Havana Lunar (9 page)
I
n the morning we rose with the dawn and enjoyed steaming ajiaco drunk from plastic cones. “There's nothing better to strengthen you for the day,” Manolito said. The broth is salty and bitter and contains every last part of the pig, some chunks bristly as a scrub brush. If you can gag it down, it helps take care of a hangover.
“¡Mono! Ven conmigo a ordeñar la vaca.” Manolito untied the calf and towed him near enough to start his mother lactating. He tied the calf to a nearby tree and began cooing to the heifer. “VaaaaCA ⦠vaaaaCA ⦠VAca-VAca-vaaaaCA.” Manolito jerked fulsome spurts from her swollen udders, filling a three-gallon bucket with steaming milk that frothed less than an inch from the top.
“Venga, Mono, you do it.”
“No, Manolito. It's been too long.”
Manolito insisted I get under there with him. I knew what was coming, but I indulged my uncle anyway. Manolito shot a hot jet of milk into my face. His hysterical laughter reverberated down the mountain, making cattle moo in the valley.
Before long Manolito set out on his mule. “It's time to take my muy muchacha to town.” On Saturdays he gets himself a bottle of banana wine and goes off to Pinar, the entire thirty miles on la mula, not the horse, porque la mula knows her own way home.
After lunch Emilio changed into his coast guard uniform and we drove out to the marina. At the dock we boarded the lone cutter. We smoked a joint and motored out to where we could see the island taper to the narrowest lip of purple on the horizon, Cabo San Miguel. Gulf waters seal a political destiny when they turn right or left at the cape. Molecules either move north to the greenish Straits of Florida or south through the blue Yucatan Channel on their way to Haità and la República Dominicana: greener on the way to the land of the greenback, bluer to Curaçao. Emilio rolled another joint and I didn't feel at all seasick.
Ten miles out Emilio cut the engines. At sunset the sky and sea were blinding blue-bright, but the island was its own source of light. This was not just the sun shining off the leaves. This was the purple heart of the island itself. This was earth, sand, and mineral shining. With distended gaze drinking in the big picture, I thought I saw a gentle ripple in the terrestrial ridge. I couldn't be sure my eyes weren't playing tricks. “Son los mogotes de Viñales,” Emilio said. “Either that or it's the rocks in your head.”
Toward nightfall I nodded off to the gentle samba of the water, but just after dark something roared overhead and wrested me back to reality. An airplane had buzzed close above our boat, flying much lower than would be possible on land. The small dual-engine was less than a hundred feet from star-board when I was shocked to see something as big as a man drop from inside the black mouth on the side of the fuselage. Emilio gunned the engine, wheeling hand over hand to roll the rudder.
“¡Carajo! What was that?” I shouted over the engine. The airplane climbed, pulled west.
“What do you think?”
“Hermanos al Rescate?”
“No way, primo. That's the best Cesna there is. Los gusanos fly shitty little single-props.”
Emilio pulled the cutter up alongside the float. I saw it was not a man, but a small burlap raft shrink-wrapped in plastic. My cousin hooked and hoisted it onto the deck, and I saw through the clear plastic: a man-sized bushel of marijuana. Emilio plunged his knife into the parcel and the vacuum seal popped to release a great gush of fragrance. Golden-haired buds coated over with crystals gave the flowerlets the look of shaggy confections, sugared like churros. I held a cured branch as thick and long as my arm. Emilio had to say only one word to enlighten me: “Colombians.”
“Where do you get the money to pay for it?”
“I don't. They drop it free of charge. My socio on this detail is trustworthy, and he's got a friend who sells in Havana at a great profit.”
We found a live crab in the folds of the burlap. “He's still crawling. He must have gotten in there wherever this bushel was wrapped.”
“Maybe it was deliberate, Escobar's way of telling us it's fresh.” Emilio threw the creature back into the sea. “Maybe he'll find himself a nice cangreja Cubana.”
Back on land, Emilio filled two Tropicola bottles for my car from coast guard pumps. “I can help you out, you know, if you'd like to get some dolares.”
“What would I need to do?”
“Drop something off with a friend in Havana. My socio and I need to find another reliable driver. Lately, there have been three or four deliveries a week.”
“No, gracias.”
“I wouldn't offer if I didn't think you'd be perfect with your state Lada and your medical card. Just once or twice. It's an easy two hundred dollars a run.”
“If they caught me, they wouldn't just put me in jail. They'd take away my doctor's license.”
“When you get out, you could make more as a taxista.”
“That's the joke these days.”
“It's no joke.”
Near midnight we were back in the Lada on the narrow, winding road into the mountains. Something ahead was holding up traffic. Around the curve we saw Manolito's mule and our stinkpotted tio loco strapped in the saddle, draped like a blanket over the animal's neck, hands clasped behind her ears, snoring but somehow hanging on. A line of buses and taxis, their lights blazing and horns blaring, couldn't pass the struggling beast.
Lada and mule made it back to Abuelo's vega before dawn. Manolito was so drunk that Emilio and I, getting him out of the saddle, could only let him fall to earth. He lay on the ground snoring. Lydia served the cousins coffee in silence. She won't do anything to help Manolito when he gets like that, especially when he's been gone all night.
I lit a cigarette. “Find me a stick that's not too dirty,” I told Emilio.
“What are you going to do?”
