After her sister’s departure Mercedes went through a long period of bitterness. “You work so hard, and for what?” That was her response to everything those days. Every night Alejo would come home and find her in a mood of deep moroseness, and he would attempt to soothe her. Miraculously, he was trying to be better to her, but she would not accept him. When he put his arms around her, she would move away.
“Why do you do that?”
“Because of what you did to me!”
She reminded him of how he ran around, playing the big man, spending their money, and of how he let Buita treat her like a slave.
“I didn’t want to be that way,” he said. “But sometimes a man does what he does.”
“You didn’t? Pssssh, but you did. You were bad to me, all for that woman Buita!” And then she would shout Buita’s name so that it was heard a thousand times in one night. Her eyes would get big, her hands would shake, and as she stormed around the house, Alejo tried to have a soothing little drink. She calmed down when his friends showed up, but if he ordered her to cook a meal at midnight, as he often did, then she started again, shouting until two or three in the morning, so that no one in the apartment could sleep.
For that reason, Horacio found himself a woman in an East Side discotheque and moved out. They lived together for a time until it seemed certain Horacio would soon be married. This excited Alejo; he went out and bought himself a very handsome blue suit that showed off his most gentlemanly qualities. But it turned out that Horacio, wishing to avoid the troubles of a big wedding, eloped with his young bride one day, and that was the end of that. The suit went into the closet.
And because of his parents’ shouting, Hector tuned out of the situation. He remained silent, he would go to a friend’s apartment, get drunk, and find shelter in feeling dizzy.
Sometimes there was peace, a calmness that was hard to trust. But sometimes that calmness remained. Alejo would come home and sit in a nice comfortable easy chair with its reclining back. He had his beer and a bowl of fruit or a tray of food, and he sat watching cowboy programs on television, the vaqueros zooming across the plains and shooting it up. He seemed so calm, with the light flickering in his face, almost like a little boy in a shoddy movie house in Cuba, watching Hoot Gibson, a little kid who wanted adventures and to live a long, wild life. Alejo liked to watch “Sugarfoot,” “Rawhide,” “Gunsmoke.” Maybe at one time he had been a Cuban cowboy. He had been a farmer, Hector knew, and there were cattle on the farms of Oriente, miles and miles of grazing land. Sometimes when Hector passed through the living room on his way out, Alejo tried to speak to him, but by then the conversations went like this:
“Hector, come here, I want to talk to you.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing, just want to know how you are.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m all right. See you.”
And Hector would leave, without saying a word more, not even telling him where.
One day during a period of calm, Alejo came home and began discussing with Mercedes the idea of opening a little general store in the country outside of New York. He was starting to think about leaving the hotel. After listening, Mercedes replied, “And where are you going to get the money? From the clouds?”
“From credit.”
She laughed. “They won’t give credit to a cook. Ask your millionaire friends who are leeches on you. Go ask for all the money you liked to give away.”
But Alejo continued to talk about opening a store. It would be a little general store where the local people would come by and chat with him and have something to eat and drink. He would find a small town with calm afternoons. The work would not be hard or rushed, and he could watch television. It would be, except for television, just like Cuba of the old days. Down there, bars were found only in the big cities. In the small towns all the drinking went on in the general stores. Out front were the meats and canned goods and barrels of rice and herbs and candies, and in the back there was a little counter that could be lifted up from the wall, when the owner wanted to leave. Behind the counter there was a bucket of ice for Hatuey Indian Malts and other beers, and behind that, a rack for bottles of rum and whiskey. Then maybe a coffeepot, and some kind of steamer to make café con leche. On the way home from work or on an empty afternoon friends and neighbors gathered, could have a few laughs. On the street there might be a cock fight or an animal auction. In any case, it could be viewed from the counter, as people had their little drinks, or good, icy-sweet malts, a guanábana batida, a Coca-Cola. In San Pedro there was such a place near the church, and Alejo used to go there as a young man and talk over his plans to come to the United States.
