Ruins (11 page)

Usnavy retreated. His hands shook as he struggled to open a customer’s plastic bag.

The rest of the day went by in a blur, until the line of customers became a sad trickle, the other workers went home for the afternoon break, and Usnavy was left by himself, sitting on a stool at the counter, his stomach tangled, staring at the foot traffic on the dusty street outside.

The world was sepia, warm but colorless.

Usnavy remembered when Jacinto first returned from Africa, how he was full of stories about wild animals and the flushed palette of the jungle. Then one night in a drunken stupor, when he was lamenting how his ex-wife had never understood him, Jacinto dropped a hand on Usnavy’s knee and told him how, long ago in ancient times, Shaka, the Zulu king, encouraged his soldiers to have what they called
uku-hlobonga
—thigh sex—in order to keep them strong.

In Angola, Jacinto said, he had had extraordinary, energy-surging intercourse with a South African transvestite, only he didn’t know at first she was a man.

“She wasn’t like the locas here,” Jacinto said. “She had lived like that all her life. Where she came from, in her tribe, if she acted like a woman, if she really believed she was a woman, well … she was … except for … you know …”

Thinking about young Reynaldo, who was always getting caught in women’s dresses or in strange circumstances with older men, Usnavy had wanted to know more about how this could happen, how believing so much could transcend something so real, but Jacinto’s fingers on his knee were beginning to travel and Usnavy had no interest at all in that. He took down the final swig of his own beer and, pretending he hadn’t even noticed, stood up, causing Jacinto’s hand to roll off.

“Aw, c’mon …” Jacinto whimpered.

It was 3 in the morning; Tejadillo echoed with a loneliness that Usnavy knew could be devastating. But there was nothing he could do to help his friend except give him a light punch on the shoulder and wish him easy dreams.

Now a drowsy Usnavy propped his head up with his hand, his elbow naked on the bodega’s scratched and empty counter, stiff at the joint. Technically, the bodega was closed until 4 o’clock, but Usnavy was exhausted. He broke open
The Old Man and the Sea
. His hands hurt even as he turned the book’s yellowed pages. His feet were burning and so he slipped off his shoes under the counter.

He knew that if he went home, he wouldn’t have the strength to make his case to Lidia. His single consolation was knowing the broken lamp he’d found in the ruins—the Tiffany!—was safely hidden somewhere in the back of the bodega, stuffed in a cardboard box and wrapped in a blanket. He was certain no one at the bodega would ever grasp its worth.

Last night, standing over Nena and Lidia, he had finally and stubbornly checked the magnificent one for the signature—the T with the other letters hanging off it. He had climbed up on the bed and poked his head inside the lamp until it looked like he was wearing it for a hat. Then he lowered the lamp, slowly, careful not to strain the chain or the electrical wires—though from the ceiling a fine grit rained on him and his family. When he concluded his search, he looked up and realized the hole from which the lamp dropped was bigger now, wider.

Yet he couldn’t think about it right then, couldn’t even consider the consequences because, once he’d had the magnificent one up close to him, he’d taken to it like an archaeologist might: with gentle care, with precision, but with a kind of focus that blackens away all else. He scoured every centimeter, with both his eyes and his hand—maybe, he considered, the initials were engraved but no longer visible. Perhaps they’d come up like Braille. But not even using a magnifying glass nor the bicarbonate of soda that Jacinto had once given him had helped Usnavy find what he was looking for. (All the while, he knew, Nena and Lidia were attempting sleep underneath him and the lamp, wordless and resentful.)

This was considerably more magnificent than any lamp he had ever seen—but, he admitted to himself with sadness, it was not a real Tiffany. Its creator, he figured, must have been a Cuban who didn’t know what he was doing; another Juan Nobody who didn’t understand that his talent was celestial but ultimately useless because it lacked a giant T to quantify and qualify it.

“Psssst … Usnavy …”

A sleepy Usnavy snapped to attention at the bodega counter.

“Usnavy, coño …”

It was Diosdado, standing in the middle of the street, his bifocals on the tip of his nose, motioning his friend over with a jerk of his head. He quickly looked over his shoulder.

“What …?”

“C’mere,” said Diosdado, his stubby legs planted stiffly, his impatient professorial air in full bloom.

Usnavy put down his Hemingway, ran his fingers through his white hair, and got up, sliding back into his shoes. His knees and elbows cracked, every juncture in his body yelled for grease.

