Ruins Page 12

  Besides, it had never occurred to him in the past to wish for anything. As he buffed, being especially careful around the loose panels, he thought of everything that he had been wishing for lately—including his still fervent desire to accidentally bump up against Mr. Tiffany’s signature somewhere on his lamp—and replaced it all with a yearning for reconciliation with Lidia, for peace with Nena, for Obdulio’s safety so far away, for understanding between Diosdado and Reynaldo; as an aside, he wished for a box of Belgian chocolates. Then, as if unable to shake a newly acquired virus, he asked for a good pair of bikes to buy and, yes, for more dollars.

  Usnavy stopped polishing.

  His eyes stinging, he stepped from Nena and Lidia’s bed to his own without letting his bare feet touch the floor (which looked wet anyway, although this could have been the screen of tears in his eyes) and lowered himself slowly to his ratty, newspaper-lined mattress. Then he cradled his head in his tired arms and sobbed.

  Usnavy was lolling on the bed, his face streaked, when he heard a knock at the door.

  If my anguish were weight, it would be heavier than the sand of all our beaches, he thought. Where, now, is my strength? I have lost all my resourcefulness.

  The knocking continued.

  “What?” he shouted, his voice hoarse. As if an echo, his stomach rumbled. He felt his guts twisting, pushing between the lining of his belly and the bed sheet.

  “Usnavy?”

  He flipped over. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Yoandry, and Burt—from yesterday.”

  What could they want? Usnavy asked himself, annoyed. He was thinking about not answering further, or telling them he was busy, when he suddenly realized they might be there to hire him as a driver again. Forgetting all his ambivalence, Usnavy leapt from the bed, his naked feet splashing into the cold puddle on the floor.

  “Just a minute,” he called out, cringing because of the water on his naked soles. He looked up for the leak but couldn’t see anything through the light.

  As he pulled on his crumpled and smelly clothes, he fingered the crisp twenty-dollar bill folded into his pocket. Looking around, he flipped the switch to turn off the lamp’s bright beacon. In a flash, the tiny room went black, muted blues and pinks exploded in front of his eyes, and he leaned against the wall, famished, waiting a moment until the dizziness passed. Then he cracked open the door a tiny sliver, trying not to gaze directly into the brilliant blaze of day outside.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the blank presence of the two men—Usnavy couldn’t see them yet, his eyes still adjusting, “I was sleeping. What can I do for you?”

  The two men looked like white globs, barely discernible from the sunlight. There was a movement among them, a slow-motion gesture of some sort, the sound coming from them like a dying tape recording.

  “I told Burt about your broken lamp,” said Yoandry. He was puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette that dribbled not just ashes but tobacco. As he spoke, he exhaled and used his fingers to extract bits of leaf from his tongue. “I think he might be willing to pay more than five dollars for it.”

  Usnavy said nothing. He was hiding behind the door, comparing the stink of his own body to the cloud of nicotine Yoandry always carried with him.

  “You know, we could both make money off it … I’d get, you know, a commission,” the boy said, but he was clearly anxious.

  Just then a happy Burt said something and reached over to pat Usnavy’s shoulder. The old man jerked involuntarily—just like Diosdado had done the day before—which startled the tall Canadian, causing him to back off and apologize. Usnavy understood Soh-ree.

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Yoandry asked, showing his gritted teeth. He leaned in close to him, rolled up his fists automatically. His pimply face was a huge yellow moon. “Don’t you realize this guy could mean a steady business for us?” But as soon as the boy got a whiff of Usnavy, he stepped back a bit and gasped for the less fetid air outside.

  Usnavy shook his head, still trying to get his bearings.

  “He’s an antiques dealer—you understand? He runs a store with your friend’s daughter’s fiancé—talk about lucky breaks, huh? Don’t ruin it for us, old man, this could be good for all of us. Now where’s the lamp? He doesn’t even care if it’s broken.”

  “I don’t want to give him a broken lamp!” protested Usnavy.

  To everyone’s astonishment, Yoandry aimed his shoulder at the door, but Usnavy was able to hold him back, pushing with his whole, tired body. Still, the boy managed a foot or two into Usnavy’s room. “Holy shit—what’s that?” he exclaimed, gazing upward. The magnificent lamp hung frozen and black above the bed.