One afternoon Alejo returned from work with an armful of pamphlets and brochures on properties for sale in the country. He got them from a friend whose brother was a real estate agent. Sitting at the kitchen table, he looked over these brochures and set three aside, ate dinner, examined them again, and then was left with two brochures of interest. One was of a retirement community with swimming pools and tennis courts. He may have chosen it because, in one of the tiny pictures, there was a blue-green meadow like the Viñales Valley in Cuba, with horses galloping through clusters of trees. And on the cover there was a fine brunette in a bathing suit sitting by the pool, looking up and smiling at him. The price of a house in this community was twenty-five thousand dollars down. That was too much. However, the other brochure was really just a mimeographed sheet with the following description: “House and storefront, 1/4 acre of land. $15,000.” This excited him. He carried the sheet around and looked at it in the evenings, conferred with friends, asking their advice.
Another day he came home with a brochure on bank mortgages, and the same evening an old friend, Eliseo Hernandez, came around to the house to explain the many intricacies of such purchases and the responsibilities of running a business, which Alejo had avoided since the days of Eduardo Delgado, when he had once had a chance to own the tobacco shop. Eliseo had come from Cuba in the mid-1950s. Alejo had put him up and lent him money. Over the years Eliseo had prospered and now he owned a number of apartment buildings in the Bronx. He told Alejo, “I’ll lend you some money if you’re serious about this thing.”
Alejo began to plan.
This consisted of going out and looking at the property in question with Eliseo, meeting with the owners, and making contact with food suppliers in the Bronx. The only problem was the timing. Although Alejo was not ready to retire for another five years, he wanted to go through with the deal now. Thinking it was all a dream, Mercedes told him he would be crazy to leave his job for so uncertain a venture. Wanting peace and tired of her doubts, one evening he told her, “I’m the man, and I’ll do as I want!”
And he might have bought the property if he had not had his accident. It happened one early morning. In the hotel kitchen there was a huge kettle ready to be moved from the stove, and being strong, Alejo was sent by the head chef to get it. The kettle was very heavy, and giving it a yank, Alejo lifted it and carried it across the room to another table; then he sat down because something had pulled loose inside his stomach and it was painful for him to walk. He worked the whole day, and the next morning he went to see a doctor who informed him that he had ruptured himself.
In a few weeks he went to Flower Memorial Hospital where he was put in a room with a tremendous, sunny view of Central Park. During his stay the doctors conducted the usual examinations and were amazed how battered his heart, liver, and lungs had become. The hernia was secondary; suddenly he had to lose seventy-five pounds! And no smoking! And no salty or fried foods! And no sweets! And no drinking! They cut him open, retied certain muscles, and left him in that sunny room to recuperate and memorize the lists and lists of requirements they had set for him.
During the hospital stay, which lasted six weeks, Alejo lost interest in buying the general store. The suddenness of his hospitalization with all its costly bills reminded him how much he needed his union insurance benefits. There was also a pension he could look forward to, and social security if he remained working at the hotel for another five years. Above all, he would miss his friends from the hotel. Cooped up in the hospital room he grew nostalgic for work and his pals. Suddenly the idea of being away from them, and for that matter from his friends in the neighborhood, made a move from the city to buy a store seem unpleasant. One afternoon when Eliseo called to say that the real estate manager had found another interested buyer, Alejo acted as if the store had not meant that much to begin with, and told Eliseo to forget about it.
Alejo spent his time watching TV, reading hot Spanish girly magazines like Pimienta, flirting with the nurses, and seeing visitors. Everyone in the family visited him. Horacio and his wife saw him one evening, Mercedes and a friend on another, Hector in the early morning, before he went to school. After two weeks in the hospital, Alejo looked great. There was redness in his cheeks and he had lost twenty pounds. He still looked enormous as he sat up bare-chested and hairy in the hospital bed, his lower abdomen covered with thick bandages. He was happy as a mouse when Hector came into the room carrying a bag of candy, but Hector was cold, aloof.
Alejo was laughing. “You know what the doctor told me?”
Hector shook his head.
“He told me no more fooling around!”
“How do you feel?”
“Good, but it hurts like a burn.”
And then he motioned Hector closer and peeled down some of the top bandages to show him where the doctors had cut. There were two deep, dark-red ridges coming up to his navel, all stitched up. “Pssssssh, but it hurts. Me duele mucho.”
“Well, it’ll go away,” Hector told him. And then, as Alejo asked him about school and life at home and Mercedes, Hector went deaf. No matter what he was asked, Hector answered “Fine,” and then he said, “Look, I gotta go. See you later, all right?” And then, as he was about to leave the room, Alejo said, “Chico, aren’t you going to give me a besito? For your Pop!” Hector came over and gave Alejo a light, cautious kiss on the neck and didn’t like it or trust the situation, as if Alejo’s calmness was a trap and he was suddenly going to blow up or see ghosts or cry and slam him into the wall. Alejo took hold of Hector’s arms, but Hector found himself saying, “Ah come on, Pop, enough is enough,” and he left right after that. It was his one visit and it was enough.
