Ruins (14 page)

Around her, the room was crowded with shelves full of religious icons, an altar holding dead flowers with papery petals, rotting bananas that leaked their puslike slime and harbored a haze of flies (why hadn’t they eaten that fruit instead of letting it go to waste, marveled Usnavy, the gods would have surely understood!). Accompanying all that were a few photographs of once-upon-a-times: Jacinto’s parents’ wedding in elegant black-and-white, his mother a girlish bride; his father, a jazzman with a trumpet in his hand, hat rakishly tilted, the Eiffel Tower in the sepia background in the years when the Revolution was young and fresh and every Cuban was an ambassador; Jacinto himself, callow and fine, his bare and sculpted chest as much of a sight as the live lion he was crouching down to pat, somebody’s domesticated but still dangerous pet out there in the jungle and war. In the picture, a massive AK-47 was strapped to Jacinto’s back, its barrel aimed at the sky.

Usnavy knelt on the floor and, moving the shirt covering the pot into a bundle under it, put it down on a stunningly varnished mahogany coffee table. Jacinto winced and quickly slid a plastic cutting board under the shirt to protect the wood.

Usnavy couldn’t believe what he was doing, couldn’t believe he was suddenly no better than Rosita—in fact, maybe worse: She did it for money, he did it … for what? To seem generous? To seem good?

“Listen, Jacinto, this isn’t really meat … it’s … it’s …” he began, but Jacinto surprised him.

“Soy, I know—don’t worry,” he said quickly, his eyes doing circles around the blanket in the pot as if to confirm that he understood that this was what they were talking about.

“No, no …” Usnavy tried to explain.

“Masa cárnica? No problem, my mother likes it fine,” Jacinto said, his pupils now darting back and forth from Usnavy to the stirring on the bed.

“You know …?” Usnavy asked, his voice trailing off before he could even finish his thoughts.

Jacinto reached into the pot and rolled a bit of the blanket in his fingers. Once he made a little ball of it, ripe and dripping, he placed it on his mother’s mouth. Her tongue darted out and licked the juices.

Later that day, Usnavy found himself outside the giant colonial doors of the Fondo de Bienes Culturales in the Old Plaza, not far from the tenement. He cleared his throat and tried to figure out what he was going to say.

The plaza, which was all rounded cobblestones, was older than the cathedral, with a parking lot hidden beneath the neglected patch of pavement. Everything was made of stone, veined or stained with gray, all of it lost in the incandescence of the afternoon.

Usnavy had muttered to himself the whole way there about his stolen bike and eyed each one that pedaled by—Flying Pigeons and Roadsters and the occasional tourist-imported Trek—curious if the twenty-dollar bill now transferred to his clean pants pocket was enough to lure any of them from their sluggish, contented riders.

“I want my bike,” he muttered. “I want my own damn bike.”

Before walking over to the Old Plaza, Usnavy had washed up at Jacinto’s, since he had a bathroom installed in his room. It boasted a portable shower with a small gas heater for his mother’s comfort, and a flushing toilet and everything.

While he was washing, the twenty-dollar bill was concealed in the pocket of his dirty pants, which Usnavy kept in sight the whole time—a gesture that caused him some shame, because Jacinto had always been his friend and he hated that, all of a sudden, he had grown distrustful even of him.

As he bathed, feeling the warm water running down his body, his neighbor put his right shoe together again, this time using not just twine but some glue he’d gotten on the black market to fix his mother’s furniture. It embarrassed Usnavy to only have one pair of shoes, but he knew his plight was not unique, just less common now, as the world turned upside down and the least likely people suddenly had Italian shoes for work and American loafers to hang around the house. (This was the case with Frank, who also had a pair of thick, flat German-brand sandals that molded to the very soles of his feet.)

“You can’t nail into this wood,” Jacinto said, done with the shoe and now patting his mother’s battered bureau. It was a fine, dark caoba, burnished so that their faces appeared within its borders, like portraits drawn with gasoline. “It’s hard as hell. I want to sell it to a foreigner. But I have to fix everything and polish it so it doesn’t look like there was ever anything wrong with it. I ran out of the putty I had but I’ll find some more, for sure.”

