Pig's Foot (30 page)

Sometimes I would call her, usually in the afternoon when she was involved in Party meetings and all that political bullshit, and we’d chat for five or ten minutes about what had happened that day. It was only when she called me that we would arrange to meet up, always at her place, an apartment in a cooperatively built
micro-brigada
block on the Calle Jesús María where doctors and lawyers lived, several dentists and a couple of university professors. Our encounters always followed the same pattern. I would go up the stairs, knock twice on her door, she would open it and we would greet each other with a kiss, but without touching each other. In Act Two we’d sit down and drink rum, stare out at the neighbouring buildings, dark hulks in the faint evening light, made darker by the grimy glass of the window, and we’d talk about the Revolution, about the new edition of
Sputnik
and about school stuff. We’d watch the movies on
Veinticuatro por Segundo
or
La comedia silente
with Armando Calderón. Then, without any preamble, we’d go into her bedroom and fuck for hours. When we were finished, she’d put on a cream-coloured cotton bathrobe and go for a shower. By the time she came out, I’d already be dressed and sitting in the living room staring out – not at the buildings, but at the bicycle on her balcony. The silence was absolute. Sometimes there would be a party in one of the neighbouring buildings; we would stare at the lights and at the people down below walking past or going up and down as though guided simply by the smell of the food or the music spilling out from somewhere. Elena would say nothing and sometimes I would have to suppress the urge to ask her questions. Or tell her things about my life that I’d never told anyone, things like that fact that I’d never known my real parents. Then she would remind me that it was time for me to leave, that her father would be home soon – he was the only member of her family still in Cuba, all the others had left for Miami. I’d leave without giving her a kiss and a couple of weeks later we would meet up again and everything would be exactly the same. Obviously, there weren’t always parties in the neighbouring buildings, and sometimes we didn’t or couldn’t drink rum, but the faint flickering lights were the same, she always took her shower, and the gathering dusk that enveloped the buildings all around never changed.

The truth is that I’d never wanted a woman the way I wanted Elena. I fucked her endlessly in every position that exists or ever will exist, I yanked her hair, I spat on her, I spanked her arse because she liked her sex down and dirty. But Elena was insatiable. Sex with her was like running a marathon. Sometimes I was surprised by her capacity to screw. She fucked like it was a matter of life and death. On more than one occasion I almost said she didn’t need to make so much effort, that a five-hour fuck would be just as good, but when it came to sex Elena was practical and efficient. She’d suck from me my last drop of semen, my soul, what little life I believed I had left in those moments of pleasure.

Sometimes, when I hadn’t seen her for several days, I would get to thinking about how different we were. She liked art; she could watch a ballet or look at a painting and recognise the painter or the choreographer. She read books I’d never heard of and although I liked the music she listened to, after a while it made me want to close my eyes and sleep. I tried to fit in with her, or rather to fit in my new situation with her, and sometimes I’d listen to Mozart or Beethoven. But I’d always wind up falling asleep and I’d have to put on NG La Banda to wake me up again because, unlike Elena, that was the music I’d always preferred.

Back then, Elena, like everyone else, was involved in the revolutionary process. She went from patrol leader in the Young Pioneers to head of the Student Collective at school and she was one of the first kids at school to get a membership card for the UJC – the Young Communist League – and as you know, back then being a member was the greatest thing in the world. It was every student’s greatest wish . . . The Revolution was young, changes that kept everyone busy were taking place every day. The programme of agrarian reform had been enacted and land confiscated from private owners now belonged to the government who in turn transferred it to farmers so they could work the land. Illiteracy had all but been abolished and infant mortality had declined; more importantly, everyone now had the right to study whatever they wanted, and get treated in hospitals and clinics for free. Basically Cuba had already become what it is today. Well, not what it is today, because these days it is something else. Let’s say it had become a beacon of hope, an example to Latin America and the world: a tiny island that had stood firm against the arrogance and barbarism of Yankee imperialism, as people put it.

