Raining over Havana E-Book

Julio Travieso Serrano

• Herausgeber: RUTH
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 393

Beschreibung

Without any doubt "Raining over Havana" by Julio Travieso Serrano is a faithful portrait of Cuban life in the 1990's. Here we may find characters who move on the margins of Havana society: prostitutes, pimps, procurers, all of them marked by pain and despair but, at the same time, full of love, passion, humor and irony, and always fighting to subsist. Their existential conflicts and psychology have been carefully delineated by the author. Havana, dirty, chaotic, but always beautiful, impregnated by magic and mystery, could well be the main character of this novel that will definitely entrap readers, because from its initial pages they will want to know whether pain or love, life or death triumphs.

Leseprobe

Original title in Spanish:Llueve sobre La Habana

E-book Edition:Claudia María Pérez Portas

E-book Design and Desktop publishing:Alejandro Romero Ávila

First edition: 2009

© 2014, Julio Travieso Serrano

© 2014, Angie Todd

ISBN:978-959-09-0628-2

Epigraph

He will spend his days like a shadow.

—Ecclesiastes, 6:12

There was like a big laugh, and this they called History.

—Julio Cortázar,Hopscotch

There is weeping in my heart

like the rain falling on the city

—Paul Verlaine, Romances without Words

I

It was raining hard, as it rains in Havana during the rainy season, with violence and rapidity, in heavy drops that drummed on rooftops and streets, but suddenly the rain ceased and everything was calm and quiet, without any noise reaching me from outside.

My wall clock also stopped, one minute before twelve on that night in May 1992, a sign of bad portent; and then Mónica appeared.

Finally, the mystery of her disappearance was revealed.

She came and told me, “I’m going to die.”

Morir, fallecer, expirar, fenecer, finar, perecer, muri, mourir, morire, morir; to die many, many words, in Spanish and all languages, indicating the same event, singular and universal, personal and general, the same and distinct, preceding human beings, preceding the earth, the galaxy; loss of energy, entropy, cessation of movement, end and beginning.

“We’re going to die. Me first, you later.” When? “Maybe in a year or two, a few more, but sooner or later it will happen. Always accompanied by pain and suffering.”

I was very frightened, not so much of the pain, but of that moment when breathing stops, oxygen ceases to flow and one’s mind darkens, like when we enter a movie theater and suddenly the darkness blinds us.

What will happen?

“And it’s all my fault,” she said, weeping, embracing me.

Was it her fault? I gently kissed her cheek. Despite my own terror, I had to infuse a little bravery and calm into her.

“You know,” she said tearfully, still resistant to loving; in other words, living, “when the pain comes, I’ll kill myself.”

I will kill myself, you will kill yourself, we will kill ourselves when the pain comes, tomorrow, within a year, two, who knows how many, I thought, melodramatically. It was not the moment for such thoughts.

“I will die too. I shall die with you,” I said and, taking her head into my hands, I looked into her eyes which, veiled by tears, were more beautiful than ever.

“Swear to me that you won’t leave me even if I turn into a hag, even if my skin falls off and my hair falls out. Swear it.”

“I swear,” I replied and kissed her again. “I swear it to you, my love.”

Since then the hands of the clock have gone around many times. That old wall clock, my faithful lifetime companion, previously hung in my parents’ house and before that in that of my grandparents and great-grandparents and even my great-great-grandparents, possibly bought by Felipe Valle, the oldest known ancestor of our family, and passed down from generation to generation, and whose little wooden doors open every half hour to admit a laborious and punctual cuckoo which, that night, did not want to leave its nest, perhaps tired of its eternal mission as the announcer of the hours.

Now the cuckoo sleeps immobile after singing and I remember Mónica, my friend, my woman, my lover, my love.

This is her story and mine, our story. It is a story in which Mónica will disappear, lost, hidden in Havana, a beautiful, ugly, dirty, vociferous city. I shall look for her, but will not find her. In her time, she will appear, but then there will be no time to love and live, just enough to relate what happened.

The cuckoo sang nine times and, as usual, I left for my long nocturnal walk. Before, when I had a real house, I liked to stay in reading. My daughters, twins, sleeping; my wife Baby watching television. I have never liked that box of images. Sometimes, if there was no power or the television was broadcasting some boring program, we talked. I read a lot during that period.

It was when I met Mónica that I preferred to go out for long nocturnal strolls. “You could get assaulted,” they told me, but I was not going to renounce the pleasure, one of the few left to me, of walking in the night, in the sweet Havana night. Was it sweet?

For me, however unpleasant the environment, there was always a special charm in the atmosphere, above all beside the sea. I walked without thinking about anything in particular and without any plan, letting myself be borne along unconsciously, sometimes in the track of a street dog, or even a cat, pausing before a beautiful early-century house, one of those that Havana’s bourgeoisie had constructed with so much care and in whose garden, oh, unusual Cuban miracle, red roses were growing. How marvelous to know that someone liked roses, someone who watered them with love in the mornings.