I didn't reply. I went to the well and came back with a bucket half-f of water. Emilio handed me the stick. Manolito breathed deeply and slowly, sleeping like a baby. Beneath his eyelids, his pupils bounced between the limits of lost worlds. He snorted once violently, making Emilio almost jump out of his skin, then settled back into a light snore.
“You're not going to throw water on his head, are you?” Emilio said. “If he wakes up wet he'll be very angry. Maybe he'll still be drunk and won't recognize you.”
I stirred a cupful of sugar into the bucket. The women of the house, preparing breakfast, cast nervous glances from the bohÃo. I dipped the tip of the stick in the pail and raised the head of the dreaming drunk. A few drops of sugar water fell to his lips. Manolito's tongue came out in reflex to lick. He briefly reached with his lips and slumped back to earth. I dipped the stick again and Manolito's mouth closed around the end. He started to suck the wood. In five minutes, Manolito was awake and giving orders to everybody in the house, Emilio and me included. It was almost morning, and it was time to get to work.
W
hen I returned from Pinar on Sunday afternoon with a bag of Abuelo's chamomile tea, I found a note in the attic. Julia had gone out to pick up some things from her old apartment. I opened the French doors and realized my balcony had become a jungle. In a week Julia had brought my dead plants back to life. For the first time in a number of days I was alone in my attic, and I missed her: not Elena, not Carlota, but Julia. I busied myself with folding my clothes and setting out clean scrubs for my next shift at the pediátrico, but all the while I was waiting for her to get home.
Beatrice called up the stairs, “¡TeLÃfono!”
It was Julia. “Where are you calling from?”
“The turistienda down the street.”
“Why don't you come up?”
“I don't want you to see me.”
“Why not?”
“It's not pretty, Mano. I look ugly, very ugly.”
I went down to meet her. She was crying and her face and hands were covered with scrapes and bruises.
“Alejandro followed me. He tore out fistfuls of my hair before I could run away. He smudged his burning cigarette out on my head ⦔
I took her to the clinic to clean her wounds with a saline solution and apply aloe to the lesions. I lay compresses on her bruised chest and shoulders and wrapped a bandage with a poultice around her head. Her earlobes and lips were red, and the red of her unpainted mouth ran a little around the edges to pink. She was running a high fever.
“We should call la patrulla,” I told her.
“We can't. They take Alejandro's payoffs.”
“I never should have left you alone.”
I took her upstairs and put her to bed on the sofa. Curled up on the braided rug, I lay awake a long time listening to her shallow breath. Several hours and many cigarettes later, I fell asleep.
J
ulia still had the bandage around her head when I got home from the pediátrico on Monday afternoon. She said it was comfort against the swelling, but I suspected that grief and shame had briefly brought her to a place where she had given up the wish to see. I asked, “Want me to read you something?”
“¿Algo de qué?”
“No sé. Un cuento o un poema.”
“Con dos condiciones: as long as it doesn't have anything to do with medicine or la Revolución.”
“No te preocupes.” French doors shut, slats pulled against the sun, I took out the bright blue Bulfinch. She was skeptical at first, but lifting the lip of elastic fabric from over her eyes, she muttered that she would give any man a chance whose name meant camachuelo. I lit a cigarette and took Julia right into Prometheus and Pandora.
Woman was not yet made. The story is that Jupiter
made her and sent her to Prometheus and his brother,
to punish them for their presumption in stealing fire
from heaven; and man, for accepting the gift. The
first woman was named Pandora. She was made in
heaven, every god contributing something to perfect
her. Venus gave her beauty, Mercury persuasion,
Apollo music, etc. Thus equipped, she was conveyed
to earth, and presented to Epimetheus, who gladly
accepted her, though cautioned by his brother to
beware of Jupiter and his gifts. Epimetheus had in
his house a jar, in which were kept certain noxious
articles, for which, in fitting man for his new abode,
he had had no occasion. Pandora was seized with
an eager curiosity to know what this jar contained;
and one day she slipped off the cover and looked in.
Forthwith there escaped a multitude of plagues for
hapless manâsuch as gout, rheumatism, and colic
for his body, and envy, spite, and revenge for his
mindâand scattered themselves far and wide.
By the second page Julia had propped herself up with pillows. “I like the sensibility of this Camachuelo fellow,” she said. “The first woman was the midwife of all the world's plaguesâthe chief being horniness. Wouldn't you agree?”
“Certainly: a plague of epidemic proportions.”
“Giving birth to man's dependency on the scarce and difficult-to-obtain antidote.”
“Which is?”
“Pussy! Read on, doctor.”
Julia and I were as hungry as the cats that live on the roof. I read to her from Bulfinch and we brewed Abuelo's tea leaves over and over. Julia lay back on the sofa and folded my clothes. She fished in the pockets of a pair of dirty pants and found the dollar change Director González had given me at his coctail party. Julia took a pen and inked something on the face of the bill.
“What's that?”
She laughed.
“What are you drawing on that dollar?”
She finished what she was doing to the bill and balled it up for better throwing. It bounced off my nose. I uncrumpled the bill and saw what she had found so funny. Jorge Washington had a Havana-shaped mark on his right cheek; block letters to the left of his froglike smirk read:
Soy homosexual.
Julia laughed. She fell asleep on the sofa and I curled up on the rug.