Havana Libre Page 13

  I tell my father, “I think I’ll go to Eckerd for some razors. Do you want anything?”

  “Nothing. You need money?”

  “I’ve got a little, thanks . . .” We both sense the awkward pause. No, I am not going to just go and start saying Papá.

  If I stand out on the intersection, the axis of my father’s life in Miami, there is nothing to compare it to 12 y 23 in Vedado. Here there was a swamp, but all that capital and ingenuity that came with the Cuban immigration in the 1960s spread across southeast Florida like—perdóname, Edmundo Desnoes—a monstrous plant with great, glistening leaves but no fruit. A gas station at every crossroads, and irritable exiles in gas-guzzling SUVs speeding in to fill up, and then speeding out to make more money, but nobody shoots the breeze with a neighbor on the sidewalk or sets up their chair on the porch to watch the telenovela. There are no porches. Havana, they say, is stuck in 1958—but at least it is a living ’58.

  At the Eckerd near my father’s apartment, a pack of the cheapest disposable razors is six dollars. After this and the calls to my father and the bus ride, Yorki’s twenty is already down to $11.50. I will never be able to buy his new Nikes, not even for twice that much, so I choose to use it on smokes. The nearest to the black tobacco of Populares is an expensive French brand called Gauloise. I could get filterless Camels, but that’s still blond tobacco. I finally settle on Marlboro Reds. I pay for my razors and smokes and make sure that the change contains a quarter.

  Outside the Eckerd, I break the filter off a Marlboro to make it taste like something and light up. I smoke for a minute on the quiet corner. I think before I make the call. It will have to be very brief. I want to make it in and out of the phone booth in less than a minute. I would be terrified to step out and see one of my father’s friends. Lives center around intersections. There is sure to be gossip among people I have not yet met, through whatever gusanos call their Radio Bemba: about how el hijo de Rodriguez has fled Castro’s medical corps and wants refuge in Miami. When there are no cars in sight, I crush out the cigarette and duck into the phone booth. My hand shaking, I insert a quarter, pushing the buttons for the number I memorized. After one ring, there is a brief tone and I say, “I met the landlord.” I hang up and exit the booth with my heart in my throat, but there is still nobody on the street.

  * * *

  Back at the apartment, my father is drunker still. “Ay, Manolo, it is very difficult to talk about.” Which part? I want to say. Instead I wait while he stands up, grabbing his lumbar—“¡Carajo!”—and staggers from his chair to the refrigerator to get us both another beer. He puts one in front of me, sits back down with his bottle, and raises the shredded gold foil to his lips to take a long pull. “That place in Vedado belongs to us,” he says. “We’ll get it back cuando se muera Fidel.”

  Now I understand. It is difficult for him to talk about losing the house. Can I blame my father for betraying a more sentimental connection to the property than to the wife he left behind and the child he never knew? I use this instant to let Caballero’s advice sink in: separate the person from the problem. This man, although my biological father, has drifted many lifetimes away from my values.

  He says, “I remember them coming, functionaries from Reforma Urbana, barely literate. Taking my coffee and looking around at the sala, estimating the square footage, like it already belonged to them. Like it already belonged to that campesina-turned-spy—what was her name?”

  “Beatrice. She’s still there.”

  “You wait. Cuando se muera Fidel, we’ll kick her out on her ass.” When Fidel is dead. I wonder: What does he mean by “we”? Beatrice. His medical school. Fidel Castro. Cuba. Who is going to try screwing him next? The bitterness. He is always running like he has to go to the bathroom. He, the perpetual refugee: running from, running to, on a treadmill, never getting away. Take whatever he can. He is rich, and yet he must grab at the tendrils of desperation. Because deep in his heart he knows that, someday again, someone will take it all away. I am thinking this when he gets up from his chair with another carajo, and I see he has finished the six-pack as well as who knows how much rum. I feel sorry for him. The only thing that makes it tolerable is concentrating on the role I must play. I must press my own ambition.

  I break the silence: “I am eager to get the application started.”

