Havana Noir

The orchid by Mariela Varona Roque

Santos Suárez

The man takes the orchid down from the balcony wall. He breathes, as always; his breaths seem like sighs. He considers the poor orchid, tied unjustly to this fake branch, and he imagines the size, number, and thickness of the petals if, instead of this fourth-floor apartment, he had a house with a yard. The yard would be filled with ancient trees, worthy of this orchid.

The excited, almost hysterical voices of his wife and a neighbor come to him from the kitchen. Oh my God, only seven years old, and Marta had told him to come straight up here, that Alfonso was going to babysit him, but Alfonso says that when the boy didn’t show up, he went down to his house to get him and found the house locked; that’s when he figured Marta must have decided to leave him with his grandmother... Alfonso? Just imagine, he’s been struck dumb by this terrible thing, like me, that boy was like a son, or a grandson, to us, you know that. I imagine the police will want to question us now...

The man has taken the orchid to the bathroom. He poses it delicately on the rim of the pan in the shower stall and pours water from a bucket, filling the pan to the exact brim so that it is perfectly balanced. The voices can still be heard in the bathroom, though they’re deadened by the thickness of two concrete walls. Yes, of course, she’s under psychiatric care, they have her on pills. She came home at 2 in the morning, and since her son has stayed here so many nights before, she didn’t want to wake him up at that hour, believing the whole time, poor thing, that her little angel was fast asleep, when by then he was...

The orchid has two withered petals the man tries to remove from the stem. One falls into his hand but the other still has some sap and refuses to fall. The fleshy, bright texture of the petals remind him of animal skin rather than plant leaves. The man sits on the toilet lid, sighing constantly, and he takes the little jug that his wife has used for the last twenty years to wash herself and dips it in the bucket. He surprises himself when he tries to remember the last time his wife washed herself before going to bed.

It’s her voice he hears, rising in tone, becoming more dramatic. Whoever did it should be castrated, should be left to bleed until his mouth overflows with ants... He was an innocent creature who couldn’t defend himself. It must have been a mentally ill person, one of those drunks who spend all day on the corner, over there at San Benigno and Zapotes, with their bottles in hand. One of them is an ex-convict, he has tattoos. You can see it in his face that he’s capable of all kinds of savagery. It was probably him — he saw the boy walking all by himself and sweet-talked him; kids go along with whoever shows them anything of the slightest beauty, the poor things... Alfonso is devastated. I could never have kids, and ever since we got to know Marta, that boy has spent more time here than with his real grandmother...

The man brings up the little jug, full now, and begins to water the orchid, which shines its venomous color in the shadows. He asks himself why this thing with the boy had to happen now, this weekend, when all signs had pointed to calm. We have to buy groceries, Alfonso. Groceries bought. And we need to get money to pay the light bill because what you gave me for household expenses has been spent. Lights paid. And please do me the damn favor of fixing the oven, because it’s leaking oil. Oven fixed. And make sure that all your messy tools and parts are put away by the time I get back. Tools and parts picked up and put away. And go by Mirna’s and return the blender, since I have to live my life borrowing blenders because it’s never occurred to you to buy me a blender. Blender returned. And remember that Marta wants you to watch the boy this Saturday, that she’s going out.

He turns the light on and closes the door to keep the voices out. Isolated phrases still come through. Seven years old, goddamn it, and no pity... Nude, smeared with blood and left in the mud, the little angel... The doctor on call at the clinic found out everything from the morgue. Yes, in the mud, in a ditch on the way to the river, behind the brickworks... It was the old man who gives massages who found him, he was looking for herbs for one of his teas... It had to be the ex-convict: Who else could it be but him? The only person who’s sick in the head around here is that guy...

The man aims the flow from the little jug to water the fake branch to which the orchid is pinned. He knows that the water will soak into the organic matter in its thick layers, and that the orchid will suck it out later like a vampire. He sees the petals shining; they seem as alive as he is, but incapable of blossoming. He remembers Marta’s boy touching the plump petals with his fingertips whenever he accompanied him on his ritual of watering the plants.

There was no need to water the boy’s cheeks to see them shine. One time, in this very bathroom, Alfonso had emptied the little jug of warm water over the boy, and his color had not been venomous at all; on the contrary, it was the healthy color of a beautiful boy, with bright eyes and red lips, splashing water everywhere, never still like an orchid. His skin reflected all the colors of a rose, including a morbid mauve under his brow. They were the colors the man imagined on the flower to come, after watering that mute plant for so many years.

But now it is the same as always: The petals are dry and hard, like a fistful of indigenous, maybe obsidian blades. Not a single bud coming up anywhere. He sees himself, as he did so many times at sunset, sharing his secret hiding place between the trees by the river with the boy. They sit in an old abandoned truck covered with vines and flanked by piles of old bricks, and he listens to the boy’s chatter while he gazes out at the trees that don’t belong to him and imagines them covered with orchids.

He lifts the fake branch and waits for the water to drip off the stem and the petals, then scurry down the shower drain. Later, he holds it with one hand, keeping the other hand under it to catch the water that continues to leak through as he takes the plant out of the shower, with his flip-flops dragging, and back to its nail on the wall in the balcony. When he returns, he hears his wife’s voice saying goodbye to the neighbor, tearing into him right away. There you go again with your hang-up with that orchid, instead of getting dressed to go help Marta, that poor woman, and then to the wake. I don’t know how you can concern yourself with that idiotic thing with the boy’s disgrace still so fresh, and knowing that it happened while he was walking over here...

The man doesn’t say anything. He goes back to the bathroom and carefully closes the door so his wife doesn’t hear him lock it. He puts the bucket and the little jug back where they belong; he uses the bathroom rug to wipe off the water that dripped on the floor, then stands before the mirror hanging above the bathroom sink. He looks at his faded eyes and hears the boy’s voice pounding in his ears, telling him not to go to his house, that it’s better to meet by the hideout near the river, the only really safe place. And he remembers his sudden rage, the childish eyes growing wider from shock, and that sensation of power once everything was finished. He pulls from his pocket the blade with the golden handle, a gift from his father, and checks the sharpness with the same spare discipline with which he performed the ritual of watering the plants.

Translation by Achy Obejas

What for, this burden by Michel Encinosa Fú

Vibora

Daniela killed herself.

She fried her brains, that’s what I mean.

They said it happened in the theater’s restroom. During the blackout. She broke open an electrical outlet, pulled the wires out, and scraped them down with a nail cutter. Then she stabbed herself in the head with a pair of scissors, two times, and tied the wires to them. Right into her brain. They said that doesn’t hurt, that you can’t feel pain in your brain even if it gets bitten. Then she sat herself down on the toilet, they said. And when the electricity came back on, the volts and amps blew through her at will. They said you just had to see what was left after that. You could peer inside her skull through the holes. Can you believe it? And her panties were wet. But her makeup was intact. Daniela wasn’t one of those lezzies who cries, they said.

Though apparently she was one of those who pees herself, they added.

Nobody actually saw anything, but that’s what they said, that’s what they’re still talking about.

And I believe them.

I say thanks and take off down the shaded sidewalk because the red and blue riot of lights from the squad cars is driving me crazy.

It’s a pretty day. There’s a bit of sunshine, little clouds, an incredible clarity.

“Hey, is it true some crazy woman killed herself in there?” La Gloria asks, coming up to me with that perennial smell of garbage that’s always about her. “Were you there? What happened? Hey, what the fuck are you laughing about?”

“It’s a beautiful day,” I tell her, avoiding the hand that’s trying to grab my arm.

“That’s because somebody wanted it to be that way and pushed some buttons in his office.”

That’s true.

It’s horrible.

It’s as if I had to be reminded that the contentment in my belly was owed to a calf that had been dismembered just a few days before.

Or worse: owed to the person who did the dismembering.

La Gloria insists: “What happened? Was it because of trouble with her lovers? Or did somebody tell her she had AIDS? C’mon, you fag, tell me.”

“It’s none of your business,” I say. “Zip it, shove it up your ass.”

She spits at my feet and walks back to the mountain of garbage covering the dumpsters.

I watch for a few seconds as she starts to dive, dig, salvage.

I’m tired of watching her. Every day, the same corners, the same dumpsters. This is La Gloria, from our neighborhood. The one who eats what you shit. The one who dresses in everybody else’s clothes. The one who picks up cigarette butts at bars. The one who scours the whole city as if it were some free supermarket. You know, that one... barbaric, and so damn young.

Her Lycra’s ripped at the butt. Her dark skin is cellulitefree. Thin and straight, her body. Curly and ash-colored, her hair. So young.

I turn my back on her and continue down 10 de Octubre Boulevard. It doesn’t matter, up or down, but down’s easier. Until the intersection with Vía Blanca. Then left, until the Lacret junction. Then down again to the boulevard. Triangles are always worse than circles. I walk along, contemplating my shadow, which moves ahead of me, until I realize I have no shadow at all to contemplate anymore. I don’t know when but at some point the sky clouded over. I’m afraid I can be slow to notice things like that.

They always told me: “Don’t go around breaking girls’ hearts. Especially the young ones. The younger they are, the worse it is.”

Ten years ago, Daniela was seven years old and I was seventeen. Ten years ago, we were both hungry. Like so many siblings in the tenements, we slept in the same bed; it was her fault I didn’t find out for the longest time about nighttime masturbation, serene and alone. But I never held it against her. I never held anything against her. Not even the way she slapped and kicked at me when she had nightmares. Instead, I’d talk to her.

“Just imagine it, Dani, my little dove. A Harley Davidson. Do you know what a Harley Davidson is? It’s a motorcycle like Uncle Patricio’s. That big, like a couch. You and me on one, on the highway. Can you imagine it? A highway, like in the movies. You know: Kansas, Arizona, Omaha, Salt Lake City, sun, big sky, straight ahead, just straight ahead, right up to the clouded horizon. There’s always lightning on that horizon, you know. Can you imagine it, my little dove? You see the light cut through the sky but the Harley’s engine won’t let you hear the thunder, so you go ahead and it never rains because the clouds run away when they see us, and there’s almost no grass, and everything’s quiet except the Harley’s engine; you’re laughing, and I just go faster and faster. Can you imagine it?”

“Yes,” she’d answer. “We’re gonna do that someday?”

“Just like I’m telling you, my little dove, someday, someday we’re gonna do all that.”

Yuri would come over and listen for a while, then leave. Yuri was a very boring older brother because he was never hungry. He’d dropped out of college to sell marijuana and PC components.

It was Yuri who pressured my mother to let me go on scholarship. “We’re too crowded here,” he said. “My clients come over, they see so many people and get nervous.” Later, he found a lover for my mother so that she left the house too. Some guy from Miramar, high up, you know. “And don’t worry; I’ll take care of Dani. She’s gonna be better fed and looked after with me than you anyway.”

Mamá let herself be talked into it. I can’t blame her.

I let myself be talked into it. Daniela never forgave me.

Seven years old. Daniela was just seven years old when I broke her heart.

She never sent it off for repairs. She learned to like the dripping of her fractured baby bottle. It lulled her at night; it gave her life a different beat.

When I came home from school, I’d lie down next to her, just like before, and I’d talk to her about festivals up at Dunlop Square, and about Mardi Gras and San Francisco.

“Stop talking shit,” she’d say, and turn her back to me.

Yuri would sometimes come by and take a look at us, and it seemed like he felt sorry for us.

Yuri is sitting alone at the table. Standing next to the wall, the sergeant is smoking. But he doesn’t count. Yuri builds a wall with dominoes. Then he knocks it down with his finger.

