Havana Libre Read online

  Mercedes had not planned it, but 25 ended at the towering entrance of the famous cemetery from movies and stories, a separate black-and-white city of cement, stone, and bones. A funeral procession was slowly entering between the majestic pillars and she thought of her aunt who, when she would visit Pinar del Rio once a year while Mercedes was a little girl, would always bring a little gift. Sometimes it had been candy, back in the days when there was candy. Then for a while it was a cone full of peanuts or some other treat you could get just as well in Pinar as in Havana. In the past couple of years before she became too sick to travel, it would be something random from her aunt’s personal odds and ends: a hair ribbon, a lapel pin, or a scene of antique Havana. The last present was a color postcard of this very necropolis. Cemeterio Colón, la Habana, it read. Mercedes had believed the souvenir photograph was beautiful at the time, the gates of wrought iron and the city of white spires pointing to the blue sky with its angelic wisps of cloud. Now it seemed strange and sad that, the last time she saw her aunt Marilyn Delgado, the woman’s final offering had been an advertisement for her own death. Mercedes wept.

  The apartment door was closed but unlocked. Thresholds are places that preserve the energy of the living long after they are gone. Her aunt Marilyn had passed through this doorway on tens of thousands of occasions over seven decades, and soon it would be someone else’s. For the privilege, Tia Marilyn had paid rent to a landlord for roughly half this time, and for the other half she had made her token payments to the Reforma Urbana. This doorway had started as a capitalist doorway, and eventually it turned into a socialist doorway.

  Mercedes was not surprised to find her aunt’s pantry had been picked clean. She was hungry, and she did not know where to get food. She wanted it to be somewhere they would not treat her like a fool. She had her ration book, but even so, to make la cola for rice and beans could take all day, and they still might run out before she got to the front. However, a cafeteria would be a waste of precious pesos. Beneath the kitchen sink she found a dented aluminum pot keeping a dripping drain from further rotting a hole in the planking that showed clear through to the apartment below. If she could find a mercado that had anything in stock and was open long enough, she would get dried beans and rice and manage with that. Then she would make herself a place to sleep on the floor, because her aunt’s bed and chairs had all been stolen, and she refused to use the moldy mattress someone had dragged in and left behind.

  Mercedes changed into clean clothes and went back down to the street with her carnét de identidad and the ration book in the pocket of her jeans, clutching to her chest the remaining pesos wrapped in a handkerchief. On the sidewalk she looked right and left. She did not know which direction to go, but she did not wish to ask any of the neighbors. There was no saying which of these people had robbed her dead aunt’s food and furniture, or who had rented out the apartment to backpackers from Germany as soon as the body had been removed. Mercedes did not remember seeing a market on her walk into the neighborhood, so she decided to go the opposite way from whence she came, in the direction of a boisterous domino game.

  It was almost eight p.m., and she was no less hungry, but when she saw the sign for a clínica de familia, she considered the other preoccupation that had been gnawing at her, and how it would be much harder to remedy than an empty stomach. She put her hand on the knob and felt that it was not locked.

  She passes through the door.

  JUEVES, 4 SEPTIEMBRE

  Manolo

  I awaken refreshed to remember the patient from Pinar del Rio, Mercedes, her blood sample in my refrigerator awaiting transport to the lab, and the recognition that there is something I can do for someone who needs and deserves my help.

  I take the vial from the refrigerator and make sure it is well stopped, placing it inside the cutout Styrofoam block I keep for transport from the clinic. With Mercedes’s blood sample in my backpack, I walk to the pediátrico and drop by the lab to fill out the order before starting my shift. It will be twenty-four hours for the various panels I am requesting.

  Midmorning the staff nurse brings me a father who is impatient to check out his daughter, and he and I have to wrangle over hospital policy.

  “Why give her more pills if she’s already feeling better?”

  “Even though her fever has gone down, I wish to finish a series of antibiotics just to be certain. Our pharmaceutical technology is very advanced, but it takes time for the human body to reveal the successive details we need to determine a prognosis.”

