Cubop City Blues Read online

  Waking the next morning he saw that Amanda had slept next to him and then left the house early. On her pillow was a note saying she had gone in search of the man with the handlebar mustache. He dressed quickly and went outside without so much as a cup of coffee. He walked around the neighborhood until he found her staring through the window of a phony French café on Ninth Avenue. All French cafés in Cubop City are phony. The real ones are in France.

  That’s the man, she said looking through Angel’s reflection on the glass.

  Inside were several youngish couples seated at the tables closest to the window, and at one of the far tables by the counter was a middle-aged man, alone, reading a book.

  What are you talking about? He doesn’t have a mustache, he said.

  Your mother appeared to me again last night and said that he’d shaved it off. She said that two of his daughters lived in the city, and the three others, whom he’d lost touch with, were spread all over the country.

  But how do you know it’s that particular man? Angel asked, letting his irritation get the better of him. I’d got over all this and you had to bring my mother into it.

  I didn’t call her, Amanda said in a calm voice that thinly disguised her condescension. She came to me. I’ll tell you how I know that’s our man.

  Angel threw his arms up over his head and started walking away. His mother was dead. He, his sister, and father had had her cremated and dumped her ashes into the Gulf Stream. Amanda caught up with him and grabbed him by the arm.

  You should have seen him handling the butter knife, like a bona fide killer. What I didn’t get to say to you because you left so abruptly was that your mother told me we would find him in that café, sitting just where he is.

  Amanda, he said almost pleading with her. You never knew my mother.

  I know her better than you think. What harm can there be if we follow that man and find out where he lives?

  They waited across the street for the man to finish his coffee and watched him as he left the café and walked south on the avenue. He was slim, almost delicate, and had thinning blond hair. He looked to be in his late fifties, hardly the attacker type. They followed him at a safe distance to Twenty-third Street, where he turned east, then to the Eighth Avenue subway, which he entered going uptown.

  Hurry, Amanda said. We’re about to lose him.

  No way, he said.

  Amanda said they’d gone too far to stop now and went down the subway steps. He went home. He had windows to wash.

  Three hours later she showed up at the apartment, disheveled and sweaty. Subways will do that to you. He watched her as she drank a glass of water, went to the bathroom, and came back to the living room to sit on the sofa. She let out a long breath, closed her eyes, and let her head rest on the back cushion.

  He’s an actor, she said finally.

  He lowered the newspaper he was reading and made a question with his face.

  I knew there was something familiar about his face, she said. I thought I had seen it in a dream. Then, as he was getting off the subway on Fifty-ninth Street, he turned toward me and I got a frontal view. It was the guy on the Electrolux commercial on the television. We got the wrong man.

  There was nothing Angel could say, nothing at all. Maybe now they could put this whole thing to rest and resume their lives as normal people. They did for a time. Two weeks later as they were having supper at their favorite neighborhood diner, she said in a barely audible register, as if she were trying to keep him from hearing it, We have to start over.

  He stopped chewing and looked at her. He could feel his eyes squinting.

  Your mother has been appearing to me every night. She’s very insistent, you know. The only way to quiet her is to find the man with the handlebar mustache.

  He grew it back? Angel asked.

  He never shaved it. I misinterpreted some symbols.

  He took another bite of his turkey club sandwich and at that moment an important question occurred to him. His mother could barely speak English when she was alive and Amanda’s Spanish was rudimentary at best. What language were they communicating in? How do you say handlebar in Spanish? Or is that not a relevant question in the spirit world? He kept these matters to himself and continued eating. A few minutes later he felt a kick to his shin, which he ignored. He felt it again. Amanda was pointing behind him and raising her eyebrows. He turned around, trying his best to be discreet, and a few tables away was a man with a handlebar mustache. He was dark haired and muscular. His face was long and bony and his cheeks were covered with acne scars. There was something hard about him, something criminal.