Who? An old lady? A beautiful woman? A child? I liked to imagine that we were both watering them.

Frequently the streets were dark, with potholes, and the mansion was flanked by one of those latest buildings, box-style with holes, the supreme exponent of bad taste, and my admiration grew in the face of the incredible relation between the beautiful and the grotesque. How could they coexist? the Beauty and the Beast, yin and yang, the two faces of Janus. And there was I, I alone to confirm the deed, to commit it to memory, I, the Roman patrician of the century, contemplating the Barbarian mounts facing the fountains of Rome. I liked all those personal and trivial comparisons, imagining myself in the body of Saint Augustine, feeling myself at a far remove from the Havana-born man that in reality I was and am.

I left the house behind and continued walking, scrutinizing the shadows, looking at windows, talking to myself; yet another madman in a city of madmen and neurotics, wondering what the people inside their houses were doing at that moment, watching bands of young people on bicycles moving along the avenues like rackety birds, loving couples making love in dark corners. My tour almost always ended on the Malecón, facing the sea. I like the sea. I like observing the movement of the tide, ebbing and flowing eternally, without rest, indifferent to everything other than its eternal task of licking the coast, boring through the rocks. A tide that has always and will always be there, long after all of us. Our lives are like the tide, with high moments and low moments. High tide and low tide; happy life, unhappy life. Years ago, like now, low tide enveloped me.

One night after my walk, I was smoking facing the sea near Hotel Nacional when a young woman, beautiful, stunning, approached me and I said to myself that she was the most beautiful and sensual woman in the world. She stopped to light a cigarette, but couldn’t. The wind, mischievously, playfully, blew out every match she lit. I went up to her and lit her cigarette with my lighter, whose flame flickered for an instant.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Don’t mention it,” I answered and she turned toward me.

Her breasts resembled two apricots and I would willingly have bitten into them there and then. She had green eyes and everything about her reminded me of my wife Baby twenty years ago.

Given her clothing and way of dolling herself up, I understood that she was not a woman for Cuban men. She definitely went out with foreigners.

“I mistook you for a foreigner,” she said in a low voice.

“Yes, I’m usually taken for a Sephardic Jew, born in Singapore and raised in Strohausen.”

It was a sardonic reply and really stupid on my part, not at all appropriate for getting into the conversation that I wanted to have with that beautiful woman, much younger than me and who, probably, would immediately walk off, leaving me with the intoxication provoked by her body.

“I thought you were a Hindu from Brahmaputra,” she said very seriously, in a voice that was now louder.

Was she mocking me in return?

For a couple of seconds we smoked in silence, looking out to sea. She seemed tense and was smoking fast, as if she wanted to finish her cigarette as rapidly as possible. Perhaps she was going through a bad time.

“Are you all right?” I asked, expecting her to reply: “What’s it to you?” or “Leave me alone.” But no. She answered me very politely.

“Yes, thank you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Mónica, Mónica Estrada Palma.”

Some time ago I had met a granddaughter of the first president of the Republic. Perhaps she was a great-granddaughter or something like that.

“A descendent of the president?”

“What president?”

“Don Tomás Estrada Palma.”

She had heard of Tomás Estrada Palma, but didn’t exactly know when he had been president. Neither did she know of other presidents after 1906. She didn’t know them and neither was she interested in knowing them.

What was her knowledge of Cuban history?

Later on I discovered that she knew who Martí, Gómez and Maceo were, but not much more than that. Was I talking with an illiterate? It didn’t seem so.

“Didn’t they tell you about Cuba’s presidents in school?” I said.

“I don’t think so, but I was never interested in history.”

Mónica smiled for the first time, while a gentle breeze came off the sea and ruffled her hair.

“What’s your name?” she asked me, and when I replied she asked me the inevitable question. “What’s your job?”

“Housing.”

“An architect?”

“Something along those lines,” I lied barefacedly. “And what do you do?”

“I’m involved in international relations.”

The breeze grew stronger and I threw my cigarette butt into the water. It probably floated for a few seconds before dissolving.

I didn’t ask her what kind of relations. In these times discretion is golden.

A peanut vendor walked past us, hawking his peanuts, and his cry was like the litany of a procession. “Peanuts, peanuts, good and hot peanuts,” he repeated as he moved off into the distance.

“I worked in international affairs once,” I said.

She too was discreet and didn’t want to know what kind of affairs.

“And are you doing all right?” I turned my eyes onto her breasts again.

“Can’t complain.”

“You wouldn’t want to establish national relations with me, would you,” I asked, and my smile was captivating and insinuating. My experience with women tells me that, sometimes, you have to be bold and totally risk yourself if you don’t want to waste time uselessly.

For a second she looked me up and down.

“Why not? Maybe it would be good to know you.”

That young woman was direct and precise, like an arrow that flies to its target. People like that are not plentiful.

“Great!” I exclaimed. “Why don’t we go for a drink or two?”

