King of Cuba (2 page)

His mother grinned, eyes shining, and brought her lips so close to his that he inhaled the garlic from that night’s ajiaco stew. “Don’t you doubt that for a second.” The pint-size tyrant’s chest filled with pride, and he strutted off to bed with big dreams, the biggest of all. He imagined his pinguita growing and growing until it floated high in the skies, a massive flesh-toned dirigible draped with parachute huevones and a proud snout that served as the control room for the whole impressive operation and that nobody—not even the Yankees, with their warships and gun batteries—would ever
dare shoot down. “Good night, mi amor.” His mother kissed him on the forehead and gave him an encouraging pat. “Sleep with the angels.” “Good night, Mami.” And with that, the pint-size tyrant rolled over and fell deeply, happily asleep.

As if my nerves weren’t already shot, now the coffeemakers are exploding all over the island. The government is distributing this half-assed café mezclado made with chickpeas. Chickpeas! The mixture clogs up the coffeemakers, heats up too fast, and—¡PÁCATA! Already two people have died, a viejita in Pinar del Río lost her hyperthyroid eye, and I don’t know how many others have been seriously injured by this latest descaro. Not to mention the holes and purple blotches on everyone’s ceilings. I, for one, prefer the blotches to my old, peeling paint.

I swear this must be part of a larger conspiracy to keep us down. How can we protest or organize against the state when we fear for our lives making coffee? This is terrorism at its worst! Hummus terrorism! Mira, I’m going to put the flame on low then head out to the garden and wait. If it blows, at least I won’t go with it.

—Aracely Mondragón, caffeine addict

Goyo Herrera wasn’t afraid to die, but he was tired of waiting for death. Waiting for the body to shut down, organ by organ, accruing its critical mass of toxins and blockages. There were places in
Switzerland, he’d heard, that would facilitate the dying; expensive, antiseptic places in the Alps where tubercular patients once waited like so many hothouse orchids. Already, he might’ve died on any number of occasions in the fifty-plus years since he’d left Cuba: the time he got hit by a taxi on Lexington Avenue, his right leg crushed and shortened by an inch; or the night he was held up outside his Manhattan diner, pistol-whipped and left for dead. There was that kidney stone, too, that nearly killed him in 1978. But if Goyo had learned anything in his eighty-six years, it was that pain alone didn’t kill a man.

Besides, he wanted that son of a bitch in Havana to die first.

Years ago he and El Comandante had been acquaintances, Goyo told anyone who would listen. But the truth was a lesser and more complicated reality. The two had barely known each other at the university, where Goyo was a quiet chemistry major and
he
was a loudmouthed law student perpetually hungry for the limelight. Goyo had spent many waking hours and a good number of sleeping ones regretting the lost opportunity of shooting the bastard. In those days it wasn’t uncommon for even a quiet chemistry major to carry a gun, and Goyo was a crack shot, having practiced since boyhood on tin cans and chickens.

Ay, he would gladly give up everything he owned—his oceanfront condo on Key Biscayne, his collapsing brownstone off Second Avenue, every last cent of his considerable fortune, even the weekly rendezvous with the shapely bank teller Vilma Espín, who was a magician of hand-mouth coordination and kept him in fighting form since his wife of fifty-nine years had died unexpectedly last New Year’s Eve—for the privilege of killing his nemesis. He’d wear chains on his ankles, chisel stones for his remaining days, even become a goddamn Democrat for the gratification of personally expediting the tyrant’s journey back to the Devil, with whom he’d obviously made a pact.

It wasn’t for politics alone that Goyo would’ve murdered that swaggering cock but for his mistreatment of the woman Goyo had loved above all others: Adelina Ponti, a pianist whose interpretations of Schubert’s early piano sonatas had won his heart. That good-for-nothing had disgraced Adelina, left her with a child, a boy she named after her errant lover, who never recognized el niño as his own. For two years, Goyo anonymously sent Adelina money to help support her son, until the day he learned that she’d hanged herself from a chandelier in her parents’ sunny music room, her bare feet grazing the keys of their Steinway baby grand. A plaster bust of Franz Schubert stood watch on a nearby shelf.

Goyo’s reasons for wanting to kill the tyrant multiplied prodigiously after the Revolution—his father’s suicide, his younger brother Marcos’s death in the Bay of Pigs—and his hatred deepened with the ensuing decades of Communist corruption and lies. There was no one in the world he loathed more, no one for whom he stoked a more bottomless fury, no one else he unwaveringly blamed for invading, oppressing, and misshaping his life than that fearmongering, fatigues-wearing, egotistical brute who continued to call the shots from his deathbed overlooking the sea.

His fixation with ending the tyrant’s life had begun to consume Goyo day and night. The thought that he could die a hero tantalized him, probably more than it should. His heroism would’ve been greater had he undertaken the mission as a young man, but even grizzled and arthritic as he was, he might yet achieve mythic status.
HERE LIES A CUBAN HERO
. Goyo imagined these words chiseled on his headstone, the wreaths and tributes, the eulogies and Martí-inspired poetry read in his honor. Luisa might even grow jealous of the pretty women who’d sigh as they surrendered a rose on his tomb, praying that a man of his stature might someday sweep them off their feet.

He reached for his inhaler and took a bitter breath. Goyo’s
lungs had weakened since his bout of pneumonia last winter on an emergency visit to New York. His Turkish tenants had set fire to his brownstone while grilling lamb shish kebabs, nearly asphyxiating the other occupants. The building had become one unceasing headache. Goyo would’ve sold it in a heartbeat, but the real estate taxes alone would amount to millions and leave him next to nothing. He was trapped, and no amount of wistful gazing at the sea would change that sorry fact.

