Havana Noir (4 page)

He did indeed get me up at that hour and we quickly headed for the Virgen del Camino. We took our positions with barely a word between us. When it was almost dawn, a truck full of cows showed up. Jeremías Batista chatted up the driver and suddenly Pascualito popped up out of a manhole with a half dozen dwarves in tow. Shouting the whole time, Pascualito ordered them to open the trucks. They poked the cows, which began jumping into the emptiness of the manholes. After a while, all that was left was the irrefutable smell of animal fear on the pavement.

“It’s as if there’s a sacrificial altar down there to which we have to make offerings,” Jeremías said.

We then committed ourselves to our messenger duties. That’s how it was every Friday, which was slaughter day. Saturdays and Wednesdays we distributed canned goods. Sundays we barely worked and Mondays we started off with orders for clothes. Tuesdays were for miscellaneous items, and we might just as easily load up an elephant as a bag of needles. Thursdays was medical day and medicine would pour out of the Falla Bonet mausoleum in Colón Cemetery to be distributed all over Havana. We pulled in a ton of money and soon Jeremías showed me how to work this to my advantage. We bought and sold in fistfuls of dollars. To this we added the rich bonuses that Pascualito handed out on the corner of the Sevilla.

I decided to buy myself some things; I got a Walkman, some cowboy boots, flower print shirts, and a new pair of glasses. I started sending my mother a monthly remittance; it seemed like this could go on forever. Late at night, I’d go dancing at the discotheques, where I met my first love, a little mulatta who was a real babe. Jeremías let me have the room and I discovered what it was like to make love.

Eventually, however, I started to lose some of my enthusiasm. Around that time, Pascualito finally took me to the sanctuary in Guanabacoa and I got to see the virgin. She was very pretty, surrounded by flowers. I asked for her blessing halfheartedly. After all, how could a blind virgin cure a cross-eyed guy? Pascualito argued that the artist who drew her had been drunk and hadn’t completed her eyes, that in fact she was the Virgin of Toledo, who, discovering herself in this condition, had decided to perform miracles.

I have to say a few words about Jeremías. He was a fox when it came to the ladies. There wasn’t a woman along the Prado who Jeremías hadn’t taken to bed. He seduced Chinese girls, mulattas, well-dressed black women, and white married women. He dressed in a flashy, streetsy style: flannel hat, riotously loud pants, and two-toned shoes that he couldn’t be seen without. That gruff character he’d been when we first met turned out to be pure show. I’ll always remember him as a good person who taught me the profile of a changing city as its buildings fell to ruins. “Behold Havana,” he’d say, “a morning like any other morning. It changes its skin, it’s both man and woman, it’s the god Changó’s city sacrificed at mid-century…”

With little Pascualito I kept up a family-like dialogue. He never expressed an opinion about the world of waste water. Only by letting things unfold naturally did I come to know and understand his secrets. He never once discussed changes in the Congregation’s hierarchy, nor the Supreme Chief’s ups and downs. I also found out that dwarves could not be buried underground, that they’d eliminated the possibility of having cemeteries below, and that to this end they’d taken over part of a cemetery in Guanabacoa which had been abandoned in the ’60s by Jews fleeing to New York. That’s where I had quite an adventure after Pascualito ordered us to make a grave.

“You and Jeremías will dig the final resting place for a brother who’s died,” he said.

I’ve always been scared stiff of cemeteries. We went in terrified, with Jeremías muttering angrily. The cemetery was on a small hill, full of ceiba trees and rounded by a crumbling wall. The graves of the Jews were lost among the fallen leaves and only patches of the Hebrew lettering could be seen on the tombstones. In the back, next to the wall, we found the small mounds under which the dwarves were buried. We began to dig and by noon we had a pretty decent hole.

When Pascualito showed up alongside the wall, he offered us swallows of a potion made from roots and said he was going to give the go-ahead to start the funeral. He immediately asked us to leave, saying that the ceremony was only for denizens of the underground. We took our time collecting our tools and that way we managed to catch a glimpse of the entrance of the Grail’s court, with a huge chalice up front held by a dwarf boy. For the first and only time I also saw the Supreme Chief.

“Art among arts, guidance and splendor, sovereign of the sun!” proclaimed the boy.

