Queen of the Underworld (35 page)

To Luisa’s and my mutual enchantment, Don Waldo plucked a handful from the top of a pile and began dealing them out like playing cards.

“¡Qué pequeñitas, estas palabras!”
said Luisa, squinting at the tiny writing on her cards.

“Sí, muy pequeñitas,”
rumbled Don Waldo. “That is my own tiny handwriting, which I can no longer read without my
lupa.
” He patted the large magnifying glass. “
Este juego,
this game we are about to play is called
Destinos y Desatinos
because that is the title of the work. It is a work,
sí,
a memoir, in the
‘cahiers’
style, with chapters on many different subjects, some aphorisms, and, as I say in the preface, things too simple or unpopular to have been said by me before. But for now, since I have the pleasure of your company, instead of my reading it to myself under the umbrella, we shall play it aloud, like a game.
Vamos a ver,
let’s see. Five cards for each of us, Luisa, Emma, and Waldito el Tremendo—that is my son Jorge’s nickname for me,
mi apodo.

“Now, we each have our five cards, but before I create the rules for this game”—Don Waldo’s translations were so seamless that I no longer kept track of which language I was hearing—“before I continue with the rules, I had better explain to Emma that in English the wonderful play on words in my title is completely lost.

“
Destinos,
in English, are ‘destinies,’ and
desatinos,
in English, are ‘mistakes.’ In Spanish, that little devil of an
a
turns a destiny into a blunder. That’s why I love it for a work of
autobiografía.
Because often in life it is difficult to tell one from the other when you are in the midst of it. Of course, later,
más tarde,
it is easy to look back and say, Ah, yes,
this
was part of my destiny, and
that
was my foolishness:
ah, qué desatino!
What rubbish was I thinking?

“Now for the rules. I shall be what you call ‘it’ in English games. I shall play the one on the defensive. Just as at university, a student must defend his
tema,
his thesis.

“So: Luisa, you will begin. Look quickly at your
tarjetas
and read aloud the first word or phrase that jumps out at you.”

Should it be serious or funny (
serio o divertido
), Luisa wanted to know.

“
Cualquiera, niña,
whichever you choose.”

As Luisa frowned at her cards, I tried not to look at mine and get ahead of the game. Even with the teeny writing, several candidates leapt up at me: the names of Ortega and Camus . . . that “skin of a lion” passage Lídia had read aloud during the communal unpicking of Altagracia’s skirt . . . and, God! There was “my” word,
usurpado,
in a chapter heading: “Exiliados, Usurpados, y Gusanos.”

But for all I knew, Don Waldo would make up different rules for me.

“¡Ay!”
screamed Luisa, bouncing up and down in her chair,
“¡Platero! Aquí está Platero!”

“I see you have picked my chapter on empathy,
la empatía.
‘Platero the Donkey: Jiménez’s Emblem of Empathy.’ Now, here are your rules. I must explain to you the
esencial,
the meat, of this Platero chapter in one minute. Not a second more.
¿Comprendéis?
”

He unstrapped his watch, which had a second hand, and laid it between Luisa and me on the table.

“One of you stop me when the
segundero
has gone once around.
Vamos,
let’s begin!”

But the second hand swept past five . . . ten . . . and Don Waldo had yet to say a word. Already he had thrown away a quarter of his allotted “defense.”

Then he said, “
Ay, niñas,
we shall have to continue our
juego
at a later time.”

Excited Spanish-speaking voices grew louder. Facing the hotel, Don Waldo had been the first to see we were no longer alone.

Lídia, in a pink linen suit and matching straw hat, had the air of one bringing home her trophies from battle and parading them out to the pool to show off to Don Waldo. Trailing in her wake came the Ocampos and an assortment of men and women in churchgoing attire.

Clamped into Lídia’s grasp so securely he might have been handcuffed to her was the only un-well-dressed member of the party, a short, solidly built man in jeans, sweaty fatigue shirt, and dusty cowboy boots.

What followed for me was as thwarting as having the English subtitles snatched away from a foreign movie just when it becomes urgently important to know who is saying what.

