Havana Noir (9 page)

After forty-eight hours straight without sleep, I can’t think about anything. I go off on tangents, just letting the ideas flow however they wish. London. I’m supposed to go to London, next month at the latest. But I’m not exactly dying to do the paperwork. My Israeli passport is valid everywhere in the world, I think, except here. To get through security at the airport here, I have to use my Cuban passport, which means asking for an exit permit, something I find irritating. It makes me feel like a prisoner, though I know at this point in my life I should be used to these things. Although, in service to the truth, that’s not the only reason I’m reluctant to begin the process of traveling. Deep down, I don’t want to fly to London, or anywhere else, because I still hold out hope that the guy will call. If my suspicions turn out to be true, if he’s alive and well and loose in Havana, he will call me. Oh yes. He can’t
not
call me. It’s an essential part of his routine, we could even say its culmination. His thing is kidnapping, raping, killing…and then telling me all about it. If he calls, I’m going to go out with him. It’ll have to be quick, right away, before there’s another scattering of corpses and the whole city goes up in arms and something comes between us, whether it’s the police or an inopportune jerk like the Beast of Macagua 8. Yes, I’m going to dive into the black of night for once. It’s decided. Well, it’s
always
been decided. From that first call, when he described from A to Z what he was going to do to his victim that night, and I later realized he had in fact done it to the T, well, he proved he was no joker calling just to talk stupidities. That’s when I smelled blood. And I went on alert, just lying in wait. There’s no point in fooling myself: I’m a predator too. Except that I’m not turned on by bunnies, I’m not turned on by easy prey. No sir. What gets me hot is always difficult, always requires ingenuity, courage, and patience; it’s challenges. That’s why I’m going to fire a shot right into my dear Ted Bundy’s neck. I’ll be his last passenger. Later, who knows…maybe I’ll finally get some sleep.

Translation by Achy Obejas

THE SCENE

BY
M
YLENE
F
ERNÁNDEZ
P
INTADO

Malecón

I
was sitting on the terrace when the electricity went out over the part of the city that I can see from here. Just then I heard my mother calling me. She is very ill. She’ll die soon. I’ve got a calendar in the kitchen where I’ve circled two dates. One is my mother’s death. The other is the last day to move out of this building. I should have inverted the order, because we have to leave the building tomorrow and my mother has two weeks to live.

When my mother was first diagnosed, everyone who cares about her advised me to leave her at the hospital in the care of doctors and nurses in case of an emergency. A few volunteered to sit with her. These were the same people who insisted that I don’t love her, that I’m selfish and don’t know anything about sacrifice. They thought I couldn’t hear them, that I’d fallen asleep in the rocking chair I brought into my mother’s room so I can watch her while she rests, and to be near when she needs me.

When the building was in working order, we had a woman who came to take care of the house and a nurse who gave my mother her shots. But now they can’t climb so many stairs. Now I give my mother her shots and do all the grocery shopping. I’ve told my mother that these people don’t come anymore because we can’t afford to pay them. I don’t want to tell her that the building barely exists anymore.

There’s no one here but us now. And since they turned off the electricity, no one comes to visit. We live on the fourteenth floor and the elevator doesn’t work anymore. Nor the motor that pumps water. But none of that is important. All the water tanks on the roof are full. And there are a lot of them, so there’s water all day long and there will be water long after we don’t need it anymore. It’s true that the refrigerator doesn’t work, but I buy my mother’s drinking water already chilled at the market. I buy her food there too. She only eats ham-and-cheese croissants and ice cream. Or
ate
. Lately, she barely touches food; she makes a pained gesture and abandons the plate between the sheets.

I found out about the city’s plans for our building when I was asked to a meeting at the office of Architecture and Urbanism near our home. It was on the twentieth floor on Malecón Avenue, with a view of the sea. The hallway walls were full of photos of our neighborhood in Vedado. Sometimes I think Vedado is so scattered and rife with transients that it’s difficult to think of it as one neighborhood, but rather many. People like to come here, to go to Coppelia dressed in their Sunday best and spend the entire day in line, to stroll La Rampa on the sidewalks still carved with things by Lam and Mariano. They go to the movies and sit along the Malecón.

The same exact photos were on the office wall too. There was one of the seawall on the Malecón. The most curious thing was that there was no one on the seawall in the photo. Not a single fisherman or couples kissing, not one kid playing. There were no brave suicides portrayed, depressed poets, drunks, street musicians, or hustlers. It must have been one of those scenes they can create now on computers. Just erase all the people with a touch of a button.

