THE HEAT WAS MURDEROUS, BUT that morning, the entire canine species of Havana seemed ready to copulate. I saw a dog huddled against an archway on Paseo del Prado, penis protruding, red as an American fire hydrant. For a moment, he stared at me as if requesting mercy. In a shaded arcade farther down the avenue, a bitch in heat stood, legs wide, her ass an open doorway. Three mutts of varying sizes surrounded her, taking turns trying to climb onto her back as she growled and showed her teeth, until the largest of the dogs settled onto her spine, biting at the fat of her neck, and she cried, paralyzed. I and a few other strangers paused under the balustrades to observe the act, remembering a time when my mother would have covered my young eyes with her hands and dragged me away with her quick steps, but as hastily as it had started between the beasts, it was over.
I stopped on the median where the permuta crowds gather looking to make a home trade, to see about registering our place. It could take years to find someone who wants to swap apartments; maybe sooner if we were lucky and found a three- or four-way exchange. But Florencia insisted nobody would want to move into a cavernous relic with tilted walls on a fourth floor in Centro Habana. If it’s not good for us anymore, why would it be good for someone else?
The permuta market was a mess of shouts and tangles, brokers taking notes on who had what property in their possession and who wanted to move where. I tried to get in on the chaos, telling as many people as I could that I had a one-bedroom in decent condition to trade, with electricity and running water, but I could see I’d need a few hours for this endeavor, time I didn’t have when the morning rush had already passed and I’d not even begun my work on la ruta.
I walked back to my taxi. It’s never been mine, but I drive it all day, so I can’t help but claim ownership over that Frankenstein; a 1950 Chevrolet shell with a 2009 Hyundai engine and Kia parts, painted matte black with plasticized seats until my cousin gets the money to replace them with real leather. It’s his car, you see. Bought with a decade’s salary from working in the machine rooms of oil rigs from Mexico to Brazil, Trinidad to Venezuela, ten months at a time. It was a dusty carcass when he purchased it from a junk collector in Boyeros. You’ll never save that piece of tin, the guy warned my cousin even though he was used to the resurrection of every kind of condemned machinery. It took years of investment and mechanical experimentation by some of the most experienced machinists of Havana. I drove a delivery truck in those years, but my cousin told me to have faith. His almendrón would be ready one day—next year, he’d say, or maybe the year after—and he’d hire me to be a real cash-collecting taxi driver.
Now my cousin sits in his house in Nuevo Vedado all day, enjoying the air-conditioning he recently had installed, playing dominó with his neighbors, watching DVDs pirated through his Mexican connections and going to bars at night in search of a girlfriend. I drive his almendrón, up and down las rutas, along avenues from Marianao to Regla and Bejucal, giving my cousin his daily cut of thirty CUC, which I earn in seven or eight hours on the road. What I earn beyond that, I get to keep.
After I left the permuta crowd, I paid the parqueador his due chavitos for minding the car. He wanted to know how long and how much the restoration took—everybody wants to know what it cost to get our Frankie running, Cubans and tourists alike. I told him six or seven years, and ten thousand dollars. He let out a low whistle.
“For ten thousand dollars, you could have gotten yourself onto a yacht and off this island.”
The bitch I saw earlier came waddling up the sidewalk, taking refuge in the space between me and the old man, leaning on my legs, until one of the male dogs, on the trail of her scent, discovered her, and again, she ran off with the mutt behind her.
“It’s nature,” the man said, with something that resembled nostalgia. “If only life for the human animal could be so simple.”
I heard a small voice behind us.
“Excuse me, chófe’, are you heading on your way soon?”
She could have passed for a schoolgirl, but she wasn’t in a uniform, and later, when we came to know each other better, she would tell me she was twenty-six, though that day I wouldn’t have aged her past eighteen. She wore a long, loose dress printed with flowers or swirls—I recall only that the dress set her apart, when all the other girls I took as passengers in my cab seemed to prefer the short and the tight.
“I’m heading up Reina right now,” I told her.
“Will you take me?”
I motioned to the car door, and she let herself into the back seat, so that when I got behind the wheel she was just behind me and I could see no more of her in the rearview mirror than the black lacy edges of her hair.
It wasn’t long before the car filled with passengers. There were arms out all over Prado, people waiting for an almendrón to pick them up and take them farther along the route. The girl sat in the back next to an older couple carrying a basket of flowers on their laps until they got off near the cemetery, and then a pair of students from the University of Havana climbed in, headphones in their ears, music so loud we could hear it over the newscaster’s voice and the tick-tock of Radio Reloj. Beside me in the front seat, a sniffling woman, older than my mother would be if my mother were still alive, and a young girl in her care who stuck her hands out the window as if trying to catch the wind.
