“So maybe I should put together a brunch.”
“A what?”
“A brunch, Conde, I said brunch. My God, how backward you are!” Bobby said on the other end of the phone and laughed.
Then Bobby had to explain to the peddler of old books that the intervening act of nourishment between breakfast and lunch was called “brunch” and had its own characteristics, which Conde would joyfully discover when he arrived midmorning at his former classmate’s house and was taken to the terrace where the aforementioned brunch was laid out.
In the center of the table was a tall, etched-glass vase, full of white and spotted lilies, which struck Conde as particularly gay. On the table was a pitcher of orange juice, a plate with a large Spanish tortilla, a tray of toast and exotic fruit spreads like blueberry and strawberry, a stick of butter, a steaming coffeepot, a pitcher of warm milk, a plate of fried bacon, some yogurts, and a platter with both white and yellow cheese accompanied by their respective slicing knives. Dazed by such abundance, Conde’s stomach issued a cry: his breakfasts usually consisted of a couple of cups of coffee and a piece of bread that was more or less chewable, wrapped around whatever edible thing he could find (if there was anything at all), and the lunches he ate on the streets were often just greasy pizzas sprinkled with vile cheeses. The morning banquet before him now exceeded all expectations, and the imagination of someone like him, or 90 percent of his compatriots. Not even Tamara could put together a table like that on her days off, since her diet had made a virtue of scarcity. The woman had reduced her nutrition to some low-sugar fruit juice and, to Conde’s horror, a tea that was equally bereft of any sweetener. The blessed fear of aging!
As they ate, the conversation revolved around the former policeman’s initial investigations and his meager, if foundational, progress.
But when the plates, bowls, pitchers, jars, and platters had been emptied of their contents—Conde had eaten everything, everything he could, with his omnivore’s philosophy of life—they gravely got down to the matter at hand.
“Tell me something, Bobby. Something important. Did you know that Raydel was not his real name?”
Bobby sighed and shook his head.
“Sometimes, it did seem like his story was a little weird, that he could be a bit of a liar. But that’s normal, isn’t it? And it didn’t matter too much to me, he gave me what I needed and … I never imagined that he was posing as a dead man. Why would he do that?”
“To hide something, or to hide himself from someone … Why take over an identity? What pushed him to do that? What had he done that he had to hide under another name?”
“What do you think?”
“That he did something serious, something very fucked-up. The kid you fell in love with was an impostor and God knows what he was hiding. For starters, I don’t think he was as simple as you thought. He had some depth. He was looking for something.”
“To steal from me?”
“That, too … But there must have been a reason. Like we’ve been saying, he robbed you for money so he could leave the country, for example. But perhaps he needed the money because he wanted to escape from something he feared.”
“¡Ay, Dios mío! Why in the hell must I always live so dangerously, man?” Bobby asked, hand on his chest. He had received Conde dressed in white pants, a white long-sleeved shirt, and some upscale espadrilles, also white. Beneath the shirt, hanging from Bobby’s neck, Conde could see a multicolored bead necklace. Was this the appropriate outfit for brunch? Conde smiled and decided that it was time to put it all out on the table.
“Bobby, do you remember Candito?”
“How could I not, Conde? That light-skinned guy with the nappy red hair who looked like a devil?”
“That’s the one,” Conde said, smiling.
“I remember perfectly well because I was scared shitless of him. That guy was really, really bad.”
“Appearances are deceiving, Bobby … Well, sometimes. Candito was always a good guy. And now he’s practically a Protestant minister.”
“I wouldn’t believe it! So, what happened to him?”
