Stabs at Happiness (4 page)

Fulgencio Batista is having a hard time getting to sleep. He can't stop thinking about the horror movie he saw tonight. It really scared him. The girl in his bed, who has luxurious dark red hair, tries to console him.

“Sweetie,” she says, “You worry too much.”

“I'm just thinking,” says ‘
El Hombre
'. “Tell the truth, will you? Do you believe in vampires?”

Yes, she does. To reassure him, however, she says no.

Oh Jesus the bomb goes off so loud it breaks the windows of the shops across the street: all you can see is smoke, all you can hear is the big echo of the explosion and then the screams of the wounded, horrible cries—or maybe you're deaf, and it's all inside your head. Maybe your screams are the loudest, the most abandoned of them all. Or you're dead and you don't know it. Come on then, amigo. Try to run away.

Mariarosa and her friend Leonora Christina go for a drive down Fifth Avenue, looking at the surf off to the right. The car is a Thunderbird, given to Mariarosa as a gift by her lover, a fifty-three year old vice president of some American company that imports or exports something—she never listens to him talk. His wife finds Cuba too humid, she's always tired. While he likes to have some fun.

“One week Justo wants to be a poet,” says Leonora, “And then the next week he wants to play the trumpet in some band. If he can ever decide what he really wants to do, and stick with it, I think he'll be okay. He's not so complicated as Angel, but Angel's too complicated for his own good. He's moody; he won't talk about what's on his mind…”

Mariarosa frowns. She's only met Justo once, but she was not impressed. Angel is so handsome: to her mind there's no comparison.

“At least,” she says, remembering an intimate confession, “Angel knows how to make you happy.”

“Yeah, that's true. Justo gets too excited. He wants to please me so bad… Maybe I can teach him. I don't know.”

There's nothing she can teach Angel.

Jagged streaks of theatrical lightning tear apart the sky, followed closely by several basso profundo roars of thunder, which some people mistake for explosions. The rain attacks the island in a fury, only gradually losing its concentration and getting lazy, slacking off.

Ulpiano Gutierrez answers the front door, expecting someone else, and is arrested by the S.I.M. He looks surprised: he's been betrayed. He knows that he'll be tortured, but maybe they'll let him live. You never know. Maybe they only suspect him a little. A ‘little': that means they just take off his fingernails and put an electric wire around his balls, then give him some juice.

“Why do you go with the blancos?” asks one of them, as the others are searching the house, alluding to the fact that almost all of the island's blacks are pro-Batista—because
El Hombre
himself is mulatto, with an unmistakably Negroid face.

“You make a mistake,” says Ulpiano. “I stay out of trouble; I just take care of myself.” He's decided to play dumb.

“Oh, I see,” says the S.I.M. man, with a knowing smile. “You're a comedian. We're gonna have some good laughs together, aren't we? We know some excellent jokes, you'll see; we'll make you laugh and laugh.”

Ulpiano's heart falls like a brick inside his chest.

In a dream it's a hundred years ago and he's a soldier on some smaller island, Martinique or St. Kitts or Barbados, wearing a blue fancy jacket with a wine-colored diagonal sash, a gold medal, and soiled white pants. He is supposed to arrest his mother, a singer who has fallen in debt.

“Why don't you just kill me?” she says, in her hoarse, seductive voice, smiling, not seeming to care one way or the other.

Angel feels he has to let her go. The alternative appalls him. He tells her of a ship that is sailing before dawn: she must hurry to the harbor. He's bribed the captain; it's all arranged.

She takes his sword and suspends it between them, butt against his chest, point pricking her between her breasts.

“Kiss me,” she says, reaching out to draw him into an embrace.

He jerks back, and the blade clatters to the rocky ground. Elena picks it up, bending over in the dark, and then, as he steps forward to help her, she stabs him, pushing the entire length into his upper abdomen, so that perhaps the point comes out his back.

He is shocked, but feels no pain. Neither does he bleed. Elena laughs again, beguilingly, and says that as long as he doesn't move he won't be hurt.

“If you stay still, you'll be all right.” She leaves him then. He doesn't dare call out after her. He scarcely dares breathe.

He wants to sob, but he is too afraid. Slowly, numbly, he contemplates his position, unable to measure the passage of time. He doesn't move.

Then he awakens, alone in his bed at daybreak. He groans, and groans again. He's paralyzed with pain, the phantom sword still piercing him through and through.

Everything is owned by the North Americans. The Cuban Electric Company is a subsidiary of the Electric Bond & Share Company of New York; the Cuban-American Telephone Company is a monopoly owned by IT&T. The United States controls the deposits of chrome, nickel, and manganese, and these are mined only when the Yankees are in a war. During peacetime, the U.S. wants to keep these deposits untouched, in reserve for when they need them.

Although you can grow almost anything in Cuba, which has fine soil, plenty of rain, and virtually no winter, more than half the food consumed here is imported from the United States.

All Cuba is good for, they say, is sugar. But even here the North Americans have control. They have a deal to buy almost all of our sugar, every year, at a fixed price.

They need to eat a lot of Butterfingers, Baby Ruths and Almond Joys.

“Where's Leonora?” asks Lieutenant Santamaria, looking past Justo to the interior of the house. He's wearing his uniform, and sunglasses, and Justo is very frightened. He has dreaded such a meeting for some time.

“She's not here. She went out to get some food.” He elaborates, nervously: “She wanted to get some peppers, you know, and a squid.”

“Are you living here then?”

“No, not really. I'm just visiting today.”

Angel barely smiles. “How long do you expect to be in Havana?”

“I don't know. I'm looking for a job.”

“I thought you were a student, studying music or something…”

“Not anymore. I'm looking for a job now.”

“Unless you know someone, a job can be hard to find. You need connections. Do you have some friends or relatives here to help you out?”

“Nobody with any pull.”

“Well, I'll ask around for you. If I hear of anything that sounds good, I'll let you know.”

“That's very generous of you.”

“No trouble at all. Will you tell Leonora Christina that I was here?”

“Yes, of course,” says Justo, smiling with a desire to please that does nothing to disguise his fear. He watches Santamaria go down to his car; when the officer turns his back to look at him one last time, just before getting in, Justo feels panic, like a fish might be trying to swim out of his gut.

There is no treachery that Santamaria might be above, no evil that he might not do. The day turns dark with danger; danger is like a fuzzy blurry black spot on the sun.