Eighty-six years old and he could still get it up good and hard when the occasion warranted—and without pharmaceutical help. But what occasion was this? Goyo closed his eyes and tried to coax back the dissipating dream. He flipped his pillow to the cooler side and pressed it against his forehead. No luck. He wanted to squeeze in another hour of sleep, but a panoply of bodily torments prevented it: raging hemorrhoids (a souvenir from his long drive north), a crippling pain in his neck, his aching lower back. Goyo threw off the pillow and sheets and opened his window shade onto the hallucinations of Second Avenue: the corner newsstand floating off the curb, squabbling pigeons swollen as overfed geese.
Today was his sixtieth wedding anniversary and the feast day of Cuba’s patron saint—La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Before her untimely death, Luisa had been planning another party, more extravagant than their fiftieth. She’d even been toying with the idea of hiring Enrique Chia to play at their bash. At least Goyo had dodged that exorbitant bullet. He looked up at the ceiling, hands positioned for prayer: Perdóname, mi amor, I’m merely relieved, given my many expenses, that . . . Oh, never mind. He’d stuck his foot in it and might not get out of this alive. The last thing he needed was to take on the dead as well as the miserable living.
A chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling onto his bed in a puff of dust. Goyo sighed. His work here was never done. The brownstone might look sturdy from the outside—geraniums on the windowsills, an unimpeachable air of permanence—but below the surface, all was decay. Cockroaches and rats infested its deteriorating walls and had overrun the basement, where Goyo kept his archives: letters his father had sent to him at boarding school; a photo of Adelina Ponti playing piano; his moldering clarinet music; the birth certificates of relatives near and far; and, most important, the titles to the Herrera properties in Cuba.
Twenty-three years ago, he and Luisa had sold their old apartment, a spacious three-bedroom in Turtle Bay, and crammed the bulk of its contents into these thousand square feet of now-collapsing building. His wife’s devotion to the baroque was evident everywhere—in the gilded Florentine boxes and porcelain figurines, in the crystal decanters half-filled with watered-down scotch. Every overpriced knickknack and silk-upholstered chair, every chandelier and lamp, down to the fringed one on the nightstand to which a spider had attached its web, murmured: “I am Luisa Miyares de Herrera . . .”
A flock of sparrows rushed in a slanting mass toward the East River. A jogger, probably from another time zone, pounded his way north. Goyo reached for a tissue and trumpeted away the night’s accretion of mucus. How his younger self would’ve recoiled at the hoary vision of him now, with his back brace and bifocals, his bruised and bleeding gums, his lamentable sag of balls. His eyes felt sticky, too, as if they’d been smeared with honey. Sometimes he pictured himself growing wild in old age: his shoulders upholstered with mold, his lungs wheezing like a leaky bassoon. Only infirmity or impending death truly showed people what tedious organisms their bodies could be.
Goyo hoisted himself out of bed, steadied his cane, and hobbled past his wife’s bric-a-brac to the bathroom. He kept a shelf of Marcus Aurelius and José Martí above the toilet paper dispenser. Goyo could always count on them to provide a modicum of solace. He’d memorized many of Aurelius’s most famous quotations: “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambition.” “And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou does every act of thy life as if it were the last.” “Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.” Aurelius had died at fifty-nine after ruling the Roman Empire for twenty years. Martí was even younger when he perished, saddling up in the name of Cuban independence and charging into his first—and only—battle at forty-two.
Twenty minutes later, the toughest part of Goyo’s day was done. He took extra care with his morning ablutions, maneuvering his tongue to plump out his cheeks and upper lip while shaving his face to an impeccable sheen. He brushed his teeth—they were holding up better than the rest of him—and doused his solar plexus with cologne. What was left of his hair he smoothed back with a soft-bristle brush. Goyo was fond of his old mutt’s face, no matter its devastations, particularly his chin with its still handsome, beckoning cleft. How the ladies had loved that cleft!
At 7:00 a.m. Víctor Ticona knocked on his door, regular as a rooster. He set out Goyo’s breakfast in silence—sliced papaya, multigrain toast, café con leche. Goyo dictated the day’s tasks, which included purchasing black support hose and spying on the Turks for any breaches of kitchen regulations (Goyo was compiling evidence to evict them). The taciturn Andean could be provoked to garrulousness only with regard to his hated in-laws, whom he blamed for turning his wife against him. Occasionally, Goyo joined in with complaints about Luisa’s family, who’d chosen to remain in Cuba and had devoted their lives to fleecing him at every turn.