Hector was tired, tired of being a Cuban cook’s son and hearing people say, “Oh you look just like Alejo!” Look like Alejo? It made him cringe. He felt like a freak, a hunchback, a man with a deformed face. Like Alejo? At least Alejo had his people, the Cubans, his brothers, but Hector was out in the twilight zone, trying to crawl out of his skin and go somewhere else, be someone else. But he could do nothing to change himself to his own satisfaction. Anything he did, like growing his hair long or dressing like a hippy, was an affectation, layered over his true skin like hospital tape. Hector always felt as if he were in costume, his true nature unknown to others and perhaps even to himself. He was part “Pop,” part Mercedes; part Cuban, part American—all wrapped tightly inside a skin in which he sometimes could not move.
He would go and get lost. Sometimes down to the rich neighborhoods, West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, and down to the park where he sometimes went with a red-sunburst, cowboy-looking guitar that he had stolen out of a music store window. He had just pulled the guitar off its stand and gone running off with it. If he had been caught, he would have gone to reform school like the deaf mute Mary’s kids, but he didn’t get caught.
One day, when he was sitting in the park under a tree, strumming a chord, some rich kids who were high on acid came by and asked him if he wanted to come to a party with them, and he said yes. They always had parties when their parents went away on weekends, they said. They would take LSD and eat opium and swallow pills. Hector went into various apartments, with white bearskin rugs, books everywhere, African instruments on the walls, color TVs, and big mirrors at the ends of halls, two bathrooms, maids trying to ignore everything. He took drugs with the others in order to be a friend. Young pretty girls turned into wild flowers and cats. They pulled down their panties and hopped on top of pianos, shook their loins and showed off their parts, while the piano strings hummed up their long slender legs into a softness that gave off scents like perfume from another world. They made him insatiably hungry, until he wanted to eat and taste them, all the beautiful flower children kissing and fucking and eating grapes and ice cream and brownies in the kitchen and in the closets. Fine and naked zombies walking around and fluttering their hands like butterflies. Girls in the corner, naked, braiding their long hair and moaning each time the sunshine warmed their necks and the smalls of their backs.
And Hector would sit there trying to maintain his cool, but all around him corpses were hiding in the closets, their eyes looking out from the dark. He could always hear Mercedes’s high pitched voice calling him: “Hector! Hector!” And he would swear that Alejo was in the next room, even though he was far away. Then there was the problem of his own body, the Cuban-diseased body with its micróbios and a heart thumping loudly, ready to burst. Looking in a mirror, he would see Alejo’s face and feel the micróbios festering inside him, and hear in the halls, children running by like fleeting sprites, like Mercedes, until someone tapped his shoulder and drew his attention away, or some pretty naked girl, with the most concerned expression, passed a rose under his nostrils, as if to bring him back.
Sometimes he came home in this state of mind, and then he would become anxious trying to avoid Alejo who, in those days after leaving the hospital, wanted to win back his friendship. As soon as Hector came home he went to bed. One time there was a knock at his door.
“Who is it?”
“Yo,” Alejo said. “It’s me.”
“Okay, okay, what do you want?”
“I came to bring you something.” Alejo pushed open the door and turned on the light. Holding a box, he looked at Hector most strangely, puzzled. “Is something wrong with you? You never go to sleep this early.”
“Nothing.”
“Well, I’ve brought you something.” And he put the box on the bed. Inside were a pair of white sneakers, just like his.
“These are for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my son.”
“Okay, okay. Thanks, Pop.”
Then Alejo tried to give him a kiss, but Hector turned away.
After Alejo left, Hector stayed up thinking about him and the sneakers and about looking like him. Hector couldn’t sleep.
