King of Cuba (18 page)

“You have no feelings except ambition and vanity!” Matamoros shouted.

“Where would any of us be without ambition or vanity?” El Comandante retorted with a tinge of exasperation. If he didn’t keep his emotions in check, he might be tempted to throw the lot of them to the sharks and invite more grief upon his regime—and just when he was trying to restore its tarnished reputation. He must deflect their hatred as he had the countless assassination attempts against him.

A fly buzzed over the dissidents’ untouched plates. At last, the foreman could no longer hold himself back. “The world you are leaving us is broken, Jefe,” he said quietly. “Let another generation try to make something from the ruins. As it is, we’re all sentenced to death.”

“You’re an intelligent man,” El Comandante said, trying to contain his fury. “What are you doing with these losers?” An
errant cockroach scuttled near his foot, and he crushed it, almost absently, with the toe of his heavy black boot. He snapped his fingers for dessert, a coconut flan baked in the shape of the island and floating in a sea of caramel syrup. After the waiters served each man a generous portion, the despot requested a box of cigars. “No calories there, pendejos,” he laughed. “You can light up with a free conscience.”

A knock on the door interrupted the luncheon. The prison dentist, Doctora Tomasa Firmat, strode in with her black bag of drills and amalgams and a low-level euphoria that resulted from her free access to anesthetics. Once a month she visited La Cabaña with the express purpose of extracting teeth. On the days Dr. Firmat appeared, the screams in the prison were more dreadful than usual.

“Good afternoon, Jefe,” she said cheerfully, a mustache of perspiration glistening on her upper lip. Circles of sweat also dampened the underarms of her white physician’s coat. “I’m here to check on one of the hunger strikers.”

The tyrant looked around and noticed, for the first time, that the left side of the foreman’s face was terribly swollen. El Comandante savored his flan, watching as the no-nonsense dentist withdrew a clawlike instrument from her bag. She bent over Collante with a dramatic flair and inserted the metal claw into his mouth. Collante moaned, pitiably, to the creaking, sucking sound of bone separating from flesh. A moment later, the triumphant dentist brandished the infected molar, bloody roots and all. The prisoners stared at one another, then down at their desserts. What more awaited them at this interminable meal? El Comandante cleaned his plate and, rubbing his stomach, made a show of refusing seconds. La dentista cauterized the site where Collante’s tooth had been, stuffed a wad of sterile gauze in its place, bid everyone a good day, and departed with her drills and clinking implements.

Collante held his cheek with one hand and reached for a proffered cigar with the other. The tyrant was pleased to see that the foreman would not refuse a Cohiba even after his ordeal. Following his lead, the hairdresser and ex-colonel each tentatively took a cigar. They lit them and leaned back against their chairs, enveloped in clouds of smoke. The cigars seemed to soothe their jangled nerves, tamp down their hunger pangs, their proclivity for self-destruction. A man didn’t kill himself, El Comandante knew, while smoking a good cigar.

The tyrant stifled a yawn. He was overcome with drowsiness after the heavy meal. “Your legacy,” he said, “is a negative imprint that will fade in a matter of weeks.”

“One can’t predict the caprices of history,” Collante mumbled as he pulled the bloody gauze from his mouth. “Sometimes the paths of logic and folly are one.”

Since when had this asshole become a philosopher? The tyrant refused to be lectured at by someone whose very education was made possible by the Revolution. The waiters cleared the hunger strikers’ plates. They would take the leftovers home to their families. It was one of the perks of the job.

“Take them away,” El Comandante ordered, finishing his cigar, and the guards reappeared to enchain the prisoners and escort them back to their cells.

1.
The student’s name was Patricio Canseco, and he was the tyrant’s most dangerous political opponent, dangerous only because he’d grown extremely popular. Canseco’s assassination set the tone for the tyrant’s later intolerance of his enemies.