“I’m getting old,” he said to Diosdado as he walked around the counter to the middle of the street. The raw blister on his foot was rubbing against the leather, causing him to lean a little as he walked. If he had his bike, he thought to himself, he wouldn’t feel this way. His limbs would be loose from exercise, his circulation would be flowing like the Nile. There would be no blister.

His friend ignored his complaint. “You drive, right?”

“Well, it’s been a long time …” It had been years, decades even, since Usnavy had chauffeured Americans around Guantánamo, the only time he’d ever had behind the wheel of an automobile. It had been since before the Revolution, when he was just a boy.

“But it’s just like riding a bike, right? You never forget?” insisted Diosdado.

“I … I don’t know,” Usnavy said.

“Look, Usnavy, I need your help.” Diosdado didn’t ask the way Obdulio had, impatient but as a friend. The manner in which Diosdado talked was almost a demand, defensive but proud. “It doesn’t matter to me whether you approve or not, you can think whatever you want. I’m going to offer you money for something, okay? And you can accept it or not, think badly of it, whatever you want. But I’m going to do this—and believe me, if you don’t help, I’ll find somebody else who will. I’m coming to you first because of all the years we’ve known each other, and because—in spite of your stupid revolutionary purity—I know you need the money. For your information—okay?—I can hear your stomach grumbling during the domino games, and I’m sure Nena and Lidia’s must be screaming too.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Usnavy demanded, hands on hips, indignant.

“I need a driver—you want to make some money? Real money? Dollars? I’ll pay you to drive for me.”

Usnavy shook his head in dismay and dropped his arms. “Diosdado, are you out of your mind or something?” he asked, now laughing sarcastically. “Did you lose your senses after that argument the other day, is that it? You think you’re a foreigner or something? You don’t have a car, my friend!”

Usnavy started to walk away but a determined Diosdado grabbed his arm and yanked him back.

“That’s the car I need you to drive,” Diosdado said, nodding in the direction of a white Daewoo parked a block away, near the Badagry woman’s home. In that instant, Usnavy recalled
her
lamp—the one in the living room, the one her nephew had supposedly misplaced and Usnavy thought he’d seen over her shoulder—did it have a T anywhere on it?

“That’s a rented car, Diosdado,” Usnavy said, reluctantly setting thoughts of Tiffany aside.

“Yes, I need a driver for it. Will you do it?”

Usnavy squinted in the car’s direction: It was certainly an expensive vehicle, he knew, with air-conditioning and tinted windows. He’d seen tourists pop open the back on cars like that and stuff in suitcase after suitcase. He always supposed they were en route to the airport, taking Cuba’s trinkets and treasures with them.

“How’d you rent a car? What are you doing?” Usnavy asked. If it had been Frank, he’d have figured it was a scheme of some sort—he was always into money-making plots—but this was Diosdado, who acted responsibly nearly all of the time. Diosdado was insufferable, but of good morals.

“I didn’t rent it. The person who rented it is a Canadian, a friend of my … of my …” Diosdado paused. His Adam’s apple slung high and his dry lips seemed to open for an eternity, without sound, without breath.

Usnavy relaxed his own stance; it was a delicate moment and he didn’t want Diosdado to pull away with one of his sudden outbursts. He raised his hand to his friend’s shoulder and gave it a slight squeeze. “You okay?” he asked.

“Of course I’m okay!” Diosdado bellowed, offended, shaking Usnavy’s hand off his shoulder. “Now are you in or what?”

The Daewoo was cramped. “If you can’t drive, how’d you get it here?” he asked Diosdado as he struggled to fit into the driver’s seat. He couldn’t believe he’d agreed to drive a foreigner around—as if it were thirty-five years before, as if the Revolution had never taken place! What was happening to him? He’d closed the bodega down without even bothering to call someone to sub for him.
I’m just helping out a friend
, he told himself over and over, trying to be convincing.

“There’s a little lever down there, under the seat, I think, which will move the seat,” Diosdado said, leaning down from the passenger’s side to the floor, tilting his head to better see through the lower half of his bifocals. He looked like a scientist, or an inspector.

“How’d you get it here?” Usnavy asked again, fingering the lever. He pulled on it and the seat suddenly plunged back, leaving his feet dangling off the pedals. Usnavy’s stomach sloshed about. The sewed-up sole of his shoe snagged for an instant on the brake pedal edge but it didn’t quite come loose.

