Pig's Foot (26 page)

‘And who’s he?’ asked El Judío.

‘Julito was from round here. We should mourn him.’

They watched as Augusto walked out the door. That day on strict orders of the management, the laundry, did not open. Augusto did not go back to bed; he went off somewhere, into some dark corner, to pay his respects to the memory of his friend Julito.

The 1930s began with a significant event, the general strike which was joined by more than 200,000 workers all over the island. The strike, which was a great success, had been coordinated by Rubén Martínez Villena who was immediately sentenced to death and had to flee to the United States. But according to my grandparents, 1931 gave them reason to celebrate. Kid Chocolate, who had left in 1928 to continue his career as a boxer in the United States, became world champion for the first time, becoming the first world boxing champion in the history of Cuba.

On the day of his victory, my grandparents helped hang signs painted by El Judío above the laundry. ‘That’s our Kid Chocolate,
Viva El Kid!
’ read one of them. Another read simply ‘Kid Chocolate: World Champion’. Augusto insisted they take down the third sign which said ‘Kid Chocolate is Jewish’, something that deeply upset Judío Alemán.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, they closed the laundry and Augusto invited his friends to take a stroll through the centre of town. There were signs everywhere celebrating the Kid’s victory; they hung from the windows of the houses, they were pasted in shop windows, everyone in Cuba was proud. Many people dressed in white and threw their hats in the air while the whoops of joy that echoed through the streets, joined by the blare of horns from a fleet of omnibuses, were a heartfelt addition to the jubilation. The Kid piled up the titles, junior lightweight, lightweight, featherweight, he fought a total of 152 matches, winning 136 – fifty of them by KO – losing only ten and drawing six which led him to be considered among the ten greatest featherweights of all time.

My grandparents were very impressed by the Capitolio, built in a record time of three years, its interiors adorned with fifty-eight different types of marble and precious woods like mahogany. To my grandparents it seemed like only yesterday they had arrived in Havana when there was nothing on this site but piles of sand, stone blocks and steel and now here was the monolithic building. It was a blue and breezeless day, boundless was the bustle of business in the city, the spark of hope to be seen in every face, all brought about by the Kid’s boxing triumph. My grandparents used to describe Havana as sheer organised chaos. I figure it must have been a lot more organised than the chaos we have today.

‘Look, Benicio, it’s Melecio’s building,’ Geru commented as they passed the Bacardí Building.

‘It’s not called the Melecio Building, it’s called the Bacardí Building. The people who own it are Jewish.’

‘Enough already, Judío,’ said Augusto, spurring on the carthorse. ‘Sometimes you really are insufferable.’

My grandparents said nothing.

Back at the house, Augusto took advantage of Gertrudis being in the bathroom to take Benicio out into the courtyard.

‘I noticed that Gertrudis doesn’t wear a wedding band,’ he said.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because it’s high time you made an honest woman of her, don’t you think?’

‘An honest woman?’

‘You should marry her, lad. And don’t hang about too long. I can tell you, by the time you get to sixty, you stop living.’

‘You stop living at sixty?’ Grandpa Benicio did not understand.

Augusto replied that this was one of life’s great truths: after the age of sixty, you no longer lived, you
survived
.

‘Before you reach sixty, you get pleasure from love, from the temptation to seduce women, from putting on a new suit of clothes, making an effort so that you can swank and later conquer them. But after sixty, love becomes just a commodity. The time for seduction is over, because you can’t get it up any more, because the body’s defects can no longer be hidden by clothes, however new, however fashionable. The truth is you’ve become an old man and no one now can save you. You simply survive, Benicio. Vicariously through your children, for example. For those who have them, that is.’

Augusto looked down. ‘To put it simply, you feed on memories. I don’t know about you but, to me, that’s not living, that’s surviving.’

‘And why did you never marry?’ asked Grandfather.