  Angel couldn’t finish his sandwich. Suddenly he wanted to be out of the diner, safe at home watching baseball, his favorite pastime in those days. Amanda was scrunched in her seat, hiding behind him as she spied the man, who had by now noticed he was being watched.

  Slowly the man with the handlebar mustache stood and walked over to their table, all six and a half feet of him. He loomed over them and squinted amorally like Lee Van Cleef looking into a western vastness. A cold liquid ran through Angel’s veins, and he readied himself to protect Amanda, perform the ultimate sacrifice for honor’s sake, and be torn asunder by this Chelsea desperado.

  Amanda smiled up at him. She had a knowing, innocent smile that would disarm the most determined killer—yes, even Lee himself at his meanest.

  Are you Rollie Fingers? she asked him.

  Bless her, Angel thought. Bless women who know baseball.

  The Chelsea desperado’s meanness dissolved and he showed them a set of nicotine-stained teeth. Sweetheart, you got the wrong jockey.

  For quite a while Amanda busied herself with other things and dropped the matter. He was liberated and was able to concentrate on his work, which he’d neglected in order to pursue the handlebar chimera. It was around this time that he began to feel a twinge in his belly, not pain exactly, but what Spanish speakers call una penita, a small sorrow. He ignored it, as one does with such things, hoping it would go away by itself, but one night the pain was piercing enough that it woke him. He sat upright in bed sweating and still in the thrall of a dream in which it was not a knife that was thrust into him but a hot poker that twisted itself around his intestines. He shook Amanda awake and told her about the pain but not the dream. She called the surgeon who took care of him the first time, and he urged them to go to the emergency room.

  While they waited for the surgeon Amanda said the recurrence of the pain was a wake-up call. Now he had to find the attacker for sure or he would suffer forever. Angel was on intravenous morphine at the time, floating in a plane where everything made sense, or nothing made sense but it was too much trouble to unravel it: a skein of cause and consequence. Morphine takes you to the edge, and it’s amazing how clear things are from there. He looked at Amanda and saw concern shadowing her face. He wanted to kiss her. He couldn’t remember if he already had. He was absolutely certain he could fly and she could fly with him. He remembered the doctor coming. He remembered a CAT scan, blood tests, X-rays. He remembered the doctor saying he had an abscess—fairly common in these cases—that he would have to drain. He remembered nodding out, a tube in his stomach, nasty nurses and nice nurses, a spot of blood that seeped onto the sheets, the fellow next to him whose stomach had been taken out. He hadn’t eaten in three weeks. His eyes were sunken and his lips were gray. According to Amanda, he’d be dead soon. His aura was diminishing.

  While Angel was home recovering, he asked Amanda what language she and his mother used to communicate. No language, she said. What do you mean? he asked. The spirit world is beyond language, she said. We use signs and and we use thoughts. He dropped the subject and fell asleep on the sofa. He dreamed of a river on which words floated and sank and floated again. He dreamed of being dizzy with loneliness. Finally he dreamed of the man who knifed him, who lived in h
is neighborhood and was waiting for the right moment to knife him again, this time aiming better and deeper so that he would die miserably on the dirty chewing-gum-splattered sidewalk.

  Angel survived the abscess without complications or need of major surgery, due in no small measure to the surgeon who treated him, one of the best in the city, and he went on about his life as if he’d never been knifed. Few cities allow for that sort of continuation and Cubop City is one. Then he received a call from a detective in the Tenth Precinct. They had a suspect in hand and wanted him to identify the perpetrator that same afternoon. He and Amanda rushed to the station house, and, as the six suspects were lined up before them, she grabbed his hand and pressed it. One of the men had a handlebar mustache. He asked the detective, who was sitting next to them, if the man lived in their neighborhood, and he nodded his head yes. Police procedure prevented him from answering out loud. I think that’s him, he said. You sure of that? the detective asked. Angel could sense Amanda’s eyes boring into him. Yes, he said.

