King of Cuba (23 page)

At last, the overhead lights flickered off. A bespectacled narrator in a turtle’s carapace stepped out from behind the curtain into
a spotlight and began singing in a high tenor.
“Fever and madness consumed many men
 . . .” El Comandante perused the program. The musical consisted of a single act divided into three scenes: Day One—Advance on Playa Larga; Day Two—Mercenaries on the Run; Day Three—Victory at Playa Girón. So who the fuck was this turtle? He squinted and checked the program again. Cojones, it was supposed to be Fernández, the hero who’d commanded the main column of Cuban forces during the invasion!

The curtains slowly opened to reveal a spectacular swamp scene populated by amphibians toting toy machine guns. They were determined to defend their swamp and swore allegiance to their bearded commander in chief, a frog in fatigues. “Fear not,” Commander Frog croaked, simultaneously chewing on a cigar. “The tanks, antiaircraft guns, and other artillery are on their way!”

The creatures burst into jubilant song:

On their way, on their way

The guns and artillery are on their way

Our leader rules the island fearlessly

In our hemisphere he has no peer . . .

The audience laughed uproariously. “
Animal Farm
meets La Revolución,” the British ambassador stage-whispered directly behind the despot. A cardboard cutout of a B-26 bomber—the silhouette of a pig in its cockpit—incited pandemonium. “Is that our plane?” squeaked a crab with blue eyestalks before the chorus kicked in again:

Bombs they will drop

On our innocent folk

Steal our dignity

Make us drink Coke!

Even these preposterous lyrics got wild applause. Had everyone gone stark raving mad? The audience seemed entranced by the animals, the sets, the songs. The whole farce was an incurable disease to which all had succumbed. The tyrant had half a mind to walk out, but doing so would only call more attention to this disaster. He felt like a condemned man. In the next scene Commander Frog set up headquarters at the Australia sugar mill, issuing orders in his bass baritone. He was unintentionally hilarious, woodenly reciting his lines with a slight lisp. (Where was that handsome militiaman the despot had handpicked to play him?) This was no homage but a grand mocking of him and his revolution. He’d have that faggot’s head for this.

The spectacle trudged on as both sides suffered significant casualties. In spite of himself, the tyrant cheered the melodramatic deaths of the mercenary pigs. One of them performed a swoon worthy of
Swan Lake,
to much enthusiastic applause. At the height of the battle, Commander Frog ordered an artillery bombardment of Playa Girón, deafeningly rendered by the orchestra’s percussion section. He followed this with a showstopping aria, “Victory Is in the Air”:

Our victory will be sweeter than sugarcane

Sweeter than sweet potatoes, sweeter than rain

Our victory is righteous, it’s preordained . . .

Soon the swamp animals had the pigs on the run. U.S. Navy destroyers attempted to rescue the squealing swine to no avail. The audience gasped when one of the cardboard destroyers went up in flames (it’d gotten too close to a spotlight), believing it was part of the special effects. The pigs charged to put out the fire but were promptly taken prisoner. In the last scene, Commander Frog and
his cronies launched into the grand finale, a reggaeton that had them hip-hop dancing under the erratic lighting.

The audience got in the swing, and a conga line broke out in the back row, snaking its way through the aisles, converging on the stage, shimmying and gyrating to the beat. The Danish ambassador swung a lacy black bra over the heads of her fellow dignitaries while the ordinarily reserved delegation from Japan let loose with hip bumping and high-fiving. El Comandante stayed put, smiling his lockjaw smile, mentally going down the list of people who would pay for this heresy.

1.
“Una Noche con Tí” is our signature song. I picked up the maracas so I could spend more time with Feito, the lead singer. Mami taught me that all men are lying, cheating dogs like my father, who left for Miami when I was a baby. Feito wrote “Una Noche con Tí” after our first night together. I felt the pain before I felt the pleasure, but now I live for the pleasure. Our conjunto has swing, everybody says so. Feito promises me that we’ll be famous someday and travel the world like the Buena Vista Social Club.

