He looks as though a blast wave consumed the right side of his body, as though an alien creature has taken a bite out of him, I swear.
At twelve, René was still living in Oriente, in a strange town called Moa, which means the Desolate Place, or the Place of the Dead, a truly bizarre place. In Occidente, we’d never even heard of it. René says it’s a city of considerable resources that could be prosperous if only its inhabitants got a percentage of the profits. But it’s in Oriente, and in eastern Cuba, people are poorer than anywhere else, they have to be, it’s practically the law. The Desolate Place or the Place of the Dead was hardly likely to be an exception, especially with a name like that.
René was brought up by his neighbors as his mother had to leave when he was very young. The “difficult years” had made things impossible and the boy was likely to starve to death or grow up deformed. His mother headed west to Occidente to earn a living. René never knew why his mother had abandoned him, until one day he found out—things always come out in the end.
Their neighbors didn’t approve of the mother; they didn’t like the fact she prostituted herself. René heard the rumors but they were no more than insinuations, a secret language or message he had to decode and which, in the end, obviously, he managed to decode. And although they helped him in other ways, what the neighbors really wanted was for René to crack the code, for the bomb to explode. Rumors are the fuel that keeps small towns alive.
René locked himself in his room, buried his head in the pillow, but didn’t cry. When I asked him about it, on the day he decided to tell me, he said that at the age of twelve he didn’t understand the importance of a mother, that what had scared him was that he didn’t think badly of her, that he didn’t think she had failed him or anything, even though, in a way, people were encouraging him to think badly of her. After a while, I don’t know how long, René decided to stop brooding about it and to support his mother at all costs, and this is what forced him to quickly become a man. At thirteen, René was stronger than ever; at fourteen, stronger than he was at thirteen; at fifteen, stronger than at fourteen, and so on.
He dropped out of school, started stealing, developed a sixth sense for details. He had an eagle eye that sees little but remembers everything it sees. He made skeleton keys, copper keys that opened every door in the town, and no one ever caught him. The Desolate Place or the Place of the Dead was the largest industrial complex in the country, comprising 40 percent of global reserves in nickel and 26 percent of cobalt, he told me. The factories were some distance outside the town and there was never any noise from them. The streets of the Desolate Place or the Place of the Dead were deserted. Everything was spattered with a red mud, the result of high mineral deposits in the soil. The houses, the pavements, the faces of the people. I told him I found it difficult to imagine and he said something I liked: he said it was as if the hottest point of the sun had been ground into powder and settled over the place.
By sixteen, stronger than he was at fifteen, René had stolen a lot and was starting to wonder whether he wanted to carry on. As though he had suddenly developed a conscience. People were already having to deal with various demons. Health conditions among the workers and residents of the Desolate Place or the Place of the Dead were appalling. They were suffering the environmental consequences of the mining operations. There were no official figures, he told me, but just as rumors grew that his mother was a prostitute, so worse fears now began to grow. Elevated incidences of cancer, respiratory problems, contaminated water, possible chemical radiation. A sickly child was born whom the people of the Desolate Place or the Place of the Dead dubbed Pinto Boy, since he had a mole, a gigantic birthmark like a benign tumor that might become malignant. This was enough for René. At seventeen, he gave up his criminal activities and headed off to work at the factories.
Factory One was a mixed processing plant owned by the government and a foreign company. It had acid pressure leaching, considered state-of-the-art technology in nickel extraction. The plant was one of the most efficient in the world. There were piles of waste, paths that glowed orange as though toxic. Trucks carted away soil laden with mineral, fifty tons a load. René saw all this with his eagle eye, he told me.
They sent him to Factory Two, a cavernous, half-ruined city of metal with internal bus routes, its own electrical plant, and thunderous, well-oiled machines. The smelting plant was crisscrossed by rivers of leachate, slag runoff like litmus. René showed me some photos; they were disgusting. The ammonia and all the other chemicals made it hard to breathe. Every time he inhaled, he felt his nostrils burning and thought he might pass out. The other workers breathed normally; they were used to it.
After a few weeks’ training, René became a sampler, someone who checked the rotary kilns in which the nickel was processed. He began to live in dark, narrow ducts filled with clouds of burning black dust where the ambient temperature was at the limit of what is bearable. All day, he had a metallic taste in his mouth, on his tongue and his lips. Over time, he told me, the intolerable rumbling of machines became silence. The furnaces became a refuge. He didn’t miss stealing, he didn’t miss the neighbors, he didn’t miss his mother.
At eighteen, René wore tight-fitting overalls, synthetic gloves, a yellow plastic hard hat, a facepiece respirator, and a belt from which hung nozzles and sample bottles. He never said so, but I pictured him like one of those species that live in the depths of the ocean, those blind creatures that no one has discovered yet. One afternoon, he tripped or fainted—he isn’t sure which. He fell against the furnace wall, and the furnace burned part of the right side of his body, fried it. He lost consciousness, obviously. An older woman, also a sampler, stumbled on his body some minutes later. She screamed, they say. But who was there to hear her? No one. The woman dragged René’s body through the narrow duct, climbed a metal staircase, and reached the first floor. Here, where there was a little more light, she realized that the furnace had left René disfigured and that the shock would probably kill him.
The shock didn’t kill him. René spent six months in the hospital and came out alive, although, as anyone can see, he was left with a section of skin that is no more than a giant scar. Part of his right earlobe had to be removed when it became infected. His right arm, right shoulder, and right cheek were burned. And there are others, parts that are hidden by his clothes. The range of his vision was reduced, but his eagle eye was intact, he told me, and that is what mattered to René.
