King of Cuba (16 page)

The stranger spoke perfect Spanish but with a foreign accent that the dictator couldn’t place. The son of a bitch was probably CIA. “What do you know about it?”

“People underestimate you at their peril.” Vásquez grinned, displaying a double row of crowded, discolored teeth. “Permit me to wish you the most felicitous of birthdays.”

“What’s your business here, Vásquez? I can see you’re not armed.”

“You were expecting an assassin then?”

“I’m always expecting assassins. How the fuck did you get my suit?”

“Let’s just say . . . the world recycles its gifts.”

The tyrant reached for the buzzer that summoned El Conejo. He would boil that rabbit’s head with parsley for this breach of security.

“It’s no use, Jefe. All connections have been temporarily severed.” Vásquez grinned again, drumming the air with pallid fingers.

“So you’re here to kill me.” El Comandante eyed his nightstand, where he kept his trusty Browning. Calmly, he opened the drawer and grabbed hold of the pistol. It was a touch dusty but otherwise ready for action. He aimed it at Vásquez.

“There’s no need for that, Jefe.”

“I’m counting to three.”

“You’ll be counting longer in eternity.”

“You’re the one who’s going to eternity, hijo de puta. One . . .”

“Put it down and I’ll tell you why I’m here.”

“Two . . .”

“It’s about your after—”

“Three.”

El Comandante pulled the trigger. The shot erupted with a deafening blast, tearing a hole in the visitor’s thigh. Through it, the tyrant spied the bookshelf where he kept his signed first editions of Babo’s novels.

“Afterlife,” Vásquez repeated without a hint of aggression. “You were trained by the Jesuits, no?”

The tyrant studied his still-smoking pistol. His thumb was bleeding where the hammer had hit it. His shoulder hurt like the devil, too. El Comandante looked up at Vásquez and felt ice in his chest. Was it heartburn, or fear? It’d been so long since he’d actually been afraid of anyone that he barely recognized the signs.

“My legacy
is
my afterlife, idiot. Here on the island, with my people.”

“Then you don’t believe in the transmigration of souls?”

The despot was tired of playing games. He slapped his own face, trying to wake himself up from this nightmare. Those fucking sleeping pills were to blame.

“You shot me through the leg and I’m still here.” Vásquez waggled a finger through the charred hole to illustrate his point.

“That proves only that you’re a figment of my imagination. You don’t exist, asshole. Listen, hand me a cigar from that box over there.”

Vásquez, or whoever he was, lifted the mahogany lid of the humidor and removed a puro. He held it to his nose. “De primera.”

“Take one for yourself,” El Comandante offered, and Vásquez did.

Vásquez struck a light by snapping his fingers and held them first to the tip of the tyrant’s cigar and then to his own.

“Nice trick.” The tyrant was enjoying this now, surrendering to the fantasy.

“You don’t have much time left, Jefe,” Vásquez said, blowing immaculate smoke rings toward the ceiling. He puffed out his cheeks and with a few quick contortions of his lips, blew out a smoky replica of the Greater Antilles.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Your death will be heroic.”

“I would expect no less.”

“You have many enemies.”

“Are you one of them?” the tyrant asked, repositioning a pillow.

“Jefe, trust me. I’m your ally.”

“Then enough chatter, Vásquez. Have some respect and shut the fuck up.”

The two of them sat smoking for a while in silence. This Vásquez was no amateur when it came to handling a fine cigar. El Comandante’s respect for him grew. It was difficult to make new friends at his age. People either shunned him out of fear and hatred or groveled obsequiously out of the same fear and hatred. To sit companionably with this stranger mitigated the weight of his loneliness
somehow. Bueno, if Vásquez was the Devil, at least he’d be assured of decent company in hell.

“Where did you say you were from?”

“I didn’t.” Vásquez was working on a wispy chart of the solar system.

“You an astronomer?”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“A reader of stars then?”

“If you wish.”

“Carajo, it doesn’t matter. You feel very—”

“Dare I say ‘brotherly’?”

