Havana Jazz Club (14 page)

CHAPTER 26

Soon thereafter, Armando and Billie went to a lawyer to initiate the divorce proceedings with Orlando. The first hurdle came when it was impossible to locate Orlando to deliver the divorce papers. Though many years had passed, his name should have appeared on some register or official document that could give a clue to his whereabouts. But it was like the earth had swallowed him whole. Armando decided to take a trip to Madrid to make a few inquiries.

The first step was to go to the New York and speak with Gregorio, who had been employing Orlando when Billie left.

It had been years since Armando had last visited the place. He hadn’t been back since Billie appeared in his life. The bar had aged badly. It was just as he remembered it: there was the same small, cramped stage where he had first seen Billie and become drawn to her beauty and her voice. Now a door next to it had a flashing sign advertising “Live Sex.” The same tables and chairs, once luxurious, now looked rickety and worn. The men and women who filled them, entangled in their pathetic games of seduction, seemed grotesque and vulgar to him now. The New York had lost any hint of glamour it had once had and become a dump that reeked of mold and sex.

He discovered Gregorio in his usual corner. He was alone, sitting at one end of the bar with his eternal cigar in one hand and a glass in the other. The cabaret owner had aged as well.

Armando walked over and introduced himself.

“It’s been awhile!” Gregorio exclaimed, hugging Armando with exaggerated enthusiasm and slapping him on the back as if he had just reunited with an old and dear friend. “Lemme guess. Some bitch snagged you and put an end to everything, right?”

“Something like that,” Armando replied, disturbed by Gregorio’s laughter and the hard slaps he was landing on his back.

“Nice, man, nice . . . I’m so happy to see you. Order whatever you want—we have to celebrate this. Girl!” he yelled to the half-naked waitress serving drinks behind the bar. “Give my friend whatever he wants!”

“I see nothing’s changed,” Armando said, just to say something, as they served him a drink.

“We’re doing the best we can,” Gregorio said with a resigned sigh. “It’s not what it once was, pal. Now every chick takes her panties off the first chance she gets, and that’s not good for business. There’s not as great a need as before. You know what I’m saying?”

Armando nodded, suddenly uncomfortable. This man repulsed him, and he was ashamed to have once been one of his best clients.

“But you have your ways,” he said with a complicit wink. “You switched the waiters in bow ties for topless girls, and now you’re offering another type of show that’s much more . . . daring.”

“You have to keep up with the times!” the impresario said, throwing him an astute look and elbowing him in the ribs. “And you can’t deny that all the girls I have are pretty hot. I choose them for the size of their breasts,” he confessed with a cackle. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t even know what their faces look like. If I passed them on the street, I wouldn’t recognize them. Unless they were naked, of course.”

He accompanied these last words with another snicker and slapped Armando’s back so hard it almost knocked him off balance.

“I see,” he said, forcing a smile.

“And the couple that performs . . .” the impresario continued, letting out a whistle. “You have to see them. The bastards fuck right on stage! You can tell having people watch turns them on, because when they’re not performing, they spend all day fighting. You wouldn’t believe the arguments they have in their dressing room! I can’t even imagine what it must be like at their house. Their neighbors must be thrilled, between the fucking and the fighting.”

Armando nodded, smiling stoically as the owner celebrated his own ingenuity with another cackle. He endured another friendly slap on his back, hoping it wouldn’t happen again.

“I remember a waiter you had when I used to come here . . .” Armando said, as if the thought had just occurred to him. “He was a very alert boy. Cuban, if I remember correctly.”

“Don’t even mention that Cuban bastard!” Gregorio said, suddenly growing serious. “What an asshole!”

“What happened?” Armando asked.

“What happened?” Gregorio’s face twisted with indignation. “The little son of a bitch robbed me. He got involved with one of the whores, and one fine day, they both disappeared with everything in the register. That’s what happened. I trusted him. He worked hard, took over everything, and gained my trust. Until he screwed me, the son of a bitch.”

“Did you report him?”

“Of course I reported him. And if they had nabbed him, I would have wrung his neck with my own bare hands. But the little bastard vanished.”

“They never found him?”

Gregorio turned to him with a malevolent smile.