‘I did marry. I married an angel, the most wonderful woman in all the world. Olga, her name was. We met at university in the glorious days of our youth. I thought she was too good for me, because, well, I was a depraved young man. There I was going from brothel to brothel while Olga was the purest creature I had ever met. She clearly deserved a better man than I. It was she who changed me the day I gave her a gift of a basket full of bread rolls from the bakery on the Esquina de Toyo. She tossed the basket on the ground and said that if I wanted her to go out with me, I should stop buying bread rolls and start to change my ways. So I changed. I gave up the whores, the gambling, all of my vices, and I devoted myself completely and entirely to her. Never in my life have I met a woman who completed me as she did, with that mane of blonde hair tumbling to her waist, those eyes green as the ocean, that statuesque figure. I knew from the moment I first kissed her that, for me, Olga was the beginning and the end. And so I wasted no time. We were engaged within a month of our first date, and a month after that we were married. I spent every penny I had so that the wedding would be worthy of her – though to find something worthy of Olga was simply impossible. I proposed to her in the Gato Tuerto and then whisked her off to the Cabaret Nacional. It was the most wonderful day of my life. Two years later, Olga died of tuberculosis in my arms. She was only twenty-five. Since then, I have never loved another woman. And I never will.’

This gave Grandpa Benicio pause for thought. This was the first time in the three years since he had met Augusto that he had heard the man speak in such a manner, head bowed, tears in his eyes.

‘That’s how life is. When it decides to fuck you over, it fucks you good and proper. At least I came through it. El Judío, now he really suffered. You see him all the time joking and laughing, anyone would think he’s the happiest man in the world, but it’s all an act to hide his grief. First his parents abandoned him. They came here from Europe intending to go to the United States, but when El Judío stood firm and refused to leave Cuba, they left him. Then he found himself a paramour, but before long she cheated on him with another man. Eventually he met the love of his life, the woman he married, the woman who divorced him and took what little he possessed, including his house. It was a disaster. Once he started bragging to me about how he didn’t need money because he had friends. I’m rich in friends, he told me. I laughed in his face and told him straight out that no one in the world has more than two or three real friends and that if he wanted proof, he had only to come to my house at three a.m. that night.

‘El Judío knocked on my door in the early hours. I took him to a little farm I used to own down Cotorro way. I took hold of one of my pigs, I slit its throat and I smeared him with blood from head to foot. He glared at me, his eyes like a dinosaur, roaring at me asking what the hell I thought I was doing, but I went on smearing his clothes until he was nothing but a mess of pig’s blood. “Who did you say your friends were?” I asked him. He said he had lots of friends, that he didn’t know where to start. “Give me one name.” “Esteban the cobbler,” he said and without wasting a minute we went to Esteban’s house near Cuatro Caminos. “I was in a fight and killed some guy. The cops are looking for me. Can I hide out in your place?” said El Judío with a look of terror on his face. His great friend Esteban made the sign of the cross three times and said no way, don’t come bringing your troubles to my door. So we went and we knocked on the doors of all the supposed friends of our friend the beak. They all said the same: get the hell out of here, sort out your own problems. Only Julio, who looked like a starving wretch and whose clothes were falling off him, had the decency to offer his friendship in time of need. As soon as he opened the door and saw El Judío covered in blood, the first thing he did was ask what he could do, how he could help. You need to come with me to Cotorro, said El Judío, and without a thought the guy pulled some clothes on and came with us. When we got to my farm, we told him it had all been a lie, that we had been trying to find out Judío’s true friends. And this decent, loyal man was the only one of Judío’s friends who ate the pig I killed that night.

‘It was then that El Judío realised that when you laugh the whole world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone. That’s why he’s my friend, because we are bound by the memories of the miserable lives we’ve had to live. So when you see him tomorrow morning, drink a shot of rum in his honour, because his life is well and truly fucked up.’

After Augusto had finished his confession, the two men stood in silence for a long time. Grandpa Benicio felt he had to change the subject, so he went back to talking about marriage, explaining that he knew without a doubt that Gertrudis was the love of his life, it was simply that back in Pata de Puerco people were not in the habit of getting married.

‘What do I do after I buy the ring?’ asked Grandfather.

