The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) (4 page)

“Oh!” Caridad the
mulata
smiles.

Mr. Curbelo enters the halfway house. All of the nuts immediately run up to ask him for cigarettes. Mr. Curbelo takes out a pack of Pall Malls and hands cigarettes out to the nuts. He doesn’t look at any of them. He distributes the cigarettes quickly, impatiently, as irritated as Arsenio when he hands out the milk in the mornings. The nuts have their first smoke of the day. Mr. Curbelo buys a pack of cigarettes daily and hands them out each morning when he arrives. Because he’s a good person? Not at all. According to federal law, Mr. Curbelo is supposed to give each nut thirty-eight dollars a month for cigarettes and other incidentals. But he doesn’t. Instead, every day he buys a pack of cigarettes for everyone, so the nuts don’t get too frantic. This is how Mr. Curbelo robs the nuts of over seven hundred dollars monthly. But even though they know all that, the nuts are incapable of demanding their money. It’s tough on the streets …

“Mr. Curbelo,” I say, approaching him.

“I can’t see you right now,” he says, opening the closet where the medicines are kept.

“I’ve had my television set stolen,” I say.

He ignores me. He opens a drawer in the closet and takes out dozens of bottles of pills which he places on top of his desk. He looks for mine. Melleril, 100 milligrams. He takes one.

“Open your mouth,” he says.

I do. He pops the pill in it.

“Swallow,” he says.

Arsenio watches me swallow. He smiles. But when I look right at him, he hides the smile by drawing a cigarette to his mouth. I don’t need to investigate any further. I know perfectly well that it was Arsenio himself who stole my television set. I understand that to complain to Curbelo is useless. The guilty party will never turn up. I turn on my heel and go toward the porch. I get there just as old one-eyed Reyes takes his small, wrinkled penis out and starts to urinate on the floor. Eddy, the nut who is well-versed in international politics, gets up from his seat, goes over to him, and delivers a brutal punch to his ribs.

“You’re disgusting!” Eddy says. “One day I’m going to kill you.”

The old one-eyed man moves back. He shakes, but doesn’t stop urinating. Then, without putting his penis away, he falls into a chair and grabs a glass of water off the floor. He drinks, savoring the water as if it were a martini.

“Ah!” he exclaims, satisfied.

I leave the porch. I go out to the street, where the winners are. The street is full of big, fast cars with heavily tinted windows so that vagabonds like me can’t snoop inside. I pass a café and hear someone call out to me,

“
¡Loco!
”

I turn quickly. But no one is looking at me. The customers are drinking their drinks, buying their cigarettes, reading their newspapers silently. I realize it’s the voice I’ve been hearing for fifteen years. That damned voice that insults me relentlessly. That voice that comes from a place unknown but very close. The voice. I walk on. North? South? What does it matter? I continue. And as I continue on, I see my body reflected in the shop windows. My whole body. My ruined mouth. My cheap and dirty clothes. I continue. On one corner, there are two female Jehovah’s Witnesses selling the magazine
Awaken
. They accost everyone, but let me pass without saying a word. The Kingdom was not made for down-and-out guys like me. I continue. Somebody laughs behind my back. Infuriated, I turn around. The laughter has nothing to do with me. It’s an old lady praising a newborn. Oh, God! I start walking again. I get to a very long bridge over a river of murky water. I lean on the railing to rest. Winners’ cars speed by. Some of them have the radio turned all the way up, blasting pulsating rock songs.

“You’re going to tell
me
about rock and roll?” I scream at the cars. “Me! I who came to this country with a picture of Chuck Berry in my shirt pocket!”

I continue. I get to a place they call
downtown
, full of gray, slapdash buildings. Elegantly dressed Americans, black and white alike, leave their workplaces to eat a hot dog and drink Coca-Cola. I walk among them, ashamed of my threadbare checked shirt and of the old pants that dance around my hips. I end up going into a shop that sells pornographic magazines. I go over to the rack and pick one of them up. I feel my penis stiffening a little and I crouch on the floor to hide my erection. Oh, God! Women. Naked women in all the positions imaginable. Beautiful women belonging to millionaires. I shut the magazine and wait a minute for the excitement to pass. When it has passed, I stand up, put the magazine back and leave. I walk on. I walk on into the heart of downtown. Until I stop, tired, and realize it’s time to go back to the halfway house.

