The years passed. Mercedes was pregnant with her second child and Alejo had not become wealthy. But he had bought himself a number of sporty brown-and-white-and-tan shoes and a brown pin-stripe suit with long tails, à la the wolfish jitterbugs of the day. With his hat and shining cufflinks, he looked sharp when he went out at night. As for Horacio, Mercedes dressed him, for the most part, with neighbor’s hand-me-downs and items left behind by visitors to the house. And there was always the trash space under the hallway stairwell where people left old shirts, pants, shorts, socks, dresses, and shoes that she took in for Horacio and for herself. But in her mind she devised imaginary clothing for Horacio, princely robes to fit the poetic nature that she was certain she had passed on to him. From the first days when Horacio crawled on the floor and dancers partied in the living room, she believed that he had inherited her father’s and grandfather’s talents. As if one man died to flow into another. “Never forget that you have aristocrat’s blood,” she would tell him. “You have the blood of an artist.”
She would tell him these things as he played on the shredding linoleum floor.
“You can see and do anything you want, niño. Your grandfather was a poet and your great-grandfather was a singer. That’s why you can do what other people can’t. You have Sorrea blood.”
Then, looking far away, she would say, “Look what we can see, niño. Instead of seeing the street, we can see a river. Instead of the building, we have a mountain. And what do we have here?” she asked, touching his hair. “We have delicious-smelling flowers!”
“We do?”
“Oh yes, we Sorreas can see anything we want. You can have anything, niño.”
“Where’s Pop, Mama?”
“Dios mío, chico, he’s out.”
Much of the time Pop disappeared for two or three days, and Mercedes, alone with Horacio, did not always know what to do. There were long silences, Horacio looking around with his sad eyes, and Mercedes watching the street from the window. So she would tell Horacio stories. Tonight she began, “Niño, you were named after your great-grandfather, Horacio Sorrea. He was a great opera singer, and his voice made him famous in all of Spain. He was an enormous man with a barrel chest and the eyes of a Caesar. He was very important and well respected, and he lived in the city of Palama on Majorca, a big island off the coast of Spain. Everything was white in that city, all the buildings, all the churches, the roads, the walls. There were statues everywhere. His house was big and white with black gates. When we came to visit, he gave me and Luisa and Rina a room with large windows and a canopy bed. At the time I was very happy. I wore a sunhat and was always getting kissed by my papa. And your great-grandpapa was good to me, too. He was always kissing me, and each night before bed, he would come into our bedroom and give all of us money so that we could buy candy the next day.
“In the evenings, before we ate dinner in a grand room set with crystal, he would sing for us, usually an aria from one of the Italian operas, and then afterward we would sit down to a huge meal and he would always say, ‘We’re going to the worms, so eat up,’ which your grandmother, Doña María, didn’t like to hear. She was very religious, while he was not. But she loved him just the same, and we all loved him… I was very sad when he died.”
She went into the bedroom, returning with an old photograph of the first Horacio. It was taken at his deathbed. He was old with white beard and furrowed brows. His eyes were closed, his hands placed atop an open Bible.
“That was a few years later. We were back in Cuba when one night we heard your great-grandfather singing. His voice seemed to be coming out of the walls and floor. It woke everyone. My father, bless his soul, looked everywhere and spent the night on the porch. In the morning all the doors in the house opened and slammed shut three times, like they say a tomb door does when a soul rises to Heaven. Later we found out that Horacio had died in Spain that day…”
She touched Horacio’s face and said, “And when he died his voice went to you.”
Some neighbors now passed in the outer hallway, and from habit Mercedes went to peek through the keyhole at them. She was always spying on people: out windows, from behind curtains, shades, and venetian blinds, through cracks in doors. Horacio was looking out the window but saw only a passing car. She returned and kissed Horacio, suddenly panicking, as if she would be alone forever without him. She nervously ran her fingers over his ribs, tickling him and cackling, making a face. He would not smile. Then she didn’t know what else to do.