The girl behind me asked to be let off by the Sagrado Corazón church. I felt her fingertips graze my palm when she paid me for the ride. I wanted to tell her it was free, that I would drive her anywhere. I wanted to tell her how to reach me, give her my number, or at least tell her my name and where she could find me on the route in the mornings, but I felt foolish, because I’d barely registered her face beneath the dark halo that seemed to rise from her mane as I shifted to get a better view of her. She slammed the door shut behind her, and I cocked my head out the window to see as much of her now as I could, but she’d already disappeared into the crowd navigating the stretch of sidewalk outside the church, and though I saw the pale motif of her dress somewhere in the pedestrian tableau, the rest of her was gone.
A family of cats made their home on the tin overhang between our window and the building next door. The thin white father cat watched over the patchy mother cat as she lay limp, her three babies kneading and sucking on her tiny nipples. I once thought of capturing a kitten to bring inside for Florencia and me to care for since we don’t have children, but she said cats were disgusting and would make her sneeze and cough even though she’s not allergic. I could never argue. The apartment was in her name. We weren’t married and she’d remind me often when we fought, threatening to throw me out, that not one millimeter of the space we’d shared for years belonged to me.
Rain fell that night, finally cooling the city. I sat by the window to feel the breeze, watching the cats that didn’t seem to mind getting wet. Florencia had the television so loud you’d think her deaf, but it was because our set was competing with the TV next door. She was watching a Korean soap opera. She loved them. They were all tears and tragedy, not dreamy and romantic like the Mexican telenovelas about peasant girls marrying land barons, which Florencia said were hopelessly out of style. She was thumbing through a fashion magazine she’d rented from a lady who collects issues left in hotels by foreigners. Every few minutes she’d hold up a page for me to see, point to a dress or a pair of shoes on a skinny model and say, “Why don’t you buy me something like that someday, Mago? You never buy me anything nice.”
This was not true. I’d bought Florencia many nice things. I bought her the television she devoted most of her life to, and the new oven in the kitchen to make her life easier, even though she only complained that it still wasn’t big enough for all the croquetas she had to make to fill her orders. Florencia was a psychologist, trained to cure insanity, or something like that. “Psychology should be a good business on this island,” she’d say, “because everyone here is depressed.” But she gave it up to peddle her mother’s secret recipe for fried finger-size breaded pork logs, making hundreds a day to sell to shops around Centro Habana and La Habana Vieja. It was illegal work. Like everything around here. Selling contraband croquetas, sometimes even to government vendors. But Florencia took the risk for the handfuls of cash she’d collect each day, and sometimes, after she paid her assistant and her delivery boy, and covered costs for ingredients, she’d make up to fifteen dollars by sunset, more than she would make in a month listening to people’s problems.
“I could do my hair like this,” Florencia said, showing me a shiny page with a red-lipped girl on it, her dark tendrils piled high on her head.
“It looks like she’s wearing a salad.”
Florencia shook her head and turned back to her magazine.
“Estúpido,” she muttered, loud enough for me to hear it but low enough for me to pretend I didn’t.
I enjoyed the silence between us until it was time for bed. I left Florencia in the sala with her beloved television and pulled the sheet over me, hoping she wouldn’t join me until I’d fallen asleep and that she’d leave me alone until I could sneak out before the first roosters of dawn woke her.
But I heard the TV switch off and Florencia’s footsteps entered the bedroom, which wasn’t really a bedroom but a space we’d forged out of the apartment with cinder blocks and vinyl sheeting.
“Your problem is you don’t appreciate me, Mago,” she said, even though my eyes were shut and I breathed heavy, as if already dreaming.
“I know you’re not sleeping. Stop being such a fraud, country boy.”
I’m not a country boy, but my parents were country people, from Ciego de Ávila, and Florencia loved to bring this up, calling me guajiro, mocking my manners, which she said were that of an old man, saying I wasn’t hip like she was, that when I turned my back people laughed at me for dressing so conservatively, my hair grown to my ears and parted on the side, not shaved down or upswept into a gelled crest like every other guy around. There goes Mago the Jehovah’s Witness! Me, with my country name—Margarito—even though she’s the one who started calling me Mago, saying I had to be some kind of magician to somehow convince a city girl like her to be with me.
“I’m too tired to argue, Flor,” I said, “and I don’t even know what we’re arguing about.”
“Do you know how many men look at me when I walk down the street?” She was kneeling on the bed next to me, needling my back with her fingers so I’d face her.
“I have no idea.”
“Dozens. Maybe hundreds.”
“Lucky you.”
“I’m blond, Mago. Do you know how many women would kill to have my hair color? Do you know how many men would beg me to have their baby just so it will come out rubiesito like me?”
“Please let me sleep, Flor.”
She shook my shoulder so I had no choice but to finally turn to her. I saw the outline of her small body, backlit by the moon, glowing in her white underwear, her face obscured by darkness so I couldn’t see the hard lines of her jaw, the cut of her cheeks, those light eyes she flashed to strangers as if they were diamonds, still poking my arm like a child, scratching my skin with her broken nails.
