Men in Miami Hotels (20 page)
On the steps to the third floor Cot stops his father with a hand on his arm. There are small scaly patches on the old man’s brown skin. He intends right there in the empty midday stairwell to tell his father about his mother, but the words catch in his chest. His father smiles at him. His old hawk face is filled with a quiet, long-discredited happiness. His eyes glisten. “
Papi, un momento
,” Cot says. Marcella has gone on ahead and waits for them on the open gallery. A small breeze shuffles a few leaves in a nearby mango tree. The pale flowers stand like candelabras among the leaves that look to Cot like bunches of green knives. “
Mami
. . . ,” he says and stops. His father says nothing, only looks at him. Grief like a cold stoniness in his chest, like a command and punishment, dislodges. His father grasps his arm with the strong left hand that scribbles the stories of his
novelas gráficas
and pulls Cot to him. They embrace, his father crying. Cot smells again the dried sweat on the old man’s body, the animal grease, and he thinks he can smell the tears, hot in his nostrils like the smell of heated iron. Marcella looks down at them from the gallery. In her eyes Cot sees the placement and character of his life—so it seems to him. The loose frills of an asparagus fern sway in a hanging pot above her. She looks sadder than he’s ever known her to be.
T
wo days later on Ciudad San Antonio Street a man pops like a cork out of the flung-open doors in an ornate stone facade and hails him. It’s Manual Cosa, one of Albertson’s men from Miami. Cosa invites him into the bar he has just hurled himself out of. Cot’s reluctant but he goes anyway. He carries snugly tucked-in one of the two pistols he’s brought with him from the boat they abandoned in the Bay of Pigs. He sits with Cosa in a tall wooden booth opposite the bar while Cosa tells him men are on their way to Havana to kill him. He flexes his hands continuously as he speaks.
“Are you one of them?”
“You know that would never happen,” Cosa says with a smile that reveals his bleached, worn-down teeth. He speaks as if they’re close friends though they’re not. “I am only here to see my mother, but I thought I would find you and warn you. I was lucky to glimpse you walking down the street. You got a limp now?”
“No. Who’s coming?”
Cosa gives him two names that are not familiar to him. He makes a quick squinting or wincing movement as he says the names—Cantrell, Markus—as if trying to conceal something from himself.
Cot glances at the open door of the bar, at the oblong of pale yellow light that looks from where he sits like the clear light of destiny. He imagined that they would make a life now in Havana. That Marcella would come to love the city and want to stay. The government would never extradite a Cuban citizen to the States. He and Marcella would marry and she would be allowed to live and work here, maybe practice law. It could easily be worked out. His father has influence. They would walk in the evenings under the big poincianas in Adelia Park. They would sit on the long white benches and listen to the stories told by the old men gathered there. They would eat iced slices of mango from patched white napkins. They would lie in bed at night and talk of simple things, like farmers. Cuba was still an old country, still lingering in the olden times. Out in the ruralities life was hardly different from that of the ancient Roman countryside. His heart is beating hard. It’s almost as if it isn’t his heart. Even the smells, the raw coriander, the peppers—are different here. The scarred wooden table they sit at, the signs above the bar advertising Venezuelan beer, Caporals,
empanadas fritos
. He knows it’s rigged. In his mind that is. An imaginary life he is always at least half living. Movement is the key to everything—Spane told him that once. It didn’t matter. Along the edges of his life reality and fantasy wash up together and mingle. Through an open door in back he can see a brown and white goat tied by its neck to a stake. A little girl bends over it, cleaning it with a rag. She looks familiar, she could be his younger sister, sunk back into time and lost in the tides, marooned here in another life, another kick out of the infinite universes.
Each leaf, each pebble has a life of its own.
Who said that?
Cosa is talking of his mother—
his
, not Cot’s.
“You know those lines in Virgil,” Cot breaks in, “right at the end of the first book of
The
Georgics
where after he’s been talking for a few hundred lines about country weather and climate and the patterns of the stars he suddenly calls out to Caesar and says everything’s gone to shit, that right and wrong are inverted and crimes and war are everywhere—how it’s like in a chariot race where the horses get loose and you can’t control the chariot—you know that part?”
“Sure, Cot, yeah.”
Down the long brown room, rising like ghosts of the up-fumed dead, he sees shapes bent over the backs of the men sitting at the bar, of others hunched at tables counting days and coins and lost loves.
“I’m sorry,” Cot says, “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
“That’s okay.”
“Come on. I’ll go with you to see your mother.”
