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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The characters in False Warare ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man's land. Some of them want to leave and can't, others left and never quite finished getting anywhere. In this choral novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together a series of interconnected stories of the perennially displaced. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, lost in the Louvre, competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a trip for émigré dissidents, these characters learn that while they may appear to be on the move, in reality they are paralysed, living in permanent stasis. With a fractured narrative that brilliantly reflects the disintegration that comes with uprooting, full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy,False Waris an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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‘What happens when exile becomes style, and style becomes a kind of home? False War is that question asked with tenderness, fury and precision.’
— Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral
‘The dissidents, migrants and exiles of False War travel the world in search of some kind of refuge, but the cities they arrive in are places of purgatory, allegorical waystations of the permanently displaced, where everyone is an outsider, caught between landfalls, hurrying nowhere: “Brightness inside, darkness outside – until we crash.” This is a timeless and urgent work, in turns lyrical, hardboiled, tender, fragmented. It maps a way forward for the twenty-first century novel.’
— Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women
‘Human displacement is the storm surge of our century, yet we only hear of the crest. Behind that swell rush the sequels of individual souls on the move, swirling, unravelling, adrift. Álvarez reels us into those milieus with such engaging detail we can’t help becoming comrades to his fugitives. A brilliant work of enchantingly real voices.’
— DBC Pierre, author of Meanwhile in Dopamine City
‘I was blown away by this novel. Nothing in the story is reducible. Its formal ambition is met by its execution, and the effect is staggering. Álvarez is an immense writer, a generational talent, and this, for me, is a generation-defining work.’
— Michael Magee, author of Close to Home
‘How do we recount the story of migration? Where does it begin and where does the journey end? Can a story have as a protagonist the very act of migrating due to exile or dissidence? In his new novel False War, Carlos Manuel Álvarez does exactly that: he puts the act of fleeing at the centre, and does so through characters that find themselves 4in the midst of a radical transfer…. Time in this novel passes in a space that hasn’t yet been occupied – an impasse of open possibilities and discovery.’
— Julieta Venegas, Gatopardo
‘Álvarez paints this generational tapestry with lush and colourful prose that is exuberant and rich, with brushstrokes of infinite tenderness, occasional violence, humour tinged with nostalgia, and critique towards a society that squashed the dreams of its residents in its attempt to reach the goal of utopia. The pages that take place in Mexico City and Berlin can serve as a clear example of how we find ourselves with an uncommon narrator, capable of speaking in his own voice about the eternal topics of loss and exile.’
— Juan Cervera, Rockdelux
‘In False War, defeat is like an ocean that connects stories from different narrators in different parts of the globe that all converge in the present, forming an archipelago in which the collective trauma of loss ends up emerging not as a national singularity but as a sign of the times, one of the scars of humanity today.’
— Nelson Cárdenas, Revista UNAM
Praise for The Fallen
‘A beautiful and painful novel that demonstrates the power of fiction to pursue the unutterable.’
— Alejandro Zambra, author of Childish Literature
‘A new Latin American literature is here: with precocious mastery of a paragon of narrative resources and an over-whelming sensibility, Carlos Manuel Álvarez portrays the only identity that truly matters – not the national one, but the human one.’
— Emiliano Monge, author of What Goes Unsaid 5
‘In a dysfunctional environment, deception invades private family life. The lines between truths and lies are blurred. In a poetic telling, this short novel explores the human capacity to love and to hurt.’
— Brigid O’Dea, Irish Times
‘His prose is supremely elegant.’
— Leila Guerriero, author of The Difficult Ghost
‘The Fallen is a subtle, intelligent and profoundly moving novel which sketches, in elegant and thoughtful prose, a rarely seen Cuban landscape.’
— Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder
Praise for The Tribe
‘There is magic in these pages…. This book tells the actual story of Cuba as it exists today.’
— Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara
‘Álvarez is very good on the absurdist rituals of zombie totalitarianism.… The Tribe vividly explores the more offbeat milieus and people of an extended Cuba.’
— Lorna Scott Fox, Times Literary Supplement
‘That rarest of books about a people that achieves a restorative function without idling in a documentarian mode, The Tribe’s gift to its subjects is not raising them as a hot topic, but by preserving their dignity in spite of the headlines.’
— J. Howard Rosier, Words Without Borders 6
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FALSE WAR
CARLOS MANUEL ÁLVAREZ
Translated by
NATASHA WIMMER
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CONTENTS
11‘I dream of a war, of right or of might, of quite unexpected logic.’
