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I
was looking for something good on the radio, and I stopped
at a station playing Latin music, salsa, son, that
kind of thing. The music ended, and the laid-back guy with
the rough voice started to talk, the one who'll go on about
anything, his kids, his bike, what he did last night. His
voice is the kind that gets under your skin, and he talks
tough and slangy, like he's never been anywhere but Central
Havana, the kind of brother who'll come up and say, "Hey,
man, what you need? I got a deal for you."
My wife and I listened
to him, and we really liked it. Nobody on the radio was doing
what he was doing. He'd play good Latin music, say something,
pause for a minute, put on another record, and then it was
on to the next thing. No long explanations or showing off.
He seemed smart, and I'm always happy to come across smart,
proud black guys, instead of the kind who won't look you in
the eye and who have that pathetic cringing slave mentality.
Well, we'd always listen
to him at home, back when we were happy and life was good,
no matter that I was earning an unhealthy and cowardly living
as a journalist, always making concessions, everything censored,
and it was killing me because each day I felt more like I
was prostituting myself, collecting my daily ration of kicks
in the ass.
Then she went back to
New York, wanting to be seen and heard. Just like everybody
else. Nobody wants to be condemned to darkness and silence.
They all want to be seen and heard, want a turn in the spotlight.
And if possible, they'd like to be bought, hired, seduced.
Did I write "everybody wants"? That's not quite
right. It should have been: "We all want to
be seen and heard."
She's a sculptor and
a painter. In the art world, that makes her "popular."
And that's supposed to be a good thing. It's comforting to
be popular. Anyway, she left again. And I was kicked out of
journalism because each day I was more reckless, and reckless
types weren't wanted. Well, it's a long story, but in the
end what they told me was: "We need careful, reasonable
people, people with good sense. We don't want anybody reckless,
because the country's going through a very sensitive and important
phase in its history."
Around the same time,
I found out that the guy with the rough, boozy voice wasn't
black. He was white, young, a college student, well-educated.
But his persona suited him.
So I was very lonely.
That's what always happens when you love holding nothing back,
like a kid. Your love goes off to New York for a long time—goes
to hell, you might say—and you're left lonelier and
more lost than a shipwreck in the middle of the Gulf Stream.
The difference is that a kid recovers quickly, whereas a forty-four-year-old
guy like me keeps kicking himself, and thinks, "Not again"
—and wonders how he could be such an idiot.
The fact that it was
Jacqueline made it even worse, because she holds an important
record in my manly existence: she once had twelve orgasms
with me, one after the other. She could have had more, but
I couldn't hold out, and I went and had mine. If I had waited
for her, she might have gotten close to twenty. Other times
she had eight or ten. She never broke her record. Because
we were happy, we got a lot of joy out of sex. The thing with
the twelve orgasms wasn't a competition. It was a game. A
great sport for keeping young and fit. I always say, "Don't
compete. Play."
Well, in any case, Jacqueline
was too sophisticated for 1994 Havana. She was born in Manhattan,
descended from a mix of three generations of English, Italians,
Spaniards, French, and Cubans originally from Santiago de
Cuba who scattered toward New Orleans and all over the Caribbean,
as far away as Venezuela and Colombia. A crazy family. Her
father had been in Normandy, was a D-day veteran. Anyway,
she's a complicated woman, and too much work for a simple
tropical male like me. She would say, "Oh, there's nobody
sophisticated left in Havana. People just keep getting tackier,
shabbier, more countrified." Something wasn't right about
that. Either it was Jacqueline's elegance, or everybody else's
tackiness, or my stupidity, because as far as I could tell,
everything was fine and I was happy, even if the poverty got
worse every time you turned around.
When I was left alone,
I had lots of time to think. I lived in the best possible
place in the world: an apartment on the roof of an old eight-story
building in Central Havana. In the evening, I'd pour myself
a glass of very strong rum on the rocks, and I'd write hard-boiled
poems (sometimes part hard-boiled, part melancholy), which
I'd leave scattered all over the place. Or I'd write letters.
At that time of day, everything turns golden, and I'd survey
my surroundings. To the north, the blue Caribbean, always
shifting, the water a mix of gold and sky. To the south and
east, the old city, eaten away by the passage of time, the
salt air and wind, and neglect. To the west, the new city,
tall buildings. Each place with its own people, their own
sounds, their own music. I liked to drink my rum in the golden
dusk and look out the windows or sit for a long time on the
terrace, watching the mouth of the port and the old medieval
castles of naked stone, which in the smooth light of afternoon
seem even more beautiful and eternal. It all got me thinking
with a certain clarity. I'd ask myself why life was the way
it was for me, and try to come to some kind of understanding.
I like to step back, observe Pedro Juan from afar.
