“Right there, I decided to become a nun.”
She decided it in silence, counting on her Roman Catholic and Apostolic mother’s complicity. First, she was put in a convent on Calle 23, in the heart of Havana that didn’t let in sunlight or even the sound of swallows chirping.
Her brother Baudilio went there with four drunk friends to rescue her and bring her back to the outside world. But the nuns refused to open the doors; they didn’t let him see her, and everything ended when her brother, sauced with rum, unloaded the cartridge of a machine gun on the convent’s old wall and left, cursing the priests and swearing he would return one day to remove her by force.
Perhaps that was why the convent’s superior decided to send La Baudilia to Madrid, to a convent on San Cosme and San Damián Street, where they worked hard and only spoke of essential matters. That was where La Baudilia’s crisis of conscience began. Why was she there? Why should she hand her life over to God in such an absurd way? She endured some very agonizing days due to the immensity of her doubts. She even doubted Saint Teresa, who was her inspiration on dark nights. On one of those nights, she couldn’t take it anymore and went to the convent’s altar, seeking an answer.
The altar was dark, only a small candle at the feet of a plaster Saint Teresa shed a little light.
La Baudilia fell in desperation before Christ on the cross and said:
“Lord, take pity on me. If you are real, if you exist, show yourself right now and give me the strength to follow this path.”
But God did not show himself, nor was his voice heard, nor did any light flicker strangely.
Then she turned toward the darkest part of the chapel and spoke thus:
“Satan, I am not afraid of you. If you truly exist, turn yourself into flesh and blood so I can see you and be your eternal servant.”
But the devil didn’t appear either. Nothing.
The next day, she packed her belongings, dressed in lay clothes, and went straight to the airport to return to Cuba, to her brother, and to the revolution.
That was her story.
“None of it exists,” she said to us, at last, leaning against the front door. “God, the devil, it’s all a lie.”
And she left. Rosa and I leaned out the window to see her walk off down Calle Mariel. She was wearing men’s jeans, a Caribbean cruise shirt that was too large for her, electrician boots, a hairstyle like a cocky Frenchman, and her gait was aggressive and shameless like a tough guy from the Pogolotti neighborhood.
Then, the Quintelas and I looked down at our hands in silence, looked in each other’s faces again in silence, and understood, in silence, how terrible it was. How terribly and expertly the devil worked.
AN AXE TO THE SIDEBURNS
The door to Alipio’s barbershop opened first thing in the morning and a man with a thug-like face entered, dressed in a blue security guard uniform with a holster full of bullets from which hung a Star handgun in its case. Alipio saw him arrive and felt a chill rise up through his legs and take root in his heart, which skipped a beat.
It was him. Alipio had not forgotten that ocher-colored face, the hairy ears, the gold tooth, the thin mustache that had been so in vogue back in the 1950s. It was him. Thirty years was not enough to change his basic characteristics. It was him. Here, in Miami, he was the security guard of some cemetery or clothing store; over there, in Cuba, before the revolution, he was Captain Ovidio Samá of the Military Intelligence Service with an evil, ferocious, and mean reputation.
For the first time in a long time, Alipio thought again about his son. He would have been forty-eight years old, and with the gift he’d had for numbers, he would perhaps now be an excellent economist or a brilliant accountant. That was what he was studying at the University when they killed him. Accounting.
“Do you want to sit down?” Alipio asked. “There’s another barber, but he gets here at ten.”
“I just came for a shave.” The man said in a raspy voice that matched his looks.
“Then sit down. I’ll be with you right away.”
The man sat down in Alipio’s chair and closed his eyes as if he were about to sleep.
“Do you want a very close shave?”
“Yes.”
Alipio took his razor and began to sweep it along his leather apron. He had spent many years looking for this man who he now had in his hands. He had gone to Jacksonville because they told him he lived there. Later, they told him he was in New Jersey, but there, they told him he had gone to Kansas to be a nightclub security guard. He ran around Kansas with a gun and a long sharp Sevillana knife. He visited every bar, pool hall, and seedy den, asking about that damned Ovidio Samá who in 1957 had killed his son during a university protest. Later, he stopped looking for him, since the latest reports said he was drug trafficking in Venezuela.
But now, fate placed Samá in his hands. A son. His only child. What he had most loved in his life. And this abominable man had emptied a machine gun into his son’s body, leaving him almost unrecognizable.
“Do you want me to clear out your blackheads?”
“Don’t worry about that. I just want a shave.”
“Has it been a long time since you came over?”
“Almost thirty years,” he replied. “I was one of the first ones to leave. How about you?”
“I came later.” Alipio said. “I believed in it at the beginning, but later became disillusioned.”
“That happened to a lot of people.”
They didn’t talk anymore. Alipio applied the shaving cream, brushed it on, and with his razor in hand began to outline the right side burn. This would be the right time. A little bit of pressure in his arm and that head would fall lifeless over the white sheet. But, then what? No one would believe it was an accident. No one would understand that revenge that had lasted for thirty years. Alipio swept the razor clean across the man’s right cheek, then he noticed a cyst on his chin and it took all his self-control to avoid it.
The man remained silent, with his eyes closed, as if intensely enjoying the coolness of the cream and the pleasant cutting of the razor. From now on, any moment was right for Alipio. Thirty years. Thirty years. He moved to the other cheek and shaved him in three precise motions.
“Your mustache, do you want it like that or shorter?”
“It’s fine like that,” the man said. “I’ve always worn my mustache like Clark Gable.”
Nonetheless, Alipio took the scissors and cut some hairs from the mustache and the nose, in addition to trimming the customers’ bushy eyebrows. He couldn’t. Now he realized that he couldn’t. No one would understand his story. He would spend the rest of his life in jail and, worse still, he would see the blood run, albeit the blood of a thug, but blood that would be weighed just the same when the time came in Heaven for a final account of his life.
Alipio finished. He dried the man’s face with a clean towel and removed the sheet from his chest. Then he held out a mirror and the man looked at himself for a few seconds.
“Satisfied?”
“More or less,” the thug said.
“That’s three dollars.”
The man took out a wallet and removed a five dollar bill.
“Keep the change,” he said.
“Thank you,” Alipio mumbled, a shadow falling over his face.
The man went over to the barbershop’s big mirror and adjusted his shirt collar and tie. Then he said: “I came here because they told me you wanted to find me and kill me. But now you realize it’s not so easy to kill.”
THE ILLUSTRATED WOMAN
Taking license with Ray Bradbury