— Arthur Rimbaud, tr. A. S. Kline
‘Since then, quite visibly in our day, what has existed is false war.’
— José Lezama Lima, tr. Natasha Wimmer 12
MODERN LIVES (I)
15MIAMI BEACH
The sound of airplanes cut across the interminable sky of Mexico City. I couldn’t hang around. I caught a flight to the border and crossed over in the South, riding buses for three days through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and part of Alabama before funneling down into Florida. I saw the sick skies. Saw the streets and the fast-food joints and the primordial gas stations of America. Looking at the map, you drift west to east across the mainland until all of a sudden you drop into this hole.
My friend Elis put me up at her place, a two-bedroom apartment on an island north of Miami Beach. She’d come to get me in Tampa, in a white Toyota. We’d been neighbors as kids and here we were together in her car, bonded by a previous life. Twenty years later, she had chosen to honor that.
“You can stay here as long as you need to,” she said.
Back then, she hadn’t moved in yet with Fanboy and she wasn’t working at a gallery. She took a few sips of coffee and set the cup in the holder between us. She was dressed in black, dark circles under her eyes, and she wore a Swatch, also black.
Windows down.
“I don’t want to get in the way,” I said. “As soon as I’m on my feet I’ll find a place to rent.”
Elis gave me a skeptical look, as if somebody of my provenance would never get on his feet, or as if there was no such thing. And what did I mean, really?
“Sure,” she said, “but for now you can stay with me. You’ll love my roommates.”
Her kindness made her even more of a stranger. I mean, she wasn’t someone I knew. We were familiar from elementary school and around the neighborhood, 16our families had probably done each other a favor or two, but that was about it.
“How’s your father?”
“Sick,” I said.
“Your mother?”
“Gone.”
I felt uncomfortable sitting there, far from everyone. The wind was in my face and I decided to focus on that. Elis: one hand on the wheel, the other on her coffee cup. She drove confidently. I told her so, and that was all I said for a while.
“It’s what I do most,” she said. “Drive.”
The highway split the horizon in two. The car scissored forward, slicing the surface. Then I was out cold. Elis woke me underneath her building. We took the elevator up to her third-floor apartment halfway down a white hallway. Emergency stairs at the far end.
Through the door to the right, the kitchen. A guy our age was chopping vegetables on a wooden board by the sink. He stepped toward us, knife in hand. I thought he was going to say hello, but he stopped at the refrigerator. His hair was up in a tight knot. Thick black hair, already touched with gray, a few strands loose. Elis introduced us and hurried to the bathroom.
“S’up?” asked the Instrumentalist.
“Not much.”
“Make yourself at home, bróder.”
He wiped his hands on his apron and blew his nose into the sink.
I went into the living room. Put my backpack on the floor and sat on the edge of a sofa bed along one wall. It was where I’d be sleeping. There was another guy on the balcony, silhouetted against the orange light of Miami evenings. He was staring at something.
17Elis came in, zipping her jeans. She led me to the balcony and introduced me to Juan. The thing Juan was staring at so intently was a map of the United States hanging from a nail.
He turned for a second and gave me a hug. His body was rigid, too stiff to turn easily, as if run through by a rod. He was tall and powerful. I thought I would snap in his arms.
“Welcome,” he said. “A new friend. New friends are always good.”
He smiled politely and went back to what he was doing. There was something off about him. You could say the same about other people, but with him you got the sense it was worse.
“He’s autistic,” Elis told me later, sprawled on the bed in her room.
She had changed into shorts, a baggy T-shirt, and ankle socks. I was still standing. I had been standing for more than an hour, even though Elis had said I could lie down, too, if I wanted.
Then the Instrumentalist burst in. He declared that I looked a mess, I needed fixing up. He hauled me a few miles away. Barber welcomed me and cut my hair. I asked him his name and he said that was his name: Barber.
INTIMATE LOVE LETTERS
Freddy Olmos drinks a glass of milk, unsweetened, and goes to bed. Floating in the tiny, vibrant room is the smell of all the men who’ve passed through since a woman whose face he can hardly remember rented him the apartment and left without saying goodbye.
Outside, a dark green taxi suddenly zigzags and flips 18over in the middle of the street. On his white bedsheet, half-asleep, Freddy Olmos is neither ugly nor beautiful. In his dream a group of people he knows cross themselves and plunge into the sea.
He gets up for work at the break of day and spends the morning selling stamps at the window of a bank beneath the Telecommunications building a few blocks from his apartment.