“You reap what you sow,” he said. “I later heard he was being held in Algeciras. By the looks of it, he had been involved in drug trafficking. He was a pusher, you know. They picked up his trail because he attacked the woman he left with, and almost killed her. The poor girl was in a coma for a few days—at least that’s what I heard. Serves him right, what an idiot. Nasty piece of work, that Cuban! He ended up right where he belonged when they put him in jail, and I hope they gave it to him where it hurts the most, you know what I mean.”

“And he’s still there?” Armando asked, trying to sound casual.

“I have no idea. But I imagine they gave him quite a few years, between one thing and another. He was a real peach, the goon.” Gregorio looked thoughtful for a few seconds and then turned back to Armando. “You know I never heard what happened to that black girl he brought with him. What was her name . . . ? You took her to your hotel. Do you remember? She was nice. You fucked her, eh?” Armando’s body tensed, and he barely registered the complicit elbow in his ribs, which he ignored. “Well, she was another one who disappeared without a trace. Boy, was the Cuban pissed! He must have come down pretty hard on her. He said if he found her, he would kill her. I knew they were involved. They pretended not to be when they were here, but I’m an old dog and nothing gets past me. That one was an ungrateful little whore too . . .”

Armando’s jaw clenched as he tried to contain his indignation.

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat. Gregorio couldn’t give him any more information, and he wanted to get away from him and out of this dump. “I have to get going.”

“Already? Have another drink, man!” Gregorio cried. Armando was afraid of another friendly pummeling, but the impresario put his arm around his shoulders and drew him in to whisper in a confidential tone, “The show is starting in just a minute. You’ll see. It’ll drive you wild.”

“Maybe some other time,” Armando said, pulling out of Gregorio’s grasp. “I’m beat from my trip today, and I have a lot to do tomorrow. I just wanted to come by to say hi.”

“You’re missing out, man! But I appreciate the visit,” Gregorio said, squeezing his hand. “It was great to see you, pal, really. I hope you come back soon. I’ll introduce you to a good chick to clear out the cobwebs. Cause you already know that once you get married . . .”

“I promise I’ll come back when I have more time,” Armando lied and hurried out.

Back in the street, he took a deep breath and thought of Billie. He knew that at this hour she would be behind the bar at the Havana, serving the customers with her warm smile, or enchanting them with her voice under Matías’s attentive gaze. He smiled tenderly at the image.

With the information Gregorio had given him, it wasn’t difficult to follow Orlando’s trail to the Central Penitentiary of Algeciras. However, what he discovered there left him stunned.

Orlando had indeed been detained, judged, and sentenced to several years in prison. But his stay there had been brief. He’d had a brawl with a fellow prisoner that ended with a knife in the Cuban’s chest.

On his way back to Barcelona, Armando wondered how to break the news to Billie and how she would take it. He knew that she had once been very much in love with the man, but he could tell that Orlando’s behavior had somehow immunized her against that kind of blind love. Billie wasn’t prone to showing her emotions, maybe because she had learned early on that it made her vulnerable and exposed her to the risk of getting hurt. So it was difficult for Armando to guess her true feelings. He suspected, however, that her resistance to opening herself up to love again had its roots in the idealized memory of that sun god, as she called him sometimes, whom she had fallen madly in love with when she was still a child. That suspicion took on a glimmer of reality when he learned that Billie had relayed her best memories of him to Nicolás. She had painted the image of a selfless, kindhearted father, obligated by circumstances to stay away from them but always worried about their well-being, and remembering them fondly.

“He needs a father figure,” Billie said, when Armando conveyed his doubts about whether it was a good idea to fill the boy’s head with these fantasies. “If I don’t, then what can I tell him when he asks me?”

Armando had said nothing, though he didn’t really agree with Billie on this point. On the one hand, Billie was right: What else could she tell the child when he asked about his father? She thought an idealized father was better than none—and certainly better than either of those heartless swine she had had the misfortune to cross paths with. But if he was honest with himself, Armando was hurt that she hadn’t accepted him as the father of the boy and the male figure he could identify with.

“He knows that you’re a very dear friend,” Billie said. “But he also knows that you’re not his father. I don’t want to confuse him any more than necessary.”