  “But she doesn’t like the medicine. It makes her feel nauseous.”

  “That’s how antibiotics work sometimes.”

  “What kind of doctor are you, making a girl who was already getting better feel sick again?”

  “Please, señor, let’s speak outside.”

  “Yes, let’s. Let’s go straight to your boss to talk about the incompetents who are employed here.”

  I would like to concede to the father that he is correct: there is something imperfect about Cuban health care, but he storms off in the direction of the director’s office. You take her home, and what happens? It seems like her condition is improving, and you get back to the house and something goes wrong. First, you waste time discussing what to do; second, you find a phone to call the hospital; third, you drive back in the car. All that time can affect the treatment. Not only that, but even after returning you waste more time registering, sitting in the waiting room, going for another exam in intensive care—and by then the symptoms have changed again.

  The nurse gives me a look that makes me smile. “Don’t worry, Juanita, you were only following my orders.”

  “I’m sorry, doctor.”

  “Don’t be. It’s simply that I read people’s faces the way other people read the newspaper.”

  In a quiet moment before lunch I chance upon the child psychiatrist, Hernández, at admitting. She has a full schedule six days a week; nevertheless, between consults she has taken to outreach in the emergency room. On her first day she wore jeans; today she helps the nurses with trauma cases and is wearing scrubs.

  “I heard you have an invitation to a conference en los Estados Unidos.” It is suggestive, the way she says this, and I suppose that this is understandable. In just a couple of days at the pediátrico, she has picked up the pervasive attitude of gridlock and futility. As jobs in the national medical service go, this is the shortest of dead ends. It is not only unlike the coveted jobs in medical tourism, it is stifling even compared to community clinics and rural hospitals. The director is a gato gordo, a fat cat of the worst breed: lots of purring, but when the time comes to get something done, he does not lift a paw. The jaded staff runs the place, and colleagues like Candelario seem to delight in coping by offering barely adequate care with the most cynical attitude.

  “Why do you mention it? Were you hoping to put in an order for whiskey and DVDs, like Candelario?”

  “I don’t drink and all I have is a broken VHS player.”

  I find myself thinking that I would like to see where she keeps the TV, would like to sit with her on the couch and not drink and watch a romantic movie. Maybe she smokes, or at least she might try, and we could get high and start giggling until she slumps against me and brushes her fingers gently against my neck, my heart stubbornly pulsing away the years—or maybe it’s minutes—left to me. Maybe she would raise those fingers to my cheek and trace the contours of my lunar . . .

  She continues, “But it wouldn’t do me any good to place an order, would it? The goods would never arrive.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “You’re soltero, right? No kids. We’ll see you on the Miami news, perhaps, another doctor drawn to the miracles of capitalist medical development and denouncing us to the US. What are you going to do to gain their trust?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Perhaps you’ll be one of those halfhearted defectors who says, Well, I support the Revolution, but for the sake of my professio
nal potential I feel it is incumbent upon me to practice and conduct research at facilities more suited to my expertise.”

  “It seems you have already prepared my remarks for me.”

  “Oh, come on, you’ve read the stories. There’s a new one every week, sometimes two or three.”

  She is so sexy with that ass in blue doctor duds that I have to struggle against casting a pathetic piropo like, Dame el sí, mami, y yo regresaré. If she did say yes, then cóño, she could bring me back.

  For a moment I imagine she is inviting me to believe this, when my better judgment takes over to say, “That’s not me, doctora. I have my principles.”

  “You say that now. But once you see the stores—the supermarkets with their shelves and shelves of wine, meat, coffee . . .”

  I offered her the slogan as a placeholder, but what I am really thinking is that if you could get to know me, you would understand that Havana and I are like one organism. “I live in the attic above a family clinic that I operate, in the house where I was born. I can’t leave Havana. A hundred types of breakfast cereal could not keep me from coming back to Cuba.”

  “And the hospitals in the USA are lean skyscrapers of stainless steel and clean tile. They’re like air-conditioned cities.”

