cosmopolitanism, the way the city’s demographics are reproduced in the stands. If you sit behind first base, you can be sure that those around you will be fans of the visiting team. The rest of the stadium (the gardens, the third base line, behind the plate) will be jammed with spectators, with small clusters of opponents, but these will be isolated, overwhelmed by the local joy.

It had been a year and a half since Luis and I had set foot in the stadium and we were surprised to see that about half the seats in our area behind the plate (the best, because of their excellent view of the playing field) were empty, and police officers stood in the aisles to close off access.

“They’re for foreigners,” explained Azúcar.

“What a waste,” said Luis, seeing, even as a voice called out “Play ball!” to begin the game, that nearly a hundred seats remained empty.

Azúcar kept eyeing that area. I thought he was looking out for the opportunity to switch seats to that more neutral territory, some distance from the scandalous crowd around us cheering for the boys from Santiago. But just as the first inning was ending, a throng of tourists showed up, the majority dressed as if on safari, or as if we’d gone back a century or so and were attending one of those games that marked Cuba’s belle époque: straw hats, felt hats, baggy white linen pants, huge fans, colored handkerchiefs around the necks, and, as if to indicate contemporary times just a bit, a beret here and there.

The blue that characterizes Las Ratas (and the New York Yankees, their supposed equals) shone brightly on the head of a woman who I thought I recognized. Was that Olivia? It was impossible to tell, the lighting in the stands was tenuous and a brim covered her forehead; my neighbor wore her hair long so I assumed it had to be tucked into the hat. But there was a way of moving when she came down the stairs, just like a gazelle, which certainly resembled hers. If Olivia was at the Latino, if those tourists were guests at the hotel, just like the players from Santiago, then her presence next to Kindelán and El Torpedo made more sense than Pupy’s: Pupy, and not Olivia, was the stranger, the upstart. Was one as much of a slut as the other? I figured I’d ask my mother-in-law over breakfast the next day.

But I forgot about Olivia pretty quickly: Suddenly, it was as if the entire stadium had entered another dimension, as if we’d been completely covered by a veil of silence. The arm with which El Torpedo was pitching seemed to belong to God. Inning after inning, the zeros were adding up on the electric scoreboard. In the fifth, Orestes Kindelán hit a high one, and the ball fell among fans way up in the highest stands of the central gardens. Among us, there was much applause, hats in the air, and high-fives. After Orestes Kindelán was congratulated by his teammates and the scoreboard reflected the run, the only (and miraculous) score by Santiago, the silence returned, even deeper now.

Luis taunted Azúcar, who wasn’t spared from the muteness that had fallen over the spectators. Whoever might be strolling by outside the Latino could never have imagined that there were forty thousand people in there, their hearts in their throats, entranced. What mattered now wasn’t the score, but the spectacle offered by El Torpedo, his super fastball doing arabesques, lines breaking on the inside, on the outside, balls that dropped in flight as if fleeing from the batter, who was left dumbfounded, looking ridiculous on the third strike and forced to make that walk to the bench behind third base with his head down, the bat landing uselessly on the red sand.

In the seventh inning (they call it the lucky inning, because that’s when pitchers start getting tired or the batters start figuring out pitches that had defied them before), El Torpedo opened with a walk, the only one of the game. The guy on first was a fast runner and, on the pitch, he sprinted toward second. In the meantime, the batter hit into the infield, where the defender had abandoned his position, and the play ended with men on third and first, with no outs. About two-thirds of the stadium awoke from its stupor. The other third debated the play. The batter had been right-handed, so the infield players should have never left their posts. Just one run ahead, the team on the field could screw up one of the best games of El Torpedo’s year.

I looked at the clock: It was just 10 o’clock at night. I thought about the pitcher’s fatigue, about the beers from this afternoon.

“This is getting good,” said Luis, who only really cares about the stakes and the beauty of the game, not about any one team.