Generally she encouraged Horacio to use his talents, as if that would provide him with some shelter in life. Sometimes in the evenings, they sang. She loved hearing him. She was proud of his voice. Nearly seven years of age, Horacio had already been singled out from his classmates by the choirmaster for free voice lessons. He practiced in school three days a week, and on Sundays Mercedes would take him to church and sit in a pew below the choir balcony, listening to Horacio sing. She would sigh, thinking of her days when she sang on Radio Holguín with her classmates. She also had a beautiful voice, pure and mellow, as if pushed through the hollow of a tree. Singing made Mercedes feel happy. She remembered many melodies, and to these she sang the lyrics in the same way that she spoke English, partially. She sang everything in la, la, la. That night she tried a radio jingle from years before:
López’s furniture is the best
Come in and give your soul a rest
la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
Bring your cash, bring your cash
and you’ll sleep well at night
la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.
But Horacio did not feel like singing, and so she brought out a composition notebook and crayons. They drew pictures together. He made houses and figures of men, she made haggish women and flowers. (One day he would be able to draw anything. Out on the street, where the kids passed the evenings drawing with boxes of colored chalk, he would be known as “the artist,” for his ease in drawing anything the older boys suggested: bosoms, nudes, cops and robbers, guns, knives, pricks.) Even as they drew, Mercedes and Horacio remained in the living room near the window, watching the street. Occasionally Horacio saw Mercedes feeling around her huge belly, and he thought she must be in pain. He grew tired of his drawing. He wanted to listen to the radio, but he couldn’t because Alejo had thrown it out the window long ago in a fit of rage. And at that time they had no television.
They left the living room and went into the bedroom. In those days Mercedes didn’t like to sleep by herself. She was always seeing things in the dark. Often she had a bad dream filled with sadness, about people leaving her. One second here, the next second, gone like a puff of smoke. Or she would see Buita coming at her from the shadows with a knife. When Alejo lay beside her in the big wide bed, she slept well and had beautiful dreams about Cuba. But in his absence the dark became too much for her, even if her Horacio slept by her side. Trying to sleep she kept wondering, “When is he coming home?”
She stared out the bedroom window at the dark courtyard with its one light. A roof door slammed shut with the wind, then—bang—it slammed shut again. She was thinking about a stroll with Alejo in Holguín years before, and then she thought about what Alejo did to her just a few weeks ago. She had burned up three of his shirts with an iron. He had grabbed her hard by the wrists, twisting them until she was forced down to her knees, and made her repeat, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry for being stupid.” Horacio had been in the room and tried to pull Alejo off her, but he was too enormous for the little boy. Alejo had played the big man with Horacio and pushed him away. A “big man” was strong, no one was to question him, he could do as he pleased. But Alejo was not comfortable in that role. He was a Jekyll and Hyde: The next day he had been contrite and come into the apartment with a present for Mercedes and candy for Horacio. He had lightened up on Mercedes: no big abuses, just the usual giving of orders and his disappearing act.
“When you have a baby, you never know. Some people can wish you harm,” she told Horacio. “So you have to be careful.”
She took a deep breath and exhaled. Now she was always sleeping on her back. Horacio watched her for a time and then asked her, “Why does Pop stay away from here?”
“Sssssssh, chico, don’t ask me that.”
Mercedes was thinking about Alejo’s recent behavior: he had started to drink to excess. And out of nowhere, he had begun taking her to bed each night. Drink riled him up; first thing, when he came home from the hotel, he closed the French doors, pulled down the shades, and turned on the fan to drown out the bed noises. Depending on her mood, Mercedes liked it. Only when she was feeling homesick or angry with him did she not want him to have a good time with her body. What she did not like at all was the smell of his breath, like rye whiskey or rum, and how he sometimes could not even stand up straight. She could take the days of Buita’s abuse and of being locked up in rooms, but the sight of Alejo falling down drunk was too much for her.
The first few times he had come home drunk, he was happy, brought her a bright, cheery scarf or another present and danced with her in the living room even though there was no music. And he had called Horacio into the living room, given him a dollar, told him to give his Pop a kiss and to buy himself a toy. And he had begun to sway, hanging onto the wall. His drunkenness struck her as funny because in Cuba he had never touched a drop of anything but Hatuey Indian Malt. Nothing more, unless there was a special occasion. And then he only had a little Spanish brandy or Cuban rum.