Truth is, even an anti-Communist maggot like me has to admit that a whole bunch of good things were done back then that brought with them a whole bunch of illusions. I remember when I used to take Elena out for a stroll, back when – I’m sure you remember – back when the Cuban peso was actually worth something. A pizza cost $1.20, something even the poorest people in my
barrio
could afford, and the spaghetti at Vita Nuovo too. Elena always liked the ice cream at Coppelia which only cost $1.50 and I was always happy to attend to her whims.

Elena was a beautiful mulatto girl tending towards white, with thick lips that were wet as though constantly moist with dew, crowned with a beauty spot as coal-black as her piercing eyes. The most beautiful thing about her was her eyes, humble eyes that knew how to persuade. I loved to see her laugh, and I did everything I could to please her without asking for anything in return since I never believed in love – that’s the truth – though I have to admit that Elena made my life as a cynic impossible.

Sometimes, in the evening, we would stroll down the Calzada Dolores to the little park just before the Diez de Octubre. I would hold her hand and we would silently immerse ourselves in the spectacle of Lawton which, back then, was nothing special, being one more outlying district of Havana with few houses and a vast number of ruined buildings and ramshackle hovels. It smelled of bread and guava cakes, of basil and rosemary. I would take her to the park and sometimes, during carnival season, even early in the evening, we would run into a line of drunks or some transvestites heading down Dolores to catch a bus to the Malecón. Thinking about it, I can say in all honesty that I was happy back then. Not always. Only when I was with that infuriating woman named Elena.

But anyway, like I said, it was a different time. A time when you could go to the beaches at Varadero and see hardly a single tourist. Sometimes, we’d check into the Hotel Nacional and pay in
pesos cubanos
, something no one would be allowed to do these days because, as you know, these days, Cubans are forbidden from going into hotels. I remember when we were back in primary, the school used to take us to Tarará. I don’t know if there was something like that in Santiago. But anyway, it had never occurred to anyone to fill a campsite, which was really more of a holiday resort, with thousands and thousands of kids. Elena and I had great fun on the fairground rides in the amusement park, in the freshwater pools and at the concerts every night, and the food was, well, it was amazing, with flavoured yoghurt for breakfast, chicken, pork and all sorts of salads for lunch and dinner and, lastly, the best thing about the place was it was completely free. Excuse me for banging on about the food, it’s just that I’m absolutely starving . . . And those fucking whiteshirts won’t give me so much as a dry cracker.

So anyway, everyone left Tarará thinking the Revolution was the coolest thing, and, in a way, it was. Years later, when everything went to hell in a handcart, Elena and I would remember those years as the most magical of our childhood. No one knows exactly when things started to go wrong. I don’t know what you think. Elena was convinced that it started with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in ’89. According to her, that’s what triggered the ‘special economic period’ that led to people eating cats and turkey vultures and steaks made out of dishrags, pizzas made with melted condoms instead of cheese, and micro chickens, which never grew, that you could get in stores, there were power cuts twenty hours a day and I don’t know what all. Nitsa Billapol’s recipe for grapefruit steak became a delicacy in our house. Every day we’d sit around the dinner table and force down this experiment in silence, I felt like screaming my frustration from the rooftops but at the same time I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of my grandparents who, to the bitter end, maintained their dignity and their undying faith in the Revolution.

But my generation was different, something I tried to tell my grandparents a million times. We didn’t know anything about the olden days; our only frame of reference was the terrible years we had to live through. To be honest, I think things started to fuck up a long time before the Russians turned their backs on us. I say that, because even back in the eighties I was already what they call a
gusano
– a maggot, a fully fledged anti-Communist Cuban – even then I had no illusions. Obviously, I did my best to bite my tongue so as not to ruin the illusions of my grandparents who were always telling me about all the injustices before the Revolution we’ve already talked about, but the minute I stepped out the front door, I went right on being disillusioned and I thought shit, things today are even more of a clusterfuck. This was my story, it was the story of Elena, of my whole generation.