“I’ll be right back,” said Azúcar, and then we saw him in the aisles behind home plate.

A gasp (of surprise? admiration? reproach?) went through the stands when El Torpedo decided to release the next pitch facing home, and not from the side, as the unwritten rules of baseball demand. The man on first took off immediately, stealing second. The next batter was a power hitter (“This guy could do some damage,” said Luis, not to me, but to a little guy devouring a pizza next to him) and I thought the pitcher was going to go for an intentional walk. But the three consecutive outs that El Torpedo managed were humiliating for Las Ratas and their fans: a silly fly ball to first base, a strikeout, a ground ball caught with his own hands, each one cheered on by the five or six thousand spectators around us (I was on my feet, clapping wildly for each of those outs).

Later, after the danger had passed, it wasn’t El Torpedo’s pitches that caught our attention, but his composure, the dignity with which he took the pitcher’s mound, serene, smiling. Azúcar returned to his seat at the beginning of the eighth inning.

“My condolences,” Luis said, and Azúcar told him to go to hell. Chewing on his cigar, eyeing his friend sideways, Luis was having as great a time as me, and he made fun of my earlier apprehensions. “I told you, Artur, those guys drink beer the way you and I drink water.”

My greatest happiness occurred on the way out of the stadium, when I heard Las Ratas fans praising El Torpedo.

“He’s a genius,” Luis declared.

“He’s a motherfucker,” Azúcar responded.

It was a great game, though it lacked any real significance for either team. Sometimes glory is wasted. I remember it now for other reasons.

At dawn the next day, it was my mother-in-law who first opened the front door. I was in the kitchen preparing coffee. She called me to come look: Two squad cars were parked in front of Pupy’s parents’ house and various cops and neighbors were standing on the porch, their faces worried. My mother-in-law crossed the street. I remained at the front door, waiting for her. I saw her put her hands on her head, then hug and kiss Pupy’s sister and go into the house. When she came back, she looked like she’d been crying: Pupy had been found murdered in the women’s bathroom at the Latino. Guillermo was a suspect.

All day, news kept coming in waves that were often contradictory: The body had been found during the eighth inning and not at the end of the game; no, it was found during the ninth; actually, it was two hours before the lights were turned off at the stadium; she’d been strangled; she was stabbed; it’d been a devastating poison; the body was stuffed in a closet; it was left in the parking lot; it was found sitting in the bleachers and she looked like she’d fallen asleep; they’d found her because Guillermo had called the police; Guillermo had left the Latino without the slightest concern about his missing wife (“Were they actually married?” my mother-in-law asked, astonished).

Shortly after lunch, we saw the new widower arrive. I asked my mother-in-law to go back and get more information (she could always take some fresh coffee over, since the flow of visitors had not ceased all day long). But she was embarrassed. She thought I wasn’t dealing with Pupy’s death the way I should. She mentioned the newly motherless children, the pain her parents must be experiencing.

They released the body that night (that’s how they said it in cop speak, and that’s how the neighbors repeated it: Her possessions had been retained, examined, and now they were free — to satisfy the rituals of death? So as to actually have peace in death?) and though my mother-in-law insisted we go to the funeral home right away, I refused to go until the next day. The burial was slated for 3 in the afternoon and there would be plenty of time to offer condolences.

There wasn’t room for one more soul at the funeral home. There were two squad cars outside (the cops inside sweating through their heavy gray shirts, were they her husband’s old colleagues? Or were they still investigating the murder?). As soon as we went in, my mother-in-law made her way, as expected, to the viewing room where she found Pupy’s parents, children, and sister. She distributed kisses and approached the casket, peering at Pupy’s face, which I imagined pale and dark around the eyes (as if she hadn’t gotten sleep in the morgue). She strolled among the other neighbors huddled throughout the funeral home. I did not see her greet the widower, who was talking nonstop, surrounded by about a dozen people.

