Adios Muchachos (4 page)

Chapter
Seven

An array of appliances was scattered around a room that looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. Several electric fans, an electric range, a refrigerator, a couple of guitars, two bicycles, and a motor-bike were all strewn about.

Margarita, wearing an apron and rubber gloves, picked her way through the stuff, raising her legs like a great wading bird. She paused, briefly studying the label on a large air conditioner. “This one’s a Westinghouse. I can let you have it for a thousand.”

A mulatto in his late forties, wearing a floral-patterned shirt, a gold chain around his neck, and a straw version of a Tyrolean hat (feathers and all), with a big black cigar clamped between his teeth, threw his hands up as if asking for clemency.

“And you can have this other one for eight hundred.”

“This is murder, Margarita. You’re really putting us up against the wall.”

“Yeah, sweetheart,” added a young blond man with a nice build, “give us a break. We’re going to take both of them off your hands.”

Margarita, confident in her knowledge of the market, replied in her friendliest tone, “No way, sweetie! One thousand eight hundred for both of them is a bargain; so take it or leave it.”

Hearing the unmistakable crunch of tires on gravel, Margarita peeked out of one of the windows to see who was coming. “Shit! It’s Alicia with a guest, and I haven’t prepared a goddamn thing …”

She rushed into the living room, picked up a guitar, and put it in the closet. Then she opened a drawer and took out the usual group of pictures, with one of the nudes of Alicia that she carefully laid out casually on the little round table in the corner. She checked the stock in the bar, holding the amber bottles up against the light to verify that they were not empty, and hurried into the kitchen.

Opening the refrigerator, she removed a few beers and put them up in the freezer along with a couple of glasses. She took a few jumbo shrimp out of the cold and set them to defrost in the microwave. Lastly, she opened a small plastic jar, poured the contents into a saucepan, and set the range to a low simmer. Finishing her preparations, she ran over to the window again, peering anxiously out onto the driveway and muttering something under her breath.

When she returned to the two men, the mulatto was just finishing his last count of the money. “OK, here’s your thousand eight. What’ll you take for the motorcycle and the fridge?”

“Don’t give me any money now, I don’t even have time to count it. Come around later this afternoon or tomorrow morning. That’s it, tomorrow morning. Now hurry on out the back way, and don’t make any noise.”

The two men departed and Margarita closed the patio door. She ran the curtains, took off her gloves and apron. Then, straightening herself up, she shook her hair, threw her arms in the air just once, lifted her chin, and with the demeanor of a grand lady, moved to open the door. Passing by the mirror in the living room, she took a quick look, was satisfied with the reflection, and continued toward the door.

Margarita opened the door to welcome Alicia just as Victor was taking the bicycle out of the trunk. Alicia took the bike by the handlebars and walked over toward her mother with the guilty pedal in her hand. As she entered the small garden next to the front door, her mother launched into the customary reproaches: “I told you that thing was going to leave you stranded. You should throw that thing away and ask your father to buy you a scooter.”

“Mother, this is Victor … Victor, my mother.”

“Wow, Mel Gibson,” Margarita interjected without really paying him too much attention. “You’re just too hardheaded; I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to tell you …”

“Please, Mother, that’s enough,” Alicia protested.

“I beg you to excuse my lapse of manners, sir, please come in.” And turning again to Alicia, “But you really have to ask your father …”

“Mother, will you shut the hell up … please!” And turning to Victor, “She has this thing with getting my father to buy me a scooter, as if it were that easy!”

When her clients were around, Alicia made a point of using strategic bits of profanity. Two elegant women who knew how to employ timely profanities gave the impression of being above it all, emancipated, liberal, chic. No decent woman of humble origins would ever curse in the presence of someone she was trying to impress. And these foreigners, accustomed as they were to the subjugation of prostitutes in the Third World, found the offhand use of obscenity by these two Cuban women surprising and, ultimately, captivating.

“You’re not Cuban, are you?”

“No, señora, Canadian.”

“But your Spanish is perfect. I would have guessed that you were Mexican.”

They moved into the living room.