My disillusionment started with the whole business with UMAP – the military units set up to eliminate bourgeois and counter-revolutionary values. I was still in primary school when they were going round arresting every kid with long hair. They’d pile them into the back of a truck and take them God knows where. They took Ricardito, my neighbour. Besides having long hair, he listened to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and any other rock band he could find. Sometimes, in secret, he played them for me on his battered RCA Victrola. I thought they were horrendous.

‘Cool, right?’ he’d say, smoking shave grass and pretending it was marijuana. ‘It’s really cool, man.’ He was a quiet kid, and good-looking too, the bastard. They snatched him off the street, shaved off his hair, tossed him in the back of a truck and took him God knows where. Big mistake. And still no one said anything, because Tarará was still open, education was better than ever, healthcare was free, the streets were safe, there were hundreds of things to be proud of, something my grandparents never tired of reminding me.

Ricardito showed up again a year later. A lot of his friends tried to get him to talk, to tell people what had happened. But tell who? Who was the guilty party, who was he supposed to tell, and what was the point? No one ever apologised to him, no one ever said, ‘Fuck, Ricardito, I made a mistake.’ I mean nobody’s perfect, everyone makes mistakes, so I don’t understand why people won’t just stand up and say ‘I made a mistake’. I don’t know about you, but I think they’re afraid. Afraid of losing everything, that’s why their instinctive reaction is to keep their mouths shut. I mean here I am telling you all this stuff and honestly I’m shitting myself. For all I know you could be with the Security Service, in which case I’m truly fucked.

But it’s the same for people who make mistakes. They’re scared too, and it’s only logical for them to wonder what price they might have to pay for their mistake if they ever admit it to the public. ‘They’ll bury me in the shit,’ they probably think. This is where our animal instincts take over: if it’s a choice between me and you, I’d rather you got fucked over. But it makes me sad, to tell you the truth. Because a society that lives in fear is a dead society, and therefore it can’t move forward. Nobody should be afraid to say ‘I don’t like that’ or to admit that they’ve made a mistake. Don’t you think?

I talked to Elena a lot about Ricardito’s case and we always agreed, but whenever I talked about it to Grandpa Benicio, he ducked the question.

‘What do you know about what life was like before the Revolution, Oscarito?’ my grandfather said to me once.

‘Nothing. But I can tell you what life is like now: no one is in favour of shortages and power cuts.’

‘You’re an ungrateful little brat,’ said Grandpa and then he and Grandma Gertrudis gave Elena and me a lecture about how Machado and Batista used to have people gunned down in the street, and did whatever they had to do to cling to power. And that bitch Elena looked at them with her noble eyes, like a cat’s eyes, as though these stories were a complete surprise.

‘And I won’t even bother to tell you what life was like in Pata de Puerco, a place no one cares about, a place where no one could read or write.’

‘I don’t know the first thing about Pata de Puerco. But you can’t deny that our leaders now have completely forgotten the people. Things are serious, Grandpa. Just ask Elena. Go on, Elena, tell him, and don’t go playing the little saint, because you’re as much of a
gusana
as me.’

‘A
gusana
? Me?’ said Elena with a look on her face like a scalded cat. ‘What are you talking about, Oscar? I completely agree with your grandparents, apart from one or two small points.’

‘One or two small points?’ I said furiously. ‘You’re a barefaced liar, you don’t agree with any of it. Don’t be a hypocrite. You’re just like your father.’

‘Leave my father out of this.’

‘But it’s true. And speaking of fathers,’ I turned back to my grandparents, ‘when exactly are you going to tell me about my real parents?’

And that was the end of the discussion. My grandparents sent us to my room and that was that. Elena didn’t even want to fuck. I went outside with her, watched as she walked away with that sexy sway of her hips that gave me goosebumps. I was right when I said she was a hypocrite. That’s what she was. But God I loved that bitch.