Cubop City Blues Read online

  At this point the dream takes one of three routes: the route of the desert, the route of water, or the route of dissipation. The first is self-evident. He is in the Atacama, the Sahara, the Mojave. The heat sears his skin and his thirst makes his tongue swell with pustules. Off in the distance there are blue mountains he never reaches no matter how much he walks. Shadows don’t exist there, not even his own, and when he turns to look back from where he’s come, he realizes he hasn’t moved an inch since yesterday. He tells himself that he must complain to the proper authorities, but they will not pay attention to him, limited as they are by the rules of their office. Forms in triplicate. Sleepy clerks. Appeals to the assistant deputy superintendent.

  In the second he finds himself snorkeling in water so clear it is like dense air. The fish are plentiful. They get in the way; they nip at his skin. He sees a manta ray the size of a car flap by under him; he sees moray eels and green and yellow sea snakes and a twenty-foot shark swallowing a brown grouper. Without realizing it he has swum several hundred yards away from the shore, past the continental shelf. When he looks down, what faces him is bottomless ocean, deep blue, all-encompassing, and he falls into the eye that is looking at him.

  The third dream is the one Angel longs for most and the one he is most reticent to enter. When it happens, he is drinking champagne with Amanda in a room where everyone is naked except them. After a few minutes a blonde-haired woman approaches the two of them and asks them in a gentle but insistent tone to take off their clothes. She is helping Angel unzip his pants when suddenly a rabbit bloops out the fly. She laughs and throws the rabbit into the air. Amanda is looking at this with a smile or a grimace on her face—he can’t tell. She asks him if he knows the woman, and he says there is something familiar about her but that no, really, he has never seen her before. In some versions of the dream Amanda catches the rabbit and is petting it. In another variation the woman with blonde hair is Angel’s wife and Amanda is in love with her. She pulls her away from him and takes her to the sofa, where they have sex. Usually a dead fish makes its way into the dream, wrapped in newspaper or hanging from a hook, and off in the distance there is a beautiful beach on which soft, creamy waves are breaking. What wakes him: a white bird crossing the sky.

  THE CITY OF

  THE PRESENT

  Each day you wake to a landscape that has followed you since childhood. Each morning you miss the songs of mockingbirds you heard many years ago when you lived by the river. What you hear instead are the garbage trucks of America, their grating roar, and the honk of taxis, impatient yellow geese, and the banter of drunken children going home at dawn to anxious parents in the suburbs. You are not of this place and so you can only pine for those early days, finding yourself awake in the same spot, the city of the present and the city of the past repeated again and again as if they were practices of memory trapped in reality.

  The city now is ahead of itself. Deeply wounded, it has healed. What is left is a scar, a raw, hard place on the skin, and the airplanes crashing into buildings and the smoke billowing and the ashes settling on the cemetery. One third of the people want to cover up the hole as if it never existed; another group wants to dig inside, keep the wound open, let it suppurate until it infects the abdominal cavity; the last third doesn’t know what is best. They go to their jobs in the morning, return home at night, live the everyday life in suspension between the idyllic past and the lurching future, and hope that from the constancy comes the antidote against the claims of time. What none of them knows is that over the actual city there is a primal city that will outlive them. They inhabit both, one as a function of their geographical selves, that is, creatures who either find themselves accidentally among its structures or have actually sought it out for its familiarity; the other in relation to their function as businessmen, construction workers, writers, cooks, crane operators, hot-dog vendors, sausage makers, ballet dancers, window cleaners, priests, simultaneous interpreters, brick layers, bridge painters.

  At lunch you overhear a conversation between two friends about seducing a landlady. Friend number one wants nothing more than to have her turn off her radio. She plays an oldie station with the volume loud enough that he has trouble concentrating. Listen, he tells his friend. I could do it. She’s still attractive; she must have been beautiful as a young woman.

  How old is she? the friend asks.

