The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (16 page)

And the kind of rep that will draw people to you. Tito finds himself surrounded by friends even more desperate for protection than he is. So long as he’d shove his piece in the face of anyone who messed with
them, they would do anything he told them to. Almost accidentally, Tito starts a gang.

Tito calls it “Los Simpáticos
.
” Like
Goodfellas
, Tito’s favorite movie. The gang grows fast. He names some lieutenants, whips up a completely clichéd and plagiarized loyalty oath. As for initiations, well, there are plenty of putos he wants dead. But when the Simpáticos kill some puto, he wants all the other gangs to know who did it. And he’s been fascinated by cyanide since he was eight years old. He knows an old family recipe that will give him all he needs.

One day, some Simpáticos and initiates are sitting around Tito’s abuela’s place—she lets him do whatever he wants, so guilt-ridden is she—watching
¿A Quién Quieres Matar?
Everyone loves the show, except Tito.

“Xavier Enamorado is bullshit,” he says. “He’s a poser.
We’re
the real deal. We kill people. That puto is bullshit.”

Miguel makes the mistake of saying, “He’s got money and women, and he’s on TV. That ain’t bad.”

By the time the show’s over, the only way Miguel’s ever going to be a Simpático is if he kills Xavier. And if he doesn’t join now, he’s dead.

But Tito likes the idea of killing Xavier so much, he’s going to help Miguel. “I’ll pretend like I want to hire him to kill you. I’ll get him to come see you at work. You get him to buy some GruuvyJuuce. And that’s when you poison him.”

It takes over a year to arrange everything. The hardest part was getting our attention, making us think Tito wanted to kill Miguel. Tito
trolls the same chat rooms we troll when we’re looking for marks. He starts posting comments, making it clear he wants to hire a hit man. We saw his posts and thought we had an easy mark. We were so used to being right, we hardly even checked out his story. We were so proud and stupid a punk like him fooled us.

Once we make the first contact with him, Tito assumes we’re going to tail him so we can get film footage on him before the hit. So he and Miguel have to start playing their parts. He fakes a big fight with Miguel at his abuela’s apartment in front of his friends and abuela, whom he sometimes forgets is in the room. She, however, sees everything with her big horse eyes and doesn’t know the fight is fake. Later that month, she hears Tito on the phone, talking to Xavier, arranging the hit on Miguel. Though her English is rocky, she catches the drift of the conversation. She is terrified.

For the first time since she poisoned him with her toothache remedy, she comes alive. She confronts him. And since he thinks we’ve bugged the place, he confirms her worst fears—he is paying someone ten thousand dollars to kill Miguel. She pleads with him. Threatens him with eternal damnation. He laughs and says, “Look around, old woman! You’re already damned!” He thinks that’s a good line for television and hopes we will use it.

Tito and Xavier arrange a meeting. He leaves the address on the kitchen table for his abuela to see—that is how impotent he thinks she is. But she has resolved to save Tito from himself. She steals ten thousand dollars from the GruuvyJuuce safe, where she is a shift
manager, and, on her lunch break, takes it to Xavier before Tito’s meeting is to occur.

Remember Xavier after his meeting with Abuela? He couldn’t wait until morning to try and make everything right. He has to find her, set everything straight. But he doesn’t know where to find Tito or his abuela. The only person he has any information on is Miguel. So he goes to see Miguel at his job. GruuvyJuuce.

Miguel had trouble telling us about the conversation he had with Xavier at GruuvyJuuce. He kept saying, “He was a good man. He just wanted to fix everything.”

But in spite of all the new wrinkles, Miguel, who’d been carrying cyanide with him since Tito’s first conversation with Xavier, stuck to the plan. He told Xavier that he would call Tito’s abuela and have her come to his hotel to collect the money. Xavier was frazzled, febrile with guilt. He wouldn’t have been hard to convince.

Miguel even gave him a mamey shake. On the house.

I am not heartless. But I believe in justice. And this time, that meant revenge.

But you have to know how to work it. Otherwise you make too many sacrifices. I wasn’t going to shoot those two little comemierdas myself, and I wasn’t, in some made-for-television act of supreme stupidity, going to hire a hit man to kill them either. Why would I have to, when the government is more than happy to take care of the details
for me? I have plenty of money. All I do is hire a pack of bloodthirsty lawyers to go to court and prove that Tito and Miguel should be tried as adults, and poof!, they’re tried as adults.

I hear you saying: “Okay, but there’s no death penalty in New York.” That’s true, but that just means the government won’t go through the hassle of killing them itself. Instead, they’re going to be incarcerated with hundreds of hardened criminals who know what those two skinny little putos have done. You know how many fan letters a week we get from American jails? If I were Tito or Miguel, right now I would be praying to God for a heart attack before I set foot in prison.

But here’s how you know I’m not heartless. I’ve hired lawyers for abuelita. Right now, they’re negotiating with GruuvyJuuce, trying to convince them of what a PR coup it would be for them to drop the charges, especially since we returned the money she stole. I think it’s going to work. My lawyers are good.

So everything’s about as right as I can make it. But it’s not right in any objective sense. Poor Xavier is forever dead.

But usually good enough is all there is. You work with the money, talent, and time you have to make everything the best it can be. That’s all you can do.

Well, and develop a taste for limes.

“I’m opening your mail, Pedrito!” Sophie yelled from the kitchen.

“That’s nice,” I mumbled back. I was sitting shirtless in my white-leather baseball-watching recliner, witnessing the Marlins getting Hemingwayed by the Yanks 10-3. It was like one of those mobster movies where you watch the only wiseguy who deep down is a decent person get shot 54 times in slo-mo. Not exactly the time to respond to Sophie’s provocations.

