It’s eight in the morning. Arsenio hasn’t woken up yet to serve breakfast. The nuts huddle, starving, in the TV room.
“Senio!” Pepe the retard screams. “Rekfast! Rekfast! When you gonna serve rekfast?”
But Arsenio is still drunk and snoring belly-up in his room. One of the nuts turns on the TV. Out comes a preacher talking about God. He says he was in Jerusalem, that he saw the Garden of Gethsemane. Pictures of the places where he wandered appear on the screen. There’s the River Jordan, whose clean, gentle waters are impossible to forget, the preacher says. “I’ve been there,” says the preacher. “Two thousand years later, I’ve inhaled Jesus’ presence.” And the preacher cries. His voice becomes pained. “Hallelujah!” he says. One of the nuts changes the channel. This time he puts on the Latin channel. Now there’s a Cuban commentator talking about international politics.
“The United States has to get tough,” he says. “Communism has infiltrated our society. It’s in the universities, the newspapers, the intelligentsia. We should go back to the great Eisenhower years.”
“That’s right!” says a nut next to me named Eddy. “The United States needs the balls to wipe them out! The first to go has to be Mexico, which is full of communists. Then Panama. And Nicaragua after that. And wherever there’s a communist, string him up by the balls! The communists took everything from me. Everything!”
“What did they take from you, Eddy?” asks Ida, the grande dame come to ruin.
Eddy responds, “They took almost a thousand acres of land planted with mangos, sugarcane, coconuts … everything!”
“My husband had a hotel and six houses in Havana taken away from him,” says Ida. “Oh! And three pharmacies and a sock factory and a restaurant.”
“They’re sons of bitches!” Eddy says. “That’s why the United States has to wipe them out. Drop five or six atomic bombs! Wipe them out!”
Eddy starts shaking.
“Wipe them out!” he says. “Wipe them out!” He shakes a lot. He shakes so much that he falls out of his chair and keeps shaking on the floor.
“Wipe them out!” he shouts from there.
Ida yells, “Arsenio! Eddy is having a fit!”
But Arsenio doesn’t answer. Then Pino, the silent nut, goes to the sink and comes back with a glass of water that he throws over Eddy’s head.
“Enough.” Ida says. “Enough. Turn off that TV.”
They turn it off. I get up. I go to the bathroom to urinate. The toilet is clogged with a sheet someone stuck inside. I urinate on the sheet. Then I wash my face with a bar of soap I find lying on the sink. I go to my room to dry myself off. The crazy guy who works nights at the pizza place is counting his money in our room.
“I earned six dollars.” He says, putting his earnings away in a wallet. “They also gave me pizza and Coca-Cola.”
“I’m glad,” I say, drying myself off with a towel.
Then the door opens abruptly and there’s Arsenio. He just woke up. His wiry hair is standing up and his eyes are bulging and dirty.
“Listen,” he says to the lunatic, “gimme three dollars.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll pay you back.”
“You never pay me back,” the lunatic complains in a childish voice. “You just take and take and never pay me back.”
“Gimme three dollars,” Arsenio repeats.
“No.”
Arsenio goes over to him, takes him by the neck with one hand and goes through his pockets with his free hand. He finds the wallet. He takes four dollars out and throws the other two on the bed. Then he turns to me and says, “You can tell Curbelo about everything you see here, if you want. I’ll bet ten to one that I win.”
He leaves the room without closing the door and yells out from the hallway,
“Breakfast!”
The nuts come out in droves after him, toward the tables in the dining room.
Then the crazy guy who works at the pizza place grabs the two dollars he has left. He smiles and exclaims happily,
“Breakfast! Great! I was starving.”
He leaves the room too. I finish drying off my face. I look at myself in the room’s stained mirror. Fifteen years ago I was a good-looking guy. I was a ladykiller. I showed off my face arrogantly everywhere I went. Now … now …
I grab the book of English poets and go to breakfast.
Arsenio hands out breakfast. It’s cold milk. The nuts complain that there are no cornflakes.
“Go tell Curbelo,” Arsenio says indifferently. He grabs the milk bottle carelessly and starts filling the glasses with apathy. Half of the milk ends up on the floor. I grab my glass and, standing, gulp it down on the spot in one fell swoop. I leave the dining room. I reenter the main house and sit down in the tattered armchair again. But first I turn on the television. A famous singer comes on, a man they call El Puma. The women of Miami worship him. El Puma gyrates. “Viva, viva, viva la liberación,” he sings. The women in the audience go wild. They start throwing flowers at him. El Puma moves his hips some more. “Viva, viva, viva la liberación”: El Puma, one of the men who makes the women of Miami tremble. The same women who won’t even deign to look at me, and if they do it’s only to tighten the hold on their purses and quicken their steps fearfully. I’ve got him here: El Puma. He has no idea who Joyce is, and doesn’t care. He’ll never read Coleridge, and doesn’t need to. He will never study Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. He will never desperately embrace an ideology only to feel betrayed by it. He’ll never feel his heart go “crack” in the face of an idea in which he firmly and desperately believed. Nor will he know who Lunacharsky, Bulganin, Kamenev or Zinoviev are. He’ll never feel the joy of taking part in a revolution or the subsequent anguish of being devoured by it. He’ll never know what the machinery is. He’ll never know.
All of a sudden, there’s a big ruckus on the porch. Tables are knocked over, chairs crash, and the metallic walls shake as if a mad elephant were bashing into them. I run over. It’s Pepe and René, the two retards, fighting over a slice of bread smeared with peanut butter. It’s a prehistoric duel — a dinosaur fighting a mammoth. Pepe’s arms, large and clumsy as octopus tentacles, beat blindly at René’s body. The latter uses his nails, as long as a kestrel’s claws, digging them into his adversary’s face. They roll onto the floor in a bear hug, noses bleeding and frothing at the mouth. No one intervenes. Pino, the silent one, continues looking at the horizon without blinking. Hilda, the decrepit old hag, looks for cigarette butts on the floor. One-eyed Reyes sips a glass of water slowly, savoring every swallow as if it were a highball. Louie, the American, flips through a Jehovah’s Witness magazine that discusses the paradise to come at the final hour. Arsenio watches the fight from the kitchen, smoking calmly. I go back to my seat. I open the book of English poets to a poem by Lord Byron:
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
I don’t read any further. I lean my head back in the armchair and close my eyes.
Mr. Curbelo arrived at ten in the morning in his small gray car. He was jovial. Caridad, the mulata who hands out the food to the nuts, praises how youthful and elegant he looks today to get in his good graces.
“I won a solid fourth place.” Mr. Curbelo says.
Then he explains, “In deep-sea fishing. I won fourth place. I reeled two in that were forty pounds each.”