The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (11 page)

He shook his head and smiled a little bit, not caring if I saw him for the pretentious, full-of-himself jerk he'd started to behave like the minute he decided he was done with me.

“You going to play the jealous wife? Now?”

“Jealous wife? Hector,
I
was going to break up with
you
.”

“I can see you were,” he said, making me angrier with every badly pronounced, well-modulated word that came out of his mouth.

“Wait here,” I said, and went into my bedroom.

When I walked back into the kitchen, he was putting his scarf back on, which made me even angrier.

“Here,” I said, pushing the journal with my breakup drafts, crumpled and not, sticking out of it hard onto his chest with my open palm.

He took it from me and began to read the letter I'd managed to finish just minutes earlier, then really looked at me for the first time since he'd come in.

“Well. What do you know?”

“Apparently nothing,” I said.

“Look, this—I never lied to you. You'll at least admit this is, eh, a bit, pathetic?”

“Are we still speaking about you? If so, then yes, quite pathetic.”

He smiled.

“I come here. To talk to you, eh, face-to-face. But you . . . you're expecting some
biiiig
pre-birthday celebration, even though I
know
I took care to write
everysing
in the wall.”

“What?”

“You know, that saying, the writing. It was in the wall,” he said, mimicking scribbling on a wall with his arm.

“The writing was
in
the wall?” I asked, hands on hips, too angry to correct him. “Really?”

“Sure. Yes.”

“And which wall would that be?”

“It's an expre—”

“Get out.”

“Mariela, come on,” he said, trying to hug me.

“Get. The fuck. Out,” I said, pushing him away hard.

“Jesus, lower your voice. Am I going to have to look for an apartment now too?”

“Of course not. But you will have to look for another Mariela. Good luck with that,
amor
.”

He actually rolled his eyes at that.

“Show yourself out,” I said, turning my back on him and unable to keep myself from finishing with, “you motherfucking asshole.”

“Nice. Very elegant. I see my effort to teach you a little culture has really paid off, eh, for you. Or to you. You know what I mean.”

“They're called prepositions. Learn to speak . . .
some goddamn English
and
get out!
” I screamed without even turning around again to face him, locking myself in the bathroom until I heard the back door close, the vein in my neck throbbing.

I filled the tub with warm water and got in, hearing the thunder outside and wishing some of it would land close to him and scare the smirk he'd left with right off his face. After a while, when I felt better, I tiptoed to the kitchen in my bathrobe, locked the back door, and decided to have myself that glass of guava wine to calm my nerves. The journal was on top of the table. He had drawn a happy face and written “Good Job” on the second letter, the one I'd written that night. The first one, the sarcastic, crumpled one I'd written the night I'd seen him leave with Olivia, was missing.

“Motherfucker!” I said out loud, wishing I could make him explode with the sound of my voice. Knowing him, I realized he could only have taken it to hide someplace like a trophy, a memento of the passion he was still capable of stirring. “Asshole,” I said, hoping he'd be careful not to leave it lying around. The last thing I needed was a problem with Morticia.

I crumpled the one he'd left behind, opened the kitchen side door, lifted the lid off the recycling bin just outside it, and threw it inside, noticing with a sigh that the mountain of wet green trash bags filled with Ellie's things were still there, looking eerily like a black plastic wave poised to rise and swallow me.

I closed the door quickly and locked it, then filled my wineglass and dropped my bathrobe on the floor, thinking the hell with him. Another glass and I thought, the hell with her too, whoever she was. The hell with everything. Half a bottle later, I reached my bed and got into it fumblingly, turning off the light, determined to forget all about him, descending hard and fast into sleep.

Chapter 12

W
hen I opened my eyes again, there were miles of forest around me, my vision filled with backlit trees in fast-forward, as if it were summer and I were on a horse-drawn carriage moving at high gallop. I could hear the rhythmic rustle of a thousand green leaves being left behind. The smell of wet roots was overwhelming. Still, strangely, I remember wondering what time period of human history I might be inhabiting, then thinking I should wake up, for starters, and realizing how odd it was to be aware that I was dreaming.

