Cubop City Blues (7 page)

She tried contacting Angel's mother again on several occasions but she was unsuccessful. Her necromancy mentor told her that once the dead accomplish their goal they disappear forever. She's joined the ether, the tutor said. She won't hear you or see you, nor can you see or hear her. The best you can do is breathe in and breathe out and hope that a molecule or two that were once part of her is in the air. Let it in, the tutor added, let it all in. In physics lies redemption.

YOU SAY BEAUTY

I
t is a special night. You have left a party held in your honor in a big house once owned by the niece of a Philadelphia banking magnate. Mainline Brahmins used to visit the house, invited by the niece to spend a weekend in the country, away from the bustle of their urban lives. Now, after passing through several owners, the house is being rented by a group of artists who do many more drugs than art. The house is falling apart, its ghosts long gone, but the artists don't care. They paint a few pictures or make believe they paint, then down the LSD, snort the cocaine, smoke the weed. There are many people at the party, most of whom you find unpleasant. The men are scraggly and bearded, the women thin and unwashed. They have come not because of art but because of the liquor and the drugs. An hour ago the wife of a truck driver offered herself to you in the attic and after the sex you wanted to get away from her. Her armpits were unshaven, a fact that you noticed in the postcoitus. She talked too much but said nothing. Nights are like that. Desire in, desire out. You say beauty and everything crumbles. You will make meaning out of this many years hence. Now her husband, the truck driver, wants to show a pornographic movie in the living room. Perhaps he knows about the sex upstairs. All you want to do is go outside, get away from the wife, the husband, the film. Nothing personal. A soft breeze blows in from the south and you can hear a loon in the distance, sounding serene and plaintive at once, where the bad music doesn't reach.

There's a small wooden rowboat tied to the dock and you take it out to the middle of the river, where the moon is waiting for you. On both banks there are large shadowy trees and beyond them the crumbling estates where the wealthy once gamboled. The moon looms under you, big, white and pock marked.
You bend over the edge of the rowboat to kiss it, aiming for the Sea of
Tranquillity, but you would much prefer the dark side if you could reach it. You like the unknown, the unseen, the black kiss. Inches away from the surface you recognize the smells of benzene and untreated sewage floating over the sweet scent of decomposing leafy matter. It is not the river of your dreams, of your wanting, no matter how much you've drunk tonight. Still, it is the only river you've got.

Moments before your lips meet the water, too late now to go back on your intent, you tip over and fall through the surface, disappearing into the brown depths and leaving behind a string of pearly bubbles that pop softly on the surface. That's the way it always is. Glub-glub but no one listens, glub-glub where the river is the same, never the same, and the moon awaits your undoing.

THE MAGNIFICENT
(M)OTHERS

F
irst there was Tata, black Earth Mother who coddled him like his real mother never could. As a small boy Angel wanted to sink into her and disappear forever into her loving, unconditional and absolute like the ocean that surrounded him on all sides. He remembers—he thinks he remembers—her huge breasts, against which he leaned when he sat on her lap, and her soft hands the color of loam as they moved over him in the bath. In the fog of early memories there were games—she touched here, he touched there—and squirms of joy. Laughter like shallow water, like waves, broke over them. She taught him to love the night, which was in her, like the sea creature that comes in his dreams and beaches where his heart beats. Her real name was sacred, therefore secret, and so he learned never to reveal it.

I
n the first grade he and a girl named Lilian would sit together during recess and relate to each other what member of their respective families they had seen naked the day before. I saw my mother, he'd say. I saw my father, she'd respond. I saw my sister. I saw my uncle. I saw my third cousin. She's fifteen years old and has nipples like chocolate kisses. I saw the gardener peeing. His pee-pee's like a yellow hose. Like a banana. Like a chunk of yuca! I saw the maid after she took a bath. Her pendejera was thick as a jungle and it was dripping wet. The testimonials were only as detailed as seven-year-olds could make them, and whatever physiological taxonomy they lacked was offset by rich metaphorical references that delight him now whenever he enters the country of the past. After their exchanges deteriorated into vulgar catalogues of fleshy parts, he started elaborating—her breasts are like balls of cheese; his pee-pee is the size of El Morro Castle when it stands up.

