The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) (3 page)

“You have beautiful eyes,” she says sweetly to me. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I slept a little. I dreamt I was in a town in the provinces, back in Cuba, and that there wasn’t a soul in the whole town. The doors and windows were wide open, and through them you could see iron beds with very clean, tightly pulled white sheets. The streets were long and silent, and all of the houses were wooden. I was running around that town in distress, looking for anyone to talk with. But there was no one. Only open houses, white beds and total silence. There wasn’t a single hint of life.

I awoke bathed in sweat. In the bed next to me, the crazy guy who was snoring like a saw is awake now and putting on a pair of pants.

“I’m going to work,” he tells me. “I work all night at a pizza place and they pay me six dollars. They also give me pizza and Coca-Cola.”

He puts on a shirt and slides into his shoes.

“I’m an old slave,” he says. “I’m reincarnated. Before this life, I was a Jew who lived in the time of the Caesars.”

He leaves with a slam of the door. I look at the street through the window. It must be midnight. I get up from the bed and go to the living room, to get some fresh air. As I pass Arsenio’s room, the hospice manager, I hear bodies struggling and then the sound of a slap. I continue on my way and sit in a tattered arm chair that reeks of old sweat. I light a cigarette and throw my head back, fearfully remembering the dream I just had. Those white, tightly made beds, those wide open solitary houses, and I, the only living being in town. Then I see somebody coming out of Arsenio’s room. It’s Hilda, the decrepit old hag. She’s naked. Arsenio comes out behind her. He’s naked too. They haven’t seen me.

“Come on,” he says to Hilda in a drunk voice. “No,” she responds. “That hurts.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a cigarette.” Arsenio says.

“No. It hurts!”

I take a drag of my cigarette and Arsenio discovers me among the shadows.

“Who’s there?”

“Me.”

“Who’s me?”

“The new guy.”

He mutters something, disgusted, and goes back inside his room. Hilda comes over to me. A ray of light from an electric street lamp bathes her naked body. It’s a body full of flab and deep valleys.

“Do you have a cigarette?” she asks in a sweet voice.

I give it to her.

“I don’t like getting it from behind,” she says. “And that pig!” she points to Arsenio’s room. “He only wants to do it that way.”

She leaves.

I lean my head against the back of the armchair again. I think of Coleridge, the author of “Kubla Khan,” whose disenchantment with the French Revolution provoked his ruin and sterility as a poet. But my thoughts are soon cut off. A long, terrifying howl shakes the boarding home. Louie, the American, shows up in the living room, his face bursting with rage.

“Fuck you up the ass!” He screams at the street, which is empty at this late hour. “Fuck you up the ass! Fuck you up the ass!”

He slams his fist against a mirror on the wall and it falls to the floor in pieces. Arsenio, the manager, says lazily from his bed,

“Louie, you
cama
now. You
pastilla
tomorrow. You
no jodas más
.”

And Louie disappears into the shadows.

* * *

Arsenio is the real one in charge at the halfway house. Even though Mr. Curbelo comes every day (except Saturday and Sunday), he’s only here for three hours and then he leaves. He makes the stew, prepares the day’s pills, writes something or other in a thick notebook and then leaves. Arsenio is here twenty-four hours a day non-stop, without even a quick run out for cigarettes. When he needs a smoke, he asks one of the nuts to go out to the bodega for him. When he’s hungry, he sends Pino, his peon, out to get him food at a joint on the corner. He also sends for beer, lots of beer, because Arsenio spends all day getting completely drunk. His friends call him Budweiser, the beer he drinks most. When he drinks, his eyes become more evil, his voice becomes even thicker, and his gestures ruder and cruder. Then he kicks one-eyed Reyes, he opens anyone’s drawers in search of money and he walks around the entire boarding home with a sharpened knife at his waist. Sometimes, he takes this knife, gives it to René, the retard, and points at one-eyed Reyes, saying, “Stick it in him!” He further explains, “Stick it in his neck, it’s the softest part.” René, the retard, takes the knife with his clumsy hand and moves forward on the old one-eyed guy. Although he stabs blindly at him, he never wounds him, since he’s not strong enough. Then Arsenio sits him down at the table; brings an empty beer can over, and plunges the knife into the can. “That’s how you stab!” he explains to René—“like this, like this, like this!” and he stabs the can until he pierces it through. Then he puts the knife back in his belt, gives the old one-eyed guy a savage kick in the behind, and sits down at Mr. Curbelo’s desk again to have another beer. “Hilda!” he calls out later. And Hilda, the decrepit old hag who stinks of urine, comes. Arsenio touches her sex through her clothes and says, “Wash yourself today!”