Goyo inspected the contents of his closet and chose his linen suit and two-toned shoes. Back in the day, his ensemble would’ve been regarded not as foppishness but as a stylish gentleman’s summer wear. After checking his appearance in the foyer mirror, Goyo adjusted his Panama hat, then swung open the front door. The dust hung thick in the corridor. He extracted a handkerchief from his breast pocket and covered his mouth. Esposito had been charging Goyo triple his initial estimates, certain that he wouldn’t risk switching contractors in midconstruction. Now the elevator was broken, too. With Víctor’s help, Goyo gingerly descended the three flights of stairs.
“I’ll be back by noon,” Goyo said. “I’m counting on you, Víctor. We need to evict those Turks one way or another.”
“A sus órdenes, Jefe.”
Goyo hailed a cab (he rarely drove in New York anymore, keeping his Cadillac safely stored in a midtown garage) and asked the driver, a Haitian, judging by his name—Henri Jean-Baptiste Dorcelus—to take him to the Brooklyn shipyards in Red Hook. In Havana, he and his brothers had grown up with chauffeurs. When they got old enough to drive, they borrowed the family Cadillacs and cruised them up and down the seawall, flirting with the pretty girls. Back then piropos were high art, not like the coarse come-ons of today. The challenge was finding the perfect balance between worshipful and provocative. Too crude, and the ladies wouldn’t give you the time of day. Too proper, and they stifled a yawn. The best flirtations were respectful but had a seductive edge. For example, if a woman had a florid backside and a tiny waist, one might say: Mujer de guitarrón es un viento de ciclón.
The taxi coasted across the Brooklyn Bridge. To the south gleamed the East River, emptying into the widening expanse of sea. What was the point of sending satellites into space, Goyo thought, when the greatest wilderness on the planet lurked at the edges of its shores? If he were young again, he might become an oceanographer like that French underwater explorer from the sixties who nobody remembered anymore. Goyo rapped on the glass partition dividing him from the taxi driver.
“Have you heard of Jacques Rosteau?” Goyo asked.
“Mais oui, ” Henri said, surprised. “He was my great-uncle on my mother’s side.”
“How’s that?” Goyo leaned forward.
“He fell in love with Maman’s youngest aunt. She was his companion for many years. In Paris, they lived. In a grand apartment on the Rue Bonaparte.”
“Is she still alive?”
“She drowned herself in La Seine after Jacques died.” Henri shook his head.
Goyo was convinced that the world’s greatest love stories remained hidden behind scrims of propriety.
Henri swerved from the bridge onto Tillary Street, driving through downtown Brooklyn and its newly gentrified neighborhoods toward the abandoned shipyards. With Goyo’s guidance, he pulled up to a chain-link fence that partially hid a building with a battered tin roof, exposed pipes, and tangles of rusted wiring. Once this had been the crown jewel in Papá’s archipelago of offices throughout the Americas—Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Panama City, Veracruz. All this from a boy who’d herded sheep in the mountains of Galicia. Papá liked to recount the time he’d fattened one of his sick sheep with bloating grasses and sold it for top dollar at the farmers’ market. His lesson: to strike a bargain with the Devil himself in pursuit of a profit.
Goyo recalled a visit to these Brooklyn offices when he was twelve and en route to the Jesuit boarding school in Canada. It was a September during World War II, and his father was nattily dressed, his gold pocket watch linked by a fine chain to his belt loop. Behind him, a rose-throated Cuban parrot preened its feathers in a bamboo cage. Papá’s executive secretary was a dead ringer for the Italian starlet Assia Noris, with her perfect brows and lush, wavy hair. Goyo watched as the secretary touched his father’s wrist, delicately, as if she were brushing away crumbs. Nothing was ever said, of course, but Goyo grew up to become, like Papá, a chronic philanderer.