He brings home a pack of ten-peso stamps. His eyes are stinging. He sees bare walls and a glass table with a basket of plastic fruit.
He sits at the table and starts a letter that seems to have no end, writing for more than two hours. Every so often he goes to the kitchen and drinks water from the faucet. He fills several sheets of paper, puts them in an envelope, and applies one of the ten-peso stamps. He goes up to his room and leaves the letter on his night table. Then he starts up again, but his hand gets tired and he leaves the next letter half-finished.
USUAL SUSPECTS
Back then they were eighteen or nineteen, and there was nothing around them that hadn’t always been there. Neither of them wanted to carry the backpack so they took turns every few blocks. The streets were empty. At the corner of Anglona and Minerva their puny bodies didn’t even cast a shadow.
“We better dump this soon,” said Maikro.
“I need breakfast first,” replied Barber, who wasn’t even Barber yet or anything remotely like him.
A transformer crackled on the electric pole. The noise got into their heads and began to act on them 19without either of them realizing it.
A horse-drawn carriage came the wrong way down the empty street. The driver was an old man in a worn olive green shirt and straw hat.
“Bad sign,” said Maikro.
“What?”
“Old man going the wrong way this time of day.”
There were still some signposts, tilting or faded, but there were no streets going any particular way, only a single street that pretended to turn into many though it would always lead them to the same place.
They waited for the carriage to go by. Slowly, so slowly. They continued down to Calzada and turned left. A bus was coming toward them, also going the wrong way.
“What the!” shouted Maikro.
“What?” said Barber again.
“It’s going the wrong way too.” Maikro pointed at the bus.
“Quit complaining, we just got started. We’re probably the ones going the wrong way.”
They came to the casa-cafetería of a man called Virgilio. They both knew him. The casa-cafetería was closed. They sat on a doorstep under a red awning.
Barber looked around. There was a ditch on either side of the street, concrete-block houses behind fences, and crisscrossing black electrical and telephone wires. Birds on the wires.
Maikro set the backpack between his legs. It was blue and grease-stained, with a peeling logo: Adidas. Nobody around here had a backpack like that. Maikro stared at his white shoes. He licked a finger and rubbed a spot off one of them. Then he lifted his finger to the sky and rubbed off the awkward birds on the wires.
Barber’s stomach cracked like a branch snapping.
20“I’m going to knock,” he said.
It had been more than twelve hours since he’d eaten. He’d been drinking water all night, but he’d pissed it out between one nightmare and the next.
“Don’t knock,” Maikro said. “Virgilio doesn’t like to be woken up.”
“But he should be up by now.”
Barber was nervous. As nervous, he thought, as he’d been one night in third grade a long time ago. In his mind, that night was endless. The next day (and this is why he’d been nervous) his teacher was going to take the whole class to a river near town. He had to get up at five. The bus was leaving at six.
Had it been the happiest night of his life? Hard to say. It was important to find happiness in concrete things, facts. Not wishes or hopes. People like Maikro would make fun of him if they knew his best memory was of a night when nothing happened.
He had pictured a silvery river with smooth white stones. Everybody jumping in, splashing, yelling, screaming their heads off. But the trip never happened. Not that it was canceled or anything. When he got to school the next day no one seemed to remember the trip had ever been planned. No one was inclined to complain. Not the teacher, not the other students. Who would they complain to, anyway?
“You’re awfully quiet,” said Maikro. “It’ll be okay.”
Everybody had forgotten, so he’d had to remember for them.
“Is there a river around here?” he asked.
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Just the dam, right?”
“Uh, no.”
“For real, I swear.”
21“The dam. You know.”
They’d been to the dam thousands of times. Somebody they knew had drowned there, gotten snagged on some piece of metal at the bottom while he was fishing.
“I think there’s a river.”
Barber’s head was in his hands and he was staring at the ground, the cracked pavement.
“You’re starving, aren’t you?” said Maikro. “Want to come to my place for something to eat?”
The sun was on the move. They were soaked with sweat and not getting anywhere.
“There’s a river in this town. We’ve always gone swimming at the dam, but I swear there’s a river here and they’ve hidden it from us.”
Maikro stared, his eyes wide. He felt as if something between them was being stretched like elastic and kept snapping back to hit him in the face.
“Let’s go to my house, come on,” he said.
“Why? Just chill out.”
They heard a door open. Virgilio appeared on the threshold. He stood there motionless. The two of them stared at him as if they were building him from scratch. As if instead of seeing him, they were sketching him with their gaze.