  “On Saturday I will take you to meet a friend on the medical board who will explain every step. If there is any chance of getting your records authorized, he will be able to do it. Once you get the permiso de trabajo, I might be able to put you on payroll and you can get behind the counter. Pharmacist’s assistant pays much better . . .”

  My father goes on, blaming Beatrice for his exile, when in reality it was his own vanity and stubbornness that sent him packing. I am convinced this is true, and I feel a bittersweet surge of pride at this tidy analysis. Doctora Hernández, you would be proud of me.

  Then I see how cruel my analysis is, however accurate. Yes, it was his own arrogance that pushed him to leave Cuba. He had spent half his lifetime harboring an open wound. And refusing to treat it or even let it heal. Picking the scab off every morning, pouring beer and rum over it every night. Horrible. Sad. And when he blamed it on Beatrice, he not only nurtured a bottomless bitterness, he forestalled ever getting over it. He would take it to his death. His defeat at the hands of a woman—uneducated, a proletarian of the nonworking peasant class—this is what ate away at him and gave him ulcers. Consumed him with anger. Crushed him beneath bitterness. Sad, tragic memories: twenty-eight years trapped in a labyrinth of what could have been.

  “Beatrice, la descarada, la enredadora, la engañadora—she will live forever.” He nods in his chair over the glass of rum. I have to lead him stumbling to his bed to get the living room to myself.

  VIERNES, 12 SEPTIEMBRE

  After work on Friday, there is a cocktail party at Mendoza’s house, and he has asked my father to bring me along. I am not certain whether my father is happy that Mendoza has extended this invitation to me, but he must grudgingly accept that I am a curiosity. I have escaped Castro’s Cuba. I am the latest harbinger on the exiles’ horizon, and so far I would seem to portend fair weather: a competent doctor, a second-generation gusano, a worm begotten of a worm.

  My father asks if I want to borrow a shirt. My favorite black T-shirt is clean from his small washing machine, so I decline.

  Driving the Buick to Mendoza’s house, he is unusually quiet. “¿Qué te pasa?” I ask.

  Looking at the traffic ahead, he says, “There were those explosions in Havana last week.”

  Caballero instructed me not to indicate that I had been anywhere near the Copacabana on Thursday, September 4, so I am cautious when my father brings it up. “Yes, I heard about it on the news. An Italian tourist was killed.”

  “Around here, the thinking goes that someone who chooses to visit Havana in wartime collaborates with the enemy.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but in other words, they say that the money for those MiGs that shot down the Brothers came from tourists who stay in those hotels.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “As a doctor,” he says, “I find such justifications for violence deplorable.”

  “And as a human being?”

  “¡Qué vá! Do not badger me, Manolo. As a human being, I live in Miami.”

  When we arrive at Mendoza’s, I realize immediately that I should have accepted my father’s offer to let me borrow a shirt. Every other man is wearing a pressed white guayabera. I assumed that, like in Cuba, I could just show up in a clean T-shirt. This proves how thoroughly my mind-set is stuck in the proletariat.

  In Havana, we would call Mendoza’s house a mansion. Here, hundreds of Miami Cubans of his profile—landowners, land developers, landlords—have palaces like this. Mendoza welcomes us and says, “¿Pasamos al bar?” At first I believe he is moving the party and we are all going to relocate to a bar somewhere
in the neighborhood. Following him into the back of his castle, however, I see that he has his own bar. There is a long counter, and behind it dozens of gleaming bottles against a lighted mirror. Pouring drinks is a mulatto in a satin vest. He is the only person of color at the party. I ask for a Bacardi, neat.

  “¿Blanco or añejo?”

  “Añejo, por favor.”

  The men cluster separately from the wives. They are holding drinks near the windows looking out on the ocean, half of them smoking cigars and half of the rest smoking cigarettes. The older men politely introduce themselves. There is interest in my defection. “Was it hard to get out?”

  “Did they hold you up at the airport?”

  The Riveras invite me to go work out with them sometime. Yuyo: “You want to see a Gold’s Gym?”

  I cannot imagine myself in one of those gleaming Miami gyms, even in borrowed workout clothes, anywhere alongside these two. “Some other time.”