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve lived a long time in Mexico. I consider it my second home.”

“How I envy you! Let me see now, my husband once …”

“Please, Mother, you can tell him your life story some other time? Now, why don’t you offer our guest a drink? Me, I need a beer. My throat is so dry it hurts.”

With this, Alicia disappeared into the kitchen.

“Please, make yourself comfortable,” Margarita said, indicating the great easy chair facing the table with the nude photograph. “What would you like to drink? Something soft? Something hard?”

Victor was undecided.

Margarita looked toward the bar shelf, saying, as if it were the most natural thing on earth, “Rum, cognac, whiskey, vodka, gin, beer?”

She didn’t know if their guest was aware of the fact that there were very few homes in Cuba with young ladies who ride Chinese bicycles and such a broad selection of spirits.

“Well, I’ll have a beer, too. Thank you, ma’am.”

While the two women were in the kitchen, Victor took in the details of the living room: period furniture, original oils by fine Cuban painters, elegant curtains, ornaments in good taste.

Alicia returned with a tray carrying two bottles of beer and an equal number of glasses.

At that moment, Victor noticed the photograph he was predestined to discover; he wrinkled his brow for a moment and then smiled. “Well, damned if it isn’t you.” Holding the picture at arm’s length, he studied it more closely.

“Yes. It was done from a painting,” Alicia laughed, twisting the caps off the two bottles and preparing to fill the glasses.

“The bottle is good enough for me, thanks. So, taken from a painting, you say?”

Alicia downed a long draft of beer, sighed with satisfaction, placed the glass carefully on the table, and reached her hand out to Victor. “The painting is upstairs. If you like, you can come along and I’ll show it to you.”

Victor took his bottle and let himself be led up the stairs. He kept wondering who this strange young woman might be. She had such a down-to-earth manner (kicking the “rat-shit” bicycle, “shut the hell up, Mother,” etc.), but with an air of distinction. The mother, too … a bit wacky, but definitely with class.

During the trip home, Alicia had been going on about the state of urban transportation in Havana, how tired she was of having to get around by bumming rides (“the creeps you meet”), and the ongoing tragedy of her continuous bicycle breakdowns.

Lining the wall along the stairs was a number of canvases, among them a gamecock in a myriad of colors, reminiscent of Mariano. Could it be an original?

Entering the unkempt room—bed all messed up, drawing table covered with papers and instruments—he was struck by the great nude of Alicia he had seen in the photo.

“Hmmm, excellent,” Victor said, touching the canvas and running the tips of his fingers over one of the nipples.

Alicia let out a giggle of complicity.

“Um, I was just trying to feel the texture,” he protested, feigning an apology. “Was it done in Cuba?”

“Yes,” she said absentmindedly, searching through one of the desk drawers.

Half an hour later, having seen the other painting in the adjoining room with the mirrors; learned that Alicia did not specialize in painters, but in beautiful men; felt that devastating breast on his arm; cautiously pet the cross-eyed hound-from-hell; learned that Leonor had returned the guitar; heard Alicia’s rendition of the Marta Valdes number and Margarita’s bolero, “Dos gardenias para ti”; tasted the shrimp enchilada; smiled at the inevitable comments about his resemblance to Mel Gibson and his Cisco Kid accent; explained his Canadian birth, twenty-five years in Mexico, and studies in the United States; downed another beer; bid farewell to Margarita who, “goodness gracious!”, was going to be late for her dentist appointment; and learned that he should make himself at home—Victor received his first kiss, a long, wet, burning kiss.

Alicia felt his immediate turgescence and, without interrupting the kiss, lightly verified its urgency with her hand. She signaled her approval with her eyes and the slightest reset of her body, and began to undo her blouse. But Victor gently stopped her hands and slowly buttoned it up again.

“Not now. The crayfish have made me very hungry. I discovered a new restaurant yesterday …”

“I’m sorry
,” she said in English, “I can’t do that. I have to find a mechanic to fix my bicycle this very evening so I can get to class tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll have to thumb my way there and back.”

Victor pulled a few twenties from his wallet and tried to put them on the table.

