Adios Muchachos (3 page)

Occasionally, one of the clients, beguiled by Alicia and pampered by Margarita, would insist that, despite the gracious hospitality, he had to attend to urgent matters, but would nevertheless be honored if they would be his guests at such and such. Alicia would hold her ground, and finally they would agree to dinner at Alicia’s. The John would bring the provisions.

“And after dinner, you can sleep over, if you like,” Margarita would interject as naturally as one might offer someone a bowl of popcorn. (The sleeping over thing was great on hot summer nights because it set the stage for the air conditioner routine or the breakdown of the tiny freezer in their modest Soviet refrigerator. Oh dear, this was so embarrassing!)

For programmed occasions when the client wanted to show off his conquest and proposed having some associates over for dinner, culinary Margarita offered two cosmopolitan alternatives: a main entrée of fondue bourguignonne (with all the right silver and china), or chicken Maryland supreme.

Margarita’s specialty was, in fact, chicken. In forty minutes she could bone it, stuff it, and sew it up with bamboo needles. Another half an hour in the pressure cooker and it was done. But that was only for impromptu dinners. Sometimes, when a client had something good to say about traditional Cuban cuisine like they serve at the Bodeguita del Medio, Alicia’s mother would let out a soprano laugh. “What ever are you talking about? Good food at the Bodeguita?”

By that time she would have already been treating him like an old friend, talking to him in the familiar
tu
, joking around, waving her restless hand in his face and inviting him to taste her own Cuban cuisine, which was much better, of course.

And in one manner of speaking, it was.

In matters of traditional Cuban cuisine, however, Margarita was a great fraud. If the guest was from Europe or from the southern cone of South America, for example, Margarita replaced the
yuca con mojo
with well-seasoned baked potatoes; the pork she prepared very lean and dry and just slightly pink in the center of the slices; the
congri
rice was never runny, and she seasoned it with a whole list of ingredients that
congri
was never meant to take. But she did produce a range of
haut cuisine
tastes, light with the slightest touch of bittersweet, which everyone praised.

She also did herself grand with Italian pasta: cannelloni, lasagna, fettuccini, ravioli, gnocchi; with sauces like il bolognesa, il pesto, le vóngole, l’arrabiata, la puttanesca. And when there were more than eight to dinner, there was the ever popular
paella
that never let her down.

When Alicia had Johns who were timid or impotent, what you might call difficult clients, she took special care that everything was perfect. A certain fatalistic bent deep inside her soul kept telling her that her Prometheus, the one who was going to free her from the blackouts and the scarcities of the Special Period, was going to come to her in the guise of one of these impotent clients. So if some guy’s pecker petered out when Alicia had already reached her third stage of stimulation, she would feign an uncontrollable immediacy, take off all her cloths to masturbate a little, and then beg the John, who was still fully dressed, to go down on her for some cunnilingus, which she helped along with expert finger work until she came to a genuine orgasm: tremors, whines, bites, sighs and all.

If after all that, the guy still couldn’t get it up, she never pressed him, but rather thanked him for the pleasure he made her feel. And if she noticed the slightest quiver in his virile member, she would pounce on him with all her energy and art until he felt like his very marrow was seeping out of his bones. It had not failed yet. And afterward she would flit around, hyperactive, happy, and thankful. She would take the guitar again, sing. The client had to let her do his toenails, his hair; he had to let her bathe him, put up with her changing the way he combed his hair, and let her play with his little china doll, her “wittle” flippy-floppy.

Alicia had learned from her mother that there were many men who had fantasies of being a big doll. Of that variety Alicia had only had two (Guido and Jack), and both of them had proposed trips abroad. It was with them that she discovered something she would never have suspected she had in her: the soul of a geisha.

Of the fearsome variety of pigs (sadists, masochists, drunks, bed farters, etc.), Alicia had not had a single one (knock on wood). But if by some mistake or stroke of bad luck she should ever wind up in the clutches of a pig or a crazy, she had her routine thoroughly rehearsed, culminating in the big turn-off: “OK, lover boy, that’ll be five hundred dollars up front, and I’m a lesbian working girl, so forget the charm.”

Chapter
Five

Victor King was driving a red Chevy along one of Havana’s main thoroughfares, accompanied by Jan van Dongen, the man with the prodigious nose. The rounded sounds of American English could barely be heard over the salsa playing in the background. Van Dongen was explaining to Victor why he was convinced that the Cuban government was going to go for their sunken-galleon tourism project.