“Jesus, I want to fucking ring his neck for what he’s done. There isn’t a soul on this island I can trust anymore. But you probably know that already.”

“I do.”

The smoke lazily encircled them.

“So how much time do I have left?” El Comandante tapped an inch of ash off his cigar into a Venetian glass ashtray.

“This business of time is tricky. Nowhere in the universe is it as divided and wasted as it is here.”

“You mean in Cuba?” The despot pushed himself up onto one elbow, ready to take offense.

“Don’t get your hackles up, Jefe. I meant on this planet.” The last of Saturn’s rings disintegrated. A replica of the Milky Way followed.

El Comandante grew drowsy. He didn’t have the same stamina for staying up all night and shooting the breeze. “I’m eighty-nine years old today.”

“Again, my felicidades.” Vásquez stood up and delicately stubbed out his cigar. The hole in his leg had vanished. “It’s time for me to go.”

“Come back anytime,” the tyrant offered with genuine hospitality. “Don’t worry about protocol.” He cackled at his own joke, and saliva collected at the corners of his mouth.

Vásquez disappeared through the closed door. The dictator inspected his room. Everything remained the same except for the smoky constellation near the ceiling—the North Star, Orion, the dippers, large and small. He finished his cigar. The morning stood still. The same pelicans hovered by the shore, diving for the same translucent fish. The same clouds cast their gauzy shadows on the sea. If he closed his eyes, El Comandante mused, might he stop time indefinitely?

Soon he dozed off. He dreamt that it was daybreak and he was floating in the air like one of the pelicans, gazing down on his near-naked, lifeless body. It was displayed, unceremoniously, on a metal operating table. His corpse sported a winter hat with earflaps like his Russian comrades used to wear. People gathered around him, parasols flaring open against the sun. Two or three men came closer, sniffing like stray dogs, their faces edged with malice. They pointed at his sagging chest, the slackness of his thighs, his gouty, unsheathed feet.

A seamstress with pins in her mouth pushed through the crowd and began to take his measurements, as if for a new suit, except that she measured extraneous details: the distance between his radial ears; the length of his incisors (she pulled back his cracked lips to check); his fingers, stiff as flagpoles; the at-rest dimensions of his penis nestled against his bloated balls. A beam of light suddenly illuminated his corpse. The steel table beneath him rose heavenward—up, up, up into the feathery clouds—before reversing direction and dropping like a broken elevator. The crowd scattered as the steel table cratered the ground. No one was left at his grave site—if, indeed, it was his grave site—except for Compañero
Vásquez, dressed in a sulfur-colored suit and twirling a gold-tipped walking stick.

“Amigo,” Vásquez called to him, exuding sympathy, “we mustn’t take pity on our own misfortunes.”

I studied to become a lawyer only to realize that there is no point to this career. What can you do as a lawyer here when the laws are arbitrary and change from day to day? You can lose your house, your job, your reputation, if the state decides this is your fate. That’s what happened to my Tío Rolando, a thoracic surgeon, after he applied to leave the country. He’s become a pariah. His children can no longer attend school. Officially, his whole family doesn’t exist. They’ll live in this limbo for as many months or years as it takes for them to escape. Now I’m studying to become an air traffic controller. The work isn’t subject to interpretation. The plane lands safely, or it doesn’t. There is no ambiguity. No margin for error.

—Margarita Bofill, aviation student

1.
The coffee tastes better since they started mixing in the chickpeas. It was too bitter before. I don’t know if the coffee in Baracoa is different than in Havana, but I’m telling you it’s smoother. Let me make you a cup and you can judge for yourself.