It was those evenings
of rum and golden light and hard-boiled or melancholy poems
and letters to distant friends that helped make me sure of
myself. If you have ideas of your own—even only a few—you
have to realize that you'll always be coming up against detractors,
people who'll stand in your way, cut you down to size, "help
you understand" that what you're saying is nothing, or
that you should avoid a certain person because he's crazy,
a fag, a traitor, a loser; somebody else might be a pervert
and a voyeur; somebody else a thief; somebody else a santero,
spiritist, druggie; somebody else trash, shameless, a slut,
a dyke, rude. Those people reduce the world to a few hybrid
types, colorless, boring, and "perfect." And they
want to turn you into a snob and a prick too. They swallow
you up in their private society, a society for ignoring and
supressing everyone else. And they tell you, "That's
life, my friend, a process of natural selection. The truth
is ours, and everybody else can go fuck themselves."
And if they spend thirty-five years hammering that into your
skull, later, when you're on your own, you think you're better
than everybody else and you're impoverished and you miss out
on the joy of variety, when variety is the spice of life,
the acceptance that we're not all alike and that if we were,
life would be very dull.
Well, then the guy with
the rough, boozy voice turned up on the radio again, fooling
around a little, and slotted in a Puerto Rican salsa orchestra,
and I danced for a while. Until I asked myself, "What
the hell am I doing here dancing all alone?" Then I turned
the radio off and went out. "I'm going to Mantilla,"
I thought. I roamed around until I caught one bus and then
another, and I got to Mantilla, which is on the outskirts
of the city, and which I like because out there you can see
red earth and the green of the land and herds of cattle. I
have some friends in the neighborhood—I used to live
there, years ago. I went to see Joseíto, a taxi driver
who lost his job in the crisis and now was gambling for a
living. He'd been supporting himself gambling for two years.
In Mantilla, there were lots of illegal little gambling clubs.
The police made a sweep sometimes and wiped out two or three,
locked everybody up for a few days, and then let them go.
I had three hundred pesos in my pocket, and Joseíto
convinced me to play. He was carrying ten thousand himself.
He was in it for the big money. We went to one of his lucky
houses. And he was lucky. I lost all my money in fifteen minutes.
I don't know why the hell I let Joseíto drag me along.
I never win anything when I gamble, but he was raking it in
from the start. By the time I left, he had already pocketed
five thousand pesos. Lucky bastard. With his kind of luck,
I'd be riding high. Well, he has a good life in Mantilla,
and he always says, "Oh, Pedro Juan, if I'd had any idea,
I would've gotten rid of that fucking taxi a long time ago."
I was pissed about the
money. It bothers me to lose. I get irritated every time,
and it bothered me that Joseíto could make a living
so easily, whereas whenever I play a hand of cards or pick
up some dice I start losing right away. I'm not a jinx, because
I give everybody else good luck. It happens all the time.
Once I bought an old, beat-up car and I left it parked out
in front of the building for a week, just sitting there; it
had two or three things wrong with it, and fixing it was going
to be expensive. Well, a few days later, an old Spaniard came
up to me to tell me that everybody in the neighborhood was
playing the car's license plate number—03657—in
the lottery. Laughing, the old man said, "We're going
to have to pay you a commission, Pedro Juan. Last night the
butcher won three thousand pesos on 57. What do you think
about that?"
"What do
I think? I think the son of a bitch should at least pay for
my repairs. The car's been sitting there for a week because
I'm so broke."
"Damn! Everybody
making money on your car, and you making shit."
That's right. I'm hopeless
at gambling, and at a whole lot of other things too.
When I left the little
club where José was getting rich, I had a few coins
in my pocket. Enough to take the bus back to downtown Havana.
But I needed a shot of rum. Losing had really pissed me off,
and I was feeling aggressive. A little rum calms me down.
"I'll go see Rene," I said to myself. Rene (I just
call him Rene because he's a good friend) is a fine press
photographer. We used to work together a lot, years ago. But
then he was caught taking nude photos. They were simple photos
of naked girls. No fucking, no black dick sucking, nothing
like that. Just nude studies of beautiful girls. There was
a scandal. He was kicked out of the Party, ejected from the
profession, and expelled from the Association of Journalists.
The last straw was when his wife kicked him out of the house
and told him she had become "disenchanted" with
him. Well, that's how it was. Cuba at the height of its existence
as socialist construct maintained a virginal purity, in exquisite
Inquisitorial style. And all of a sudden, the guy realized
that his life was over. He was living in a dump in Mantilla
with a fucked-up son who supported himself by selling grass,
but who spent more time in jail than he spent in their dump
selling the stuff he brought back from Baracoa. He sold coconut
oil, coffee, and chocolate too, on the black market, but he
made his real money dealing in excellent mountain weed and
he brought so much back that he could sell it cheap.