First his torso. They gave him a big belly, a red T-shirt, and flabby pecs. Maikro gave him bandy legs, denim shorts, and black rubber sandals, and Barber gave him short freckled arms and a faded tattoo on one shoulder.
In fact, Virgilio didn’t need the two of them at all. From the very start he had appeared at the door with the same old bald spot, bifocals, and mustache yellowed by tobacco. But he stood there anyway, as if his starving neighbors really were assembling him piece by piece and he needed them to start his day. 22
MIAMI BEACH
“Barber’s kind of an odd guy,” I said to the Instrumentalist on our way back to Miami Beach.
“Yes,” he said, and then: “Years ago somebody died on him.”
INTIMATE LOVE LETTERS
At night, Freddy Olmos walks along the shore, but he can’t make out anyone’s face. He picks up his instrument, and coins start falling into the case. What kind of instrument is that, people ask, and he doesn’t know how to answer. He’s playing the instrument he taught himself to play.
He used to come here with a friend whose instrument also couldn’t be identified. It hardly mattered. A few coins, guaranteed, and the next day, after selling stamps, they’d go to some cheap restaurant and then poke around the city. They’d take some guys to bed, and, after midnight, if they hadn’t managed to find anyone, they’d find each other.
Freddy Olmos remembers that when his friend decided to leave, he went to see him off. It was three in the afternoon and they were in the bay tunnel. A deathly light was falling like a scream over the city. Freddy Olmos reminded his friend of the time they’d run into each other in a coffee shop after meeting in prison.
“You drank a tamarind juice and fainted.”
“From hunger,” said his friend.
“I put ice on your neck to bring you around.”
“No. You left the ice on my neck and it burned. You went off to laugh in a corner.”
23“We were young. You went pale so fast.”
“I don’t know whether we should be having this conversation,” said his friend.
“I didn’t think anyone our age could turn that white.”
They were in a car on the way to the airport. The friend was wearing sunglasses. The traffic signs in the middle of the avenue looked like tribal symbols painted on the wall of a cave no one had entered for thousands of years. The car broke down a few miles from the terminal, at an intersection where there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Freddy Olmos and his friend grabbed the suitcases and continued on foot.
They walked for more than half an hour along the airport wall. On the other side was a vacant lot and rusty tracks, no train or smoke or station. The wall looked like the wall of the prison where they’d first met.
“Try not to sleep on the plane.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. I’m too nervous,” said the friend.
“Everything will be okay.”
“I should have taken something.”
The friend gazed ahead, then down at the ground. Freddy Olmos looked around. He was trying to put his finger on something. They got to the terminal and sat on some metal benches in the parking lot, by the private taxis.
“That’s where you’ll be soon,” said Freddy Olmos, and he pointed upward.
“Crazy!” replied his friend.
They both looked up.
“It’s about time for me to go.”
A fat vein throbbed on the friend’s forehead. They hugged and the friend disappeared through the glass doors of the airport.
24It was raining softly as Freddy Olmos made his way back on foot. Cars came and went and puddles grew in the middle of the avenue. His shoes were splattered with mud.
THE BARBER OF HIALEAH
The blade shaved the man’s right cheek. His skin was whiter under the heavy beard and Barber’s hand shook. He didn’t know if he could go on. He tried to think of an excuse to stop, but nothing convincing came to mind. He couldn’t leave the man half-shaved. With the razor still in his hand, he went to a small fridge he kept in the living room and poured himself a glass of water.
Client asked whether anything was wrong. Barber said he’d be right back. He surveyed the room, trying to register it, despite its familiarity. There was a makeshift bed in one corner, hair on the floor, folded towels on a plastic stool. There was a shelf with skin creams, lotions, and combs, razor blades in their cases.
The reflection of another silver blade shone in the mirror on the wall above the shelf. On the swivel chair, Client was still swathed in a black nylon robe that fastened at the neck and fell to his ankles. His stained boots were on the footrest.
The barbershop was in Hialeah, at the corner of Sixteenth and Sixtieth. Barber couldn’t help noticing that Client had arrived on foot. In that part of town, people always drove.
It was quiet there. Squat houses, generally brown or ocher, with pitched tile roofs. There were dirty yards, overgrown coconut palms, rusty metal fences, broken mailboxes on the sidewalks, and driveways for two or three cars.