In 1961, as panic over the Revolution skyrocketed, the Herrera ships were transporting people along with their usual cargo of sugar, tobacco, and coffee. The going rate for a spot on a northbound ship: three thousand dollars per man, woman, and child. Passengers accused Papá of extortion, but later, after his suicide, Goyo received dozens of letters from exiles claiming that Arturo Herrera had saved their lives. On that last voyage from Havana, Goyo was cheek by jowl with Cuba’s elite like so many peasants on an immigrant ship. The socialites hid their jewels in unmentionable places, and their impudent children wore three and four outfits at once. These days, a reverse flow of goods trickled into the island via returning exiles bearing aspirin, tires, panty hose, and cheap Chinese sandals for their relatives.
Goyo wondered how many of those same exiles had taken their lives after the catastrophe of the Revolution. His father had lived for the promise of return but soon became a man with no country, a homeless man. He killed himself one Sunday afternoon when Goyo was due for supper. Papá had left a simple meal on the kitchen table: a Spanish omelet with a side of still-steaming white rice, a salad cooling in the refrigerator. Goyo imagined his father slipping his 1927 Detective Special, the one he’d had inlaid with a mother-of-pearl handle, into his mouth; imagined him, unflinching, as he pulled the trigger.
Across the river, the lower Manhattan skyline brooded. It’d never looked right to Goyo since 9/11. The towering twin ghosts still hovered there like gigantic phantom limbs. He’d been uptown when the planes hit, lingering, dry-mouthed, in the luscious Carla Stracci’s bed after a night of drinking champagne and smoking pot (it was the one and only time he’d tried it) and nursing a splitting headache. None of his family was in town: Luisa was in Miami, Alina on a photo assignment in the Serengeti, and Goyito in a Jacksonville county jail for petty larceny—all safe, thank goodness.
The driver leaned against the hood of his taxi, smoking a cigarette. Goyo was inclined to join him with the cigar in his pocket but decided against it. Everything had its time, its place, its appropriate level of reverence. It was too early in the day for his puro. The traffic back to the city was bumper-to-bumper. Men and women bound for Wall Street trekked across the Brooklyn Bridge. Goyo was glad that he hadn’t spent his life slaving away at a big corporation. He’d been a slave all right, but to the demands of his own business.
On an impulse, Goyo had the driver stop at a Korean fruit stand on Thirty-Seventh Street and bought a bouquet of lilies for Carla. Then he instructed the driver to drop him off at the United Nations, where his ex-lover still worked as secretary to the Italian delegation. Goyo was anxious to see her, longed to bury his head in her magnificent breasts. The Russian security guard, a hulking vestige from the Cold War, was on duty as usual at the north entrance for visitors. Poor Yuri’s face looked like badly baked bread: lumpy cheeks, sagging chin, a crusty, split upper lip. Over the nearly three decades that they’d been friends, the Russian had proved an invaluable resource to Goyo, briefing him on potential paramours and arranging catering opportunities in exchange for roast-beef-and-horseradish sandwiches and multiple quarts of borscht.
Today, the Russian inspected the lilies with a conspiratorial smile. “You are inspiration to mankind, Comrade Herrera,” he said, gargling his r’s. As usual, he waved Goyo into the United Nations without the security protocol required of visitors.
“Is she in today?” Goyo asked, bypassing the metal detector. At one time, he was probably better known at the UN than its transient secretaries-general. With a nod, he promised Yuri a care package that very afternoon.
The General Assembly building was undergoing renovations. All of New York, it seemed, was on the brink of collapse. Goyo circumvented the construction zones and found his way to the Italian offices. At the reception desk, in all her glorious curves, sat La Carla in a tight cashmere sweater. (Not even that bombshell Vilmita could hold a candle to her.) Coño, he would walk on coals for this woman! Goyo stopped in his tracks, seized by a nervous spasm of sneezing that made his ex-lover laugh out loud. Whatever awkwardness may have existed between them (the affair hadn’t ended well, rife with recriminations and flying crockery) dissipated. Sheepishly, he handed her the flowers.
“Eh, you are allergic to the lilies,” Carla purred, patting his cheek. She offered him a tissue and made him blow his nose like a schoolboy. Then she reached inside a cabinet for a crystal vase. An imposing diamond gleamed on her ring finger.
“You’re married?” Goyo asked stupidly.
In response, she held up a silver-framed photograph of a disturbingly muscular man in a military uniform, one trouser leg pinned neatly to thigh level. The astonishment must’ve shown on Goyo’s face because Carla put a hand on her hip and said, a touch defensively, “He’s a war hero.”