That invitation was very daring on my part because I didn’t have enough dollars to take her to a fancy bar, as she deserved. The only place where we could have drunk was in my bedroom or in any slow-death hole.

“What’s the time?”

I consulted my antiquated Soviet watch, a present from my daughters.

“My watch has stopped,” I replied, “but it must be around ten.”

“Another time. Today I want to talk with somebody, just talk and nothing more. We could walk for a while.”

“If you want to. Let’s walk, that’s what I’ve been doing lately, walking.”

I felt disappointed. The vision of her apricot breasts had whetted my appetite and I saw myself with them in my mouth. Suddenly everything was going to be reduced to a conversation, perhaps with a jinetera, and my opinion of their education and intelligence wasn’t very high. However, that night I had nothing better to do.

Unhurriedly, we walked along the Malecón and then up La Rampa, talking animatedly. When we reached M Street, she extended her hand.

“This is where I live,” she signaled with her head to the building on one side of us.

“When can I see you again?” I asked anxiously. It was the big moment for knowing whether she liked me or not.

“On Monday. Is ten all right by you?”

“Where?”

“Around here, on La Rampa. Well, see you,” she said and walked toward the door of the building.

“You know,” I almost shouted as she walked away, “you are the prettiest woman in the world!”

She turned back, smiling and waved me goodbye with her hand.

Living is difficult, but living in Cuba and being a jinetera is even more so. However, it has its attractions, like frequenting hotels, beaches, discos and other luxurious places, and getting hold of dollars with which to buy more and better food, dress well, acquire electro-domestic goods—a twenty-one-inch Sony television, a tape recorder, compact discs.

Prostitution and prostitutes are millenary words, more or less accepted by everyone. On the other hand, usage of the word jinetera is confined to the island of Cuba. The twenty-second edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, 2001, enters it as follows: “jinetera f. Cuba. A prostitute who seeks her clients among foreigners.” Correct, but not exact, because the word can also be masculine; in other words, male prostitutes, jineteros, as much with the opposite sex as with their own.

The reason why jineteras seek out foreigners is simple and well-known: Cuban men do not have enough dollars to buy their services.

But at this point jineteras in their totality do not concern us; one in particular does, Mónica. Later, another one, Malú, will as well.

We are being unjust and rather imprecise in describing Mónica as a jinetera. For a Cuban, a jinetera is a woman who goes out into the streets and stops somewhere frequented by foreigners, hoping that somebody will proposition her. As opposed to others, Mónica does not walk the streets. She has had foreign lovers whom she met in a disco or who were introduced to her by Cuban procurers. She was usually maintained by men who were temporarily resident in Cuba and paid her in return for favors. They visited her in her apartment or took her to their houses or a hotel. We could say that she is a classy jinetera, an exclusive jinetera who at present is not in a relationship with anybody. Why? She does not want to go back to the subjection of the tastes and caprices of some foreigner which at times can be humiliating or even degrading. She wants to have a break, rest, and then see. In any case, she has some money saved and that allows her to live comfortably, to an extent.

Él has just met her in the vicinity of a famous Havana hotel that holds old stories of loves and revolutions. He helps her to light a cigarette and looks at her lustfully, because Mónica’s breasts, although small, are firm and very erect, just as he likes them. Afterward, they have talked and have gone walking along the Malecón, which is beautiful, despite its unlit streetlamps, illuminated by a round and satisfied moon resembling a large yellow squash, with that view of the sea and the waves breaking against the reefs. They talk a little about everything and say goodbye like old friends, and Él is left wondering what she is. He thinks that she is a jinetera, but he wants to know a lot more and, of course, go to bed with her.

We are talking of a woman who says that her name is Mónica, but there are also things to be discovered about Él. His life might be very interesting or very unfortunate, although when it comes to misfortunes it is difficult to decide who carries the greater burden in this world. So far, we know that he wants to tell us her story. Is he capable of doing so?

They called me “house-swapper” but the most appropriate term for my activity is “runner,” as I work for people wanting to exchange or buy houses. Just as in other countries there are runners for business, real estate, stocks, I was a runner for house swaps.

“And what exactly does a house-runner do?” inquired an elderly lady who, seemingly, wasn’t abreast of the situation in the country. Perhaps the lady had been asleep for thirty years, perhaps she hibernated; probably, simply, she had never left her house or her sclerosis was advancing rapidly.

Very didactically, I explained to her that, given that it was prohibited under existing regulations to buy a house, one of the few ways of obtaining a new home was by exchanging one for your own, and that is where I came in, in the capacity of an intermediary. You have a two-bedroom apartment and want a three-bedroom one, like that of the gentleman who wants a smaller home, so I put you both in contact and, finally, you both pay me for my services. Not much. Just enough to subsist.

