THE RUB PUB
Holguín had a totally macho atmosphere which my family shared and in which they raised me. Nevertheless, my love life at thirteen was somewhat ambiguous. I fell in love with Carlos, a kid from the factory, with whom I had a lot in common; we even looked alike. We had both been abandoned by our fathers and were only children, closely attached to our mothers. I used to go to the movies with Carlos, but our relationship was limited to sitting next to each other in the theater and letting our knees touch, as if by accident; with our knees in close contact, we would sit for hours watching ferocious Indians parade or listening to Pedro Infante sing. Perhaps influenced by the prevalent attitude in town, I also had girlfriends: Irene, Irma, Lourdes, Marlene; and I had fistfights with other boys who were after them, or with the ones whose girlfriends I had taken away. I remember fighting it out with a very good-looking boy, Pombo, who actually punched me hard in the face. Looking back, I think I was more in love with Pombo than with Lourdes, the girl I “took away” from him; perhaps I kept her as my steady just to annoy him.
At the time, I was still attracted to Carlos. He was the one who first took me to Eufrasia’s Rub Pub, which was a big whorehouse with a grand dance floor. It was located on the top of a red dirt hill we used to call the Frontier, a very appropriate name since beyond it there was a neighborhood with no pretensions of civilization, no hypocrisy, and where anything could happen. Almost everyone who lived there was a thug or a prostitute. For me, visiting that place was a great revelation and an irresistible attraction. The name Rub Pub came about because the women who danced there would sway their hips in such a way that, rather than dancing, they would rub against the men’s genitals in a circular motion. Once the music stopped, the man would make the arrangements to have sex with the woman, and for two or three dollars they would get a room in the house across the street. Each dance, by the way, cost five cents. When the organ music started, Eufrasia, the owner, dressed all in red and with her huge white handbag, would tap each man on the shoulder in order to collect his five cents. Two of those five cents went to the woman. Eufrasia kept track mentally of how many times each whore had danced and how much to give her as her share. I danced with Lolín, a young mulatto girl with powerful thighs. In the end, encouraged by some friends, Carlos among them, I went to the house across the street to fuck Lolín. We did it by the light of a kerosene lamp, and I remembered my mother in the country. I was nervous and could not get an erection, but Lolín was so adept that she finally got me aroused. Or rather, was it my thinking of Carlos’s face while he waited for me outside? In any case, it was the first time I ejaculated inside a woman.
My grandparents’ house was not really theirs. Ozaida, one of their daughters, had helped them buy it. She was planning to leave for the United States with her husband. They had a daughter who died, and Ozaida had never completely gotten over the tragedy. Perhaps Florentino, her husband, thought she would feel better living in the United States. I don’t think she has. It seems to me that over time Ozaida has felt even unhappier in the loneliness and horror of the Miami swamps.
The house was still too small for us—there were only two bedrooms for ten people—and so I sometimes went over to my aunt Ofelia’s to sleep. No one, of course, had the privilege of sleeping alone. We slept two or three to a bed. My grandparents, who were able to sleep separately in their country house, and therefore hate each other at a respectful distance, now had to share a bed. Perhaps that was why they started making love again. Sometimes while I was writing, I would hear them in their bed, engaged in pretty noisy sexual embraces. I would take advantage of the opportunity and slide under the bed in which they were fornicating to snitch some money from his wooden box. My grandfather would bring that box from the store every night. It was, one might say, his cash register.
Usually when I spent the night at my aunt’s I shared the bed with my cousin Renán, who was sixteen years old and, it was said, already a Don Juan. After some minor erotic adventure, Renán would get home and masturbate in the same bed where I was sleeping. I enjoyed those episodes and like to think that sometimes, pretending to be asleep, I assisted him.
When I had time, I attended a sort of junior high school, where I had an anatomy teacher who made us recite, commas and all, the entire text of an awful book on anatomy, physiology, and hygiene. You could not pass unless you could recite it by heart. At that school I also fell in love with my grammar teacher. So my platonic love then was divided between Carlos, who was fourteen, and an old professor, who was around seventy. As a result, when my cousin masturbated thinking of one of the girls that perhaps he had kissed in one of the few scrimpy parks in town, I would do the same thinking of the grammar teacher who never paid any attention to me, although the students claimed he was homosexual and many even bragged about having fucked him.
In 1957 my cousin Dulce María and her mother came from Miami to spend some time in Holguín. Dulce María had turned into a very beautiful girl. It was just then that my friendship with Carlos had reached its deepest level; every night we went to the movies together. My cousin sensed something unusual in that friendship, and maybe that is why she fell in love with Carlos. Everything changed for me. No longer were Carlos and I going to the movies together; it was the two of them, and I was their chaperon. They sat next to each other in the theater and I would see them kissing. My cousin was now doing, right in front of me, all the things I had longed to do with Carlos, and I was just supposed to make sure nothing “bad” happened, according to my grandmother’s instructions. The romance lasted for a month, until my cousin returned to Miami. Carlos tried to go out with me again, but I wanted no part of it; secretly he had betrayed me, and I didn’t need to explain anything; he understood. Carlos would sit on the porch and talk with my grandparents, waiting for me to come out but, stubbornly, I would remain in the dining room. I had started writing another terrible novel, “The Cannibal,” which fortunately was later lost. Never again did I go to the movies with Carlos.
In those days I made my voice sound deeper, pretended to be tough, and increased the number of my girlfriends. I even managed, I think, to convince myself that I liked one or another of the girls. In school I courted them all and took pains to keep anyone from even imagining that I did not like women. But one day, while the anatomy teacher was repeating her litany, one of my classmates sat next to me and with absolutely diabolic sincerity said, “Look, Reinaldo, you are a faggot. Do you know what a faggot is? It’s a man who likes other men. A faggot, that’s what you are.”