—Adolfo Ochoa, historian in exile

The morning was so hot that only children moved with any semblance of energy. Goyo had walked these same streets with Luisa twenty years ago wearing squeaky new sneakers—the first pairs either had ever owned. They’d started exercising gradually, trudging along the nearby college’s symmetrical paths. Wealthy, corpulent dieters from around the world lumbered alongside them like so many dinosaurs. On rainy days the lot of them trooped over to the indoor shopping mall, forming a colorful parade in their size quadruple-X sweats.

Goyo drove his son to the Devil’s Diner, renowned as the best place for a last meal before commencing the Rice House diet. The diner’s cinnamon buns were legendary, each larger than an infant’s head. Goyo and his son slid into a red vinyl booth and accepted the photo menus from the waitress. The offerings verged on the
porno graphic: caloric sundaes erotically glistening with pecans; slabs of ham like a chorus line of delectable thighs; deep-fried Oreos smothered under scoops of candy-flecked ice cream. Across the ceiling, giant ventilation shafts sucked up the copious grease fumes.

Goyito selected breakfast specials numbers three and seven: six fried eggs, a double portion of cheese grits, two cinnamon buns, a pound of country ham, home fries, a stack of flapjacks, a basket ‘o biskits [
sic
], bottomless orange juice, and a pot of coffee. Goyo ordered a half grapefruit with a bowl of raisin bran (to help relieve a two-day bout of constipation). He shook out his medications onto an oversize napkin and swallowed the pills with a glass of tomato juice. When their orders arrived, Goyito calmly and meticulously devoured his breakfast. His focus was impressive, his manners impeccable. His lineless face seemed outside time. He wielded his knife and fork with aplomb, dabbed his mouth at regular intervals, and dispatched his grits like soup, decorously tipping the bowl away from his torso.

Goyo scrutinized the other customers, who also were tucking into manifold platters of food. His son, at five four and nearly three hundred pounds, was among the largest. Goyito called over the waitress and ordered a slice of pecan pie à la mode for dessert. Weeks had elapsed since Goyito had professed a desire to kill himself. He wasn’t on the streets, or in jail, or in a mental hospital with his arms straitjacketed across his chest and a rubber clamp between his teeth. This, at least, was progress. Outside, a pair of boat-tailed grackles hopped and screeched under a crepe myrtle’s blossom-draped limbs. Goyo tried to catch his son’s eye, but he was too busy delicately scraping the last of the pecan pie off his plate.

At the Rice House, Goyo wrote a sizable check for his son’s weight-loss program. He signed his name at the bottom of a stack of paperwork next to Goyito’s spidery scrawl. Sometimes Goyo
guiltily wished for another son, one he might’ve loved without reserve, with whom he might’ve been friends at this stage of life, a son he could brag about to his friends, who had, above all, a capacity for happiness. Goyito had been the most sensitive in the family. When he was a boy, his nerves seemed to trail from his body like fibers of light. What else, Goyo lamented, could he have done to save him?

Soon Goyito would submit to the rigors of eating the daily fare of hundreds of millions of Asians. Their dietary habits formed the basis of the Rice House’s “revolutionary” approach to eating: a modest portion of white rice topped with steamed vegetables and “seasoned” with specks of animal protein. Only Americans, Goyo thought, would pay thousands of dollars to be meagerly fed, spartanly housed, and monitored by humorless nurses.

Goyo joined his son for the inaugural meal. They sat at a table with a voluminous woman from Dallas and a goateed Venezuelan who, despite his considerable bulk, gave off a playboy air. It turned out that the playboy was heir to an oil fortune in Caracas. His self-professed downfall: sweet fried plantains. He admitted to eating them by the boatload. The mood was grim during the first course, a scant bowl of vegetable broth. It was tasteless and needed salt, but no saltshakers were permitted. At the other tables, the regulars had the unmistakable gray cast of prison inmates. Goyito consumed his broth with the same imperturbability he’d displayed toward his grits.