A regatta was under way in Biscayne Bay, and Goyo raised his binoculars to get a better look. It was the same parade of self-important fools he’d battled at the yacht club before submitting his resignation and telling them all, in no uncertain terms, to go to hell. This hadn’t done much for his social life. But it wasn’t the solitude of endless tropical days that bothered Goyo. After years of crushing work in New York and a frenetic retirement with the ever-restless Luisa, old age held for him an appealing laxness, a mellowing and decadence of the flesh, the freedom to nap—something he did despite the crises afflicting him daily—like the feral cats that used to roam his childhood village in Honduras.

Smarter people than he had philosophized about confronting the deaf immensity of death. He wasn’t particularly original in his thinking. But he found it ironic that true languor—precursor to the eternal one, of course—hadn’t invaded his bones until after his wife had succumbed to a brain aneurysm. Luisa had been aggressively social and socially climbing, especially in Miami, but too mistrustful to have any real friends. Goyo had loved her profoundly at first, then more shallowly, until the feeling devolved into obligatory affection and lapsed into ordinary tolerance. Love had flared at the beginning, but then who the hell knew what happened? Decades of tired entanglements later, he still didn’t know.

Goyo felt unending shame when he thought about his wife, partly due to the guilt she’d induced in him over his affairs with
their diner’s siren waitresses; for gambling away a million dollars in the stock market pursuing a “bulletproof” strategy advocated by his hotshot ex-broker, now incarcerated; for not defending her against the barrage of insults by his mother early in their marriage. The shame, however, was most piercing, most unendurable, when Goyo revisited what he considered his principal failing: surrendering his children to his wife’s violence and unreasonableness.

His son, Goyito, now pushing sixty, lived on disability in the Florida panhandle, his brain irremediably fried by cocaine and further addled by the medications he took by the fistful to prevent him from killing himself. Alina, six years younger, was troubled in her own peculiar ways. Ever since she’d come to live with him—ostensibly to help him recover from precipitous widowerhood—Goyo had suspected her motives. His daughter had no visible means of support, had taken up long-distance swimming (he could spot her now, porpoise-like, making her way along the horizon), and when she wasn’t swimming, snapped her fancy cameras in his face.

The other day Alina had the nerve to ask him to pose nude for her. Goyo was the first to admit that he didn’t have much in the way of artistic inclinations, but pose nude for his daughter? This was perversity, plain and simple. He’d heard from one of the garage attendants that Alina had asked the same of other retirees in his condominium, embarrassing Goyo to no end. He had half a mind to kick her out for this alone. Within the hour, if she hadn’t drowned or been eaten by sharks, Alina would walk through the front door tracking in rivulets of sand and disturbing him with the strange configurations of seaweed plastered to her manly shoulders.

Goyo wondered whether El Comandante suffered such troubles with his own children, a veritable tribe at this point, if the reports he’d read in
El Nuevo Herald
were even half true. Some years ago, one of the tyrant’s illegitimate daughters had written a tell-all memoir about growing up on the island, neglected and suffering
from bulimia, an all-but-unheard-of disease among her hungry fellow citizens. The book had made her a celebrity in Miami for one short-lived season.

Unlike his compatriots, Goyo wasn’t a blind believer in exile gossip. He’d spent too many years in Manhattan honing his cynicism and reading the
New York Post
. Goyo took pride in his ability to distinguish fact from fiction, the honorable from the crooked, the deal from the scam. Yet this skill seemed increasingly irrelevant at his stage of life. It was all a fiction, he decided, a pliable narrative one could shape, photographs one could freeze at selected junctures, then engage in speculation and pointless deductions. Wasn’t that what El Comandante had done? Bent history to his will? Cunningly divided and spliced it into a seamless whole?

The sea was calm, mocking the agitation Goyo felt inside. He was weary of the excuses he’d made for sitting on the sidelines of life, the never-ending rationalizations that choked him like a fetid mangrove swamp. What would he say to El Comandante if they ever met again? Or would they immediately resort to insults and blows? What would they have in common anymore besides arthritis and diverticulitis? Like the tyrant, Goyo had spent his early childhood in the countryside, had two brothers and a Spanish father—Galician, too—who took years to formalize relations with the mother of his children. In short, they were both bastards.

Goyo’s mother wasn’t Cuban by birth but Guatemalan. After she’d borne three sons by her itinerant Spanish lover, the young family moved to coastal Honduras, the headquarters of Arturo Herrera’s burgeoning shipping business. Goyo lived on a beach where he once watched the sea recede for a mile before a tidal wave destroyed their town. Undeterred, Arturo relocated his family to Cuba and finally married Goyo’s mother, who was seized thereafter with a sporadic religiosity incited by her gratitude for her good fortune. By then Papá had become very wealthy and Goyo’s days on
the beach were supplanted by a stint at a Jesuit boarding school in Canada, where he learned Latin, played baseball and the clarinet, and fell in love with chemistry. To this day, the delightful symmetry of the carbon cluster C
₆₀
moved Goyo to tears. He’d also closely followed the efforts of chemists to make the polyhedral hydrocarbon dodecahedrane (C
₂₀
H
₂₀
), a challenge they finally achieved in 1980.

Goyo pricked his finger to read his blood sugar, which was a little high but nothing to panic over. He reached for his pills but forgot which tablets were for what and washed down a random handful with a glass of diluted orange juice. His ailments had accrued faster than he could keep straight, upsetting the color-coding medications system his wife had devised. In descending order of importance, Goyo suffered from heart disease (he’d had a triple bypass four years ago), crippling arthritis in his lower spine and both knees (he walked at a thirty-degree angle to the floor), borderline diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, and intermittent impotence. Perhaps the impotence should’ve topped the list. It certainly would have in his prime, when he could screw a dozen times in a day and still roar for more.