Nicolás loved Armando and accepted him as part of his family, but he didn’t consider him to have any authority over him. If Armando scolded him, or even just took Billie’s side in an argument between mother and son, Nicolás would snap that he wasn’t his father and had no right to get involved, that he had a father who would return one day. Armando sometimes felt wounded by the boy’s attitude. After all, he had watched Nicolás be born, and he couldn’t have loved him more if he were his own blood. But Billie brushed off her son’s behavior and urged Armando not to pay it much attention. Kids were cruel sometimes, she said, and they don’t take half measures when it comes to beating an adult in an argument. They have a special instinct for knowing what will hurt the most. Armando could only agree. She and Nicolás were everything to him, and he wouldn’t hesitate to offer his own life for either of theirs, but he had to accept that he wasn’t anything more than a guest in their little family. He was grateful that they welcomed him into the family at all. Nicolás was a smart boy. He intuited Armando’s feelings, and sometimes abused his goodness and devotion.

Billie went pale when Armando explained what he had found out on his trip. Wrapped in a hermetic silence, the distress drawn on her face, she sat in a chair looking pensive for a long time. Watching her, Armando sensed that every memory she had shared with Orlando was coming back to her like an old movie that, until then, she had only seen little clips of. Orlando had been everything to her at one point, Armando knew, as he watched Billie’s impassive face, her hands clenched in her lap, the dark night that lived in her eyes blacker and more inscrutable than ever. When Orlando had taken possession of that innocent soul on the Malecón in Havana, he had scarred her permanently.

After a while—what may have only been a few minutes but which to Armando seemed an eternity—Billie sighed and looked at her watch.

“I’m going to make dinner,” she said in a neutral tone. “Nico will be here soon.”

Armando didn’t say anything. As pots began clanging in the kitchen, he swallowed his words of advice and withstood the urge to go after her and wrap his arms around her, to feel her crying a widow’s tears. Because he was sure that Billie suddenly felt like a widow, somehow a little lonelier now that the invisible link holding her, in some small way, to Orlando was broken forever.

Billie never mentioned Orlando’s name again.

CHAPTER 27

Nicolás was a very intelligent and alert boy. But, at fifteen, he had no interest in his studies. Instead he was irresistibly drawn to everything forbidden. He was always coming up with the most outlandish ideas to satisfy his thirst for adventure and adrenaline. School was more of a testing ground for him than an education center, a place that offered him hundreds of opportunities to show off his cleverness and new ways of defying authority. It was also where he recruited accomplices and disciples.

When Billie watched him from the window when he left for school every morning, she was both disgusted and saddened to see that he already had a cigarette between his lips by the time he reached the corner. He walked with a swaggering, cocky gait that she deeply disliked. He was no longer the charming, kind little boy who had gotten along with everyone, Billie thought, as she watched him moving away down the street. Though she knew that he attended his classes, she had no idea where he spent his free hours later in the day.

She couldn’t confront him directly anymore. Criticizing his behavior and punishing him the way she had when he was little only made him angry. So she and Armando tried to straighten out his behavior through subtler methods. They pointed out the negative consequences of certain actions in other young men like him and tried to convince him that he needed a good education if he wanted to get a good job and enjoy life in the future. But Nicolás simply snapped back at them that knowing history and Napoleon’s great deeds was never going to help him get a good job. Why spend hours trying to untangle complicated mathematic equations if he had no intention of working in a profession that had anything to do with numbers?

“Studying math speeds up your brain and helps you solve all kinds of problems, even if they’re not calculus,” Armando tried to explain.

“I already know how to solve my problems. I don’t need math or any of the other stuff they teach us in school,” Nicolás said insolently.

“Well, you use numbers every day much more than you think,” Armando insisted. “We’re always doing math, without even realizing it.”

“Then what are calculators for?” the boy shot back.

“Sweetie,” Billie said. “I understand it seems boring to you now. But someday you’ll realize that your studies are important. It’s hard to find a good job these days, and you have to be very qualified.”

“Don’t worry, Mother. All I want is to start working as soon as possible and earn some dough. I’m tired of wasting time at that stupid school every day.”

“But you’re only fifteen, so you have no choice but to go. You may as well take advantage of it,” Armando pointed out. “If you studied more, you wouldn’t be so bored.”

“Damn! Stop nagging me! I’m so sick of both of you,” Nicolás said, and slammed the door to his room. He began blasting his music until Billie, unable to take it any longer, knocked on his door.