The rich kids’ fathers were doctors and lawyers and book publishers. When they asked about Alejo’s occupation, Hector always told them “chef,” as Horacio always told people. But he was only a cook, and he smelled of meat. Hector got sneakers, but his friends were given stereos and sent away to resortlike colleges and to Europe. Hector went to Coney Island. So when Alejo asked, “Why don’t you look at me? I try to give you things,” Hector answered him roughly and demanded more. When he finally graduated from high school, which he had hated, he demanded a cash present, one hundred dollars, which Alejo managed to give him. Then Hector blew it on a girl in a bar. And even that wasn’t enough. Nothing could equal the big parties, trips, and cash of his West End and Riverside friends.
Hector came to a point when he paid no attention to Alejo.
“Would you take a walk with me today?”
“No Pop, I’m busy.”
And yet Alejo continued to try. Each time he went out, he returned with something for Hector. A pair of socks, identical to his own; a T-shirt, a sports shirt, or pants identical to his own.
“Come on, Pop,” Hector always said. “I’m my own man.”
But he wasn’t. He wanted to get out of his skin and go somewhere. He was tired of the neighborhood: the hoods, the racists, the snotty college kids, the dope fiends, the booze, the drugs. He was tired of getting drunk with his neighborhood pals, tired of being high, tired of being like a Cuban Quasimodo. He wanted to go somewhere, but where?
One day in the late spring he started to think about Aunt Buita in Miami. She still sent him presents every Christmas and wrote the same letters each year: “I miss you very much and dream of the days when you will come to see me.” So Hector badgered Alejo until he called Buita to arrange a visit that summer.
The very day Hector left for Miami, he said two words to Alejo, and passed much of his time pacing his bedroom, impatient to go. He looked in the mirror; he was the hip blimp wearing a gray flannel jacket and black turtleneck. “Don’t you think you’ll be hot in Miami?” asked Alejo.
“No.” That was one of the two words.
And he had loaded himself down with a guitar and with a stack of records, rock ’n’ roll—“heepie music,” as Buita would call it.
“Don’t you think you’re taking too much?” Alejo asked him.
“So?” And that was the second word.
There were kids playing ball in the street and some neighbors waiting with Alejo on the stoop when the car came around. Alejo was wearing black pants, a belt that had been stretched very far, so that its holes were like oriental eyes, a T-shirt, and comfortable sneakers that gave him spring when he rushed to the car to get an embrace and kiss from Hector. He rapped at the window. Hector moved inside and waved him away. There were so many people around.
“Come on, I’m your papa,” said Alejo, with his head so far inside the car that his slightly bristled cheek was right in front of Hector. “Come on, I’m your papa,” he said again. But Hector ignored him, and Alejo went back to the stoop, waving like a mad man as the car finally drove away.
Alberto Piñon, Buita’s bandleader-contractor husband, had aged gracefully. His white hair was parted down the middle, and he had a suave moustache and clear blue eyes that were still the eyes of a young child. He was a calm man who attended to his responsibilities in an orderly fashion. He carried around a thermos of Cuban coffee and rum. He owned two Cadillacs and had taken Buita on a cross-country journey to Disneyland—not once, but twice! He owned a large house with central air conditioning, three remote-control color TV sets, a swimming pool, and a white baby grand piano on which, in his spare time, he composed simple melodies in the mode of the Cuban songwriter Ernesto Lecuona. He had thousands of dollars in the bank and had built houses everywhere in the Miami area. Looking over swampland, he would put his hand on Hector’s shoulder and say things like, “One day I’m going to build a huge development for Cubans here.”
He took Hector for long drives into the country, down to Key West or up north to the Hialeah brothels where he visited his “regular little girl, sweet as a spring peach.” He didn’t smell of meat. He was clean. He took showers, dried himself frantically, and then covered himself with clouds of talcum powder. He owned a huge gold watch with all kinds of dials. He had perfect white teeth. He was a member of the American Legion, and belonged to a weekly canasta club. In his garage he had pictures of himself seated at a table with Caesar Romero and Errol Flynn. He seemed to have gotten around. In stores he never looked at the price of anything, and not giving a damn about God, he ate meat on Fridays and did as he pleased when it came to church. He liked playing patrón. One night he took Hector to see a stripper in a nightclub. She was a tanned beauty with a perfect athletic body. “Lolita, the Cuban Goddess” stripped down to a mesh nylon body stocking and then tore it off and flung it out into the audience. She had gold-dyed pubic hair. Flowers covered her nipples, and glitters made two circles on her thighs. She danced for a time and then took a pack of cigarettes and shoved it up her vagina. Then she danced and wriggled and pulled the cigarettes out one by one, giving them to the men in the audience. For a finale, she placed a long candle up her vagina with the wick end lit and sticking out. As she lay down, men in the audience came forward and lit their cigarettes. Then music, curtain, and she was gone.