“Nothing. Candito, and also Rabbit, think that your Virgin is very strange. She doesn’t look like Our Lady of Regla on prayer cards and on Cuban altars, or like the one in Andalucía. Candito thought She reminded him more of the Virgin of Montserrat, being a Black Madonna with a Black baby Jesus and—”
“The thing is, Conde,” Bobby interrupted, “She’s very, very old. It doesn’t matter whether She looks like the Virgin in the church in Regla or on the prayer cards, but rather what Her believers saw and continue to see in Her. How many statues of Christ have you seen? And of the Virgin Mary? Thousands, right? And some of them are Black, aren’t they? There are Japanese Virgin Marys, too! Look, I’m sure that the image of Christ you’re most familiar with is the one that everyone here has, the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
Bobby imitated the pose of the painting that devoted Cubans usually hung in their living rooms: a Jesus with a kind but condescending face, with His left hand over a chest exposing a wounded heart. Conde recalled that a very peculiar image of Christ, painted by Rembrandt, had led him to discover the extraordinary lives of several Jews in relation to that portrait of a Jesus different from the ones recreated by other painters of Rembrandt’s time and, of course, from the Christ of the Cuban popular prayer cards.
“When my grandmother inherited it from her father, she knew it as the Virgin of Regla,” Bobby continued. “I don’t know if She came from Spain or if She was carved here in Cuba. What I do know is that She’s my Virgin of Regla. And that son of a bitch stole Her from me.”
“You’re right,” Conde admitted, serving himself more coffee and lighting another cigarette. “Since She’s so rare, perhaps that will make it easier to find Her. Incidentally, Yoyi told me She’d been brought over from Andalucía.”
“That’s also possible, yes. I think I said that to you before. But I’m not sure, to be honest. She’s so old…”
Conde didn’t want keep pushing the subject, since there was another that had been nagging at him since his arrival.
“Explain something to me, Bobby. If you’ve always been Catholic, like you said, then why did you undergo initiation with the Yoruba saints?” He pointed to the necklaces his friend was wearing. “And why are you wearing all white today and all of those beads?”
Bobby placed the back of his hand over his eyes: it was the gayest gesture Conde had ever seen in his life.
“My God. Don’t tell me you forgot that today is the feast day of the Virgin of Regla?”
The former policeman opened his eyes. How could he possibly have forgotten, involved as he was in this particular investigation?
“In a little bit, I’m going to my Padrino’s house. Today, we’re going to celebrate Yemayá. And my little Virgin is going to miss it, man.”
“I guess I get an F in the saint’s day calendar,” Conde admitted. “I had forgotten. But, tell me, why did you become a Santero if you believe in God and the Virgin?”
Bobby shook his head, leaned back in his chair, glibly stole a cigarette from Conde like it was nothing, and held it between his fingers.
“It used to be practically a crime, but nowadays it’s in vogue to practice Santería, you know. When people are desperate they’ll believe anything, and desperate people abound around here. The bad thing is that it’s all a business now, a pyramid scheme. If you go see a Santera, she’ll immediately tell you that your problem is serious and that you need to make saint. And then she sends you to see a Babalawo—who of course is her Padrino, her friend, and often her business partner—and they do the ceremony for you and charge you an arm and a leg for all of the paraphernalia relating to the initiation. And you pay it happily, because you become part of the clan and receive divine protection … that is, if you even believe in divine protection. And then you yourself get into the business of putting together the ceremony for someone else, especially if they live abroad and come to Cuba with American dollars … But I underwent the ceremony with serious people, or so I like to believe. I did it because I really felt that I was going crazy and I needed some relief.”
“Was this when they kicked you out of the university?”
“No, later. Like fifteen years later.”
“Why, what happened then?”
“When I separated from Estelita and started living with Israel, it was a very big change in my life. It was what I wanted most, what I was truly hoping for, but it had suddenly shaken me from head to toe. My life, my wife, my kids … my whole story. It was sometimes a very difficult process. I felt happy about having rebelled, but at the same time I felt dislocated, like I was lost … That was when Israel took me to see his Madrina and … you know … they had to do an asentamiento, a ceremony by that name. And you know how it goes, one thing led to another … Before I knew it, I’d made saint.”
Bobby pointed to the blue-and-white beaded bracelet he wore on his wrist and then stroked the necklaces hanging from his neck. Conde thought for a moment.
“Yes, I imagine it wasn’t easy … So, what happened with Estelita and your children?”
Bobby almost smiled.
“The same thing that happens to everyone else … They live in Las Vegas now. They don’t want to come to Cuba so I spent several days with them when I was up North. They don’t care what the hell is happening here, they don’t even want to know. It’s fucked-up, isn’t it?”