“I already know.”

I sit down facing him, pick up a few of the dominoes, and build half a Stonehenge. Daniela was always intrigued by that sort of thing. Dolmens, menhirs, that stuff; neolithic drunken sprees, all that bullshit.

“We hafta keep going. Do you hear me, Omaha? We hafta let go, let go of old baggage,” he says, raising his head to see beyond me. “What you got there?”

The man coming in is pushing a little boy in front of him.

“You can keep him overnight. But I need him back early tomorrow. You can pay me the usual.”

“What’s your hurry?” Yuri takes stock of the boy, who smiles at him.

“He’s my sister-in-law’s nephew. That’s the hurry. Like I said, the usual.”

The man leaves.

Yuri gets up. “Come here,” he says to the boy.

I follow them.

In the back bedroom, Yuri sits the boy on the bed and offers him a cold ham-and-cheese snack and a TuKola from a little table. He watches for a while as the boy eats and drinks, then he gives him a Nintendo DS.

“I can’t stand it when they bring them to me like that,” he says. “They don’t last the night.”

I shrug and go back to the living room.

The sergeant’s at the table, pawing a domino. He blinks like a kid who’s been caught in the act, drops the domino, and returns his three hundred pounds of fat and muscle to their post.

I stick the first DVD I find into the player and throw myself on the couch.

Wesley Snipes with glasses and a sword. Just what I need.

It starts to rain outside.

That night two weeks ago it was also raining out on Santa Catalina.

Héctor. Héctor and I shared a desk in primary school. He’d lend me his pencil. He’d let me play with the toy soldiers that he brought to school behind his mother’s back. His hair was very blond, practically white, dry, curly.

He hadn’t changed much.

“Omaha,” Héctor said, “decide. We’re not gonna be here all night.”

Daniela looked scared. The other girl, her friend, did too.

When he was a kid, Héctor had been a loner. He only played with me. Now he’d switched playmates. And multiplied them — by a lot.

Those five guys looked very capable of waiting all night. But maybe they weren’t.

They’d certainly seemed impatient when they stepped in our path and dragged us to that garage in Heredia.

I am not your rolling wheels, I am the highway, I am not your carpet ride, I am the sky... screamed Chris Cornell from the Panasonic on the Chevrolet’s hood.

It seemed possible.

“Your brother’s gone too far, Omaha,” Héctor told me. “He’s stepping on my territory. Gourmet meat is his thing, and that’s fine, but selling weed is my business, and given how tight it’s been, the last thing I’m looking for is competition. I hafta send him a message, okay? It’s not that I wanna do you harm but I’ve got my buddies and the neighborhood watching me. That’s all it is, so relax, nothing’s gonna happen to you. Just decide already. Which of these two?”

Both girls stopped looking my way.

“C’mon, your sister or her little friend. You decide.”

“All so that I turn around and let my brother know that you threatened us with a switchblade and—”

“What switchblade? Do you see a switchblade? Any kind of knife? Do you think we need that?”

I looked at them.

Héctor had really grown up. Quite a bit. The others too. I remembered them vaguely from primary school too. No. They didn’t need any of that.

Daniela’s little friend was still holding one of the sunflowers the actors had given out to the audience. The play had been fun. There were a lot of kids in the audience. There were a lot of laughs.

“Get my sister outta here,” I finally told Héctor. “I don’t want her to see anything.”

The guy shakes his umbrella at the door and comes in.

“Got anything?” he asks.

Yuri nods. The guy takes out his wallet.

“And the other thing?”

Yuri nods.

“Thank God.” The man puts two bills down in front of him, on the table. “I had a fight today with the union guys, because of last week’s payroll. I told you about it... so I’m short. And when I get home my wife is going to want me to take her to the movies, and my daughter’s fighting with her husband so she comes over now and then just to talk crap and...”

Yuri keeps nodding. He takes a couple of joints from his pocket and gives them to the man, who then heads to the back room.

“Gimme one,” I tell Yuri.

“No,” he responds. “No, unless you pay for it.”

“Fuck, man, I’m your brother.”

“Debt between brothers is the worst thing in the world.” Voices.

The man’s voice. I think I also hear the boy. I’m not sure.

They took Daniela out of my sight. Two of them grabbed the other girl. Héctor pumped up the volume.

I didn’t look at her face as I unbuttoned her jeans. Or as I pulled them down. Or as I pulled down her panties. Her navel was pierced. It was a tiny Chinese lion’s head, with a miniscule gemstone. Maybe it was just some piece of glass. Yeah, that’s probably what it was.

I felt the tip of Héctor’s boot on my butt.

“Not like that. Fuck her from behind. So she’ll feel it. So you’ll both feel it, you and her.”

They turned her around. They bent her over the hood of the car.

I realized the best thing to do was get it over with as soon as possible, and I acted accordingly. She was good. She didn’t scream.

“Okay,” Héctor said as I zipped up my fly. “Tell your brother to keep his paws off my business. You were great, really. Just ask her.”

I turned around, very slowly.

Daniela was behind me, at the garage door. Two of them were holding her; she had a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth. They’d held her there the whole time. Her jeans were at her knees. A third guy, at her back, moved away.

Daniela heaved as if she’d been holding her breath for hundreds of years.

The guy pulled up his zipper.

I don’t know what was worse: that she saw me or that I saw her. Or knowing that she’d seen me, or knowing that she knew that I knew she’d seen me, or knowing that she knew I’d seen her.

Maybe I should have asked the other girl, her little friend, what was worse.

But I didn’t. I never saw her again.

The woman leans against the doorframe, her hip pointing. “Hey, Yuri, what about me? Are you gonna pay me or what? Look, I don’t want any trouble with you but you can’t disrespect me.”

Yuri stretches in his chair.

“I’ve got your stuff, girl. But it’s not time for me to give it to you yet. I’m about to make an investment, and I could need it at any moment. I’ve got a live one. Let it go for now, come back Thursday. Look, I’m not lying.” He takes a wad of bills and fans them out. “Your stuff is right here, but listen to what I’m telling you... Of course, if you really need it, I’ll gladly... I mean, you know that, right?”

“You know how it is, Yuri...” She comes in and stands by my side.

She smells divine.

“I don’t think there’s a problem waiting till Thursday.”

And she heads for the back room.

Yuri puts the bills away and lights a joint. He blows the smoke in my face.

“Don’t look at me like that. You just never had the balls for business.”

That’s true.

I’m just Omaha, you know.

Omaha, with the happy face.

The one who crosses the street without a lick of sunlight. The one who doesn’t get wet at the beach when it rains. The one who knows how to talk to kids. The one who sells his only pair of shoes today and then tomorrow somebody gives him a motorcycle. The one who never pays but always invites. The one who leaves for church and comes back from the cabaret. The one everybody knows, and who everyone thinks tastes like honey. Or like really cold beer. Or smoked cheese. Or snapper. It’s a matter of taste. The one who came to stay. The one who’s always leaving. That one, yes, Omaha. The one you want to be.

It just won’t stop raining outside.

But I have to go out.

Or I’m going to go crazy.

The rain masks La Gloria’s stench so that it’s bearable. She doesn’t realize I’m behind her, staring at her ass while she’s absorbed in her excavation, until a few minutes later. She turns to me with her arms full of empty bottles.

“Hey, c’mon, gimme a hand.”

To her surprise, I say yes.

We put the bottles in a sack, already about half full with God knows what crap. We drag it one, two, three blocks in the rain, until she says, “We’re here.”

I follow her into the dark hallway. Stairs. She goes first. I miss a step and fall flat on the sack. It’s a little softer than I’d imagined. We go on. Door, lock, key.

“Come in.”

I manage to find a bench and sit down. La Gloria throws me something that feels like a towel and suggests I take off my shirt. I obey. She turns the light on and the first things I see are her tits.

Beautiful tits.

“You look like a wet cat,” she says, throwing her sweater on the floor. “C’mon, you must have come for something.”

She goes through a door and turns on another light.

The first room is a warehouse full of bags and trash. It didn’t surprise me. But this one does. There are books to the ceiling, piles of them, lovingly stacked. In the corner there’s a shiny hotplate. In the other, a naked mattress. In the other, a few things on hangers. That’s all.

And La Gloria, nude.

I didn’t see when she took off the Lycra and her tennis shoes. I’m still slow, very slow.

“We have to hurry,” she says. “My man will be here soon.”

Why not? All women have a right to get some, even the Glorias.

“What does your man do? Does he dumpster-dive too?”

“No way. My guy’s big, he has his own thing. He’s a businessman.”

“Oh, c’mon. What businessman is gonna wanna be with a little pig like you?”

“Hey, I’m telling you. My man’s the king of the neighborhood. His name is Héctor. Don’t tell me you don’t know him.”

“Héctor, the blond guy who sells weed?”

“That’s the one. You’re surprised? There are a lot of men who like women like me, women who know how to move. He doesn’t sleep with anybody else. I’m the one he likes. He’s always bringing me gifts.”

I approach her. She opens her arms to me.

I slap her twice, in rapid succession, across the face.

She collapses on the mattress, dripping blood from her nose.

“Son of a bitch! Cocksucker! What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“I don’t like women like you.”

“You’re crazy, faggot.”

“If Héctor asks, tell him it was Yuri.”

“And who the fuck is Yuri?”

“I’m Yuri,” I say, and leave her there, bleeding.

It was me who invited Daniela and her friend to the theater that night. Should I feel guilty about that? It was me who said, “Let’s go down the street.” Should I feel guilty?

Yuri’s right at the door, brow furrowed.

I peer inside.

There are four guys playing dominoes. Two smoke and look out the window without speaking.

The sergeant is in the middle of the hallway that goes to the back, and he’s making an effort with the Nintendo DS.

“I hate it when it gets like this,” Yuri says to me. “Too many people hanging out. But since it’s raining... If we only had two or three more... It’s actually a good day to make money but I don’t have many offers... Got any ideas?”

I shrug. What am I going to come up with?

A man walks out of the room in back and moves past the sergeant. Yuri signals another guy, who hurries to the back. The one who’s just come out of the room talks to Yuri.

“You should clean him up.” And he leaves in a hurry.

“Omaha, do me a favor, fire up the water heater,” Yuri says. “And fill the bathtub. And grab a couple of clean sheets out of my closet too.”

I obey.

Yuri’s closet shares a wall with the other room, the one in the back.

Something can be heard.

Not much, but something.

In any case, I don’t stick around.

I’m tired of hearing it.

Dani spent more than a week without speaking, without crying, without stepping outside. Practically without eating or sleeping. “I can’t stand it, Omaha, I can’t stand it. Why didn’t you do anything?”

I told her to go to the doctor, to get drunk, to get some sleep. She ignored me.

“Are you going to be much longer?” Yuri peers in from the bathroom door. “Two more guys just got here, and one of them pays really well.”

“I’m almost done,” I respond.

He could care less, and he leaves.

I stick my hand in the water. It’s still warm.

The boy looks up at me for the first time.

I return his gaze. It’s easy. Too easy.

“Get in here... Sit down... Lean forward so I can wash your back... Stand up... Raise your leg... Now the other one... Sit back down... Now turn around... Close your eyes so you won’t get shampoo...”

It’s too easy.

And I like that.

I dry him, I dress him, I push him out, I leave him in the back room and go signal Yuri. Without missing a beat, he calls over to a man who could be our grandfather.

“He has a couple of bruises and some scratches,” I tell Yuri. “So I turned off the overhead light and just left the lamp on. You know how some clients don’t like that.”

“You’re learning,” he says.