“You like it here, huh, boy?” Alberto asked him.
But Hector’s time with Alberto was not always fun. To acquaint Hector with his business, Alberto took him out to a construction site and put Hector to work with a pick and shovel, digging ditches for thick, corrugated foundation cables. Hector did not mind. He enjoyed the dirty stories the men told during lunch time and liked the idea of working with Cubans who did not fall down. And he was flabbergasted one evening when, after work, Alberto took him to a secret meeting of Cubans who wanted to overthrow Castro. The men drank and reminisced about the old days, hissed like snakes with the pain of nostalgia, pointed at maps of Cuba. There was a discussion about landing spots for invasion along the southern coast of Cuba, a discussion of weapons. Then a tray of sandwiches and coffee was brought out, and dues were collected. Some of the Cubans considered the secret group to be like a social club; others were dead serious. Many of them, including Buita’s “son,” Ki-ki Delgado, were survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion. They talked about killing “the son-of-a-bitch-over-there” and about the crucial mistakes that had been made because of Kennedy and Fulbright. Although Hector said not a word in the discussions, he felt himself part of an inner circle, around strong Cuban men.
Hector liked being away from New York City, in a clean place. Downtown Miami was slick, neon everywhere. He went to a movie house near Calle Ocho and saw a film about vampires. Hector liked the Cuban sandwiches, the air conditioning, the modern buses. There were no street gangs, derelicts, or junkies. No broken glass. He liked being near Cubans who did not stagger down halls; he felt protected. Strolling along the white sidewalks, under coconut and orange trees, he daydreamed about living this good life. Aunt Margarita, Ki-ki’s mother, said that Alberto and Buita would buy Hector a car and send him to a nice school if he ever decided to stay with them in Miami; he would be able to go swimming every day and go to the movies at night, and he could find himself a nice, wholesome girlfriend to marry and have many children. Here, in Miami, he stood at the edge of the water, thinking that Cuba was only 140 miles away.
As part of her scheme to keep Hector in Miami, Buita often recounted to him the crimes of his mother and the Santinio family’s trials with her, while at the same time she bought him everything he wanted, promised him the world. Hector felt as if his eyes had been gouged out by her, as if his brain had collapsed. She was getting to him. He was believing her. “At night,” she told him, “I have dreams about your poor father. Oh how he calls to me in his dreams, crying, suffering so… and you know why.”
Then the old story again: “Ah, your mother… when she married him, and it turned out that he wasn’t rich, she told everyone that she would make him suffer. He had his chance to come with me and Alberto but she wanted him to stay in that city with the lowlifes! With her kind! Not the fine Cubans you find here. Here he could have made something of himself, but now all he is is a cook. I thank God my father isn’t alive to see that. Do you know how much time I spend wondering how your Papa can take it, being nothing and working with nothing and having nothing in the world… and in the richest country… and all because of that woman?
“I know he drinks. He drinks because he knows he has nothing and will go nowhere. He could have been many things, but now he’s a cook, and he takes a drink. Not because the work is demeaning but because he comes home and she’s waiting to take the money he earns from his pockets and because she ridicules him. Of course he takes a drink, who in Cuba would have ever thought these things would happen to him?
“When we came to New York, of course we tried to bring him into the finest Cuban circles in the city. We would take him to the grand ballrooms, where the cream of Cuban society gathered. The few times we took your mother, she made a scene. Of course your father was going to dance with someone else, how else could he have fun? Or come to know the important people? We didn’t want to spoil his chances so we left your mother at home, but when we came back she always accused him of desertion, the poor man, just when he was trying to improve himself.”
At this point in the story, Buita would pull Hector close and hug him, giving him many kisses. Then she would start weeping.
“And when you were born I was worried for you, because I knew all about the crazy things your mother had done to your poor brother, things too horrible to tell you—but she poisoned him once, and I saved him, you know, took him to the hospital and saved him. And do you know what, child? That woman never thanked me, even though someone’s death is the worst thing in the world. And when you were born, I told Alberto, ‘Oh no, she’s going to do the same things over again.’ I warned your father and told him ‘Watch that woman, she’s up to no good.’ And I ask you, child, what happened? You almost died! Her thoughts were so scrambled that she couldn’t even take care of you well enough to keep you in good health. You should have seen us crying here, the day your father called to tell us what had happened because of her negligence. No intelligent woman lets someone stay ill for so long and does nothing about it. It was her fault, no matter what she says to you, dear, it was her. She only thinks about herself, which is why you got so ill and almost died.
