The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) (8 page)

“Do you know that you’re a good painter?”

“No,” says Frances. “I have no technique.”

No,” I say to her. “You’re already a painter. Your technique is primitive, but it’s very good.”

She takes her drawings out of my hands and puts them back in the folder.

“They’re worthless,” she says with a sad smile.

“Listen,” I say, sitting down next to her. “I swear that … pay attention. Let me say this to you and believe me, please. You are a tremendous artist. You are. I’m telling you. I’m here, in this disgusting
house
, and I’m practically a phantom of myself. But I’m telling you that I know something about art. You are amazing. Do you know who Rousseau was?”

“No,” she says.

“Well you don’t need to,” I say. “Your technique is similar. Have you ever painted oils?”

“No.”

“Learn to paint with oils,” I say. “Give some color to these drawings. Listen!” I say, taking her strongly by the neck. “You are a good artist. Goooood.”

She smiles. I squeeze my hand a little tighter and her eyes fill with tears. But she keeps smiling. I feel a wave of desire washing over me again. I let go of her. I go over to the room’s door and lock it again. I go over to her gently and start to kiss her arms, her armpits, the nape of her neck. She smiles. I kiss her slowly on the mouth. Once again, I throw her down on the bed and take out my penis. Pulling aside her small panties with my fingers, I penetrate her slowly.

“Kill me,” she says.

“You really want me to kill you?” I ask, sinking into her completely.

“Yes, kill me,” she says.

I get a hand on her neck and start to squeeze forcefully again.

“Bitch!” I say, suffocating her and penetrating her at the same time. “You’re a good artist. You draw well. But you need to learn about color. Colooor.”

“
Ay!
” she says.

“Die!” I say, feeling myself dissolve between her legs again.

We remain that way for a while, totally undone. I’m kissing her cold hand. She’s playing with my hair. I stand up. I straighten my shirt. She lowers her dress and sits on the edge of the bed.

“Listen,” I say to her. “Do you want to go for a spin with me?”

“Where to, my angel?”

“Around!”

“Okay.”

We leave. When we get to the street, Frances presses against me and grabs my arm.

“Where are we going?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

I look up and down the street. Then I point vaguely at a place they call Little Havana. We start to walk. This might be the poorest ghetto of the Cuban section. Here live the great majority of the 50,000 who arrived on Miami’s shores in that last spectacular exodus of 1980. They haven’t been able to get a leg up yet, and you can see them any time of day sitting in the doorways of their homes, sporting shorts, brightly colored t-shirts and baseball hats. They flaunt thick gold chains on their necks with medallions of saints, Indians and stars. They drink canned beer. They fix their rundown cars and listen, for hours on end, to loud rock or exasperating drum solos on their portable radios.

We walk. When we get to 8th Street, we turn to the right and head toward the heart of the ghetto. Bodegas, clothing stores, opticians, barber shops, restaurants, coffee shops, pawn shops, furniture stores. All of it small, square, simple, made without any architectural artifice or aesthetic concerns. Created to make a few cents and thus cobble together that petit bourgeois life-style to which the average Cuban aspires.

We walk on. We walk on. When we reach the big, gray arcade of a Baptist church, we sit at the foot of one of the pillars. A protest march of old people passes on the street, toward downtown. I don’t know what they’re marching for. They raise signs that say, “Enough already!” and they’re waving Cuban and American flags. Somebody comes over to us and gives us both typewritten pieces of paper. I read:

It’s time. The “Cuban Avengers” group has been started in Miami. From today on, take heed all the indifferent, the mean-spirited, the closet communists and all those who enjoy life in this hedonistic and bucolic city while an unhappy Cuba moans in chains. “Cuban Avengers” will show all Cubans the path to follow.

I crumple up the piece of paper and throw it out. I start laughing. I lean against the pillar and look at Frances. She gets closer to me and sinks her shoulder into my ribs. She takes one of my arms and places it over her shoulder. I squeeze her a little more and kiss her head.

“My angel,” she says. “Were you ever a communist?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

We’re silent. Then she says,

“At the beginning.”

I lean my head back against the pillar and sing an old anthem from the early years of the Revolution in a low voice:

Somos las brigadas Conrado Benítez
Somos la vanguardia de la revolución

She continues:

Con el libro en alto, cumplimos una meta
Llevar a toda Cuba la alfabetización

We burst out laughing.