The haze in the funeral home caused by the smokers drove me outside, far from all the chattering, where I engaged in monosyllabic exchanges with acquaintances who went in and out. My mother-in-law came out now and then to share what she was hearing inside: It looked like it was true about the closet and the knifing, though the stab count varied between one and five (the theories about strangulation and poisoning, which had struck me as crazy, had disappeared). The issue of the time also appeared to be resolved: A little before 10, Pupy had left her seat to go to the bathroom. The game had ended at 10:40 and Guillermo didn’t think it was particularly strange at first that his wife hadn’t come back before the game’s last out. On nights like that, with the stadium full, the lines in the women’s bathrooms were long, interrupted now and again by employees in charge of flushing the toilets by forcing buckets of water into them.

I approached the chorus surrounding the widower: He was ashen, and he kept pausing to explain more than tell about the moment when he arrived at the women’s bathroom and found an employee closing the door. The woman had assured him that there was no one inside except an older woman, whose description didn’t fit the person Guillermo said he was looking for. He thought maybe Pupy had gone to the bathroom on the other side of the Latino (those near where we had been sitting), and he went around, avoiding the employees who’d started to put up gates and burglar bars, only to find that bathroom empty as well. He climbed the stairs to the stands, looked over to the area behind third base: There was no one there except the cleaning crew, which was sweeping. He went out to the streets, moving from one entrance to the other.

“I was just walking from here to there and there to here,” he said. Somebody from the chorus asked what he’d been thinking during his search. “You know, Pupy was kind of nutty,” he answered, “and since I’d moved from where we’d been sitting to go look for her, it occurred to me that maybe she’d gone ahead to the bus stop.”

According to the police, what made Guillermo a suspect was that he’d been found at home, fast asleep, when Pupy’s body was discovered in the closet in the third base women’s bathroom, surrounded by buckets and mops.

“They just don’t know how it happened,” the widower tried to explain. “How was I supposed to know she was dead?”

According to Guillermo’s own telling, the two of them had drunk an entire bottle of Patricruzado at the stadium just before the seventh inning. Azúcar, Luis, and I had finished off our rum in the ninth, with the last out.

“I was beat when I got home, I threw myself in bed, and I was dead to the world,” Guillermo said. The cops came knocking on the door around 2 in the morning. A stadium worker had found the body when she went looking for the acid to pour into the toilets after the general cleaning.

The mourners demanded that Guillermo enlighten them about possible motives, that he name suspects, that he repeat every word uttered by the police.

“You all knew Pupy,” he said, “and there was stuff, but she always tried to get along with everybody. As far as I’m concerned, they just got her mixed up with somebody else.”

I asked him if she’d left her seat before or after the seventh inning.

“During the walk,” he responded.

It was almost 11 o’clock in the morning. Sunday’s game started at 2 and the players from my team might still be hanging out in the hotel lobby. I asked my mother-in-law to wait for me. When I parked next to the Plaza de las Banderas, I saw the players’ bus leaving. A few foreigners waved goodbye from the sidewalk with a certain familiarity. I identified a few picture hats, a cap with a Marlins logo.

At five till 2, I entered the Latino. The stadium felt like a different place. The sun washed out the colors in the stands, the worn field sparkled, and a few kids ran in the aisles. The silence came not from awe but from abandonment. I found the place where the tourists had been seated the night before. Nobody was watching the access door now. I sat down in the very middle of the section by myself. The applause and whistles after good plays sounded like the echoes of a small town stadium. The players were closer, and more visibly tired; the uniforms dirty; the bats scarred. I left before the game had even reached its midway point. Las Ratas were ahead but nobody seemed to care, not even me.

A few weeks later, the radiator in my car began to leak; days later, it had become a stream that lined the walk from my garage. When it got to be a hose watering the garden, I remembered Azúcar. I found him on the basketball court in a bad mood: His team had just lost and the players were arguing about whose fault it was. He told me there were no radiators to be found, and then gave me an obscure address on the banks of the Almendares River where I could get a box of balloons and the sealant to repair the damage myself. The postseason had already begun and Santiago had destroyed its first rival in only three games. I told Azúcar that I was sure El Torpedo would take us through to the championship.

