The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (4 page)

It was a variation of something I'd say more and more frequently over the six months we were together. He'd always answer the same thing:

“Mi vicio eres tú,”
which meant that I was his vice, and sounded just as corny in Spanish as it does in English. But he'd say it in the softest voice while looking at me with the look you give the people you know you could never say no to.

One day, after a bowl of heavenly seafood soup, too much homemade
tinto de verano
(Place the following ingredients into a big glass jug: two cups of cheap Spanish rioja wine, one quarter cup of grenadine, a squirt of fresh lime juice, half a cup of fresh orange juice, half a cup of club soda, and four heaping tablespoons of brown sugar. Chill. Serve with a sprig of mint.) and sex, I made a mistake. I told him my secret: that I used to have to cover my ears to avoid the whispering and the calling of people I couldn't always see, that I'd known what it was like to feel the dark weight of strangers' secrets when they walked past me, and how I'd murdered it all the same way he'd be able to someday murder his nostalgia for the friends, the streets, and the little rituals of poverty he thought he'd left behind. I told him this to give him faith that his sadness too would pass. To give him something to hang on to. To keep him from partying his life away.

The next day, he begged me to go with him to see his godmother. She was Dominican but had fallen in love with a Cuban man and had lived in Cuba until the day he died. Now she lived in the Miami neighborhood of Allapattah, in a little blue frame house that was almost completely obscured by shrubs and fruit trees, and I had only to lay eyes on her to be scared out of my freckles.

She had brown skin and freaky green eyes, so intense they seemed fluorescent. But what scared me was her voice. The moment she spoke, it's as if her voice's shadow went off on its own to tell stories of women who threw themselves at the coffins of men they'd loved, of the trembling palms of young men about to pull triggers while looking into the eyes of other boys, and of the hearts of mothers, lurching and shaking in the knowledge that their daughters would not be coming home that night, or any night. It was a bit like a double sound track. One song is saying hello and asking Jorge how he knows me, and the other is performing a spoken poem made up of the world's saddest headlines.

I think I scared her too, because two minutes after first taking my hands in hers, she opened her eyes wide as if urgently displeased with whatever I had “brought in with me.” Then both her voices became one, and this section of the poem was composed of the events of my entire life. She told me I could've had children but that it was too late now, and that I'd be tragically unhappy until I started respecting Yemayá's will for my life, and started to see again like I was supposed to. Then she told her godson to stay away from me if he knew what was good for him because I'd have nothing to give him but problems, and proceeded to pretty much shoo and push us out of her house.

“Mariela, pero no le hagas caso a la vieja, por tu vida, tatica,”
he said over and over again on the drive home, one hand on the wheel, the other holding my hands to his face, asking me to please forgive the crazy old woman, and to forgive him for bringing me, and even stopping the car on the side of the road to hug me until I'd stopped trembling, promising it would be a long time before he'd go see the dratted witch (
bruja de mierda esa
) again, even if she
was
his godmother. He'd only wanted to help. To show me I had nothing to be ashamed of. He'd wanted his godmother to figure out the perfectly logical reason I hadn't seen my mother's illness so I could understand it. But the experience had shaken me up so much that I continued to cry all the way home, and when a week later, he got notice of his wife's release date two months hence, I convinced him it was a good idea to start preparing for his new life with fidelity and made him promise not to call me again, no matter what. I also promised myself I'd forget him and never again make the mistake of telling anyone about my truncated gift.

But my clairvoyance was not the only reason I ran away from him. I also did it because there'd been something there. Maybe not enough of a something to survive his crazy lifestyle, his even crazier godmother, and my own crazy habit of being drawn only to those relationships most bereft of possibility, but still . . . something. And that something made me want him to have a chance at what I thought I'd never have: a happy marriage, a real life.

I don't say this now because time has passed. I knew what I felt then but figured his godmother was probably right about my having nothing for him. So I renounced him and worked on quickly filling the space he'd left empty before he came back for me, ignoring what I'd said about never contacting me because he realized he loved me so much (my secret fantasy) or I realized he'd never intended to.

Chapter 5

“Y
ou'll be okay walking?” Hector asked, slowing down when we neared the corner of Twentieth Avenue and Eighth Street that afternoon. Fifteen minutes ago, we'd left the St. Michel, and already his mind was many worlds away.

“ 'Course. Not even dark yet.”

“Okay,
flaca. Ciao
then,” he said, forgetting to ask me to text him when I was within the safe confines of my apartment.

As I opened the car door, I hesitated, waiting for him to say that he'd call me later to wish me a good night, as usual. But he didn't, so I got out, slowly walking away, my mind caught up in wondering what on earth could be preoccupying him to make him so abruptly distant.

I remember thinking that Hector was acting like a man about to embark on that wonderful time in the life of most affairs called “the beginning.” Only, I felt more like the wife than the mistress because if Hector was beginning something, it was certainly not with me.

