“That way you’ll meet my husband,” she said.
Theirs was a typical Havana apartment that had seen better days: furniture that needed upholstering, crumbling walls, broken windows. Reinita tiptoed in and said, “Nicanor José...” But we only heard a loud cough.
Reinita told me to follow her and we went into an office, a room where we found a sixty-something man smoking a cigar. Behind him, there was a wall covered with photographs, posters, certificates, and a map of Havana. The biggest photo had a caption in German and featured a crane placing a concrete block in the middle of a street. The man was barefoot and wore a sweater which fell over his wool pants. He saw that I was interested in the photo and told me that it was the unyielding Berlin Wall.
“It was the wall that saved us,” he said. Then he showed me his certificates, describing them like in a newsreel. “Ah, this one, this one’s from the KGB, a year-long course in Moscow! And this other one, from the second-rate Czech intelligence agency! And that one, from the very disciplined German police force!” He coughed and spit out the window, then pointed to the map of Havana. “Do you see those circles? Do you? Those are the exits from the sewers, the manholes. I was the first to discover the plague, the first to declare that the city was being overrun by Jews, those same Jews who fled from their Havana synagogues just as the Berlin Wall was being built. They’ve gone underground, where they’ve turned into vermin who suck the blood of the people!”
From then on I became a regular visitor. It was from Reinita Príncipe that I learned her husband had been an officer who’d traveled the world taking courses in espionage and counter-espionage, and that he’d been forced into retirement after he threw a tantrum at a meeting of generals and insisted there were dwarves in the Havana sewers.
“Then the wall fell,” Reinita explained, “and he never got well again. He lives cursing Vaclav Havel, who he met in Prague.”
Lucecita didn’t like that I visited every day, much less the manner I had about me. I always showed up loaded down with canned sausages. Her mother pushed her to be polite but she was determined to sour my existence. At the dinner table — because in a month’s time I was having dinner there regularly — she’d roll her eyes back and make nasty comments about people who try to buy love. And all the while I was drooling for her, praising her more and more, blowing all of my savings. But she never gave me a break. She egged her father on to declare war against me. The old man began his campaign by threatening to go to his old comrades so that I’d be arrested as an agent of the synagogues.
“Make yourself scarce,” my friend Jeremías counseled.
That’s what I did, and what a terrible loneliness came over me! I didn’t have any desire to get back at her by being with some girl who sold love. I started to hate Havana. In the afternoons, I would go to Dos Hermanos and get drunk. The same stevedores were there, and the Chinese mulatta who had once made me come by the light of Morro Castle. They all touched my head.
It wasn’t until a month later that my life took another turn. One Sunday afternoon, I ran into Pascualito at the entrance to the Packard. He told me he’d been waiting for me for a while. Discreetly, we made our way to an Andalusian bar on the Prado. We ordered two anisettes and then, in a low voice, he talked about the Great Grail, the Supreme Chief, and the problems they were having underground picking up TV transmissions. He asked if I was still hanging around the studios on Masón and San Miguel. When I told him about my romantic travails, he insisted I go back and dedicate myself to spying.
“You will be very well paid,” he said.
“But why me?” I asked. “There are all those dwarf acrobats there, the ones who work with Snow White. Surely you can contact one of them.”
“They’re artists, and the Grail doesn’t trust artists,” Pascualito answered.
I returned to Masón and San Miguel to try and regain Reinita Príncipe’s favor. She was very accepting, and thanks to her I became friends with producers, scenic artists, and video technicians. In just two weeks, I was able to lift some blueprints and a list of security guards. Reinita Príncipe turned a blind eye, banking on my promise that I would not make her pay her debt. Lucecita also made a radical change. She began to flirt with me and urged me to visit her at home again. I didn’t get as worked up this time, but there’s no doubt I did let myself fall for this unrequited love again.
When I visited one evening, I came loaded down with provisions. They locked the old man in his room, Reinita lit some incense, and we all got drunk. Lucecita drank too much and started toasting the swallows that flew alone at dawn above the water — that’s how inspired she was. At midnight on the dot, we uncorked a bottle of champagne and Reinita pushed me into the girl’s room. Lucecita kept talking to the swallows and I was so scared that I started stammering, as if I’d been smoking weed. She begged me to never take off my glasses.
“They make you beautiful,” she said. And so I lay down next to her, barely touching her. “It’ll be our secret that we embrace only with our spirits,” she said conspiratorially.
That dawn, in a spectacular robbery that left Havana completely in awe, the studio at Masón and San Miguel was taken apart piece by piece. Reinita told me that they’d found the night guard fast asleep and that there would be a no-holds-barred investigation. The city would be dredged up like a minefield.
“There’s so much hate,” she said.
Nobody gave me a second thought. They even interviewed the studio janitors, but no one thought to ask me squat. It was as if I didn’t exist.
“I’m invisible,” I told Lucecita.
“Thank your lucky stars,” she said. “Maybe precisely because of that I’ll love you someday.” Pascualito met me at Rosendo Gil’s house and told me that the Great Grail sent its congratulations. He added that the Supreme Chief would give me a medal, and that I could ask for whatever I wanted. I didn’t know what to say. It was actually Pascualito who suggested the idea of the restaurant.
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
“Nothing, just live and look out for the Grail’s share.”
It was easy to convince Lucecita to let us build the restaurant at her house. We worked hard during those days. From the sewers came tables, tablecloths, the goods for the meals, everything. The only condition I laid down was that my friend Jeremías would be the sole supplier for the new business. He just radiated happiness. Reinita Príncipe reacted the same way, and I’ve often wondered if he had conquered that poor and faded star’s heart.
And as it turned out, Lucecita did grow to love me. I don’t know if her love came from pity or because we were making so much money, but one night she told me to stop acting like a fool. I made love to her like never before, so that daybreak found us still in bed, and after that, at least for a little while, I became the hardest working man in the city.
My restaurant was always full, open twenty-four hours and decorated with posters from our heroic period. There’s nothing a foreigner likes more than somebody else’s heroism. They went crazy staring at the posters of a worker’s fist held high, or that one in which the gears of a machine smash the bureaucracy. Lucecita’s father got in on the act too. The tourists would go into his room and hear the tales of his travels to KGB headquarters and that afternoon when he saw Vaclav Havel under the falling snow in Prague. The old man would tell his life story with pride, wearing his old military uniform and showing the map of Havana which he used to repeat his conspiracy theory. He never tried to charge a fee. Nonetheless, Reinita always left a dollar on a silver ashtray to try and inspire the tourists.