  Her teasing is much more relentless than any of the other doctors’. I have to give her credit for stamina, but I change the subject. “Look, I need to step out at lunch, and I might be a few minutes late coming back. Would you please keep an eye out front for me?”

  Her shoulder in the doorway, Hernández leans her hip into one hand. “I’ll keep an eye on admitting, but I won’t be much help in surgery.”

  “If something like that arises, the head nurse will contact the surgeon on call, but I’d rather a scared kid who is not feeling well talk to you instead of Candelario.”

  “If I were a scared kid, I’d rather talk to me too.”

  “Gracias. Hasta luego.”

  Yorki has jobs at the Neptuno and at the Havana Libre. He washes dishes at both places, not for the extra pesos but because it doubles his access to black markets for beer, lobsters, and whatever else he and the kitchen staff can smuggle out of there without getting caught. Whenever I go see Yorki, I have to work out which hotel he’ll be at that day. Today is Thursday, so it’s the Neptuno, three kilometers away. As long as I walk briskly and keep the conversation brief, I have just enough time to get there and back during my lunch hour.

  I hike down Paseo all the way to el Malecón, through the túnel de Almendares into Miramar. When it runs at all, the Rio de Almendares is like an open sewer separating the ambassadors’ residences from my neighbors and patients in Vedado. On the other side, I cannot stand the traffic of tourists and diplomats on Quinta Avenida, so I make my way five short blocks straight to the stone beaches that remind me of the rocky coastline of Pinar—except that for the past seven years there have been so many abandoned cats and dogs scavenging the beach for anything to eat: dead fish or trash or sometimes each other, which does mar the beauty of the sea.

  Out by the Copacabana I see the rafters. Balseros have been leaving from Varadero, from Mariel, and now from mero Miramar. The Tritón and Neptuno are twin sentries overlooking the Florida Straits. I use the service entrance. The kitchen at the Neptuno is enormous. Navigating it reminds me of that long take from Yorki’s bootlegged copy of Goodfellas.

  Against one wall are the dishwashers, three of them at a ludicrous 1950s conveyor system that the hotel maintenance staff somehow keeps loudly spouting steam. Yorki, with his skinny fútbol-player physique like a muscular scarecrow, wearing a Guns N’ Roses bandanna, stands out at the end of the line. Yorki is my oldest friend, and he almost did not stay that way. He looks up when I tap him on the shoulder, tips his chin in salute, and raises his fingers to the corners of his mouth to shriek-whistle over the noise of the machines by the other two dishwashers. They nod back and one of them moves down to his position so he can get out of the din for a minute.

  Outside by the trash barrels, Yorki takes the opportunity to smoke a precious Marlboro and crack a joke: “Did you hear the one about Pepito and the prostíbulo?”

  “Either way, I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “Pepito and his father walk past a house of prostitution, and Pepito says, Papi, what’s this place? His father replies, It’s a factory where they make people. So Pepito goes the next day and peeks through the curtains to see two queers doing it. When he gets home he says, Papi, I went to the people factory. His father answers, Yes, Pepito, and what did you see? The boy says, I saw one that was almost finished. A worker still had his hose attached.”

  “A cousin is moving from Pinar,” I tell him when the joke is over. If I do not say cousin, Yorki will ask too many questions. I have contemplated what I am planning on doing for Mercedes before I do it. “See if you can get her a situation here or at the Havana Libre, something with a place to stay.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  I do not begrudge Yorki the mordida. He is just trying to get me up to speed on the New World Order, the New Economy, and all the other new things I have missed out on and he has mastered so far this decade. On the walk over to the hotel, I was thinking he might put it this way, so I respond with capitalist confidence, as prepared as a businessman: “I will bring you back those tenis Americanos from Tampa.”

  “What? Has your salida for the conference been approved?”

  “It is looking more likely.”

  “Your cousin, how old is she?”