  Mendoza introduces me first to a doctor, Centurión, a retired geriatrician who visibly sniffs when my father says that I, too, am a physician and that I have just escaped Cuba. Acabado de llegar. I think of the annual pediátrico mixer that Gonzalez calls a cocktail party: a bottle of ron paticrusados and a scrawny salami that disappears too quickly. Here in the US, this is how doctors do it every Friday: with heaping platters of food and a full bar.

  I am able to add some authenticity to my litany by referring to the abusive system of ever-expanding work overloads. Let them exploit it for their propaganda. I tell them about the corruption, the frustration with the poor state of the hospitals, the Communist Party graft, all in the past tense. “The director would get funds for staffing and instead spend it on personal travel and perks for his office—everything from air-conditioning to chocolate. In order to function, any doctor with a conscience had to work twice as hard.” For once, Director Gonzalez is proving useful. It is not hard for me to summon real resentment for him before this audience. I am beginning to believe my own rap.

  My father interjects, “There’s a saying aquí: If you want something done, give it to someone who is busy.” The cruel logic of el capitalismo, encapsulated in an aphorism like this, occasionally rings truer than all the socialist slogans of my youth.

  “¿Cuánto tiempo practicaste en la Habana?” asks Centurión.

  I tell him that I finished medical school early, so it had been almost eight years practicing at the pediatric hospital.

  “Yo no me jactaría de haber trabajado tanto tiempo en ese infierno para el diablo.” I would not brag about working so long in hell for the devil.

  He is not being ironic. This subdues the party a bit. It is an affront for one Cuban to thus challenge another, although it all seems a bit absurd to me—sipping mojitos in their white guayaberas with their manicures. A shiver goes down my spine. This is the attitude that allows these men to fund death in Havana. These delicate old men paid to explode a bomb that ripped through a hotel lobby and killed a young man while he was eating his lunch.

  Mendoza mumbles something about a difference in personality and removes me to the kitchen, where Coroalles pulls us two beers from a refrigerator the size of a small apartment. I ask to use the bathroom, but the one off the kitchen is locked. “Must be the Rivera boys,” says Mendoza, the jocular godfather, parent to none but uncle to all. He bangs on the door. “We know what you’re doing in there, hombres! Coroalles, take him to the one in my office.”

  “Follow me, amigo,” Coroalles says, leading me through vaulted hallways to the other end of the house, adding, “I needed to go anyway,” as if to emphasize that he does not usually take orders from Mendoza. It strikes me how strict the caste system is in Cuban America: for twenty-five years Coroalles has been el mozo, the gopher, busboy, stockboy, and shopboy, but who would ever expect him to ask for more? These men are his only family, and my father is both his brother and his bread-and-butter.

  Mendoza’s office is a typically bombastic arrangement: walls lined with lots of books whose spines have never been cracked, and on the great oak desk, one elegant late-model laptop.

  “You mind if I go first?” Coroalles says, and I know that he has considered for a moment what, in the worst-case scenario, someone like me might be thinking. But he has probably decided that the odds are better someone like me will seize up and merely deliberate the possibility of snooping should I be left alone so suddenly, whereas standing at the throne to go I could build up my courage. Therefore, he will go first, and I will wait outside and listen for the flush.

  Coroalles, if only your modesty had not allowed you to shut the door all the way while peeing, you could have kept an eye on the situation through the crack. Thus I find myself alone in Mendoza’s office, where the little yellow light on the top edge of the laptop means the computer is asleep, but breathing. I press the space bar to wake it up. The screen comes to life. I touch the trackball and click the task bar, and there is the Explorer icon. I tap it twice and it opens to Yahoo. Mendoza is already logged in. In the drafts folder there is an unsent message. It is not made up of full sentences, so I stare at the numbers and words and repeat them to myself several times until they are memorized as groupings.

  26-9

  José Martí

  4,500

  My heart is beating to get out of my chest. I hear Coroalles’s stream diminishing. I might have found something, an electronic text with terrorist intent, possible evidence of a premeditated plan for mass murder. First, a hyphenated numeral: 26-9. Then the name of our great liberator. And then the number 4,500, which I immediately recognize as a multiple of the same amount paid to the Salvadoran for bombing the Copacabana.