  Oh, sixty maybe.

  That’s tough. What makes you think she’ll turn the radio down instead of up?

  She’s sublimating. As soon as she has good sex, she’ll do anything I say.

  What if she gives better sex than she gets? friend number two says. Will you then do anything for her, will you let her turn the volume up even higher?

  At this point their soup comes and their conversation drifts here and there—work, new apartment, baseball—with nothing to hold it together.

  You move into your own mind. No one would deny you’re from Cubop City, even if you were born elsewhere. When you came thirty-eight years ago, you were twelve. There was no anxiety about how to get around, how to act, what to say. You knew these things, you had learned the code in the city of your birth, and you applied it with relative success. There were minor adjustments. In Cubop City you didn’t have to wave at buses for them to stop. You had to look carefully before crossing a street; there was less sky to look at, more anger to avoid. There were crowds at rush hour such as you’d never seen. Minor things. You knew the pulse of the city because it was your pulse. You knew to get out of harm’s way, yell at a driver running a yellow light. Your heart beat fast; your ambition grew in direct relation to the city itself, its thirst and hunger, its drive to charge at nature and swallow it. The city was hard work, propelling itself beyond the day to the next at the speed of neon. In winter, bundles moved about spewing steam like locomotives. The sun was weak willed and timorous. The city went on with its business.

  You finish your lunch and walk outside. It is autumn. Already the saplings on the avenue have lost their leaves. The noise has grown and you feel the need for quiet, the afternoon scurrying away into the factory towns of New Jersey, the body of time stretching as a cat stretches on the floor. We can only remember the past: a slow movie about to end, the smell of ripe guava, the taste of tamarind, a mockingbird swooping to a fence post, marking territory with song. You are walking down the sidewalk, the primal and the actual city intertwined. The organism that took your childhood away is the one that gave you the gift of manhood. You will know no other place like you know this. This city with a scar like a knife wound on its belly, this city like the flames shooting into the sky, rock hewn, crystallizing, into which you disappear.

  THE BUTTERFLY

  After the knifing, when Angel is so close to death he can taste its breath, a field opens before him and slopes down to the sea. He goes out on that field and sits in the tall grass. The sky is deep blue and the sun is a friendly creature with no inclination to blaze. Hours he spends looking out toward the water, reclining backward with elbows on the ground. Sometimes an orange butterfly alights on his bare knees and its scratchy legs distract him from his reverie. Is the butterfly imagining him, or is he imagining the butterfly? It is very beautiful and seems comfortable there. Even as he thinks comfortable, he wonders if that isn’t fallacious. Comfort doesn’t enter into the life of an insect any more than it enters into the life of a rock. Butterfly is still one moment, in motion the next. It has no expectation of comfort, no way of identifying it. Then the thought occurs to him, as spontaneously as the butterfly, that all qualities he applies to himself and his fellow humans—there is that beautiful neighbor getting into her car with that sullen expression; there is the rapacious building manager who is trying to get him out of his apartment; there is a broken woman making her way through the world—are in the end manifestations of that same pathetic fallacy. Sometimes he thinks his feelings are chemical impulses not much different from the ones that
drive the butterfly, except that he is aware of them, an awareness that often leads to paralysis, though he might call it comfort.

  His mind returns to the field, the way it slopes gently toward the water and then, with a sudden dip, reaches the sand. Yellow flowers, the names of which he doesn’t know, sway in the breeze. Overhead a hawk is thermalling, and far away on the ocean’s surface tiny sailboats are flashing in the sun. Off the corner of his eye he notices a figure dressed in white looking at him. This story was going to be about her and about the small house they share on the hill. It is there where he is trying to recreate the universe in his image, but every day it becomes more arduous, less like him and increasingly like a broken atomized picture where only his chin or his ears or his shadowed brow or sometimes a tooth or half a tongue is identifiable. Behind the hill on which the house sits are two ridges. A trestle bridge crosses from one ridge to the other, and it is rumored that in the old days, young pregnant women threw themselves off it into the path of oncoming trains. Nothing of the sort has happened since they’ve been here.