And it’s true. I’m learning. Finally.

Not much, but something.

Enough.

At least, I hope.

Today, when Daniela told me she wanted to have some ice cream and then go to the movies, and then to the theater to see some friends rehearse, I felt so good.

Now I feel so stupid.

The sergeant throws the old man out of the back room, slapping him disdainfully, but not too hard. We all have bad days. We can all have a bad day followed by another bad day. We’ll all have a worse day. Until the end of days. Until the end of us.

The old man leaves, crying.

The boy’s on the bed facing the wall, and he’s shaking.

Yuri brings him some pills. I look at him suspiciously, so he explains: “To get him up.”

I nod. To get him up, whatever that means. Whatever those pills might be. Amphetamines. Tonics. Something for high-performance athletes. For desperate economists. Antidepressants. Hallucinogens. For housewives. For new wave santeros. Analgesics. For everyone. Maybe all at once. They’re different kinds of pills. It’s a lot of pills.

Or maybe just placebos.

Probably.

“There’s fresh coffee in the kitchen,” Yuri tells me. “Bring me a glass.”

I go, serve the equivalent of one cup, and come back.

“I said a glass,” Yuri says, raising his voice. “A whole glass. Filled to the brim.”

I go, pour, come back.

Yuri makes the boy turn around and sit up at the edge of the bed while the sergeant crushes the pills with his fingers and sprinkles them in the coffee.

Maybe they’re not placebos after all.

The boy just looks at the floor.

“Here, drink this.” Yuri brings the glass to his face.

After a bit of a struggle and some splattering of the coffee on the sheets, the glass is empty. There’s some sediment at the bottom. It’s quite thick. Yuri hands the glass to the sergeant, who goes to the kitchen and then comes back stirring it, full again.

“C’mon, don’t play dumb.” Yuri starts the second round.

The boy surrenders even more. After he empties the glass, he coughs.

“Bring him a soda, carbonated,” Yuri demands.

I go. While I’m at it, I grab a beer for myself. I down it in long swallows while the boy drinks avidly.

“How many left?” Yuri asks.

“Two,” the sergeant answers.

Yuri nods and holds the boy by the shoulders.

“Okay, everything’s all right. Act like a man and I’ll give you a present later.”

The boy doesn’t say anything. Yuri takes his silence as a good sign and the three of us walk out, leaving him alone.

Hanging out by the window, I stare at my hands. For the first time, I notice that my little finger is slightly separated from the rest at the base, and it begins a little lower. I wonder if everybody else’s hands are like this. Or maybe I’m deformed. Curious, I try to get a look at Yuri’s hands. I can’t manage it. He has them in his pockets. I try to see the sergeant’s hands but he’s always making fists.

I try to remember Daniela’s hands.

It’s useless.

The only thing I remember — I think — is that they were weak.

How much strength do you need to stab yourself in the head with a pair of scissors?

How long do I have to wait?

“Forget about it.” Yuri appears at my side. “Forget about Dani. Have some balls and forget about it.”

I think I detect sadness on his hard face. I start to feel an intense regret. Who knows, maybe things won’t turn out so well. The sergeant is strong but I’ve never actually seen him work. I’m sure he can take two, even three, maybe even four, but who knows. Héctor is the king of the neighborhood. And there are so many people in the neighborhood. And Yuri... Yuri’s my brother. He’s as skinny as me. That’s why he has the sergeant. My only sibling now. I should...

“In any case, she was a whore,” Yuri says. “She was a whore, that Dani. A helluva whore. It’s better this way.”

I stare at him.

“I started fucking her back when you moved to Grandma’s house. Dani liked it. She also loved it when I took pictures. I told the guys, I showed them the photos. Then one of them asked me if he could fuck her. I thought he was joking but he was serious. He said he’d pay, so that it wouldn’t screw up our friendship. I said yes. Then came the other guys. Dani still liked it, not as much as before, but she still liked it. Later, some woman brought me a little girl. She was her husband’s daughter, not hers, and she’d leave her with me on Wednesdays, when her husband had to do his turn at neighborhood watch. She said we could split the profits. I thought that was all right... That’s how we started. One day, when Dani was older, she said she wanted to stop. I told her that was okay, that I didn’t need her anymore. She asked me not to tell you, ever. I said okay to that too. But that’s not important anymore... Can you imagine? She loved it when I called her my little dove, the way you do... It’s so strange that after everything she took up each hole, that she cracked from being forced... Yes, I heard about it, though neither of you said anything to me. I also heard you were showing off... but it doesn’t matter... Do you wanna see the photos of Dani from when she was a kid? I still have them.”

I don’t think I see anything on Yuri’s face anymore. It’s just a hardened face. That’s all.

“Seriously, do you wanna see the photos?” he insists. “You can even keep them. For real. Consider them a gift. If you don’t want them, I’ll give them to the sergeant.”

I tell him no. I tell him I don’t need them. He can do with them whatever he wants. I look outside to the street, to the corner, and tell him I have to go to the bathroom.

While we were watching the rehearsal, I noticed that Dani had been quiet for a while, absorbed in something. I thought I knew what it was and put my arm around her.

“What you have to do is tell yourself that nothing happened. If you say it enough, it’ll come true. Because it’s the truth. Nothing happened. For me, you’re still Daniela, my little dove. And if you want, when you feel better, I’ll tell Yuri, and you’ll see how that sergeant guy he has in the shadows shoves Morro Castle up Héctor’s ass and then does the same to the others...” I was on my ingenious little speech, of which I was very proud, so I smiled when she said, also smiling, to wait for her a minute, that she was going to the bathroom.

I was still smiling when the lights went out.

I was smiling still when the lights came back on, when somebody screamed in the bathroom, when everybody began running around.

How stupid.

I’ve lost sight of Héctor and his animals from my perch by the window; they’re probably at the door. They’re about six or seven, the animals. That’s why I’m not so sure what’s going to happen now. I’m not even sure what it is I want to happen.

Voices. Screams. La Gloria’s name. Screams. Daniela’s name. More screams. The thud of a fist on a table. Another thud. More screams. The volume drops. Then some more. Voices. Isolated words.

Silence.

I leave my post and move to the living room.

Yuri and Héctor are sitting at the table. There are a few bills between them. A bottle of rum. Glasses. Grave but serene faces. Men at the table. Business matters, men.

“When I catch whoever hit my baby’s face, I’m gonna cut off his balls,” Héctor says, and he seems to be repeating it for the fourth or fifth time. “Nobody hits one of my women like that... and much less while trying to fuck with a business associate...” He looks at Yuri. “The truth is, it’s not your fault you had such an asshole for a sister.”

Yuri nods: “You don’t get to pick your family, as much as you may want to... About the other thing, business, let’s meet tomorrow at the bar, and we’ll talk about it then, with our heads cleared. You’ll see that we come to terms.”

“Damn right, damn right.”

“Omaha.” Yuri shakes his head in my direction. “Go up to the corner and get us a coupla bottles. My buddies here are soaked and we have to warm them up. Take that.” And he points to the bills on the table.

The sergeant and the animals huddle around to look at photos the former is holding. They laugh. They click their tongues. In one of the photos, I see can Daniela’s smile shining. A dumb-blonde smile, like Britney Spears, the kind she knew would make me laugh.

“The good stuff or the cheap stuff?” I ask Yuri as I pick up the bills.

“The good stuff, goddamnit, since everything’s going so well.”

We hear a man’s voice and a boy’s crying coming from the back room.

Yuri, Héctor, the sergeant, and the animals laugh.

And I laugh too, and go out under the pouring rain to get the bottles, because, truth be told, as often happens when there are men around who know what they’re doing, everything’s going so well.

Translation by Achy Obejas

The red bridge by Yoss

Lawton

From the moment Humbertico the Piranha staggered into the courtyard, Yako knew he’d come for him, cuz of Petra, and that he’d hafta decide once and for all whether to cross the red bridge. Yako glances at me sideways, as if looking for support, or a laugh, a nod, a joke, an I told you so, for being such a trouser snake. But I don’t say anything, and that’s worse. It’s like saying, Go on, this is your battle.

Humbertico: mulatto, skinny, and sinewy, with a toothless smile that makes him look like a carnivorous fish, the scar on his shoulder carved by a machete boasting a crude tattoo, But I Killed Him. For that, he served six years in the tank and he just got out. He’s still got a jailhouse wariness about him though, instinctively walking glued to the walls so as not to ever leave his back exposed, or give his ass away inadvertently. He’s carrying a bottle in his right hand and a stream of curse words on his ragged tongue. He’s looking for that big ol’ useless white s.o.b., so I can cut his balls off for being a dick.

As soon as he walks in, the whole courtyard freezes, everybody well aware of the whole story with Yako and Petra, Humbertico’s sister, cuz in Cuba everybody knows everything, and more so here: The domino pieces fall silent, just like the jokes about how Big-Assed Berta, Dagoberto’s woman, is cheating on him with Yepo’s son, Manolito the Tripod. Everybody folds and swallows dryly.

Nobody knows how Humbertico found out, if somebody snitched or what. That’ll matter later... if it matters at all. The fact is, now he knows and he’s come looking for answers. Blood’ll wash this mulatto convict’s honor clean, defiled when Yako broke his little whore sister’s hymen. An eye for an eye...

When a man comes to force somebody across that red bridge or to drown him in shit, you can smell it in the air. It’s a cold, salty tang, like dried sweat and old pee on dirty fabric. It’s a smell that announces blood without being blood.

Yako and I thought differently about a lot of things. But we grew up together, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Batman and Robin, but without all that faggot crap, watching each others’ backs, the way white boys hafta if they wanna survive in a neighborhood like El Patio. Especially if you’re a scrawny white boy and not a huge mothafucka since you were a kid, like Yako. Yako’s mother baptized him Jacobo but it’s a name he’s always hated cuz it sounds kitschy and stupid. It sounds like shit on a stick, he always said. Together we learned to be men, to fight without backing down, even with guys so big we never knew what was best, to just jump them or run, but in the end we always had to swallow our fears and fight, even if they killed us afterwards, cuz you’ve gotta be a man, and real men don’t chicken out. Not in El Patio, or else you’re a dead fish, a worthless whore, meat for bait, forced to put up with everything. We were so afraid of being afraid, we became men that way, and like it or not, that’s gotta count for something.

Yako was always one step ahead of me, since we were kids. He played ball better than me, he had more luck with the babes; even playing Parcheesi it seemed like the dice smiled up at him while they stuck their tongue out at me. He was destined to win, the bastard. It looked like he was gonna be president of something, everything came so easily to him, effortlessly — while I was always runner-up. Later, I went to college and served my year of compulsory military service in advance, while Yako just did his military tour, tough and pure, and each of us found our path and matured. Or we just got old and started to rot, who knows. Everything was different then. His star dimmed, he stayed in El Patio. The elders say luck gets tired of not being taken advantage of.

Yako knew from the start that this one wasn’t gonna be taken care of with a couple of slaps and yo-mama-you-fuckin-faggot-I-let-you-live-cuz-they-held-me-down, in the old El Patio tradition, playing at big man, being cool and pretending nothing’s happened. This one had come thumbs up or down, blood and balls. He’s probably remembering what we talked about three days before, how only imbeciles fight without being afraid, cuz the smart ones know just how much there is to lose in death and how painful pain really is, and they take care of themselves. But if you take too much care, no matter how smart you are, then you’re a pussy, and there’s nothing worse than that in El Patio. He may even have wondered if Humbertico the Piranha was carrying anything, cuz he was searching his back pocket, where those of us from El Patio carry a blade and our bad intentions.