I heard him drive away in the opposite direction and picked up my pace along the portion of Eighth Street that leads toward the Coffee Park section where I live, remembering to turn my head and cross the street when I passed the corner of Fifteenth, the street where Jorge lived, or maybe, used to live. I did this every time, even though I'd never once run into him in the year or so since we stopped seeing each other.

From that corner, it was a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk to my apartment and, since this is where all the madness was about to unfold, I might as well give you a quick history tour of the area: Little Havana, Coffee Park, and the civil war of sorts that made it a less than ordinary place to live in.

In the late 1990s, there was a movement to more broadly promote Little Havana as a tourist destination, the premier enclave of Cuban culture in the United States and site of the world's largest outdoor Hispanic festival, Calle Ocho's Carnaval Miami.

But tensions mounted when some of the more liberal residents began to feel that the nostalgic earthiness of Little Havana that had brought them there in the first place was being threatened by the city's push to “clean up” and rebrand the area as a sanitized, commercialized, tourist-attracting destination.

“Look, Mariela, if I wanted to live in the suburbs of Disney World, I'd live in the fucking suburbs of Disney World,” Iris, who owned the fourplex next to mine, said to me at the time.

The result was that many of the “rebels” ended up moving to our side of Little Havana: Coffee Park, then really just a large square block of greenery and mature trees, but now surrounded by little coffee shops, independent “boutiques,” apartments that doubled as yoga studios, art co-ops, and holistic pharmacies attended by young bearded guys high on medicinal marijuana. Coffee Park became the symbol of neighborhood defiance, collectively and consciously turning up its nose at the bureaucrats, deciding that it was going to be as bohemian, progressive, and liberal as it got.

Of course, even as the little businesses sprouted all around, you still had the big Spanish-style houses turned rental duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, most dating from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, proudly holding their ground, alongside the storefronts. This made for a pretty self-contained community, whose people answered “Coffee Park” when asked where they lived, even though Coffee Park was, officially, and for most practical purposes, part of Little Havana.

My own fourplex was built in 1935, a big Spanish-style square of a building blessed with high ceilings, ornate moldings and arches, and big windows. Manuel, my second husband, had painted it a deep papaya color that I'd hated at the time, but had grown to love for the contrast of its orange-red hues against the green leaves and brown bark of the trees on the square across the street, all somehow fitting right in with the vintage awnings of the boho-chic storefronts.

Inside, it was a charming Spanish-style building with one-bedroom apartments, original hardwood floors, a nonworking fireplace in every unit, and fire escapes off each second-floor kitchen doubling as urban jungle gardens. There was also a small backyard taken over by a big avocado tree, its huge, shady limbs presiding over always-moist green grass.

But charming as my little building was, it was also a money drain. It needed the big roof and plumbing repairs that buildings require every fifteen to twenty years, and I often asked myself why I didn't just sell the damn thing, knowing as soon as the idea crossed my mind that I simply couldn't. It was all I had left from my mother, and, despite the real estate bubble's recent noisy burst, it was the safest investment in the world. I mean, the area just had to take off, surrounded as it was by chic metro neighborhoods like Brickell, Downtown Miami, the Design District, and Wynwood.

I could see it becoming the next Greenwich Village before Greenwich Village realized it was cool, just as my mom had predicted. She bought the little fourplex at precisely the right time, in the middle of a housing slump and a few months before all the feuding about redeveloping Little Havana started. Back then, the square was just an improbable patch of green, located at the easternmost end of Calle Ocho and ridiculously close to Interstate 95. Still, she'd been determined to buy it, as if she'd somehow known that one day businesses, artists, and activists would begin moving into the houses and apartment buildings surrounding the park, turning the square into their own little bohemian enclave.

“This place,” she'd say, “has potential. I may not have inherited the gift of seeing the future like you, Mariela, but I have the vision of instinct and experience, and I tell you Coffee Park has nowhere to go but up.”

On the Wednesday I returned from my afternoon with Hector, the area was clean, the trees still green, and there were no signs of the loud music sometimes heard on weeknights, of the couple of harmless pseudo-homeless people, or of the few prostitutes who sometimes brightened my afternoons with their sequined tops, hot pants, and high heels. Not that I judged them for being sluts. (How could I?) I judged them for failing to realize they'd attract more customers if they'd just invest $2.69 in a tube of ultra-whitening, tartar control toothpaste every once in a while. But, all of that said, Coffee Park was still, for the most part, a great little neighborhood.

It was also the place where I reinvented myself after my divorces. You'll remember that when I couldn't afford to continue living in my Coral Gables home (post husband number two), I'd decided (was forced) to get entrepreneurial, taking my post-divorce, highly sharpened computer skills and my knack for finding information and resources on the Internet and going right back to Coffee Park to hang my shingle.