Before that I had a more lucrative activity, a money-changer; in other words, changing pesos for dollars and vice-versa. The dollar is at seven pesos, or ten, twenty, fifty; I buy, buy. It goes up to seventy; thousands of people leave the country on truck tires; the peso drops, the dollar continues rising, to 100, 120; I buy. The dollar goes down, the peso goes up; I sell. The government proclaims economic recovery; I sell, I buy.

That was my work until the police arrested my partner and I had to suspend such an interesting illegal activity.

House-runner, dollar exchange agent: two occupations far more agreeable than being a gravedigger or garbage collector. They proposed me those after sacking me from my last job, when my wife Baby and my daughters, the twins, were still real presences in my life.

“Where are you going to work?” said Baby and there was concern in her face.

“In the cemetery or collecting garbage,” I spoke slowly as if my mouth wasn’t working properly.

“Gravedigger, garbage collector!” The concern was replaced by shock. “You, a brilliant journalist!”

“The guy from the Ministry of Labor doesn’t have anything else for me,” I explained, disheartened, “only that or cutting sugar cane in Camagüey.”

“What are you going to do?” her preoccupation surfaced again. “If you don’t have a job they can charge you under the Vagrancy Act,” concern gave way to fear.

“I won’t accept and they can do what they like,” I said determinedly.

“How are we going to live? We can’t manage on my wages,” fear was replaced by desperation.

“Something will turn up,” I said, not very convincingly. I remembered Thomas, the doctor, a Milan Kundera character who, in Czechoslovakia, was forced to become a window cleaner. The doctor traverses Prague, leaving windows clean and getting to know beautiful women. I would have accepted a job like that willingly, but the man from the Ministry didn’t propose it, perhaps because in Havana business windows don’t get cleaned.

Something did turn up. Thanks to the good offices of my former boss, Alejandro Rojas, they sent me to an old books warehouse. There I didn’t meet beautiful women but abysmal African, Russian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz writers and other illustrious paper smudgers that I carried on my shoulder along with all possible equations, chemical and mathematical, in text books.

Disappointed by such superficial relations and in order to avoid the face of an ignorant administrator, the implacable judge of my reading during work and my acid comments on everyday life, I moved on to another job, then to others; each one as mediocre and irrelevant as the previous one and all of them as a state employee. Finally, tired of receiving orders from everybody and nobody, when Baby and the twins were already one more memory, I stopped being a government employee and became the aide to an old man who, in a self-employed capacity and together with his son, did removals in his dilapidated and antediluvian truck. An old man who transported furniture, refrigerators and televisions all over the city and who, on discovering my former profession, began to call me “poet.” “Hey, poet,” he used to shout from a fourth-floor balcony as I, puffing and panting, pushed an enormous four-legged oak table that little by little was raised from the ground. On its elevation, the table resembled an animal trapped in an eagle’s talons. “Push, poet,” repeated the old man, and between his son and me we carried, under a cruel and implacable sun, white-painted chairs which, hoisted in the air, reminded me of the sails of a boat. “Hey, poet, don’t fall asleep,” the old captain shouted at me from the command post, and I, stuttering, crushed under the mammoth weight of a Soviet refrigerator, heavy, hard, non-functional. Later, at night time, my bones creaked, my muscles creaked, my back creaked and I gave myself long liniment rubs to silence the complaints of my suffering body.

That heavy work was beneficial. It strengthened and prepared me for the long walks in search of houses. In those searches I didn’t only discover houses. Often an amiable lady, whose husband was too frequently absent, wanted something more than a house swap. So we engaged in a strong and intimate relationship that never went farther than two or three encounters, as that would risk getting used to the lady. A man like me mustn’t get used to anything. What is willingly repeated, what gives us pleasure and becomes a habit, is very painful when it’s lost.

Mónica was the exception to that rule and I am paying a high price for its confirmation.

On some occasions I had a bad time on unexpectedly finding that someone wanting to exchange his home was a former work comrade who had become a senior official, or an ex-disciple converted into an eminent doctor. “Hell,” they would say on seeing me, “you, a house-runner?” Of course, we all know that house-runners don’t figure very high on the Cuban social pyramid. They were—not anymore—on the level of street vendors and taxi drivers. I got used to such welcomes and replied, malignantly, “Here I am, getting rich,” while I thought, “Go to hell, I’m free and you are subjected to a boss and fixed hours.” Of course, that thought was sheer nonsense dictated by my arrogance. In real terms, I wasn’t free either and my former comrades had far better living standards—not anymore.

So, the day that I met Mónica, I slept until very late and woke up tired, depressed. To lift my spirits I drank a glass of rum and after grabbing any old thing to eat, went on my customary tour as a runner. First I visited a semi-ruined mansion on Línea Street, whose owner, an old man of indefinable age, invited me to sit down in a chair with a broken back.

Suddenly, it started to rain. It seemed that something was changing in the climate, because it was raining almost every day.

“Look at the house, a marvel, see for yourself,” he said and I went on a tour of the mansion.