The other photos were busier. People strolling on La Rampa, cars on Paseo and Avenue of the Presidents. Coppelia without lines, with satisfied customers eating different flavors of ice cream.

Since the man I was meeting took his time, I looked at the photos and then at the city from the balcony next to the office. There are little homemade structures all over the rooftops, mansions turned into barracks, houses that can barely stand. The rooftops have become dovecots. There are fields of laundry lines; residue of homeless people; plants that grow between the tiles on the eaves; dogs that can’t be kept inside anymore so that instead of guarding homes, they’ve turned into lookouts who scan the horizon. Sun-drenched treetops, humid and green; church steeples. Little gray streets, a few cobblestone, which intersect, sometimes timidly, as if hiding from the multitudes. And then the sea, always lying in wait, and the Malecón which keeps us safe. It’s a wall of lamentation, the entrance to and from the country of Never Again, a fixture on postcards and calendars. Therapy for my mother.

Every time my mother could gather her strength to get up, she’d ask me to take her out on the terrace. With the very first remittance sent by my brother from San Francisco—once he realized that experiencing the spectacle of my mother in the process of dying would affect his biorhythm and would keep him from his successful life as a designer—I bought a lounge chair, a down pillow, and a thin mattress pad, and she began to spend her hours sitting out there. I brought her books. But later I realized she preferred chatting. Still later, it became clear that what she wanted more than anything was to gaze at the part of the city that was ours. One day she said, in a whisper, that she’d never had much time to look at the sky and that the clouds passed much too quickly.

On those afternoons, she discovered a million things. She heard the sound of the bells from San Juan of Letrán and the songs from the day care center nearby; the whistle of the scissors sharpener; the riot of pigeon wings on the roof across from us. And then, as soon as the sun started buzzing on the water, I’d take her back to her room.

We talked about the buildings around us and what they might be like inside. We would describe those we’d actually visited and later make ambitious plans about how we would renovate them without tearing down the original structures.

I had time to think about all this until the man I was meeting came and asked me into his office. Almost giddy as he spoke, he explained that our building would be going through a major renovation, and that the current tenants would be given new housing according to their needs. I explained that we needed to stay. I told him about the situation with my mother and that I wasn’t sure we could move her.

The man understood that my situation was delicate. But so was his. He had plans to complete, deadlines and tasks, expenses that had been given the okay in order to procure resources. Everything was architecturally and financially aligned. Emptying the building was just the first task. But he could give me an extension. I smiled—sometimes I can be truly charming—and thanked him. As we were saying goodbye, I felt that he wanted to say something, maybe just the usual good wishes for recuperation, but he seemed to think better of it and kept quiet.

That same day, I met with the doctor; I was ready to have my mother at home until the day she died. I explained about the therapeutic qualities of the terrace, how she delighted in the architectural view, the sea, and the dawn. I told him I’d been born in that neighborhood, in that house, and that my mother felt in her element there. I said nothing about the plans to empty out the building.

The doctor was glad to hear our home was fresh and high up, with sun and light, air and space. He was also glad it had such a good view of the water and said that Vedado reminded him of Manhattan. I nodded so he’d feel comfortable and I got his approval. He told me that if I made sure we had the proper conditions, I could keep her there until she died.

I then quickly talked to him about my brother and his help. The doctor asked if my brother had any plans to visit my mother. I lied, saying that his papers were still not in order and that he suffered a lot because he couldn’t come.

A few weeks after that, my neighbors began moving out of the building, many coming by for a last goodbye. But my mother didn’t pay much attention to them. The morphine and phenobarbital left her with just a few lucid moments, and I took advantage of them to bring her out on the terrace, where we would continue “renovating” Vedado. Everyone asked when we were leaving. Everybody was very concerned about the work on the building and how soon even the most minimal of services would be unavailable. I calmed them down, saying that everything was ready, that I’d made the pertinent arrangements with the hospital to comfortably transport my mother using a powerful anesthetic the minute the psychologist determined it was appropriate.

After they all left, there came a happy time, having a sixteen-story building all to ourselves, knowing that no neighbor would stop me in the hallways to ask me the same things: how she was this morning, how much morphine she was taking, if she was eating, when my brother was coming, and, poor woman, what bad luck…I never gave an honest answer: My mother woke up radiant every day, spent hours entertained with her 2000-piece jigsaw puzzles (her collection of puzzles, all famous portraits, was well known), and the morphine was just so she’d sleep quietly. The stampede out of the building spared me the obligation of lying to them all, though I’d never felt the slightest bit guilty about it.