“I taught five peasants how to read,” she confesses.

“Oh yeah? Where?”

“In the Sierra Maestra,” she says. “In a place called El Roble.”

“I was around there,” I say. “I was teaching some other peasants in La Plata. Three mountains from there.”

“How long ago was that, my angel?”

I close my eyes.

“Twenty-two … twenty-three years ago,” I say. “Nobody understands that,” she says. “I tell my psychiatrist and he just gives me strong Etrafon pills. Twenty-three years, my angel?”

She looks at me with tired eyes.

“I think I’m dead inside,” she says.

“Me too.”

I take her by the hands and we stand up. A black convertible goes by in front of us. A Miami teenager sticks his head out and yells at us, “Trash!”

I flash him the longest finger on my hand. Then I squeeze Frances’ hand and we start walking back to the halfway house. I’m hungry. I’d like to eat, at the very least, a meat empanada. But I don’t have a single cent.

“I have two dimes,” says Frances, untying a handkerchief.

“They’re no good. Everything in this country costs more than twenty-five cents.”

Nonetheless, we stop in front of a coffee shop called
La Libertaria
.

“How much is that empanada?” Frances asks an old server who looks bored behind the counter.

“Fifty cents.”

“Oh!”

We turn around. When we’ve gone a few steps, the man calls out to us.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Are you Cuban?”

“Yes.”

“Man and wife?”

“Yes.”

“Come in, I’ll give you something to eat.”

We go in.

“My name is Montoya,” the man says as he cuts two big slices of bread and starts to put ham and cheese on them. “I’ve also had rough times in this country. Don’t tell anyone I said so, but this country will
eat you alive
. I’m Montoya!” He says again, adding two large pickle slices between the bread slices. “I’m an old revolutionary. I’ve been imprisoned under every one of the tyrannies Cuba has suffered. In 1933, in 1952 and most recently, under the hammer and sickle.”

“Anarchist?” I ask.

“Anarchist,” he confesses. “My whole life. Fighting the Americans and the Russians. Now I’m very peaceful.”

He puts the open-faced sandwiches, all ready, on the counter and invites us to eat. Then he takes out two Coca-Colas and sets them in front of us.

“In 1961,” he says, leaning forward on his elbows over the counter, “Rafael Porto Penas, lame Estrada, the now-deceased Manolito Ruvalcaba, and I were all together in the same car with Fidel Castro. I was at the wheel. Fidel was without his bodyguards. Lame Estrada looked him right in the eye and asked, ‘Fidel … are you a communist?’ And Fidel replied, ‘
Caballeros
, I swear to you by my mother that I am not a communist nor will I ever be one!’ See what kind of guy he is!”

We burst out laughing.

“Cuban history isn’t written yet,” Montoya says. “The day I write it, the world will end!”

He goes over to two customers who just walked in and Frances and I take the opportunity to eat our sandwiches. We eat and drink in silence for a few minutes. When we’re done, Montoya is in front of us again.

“Thank you,” I say.

He stretches his hand out to me. Then he extends it to Frances.

“Go to Homestead!” he then says. “They need people there to pick avocadoes and tomatoes.”

“Thank you,” I say again. “Maybe we’ll do that.”

We leave. We walk toward First Street. While we walk, a great idea pops into my head.

“Frances,” I say, stopping at Sixth Avenue. “Tell me, my angel."

"Frances … Frances … ,” I say, leaning up against a wall and bringing her gently to me. “I’ve just had a magnificent idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s leave the halfway house!” I say, bringing her to my chest. “With what we both receive from social security, we could live in a small house, and we could even earn a little more if we did some menial work here and there.”

She looks at me, surprised by my idea. Her mouth and chin start trembling slightly.

“My angel!” she says, moved. “And can I bring my little boy from New Jersey?”

“Of course!”

“And you would help me raise him?”

“Yes!”

She squeezes my hands tightly. She looks at me with her trembling smile. She’s so moved that for a few seconds, she doesn’t know what to say. Then all the color drains from her face. Her eyes roll back and she faints in my arms.

“Frances… Frances!” I say, helping her up from the sidewalk. “What’s wrong?”

