It was during this time that my mother died. I had her frozen and brought from my hometown to Havana, where I buried her in one of the niches in the Falla Bonet mausoleum, between bags of aspirins and cough syrup. My mother could never have imagined her eternal sleep on Carrara marble.
A few days later, Lucecita and I got married in a church. It was a sumptuous wedding and I wore a new black suit and turquoise tie. Five months later, Pascual Jeremías was born.
You’re a winner! my mother had written to me in a letter shortly before her death. That’s how I felt too, proud, so much that I’d forgotten I was cross-eyed, I’d forgotten my suffering, I’d forgotten the injustices. I’d begun to look at life as an endless spending spree. There was no one taking care of my heart, no one to give me a wake-up call.
Soon, however, laziness was catching up with me. Little by little, Lucecita had been taking over the reins of the business. She knew exactly how to fix the day’s receipts, and with great care she’d divvy the Grail’s share, the money for the inspectors, money for bribes to keep everything quiet, and, of course, money for us.
“With the extra money, we’ll be rich,” Lucecita told me one night.
“What if they find us out?” I asked fearfully.
“How will they find out?” she replied, as she kissed my waist and took my glasses off for the first time. “Are you going to talk? Am I going to talk? Is Jeremías going to talk...?”
I know, of course, that life’s adventure is filled with big risks. But our good fortune went out with the old man; it was flushed right down the toilet. We did everything we could so that he wouldn’t talk. But the old man put off his antagonism toward the dwarves long enough to send them messages. He saved every jar of mayonnaise, every bottle of mustard, every container we threw away, and he sent them down with every flush of the toilet, each one stuffed with a letter that told about our various transgressions.
The first warning came the Monday that Jeremías disappeared. I tried in vain to find him. I went to the Packard, searched his room, then checked out every corner of the Prado where he made his conquests. Nobody had seen him since Friday. I visited Pascualito at his spot in front of the train station. I tried to hug him but he held back. He talked about a moon so cruel that it poisons men’s hearts. He told me about how certain waters can wash shame away.
“Something strange is going on,” I told Lucecita when I got home.
“Jeremías is in love and Pascualito is a neurotic dwarf,” she responded, trying to calm me down.
“Dark times are coming,” I said.
“No, our son won’t be subject to the same struggles as you and me.”
“Dark times are coming,” I repeated.
And I was right. At dawn, we were attacked by a horde of dwarves. Within minutes they’d taken everything. A bigbreasted female dwarf snatched Pascual Jeremías from his crib. Then they took Lucecita and Reinita Príncipe. They took the old man too, wrapped in his map of Havana. I was left without the strength or will to act.
That’s when Pascualito came in and repeated what he’d said about the cruel moon and signaled for me to pick him up. I kissed him on the cheek, and I don’t remember anything after that.
I woke up in a shed made of ice deep in a cave. My body shivered. My good friend Jeremías approached me. And, my God! He was now a despicable dwarf! Jeremías had short legs, an old double-breasted coat over his tiny body, and his ears were mangled. He was wearing flannel boots instead of two-toned shoes, and he seemed so resigned that I was terrified.
“I don’t exist anymore,” he said, helping me up.
My scream chilled the cave even more. I too was a dwarf! I too was a dwarf with lips twisted in confusion, a dwarf without eyelashes.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said like a priest, and then he talked about Christ’s commandments, about punishment and absolution. He said Pontius Pilate was our wasteland’s patron saint.
“How long will we be like this?” I sobbed.
“Forever,” was his reply.
Today there was a slaughter. The slaughterhouse is next to this freezer and from dawn through the rest of the live long day, the cows’ mooing has been tormenting me. I wonder if cows think about life and death. But those are subtleties that don’t really matter. My tragedy is double: I no longer breathe Havana’s air and I’m despised. The dwarves — I still talk as if I’m not one of them — have a unique standard of beauty. They love their short bodies and the familial shine in their eyes.
I have to do the worst jobs: carry boxes, cut out cow livers, cremate their bones, and slice off bull’s tongues.
“The Big Show’s about to begin,” Jeremías tells me. He’s still my good friend.
I’ll finish up these notes right now and sit myself in front of the TV — it’s the only entertainment allowed — where I’ll be face to face with Lucecita. It’s a show produced just for underground TV. They’ll introduce her as the World Famous Vedette. She’ll play up her underappreciated sensuality. When I see her, I’ll forget all about the real woman, the lover I so desired, and merely ask myself if my Pascual Jeremías was able to save himself like his mother.
Jeremías yells at me that the show is starting. I’d give anything to stop hearing Glenn Miller, that same melody that always comes over the loudspeakers! I want to have wings and fly, to escape with my son as if he were a sacred feline and climb the mountain that’s Havana, and be a man. My Lucecita sings the show’s theme song and I travel through space and light, to the dream on the screen, and love her.
Translation by Achy Obejas
The last passenger
by Ena LucÍa Portela
Vedado
It’s well known that the guy never confessed. But neither did he ever deny the charges that were leveled against him. The night he was arrested, he said, “Fuck you, dick heads, I shit on the whore who birthed all of you motherfuckers!” Or something like that. And after that initial statement, he never uttered anything vaguely coherent again. Once he was at the police station at Zapata and F streets, between the braying and the shrieking, he got obsessed with a certain clattering caused by the vermin whose little feet galloped up his spine — plick! plack! plick! plack! — and dicked with him all night — the bastards! — not letting him sleep, driving him crazy — hee! hee! hee! — crazy, just fucking wacko... All of a sudden, he’d howl frenetically, roll his eyes back, and hit himself on his temples with his fists; he’d even foam at the mouth. It was quite the spectacle!
According to what I’ve been told, there was no human way to get him off that. They interrogated him without rest for hours and hours, for whole days. They showed him photographs of his victims, exactly how he’d left them (if the facts I have are true, those photos are even more hair-raising than the ones of the Tate-LaBianca murders), they smeared the photos under his nostrils, they threatened to crack his head open like a pumpkin and even gave him a few good slaps — and nothing. The guy never responded. Maybe he was making up the stuff about the galloping vermin so as to avoid responsibility for his actions, maybe it wasn’t so much that he was pretending, or that he was bald-face lying, but that... heck, who knows! The forensic psychiatrist concluded there was nothing insane about him, that the guy was fine in the head — more precisely, that he was perfectly capable of distinguishing right from wrong when he did what he did.