“Do you know that yesterday a man stopped me on the street because he thought I was American? American, Mago! How many Cuban girls do you know who can pass for a Yuma?”
“Not very many.”
“Liar. You don’t know any. Only me. And do you know what this man said to me when I told him my name?”
“Why did you tell him your name?”
“He said I had the same name as one of Italy’s greatest cities. He said it was one of the most beautiful places in all of Europe, full of history and majesty. He said it suited me.”
“Did you tell him it was just your grandmother’s name?”
“You’re not smarter than me, Mago. Don’t try to make me feel dumb when you’re the one who didn’t go to school past thirteen.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel anything, Flor. I’m tired. I’ve been driving all day. My back aches. Please, just let me rest.”
“You think you’re special because you drive your cousin’s almendrón and you make more money than I do. I’m the special one, Mago. Look at me with my glorious hair that God gave me. I’m like an angel in this dark hell. You don’t deserve me. Everybody tells me so. That’s what people think when they see us on the street together. Your worst crime is you don’t even know it.”
I picked up three girls going east on Neptuno, just as I dropped off a lady on the corner of Infanta. They took up the back seat while the front seat beside me remained empty. It was barely afternoon, but the girls were dressed as if going to a party, one in a glittery skirt, the other in pants that looked like your fingers might stick to the fabric, and the other, in the sort of yellow dress one might otherwise wear for Ochún. The girl in the skirt said, “Remember always to smile. Even if you don’t know what they’re saying, even if you think they’ve just insulted you. Smile, smile, smile.”
“And touch his hand or his arm any chance you have. They love that,” the one in the pants said.
The girl in yellow received these instructions with nods while the other girls continued.
“You can sleep there, but get out before any housekeeping lady sees you or you’ll have to tip her to keep quiet.”
“Look sad when you say goodbye. It makes them feel important.”
“Don’t ask if he’s married. Don’t ask if he has children. Don’t ask anything except what work he does and then look very impressed and say you never met anyone as successful as him.”
The girl in yellow laughed, and the other two scolded her.
“You’re getting the benefit of our experience, Claudi. Don’t be an ingrate. And make sure you leave with plans to see each other again.”
The girls didn’t notice my eyes on them through the mirror. I’m good at stealing glances when passengers think I’m just watching for cars. These girls were young. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. With makeup and jewelry, it was hard to tell. The fact that they had makeup and jewelry at all told me they were at least old enough to have found a way, for a while now, to pay for it.
They asked if I could keep driving along the bend down Prado so they wouldn’t have to walk so far in their heels. They would tip me extra, they said. And when other people tried to flag down my almendrón on the way, the girls commanded me from the back seat to ignore them, and said they would tip me more to keep the ride private too.
They got off just before the park, and I hopped out and pretended to check the engine so I could buy some time and see where they went. I saw them step onto a terrace outside one of the hotels on the avenida and there, three men stood up from a café table to meet them with kisses, their pale hands lingering along the girls’ backs.
I thought of Flor. Once, during one of her annual depressions, she told me it was her bad fortune to have been born in Cuba a pearl-skinned rubia who struggled to keep every kilo on her gaunt frame, unable to make a dollar on her body since foreigners came to the island looking for the voluptuous dark-skinned women of the travel brochures and Tropicana posters.
I’d never seen the area so packed with tourists, not even in the winter when all the Russians and Canadians come to Havana, and we were only in July, each afternoon flushed by rain. I stood around a few minutes before a policeman had a chance to chase me off since only government taxis are allowed to park in front of hotels, hoping to catch the eye of an adventurous foreigner, the kind who have figured out how much cheaper it is to travel in an almendrón than a tourist cab or even a Coco-Taxi.
“Chófe’ ” a voice said, and I knew it instantly, though it had been months since I’d seen her, heard her, saw her faded dress slip away in the crowds.
“Are you working?” she asked.
This time I got a good look at her, waiting for her to recognize me. Her dark hair swept to one side, curls that had been brushed out with care, stray strands sticking to the sweat at the base of her neck. She wore another long dress, sleeveless with buttons up the front. Navy blue, a color too heavy for such a hot day, and patches of perspiration marked the creases beneath her ribs.
“Yes, I’m working,” I told her. “I was just taking a break. The car is all yours. Where would you like to go?”
“I was hoping you were planning on doing the Boyeros ruta. I’m going to El Rincón.”
She studied me. I was certain then that she knew my face too, perhaps that, though she couldn’t connect me to the exact moment we’d met a month or two ago at almost this very spot on Prado, she sensed the familiarity between us as much as I did.
“To San Lázaro?”
She nodded.
“I’ll take you,” I said. “I always have a reason to go that way.”
She sat in the front seat, leaning on the door, taking in the smell of the ocean as we passed the Malecón. I played with the radio dial, but every station only played news and I decided music was better so I put in a disc, but when the first reggaetón song came on, she turned to me with a gentle frown and asked if I minded not listening to anything at all.