The best part was the sensation that came over me when I arrived home after getting morphine, or juice, or phenobarbital, the syringes, or something for her cravings. I walked 17th Street in the shade of the laurel trees and came in the entrance without worrying about the manager, vendors, or people looking to trade housing, knowing that I had exclusive rights to the place. There was no one murmuring behind the doors that my brother was a jerk who thought money could solve everything, or that I have a heart of steel and what I really wanted was for my mother to finally die. The theories vary on this last hypothesis.

The simplest one is that I’ll finally be able to go live with my brother. The truth is that we were always very close; the two of us would play house, and cowboys, and later we both ended up studying art and architecture. He adored the houses designed by Le Corbusier and I was taken by the Impressionists. Now he’s in San Francisco, sending money so I don’t need to do anything other than care for our mother until she dies.

Another theory, which requires more neighborly shrewdness but is actually expired, is related to the Sorbonne professor who used to visit me because he was interested in the Cuban movie posters I had once researched. He would come by frequently, long after he’d viewed the entire national poster collection, finished his thesis, and curated his exhibit. Then the real goal of his visits became sleeping together as much as possible, to which I had no objections. Just around the time my mother got sick, he invited me to Paris to give a series of presentations on how the French posters of 1968 had influenced Cuba. Though I wrote out my script at first, I ultimately answered that I could not travel because of my mother’s illness. And I apologized, as though my mother’s death were a mere inconvenience disrupting his magnum plans. He has never written again.

For those neighbors who don’t sign on to either of those two theories, there’s a more general option, which doesn’t really pin anything concrete on me. According to this one, I want to be free so I can do whatever I want, like sleep with lots of men and women; drink until I fall on my ass; smoke marijuana and take pills and watch a lot of porno films on giant screens with quadraphonic sound. In other words, to manifest this dark side which my ex-neighbors insist on having seen in me since I was a little girl. They’re convinced that my mother not having left for paradise yet is the only reason I haven’t descended into hell.

Now that we’re without them—they’re far away, furnishing other homes and surely missing Vedado and its excellent bus routes (on which no buses actually pass) and its movie theaters (always without air-conditioning in the summer) and Coppelia (with its serpentine lines) and the Malecón (which is the only real populated part of Vedado, because it’s free)—my mother and I are quite content.

She doesn’t know that the neighbors have moved out and so she innocently enjoys the magical breeze that has blown away the radio and its shrill music, the hammering at 6 in the morning, dogs barking all through the night, fights between parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.

A little after the neighbors left, our phone was disconnected. I thought God was on my side. In any case, I’d had it off the hook for most of the last few weeks. That was how I had avoided giving a health report every five minutes to the curious; the worst part was hearing their comforting words and the sense that, behind them, there was such relief that it was my mother and not theirs who was about to ride with Charon.

When they cut the gas, I started using the two-burner hotplate we kept for emergencies. My mother was eating less every day. So when we finally lost our electricity too, there wasn’t much to worry about.

I fired the nurse, who cried a bit as she showed me how to give my mother her shots, regulate the oxygen pump, take her blood pressure, and raise the Fowler bed to the right height so my mother could get up. I also learned to smile when I wanted to cry and to convince myself that she was going to die anyway.

We have been very happy here, my mother and I, absolute rulers of this beautiful building in ruins, I thought as I left the terrace to answer my mother’s call on the last night in my neighborhood. When I went back, the city was black. I imagined that the tourists on the cruise ship—the only line of lights on the water—must have a very interesting view. What must it be like to face a city completely in the dark?

When my mother called me—thank God the building’s empty or the neighbors’ noises would have never let me hear her, especially now that her voice is not much more than a whisper—she said she was very tired. But it wasn’t exactly a complaint, more of a statement of fact. My mother, who had never been the kind of Catholic who sat in church pews or wore chains with little crucifixes, had had a priest visit just a few days before.

I had tried to make sure the priest was as young as possible, so he could make it up all fourteen flights. I found one who did all his rounds on a bike, so that the elevator not working didn’t strike him as a great obstacle. Nonetheless, he was exhausted when he arrived and needed some time to get himself together out on the terrace, looking at the sea and the nearby buildings. He said it gave him a great deal of peace. I told him about my mother, how much she enjoyed it too, and that I’d found a way for her to have pleasant days out on those few square meters. I didn’t tell the priest that we only had a few days before we had to move out of the building.