  “That’s none of your business,” said Usnavy, pushing the boy.

  Yoandry turned and said something to the Canadian, who was all scared now. Usnavy could see him coming into view: Burt gaped dumb-founded at the magnificent lamp then made a nervous motion with his hand as if to say Okay.

  “Listen, he doesn’t care if the little lamp’s broken,” Yoandry insisted, turning to Usnavy. “And he’ll buy that thing too,” he added, pointing at the black dome behind Usnavy’s shoulder. “Do you understand? He doesn’t care. He’ll pay us dollars, real dollars, enough for both of us—we’ll split it evenly—for the little one, and god knows what for that atrocity.”

  Usnavy arched his eyebrows. “Your commission is the same as my fee? You’re kidding me, right?”

  The boy whirled his eyes, surveying the woeful tenement, then smugly aimed them back at Usnavy. “How else are you going to get any dollars at all, old man?”

  Usnavy stiffened. “How else are you going to get anything that easy, huh?”

  With that, he pushed the door even harder against Yoandry’s shoulder, surprising himself by driving the muscle boy out of the room. As Yoandry pounded on the locked door and called his name, Usnavy felt around the darkness for his cot and threw himself on it. He thought his skull might explode from the pressure of so much hunger.

  Usnavy’s stomach was acting as if it were filled with snakes, all of them coiling, swallowing, strangling each other. The magnificent lamp was not for sale. The magnificent lamp was his own peculiar patrimony; it was all he’d ever had.

  He reached over and pulled open the door of the small fridge, feeling its cool mist on his forearm and the gold of its tiny light. Maybe there was a bit of rice. He felt around without looking, then realized his fingers were knuckle deep in some kind of creamy liquid.

  Usnavy sat up, his hand dripping on the floor and on his bed, and peered into the icebox. There, in plain sight, was a small blanket cut in pieces, marinating in a muddy sauce. It was the only thing in the entire fridge but for a domino-sized pat of margarine and two plastic bottles of soda, both filled with boiled water.

  Disgusted and appalled, Usnavy slammed the door shut. The fridge rocked against the wall and let loose a blue spark. Had Lidia deliberately fed their daughter this … this abomination? Or had that cunning Rosita tricked her? Lidia, Usnavy knew, was a trusting soul. But still … Lidia had to know what was in her own refrigerator! She must have fallen under Rosita’s spell, he determined, and imagined himself twisting Rosita’s neck.

  Usnavy wiped his hand on his dirty pants, then licked his fingers to get the last of it. It was good, he reluctantly admitted, his stomach looping. It was damn good … He sucked his hand clean and sat on the edge of the bed.

  What to do?

  He abruptly yanked open the door of the fridge and pulled out the pot with the blanket. He would not eat the blanket—he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He would do this as cleanly, as stealthily, as a Maasai warrior sucking on a bull’s jugular. He tipped the pot and sipped at its edge, drinking in the brown sauce. It had onions and tomatoes and maybe a bit of cumin. It was thick and tasty, with a hint of real beef. But then the blanket pushed up against his lips as he tilted the pot to get at the gravy and he grabbed it with his teeth, pulling and slurping to absorb as much of the nourishme
nt as he could. He could feel the sauce messily trickling down his chin and neck; he was a hysterical hyena feasting.

  After a frenzied moment, an agitated Usnavy regained his composure and shoved the pot into the fridge, the chewed end of a blanket remnant draped over its side. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d sprinted the length of the Malecón. He wiped his mouth with his forearm in one long, defeated gesture. He needed water; he needed a torrent to wash him away.

  He turned on the light and went scavenging for clean clothes in his drawer. He had a couple of extra pairs of pants, and both were laundered and ironed along with a few T-shirts and regular shirts, all neatly folded next to his clean underwear in the drawer. Lidia, it seemed, must have forgiven him.

  But to his dismay, the books piled next to the drawers under the bed were like sponges, watermarks crisscrossing their sides. After so many days of leaks and puddles, still no one had moved them. It was too late to save them now: Usnavy knew the covers would peel the minute he tried to separate them.

  With the taste of the blanket lingering on his tongue, Usnavy grabbed what he needed, including his toothbrush, razor, and a plastic bottle filled with the last of the water from his barrel. He headed out across the courtyard to the communal shower, the twenty-dollar bill still hidden in his pocket. When he got there he found the drain stuffed up, and Chachi using bent metal hangers to pull out inky globs of sticky hair that looked like a mammoth black squid.