“Get away, will you!” Hilda complains, indignant. And Arsenio bursts out laughing. And his square and sweaty torso is slashed through with a scar that goes from his chest to his navel. It’s from being stabbed in prison, five years ago, where he was doing time for stealing. Mr. Curbelo pays him seventy dollars a week. But Arsenio is happy. He has no family, no profession, no life ambitions, and here, in the halfway house, he’s a big fish. For the first time in his life, Arsenio feels fulfilled somewhere. Besides, he knows that Curbelo will never fire him. “I am his everything,” he goes around saying. “He’ll never find another guy like me.” And it’s true. For seventy dollars a week, Curbelo will not find another secretary like Arsenio in the whole United States. He won’t find him.

I woke up. I fell asleep in the tattered armchair and woke up around seven. I dreamt I was tied to a rock and that my nails were long and yellow like a fakir’s. In my dream, although men tied me up as a punishment, I had great power over the world’s animals. “Octopi!” I screamed, “bring me a shell engraved with the Statue of Liberty.” And the large, cartilaginous octopi toiled with their tentacles to find that shell among the millions and millions of shells in the sea. Then they found it and struggled to bring it up to the rock where I was captive and they oh so humbly and respectfully handed it over to me. I looked at the shell, let out a peal of laughter, and threw it scornfully into the great void. The octopi all shed large crystalline tears at my cruelty. But I laughed at their weeping, and roared, “Bring me another one just like it!”

It’s eight in the morning. Arsenio hasn’t woken up yet to serve breakfast. The nuts huddle, starving, in the TV room.

“Senio!” Pepe the retard screams. “Rekfast! Rekfast! When you gonna serve rekfast?”

But Arsenio is still drunk and snoring belly-up in his room. One of the nuts turns on the TV. Out comes a preacher talking about God. He says he was in Jerusalem, that he saw the Garden of Gethsemane. Pictures of the places where he wandered appear on the screen. There’s the River Jordan, whose clean, gentle waters are impossible to forget, the preacher says. “I’ve been there,” says the preacher. “Two thousand years later, I’ve inhaled Jesus’ presence.” And the preacher cries. His voice becomes pained. “Hallelujah!” he says. One of the nuts changes the channel. This time he puts on the Latin channel. Now there’s a Cuban commentator talking about international politics.

“The United States has to get tough,” he says. “Communism has infiltrated our society. It’s in the universities, the newspapers, the intelligentsia. We should go back to the great Eisenhower years.”

“That’s right!” says a nut next to me named Eddy. “The United States needs the balls to wipe them out! The first to go has to be Mexico, which is full of communists. Then Panama. And Nicaragua after that. And wherever there’s a communist, string him up by the balls! The communists took everything from me. Everything!”

“What did they take from you, Eddy?” asks Ida, the grande dame come to ruin.

Eddy responds, “They took almost a thousand acres of land planted with mangos, sugarcane, coconuts … everything!”

“My husband had a hotel and six houses in Havana taken away from him,” says Ida. “Oh! And three pharmacies and a sock factory and a restaurant.”

“They’re sons of bitches!” Eddy says. “That’s why the United States has to wipe them out. Drop five or six atomic bombs! Wipe them out!”

Eddy starts shaking.

“Wipe them out!” he says. “Wipe them out!” He shakes a lot. He shakes so much that he falls out of his chair and keeps shaking on the floor.

“Wipe them out!” he shouts from there.

Ida yells, “Arsenio! Eddy is having a fit!”

But Arsenio doesn’t answer. Then Pino, the silent nut, goes to the sink and comes back with a glass of water that he throws over Eddy’s head.

“Enough.” Ida says. “Enough. Turn off that TV.”

They turn it off. I get up. I go to the bathroom to urinate. The toilet is clogged with a sheet someone stuck inside. I urinate on the sheet. Then I wash my face with a bar of soap I find lying on the sink. I go to my room to dry myself off. The crazy guy who works nights at the pizza place is counting his money in our room.