I
n the fourth grade, he, a girl named Miriam, and his friend Oscar had to stay in the classroom during recess for talking in class. After the teacher warned them they were not to talk among themselves, she said, It's a beautiful day, and went out to catch her breath and smoke a cigarette. While she was gone, in silent glee and without exchanging a word, the three of them went to the blackboard and drew huge penises entering equally huge vaginas in a sort of scholastic cavern-painting orgy. They erased the drawings when the bell rang.

B
y the water fountain, a girl whose name he never learned asked him if he wanted to see su cosita. It would cost him a real, ten cents. He looked at her fingers. They were white and puffy. She was American, from the state of Kentucky. The nails were pink and culminated in white slivers of moon. Only then did he notice her red hair and freckled face. Of course he paid the price. He keeps paying it, even now when his memories are copies of his memories and the original is lost under many layers of remembering.

S
unning herself on the beach of his making is his cousin, Martica. She was a plain girl, thin and bony. Through her face skittered the permanent scowl of disenchantment. She appeared, even to an eight-year-old with limited experience, moody and irksome, and she had to be handled as one handles a sea urchin. Angel had been invited to spend the day at the beach by Martica's mother, Ada. He dreaded the idea. He was not keen on sitting on the sand in the middle of the day, certainly not with his boring cousin and officious aunt, but his mother insisted he go. It would do him good, she'd said, to swim in the ocean, splash around in the waves, play with children his own age. He hated children his age.

Angel sat on the edge of the beach blanket watching a group of children chasing the waves, hoping they wouldn't ask him to join them, when he lowered his eyes and came upon Martica's feet. Her toes were perfectly proportioned, her middle and third slightly longer than her big toe and gently curved, as if in response to the arch, which was a marvel of skeletal architecture, parabolic and fleshy, yet not so pronounced as to break completely with the line of the heel. Oh, he was transfixed, he was smitten. A surge of fluids within him quickened his heart and made the small bud between his legs stand straight away from his body. From that day on he became an adorer of feet.

S
amara, whose father was an important functionary in the Communist Party, winked at him in math class. She assumed that superior attitude of someone who believes hers is the only truth. Her feet were glorious appendages, of the sort that, when he was older, would make him swoon. He saw them once, at the school's annual swim party and barbecue. He remembers them now as patrician and high arched, with toes like minnows—not at all the proletarian feet one would expect, given her family's political inclinations. Her behavior was colored by ambivalence born of equanimity. To this day he does not know what that wink in math class meant, everything or nothing. Samara, that little Marxist, stands forever in his mind's eye and ear, singing “The Internacionale.”

N
ot long after that, Martica and her family left for the United States. His family left a year later and he was not to see her again for many years. Over time, by dint of careful observation coupled with the focus of someone seeking, beyond all other ambition, perfection lost, he grew to acquire an extraordinary knowledge of the female foot. As a teenager he looked through newspapers and magazines in search of advertisements for shoes or stockings. Best were nail-polish ads, for they showed the whole foot and featured the toes, those unparalleled glories of the human anatomy that filled his body with hormonal explosions. The onanistic flights he went on with those photographs, however, were nothing compared to the ecstasies of longing he experienced in contemplation of the real feet he saw naked on the beach or clad in sandals on city streets in summertime.

When he entered the university, he braved the dangerous streets of the red-light district. There he consorted with prostitutes who showed him their extremities for a fee. Of all he saw and touched and reveled over, none was as well formed as Martica's. Soon he ran out of money and concluded he might have better luck with regular women. He went out with dozens and became serious with those few who considered as a matter of course his habit of looking at and caressing their feet and who enjoyed the novel way in which his lips sucked and his tongue curled around their toes.

O
lga, dark-haired queen of the dance floor, played him like a yo-yo. Her curvaceous and free-flowing body more than made up for her flat, undistinguished feet. She made him do the dog walk, the high-wire act, the loop around the world. All the tugging and pulling made him dizzy. Older, more experienced than he, she taught him many things, most important, that without being vulnerable one cannot entertain mystery, the most profound of which, after death, is love. When she ran off with the singer of a rock band, he felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He still feels it sometimes when it rains. His Jesuit teachers had been priming him to enter the order, but after Olga, St. Ignatius didn't stand a chance. He recently found her letters in an old trunk filled with papers and was surprised at how maudlin love can be from a distance.