I wondered if she’d noticed how I’d driven past people with their hands out along the ruta, wanting to go in our direction. I wondered if she could tell that I’d wanted to ride in the car alone with her, even though we hardly spoke, even though someone called her on her mobile phone and she told that person she loved them.
Flor called me too. I ignored it like I usually do, so that I don’t have to waste unnecessary phone minutes, and she knows to call a second time only when it’s urgent. This time she didn’t call twice, so I wasn’t worried. I don’t miss Flor all day like I did in the early days of our love. It was almost ten years ago, when I was thirty-five and she, thirty. We both left other people to be together. We thought we’d found the source of eternal joy in each other. We thought we would never want anybody else.
We passed through the sloping roads of Santiago de las Vegas, and I turned onto the tapered path to El Rincón. A lone horse chewed on a pile of cut sugarcane. A cluster of barefoot children rolled coconuts around as if they were marbles. People stood in doorways of clapboard houses selling purple flowers, tobacco, beans, and rum, for pilgrims to bring as offerings to San Lázaro, or the orisha, Babalú Ayé. There were beggars gathered at the gates outside the church property, as usual, among vendors of prayer cards and rosaries.
“You can leave me here,” the girl said.
“I can wait for you. It will be hard for you to find a ride back to the city so late in the day.”
“You don’t mind?”
“I have someone to visit here. We’ll meet out front when you’re ready to go.”
Some of the beggars came right to the car and followed us until we were past the gates, asking for limosnas, and the girl and I each divided our chavitos among them. A man with no legs tried to sell us purple candles for the santos. The girl bought two.
She went into the church, but I walked ahead toward the hospital behind it. I hadn’t been in a few months. Flor says my visiting doesn’t really make a difference. My father no longer understands the passing of time. Sunrises and sunsets mean nothing. He doesn’t know that one day ends and another begins. He doesn’t see himself or me grow older, and doesn’t remember that his wife died decades ago. For him there is only this perennial hour—the haze of dawn or twilight—every face before him, a benevolent stranger. The doctors, the nuns, the other patients. Even the face of his own son.
They told me my mother died of pneumonia. I remember when she became sick, a strong woman suddenly frail, her complexion grayed until she dissolved into her bedsheets because she refused to go to a hospital, and they took her away. My father raised me alone in that apartment near Ciudad de la Libertad. He was a policeman until the spots became so bad, pink and white blotches on his brown skin, bumps rising, flesh peeling away, sores opening, denting so far in at places I was certain I saw bone. He didn’t believe the first doctor who told him it was leprosy. There are no lepers left in Cuba! It was eradicated by the revolution, along with the other evils. But the doctors said that wasn’t true, ask any dermatologist. Even though lepers were no longer forced into isolation, they preferred to remain hidden at places like the lazaretto of El Rincón among those who suffered similar conditions, away from the stares, superstitions of castigos de Dios, and the cruelties of the pueblo. I told him I would care for him at home just like we had cared for my mother, but my father said he wanted me to be free of him. As I think of it now, those were the months during which my father first started to lose his words, the names for certain objects just out of his grasp, the names of people we knew blanching from memory.
My father had been at the hospital for thirty years. Since I was fifteen and an uncle came to live with me after my father left. When I returned home after completing my military service, the uncle told me he’d convinced my father to sign the property over to his name, so I had to find another place to live. I complained to my father about it, but he’d already slipped into a limbo of time and reason even though he wasn’t yet fifty, and gave me the puzzled, empty stare I would learn to accept in place of what had once been an expressive face, eyes that could hide nothing. So I left the matter alone and found a friend who let me sleep on his azotea.
The guards at the hospital gate stopped me, telling me the santuario is that way, pointing to the church.
“I’ve come to see someone at the hospital.”
They raised their brows, surely because those who live in the lazaretto rarely get visitors, but they let me through.
I found my father in the room he shared with five other men. He sat in a wheelchair by the window, his once strong hands knotted by arthritis, his chest recessed, his back rounded and neck shortened like a hutia. He sat beside an old woman even smaller than he was, in her own wheelchair, wearing a white nightgown that showed the outlines of what was left of her breasts, the few white hairs on her head combed flat against her scalp. A nurse told me the woman came from her room to visit my father in his every day.
“Viejo,” I said, kneeling before him. “I’m your son. Margarito. You are Octavio, my father.”
He stared at me with curiosity, reaching out his shaky fingers to touch my cheek.
“I know you,” he said, and for that second, it might have been true, but his gaze quickly left me and turned toward his companion, who had a similar stare, as if she were seeing through my father into another place, one in which everything was not yet forgotten.
The other residents were quiet as they sat and took in the space of the white concrete room, the soothing view of the garden and a tree with chirping birds. There was noise down the corridor; conversations between nurses and nuns, the murmur of a radio.