‘I’ll tell you. We all go to a church, you get married and we throw a big party.’

‘Marry in a church? We don’t believe in God, Gertrudis and me.’

‘Neither do I,
chico
,’ said Augusto, ‘but that’s just how it’s done.’

That same day, Grandfather began saving money so that he could buy my grandmother a ring. In the laundry, El Judío, who heard about what he was planning from Augusto, constantly teased him, falling on his knees, his Bolshevik hat clutched to his chest, simpering, ‘Of course I’ll marry you, sweetie-pie.’ One time my grandma nearly walked in on them. El Judío, acting the fool, started pretending to play the guitar and my grandmother looked at him suspiciously. ‘He does it to hide his grief,’ thought Grandpa Benicio. In that moment he realised that Judío’s pain was truly terrible since he was constantly play-acting, and Benicio stood looking at him sadly.

Something else I just realised about my grandparents: they were incurable romantics. Not like me, I’m a cynic about most things in life, though even I have my Mr Darcy moments. The love between my grandparents was one of those glorious lovey-dovey relationships with flowers and fine words and great respect. I never heard them say a harsh word to each other, or even heard them argue the way couples usually do, because there are times when you just want to tell your other half to fuck off. Like I did one day with Elena. She was really lovely, she was funny and all that, but sometimes she’d just push my buttons and I’d wind up exploding. Once she started on at me about how I never held her hand and never kissed her in public, about how a bunch of her girlfriends had said I was boorish, that I had no romance.

‘Tell your girlfriends to go fuck themselves and stop messing with my head, Elena, unless you want a kick up the arse,’ I said. I regretted it afterwards. Truth is, I really loved the bitch.

Anyway, to get back to my grandparents, now they were as sweet as a slab of sticky toffee. That’s why I was surprised when Grandpa Benicio told me all the stuff he told me, all that stuff about Pata de Puerco, about saying that Gertrudis was ridiculous, that she was punishing herself. Grandpa wasn’t like that. In Lawton, everyone knew him as someone who was polite to dogs, even the vicious mutts. So I wasn’t surprised when Grandpa Benicio told me how he proposed to Grandma Gertrudis.

Augusto had suggested that he hide the ring in one of the sweet buns they sold at the bakery on the Esquina de Toyo, wrap it up in a box and present it to her at El Floridita.

‘But what if she swallows it?’ said Grandfather. Then they thought it might be simpler and more sensible to tie the ring to the leg of one of Judío’s carrier pigeons, for example, and release it while Benicio and his future wife were out walking near the Lawton parish church. The dove would come and land on Gertrudis’s shoulder and she would immediately notice the ring attached to the bird’s foot.

El Judío, for his part, thought this a barbaric idea; if Benicio planned to propose to Gertrudis, he should do so like a Jewish gentleman, save up his money little by little until he had enough to pay José Matamoros and his Band to come and play at the laundry. ‘Pack it in, Judío,’ said Augusto, ‘this is no time for jokes.’

They considered the idea of a drive into the city to the Bodeguita del Medio so that Benicio could propose either on the Malecón as they walked along the seafront, or on the majestic steps leading up to the University of Habana. Eventually, Grandfather told them not to worry about it, he would think of something.

A year later, Grandpa had finally saved enough money to buy an eighteen-carat gold ring for my grandmother. That August of 1933, Havana was in the grip of a sweltering heatwave, the sun beat down on the flagstones and by mid-morning clothes were sodden from the humidity. Grandfather asked Augusto if he might have the day off and his friend hugged him hard and wished him luck. ‘Cross and hook, Choco!’ called Judío and my grandfather watched as they left the house and headed for the laundry.

Gertrudis and Benicio walked along the Calzada Dolores and then turned and headed down the Calzada del Diez de Octubre, stopping to stare in the shop windows. Every time Grandma pointed out something, Grandpa dashed into the shop to buy it for her. ‘You’re going to bankrupt us,
mi amor
,’ said Gertrudis anxiously, but Benicio simply said it was only for today. After that, Grandma stopped pointing out toys and clothes in the shop windows.