But when a commercial break finally euthanized the inning, I did respond. “¿What are you doing opening my mail, vieja entrometia?” I yelled back to her. Her Spanish wasn’t the greatest, but I’d called her a nosy old lady plenty of times before. She knew that phrase all too well.

I smiled and turned back to the beer commercials, but I guess I had the TV turned up too loud. I never heard her pad up behind me. Then she sprung: she reached over the chair and pulled my nipples so hard she turned them into dunce caps.

I yelped, begged for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming, but finally she tucked her mouth into my neck, tender as can be, and said, “That’s for calling me ‘vieja.’” Only then did she release them.

I pressed a kiss into her cheek. “You started it. And anyway, I like viejas. You’re only 54. You think we fuck now, wait ‘til you’re 77. You’re going to have to join the hip-replacement-of-the-month club.”

She produced the pages of a handwritten letter, shook them under my nose. “Do you want your mail or not?”

“¿Who’s it from?”

“Gustavito.”

“¿Who else?” Gustavito—the craziest of all my Cuban cousins. “¿What’s he scheming now?”

“He says he found Milhuevos.”

Sophie didn’t move a millimeter. She was waiting to see how I’d react. Maybe I’d be austere, reverential, in keeping with the seriousness of the news she’d given me. Maybe I’d be pissed at her for making light of some of the most serious news we’d ever received. But that’s the Cuban way: mix a few shit-jokes and pranks in with the heartbreak, or you won’t make it through another day. Our marriage never would have lasted if we stayed mad every time we fucked with each other. 80% of our communication was mindfucks.

But 20% was pure tenderness. “Mámi,” I said. “¿He really found Mámi? ¿What’d he find, exactly? ¿Her remains?”

“I’m not sure. Look here,” she said, pointing to a word in the letter. “He said he found her ‘paredón.’ What’s that?”

I laughed. “Mi vida, I love you so much I forget sometimes you’re not Cuban. So okay, if a ‘pared’ is a wall, a ‘paredón’ is a big mother-fucking wall. Kids could play handball against it, you could stick a full-sized billboard advertisement on it, Diego Rivera could paint the entire epic history of a lost civilization on it, that big.” And then, gently, I added, “Also, it’s a great place to line up people and shoot them.”

“Like Che did to your mom,” she completed. She curled up a little more in my lap and shuddered. Then, thoughtfully, she added, “Gustavito’s sure they found the right place, but I thought that town had been abandoned.” I nodded. “How can he be sure?”

Ever the journalist, mi vida. But I had skimmed the second half of the letter. “He found a historian. Someone who works at one of the museums of the Revolution. He’s been doing research. It looks like … oh Christ. Oh Christ on a cracker.”

“What?”

I laughed. “It seems our good historian Jesús has a side-business. He finds suckers—sorry, I mean Americans—like me and offers to find where their loved ones had been executed by the Cuban Revolution and recovers the soul for them. Gustavito thinks Jesús can help us communicate with my long-dead mother.”

“Get the fuck to Carthage,” said Sophie, snatching the letter from me. As she read, joy and wonder beamed behind her eyes. “I knew something crazy was going on. But my Spanish wasn’t up to deciphering how crazy. I love your family!”

“Me too, mi vida,” I said, a little more melancholy than I’d intended. “It’s total bullshit, you know.”

“I
don’t
know. You’re the cynic of the family. I’m open to new possibilities.”

“¿So, what? ¿You think we should go?”

I could feel the incredulity radiating from her head. “Are you kidding? Of course we’re going! What’s wrong with you?”

Sitting on the plane waiting for take-off, I reread Gustavito’s letter. Not much to go on: Gustavito’s way better in person than on the page. So I closed my eyes and tried to remember everything I could about Mámi.

It wasn’t much. She was executed before I was two. Most of what I knew about her was how she died.

Cuba, 1959: Castro’s coup had, against all odds, succeeded. Che had just won a decisive battle at Santa Clara. As he headed for Havana to join Fidel and the other revolutionary generals, he stopped at places along the way, holding “trials” to punish Batista loyalists. Now don’t get me wrong: Batista was an hijo de la gran puta, and plenty of people who worked for him were his corrupt little putos, building their fortunes off the misery of others. But there were also the decent government functionaries who simply did the necessary bureaucratic work of keeping Cuba going. It was hard to tell who was a bastard and who was just trying to keep society afloat. So you held trials to separate the guilty from the innocent, ¿right?

Wrong. This was a revolution. There needed to be executions. So Che would accuse you of sympathizing with Batista, then you’d offer your defense, then you were found guilty, then he’d stand you in front of a paredón, then a firing squad ripped you apart. Most of those executions took place in La Cabaña prison in Havana, but Che perfected his “pedagogy of the paredón” on the way there. The secret was to get the crowd to demand blood. Then the deaths aren’t on you; it’s the
will of the people. “¡Pa-re-dón!” the people yelled. Their new government simply obliged them.

Mámi had worked as secretary to the mayor in the little town of Brota Flor. According to Pápi, the mayor was a likable, handsome sleazebag, all pomaded hair and New York suits. None too bright, and a zángano to boot: always looking for an angle instead of an honest day’s work. So it fell to young Mámi to keep the town running behind the scenes.

This she did for almost a decade. But then when Che came rolling through, the townspeople, caught up in revolutionary fervor, told him that it wasn’t enough just to fusillade the mayor. Mámi was the real bureaucratic brains of the town. If anyone in town had served Batista’s interests, it was she.