Great. Nothing more can be done. I go back to my room and let myself fall heavily on the bed. The pillow stinks of old sweat. The sweat of other nuts who have been through here and shriveled up between these four walls. I throw it far away from me. Tomorrow I’ll ask for a clean sheet, a new pillow and a lock to put on the door so that no one enters without asking first. I look at the ceiling. It’s a blue ceiling, peeling, overrun with tiny brown cockroaches. Great. This is the end of me, the lowest I could go. There’s nothing else after this halfway house. Just the street and nothing more. The door opens again. It’s Hilda, the decrepit old hag who urinates on her clothes. She has come in search of a cigarette. I give it to her. She looks at me with kind-hearted eyes. I notice a certain beauty of yesteryear behind that revolting face. She has an incredibly sweet voice. With it, she tells me her story. She has never married, she says. She’s a virgin. She is, she says, eighteen years old. She’s looking for a proper gentleman to marry. But a gentleman! Not just anyone.
“You have beautiful eyes,” she says sweetly to me. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I slept a little. I dreamt I was in a town in the provinces, back in Cuba, and that there wasn’t a soul in the whole town. The doors and windows were wide open, and through them you could see iron beds with very clean, tightly pulled white sheets. The streets were long and silent, and all of the houses were wooden. I was running around that town in distress, looking for anyone to talk with. But there was no one. Only open houses, white beds and total silence. There wasn’t a single hint of life.
I awoke bathed in sweat. In the bed next to me, the crazy guy who was snoring like a saw is awake now and putting on a pair of pants.
“I’m going to work,” he tells me. “I work all night at a pizza place and they pay me six dollars. They also give me pizza and Coca-Cola.”
He puts on a shirt and slides into his shoes.
“I’m an old slave,” he says. “I’m reincarnated. Before this life, I was a Jew who lived in the time of the Caesars.”
He leaves with a slam of the door. I look at the street through the window. It must be midnight. I get up from the bed and go to the living room, to get some fresh air. As I pass Arsenio’s room, the hospice manager, I hear bodies struggling and then the sound of a slap. I continue on my way and sit in a tattered arm chair that reeks of old sweat. I light a cigarette and throw my head back, fearfully remembering the dream I just had. Those white, tightly made beds, those wide open solitary houses, and I, the only living being in town. Then I see somebody coming out of Arsenio’s room. It’s Hilda, the decrepit old hag. She’s naked. Arsenio comes out behind her. He’s naked too. They haven’t seen me.
“Come on,” he says to Hilda in a drunk voice. “No,” she responds. “That hurts.”
“Come on, I’ll give you a cigarette.” Arsenio says.
“No. It hurts!”
I take a drag of my cigarette and Arsenio discovers me among the shadows.
“Who’s there?”
“Me.”
“Who’s me?”
“The new guy.”
He mutters something, disgusted, and goes back inside his room. Hilda comes over to me. A ray of light from an electric street lamp bathes her naked body. It’s a body full of flab and deep valleys.
“Do you have a cigarette?” she asks in a sweet voice.
I give it to her.
“I don’t like getting it from behind,” she says. “And that pig!” she points to Arsenio’s room. “He only wants to do it that way.”
She leaves.
I lean my head against the back of the armchair again. I think of Coleridge, the author of “Kubla Khan,” whose disenchantment with the French Revolution provoked his ruin and sterility as a poet. But my thoughts are soon cut off. A long, terrifying howl shakes the boarding home. Louie, the American, shows up in the living room, his face bursting with rage.
“Fuck you up the ass!” He screams at the street, which is empty at this late hour. “Fuck you up the ass! Fuck you up the ass!”
He slams his fist against a mirror on the wall and it falls to the floor in pieces. Arsenio, the manager, says lazily from his bed,
“Louie, you cama now. You pastilla tomorrow. You no jodas más.”
And Louie disappears into the shadows.
* * *
Arsenio is the real one in charge at the halfway house. Even though Mr. Curbelo comes every day (except Saturday and Sunday), he’s only here for three hours and then he leaves. He makes the stew, prepares the day’s pills, writes something or other in a thick notebook and then leaves. Arsenio is here twenty-four hours a day non-stop, without even a quick run out for cigarettes. When he needs a smoke, he asks one of the nuts to go out to the bodega for him. When he’s hungry, he sends Pino, his peon, out to get him food at a joint on the corner. He also sends for beer, lots of beer, because Arsenio spends all day getting completely drunk. His friends call him Budweiser, the beer he drinks most. When he drinks, his eyes become more evil, his voice becomes even thicker, and his gestures ruder and cruder. Then he kicks one-eyed Reyes, he opens anyone’s drawers in search of money and he walks around the entire boarding home with a sharpened knife at his waist. Sometimes, he takes this knife, gives it to René, the retard, and points at one-eyed Reyes, saying, “Stick it in him!” He further explains, “Stick it in his neck, it’s the softest part.” René, the retard, takes the knife with his clumsy hand and moves forward on the old one-eyed guy. Although he stabs blindly at him, he never wounds him, since he’s not strong enough. Then Arsenio sits him down at the table; brings an empty beer can over, and plunges the knife into the can. “That’s how you stab!” he explains to René—“like this, like this, like this!” and he stabs the can until he pierces it through. Then he puts the knife back in his belt, gives the old one-eyed guy a savage kick in the behind, and sits down at Mr. Curbelo’s desk again to have another beer. “Hilda!” he calls out later. And Hilda, the decrepit old hag who stinks of urine, comes. Arsenio touches her sex through her clothes and says, “Wash yourself today!”
“Get away, will you!” Hilda complains, indignant. And Arsenio bursts out laughing. And his square and sweaty torso is slashed through with a scar that goes from his chest to his navel. It’s from being stabbed in prison, five years ago, where he was doing time for stealing. Mr. Curbelo pays him seventy dollars a week. But Arsenio is happy. He has no family, no profession, no life ambitions, and here, in the halfway house, he’s a big fish. For the first time in his life, Arsenio feels fulfilled somewhere. Besides, he knows that Curbelo will never fire him. “I am his everything,” he goes around saying. “He’ll never find another guy like me.” And it’s true. For seventy dollars a week, Curbelo will not find another secretary like Arsenio in the whole United States. He won’t find him.
I woke up. I fell asleep in the tattered armchair and woke up around seven. I dreamt I was tied to a rock and that my nails were long and yellow like a fakir’s. In my dream, although men tied me up as a punishment, I had great power over the world’s animals. “Octopi!” I screamed, “bring me a shell engraved with the Statue of Liberty.” And the large, cartilaginous octopi toiled with their tentacles to find that shell among the millions and millions of shells in the sea. Then they found it and struggled to bring it up to the rock where I was captive and they oh so humbly and respectfully handed it over to me. I looked at the shell, let out a peal of laughter, and threw it scornfully into the great void. The octopi all shed large crystalline tears at my cruelty. But I laughed at their weeping, and roared, “Bring me another one just like it!”