  After that it was only a matter of time. He testified at the trial a year later. The man had by now shaved off his mustache but it didn’t matter. He identified him and the court-appointed defense lawyer offered a weak and ineffectual cross-examination. He was found guilty. Then the judge discovered some inconsistencies in the prosecutor’s papers and the case was thrown out. The man was let go. Justice had been done. Amanda wasn’t so sure.

  She tried contacting Angel’s mother again on several occasions but she was unsuccessful. Her necromancy mentor told her that once the dead accomplish their goal they disappear forever. She’s joined the ether, the tutor said. She won’t hear you or see you, nor can you see or hear her. The best you can do is breathe in and breathe out and hope that a molecule or two that were once part of her is in the air. Let it in, the tutor added, let it all in. In physics lies redemption.

  YOU SAY BEAUTY

  It is a special night. You have left a party held in your honor in a big house once owned by the niece of a Philadelphia banking magnate. Mainline Brahmins used to visit the house, invited by the niece to spend a weekend in the country, away from the bustle of their urban lives. Now, after passing through several owners, the house is being rented by a group of artists who do many more drugs than art. The house is falling apart, its ghosts long gone, but the artists don’t care. They paint a few pictures or make believe they paint, then down the LSD, snort the cocaine, smoke the weed. There are many people at the party, most of whom you find unpleasant. The men are scraggly and bearded, the women thin and unwashed. They have come not because of art but because of the liquor and the drugs. An hour ago the wife of a truck driver offered herself to you in the attic and after the sex you wanted to get away from her. Her armpits were unshaven, a fact that you noticed in the postcoitus. She talked too much but said nothing. Nights are like that. Desire in, desire out. You say beauty and everything crumbles. You will make meaning out of this many years hence. Now her husband, the truck driver, wants to show a pornographic movie in the living room. Perhaps he knows about the sex upstairs. All you want to do is go outside, get away from the wife, the husband, the film. Nothing personal. A soft breeze blows in from the south and you can hear a loon in the distance, sounding serene and plaintive at once, where the bad music doesn’t reach.

  There’s a small wooden rowboat tied to the dock and you take it out to the middle of the river, where the moon is waiting for you. On both banks there are large shadowy trees and beyond them the crumbling estates where the wealthy once gamboled. The moon looms under you, big, white and pock marked. You bend over the edge of the rowboat to kiss it, aiming for the Sea of Tranquillity, but you would much prefer the dark side if you could reach it. You like the unknown, the unseen, the black kiss. Inches away from the surface you recognize the smells of benzene and untreated sewage floating over the sweet scent of decomposing leafy matter. It is not the river of your dreams, of your wanting, no matter how much you’ve drunk tonight. Still, it is the only river you’ve got.

  Moments before your lips meet the water, too late now to go back on your intent, you tip over and fall through the surface, disappearing into the brown depths and leaving behind a string of pearly bubbles that pop softly on the surface. That’s the way it always is. Glub-glub but no one listens, glub-glub where the river is the same, never the same, and the moon awaits your undoing.

  THE MAGNIFICENT

  (M)OTHERS

  First there was Tata, black Earth Mother who coddled him like his real mother never could. As a small boy Angel wanted to sink into her and disappear forever into her loving, unconditional and absolute like the ocean that surrounded him on all sides. He remembers—he thinks he remembers—her huge breasts, against which he leaned when he sat on her lap, and her soft hands the color of loam as they moved over him in the bath. In the fog of early memories there were games—she touched here, he touched there—and squirms of joy. Laughter like shallow water, like waves, broke over them. She taught him to love the night, which was in her, like the sea creature that comes in his dreams and beaches where his heart beats. Her real name was sacred, therefore secret, and so he learned never to reveal it.