Alejo started out each day innocently enough, having a few drinks here and there in the hotel, where the liquor was free. Wooden cases of scotch, vodka, gin, and rum were stored behind a pair of shiny metal doors. A huge freezer and ice machine beside the liquor closet sent out chilling waves of frost into the kitchen whenever it was opened. The liquor closet was locked only with a latch and hook, so that around noon, all the men on the morning shift began to pass around shot glasses of whiskey and rum. By then the morning’s preparations for the crowded businessmen’s luncheons were completed, and the bar had become so busy that a bottle or two would never be missed. Then, among the sizzling and simmering pots and pans, everyone hurried to serve out the platters, each man at his post, ladle or serving fork in hand, with his little drink ready when it got too hot, and the headwaiter started shouting through the double doors for them to hurry. After the rush the cooks turned to the preparation of dinner and guzzled a few more slugs of booze here and there. By the end of the shift, the cooks and helpers were painlessly drunk and ready for the subway ride home.
This was not somber, melancholic drinking. It was the drinking of kinship. Men at work. Greek, Italian, Jew, Haitian, Latin, Negro, having a few laughs, talking about women, and teaching each other phrases in their own languages, in the long run entangling English with French and Italian and Spanish and Greek and Yiddish and jive. In the rush of good feelings from the whiskey, there was a lot of joke telling, talk of sex, gambling, and card games. Their salaries were not high, but the companionship and booze made up for it.
But a year ago, in 1950, something had happened in Cuba that made Alejo’s drinking more serious. One day he received a letter from his mother and stood by the window to read it by the sunlight. The letter in his hand seemed very old, written in faded light blue ink as if from the nineteenth century. The light lit up the page and seemed to pass through his hands. He read that his brother Hector was dead.
There had been a rainstorm in Cuba and Hector, then about forty-five years old, was riding his horse home in the dark. He was drunk and riding too quickly when lightning cracked the sky. His horse bolted, throwing him headlong into a tree, and he broke his neck. If he was not already dead when he slid down into the mud, he drowned in the rainwater.
Alejo cried out: “Dios mío! I can’t believe it! My brother, my brother!” He was like a wounded animal, shaking and his chest heaving, as if he were going to have a heart attack. “My brother! What can I do? Mercita tell me, what can I do?” he cried in a high-pitched voice, leaning against the wall, his head and chest ready to burst. “Dead like nothing,” Alejo kept repeating.
“Don’t kill yourself over this,” Mercedes told him. “He was your brother, but it’s not as if you have been hearing from him all this time.”
What Mercedes had told him was true. After the kisses and embraces at the harbor before the journey to America there had been not another word between them, not a letter, no news, until Alejo learned that his brother, whom he loved very much, was dead.
Now Alejo would take a swig of rum, have a thought that made his eyes burn, and then bury his head in his arms. “¡Carajo!” he would say over and over again, “my brother is dead.”
“Don’t be a fool, that’s not going to help you,” Mercedes would tell him about the rum. “You’re too good for that, too strong, too much of a man…”
But despite her sympathy—and she felt very bad for him—Alejo’s spirit grew melancholy. He took to disappearing at night, had his way with her in bed, and tried to have a good time, as if his grief had left him. Sometimes when he was drunk and he touched Mercedes, she would run down the hall to find shelter with Horacio, and Alejo would call out, “To hell with you!”
One afternoon he just wouldn’t take no. Horacio was sick with a virus, and Mercedes was tired. When Alejo began to run his hand up and down her side and then placed her hand on his sex, she pushed him away.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I’m the man, I’ll touch you when I please.”
“No you don’t, Señor. You think you can come in when you want to and do as you please. What am I, a slave? You didn’t even look at me for two months and now—what happened? Did someone say that you don’t sleep with your wife?”
“Mercita, come here!”
She was in the corner of the bedroom, trying to hide herself beside the closet, but he grabbed her by the wrists and threw her onto the bed.
“Take off that rag!” he said about her dress, which was like a rag. And when she hesitated, he tore it down the front and then got her into bed. She was squirming under him and pushing his face away from her. “Malo! Malo!” she kept repeating. “Bad man! Bad man!” But he had his way with her.