T
he singularities of life and the accidents of circumstance led him to Irene, the black-Irish girl who was taller than he by three inches. Toes splaying in all directions, her feet were batrachian, of the sort that stick to walls and ceilings. Her humor, which was sharp and furious, saved her. No one, not pundits, priests, or proselytes, escaped the poison darts that flew from her mouth. With him she was careful and made sure that the barbs that came in his direction were lined with felt. Reluctant to have sex, she finally succumbed in the family room of her parents' Scarsdale home.

B
erta, from the Dominican Republic, was sexual and insatiable with smooth cinnamon skin and smart luminous eyes. They went many places together but always wound up in bed when the day was done. He didn't ask many questions, nor did she. There was something about the way she moved up and down his body, something about her smell and her taste that made him think of redemption. Berta pushed him deeper in. It was the end of the sixties. He'd been in the United States not quite ten years. Life was a cabaret, life was a Lucumí chant, life was ten tons of metal on the back of a dump truck headed east on the BQE. Domesticity led him to drown in the ocean of his obsession. He could never have enough of Berta. So he left. Crawled out of the muck and moved to the suburbs, which offered a dullness he confused for peace of mind.

V
anessa used to sing boleros before she met him. Afterward, she didn't sing a note but mumbled incoherencies while the adorer of feet sat in rapt contemplation of hers. They were calloused and bunioned with corns growing on all her toes, which were very beautiful but smelled like rotten cheese. After hearing him whimper on the rug by their bed, she grew ashamed and wrapped her extremities in burlap, which did not help her infections but did wonders for her self-esteem. She sang him a final bolero and told him, Eres un enfermo, vete a la pinga—two Cuban expressions that can communicate many things but in this particular case meant he should get as far away from her as he possibly could.

The succession of women that followed was notable because of their sameness. There was Amber, Eloisa, Sandra, and Susana, whom he married for her mind, a deadly mistake; Anne, whom he also married and with whom he had two daughters. There was Olympia, who was, in contrast to her name, petite; two Nancies; and one Michelle, dull and viscous and feral. They were all the same to him, devoid of individuality and, therefore, in the end, boring. No more poring over podiatry textbooks, no more hours wasted surfing the Internet. He grew despondent and was without a woman for eighteen months. His hands began shaking at odd moments, and he woke at night in cold sweats, which could only be cured by drinking substantial amounts of alcohol. He suffered stomach ailments and muscle cramps; his temples grew gray, his voice weak and distorted; yet, despite the maladies, his writing acquired an acumen it never had before. As a result he began publishing his work with regularity and he received invitations from many universities to lecture and read his fiction.

Angel heard from relatives that Martica had married an Albanian building superintendent and moved to a far-off borough of Cubop City. Imagine his surprise and delight! He called Martica and went to see her that same afternoon. On the long subway ride out he sang and laughed to himself and gave money to three different panhandlers, only one of whom seemed in dire need.

When they saw each other he and Martica embraced. He pulled her to arms' length and saw that she had filled out and was not as unattractive as he imagined. Life had done interesting things to her face. Beside himself with anxiety and disregarding any sense of decorum, he confessed to her that he had become enthralled with her feet. He exaggerated and said that every waking hour since they had last seen each other he had thought about them, keeping them alive in the fire of his memory until such time as he found a like pair to replace them. But he hadn't.

She was shocked and brought her hand to her mouth, where it rested obliquely. She was about to walk away when she realized his anguish and offered a smile. She pointed down and there at the end of her legs was a pair of brown orthopedic shoes, tied on the side, that looked like two loaves of rustic Albanian bread.

My feet, she said, have been the source of much pain over the years. I've had many surgeries. They are mutilated beyond recognition. I wouldn't show them to anyone.

On the inside he swooned and almost fell into a maelstrom of despair. On the outside he was kind and familiar. He kissed her again on the forehead and left her apartment as soon as prudence allowed. He never got to meet her Albanian husband, never got to see her again. In his mind Martica was dead and her feet had gone to hell.