  “She’ll be twenty-one in a few weeks,” I say, adding, in a flagrant breach of patient confidentiality because I know of no better way to fend off Yorki, which is essential in circumstances like this, “Naturally this stays between you and me, but she may be HIV-positive.”

  Yorki pinches the ember off and puts the half-smoked Marlboro back in the pack. “I’ll check if there’s something in housekeeping at the Havana Libre. The camareras there have a common room with bunk beds.”

  “Her name is Mercedes. I’ll send her around to the Havana Libre to talk to you this weekend.”

  I take the service exit. On my hike back down Tercera Avenida I have to wonder: Is this really happening? Would I really do something for Pérez to confirm my seat on that flight to a conference just to bring back running shoes for Yorki so that Mercedes can get a job as a maid at a luxury hotel in Havana? All symptoms would seem to point to the conclusion that indeed, this is what is happening. And the beauty of it is, I can return with those Nikes and refuse to ever cooperate with the PNR—to hell with Pérez.

  I pass the Russian embassy and am so lost in thought that I walk all the way around the traffic circle twice. By the time I realize my mistake, a thunderclap shakes the earth and rattles all the cars parked on the street. Alarms go off in all the diplomats’ and tourists’ cars, but the day is clear and bright, so how could there be lightning? Are workers dynamiting rocks nearby for a new hotel going up?

  This is when I hear the screams, and turn to see people running out of the Copacabana, smoke pouring from the lobby’s shattered windows.

  My emergency-room instinct makes me run toward the hotel. I hesitate to enter, not for fear of what I will find, but absurdly because I have come to accept that front doors to expensive hotels are off-limits to anyone with pitiful pesos instead of Yanqui dollars, except for jineteras.

  A stout State Security agent in a dark suit approaches menacingly, with both arms held out like an American football player, and in order to hold my hospital ID card out with a shaking hand I have to suppress a decade of reflexes that rendered me a second-class citizen who had given up on ever entering a nice place like this. I notice his earpiece, the outline of a handgun under his jacket, and I see he is confused and in shock himself. He does not recognize the insignia of the national medical service on my card.

  “Soy médico.”

  Without a beat he responds, “Why didn’t you say something, damn it, there’s a tourist bleedi
ng to death inside here!” He grabs my sleeve and drags me through the entrance into a scene of chaos in the dining room.

  The security agent was half right: the tourist is still bleeding, but by the time I get to him and reach for his hand he is already as good as dead.

  He is young, looks like he’s in his late twenties, and there is a piece of metal embedded near his Adam’s apple that appears to have pierced the carotid artery. Whenever I read the phrase died instantly in the newspaper, I know that it is usually a euphemism. More often than not, it takes several minutes.

  The young man’s skin is tan and smooth, and his eyes are open, reflecting mine. Does he see me? It makes no difference, because his desperate gulps for air along with the volume of bleeding from the wound in his neck tell me it will be a short competition between blood loss and asphyxiation until the end. We lock eyes and I let him see my humanity. Watching him gasp for breath is all the more galling for the ridiculous association the mind makes, because one thinks of all the fish one has killed this way, and how it can happen to humans like this man, who has just been dispossessed of a hearty life in precisely the same senseless way. His breathing finally ceases, and I see his corneas cloud over.

  The paramedics arrive and a young ambulance driver wants to check me out, but I protest that I am not hurt and he should pay attention to the victims. He tells me that there are enough medical personnel to attend to everyone, and that I may be suffering shock and should go to the emergency room so that they can monitor my condition. I tell him that I am a physician and surgeon and that I work in an emergency room; I will monitor my own condition.

  Many more men and women have been hit by the concussion wave, window shards that flew into them just minutes ago. You cannot see blood because the glass pierced the epidermis at such velocity: tiny particles peppering the faces, arms, and legs; glass in their clothing, which would have to be removed delicately, not all at once. I have been trained for this—calming a disaster scene, treating shock victims—but it feels like a hundred years ago. I touch the shoulders of as many as I can. Be calm. Help is on the way. Mercifully, there are no injured children in sight.