  “This is gonna be awhile, compañero,” Chachi said, barely glancing up at Usnavy. The frothy piles of hair sputtered on the floor next to him, rising and falling as if they were breathing on their own.

  Usnavy’s stomach turned ever so slowly. He looked over at the line of waiting people, everyone carrying their own modest toiletries and bottles or buckets of water. A couple of women worked at crossword puzzles in rolled-up magazines.

  “The last one?” Usnavy called out. An elderly woman raised her hand and Usnavy nodded at her in acknowledgment. “I’ve got to lie down or I’ll throw up,” he admitted. “Is it okay with everybody if I go to my room and wait there?” The line muttered indifferently.

  Usnavy trudged across the courtyard, the bottle sloshing the water around under his arm, his clothes draped over the other. He tried to imagine himself far away from Tejadillo, a fierce hunting dog among sleek Herero heroes relaxing in the hot springs between the mountains and Windhoek.

  Usnavy had just reached his room when Jacinto came up behind him. “Usnavy, old man,” he said, a little breathlessly, “can you help me?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I need some food. For my mother. Anything.”

  As the grocer, Usnavy was used to people asking for food, for scraps, but Jacinto … never. Usnavy looked him over quickly, just enough to appreciate that all his usual swagger had dissipated. Before him was a once handsome russet-skinned man, his nappy hair like rotted cotton, his eyes wandering in an inner galaxy like satellites torn loose from their orbits.

  “Are you okay?” Usnavy asked.

  “My mother’s gonna die, Usnavy,” he said wearily. “I thought maybe … you might have something extra from the bodega, anything really. Whatever.”

  Usnavy hesitated. He had an awful, awful thought. “I … I have something … some meat, maybe,” he finally said. “Just a minute.”

  He went inside and grabbed the pot from the fridge, covering it with his dirty shirt so nobody could see. They crossed the bustling tenement without a word, as people looked up from their card tournaments, board games, and other luckless entertainments, eyeing them suspiciously but not asking any questions.

  Inside Jacinto’s room, there was only a single, tiny bulb in a lamp covered by a silk shade with fringes. It shone white, like an oracle. The air in the room was pungent with the claustrophobic smell of disease. Jacinto had inexplicably put up wooden posts—like the kind crews contrived when buildings were unstable. Usnavy wanted to tell him this was a bit much on his part, that there were those invisible giants who held up the city, but just then he heard the even but fragile breathing of his friend’s mother. Where was she?

  A clothesline stretched across the room on which Jacinto had improvised something of a curtain with a frayed sheet. Behind it was a bed on which the old woman lay, still as soapstone. Usnavy felt sorry for her immediately: Shrunken, her bedclothes loose and damp about her, her dried up breasts testified to the many lives she’d nurtured.

  Around her, the room was crowded with shelves full of religious icons, an altar holding dead flowers with papery petals, rotting bananas that leaked their puslike slime and harbored a haze of flies (why hadn’t they eaten that fruit instead of letting it go to waste, marveled Usnavy, the gods would have surely understood!). Accompanying all that were a few photographs of once-upon-a-times: Jacinto’s parents’ wedding in elegant black-and-white, his mother a girlish bride; his father, a jazzman with a trumpet in his hand, hat rakishly tilted, the Eiffel Tower in the sepia background in the years when the Revolution was young and fresh and every Cuban was an ambassador; Jacinto himself, callow and fine, his bare and sculpted chest as much of a sight as the live lion he was crouching down to pat, somebody’s domesticated but still dangerous pet out there in the jungle and war. In the picture, a massive AK-47 was strapped to Jacinto’s back, its barrel aimed at the sky.

  Usnavy knelt on the floor and, moving the shirt covering the pot into a bundle under it, put it down on a stunningly varnished mahogany coffee table. Jacinto winced and quickly slid a plastic cutting board under the shirt to protect the wood.

  Usnavy couldn’t believe what he was doing, couldn’t believe he was suddenly no better than Rosita—in fact, maybe worse: She did it for money, he did it … for what? To seem generous? To seem good?

  “Listen, Jacinto, this isn’t really meat … it’s … it’s …” he began, but Jacinto surprised him.