The stranger, handsome in a sexy, brutish way, was Alex’s half brother Nestor, who had just flown himself from the Camagüey ranch to Florida in the family’s plane. This much I caught, even though the rat-a-tat of everyone’s Spanish, Lídia’s included, was going a mile a minute. If Alex had gone to fetch this brother, what was he doing now? In my frustration, it even occurred to me that Lídia was deliberately speaking fast to exclude me; she had not once looked my way. Probably she was still punishing me for asserting my independence on the night of her party. She also had dispensed with her refined diction and adopted her stepson’s lazy manner of slurring words together. I was bombarded by a completely different Spanish from Don Waldo’s courtly back-and-forthness with Luisa and me.

Whatever Nestor was relating in his indolent, slurry mumble was eliciting wave after wave of mounting indignation in his listeners.

“¡Bárbaros! ¡Gamberros!”

“¡No me lo digas!”

“¡Ay! ¡Qué injusticia!”

“¡ . . . y qué idiotez!”

“¿Han estropeado todo ya, los Fidelistas?”

“¡Es verdad: Lo ha estropeado todo . . . desde hace seis meses . . . tantas mentiras!”

“Qué verguenza . . .”

“¡GENTUZA!”

“¡CANALLA!”

“¡No puedo creer que esto me está pasando!”

Back to square one, Emma. Just as on the night of the tornado, I was the foreigner in their midst. Recognizable words flew by—there went one! there went another!—but, given my kindergarten-level skill in assembling them, they added up to a great big nothing. I resolved to enroll in a night course in Spanish conversation at the University of Miami as soon as I had my first paycheck. Even if I hadn’t got the new shoes from Bev I would now have given the Spanish lessons priority.

“Papi, él no quiso hacerlo,”
Nestor continued to regale them in his lazy, mumbled Spanish,
“y . . . lo hicieron, los brutos . . . lo hicieron lenta y mal—”

“¡Horroroso! Tremendamenta mal . . . !”

“Es puro barbarismo . . .”

“¡Pobre animalucho!”

“Brutalidad . . . criminal . . .”

Marisa Ocampo, seeing her daughter’s teeth begin to chatter, hustled Luisa into a nearby cabana to strip her out of her wet bathing suit. They returned, arm in arm, a well-combed Luisa bundled snugly in her terry-cloth beach robe her mother had a matching copy of upstairs.

I was recalled to the state of my own appearance. My “beach robe” was clearly a man’s silk dressing gown, and was wet all down the back. My hair, I knew, had dried into a weedy, shoulder-length fright. No wonder nobody had so much as glanced my way. And there was no longer a mother close by to shepherd me off to a cabana and lick me back into shape. Where was Alex? If only I could
just arrive
in my room without having to shuffle in my Weejuns, with my wet backside, past this church-clad crowd.

Don Waldo unscrewed his thermos, poured out a steaming cup, and offered it to Nestor.
“Cafecito, hijo,”
he softly lisped. And then in a Spanish I could completely understand: We are very sorry about what has happened. You must be exhausted (
agotado
) after your terrible experience.”

June 21

. . . It’s Sunday afternoon and here’s the rest of the letter to you I started yesterday. I mailed Loney’s letter yesterday, you’ll be glad to know, with news of weather and what I found out in the
Star
’s morgue about Tess. I included a clipping of my “most crowd-pleasing story” so far (according to one of the editors) and a Garbo-ish photo of me in raincoat and hat because the model from the agency failed to show up.

The
Miami Star
is not exactly the
New York Times,
but I am holding my own and the assistant managing editor (whom everyone calls Lucifer because of his ambition and quick rise to power) has already indicated I’m making the grade. I just have to work very hard and come up with more crowd-pleasing ideas so they won’t shunt me off to one of their boondock bureaus.

Your presents were perfect. Nothing is more mysterious and seductive than a white silk scarf crossed under the chin and tied at the back of the neck and wraparound sunglasses, which I need to get. The Spanish dictionary is a godsend. Thank you for anticipating my needs. I have been making lists of words ever since I came back from a FLUMMOXING experience downstairs at the pool. As you know, the Julia Tuttle caters mainly to Cubans—that’s why Tess, with her Cuban connections, was able to get me the special rate. So far I have managed to get by because most people speak some English, like Marisa Ocampo, who was at St. Clothilde’s a few years before me, and Alex de Costa, the Cuban-American manager, who is twenty-eight and has a degree in Comparative Lit. from Harvard. (He has a little crush on me, but he’s more like a fellow voyager, if you know what I mean.) His mother is another story, which makes me realize how fortunate I am to have been born to you. But more on that later.