I get to the halfway house and try to enter through the front door. It’s locked. A maid, whose name is Josefina, cleans the house inside, so the nuts have been banished to the porch.

“Get out,
locos!
” Josefina says, pushing them all out with a broom. And the nuts leave without complaint, taking their seats on the porch. It’s a dark porch, surrounded by black metallic cloth, with an ever-present puddle of urine at the center thanks to old one-eyed Reyes, who has lost all shame and urinates everywhere all the time, despite the punches he receives on his squalid chest and gray, unkempt head. I turn around and sit on one of the porch chairs, inhaling the strong smell of urine. I take the book of English poets out of my pocket. But I don’t read any of it. I just look at the cover. It’s a beautiful book. Thick. Finely bound.
El Negro
gave it to me when he came back from New York. It cost him twelve dollars. I look at some of the illustrations in the book. I see Samuel Coleridge’s face again. I see John Keats, he who in 1817 asked himself,

Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll

Then Ida, the grande dame come to ruin, gets up from her chair and comes over to me.

“Do you read?” she asks.

“Occasionally,” I respond.

“Oh!” She says. “I used to read a lot, back in Cuba. Romance novels.”

“Oh!”

I look at her. She dresses relatively well compared to the way the other people at the halfway house dress. Her body, while old, is clean and smells vaguely of cologne water. She’s one of the ones who knows how to exercise her rights and demands her thirty-eight dollars a month from Mr. Curbelo.

She was a member of the bourgeoisie back in Cuba, in the years when I was a young communist. Now the communist and the bourgeois woman are in the same place, the same spot history has assigned them: the halfway house.

I open the book of Romantic English poets and read a poem by William Blake:

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life & bid thee feed
By the stream & o’er the mead

I close the book. Mr. Curbelo pokes his head through the porch door and motions to me with his hands. I go. At his desk, a well-dressed, well-groomed man is waiting for us with a thick gold chain around his neck and a large watch on his wrist. He’s wearing a fetching pair of tinted glasses.

“This is the psychiatrist,” Mr. Curbelo says. “Tell him everything that’s the matter with you.”

I take a seat in a chair that Curbelo brings me. The psychiatrist takes a piece of paper out of a folder and starts to fill it out with a fountain pen. While he writes, he asks me, “Let’s see, William. What’s the matter?”

I don’t answer.

“What’s the matter?” he asks again.

I take a deep breath. It’s the same bullshit as always.

“I hear voices,” I say.

“What else?”

“I see devils on the walls.”

“Hmmm!” he says. “Do you talk to those devils?”

“No.”

“What else do you have?”

“Fatigue.”

“Hmmm!”

He writes for a long time. He writes, writes, writes. He takes off the tinted glasses and looks at me. His eyes don’t show the slightest interest in me.

“How old are you, William?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Hmmm!”

He looks at my clothes, my shoes.

“Do you know what day today is?”

“Today,” I say uncomfortably. “Friday.”

“Friday, the what?”

“Friday . . . the fourteenth.”

“Of what month?”

“August.”

He writes again. While he does, he discloses impersonally, “Today is Monday, the twenty-third of September."

He writes a little more.

“Okay, William. That will be all.”

I stand up and go back to the porch. There’s a surprise for me there.
El Negro
has come to see me all the way from Miami Beach. He has a book in his hand and he holds it out to me as a greeting. It’s
Time of the Assassins
by Henry Miller.

“I’m afraid it will ruin you,” he says.

“Stop fucking with me!” I reply.

I take him by the arm and lead him to a broken-down car that sits in the garage of the halfway house. It’s a car from 1950 that belongs to Mr. Curbelo. One day it just stopped forever and Mr. Curbelo left it there, at the halfway house, so it would go on deteriorating, slowly, along with the nuts. We get in the car and sit in the back seat, between oxidized springs and pieces of dirty padding.

“What’s new?” I anxiously ask
El Negro
. He’s my link to society. He goes to meetings with Cuban intellectuals, talks about politics, reads the papers, watches television, and then, every week or two, he comes to see me to share the gist of his travels through the world.

