The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (3 page)

Chapter 4

S
o now I'm going to have to tell you about the list.

I believe every woman (except virgins and, maybe, nuns) has a list, be it written out on actual paper or on the multicolored Post-its of her memory.

No, not the list of every quality she wants in a man (which only works if you work on being all the things on the list first, by the way). The list I'm talking about is the one with the names of every man she's ever slept with. Or every man she ever slept with whom she really loved. Or every man she ever slept with who was truly fabulous in bed, or whatever else is important for her to keep track of about the men she's slept with.

And no matter what that is, or whether your list is made up of men or women for that matter, the parameters you've chosen to impose on that list of who you've let inside you, and what has happened afterward, say more about your past, present, and future than any tarot card reading ever will.

Mine listed every man I'd ever slept with who had given me a long-lasting reason to wish I hadn't.

But, to be fair, you do choose them, these men, for a reason, and my reasons could always be traced back to my mother.

And since there's no easy way to, say, slip in this bit of information, I'm just going to say it: My mother was a prostitute.

A smart, terribly beautiful, devastatingly voluptuous one. And unlike the dollar-store sluts who sometimes pollute the stoop of my Coffee Park fourplex walking around like hens without heads, she had a business strategy, a niche she liked to call “womanly kindness.” She knew there was a good possibility that a powerful man willing to pay for it was a man whose self-esteem was on vacation. She also knew that such a man craved a belly laugh when he made a joke and an admiring glance when he dropped his pants, more than he craved the bursting, raging, cataclysmic orgasms he was, purportedly, risking his marriage and reputation for. The reason my mother knew, or thought she knew, so much about men with power is that they were the only kind she'd “date”—powerful (and possibly corrupt) power brokers, bankers, and politicians, that was the rule. Good thing it was the late seventies and there were plenty of those to go around in Miami.

“Be nice to your men when you grow up, Mariela,” she'd say while braiding my hair on lazy Sunday afternoons. “Pick 'em up when they're feeling down and they'll never be able to forget you.”

But forget me they did, which goes to show that one woman's fortune-making niche can be another's losing streak.

And if my mother's illness was the reason I was never much of a butterfly as a young woman, her lifestyle was the reason I grew up yearning for love, for a community, for a simple life, the opposite of what she'd had.

After she died, I sold our house and filled my hours with renting and managing the properties she had left me: a mid-century bungalow in the southeastern neighborhood of Pinecrest, a Mediterranean cottage in central Coral Gables, and the Coffee Park fourplex. I also worked part time at Lion Video, a small, artsy store specializing in foreign and hard-to-find films, and spent all my free time and money watching movies at the mall, missing her terribly and trying to go on with life all by myself.

Then I met my first husband, Alejandro.

He was forty-one years old to my twenty-five when we married. An avid reader who taught children with special needs, he had absolutely no money and was as different from my mother's “boyfriends” as I could possibly find.

At first, we were happy, probably because I didn't know any better. I was young and welcomed his guidance and his stable routines. I liked being the wife and playing house and dreaming of the children we'd have. Six years later, I'd grown up and begun to enjoy him less, to feel stifled by his stability and bored by the sameness and the arbitrary nature of our, or rather his, routines.

It didn't help that he seemed to save all his patience for his students. He was from Spain, where it's considered slightly vulgar, but not uncommon, to tell people to go take it in the ass as a slang way of sending someone to hell.
“A tomar por el saco, tío”
he'd say in the middle of the slightest altercation. Incidentally, I had discovered that it was also the only way he liked to have sex, and I was seriously rethinking our marriage when he surprised me by leaving me for a local TV weather girl. Said he wanted a woman with a real career, not someone who “played” at being a real estate investor but spent all her time at the movies, talking to her tenants and neighbors, or on her computer.

Since, thanks to my mother's real estate investments, I had a “level of solvency” that he had become “accustomed” to and a lifestyle his teacher's salary could not maintain, and since he had no assets besides his Kia, while I had three very desirable, free and clear properties in then home-value-rich Miami, the judge gave him the Pinecrest seventies-style bungalow we lived in based on the value acquired by the property while we'd been married.

Oh, how I loved that house, so surrounded by trees in the middle of a neighborhood full of sixties-inspired slanted roofs. I could have fought for it, but by the time Alejandro and his lawyer were done with me, my will to speak, much less negotiate anything, had died, and my only hope was that he'd take it easy on the weather girl, she who had to stand to do her job.

I moved back to Coffee Park, my refuge after every failure, until a few years later, in a society-induced panic over turning thirty-five and not having children, I married Manuel and moved into the Coral Gables house with him.

Manuel was the opposite of Alejandro. Puerto Rican, sexy, good in bed, really funny, and really irresponsible. Two years later, I had begun to tire of lying to people about his whereabouts when they called threatening to sue us if he didn't finish the roof they'd already paid him to fix, when he managed to meet a yoga teacher who felt that supporting him was the least she could do in exchange for the “sheer joy” he brought into her life.

“You know what your problem is, Mariela? You don't really see people. And you know why? 'Cause you're just not spiritual. You don't see people for who they can be. Do you even appreciate all I've done for you?” he'd said to me one of the many times I'd had to call to tell him that a very angry client was on my doorstep and that I'd give him his mistress's address if he didn't come and take care of it right away.

I remember taking some time after he said that to me to sift through my memories of our marriage, trying hard to think of what part of him I'd neglected to see, and though plenty of things came up, none were positive, so I guessed he was right. There must have been some good—there always is—and if I hadn't seen it, it's because I hadn't been looking. He never truly saw me either, but I didn't blame him for that. I'd never told him, or Alejandro, or anyone, about my mother, or about my stillborn clairvoyance. So how could I expect him to see what I hadn't been willing to show?