The Supreme Chief was fat, pot-bellied, and bare-chested, with a navel as big as a tomato. That’s about all I got to see before Pascualito shooed us away.

A week later, I was promoted to work in a special service delivering household goods. Tulle, flowers, and good champagne—the underground was ready to offer it all. That’s how Rosendo Gil came into my life. He’d set up a laundromat in his house on Muralla Street at the request of the dwarves. There was a sign at the entrance that read:
Lightning Laundry: washing and ironing in a flash.

Rosendo would give me a list of deliveries every morning. I don’t think, to this day, that I’ve ever worked as hard. I was always loaded down with lace dresses on the buses, traveling all the way to Miramar and Nuevo Vedado. I saw so many pretty girls completely untouched by bad times! But what I didn’t like about those grand mansions with gardens and dogs was that the people there always looked at me as if I was a criminal. To fuck with them, I stopped wearing my glasses. Whenever I went to ring one of those bells
à la
“Avon calling,” I’d make myself even more cross-eyed.

That’s how things were going for me in Havana, although I was growing a little disconnected from Jeremías. We continued to share the room at the Packard, but our different work schedules made it so we hardly ever saw each other anymore.

That is, that’s how it was going until an angel came along—or just bad luck. I remember it was a Wednesday, during my second Christmas season in Havana. It was December 25 and a delivery was slated for Masón and San Miguel streets, headquarters of TV Cubana; I was to ask for Reinita Príncipe. So off I went, and I asked for her when I arrived and they brought her to me right away. She was the actor who played the servant on the latest hit telenovela. I’d taken off my glasses and my crossed eyes had gotten worse and I wanted nothing more in that moment than for my eyes to be uniform, straight. The woman told me that we’d have to wait, that Lucecita was taping. “She’s my daughter, you know, Lucecita,” she clarified. “I want her to try on the outfit, then we’ll figure out the bill.”

Later she invited me to the studio and I saw a TV show for the first time. They were taping
Snow White
. Lucecita had the starring role. I’d never seen a girl like that. I’ve never again seen such beautiful eyes. Reclining on a rock, she seemed the picture of happiness, radiant. It was the scene in which the prince saves her, when he arrives and kisses her and Snow White comes back to life. Then the dwarves danced and ran around the studio, and the end of the story made me cry.

“This is the guy who brought the ball gown,” Lucecita’s mother said as she introduced me. I held the box with the dress out to her, she smiled at me and happily went to try it on. I waited in limbo, just staring at the cameras that captured dreams.

“Doesn’t she look lovely!” Reinita Príncipe exclaimed when her daughter returned. The dwarves fawned over her, petting the tulle. The entire studio admired her.

“Let’s go home,” her mother urged.

Right now, I don’t know, I couldn’t honestly say if Lucecita was pushed on me or if I fell for her all on my own. We were at the entrance to their apartment—that first day they didn’t invite me in—around the corner from Masón and San Miguel, right next door to the Napoleonic Museum facing the university, when Reinita Príncipe, with her best servant’s voice from the telenovelas, told me she only had half the money. She told me TV was a living hell, that they weren’t making any real shows, and that beauty was dying. Given the situation, I certainly wasn’t going to let her down. I was a businessman, I had no way of knowing if everything that went on in Havana was just the dwarves’ doings. Logic indicated that if they’d gotten as far as TV, they could be anywhere. Nonetheless, this woman inspired me to trust her. That’s why I said what I said.

“I can extend credit, but only for a few days.”

“So I can keep it!” Lucecita rejoiced.

From that moment on—and that’s why I believe life can change with a single word from a woman—I became Lucecita’s biggest admirer. There wasn’t an afternoon I couldn’t be found in the studio. I managed to get myself a special pass so that I could always sit in the very first row to watch the shows.

“Is it love?” she asked me.

But it really hurt when they didn’t invite me to her birthday party. That night I wandered around the university walls and gazed up at the festive goings-on at Lucecita’s; I couldn’t work up the nerve to go in. I remember that I headed to the Napoleonic Museum instead and paused in front of the bed that once belonged to the Great Corsican. I became enchanted with Josephine’s portrait, and I had a strong urge to steal it, so that I’d finally have a lover. Yet imagination is one thing and real life is another.

“Put the squeeze on the mother,” Rosendo Gil, who’d now become my confidante, advised me. “Either she pays or she gives you her daughter.” Then he laughed salaciously.