“Everything’s the same.”
El Negro
says. “Everything’s the same … ,” he says. Then, all of a sudden: “Well! Truman Capote died.”

“I know.”

“That’s it,”
El Negro
says. He takes a newspaper out of his pocket and gives it to me. It’s the Mariel newspaper, edited by young Cubans in exile.

“There’s a poem of mine in there,”
El Negro
says. “On page six.”

I look for page six. There’s a poem called “There’s Always Light in the Devil’s Eyes.” It reminds me of Saint-John Perse. I tell him. He’s flattered.

“It reminds me of
Rains
,” I say.

“Me, too,”
El Negro
says.

Then he looks at me. He takes in my clothes, my shoes, my dirty, tangled hair. He shakes his head disapprovingly.

“Hey, Willy,” he then says, “you should take better care of yourself.”

“Oh, am I that run down?”

“Not yet,” he says. “But try not to get any worse.” “I’ll take care of myself,” I say.

El Negro
pats my knee. I realize that he’s about to leave. He takes out a half-empty pack of Marlboros and gives it to me. Then he takes out a dollar and gives that to me, too.

“It’s all I have,” he says.

“I know.”

We get out of the car. A nut comes up to us to ask for a cigarette.
El Negro
gives him one.

“Adios, Doctor Zhivago,” he says, smiling. He turns around and leaves.

I go back to the porch. As I am about to go in, somebody calls to me from the dining room. It’s Arsenio, the halfway house second-in-command. He’s shirtless and hiding a can of beer under the table since it’s not right for the psychiatrist who’s visiting the residence today to see him drinking.

“Come here,” he says to me and points to a chair.

I go inside. Besides him and me, there’s no one else in the dining room. He looks at the books I have in my hand and starts laughing.

“Listen … ,” he says, drinking from the can. “I’ve been watching you closely.”

“Yeah? And what do you make of me?”

“That you’re not crazy,” he says, still smiling.

“And what school of psychiatry did you go to?” I ask, irritated.

“None,” he replies. “I just have street psychology. And I’ll tell you again that you, you’re not crazy! Let’s see,” he then says, “take this cigarette and burn your tongue.”

I’m disgusted by his idiocy. His malt beer-colored body, the huge scar that goes from his chest down to his navel.

“You see?” he says, taking a swig of beer. “See how you’re not crazy?”

And then he smiles with his mouth full of rotten teeth. I leave. The cleaning is done and we can go back inside. The nuts are watching TV. I cross the living room and finally enter my room. I slam the door shut. I’m indignant and I don’t know why. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is snoring in his bed like a saw cutting a piece of wood. I become more indignant. I go over to him and give him a kick in the behind. He awakens, frightened, and curls himself up in a corner.

“Listen, you son of a bitch!” I say to him. “Don’t snore anymore!”

At the sight of his fear, my anger abates. I sit down on the bed again. I smell bad. So much so that I grab the towel and soap and head out toward the bathroom. On the way, I see old one-eyed Reyes, who is covertly urinating in a corner. I look around. I don’t see anyone. I go over to Reyes and grab him tightly by the neck. I give him a kick in the testicles. I bang his head against the wall.

“Sorry, sorry … ,” Reyes says.

I look at him, disgusted. His forehead is bleeding. Upon seeing this, I feel a strange pleasure. I grab the towel, twist it, and whip his frail chest.

“Have mercy … ,” Reyes implores.

“Stop pissing everywhere!” I say furiously.

As I turn back down the hall, I see Arsenio there, leaning against the wall. He saw it all. He smiles. He leaves the can of beer in a corner and asks to borrow my towel. I give it to him. He twists it tightly. He makes a perfect whip of it and using all his strength brings it down on Reyes’ back. One, two, three times, until the old man falls in a corner, bathed in urine, blood and sweat. Arsenio gives me the towel back. He smiles at me again. He grabs his can of beer and sits down again at his desk. Mr. Curbelo has left. Arsenio is now the head of the halfway house again.

I continue toward the bathroom. I go inside, lock the door and start to undress. My clothes stink, but my socks reek even more. I grab them, inhale their deeply embedded muddy smell, and throw them in the waste basket. They were the only socks I had. Now I’ll walk around the city sockless.