Enormous cracks were opening in the bedroom ceilings, similar to murky cavities; the walls were like a leper’s skin; and the glass in the windows had been replaced by cardboard.

“What do you think, eh? Terrific house. It belonged to the Marquise of Turiguanó, my grandmother, may she rest in peace,” the old man looked happy.

I was talking with no less than an aristocrat.

“It’s not bad. I’ve seen worse,” I told him, but the old man didn’t seem to hear me. Beside him, on a little table, was an opened bottle of rum. On seeing my glance, he picked up the bottle and invited me to a drink.

“Ah, rum, the happy child of sugar cane, a marvelous confidante.”

I accepted his invitation with pleasure. The old man served himself and filled my glass with largesse. I drank avidly. I was feeling very tense and tension filled me with a great desire to drink. Excellent rum, as befitting a nobleman fallen upon lower times, but noble all the same. Not long afterward the bottle was almost empty, and the old aristocrat ended up by telling me the story of his grandmother, the lady countess, and her family.

They had left for the United States after black Cubans were granted access to the beaches and other public recreational facilities.

They all went except for the old man who, in those years, was madly in love with a young woman with progressive ideas, a fervent supporter of racial equality, very content to stay in the country, and whose only condition for accepting him was that he didn’t leave. Years later she went as well, but by then, the aristocrat had had two heart attacks and wished to remain in his country and in his old mansion that, little by little, was falling down. He had grown old and needed money to survive.

The old man finished what was left of the rum in the bottle.

“You know, I want a good apartment and money on top,” he said.

“I’m going to sort that out for you.” I got up and breathed deeply.

When I left, it had already stopped raining. My head was reeling and I breathed strongly once again, but only a wave of humid air entered my lungs. I still had a number of other houses to visit, but I wasn’t in any hurry. “What for,” I asked myself.

“Will she come?” I asked myself that Monday at ten, and looked at my watch. La Rampa was crowded with people talking, looking or walking slowly. I went down La Rampa in the direction of the sea, on the left sidewalk, keeping my eyes on the right sidewalk. I stopped for a moment outside the building where we had said goodbye on our last meeting. I didn’t see her, so I continued walking and, reaching the Malecón, came back up the opposite sidewalk, telling myself that that didn’t make any sense. She obviously wasn’t going to come. She had given me a date like that, so unusual, to go out for a walk, maybe just to play with me. And why should she come? I didn’t have anything to offer her, I told myself, apart from a bit of conversation, and you can’t live on conversation. I couldn’t invite her to Tropicana, or even to La Zorra y el Cuervo, which some foreigners were entering at that instant. I couldn’t say to her: “I’ve rented a room in the St John,” or “Let’s go to a restaurant.” And she would have somebody to invite her to cabarets, restaurants, hotels. Upset by those disheartening thoughts, I walked fast and, opposite the market, I crossed M Street and skirted the hotel without finding her.

The night was a failure, a shit and I was an idiot for believing the words of the first bandit, the first cheap slut, the first liar that I came across. But nobody was going to play me for a fool. If I ever found her she’d soon find out…

The red stop light on L Street halted my uncontrollable thoughts. People went by, indifferent to my bad mood, indifferent to the frustration of a mature man whom a young woman had left waiting. Couples passed by holding hands, happy, satisfied; a transvestite went by, tall, beautiful, dressed in tight jeans; and three prostitutes, an old man, two elderly women, two gays, Humberto the bookseller, who didn’t see me; some tourists in shorts and sandals, a fat women with a dachshund that urinated right on the corner, indifferent to the comings and goings of passers-by; Tanganika, the street musician with the cans; and even el Caballero de París could have gone by, but that was impossible because he had died ten years ago in a mental institution. The only one who didn’t go by was her, because she had taken me for a ride.

“Hallo,” said a voice behind me and I almost jumped like a scalded cat.

There she was, even more beautiful than in our first encounter, there were her green eyes and her magical smile. Suddenly I felt happy, content, like a child who has been given a much-wanted present.

“Have you been here long,” she said.

“I just arrived.”

“Good. I’ve been walking up and down, but I didn’t see you.”

“Of course, I just arrived.” Despite my experience with women I felt nervous. What could we do? She wouldn’t want to go to my room and I didn’t have dollars to take her anywhere else. In reality, I was without a good plan of attack.

“What do you want to do,” I asked her uncertainly.

“Let’s walk.”

We walked for a long time and when we got tired she proposed going to a hotel bar. The moment of truth had come.

“I don’t have any dollars,” I said, looking her in the eye.

“I’m inviting you, man.” She took my hand and I felt all the warmth of hers between my fingers.

Sometimes I act like a knight errant who would prefer to die rather than be dishonored. The natural thing in this world in which we live would have been for me to reply, “OK, you pay today, and I’ll pay tomorrow,” and every-one happy, even though tomorrow I won’t be paying anything. However, I said in a melodramatic voice—and in the business of being melodramatic (“idiot,” my friend Francis calls me) I have no equal—, “No way.”