“Bosnia.”
Goyo coughed into his fist. He struggled not to think of her husband’s stump; like a blunt hand, he imagined, lacking articulation. “You are happy then?”
“Only animals are happy,” Carla snapped, her voice dropping an octave.
Goyo recalled the night at boarding school when the first-floor boys had procured a hooker—one for nine of them—at the cut-rate price of ten dollars per customer. She, too, had been missing a leg.
Carla produced an espresso from the sleek cappuccino machine behind her desk. Goyo wanted to say that he missed her skin, her scent; that he’d often wondered in the days following 9/11 whether he’d made a mistake staying with his wife.
“Luisa is dead,” he said.
“Yuri told me. My condolences.”
Since when had that Russian become such a chatterbox? Goyo drank his espresso and watched Carla watching him before he dared take a peek at her cleavage. Her breasts were perfect, majestically situated on her torso. He should’ve come better prepared to win her back.
A group of men in guayaberas walked down the hall speaking Cuban-accented Spanish. Goyo looked quizzically at Carla. Every nerve in his body fired up.
“Tomorrow, at noon,” Carla said.
“Damn it.” Goyo wasn’t expecting the tyrant until next week. There’d been nothing about this change of plans from those idiots at Hijodeputa.com.
“When he went to Harlem many years ago, i negri loved him,” Carla said, but Goyo wasn’t listening. “I negri . . . they loved him.”
Goyo descended into his blackest soul, stirring up from its bottom the residue of his scoured life, of the lives of thousands of his fellow exiles. His blood roiled anew at the thought of El Comandante extolling the virtues of his last-gasp regime at the UN.
“Querida, I need to ask you a favor,” Goyo began, slipping his pistol from its holster and eyeing her spotless desk. He needed a safe place to keep the Glock until tomorrow. Security quadrupled when a controversial leader like El Comandante visited. Goyo couldn’t risk not getting the weapon through security, even with his Russian friend on duty. He knew by the expression on Carla’s face that she would comply. She would comply, Goyo knew, because despite her one-legged husband, she still loved him.
There was no time to waste. The tyrant was coming to his very door, to ridicule by his unrepentant presence everyone he’d so brutally driven away. Bueno, let the bastard come. Goyo was ready.
I lie awake at night worrying that they’re going to screw me. This is my big shot and I don’t want to blow it. Finally, I have something they want. “They” meaning the world beyond this fucking island, the golden goose—Hollywood itself. I’m just one writer, vulnerable against those sharks. Yes, I have an agent in Spain, but we’re talking major cifra here, and when that’s at stake I could be sold out with a sneeze. It’s neocolonialism all over again. I haven’t written a damn word from all the stress. Detective Harry Morales is my invention. If I play this right, he could become the next Sherlock Holmes, or James Bond; my family set up for generations. I need to hang tough, hold my ground. Nobody gives it to me up the ass. Nobody.
—Manolo Goytisolo, detective novelist
The older El Comandante got, the more he hated traveling. Even that day trip to Mexico two months ago had exhausted him to no end. The last thing he needed today was to get tricked out in his Armani suit and travel to New York City. It was too cold there no matter the season. The beds were uncomfortable and the unfamiliar noises jangled his nerves. The truth was that he no longer felt at home anywhere but on the red, clay-rich soil of his island. Long gone were the days when he’d cut a handsome figure in fatigues, inciting crowds the world over with his stirring speeches. Now he could count on one hand the places left where he remained a hero: Bolivia, South Africa, parts of Mexico, Vietnam, and—yes—Harlem.
Harlem’s love affair with him had begun in 1960, after he and his men had been evicted from their midtown hotel under pressure from Washington. El Comandante suggested pitching tents in the United Nations gardens, but black politicos rallied to bring him uptown to the Hotel Marisa, famous thereafter as the place where he and Malcolm X had met. None of his subsequent visits to the UN—not in 1979, when he’d gotten a standing ovation for condemning apartheid; nor in 1995, when he’d memorably called the U.S. embargo a “noiseless atom bomb”—could replicate the thrill of his first, hours-long harangue of the General Assembly.