But then the forest gave way to Hector, drinking his watery, coffeelike mate tea and reading the business section of the newspaper,
my
newspaper, in
my
kitchen. Maybe I'd woken and gone to the kitchen for water. Otherwise, how was I standing in front of him?

He seemed to have forgotten that we'd broken up. Yet he never looked up or smiled conspiratorially. He didn't reach out with his left hand, offhandedly cupping my right breast as if to say hello. He didn't push his half-full, lukewarm cup toward me as if to ask me to pour him some more or give any sign of being aware of anything other than the paper in front of him.

He was smoking a cigar, its orange-yellow ember of a tip lighting up my entire kitchen like daylight. But when I started to ask him to be careful, to warn him that the smoke would cling to everything, to remind him that his wife, sleeping mere yards away, might recognize the smell of his smuggled Cohiba, I noticed there was no smoke and no ashes.

That's when I knew.

What I was looking at was my own memory of Hector. A live image created by me.
But why was it in my kitchen?
I would think later, upon waking. What had happened to him that he appeared unable to see or hear me? I didn't know. But if the guilt I felt enveloping me throughout the dream was any indication, what I
did
know was that, whatever it was, I was somehow responsible.

Chapter 13

W
hen I woke up, all was as it had been when I'd gone to sleep, except for the fact that I was now officially forty, and that I couldn't get that awful dream out of my head.

It had been so real, the feeling, no, the certainty, that something not so great had happened to Hector and I was to blame. Yet, try as I did, I couldn't remember the part of the dream that had given me that impression. All I had was that image of him smoking his smokeless cigar and the lingering sensation of darkness and doom quickly coming closer, announcing itself from afar like a funeral parade whose lead float you can hear rolling toward you from twenty blocks away.

I didn't particularly like dreaming, much less dreaming trouble, but what are you going to do, right? It had obviously been just that, a dream that was over now, just like Hector.

The clock by my bed read only six thirty, but it was no use trying to fall asleep again. (God forbid that insane dream decided to pick up where it had left off.)

I shuffled over to the bathroom and stood in front of the bathroom cabinet mirror.

“Well, happy birthday, Mariela!” I said out loud, trying to put enough cheer into it to convince myself it was a heartfelt birthday wish. “It'll all be all right. Eventually,” I added, realizing there wasn't enough cheer in the world to turn this day into anything other than what it was—the day after a man cared so little about me he decided to break up with me on the eve of my birthday.

Brushing my teeth, I knew that birthday or not, and breakup or not, I had more important things to do. For starters, I had to get a move on fixing up
apartamento tres
if I was going to rent it quickly and keep my finances flowing.

I trudged to the kitchen for coffee, last night's dream assaulting me as soon as I stepped onto the linoleum.
He was sitting in that same chair,
I thought, half expecting him to appear again as I opened an old but pretty pink tin can that used to hold French tea and realized I was out of coffee.

Since going without caffeine in the state I was in was not an option, I decided to walk the few blocks to the I-95 bridge and cross the trembling, groaning underpass to Tinta y Café, a little community arts café where I used to hang out in another life, while going out with Jorge, if you must know.

My plan was to get some strong Cuban coffee into me, read the paper, and kill a little time until the hardware store where Gustavo worked opened at around eight and I could get my rental apartment makeover going.

I dressed in ripped (from use), oversized, and soft (also from use) boyfriend jeans, an old chocolate-colored T-shirt reading B
AD
C
OP
! N
O
D
OUGHNUTS,
and well-worn, leather flip-flops with a silver Thai bead dangling from the place where the leather met to hold the toes in place. And then, for no reason, and with no conscious premeditation, I cut myself some bangs. And when I say bangs, I mean bangs: cut straight across, stopping only when there were at least two inches between my eyebrows and the tips of the hair on my forehead. It could've been a disaster, but the effect was fresh, playful, almost flapperlike. I thought it made me look lighter, renewed.

I'd read once that when women are heartbroken, they do two things: change their hair in a drastic way and travel somewhere far away. Since I didn't have the money to travel at the moment, I decided to look at my bangs as low-cost breakup therapy and walked off in search of my coffee.