“That guy throws rocks,” he said. “That night was different, but anybody can have a game like that.” Then he laid out El Torpedo’s career statistics, which were, in fact, mediocre.

I mentioned that a neighbor of mine had been killed at the Latino.

“You’re neighbors with the late Pupy?” he asked. “Well, you were neighbors.” He grinned. “Hell, you still are — you didn’t move.” He stood there thinking. “Fuck, how would you say that?”

“I was neighbors with the late Pupy.”

He repeated it. “You were neighbors...” He wasn’t sure I was right.

“I guess she had to pay,” I said.

“She was out of her league,” he responded.

“How much did you lose?” I dared to ask.

He looked at me uncertainly. “Forget about that.”

Two months later, Pupy’s death was still in the shadows. Guillermo was brought in once or twice and Pupy’s mother told my mother-in-law that something had happened with the woman who cleaned the bathrooms. It was also being said that a woman’s wig and high heels had been found that night abandoned in the stands.

“Did they make him try on the shoes?” I asked her, trying to imagine that robust black guy in high heels and crowned by a brilliant blond wig. Were we now playing some kind of Cinderella game in reverse, with the police going door to door to see which of the men who had been at the Latino that night could fit into the shoes worn by the killer transvestite? My mother-in-law suggested I be more respectful.

The championship was about to end, my team looked invincible, and I invited Luis and Charo, his wife, for lunch at my house to watch the decisive game, being broadcast from Santiago. As my friends rang the bell, Pupy’s father, bent over an old cane that looked like a stick of wood, passed by on his morning walk from one corner to another.

“Poor man,” Luis said after I told him who it was.

I lit the coals and brought out the plate of chops marinated in sour orange, salt, and garlic.

I tried to make sure Pupy didn’t get dropped from the conversation. I reminded Luis of El Torpedo’s exploits. The chops, now resting over a slow fire, began to drip on the burning coals and release a smell of burning fat. I suggested to Luis that we make a game out of guessing Pupy’s killer.

He laughed. “Artur, you’re such a kidder...”

My mother-in-law brought out a tray of pork rinds, “so you have something with which to fill your mouths.” I asked her to join us. She preferred showing off her flowering rhododendrons to Charo, as well as the lilies that would dry up if the rains didn’t come soon.

I got a piece of paper and drew a few lines that could be the field and others that attempted to define the stands. Underneath, I made a mark suggesting a timeline. At the beginning I wrote in twelve noon.

Luis asked me if that was when I’d called him. “I don’t remember a thing, Artur.”

I knew I’d gotten his interest. On the timeline, I started scribbling in words to define actions: the moment I saw Pupy with El Torpedo, when we arrived at the Latino... And on the diagram of the stadium, I marked the hours in which these events occurred: A little before 10, Pupy gets up to go to the bathroom; minutes later, second base gets stolen from under El Torpedo and he allows a hit; then Azúcar leaves our side.

As soon as I wrote Azúcar, I could see Luis’s eyes getting worried.

“No, Artur, not Azúcar.”

I calmed him. I explained that his neighbor being a fan of Las Ratas did not, in my opinion, make him a killer. But later I did raise the topic more soberly: If in fact Azúcar had gotten up from his seat with the purpose of murdering Pupy, fate was sweeping by us (I only said “us” to implicate Luis) with such force that, in a way perhaps we didn’t yet understand, we might also be guilty.

Luis shot up, his hands in the air as if asking for a time out, and made his way to the pork rinds. He grabbed a fistful (some were hard, or “past their prime,” according to my mother-in-law). “Let’s see, let’s see,” he said. “So Azúcar didn’t kill her?”

“Correct.” I needed him not to feel compelled to defend his friend.

“Well, then, go on.”