—Eva Molina, maracas player

The dog’s hot, humid panting was driving Goyo crazy. For the last two hundred miles, Rudy had been the subject of Goyito’s avid conversation. The life expectancy of Great Danes was approximately seven years (Rudy was six and a half). The dogs suffered from severe hip dysplasia (ditto Rudy). Many could not exercise immediately after eating because of their torsion-prone stomachs, the details of which Goyo didn’t have the mental stamina to review after his son’s exhaustive tutorial. And according to Goyito, these gentle behemoths were, by temperament, the biggest lapdogs ever. On this last leg of their trip, Rudy had refused to sit alone in the backseat (as evidenced by his vengeful assault on the upholstery) and rested his massive, drooling head on Goyito’s thighs.

Goyo checked the rearview mirror. Rudy grinned back, his tongue lolling to one side. He’d just happily devoured a sack of
chicken strips. The stench of two semiwashed men and one colossal, flatulent dog—even in a vehicle as capacious as his Cadillac—was suffocating. It was a miracle they’d gotten as far as New Jersey without killing each other. So much had deteriorated in the state since Goyo had last passed through: abandoned factories; shuttered Main Streets; unsightly, sprawling malls. For years Goyo had regularly crossed the George Washington Bridge to practice at shooting ranges alongside other relatively normal gun owners—deer hunters and law enforcement types who enjoyed exercising their Second Amendment rights.

“Stop. Dad.”

“What’s the matter?”

“My legs are asleep.” Goyito’s chin bobbed to a rhythm only he could hear. “I have to sit up front.”

“What about Rudy?”

“I spoke to him. He’ll be okay.”

Goyo pulled off at the next exit and into a gas station. His son sprang out the back door and into the convenience store, emerging moments later with several hot dogs smothered with condiments, a jumbo-size bag of spicy chips, and the biggest cherry Slushee this side of the Greenwich Meridian Line. Goyito slipped into the passenger seat, fed one of the hot dogs to the hypersalivating Rudy, then did the unthinkable: he removed his sneakers and put his bare, sore-infested diabetic feet on the dashboard.

Goyo tried to keep his eyes on the road, but his son’s feet were mesmerizing—the thick, corrugated nails rising off the toes; the grilled-meat look of the flesh; the open, deeply crimson wounds. It was evident that poor Goyito was dying from the bottom up. His feet reminded Goyo of the photographs of lepers that had scared him senseless as a child. Without preamble, Goyito started to cry. The tears ran down his cheeks and neck, soaked into his junk food. His face shone with suffering.

“What is it?” Goyo asked. “Do you need me to stop again?”

His son carried despair like a set of car keys, losing and finding it almost at random. Goyo wasn’t sure what to do. He’d already backtracked to North Carolina to pick Goyito up, losing a whole day’s driving. Rudy barked in sympathy, his immense head canted toward the roof of the car. The barking felt like sledgehammer blows to Goyo’s cranium. Soon the Great Dane lapsed into moaning arias that, combined with Goyito’s wails, forged a mournful, synchronous duet. Still sniffling, Goyito reached into his pants pockets and pulled them inside out in a hobo’s gesture of “broke.”

“You’re worried about money?” Goyo felt a tightening wreath of pain around his skull. The stress of driving with these two was taking its toll. They cruised past a run-down town fluttering with American flags. His daughter had once theorized that if three or more flags were flying on any given suburban street, Republicans were preponderant.

Both Goyito and Rudy scratched behind their ears. Please, God, Goyo prayed, don’t let his Cadillac be infested with fleas. Or ticks.

“I’m, uh, uh, trying to remember,” Goyito stammered.

Goyo understood this. Memory could be a plague sometimes, corroding one’s soul with all that was lost and unforgotten. Who could have imagined their fates? At times Goyo felt madly in love with his loss, painful as it was. His lifelong devotion to Adelina was a testament to that. He didn’t know a single Cuban of his generation who wasn’t besotted with the past. But his son’s regrets were of a different order altogether.

“I’m very sorry, hijo,” Goyo said, anticipating a fresh volley of accusations: how he’d abandoned him as a boy; surrendered him to a cruel, mercurial mother. These were the recurring themes of his psychotherapy.

Dusk was falling, and the sun seemed no more powerful than
a lightbulb. The passing trees whistled the same B flat. Goyo felt the beauty of impending evening, something he hadn’t noticed much before. He barely remembered the years he’d worked at the diner, recalled only a few of his extramarital affairs. (Where were all those gorgeous, soft-eyed, wet, breathy mistresses now?) Alina and Goyito both claimed he hadn’t been around when they were kids except for their annual Easter Sunday expedition to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes.