“I earned six dollars.” He says, putting his earnings away in a wallet. “They also gave me pizza and Coca-Cola.”

“I’m glad,” I say, drying myself off with a towel.

Then the door opens abruptly and there’s Arsenio. He just woke up. His wiry hair is standing up and his eyes are bulging and dirty.

“Listen,” he says to the lunatic, “gimme three dollars.”

“Why?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll pay you back.”

“You never pay me back,” the lunatic complains in a childish voice. “You just take and take and never pay me back.”

“Gimme three dollars,” Arsenio repeats.

“No.”

Arsenio goes over to him, takes him by the neck with one hand and goes through his pockets with his free hand. He finds the wallet. He takes four dollars out and throws the other two on the bed. Then he turns to me and says, “You can tell Curbelo about everything you see here, if you want. I’ll bet ten to one that I win.”

He leaves the room without closing the door and yells out from the hallway,

“Breakfast!”

The nuts come out in droves after him, toward the tables in the dining room.

Then the crazy guy who works at the pizza place grabs the two dollars he has left. He smiles and exclaims happily,

“Breakfast! Great! I was starving.”

He leaves the room too. I finish drying off my face. I look at myself in the room’s stained mirror. Fifteen years ago I was a good-looking guy. I was a ladykiller. I showed off my face arrogantly everywhere I went. Now … now …

I grab the book of English poets and go to breakfast.

Arsenio hands out breakfast. It’s cold milk. The nuts complain that there are no cornflakes.

“Go tell Curbelo,” Arsenio says indifferently. He grabs the milk bottle carelessly and starts filling the glasses with apathy. Half of the milk ends up on the floor. I grab my glass and, standing, gulp it down on the spot in one fell swoop. I leave the dining room. I reenter the main house and sit down in the tattered armchair again. But first I turn on the television. A famous singer comes on, a man they call
El Puma
. The women of Miami worship him.
El Puma
gyrates. “
Viva, viva, viva la liberación
,” he sings. The women in the audience go wild. They start throwing flowers at him.
El Puma
moves his hips some more. “
Viva, viva, viva la liberación
”:
El Puma
, one of the men who makes the women of Miami tremble. The same women who won’t even deign to look at me, and if they do it’s only to tighten the hold on their purses and quicken their steps fearfully. I’ve got him here:
El Puma
. He has no idea who Joyce is, and doesn’t care. He’ll never read Coleridge, and doesn’t need to. He will never study Marx’s
Eighteenth Brumaire
. He will never desperately embrace an ideology only to feel betrayed by it. He’ll never feel his heart go “crack” in the face of an idea in which he firmly and desperately believed. Nor will he know who Lunacharsky, Bulganin, Kamenev or Zinoviev are. He’ll never feel the joy of taking part in a revolution or the subsequent anguish of being devoured by it. He’ll never know what the machinery is. He’ll never know.

All of a sudden, there’s a big ruckus on the porch. Tables are knocked over, chairs crash, and the metallic walls shake as if a mad elephant were bashing into them. I run over. It’s Pepe and René, the two retards, fighting over a slice of bread smeared with peanut butter. It’s a prehistoric duel—a dinosaur fighting a mammoth. Pepe’s arms, large and clumsy as octopus tentacles, beat blindly at René’s body. The latter uses his nails, as long as a kestrel’s claws, digging them into his adversary’s face. They roll onto the floor in a bear hug, noses bleeding and frothing at the mouth. No one intervenes. Pino, the silent one, continues looking at the horizon without blinking. Hilda, the decrepit old hag, looks for cigarette butts on the floor. One-eyed Reyes sips a glass of water slowly, savoring every swallow as if it were a highball. Louie, the American, flips through a Jehovah’s Witness magazine that discusses the paradise to come at the final hour. Arsenio watches the fight from the kitchen, smoking calmly. I go back to my seat. I open the book of English poets to a poem by Lord Byron:

My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!

I don’t read any further. I lean my head back in the armchair and close my eyes.

Mr. Curbelo arrived at ten in the morning in his small gray car. He was jovial. Caridad, the
mulata
who hands out the food to the nuts, praises how youthful and elegant he looks today to get in his good graces.

“I won a solid fourth place.” Mr. Curbelo says.

Then he explains, “In deep-sea fishing. I won fourth place. I reeled two in that were forty pounds each.”