  “Soy, I know—don’t worry,” he said quickly, his eyes doing circles around the blanket in the pot as if to confirm that he understood that this was what they were talking about.

  “No, no …” Usnavy tried to explain.

  “Masa cárnica? No problem, my mother likes it fine,” Jacinto said, his pupils now darting back and forth from Usnavy to the stirring on the bed.

  “You know …?” Usnavy asked, his voice trailing off before he could even finish his thoughts.

  Jacinto reached into the pot and rolled a bit of the blanket in his fingers. Once he made a little ball of it, ripe and dripping, he placed it on his mother’s mouth. Her tongue darted out and licked the juices.

  Later that day, Usnavy found himself outside the giant colonial doors of the Fondo de Bienes Culturales in the Old Plaza, not far from the tenement. He cleared his throat and tried to figure out what he was going to say.

  The plaza, which was all rounded cobblestones, was older than the cathedral, with a parking lot hidden beneath the neglected patch of pavement. Everything was made of stone, veined or stained with gray, all of it lost in the incandescence of the afternoon.

  Usnavy had muttered to himself the whole way there about his stolen bike and eyed each one that pedaled by—Flying Pigeons and Roadsters and the occasional tourist-imported Trek—curious if the twenty-dollar bill now transferred to his clean pants pocket was enough to lure any of them from their sluggish, contented riders.

  “I want my bike,” he muttered. “I want my own damn bike.”

  Before walking over to the Old Plaza, Usnavy had washed up at Jacinto’s, since he had a bathroom installed in his room. It boasted a portable shower with a small gas heater for his mother’s comfort, and a flushing toilet and everything.

  While he was washing, the twenty-dollar bill was concealed in the pocket of his dirty pants, which Usnavy kept in sight the whole time—a gesture that caused him some shame, because Jacinto had always been his friend and he hated that, all of a sudden, he had grown distrustful even of him.

  As he bathed, feeling the warm water running down his body, his
neighbor put his right shoe together again, this time using not just twine but some glue he’d gotten on the black market to fix his mother’s furniture. It embarrassed Usnavy to only have one pair of shoes, but he knew his plight was not unique, just less common now, as the world turned upside down and the least likely people suddenly had Italian shoes for work and American loafers to hang around the house. (This was the case with Frank, who also had a pair of thick, flat German-brand sandals that molded to the very soles of his feet.)

  “You can’t nail into this wood,” Jacinto said, done with the shoe and now patting his mother’s battered bureau. It was a fine, dark caoba, burnished so that their faces appeared within its borders, like portraits drawn with gasoline. “It’s hard as hell. I want to sell it to a foreigner. But I have to fix everything and polish it so it doesn’t look like there was ever anything wrong with it. I ran out of the putty I had but I’ll find some more, for sure.”

  Usnavy immediately made a mental note to bring Reynaldo—Reina?—whatever—and her/his fiancé to see Jacinto’s things once they arrived in Havana. It was the least he could do. He would have considered bringing Burt—it’s possible, if he was interested in lamps, he might be interested in furniture—but he wasn’t sure he could get the Canadian away from Yoandry, who would surely try to usurp the deal.

  The Fondo, which served as a kind of clearinghouse for craftspeople, was headquartered in a huge eighteenth-century mansion which once belonged to the Count of Mopox and Jaruco on the corner of Muralla and San Ignacio. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plaza had been an apex of culture: On the same block, the Havana Philharmonic had once made music, and not too far away the captain general’s printing press had produced some early works. Now the plaza was windy and barren but for a few foreign tourists and a string of bare-chested kids who followed, brazenly begging for food or money.

  Like the other manors on the plaza, the Fondo had great stone columns, with balconies amply described by Cirilo Villaverde in Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Angel, the first real Cuban novel. The balconies—many crumbling and held up by wooden supports like the kind Jacinto imitated in his room—ran the length of four or five houses, the legacy of disappeared colonial millionaires. (Usnavy didn’t argue about the need for these supports, but in his mind it was still the invisible giants leaning against the walls who ultimately made the difference.) These buildings had arched doorways with fan-shaped stained-glass portals above them. The glass in these was blue and white, remarkably insipid, maybe with a panel of burnt red here and there. Usnavy sniffed: The light that ran through them was merely tempered, never glorious.