  In the first grade he and a girl named Lilian would sit together during recess and relate to each other what member of their respective families they had seen naked the day before. I saw my mother, he’d say. I saw my father, she’d respond. I saw my sister. I saw my uncle. I saw my third cousin. She’s fifteen years old and has nipples like chocolate kisses. I saw the gardener peeing. His pee-pee’s like a yellow hose. Like a banana. Like a chunk of yuca! I saw the maid after she took a bath. Her pendejera was thick as a jungle and it was dripping wet. The testimonials were only as detailed as seven-year-olds could make them, and whatever physiological taxonomy they lacked was offset by rich metaphorical references that delight him now whenever he enters the country of the past. After their exchanges deteriorated into vulgar catalogues of fleshy parts, he started elaborating—her breasts are like balls of cheese; his pee-pee is the size of El Morro Castle when it stands up.

  In the fourth grade, he, a girl named Miriam, and his friend Oscar had to stay in the classroom during recess for talking in class. After the teacher warned them they were not to talk among themselves, she said, It’s a beautiful day, and went out to catch her breath and smoke a cigarette. While she was gone, in silent glee and without exchanging a word, the three of them went to the blackboard and drew huge penises entering equally huge vaginas in a sort of scholastic cavern-painting orgy. They erased the drawings when the bell rang.

  By the water fountain, a girl whose name he never learned asked him if he wanted to see su cosita. It would cost him a real, ten cents. He looked at her fingers. They were white and puffy. She was American, from the state of Kentucky. The nails were pink and culminated in white slivers of moon. Only then did he notice her red hair and freckled face. Of course he paid the price. He keeps paying it, even now when his memories are copies of his memories and the original is lost under many layers of remembering.

  Sunning herself on the beach of his making is his cousin, Martica. She was a plain girl, thin and bony. Through her face skittered the permanent scowl of disenchantment. She appeared, even to an eight-year-old with limited experience, moody and irksome, and she had to be handled as one handles a sea urchin. Angel had been invited to spend the day at the beach by Martica’s mother, Ada. He dreaded the idea. He was not keen on sitting on the sand in the middle of the day, certainly not with his boring cousin and officious aunt, but his mother insisted he go. It would do him good, she’d said, to swim in the ocean, splash around in the waves, play with children his own age. He hated children his age.

  Angel sat on the edge of the beach blanket watching a group of children chasing the waves, hoping they wouldn’t ask him to join them, when he lowered his eyes and came upon Martica’s feet. Her toes were perfectly proportioned, her middle and third slightly longer than her
big toe and gently curved, as if in response to the arch, which was a marvel of skeletal architecture, parabolic and fleshy, yet not so pronounced as to break completely with the line of the heel. Oh, he was transfixed, he was smitten. A surge of fluids within him quickened his heart and made the small bud between his legs stand straight away from his body. From that day on he became an adorer of feet.

  Samara, whose father was an important functionary in the Communist Party, winked at him in math class. She assumed that superior attitude of someone who believes hers is the only truth. Her feet were glorious appendages, of the sort that, when he was older, would make him swoon. He saw them once, at the school’s annual swim party and barbecue. He remembers them now as patrician and high arched, with toes like minnows—not at all the proletarian feet one would expect, given her family’s political inclinations. Her behavior was colored by ambivalence born of equanimity. To this day he does not know what that wink in math class meant, everything or nothing. Samara, that little Marxist, stands forever in his mind’s eye and ear, singing “The Internacionale.”

  Not long after that, Martica and her family left for the United States. His family left a year later and he was not to see her again for many years. Over time, by dint of careful observation coupled with the focus of someone seeking, beyond all other ambition, perfection lost, he grew to acquire an extraordinary knowledge of the female foot. As a teenager he looked through newspapers and magazines in search of advertisements for shoes or stockings. Best were nail-polish ads, for they showed the whole foot and featured the toes, those unparalleled glories of the human anatomy that filled his body with hormonal explosions. The onanistic flights he went on with those photographs, however, were nothing compared to the ecstasies of longing he experienced in contemplation of the real feet he saw naked on the beach or clad in sandals on city streets in summertime.