25The sun melted the street most of the day. It was a poor neighborhood, full of immigrants. People worked construction on new buildings in Downtown, drove freight to Tampa or Orlando, or fought for minimum wage with the druggies and the hungry homeless who made late-night pilgrimages to Denny’s and McDonald’s. The type to pay for a sandwich and soda by searching pockets one at a time and counting out a pile of coins on the counter.
A barbershop like this was hard to find. Normally people went to beauty salons full of posters and mirrors, places that made you feel safe, but Barber was cheap and it would be no exaggeration to call him a stylist.
He worked patiently in his living room, as if his cuts were about to be featured in some fashion magazine and he wasn’t just styling the heads of people nobody cared about. Heads of fellow Cubans, Central Americans, adolescent African Americans from the surrounding neighborhoods, Brownsville or Gladeview.
Junker cars were often double-parked in the street because there weren’t enough spaces. It had taken years for Barber to reach a baseline at which he could at least pay the rent on time and permit himself small luxuries, like buying beer on weekend nights and drinking it while he watched an HBO movie or music videos on MTV.
Lights out, bluish TV images reflected on the walls, creeping into his soul.
Recently he had started buying tickets to Florida Marlins games. The Marlins were still a new franchise in the city, less than two years old. Barber had come to Miami almost fifteen years before, with the first exodus. He no longer remembered Maikro or Virgilio, his old comrades. Back then the city had no major league team.
He had crossed the sea on a boat, huddled on deck with some fifty migrants. But it hadn’t been just them, 26there had been boats all around, adding up to hundreds of thousands of fugitives. They were crusted with salt when they got to Miami, shriveled skin on bone.
They were housed in drab green tents in a fenced-in enclosure. The tents were in Downtown, next to the columns supporting the expressways along which the whole city shuttled, people coming and going back and forth in their private cars. A world that for the first few months was alien to Barber, a world that he envied.
He was given a mattress, a sheet, two pillowcases. He washed in the camp’s public restrooms and spent his days making plans that fell apart as soon as night came. Clotheslines were strung between the tents, but no matter how often he washed his clothes they were always stiff and shabby-looking.
Trash piled up beside the tents and along the fence. Queers, crooks, swindlers, and the down-and-out, all thrown together. AIDS had yet to appear, but when it did a few years later, it would come right for many of these people.
Barber wondered then how he would make a living. He had rejected some offers. Where he came from he had repaired disposable lighters for the town’s smokers. He would carry a bench and a folding table from home and work until midday in the municipal park by the church, in the shade of the trees. No river to swim in or anything, only the trout dam.
Sometimes he thought back on that postcard image and it was just as hard to believe it had ever been his life as it was to believe that at some point, all at once, it no longer was. A policeman had kicked his folding table over, lighters tumbling to the ground. What he did was no longer considered a job.
And they were right. In Miami he couldn’t repair 27lighters. Here, if a lighter broke, you threw it away. No one in the tents cut their hair and hardly anybody shaved. For Barber it was like finding a treasure when he realized, looking at everyone else and then at himself in the hand mirror they all used each morning, that hair grew no matter where you were. No power could make it stop. If he learned to cut hair, he could survive anywhere.
First he practiced on willing volunteers in the camp. A bad cut was the least of anyone’s problems. Basically there was no such thing as a bad cut. Later Barber thought there were probably many other ways he could have come up with to support himself, but evidently he had come up with cutting hair because it was his thing.
By the time he left the camp he had a client base who followed him to the house in Hialeah. Those clients spread the word to other potential clients, who were part of the same family even if they hadn’t crossed the sea in the same way or lived for months in a camp in the heart of the city. Who cut Barber’s hair? No one, and he rarely trimmed his beard.
At some point he thought about expanding, going more upscale, but he realized he had a brand and there was no escaping it. Which was why, when Client knocked at his door after closing time, Barber took one look and knew this was the reason his barbershop existed, for somebody with no chance almost anywhere else in the city.
His hair was down to his shoulders, brittle. The ends dead, sun-scorched. Beard thick and overgrown. He was getting eaten alive. There was no room left for anything but an overwhelmed nose and tiny frightened eyes, which surely imagined they too would be swallowed up at any moment.
“Just got here,” said Client. “I was told I could come to you.”
28“Got here from where?”
“The sea.”
Barber had no more questions.
“Take a seat, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
He had already put away his tools, but he got them out again from the shelf drawer. Two razors, a red comb, and a pair of scissors he began to sharpen.
“How many of you are there?”
“No idea. Lots.”
Barber had listened without much interest to the news about the second exodus. People were leaving on rafts, desperate, the sea infested with bodies.