So that’s how I approached Reinita Príncipe. I told her my bosses were demanding payment and if I didn’t come up with it, they’d retaliate. She got very serious and talked about some money she was owed and that she’d been cast in a starring role. I turned a deaf ear to her and told her about a terrible tribe of thieves who would lie in wait at night. She promised to pay the debt that same week. Later, after a complete transformation, she scolded me for not attending the birthday party. I looked at her with such disdain that she changed the subject and invited me to have coffee at her house.

“That way you’ll meet my husband,” she said.

Theirs was a typical Havana apartment that had seen better days: furniture that needed upholstering, crumbling walls, broken windows. Reinita tiptoed in and said, “Nicanor José…” But we only heard a loud cough.

Reinita told me to follow her and we went into an office, a room where we found a sixty-something man smoking a cigar. Behind him, there was a wall covered with photographs, posters, certificates, and a map of Havana. The biggest photo had a caption in German and featured a crane placing a concrete block in the middle of a street. The man was barefoot and wore a sweater which fell over his wool pants. He saw that I was interested in the photo and told me that it was the unyielding Berlin Wall.

“It was the wall that saved us,” he said. Then he showed me his certificates, describing them like in a newsreel. “Ah, this one, this one’s from the KGB, a year-long course in Moscow! And this other one, from the second-rate Czech intelligence agency! And that one, from the very disciplined German police force!” He coughed and spit out the window, then pointed to the map of Havana. “Do you see those circles? Do you? Those are the exits from the sewers, the manholes. I was the first to discover the plague, the first to declare that the city was being overrun by Jews, those same Jews who fled from their Havana synagogues just as the Berlin Wall was being built. They’ve gone underground, where they’ve turned into vermin who suck the blood of the people!”

From then on I became a regular visitor. It was from Reinita Príncipe that I learned her husband had been an officer who’d traveled the world taking courses in espionage and counter-espionage, and that he’d been forced into retirement after he threw a tantrum at a meeting of generals and insisted there were dwarves in the Havana sewers.

“Then the wall fell,” Reinita explained, “and he never got well again. He lives cursing Vaclav Havel, who he met in Prague.”

Lucecita didn’t like that I visited every day, much less the manner I had about me. I always showed up loaded down with canned sausages. Her mother pushed her to be polite but she was determined to sour my existence. At the dinner table—because in a month’s time I was having dinner there regularly—she’d roll her eyes back and make nasty comments about people who try to buy love. And all the while I was drooling for her, praising her more and more, blowing all of my savings. But she never gave me a break. She egged her father on to declare war against me. The old man began his campaign by threatening to go to his old comrades so that I’d be arrested as an agent of the synagogues.

“Make yourself scarce,” my friend Jeremías counseled.

That’s what I did, and what a terrible loneliness came over me! I didn’t have any desire to get back at her by being with some girl who sold love. I started to hate Havana. In the afternoons, I would go to Dos Hermanos and get drunk. The same stevedores were there, and the Chinese mulatta who had once made me come by the light of Morro Castle. They all touched my head.

It wasn’t until a month later that my life took another turn. One Sunday afternoon, I ran into Pascualito at the entrance to the Packard. He told me he’d been waiting for me for a while. Discreetly, we made our way to an Andalusian bar on the Prado. We ordered two anisettes and then, in a low voice, he talked about the Great Grail, the Supreme Chief, and the problems they were having underground picking up TV transmissions. He asked if I was still hanging around the studios on Masón and San Miguel. When I told him about my romantic travails, he insisted I go back and dedicate myself to spying.

“You will be very well paid,” he said.

“But why me?” I asked. “There are all those dwarf acrobats there, the ones who work with Snow White. Surely you can contact one of them.”

“They’re artists, and the Grail doesn’t trust artists,” Pascualito answered.

I returned to Masón and San Miguel to try and regain Reinita Príncipe’s favor. She was very accepting, and thanks to her I became friends with producers, scenic artists, and video technicians. In just two weeks, I was able to lift some blueprints and a list of security guards. Reinita Príncipe turned a blind eye, banking on my promise that I would not make her pay her debt. Lucecita also made a radical change. She began to flirt with me and urged me to visit her at home again. I didn’t get as worked up this time, but there’s no doubt I did let myself fall for this unrequited love again.