—Magdalena Alvarez, truck driver

Goyo settled on a garish cushion next to his son and watched the seminaked harlequins slither up and down the glistening poles. There were seven dancers altogether, but Goyo was fixated on the skinny, pliable one. She looked soft in spite of her acrobatics, boneless, as if any man could shape her flesh to his needs. Goyito was wearing a Mexican poncho and a bear mask, an outfit he claimed protected him from malevolent forces. His Great Dane, the indomitable Rudy, waited in the parking lot in Goyo’s newly repaired Cadillac, the windows open, a chewed rawhide in the mangled backseat. How the hell had they ended up in this strip joint on the outskirts of Durham, the obesity capital of America, on a jag of father-son debauchery?

The tempo picked up as the dancers, long-legged variations of one another, approached the cheering patrons in Rockettes fashion.
They kicked their legs high, leaving nothing to the imagination. Goyo found this display distasteful in the extreme. A woman’s treasure wasn’t meant to be paraded in such shorn, unseemly quantities. It seemed to Goyo that what this dancing offered—if such gyrations could be called dancing—appealed not so much to the audience’s groins as to their feeble hopes. As a theatrical production, it was a disaster.

His son cheered the women on along with the other men, who summoned the dancers with ten- and twenty-dollar bills. Goyito had singles, which he held out in threes or fives (he had a fear of even numbers). He was probably not much different from the strip club regulars—neither talented nor burdened with superior intelligence nor extraordinary in any way. He had one unpardonable zeal: cocaine. All the rest was shaped by habit and a paucity of imagination.

Goyito thumped the cocktail table with the heel of his hand, rousing the curiosity of the boneless girl.

“Hi, Papa Bear,” she growled, baring teeth so tiny they might’ve been her milk teeth. Boneless Girl’s nacreous flesh seemed to shimmy in every direction at once.

Reluctantly, Goyo thought of his son’s penis. It hadn’t been circumcised—only the Jews in Cuba were circumcised—but the boy, in a drug-addled frenzy, had attempted a do-it-yourself circumcision at sixteen.

A string of vermilion lights flashed, signaling the dancers to retreat. Hips and breasts blooming with cash, they launched into a disco number. Goyo escaped the smoky club and hobbled outside. Cement clamshell fountains furred with mold framed the entrance. The parking lot was packed with locals and drive-through travelers. Goyito had begged his father to take him to Durham en route to New York so that he could enroll at the Rice House. Luisa
had spent many months and thousands of dollars shedding extra pounds at its weight-loss program.

The night was oppressively humid. Goyo’s every gesture seemed to indent the air. He closed his eyes for a moment, watching the pink quivering of his lids under the bright parking lot lights. Then he reached into his guayabera pocket for the cigar he’d been saving. He lit a match and held it to the tip, puffing until the compressed leaves embraced the flame. The smoke soothed his throat, seeped through his nostrils, rolled along his palate.

A fragrant scrim enveloped him. To surrender to a good cigar was to deny time’s tyranny. As he smoked, Goyo had the disconcerting feeling that he was mirroring the tyrant’s movements. Back at the university, people had often mistaken the two of them. They’d both been tall and handsome then, and were known to drop Latin aphorisms into casual conversations. But Goyo had been a political moderate in his youth, the opposite of that firebrand thug who was always on one hit list or another. Everyone knew he’d murdered a fellow student over some barbaric nonsense.
¹

The unfamiliar sounds of the North Carolina night unsettled Goyo. He couldn’t identify a single birdsong, and the crickets ground out an alien whirring. Above him, at least, the skies were embossed with the same moon and stars. The older he got, the more vividly his memories of Cuba returned—its dialects, its minerals, its underground caves, its guajiros, its hummingbirds, its fish, its chaos, its peanut vendors, its Chinese lotteries, its cacophonies, its myths, its terrors. Maybe this was what happened when a man approached death; senility and longing conspired to
overtake reality. Perhaps Cuba had become nothing but an imaginary place, unrelated to any truth. Goyo looked down at his feet, which loomed closer every day. Coño, there was no denying his diminution. He recalled, much chagrined, how his daughter had ridiculed his wished-for epitaph:
Here lies a Cuban hero.
The last thing he wanted was to die another forgettable, brooding exile in the heart of discontent.