I held his hand for a few minutes, rough and hard and cold in my palms. He’d lost feeling in his hands long ago, and though a blanket covered his knees, I saw his ankles had vaulted inward. He watched me with a vacant look, and I worried I was making him uncomfortable, forcing him into a moment of tenderness with me.
I told my father I would come see him again soon. I said it aloud and again in my mind, unsure of which way he would be more likely to hear me. I told him I would come next time with Flor, who never knew my father as the elegant uniformed officer he was, the one the neighborhood was proud to call their own. She’d come with me only twice to see him. She said it depressed her to be among the lepers and senile even if they weren’t really contagious. Nobody wants to be reminded of sickness and death, she said, even if she was a psychologist and supposedly trained to deal with people in distress. I thought she would want to at least be a comfort to me, but when I asked her to accompany me to see my father the next time, she said she would rather I go alone.
There were dogs roaming the church property. These were no longer strays, adopted by the groundskeepers, given names like Milagros and Santiago. Even the mutt one of the janitors found as a puppy, tucked beside the plastic baby Jesus in the Christmas crèche, was named Noel. There were seven or eight of them, but the groundskeepers kept them confined to a fenced garden when the church was crowded. One of them told me it was because humans couldn’t be trusted. They were capable of harm even if they came here to pray. One man had spent hours in the shrine only to walk down the church steps, find a small mutt napping on the pavement, and pick it up by its neck until he nearly crushed the animal’s throat. One of the groundskeepers saved the dog, asking the man why he would do such a thing, but he had no answer. The groundskeepers said it was their duty to watch over the dogs since dogs had been the only friends of San Lázaro, after all, walking with the man of the parable, licking his wounds as society shunned him.
The feast day of San Lázaro was a dangerous day for the dogs, I was told; the santuario packed with the devoted, carrying out promises, dragging themselves on their knees, raw from the pebbled road, pulling large boulders with ropes tied to their legs or shoulders. When my mother lay dying, my father made a promise to San Lázaro that he would join the pilgrims, making the procession to El Rincón on his knees on December 17 like the other faithful and penitents, and wear purple for all his remaining days, if only the saint would cure his wife, but his prayer went unanswered. Maybe when my father became ill, I should have tried making a similar promise to save him. I never did.
But when I came to El Rincón, I still liked to go into the small room they made to house the ex-votos; glass cases holding proof of prayers answered. Golden trophies belonging to Olympic athletes, baseball players; knitted baby shoes in gratitude of miracle births, children brought back from the clutches of death; photographs of families reunited after long separations, and medals from veterans of wars in Angola, Bolivia, Ethiopia, and Grenada.
I pressed my face close to the glass to read a letter in fading ink written by a mother describing her child’s recovery from alcoholism, touched by the mother’s gesture of writing a letter to a saint most people say never existed. I noticed I was no longer alone in the room of the ex-votos. The girl I’d brought in the taxi was also taking in the tokens of thanks. We moved about the glass cases quietly. I was aware of her, just as she was aware of me. But I didn’t want to speak, taking us both out of the spell of faith in that small room, as if we might each absorb a trace.
When we got on our way back to the city, the girl pulled a small notebook out of her purse and wrote something down.
“This is my three hundredth church,” she said.
“What?”
“I keep track.”
“You’ve been to three hundred churches?”
“Well, there aren’t that many in Havana, so most of them I’ve repeated several times. But I’ve been in a church each day for three hundred days in a row. Today was a special day. That’s why I wanted to come all the way out here.”
“Why do you go through all that trouble?”
She paused, as if unsure now that she’d started a real conversation between us, but continued. “I’ve been asking the santos for something almost all my life, but they never heard me. Somebody told me I had to make a big promise, show them how serious I am about repaying the favor even before it’s granted. I promised I would visit a church every single day for a year until they hear me.”
“You don’t get tired of going to churches?”
“Of course I do. But that’s the point of the promise. All those virgins and saints have to know how bad you want it.”
“What is it you asked for?”
She was quiet, and my instinct was to apologize for being so blunt, but then she turned to me, and I saw her face directly before mine for the first time. Her lips were thin and toasted by the heat, and I wanted to run my fingers over them just to see what she might do.
“I have an aunt in San Diego. That’s in the United States. Since I was born, my parents have begged her to claim me as family and bring me to live with her, but she said she didn’t want the responsibility of looking after a young girl. Now I’m twenty-six. On this island, practically an old woman. But I’m married, so I’ve been asking my aunt now that I have a husband and we will be responsible for each other, if she will finally file the papers to bring us over so we can try for a better life over there. She says she’s thinking about it. That’s the reason for the prayer and promises. To help her decide.”
That she should want to leave this island, even though I still didn’t know her name, somehow felt personally hurtful. Even more than the fact that she was married.
