Sixteen years after that flawed prediction, Beatriz lived alone in a crumbling five-story apartment in Centro Habana. Several years before, the buzzer system had broken. Now when her friends came to visit, they knew to call out her name from the street. They stood just far enough away from the balcony so she could see them, but still close enough so they could catch the key when she tossed it down from the third door.
Unfortunately, Beatriz had yet to encounter such a simple solution to the many other malfunctions of her apartment. The bathtub faucets worked only infrequently. The refrigerator froze up and then defrosted at will, leaving soupy puddles around the icy mangoes and spilling a sweet, sticky syrup onto the floor whenever she opened its door.
Her TV was color when Manrique bought it ten years ago, but now it produced only a grainy black-and-white image on each of Cuba’s two stations, both government-run. If Beatriz smacked the shelf beneath the television really hard, sometimes a streak of magenta would flash across the screen, but it always faded. To hear the sound, she had to connect it to the stereo she’d given Marisol for her quinces.
Beatriz still remembered how everyone had danced that night, more than twenty tightly packed bodies swirling around her, sweat streaming down their foreheads, the living room gallery of Marisol’s paintings blurring before their eyes. They had kept dancing even after the lights went out and the stereo stopped (Manrique tapped out the rhythm with a spoon and a frying pan), signaling the start of the daily apagones at the height of the Special Period, those spare years of sugarwater tea and salt-water baths immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Looking back now, Beatriz felt an unexpected tenderness toward that time when, despite the difficulties, they had managed to pull through. Together. As a family.
It was only 7 in the evening, but already a dreary, drizzly darkness enveloped Centro Habana as Beatriz stepped out into the grime of Industria Street, turning left at the corner of Virtudes. Lately this intersection, where she had lived for forty-six years and never given much thought to the meaning of the street names, had begun to seem rife with metaphor, with irony. She had always been industrious, but in the last two weeks, virtue had felt further from her reach than ever before.
Fearing that her refrigerator would completely conk out any day now and feeling desperate for money to buy a new one, Beatriz had begun rubber-banding so many cigars around her thighs and calves at work that she had to wobble her way out of the factory at the end of each day. Each evening, she stashed her loot at the house of her friend Clara, a schoolteacher who no one would suspect of having access to stolen cigars. In three weeks, once she’d acquired (the word Beatriz preferred to describe her actions) enough cigars to fill seven boxes, she would pay Clara ten dollars for her help, and then, for thirty-five more dollars, she would hire her friend Orestes, a wood-worker extraordinaire, to make the cedar boxes. Orestes had once produced the drums for Havana’s most popular percussion band, Los Sobrevivantes. But then the members had gone to New Orleans for a performance and never returned. Orestes’s wife, the lead drummer, had promised to file the paperwork for him to join her, but soon she’d stopped responding to his letters. Now, whenever Beatriz asked Orestes if he’d heard from her, he’d invoke that old Cuban aphorism of abandonment, blaming his wife’s silence on the lure of her new capitalist life in La Yuma. He’d shake his head and say, La Coca-Cola del olvido — the Coca-Cola of oblivion.
As far as profitability went, Beatriz’s cigar-selling business was a good negocio, bringing in eighty dollars for each pungent package she hawked to the tourists hanging out along the Malecón. But the risk of getting caught — and the shame of losing her job — had convinced Beatriz that this would be a one-time deal. She felt much safer with negocios unrelated to her official work, even if they didn’t bring in such big profits. She felt safer outside of the factory, and in the streets.
At the intersection of Virtudes and Consulado, Beatriz stepped over a puddle of doggie diarrhea and narrowly missed being splashed by a stream of wastewater dripping down from an overhead balcony. In the street, a game of pelota was in progress. The players had created baseball diamonds from the negative space, and ran to invisible bases between the bici-taxis and the stationary, not-abandoned yet not-functioning automobiles that pushed up against the deteriorating sidewalk.
Beatriz’s first stop tonight was the ciudadela where Marilys lived. A one-family mansion in pre-Revolution times, it now housed five families, each of which lived in what had formerly been one large room. In an attempt to make it feel like a house, the inhabitants had built in bathrooms and kitchens and barbacoas, makeshift lofts that doubled as bedrooms, jutting out in the middle of living rooms and cutting the head space in half.
Outside of Marilys’s ciudadela, a group of teenage girls in spandex body suits stood surveying the street scene.
Inside, Marilys was where she always was (in front of the TV, watching that interminable Brazilian telenovela, El Rey del Ganado), wearing what she always wore (a gauzy yellow mumu), sitting as she always sat (in her rocking chair). Her wrinkled face glowed in the blue light of the television, and Beatriz invited herself in.
Marilys smiled, pleasantly surprised by the company, and asked, “What brings you here?”
“It’s time for your eyebrow pluck,” Beatriz replied. “Remember, you asked me to come by sometime tonight?”
Marilys looked suddenly worried. She raised a veiny hand to her nose, her fingers between her eyes. “Oh my, I’d forgotten,” she said. “I’m actually okay now. Do you think you can come back in another week?”
Beatriz nodded. Sometimes it went this way with los viejos, their memory not what it used to be.
As Beatriz turned toward the door, Marilys called out, “Since you’re here, would you like to join me for the telenovela?”
“Ay, mi vida, no,” Beatriz said, softening her voice so as not to appear irritated. “I have a lot of work to do tonight.”
The word on the street was that things were supposed to have gotten better after the worst of the Special Period ended in 1994. But for Beatriz, this was when the built-up stresses really began to take their toll. Within a year, her husband left her, claiming incompatibility, and her parents, who had shared their two-bedroom apartment with them and whose constant bickering over finances had certainly not helped the situation, died within days of each other. Although Marisol, age seventeen and at the height of her teenage angst, had frequently argued with all of them, she nonetheless cried for a week straight. Her paintings went from colorful cubist portraits to dark post-modern smears of varying shades of gray, and then over time, she just stopped painting altogether.
Two years after her grandparents died, and against her mother’s objections, Marisol accompanied Beatriz to the Colón Cemetery. It was their pre-assigned time to retrieve the bones, making space for the bodies of the newly deceased. When the caskets were opened, the half-decayed corpses Marisol saw — rotting flesh still clinging to their bones as an other-worldly stench swirled around them — made her want to run away. She told Beatriz she wanted to flee not just the cemetery but also the island itself, where everything — from buying milk after the age of seven (when it was no longer available through rationing) to purchasing paper and paints for artwork — was a struggle, and rest, even after death, remained elusive.