Alicia glowered at him. “Would you please have the common decency to put that away? I don’t take money from anyone! Just what do you take me for?”

Victor appeared very confused. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to … I just wanted you to be able to get a new bicycle … so we could go out to dinner tonight.”

“Now you listen and listen good: In this country, the only thing we have left is our dignity …”

And while Alicia recited the mnemonic exordium to her ethical-sentimental-revolutionary harangue, Victor threw his hands up in defeat, slipped his wallet back into his pocket, and delicately pressed his fingertips to her lips.

“OK, I agree. I admire your position, but at least let me take you to dinner.”

“I won’t go to a restaurant either. It’d make me sad and ashamed of myself.”

“I don’t understand!”

“Of course you don’t. You live on the moon …” And with the pleading eyes of a lachrymose kitten, “Can’t you see that the money you would spend buying dinner for me would be enough to feed a Cuban family for two months? It would stick in my throat … immoral …”

“So, then, come to my place and let me cook something up for you. Later we can pick up the bicycle and I’ll take you over to the mechanic’s place myself.”

Alicia looked at him, thinking, biting her lip.

“Come on, take the plunge. I really do cook rather well. I know you’ll have a good time.”

Obeying the subconscious demands of her destiny, that afternoon Alicia broke one of her cardinal rules: never sleep away from home.

Since devoting herself to her new vocation, she had never slept away from home. But then, no thirty-seven-year-old Mel Gibson had ever offered to cook for her.

Chapter
Eight

Van Dongen’s great nose quivered as he painted. He was painting furiously, leaning over the easel, filling in the colors on a charcoal sketch of the rear view of a blond woman on a bicycle. The woman was wearing a pair of shorts that were a little too short and a little too tight. The sketch highlighted the strenuous pedaling on the much-too-high seat. The childlike charm of those efforts contrasted, however, with the obscene gyrations—too obscene to be used in advertising and not obscene enough for a pornographic poster, although the swing of the hip and the consequent slant of that splendid ass might attract a lot of people to one of those movie houses that show
exciting
films.

But the sketch was not lacking in poetry. Around his subject, the artist had placed a garland of triumphal laurels and Aphrodisian myrtle in the manner of a halo crowned at its highest point by a lyre that served as a clasp. And there were little cupids flitting around her heart-shaped butt.

Van Dongen’s musing was interrupted by the sound of a key turning in the lock, and he turned toward the front door, smiling. His visitor was Carmen, a special blend of European, African, and Asian that Cubans call
mulata china.
Her features were noble, and as she turned to close the door, the line of her well-sculptured legs suggested that five years and five pounds ago she might have resembled physical perfection. Carmen was about thirty years old—she was no longer perfect, but her imperfection was more than compensated for by her telluric magnetism.

Van Dongen covered his nose with both hands as she circled around and kissed him on the back of his neck.

“What was it that couldn’t wait for another couple of hours? I had to tell them that my mother was sick and ask one of the other nurses to keep an eye on my ward until the end of my shift.”

He stood up, fetched an old exercise bicycle from the far end of the room, and set it up in front of the painting.

“Take your clothes off and get on.”

She looked at him for a moment and smiled. She removed her nurse’s cap and took a few steps back to look him in the eye. He sat down again and covered his nose. The starched white uniform fell away like a mother-ofpearl shell. Her white underclothes were almost phosphorescent against the golden brown of her skin.

“So, lover, what’s this new kink?”

“I had a dream that I saw you naked on a bicycle, just like that.”

Carmen stepped closer. She was stroking her hair as she examined the painting with more than a little suspicion. “Hmmm, that ass is much too white to be mine. You sure it was me you were dreaming about?”

“Yes, it was you, but in the dream the light was so intense it even inspired me to write a tune. Now get on the bike and start pedaling.”

“No, I don’t like to do things cold turkey. Play me your melody to see if it warms me up a little.”

Jan stood and walked over to an armoire. He opened a drawer and took out a black mask that covered everything but his mouth and eyes. With the mask securely covering his face, Jan began to play.

And as he played, he swayed his shoulders and his torso with unsuspected grace.