“I’ve never prayed for anything,” was all I said.
“You should try it sometime.”
Raindrops began to fall on the windshield. A few moments later, we were driving under the thickest clouds in the storm, streaks of water sliding in through the windows, which we rolled up, and the air in the car grew warmer between the girl and me.
We edged down Vía Blanca and the girl asked me to leave her near Calle Aguacate. She had to go to work, she said.
“What is it you do?”
“I’m a typist for a poet. He says he’s blind, but I would swear I see him watching me as I sit in front of him. I think he just likes to hear his voice but not the actual writing of words. I’m good with my fingers though. My mother taught me how to play piano when I was a child. I could play with my eyes closed. She thought I could be a professional, but then some Spaniards offered her money for the piano, so she sold it.”
“And your husband?”
“He doesn’t play the piano.”
“No, I mean, what does he do?”
“He’s works in tourism. Sometimes they let him be a guide to foreign groups, which is the best, because he makes tips. But sometimes they just keep him in the office.”
“You don’t wear a ring,” I said, immediately fearing I’d made her uncomfortable.
She looked down at her hand and rubbed the finger where a band should be.
“We’re saving money for other things first.”
I thought of Flor, who said the only reason to marry was if you were going to get something out of it like a visa or property. Beyond that, there was no point. “Love, sex, children, family,” she’d say, “you don’t need marriage for those.”
I’d wanted to marry her for a time. I was traditional. Perhaps I still am. But Flor laughed at my desire to make her a bride as if I were trying to con her just to get my name on the apartment deed.
When we came to the poet’s address, the girl paid me, and though it wasn’t nearly enough for what I would have charged anyone else for the long ride out to El Rincón, I told her I wouldn’t take her money.
“Why not? It’s only fair.”
I shook my head and waved my hand so she couldn’t drop any bills into my palm as she was trying to do.
“You did me a favor. Because of you, today I saw my father. He’s at the hospital there.”
She smiled and put the money back into her purse.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll take you to your churches. I’ll meet you where I picked you up today, every morning at nine, and I’ll take you to a different church so you can make good on your promise until you get your prayer answered.”
She seemed uncertain as she studied me and finally said, in a voice that was lower and slower than the one I’d previously heard from her, “I’ll let you take me. But only because my mother says you should never stop someone from trying to do something kind.”
I woke up before the roosters even though it would be hours before I saw the girl. Flor stirred beside me and rolled onto her side to watch me dress for the day, her face tranquil, eyes still swollen with sleep.
“You don’t kiss me anymore,” she said, as I slipped my belt through the loops of my pants.
“What are you talking about? I kissed you yesterday when I got home. You didn’t notice because you were busy watching the Koreans.”
“You used to kiss me in the morning. When you woke up. When you thought I was still asleep. You don’t do that anymore.”
I leaned over to kiss her, but she turned her face from me.
“Not like that. It’s too late. I’m awake. The moment is gone.”
“When did you become such a romantic?”
“When I realized there was no romance left.”
I put my shirt on and noticed a button was still missing even though I’d asked Flor to sew it for me days ago. I took it off again to see if she’d notice the reason, but she didn’t. I reached for another shirt, a blue-and-white-striped one that once belonged to my cousin, who said he bought it in Lima.
“Flor,” I said. “Why have we never tried to leave this island?”
“We’re too old to go anywhere.”
“But before. Why didn’t we ever try?”
“Neither of us has anybody anywhere who can claim us.”
“But there are other ways.”
“I tried. Before I knew you.” She was referring to the time she almost married a Mexican but the guy married another girl whose family was willing to pay more to send her off with him.
“Why did you stop trying?”
“I realized life is hard and miserable no matter where you live.”
“You’re miserable?”
She shrugged. “Things could be better. They could also be worse.”
She got out of bed and walked toward the kitchen in her underwear. I tried to think back to a time when Flor was ever modest with me but couldn’t think of one. She’d been the one to pursue me when I was with another woman. She’d found out I worked at a shipping facility in Jaimanitas and came there in a borrowed car and told me she was tired of her boyfriend and wanted to be with me with enough confidence for us both.
I heard her turn on the oven and pull out baking sheets and bowls for the morning shift. She spent hours alone in the apartment with her twenty-year-old assistant. It only occurred to me then that Flor’s lack of modesty might not be reserved only for me. I walked over and met her by the sink.
“Give me some money, Mago. I’ve got to send Josué out to buy lard today.”
“I’m short this week. Don’t you have any?”
“I don’t get paid until Saturday. Why are you short?”
“Yesterday was slow. I made only enough to pay my cousin.”
“How could it be slow? It wasn’t a holiday.”
I didn’t want to tell her about the girl or my trip to El Rincón.
“Just one of those days,” I said, going back to the bedroom and reaching into the cigar box we’d bolted into a slat beneath the bed and took out some bills from our savings. I went back and handed them to Flor, who inhaled as if they were roses.