Usnavy immediately made a mental note to bring Reynaldo—Reina?—whatever—and her/his fiancé to see Jacinto’s things once they arrived in Havana. It was the least he could do. He would have considered bringing Burt—it’s possible, if he was interested in lamps, he might be interested in furniture—but he wasn’t sure he could get the Canadian away from Yoandry, who would surely try to usurp the deal.

The Fondo, which served as a kind of clearinghouse for craftspeople, was headquartered in a huge eighteenth-century mansion which once belonged to the Count of Mopox and Jaruco on the corner of Muralla and San Ignacio. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plaza had been an apex of culture: On the same block, the Havana Philharmonic had once made music, and not too far away the captain general’s printing press had produced some early works. Now the plaza was windy and barren but for a few foreign tourists and a string of bare-chested kids who followed, brazenly begging for food or money.

Like the other manors on the plaza, the Fondo had great stone columns, with balconies amply described by Cirilo Villaverde in
Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Angel
, the first real Cuban novel. The balconies—many crumbling and held up by wooden supports like the kind Jacinto imitated in his room—ran the length of four or five houses, the legacy of disappeared colonial millionaires. (Usnavy didn’t argue about the need for these supports, but in his mind it was still the invisible giants leaning against the walls who ultimately made the difference.) These buildings had arched doorways with fan-shaped stained-glass portals above them. The glass in these was blue and white, remarkably insipid, maybe with a panel of burnt red here and there. Usnavy sniffed: The light that ran through them was merely tempered, never glorious.

During the years of the colony, the owners had lived upstairs in their dry serenity, sometimes with an occasional boarder or guest, but downstairs, in the shadowy and damp chambers, retail merchants—nearly all of them recent Spanish immigrants—would sell their cheap wares on portable tables, blankets, and display cases that could be pushed like carts. Standing there with the injured lamp in a brown paper bag in his hands, Usnavy felt a little like they might have, like somebody who had washed up on the shores.

“Excuse me,” he said as he ventured toward a thin young man in a tie-dyed T-shirt and sporting a ponytail. The fellow was having a smoke and puttering outside the Fondo but exuded authority in a way that suggested he worked there. “I’m looking for someone … I don’t know his name, he works on lamps.”

“Lamps? Lots of guys work on lamps,” the young man said with a lazy smile. “Do you know what kind of lamps?”

“Like this,” Usnavy said, opening the mouth of the paper bag enough to let the injured lamp sparkle.

“Ahh …” the young man said, throwing his cigarette to the ground and grinding it out with his foot. Usnavy took note of his shoe: Its sole was multileveled, like Burt’s. “This fellow always wears overalls? ‘The reality of things is their light’—that guy?”

Usnavy had never heard the sparkly man say such a thing but it sounded right to him so he nodded.

“That’s Virgilio,” said the young man. “He’s at his shop. Are you a private client?”

Usnavy hesitated. “I … I don’t know, I just want to fix the lamp,” he said.

The young man leaned over and peered into the bag again. “That could cost you. You just want light, right?”

Usnavy nodded again.

“Well, that’s going to be expensive. If I were you, I’d get a new lamp, something practical, something more modern. That one’s kind of ostentatious, don’t you think?”

“You’re probably right, yes,” Usnavy said, trying to gauge his response. Was this guy trying to deceive him, like Yoandry that first day? “But I inherited this lamp from my mother, so it’s got sentimental value,” Usnavy lied, reducing his mother’s gift to something so small, so unlikely. “You know how that is,” he continued, his hand stroking the paper bag and clutching it tighter. “We become attached to things even if they’re worthless.”

The young man shrugged. He tilted his head and stared at his undoubtedly expensive American shoes. Usnavy could see him skipping across the sea in those things.

Virgilio—the sparkly man—lived a good way from the Fondo, up by the gleaming glass building that was the old American embassy, now officially called the U.S. Interests Section. It was one of the tallest, most modern buildings in the city. From the first haze of light in the skies each day, there was always a long, sullen line of visa petitioners stretching around it for blocks. The column was orderly and quiet but secreted an air of fatality as it inched forward. Even the small children hanging off their parents were unusually gloomy, everyone committed to giving up their memories of seashells and hurricanes and Revolution.