He did it to be an asshole, to mindfuck, to distract and impress the Piranha. Cuz in fact he doesn’t have shit. He’s never carried a blade. A big guy who carries a blade is just asking to be hunted down, taken by surprise, so they can slice him with a machete, and then he can look like a fool in front of everybody. It’s not a matter of playing clean; it’s about risk, going naked, giving the other guy the blade’s advantage if you’ve got him on size. El Patio’s ethics.

My pal Yako is just over six feet, like a basketball player, pure muscle like tightened cords under milky skin, frecklefaced, blond naps, and sly blue eyes. I’m always telling him he needs to get it together to do weights, to drink less beer and homemade champagne, and to harden the muscles on all that height he won in the lottery of genetics, cuz with a little dedication he could be another Mr. Olympia, like Arnold in his better days. But he’d rather play hoops and spend the day hanging out on the curb talking shit, drinking bad rum, and trying to hit on any stick in a skirt that strolls through El Patio. He laughs and says he can’t get into that whole queer thing with the muscles and the poses, that he doesn’t need to sweat it out on weights or get all purple from taking hits learning karate — he doesn’t need that shit cuz nobody fucks with the big guys, and then he shows me his hands, each one as thick as my two put together.

Those same hands are now tangled nervously behind his back; everybody in El Patio’s looking at him, knowing he’s gotta do something, better just to face the music before Humbertico sees him and there’s no turning back. Maybe better to step up and not look like he’s been corralled, like the orca and the whale in that movie they just showed, the little fish showing balls to the big one. Even if the orca and the whale are both mammals, it’s the same thing: The fish with the biggest balls will eat the more cowardly one, no matter the size. That way, no one can say, He chickened out; or, I can’t believe it, who would have imagined Cachita’s boy coming on so tough and then he turns out to be such a wimp...

You do or don’t cross the red bridge, but nobody does it cuz they wanna. Nobody thinks about it too much, you just fall into it and that’s that. No matter how stupid you are, when you think you can kill you also hafta think you can die. But everybody wants to believe it’s his own decision, and nobody can take away anybody else’s right to play dumb. Yako likes that definition of free will: to pretend to choose what you know is inevitable, to try to think and reflect on what is actually imposed by your own instincts and the moment.

Yako did a pretty comfy military tour: He didn’t go to Angola, he wasn’t part of the Special Forces. We’re a fortunate generation, after all, except for the Special Period. Cuz he’s tall and handsome, Cachita’s lucky son got his fate as palace guard handed to him from heaven. A total breeze, every night spent partying; sometimes during the evening’s firing of the cannons, he’d be playing toy soldier next to Eusebio Leal and foreign girls in shorts who’d get their picture taken with him, pressing tight against him. Now that’s the life. That’s how he met Silvia, who went by La Cabaña with some Italians. Me, I had to wait a whole year before I could get into the CUJAE, with scarcities, hunger, marches, and guard duty even on holidays. And without a girlfriend other than Manita and her five little ones, guarding my ass like a fine rooster. Sometimes military units can be like prisons, but with different sentences.

Finally, Humbertico the Piranha spies his prey in the group and smashes a bottle against the wall. He advances and waves that glass flower like death’s hand. But Yako and everybody else in El Patio know the real danger’s in the other hand, which hangs practically down to his knee, as if it’s not doing anything. Humbertico’s a leftie, and no matter how drunk he may be, he knows the whole world knows that, though he tries to hide it to his advantage even if he knows it’s not gonna do him any good. In the end he’s gonna hafta use his left upfront to whack the fucking whitey who did his fourteen-year-old sister, even though he was trying to protect her like a dog with a bone.

To have females in the family is a trip in El Patio, where every male’s all over anybody who slips. The worst part is that there’s always something, then you’ve gotta sound off, have balls, and, if it comes down to it, kill. A man can’t let anybody step all over his word, especially if he just got outta the tank, where if you lift your legs once, it’s forever.

It was Yako who did Petra but it could have been anybody. What happened was gonna happen, and better sooner than later. A leopard never changes its spots and that half-breed girl was born with whoring in her hot blood, and with a body that even her mother Tomasa wished she’d had so she could have earned a few pennies with the guys instead of rotting her liver drinking bad rum. Maybe if she’d gotten outta El Patio, Petra could have been a model or a dancer at the Tropicana, who knows. But El Patio is a drain, a bloodsucker — whoever stays kicks out his or her future soaked in liters of ethyl; life is one long moment waiting for nothing, or everything, or Armageddon; no one knows or cares.

Ever since she was a kid, Petra liked to lean on her brother while he played dominoes, until she was a coupla feet off the floor and her ass started spilling from her shorts and her sweater started swelling from the push of her tits; by then she was already on a first-name basis with all the neighborhood thugs. So folks started taking bets that she’d wind up spending her nights hanging out in front of the Hotel Cohíba... It was a matter of time — and of getting her ass loose from her older brother and his menacing belt to discipline her with and his, If I ever catch you in any hanky panky I’ll kick your ass purple and kill the son of a bitch who’s burrowing into it. But somebody had to be first, and it only made sense that it be Yako, the pretty boy, the sexy white boy, the one who — to top it off — already had a superfuckingincredibly edible and hyperfuckable girl like Silvia. Women get into that shit too, so that before they get with hot guys, they actually prefer guys who get on with hot women. And that everybody know about it. Especially here in El Patio, where whoever’s not keeping an eye on her old man is busy doing somebody else’s lover.

Yako came outta military service drenched with an existential laziness: He didn’t wanna do anything, not studying or working, not even close to being bad or thinking big, robbing banks or lending dollars at twenty percent interest, or selling weed like we dreamed of doing as boys, living it up in Yepo’s little patch of dirt, smoking our first Populares and later our first joint, which is surely the most delightful ever. The boy came back defeated and philosophical: He just wanted to play basketball for hours and hours, to fuck Silvia and any other panties that passed by, and to talk about three things — the red bridge, Salieri, and the Theory of Shit. He didn’t wanna hear about getting a job, even in jest. Construction or hunting crocodiles? No way. Not that he had anything else happening. Yako, the neighborhood philosopher, lowering his lids over his crossed eyes from behind a bottle of firewater, laying it down for whomever wanted to hear, the days getting lost in the dribble of the basketballs with their NBA logos penned by hand, the basket on the corner zigzagged by ocuje roots; watching porno pictures with Alfredo, the ex — merchant marine who was the last to be with Tomasa, Petra’s old mama, and Silvia, though nobody got why she didn’t kick him out given that she knew all about his infidelities.

Humbertico the Piranha says he shits ever so sweetly on the midwife who washed the pubes on Yako the faggot’s motherfucking whore mother the day she was born, but knowing she’s dead, that faggot sure as hell isn’t gonna leap up to defend her. The stink of bad liquor adds fuel to his words. He should step up if he’s any kind of man, let’s see if he’s got the balls to take him — Humbertico — on, the way he had ’em taking advantage of an innocent girl. His little sister is innocent the same way El Patio is a wealthy suburb, but for a moment it sounds like truth on his tongue, what Yako did seems abusive and indecent. Fourteen years of age is fourteen years of age, even if she uses a 38 bra. Let’s see, let’s see how bad he is: Step up, let him try to take me, unless he’s just a cherry-buster, an ass-fucker. I’m gonna gut him like a fish, so he learns not to mess around with real men. Yako tries the thing with his back pocket again but the Piranha, fresh outta the tank, knows what’s up, doesn’t fall for it, sees the bluff, knows big guys never carry shit. He spits, his saliva thick with fear and shame spattering Yako’s new Nikes, Silvia’s most recent present. He’s just waiting now. The silence is so deep Babas’s gurgling sounds like a lion’s purr.

Then the crowd parts, opening up some space for whatever’s about to happen, cuz when things are fated and it’s not your turn, all that’s left is to watch. Yako — Caesar without too much desire to cross the Rubicon — bends and wipes the green phlegm from the tip of his shoe, but he’s already on the red bridge and he knows it and I know it and what nobody knows is which way he’s gonna go, if he’s gonna cross or run.

Yako’s Theory of Shit is very simple: If we come from shit, we are shit, and will return to shit, then it makes no sense to lift one shitty finger to get outta the great universal shit. Shit on Einstein and Newton and the whole fucking shitty world, and shit on the progress of mankind, and fighting for a cause and all that other shit. It may sound dumb, but after the shivers that come from the third shot of Tiger’s Bone, which scalds your throat like a lash from the inside, everybody in El Patio stops thinking, That’s not so original, or whatever, and then Yako’s just right on, and even floating debris like Babas suddenly remembers thinking something like that at some point. Then it’s, Damn, white boy, you got it, you’re the man, and they pass around a fourth shot. Even before we knew each other... we drank together. Now that we know each other, we drink together. So to shit with it all, and let’s drink until we can’t recognize each other.

Humbertico the Piranha, a little rat since he was a kid, old-time hustler, jail meat, and brownnoser to every black section chief there ever was in La Cabaña, knows he has a chance when Yako bends over to wipe the spit off, but he seems afraid of the ballplayer’s big hands, and he hesitates. He may not be too smart or have much to lose after getting outta the tank, but he has doubts, he has to be afraid and have his doubts. You don’t dick around with death, and after all he’s said to Yako, it’s gotta be face to face, fuck or get fucked, no slapping, first blood, and they break them up, cuz in El Patio you can smell when it’s gotta go to the very end, and not even God’s gonna come between these two now. When there’s a little sister’s broken hymen on the table, honor demands death even more than blood. Now Humbertico the Piranha, drunk and all, realizes there’s no going back, and he’s probably cursing the moment he decided to deal with this... He may be gambling a shitty life, but it’s his and it’s the only one he has.

Sometimes Yako says, My second surname is Salieri. And then he goes off on this philosophical turn, very elegant, very erudite. For him, the great cosmic joke, the great fuck, is not being a genius, nor a fool, and knowing it or not knowing it, and living contentedly like Babas, with his idiocy, happily pushing his cart from one end of El Patio to the other all the live long day, no matter who’s laughing at him. The chaos, the living end, the tragedy, is being in the middle: having the desire, knowing exactly what constitutes greatness, and not having any of it yourself. Salieri. Not the worst, just another good one. Not even among the best. Not the crackerjack, the number one, the top guy, the man, but maybe the guy who carries the main man’s bag. And that can be the same whether you make it to the palace guard or not, or whether you have a career, or whether you ever play in the NBA with Michael Jordan, or even Team Cuba. Or whether you were born in El Patio, feral Lawton, half alley, half tenement, instead of Haiti or Switzerland. It’s always being the midpoint, one more little mark among the statistics... and knowing it. Realizing it, that’s the hard part. Some people get it, some don’t, but everybody nods their heads and says, This white boy speaks from the soul, with power in his words, brains, yes siree. And then there’s another drink, to forget what shit we all are, and just in case that Salieri...

Humbertico the Piranha doesn’t have a piece, they’re fifty bucks each and he doesn’t have that kinda cash, he’s just gotten out and he hasn’t made his connections yet cuz Alfredo the ex-marine doesn’t want ex-cons near his video thing. Sorry bud, it’s not like before, now you’re branded. What the Piranha has is a sharp, filed-down spoon, strapped to his hairless ankle with a rubber band. Ever since he was in that brawl with that fat black guy at La Tropical and he got out by the skin of his teeth, when he had to cut the guy and the razorblade broke in his hand, he hasn’t had any confidence in switchblades. Or in any knife.