She smiled and took my other hand. She looked very beautiful.

“All right then, we’ll go to my apartment. I’ll fix daiquiris and we can listen to the Beatles. Do you like the Beatles?”

After that day we continued seeing each other and I soon found out what her real international relations were, as she found out about my activities as a runner. It was better that way. We had removed our masks and the two of us were on the same level.

Finally, after one of our walks, we went to my room, where everything was strewn about as usual. When we arrived I hurried to impose a bit of order; then I opened a bottle of rum and filled two glasses: mine straight and hers on the rocks.

“I don’t have anything to eat today,” I apologized.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said and raised her glass. “To you.”

“To us.”

Mónica took a long drink and I imitated her. The rum went down well because we had soon downed the bottle. Ah, how good I felt, my whole body, my skin, my nerves, my bones, my muscles, were happy and leapt within me. Unstoppably, my hand touched her right breast first and then the left one. They were small and hard and I caressed them.

She shuddered and her legs, covered by a short skirt, stretched out. With my left hand I began to explore them from her knees to her thighs.

She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be caressed. Then she got up and went over to the open window from which came the vision of the darkness of the sea. There, she leaned over the window ledge and her buttocks rose, dominant, provocative.

Instinctively, I moved over her while extracting my hook—the hook of Jacques de Sores, the perfidious pirate, plunderer and violator of noble Havana, the large hook that he drove into dozens of victims—and, turning her towards me, yanked off her bikini briefs and penetrated her with the whole length of the iron hook, already red-hot. She gripped me by the waist and began to kiss me.

What a beautiful moment. Mónica facing me, penetrated, and in the background, the sea in all its extension and in its surprising negritude.

Thus we were, forming a single figure, one body united by the bridge of life, by my bridge of iron and chains, until I released her and made her turn her back to me.

For a long time I mounted her and remained astride her until she cried out and dug her nails into my thighs. Then something exploded in my body and I squeezed her violently and passionately bit her nape.

Afterwards, I let myself fall back onto the floor and I felt that as if my body was elevating, leaving via the window and flying far away, very far away to the infinite, clean of burdens and ties. Mónica lay down beside me with one hand on my chest. I pulled her to me and kissed her gently on the mouth.

“Thank you,” I murmured into her ear, “thank you.”

“You’re very loving,” she said and caressed my hair. Her large green eyes were glistening.

That was how it was that first time in my apartment.

It is nine in the morning on any given day long before Mónica meets Él, and she is sleeping in her apartment in a building on La Rampa that was beautiful in another era but is now in ruins on the outside. In that building Mónica’s close neighbors are Crazy Queta, Maruja the fortune-teller, Ms. Piedad Cruz, the owner of ten dogs, and Yumalaidi the prostitute.

Mónica’s apartment was not in ruins; quite the opposite, because with the money that she has earned she has been able to restore it and maintain it in good condition.

It is small—living-dining room, bedroom, bathroom—beautiful and welcoming. In the living room there is a glass table and on top of it a large jar of red roses. Mónica likes flowers a lot and buys them from a seller who passes by in the street crying, “Flowers, hear ye, flower seller, flowers.” Four high-backed chairs and two armchairs complete the furniture. On the walls a large image of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre and two reproductions of paintings by famous Cuban artists—Lam’s The Chair and Carlos Enríquez’ The Kidnapping of Mulatto Women,—and shelves with books; in a corner, an expensive stereo and a large-screen television.

This apartment is not really hers, but it is as if it really was. It belonged to Rogelio, a stage actor with whom Mónica lived for a while, the only man—maybe—who gave her tranquility. The furniture and the paintings were also Rogelio’s. Mónica met him after dropping university, when she wanted to be an actress and he was a man in his fifties. “Come and live in my apartment,” he suggested, and she accepted. After one year of living together, he decided to go to the United States, “Because all of this is shit, theater is shit and it’s all one big farce,” he said and left Cuba, leaving Mónica in his apartment which, legally, he should have vacated and handed over to the state, as she had been living there only for one year and at least five years were required to claim any right to the property. Mónica did not have to leave. A bit of money was enough; here for a lawyer, there for a notary and over there for some diligent officials, and in the end documents confirm that she is the actor’s niece and had been living with him for ten years. Then came long letters from Miami, from Rogelio, who lives in a small apartment in Little Havana, has bought a third-hand car and plays dominoes with other old Cuban actors in a café on Eighth Street and writes sadly, “This is shit and the theater in Miami is shit and it’s all one big farce.”

In another meeting, Mónica confided to me in between drinks that Rodríguez was her first surname and Estrada Palma the second. As for her first name, it was another, as different as Caridad de los Dolores, which she decided to change to Mónica.

“A vulgar, ridiculous little name,” she said and her eyes blinked, reminding me of the flapping of a bird.

“Mine’s no better,” I said.

It was raining, we were in my small room and we were feeling good, drinking tequila and talking, just talking. I drank a bit of tequila and kissed her eyes.

