A Quiet Vendetta (60 page)

Having reprimanded him, in and of itself nothing more than a poor explanation to myself of why he was now dead, I was still faced with the grim reality: on my front room floor, wrapped in a rug, was a dead constabulare, and until I did something decisive he was going nowhere.

Fifteen minutes later I got up from the chair and started pacing the room. I walked around Hernández clockwise, and then anti-clockwise. At one point I stopped near his head, leant down, peered into the hole where his face lay and said ‘
¡Hijos de puta
!’ with such venom that spittle flew from my lips.

I felt vexed, angered by his silent presence, and though my first impulse was to take something heavy – perhaps a hammer, or a large stone – and beat his head to a useless pulp, I restrained myself. This matter was a problem enough without further complications to clean up. And then in back of that reaction was a sense of regret, a narrow sense of guilt perhaps. I felt a momentary panic as I considered the possibility that Victor might return and see a dead body in his house. I was not afraid for myself, but when I thought of my son my viewpoint changed. I wanted the past behind me, and yet here, even as I stood over the dead body of the constabulare, the past was making its insidious way towards the present.

I glanced at my watch. It was a little after two. I went out to the front and backed my car up as close to the house as it would go without attracting too much attention. I unlocked the trunk and propped it open with the edge of a blanket inside. I returned to the house, and from a strong cord I found in a drawer in the kitchen I cut two lengths which I used to tie up each end of the rug. Hernández was not as heavy as I had imagined, and I was surprised at the ease with which I hefted him up onto my shoulder. I stood within the doorway of the house until I was certain there were no passers-by or people standing on their porches, and then I hurried across the few feet of pathway, used my knee to push the trunk upwards, and lowered Hernández’s body into it. I had to bend Hernández at the knees to get him inside, and then I slammed the trunk shut and locked it. I drove the car down to the edge of the road and parked it once again. Visions of Carryl Chevron came back to haunt me. I remembered how the death of the salesman had started me along this path, how I had been a similar age to Victor, and the sense of coincidence was almost painful.

Claudia and Victor returned no more than half an hour later. I greeted them warmly. I had taken the steak knife from the sink, dried it carefully and replaced it in the drawer. I had warmed some bread, sliced some dried meat and eaten a sandwich. I felt level-headed, altogether in control, and while Claudia prepared our evening meal I sat with Victor in the main room and listened as he read to me.

Later, evening closing up against us, I asked Claudia if she would be willing to stay with Victor for an extra hour or so as I had a small errand to run. Claudia was more than happy to facilitate me. I believed she was lonely perhaps, her husband having been dead more than three years, and the time she spent with Victor, the hours she spent in my house catering to us, seemed to give her purpose and respite from a world she felt no great desire to long inhabit. I took my car keys; I left the house. I let the handbrake off and rolled the car down to the end of the street before I started the engine. I did not turn on the headlights until I reached the junction at the end, and then I took a route north along Belgica onto Avenida de las Misiones. I headed out towards the coast, to the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta, and down there, down along the edge of the Canal de Entrada, I pulled the car to a halt above a dark gully that climbed down to the edge of the water.

From the trunk of the car I lifted the rug with Hernández’s body inside and carried it to the edge of the high verge. I rolled him out from within, folded the rug and returned it to the trunk. I took a small can of gasoline from the back of the car and doused Hernández’s body liberally. I stepped back and struck a match. I watched the flame for a moment, like a single candle against the night sky, and then I tossed it towards his body. The body ignited with a sudden
whoosh
, and flames swelled upwards. I was panicked for a moment. Such a fire would be visible all along the coastline, but by then it was too late. I hurried back to the car, started the engine without illuminating the headlights, turned around, and headed back to the road. At the top of the incline, perhaps three or four hundred yards from the fire, I killed the engine and sat watching for a while. No-one came. There was no sudden alarm raised. It was as if the eyes of Cuba were turned the other way. How long the body burned I did not know. After thirty or forty minutes I started the engine once again and drove away. I was half a mile from Hernández before I switched on the headlights, and by the time I reached the house I had almost forgotten the man existed.

