Evita is here, too, of course. Not up front but in back of the crowd. She’s just six now, and her blond hair and blue eyes contrast almost comically with the thick layer of dirt clinging to her milk-white skin. Amazing how much grime she’s managed to get on her in just two hours since she escaped her house.
Later, so she can get back into her good clothes without making her strict father, Big Boss Vargas, suspicious about her running away, Abel and I will have to bathe her conscientiously, happily wasting the water that we worked so hard that morning to haul up, bucket by bucket, from the only unpolluted potable water tap in the neighborhood, energetically scrubbing her while she laughs with delight and not a trace of shame, never suspecting that we’re no longer staring at her naked body quite as innocently as we had the year before.
Abel, my best friend. Mi amigo del alma. The first kid I secretly shared the pleasures of sex with, our mutual discovery of having an orgasm, which was more than an extension of our friendship. Skin as black as night, soul as pure as heaven. I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for him. At the age of fifteen, as soon as his born skill with computers began to pay its first dividends, he loaned me the money for my ticket into orbit, trusting that someday I’d pay him back.
I have no idea what’s become of him. When I climbed on board the shuttle to the Clifford Simak Geosynchronic Transit Station, those thousand CUCs seemed like a fortune, and I promised to give them back to him as soon as I could. But eight years have gone by, I’ve made a thousand times that much money, and I’ve never even tried.
I’m an ungrateful, egotistical bastard, I know.
Maybe he’s already dead, Abel. The life of a hacker in Rubble City isn’t worth much. The Pancaribbean Mafia considers them disposable personnel.
Or maybe he left his risky job, got married, has kids of his own, and…
But no, I can’t let myself think about such things, not even in my dreams.
Also jumping around and making a racket with the rest of us is Little Ramiro Flyface, the boy who was born without eyes because his mother abused broncodust when she was pregnant with him. The funny thing is that after he was born, Lina became the best mother in the world (maybe she felt guilty), and for years she saved up every CUC she earned from selling her body until, when her son was five, she was able to buy him the artificial eyes he needed. They might have been the cheapest on the market, a pair of multifaceted North Korean holoprostheses that only let him see in black and white and gave him his nickname, but all the same he preferred it to what they used to call him: Little Ramiro Flatface.
And here’s Yamy, a glowingly healthy, precocious girl, the only professional worker in the neighborhood. Professional sex worker, that is. She’s with Marré el Gordo’s housecall girls. At the age of eight, she’s already forgotten more about sex than most women in Nu Barsa will learn in their whole lives. The nipples of her skinny breasts, still more those of a child than of an adolescent, barely covered by a thin T-shirt, translucent as onionskin, are more expressive than her big, mascara-coated eyes. She glances at me every now and then, mischievously. She’s promised me that when I turn ten in a few months, she’ll initiate me for free into the mysteries of hetero sex, and I won’t have to go through the sweaty, greasy ordeal so many other boys endure with lusty Karlita.
She’ll never fulfill that promise. The brilliance of nocturnal butterflies fades quickly in Rubble City, and Marré el Gordo pays well—but only because he doesn’t do much to keep his girls safe. Some dissatisfied client will let something slip about Yamy’s perfect health, a very valuable exception in the polluted environment of CH; organ traffickers from the Pancaribbean Mafia will catch her one night on her way home from making the rounds, and all we’ll find later will be the remains.
The police? Don’t bother. The easiest way to keep law and order in CH is to pretend the outer districts simply don’t exist and let us kill each other ourselves.
There’s also Ricardito, nicknamed the Octopus because some nasty trick of chemistry, radioactivity, and sensitive genes made him be born with two tiny extra hands jutting from his elbows. No surgeon dares to amputate them, for fear that doing so might make him lose mobility in his regular hands.
Also, there’s the one I’ll never forget. Slow and easygoing because of the extra weight her mutant metabolism gives her, sweating acrid buckets from every pore, there’s Karlita the Tub, who later on will always remind me of my friend Narcís—though he’s well over seven feet tall and he lets himself weigh three hundred kilos from pure laziness, while Karlita, like it or not, already weighs two hundred kilos at the age of eight, and she’s barely five foot four.
Worse, the poor girl knows her condition will worsen year by year until she finally suffocates under her own rolls of fat before turning twenty-five. So, wishing to make the most of her short life span, she’s always available for the craziest sex games.
And there’s Damián, better known as Legs the Orphan. So-called because his father, hooked on wildwall, the curse of our neighborhood (one of many; here, drugs grow like weeds), sold his son’s legs to an organ trafficker when the kid was three. After the father came down from his high, he felt so ashamed he killed himself. He left behind Rita, a pay guide dog he’d picked up cheap when Aid for the Disabled discarded it for being a mutant. Not so much for its three eyes as for always being in heat.
In other words, the whole gang’s here. Because today is Racing Day.
Not horse racing, of course. Not dog racing, or steroid-pumped human racing like you can see on holovision or in the fancy stadiums of luxurious downtown CH. No. Here in Rubble City, the populated zone with the highest background radioactivity level anywhere on our already polluted planet Earth, none of those well-trained or genetically engineered runners would last one day.
The tenement house where I grew up is a hellhole at the end of the tunnel. Only the most desperate or the most highly resistant creatures can survive there. No wonder, then, that both the poor little mutants that do the racing and we humans who do the betting on them are all amply endowed with resistance and with desperation.
Boasting, howling, and pounding on one another’s backs, half-jokingly and half deadly serious, like mischievous or perhaps lecherous monkeys, those of us who’ve brought our little cages end up in the front row, ready to set our captives loose when old Diosdado gives the signal.
Diosdado Valdés, heart and soul of So’s Your Mother Street and respected throughout Rubble City, is the adoptive father or grandfather—nobody knows which and nobody cares—of dozens of orphans. He takes in lots of newborns abandoned by their mothers, raising them and watching over them in his home to repay his orishas for the generosity someone showed him when he was little. Until they’re five and can fend for themselves. Then he frees us, to die in the streets—or grow into adults.
But all of us who survived were proud to bear his last name, which he told us was, once upon a time, the only surname fatherless children were allowed to bear in Cuba.
The old man is one of the most highly respected babalawos, priests in the syncretic Yoruba religion of the orishas, in all Rubble City. Some say, in all CH. Nobody knows how old he really is. They say that though he now seems like a harmless fellow, he was in Special Ops when he was young, and he got injured in an explosion. They also say he sacrificed part of his body to the jealous African deities. It might all be true. He’s thin, always wears white, has only one eye and one leg, and constantly jokes that any day now he’ll cut off an arm to finally look like his favorite orisha: one-legged, one-eyed, one-armed Olofi. Diosdado is the only adult whose authority we kids unquestioningly recognize is the eternal judge and arbiter of our most serious games and arguments.