“Yeah” was all Conde said, as he didn’t want to get too deep into such tempestuous waters. At least not right now. “So, making saint?”
Bobby reached out and took the lighter. He served himself some more coffee, took a sip, and then lit the cigarette he’d been holding between his fingers—all very slowly, in a manner practically bereft of desire. He inhaled the smoke, and the pleasure was reflected in his face.
“It really wasn’t easy,” he said finally. “But I think you can understand me … I still think, sometimes, that my life could have been something else, if they hadn’t thwarted it, Conde.”
His words expressed a sad rage.
“Didn’t you just tell me that you found yourself in the end?” Conde asked. “That you’ve been happy?”
Bobby nodded several times.
“Yes … In the end. But what I had to go through first was a living hell. And I’m not being melodramatic. Look, my friend, I don’t like talking about this, but sometimes I need to.”
Bobby put out the cigarette and sighed, as if he were leaking air. He looked toward the yard, and since the effeminate lilies were in his line of sight, he reached out and moved one that seemed out of place.
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” Conde said, gesturing to emphasize, but his interlocutor went on as if he had not heard him.
“When I started going out with Katiuska, in college … Well, I did it because I wanted to be a man. I didn’t want to be a fairy, I wanted to be normal, do you hear me? Normal. And to be accepted and not have my life fucked up. Do you remember the pressure? So, I did everything I could to fix myself on the inside. But my relationship with Katiuska was weird. When we were alone, we kissed, we got hot and heavy, and sometimes she jerked me off. She’d ask me to lick her down there, but we didn’t screw; she wouldn’t let me stick it in her. She always stopped me for some reason, which I found out later.”
Conde gulped. The love story was getting dark.
“One day, a group of us went to a beach house. There were about eight of us, including Katiuska and her cousin, but Katiuska went back to Havana on the first night because she had a very important meeting the next day, very early at the university with the Young Communists. It was extremely hot that night and we had a bunch of beer and rum, so those of us who were left went to the beach. It must have been after midnight, and someone, a girl, proposed that we swim naked, since it was dark and there was no one around. It was more decadent to enter the sea that way. All of us, half-drunk as we were, took off our clothes. But as soon as I saw Katiuska’s cousin and I saw his prick and I saw his eyes … Well, I can’t describe it. I saw his prick and that gaze—I felt like I was melting inside. The rest was easy. That night I made my sexual debut. I was still a virgin, you know, both at giving and receiving. A virgin in Cuba at the age of twenty-three! Well, that night was an epiphany … Can one call it an epiphany? Whatever, it sounds good. That night, he gave it to me and I gave it to him until we had nothing left, and suddenly, I felt like I had found myself, Conde … That I was being myself, you know? The next morning, the two of us acted like nothing had happened. That was what we had to do, right? And when Katiuska came back at noon, everything was the same. Or, I acted like everything was the same, although the truth was that everything had changed: I felt it inside, in my heart, I felt it outside, on my skin … That night, Katiuska and I kissed, masturbated each other, just like usual, but I realized that sex with a woman now made less sense to me; it was a farce … And I had a breakdown. I didn’t want anyone to know what I had done on the beach. I repressed myself even more, I forced myself to seem more macho … Until one day, I couldn’t take it anymore and I fell into a darker pit: an unbearable feeling of guilt, feeling like an impostor, a sinner. So I decided to open up. I told Katiuska what had happened with her cousin and the truth of my life. I asked her to help me save myself. To make me a man, to remove the perversions of my mind. I remember how she listened to me, asked me things, details about how it had been with her cousin, and finally she said yes, she was going to help me, she needed a few days to see how, what she could do. She was very surprised by all of that, she told me.”
“You screwed up, Bobby,” Conde managed to say, foreseeing the end of this story.
