Humbertico the Piranha, a little rat since he was a kid, old-time hustler, jail meat, and brownnoser to every black section chief there ever was in La Cabaña, knows he has a chance when Yako bends over to wipe the spit off, but he seems afraid of the ballplayer’s big hands, and he hesitates. He may not be too smart or have much to lose after getting outta the tank, but he has doubts, he has to be afraid and have his doubts. You don’t dick around with death, and after all he’s said to Yako, it’s gotta be face to face, fuck or get fucked, no slapping, first blood, and they break them up, cuz in El Patio you can smell when it’s gotta go to the very end, and not even God’s gonna come between these two now. When there’s a little sister’s broken hymen on the table, honor demands death even more than blood. Now Humbertico the Piranha, drunk and all, realizes there’s no going back, and he’s probably cursing the moment he decided to deal with this... He may be gambling a shitty life, but it’s his and it’s the only one he has.
Sometimes Yako says, My second surname is Salieri. And then he goes off on this philosophical turn, very elegant, very erudite. For him, the great cosmic joke, the great fuck, is not being a genius, nor a fool, and knowing it or not knowing it, and living contentedly like Babas, with his idiocy, happily pushing his cart from one end of El Patio to the other all the live long day, no matter who’s laughing at him. The chaos, the living end, the tragedy, is being in the middle: having the desire, knowing exactly what constitutes greatness, and not having any of it yourself. Salieri. Not the worst, just another good one. Not even among the best. Not the crackerjack, the number one, the top guy, the man, but maybe the guy who carries the main man’s bag. And that can be the same whether you make it to the palace guard or not, or whether you have a career, or whether you ever play in the NBA with Michael Jordan, or even Team Cuba. Or whether you were born in El Patio, feral Lawton, half alley, half tenement, instead of Haiti or Switzerland. It’s always being the midpoint, one more little mark among the statistics... and knowing it. Realizing it, that’s the hard part. Some people get it, some don’t, but everybody nods their heads and says, This white boy speaks from the soul, with power in his words, brains, yes siree. And then there’s another drink, to forget what shit we all are, and just in case that Salieri...
Humbertico the Piranha doesn’t have a piece, they’re fifty bucks each and he doesn’t have that kinda cash, he’s just gotten out and he hasn’t made his connections yet cuz Alfredo the ex-marine doesn’t want ex-cons near his video thing. Sorry bud, it’s not like before, now you’re branded. What the Piranha has is a sharp, filed-down spoon, strapped to his hairless ankle with a rubber band. Ever since he was in that brawl with that fat black guy at La Tropical and he got out by the skin of his teeth, when he had to cut the guy and the razorblade broke in his hand, he hasn’t had any confidence in switchblades. Or in any knife.
His hand knows by heart the sound of the filed-down spoon against the stone floor of the cell. Nobody knows how he got it out, maybe wrapped in brown paper stuffed up his big asshole, so used by the cellblock chief, or by dropping dimes on the guards, since that’ll make anything happen. It’s his treasure, and he doesn’t like to show it around too much. The spoon is Chinese, you can still see the letters on the handle, dull from so much handling. Sometimes he has to squeeze it to fall asleep, and he cries then, in his slumber, just like back then. The wiseguys say his little rosy asshole misses a certain big horse cock, that he wants to go back to being its mare, like the loyal wreck fish he is. The truth is that having it close gives him courage, helps him feel complete, and to remember he’s still a man and that he never actually gave his ass up to anyone in the tank, although the story goes that a coupla times he took advantage of Damián the Sewer from Cellblock 4. But that’s not too terrible, cuz being without females is tough, and you’ve gotta get what you can.
If he bends to get the blade in front of Yako, those Nike 48s are gonna leave footprints all over his face. Maybe at that moment his liquored mind decides to shit on the shitty summer heat that makes it impossible to wear long sleeves and hide the steel, and he imagines a special strip of leather for his wrist so he can carry the blade like the gangsters in the Saturday night movies. Or he doesn’t think at all, cuz in any case he’s got the broken bottle. So it’s fairly certain that the attack from top to bottom with the glass flower will come from a twist of the wrist, it will scratch but not kill, the product of alcohol and instinct and resentment, not from the former prisoner’s guts or smarts.
Yako sees the glass coming for his eyes and he knows it’s the red bridge’s sentry. El Patio sees the bottle coming in slowmotion and the whole world explodes in screams, cuz the fight’s real now, like those little whirls in the dust in the midday heat. It can end the same way, just like that, and it can all go back to being dust, even with a little bit of blood.
Yako says every life comes to a red bridge.
That’s a joke I like, and him too, so he says it like ten times a day. Yako, the red bridge philosopher.
Maybe he read it in some Chinese book, though he doesn’t read much. It sounds like the kind of philosophy that comes from people who dress in silk and drink tea, with a whole lotta time on their hands to watch the carps feasting on bread. Like at the Japanese Garden, where we went the last time — him, Silvia, and me — and I heard them arguing in the arbor and I pretended I was in my own little world but didn’t miss a word. He to her: Fuckin’ whore. She to him: You knew it, and anyway, what right do you have to say anything to me, you lazy delinquent good for nothing? This is a common exchange between Cuban couples these days, an inevitable refrain if the couple’s from El Patio. It’s another way of saying, I love you, baby; I love you, too, Daddy.
The red bridge is a blood decision, a bullfighter’s choice, a gentlemen’s agreement. You enter it cuz somebody’s pushed you, and you exit only by crossing and killing, or chickening out and playing guitar, doing a faggot’s twirl. Yako has given the matter a lotta thought, up in clouds of pure weed, which always give me a deadly cough: If you kill, everybody knows you crossed the red bridge, and you realize it’s not so easy, but there’s no going back. Cuz on the other side is the tank, and in there men aren’t men anymore but beasts, and the lyrics from that song about Moncada is a lie — a crocodile will in fact eat its own. And if you chicken out, you may as well climb on a raft and leave the country, and maybe even that won’t matter, cuz a man with a yellow stripe down his back can be sniffed out by his sweat, whether in El Patio or China. Once a coward, always a coward.
We argued about this a lot.
Yako and Silvia and me, by myself as always, we went to see Lord Jim, the Peter O’Toole movie, cuz I’d read the book. Yako liked it, though he said that no one comes back from a sea of coward’s shit, that there’s no redemption and no second chance. But later, Yako, who doesn’t read, asked me for Conrad’s book. Even for him, it must be nice to realize that somebody else has already laid down in black-and-white the ideas that have been making rounds in your head without quite landing. Must be nice to know you’re not alone in your thinking, that’s all.
The thing with the red bridge isn’t too bad. It’s like Moby Dick was for Ahab, or Hamlet pondering what to do with his whore mother and his bastard uncle after they killed his father. And, of course, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It’s always the same shit.