This was almost three years ago and it had taken all this time to get the divorce finalized. In the end, I agreed to have him keep the Coral Gables house in exchange for a release of liability from his lawsuit-prone construction business on which I'd been an enthusiastic cosigner, stupid woman that I was.

It was a beautiful house in a great location right smack in the middle of Coral Gables, which is right smack in the middle of Miami. It had a big yard, a coral rock-rimmed pool, an all-around wooden fence, and rested on the quiet, tree-laden side of Aragon Avenue. Perhaps best of all, it was walking distance from Books and Books, an old-style independent bookstore and café that is, to this day, my very favorite place in all of Miami, not just for the books, but for the place itself, all wooden bookcases, Spanish-style iron railings, and a cozy courtyard with orange patio umbrellas and dangling garden lights on breezy autumn nights.

But I couldn't afford the upkeep, there was no way to turn the house into a multifamily home, and at the time, the rent I could have gotten for it would barely have covered the taxes and landscaping. So I let him have it. Something told me that when the “joy” he'd be able to provide his new wife after paying Coral Gables's obscenely high property taxes got too sheer for her taste, she'd promptly throw him out on his lazy ass.

I read somewhere that actress Zsa Zsa Gabor once said, “I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.” Well, you can think of Dumb and Dumber as the Zsa Zsa Gabors of my life and list.

After those two, I thought the problem might be marriage, the absurd need to complicate everything with the blatantly false promise (since the person making the promise cannot be absolutely sure he'll be able to keep it) of security and exclusivity.

No longer did I wonder if my mother wouldn't have been happier with an honest man willing to devote his life to her, instead of hurrying to live, and work, and save for her sunny horizon only to die from Olympic-speed cancer instead. No, my mother had had it right all along. It was my strategy of “normal” relationships based on “true love” that was wrong. And it wasn't just marriage. It was the hope of “ever after” and the attachment that surely followed that had caused my poverty of both finances and faith.

I realized something had to change, so I changed it.

First, I moved back into my fourplex's
apartamento uno,
hung a vintage, Chinese-red tin sign proclaiming me “The Landlord” on the door, and a hand-painted, cursive one on the window that read
G
ESTIONES Y DILIGENCIAS
,
offering my services for odd jobs of a clerical nature. I knew a thing or two about lawyers, courts, and divorce, and how to find information using a computer. I could fill out forms and use a phone, and I
was
bilingual. So I bought a desk, a computer, a printer, and a fax and “opened” for business.

Second, I had to figure out a way to protect myself from my marrying heart. I couldn't allow love to once again deliver me into the hands of a man who'd take what I had left and leave me asking what about me made me so easy to leave for another. Since all I had was real estate, it seemed to me that as long as I didn't make the mistake of marrying, I was safe. Which is why, with the ink on divorce decree number two still wet, I made the very conscious decision to sleep with married men and only married men.

And who should come along but lucky number three.

I met Jorge through my tenant in
apartamento dos,
Gustavo, who brought him over one day and asked me if I'd help his friend with a small business loan application. Jorge wanted to make sure it was correctly filled out and didn't trust his English as a second language skills. He also wanted to hire me to find a place where he could practice what he did know on the cheap, as he was saving to open a small café of his own.

He told me he'd been a chef and worked at some of the best Varadero hotels in Cuba before making his way out to sea, officially becoming a
balsero
(a rafter) and spending almost two years at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp for refugees during the 1994 exodus, before coming to Miami.

He was six feet tall, all bony muscle and energetic, fast-moving limbs. He walked fast, and it was a while before I noticed he slumped a bit from the habit of bending over the counter to be almost eye level with whatever he was cutting, chopping, or seeding. Instead, what I noticed the first time I saw him, was the wavy brown hair that looked good even though it seemed to go every which way, and his eyes, big and dark, giving him an air of mournful thoughtfulness. Until he smiled. Then they brought out his true nature: friendly and flirty, earnest, like a shy boy who has learned how to be daring, and I hadn't been able to resist him.

He'd taught me how to dance salsa casino, how to cook, and how to tell a good joke using my body and all of my face. He also taught me how to play dominoes like an expert and the correct way to kiss the sides of fingers and ankles, the inner wrists, and the backs of the knees. (Open your mouth a little, push your lips out, and then softly drag the warm, fleshy, moist part of your lips over the chosen body part until your lower and upper lips meet on the skin. Stay there for a second. Breathe into the skin. Now kiss.)

How could he do all this with me while being married?
Ay,
my friend, I should tell you, if you don't already know it, that when it comes to Cuba and Cubans, it's always complicated.

After being in Miami for a while, he'd been allowed to go back to visit his mother. During the visit, he met Yuleidys, a nurse. They'd married sometime after that, but she couldn't leave and he couldn't go back there to live. After almost two years of visits and paperwork, she got her release papers from the Cuban government just before I met him, and for months had been supposed to arrive “any day now.” Theirs, I thought, was the most romantic relationship, made perfect by the ninety miles of sea between them, romanticized with letters, pictures, home videos, and long $1.29 per minute phone calls even in the post-Skype era of free international calling.

He had a kind heart and often stayed the entire night if he was off from the restaurant. He'd bring me
café con leche
in bed and always treated me as if what we had was real, as if he loved me, even though I knew I was just his temporary medicine against the loneliness and frustration with the politics of politics.

Not that I was his only remedy. He often dealt with his nostalgia by partying with his chef friends after he got off work, drinking wine and smoking pot until the wee hours of the morning, sleeping 'til all hours, and living his “promised land” life during the few hours before he had to be back for his shift.

“You're so talented.... I don't know why you treat your life like a light version of a
Miami Vice
episode,” I told him once.