I pat her face a few times. Slowly, she comes to. “It’s hope, my angel …,” she says. “Hope!” She hugs me tightly. I look at her. Her lips, her cheeks, her face, all of it is trembling intensely. She starts to cry.

“It’s not going to work out,” she says. “It’s not going to work out.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m crazy. I need to take four pills of strong Etrafon daily.”

“I’ll give them to you.”

“I hear voices,” she says. “It seems like everyone is talking about me.”

“Me too,” I say. “But to hell with the voices!”

I grab her by the waist. Slowly, we begin to walk back to the halfway house. A new car passes next to us. A guy with a thin beard and tinted glasses sticks his head out the window and yells at me, “Dump that bitch!”

We walk on. While we walk, I’m planning the steps we’ll take. Tomorrow, the first of the month, our social security checks arrive. I’ll talk to Curbelo and ask him for mine and Frances’. Then we’ll pack our bags, I’ll call a taxi and we’ll go house hunting. For the first time in years, a small ray of hope shines into the deep dark well of my empty chest. Without realizing it, I smile.

We enter the halfway house through the back porch, cocooned by dark metallic fabric. The nuts have finished eating and are digesting there, sitting on the wooden chairs. Upon entering the house, Frances and I separate. She goes to her room; I go on to mine. I’m singing an old Beatles song:

He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land

Hilda, the decrepit old hag, steps in front of me and asks for a cigarette. I give it to her. Then I grab her head and give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you!” she says, surprised. “That’s the first kiss I’ve gotten in mannnnny years.”

“Do you want another one?”

“Okay.”

I kiss her again, on the other cheek.

“Why, thank you,” she says to me.

I continue on my way, singing
Nowhere Man
. I get to my room. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is on his bed, counting his money.

“Hey,” I say to him: “I need you to give me a dollar.”

“A dollar, Mister William? You’re crazy!”

I pry his wallet from his hands. I look for a dollar. I take it.

“Give me my wallet,” the crazy guy groans.

I give it to him, then throw my arm around him affectionately.

“A dollar, man. Just a lousy dollar.” I say to him.

He looks at me. I smile at him. I kiss his face. He ends up laughing himself.

“Okay, Mister William,” he says.

“I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” I say.

I go outside, toward the corner. I’m going to buy today’s paper to look through the ads for a good apartment for Frances and me. A simple apartment, no more than two hundred dollars. I’m happy. Oh, damn it! I think I’m happy. Let me say “think.” Let me not tempt the devil and bring fury and fatality onto myself. I get to the corner bodega. I grab a paper from the rack. I pay with the dollar.

“You have a pending debt,” the bodega owner says. “Fifty cents.”

“Me? From when?”

“A month ago. Don’t you remember? A Coca-Cola.”

“Oh, please! A woman as pretty as you is going to tell me that? Surely it’s a mistake.”

When I call her pretty, she smiles.

“I must be confused,” she then says.

“That’s alright.”

I smile at her. I can still play a woman. It’s easy. You just have to spend some time on it.

“Why don’t you dye your hair blond?” I ask, still keeping up the act. “If you dyed your hair blond, you’d look so much better.”

“You think so?” she says, running her fingers through her hair.

“Sure.”

She opens the cash register. She puts the dollar in. She gives me back seventy-five cents.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Thank
you
,” she says. “The thing about the Coca-Cola must have been a mistake.”

“That’s alright.”

I leave with the newspaper under my arm, singing
Nowhere Man
softly. A black man looks at me from the doorway of his house with sinister eyes. As I walk past, I say, “Hi, paisano!”

He smiles. “Damn, Slim. How are you? Who are you?”

“Slim,” I reply. “Just Slim.”

“Damn, well I’m glad to have one more friend. I’m
Clean Dough
. I arrived on a boat five years ago. I’m here for you. You’ve got a home here.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you,
Clean Dough
.”

“Now you know!”
Clean Dough
says, waving his fist in the air good-bye.

I continue toward the home. As I pass a house surrounded by a tall fence, an enormous black dog jumps up and starts to bark angrily. I stop. Carefully, I reach my hand over the fence and stroke his head. The dog barks one more time, confused. He sits on his hind legs and starts to lick my hand. In command of the situation, I lean over the fence and give him a kiss on the snout. I continue on my way. Upon arriving at the boarding home, I see Pedro, the silent Indian who never talks to anyone. He’s sitting in the doorway of the house.