After last night's showers, the streets looked as if God himself had given them a good scrubbing, their colors bright once again. Across the street, the square looked greener than ever after its bath, except for the grays and browns of the occasional homeless person sleeping on some bench, bundled in Salvation Army anythings. Soon it would be filled with card tables and domino-playing Cubans, the overflow from those who weren't early enough to secure a seat at the Maximo Gomez Park, the official domino site for the area.

As I walked toward the I-95 underpass, sometimes on tiptoe to avoid getting my leather flip-flops wet in leftover rain puddles, Hector's face popped up as if my mind were a deck rigged to give you the same card no matter how many times you shuffled it.

I should feel relieved that it's over,
I thought. Now I knew. No more wondering. No more mental limbo. And then there was the way he'd done it, so crude and heartless, so unlike him. (Or was it?) I tried to see the silver lining in that: By acting like an ass, he'd prevented me from romanticizing him, made me want to forget him faster.

Tinta y Café was empty. Only the small window and outside counter for dispensing the ready-to-eat basics—toast,
croquetas,
and coffee—was open. I asked for a
cortadito
to go (a small amount of black coffee “cut” in half by a dash of evaporated milk and sweetened with a teaspoon of brown sugar or two), and strolled toward Alvarez Locksmith, a small shop that was part locksmith, part hardware, part whatever odd and end you might need, and where Gustavo worked when he wasn't turning the scrap metal with which he occasionally littered my building's backyard into sculpture.

The shop was twelve blocks away, and I took my time walking through Little Havana, taking in its morning sounds.

I've always thought that to really “get” Little Havana in general, and Coffee Park in particular, you need to be eye level with it, be an immigrant of some sort. You have to have traveled from someplace far away and gone somewhere else altogether by something resembling choice. And then you have to arrive in this strange place, strange to you, or maybe just strange, and find something here that makes you say: “It's not my home, but it could be because I no longer fully belong to the place I've come from, couldn't return there even if I wanted to, and so this will be just fine for now, because at last, at least, I'm somewhere.”

If you're Latino and live in Florida, there's a good chance you were in Little Havana when you said those words, and that that “somewhere for now” was Calle Ocho and the things I walked by that Saturday morning: the little fruit and vegetable carts where you can get six juicy tomatoes for two dollars and a humongous just-ripe Florida avocado for a buck, the Tower Theater with its marquee announcing the varied art film offerings, the Lebo mural on Eighth and Seventeenth, the record shops not admitting to, but selling, pirated Cuban music, the pawn shops bursting with hostage treasures, and the space where the old Cervantes bookstore had been on Nineteenth. And yes, where the man I'd slept with until yesterday now owned his.

At the hardware store, I found Gustavo in a sour mood, playing despondently with a handful of rusty pulleys.

“Still working on that sculpture?”

“
Qué bola,
Mariela?” he greeted me, putting the pulleys down on the old dark-stained wood counter. “Nice hair.”

“Thank you, and a fair warning to you, mister: It's my birthday, so think twice before making fun of me. I'm just saying.”

“
No, no. Qué va
. It looks good.
Bien loco
. I like it.”

“
Bueno, oye,
thanks for helping me take care of the Ellie thing the other day.”

“Man, I knew she wasn't right, but I told her
que no te hiciera una mierda,
you know, to do things right. Did she bring you your money yet?”

“Nah, and I doubt she will. I'll be happy if she just picks up her junk and moves on, you know?”

“It's not right,” he said, shaking his head. “Iris said she'd never seen anything like it, and she's old as hell.”

“
Chico,
let me put it to you this way: By the time you got there to change the locks, the worst was over. It was like Hurricane Andrew went through there, okay? But, you know? Onward and forward. So let's see, I need some grease remover and some superstrong glue. Also primer, a caulking gun, some spackling paste, and cleaning supplies,” I finished reading from my list and followed him as he walked around the shop searching for each thing.

“Don't you worry, Mariela,” he said. “I'm going to help you find another tenant, call a few friends, see who's looking.”

“Thanks, Gustavo. And speaking of friends, how's Jorge? Remember him?”

That stopped him in his tracks and made him turn around and take a good long look at me before saying, “I sure do. Question is, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Let's see. I introduce you to a good friend. He falls for you like a
comemierda,
a total loser. You seem okay with that. Then, one day, you dismiss him for no reason.”

“I didn't dismiss him for no reason. He did have a wife, you know.”

