Yako bends and rolls on the floor like a big, gangly, but still very agile spider. That’s why the ragged end of the broken bottle only slices through his Benetton sweatshirt and barely draws blood from his shoulder before his legs collide with Humbertico the Piranha and they both get tangled up. Red’s rushing now, El Patio shouts in a single voice, like at the cockfights, dogfights, or some adolescent brawl where they beat each other purple then turn up as buddies the next day, for the pure pleasure of throwing punches and then forgiving each other later. But everyone already knows this one won’t have such a sweet ending. Although with all the screaming it does seem rather like a sport, like a game, and a couple of smart-asses even place bets. It’s just that Tension, like a couple of springs in the air, doesn’t actually scream, doesn’t actually stand, but rather sits there next to Death, polishing her nails at the domino tables, cuz they know that something’s gotta happen, and even what it is, but they’re not saying.
Yako doesn’t deserve Silvia, even if she turns tricks, and the three of us know it. But she’s too much of a woman for Yako to leave her, and I’m too nice, too naïve, and too easily fooled for an ambitious street-smart girl from Bayamo like her, who’s also determined to get some distance from her race, being a mulatta ashamed of her naps. I’m white too but dark-haired, short, with dark eyes. I’m no competition. That’s the triangle in which I don’t belong even when I’m present, in which I have no weight and won’t have any even after I graduate as one more mechanical engineer, a grease monkey at some sugar mill, cleaning spark plugs, crucified for life unless I get on with some corporation, otherwise I won’t have a chance to even sniff a bill from afar, no matter how many books I read, or how much weight I lift at the gym that Manolito the Tripod built under that same ackee tree from our childhood. It’s not the same tree anymore either: During the storm of the century, it lost its smoking branch, which fell on Cachita’s she-goat, out looking for who knows what, and killed her.
Maybe what Silvia seeks in Yako, or him in her, is just Salieri, to settle and that’s it, just shit and a bridge that might be pink for women, pink or black lace with the smell of hotel air freshener, a fat Spaniard, Salsa Palace, Cayo Coco, and a passport to go abroad. Even I couldn’t say what I’m looking for in my pal Yako’s woman, cuz if he ever caught me I’d be dead meat, but truth is I always fall in her same trap even though there are so many little cheery student whores wandering around the CUJAE housing. Maybe it’s cuz they’re always giving me a hard time about my street style, no earrings or long hair, cuz in El Patio they don’t put up with that fag crap... or maybe it’s cuz we always like the challenge, the bridge, death escaping from the shithole even as we sink deeper.
Rolling around on the ground is Humbertico the Piranha’s thing. He bites with the slightly bucked teeth that earned him his nickname, kicks, scratches, twists, he’s got monkey arms and octopus tentacles. He’s happy cuz so long as the big guy doesn’t get up, he can always win, and he plays dirty too; with luck he’ll get him in one of those strangle holds every one of El Patio’s native sons learns practically before he learns to walk, and that way he doesn’t hafta kill him. But size imposes itself. Yako turns in the dust, gives a couple of big thrusts with his shoulders, manages to kneel, and covers the Piranha’s face with his giant hand, screaming like he’s outta his mind. He grinds his neck on El Patio’s dirt, like he’s finishing off the memory of his having fucked Petra. And in that moment Humbertico remembers what he knew from the start but had hoped to forget: that he has to go for his sharpened spoon so the decision can finally be made, like that night in Cellblock 3 when he had to gamble his life with Saúl the Albino for the right to get any kind of scrap, and the big black chief just looked on to see who he’d get as a foot soldier and who he’d give up to get fucked by the others.
Even if he goes back to the tank, he has to do this, cuz whoever’s survived there can’t resist a fight, no matter what. Humbertico knows that every fight is about more than who wins and who loses, but also about what you’re risking, what you win, and what you lose, which is why he finally twists his hand down for the spoon and tentatively searches for Yako’s beer-filled guts, to cut him or rip him or win God knows what from him.
The red bridge is a fixed idea that hypnotizes. A path from which no one returns, a crossroads with no way out. A lot of people have known it, or know it, and they may call it something else. It’s the shady street in gangster movies. The door. The throne of blood in one Kurosawa film. For Conan Doyle it was the Brazilian cat, the night spent next to the beast, which turns your hair white and leaves you limping and changed forever, but alive. The Driver, that old Ryan O’Neal movie in which he’s like a maniac behind the wheel, crashing cars to prove he was a tough guy. Or Matt Dillon in Rumblefish, looking for traces of his troublemaker brother and finally glad when the Motorcycle Boy dies and frees him. It’s the bridge over the River Kwai. All that and nothing really, that’s the red bridge. I’ve thought about this, but not as much as Yako. It’s an obsession with him. To imagine what it must feel like to kill — realizing that you’ve violated a worldly law and that no one up high is gonna punish you for it, that Nietzsche was right, that God died outta sheer boredom, and that if other men don’t take you up on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, there’s no bolt of lightning that’s gonna strike you down to purge the sin. So then to hell with morality: It’s the law of the jungle that counts, fuck before you get fucked. The cops and the laws don’t have any more right than their force and cunning, like everybody else.
God died by drowning in shit. Silvia and I fucked like crazy at the beach house, next to a drunken Yako, friend and lover, doing it just to do it, just cuz we shouldn’t have, risking it all, doing it without love, practically without pleasure, knowing too well what would happen if he knew, imagining that in fact he already knew, all the while wanting him to know and to react, so that all the façades and the masks could go to shit.
Yako sees the spoon coming, wanting to scoop out a new navel for him, and he stops it by some miracle, his fingers all cut up now. I practically feel his pain, and I tense up wanting to help him, as if I were him, my heart beating open-mouthed.
It’s at moments like this that all the Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal and Jackie Chan movies are revealed as indisputable lies. In real life, a blade is fear, cold, stinks of danger and death, adrenaline runs like a river, your muscles tense and you freeze cuz you’re so scared, and there’s no choreography for a ballet of kicks nor Jean-Claude Van Damme swiveling in the air. Or maybe you don’t freeze, you can move but like in a dream: You wanna run but you can never run as much as you want, you wanna do a quick slip like in the movies but instead you cut your fingers, not even all the way, just about to the bone, so that they bleed and hurt. Slow and clumsy the slice, not like a samurai whose sword demands a clean swipe which sends a hand flying. You wanna come on with a chest-splitting suki chop but you just slap and fall back from the force of the rebound; this is a fight of handless morons and frail epileptics, and there’s dirt and noise and you know you’ve gotta do something but you don’t know what. There’s a voice that tells you, Yako’s gotta come outta this no matter what, and there’s Humbertico the Piranha’s rabid bite on his fingers.
But there is a God in heaven: You, Yako, your blood makes the blade slip from his fingers, now white from pressing so tight, and it bounces and clinks on the hard ground muddying with sweat, blood, and fear. And you grab him by the neck, walnut-brown mulatto shivering under your white forearm with black hairs, and squeeze and squeeze... and everybody’s screaming, and I say, Coño, and run.