“I don’t know, maybe I wanted it to happen? Three days later, there was a meeting of the Student Federation, because of the preparations for that year’s Youth Festival, remember? And Katiuska, who was the organizer of the Youth Grass Roots Committee, asked to speak at the end of the meeting and said she had to communicate to the group—I’ll never forget her words—‘A serious problem that compañero Roberto Roque Rosell was facing’ … And then she told them everything I’d told her, but worse still, she said that her cousin was willing to testify to how I’d taken advantage of his state of inebriation. I ran out of there, Conde. I left that school like a madman, crying, my heart beating so quickly that I thought I was dying … Two days later, a professor and the Young Communist League secretary came to my house to tell me that Katiuska’s cousin had decided not to accuse me in a hearing, but that I was being expelled from the university for serious moral and ideological deviation, incompatible with the behavior of a young, revolutionary university student…”
“What a bitch, that Katiuska!”
Bobby smiled. It was a sad grimace, laced with nostalgia.
“Anyone who has lived through that can understand me. That was the beginning of my time in hell … The rest of my story is more or less what I already told you,” Bobby said. “Now, you haven’t even heard the best part yet…”
“There’s a best part?”
“Yes, I think so. Well, juiciest, at least.”
“What’s that?”
“A few years later, I ran into Katiuska and … you know why she wouldn’t have sex with me?”
Conde smacked his forehead. The image of Katiuska’s face, in the bar near the university, returned to his mind like a boomerang. And then the answer to that whole imbroglio suddenly came to him.
“Because she was gay!”
“A complete lesbian, my friend. The dykes call her Joaquín! And now she’s the leader of I-don’t-know-what lesbian group, a gay pride activist, and a defender of the transformers and the transformed! A leader, a standard-bearer, man! Damn, you can’t tell me this story’s happy ending isn’t the best part, huh, brother?”
Enthralled, he studied the intensely green foliage of the avocado tree that majestically ruled over the yard at Carlos’s house. Among its branches still hung several of those prodigious fruits, with their generous green and yellow flesh that Cubans never eat like fruit, only seasoned as a salad. He tried to calculate how many of those avocados he could have shared throughout the forty-plus years of friendship with Carlos, Andrés, and Rabbit. How much hunger had they sated eating wedges of avocado sprinkled with salt and stuffed into a loaf of bread? How many inadequate meals had they augmented with salads made from those avocados, sometimes even garnished with a bit of olive oil, some drops of lemon juice that brought out their sweet flavor, along with slices of onion that stimulated the taste buds? Moved, absorbed in the observation of that tree, he thought of how they’d shared some intense, full years throughout which they had come to know all that was good and bad in life. Years, decades already, in which they’d enjoyed one another’s company until they felt, each of them, fully complemented. They were all individuals and also part of a clan. They possessed an intricate mixture of experiences, accumulated gains and losses, which they greedily protected from outside erosion and converted, he’d always thought, into the bricks of the wall behind which they each took refuge from invasions of all kinds, as survivors of a catastrophe, perhaps many.
The strange mood caused by Bobby’s confession had led him to arrange an overdue encounter with his friend Rabbit that very day at noon, and they had made plans to meet at Carlos’s house, under the condition that there would be no alcohol. Who had imposed this Dry Law? Carlos, Rabbit, Conde himself? Was it because of a premonition? A fear of the Devil? Conde couldn’t remember, but what he did know was that time and life can do away with everything, even noble, old trees like the pleasant avocado he now contemplated from the terrace.
They knew one another so well that Conde could tell whatever Rabbit had to say was serious, just from the way that Rabbit had looked at Carlos and how the latter silently gestured for him to go on, without any of his usual shrill disclaimers. For his part, Conde had looked at the two of them and decided to keep level for once, to patiently wait for the conversation to develop. Perhaps his guilt over having first forgotten and then delayed Rabbit’s request for a meeting was making him feel at a disadvantage. This feeling was strange and bothersome to him, and it was aggravated by the growing uncertainty of his true ability to offer friendship. How could he have delayed, even forgotten his friend’s request? Just because of the money Bobby was paying him? Still silent and feeling miserable, he accepted the cup of coffee that Josefina brought to him on the terrace and lit one of his cigarettes. The way the older woman was moving, taking extra care to be unobtrusive, Conde assumed that she was already up to speed on the meeting’s agenda. His concern overflowed. Unable to contain himself any longer, he looked at Rabbit and offered up the palms of his hands: Come on, give me what you need to give me.