“We were ready to go to your funeral, but thank God you’re here. We used to call up your mother but she never said a word to you about these calls, did she? Do you remember? Remember how your aunt sent you all those presents? And why? Because we love you so much and with a love like a mother’s love, not like your mother, who used to take a look at you and feel disgust for you and contempt for your father…”
Buita was tricking Hector, trying to feed his antagonisms toward the old life. But she needed to do more to win him. She set up a lure: a blond Cuban girl named Cindy, who suddenly began to visit in the afternoons.
Cindy was a beautiful girl. She always sunbathed in the backyard, showing off her body in a tight black one-piece bathing suit. On hot days when the cracks of the sidewalk sent up whisps of steam, her skin would soon be covered with beads of sweat as she lay in the sun. Then she would come into the air-conditioned house, eat a snack, and inquire about the soap operas that Buita had been faithfully following all her days in America. Then, to torment Hector, she would put on some Beatle records and shimmy on top of a piano bench, the bathing suit pulling tightly on her buttocks. As he watched Cindy twisting her body all around, Hector wanted to sink his teeth into her flesh. Each day she seemed yummier and yummier. But even though she wore the tightest bathing suit that showed off her “wares,” she was a virgin, so pure and Cuban, like the golden honey she swirled around in her mouth after lunch.
She was part of a dream. Always so cheerful and sure of herself, she shimmied through her days, while Hector remained quiet, shy, and gloomy. In his fantasies Hector became more like Cindy, part of the “good life” that Buita was offering him. Cindy dancing, Cindy in the cool air conditioning, memories of Alejo’s melancholia on days when Hector ran from him, death and screaming, and heart attacks… the thought of returning to New York made him ready to explode. He wanted to tear off Cindy’s bathing suit, go to a nice wholesome Dade County Community College. He kept thinking of Cindy’s mouth and nice clean sidewalks and the clusters of trees around the park and Cindy’s luscious hips and good productive Cubans everywhere and Cindy’s tongue, soft and moist, gleaming in her mouth when she talked; the opportunity of joining Alberto’s business and Cindy’s cleavage and dear Aunt Buita and good Aunt Margarita and Cindy’s plump thigh…
Above all, to Hector, Cindy was a nice, clean, Cuban girl with a modest, gold crucifix around her neck. He had believed in God once and was ready to go that route again, if necessary, to finding purification. He wanted to be cured of his sense of illnesses: inadequacy, stupidity, obesity, ignorance. He wanted to go to bed and wake up a Cuban in the Havana of 1922, run into Alejo as a boy. But he would settle for Miami. He would believe in God and all the things good people believe in. He would court Cindy, float in the clouds, get married, daydream watching the ocean, run off to a little Cuban-American hideaway, fuck her on top of a piano bench and on a big silken bed with heart-shaped pillows, have children, and shimmy to the Beatles and boogaloo to soul and surf music.
The truth was, Buita was a close friend of Cindy’s mother and had presented her with the appealing scenario of a future wedding and a good start in life. So Cindy’s mother sent her over to Buita’s house. Cindy, who liked the swimming pool and the air conditioning, did not really like Hector. When he tried to impress her by pulling a book from the shelf and pretending to read, Cindy would smile. But her smile didn’t mean friendship. She had already gone through her “reading thing,” as she called it, before high school. And when Hector suggested, “Why don’t you come over when Buita’s not around?” her nervous laughter didn’t mean she wanted to. Not at all.
On the evening of the moon landing, Cindy and her mother came to Buita’s house to watch the event on their huge twenty-five-inch color TV. And that night Alejo called Miami from a new telephone he had had installed in the bedroom. He decided to call after Mercedes had told him about a bad dream in which Buita came at her with a knife. Waking in a nervous state, Mercedes began to worry about Hector. “Don’t be worried,” he told her. “Hector is fine.” Alejo leaned against the wall, watched Neil Armstrong on the television, listened to the clicking of the long distance lines.