His hand knows by heart the sound of the filed-down spoon against the stone floor of the cell. Nobody knows how he got it out, maybe wrapped in brown paper stuffed up his big asshole, so used by the cellblock chief, or by dropping dimes on the guards, since that’ll make anything happen. It’s his treasure, and he doesn’t like to show it around too much. The spoon is Chinese, you can still see the letters on the handle, dull from so much handling. Sometimes he has to squeeze it to fall asleep, and he cries then, in his slumber, just like back then. The wiseguys say his little rosy asshole misses a certain big horse cock, that he wants to go back to being its mare, like the loyal wreck fish he is. The truth is that having it close gives him courage, helps him feel complete, and to remember he’s still a man and that he never actually gave his ass up to anyone in the tank, although the story goes that a coupla times he took advantage of Damián the Sewer from Cellblock 4. But that’s not too terrible, cuz being without females is tough, and you’ve gotta get what you can.

If he bends to get the blade in front of Yako, those Nike 48s are gonna leave footprints all over his face. Maybe at that moment his liquored mind decides to shit on the shitty summer heat that makes it impossible to wear long sleeves and hide the steel, and he imagines a special strip of leather for his wrist so he can carry the blade like the gangsters in the Saturday night movies. Or he doesn’t think at all, cuz in any case he’s got the broken bottle. So it’s fairly certain that the attack from top to bottom with the glass flower will come from a twist of the wrist, it will scratch but not kill, the product of alcohol and instinct and resentment, not from the former prisoner’s guts or smarts.

Yako sees the glass coming for his eyes and he knows it’s the red bridge’s sentry. El Patio sees the bottle coming in slowmotion and the whole world explodes in screams, cuz the fight’s real now, like those little whirls in the dust in the midday heat. It can end the same way, just like that, and it can all go back to being dust, even with a little bit of blood.

Yako says every life comes to a red bridge.

That’s a joke I like, and him too, so he says it like ten times a day. Yako, the red bridge philosopher.

Maybe he read it in some Chinese book, though he doesn’t read much. It sounds like the kind of philosophy that comes from people who dress in silk and drink tea, with a whole lotta time on their hands to watch the carps feasting on bread. Like at the Japanese Garden, where we went the last time — him, Silvia, and me — and I heard them arguing in the arbor and I pretended I was in my own little world but didn’t miss a word. He to her: Fuckin’ whore. She to him: You knew it, and anyway, what right do you have to say anything to me, you lazy delinquent good for nothing? This is a common exchange between Cuban couples these days, an inevitable refrain if the couple’s from El Patio. It’s another way of saying, I love you, baby; I love you, too, Daddy.

The red bridge is a blood decision, a bullfighter’s choice, a gentlemen’s agreement. You enter it cuz somebody’s pushed you, and you exit only by crossing and killing, or chickening out and playing guitar, doing a faggot’s twirl. Yako has given the matter a lotta thought, up in clouds of pure weed, which always give me a deadly cough: If you kill, everybody knows you crossed the red bridge, and you realize it’s not so easy, but there’s no going back. Cuz on the other side is the tank, and in there men aren’t men anymore but beasts, and the lyrics from that song about Moncada is a lie — a crocodile will in fact eat its own. And if you chicken out, you may as well climb on a raft and leave the country, and maybe even that won’t matter, cuz a man with a yellow stripe down his back can be sniffed out by his sweat, whether in El Patio or China. Once a coward, always a coward.

We argued about this a lot.

Yako and Silvia and me, by myself as always, we went to see Lord Jim, the Peter O’Toole movie, cuz I’d read the book. Yako liked it, though he said that no one comes back from a sea of coward’s shit, that there’s no redemption and no second chance. But later, Yako, who doesn’t read, asked me for Conrad’s book. Even for him, it must be nice to realize that somebody else has already laid down in black-and-white the ideas that have been making rounds in your head without quite landing. Must be nice to know you’re not alone in your thinking, that’s all.

The thing with the red bridge isn’t too bad. It’s like Moby Dick was for Ahab, or Hamlet pondering what to do with his whore mother and his bastard uncle after they killed his father. And, of course, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It’s always the same shit.

Yako bends and rolls on the floor like a big, gangly, but still very agile spider. That’s why the ragged end of the broken bottle only slices through his Benetton sweatshirt and barely draws blood from his shoulder before his legs collide with Humbertico the Piranha and they both get tangled up. Red’s rushing now, El Patio shouts in a single voice, like at the cockfights, dogfights, or some adolescent brawl where they beat each other purple then turn up as buddies the next day, for the pure pleasure of throwing punches and then forgiving each other later. But everyone already knows this one won’t have such a sweet ending. Although with all the screaming it does seem rather like a sport, like a game, and a couple of smart-asses even place bets. It’s just that Tension, like a couple of springs in the air, doesn’t actually scream, doesn’t actually stand, but rather sits there next to Death, polishing her nails at the domino tables, cuz they know that something’s gotta happen, and even what it is, but they’re not saying.

Yako doesn’t deserve Silvia, even if she turns tricks, and the three of us know it. But she’s too much of a woman for Yako to leave her, and I’m too nice, too naïve, and too easily fooled for an ambitious street-smart girl from Bayamo like her, who’s also determined to get some distance from her race, being a mulatta ashamed of her naps. I’m white too but dark-haired, short, with dark eyes. I’m no competition. That’s the triangle in which I don’t belong even when I’m present, in which I have no weight and won’t have any even after I graduate as one more mechanical engineer, a grease monkey at some sugar mill, cleaning spark plugs, crucified for life unless I get on with some corporation, otherwise I won’t have a chance to even sniff a bill from afar, no matter how many books I read, or how much weight I lift at the gym that Manolito the Tripod built under that same ackee tree from our childhood. It’s not the same tree anymore either: During the storm of the century, it lost its smoking branch, which fell on Cachita’s she-goat, out looking for who knows what, and killed her.

Maybe what Silvia seeks in Yako, or him in her, is just Salieri, to settle and that’s it, just shit and a bridge that might be pink for women, pink or black lace with the smell of hotel air freshener, a fat Spaniard, Salsa Palace, Cayo Coco, and a passport to go abroad. Even I couldn’t say what I’m looking for in my pal Yako’s woman, cuz if he ever caught me I’d be dead meat, but truth is I always fall in her same trap even though there are so many little cheery student whores wandering around the CUJAE housing. Maybe it’s cuz they’re always giving me a hard time about my street style, no earrings or long hair, cuz in El Patio they don’t put up with that fag crap... or maybe it’s cuz we always like the challenge, the bridge, death escaping from the shithole even as we sink deeper.

Rolling around on the ground is Humbertico the Piranha’s thing. He bites with the slightly bucked teeth that earned him his nickname, kicks, scratches, twists, he’s got monkey arms and octopus tentacles. He’s happy cuz so long as the big guy doesn’t get up, he can always win, and he plays dirty too; with luck he’ll get him in one of those strangle holds every one of El Patio’s native sons learns practically before he learns to walk, and that way he doesn’t hafta kill him. But size imposes itself. Yako turns in the dust, gives a couple of big thrusts with his shoulders, manages to kneel, and covers the Piranha’s face with his giant hand, screaming like he’s outta his mind. He grinds his neck on El Patio’s dirt, like he’s finishing off the memory of his having fucked Petra. And in that moment Humbertico remembers what he knew from the start but had hoped to forget: that he has to go for his sharpened spoon so the decision can finally be made, like that night in Cellblock 3 when he had to gamble his life with Saúl the Albino for the right to get any kind of scrap, and the big black chief just looked on to see who he’d get as a foot soldier and who he’d give up to get fucked by the others.

Even if he goes back to the tank, he has to do this, cuz whoever’s survived there can’t resist a fight, no matter what. Humbertico knows that every fight is about more than who wins and who loses, but also about what you’re risking, what you win, and what you lose, which is why he finally twists his hand down for the spoon and tentatively searches for Yako’s beer-filled guts, to cut him or rip him or win God knows what from him.

The red bridge is a fixed idea that hypnotizes. A path from which no one returns, a crossroads with no way out. A lot of people have known it, or know it, and they may call it something else. It’s the shady street in gangster movies. The door. The throne of blood in one Kurosawa film. For Conan Doyle it was the Brazilian cat, the night spent next to the beast, which turns your hair white and leaves you limping and changed forever, but alive. The Driver, that old Ryan O’Neal movie in which he’s like a maniac behind the wheel, crashing cars to prove he was a tough guy. Or Matt Dillon in Rumblefish, looking for traces of his troublemaker brother and finally glad when the Motorcycle Boy dies and frees him. It’s the bridge over the River Kwai. All that and nothing really, that’s the red bridge. I’ve thought about this, but not as much as Yako. It’s an obsession with him. To imagine what it must feel like to kill — realizing that you’ve violated a worldly law and that no one up high is gonna punish you for it, that Nietzsche was right, that God died outta sheer boredom, and that if other men don’t take you up on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, there’s no bolt of lightning that’s gonna strike you down to purge the sin. So then to hell with morality: It’s the law of the jungle that counts, fuck before you get fucked. The cops and the laws don’t have any more right than their force and cunning, like everybody else.

God died by drowning in shit. Silvia and I fucked like crazy at the beach house, next to a drunken Yako, friend and lover, doing it just to do it, just cuz we shouldn’t have, risking it all, doing it without love, practically without pleasure, knowing too well what would happen if he knew, imagining that in fact he already knew, all the while wanting him to know and to react, so that all the façades and the masks could go to shit.

Yako sees the spoon coming, wanting to scoop out a new navel for him, and he stops it by some miracle, his fingers all cut up now. I practically feel his pain, and I tense up wanting to help him, as if I were him, my heart beating open-mouthed.

It’s at moments like this that all the Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal and Jackie Chan movies are revealed as indisputable lies. In real life, a blade is fear, cold, stinks of danger and death, adrenaline runs like a river, your muscles tense and you freeze cuz you’re so scared, and there’s no choreography for a ballet of kicks nor Jean-Claude Van Damme swiveling in the air. Or maybe you don’t freeze, you can move but like in a dream: You wanna run but you can never run as much as you want, you wanna do a quick slip like in the movies but instead you cut your fingers, not even all the way, just about to the bone, so that they bleed and hurt. Slow and clumsy the slice, not like a samurai whose sword demands a clean swipe which sends a hand flying. You wanna come on with a chest-splitting suki chop but you just slap and fall back from the force of the rebound; this is a fight of handless morons and frail epileptics, and there’s dirt and noise and you know you’ve gotta do something but you don’t know what. There’s a voice that tells you, Yako’s gotta come outta this no matter what, and there’s Humbertico the Piranha’s rabid bite on his fingers.

But there is a God in heaven: You, Yako, your blood makes the blade slip from his fingers, now white from pressing so tight, and it bounces and clinks on the hard ground muddying with sweat, blood, and fear. And you grab him by the neck, walnut-brown mulatto shivering under your white forearm with black hairs, and squeeze and squeeze... and everybody’s screaming, and I say, Coño, and run.

I run inside, to his house, searching for the key under the cactus pot, and when I go in I topple the chair and don’t have the time or inclination to say anything to whoever’s there, looking at me from behind the partition, still sort of taking a nap, maybe just waking up cuz of the scandal outside, maybe accustomed to it all from so many years of living in El Patio. I search under the mattress, find what I’m looking for, and rush back with my tongue hanging out, praying that what I left seconds ago hasn’t ended badly...

On time. Cuz Humbertico the Piranha has gotten loose and is struggling to retrieve the spoon and its blade. And he’s gonna get it, Yako can’t stop him, he wiggles and wiggles...

