I don’t answer.
“What’s the matter?” he asks again.
I take a deep breath. It’s the same bullshit as always.
“I hear voices,” I say.
“What else?”
“I see devils on the walls.”
“Hmmm!” he says. “Do you talk to those devils?”
“No.”
“What else do you have?”
“Fatigue.”
“Hmmm!”
He writes for a long time. He writes, writes, writes. He takes off the tinted glasses and looks at me. His eyes don’t show the slightest interest in me.
“How old are you, William?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Hmmm!”
He looks at my clothes, my shoes.
“Do you know what day today is?”
“Today,” I say uncomfortably. “Friday.”
“Friday, the what?”
“Friday. . the fourteenth.”
“Of what month?”
“August.”
He writes again. While he does, he discloses impersonally, “Today is Monday, the twenty-third of September."
He writes a little more.
“Okay, William. That will be all.”
I stand up and go back to the porch. There’s a surprise for me there. El Negro has come to see me all the way from Miami Beach. He has a book in his hand and he holds it out to me as a greeting. It’s Time of the Assassins by Henry Miller.
“I’m afraid it will ruin you,” he says.
“Stop fucking with me!” I reply.
I take him by the arm and lead him to a broken-down car that sits in the garage of the halfway house. It’s a car from 1950 that belongs to Mr. Curbelo. One day it just stopped forever and Mr. Curbelo left it there, at the halfway house, so it would go on deteriorating, slowly, along with the nuts. We get in the car and sit in the back seat, between oxidized springs and pieces of dirty padding.
“What’s new?” I anxiously ask El Negro. He’s my link to society. He goes to meetings with Cuban intellectuals, talks about politics, reads the papers, watches television, and then, every week or two, he comes to see me to share the gist of his travels through the world.
“Everything’s the same.” El Negro says. “Everything’s the same …,” he says. Then, all of a sudden: “Well! Truman Capote died.”
“I know.”
“That’s it,” El Negro says. He takes a newspaper out of his pocket and gives it to me. It’s the Mariel newspaper, edited by young Cubans in exile.
“There’s a poem of mine in there,” El Negro says. “On page six.”
I look for page six. There’s a poem called “There’s Always Light in the Devil’s Eyes.” It reminds me of Saint-John Perse. I tell him. He’s flattered.
“It reminds me of Rains,” I say.
“Me, too,” El Negro says.
Then he looks at me. He takes in my clothes, my shoes, my dirty, tangled hair. He shakes his head disapprovingly.
“Hey, Willy,” he then says, “you should take better care of yourself.”
“Oh, am I that run down?”
“Not yet,” he says. “But try not to get any worse.” “I’ll take care of myself,” I say.
El Negro pats my knee. I realize that he’s about to leave. He takes out a half-empty pack of Marlboros and gives it to me. Then he takes out a dollar and gives that to me, too.
“It’s all I have,” he says.
“I know.”
We get out of the car. A nut comes up to us to ask for a cigarette. El Negro gives him one.
“Adios, Doctor Zhivago,” he says, smiling. He turns around and leaves.
I go back to the porch. As I am about to go in, somebody calls to me from the dining room. It’s Arsenio, the halfway house second-in-command. He’s shirtless and hiding a can of beer under the table since it’s not right for the psychiatrist who’s visiting the residence today to see him drinking.
“Come here,” he says to me and points to a chair.
I go inside. Besides him and me, there’s no one else in the dining room. He looks at the books I have in my hand and starts laughing.
“Listen …,” he says, drinking from the can. “I’ve been watching you closely.”
“Yeah? And what do you make of me?”
“That you’re not crazy,” he says, still smiling.
“And what school of psychiatry did you go to?” I ask, irritated.
“None,” he replies. “I just have street psychology. And I’ll tell you again that you, you’re not crazy! Let’s see,” he then says, “take this cigarette and burn your tongue.”
I’m disgusted by his idiocy. His malt beer-colored body, the huge scar that goes from his chest down to his navel.
“You see?” he says, taking a swig of beer. “See how you’re not crazy?”
And then he smiles with his mouth full of rotten teeth. I leave. The cleaning is done and we can go back inside. The nuts are watching TV. I cross the living room and finally enter my room. I slam the door shut. I’m indignant and I don’t know why. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is snoring in his bed like a saw cutting a piece of wood. I become more indignant. I go over to him and give him a kick in the behind. He awakens, frightened, and curls himself up in a corner.
“Listen, you son of a bitch!” I say to him. “Don’t snore anymore!”
At the sight of his fear, my anger abates. I sit down on the bed again. I smell bad. So much so that I grab the towel and soap and head out toward the bathroom. On the way, I see old one-eyed Reyes, who is covertly urinating in a corner. I look around. I don’t see anyone. I go over to Reyes and grab him tightly by the neck. I give him a kick in the testicles. I bang his head against the wall.
“Sorry, sorry …,” Reyes says.
I look at him, disgusted. His forehead is bleeding. Upon seeing this, I feel a strange pleasure. I grab the towel, twist it, and whip his frail chest.
“Have mercy …,” Reyes implores.
“Stop pissing everywhere!” I say furiously.
As I turn back down the hall, I see Arsenio there, leaning against the wall. He saw it all. He smiles. He leaves the can of beer in a corner and asks to borrow my towel. I give it to him. He twists it tightly. He makes a perfect whip of it and using all his strength brings it down on Reyes’ back. One, two, three times, until the old man falls in a corner, bathed in urine, blood and sweat. Arsenio gives me the towel back. He smiles at me again. He grabs his can of beer and sits down again at his desk. Mr. Curbelo has left. Arsenio is now the head of the halfway house again.
I continue toward the bathroom. I go inside, lock the door and start to undress. My clothes stink, but my socks reek even more. I grab them, inhale their deeply embedded muddy smell, and throw them in the waste basket. They were the only socks I had. Now I’ll walk around the city sockless.
I go in the shower, turn it on and stand under the hot water. As the water runs over my head and body, I smile, thinking of old Reyes. I’m amused by the face he made when he was beaten, by the way his frail body shuddered, by his sorrowful pleas. Then he fell on top of his own urine and asked for mercy from there. “Mercy!” Remembering that, my body shudders with pleasure again. I soap myself up thoroughly, using my underwear as a washcloth. Then I rinse myself off and turn off the shower. I dry off. I put on the same clothes. I go out. In the living room, the nuts are still watching TV. The set is broken and you can only see colored lights, but still they sit, watching the screen, paying the lack of images no mind. I go to my room and leave the towel and the soap. I go out, combing my hair, toward the living room. The nuts are still there, frozen in place as they watch the broken TV. I kneel before the set and fix it. I sit in the tattered armchair and prop my feet up on an empty chair. The announcer says something about ten guerrillas dead in El Salvador. Then Eddy, the nut who is well-versed in international politics, comes down to earth.