I said goodbye and kissed her cheek just as she said, “One day I’m going to leave you for a rich man. I may be too old to find a good-looking young one, but I can still catch a rich foreign viejo looking for a girl to take care of him until he dies. What do you think of that?”
“A fine plan, mi amor.”
“You’ll miss me when I go. Your life will be empty, but I’ll write you letters from my new house and send you photos.”
“How kind of you.”
“And when he dies, I’ll come back to Cuba and buy a big house so we can live in it together. And we’ll never have to think of this rotting cave again.”
“You’ll be a hero.”
“Yes, Mago. I know.”
The girl wanted to go up to La Víbora, to the church of the Pasionistas. She was wearing the same dress as the first time I saw her, and the sight filled me with unreasonable hope, as if she’d worn it only for me. I’d gone to Prado early to try to get a word in with the permuta crowd again, remind everyone that I still had an apartment to trade, but there was no interest. I found her waiting by the almendrón, holding a newspaper over her face to block the sun, and despite the small patch of shade across her cheeks, I saw she’d gone through the trouble of putting gloss on her lips.
We were quiet for most of the drive into the hills, but I entertained myself by pretending the girl and I were on a date. I smiled at the picture I created of us as a couple, driving out of the city to enjoy a picnic in Parque Lenin, or on our way to Varadero or Playa Girón for a day at the beach. I thought myself the luckiest man in the world to have this pretty, gentle young woman at my side. The way she loved me, I imagined, was full of sweetness, her thin pianist hands grazing my neck with her fingertips whenever we embraced. She leaned against the window and watched the dusty city panorama blur past us, the dreamy girl who writes for the poet but doesn’t care even to listen to his words.
I looked over at her, slouching in the seat inches from me, close enough for me to touch either her arm or her thigh, for her to hear me whisper that I hoped her prayer was never answered so that she’d never leave me on this island without her.
I parked in front of the church while she went in.
“Are you sure you don’t want to join me?” she asked.
“No, you go ahead. I’ve got to mind the car.”
She disappeared between the open doors and into the darkness of the church.
I stood by, taking in the downward slope of the hill, Havana pooling at its base, specks of white among blue, a shred of sea behind it. Here in La Víbora, wind curled though the green parks, among the shanties, and brushed against my face as I closed my eyes and pretended it was the girl reaching for me.
She returned to me a few minutes later looking somehow refreshed and wrote down the date and name of the church in her little notebook as we started on our way back down to Centro Habana. I drove her to the poet’s home, and once again, she tried to pay me, but I refused her money.
“Don’t try to pay me again,” I said.
She seemed taken aback my firmness.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever known willing to do something for free.”
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t free when she gave me a peace unlike any other, a respite from the crowds that normally fill my taxi, a private liberty in which I can play in our shared silence at an imagined intimacy, a life that will never be.
September mornings are dark until nearly seven. I pulled the car out of the garage and passed a guy walking a muzzled dog forced to drag a tire that had been tied by a rope to its neck. The man walked briskly and the dog, though muscled and wide, struggled with the weight of the goma as it twisted and rolled to its side. The dog tried to stop, but the man kicked it in the rear to keep it moving.
I rolled the car slowly as I passed the man and lowered the window.
“Why don’t you give the dog a break? You can see it’s tired.”
“This is a fighting dog, asere. He’s not allowed to get tired.”
“There are police on the next block. They’ll fine you if they see you.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The dog rested on its back legs as I distracted the man, the tire falling flat.
“You’re torturing the poor animal.”
I could see the man growing impatient with my delaying him.
“What do you know about animals? You drive an almendrón.”
“I know what I’m looking at here isn’t right.”
“Nothing about this island is right. What about the tire I’ve got tied to my neck? Do you see anyone stopping to help me?”
He kicked the dog again, and they both started walking, the dog’s neck dipping under the weight of the tire, the man tugging it up with his hands on the dog’s scruff. I couldn’t watch anymore and started the car in the direction of Galeano to start my ruta, to make as much as I could before it was time to pick up the girl.
I’d been driving her for nearly two months, even on Sundays, my only day off, and telling Flor I’d been hired by an old friend of my mother’s to run errands. Together, the girl and I visited dozens of churches, some, multiple times. Each morning, she appeared from the archways on Prado and we’d ride in an easy silence that she only interrupted to remark on the heat, to say the forecast predicted early rain, and when I’d drop her afterward at the doors of the poet, she would sometimes touch the top of my hand softly as she thanked me.
Flor only noticed that my daily earnings had thinned. I tried to compensate by starting my route earlier in the morning or finishing later at night, but it didn’t make up for the prime morning hours I offered to the girl to help her make her promise.
That morning, when the girl found me waiting for her by the corner, she settled into the car in the way I’d memorized and tried to conjure for the rest of the day after she’d gone to her job and I picked up other passengers who sat in her place. Her shoulders against the upholstery. Her knees leaned toward me.