Also staying here is an internationally famous writer and critic, Don Waldo Navarro, who’s seventy-seven—he arrived Friday with his young mulatto bride. He smuggled his politically seditious memoirs out of Cuba on note cards sewed into her long skirt, and he and I and Marisa’s little daughter (whom I am teaching to swim) were playing a game out by the pool late this morning with the note cards, all of us getting along fabulously in this effortless mixture of English and Spanish, when out comes Alex’s mother with a whole parade of Cuban refugees she picked up at church and is offering free rooms to in exchange for work. She also had in tow Alex’s half brother from her second marriage—she’s had five husbands, but would really rather be organizing a revolution, but more on that later—and it was clear the half brother had been through something awful. He’d just escaped from Cuba in the family plane and everybody was talking fast in a non-Castilian Spanish, saying how horrible and what barbarians (I could follow that much), but it wasn’t until after Alex’s mother led everyone off again for a buffet lunch that Don Waldo was able to fill me in.

The revolutionaries (called “barbudos” because of their beards) had just confiscated the de Costa ranch in Cuba as part of Castro’s new “land reform,” and they wanted to have a barbecue to celebrate. They ordered Nestor’s father—at gunpoint—to slaughter his $20,000 breeding bull! He and the other son refused and were locked in a military truck to be taken off to prison. The sons’ wives were put under house arrest in the servants’ quarters and Nestor was allowed to help them move their things. Then, while the “barbudos” were inexpertly slaughtering the bull, and the animal was screaming bloody murder, Nestor managed to flee in the family plane. Now he is on his way to the Dominican Republic to join some exile brigade being trained there. He is distraught but says he can do more to fight Castro this way than sitting in prison with his father and brother.

Never a dull moment at the Julia Tuttle. Or elsewhere in Miami, for that matter. While interviewing the wounded at the hospital after the tornado, I spent half an hour talking to a famous ex-madam of a Mafia “house” on Palm Island who had just tried to kill herself for the third time. She’s married to a psychiatrist now, is “respectable,” and goes to Tess’s hairdresser. I think there’s a novel here if I can succeed in imagining it all from her side. Tess is going to try to arrange another meeting between us. Of course, I’d have to do a lot of research, but already yesterday I met an actual gangster walking his boss’s dog on Miami Beach.

There is still so much to get done, but boy am I ever thankful I had you as my mother. It has certainly put me ahead of the game . . .

21.

F
ISHER’S
F
UNERAL
H
OME WAS
a Spanish-hacienda-style establishment with verandas and hanging plants, sloping red-tile roofs, and a meticulously barbered turf lawn. A winding drive flanked by royal palms meandered discreetly around to the rear of the house and a parking lot bordered by tasteful utilitarian outbuildings, also roofed in red tile. This rear view, including the hearse waiting to carry Stella’s body to the nearby cemetery, was rendered invisible from the street on either side by high flowering hedges.

I was going to have to bone up on tropical flora.

I had assumed that Stella would be buried in some lovely cemetery over on the Beach, where she had lived the last third of her life. But as Marge Armstrong drove us to the funeral on Monday in her sporty little MG she explained that there
were
no cemeteries on Miami Beach. “The Chamber of Commerce considers them bad for tourism,” she said. “People aren’t supposed to die in Paradise.”

We entered the floral-scented chill of Fisher’s reception hall, where a man in a dark suit stood by to greet us with just the right professional touch of lugubriousness and asked us to sign our names in Stella’s visitors’ book beside a spray of orange flowers. It wasn’t yet noon and already there were several pages of signatures ahead of us.

As I was recording my presence in my best St. Clothilde’s penmanship (for I knew Paul would cherish this book for the rest of his life) and wishing for a finer instrument than the blue ballpoint provided by Fisher’s, my covetous eye jumped to a wide-nibbed bold script a few lines above. Damn it,
someone
had come armed with his own personal fountain pen flowing with jet-black ink.