Breathless, feeling like an s.o.b., I threw it at him: the horn-handled blade from Albacete province given to him by Gema, that Spanish girl he fucked last year. The one I wanted to fuck and didn’t have the guts to face. The pitch turned out okay: There went that Made in Spain, already open and everything, spinning on the ground, right into his hand. There was no way he couldn’t get it, and the rest was automatic.

We grew up together and he was cut and all the blood on the ground and on his clothes was his and all I’d wanted to do was help him...

That’s what everybody said later, during the runaround and the ambulance and the squad car and the questions. That’s what I told them. Yes, I threw it at him, I wanted him to have a chance cuz he was my pal, but what happened wasn’t all my fault, I told the mustached lieutenant who was taking the report as the paramedics carried the body off, now a knot under the red-stained sheets. Tears started to fall. Without lament, with a tightness in my chest, the way men cry when they have no choice and there’s an overwhelming impotence and there’s nothing more that can be done. The way we cry in El Patio. The way Yako was crying when they took him away.

I cried until the mustached lieutenant, from Santiago like so many of these patrol car guys, but good people unlike most of them, took me aside and put his hand on my shoulder as if I were his son, cuz I was young enough to be his son, and said to me in a low voice that life is fucked and things just happen. He said he wished he had friends like me...

If things were looked at right, it wasn’t Yako’s fault either, since he was a big guy and wasn’t used to fighting with a knife, and he used the spearpoint instead of the blade, the way you do when you think you might lose the weapon if it gets stuck in the wound, and he had such bad luck, or such good aim, that the blade shot right into Humbertico’s eye and into his brain.

Simply put, it was the Piranha’s day, that’s all. Bad luck... If it’s your turn, it’s your turn. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Everybody knew it was going to end badly. You don’t mess with knives, that’s what the elders said. And his poor sister... now nothing can save her from whoring.

According to the lieutenant, they weren’t gonna be very hard on Yako. He only had a few little things on his record, mostly peer pressure stuff like stealing jeans from laundry lines. Humbertico was already a jailbird, a bad egg, destined to return. And he’d attacked first, so it would be self-defense anyway, with a bunch of eyewitnesses to boot. It had happened in the heat of battle, Yako had been overtaken by passion...

That’s what the lawyer said at the trial. So did Manolito the Tripod, and Alfredo who went in his marine uniform, and even Babas.

Petra didn’t cry for her dead brother or make a scene during the trial. He brought it on himself, the fool, for trying to come on so tough, for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, cuz I know how to take care of myself, she was heard to say, and the women in El Patio wrote her off after that, cuz you can be a whore if you want, but blood is blood, even if it’s the guy who took your virginity who spills it.

I also gave testimony, right after a test I had to take, and that also influenced things. As soon as the sentence was declared, Yako, with tears in his eyes, told me that I was his only friend and that he’d never forget it. That he’d get out, that in the end it was only one dead guy. But I knew he was lying, and he did too. There’s a greater distance between zero and one than between one and infinity, and he was now on the other side.

In the last few months, I’ve dreamt now and then of Yako’s face telling me, Brothers forever. And the blade, with its bent horn, zigzagging on the dirt, and later shining like a needle in the air. The cops kept it, of course, as evidence. It’s too bad cuz it was a good knife, with a fine edge, firm and steady.

I still visit Yako now and then, but not as much as during the first few months. Those are the rules, everything’s a waste, so they gave him four years; it’s a lot... Silvia only went with me the first two times, and she never requested a conjugal visit with Yako.

I haven’t seen her since. Well, there was that one time, from afar, in that little hotel at the CUJAE, she was with a French engineer who was attending a conference there. She pretended she didn’t see me, of course, and I didn’t even say hello. I’d fucked her a couple more times while Yako was awaiting his sentence, but she wasn’t interested after that. The feeling’s mutual. I’m not surprised, I knew it from the start. It was all cuz she was his woman and I was his pal. It may have been another way of getting even more of him, of entering his childhood, that little piece of his life which had never been revealed. Yako before he was Yako, before he thought about the red bridge that he feared and desired and ultimately crossed.

On a visit, the second one, he told me that someone had ordered him killed. Maybe it’s not just paranoia. He thinks it was Petra, the Piranha’s sister, and I didn’t say anything one way or the other. Who can understand women anyway — one day lots of kisses, then the next they drive a stake through your heart. It’s not true that they’re all bad; some are worse.

Two guys attacked him in the bathroom: He had to be cool, he was hit by metal tubes, they broke his arm, but he got one of them in the eye, a fat, bald white guy sporting Santa Bárbara tattoos. Now nobody fucks with him, but they gave him two more years for blinding the guy. Between that and what he did to the Piranha, they’ve started to call him The Ophthalmologist. He laughs when he tells the story, then he puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me again how I’m really his pal. And what a blast we’re gonna have, what a fucking blast, once he gets out. For now, he’s pretty much okay: He has things to do, like surviving and watching his back, and climbing the cellblock’s hierarchy. He’s gotten it in his head that he wants to be a cellblock chief.

He’s no longer afraid of losing his life. Maybe there’s value in that: that absolutely nothing matters at all anymore. Now everything’s easy, he doesn’t hafta think much. He doesn’t read anymore. Anvil or hammer. To hit or be hit, to kill or die. He knows the rules now, and he plays accordingly. Living on the other side of the red bridge is not so hard. He told me maybe he’ll get a tattoo, old-school prison style, by hand, with a sewing needle and ink made from burnt shampoo. Maybe he’ll get a Santería emblem, or a kimyankela, a one-eyed spirit with one leg, one arm, to impress the black hordes in the tank. He’s using five necklaces now, never mind that he didn’t believe in any of it.

In his own way, Yako’s happy. I go along with him and tell him how things are on the streets, and we make plans together, even though we both know it won’t be the same. Never again. Maybe that’s real freedom, knowing the limits. The red bridge isn’t so bad. What’s worse is being in the middle, or on the other side, knowing you still hafta cross it, but not knowing when...

At first, in spite of everything, I envied him a little. Not now. I’ve crossed the bridge too... my own bridge, more green than red. After I threw that blade his way that afternoon, everything’s been easier, as if I’d always laid low, in the shade of the hill it took so much to climb. You could say that El Patio’s fate has finally caught up with me, but I live ten times better than before: I bought a color TV for my old girl, and I have as many women as I want — me, the shy one.

It wasn’t even my idea but now the trap is well-greased: port-transportation-domestic economy. Petra lures them from in front of the hotel or when they’re trying to hitch a ride, and she brings them to my house, where I offer them PPG, cigars, rum, as if it were all mine to give. Alfredo the ex-marine has his contacts and procures the product. There’s always something for me, for being the face of the operation. Everything cuz I gained the guy’s trust by throwing the knife to Yako when he needed it.

Manolito the Tripod and Alfredo fuck Petra now and again... I don’t get it: She looks good but she’s cold as the wind. I gave her a couple of turns but I got bored. Her clitoris is about the size of a plantain seed... except they don’t really have seeds. All that flaunting, all that heating up, and then she has to fake it. Pity all those foreigners who believe it...

A few days ago, she asked me if she could go see Yako, if she could get a conjugal visit with him. Life is full of surprises... true love, or maybe she just really wants to fuck him and pay him back for the Piranha? I hafta think about what I’m gonna say to her.

I imagine Yako never cared whether Petra could come fucked up the ass or whether she was frigid. It was all about appearances, about not letting panties walk by without getting in them, and about daring the Piranha, with the invisible sign on his head advertising him as a tough guy just outta the tank. The challenge. Yako the mothafucka, the hard one, the guy from the red bridge.

Who cares. Life is shit, from shit we come and to shit we shall return, and between shit and more shit, there are a few shitty dollars from the black market which we’ll spend buying more shit or horrible liquor for fighting, until one day it’s all over, with blood and dirt or with sheets and intensive therapy. Then somebody, like so many others, will say, Alive.

For the time being, I’ve dropped outta school. I asked for a leave and they gave it to me without questions. It was my third year, but to hell with it. I don’t plan on going back. What’s a white boy from El Patio doing wasting his time at the CUJAE anyway, studying for an engineering degree which isn’t gonna do shit for him? With so much business and so many whores and so much life waiting out here — in El Patio or beyond — it’s all the same.

Even so, I can’t forget that afternoon, the fight, the dash to get the knife, my pitch, and the horn-handle on the ground, the hit and the burst of blood from the Piranha’s eye. I’ve lived it a thousand times in my memory. And each time I’m more sure of why I did it... but a lot less sure of how I did it. If I did it on purpose, or if I made that up later.

Yako on the red bridge. I saw him fighting but didn’t feel his fear. He was gonna win — he was big and he was winning, he would have won cleanly anyway. He was blond and had light eyes and played basketball pretty well, he fucked Silvia without having to hide and she had more fun with him and his drunkenness than she ever did with my desire. He had eight inches on me, and he’d always been better at everything. That I was studying toward a degree and read a lot and knew that someday I could suddenly leave El Patio if I wanted to didn’t matter. It wasn’t books about exotic places or incredible cold-blooded adventurers in monstrous heat that mattered at the moment of truth. It was him and not me. That was real life, sweat and blood and guts and brawls, and he lived them and I didn’t. And he was on the red bridge, on the ground in a fight in which only one would come out alive, even if neither actually died. Dying? Everything ran smoothly until... it was like a nuclear explosion, like when Uranium 238 boils until it hits critical mass.

My decision — if it was a decision — was spontaneous, without premeditation, not the way I once insinuated to Silvia during a fuck, in fact the last time we fucked. You can take a lot of shit when you have a half bottle of bad rum inside you.

It was a lie — I didn’t contemplate it for weeks beforehand, eating my liver while fueled by old envy and resentment; I didn’t plan it all ahead of time; I didn’t talk Yako into fucking Petra; nor did I pay her all my savings to open her legs to him, knowing full well what Humbertico the Piranha would do. It wasn’t me who told him, and I didn’t throw the knife knowing that Yako always talked about a Florentine-style stabbing: eye-brain-death. It simply happened that way, and I took advantage of the timing, the situation, the sinister series of linked coincidences, the circumstances. I’m not that much of a sonovabitch or that Machiavellian.

Or maybe I am...?

The fucked-up part is that I can’t be sure. Maybe God exists, and if he exists... I’m afraid that just thinking about it is enough.

In El Patio they say I’m an educated guy cuz I read and I went to school. Everybody says there are answers to everything in the Bible. I went leafing through it for the first time a coupla days ago. There was once a Jacob who saw a ladder to heaven and fought with an angel. But it doesn’t say anything about a red bridge. Nor about a horn-handled knife, of course.

Translation by Achy Obejas

La Coca-Cola del Olvido by Lea Aschkenas

Centro Habana

She was a fifty-four-year-old light-skinned black woman, a technical engineer at the H. Upmann Tobacco Factory by day, and under the cover of darkness, a black market beautician prowling the poorly lit alleys of Centro Habana, trimming beards and plucking eyebrows for those too elderly to do so for themselves, giving pedicures and cleaning pores for those too young and too vain to see past their own noses.

She hadn’t always been this snide. Once, she too had believed in beauty, revered it even. As a child, she had chosen her career because of it. This was back in the days of Batista, when she had noticed that all the beautiful people in La Poma, that bottleneck of chaos and corruption and color that has forever been Havana, were professionals — doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers.