Usnavy walked gingerly on the shady side of the street across from them, prospective exiles who, at another time, would have been viewed as enemies or traitors. He couldn’t begin to count how often he’d been called—and how often he’d responded—to repudiate and denounce a neighbor who’d decided to leave. At first, their flight was what he clearly perceived as betrayal, and his arm would be hearty and hurl eggs and tomatoes with the kind of fuel only rage can provide.

But later his body faltered, perhaps from old age, but more likely from the pain these constant losses caused him: Each time he pitched a rotting grapefruit or other piece of garbage at someone who had once been his friend—a boy he’d seen grow up in the tenement, a good boy, one of the sapos from the domino games; or a young woman who’d extended a kindness, perhaps with medicine for Nena, or a cold drink in her living room while he watched the Comandante on her TV; or someone who’d given Lidia a bit of oil or a candle—he felt weaker and weaker, until one day he went to one of those horrible encounters and could hardly move. As everyone around him yelled obscenities at the frightened elderly couple who’d scored visas to the U.S. (and whom Usnavy knew from the CDR itself, both former officers, competent and enthusiastic), he shuffled through the throngs, embraced them both wordlessly, and went home. After that, he never again allowed himself to be volunteered for that particular kind of activity.

Now, Usnavy saw Virgilio frown as he poked his head into the artisan’s studio. Though the interaction at Lámparas Cubanas had been pleasant enough, it was clear that the more recent episode in which Usnavy had almost run him over in the Daewoo was still fresh on Virgilio’s mind (tinted windows and all!).

“You nearly killed me,” he said just as Usnavy tiptoed in. The door was held open by a block of blue glass that looked like a chunk of ice. Usnavy wanted to touch it but kept his hands on the paper bag with the injured lamp, gripping it a little tighter.

Virgilio’s studio was an old stable turned into a garage in the back patio of a huge house that, like the tenement at Tejadillo, had been divided and subdivided until it was left with many single rooms. But to Usnavy’s surprise, the only people he saw crossing the patio on his way to the back were old men and women, older than he in fact. A couple of the men wore yarmulkes, though they had no meaning for Usnavy. (The Jews he knew in Old Havana—usually called Turks and Poles by the Cubans—looked like everybody else.) There were no kids anywhere, not even around the domino game in the parlor that Usnavy stopped to watch for a moment before heading toward the rear. To his amazement, the elderly players maintained a complete and total silence; the only sound was the rattle of the dominos on the table, their little metal navels scratching its surface until it resembled nothing less than a tangle of wire and bars. In the meantime, a couple of cats looked on, snuggling together in the shade, bizarrely fat, oblivious to all dangers.

Facing Virgilio in the studio, Usnavy held the lamp like a baby. All around the artisan—again wearing his sparkly blue overalls—there were lamps, red and blue and orange panels, cooling on work frames, lamps drawn with flowers or trees, resting on shelves and in rows on the floor, lamps with seascapes and deep purples hanging by the dozen from the ceiling, though not one of them was turned on. Instead, just like at Lámparas Cubanas, they were bathed in the frosty filter of a long white fluorescent tube, plus whatever natural light leaked in through the windows. In the rear of the garage—in its day it would have housed about a dozen cars, one for nearly every apartment—there were piles of sand, metal benches, and a large contraption that looked like a cross between a furnace and a submarine.

Another old man puttered about, his face in the shadows. A younger man followed him. The two were stretching a large piece of something that resembled jelly, uncurling it from a folded position onto a large metal table. In the corner was what looked like a barrel with a smoldering white fire. The two men did everything in silence, working like insects and balseros, but confident of their timing. Holding the piece with pincers, they carefully placed it in a giant metal box that looked like a refrigerator, then relaxed, slapping each other around in congratulation. The heat was unbearable but the two just wiped the sweat from their bodies with their bare hands, sputtering in the flames of the barrel.

“You were driving like a fool, like a maniac,” said Virgilio, who was sitting at a table, pushing a piece of red glass under a stylus with a tiny diamond point and drawing a long, willowy flower into the surface. A thin hose attached to the stylus sprayed the point, the glass, and most of Virgilio’s chest, which was protected by a black rubber apron. The water ran onto a pan and down to the floor, creating a giant black shadow on the cement; it was everywhere.