Goyito had a photographic memory of his childhood, especially the hurts and degradations of which he kept an interminable tally. Now he was tearfully refuting his mother’s assertion that he’d never worked: he’d cleaned offices at night; worked as a hospital orderly, a job he loved because when anyone asked him what he did for a living he could retort: “I save lives”; selling men’s clothing at a suburban Nordstrom, not far from here, in fact. When he disappeared from that job, his manager said that Goyito had been the best damn salesman they’d ever had. Later, when Goyo had to break down the door of his son’s apartment in Brooklyn, he found a hundred dress shirts still in their plastic wrappers, a carton of Italian silk ties, and thousands of hours of videotaped pornography.

Goyito also had worked at the diner, against Luisa’s will. It hadn’t lasted long. Goyito made off with a freezer filled with hamburger meat. The next thing Goyo knew, his son had turned himself over to a chicken farm in the Florida panhandle run by missionaries who bragged success with men like him. Shoveling shit in the hot sun would leave him too tired, they promised, to want to use drugs. Goyito hadn’t understood “hardscrabble” until then: the unyielding earth, the vicious pecking order of the South, the heat and bugs that nearly killed him.

Another crime spree landed him in a county jail with a new set of missionaries, who got him praising the Lord for a while. But his son’s last “Hallelujah!” expired on his first day out.

“Dad, are you listening to me?” Goyito gave him a psychotic stare. His hands looked lumpy and mutilated.

For a moment, Goyo thought his son capable of strangling him to death, but he shook off the thought. This had been Luisa’s fear, one she masked behind her unrelenting disdain.

“Díme, Goyito.”

“Is it true that Mom refused to touch me when I was a baby?”

“We’ve been over this, hijo. There was no name for what she suffered then. No treatment. Now it is common for women to be depressed, to reject their children. Allow me to say this with deep love and empathy: you are not the only tragedy in the world.”

“Did she ever touch my penis?”

“How should I know?” Goyo felt a jolt of disgust. He had his doubts about how useful such psychological delving was to anyone.

“Did you?”

Goyo looked over into the great pity of his son’s eyes and tried to feel remorse. He wasn’t sure he had any more to spare. What he really wanted to do was focus on killing the tyrant without further interference. He needed to check in with his friend, the Russian security guard, who always admitted him to the UN with barely a cursory inspection. Had the protocols changed? Could he sneak in his handgun? Might he trust Goyito enough to tell him his plans?

“She hated me even before I was me.” Goyito looked forlornly out the window, then turned the dial on the radio, which whined like an espresso machine. “I . . . don’t . . . like women.”

Goyo snapped off the radio. He felt a certain expertise on the subject. If his son wanted to discuss women, Goyo was all ears.

“Remember that girl I was engaged to?” Goyito asked.

Goyo remembered her well. A good-looking redhead, big-boned, with a strained expression. Aileen something-or-other. She’d been studying to be a nurse and sometimes wore a black patch over one eye. His son had met her at an AA meeting. Everyone in her
family was a drunk. Goyito had stolen the girl’s credit card to buy her the diamond ring and pay for a trip to Miami to meet everyone at Christmas.

“She used to tie me up.” His son extracted a handful of pills from his shirt pocket, popped them into his mouth, swallowed. One of them was the size of quail’s egg.

Goyo didn’t know which of his son’s pills were legitimate—there were so goddamn many of them—and which were not. “Are you sure you want to—”

“Whipped me. Pissed on me. Stuck metal up my ass.” Goyito coughed into the back of his hand and looked straight ahead.

Goyo was speechless. He reached over and patted his son’s shoulder as if it were the edge of some vast mystery. He’d known about the woman in the projects who gave him blow jobs for a percentage of his disability check. But this?

“Ballbreakers. Bitches. That’s what gets me off.”

It had been excruciating for Goyo to picture his son homeless, or smoking crack, or more recently submitting to fourteen sessions of electroshock therapy in a Tallahassee mental hospital. But trussed up like a pig for a woman to abuse? This was more than he could stand. If someone had taken a hot poker to his brain, Goyo thought, it might feel something like what his son felt every day.