It was three days before Hernández’s body was finally identified, more than a week before another constabulare came to Raúl Brito’s shop to ask if Hernández had been seen there in the previous days. Raúl, forgetful at the best of times, said he could not recall the last time he had seen the man, and I acted patient and yet suitably ignorant of anything but books and cigars. I had already spoken with Raúl, told him that all necessary documentation had been signed, and had given him the first thousand dollars of the ten he was due. Raúl did not question me, I was his friend, and there was nothing requiring further discussion. I heard mention of Luis Hernández once more in the subsequent week, and then there was nothing. He seemed to have been a man of little consequence in life, and equally lacked consequence in death. The lawyer never contacted Raúl Brito regarding any incomplete documentation and the matter became unimportant. Each month for the subsequent nine months I gave Raúl a further thousand dollars, and Raúl – he of the old ways – never felt any need to consign the money to a bank. I was a partner in spirit, not on paper, and this arrangement served me well.

For three years my life with Victor became a simple and uncomplicated matter of moving from one day to the next with merely the darkness providing the seam between. He was schooled well, and by the time he reached thirteen years of age I could see in him the wide-eyed longing for the world that had been present as a young child. He asked me of America frequently, of the things I had done, the life I had lived in the New World. I lied to him in small matter-of-fact ways. It seemed unnecessary to tell him anything he would not have been able to comprehend, and thus he heard what he wanted to hear and he imagined the rest. The better part of a year later, as we entered the fall of 1996 and I approached my fifty-ninth birthday, Victor came to me one evening and sat facing me in the kitchen. Claudia had long since left for the night, and the house was quiet. He brought with him a book filled with pictures, landscapes and night-time horizons, and he showed me the towering image of Manhattan against a brilliant sunset.

‘You have been to New York,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper.

‘I have,’ I said. ‘I lived in New York for some years.’

‘Before I was born.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, before you were born. I left New York in the spring of 1982 and you weren’t born until the summer, and by then we had moved to Los Angeles.’

‘And you met Mommy there?’

‘Yes, I met her at the beginning of 1974 and we were married in May of 1977.’

‘Where did you live?’

I smiled. I could remember the sounds and smells, the faces of the people in the street. I remembered almost word for word the discussion that was held regarding a man called Jimmy Hoffa.

‘We lived in a small suburb of New York called Little Italy.’

‘Italy? Like the country?’

‘Yes, like the country.’

Victor was quiet for a time, pensive almost, and then he looked up at me and said, ‘What was it like, Daddy . . . what was America like? I find it hard to remember much at all.’

I leaned forward and took his hand. I held it as if it was my lifeline to something precious and eternal. ‘It is a vast country,’ I said. ‘Many, many, many times larger than Cuba. Cuba is just a small island near the coast of America. There are millions of people, tall buildings, wide streets, shopping malls larger than the Old Wall Ruins. Sometimes it is difficult to walk down the street because there are so many people coming the opposite way. It has everything good and everything bad that can be found in the world.’

‘Bad?’ Victor asked. ‘Like what?’

I shook my head. ‘Sometimes it is difficult to understand why men do the things they do. Some men kill, some men take drugs and steal other people’s property. Some men, out of desperation perhaps, feel that this is the only way they can live their lives. But against that it is possible for anyone to be happy in America. There is enough of everything to satisfy, and if a man works hard and keeps his word the whole world can be his.’

Victor was quiet again. I watched his face. I saw the light in his eyes, and I knew what he would say.

‘I want to go back to America, Daddy. I really want to go back to America and see it. I want to go to New York and see the buildings and the people. Could we do that?’

I sighed and shook my head. ‘I am old, Victor. I have come here to live the rest of my life. You are young, and when I am gone there will be all the time you need to see America . . . all the time you need to go anywhere you want in the world, and you won’t have your old father slowing you down.’