“Shit!” Victor interrupted with a savage blast of the horn. Using his chin, he pointed at the four bicycle riders who were taking up the full width of the street.

“Can you believe those assholes?”

Another two blasts. Then a fourth, and the cyclists did not even blink. One of them, who was pedaling along steadily as if he had all day, reached his arm around and shot Victor a bird without even looking at him.

“That’s for your mother,” Victor muttered in Spanish. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

It was true, of course, the cyclists were not using the bicycle lane but were taking up the entire Malecón drive.

Beep, beep, beeeep!

“No way, sonofabitch! Just look at those pricks; just bullshitting away like they were in the fucking park!” Victor tried to speak a neutral kind of Spanish with the officials he met in Cuba and elsewhere in South America, but every time he got pissed, he reverted to the colorful Spanish he had picked up in Mexico.

To get around the bicycles, he took a double left, crossing over the twin yellow lines and racing ahead; but instead of continuing on, he deliberately slowed down beside another bicycle. This one was advancing correctly along the lane set aside for bicycles. Somehow, amid the split-second action involved in that dangerous maneuver, his subconscious monitor had noticed those honeydews bouncing around on either side of that tiny seat and he slowed down almost to a halt to let her go by. He was so dazzled by what he saw that he hardly heard the impotent protests and insults coming from the jerks he had just cut off.

Several months after this unexplainable act that would leave an indelible mark on his life, if someone asked him exactly why he had been so stupid, Victor would have been hard-pressed to explain. He could not even explain it to himself.

Did I do it just to piss off those four assholes? Was I seized with some transcendental inspiration to teach them that he who lives like a road hog dies like a road hog? Was I trying to provoke them?

No. He was not in the habit of pissing off other drivers and trading sterile insults. And running a dumb risk to teach someone a lesson was not his style at all.

A fuzzy flash of his subconscious had on several occasions led him to wonder if that unprecedented and dangerous tromp on the breaks might not have been the result of a hormonal reaction, a categorical imperative emanating from the very essence of his testicles and unthinkingly relayed by his brain down to his break leg in milliseconds.

“No wonder! With that ass staring them in the face, who would be riding single-file in the bicycle lane? And then, when the car blocked their view, the two on the right tried to jam over with the others to keep the quarry in their sights.”

“Naturally, I would have done the same thing,” Jan commented.

But Victor was fascinated by the action on the bicycle seat and never heard a word. “Mother of God! Do you think she’s a whore?”

“I don’t think so; she looks like a student,” Jan commented, his proboscis wiggling with his every word.

“Well, in any case, Jan, I would very much like to be introduced to an ass like that.”

Victor picked up a little speed and pulled alongside.

The girl, a blonde with a deep natural suntan, also had a beautiful profile.

When Victor rolled down the window and shot his best Mel Gibson smile, she glanced at him with no apparent interest. Her pedaling style was assertive. Her breasts were firm and her lips were full. Across her back she carried a gunnysack with a large T-square and two rolled up sheets of drawing paper.

As they neared the Riviera Hotel, she stepped up the pace, signaled that she was about to turn into the left lane, and crossed right in front of them.

“Lord in heaven, what was that!”

The insinuating foothills of those twin orbs of blushing buttocks were overflowing on either side of the overwhelmed bicycle seat. Victor could not remember the last time he had had such a spontaneous erection.

When she turned at the hotel, the four other cyclists continued on their way along the Malecón drive. One of them made the inevitable indecent remark; the other three, also inevitably, laughed without mirth.

Victor’s brain was racing. That ass brought to him so graciously by the Havana rush hour might be the exact thing he so very much needed to find. And since even the longest journey begins with but a single step, he was going to follow her wherever she led him.

Picking up women in the street was definitely not his style, but this time he would give it a try. He pulled over to the curb and turned to van Dongen. “Would you mind very much, Jan? There are lots of taxis at the Riviera stand and I don’t want to let this kind of opportunity get away from me.”

“No problem,” smiled The Nose good naturedly, “and good luck.”

Jan got out of the car and sauntered toward the taxi stand.

The bicycle had turned down Third Street and Victor lost sight of the girl for a moment. He sped up and spotted her almost at the other corner; when she made her next left turn, the red Chevy was right behind her, some twenty yards away.