At first, my clients had been people who had some disposable income, but no patience to wait all day for their turn at the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana, the only truly active community nonprofit offering immigrant services at the time. So they'd come to me instead, and I'd correct a billing mistake, negotiate a deferment on a loan, find an address on MapQuest, or download a bus route schedule. I'd do basic tax returns and fill out college financial aid or loan forms, as I had for Jorge. I wrote letters for every purpose and, once or twice, I'd even been hired to call a boss and say “my husband” was sick and would not be in to work that day.

And then, little by little, a certain kind of clientele began streaming in with more frequency than the rest: women. Confused, heartbroken, pissed-as-hell women getting divorced and who, having heard of “my history,” figured I'd have an extra lesson or two to share with them. This was perfectly normal. Living in Coffee Park one heard about everyone's everything, and the fact that I'd twice had to return to the neighborhood after yet another man had cheated on me was the kind of history people tended to remember. Oh, let me tell you, that's when I felt the tug of a new calling grabbing hold of my heart.

Take Silvia, for example.

“Did you already ask for a divorce?” I asked her when she came to see me.

“Of course!”

“Take it back.”

“What? Didn't you hear what I said? He's sleeping with my cousin! My cou-cou-couuuuuuuu-sin!” She sobbed for a few minutes before shaking her head and thundering
“My cousin!”
redundantly.

“I know that, Silvia. I know. Trust me. I know how you feel and this is why you need a lawyer: He doesn't have a job. You have two. He's been taking care of the kids while you work—”

“That's the worst of it! Do you know
lo que hizo ese hijo de la gran puta
?”

(Nonliteral translation: son of the mother of all bitches.)

“All right,” I said, realizing I'd have to let her vent before she'd let me help her. “What did he do?”

“He'd get movies for the kids, and ice cream, and all kinds of junk food, and sneak that skanky ho in through the back room next to the laundry while the kids were watching TV.” She finished on the verge of a thrombosis, her abundant chest heaving like a body of water with tsunami symptoms.

“I know. I know, but—”

“You knew?”

“No, no. I mean that I know what it's like.”

“Oh.” She nodded, no doubt remembering what she'd heard of “my history.”

I tried again: “In court, all they'll know, or want to know, is that you're the breadwinner with the two jobs and no time to take care of the kids, and they'll probably say that keeping it that way would be less disruptive to the children since he's been doing it now for about—”

“Oh, yeah, he's been doing it all right. You want to hear disruptive?”

I sighed, willing myself to avoid joining her over there at the deep, dark end of her rage pool where I wouldn't be able to help her.

“What I'm trying to say is that he could end up with joint custody, the kids living with him, and you having to pay
him
child support.”

“No! You think? He wouldn't. He wouldn't dare.”

“You say he was sleeping with your cousin, in your house, with your children present, while you were working two jobs?”

“Oh my God. You're right. He would! He
would
dare.”

“I'm just saying, be careful. 'Cause let me tell you, that ‘equal distribution of assets' in this lousy, no-fault divorce state is Florida's way of charging you for the sunshine.”

Silvia nodded, wide-eyed, before saying, “What I need is a badass, motherfucking lawyer.”

I was happy she'd gone from “no lawyer” to wanting a “badass” one, but knowing my share of them from the work I did and knowing she didn't have enough money for even five minutes of a Miami “motherfucking” lawyer's time, I said, “Would you settle for a Legal Aid motherfucking lawyer?”

When she nodded urgently, I got the area number for Legal Aid and for the local children and family services office and made appointments for her while printing out every useful document on divorce and family law that I could find online.

It felt so good to help these women. I typically charged a nominal fee of ten dollars per hour, but often reduced my fee or worked extra hours I didn't charge for because, as far as I was concerned, this was now my real gift. I was over clairvoyance and good riddance! If the failure of my marriages had proven something to me, it was that if I'd ever had “sight,” it was swimming in shit somewhere else.

On the other hand, with my keyboard I could see farther than any psychic. Sometimes, all I had to do was search the Internet and hand the woman a simple answer (no charge if the search took five minutes or less), and the next thing I knew they'd be looking at my computer and me as if I were magic incarnate and the computer were my crystal ball. I hated that. It reminded me of how my clairvoyance had made me feel special as a teen. You know, before my mother got sick and I realized I was a fraud.

And there I was, Mother-Teresa-with-a-laptop tending to my building, my clients, and my tenants by day, firm believer in my “married men only” rule by night: Both came with no real obligations and no money-loss issues, and had the added benefit of occupying space I might otherwise be tempted to hand over to dangerously unattached men.

I hadn't always been that cynical and distrusting. All my life, I had yearned for a sister or a best friend. Another woman with whom to have an even closer bond than the one I'd had with my mother. But somehow, I didn't know a single female besides Iris whom I could truly call a friend. And probably because so many of them seemed bent on taking my lousy husbands, I had lost the capacity to regret that I might now possibly be taking theirs.

I just went about my life, one day at a time, trying not to think about the fact that I helped women with one hand, while hurting them with the other.