“You’re very appealing,” she murmured and her hands caressed my chest.

“Appealing?” What did appealing mean? Beautiful? Before I was, but not now.

Rich, fortunate, with a future? Neither am I that. So, why did she accept me despite the age difference? “What can I give her?” I asked myself.

“You’re appealing to me because of how good and understanding you are with me,” she said.

I didn’t like that very much. It wasn’t my physique or my intelligence that attracted her, but my supposed kindness. It would seem that I was a benevolent father. However, I made no comment.

“And your parents?” I asked.

Divorced. The father married again a number of times, always with a younger woman, left the country and sent her his final letter, after one year of silence, just before he died of a heart attack.

The mother, a beautiful ex-model, worked in a well-known tourism resort and was only concerned about herself and her lovers, important men with whom she spent weekends and vacations at the beach.

“You know,” Mónica pulled a face and kissed me on the nose, seemingly she was drunk on the tequila, “my mother and her friends detest the Beatles. Only the one before the last one, an athletic blond, liked them.”

“Did the blond guy treat you well?”

“Brilliantly; he gave me a Beatles collection that he had bought on one of his trips abroad. We slept together on the beach one night listening to them.”

I liked the fact that she didn’t hide her past sexual life from me and I liked it that she didn’t say “screw, stick it to me, fuck” or any of the other verbs utilized in Cuba instead of the classical “fornicate.” When we talked about sex between us we always said “make love.” In truth, we were making love to one another, we loved each other in our prolonged fornications, which could last for four or five hours in one single carnal act.

As for other swear words, Mónica hadn’t completely lost the Cuban family education, old-fashioned education.

I too had such an education, but since I became a house-runner and a trafficker of anything, my lexicon had been picking up the words usually uttered in the port of Havana and in all the ports of the world.

I drank what was left in the bottle of tequila. Excellent tequila, aged Sauza.

“It’s amazing that you should like the Beatles,” I said. “They’re not your generation. You should like cruder and more violent singers.”

“I’m old-fashioned?” A smile that gave her a childlike and ingenuous air appeared on her lips. “The important thing is that they’re romantics and I feel very close to them, so…”

“Did the blond guy do something like that to you?” I interrupted her and my fingers caressed her sex to prepare for the entry of my triumphal lance, which rose up strongly.

“Hang on, let me finish telling you!” she exclaimed. “My mum and her friends only liked danzón and boleros.”

As far as I could see, she wanted to settle accounts with her mother and her mother’s lovers. Mentally I imagined the lady on the beach, dancing danzón with various men, all naked, who, I don’t know why, I pictured as very fat with huge bellies. That vision of fat naked men made my bellicose sexual impetus flag. I’m a case as far as that goes—an anti-sexual image, the kitsch aspect of sex, inhibits me.

“And you don’t like old Ray Coniff and the fabulous Nat King Cole,” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“They’re not bad, but they’re for old guys like you,” she said in a schmaltzy tone.

“Thanks a lot,” I said and kissed her forehead, just like I was her father.

She was gratified by that gesture.

“You’re very tender,” she said.

It would seem that Mónica was decidedly romantic and somewhat tipsy but, for me, the tequila, excellent tequila, aged Sauza, was beginning to get me hot and riled up, like a Mexican cowboy. First she had said that I was good and understanding, then that I was tender and I didn’t like that either. It sounded soft and weak to me and I’ve always been a hard guy.

“Don talk shit. Who needs tenderness today? Me, you?” I asked heatedly.

“Perhaps your grandmother!” she said harshly.

We both fell quiet, perhaps thinking about our lives and about those who had loved us. Soon my annoyance disappeared. I felt certain that very few people had given her genuine affection. I recalled her close friend Malú, whom she had introduced me to a few days earlier.

“And Malú? Tell me about her,” I said in a conciliatory way.

“Malú?” There was surprise in her voice.

“Has she helped you? Has she been good to you?”

“She’s a wonderful friend.”

Her words flew out in a rush. “A bit crazy and violent.”

“How did you get to know each other?” I enquired cautiously, trying to penetrate the hidden labyrinth that I supposed existed between the two of them.

Mónica passed a hand across her forehead.

“A long time ago,” she said in a very low voice, “while we were in secondary school. Lu had just come to Havana and although she lived in a tenement she was no street-wise girl, but only for a short time. We’ve been friends since then.”

“When did she become a jinetera?” Suddenly, I broke my rule of discretion and had a desire to know more about Malú.

But Mónica didn’t want to say anything more. However, in later encounters she told me, as if we were talking about somebody else, not about Malú and herself, part of her story. But it took many days and many rainstorms for those confidences to come.