Hysterical types talked about the ocean turning red, but Barber, who knew the sea, knew that water never turned red. No matter what happens, water is always dark blue or black, and everything is swallowed up and absorbed effortlessly, without any change in color.
FALSE WAR
I was mute when I spoke and once it was quiet I never stopped talking. That was the truth underlying everything. People asked me how I felt and I said fine, but clearly I wasn’t fine. In fact, people don’t ask that question when you’re fine. There’s no need. The body speaks and people ask questions because the body is sending signals. Sometimes I even tried to tell the truth, but the words went astray and they led me astray.
I tried to understand what was happening. The people who could’ve helped, who maybe were genuinely interested, never figured it out. I sent them away and watched them leave for good. They were convinced my mouth made more sense than my body, and what the mouth said 29was important, when pretty much everybody knows you can’t trust a mouth.
I had the clear sense I never entirely understood the conversations I was part of. Reasonable people, the usual topics, but I only caught a fraction of what they were trying to say. It seemed, too, that this had always been the case and I was only noticing it now. Probably I’d been leaving behind a permanent trail of misunderstandings.
Seven years of stumbling around. I’d been through Miami, different places across the country, and now I was spending a while in New York. In all that time I hadn’t been back to Havana. You have to do something and do it now, I remember thinking. It was the night of the Fourth of July. I was kind of with a girl, the girl I’d been seeing the last few months. I’d met her on a dark rooftop in Williamsburg, when the city still had a lot to say to me. The total light of Manhattan was falling on the waters of the East River and I convinced myself that at least a part of that wouldn’t exist if I wasn’t there. We went home together that night.
I’m not choosing New York to say all this because it’s a known name, recognizable, a place many of you—maybe all of you—have a postcard of in your heads. That’s not why I’m choosing it, since if given the choice, I would always choose the nameless places no one has heard of, the only real places, where you can run and dream in open spaces without the prescription of maps or the prison of references. I’m talking about New York to stick strictly to the facts, because it was there, and nowhere else, that things came full circle. Really, what more could there be after that?
Fireworks were bursting noisily in the sky of Inwood that night. On Academy Street, taken over by Dominicans, the Fourth translated into a jubilant handful of 30families and neighbors on each stretch of sidewalk, with speakers, folding chairs, and beer bottles at the foot of stern buildings. Under the public trees, children ran exultantly between cars.
The girl and I showed up after midnight. Outside we saw the glow of fireworks and heard the bang of firecrackers. The city celebrating itself, egos combusting in the concrete jungle. I immediately remembered what someone had once told me about a man walking along the sidewalk who’d been struck by a bullet fired in the air by an army officer to celebrate the New Year. How do stray bullets kill? I wondered. Since I’d heard that man’s story, I had begun to pray no one would be celebrating anything when I went out.
I didn’t even make it to the subway entrance. We took a taxi to the West Village. Huddled in the back seat, the succession of buildings and also each individual building making me aware of time held hostage, frozen. Time captive within the grand edifices of the past, parading on the stage of memory. Like something stirring within a stone, or the stone itself.
SEWER RATS
El Camello is with me in the back of the truck beneath the canopy. RIP Camello. It’s just us again now in the almost-dark, and it’s a little cold because of the wind coming in through the sides. There’s a green bulb up front, charged off the engine battery. A Christmas-tree light. It glows with a shitty light and a little bit of all that always reaches the back seats. It settles on our arms and makes us look sickly, like we really are some garbage color. The truck is going full speed. The light stiffens and grabs hold of us.
31People have been getting off along the way until it’s just the two of us driving with the Gringo. Same grind every day. Night comes and we go back to the barrio. The van stops in San Miguel, Regla, Guanabacoa. The same area El Camello and I cruise first thing. We know more or less the time the truck will head back and we wait for it at La Virgen del Camino.
We don’t know much about the Gringo, nothing about the bounty hunters, and no one has ever come asking me to report anything or take them anywhere. The Gringo is black but everybody knows he’s not from here. You can tell the difference: black Africans, black Caribbeans, black Northerners. And then there’s his accent. Words tangle on the guy’s tongue and pretty soon you realize they come twisted out of his mouth. It’s a struggle and they’d rather stay put. The Gringo is into silence.
But that night he suddenly starts talking, never taking his foot off the accelerator. El Camello gives himself a shake and says he’d rather be bitten by a mosquito than have one buzzing in his ear. So many conversations about so many things and for some reason that’s what hits home.
“True,” the Gringo replies.
