“No,” I say. “It’s okay.”
We sit down on some steps, at the foot of a closed door. There we shake hands effusively.
“How’s that life of yours in Miami?” I ask.
“Same old, same old,” El Negro says. “Oh!” he suddenly remembers. “Carlos Alfonso, the poet, went to Cuba. He was there for two weeks.”
“And what does he have to say? What does he have to say about Cuba?”
“He says everything’s the same. People are wearing jeans on the streets. Everyone in jeans!”
I burst out laughing.
“What else?”
“What else? Nothing,” El Negro says. “Everything’s the same. Everything is just as we left it five years ago. Except, perhaps, Havana is in ruins. But everything’s the same.”
Then El Negro looks me right in the eye and slaps my knee with his hand.
“Willy,” he says to me, “let’s leave here!”
“Where to?”
“To Madrid. To Spain. Let’s go see the Gothic neighborhood in Barcelona. Let’s go see El Greco in the Cathedral of Toledo!”
I start laughing.
“Someday we’ll go, yeah …,” I say, laughing. “With only five thousand dollars,” says El Negro. “Five thousand dollars! We’ll retrace allll of Hemingway’s steps in The Sun Also Rises.”
“Someday we’ll go,” I say.
We’re silent for a few seconds. A nut comes over and asks us for a cigarette. El Negro gives it to him.
“I want to see where Brett … you remember Brett Ashley, don’t you? The heroine from A Moveable Feast.”
“Yes,” I say. “I remember.”
“I want to see where Brett ate; where Brett danced; where Brett screwed the bullfighter,” El Negro says, smiling at the horizon.
“You’ll see it,” I say, “Someday you’ll see it!”
“Let’s make our goal two years,” El Negro says. “In two years, we’ll go to Madrid.”
“Okay,” I say. “Two years. Okay.”
El Negro looks me right in the eye again. He slaps me on the knee affectionately. I realize he’s about to leave. He gets up, takes a nearly full pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and gives it to me. Then he takes out two quarters and gives them to me, too.
“Write something, Willy,” he says.
“I’ll try,” I say.
He bursts out laughing. He turns on his heels. He gets farther away. When he gets to the corner, he turns around and yells something to me. It seems like part of a poem, but I only hear the words “dust,” “silhouettes,” “symmetry.” That’s all.
I go back inside the halfway house.
In my room, I throw myself back on the bed and fall asleep again. This time I dreamt that the Revolution was over, and that I was returning to Cuba with a group of old octogenarians. An old man with a long, white beard guided us, outfitted with a long staff. We stopped every three steps and the old man pointed out a bunch of ruins with his staff.
“This was the Sans Souci Cabaret,” the old man then said.
We walked on a little bit and then he would say again, “This was the Capitol building,” pointing at a field of weeds full of broken chairs.
“This was the Hilton Hotel,” and the old man pointed at a bunch of red bricks.
“This was the Paseo del Prado,” and now it was just a lion statue half-sunk into the ground.
So we walked through all of Havana like that. Vegetation covered everything, like in the bewitched city in Sleeping Beauty. Over everything reigned an air of silence and mystery akin to what Columbus must have found when he first landed on Cuban soil.
I woke up.
It had to be about one in the morning. I sit on the edge of the bed with an empty feeling in my chest. I look out the window. There are three homosexuals dressed as women on the corner, waiting for lonely men. Cars driven by these men without women prowl around the corner slowly. I rise from the bed, depressed. I don’t know what to do. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is sleeping under a thick blanket, even though the heat is unbearable. He’s snoring. I decide to go out to the living room and sit in the old, tattered armchair. I go. As I pass by Arsenio’s room, I hear the voice of Hilda, the decrepit old hag, who is complaining because Arsenio is messing around with her behind.
“Keep still!” Arsenio says. I hear them struggle. I reach the armchair and sink heavily into it. Louie, the American, is sitting in a dark corner of the room.
“Leave me alone!” he says to the wall, his voice full of hate. “I’m going to destroy you! Leave me alone!”
I hear Hilda’s frantic voice coming from Arsenio’s room again.
“Not there,” she says. “Not there!”
Tato, the ex-boxer, comes out of the shadows wearing only a small pair of briefs. He sits in a chair in front of me and asks for a cigarette. I give it to him. He lights it with a cheap lighter.
“Listen to this story, Willy,” he says to me as he exhales a cloud of smoke. “Listen to this story, you’re gonna like it. Back there, in Havana, in the age of Jack Dempsey, there was a man who wanted to be the avenger of mankind. They called him ‘The God of the Starry Skies,’ ‘The King of the Underworld,’ ‘The Terrible Man.’”
He’s quiet for a few seconds, then he reveals: “That man was me.”
He lets out an incoherent peal of laughter and repeats,
“Do you like my story, Willy?”
"Yes."
“It’s the story of complete revenge. Of all mankind. Of a man’s pain. Do you get it?”
“Yes.”
“Great,” he says, getting up. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you the next chapter.”
He takes a long drag of his cigarette and disappears in the dark again.
It’s hot. I take off my shirt and put my feet on a beaten-up chair. I close my eyes, sink my chin into my chest and remain that way for many seconds, immersed in the wide emptiness of my existence.
I point an imaginary gun at my temple. I shoot.
“Fuck you up your ass!” Louie yells at his ghosts. “Fuck your ass!”
I get up. I return slowly to my room. In the half-light I see two cockroaches, as big as dates, fornicating on my pillow. I grab my towel, twist it and bring it down heavily on them. They escape. I fall on the bed, splaying my legs. I touch myself. It has been one long year since I’ve been inside a woman. The last one was a Colombian loca I met in a hospital. I think of the Colombian. I remember the surprising way she took her bra off in front of me, in her room, and showed me her tits. Then I remember the shameless way she pulled down the sheet covering her, and showed me her sex, and how she then opened her legs slowly and said to me, “Come here.”
I was afraid since the hospital nurses went in and out of the rooms constantly. But the pull of sex was stronger. I fell on her. I entered her slowly, sweetly. She had a beautiful whore’s mouth.
I wake up. It’s daytime already. The heat is suffocating, but the crazy guy who works at the pizza place sleeps under a thick blanket that reeks like a dead animal. I look at him with hate. I entertain myself imagining for a few seconds wielding a sharp axe over his square head. When the hate starts gnawing at me, I stand up, look for my filthy towel and a sliver of soap and go to the bathroom. The bathroom is flooded. Somebody put a leather jacket in the toilet. The floor is covered in feces, paper and other filth. I head for the second bathroom in the other hallway of the halfway house. Everyone is waiting in front of it: René, Pepe, Hilda, Ida, Pedro and Eddy. Louie, the American, has been inside the bathroom for an hour and doesn’t want to come out. Eddy beats on the door loudly. But Louie won’t open.