  I hear Coroalles press the handle and my heart leaps into my throat. I flip the laptop shut and fortunately the little smack sound coincides with the crescendo of Coroalles’s flush, and I am glad I have enough of my wits about me to take a sidestep, one long sidestep that matches the apogee of what is visible in the room from the inward-opening door of Mendoza’s bathroom. With a glance over my shoulder I verify this, and I raise a finger that says to anyone who cares to ask themselves, This finger has been running along the spines from the top shelf for the last minute and a half or so, for as long as you have been hastily peeing and quickly zipping up. Coroalles, his conscience needling him, has not bothered to wash his hands. There are a few dark spots where the last drops of pee sprinkled on his fly while he zipped up too hastily.

  He takes in the room—the new gusano apparently absorbed in the fascinating titles from Mendoza’s august collection, the laptop shut—and he seems satisfied. “You go ahead,” he says.

  “Ah, sí.” I act as if I have lost myself for a moment in literary contemplation and have almost forgotten that I needed to go, and like a good spy I add what I consider a small masterstroke of authenticity: “I can find my way back.” Do not try to seem innocent in his eyes. He wants to be useful, and yet the men in the caste above his, who have been above him since long before the Revolution in Havana, wish to ridicule him. Ah, Coroalles thinks el hijo de Rodriquez is too curious. A touch of jealousy? Did you really think el doctor was going to leave you the store when he retired? It can only be in my favor if I go ahead and validate his legitimate suspicions.

  “Mm,” Coroalles says, taking my full measure when I brush past him to the bathroom. I close the door with a click and don’t bother to lock it, but my hands are shaking so bad I have trouble unzipping, and when I am unzipped, it takes a full minute for my taut bladder to let loose, as I repeat to myself, José Martí, 26-9, 4,500. I flush and turn the faucet on full bore, washing my hands like I plan to go into surgery. José Martí, 26-9, 4,500.

  When I emerge from the bathroom, Coroalles is pretending to study the first page of a book from the section of shelf I had been ogling. Looks like Lope de Vega’s Versos. “Shall we return to the party?” he says brightly. As if there were any way he would just leave me alone if I were to say, No, I think I’ll browse the books for a while.

&
nbsp; “Muy bien,” I say, preceding him down the hall.

  On the way back to the party, Yuyo grabs my arm and shows me a little white powder. “Come on, have a blast.”

  It takes me a moment to understand that he is offering me cocaine. There is nothing quite so distasteful as two men crammed into a bathroom together to bend over a little mound of addictive powder that has been cut with talc and contaminated by various poisons to gorge their noses on aggression, and I wish nothing more than to leave the party with my father as soon as possible. I must get to a pay phone.

  “Try it, mang. It will let you drink more.”

  “Please excuse me. I already have to drive my father home, and I don’t even have an American license.” Yuyo leaves me to go get high. My hands are wet with perspiration.

  Down the hall I hear Mendoza telling Centurión: “It’s the only way on or off the island. Think of what it will do to tourism when tourists decide it isn’t safe.” When I enter the living room, Mendoza lowers his voice.

  * * *

  It gets late and I tell my father it’s time to go home, thinking, I will have to get him drunker.

  Compared to the Lada with its clunky gears, driving the Buick is a piece of cake. Although my left foot keeps pushing the floorboard for a ghost clutch, the transmission is automatic, and it shifts gears as smoothly as silk. It’s not even audible—that’s Yanqui know-how.

  Back at my father’s apartment, he is so drunk I have to help him up the stairs. He soliloquizes: “For a while I thought we might be able to work through it. The ocean sounds coming up on a clear, quiet night at your mother’s house made Havana tolerable for a few hours; it felt all the more precious, knowing that all the evil down below could not harass us around the clock. They took everything, Manolo, the house, the business, my dream: a private practice. We worked for that. Ten years of hard work. We put a lot of money into that. Then Fidel makes one speech and it all evaporates. A voucher for two nights at the Havana Libre. Then they took away half of our house in Vedado, your mother’s childhood home, and we are supposed to thank them? They let your mother die.”