“Ah, that’s it … but you’ve got to bring it up a little.” Diosdado ignored his friend’s question yet again.

“Maybe if you get in the backseat and push me, I can get it to stay put a little closer to the pedals.”

Diosdado popped his head up and glared at Usnavy. “Don’t be such an underdeveloped moron, for god’s sake,” he said. “This is a First World vehicle. Do you really think someone has to climb in the back to push you in order to adjust the seat?”

“It’s Korean or something,” Usnavy snapped. “It’s Third World, just like us.”

“You know what I mean,” Diosdado said. “Just pull the lever and bring yourself up. It can’t be that hard!”

Usnavy tugged on the lever and scooted, letting the seat click into place. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean—which is that anything that’s Cuban is difficult—anything that isn’t Cuban is wonderful,” he said, annoyed that Diosdado’s instructions had worked.

“What are you talking about? Are you going to try and turn this into another Cuba-against-the-world argument—because I’m not ready for that, okay? Not now,” Diosdado shot back, frustrated, as he quickly adjusted the passenger’s seat. “Cubans don’t make cars and have never made cars so there’s not even a point of comparison, all right?”

“You know why we don’t make cars?” Usnavy asked, his two feet desperately trying to remember how to handle the clutch and the accelerator and the brake all at once. If Lidia were here, he thought, she’d be giggling at his clumsiness. “Because we have allowed the world to think we can’t make cars. I mean, why not? Why wouldn’t we be able to make cars? Other small nations make cars—Japan, see, Korea and Italy, even the Yugoslavians. We could make cars if given the chance.”

Diosdado rolled his eyes.

Usnavy turned the ignition only to have the engine grind so loud—it was like a drill, nails on a blackboard, and a squealing pig all rolled into one—that people on the street and nearby stoops shouted at him to stop. The Badagry woman and her two elderly widowed sisters peered out their barred window, a corona of light behind them. This would never have happened to Lidia.

“Oh my god! Oh my god!” screamed Diosdado, twisting in his seat as if he were having a seizure. “Do you have a clue what you’re doing? Do you have a clue? Because if something happens to this car, Usnavy, I’m … I’m …”

“I told you it had been a long time, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you that?”

Usnavy slammed his foot on the clutch and turned the key again. This time the engine purred and the neighbors smiled and clapped. But as soon as Usnavy tried to put the car in gear, it leapt ahead of him and died again. The neighbors chortled but for Jacinto, who walked by in such a hurry he didn’t even notice it was Usnavy in the car. Diosdado groaned and slid down in the seat.

“Give me a minute, just give me a minute,” Usnavy pleaded, turning the car on again. With his foot firmly on the clutch, he maneuvered the gear shaft through the diagram on the knob: up and down, then up to the right and down, then … His blistered foot slipped and the motor whined back to silence. Maybe, he thought, it was a good thing Lidia wasn’t anywhere in sight, that way he wouldn’t ever have to tell her about this. And certainly Nena could never know: What would she think of him?

“God help me,” Diosdado said, his eyes teary behind his bifocals.

“Leave god out of this,” Usnavy snarled, remembering the betrayal of light from the first three biblical days, turning the key and working his feet so that the Daewoo lunged forward, rabbit-like, hurling all his neighbors in Old Havana off the streets and stoops, but with the highpitched sound of good-natured laughter trailing behind them.

Usnavy followed Diosdado’s directions as best he could but Havana traffic was suddenly a horror to him. In Guantánamo a million years ago, there were only a few dozen vehicles and the population, he was certain, had respected stop signs and pedestrian crossings. Now, even in the very depths of the Special Period, Havana’s streets—so pleasant and spacious on a bike—seemed a confused labyrinth. Everyone ignored even the simplest rules of the road. When Usnavy whirled the steering wheel at a curb to avoid hitting a handful of kids playing stickball in the street, Diosdado screamed.

“You’re hysterical!” Usnavy yelled at him. “Control yourself—you’ll only make things worse!”

Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw the sparkly man from Lámparas Cubanas among the throngs leaping away from the Daewoo and was relieved to realize those had not been his chewed-up overalls floating off the Malecón. As the Daewoo careened down the block, the sparkly man, now holding his hip, turned and glowered in Usnavy’s direction.