“That’s it!” he yells. “Ten dead communists! There should be one hundred! One thousand! A million dead communists! Someone with some balls needs to wipe them out! First Mexico. Then Panama. Then Venezuela and Nicaragua. And then clean up the United States, which is infested with communists. They took everything from me! Everything!”
“Me, too.” says Ida, the grande dame come to ruin. “Six houses, a pharmacy and an apartment building.”
Then, Ida turns to Pino, the silent nut, and asks, “How about you, Pino, what did they take from you?”
But Pino doesn’t answer. He looks out at the street and remains still, unblinking.
Just then, in comes old Castaño, the centenarian who leans on the walls when he walks. Like one-eyed Reyes and that decrepit hag Hilda, urine permeates his clothes.
“I want to die!” Castaño yells. “I want to die!”
René, the youngest of the two mental retards, grabs him by the neck, shakes him forcefully, and takes him back to his room by kicking his behind.
“I want to die!” We hear old Castaño’s voice again until René slams shut the door to his room, burying his screams. Then Napoleon, a four-foot-tall midget, fat and solid as a speed bag, comes over to me. Mother Nature placed a medieval knight’s face on that midget’s body. His face is tragically beautiful and his large, popping eyes forever wear a deeply submissive expression. He’s Colombian, and his manner of speaking is also submissive — the speech of those born to obey.
“Sir, sir,” he says to me. “That one!” and he points at a nut named Tato, whose face looks like a former boxer’s. “That one touched me!”
“Stop talking shit.” Tato says.
“He touched me,” Napoleon insists. “Yesterday, in my room, he came at night and touched me!”
I look at Tato. He doesn’t look like a homosexual. Nonetheless, the midget’s words make him sweat in embarrassment. He sweats. He sweats. He sweats. He sweats so much that in three minutes his white shirt becomes transparent.
“Don’t pay any attention to the nuts here,” he says to me. “or you’ll end up crazy, too.”
“He touched me!” Napoleon keeps saying.
Then Tato gets up from his seat, laughs suddenly in an incomprehensible way and says to me carelessly, “That’s the same thing they said to Rocky Marciano in the eighth round and he got up and knocked out Joe Wolcox. So … life sucks!” and he leaves.
Ida, the grande dame come to ruin, looks at me, outraged,
“The things we have to see!” she says. “The things we have to hear!”
The TV news hour is over. I get up. They call us to eat.
Caridad the mulata serves the food. She also served time, back in Cuba, for stabbing her husband. She lives across the street from the halfway house, with a new husband and two huge pedigree dogs. She feeds the dogs with food from the halfway house. Not leftovers, but hot food that she takes from the nuts’ daily ration. The locos know it and don’t complain. If they do complain, Caridad the mulata tells them as plain as day to go to hell. And nothing happens. Mr. Curbelo never finds out. Or if he does find out, he says, as always, “My employees have my complete confidence.” So none of what you’re saying is true. The nuts lose again and realize that it’s best to keep their mouths shut. Caridad the mulata would like to make the stew every day so she can get Mr. Curbelo to pay her those good thirty dollars more. That’s why she says to the nuts all the time, “Complain! Protest! Today’s peas are inedible! The truth is that you’re a bunch of pussies!”
But none of the nuts complain, and Curbelo saves his money by continuing to make the stew every day with his little bourgeois face.
“Do you want to move to a different table?” Caridad asks me at dinner time.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you like those disgusting locos?”
“No.”
“Come on,” she says, “sit here,” and she swipes the midget Napoleon out of his seat and seats me in his place. And so I stop sitting at the untouchables’ table, with Hilda, Reyes, Pepe and René. Now I’m at a table with Eddy, Tato, Pino, Pedro, Ida and Louie. That afternoon we had rice, raw lentils, three pieces of lettuce and salpicón. I had three spoonfuls and spit the fourth out onto my plate. I left. As I pass by Mr. Curbelo’s desk, I see Arsenio eating. He’s eating on a plastic tray, brought from a nearby diner. He’s eating with a fork and knife, and his food is yellow rice, pork, yuca and red tomatoes. And beer, too.
“Hey,” he says to me when I pass by. “Take a seat.”
I sit down. He waves at me with his hand to wait until he’s done. I wait. He finishes eating. He takes all the leftovers and throws them out, along with the tray, in the waste basket. The empty can of beer, too. He burps. He looks at me with lost eyes. He takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers me one. We smoke. Then he says, “Okay … let’s get right to it. Do you want to be my assistant here?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not interested.”
“It will be great,” he advises me.
“I’m not interested.”
“Fine.” he says. “Friends?”
“Friends.” I say.
He shakes my hand.
“I am the way I am,” he says. “I smoke marijuana, I drink beer, I do blow, I do it all! But I’m a man.”
“I get you,” I say.
“I see you give the old one-eyed man a beating and I could give a shit. Now, I expect the same of you. Everything you see me do around us stays between us men. Got it?”
“Got it,” I say.
“Mafia?”
“Mafia,” I reply.
“Great.” He smiles.
I get up. I go to my room. I lie down on the bed. I don’t like what just happened. I regret having beaten the old one-eyed man. But it’s too late. I’ve gone from being a witness to being complicit in what happens in the halfway house.
I fell asleep. I dreamt that I was running naked along a wide avenue and that I was going into a house surrounded by a beautiful garden. It was Mr. Curbelo’s house. I knocked at the door and his wife answered. She was a dish. She let me hug and kiss her. She said “I’ll give you whatever you want. My name is Necessity.”
“I’ll call you Necess,” I said. And I yelled loudly, “Necess!”
Then Curbelo pulled up in his gray car. I tried to escape through the garden, but he grabbed me by the arm. My body was covered in white scales.
“Here!” screamed Curbelo, and a police car showed up in the garden. That’s when I woke up.
It was about twelve at night. The crazy guy who works in the pizza place snores like a pig. I head out, shirtless, toward the living room. There I find Arsenio and Ida, the grande dame come to ruin. Arsenio has his hand on her knee. He sticks his tongue in her ear. Ida resists. She sees me and resists even more. I pass by them and sit in the tattered armchair.
“Arsenio,” Ida says angrily, “tomorrow I’m going to tell Mr. Curbelo everything.”
Arsenio starts laughing. He touches one of her flaccid breasts. He presses himself against it.
“For God’s sake!” Ida says. “Don’t you realize I’m an old woman?”
“It’s like cod,” Arsenio says. “The older, the better.”
Then he looks at me. He knows I’m looking at him and says to me, with all familiarity, “Mafia!”
“Mafia,” I say. I light a cigarette and lean back in the armchair.
“Let me go, Arsenio,” Ida begs. But Arsenio laughs. He tries to stick his hand under the old lady’s dress. He kisses her on the mouth. “Please …,” says Ida.