Another stifling September day dawned. The tyrant loathed early autumn, when the threat of hurricanes and the dropping barometric pressure pushed everyone to the breaking point. A muscle spasm cinched his waist. He drank the water left for him on the nightstand and stared out at the Caribbean Sea. The Focsa tower1 jutted high above the city’s dilapidated skyline. It’d been the last major building to go up before the Revolution. On the other side of town, the blanched dome of the Capitol seemed to mock his revolution. Carajo, he was responsible for this mess, for a society in which prostitutes were revered as “heroines” for keeping their families afloat during hard times.2
El Comandante pulled the Browning from his nightstand drawer and slipped the tip of the barrel into his mouth. His chapped lips clung to the steel. What else did he have left to prove? The real trial was crossing the chasm from dying to dead. Non est ad astra mollis e terris via. There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. Another Jesuit chestnut. The tyrant chambered a round and closed his eyes. Memories floated behind his eyelids: Mami napping in her hammock with a flock of baby chicks; the Jamaican cutter’s girl kissing him under the tamarind tree, then pronouncing them married; the time he heard his parents fucking while Papá’s legal wife and daughters sat in the parlor, pretending not to listen.
The phone rang, and he knew without looking that it was Fernando.
“I had a terrible dream about you.” His brother’s voice swallowed the last syllable. “I thought you’d . . .”
“I’m fine,” the tyrant said drily.
“Are you—”
“Pick me up in an hour.”
In the early years of the Revolution, when their safety was continually in jeopardy, Fernando had wanted to hire body doubles for them. El Comandante had scoffed at the idea, not wanting anyone to take a bullet meant for him. Persistent, Fernando sent him one doppelgänger after another and selected a blacksmith as his own impostor. That lucky bastard enjoyed the good life well into his sixties—wining and dining minor dignitaries, cutting factory ribbons, bedding small-town beauty queens—until the day he feasted on a platter of cyanide-laced crabs at a mechanics’ convention in Varadero. There was the awkward business of “Fernando’s” resurrection after thirty-seven eyewitnesses had seen him drop dead. But the Revolution was adept, if it was adept at anything, at revising history.
El Comandante put away his pistol. His suicide would only serve as propaganda for his enemies. The best course of events would be for him to be killed in action, like José Martí. This would yield the optimum political capital, which the Revolution could then exploit for years to come like it’d done with Che and Camilo. The ultimate vindication, of course, would be to outlive every last one of his enemies. If only he could.
The tyrant grasped the bedpost. The day had barely begun and he felt wasted as chalk. He ran his tongue along the gluey roof of his mouth. How sick and tired he was of cooperating with his handlers like some sorry gelding. This was what old age demanded: reasonableness and a resignation to the obliterating sameness of meals, solitude, sickness. As he made his way to the toilet, a turkey buzzard momentarily landed on his balcony, then flew away. El Líder pried open the iron-grilled window. The air smelled rancid, like days-old shellfish. He’d come to resemble the view, sun-faded and devoid of grandeur.
Delia appeared at his door in a lavender nightgown, her hair in disarray. She, too, had dreamt about him. “You were wallowing in the swamp like an injured crane. You opened your beak to cry for help but no sound came.” She nestled against her husband’s chest, nearly toppling him.
“It’s that fucking musical! I shouldn’t have told you anything about it.” He’d been having nightmares from that goddamn play—mostly of giant, imperialist crabs running amok in Havana.
The backfiring of a fifties Chevy in the street below startled them both.
“Don’t go to New York, mi cielo. I beg you.”
“Carajo,” he muttered, then repeated it for good measure before disappearing into the bathroom.
1. I was a middleweight Olympic boxing champ. I could’ve defected and gone professional, but when my chance came, I choked. The state rewarded my loyalty with this plum job: head bartender at the rooftop bar of El Focsa. Views in every direction and tips enough to live better than most. Here in the skies, I mix drinks—forgive the pun—that pack a serious punch.
—Romero Fino, bartender
2. So much history and what do the tourists want to know? Where they can get cheap cigars, the best mojitos, and where to find the women. Tell me, what has changed since 1959? What do these imbeciles care about the Grito de Yara, or the Treaty of Zanjón? My knowledge is wasted. And yet I know this much: the wheel of history will turn and our country will be free again.
—Sebastiano Durán, tour guide