  The white figure that appeared on the edge of the field is his lover. She has been very good to him, keeping the house in order and making suggestions as he goes about recreating the universe. As he said, it is a difficult process and he simply cannot keep track of everything. One day he puts a gun on the table on one page and on the next he has a vase of flowers. Guns to roses? No. Sloppiness. Or a character is blonde in chapter 3 but dark haired in chapter 5. Once, he created the character of a priest who was the embodiment of goodness itself. A few pages later, the priest was unexpectedly found in bed with his niece. It was as if the universe, infinite in its possibilities, kept intruding on the fiction—no, on his writerly mind—and insisted on fighting the convolutions of actuality with the artifice of linear narrative. His lover has been quite helpful in pointing these things out and quite helpful, too, in the subtle ways in which she eases him when the writing is not going well. Just last week, for example, before she went out for the day, she left lunch on the table and next to it the Hemingway book open to his favorite passage of “Big Two-Hearted River.” He ate lunch at ten in the morning and spent the rest of the day reading and rereading that passage.

  After the dishes are done, an antediluvian quiet settles over the house. The crickets chirp and a whip-poor-will sings. His lover and he sit on the sofa and discuss the next day’s work. Her docility then is in contrast to the catlike spirit that leaps out of her in moments of anger or when she abandons herself to the pleasures of the bed. She’s had plenty of experience with other lovers, but it is mostly instinct that drives her, not knowledge. He’s flesh in her maw and he submits. She keeps him from falling into the abyss of the birds without caring what is eternal: joy or terror. Love comes in many guises.

  As she approaches he notices that her face bears an expression he’s never seen before, a stony indifference, a stern determination. Her steps are not languorous but forceful, martial even, as if she were following the orders of a higher force. When she reaches him, she looks down, and for a moment he can see the wings of pity fly across her eyes, but they are soon replaced by a rapine shadow that presses him down and keeps him on the ground in the same position from which he has been admiring the sea and the sailboats.

  Oh, she’s come to tell him that she cannot live with him anymore, that she has found someone else, etc., etc. She will leave today with her clothes and some of the things he has given her. He feels as if he must get up and be at eye level with her, but her gaze, which he himself has made all-powerful, pins him to the ground. She turns, and in her turning is such grace he can barely stand it. His heart is beating fast and his throat wants to crumble, but if he has one advantage over the situation, it is that everything around him is his making—the house, the field, the sea, his posture, his lover walking toward him and walking away.

  He lets her go and lies back to look at the sky, which is soon covered by clouds. A strong wind blows off the ocean and the butterfly disappears. The wind pushes the grass stalks uphill and in a few minutes large drops start falling, a few at first, and then the sky breaks open and the rain comes down, heavy, persistent. He runs back to the house and finds that everything is as he left it, the whiskey bottle on the counter, the red roses he bought yesterday, still fresh and fragrant, the cantaloupe half on the kitchen table that he hoped they could have with lunch. Sitting on the reading chair he listens to the rain hit the cottage roof, beating him down until he is a small helpless creature in the universe of his making. He realizes his love, that he himself devised, is a dull sublunary lovers’ love.

  KILLER OF CROCODILES

  Angel’s grandfather, Pedro Romero, was the best policeman in Havana. They say he wasn’t afraid of anyone, un macho de verdad, they say, driven to ridding the city of the criminal elements who dominated the streets, even if he had to break the law to do so. Angel met Pedro in a nursing home in Miami, thirty years after Angel’s grandmother threw him out of the house for his philandering ways. Pedro took up with a woman with whom he had a daughter, and after she, too, broke with him, he fake-married a simple twenty-year-old girl from the country. They say his cousin, Gustavo, a lawyer and notary public, arranged the whole thing but never submitted the papers to the marriage bureau, so as far as the law was concerned, the marriage never took place. Pedro was merely interested in getting the guajira into bed. He wound up falling in love and stayed with her for fifteen years until he left for the United States. By then he had retired from the police force but his reputation preceded him everywhere he went. He was, after all, the man who had tracked, found, and killed Manolito Rivas, one of the most notorious murderers ever to roam the streets of the capital. Whenever Pedro entered a bar, people bought him drinks, and more than once he was seen walking down the Malecón with a tall, blonde Americana on his arm.