The two of us freeze because suddenly there’s something like hand-to-hand combat going on between things we can’t fathom, maybe the speed of the van, mosquitoes, the Gringo’s words, and we aren’t sure: did he really say that? But apparently he did. He said it.
El Camello and I look at each other like we’ve been wanting to join forces with the Gringo for a while, but neither of us wants anything. That has never occurred to us. The van reaches home ground and no one talks and the only sound along that final stretch is El Camello slapping himself to scare away mosquitoes. Even though I say there are no mosquitoes and El Camello is scaring away 32something neither of us have figured out yet. Considering what’s about to happen, he doesn’t manage to scare away anything at all.
The next night I say something to the Gringo about the truck’s rear-wheel drive, which never breaks down.
“Mitsubishi engine and gearbox,” he says, “and Chinese differential.”
El Camello asks him whether he’s ever broken an axle. The houses file past. Every so often we pass under a streetlight. The Gringo has lost two axles. One he got replaced at the shop and the second was made for him by a lathe operator. He’s driving with one hand on the wheel and the other rubbing his neck. He swivels a little while he’s talking to us, taking his eyes off the road. Then he looks ahead again.
“But axles have to be factory-made,” I say.
“They’re made out of factory axles,” says the Gringo, “usually from Russian jeeps.”
“The factory ones are better in the end, because the more you grind them down on the lathe, the weaker they get,” says El Camello.
The Gringo asks how he knows that. El Camello says his grandfather always had cars.
“At the factory they give them a treatment to make them hard on the outside and softer in the middle,” says El Gringo. “Sometimes they’re hollow to absorb vibration.”
It’s a good last sentence to hear. I see the veins in the Gringo’s arm. El Camello has fallen silent, considering what to say next. The tarp slaps the frame of the truck’s roof. Wrappers and crushed soda cans. The green Christmas light blinks in horror. My seat is hard and uncomfortable.
With the impact, a huddled form flies up on the hood and seems to come at us, about to go through the 33windshield, but at the same time it’s like it bursts from the choked heart of the van, like something is stuck in there and we’re trying to spit it out. El Gringo slams on the brakes. Our souls slide from our mouths and escape down the street. We’re emptied out. I know I’ve turned pale and I’m shrinking down to nothing.
“We killed him,” said El Camello.
Everything is dark around us, but the collision itself is a source of energy and the flash of it lights us up. The windshield repels the huddled form and the thump on the pavement sounds like a rebuke. El Gringo is still in the same position. Hand on the wheel, blood running through his veins like alcohol through a still. He swivels his neck slowly, gracefully. No spinal cord injury. He sighs.
“Perfect,” we hear.
If that’s all he has to say, this is going to get worse, I think. You never expect to be in an accident, and when you are, you never expect it’ll be with a guy like this. El Camello shifts in his seat and El Gringo tells him to stay where he is. He lowers his window calmly, pulling a pack of local cigarettes out of his pocket. Rummaging through tools and papers in the glove compartment, he finds a brown Bic lighter. He leans out the window and lights a cigarette.
“Nobody around,” he says.
He’s right. People haven’t emerged from their houses. The only sound is the muffled moaning of the huddled form. The Christmas light goes out. The ash of the cigarette glows in the darkness of the truck. El Camello and I listen hard. 34
FANBOY’S CHOICE
Elis got lost one afternoon in the halls of the Louvre. We were living together at the time and it had been a while since she said chau to her Miami Beach apartment and Juan and the Instrumentalist. The head cases. Adolescent had left, too, with Gloria, the girl with bright red hair. Adolescent had been Elis’s neighbor when they were kids and I liked the dude. She picked him up when he crossed the border, but it’s not like we saw much of each other. Elis had given up weed and blow, and I tried my best to keep things fun.
Our trip to Paris had been in the works for a while, gift-wrapped and tied with a bow. Six months at least, in fact. I’d found a deal on tickets back in September. Things were going pretty good, basically, but it’s fucked up to plan like that, sort of like somebody’s making you do it.
Sure, I like capitalism. That’s not what I’m saying. Always on the hustle, that’s me. I make my roll, own my wheels, pay my bills, don’t depend on anybody else. I’ve got a mortgage on a place in Kendall and I could bag a yacht if I focused on it, but sometimes you got to float there in your jar like life isn’t passing you by.
Airline companies think you live in some promo postcard, the kind they put out. Perfect harmony, now and forever. No, loco, that’s not how it is. You can’t break a leg, can’t catch cold, can’t fight. Nada for six months. Basically: how am I supposed to pay in September for something happening the next March? How can I know anything in September!