“I’m going to travel, Conde,” his friend began. “I’m gonna try to, at least.”
Conde sighed, relieved. Was that all? Nobody was dying, everyone’s prostates and livers continued on?
“Well, you’re going to travel! That’s great, I’m happy for you and … Nowadays, everyone travels…”
“I don’t know if I’m going to come back.”
Conde felt like he’d been hit. His friend was leaving? Another one? But Rabbit was one of them, the persistent ones, determined, a fellow survivor—and now he was thinking of leaving them, too? Who would turn out the light at el Morro when there was no one left?
“What are you talking about, brother?”
Rabbit looked at him unblinkingly.
“My daughter did the paperwork for me. Andrés is going to cover the costs. If they give me a visa, I’m going to Miami for a while. And there, I’ll decide whether or not I’m going to stay. Esmé and Andrés say they’ll help me. But I’m scared. Scared of going and not coming back. Scared of coming back and…”
Conde felt on the verge of crumbling.
“How long? You, Andrés, Skinny, Esmé, Josefina—everyone and their mothers! How long have you all been planning this?”
“I don’t know. Two, maybe three months.”
“So why didn’t you say anything to me, Rabbit?”
“Because I’m scared,” his friend admitted.
“Look, Conde,” Carlos interjected, but Conde stopped him with a wave of his hand.
“Scared of what, Rabbit?”
“Of everything. Of traveling, of staying there, of preferring to return,” Rabbit said. “Of you being pissed at me.”
“Why did you think I’d be pissed?”
Rabbit looked at Skinny Carlos again, and it was Skinny who responded.
“Because we know what you’re like, Beast … Because we love you. Because you’re already pissed, aren’t you?”
What Carlos had said was regrettable, but true: this felt to Conde like a question of love, and at that moment he felt like a groom about to be jilted at the altar. Nevertheless, he tried to overcome his ego, his instinct to preserve his tribe, the awakened sense of loss announcing itself on the horizon.
“What the hell are you going to do in Miami? You’re sixty years old. Here, it’s a miracle that we get by, but we do get by…”
“People also get by over there. Things here are getting uglier every day and seem to be headed for worse. Anyway, I really don’t know if I’m going to stay there, Conde. I don’t even know if I’m going to get to make the trip, if my wife and I will be able to get visas … But what I want is to try. At least that. And, if they let me leave this island, I want the opportunity to choose for myself whether I stay in Miami or come back. Once I get there, I’ll do the math and figure out if I was wrong to come … It’s not really that I want to live in Miami. It’s that for people like us, we’ve never been able to choose, and to choose wrong. We had that right taken away from us.”
Conde nodded. He knew that any argument he could make wouldn’t work against the sound logic of his friend’s lived experience. His desires for the privilege to be able to choose, and be proven wrong … perhaps even proven right. But Conde’s discomfort had nothing to do with logic, but with his feelings. If they kept losing friends like this, what kind of solitude would await them at the end? In what swamp would they drown? In what state would their naked souls reach their final destination? Feeling uneasy, he lifted his gaze and once again contemplated the avocado tree that had nourished them so many times, their bellies and their spirits. The tree, at least, remained. The tree was still there.
“You’re right, Rabbit,” he said at last. “Yes, you should try, and be wrong as many times as you want. That’s how we know we’re still alive, right? Ah, and if I find that Blessed Virgin and Bobby pays me, you can count on that money for whatever you need. With what’s left over, Skinny and I will go get drunk forty times over and tell the same stories again and again until we burst like fireworks … Or until you come back and tell us whether or not you were wrong about what you decided for yourself, about whatever the hell you did because you fucking felt like it. But you know what? I’m not gonna save any avocados for you. I’m gonna eat them all, till I have avocados coming out of my ears.”