‘I don’t want to go alone, I want
you
to take me. I want you to show me everywhere you have been, all the places and the people—’

I let go of Victor’s hand and raised my own. I shook my head slowly. ‘Victor . . . I don’t know that you will understand even if I explain it to you, but I cannot go back to America. I am an old man now. I am nearly sixty years of age, and there is a great deal of America that I want to forget. We will stay here for a few years more, and then when you are eighteen you will be free to do whatever you wish and go wherever you might want to go. I will not stop you. I would not have it in my heart to stop you doing anything you wanted to do—’

‘So don’t stop me now,’ Victor said, and in his tone I heard that edge of fiery determination that I possessed as a young man. He was so like me in so many ways, and yet he was also innocent, and blind to the brutality of the world he desired.

‘I cannot—’ I started.

‘You mean you
will
not,’ he retorted, and he snatched the book and slammed it shut.

‘Victor,’ I said, my voice stern, unforgiving.

He glared at me defiantly.

‘We will not talk about this any more tonight,’ I said.

‘We will not talk of this ever again if you have your way,’ he replied.

‘Victor, I am your father—’

‘And I am your son. And I lost my sister and my mother too. I am lonely here. I spend all my time with Claudia, studying every hour of the day, and I cannot stay like this for the rest of my life.’

‘No-one is asking you to stay like this for the rest of your life . . . just for a few years more.’

‘A few days more would be too long,’ he said, and he rose from his chair. He looked down at me, a young man defying his father, and though at some other time I might have raised my voice to him, though I might have sent him to his room for his lack of compliance and misbehavior, I could do nothing but watch him silently as he spoke.

‘I am fourteen years old . . . old enough to know what I want, Father, and what I want is to go to America. No, we will not talk about it any more tonight. But we will talk about it again, and we will keep on talking about it until you are prepared to see things from my point of view. Then you will make a decision, and if the decision is that you will not take me then I will find a way to go by myself.’

He pushed his chair back with his knees, the sound like something ugly dragging itself across the ceramic tile, and then he turned and walked to the door.

He looked back as he stood in the doorway. ‘Goodnight, Father,’ he said, his voice curt and brusque. ‘I will see you in the morning.’

I listened as he made his way up the stairs to his room, as he slammed his door shut behind him, and I leaned forward, my arms folded on the table, and I rested my forehead on my hands.

I imagined Victor finding his way to America alone. I imagined him reaching New York and wandering the streets alone. I imagined what might happen to him, who he might meet and what would become of him.

I felt tears in my eyes, a knot of twisted emotion in my throat, and I believed for a second that if he went he would become what I had become. Either that, or he would die.

I did not sleep that night, and when I heard him rise in the morning, as I listened to him prepare his own breakfast in the kitchen below me, I could not face the prospect of seeing him look so defiantly at me again.

I waited until Claudia arrived and his lessons began, and then I rose and showered. I dressed quickly and quietly, and left the house by the rear door and made my way to the store.

Victor did not so much withdraw from me as quietly disappear. I saw less and less of him, and this, I believed, was how he intended it to be. In the morning he would say little. He would prepare his own food and retreat to his room until Claudia arrived. Then he would join her in the main room and close the door firmly behind him. Though it was not locked it was obvious that he did not wish me to enter, and so I did not. I believed perhaps that I was allowing him some degree of control over his life, but all I was doing was allowing him to draw himself further away from me. In the evening when I returned from the store he would be upstairs in his room. I learned very quickly that he would arrange for the evening meal to be prepared before I came home, and he would eat with Claudia. This again was of his own devising, and it was evident in his manner and attitude that he no longer considered me a part of his life. I had refused him something that he longed for, and thus I had been summarily excommunicated.

On many occasions, too many to recall, I attempted to win him back, but he was stubborn, and as we entered October of 1996 I realized that he had chosen a path, much as I had done. Perhaps I consoled myself with the knowledge that where I had killed a man to gain my knowledge of the world, all my own son wished to do was visit America, the land of his birth, the home of his mother.