Maybe a couple like us can’t get on that kind of schedule, you know. That’s what I think. Settled people, that’s who these things are for, Mormon couples, serious gringo types. Families born here, no debt, people you can see 35doing their thing, making plans ten years out, no worries. Coasting along, no detours. People like that never even die.
And we were doing just fine back then, but however you bend it, immigrant time is different. Aimín, no matter how sweet it is, you got two months’ stability as an immigrant, three if you push it. Then something’s going to happen. Somebody sideswipes you on the Palmetto, there’s a strange charge on your card, the price of gas goes up, the new president has it out for you.
That’s what I was thinking about when I clicked confirm on the airline page. This can’t end well, I thought, it’s like paying for a ticket to nowhere. But I had already promised Elis and the only way to keep things on track was to go all out.
The month before, I had spent a weekend in New York. Elis was working in the gallery and she wanted me to wait to go until the next weekend, but I wanted to see José Fernández pitch and José Fernández was pitching on Saturday. Understand: I wasn’t going to see my ex, I didn’t know where my ex was living and I didn’t care. But Elis was sure my ex lived in New York and that it was all a plot.
My ex could have been in Minnesota, NOLA, Alaska with the Eskimos, lol. Do you think I cared? Do you think an ex is going to matter more than a right-hander from your hometown, same age as you, who makes it to the majors and becomes a friggin star? Por-fa-vor, dame un breik.
Then Elis said why didn’t I just go see José Fernández any old day at Marlins Park like always. The truth is I could kind of see her point. Aimín, you get serious and shit thickens. Suddenly you’re going to New York to see a pitcher who plays on your home team, and you’re away the weekend your girlfriend has an opening at the 36gallery where she works over at 131 Menores Avenue.
Well, I tried to explain that Marlins Park was one thing and Yankee Stadium was something else entirely. Like seeing a reproduction versus the original. When a pitcher plays Yankee Stadium, whatever he’s done anywhere else is just a copy. Feik, basically. And that was something I realized the minute the man climbed up on the mound in his bad boy cap and that big M for Miami and the orange 16 on his back.
I forgot about everything. I thought what I’d done was no big deal and when I got back there wouldn’t be any drama. Happy like an armored limo, parked todo fachon on Collins South Beach. I was sitting in the right field stands with a bunch of Dominicans from Cibao, the plastic cups of lager coming and going and the flames on the stadium screen and the special effects and the glamor and the player shots and a gringo saying into the microphone meik som nois, meik som nois, and me yelling, Marlins fan or not.
Shit, José Fernández, Greek god, you’re in my memory, your divine BC windup on permanent display in the more or less empty museum of my heart. I see you before the debacle, your fastballs going dark, batters crossing and uncrossing themselves. Fastball with a brain, knowing where to die. The zeros drop onto the board and you’re up at ninety-eight, ninety-seven and holding, the knife of your slider, a massacre, and little by little the Bronx loses its tongue. There’s no such thing as a strike zone, you show us where it is, you erase it, now you see it, now you don’t, a painting on air.
I got back to Miami hungover and the floor was glass and it cracked the minute I set foot on it. How do I fix this? Any other chick, you slay her with Vegas, you slay her with Philly, Punta Cana, I don’t know, some Orlando 37theme park, basically. But none of that is Elis. Art’s her thing, so where to take her?
In Europe there’s art for sure. So if you’ve already cashed in a New York, how do you match that? No choice, loco. It’s Paris or die. I’ll give you half an hour to think about it, just to be nice. Paris. Not Barcelona, not Berlin, not Atlantis. A New York can be forgiven with a Paris. Anything else is money down the drain and hard feelings.
A DAY AT THE BEACH
It’s summer and Father, Mother, Sister, and Adolescent are on vacation in Varadero. At this point, Adolescent really is a teenager. Later, when he’s older, he’ll emigrate to Mexico City, and then, a bit older still, he’ll go on to Miami, but through it all he’ll always be Adolescent.
The week at the beach passes uneventfully. On the next-to-last day, however, they reach the sand and Mother remembers the time Adolescent was eleven and he started army-crawling in the hot sun from the edge of the beach to the water, because he wanted to know how Soviet hero Aleksei Maresyev felt in A Story about a Real Man when the Nazis shot down his fighter plane and he had to drag himself over the steppe for eighteen days. In the bitter weather of war, Maresyev ended up with his legs amputated.
