“What is Buena Ventura?” he said. “Come, come, I am a man of the world.”
The first man had gotten scared now. He closed his mouth very tightly and shook his head.
“It is very unfair to introduce a subject and then not continue it, Comrade,” Tarp said. “A person would think there was something to hide.”
The second man turned on the first. “You see?” he said loudly. “What a mouth!” He waved his hands at Tarp. “The first thing that comes into his head, he says it — out it comes, just like vomit. Disgusting!” He folded his arms and scowled at the other militia man. “See what you have done now, you and your mouth? Now a foreigner has formed a bad opinion of the revolution. What is that between your ears, a rock?” He swung back to look at Tarp. “Buena Ventura is a slum. Eh? That is very plainspoken, no? A slum — dirty, poor, mean, crooked — the works. The revolution has passed it by. Why? Because the people are incorrigibles. They should have been sent to the United States, but we could not get them to the boats fast enough. In my block committee, we have had a paper about Buena Ventura. As a bad example. Buena Ventura is famous. In a very bad sort of way.”
“Maybe the revolution needs Buena Ventura to remind itself of what it triumphed over.”
The man looked at Tarp with respect. “That is pretty good. May I repeat that at my block committee?”
“I am flattered. But let me be honest, my friend. Even in the Soviet Union, we have slums. One or two. Socialism is a stage, after all. It is not perfection. Eh? There are always backsliders who betray the best interests of the people.”
The first man was grinning. He had round cheeks, like Ping-Pong balls. “You can get girls in Buena Ventura,” he said.
“Oh, sweet Jesu,” the second one said. “Will you ever shut up?”
“You can get anything in Buena Ventura.” He swung an arm over the shiny, greasy metal tubing that formed a handhold over the back of the seat and faced Tarp. “Colombian cocaine, they say. Truly. Gambling. Cockfights. There are degenerates in Buena Ventura.” He leaned back, looked around the bus, leaned toward Tarp again. “You can really have a good time, they say.” He leaned back again, then again leaned forward and said, “Get me?”
“I get you.”
The man grunted. He smiled at his friend as if he were sure he had done exactly the right thing after all, for now the Russian comrade would know the real facts of the revolution. He seemed quite pleased with himself.
The bus did not slow again long enough for them to talk, and they were all quiet. The two militia men got off near their suburb and then stood by the road, arguing with each other as the bus pulled out of sight.
Tarp went forward and asked the driver how close he went to Buena Ventura.
The black driver looked at him with cynical amusement. “About half-a-mile walk, man.”
“Let me out when you are closest to it.”
“Keep everything in your pants, man.” The black man shot him a look. “I mean your money, you follow?”
Fifteen minutes later he waved to Tarp and brought the bus to a stop. “Don’t believe the first kid tells you his mother’s a virgin and you can have her for ten pesos,” he said.
“Should I believe the second one?”
“I think he lies a little, too. Have a good time, man.”
Tarp got down from the bus and the door folded up behind him. He waved, but the driver was already looking at the road ahead, and he roared away with a belching of diesel smoke that left Tarp coughing.
Chapter 7
Buena Ventura had been middle class long ago, and then it had become a slum, and then the revolution had renovated it. Now it was a slum again. The government had cleaned it up and moved in the people of another old slum, perhaps believing that a change of scene would make them good revolutionaries, and they had managed to make it just like home. The architecture could still speak of a great past, a past sometime around the Spanish-American War. Decayed posters spoke of a revolution that had tried and had then turned to more rewarding efforts. One of the posters read “Exhort your men to—” but it no longer told the women of Buena Ventura what they were to exhort their men to do. “Enlarge the—” read another. “Resist,” instructed a third. Faded pink-and-gray letters, above once noble faces that had bleached like poor photographs, warned, “Enemies of the Revolution surround us.” Tarp believed it.
The first girl approached him just after he turned the corner from the typically clean, typically spare streets of revolutionary Havana into the first of Buena Ventura’s alleys. He felt that he was moving backward in time. The litter grew deeper. There were dog droppings on the pavement. There were graffiti.
“Want to have a good time?” said a girl of fourteen. She had a bored, professional voice.
In two blocks he counted five pimps and eight girls, and he supposed that at least a few of them were police.
“Sell your watch?” a grinning youth said, pressing close to his left side and falling into step.
“Go fornicate with yourself,” Tarp said in his best Miami Spanish.
“I give you the best price in Havana.”
“I will give you a permanent pain between your legs.”
“A hundred ten pesos.”
“Go away.”
“A hundred twenty.”
“Go.”
“A hundred thirty.”
“Go.”
“My last offer, absolutely, no excrement.”
Tarp felt deft fingers lift the tail of the khaki shirt and feel for the wallet that should have been there. He caught one finger, twisted, drove the extended fingers of his right hand up under the young man’s ribs. There was a sound as if the man had been sick; his face was very white and his little mustache seemed to jump from it because it was so black. He looked angry and desperate and frightened, and Tarp felt sorry for him, even while he despised him.
“Want me to break this finger?”
“No — no! I did nothing…”
“You change money?”
“Yes — ah!”
“French money?”
“Yes.”
“I want to change some French money. You want to do business, stop trying to rob me and show me your money.”
“How much?”
“Four thousand francs.”
“I have to get that much money. That is much money. I give a good price, but I have to check.”
“Where?”
“Up that alley. Two minutes.” He nodded toward an opening ten yards ahead.
“You think I am an imbecile.”
“No!”
“You want to get your friends so you can rob me.”
“In two minutes?” He was almost screaming. Across the street, a girl who had her hair piled up like a forties movie star watched them without expression. “I need to check the price and get money, that is all. Truly! You think in Buena Ventura I would carry that much money? I swear!”
“On the Virgin’s cloak, I suppose.”
“I am a good Christian. Two minutes.”
Tarp let him go. “You had better be honest with me.”
“I swear.”
The girl sauntered across. A cat, pausing in its pursuit of a flea, sat down in the middle of the pavement to watch her. “Want to go to paradise?” the girl said.
“No money, angel.”
“Did he get it all?”
“There was none to get. How about taking me to paradise for love?”
“I save my love for Fidel.”
“And the church, I hope.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No, I am a priest. Good-bye, angel.”
He went back down the street, looked into the alley, and saw the young man with the mustache. The alley was like a canyon choked with trash, sunless, smelly. There was a chain-link fence blocking it fifty feet down, and the paper had blown up against it into a pile half as high as Tarp was tall.