“Papa, everyone is going to the movies today. They’re showing a Red Ryder film.”
“There’s no money,” Papa Lorenzo said without looking up from his newspaper.
Agar knew he was running a risk if he persisted. Nonetheless, he tried again: “Papa. don’t you have seventy cents? That’s all a movie costs.”
Papa Lorenzo looked at him, irritated. Then he turned around on the sofa, showing him his back.
“Don’t go.,” he said from there. “The Siboney Indians never went to the movies, and they were happy.”
Mama Pepita dropped the pots and pans and came out of the kitchen.
“You’re a monster!” She yelled. “Your answer to everything is the Indians. I haven’t worn a new dress for five years, simply because the Indians walked around naked — and they were happy! And for six months I’ve been walking around with this horrible rat’s nest on my head, simply because the Indians didn’t get permanents — and they were happy! Everything goes back to the Indians. But the Indians are kaput!”
She was yelling.
Papa Lorenzo, his face buried in the back of the sofa, pretended he was asleep. In the end, he opened his eyes, feigned a TV commercial smile, and said: “There’s no money.”
Mama Pepita grumbled again and began to circle the sofa, looking for Papa Lorenzo’s eyes to throw his indolence in his face. She finally managed to irritate him. So Papa Lorenzo leapt from the sofa and ran around the room and started to turn everything over shrieking:
“THERE ISN’T ANY!”
And then, he pulled the drawers from the closet, and started to empty the Closet of Souvenirs, screaming:
“THERE ISN’T ANY!” and throwing Bukharin and Kropotkin’s books.
“THERE ISN’T ANY!” he said, throwing Stalin’s photos against the walls.
“THERE ISN’T ANY!” he said, tossing up the old communist newspapers.
“THERE ISN’T ANY. THERE ISN’T ANY. THERE ISN’T ANY. THERE ISN’T ANY!”
And at last exhausted, he fell over the mess of clothing and red books, huffing.
“I’m disgusted,” Papa Lorenzo then said. “My life is a real son of a bitch.”
At Sixteen, Run from that Ox So Lean!
Agar took advantage of the confusion and slipped out to the yard; Papa Lorenzo’s screams could still be heard from inside the house. He lay down at last, behind Mama Pepita’s wash tub. From there, he contemplated an incredibly blue sky with some incredibly white clouds.
I’ll play the cloud game, he thought.
It wasn’t hard for him to find Sergeant York, with his helmet and backpack, firing from the sky.
The cloud, in its turtle-pace path, fell apart and later became an angry Apache. And then it became Tonka: the wild horse. And later it was a spider in a circle of rocks. In the end, it took on the shape of a large rabbit. It was Bugs Bunny, “the Lucky Wabbit.”
“So long, folks!” Bugs Bunny said, lifting a hand made of white smoke. “We’re going to the land of giant carrots. ”
Papa Lorenzo went by too, followed by Agrispina Pérez Pérez and the witch from “Macabre Stories” and the bicephalous man from Finstown.
He caressed his penis. Now he could take it out without any problem. There, at the end of the yard, Mama Pepita would never be able to surprise him and he would be able to put it away before she could see him.
So he took it, definitively, in his hands, and rubbed it like a good Boy Scout rubs a pine stick to make a fire in the dark forest.
He was just playing.
Because he never felt that ticklish sensation that Tin Marbán mentioned.
He was like that for a while, rubbing himself as he reviewed the clouds, absorbed. Discovering in them new faces, objects and characters that took shape in their slow march toward the West. He closed his eyes.
The great star Tongolele, who announced Sensat oil, found him in his boudoir.
“Hello!” she exclaimed, disconcerted. “Were you here?”
Quasimodo saw her lift her leg and undo her garter straps. She was then barefoot on the rug, and walked around the room, with her zipper down.
She turned toward Quasimodo then, and with an air of indifference, she took off her bra. Quasimodo contemplated her tits shaking freely and threw himself on them.
“What are you doing, you monster!”
He trapped her between his hands. He could feel his heart beating at the tip of his phallus. His gigantic, eighteen inch phallus.
Tongolele fell, definitively conquered, onto the grass of his boudoir. Quasimodo violently entered that soft body, listening to the crunching of membranes and the squealing of organs. Tongolele’s organs, the great star of Sensat Oil. The woman with the fabulous tits who —
Suddenly, he shuddered.
Inside his head came an unexpected somersault.
He felt that something inside him was coming loose.
Something was being unleashed after having been shut up for thousands of years. New. Unknown. Something that shook him to the marrow of his bones and caused strong shudders of pleasure.
Something had erupted from his deepest insides. And now in a grandiose stupor, he looked at his hands.
Thick, white lava.
Sticky lava like the saliva from a cold.
Like paste itself.
He understood everything at once during that decisive moment. With an unfamiliar calm, he stood up and went to the gate of the yard.
Then he said, solemnly and seriously: Ladies and Gentlemen.
As if before the Grand Jury of Public Opinion.
And he started running forever.
The sun was beating down hard on the wild rosemary, and its rays were melting over the countryside in purple and greenish lights. And from a wall, a lizard took out its red tie in the intermittent signal of “danger,” “danger,” “danger.”
HAVANA, 1968
THE MAGIC STILL
THE DEVIL AND THE NUN
They called her La Baudilia, because she was the exact female version of her brother, that famous Baudilio Cartablanca, who later ended a long career as a Venezuelan revolutionary, dying a renegade. She had the same sharp nose, the same bulging eyes, and the same measured and gentle way of speaking that hid, or tried to hide, a naive self-sufficiency.
I met her at the Quintelas’ home, in the Apolo neighborhood, and I quickly hit it off with her because of her open and aggressive spirit, and the fact that she was a great storyteller.
One of those stories was about her own life.
She said she had come to know love late in life because, as a girl, her brother scared off her boyfriends. She said it with a smile, although with a distant note of bitterness. The last of her suitors was a young man, Consolación, from her town, who dressed very elegantly, and always showed up with a handful of roses, smelling of French cologne. He seemed like one of the knights of old. His relationship with her did not go beyond an inoffensive clutching of hands and a whispering exchange of songs. Their courtship lasted three months, until the day on which Baudilio, her ferocious brother, came home early from a political meeting and confronted the young man with a disdainful expression.
The suitor was a refined young man. He crossed his legs in the English manner and spoke with the voice of a provincial poet. Baudilio looked him over, found out he was a symbolist poet, touched the feeble muscles of his arm, and at last said mockingly, “So this is the little fag you found for yourself.”
It was the end. The young man wanted to protest, but he couldn’t. Instead of daring to respond to the insolence with a strong word or a punch in the mouth, he left the house in shame, tears in his eyes, and never returned.