Buita picked up. “Buita! How is everything, sister?”
Buita and Alejo spoke for about ten minutes, Buita enumerating Hector’s activities and hinting at a romance between Hector and Cindy.
“How good,” Alejo said. “Let me talk to the boy.”
When Buita called Hector to the phone, he was annoyed. Each time Cindy moved in her chair, the hem of her skirt lifted higher and higher, and Hector could not take his eyes off her.
“Your papa wants to speak to you.”
Hector cringed, and his pale face turned red. He shook his head as if to wave Alejo’s call away, but finally he went to the phone.
“Yeah?”
Alejo leaned against the wall. He was smiling. He was wearing checkered pants and sneakers just like the ones he had given to Hector. His elbow rested on the armario. He was happy to speak with Hector.
“How are you? Did you see the moon? That’s something, isn’t it? So how are you? Are you happy to hear from your papa? You know I miss you, boy.” He kept speaking, but Hector was not really listening. He was paying attention to the television noises and thinking about Cindy. “You know I miss you boy… ai chico, are you there?”
“Yeah, Pop.” But Hector did not say another word.
“Okay, good-bye, son,” Alejo said finally and then Mercedes, with her screechy, high-pitched voice, got on the phone. She asked him to think of her often and told him to take care of himself. She said, “Your papa misses you,” so often that he got tired of hearing it, and then he gave Buita the phone.
Hector did not think about Alejo as the days passed. If he wasn’t following Cindy around, he would often take walks into the fields where the sunflowers grew tall, in the steam of the Miami afternoons. A few times he caught a bus downtown and went to the old-Havana style cafeterias. There he sipped sweet juices and smiled at the pretty gypsy-looking waitress who seemed tired of life, while the Cubans around him, old-timers, carried on their conversations. Sometimes they looked at him as if he were a tourist, definitely out of place, even though he tapped his feet to the jukebox and even though he nodded when they looked over. They resumed their talk again as if he were not there. Then he began to think about what he would need in this world to court the waitress, for example, and to make her smile the Cubanita way, as if she had just spent an exhausting night with him. What could Hector do to be more like the suave, lanky, young Cubans, smooth and untroubled, purposeful in their ways, gliding down the sidewalks? Everywhere he went in downtown Miami he saw them, men in bright-colored guayaberas and women in sleeveless dresses. Their Spanish flowed into his ears: “Hey Ramón, how did that chick turn out for you?” “She was hot, I jammed her and she screamed and her pussy just kept getting hotter and hotter!” “This is my daughter, Inocencia. She just completed her first communion. Inocencia, this is my old friend María. I knew her back when in Cuba.” “Come to the house and we’ll have a little party.” “Rudolfo is looking for a job, he just got in from Spain. He used to be a mechanic in Havana, but they put him in the army. He’s got a wife and two kids and doesn’t care what you can pay him. He needs the work.” “And you should see, for the marvel of your life, Disneyland. I’m telling you Consuelo, the marvels of American science are there! This country has more good than any other in the world!” “… and every time I fucked her, she wanted the old stick again.”
But as he sat there in the cafeteria or in any other shop, the owners always asked “What would you like?” in English, or if they could not speak English, there was always a Cuban around to ask the same question in English for them. And Hector would play the American-American. When he did ask for something in Spanish, the response was always, “You speak good Spanish, for an American.”
“My parents were from Oriente.”
Looking him over, not believing a word of it, they would reply, “Oh yes?” But they didn’t return to make more conversation, as he wanted; they just slapped down the bill.
Walking along Calle Ocho, he would think about what he should have said to prove his authenticity: “Look, my mother believes in the spirits and the Devil and Jesus Christ. I know about Santa Barbara! And the Virgin of Cobre! I know about the white cassava and yucca and arroz con pollo y lechón asado… Machado and Maximo Gomez… and my father came from San Pedro, Oriente province, home province of Fidel Castro, Batista, and Desi Arnaz. My father’s a worker and Santiago is fifty miles south of Holguín. I know about the shadows and magic, how you court nice girls and get married, and drink only with the men, and the women are your slaves, and you look to the future and never fear death. You have the Day of the Three Kings instead of Christmas as the time for giving presents. You drink rum and don’t take LSD, you walk straight and do not fall down. You don’t cry and are very strong, and one gaze from your eyes makes women faint. Your sexes are enormous, the women are your slaves…” and on and on, until he felt himself fading away.