Now she never resisted him. Instead, when he took her to bed she allowed herself to float away. Her body was in bed, but she herself was elsewhere: in the hallway, looking down on Horacio, by the window, looking at the clouds. All he would have had to say was, “Mercita, my wife, come here… my flower…” and she would have gone willingly. No. He was determined to show her that he was the man and to break the spirit that challenged him. No wife of his was going to turn her face away from a kiss or shrink at his touch, refusing him love. No. He was the man. And he was not going to go without love just because he took a “little drink” now and then.
This evening was no different from any other since his brother’s death. Where is he? Mercedes wondered. There was a noise at the door, but it was not Alejo. She sighed, and Horacio, beside her, pretended to sleep. On the bureau the Wes-clock continued to tick-tick-tick. Next to it there was a framed photograph of Alejo and Mercedes in the good days. He was wearing a guayabera and was very thin and handsome. She had her hair up in a Betty Grable coif, and her ruffled blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons and flowery embroidered vest gave her the air of a young starlet from Hollywood.
“Mama,” Horacio said, “I can’t sleep.”
“Just have good thoughts and go to sleep.”
“Mama, what are you thinking about?”
“About my family. My papa—but that’s not always good. If you think too much about a dead person, he will think you are calling him.”
“The dead?”
“Yes, child, like in the movies you love to watch.”
Inside her belly there was a gentle kick. Horacio put his hand on her belly. Suddenly in a bad mood, Mercedes yanked it off.
“Be careful, child!”
“Did it hurt?”
“You ask too many questions. Just be careful!”
Restless, Mercedes got up. There were some voices coming from the street. She went into the living room and looked out the window: There were some drunk Irish kids passing around a bottle of beer and a soldier standing beside a car, urinating in the street.
“Pssssssh, I hate waiting every night.”
Downtown, on Tenth Avenue, Alejo finally left the club where he had been drinking with a friend. He had been staying in Brooklyn the last two nights, going to parties thrown by new acquaintances. Each time he meant to stay only a few hours, but he would get carried away and stay until it was time to go to work. He kept a change of clothing in his locker at the hotel, but now, running out of money, he had to go home.
With another kid coming, he was going to straighten out. He had lost his temper with Horacio too many times. Sometimes he didn’t want to deal with his own situation. He would have a drink and the kid would start crying. No matter how much Alejo loved the kid, he was too noisy, and so Alejo would say, Cállate, cállate! “Shut up! Shut up!” Not that he didn’t want to pay attention to Horacio, but this was Mercedes’s job. She was the woman of the house and he was the man. The man’s job was to go out and work, which he did, and pay the bills, which he did. Her job was to clean the house, cook, and take care of the baby. If the baby was crying too much, then she wasn’t doing everything right. In Cuba, they know how to raise children so that the man doesn’t get involved, but in the small apartments of New York, you see the kids all the time. He had hit Horacio too many times, and he had tried to make it up, but it was too late. He would come home a little drunk and call Horacio over. Remembering the day before, when Alejo had slapped him for no reason, Horacio would play deaf and dumb and run down the hall, hide in his room.
That wasn’t Alejo’s fault: when Buita left him and Hector died in Cuba, he felt abandoned in the world. A wife cannot be pure family. You have to provide for her and prove yourself. And if you can’t do that, if she doesn’t respect you and calls you a drunk, then you have to go out and find people who do respect you. And pretty women to dance with you and shake their bodies for your admiration. That woman, Mercedes, was letting herself go. She was thin before, but now she was pregnant again and too fat with the baby, which filled her up. In Cuba, a man could truly have his way. Poor Hector used to have his way. He had Myra and the children at home on that farm outside San Pedro, and he had his nice little mistress in town. Papa had his little girl, too, so why couldn’t he? Dios mío, how Alejo missed Hector and the rides they used to take to the broken-down part of town, with the little shacks and the dirt floors and nothing but a mattress or just piled up newspapers covered with a sheet. The girls took care of them there. They could find it anywhere, even in a cane field, should he feel bad for that?