“I have something to tell you,” she said. “Today is the last day I’ll need you to drive me. I’ve fulfilled my promise.”
“Your year is over? Already?”
She nodded.
“What happens now? Did your aunt file the papers to bring you over?”
“Not yet.”
“Then why stop? You can start another year. Keep going until you get your wish.”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve given up, chófe’. I won’t do another day.”
She wanted to go to the cathedral, since it was the first church she’d visited when she’d started her year of promises. I parked the car and walked with her to the edge of the plaza. I wanted to see her walk up the steps. She was in another of her long dresses, which, when I once complimented her, she told me she’d sewn herself; another hobby she’d picked up to make use of her restless fingers until they found another piano.
When she came out a few minutes later, her face serene and satisfied, we walked together back to the almendrón. A mother cat lay next to a shopkeeper’s door, two kittens nursing on her. The girl stopped to watch and the shopkeeper stuck her head out to tell us the mother cat belonged to her but we could take one of the kittens if we wanted.
The girl bent over to get a closer look at the cats, swirls of orange and black on white.
“You should take one,” I said.
“I don’t want to love anything on this island. It will make it harder to leave.”
I wondered if she noticed how slowly I drove when it was time to take her to see the poet, if she could tell that I did not want the morning to end because we’d run out of churches and days together.
When we arrived, I told her that if she should ever want to start a new year of promises, I would wait for her at the same spot on the same street at the same time every morning.
“You don’t have to do that. I told you, it’s finished.”
“If you show up, fine. If you don’t, that’s okay too. I’ll be there. It’s not out of the way for me. It’s on my ruta.”
She smiled and touched my hand, the way she’d started doing since she’d stopped trying to give me money.
“Thank you, chófe’.”
I never told her my name, and she never told me hers, though once, when I left her to her work with the poet, I heard a woman call hello to her from down the street before she stepped through the door. The woman called her Margarita.
Flor found us a permuta, and she did it without my help, as she emphasized, when we went to see the apartment together that night. It wasn’t too far from our current home, on the edges of Barrio Chino, larger, though there were an extra two flights of stairs to climb, which made it an even trade.
“I don’t want to move,” I told Flor when we got home and were supposed to be thinking it over. “This place isn’t so bad. And that place isn’t much better.”
“This apartment is mine to trade and mine to keep, Mago. I’m the one who makes the decision.”
“I don’t have to go with you.”
I didn’t mean it to sound like a threat, but that’s how Flor took it. She stared at me as she settled into her favorite chair to watch television.
“That’s true. You don’t have to come with me. But we both know you have nowhere else to go.”
I woke before the roosters. Or maybe I never really slept. I was waiting for the hour in which I could rise without arousing suspicion, dressing to start my ruta and make my way to the corner where I hoped the girl would find me even if for just one more day of her promise. Flor didn’t wake, though she had to be up soon to start her morning croqueta dispatch. I leaned over to kiss her goodbye, so she couldn’t bring up charges against me later, but when I came closer, instead of brushing my lips against her face, I pressed my fingers lightly into her cheek.
I was through the first hour of my route, driving passengers on their morning commutes, when Flor began calling. I ignored it at first, but she called again and again until I picked up, her voice panicked because Josué hadn’t arrived for work and if she didn’t make her day’s deliveries, she would start losing orders.
“You need to come home and help me, Mago. I need you to make those deliveries for me.”
It was nearly nine, when I was due at my stop of Prado, though there was no guarantee the girl would be there to meet me. I wanted to wait for her, even if it took hours, for a chance at the nourishment she’d given my days. But Flor was crying like I’d never heard her, or like I’d only heard her when money was involved, so when I unloaded the last of my passengers, instead of heading to Prado, I turned in the direction of our apartment to help Flor.
She’d meet me on the corner of Infanta, she said, to save time. As I approached, I saw Flor standing with three trays piled against her chest. She saw my taxi coming and stepped closer to the curb. I slowed the car but couldn’t make myself stop. I kept driving and heard her shout my name several times, but I was already headed in the direction of the Malecón, watching Flor shrink in the rearview mirror. The phone started to ring, and I answered to her howls that I’d driven right past her.
“I didn’t see you,” I said. “I’ll come back around now.”
But I was already driving along the seawall, the waves spiking over the Malecón, covering the avenue in liquid sheen. Flor’s calls didn’t cease until I turned the phone off, parking the car at our usual corner on Prado, waiting for my favorite face to emerge from the shadows of the archways. I knew she would come. I knew she, too, had found some small sense of refuge in the space of the almendrón that she would find difficult to surrender. I waited, because I knew that even though she’d said she’d fulfilled her year of promises and had given her prayer legs of its own on which to stand, because she was a girl bold enough to have faith in the unseen, to know that there is no end to a promise, she would come to the corner to find me.