“Nico, turn it down please, the neighbors are going to complain.”

Nicolás turned off the music and stormed out of his room.

“I’m going out for a bit,” he said.

“But Nico, sweetie,” Billie protested, “we’re going to eat dinner soon.”

“Well then I’ll be back soon! A person can’t do anything in this place.”

He slammed the door and left Billie feeling helpless in the face of her son’s growing rebellion.

“It’s impossible to talk to him,” she complained to Armando. “He doesn’t listen.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just his age. It’ll pass.”

But Billie did worry. His behavior could turn into something dangerous, if not irreversible, and create serious complications for her son.

She had grown seriously alarmed a few years before when, one afternoon, almost two months before Nicolás turned thirteen, he arrived home visibly drunk. He didn’t want to eat dinner and went straight to bed, but he spent the whole night rushing to the bathroom to vomit. Billie stayed silently by his side, knowing it was useless to reprimand him or give him a sermon just then, and trusting that the unpleasant consequences would serve as sufficient punishment. In the morning, though neither of them had slept all night, she woke Nicolás for school at the regular time, and didn’t care one bit when the boy complained of a terrible headache.

“That headache is called a hangover, and it’s what happens when you drink more than you should. If you do something bad, you have to deal with the consequences,” Billie said.

That afternoon, Billie asked her son for an explanation. Nicolás told her—wearing his most honest and innocent expression—that he was hanging out in the park with his friends when they found a half-empty bottle, and they had just tried it to see what it was. Of course, Billie didn’t believe him—it was clear from her son’s state when he had arrived home that he’d drunk a great deal more than he claimed. The flagrant lie only made her angrier, but she tried to control herself and make Nicolás see how stupid he and his friends had been to drink from a bottle that they supposedly knew nothing about.

“What if it had been some chemical product? Or poison?” Billie asked.

“We smelled it first, Mom, we’re not that stupid,” the boy countered proudly.

Not knowing how to confront the problem, Billie put an end to the conversation. When she told Armando about what had happened, he brushed it off.

“Don’t worry so much, Billie! This is kid stuff. Nico is at the age of experimenting. It’s normal for him to be trying new things. I’m sure he’ll never want to drink again after how bad he felt.”

And so it was. From what she could see, the boy had never tried alcohol again. He promised his mother himself that he wouldn’t do it again, claiming to have found no pleasure in it.

Nicolás’s promises didn’t reassure Billie for long, however. It turned out to be only the first of many problems she would face in the coming years.

A few months later, she noticed that her son often came home looking tired and acting dazed. He barely listened when she spoke and appeared to be struggling to follow the conversation. If Billie asked about his behavior, Nicolás explained that he had been playing football and was tired. If she asked why his eyes were glazed, he responded that the cold night air had irritated them. He spent all his time shut up in his room. When Billie went to get him for dinner, she would often find him asleep. Sometimes he refused to get up and join her at the table. Nicolás had always been strong and energetic, playing sports without ever getting tired. Billie thought maybe he was sick, or that it was growing pains and he might need some kind of vitamin to stabilize him. She decided he should go see a doctor, but Nicolás flatly refused when she suggested it.

“Nothing’s wrong with me, Mother,” he replied tensely. “You’re just imagining things. Leave me alone!”

Billie didn’t insist, but she couldn’t stop herself from noticing her son’s hooded eyes, his apathy, his irritability, his lack of appetite. An alarming suspicion formed in her mind and, though she didn’t want to, she took to spying on Nicolás discreetly. She eventually came to the terrible conclusion that her son was doing drugs.

She didn’t want to say anything to Armando—she thought he would brush this off too, saying that all boys that age smoked a joint every once in a while, and it was no big deal. But Billie knew her son and was afraid that he wouldn’t stop there. He would want to keep experimenting and would turn from the occasional joint to more dangerous substances, starting down a path that would be very difficult to rescue him from.