When the Revolution triumphed on the eve of her tenth birthday, she had been immediately caught up in its spell of social justice, its promise of education (the path to professionalism) for everyone. When the Literacy Campaign came in 1961 and she was only twelve, too young to go into the countryside to teach the guajiros how to read, she volunteered to tutor illiterate workers at a factory in Havana. At eighteen, she accepted a scholarship to study in Moscow, emerging eight years later with her PhD in engineering. She returned home in 1975 and in less than a year secured a job at the tobacco factory, met Manrique, a flautist with the National Symphony Orchestra, and got married. When Marisol was born two years later, everyone declared her to be the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen. Una hija de Ochún, they said as she grew into a striking adolescent, her skin a milky brown, her hair a long curled black with sun-streaked highlights of red-gold. She was an artistic youth whose vibrant, wildly distorted paintings of the neighbors entertained everyone. She will be successful, just like her parents, people said. Qué familia, they said. When the babalao next door prophesied, at Marisol’s tenth birthday party, that the three of them would live a happy and fruitful life, everyone had nodded their heads in envious agreement.

Sixteen years after that flawed prediction, Beatriz lived alone in a crumbling five-story apartment in Centro Habana. Several years before, the buzzer system had broken. Now when her friends came to visit, they knew to call out her name from the street. They stood just far enough away from the balcony so she could see them, but still close enough so they could catch the key when she tossed it down from the third door.

Unfortunately, Beatriz had yet to encounter such a simple solution to the many other malfunctions of her apartment. The bathtub faucets worked only infrequently. The refrigerator froze up and then defrosted at will, leaving soupy puddles around the icy mangoes and spilling a sweet, sticky syrup onto the floor whenever she opened its door.

Her TV was color when Manrique bought it ten years ago, but now it produced only a grainy black-and-white image on each of Cuba’s two stations, both government-run. If Beatriz smacked the shelf beneath the television really hard, sometimes a streak of magenta would flash across the screen, but it always faded. To hear the sound, she had to connect it to the stereo she’d given Marisol for her quinces.

Beatriz still remembered how everyone had danced that night, more than twenty tightly packed bodies swirling around her, sweat streaming down their foreheads, the living room gallery of Marisol’s paintings blurring before their eyes. They had kept dancing even after the lights went out and the stereo stopped (Manrique tapped out the rhythm with a spoon and a frying pan), signaling the start of the daily apagones at the height of the Special Period, those spare years of sugarwater tea and salt-water baths immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Looking back now, Beatriz felt an unexpected tenderness toward that time when, despite the difficulties, they had managed to pull through. Together. As a family.

It was only 7 in the evening, but already a dreary, drizzly darkness enveloped Centro Habana as Beatriz stepped out into the grime of Industria Street, turning left at the corner of Virtudes. Lately this intersection, where she had lived for forty-six years and never given much thought to the meaning of the street names, had begun to seem rife with metaphor, with irony. She had always been industrious, but in the last two weeks, virtue had felt further from her reach than ever before.

Fearing that her refrigerator would completely conk out any day now and feeling desperate for money to buy a new one, Beatriz had begun rubber-banding so many cigars around her thighs and calves at work that she had to wobble her way out of the factory at the end of each day. Each evening, she stashed her loot at the house of her friend Clara, a schoolteacher who no one would suspect of having access to stolen cigars. In three weeks, once she’d acquired (the word Beatriz preferred to describe her actions) enough cigars to fill seven boxes, she would pay Clara ten dollars for her help, and then, for thirty-five more dollars, she would hire her friend Orestes, a wood-worker extraordinaire, to make the cedar boxes. Orestes had once produced the drums for Havana’s most popular percussion band, Los Sobrevivantes. But then the members had gone to New Orleans for a performance and never returned. Orestes’s wife, the lead drummer, had promised to file the paperwork for him to join her, but soon she’d stopped responding to his letters. Now, whenever Beatriz asked Orestes if he’d heard from her, he’d invoke that old Cuban aphorism of abandonment, blaming his wife’s silence on the lure of her new capitalist life in La Yuma. He’d shake his head and say, La Coca-Cola del olvido — the Coca-Cola of oblivion.

As far as profitability went, Beatriz’s cigar-selling business was a good negocio, bringing in eighty dollars for each pungent package she hawked to the tourists hanging out along the Malecón. But the risk of getting caught — and the shame of losing her job — had convinced Beatriz that this would be a one-time deal. She felt much safer with negocios unrelated to her official work, even if they didn’t bring in such big profits. She felt safer outside of the factory, and in the streets.

At the intersection of Virtudes and Consulado, Beatriz stepped over a puddle of doggie diarrhea and narrowly missed being splashed by a stream of wastewater dripping down from an overhead balcony. In the street, a game of pelota was in progress. The players had created baseball diamonds from the negative space, and ran to invisible bases between the bici-taxis and the stationary, not-abandoned yet not-functioning automobiles that pushed up against the deteriorating sidewalk.

Beatriz’s first stop tonight was the ciudadela where Marilys lived. A one-family mansion in pre-Revolution times, it now housed five families, each of which lived in what had formerly been one large room. In an attempt to make it feel like a house, the inhabitants had built in bathrooms and kitchens and barbacoas, makeshift lofts that doubled as bedrooms, jutting out in the middle of living rooms and cutting the head space in half.

Outside of Marilys’s ciudadela, a group of teenage girls in spandex body suits stood surveying the street scene.

Inside, Marilys was where she always was (in front of the TV, watching that interminable Brazilian telenovela, El Rey del Ganado), wearing what she always wore (a gauzy yellow mumu), sitting as she always sat (in her rocking chair). Her wrinkled face glowed in the blue light of the television, and Beatriz invited herself in.

Marilys smiled, pleasantly surprised by the company, and asked, “What brings you here?”

“It’s time for your eyebrow pluck,” Beatriz replied. “Remember, you asked me to come by sometime tonight?”

Marilys looked suddenly worried. She raised a veiny hand to her nose, her fingers between her eyes. “Oh my, I’d forgotten,” she said. “I’m actually okay now. Do you think you can come back in another week?”

Beatriz nodded. Sometimes it went this way with los viejos, their memory not what it used to be.

As Beatriz turned toward the door, Marilys called out, “Since you’re here, would you like to join me for the telenovela?”

“Ay, mi vida, no,” Beatriz said, softening her voice so as not to appear irritated. “I have a lot of work to do tonight.”

The word on the street was that things were supposed to have gotten better after the worst of the Special Period ended in 1994. But for Beatriz, this was when the built-up stresses really began to take their toll. Within a year, her husband left her, claiming incompatibility, and her parents, who had shared their two-bedroom apartment with them and whose constant bickering over finances had certainly not helped the situation, died within days of each other. Although Marisol, age seventeen and at the height of her teenage angst, had frequently argued with all of them, she nonetheless cried for a week straight. Her paintings went from colorful cubist portraits to dark post-modern smears of varying shades of gray, and then over time, she just stopped painting altogether.

Two years after her grandparents died, and against her mother’s objections, Marisol accompanied Beatriz to the Colón Cemetery. It was their pre-assigned time to retrieve the bones, making space for the bodies of the newly deceased. When the caskets were opened, the half-decayed corpses Marisol saw — rotting flesh still clinging to their bones as an other-worldly stench swirled around them — made her want to run away. She told Beatriz she wanted to flee not just the cemetery but also the island itself, where everything — from buying milk after the age of seven (when it was no longer available through rationing) to purchasing paper and paints for artwork — was a struggle, and rest, even after death, remained elusive.

Unlike Marisol, who had not lived through the Revolution, Beatriz knew that it was important to stay put, to be patient and prepared for the inevitable sea change that, however slowly, was on its way, for the day when professionals would once again be paid their worth (instead of the measly twelve dollars per month she earned as an engineer) and the world of negocios would be a thing of the past. Beatriz tried to share this wisdom with Marisol. She encouraged her to return to her painting, to pursue it professionally by applying to El Instituto Superior de Artes, but Marisol would have none of it.

“I’m young, mimi,” she protested. “I don’t want to spend my life sitting around, waiting for change.”

Instead of El ISA, Marisol applied for el bombo, the Cuban lottery that gave one hundred and twenty thousand Cubans permission to move ninety miles north to La Yuma each year. And then Marisol waited, biding her time by befriending visiting foreign boys who, blinded by her beauty, did whatever she asked of them. To their surprise, it never involved a ring.

Marisol wanted out, she was quick to tell people, but she wanted it on her own terms, not on the arm of a man she didn’t like much to begin with. The foreign boys were good for their fula, however, and Marisol didn’t turn down any of their offers to take her out for fancy meals or buy her presents, all of which she handed over to her mother. Since the departure and deaths of the rest of her family and the passage of her moody seventeenth year, Marisol had transformed into a dutiful daughter. Like a cat with its proud catch of a mangled bird, Marisol brought her greasy-haired Italians and beer-bellied German men back to the house to bestow Beatriz with groceries like cheese and eggs and fresh fatty cuts of pork that she never could have afforded on her engineer’s salary. And then, with an airy goodbye kiss, Marisol would shoo her surprised suitors out the door.

Five years after she’d applied for el bombo, Marisol’s number had finally come up. Now it had been three years since she’d moved to Miami, and six weeks since Beatriz had last heard from her, the longest they had ever gone without communicating. Usually, Marisol called for a fifteen-minute check-in on the first Sunday of each month, and also, at some point each month, Beatriz received a letter with twenty-five or fifty dollars sent via a visitor Marisol had met in Miami. But this month there had been no phone call, and without Internet or even a way to dial the U.S. directly, Beatriz had been unable to contact Marisol on her own. She’d tried calling collect a few times, but Marisol was never there — she worked odd hours, a different schedule each week at an all-night restaurant whose name Beatriz couldn’t remember.

People tried to reassure her that everything was all right. It was just the distractions of Marisol’s new life, they would say. It was just la Coca-Cola del olvido.

Beatriz had suffered through so many secondhand stories of good-kid-turned-selfish-capitalist-pig that she’d wanted to scream. Each time, she’d shaken her head and recounted how, through all Marisol’s travails of the past three years, she had always managed to call, to send some small amount of money home to help out.

But this is how it is with la Coca-Cola del olvido, Beatriz’s friends had told her, as though this were not just an expression but the name of some unpredictable, incurable disease. It happens without warning, they said.

To occupy her mind and time, and to make up for her absent allowance this month, Beatriz had taken the remaining twenty-five dollars of Marisol’s last remittance and, through an extensive network of friends who could acquire the objects at their workplaces, had invested in some sharp scissors, a small plastic squirter, bottles of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, some shaving cream and aftershave, a pair of shiny metal tweezers, a nail clipper, three bottles of nail polish (red, purple, and pink) and some nail polish remover, a file, a fine-toothed comb, and a pack of six razors. She’d practiced on a friend next door, and then she’d begun her black market beautician tour where, by shaving one face each night and performing one eyebrow pluck for just eight pesos each, she could earn twice as much as she made each month at her engineering job, which she felt obliged to keep so as to not provoke suspicion. And, of course, to maintain her professional status for when the next revolution came, after which, she was certain, Marisol would return.

Beatriz’s second stop tonight was at a solar, a step down from a ciudadela. Here, most of the one-room houses did not have bathrooms, and several were without kitchens. Through a narrow doorway with no door, Beatriz stepped into the courtyard of the former mansion, now a cement floor covered with little puddles of water. The only light inside the solar came in the form of a thin orange glow from beneath the individual families’ doors. The courtyard walls were cracked, and Beatriz could hear cockroaches scurrying in the shadows near where a shirtless man stood stirring some pot over a communal stove. A corner shack served as a bathroom, minus the toilet paper and light-bulb, which each occupant supplied for herself.

