At first, in spite of everything, I envied him a little. Not now. I’ve crossed the bridge too... my own bridge, more green than red. After I threw that blade his way that afternoon, everything’s been easier, as if I’d always laid low, in the shade of the hill it took so much to climb. You could say that El Patio’s fate has finally caught up with me, but I live ten times better than before: I bought a color TV for my old girl, and I have as many women as I want — me, the shy one.
It wasn’t even my idea but now the trap is well-greased: port-transportation-domestic economy. Petra lures them from in front of the hotel or when they’re trying to hitch a ride, and she brings them to my house, where I offer them PPG, cigars, rum, as if it were all mine to give. Alfredo the ex-marine has his contacts and procures the product. There’s always something for me, for being the face of the operation. Everything cuz I gained the guy’s trust by throwing the knife to Yako when he needed it.
Manolito the Tripod and Alfredo fuck Petra now and again... I don’t get it: She looks good but she’s cold as the wind. I gave her a couple of turns but I got bored. Her clitoris is about the size of a plantain seed... except they don’t really have seeds. All that flaunting, all that heating up, and then she has to fake it. Pity all those foreigners who believe it...
A few days ago, she asked me if she could go see Yako, if she could get a conjugal visit with him. Life is full of surprises... true love, or maybe she just really wants to fuck him and pay him back for the Piranha? I hafta think about what I’m gonna say to her.
I imagine Yako never cared whether Petra could come fucked up the ass or whether she was frigid. It was all about appearances, about not letting panties walk by without getting in them, and about daring the Piranha, with the invisible sign on his head advertising him as a tough guy just outta the tank. The challenge. Yako the mothafucka, the hard one, the guy from the red bridge.
Who cares. Life is shit, from shit we come and to shit we shall return, and between shit and more shit, there are a few shitty dollars from the black market which we’ll spend buying more shit or horrible liquor for fighting, until one day it’s all over, with blood and dirt or with sheets and intensive therapy. Then somebody, like so many others, will say, Alive.
For the time being, I’ve dropped outta school. I asked for a leave and they gave it to me without questions. It was my third year, but to hell with it. I don’t plan on going back. What’s a white boy from El Patio doing wasting his time at the CUJAE anyway, studying for an engineering degree which isn’t gonna do shit for him? With so much business and so many whores and so much life waiting out here — in El Patio or beyond — it’s all the same.
Even so, I can’t forget that afternoon, the fight, the dash to get the knife, my pitch, and the horn-handle on the ground, the hit and the burst of blood from the Piranha’s eye. I’ve lived it a thousand times in my memory. And each time I’m more sure of why I did it... but a lot less sure of how I did it. If I did it on purpose, or if I made that up later.
Yako on the red bridge. I saw him fighting but didn’t feel his fear. He was gonna win — he was big and he was winning, he would have won cleanly anyway. He was blond and had light eyes and played basketball pretty well, he fucked Silvia without having to hide and she had more fun with him and his drunkenness than she ever did with my desire. He had eight inches on me, and he’d always been better at everything. That I was studying toward a degree and read a lot and knew that someday I could suddenly leave El Patio if I wanted to didn’t matter. It wasn’t books about exotic places or incredible cold-blooded adventurers in monstrous heat that mattered at the moment of truth. It was him and not me. That was real life, sweat and blood and guts and brawls, and he lived them and I didn’t. And he was on the red bridge, on the ground in a fight in which only one would come out alive, even if neither actually died. Dying? Everything ran smoothly until... it was like a nuclear explosion, like when Uranium 238 boils until it hits critical mass.
My decision — if it was a decision — was spontaneous, without premeditation, not the way I once insinuated to Silvia during a fuck, in fact the last time we fucked. You can take a lot of shit when you have a half bottle of bad rum inside you.
It was a lie — I didn’t contemplate it for weeks beforehand, eating my liver while fueled by old envy and resentment; I didn’t plan it all ahead of time; I didn’t talk Yako into fucking Petra; nor did I pay her all my savings to open her legs to him, knowing full well what Humbertico the Piranha would do. It wasn’t me who told him, and I didn’t throw the knife knowing that Yako always talked about a Florentine-style stabbing: eye-brain-death. It simply happened that way, and I took advantage of the timing, the situation, the sinister series of linked coincidences, the circumstances. I’m not that much of a sonovabitch or that Machiavellian.
Or maybe I am...?
The fucked-up part is that I can’t be sure. Maybe God exists, and if he exists... I’m afraid that just thinking about it is enough.
In El Patio they say I’m an educated guy cuz I read and I went to school. Everybody says there are answers to everything in the Bible. I went leafing through it for the first time a coupla days ago. There was once a Jacob who saw a ladder to heaven and fought with an angel. But it doesn’t say anything about a red bridge. Nor about a horn-handled knife, of course.
Translation by Achy Obejas
La Coca-Cola del Olvido
by Lea Aschkenas
Centro Habana
She was a fifty-four-year-old light-skinned black woman, a technical engineer at the H. Upmann Tobacco Factory by day, and under the cover of darkness, a black market beautician prowling the poorly lit alleys of Centro Habana, trimming beards and plucking eyebrows for those too elderly to do so for themselves, giving pedicures and cleaning pores for those too young and too vain to see past their own noses.
She hadn’t always been this snide. Once, she too had believed in beauty, revered it even. As a child, she had chosen her career because of it. This was back in the days of Batista, when she had noticed that all the beautiful people in La Poma, that bottleneck of chaos and corruption and color that has forever been Havana, were professionals — doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers.
When the Revolution triumphed on the eve of her tenth birthday, she had been immediately caught up in its spell of social justice, its promise of education (the path to professionalism) for everyone. When the Literacy Campaign came in 1961 and she was only twelve, too young to go into the countryside to teach the guajiros how to read, she volunteered to tutor illiterate workers at a factory in Havana. At eighteen, she accepted a scholarship to study in Moscow, emerging eight years later with her PhD in engineering. She returned home in 1975 and in less than a year secured a job at the tobacco factory, met Manrique, a flautist with the National Symphony Orchestra, and got married. When Marisol was born two years later, everyone declared her to be the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen. Una hija de Ochún, they said as she grew into a striking adolescent, her skin a milky brown, her hair a long curled black with sun-streaked highlights of red-gold. She was an artistic youth whose vibrant, wildly distorted paintings of the neighbors entertained everyone. She will be successful, just like her parents, people said. Qué familia, they said. When the babalao next door prophesied, at Marisol’s tenth birthday party, that the three of them would live a happy and fruitful life, everyone had nodded their heads in envious agreement.