Rene was alone now.
His druggie son had left by raft for Miami in the exodus of
August 1994. And he had no idea what had happened to him.
"I don't
know where he is, whether he got to Miami, or whether he was
taken to the naval base at Guantánamo. Or whether he's
in Panama. I have no idea. To hell with it, Pedro Juan. To
hell with everybody. When he was here, he spent all his time
telling me that if it wasn't for him, I'd be out on the street.
Everybody can go fuck themselves! I've gotten the shit kicked
out of me so many times I'm sick of them all."
He started to cry. He
was sobbing. I thought he was probably stoned.
"Come on,
Rene, I'm your friend. Cut it out, man. Let's go get some
rum."
"There's
a little left in the kitchen. Bring it here."
It was rat poison. Half
a bottle of cockroach repellent. I swallowed down a shot.
"Rene, for
God's sake, you're killing yourself with this aguardiente.
What the fuck is it made of?"
"Sugar, believe
it or not. My next door neighbor makes it. I know it's shit,
but I'm used to it now. It doesn't seem so bad to me. Fancy
a joint? There are some papers in the drawer."
"Why are
you talking like that? Since when are you the big Spaniard?"
"I picked
it up from the whores who come here. They're so dumb they
talk to me like the Spaniards who hang out with them. They're
always saying `have a light?' `good chap,' `let's
have a word.' They're crazy. So am I. I'm crazy and I talk
just like those Spaniards and their black bitches."
We lit the joints and
we sat in silence. I shut my eyes to savor mine. That Baracoa
weed has a smell and taste like nothing else. But it's strong.
I didn't inhale much. I was thinking I should go to Baracoa
and bring back a kilo or two. Rene's son would bring back
coconut oil, coffee, and chocolate too because the smell of
the coffee masked the smell of the weed. I could do the same
thing. And I'd make a few pesos. That's what I was thinking
when I felt Rene get up, pull a photo album out of a drawer,
and hand it to me.
"Look at
this, Pedro Juan."
He was already stumbling
over his words, after all the aguardiente and the
grass. He dropped into his armchair again, flattened and hopeless.
I had to get the hell out of there. The air in that place
reeked of shit and despair. And it's contagious. It's like
breathing in a poisonous gas that gets in your blood and suffocates
you. I couldn't keep talking to Rene. I needed a buddy who
was tough. The kind of guy who could get me out of my slump
and away from all my memories of happiness. I needed to make
myself hard like a rock.
I opened the album.
It was a collection of nudes. There were at least three hundred
of them, in every position. Blacks, mulattas, whites, brunettes,
blondes. Smiling ones and serious ones. Some were in pairs,
kissing or embracing or feeling each other's tits.
"So what
is this, Rene?"
"Whores,
man. A catalog of whores. Lots of taxi drivers keep photos
like this for the tourists. They advertise the product around
town, the tourist picks what he wants, and they take him to
the right place."
"Then you're
shooting pictures of stars! Rene, photographer to the stars!"
"Rene, photographer
to the whores! I'm finished, man. I'm washed up."
"Don't talk
shit, Rene. If you're making good money that way ..."
"You know
I'm an artist. This is crap, kid."
"Listen,
you're driving me crazy. Don't be such an asshole. Take advantage
of these whores. If I were you, I'd take the damn photos for
the catalogs, and then I'd take good nude shots, powerful
ones of whores in their beds, in their rooms, in their world,
in black and white, and then in a few years I'd put together
an incredible exhibition: `Whores of Havana.' And you'd be
launched with the kind of show even Sebastião Salgado
couldn't put together."
"In this
country? The whores of Havana?"
"In this
country or wherever. Work and then find a place to show your
work. Then if they shut you down here, go somewhere else,
anywhere. But whatever you do, get off your ass and out of
this fucking room."
"Well ...
it's not a bad idea."
"Of course
it's not. Try it, and I promise you'll get back on track.
Listen, did your son have partners in Baracoa?"
"What do
you want to do?"
"Bring back
a little weed. I'm cleaned out, Rene. I have to make a few
pesos."
"If you go, look up Ramoncito
El Loco. He lives on the way out of Baracoa, near La Farola.
Everybody knows who he is. Tell him you're my partner, and
that this is for me. That way he'll give you a deal. But don't
hang out with him, because everybody knows the old man's always
been a dealer. You'll get busted."
"All right,
brother. Take care of yourself. We'll be in touch."
I had to hurry to Baracoa.
After I took care of business, maybe I could find myself one
of those big-assed Indian women who make you feel like you've
got the sweetest dick in the world. The Indians there have
barely mixed with whites or blacks. A little trip would be
worth the trouble. The people there are different.
© Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
'Memories of
Tenderness' appears in Dirty
Havana Trilogy
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