His mother told him that everything was fine now and sent for him. René moved to Occidente and arrived in the pueblo. His mother lived there and no longer worked as a prostitute—she had a house and a job with a clandestine company. René started out as a blacksmith’s assistant, later he sold feed for horses, even later he got a job at the beach collecting trash. René started work before dawn. He cannot be exposed to the sun for too long. One day, his skin started growing over some of the disfigured parts, and when it had been growing for some time, René realized that there is no more body for the skin to cover, that he has more skin than anything else, more skin than he needs, that it is building up between his fingers. On his right hand, René looked as though he was wearing a glove. He didn’t like it, so he had surgery. They cut away all the skin and threw it into the trash.
René went back to work. Things with his mother were going well. She took care of him, determined to make up for lost time, pulled a few strings. René didn’t get involved, didn’t want to get involved. His eagle eye, he told me, knew where not to look. He started to work at the hotel, he was the new driver, and this is how I met him, when he drove up one day as I was walking to the bus stop. He asked me if I live in the pueblo. I said yes, and, without getting out of the car, he asked me if I wanted to ride with him. I hesitated, but he insisted and I accepted. You’ve got no chance, I thought. But René was not looking for a chance, he was looking for company and conversation. He said that he had seen me in the hotel, in the staff canteen at lunchtime. He said he thought we had things in common. Really? I said. What things? I said. He couldn’t explain and looked very ashamed. He put his hands on the wheel and stared at the road. I couldn’t stop thinking about all that burnt, scarred flesh.
Don’t worry, I said, I’m sure we’ve got things in common. René smiled. We didn’t say much else. He dropped me off outside my building and I thanked him. I climbed the stairs to the apartment, still thinking we had nothing in common, but that night his repulsive image, this ugly guy, this broken thing, went round and round in my head. The following day, when I got to the hotel, I went looking for him and said hello. We arranged to have lunch together. It became a habit. We started to fall in love; this was the moment for me to act. I needed a right-hand man at work. I explained to René how the scam worked. He had been there nearly three months and no one had told him. But he knew something was going on. His eagle eye was powerful. He could read a car license plate from two blocks away.
We didn’t traffic meat, drugs, or tobacco. Everything we stole, we stole simply so we could live in a minimum of comfort, not to get rich, because here anything that involves getting rich ends in catastrophe. OK, René said, I get it, we live in a country so small that there will come a day when it’s not even big enough to house the owner. Sure, however you want to look at it, I said, it is what it is. We stole ham, cheese, bottles of wine, rum, whiskey, tins of tuna and sardines, jars of pickles.
Since it is an all-inclusive resort hotel, the amount of food the tourists will consume is carefully calculated in advance. A figure that is invariably inflated. The excess is divvied up between the workers and the security guards. The maintenance staff and the drivers are the only people authorized to move between the various parts of the hotel. The contraband is transported from place to place in their bags, their toolboxes, their briefcases. Sometimes, at the last minute, word goes round and the whole thing has to be nixed. There’s an inspection scheduled, and we can’t risk it. It’s funny, in a way, because the guest’s account has already been settled, the goods have already been signed off, and it would be suspicious if there was a surplus. So we have to make it disappear. We slice the ham and the cheeses, use bandages and surgical tape to stick it to our bellies, our backs, our legs, and smuggle it out that way.
Despite everything, business was brisk. There was enough food to bring home and even to sell a little. I made enough to buy Mamá an automatic washing machine, and I started thinking about redecorating the apartment. René started siphoning off some of the gas allocated to the hotel. He stole it and I found people to buy it. One way or another, I felt like things were taking off, until my father was appointed manager of the hotel. In his first week, he fired five people and even thought about laying me off. Not because he caught me doing anything, but because I’m his daughter and the very thought of nepotism gets him riled up. He tried to fire me but can’t.
My father decided that, of all the chauffeurs working at the hotel, René should be his driver. I didn’t like the idea, and René found it worrying. But we couldn’t object; we just bided our time. I went round to René’s house at night and talked to his mother. I observed their relationship. When Mamá started to get sick, I felt completely devastated. I didn’t feel like doing anything, but I had to carry on stealing. René supported me and I got used to his physical abnormalities. I started to see anyone who hasn’t suffered burns down their right side as deformed.
René gave me a slightly bigger percentage of the profits from the sale of siphoned gas. Mamá took to him, as did my father, though for very different reasons. René was generous to me and to Mamá, and with my father he was respectful and disciplined. With his own mother, he was kind of intense. I knew she hadn’t been a good mother, the way mine was. But it didn’t matter now they were together and happy. I thought about this one day when I saw them hugging, or another time when I saw them joking around and arguing. They argued, they fought, they patched things up, and no one was traumatized by any of it. There were no falls, no dramas.
It seems stupid now, but in the moment, that’s not how I felt. I realized that I no longer had a healthy mother with whom I could do things like this. All her years of being a perfect mother no longer matter, they’ve melted away. These days, even an ex-prostitute is more of a mother than she is. I stopped going round to René’s house. We carried on with the business, but René started getting careless and stealing more than he should. I saw it coming, but I didn’t say anything. Then my father discovered forty liters of gas allocated to his Nissan had gone missing. He found out where René stashed the fuel and fired him on the spot.
René tried to explain but my father wouldn’t let him. So he came to ask me to intervene. I can’t get involved right now, I said. René feels that I betrayed him. No one else believes that—René getting fired has seriously affected me financially. I know, René said. But you ratted me out, he said. How do you know? I said. I know, he said, then turned on his heel and walked away, with his eagle eye and his charred, flaccid skin.
I haven’t seen him since. But that doesn’t surprise me; nothing surprises me. The only thing that surprises me—go figure—is that if you don’t think about it, you don’t notice. But if you do think about it, even for a second, there’s always some tiny part of your body that is about to itch or ache.