  By the time Angel met Pedro he’d been writing for ten years. He’d published two books that sold a total of a thousand copies, give or take a dozen, and after considering his meager success, he was almost ready to give up writing for good. His ambition, his last thread of hope, was to write a story about Pedro that would revive his sputtering writer’s soul.

  Pedro was a shriveled old man who could hardly speak due to the laryngeal cancer that was killing him but who still whistled at all the nurses who entered his room, even the ugly ones. As a result the nurses gave him special treatment, bringing him chocolate treats to suck on and cans of Orange Crush, the only liquid that slaked his ever-present thirst. When he saw Angel, he raised his hands in an inquiring gesture, and Angel answered that he was Zoila’s grandson and therefore his as well. Pedro started shaking so badly that he had to sit down. He waved Angel over to the chair and embraced him, planting a wet, unpleasant kiss on his cheek. Then he told that old joke about an inventor who had developed a fruit that tasted like a woman’s vagina. Angel forced out a laugh.

  You don’t like the joke? he asked. Angel could practically hear his vocal chords straining to vibrate.

  I’ve heard it before, Angel said.

  The truth was that laughing was difficult because Angel had inherited his family’s resentment over the way Pedro had treated them. What kind of man would abandon his wife and children just like that? His father was forced to leave school and work sweeping the floors of a soap factory at fourteen, and his uncle was so traumatized by the absence of a father that he started drinking at sixteen, and by the time he was twenty-five he was a hopeless dipsomaniac. Angel’s grandmother, Zoila, became a recluse, embittered by what Pedro had done yet unable to forget the only man who had brought any kind of happiness to her life. As she drew her last breath she called out: Pedro, ven a mí. Come to me.

  How is your grandmother? Pedro asked, looking at Angel intently.

  She’s fine, Angel lied and quickly changed the conversation. Manolito Rivas, the famous murderer. You found him?

  Yes, he said and then remained silent for
some time. His eyes were frozen and unmoored. His jaw dropped open.

  If the old man dies now, Angel thought, I won’t get my story, and so he called out to him several times until he awoke.

  Did you hear the one about Mr. Pérez and Mr. Brown at a bar in South Miami? Pedro asked.

  Angel listened to the joke and this time he laughed heartily. He waited a few minutes before asking Pedro again to tell him about his pursuit of Manolito Rivas.

  Pedro smiled, his eyes fixed on the wall by the door, then shook his head slowly as if remembering something fanciful, a story he had once invented to entertain friends but which had now become more real than the rest of his life. He opened a fresh can of Orange Crush and began to speak.

  Manolito Rivas was a dandy, always dressed impeccably in the latest styles. His hair was slicked back and shiny, and his fingernails were perfectly manicured. To see him walking down the street you’d think he was a successful actor or musician or a child of privilege. In reality he was a brutal killer, murdering women with impunity and then boasting about his exploits in the barrios of the city. Despite his life of crime, maybe because of it—you never know about these things—Manolito Rivas had become a legend in Havana. Newspapers carried front-page stories about his antics—how he’d set a woman on fire after raping her; how he’d enamored the scion of a wealthy banking family, then drowned her in the bathtub and distributed her money among the poor who lived in La Plaza del Vapor. His last victim was the widow of a government retiree whom he’d suffocated and then shoved her dentures down her throat. What a way to die, devoured by your own mouth!