Victor checked the time, pulled out his cell phone, and rapidly tapped out a number. “Hello, Margaret? Yes, it’s me. Please tell Karl Bos that I won’t be able to keep our appointment. I’m a bit under the weather. No, no! Don’t you worry about me. It’s really nothing: an upset stomach and a bit of a temperature. Yeah, that’s probably it. Would you ask him to set a new date, please? OK, thanks a lot.”

When she was about to cross the next street, Alicia leaned over, gave the linchpin a slight tug, and off went the pedal. She let herself fall to the ground practically on all fours; but as she positioned herself to get on her feet again, she got one foot stuck somewhere under the frame, her right hand on the handlebar and her left on the pavement. That position had the immense effect of appearing very painful while simultaneously revealing an impressive view of her posterior expanses.

Victor jumped out of his car with genuine concern and ran over to assist her. “Have you hurt yourself, miss?”

Alicia had already gotten free of her entanglement with the bicycle and was standing with the pedal in one hand and a lock nut in the other. She looked at him furiously, as if he were to blame for her misfortunes.

“That rat-shit piece of junk!” She threw a vicious kick at the bike and broke into sobs.

“Take it easy, now, miss. Let me help you.”

Alicia turned her back on him. With her hands on her hips, she leaned over, stiff-legged, to check if she had injured her knees.

At this further exhibition of her glutei, Victor had to bite his lip.

Still looking the other way, Alicia began to complain: “And just how do you propose to help me? Every time this crap breaks down, it means several days without any transportation at all.”

“Well, I can at least take you wherever you’re going right now. Let me put the bike in the trunk.”

Alicia turned and looked at him with surprise. “Do you think it will fit?”

“Of course it will.”

“Which way were you going?”

“Your way,” he replied with a handsome, self-assured smile.

Alicia did not smile back. With the discreet approval of the Mona Lisa, she gave him a thorough visual examination from head to foot, with a not-too-brief stopover at his crotch. “Thank you,” she finally said with a sigh of relief.

And Victor smiled again, quite certain that he had passed the inspection.

Chapter
Six

When a client failed to come over within the first forty-eight hours, or if he mentioned that he would soon be traveling abroad, Alicia would revert to her standard procedure and start pedaling again.

As a young woman, Alicia had been an early bloomer. By the time she was fifteen she had a fantastic body, eyes that were an almost transparent amber and that golden skin that makes Caribbean blondes just as sexy, or even sexier, sometimes, than the legendary mulatto women.

Alicia fell in love with her physical education teacher, a black man with a body like a Greek god. Consumed with a desire that she could no longer suppress, she practically forced him to take her on one of the gym mats.

When she told her mother, all Margarita had to say was, “Well that’s life,” while thinking to herself,
I should have known her genes would have their way in the end.

“But since you’re into that, you might as well learn. Now look …”

So from that day, spurred on more by her woman’s pride than by motherly love, Margarita taught Alicia all she knew. And since Alicia was no longer a child, Margarita decided to tell her the truth about her father. He had had many affairs; she suffered bitterly. Margarita loved Hermán dearly, but she would rather die than lose her dignity, so she got herself a lover, and another and another. When Hermán found out, he left her. He said that what she had done was unforgivable.

“So it was all right for him, but I was unforgivable. Can you beat that?” she recalled with rage, her gaze lost in the distance.

Regarding Alicia’s decision several years later to work the foreign market, turning tricks for treats, as she used to say, getting along quite well without euphemisms, Margarita had a clear conscience. The idea had been Alicia’s. Her own original creation. And she had made that decision when she was over twenty-one, legally of age, and with a body that was all woman, in some ways a hell of a lot more mature than her mother. And with a pair of
cojones
that would be the envy of any man.

No, she did not condemn herself for her performance as a mother. Nor did she regret having helped Alicia so enthusiastically when she finally made her decision. Alicia herself had told her that as long as the Johns were not unpleasant, whoring was a lot of fun, challenging and stimulating.

What else could Margarita do? As a contribution to the new family business, Margarita had even sacrificed her relationship with Carlos, her latest lover, who had been living with them for a few months. It was really a shame. The guy was good in bed, quiet, sufficiently in love to do everything he could for her, and he had never broken her balls with petty jealousy or with that routine about not getting enough attention. But he was not an asset; the dummy would just be getting in the way.

So she chucked him out with no explanation. “It’s over!
Finito
, gone with the wind. And that’s it! Pick up your things and get out.”