Was it so bad to have a few drinks? So he spent money. He spent too much on entertainment, but he didn’t forget the rent; he paid it with his sweat. He didn’t go to loan sharks but to the union, and he paid them back the next week. Other men didn’t give a fuck if their kids starved, and they kicked their wives out into the street for yelling about one little drink. So his family shouldn’t look at him, at their provider, in such a way. They should have respect, and the boy should give him kisses and not run away. Do they think he doesn’t deserve their love and respect? That he’s supposed to beg for it? That he, Alejo Santinio, should beg for a piece of ass from his wife and for a kiss and hug from his own son, when he is the man of the household?
When the new one was born he was going to teach him respect and love. And he was going to treat him good. This one would be a good Santinio. He would know there’s nothing wrong with a few drinks. He would be a boy who would love his Pop. And his name would be Hector, after Hector Santinio. And if it was a girl, they’d have another baby until a male was born and there was once again a Hector Santinio in this world.
It was very dark. The roof door was slamming in the wind. The slamming door, to the ear of a child trying to fall asleep, was ghostly, a result of strange forces, the kind that Mercedes always spoke of, just making life a little more difficult for uneasy sleepers. Worries became animated in the dark and slammed into the window like pounding fists, upsetting Mercedes who became more and more nervous, hitting and pushing Horacio away for no reason. The door slammed, and voices came down from the third floor. The deaf-mute speaking in her mangled vowels and her dead-drunk husband trying to explain something and giving up, repeating, “All right, all right, what doyouwant-metodo, die?” Mercedes breathed as if in pain, and electricity tightened Horacio’s muscles, and for them both sleep was impossible.
Horacio kept wondering if his talents to draw and sing would help keep out the suffocating gloom he felt surrounding him. He wondered if he would ever stop hearing shouts in the dark hallways or see his Pop in the next room drinking until he fell down. But that night nothing had changed.
At the door, finally, there was the jingling of keys. The door opened and closed with a sudden, tremendous slam. Its frame was so painted over that it had to be pushed hard and always banged into the glass armario in the niche in the entranceway. There was a picture of Christ with a burning heart on the door, and it fell down. Then Alejo, leaning too far forward, rushed into the armario, things fell, and Mercedes opened her eyes.
Footsteps in the hall and then Alejo’s voice: “Mercita, Mercita it’s me.”
She did not answer him.
“Mercedes,” he called out with more force. “I’m here.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m hungry, make me a steak.”
“It’s three in the morning.”
“I don’t care. I’m hungry.”
“Well, I’m not your slave. Get one of your friends to make a steak.”
“Mercita, Mercita, don’t make me crazy now.” He went into the bedroom, took hold of her wrists and started to squeeze, when he realized what he was doing.
“Please, Mercita,” he said. “I’m very hungry. Cook me a steak.”
“Psssssh,” she said, getting up, “I am a slave.”
She went into the kitchen and took a steak out of the refrigerator. There was always meat and chicken and shrimp, which Alejo would bring home once or twice a week, wrapped in freezer paper, from the hotel. As she prepared the steak, Alejo sat at the table, smoking cigarettes. She said nothing, until he went to get the whiskey bottle from the cabinet and began to pour himself a shot. Then she said, “Look at your face when you swallow that. Why?”
“Because I am the man, and if you don’t like it, get out.”
How many times had she heard him say that? She sighed. After she served him the steak, she went back to the bedroom, got Horacio, and they went down the hall to Horacio’s room where they tried to sleep. Alejo ate his steak then went to his bedroom. Finding the bed empty, he went down the hall and pushed open Horacio’s door.
“You sleep with me. Leave him here.”
When Mercedes didn’t answer him right away, he took hold of her and dragged her from the bed and down the hall. In their bed he smothered her with his enormous body. She tasted his salty sweat and the whiskey and steak on his tongue and mouth. The bed shook for a long time under Mercedes’s and Alejo’s weight. He made great breathing noises; she sighed. He ground his teeth and his face and body turned a livid red. He shouted something—She turned her face away from his and let her arms slide off his back. Tenderly, he kissed her neck and rolled off her. Then they went to sleep as best as they could. In the morning Mercedes took Horacio to church and, sitting below the balcony, listened to him sing in the choir.