But Azúcar could certainly be useful: Why did he get up from his seat just as Las Ratas were threatening in the seventh inning?

Luis demurred — how could he possibly know?

I was as clear as I could be: Azúcar had gotten up to make a bet.

Luis narrowed his eyes, now two little lines on his face.

I told him about the conversation I’d had with his buddy when I went looking for the radiator.

Luis pulled a cigar from his pocket and asked me for a light. The flame on the stove was better than the burning coals on the grill.

“You want me to tell you the truth?” he asked on his way back from the kitchen, a little bit of malice in his voice. “That night, Azúcar lost a bundle.”

I liked the phrase, and it sounded natural in Luis’s voice: “a bundle.”

I called over to my mother-in-law and my wife, who was prepping the salad. “I’ve got it,” I said euphorically.

My mother-in-law told me to lower my voice: Behind the patio fence bobbed the heads of some of our neighbors. She always assumed their ears were on alert, spying on our conversations.

I explained the diagram and the timeline. On another sheet of paper, I scribbled my logic:

a) Someone whose identity we’d yet to discover contracted Pupy to seduce El Torpedo and somehow convince him to lose the game;

b) El Torpedo went to bed with Pupy (“Pupy slept with El Torpedo,” my wife clarified) and agreed to drop the game. We can assume that the sex alone was not enough to convince him (Pupy was no longer young and, according to my wife and mother-in-law, had never been pretty). The pitcher was probably also offered a substantial amount of money.

c) At the end of the sixth inning, Santiago was ahead by one run and El Torpedo seemed invincible. It would have been easy to get a bunch of neophytes to bet on them.

d) Pupy went to complete the second half of her assignment — to promote big bets against Las Ratas.

e) The walk, the stolen second, the hit all made it look like El Torpedo was doing his part.

f) Azúcar got up to go bet a bundle in favor of Las Ratas — that is, against the popular current.

g) El Torpedo reacted. We could attribute it to his pride, perhaps because of something said by a teammate, or maybe an insult hurled from the bleachers, or perhaps he simply realized he was having an exceptional night and he wasn’t prepared to throw it away. h) When he decided to stand facing the batter to pitch, with men on first and third, El Torpedo defied those who were trying to buy him. The dimwits figured he was just shamelessly screwing up. The more alert understood he was laughing at them.

i) When El Torpedo managed to dominate Las Ratas without allowing the tying run, Pupy’s fate was sealed.

I repeated Azúcar’s words: “She was out of her league.”

“So who do you think killed her?” my mother-in-law asked. Her look wasn’t curiosity so I was prepared to have her contradict me.

The chops were just about ready, the game was about to start, and there were still two outstanding questions. Or three. And a clarification.

“Do you know why Azúcar isn’t a suspect?”

Luis shook his head.

“Because he got up before Las Ratas became a threat, and because he came back too quickly.”

My wife said it was all absurd and went to deal with the lettuce and tomatoes.

“Who’s an easy touch for a lot of money on a bet? Who would bet against Las Ratas at the Latino?”

I’ve always admired how keen Charo can be, and her response was what I expected: “No Habanero would dare it, and people from Santiago never have enough money.”

So who was in position to lure the foreigners, for whom betting was probably not illegal, to the stadium? Who, in fact, was in a position to make the bets that, in the language of the profession, could be called part of the “tourist package”?

My wife brought the salad. “Olivia,” she said.

“Oh, please, be quiet,” my mother-in-law admonished, immediately surveying the top of the fence for listeners.

“The one whose father’s on the radio?” asked Luis.

Trying to imagine the actual killing seemed futile to me, but my audience demanded it. The women’s bathroom, where the stadium security guards have little access, could easily be a betting spot.

Olivia might well have been with her guests in the stands, explaining the doings on the field. “The one who’s going up to bat next is the loud one from the restaurant,” she might have said, and the tourists would have looked at the guy under mercury lights, hardly believing he was the same man who had slept in a chair in the hotel lobby.