“She’s not at home right now,” Cosa says drumming the table.
Cot sees the truth in the man’s face; it stands out, distinct as an old tattoo.
“Well, let’s walk over to her place. I’d like to see where she lives.”
They head down a long sunny street, not ambling but not hurrying either. Two men in white
guayabera
shirts pass and one of them looks familiarly back at them, a nobody pretending to be somebody, or vice versa. Cosa directs Cot into a small, less sunny street. A few spindly pines sprout from shallow depressions along the urban sidewalk. At the corner a large mahogany tree fills a sunken median space. The trunk’s painted white halfway up. Low, unpainted concrete buildings shrink back from crumbling pavement. Three boys in identical yellow nylon jackets move off the curb to let them pass. Doors like cabinet panels are recessed below balconies from which hang long haggard strands of
cameron de rosa
. They turn into another street not so nice. Fixed in an intersection is a small park with a large drooping banyan set among yellowed royal palms. Cot turns and sees that the two men in white shirts are following. Up ahead and in an undersweep down to a wide flat area are the tracks of the municipal train station. Lines of passenger cars rust in the hot sunlight. Beyond the little park a weary industrial landscape of low factory buildings and warehouses. The banyan has let down its dark strings and branchings like barriers before something darker. Off to the side in a narrow playground boys are playing basketball at a skirtless hoop. Shirts and skins.
“Humidity makes you slimy,” Cot says as they enter the shade under the swamp-smelling banyan.
“What’s that?” Cosa says, but Cot already has his gun out. Cosa doesn’t have time to prepare himself before Cot shoots him in the head. The bullet balloons his cheeks as his big body caves in and falls. Cot dashes around the side of the banyan tree, moving cleanly and without obstruction. On the backside he ducks in among the long, down-dipped strands of the tree’s branching. The two men following come running around the tree, bent at the waist, crouching as they come. Cot shoots them both as they run. One lunges forward as if he’s trying to catch something in his arms and lands on his face in the dust. The other falls as if thumped suddenly from the vivid air and careers onto his side. They look dead enough to be dead. Cot’s breath is tight, concealed, taking a break. He makes himself start breathing again, long stroking in-pulls. He takes the pistols from the two assassins, takes quickly their sweated-on American dollars. The basketball players are out of sight around the other side of the tree. Ahead in the china-white sunlight, out where the wide, empty yards of the train station begin—Casablanca it’s called—no one’s about.
Cot moves around the side of the tree on feet that are almost weightless. He’s thinking of the winter in KW when it got so cold they took the rugs up off the floors and used them for blankets. A rustling in the dark leaves is only rats. Cosa lies on his side with his arm under his head. Cot squats beside him, a man he shared a strawberry soda with once on a rainy street in Tampa. A man who, he knows, has no mother in Havana. With his knuckle he touches the skin on Cosa’s forehead. It’s still warm, like life. He rises and walks slowly down a packed earth path leading out of the little park. He feels as if he’s drugged, or maybe—for the time being—undrugged. He can see into the spaces of the day. Locate the unburdened
jouissance
. A loose, wavering sensation places itself calmly into empty spaces in his mind. Every melting bonbon, discarded fingernail, has a life of its own, he’s sure of it. Even the dead, clogged with blood. At a spigot he wets his handkerchief and bathes his face. The sky over the city is a clear, unobstructed blue, small handsome white clouds in the east. Havana skies aren’t encumbered with pollutants. You can see the stars at night, some nights, if you step away from the lights. And even in the best neighborhoods there aren’t too many streetlights, sometimes only fat Russian bulbs strung on poles, casting a palpable amber glow rounding off a plush darkness. Watching him, the basketball players stand on the court as he once stood in José Martí Park in KW with a basketball snugged against his hip watching Curtis Pell carve a diamond into his arm with a knife. He wishes he could go among them, ask them to let him play, but he knows this is impossible, and knows this thought or desire is only the wish for a wish.