It was obvious, of course, that there was no way that Carlos could be made to fit into Ali’s project. Not that she ever said anything. But it was the kind of project that required total dedication, and since her baby had made the decision, what else could she do but get rid of the excess baggage and back her all the way. And there was no time to be wasted; that ass, those boobs, that twenty-three-year-old skin, and those huge balls of hers were not going to last forever.

The whole plan, it was true, had been Alicia’s creation—from the gimmick of showing off her ass on the bike to the operating procedure for seduction. But Margarita, like Queen Isabella of Castille, had believed, believed so hard that she sold her last jewel to pay for the first bicycle in US dollars.

“Well, this is it; it’s now or never,” Alicia had said when they went to buy the bike.

“It’s all his fault,” Margarita said, recalling her exhusband with loathing, “and that bald prick Gorbachev, who screwed up everything.”

If the Soviet Union had not caved in, there would be no Special Period in Cuba. Alicia would have finished her studies at the university. She would certainly have gotten herself the right kind of husband: somebody in the
nomenklatura
, a technocrat, or maybe an artist, which had been her childhood dream.

But in 1994, when the crisis was affecting their stomachs, their feet, and even their minds, Alicia’s patriotism could stretch no further, so she decided to become a whore.

“Yes, whore, whore, of course I’m a whore,” the baby had insisted.

With blackouts every night and daily bread rations down to a single roll per person, Alicia had made several honest attempts to rope herself a rich foreigner who could take her out of the country and set her up with the lifestyle she wanted. She said that she had only one life to lead and that she had expensive tastes. She said that she wanted to satisfy those tastes in this one life she had and that right now was not soon enough.

On two occasions, during the years 1994 and 1995, her honest attempts had been on the verge of fruition but had fallen through at the very last moment.

The day came, then, when Alicia decided to become a whore.

Not a single speech more! Whenever she saw Fidel on television, she would turn it off. Well, they could just take their fucking morality and their fucking principles and stuff them. A whore, and that’s that!

Margarita had to agree. What else could she do? She certainly had no way to stop her daughter. And finally, in a flood of tears, she confessed to herself that if she had been twenty years younger she would have done the same thing.

“My poor baby …”

“Poor baby, my ass! Go to your fucking church if you want to cry.”

Alicia and her mother had never stood against the Revolution.

Margarita was born in 1948. She studied painting at San Alejandro during the late ’60s and then did a couple of years of an Art History major at the university. Then came her marriage and the traveling. With Hermán, an official with the Ministry of Foreign Trade who was about two decades her senior, Margarita had spent five years in Belgium and three in England. She was descended from one of the old well-to-do families of Havana, but out of love for Hermán, a good-looking, virile man, patriotic and
Fidelista
, she had deserted her rich family when they emigrated to Miami and embraced the revolutionary process quite sincerely—always from a very comfortable position, of course, but the embrace was sincere.

When she and her husband were recalled back to Cuba, Margarita got her first job in a museum. For the last ten years, she had worked in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, first as a secretary and then in the protocol department.

Margarita had felt completely at home in that rarefied cosmopolitan environment, working with foreign guests and organizing the details of their visits to Havana. And although she had always considered herself to be a revolutionary, her patriotism and convictions were heavily compromised in 1991, when Hermán left her.

From that day, Margarita and Alicia lost many of the privileges that had flowed to them through Hermán. He had, it was true, left them the house in the exclusive Miramar district: two floors, five bedrooms, garden, backyard, trees, a garage, and the old Triumph they had brought back from England (although it had never been repaired since the engine had burned out two years earlier).

And so it was that when Alicia did not have a steady client to occupy her attention for a couple of days, she would bring out her bicycle and go hunting. If the hunting was slow she would pedal seven days a week, from ten to twelve and four to six.

Her technique was unique, and it worked.

The proof in the pudding was that just a few months after getting started she had already received four firm proposals for stable relationships abroad: Panama, Argentina, Germany, and Italy. The Panamanian was very rich and good-looking, but he was a despot with the word “Mafia” written all over him. The German was even wealthier, but much too old and a bit too crotchety even for Alicia’s broad margin of tolerance. The Argentine was a typical rich kid, a little crazy, with a huge inheritance and a big business, but immature and far too demanding. Of the four, Alicia would have chosen the Italian, but he did not have enough money, was much too fat, and was just a bit of a dummy.

The pedaling had to go on.