Your name is María Luisa, but when you were still little your mother began to call you by that nickname taken from a Brazilian soap that was all the rage in Cuba, Malú. There is a lot in you reminiscent of the famous character interpreted by Regina Duarte. Like all those born under the sign of Aries—Mónica is a Leo—you are intransigent about things done badly, a fighter, supportive, a good friend, and you do not allow yourself to be manipulated or dominated. Thus far with similarities, because the rest is very different. The Malú of the soap majored in Sociology and you were unable to finish college; she lives in a comfortable Río apartment and until recently you lived in a poky room in Habana Vieja; she had two serious, working parents, you do not know who your progenitor is—at least after your baptismal name comes the maternal López, and right after, that odd acronym Soa, given to those with no second surname—, and your mother was a black washer-woman till her very last day. Moreover, there is that sister of yours, hysterical and aggressive, who would have driven the Brazilian Malú and Regina Duarte crazy. And finally, but most importantly, Malú-Regina is a decent woman, appreciated by society, and you are a simple jinetera, looked down on by many, one who frequently brawls with other whores fighting for areas of influence, harassed by pimps and, sometimes, by the police.

So, why are you a prostitute? A strange question, difficult to answer; one that I should not have put to you, knowing you as I do. However, the readers want clarification on certain points; for example, that of a young woman who prostitutes herself.

“I’m a prostitute because I bloody want to be and because I like men,” you retorted to your sister when she found out that you were practicing that millenary profession.

It was raining and both of you were sitting in front of a broken television set in the tenement room. From one corner water dripped slowly, like tears, into the interior of a bucket. From the wall, a paper Christ bore his hand on his heart and looked at you sadly; and Santa Bárbara, on a small altar in another corner, observed you attentively, perhaps without understanding the fight.

“You’re one hell of a brazen whore!” yells the sister.

No, you are both wrong. Malú is not a shameless prostitute, nor has she prostituted herself for the simple pleasure of knowing many men. If that was the case, she would go to bed with Cubans and she only does so with foreigners.

Foreigners, the owners of dollars. Dollars that allow Malú to buy more food.

“Not what they give me on the ration book; everything else: protein,” you said to one of your first lovers, “none of those rice and beans.” Meat, yes, all kinds of meat…and cheese, milk, beer, Italian pasta and also clothes, perfume, shoes. Dollars so as to throw out the old, broken television and buy a new one, the latest model; dollars to acquire furniture to fix up the poky bedroom and, in the next twelve months, via the subterranean market, get a small apartment, small but welcoming, in some good neighborhood, not in the ruins of Centro Habana.

For all those reasons you have become a prostitute, but also to enjoy a bit of this shit life, you think, which is only one and ends with the first wrinkles; and to frequent discos, hotels, exclusive beaches, gyms, unattainable for the average schmuck with no dollars.

“Yes, and in exchange give your ass to any fat foreigner!” cries your sister, who stares at you with her myopic eyes covered by glasses broken in the middle. She’s sitting on a small swing and has her hair tied back at the neck in a large bun. Her skin is much darker than yours and when she talks she moves her hands in an uncontrolled way.

You look at her (we look at her) and in your regard there is more mockery than anger and rancor, although both could have been there. You cannot remember one day since your childhood when your sister, always bitter and frustrated, has not made you unhappy; but now what she is saying makes you laugh because she, as is abundantly clear, has no backside to offer, not to mention her teeth, stained and irregular, nor her prematurely drooping breasts for which nobody would pay a dime.

Your sister looks in bad shape, tired, aged, skinny.

“Girl, you’ve got nothing to give,” you are about to reply but you restrain yourself. The last time that you two argued she had a hysterical fit accompanied by screams, blows and kicks, which provoked the intervention of the gossiping neighbors. However, you cannot help but reproach her, “If it had been down to you we would have died of hunger a good while back because what you earn in the flower store (seven dollars per month) isn’t enough to feed us for one week.”

She gets up, walks across the room and stops in front of the Santa Bárbara statue. It is not a fancy statue but her glass eyes are beautiful and her smile is pleasant.

“How could you allow this, Santa Bárbara!” she exclaims and it looks as if she is about to cry.

In saying Santa Bárbara something is lacking. The saint can also be Changó, the fabulous god of Santería masked beneath the cloak of the Catholic saint. Changó, who likes double-edged hatchets and bananas at his feet. You look at Changó-Santa Bárbara and try to ignore your hysterical sister. You have always acted like that in disagreeable moments, looking at or conjuring up Changó to fill you with his strength and energy. What Mónica did not mention in the story she told Él, is that you are a daughter of Changó, his devotee; because when you were barely eight years old your mother made you go through the initiation ceremony during which you united yourself with the god.

However, Changó’s influence cannot work on your sister, who continues her lamentations over her sad life and the ills that she has to endure without a husband and with a shamed sister.

You cannot take any more of that broody hen clucking and, taking your purse, you open the door. On leaving you hear your sister’s cry, “Go, go, you shameless whore.”

You do not answer, you close the door and go out. To your right, gathered at their bedroom windows are the inevitable neighbors, who have undoubtedly heard your sister’s yelling.