Did Olivia kill with her own hands or merely order the hit? My mother-in-law, for the second time, said she didn’t want to hear anymore. I couldn’t imagine Olivia going into those flooded bathrooms, which you could smell from far away. At the third out of the seventh inning, there would have been plenty of resentment to go around.

“Olivia probably didn’t even have to have her killed,” Charo proposed.

I declined to accept the idea. How much money did those people lose who’d trusted in Pupy, in El Torpedo? Who had thought up the operation?

So that it wouldn’t be Olivia’s cadaver that showed up in the hallway at the Latino, or in one of the dark little streets around it, Pupy had to die.

“Thank God they didn’t kill El Torpedo.”

“Too risky,” I said.

“Yes, here we’re all equal, but some are more equal than others,” added Charo.

My wife came to tell us that they were singing the national anthem in the stadium in Santiago. “Are you finished wasting time yet?” she asked.

“This has given me a headache,” Luis said.

“That’s because you let him get to you.”

But Luis and Charo agreed that my conclusions were irrefutable.

“If it’s so easy to solve the murder, why haven’t the police been able to do it?” my wife asked.

“Because they’re idiots,” explained Charo.

“I don’t think they’d play around with a murder.” My wife had lost her sense of humor. “It’s a good thing you never wanted to be a policeman.”

According to her, the detectives had to know everything we’d come up with, and more. In fact, we didn’t really know much about that world of gambling and revenge. For what I was saying to be true, wouldn’t Olivia have had to pay something to someone? Where would she get that kind of cash? Was Javier, her husband, unaware of her dealings, or was he in on it too?

My wife might very well have been right, but in cases like this, I know she can get insufferable, and it becomes impossible for me not to argue against her.

“She’s a murderer,” I said conclusively.

Luis took his plate to the living room and I went ahead to tell my mother-in-law she could serve.

“She’s always up in the clouds,” my mother-in-law said, as she gave the black beans a final touch by pouring just a smidgen of olive oil and vinegar on top. “And you don’t even know what I know!”

I tried to get her to at least drop a hint: Had the police interviewed Olivia?

“Are you crazy?” When my mother-in-law decides to bite her tongue, she’s as silent as a tomb. Anyway, El Torpedo was on the pitcher’s mound and Luis was screaming for me to come watch.

I went to bed early and in a foul mood: El Torpedo was spanked and the championship had slipped through our hands. By the fifth inning, the game was a mess and we had abandoned the TV. Out on the terrace, which was still haunted by the smell of the grilled chops, Luis and I silently finished off the two bottles of rum that were left. I fell asleep out there, without noticing when our friends went home. The world was still in balance inside my head when I dropped into bed. I shut my eyes. Then the world made a sudden turn. I opened my eyes and tried to focus until the ceiling above me almost righted itself.

“You know you screwed up,” my wife said.

I pleaded with her not to move the bed; I assured her I was feeling better. But she was talking about Olivia. The ceiling was now just about flat again and parallel with the floor.

“If she finds out what you were saying about her, she could make trouble for you, and you won’t have an easy time of it.” The ceiling was once more intent on oscillating, on coming closer then retreating. I got up and had a glass of ice water. Dawn found me in a chair in the living room.

Some days after those pork chops had been served and devoured, I was sitting on the porch reading. My mother-in-law was in the garden admiring some gardenias that were beginning to sprout. Olivia and her husband walked by on the street and greeted us. Their arms were full and their exhaustion was obvious. My mother-in-law didn’t even lift her eyes from the gardenias’ pale, fragile stems.

“Has their car broken down?” I asked my mother-in-law.

Olivia and her husband stopped to talk with Pupy’s parents.

My mother-in-law watched the scene, then shook the dirt off her shoes. “They had to sell the car,” she said. “It’s a miracle they didn’t kill her too.” As she walked by me, she muttered, “Degenerate.”

Translation by Achy Obejas