“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, “just an old dwarf’s crazy ramblings.” Then he gave me another piece of peanut brittle. I was grateful, but my hunger was calling for more. Nonetheless, I ate it with the same frantic appetite as before, and he asked me where I was headed. I told him what had happened and shared my determination to stay in Havana.
He immediately asked me, “Do you dare work for a dwarf?”
“Just tell me what to do and I’ll start right now,”
I answered. “I’m going to take a chance with you,” he said.
I was about to tell him I was a good man when he suddenly leaned down and removed the manhole cover, reached in, and — I don’t know how, through what act of magic — retrieved a package.
He looked both ways then spoke, pronouncing each word very carefully. “Someone I trust has to deliver this package to Aramburu 111. I can’t move from this corner, maybe you’ll understand someday. I trust you can complete this task; your future depends on it.”
He paused, took off his cap, scratched his head, and talked about the forces that govern the underground, about the palaces King Solomon had built after his death under the cities.
“Take it or leave it,” he said.
I grabbed the package and felt it rattle like an old treasure chest.
“Sausages! Inoffensive sausages!” the dwarf chanted, overcome by a strange giddiness. “Be very careful. At the first sign of trouble, just toss the package at the feet of the police; they won’t follow you then.”
That’s how the dwarf pushed me into my first black market venture, which I completed nicely. Of course, my nerves were on edge the whole time I moved along the streets. Whenever I saw a cop, I got ready to toss the damn sausages at his feet. But I arrived on Aramburu Street without any problems, rang the doorbell on number 111, and was received by an old couple. They grilled me about a password I didn’t know. I explained that it was my first day on the job. They said that whenever I visited them, I had to say, “Pontius Pilate!” Then they led me to the living room and opened the package. It held about thirty cans of frankfurters.
“Here,” the old woman said. I saw two twenty-dollar bills and two singles.
I headed back to the train station but there was no trace of the dwarf. One of the taxi drivers said he’d seen him getting into a blue car. I didn’t know what to do with the money. It was past noon and I wanted to sit down to a real meal, to sit at a table and stuff myself, like I hadn’t done since I’d left my hometown. With that in mind — more daydream than reality — I went back to Puerto Avenue, not via the Old Havana shortcuts but through Central Park and the Prado, which at that hour was burning with a heat that scorched every corner.
Once on Puerto Avenue, after some haggling with a woman in a colonial doorway, I was able to buy a fritter and a tamarind soda from an illegal vendor. From there I went window shopping at the tourist places around the cathedral and became enchanted by the lighters with little scenes of Havana on them, and by the pens which showed naked rumba dancers in oily seas when you shook them, and by the racks of fashion magazines from all over the world. I toured the Bodeguita del Medio and scrawled my name into the graffiti on the bathroom wall. Then I went back to Central Park and saw the Catherine Deneuve movie at the Payret.
When I got out, sunset was coming on, and I moved down to the docks again. With the little money that was left, I ordered a double rum at the Dos Hermanos Tavern. From the bar, I could see the ferries to Regla and Casablanca, their passengers coming and going. There was a lot of serious drinking going on in the bar. The stevedores drank bottles of that hellish rum as if it was water, the bartender shouted out orders in a lingo I couldn’t understand, and the women that came in and out resembled characters from a Japanese comic book, their tight dresses like badly rolled cigarettes.
“Take off those glasses,” one them said to me provocatively. She was a mulatta with Chinese blood who was supposedly about thirty-five years old, not at all unattractive, although tourists no longer looked her way; she was forgotten in the game of international flags of love. She’d put on weight and her hips were square.
“I’m cross-eyed,” I told her bravely. I lowered my glasses and she looked at my eyes, scrutinized them, and said that cross-eyed guys brought her luck.
She touched my head with an exorcist’s flair meant to transmit that luck, then turned around and shouted something like, “This guy’s cross-eyed!”
Two other women came and touched my head. The gentle bartender refilled my glass of rum. A black stevedore came up to me and told me about a blind virgin on an altar in a church near the outskirts of the village of Guanabacoa. “In the wilderness, right on the edge of the jungle, there’s a chapel with a virgin that’s said to be from Toledo who cures anything that’s wrong with the eyes,” he said.
The black guy left and the Chinese mulatta said he was a bullshitter. She ordered a drink and made the bartender fill my glass again.
“Does the virgin exist?” I asked.
“God only knows,” she said.
To make a long story short, I got the drunkest I’ve ever been in my life. At 10 o’clock, I left that hole in the wall with those wasted women and other port dwellers, arm in arm, everybody touching my head. Surrounded by so much alcohol, my only concern was those forty-two dollars that, if the dwarf never showed up again, would be my only salvation.
In that state, we strolled down Puerto Avenue, leaving behind the customs office and the old stock market. The Chinese mulatta shamelessly licked my eyes like a windshield wiper, then stuck her tongue in my ears, between my teeth; her tongue and my tongue parried... that mulatta’s tongue and that deadly alcohol. Right at the Point, with Morro Castle and its lighthouse before us, she stuck her hand in my pants, shaking me like a bottle of elixir; I practically overflowed in front of all of Havana.
“C’mon, fill me with your suds,” she begged me.
But her voice worked against her and made me bolt. I don’t know what lonely thoughts or fear caused me to dash toward the Prado and leave the mulatta behind, down to the Malecón, that barrier between the ocean and the city’s captive souls. I only paused when I got to the Hotel Sevilla. I took refuge in its doorway, next to the dwarf in the corduroy cap and his card table display of peanut brittle.
Right away, he saw the strange trance that had overcome me and said, “Hey kid, kid...”
But I was jabbering about the virgin who cures sick eyes, that virgin in Guanabacoa, the virgin from Toledo. Demanding to know if she existed, I kept moaning, “Hey, dwarf... that’s it, dwarf... c’mere, dwarf...”
Then he offered me the third peanut brittle in less than a day and I began to eat. “Did they pay you?” he asked.
I dug around in my pockets and I gave him his forty-two dollars. He took the bills, held them up to the moonlight, checked them closely, and handed me two dollars.
“Your pay... hee, hee, hee... your first pay as a man.”