“She was in Cuba!” he said, as if that made it all right.

“Still his wife.”

“That's not the point, and you know it. You hurt him.”

“I hurt
him?
What did I do?”

“You wouldn't take his calls. You refused to see him!” said Gustavo.

“That was a mutual decision and, again: He was, or is, married. How hurt could he have been?” I asked.

“You really want me to tell you?”

I didn't. It's the reason I'd never asked Gustavo about Jorge in all these months. What? And have Gustavo change my mind and drag me back into that no-win situation? Or risk him telling Jorge? Then Jorge would think I wanted him back or that I missed him, or the worst possible scenario: they'd man-talk about me. No, the worst scenario would be that they'd
Cuban man-talk
about me. You know what I mean, don't you? How once you go Cuban, you never go back, and how they're the best lovers in the world, and on and on. Don't laugh. They do talk like that. And it shouldn't surprise you. Everything Cuban is better. Bigger. Better tasting, or functioning, or whatever. It's part of our thing, and it's innocent, but I still didn't want them talking about me, because the fact of the matter is that when I decided to get Jorge out of my mind, I'd gotten him out of my mind. (True, it had taken an Argentinean to help me do it. But I'd done it.)

“Just forget I said anything,” I said, feigning interest in a tube of cement-colored spackling paste.

“He was married in Cuba, which you knew when you met him. And I don't think there was a ‘we' in that breakup decision. I think you decided, and he just accepted it, because what else was he going to do? Stalk you?”

“Like I said, married in Cuba is still married. And not that it's any of your business, but she was finally coming to be with him here in Miami.
She
decided to come,
then
I broke up with him. That's
why
I broke up with him. Not the other way around, okay?” I said, surprised that Jorge had shared this much about us, that I was having to defend my actions to Gustavo.

“Oh. Really? And did you tell him this? That you were breaking up with him . . . for him?”

“Yes, I told him and let's drop the subject. I was just going to ask how he was. How the marriage was going. That's all.”

“Oh. Well, if that's all, he's doing fine. And the marriage is none of your business.”

“Still working at Michy's?”

“Nah, thank God. Or I'd have to warn the man about the possibility of running into you there. We can't keep letting you women stomp all over us whenever you want.”

“No need. And I have no intention of stalking, or stomping, anyone.”

“Okay. I mean, he's a friend, you know?”

“Okay then. If I saw him, all I'd do is say hello.”

“Well, don't go saying hello if you're going to leave him worse than you find him. Let him be, will you?”

“Okay. I get it. Sorry. God.”

“Okay. I'm sorry too. Didn't mean to get agitated, take my things out on you.”

“What things?”

But he kept trying to reach the back of a shelf, finally pulling out a black plastic bottle of degreaser, before answering my question.

“Abril broke up with me.”

“Oh,” I said, finally understanding his it's-just-not-right mood and wondering what unloving, sex-hating, twenty-four-hour bug had gotten hold of my neighborhood recently.

“When?”

“Yesterday morning.”

He looked about to cry, and if you knew Gustavo, you'd understand how strange, how unsettling, the mere possibility seemed to me that morning. In the six years he'd lived in my building, I'd only seen him cry once, and then only because he was drunk and got to talking about his family in Cuba and about how much he missed them. Don't get me wrong—he's a sweet guy. Just not one to share his problems, complain about his life, or give out X-rays of his heart in the form of information.

Until he fell in love. The minute Abril moved into Iris's building six months ago, Gustavo threw himself at her like Batman leaping down the side of the tallest of buildings, mask forgotten in her gaze, cape carelessly draped on his arm, and his face wearing his feelings, there for all to see what love could turn a man into.

I didn't blame him. Have you ever seen a model in a fashion magazine and said to yourself, “She's not that pretty,” while still having to admit that there's something about her? That's Abril. Plus, like I said before, she knew how to be mysterious.

“I'm sure you'll patch things up,” I said, not telling him my feeling that somehow Henry's father, whoever he was, was behind her decision to break up with him. Maybe she'd gone back to him and would leave as mysteriously as she'd come.

“She says there's no one else,” he said, reading my mind. “That it's about sacrificing for her son. What does that have to do with anything?”