They went through torn-up office after torn-up office, at last finding the inner sanctum of record-keeping where, industriously, the two men pillaged first the C's and then the many Castros who had, over the years, applied to the university for admission. It didn't take a long time, for there were very helpful photos, and, as it turned out, Latavistada had an attribute ever so valuable to a secret policeman: a photographic memory.
"Ah, here, I think. Frankie, this? Does this seem right?"
"I ain't ever seen the guy."
"No, this would be him."
He handed over a photograph, while he studied the file. What Frankie saw made almost no impression on him, as images seldom did. He drifted a little, then made an effort to concentrate and saw an oval face not without its appeal, the eyes dark and sharp, under a crop of dense black hair. The nose was strong; the guy almost looked Italian, or Sicilian even. Yet the face also was so young. It had no lines, no strength, no passion to it, only a voluptuary's indolence.
"He looks rich."
"What an excellent observation. He is. It says here he comes from Biran, above Santiago, almost in the Sierras. His father has an estate and works, or worked, for many years for United Fruit. You see, it's always the same, this business. It's always about fathers and sons. This little prick wants to show his papa he's a bigger man, that he will amount to something. So where papa controls a thousand acres, sonny will someday control the nation."
Frankie had no idea what the Cuban was talking about.
But then he said, "And here is where he will flee. Back to Oriente and the mountains, where he is son of the favored lord, out of reach of the law. Well, Frankie, we shall reach him, no?"
Chapter 30
"And another thing wrong with you," Papa said, "you're lazy. You're evilly lazy. You lie around all day dreaming. You are incapable of doing a man's work. Additionally, your bathing habits are the source of much laughter. I labored so hard for so long to produce this? What a sorry specimen you are. Are you a cabrone? You are not a homosexual, are you?"
"Papa," he said, "I am not a homosexual. I am a masculine man."
"You are not masculine at all. A masculine man is dynamic. He makes things happen by will and effort―"
"And by licking the boot of the North Americans of United Fruit."
"Yes, it's true, I worked for them, but only to acquire money to buy land and build this place and marry and bring all you worthless children into the world. And to borrow tractors from. Without their tractors, where would we be? Senor Jennings, he smiled when the tractors disappeared and he never took them back until the plowing was done."
"The generosity of the Americans is wonderful. They come to our island and steal and degrade us and you are grateful they let you borrow a tractor now and then!"
"Bah! A man knows gratitude. He feels it. He is not ignorant and petty and selfish and vain. You are all of them. I should have worked you harder. That was my mistake, to my shame. You never had chores. I should have worked you like a dog and made you into a man. Instead, you are womanly."
"I am not womanly. I am between opportunities, but I swear to you, I am a man of destiny."
The house was large but crude. It was full of dogs and guns and cats and chickens and dirty boots and crumpled clothes and books and blankets and horse tack. It was really a barn with rooms and beds, and it suited Angel the father perfectly, for it is exactly what he'd wanted to build in the world, from the raw jungle, and he had done so. Animals more or less roamed through it, and its shabbiness was worn proudly, as if to say, true people of the earth live here. Savagery was everywhere; even his wife wore a gun and when she called the younger children to dinner, it was with a gunshot.
Outside, not everywhere but in a certain direction, the jungle loomed, and beyond the jungle the peaks of the Sierra Maestra penetrated the clouds, remote and forbidden. You could hide an army up there and no one could get you out.
"What did you do today?" Papa demanded. Papa loved to fight. It was his amusement. He worked, he fought, he made children and then ignored them. That was his way.
"Papa, I told you, it's a vacation. I relaxed."
"You could have helped the boys weed around the cane."
"I am a lawyer and a thinker. I am not a sugarcane worker."
"Your mother says you swam in the morning and played beisbol in the afternoon."
"I am a superb baseball player. Why should I not do what pleases me? The children love me."
"You tell them lies, and you are always the hero in those tales but in no other."
"I will be the hero, father."
"Bah, heroes."
"Tomorrow I will fish and in the afternoon, I will borrow a rifle and hunt. Tomas tells me there are boar by the Sierra de Mayari."
"Meanwhile, I worry about the price of sugar and the campesinos and the health of their families and whether or not the generator will last another year and what to do if the price of fuel goes up and the North Americans develop a cheaper chemical sugar, and all you do is sleep and hunt and drink! God himself would be ashamed of such a son."
The old man spat into the fireplace, but missed.
He fished, he hunted. He caught sixteen sea bass with the old campesino Jose, who'd been there so long he claimed to have witnessed the Americans running off of San Juan Hill and used to amuse the kids with those stories when they'd been young. In the afternoon, he hunted, and the dogs drove a boar into a bog and he shot it with an old cowboy rifle. It squawked and shivered and shat while it died, but die it did, and rather swiftly too, for the young man did most things with casual elegant precision, and shooting was but one of them.
The boar butchered by he himself: knifing and peeling, and reaching into the bloated guts and pulling them out with his fingers so they oozed with shit and food and blood and filled his fingernails as he yanked. The gutpile abandoned for others in the jungle, he brought the hollowed thing home slung over his shoulder, like a cape that oozed blood down his body. He was a magnificent red god, man as savage, gone to jungle, killed in jungle, and returned with meat. His papa did not look twice at him as he trudged with the animal's carcass into the farmyard. But that meat fed the family one night and the fish another, not that there was any shortage in the larder, because Angel Ruiz Castro was a man of importance and substance, even if he browbeat anyone who came within his range, unless they were North American.
And then the boy took a trip. His destination was Cueto, the railroad town that ran up to Antilla and was larger than the muddy shanties of Biran. He knew a certain lady in this town. If she was not there, he would visit her sister. It wasn't that he wanted to do this thing, it was that he had to. A man has certain needs and they can't be satisfied always in matrimony. What is a man to do when he is far from his home and waiting for the clarification to set in?
She was not there; nor was her sister. But a neighbor was. He was big and handsome with that Spanish nose and those imperial ways that all commented upon. He moved gracefully, and had once been elected the greatest high school athlete in Cuba. Had not a war and then a political awakening occurred, he might have been a great beisbol player. He could use the money to finance a fight against the North Americans who paid him; what a wonderful idea!
Anyhow, this lady's husband was away in Santiago for his American-owned company, Dumois-Nipe, a subsidiary of United Fruit, and so the young man's dalliance had a double-meaning: he was screwing her and he was therefore screwing Dumois-Nipe. In bed, he was magnificent, a tiger, an athlete again, and the sheets grew heavy with the sweat of his labor and the woman sang, and the birds fluttered and the clouds parted. Like a matador, he worked her slowly, turning her this way, then that, encouraging her, partaking in her power, until the two were joined in a dance that was both spectacular and tragic. He rammed in for the kill.