She had to do something, but she didn’t know how to bring it up to Nicolás. She knew that if she sat him down and brought the matter up directly, the boy would get defensive and they would just end up arguing. First, she had to find out whether her suspicions had a basis or not. Though she watched him stealthily and went through his room when the boy wasn’t home, she knew she wouldn’t find anything. Nicolás was clever, and he loved demonstrating to both himself and everyone else that he could outsmart them. She tried to bring it up indirectly—referring to television programs or some news item—to send subtle messages to her son, in hopes that she could get him to think about what he was doing and maybe put an end to it on his own. She didn’t know how else she could help him, except to stay alert and always be ready to lend him a hand.

But one afternoon, she suddenly got horrifying proof that there were worse things afoot than the occasional joint.

Nicolás had been receiving phone calls from friends she didn’t know, and others were showing up at their front door. Her son always claimed that he had to go down to the street to return a CD, or a comic book, or to get some assignment for class. Billie started to get suspicious. So one evening after he received a call and Nicolás went down to the door, Billie went into his room. It didn’t take long for her to find the motive for her son’s flashy new friendships. In a shoe box in his wardrobe that she didn’t remember having seen before, she found a cube of hashish the size of a chocolate bar. She had no doubt what it was because the penetrating odor was unmistakable. In the same box, he had also stashed a small knife and a considerable sum of money. She was stunned. Her son wasn’t just doing drugs, he was dealing them too. This was way too serious for her to ignore.

Nicolás stopped dead in his tracks when he saw his mother sitting on the sofa in the living room with the shoe box on her lap.

“What does this mean, Nicolás?” Billie asked in a grave voice.

“Well, you can see for yourself, can’t you?” he replied coolly, after letting out a deep sigh of resignation.

“Are you selling drugs? How did you get into this? Don’t you realize you’re committing a very serious crime?”

“What do you want me to do? I need dough. I can’t get a job because I’m not old enough, and you keep insisting that I waste time going to that shitty school. How did you think I was buying all those nice clothes and music and computer games?”

“It never crossed my mind that you were capable of such a thing!” Billie responded, indignant at her son’s defiant attitude. “Every time I asked you where something came from, you told me a friend lent it to you, or gave it to you, or that you traded it for something. I give you money whenever you ask for it, and you get money out of Armando too.”

“It’s not enough, Mother! Stuff is expensive, you know. Besides, this way I don’t have to be begging you all the time and putting up with your sermons.”

“I’m only trying to teach you the value of money, so that you understand what it costs to earn it. I can’t give in to your every whim.”

“Well, now you can see how far your ‘teaching skills’ got me.” Nicolás made quotation marks with his fingers to emphasize the irony of his words.

“Fine!” Billie jumped up from the sofa, resolved. “Well, that’s it. You’re not going to keep selling drugs in my house.”

“What are you going to do?” the boy yelped when he saw his mother heading to the kitchen with the shoe box.

“I’m going to throw it in the trash.”

“Please don’t do that! That’s worth a lot of money, and I still have to pay for it.”

“Well you can pay for it with the money you’ve already got!” Billie screamed, waving around the money that had been inside the box.

“That’s not enough! Please, don’t throw it away! Let me give back what’s left, and I swear to you I’ll never sell again.”

Billie turned back toward her son with an expression of sadness on her face that silenced the boy.

“I can’t trust you anymore, Nicolás. And I swear that if you continue to do this, I will report you to the police myself, no matter how much it pains me to do so.”

Billie’s voice was trembling. She had never imagined she would have to speak so harshly to her son.

Nicolás didn’t answer. He scooped up his money from the floor and went to shut himself in his room. Billie, with her heart clenched and her eyes spilling over with tears, crumbled up the chunk of hash and mixed it into the garbage, then tied the bag and took it down to the street and put it in the dumpster.

As she walked back upstairs, she wondered where she had gone wrong with him. She had always treated him with affection and respect and tried to instill in him good values and principles. Forced to be both father and mother to him, she had tried her best to balance discipline with unconditional love and understanding.

She rejected the horrible thought that her son might have inherited the seed of evil in his soul from his real father. She had believed she could mold his character, make a good and noble man out of him like Armando, but maybe his genetic makeup was too strong for her good intentions.

She wasn’t ready to give up on him. She knew that deep down Nicolás was a good boy, that his intentions were good. He was just at a difficult age. She was determined to remain at his side and support him, to make him reflect on his mistakes and help him fix them, to take him by the hand and lead him down the right path. Together, they would keep moving forward.

But Billie couldn’t save her son.