Shortly before 8:00 p.m., Conde was posted on the side of Parque Central next to the run-down Cine Payret. With the noise of Rabbit’s decision still buzzing in his head, he studied his surroundings, which seemed not to change, until the setting of the sun. And not for the better. He saw that many of the policemen patrolling the area had German shepherds and were armed as if they were in Star Wars. It was soon obvious to Conde that with the arrival of twilight, the stunned masses that frequented this place in the light of day had been replaced by shifty, shadowy characters, looking for their fix: money, sex, amusement, or all of the above, by any sordid means necessary. It was cockroach time. For not the first time, he was happy that he wasn’t a cop anymore, that he had the option of watching this scene from the sidelines as a simple shocked onlooker before the spectacle of a bubbling, growing world—one that hadn’t existed back during his days as a cop.
The Bat appeared half an hour later. It seemed that he’d bathed, because he didn’t stink like he had the day before. He was wearing a shirt with silver sequins and his eyes looked almost normal, perhaps a little smaller than they should be. Was that because of his defect, or just the effects of marijuana?
“What’s up?” Conde asked as the kid sat down on a bench.
“You’ve had me working like a madman, compadre.”
“Don’t make stuff up, Yuniesky. Did you buy yourself that shirt with the money I gave you?”
“Yeah,” the young man smiled. “It’s hot, right?”
“Really nice,” Conde confirmed. “Now spill it. What’d you find out about your buddy Raydel?”
The Bat hesitated, then decided to go on.
“The Albino spotted him recently in San Miguel del Padrón, in that ‘settlement’ where all those Easterners stay. He has a cousin there named Ramiro.”
“Ah, I’ve heard of him. Ramiro what?”
“Ramiro the Cloak. I don’t know his last name. But they call him the Cloak, so he must be one hell of a guy, right?”
“How’d you find that out? This cousin, did he do the hit on that gay guy’s place with you and Raydel?”
“Listen, you’re asking a lot for someone paying so little!” It was clear from his reaction that Conde had hit the nail on the head. “I already told you what you wanted. I don’t know Ramiro. Be happy with what I’ve given you and pay up.”
Conde looked at him like he didn’t know him.
“Your cut comes later, if I get to do business with Raydel.”
The Bat nodded. He seemed relieved. “Shall I tell you something that’s worth five big ones?” asked the Bat. Conde waited patiently. “Did you know that Raydel was not his real name?”
“Buddy, I’m the one who told you that yesterday.”
The Bat scratched his head, which was a fitting gesture for his namesake.
“Damn, that’s right. It was you. This stuff I’m smoking is really something. The other day I took a couple hits and that little guy over there”—he pointed behind him, at the statue of José Martí—“he told me about a monster that eats your insides…”
“So, do you know what Raydel’s real name is?”
“No, I don’t. Manduco doesn’t know, either—he’s the other partner he had in that underground beef business. The Albino was the one who told me where Raydel is. Apparently he’s owed him money for a while now. What a singao! That’s why he changed his name and everyone’s after him.”
Conde nodded. “I’m going to go out there and look for Raydel tomorrow. Do you want to come with me?”
The Bat opened his eyes, until they were almost a normal size. “You’re crazy!” Then, lowering his voice, “Nobody can find out I gave you the green light, not Raydel or the Cloak or anybody else. If they do, they’ll fuck me up.”
Conde nodded again. “So, when did the Albino find out that Raydel was with his cousin?”
“About a week ago. Raydel told him that as soon as he sold a few things, he would come see him and settle up his debt.”
“A week … So maybe he’s already flown the coop.”
“Where was he gonna go? Back to Oriente? Nah…” The Bat was thinking. “I swear, if Raydel is anywhere, it’s there, in that neighborhood. That’s like the pirate cave, where he keeps his booty.”
“But he can’t be keeping the stuff there. He’d be crazy to do that.”
The Bat scratched his head again. Maybe it itched from thinking too hard. “That’s true. But he couldn’t keep it in Santiago, either, right?”
Conde stood up. “Tomorrow, I’m going to San Miguel.”
“What about me? How do I get my cut?”
“I’ll stop by your house. You have my word.”
“Your word?” the mulato asked, crestfallen. “Whose fucking word is worth anything in this world, big man?”
“Mine,” Conde said. “You’re going to believe it, because you’ll have no other choice once you see it with those bat eyes of yours. Yeah, your top is really nice…”