O
n his way home—just before he boards a pedicab and rides rattling through city streets—limping gamely along, he comes on a parade moving down a wide avenue past big lemon trees. He starts to duck down another route, but then he makes himself stop to watch the defile go by. It’s difficult to make himself to do this, like lifting a large stone or a car bumper or saying to someone you love that you know what’s being concealed. He’s sweating and feels light headed. Girls in stiff ruffled skirts and satin accordion bodices, men in one-piece satin suits—Cubans, Bolivians, Peruvians under their national flags, with balloon sleeves and tightly wrapped leggings with bells attached, Venezuelans, Santo Dominicans carrying picador hats, sovereign principalities of the Caribbean basin—dance by, often several dancers bouncing back and forth a step, advancing along the wide boulevard with its stained wooden doors and stained, unpainted stone facades holding steady, the dancers sweating in the hot spring sunshine of the tropics, one group after another, secernate only in the colors and ages of the participants—each group alive in its own world of particularities and energy—dancers whirling, grinning as they spin and bow, advancing behind pickup trucks carrying gigantic speakers blasting chant-like rhythms, islanders and Central Americans with Indian blood, skinny folk from coastal cities and capitals, farmers and fishermen—yipping and crying out, with their open hands dashing sweat off their foreheads.
They’re going on without me
, he thinks—meaning the children, or everybody, or the world, meaning even those close to him, dancing away in brutal rhythms tamped down by worry and despair, by hope or fantastical leanings. He stands abruptly ashamed as a group of schoolgirls in orange-sherbet shorts and white tops with the words
LIBERDAD Y UNIDAD
emblazoned in glittery red sequins across their chests perform bows and striking leaps in front of him as if they recognize him from some vivid particolored other world. He tries to give them the benefit of his full-on blankness—or no, suddenly and without meaning to, his faked delight and complete understanding of and even love for what they are doing here on Earth—but it’s like looking into glare. He reaches into his pocket for money to pay his way out of this, stops, slaps his bare arm as if for mosquitoes, and grins foolishly. Everyone in the crowd is engaged, delighted, filled with fresh life, or they’re expertly faking it. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to turn away, wants to dive for cover behind a bush or maybe throw a bystander ahead of him as a shield or maybe he could pull his pistol or tear open his clothes but body and limbs are made of cement. Inside this casing he senses an eruption gathering itself. This has happened before. He’s got to get out of there quick. But still he can’t move. His face burns. His body is being sorcerised in some archaic transfiguration into ugly beastliness. The girls, grinning and jumping in the air, break away and thank God skip down the street. He’s about to sob—sob and cry out—but he doesn’t and as the bands and dancers pour in a tide past him he wonders why, the answer floating just ahead of him, blurred and wobbling, unreadable. But he’s not really looking for an explanation. He sways, shivering, unable even to step back from the massive sunlight and clamor. A hugeness, an endlessness, seems to be located—
is
locatable
, he thinks—in every part, in that girl’s bulbous gold ring, in a sailor’s glance, in a monkey-faced boy sucking a piece of ice and in all the clanging music in his head of change and uselessness and covert action and a capriole of the heart’s make-believe, he’s got it, or almost has, like a thousand times before, at the track, in Marcella’s arms, in gunfire and expertise, always shifting as it comes, always beleaguered and estivating or leaping, dissolving into fumes and uncached hopelessness even as it gets here. Every sound, every look and concatenation, has a life of its own, he knows this for a fact, but what does it matter. It’s impossible to bear. And then this knowledge or figment passes, and still he is standing on the street in a small crowd of spectators and the dancers are straggling by and a few are singing revolutionary songs that do not exactly fit the music the trucks are playing. He is who he has been, what; an approximation of it. He buys a guava ice and eats it, his teeth chattering, the red juice dripping from his fingers. He can’t tell where it comes from—maybe from out of the swirl and gusting of life that just held him like a baby in its grip—but he knows, as if the facts have been scrawled in chalk on the street, what Marcella has done, and he knows what he will do. I’ve known right along, he thinks, and thinking this it seems true.
S
o he took a pedicab back to his father’s apartment and waked Marcella who was sleeping on the narrow bed in the extra bedroom. Single drops of sweat had collected in the wells of her eyes. She came softly, supplely into his arms. He dabbed the sweat with the tail of his shirt. A quivering breeze picked solemnly at the thin curtains, pulling them out and letting them go. The curtains were blue and printed with ships in full yellow sail. “Are you happy to be here?” he said, half joking, half not.
She hesitated, a slice of sunlight catching in her eyelashes, and said narrowly, maybe joking, maybe not, “I love the antique dust.” Her dark eyes were glossy, still hampered by sleep. She licked the skin under his ear. “All last year I thought I couldn’t go on this way with you—or, no, I thought I could, but that it wasn’t possible.”
“It’s never really been possible, has it? We’ve just gone on with it anyway.”
“I don’t think like that. Maybe now I do a little, but no—it’s not a change, or even a resolution. Something’s been cut away from me. I thought I was . . . I mean . . . everything became unfamiliar, even you. I moved away.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t mean really. In my mind. Now I’m back.”
