It was much harder to find the key to graduating from law school. It had been an incredible sacrifice to study at dawn, after each blackout, beating back sleep with abundant quantities of bitter tea.
From my balcony, the buildings and the street and the sky around me all seem beautiful, black like a great ocean of ink. That’s also how I see my future, and that of my family. Why not try and find a bit of light, even if it’s not so early in life?
In the months that followed, the streets remained littered with craters, ever darker, covered with trash, reeking. People walked by aimlessly, their eyes blank, resting in line after line, going from frustration to frustration.
Cats and dogs almost reached the point of extinction as adolescents discovered their flesh was edible, and the only ones seen on the streets were the most famished, abandoned pets dragging along their torn tufts of skin.
A girl faints next to me on the bus, a woman drops to the sidewalk one morning as I’m looking out my balcony. I’m told about an elderly woman who committed suicide because she couldn’t take the cries of her little grandson begging for another piece of bread, even as the radio broadcasts announced that ours is the best fed nation on earth, with the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy. My friends and acquaintances are dying so quickly, at early ages.
“We’re so lucky to live in this country,” my young daughter says to me as she watches the haunting images from the rest of the world on our TV.
But I can’t believe it when I see two neighbors dive into a dumpster to scavenge through the fermenting garbage that had been feasted on by a myriad flies. Why is it that this country’s fertile soil is so sterile? Why don’t women want to give birth and why don’t young people want to live? What makes people support so euphorically that which they in fact hate? Why do they work against themselves? Why do they seem to experience such joy as they dig hopeless tombs for their grandchildren?
Sodium monofluoracetate is infallible. Its chemical formula is CH2F-COON and I’ve read that it takes less than a tenth of a teaspoon to kill a degenerate like Francisco.
But what if the police perform an autopsy? They probably won’t, though; there aren’t many doctors left in this country now that the majority has been contracted out to Venezuela and other places. And those left are overwhelmed with work, so they’re more likely to determine it was a sudden cardiac arrest and not expend limited resources on an autopsy.
I’ve read that this poison interrupts the Krebs cycle, that it alters the citric acid in the body. The poison turns into fluorcitrate, creates a citric concentration in the veins, and deprives the cells of energy. Cellular death is slow and painful.
The cops aren’t going to waste time over whether some guy like Francisco died from a cardiac arrest or a few drops of sodium monofluoracetate. The cops have highly qualified experts and forensic doctors working with them who can find traces of the poison lingering in the liver, the brain, the kidneys, hair. But what if the morgue technician removed Francisco’s liver and viscera and sold them on the black market as beef liver, beef viscera? Did other families die — children too — poisoned by Compound 1080 residue in meat?
The police officer who asks for my documents, for my passport, has a threatening expression. Behind me, the giant automatic glass door is closing forever. The glittering lights blind me. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so much artificial illumination. The airport’s hallways seem so beautiful, even though they have nothing by way of decoration other than their cleanliness and tang. I walk. I go very fast so that the doors won’t close anew. I run to the escalators, then run again until I reach the counter where there’s a man with a quizzical but apathetic expression.
“Your documents are in order but you cannot be completely admitted to the United States until you prove that your soul came with you; your body has arrived but you’ve left your soul in Cuba,” the immigration official at Miami International Airport says coolly. “What are you going to do?”
What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I ask myself over and over as I leave the airport. I’ll start over, that’s what. I’ll transform my hopes into a new soul until I can recover the lost soul that they tell me here I left in Havana, and which in Havana they say I brought here.
Somebody else can take care of the thief at 503 La Rosa Street. I could never get my hands on even two drops of sodium monofluoracetate, and I could never actually kill another human being. Perhaps they would have never found me out, but I’m glad that crook Francisco lives on and can still hope to change. I will, from here, far from Cuba, try to reconstruct my soul from its own sense of hope, which is only possible where there’s light.
Murder, according to my mother-in-law
by Arturo Arango
for Achy, guilty
El Cerro
Her name was Lucrecia, they called her Pupy, and my mother-in-law couldn’t stand her from the moment we met because it was rumored all over the neighborhood that what she liked most were black men. Whenever her name came up, my mother-in-law would make a face and say, “That pig.”
Arguing with my mother-in-law is one of my favorite pastimes.
As far as we knew, the black men that popular opinion attributed to Pupy came down to just one: Guillermo, the father of her younger children, a strapping, smiling man who had once been a police officer, and with whom Pupy lived a few blocks from our house.
“He is a great guy,” I’d tell my mother-in-law.
“He’s better than her,” she’d concur. “But she’s still a pig.”
Pupy’s oldest boy, whose father we had never met, had blue eyes and lived with his grandparents, right across the street from our house.
I was at the stadium the night “it all happened,” as my mother-in-law says, always reluctant to actually let out of her mouth words such as cancer, or murder, believing that by not pronouncing them, she can keep these misfortunes from herself and her family.
To live in Havana and say “the stadium” means only one thing: the Latinoamericano, an ancient structure that’s been renovated over and over, and which, in extreme cases, can hold up to 150,000 people. At my age, I prefer the comfort of the rocking chair and the TV, with coffee in hand during the breaks, and the bed nearby for when a game gets boring. But during each playoff series, I keep a ritual of going at least once to that place which is both circus and temple, to become part of the spectacle that takes place in the bleachers.
The championship was being decided and the same two rivals were facing off as always: the most arrogant of teams, the one that can’t stand to not make it to the postseason, the one that’s so worshipped, protected, spoiled — and whose name will never come out of my mouth and I will refer to only as Las Ratas — and Santiago de Cuba, in which I always place my hopes, and always support.
Luis Lorente had been calling me since Friday night to remind me that Santiago would not be back again to play at the Latino after this because Las Ratas had very little chance of reaching even the quarterfinals that year. The stadium might be closed until November, at which time the next tournament would begin.
Saturday morning, I returned his calclass="underline" I’d go by his house an hour before the game. After talking to Luis, I agreed to another duty I found considerably less pleasant: I took my mother-in-law grocery shopping.
Markets make me weary, and my mother-in-law says the same things week after week when she gets back in the car with a handful of scrawny scallions and a pale pumpkin. It’s true that prices keep going up and that she’s the one who cooks for the whole family, but living through those Saturday excursions — watching her make faces when she squeezes the avocados or cabbage, or the anxious way she pulls the wrinkled bills from her wallet, without any certainty about what she’s actually handing the cashier — it’s like sinking in an endless swamp.