The rest of lunch—white rice, dry-grilled eggplant, a microscopic portion of minced chicken—worsened Goyo’s disposition. He’d paid twenty dollars as a guest for this unspeakable meal, which had cost the Rice House thieves less than fifty cents. This was on top of the forty-three dollars he’d shelled out for brunch, the thirty-five-hundred-dollar deposit for Goyito’s first two weeks here, and the kennel-and-kibble fees for Rudy at a local pet resort.
Everything about the place depressed Goyo. The shabby clapboard structure painted a minimalist gray. The bulbous TV set from the seventies. The garden, colorless except for a few anemic tomato vines. The not so subliminal message was clear:
tame your excesses
. If this were a country, Goyo thought, its citizens would be clamoring to emigrate.

After a dessert of mealy sliced pears in sugar-free syrup, it was time to get back on the road. Goyito buried his head in his father’s chest. No matter that he was loco de remate, his son loved him with a child’s vast innocence. The two walked arm in arm to the Cadillac and together adjusted a droopy side mirror. Goyo could’ve used a nap, but he was anxious to continue his trip. As his son frantically waved, Goyo pulled down the gravel driveway and onto the sleepy streets of Durham, then out toward the interstate that would take him to New York.

A hundred miles flew by as Goyo sped through the dense foliage of the South. He wanted to make it to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., before nightfall, check into a nice hotel, order a top sirloin from room service. He fiddled with his XM radio, scanning its two-hundred-plus stations. A Yankees game was under way—another dead heat with the Red Sox. The Yankees pitcher threw behind a right-handed slugger, and the Red Sox bench emptied as the batter charged the mound. Goyo remembered his own days as a third baseman—that triple play he’d made, catching the ball, stepping on third, throwing to first before the stumbling runner could get back. The crowd had gone crazy.
Go-yo! Go-yo!
For twenty-four hours he dreamt himself into the majors—until the next game, when he caught his cleat on the pitcher’s mound running to position and flopped 360 degrees. He got his second standing ovation in as many days.

At a gas station in rural Virginia—his Cadillac was an unrepentant guzzler—Goyo noticed the billboard for an indoor shooting
range down the road. Five pickup trucks filled the lot. Goyo extracted his Glock from the glove compartment and slipped it into his waistband. Leaning hard on his cane, he headed inside. He tried not to think of the arguments he’d had with his daughter over his possession of weapons. During their last debate, she’d stopped him cold with the question “Is there a gun that can’t kill the owner of the gun?” Alina might be crazy, Goyo thought, but she was whip smart.

A couple of country boys idled behind the counter. They were respectful enough, gushing their “yes, sirs” and “sure things.” The freckled one did most of the talking. Goyo examined the assortment of firearms on display: AK47s, twelve-gauge shotguns, .357 Smith & Wesson Magnums. He was tempted to try one of the semiautomatics, but he wasn’t here to play. “Give me thirty rounds of nine millimeters,” Goyo said, trying to countrify his accent a bit, though the clerks had probably seen his Florida plates on the security cameras. They asked him to fill out a disclaimer stating that he wasn’t mentally incompetent, a fugitive from the law, or involved in a violent domestic dispute. Then he surrendered his driver’s license.

“Nineteen twenty-nine.” The freckled boy whistled. His expression matched that of the longhorn sheep trophy on the wall behind him. Where the hell had they hunted that? Goyo declined the boy’s offer to load the magazine. For years he’d kept his Glock tucked under the diner’s cash register. He’d never shot anyone, but he’d waved the gun around enough times to spread the word that he was packing. When you rehearsed something long enough, its reality became more likely. After what’d happened in Cuba, he wasn’t about to let some punk take anything else away from him.

The blasts from the other shooters jarred Goyo, even with his ear protectors on. In one booth, a sloppy-looking woman shot off a rifle, muttering: “Oh yeah, baby, you gonna pay.” Goyo set up at the far station. He steadied his shoulder against the cinder-block
wall and pushed five rounds into the magazine. He sent the target out forty feet, farther than the deadly accuracy the Glock promised at closer range. A cramp pinched the arch in one foot, but he ignored the pain. The Glock felt solid in his hands. He straightened his right arm, stabilizing it with his left, both thumbs forward. Then he lined up the sights, and exhaled. One easy squeeze should do it. Así. Straight to the heart.