This stop was not actually prearranged, but Beatriz felt the need to find an extra customer to make up for Marilys asking her to come back next week. Her postponement of the eyebrow pluck was unusual. Habaneros were a proud people; they might be suffering through their third night of pollo al bloqueo (chicken meat the first night, rice and fried chicken skin the second, chicken-bone soup the third), but look askew at an Habanera’s fingernails and she would find the money for a manicure.

If she must, Beatriz decided, she would use this tactic to convince Rita, whose gray hair she had bleached a platinum-blond ten days ago, that she needed a haircut.

Rita lived on the second floor of the solar, and as Beatriz used the banister to feel her way up the unlit staircase, she stumbled on a chipped step and felt her knee slam into the cold, hard marble. Her beautician bag slipped from her shoulder and tumbled back down the steps. By the time she regained her balance and retrieved her goods, her hands were trembling and her knee throbbing. She arrived at Rita’s door out of breath and with her heart beating so loudly she was sure it could suffice for a knock.

Rita opened the door a crack and then, once she recognized Beatriz, a crack more, flooding the corridor with light. In her long white nightgown, she looked like an aging angel.

“I almost killed myself on your steps just now,” Beatriz said, going for the sympathy sale. “I came up to ask if you’d like a haircut tonight.”

“Oh my!” Rita said. “You didn’t bring your flashlight?”

“Battery’s dead,” Beatriz replied.

“Mine too,” Rita said, nodding. Timidly, she patted at her short and, in this light, neon-blond hair. “Well, I guess I could use a trim tonight. I’d invite you in,” she added, hesitating, “but my husband’s in his underwear. We’ve just finished watching the telenovela.”

“He can sit in the bedroom. It shouldn’t take me that long,” Beatriz said, surprising herself with her assertiveness.

“Oh, all right,” Rita conceded. “You hear that, Ernesto?” She stepped back as a fleshy white figure with droopy boxers darted into the bedroom, separated from the main room by a thin sheet suspended from the ceiling.

In the living room, Rita settled into a rocking chair, and Beatriz used two clothespins to attach a worn white pillowcase to her upper back. She squirted water in Rita’s hair and handed her a tiny broken slab of mirror to inspect the process.

“Still no word from Marisol?” Rita asked as her friend began cutting.

Beatriz shook her head into the mirror, her reflection smudged and distorted. “And your son, how is he?” she asked. Rita’s son, a musician who had requested political asylum while touring in Mexico two years ago, now lived in New Jersey.

“He’s well, I think,” Rita said. “Although I haven’t heard from him for a while either. Bueno, ya tú sabes.”

Beatriz nodded, grateful to Rita for not starting in with la Coca-Cola del olvido. Rita told her about a woman she knew who had been changing jobs a lot lately, provoking suspicions in the neighborhood. Rita became animated as she told the story, waving her arms and the mirror.

“Rita, stay still,” said Beatriz, clipping close to her ear.

A small white dog walked in from the balcony and started sniffing under Rita’s nightgown.

“Ay, Yochi, vete!” Rita kicked her legs at the dog.

Beatriz sighed and put her hands firmly on Rita’s head. She had a sudden, stinging flash of déjà vu, recalling how she used to take the same stance with Marisol when she was little and refused to sit still for her haircuts.

“Don’t cut too much,” Rita said as Beatriz trimmed a piece she had missed in the back.

“Don’t worry. It looks good,” Beatriz said, placing her hand gently on Rita’s neck. “And actually, if you’re satisfied, I think I’m done.”

Rita studied herself once more in the jagged mirror, smiling at what she saw. She handed Beatriz her pay at the door and then stood with it open, shedding light on her friend’s descent.

In Marisol’s last letter, she’d written that she had enrolled in English classes.

I’m getting tired of the politics in Miami, all the anger and constant rehashing of the past, she’d written. And I’ve decided that I want to leave, and that the first step to doing so is to improve my English.

Marisol went on to write that she had come up with a plan for her future. She wanted to move to New York and enroll in art school. She had recently started painting again, and she was going to submit some of her slides for a few scholarships for Latino students.

When I receive one, she’d written, I’m hoping that with some money I’ve been saving I can come home for a visit.

As much as Beatriz had wanted to tell someone, to tell everyone that her daughter would be back to see her, she had refrained, not wanting to jinx this good news by discussing it prematurely. She had decided to hold off on saying anything until a ticket had been purchased. She had decided to wait patiently until she received word from Marisol, not knowing at the time of the even greater patience that would soon be demanded of her.

As Beatriz made her way down Zulueta Street to what she hoped would be her final house of the night, the drizzle turned into a full-on downpour. The few unfortunate souls still in the street ran as if on fire, intent on getting home before the dilapidated balconies above them began falling, as they were known to do during hurricane season. A lone cyclist futilely spun the pedals of his clunky Chinese bike, his fenderless wheels spitting street slime all over his bare legs.

The sky echoed with the crash of thunder, and the eerie, almost human cry of cats mating emanated from behind an open dumpster.

Outside the house of her friend Fefé, who had requested a haircut tonight, Beatriz heard what sounded like foreign voices. Before she could get close enough to listen more carefully, a gust of wind blew open the front door, revealing a party gathered around a small color TV. There were grandmothers and babies, middle-aged men and children of all ages watching a cartoon family sit down for dinner. The curvaceously drawn mother whose hair was styled in a beehive was pointing her finger angrily and yelling in English at a beer-bellied man at the head of the table, while a baby sat in a high chair, sucking a pacifier.

Beatriz’s first thought was that Fefé’s sister, who lived in La Yuma, must have sent back this video of American TV. Her second, more wishful thought was that maybe there had been money padding the video package and, maybe, if Fefé was feeling generous tonight, she would offer her guests a round of haircuts on the house. Beatriz spotted a woman who could use a new bleach job, and there was a teenage girl who could certainly benefit from her pore-purifying treatment.

But at the moment, everyone was too mesmerized by the muñequitos to even notice Beatriz standing tentatively in the doorway. She cleared her throat, and said, “Oye! Y aquí, qué bolá?”

“Oh, Beatriz!” Fefé said when she turned around along with the rest of the party. “With all the excitement, I completely forgot about my haircut.”

Fefé motioned for Beatriz to come in, and the crowd parted to make space for her. To the side of the TV was a white, plate-shaped structure that Fefé pointed to proudly.

“It’s an antenna,” she told Beatriz. “My son in Spain sent me some money last week, and I bought it from this man on Concordia who sells them as his negocio. Now we can get every station they get in La Yuma. It’s amazing the variety, and the crazy things they watch there.”

“Like what?” Beatriz asked, glancing at the screen again. She couldn’t understand a word of what was being said. “Does anyone here speak English?”

Fefé looked around, perplexed, as if the thought had never occurred to her. They all shook their heads.

“There are a lot of programs in Spanish,” Fefé said. “I’ll give you a taste of the stations while you give me my haircut.”

Beatriz positioned herself behind Fefé, took out her pillowcase, and, as discretely as possible, wiped off Rita’s stray hairs. “How much?” she asked as she pulled back a ponytail of Fefé’s thick brown, shoulder-length hair.

Fefé put a hand on her neck, just an inch below her ears. “I saw a woman on one of these channels with her hair this length, and layered — make mine layered — and it looked very nice.”

While Beatriz pinned her hair, Fefé flipped through the stations. It was true what she’d said about what those Americanos watched. There was every type of program imaginable — telenovelas and comedies and scientific shows. There were, Fefé said, stations that ran movies all night, and ones that showed twenty-four-hour sports, the likes of which Beatriz had never seen before — people scaling sheer rock walls, suspended by a series of thin ropes and supported, it seemed, by nothing; people trying to balance on oval-shaped boards in the ocean as the waves beat them down; and people standing on still smaller boards with wheels and riding up and down treacherously sloped platforms. Why would anyone willingly put himself through this? Beatriz wondered.

On a Spanish-language station, there was a show without any actors, just real people, a panel of three women accusing their partners of having slept with the other women’s daughters or mothers. Things like this went on in Cuba, Beatriz knew, but why were all these people on TV, airing their dirty laundry for the world to see? And then, also in Spanish, there was a courtroom show where, in the two-minute clip Beatriz saw, two former friends were yelling at each other about a slippery spot on one’s driveway that had caused the other to fall and break her leg when she had stopped by for a visit.

Beatriz made a mental note to ask Marisol if she knew about this case, to remind her to clear all slippery things from her driveway. She felt strange thinking about this side of American life she had never known about before, and she felt disturbed by her inability to picture Marisol in this world.

In their first few conversations after Marisol had left, she had tried to tell Beatriz about all the differences in La Yuma, but it had been too much for Beatriz to comprehend, and soon their conversations had reverted to simpler and more universal topics, like the weather and the salaries at different jobs. They had talked a lot about money and, Beatriz now realized, most often their conversations had focused on the problems in Cuba. At some point, Marisol had stopped trying to explain her life in La Yuma.

“Very early in the morning there is even pornografía,” Fefé announced as she flipped the station once more, pulling Beatriz out of her thoughts. “Men with pingas the size of elephants’!”

There was a hearty round of laughter, and then someone called out, “Las noticias!”

“Oh, right,” Fefé said. “There’s Spanish-language news right now on Univisión.”

Unlike Cuban news, which was essentially a recapping of all that was going well on the island, Univisión seemed to recount only the disastrous. It was a litany of loss — a baby stolen from a shopping cart as the mother turned her back for a split second to pick out a green pepper, a man who returned to his hometown twenty years after he graduated from high school and murdered the teacher who had failed him in geometry.

“Escucha eso!” Fefé announced. “Their news is more sensational than our telenovelas.” Everyone nodded their heads in shocked silence.

When a photo of George Bush came on the screen, a loud hiss reverberated through Fefé’s living room, making it impossible for Beatriz to hear what the newscaster was saying.

By the time the local Miami news came on, Beatriz had cut a good four inches off of Fefé’s hair, and she was beginning to feel a little worried about how Fefé would react to the end result. Personally, Beatriz didn’t think that she had the type of face for short hair. It wasn’t angular enough, and would now look even rounder.

Beatriz was about to hand Fefé the bit of broken mirror when she heard the newscaster mention something about Havana.

“...After nearly two weeks of investigations into the bombing of the gallery, located on a side street in Little Havana...” the newscaster was saying, and Beatriz realized she’d misheard him.

Fefé was so caught up in the news that Beatriz decided to wait for a commercial break. Even after just two weeks of cutting hair, Beatriz had learned her lesson about asking people to approve further cutting when they were distracted, only to have them angrily retract their consent after the fact.

Beatriz set down her scissors and held the mirror in her hand, turning her attention back to the TV.

“Police have reported that the explosion was set off by a group of Cuban exiles who refer to themselves as ‘Los Rectificantes,’” the newscaster continued. And once more, a loud hiss filled the living room. “They claim to have been protesting the five painters whose works were exhibited, all of whom still reside in Cuba and have been labeled as Castro-supporters by the bombers.”

“Son terroristas todos!” a man next to Fefé declared angrily.

“Although the bombing took place when the gallery was closed, police have confirmed that there was one casualty, a young woman who had been peering through the window at the moment the bomb went off.”

As the photo of a smiling mulatta flashed onto the screen, her face framed by long black ringlets sun-streaked with redgold, the newscaster’s voice was once again drowned out, not by hisses this time, but by a lone, shrill wail, and the sound of shattering glass.