Soon he was thinking how good dear Aunt Buita was to him. She was offering him a life: college, a car, friends. If he stayed, he wouldn’t have to go home and look at Alejo and Mercedes. He could forget everything—the medicines, the arguments, having no money. He wouldn’t have to get drunk with his old buddies. But he wanted more. To crawl out of his skin, get a tan, get healthy, be Cuban, forget the shit—marry Cindy.
Hector started going places with Cindy at night. Buita paid for these excursions. One night they went to the Zebra Disco. The hall was decorated to look like an enormous Tarzan-style hut with strobe lights and stuffed zebras and zebra skins everywhere. There was a thick haze of purple smoke in the air, a refreshment counter where pizza, hamburgers, and Cuban sandwiches (pork, swiss cheese, turkey, ham on hero bread) were sold. The music was by the Supremes, Beatles, Four Tops, Rolling Stones. Cindy was wearing a pair of tight white slacks, and a striped halter top. She was dancing in absentia. She was standing in front of Hector but did not seem to be there. She was watching colors on a screen on the opposite wall change forms. She was chewing gum. Hector felt out of place, and in his dreams he was taking Cindy out on the beach and, under the moonlight, fucking her in the sand the way Horacio used to fuck girls under the boardwalk at Far Rockaway Beach and Coney Island. He daydreamed about finding starfish in the cleft of her bosom and about floating-in-water-love with her—kisses, gropes, all lust—but even while he dreamed this she was digging someone else: a sharp-looking Cuban a few feet away who was watching her and smiling. One second she was dancing with Hector and the next she was shaking her winsome hips for the other guy. She was giving off wisps of orchid scents and showing off her big white teeth and speaking to the other guy in Spanish.
“Who you with?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“All right! Vaya!”
Hector was trying to be cool as Cindy and her new partner started to dance. Hector moved closer to watch them, but they moved away. This went on for two or three songs, and then Cindy and the Cuban went off to get a hamburger. Hector waited about a half hour and then went to the refreshment counter. There was a bamboo fence covered with fake orchids and ferns and a few rubber palms around the counter. She was sitting with the Cuban behind one of the trees, making out. Alejo would have been able to sweep her off her feet, Hector knew. At least Alejo should have taught him something about women. He thought of the way all the women gave Alejo the onceover whenever he walked into a room, how they all turned to look at him. He put Alejo out of his mind, walked back out onto the dance floor, and started to dance. He did a few turns like a spinning mannequin and then felt a fist slamming into his chest. Someone hit him, but no one was there. He danced again and, boom! there was the same punch. His arm had a spasm, and then the spasm went away. He sat down, off to the side, drank a Coca-Cola. He felt like a “lame,” as the neighborhood kids used to call him when Mercedes would not let him out of the house. He waited on the bench for a half hour and then stood up against the wall. He watched the dancers, Cindy among them, as they swung around. Everybody was dancing but him. Some of Cindy’s friends came over and pulled him onto the dance floor, saying, “Don’t you know how to have a good time?”
So he started to dance again. Then he thought he heard his name being called out through the loudspeaker. “Hector Santinio. Hector Santinio come to the office.” He went to the office. There was a phone call for him. “Margarita’s coming to get you,” Buita told him. But why? She told him nothing more. For a half hour he waited in front of the Zebra on a striped bench, and then Margarita came and they drove home. She was chainsmoking and looked very tired, as tired as she had looked in the days of her dead husband’s illness.
“Where are we going, Tía?” Hector asked.
Margarita did not answer. At the house he packed. In the kitchen he ate a quick sandwich, bacon and lettuce and tomato on toasted rye bread. He kissed Buita good-bye. They drove to the airport. Margarita and Hector flew to New York. They did not say very much. In New York everything was quiet in the apartment. Paula and another neighbor were in the living room. A big fan was blowing the window drapery. Horacio was in the kitchen. It was very early in the morning. “Come on, let’s go,” Horacio said to Hector. His car was parked outside. They drove downtown to a square building and walked through a hall of tables. The hall was as large as an airport hangar. Their footsteps made echoes. They waited in a small room, facing a window booth with curtains. When a light came on they pressed a button, the window curtains parted. A table lifted into view. On it rested Alejo Santinio in a black shroud, eyes shut, arms at his side, dead.