Dirty Havana Trilogy

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Chapter One

MAROONED IN NO-MAN'S-LAND

1:1 / New Things in My Life

Early that morning, there was a pink postcard sticking out of my mailbox, from Mark Pawson in London. In big letters he had written, "June 5, 1993, some bastard stole the front wheel of my bicycle." A year later, and that business was still bothering him. I thought about the little club near Mark's apartment, where every night Rodolfo would strip and do a sexy dance while I banged out weird tropical-improvisational music on bongo drums, shaking rattles, making guttural noises, trying anything else I could think of. We had fun, drank free beer, and got paid twenty-five pounds a night. Too bad it couldn't have lasted longer. But black dancers were a hot commodity, and Rodolfo left for Liverpool to teach modern dance. I was broke, and I stayed at Mark's until I got bored and came back.

    Now I was training myself to take nothing seriously. A man's allowed to make lots of small mistakes, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if the mistakes are big ones and they weigh him down, his only solution is to stop taking himself seriously. It's the only way to avoid suffering--suffering, prolonged, can be fatal.

    I stuck the postcard up behind the door, put on a tape of Armstrong's "Snake Rag," felt much better, and stopped thinking. I don't have to think while I'm listening to music. But jazz like this cheers me up too and makes me feel like dancing. I had a cup of tea for breakfast, took a shit, read some gay poems by Allen Ginsberg, and was amazed by "Sphincter" and "Personals ad." I hope my good old asshole holds out . But I couldn't be amazed for long, because two very young friends of mine showed up, wanting to know if I thought it would be a good idea to launch a raft from Cabo San Antonio heading for Cabo Catoche, or whether it would be better to take off north directly for Miami. Those were the days of the exodus, the summer of '94. The day before, a girlfriend had called me to say, "What'll we do now that all the men and kids are leaving? It's going to be hard." Things weren't like that, exactly. Lots of people were staying, the ones who couldn't live anywhere else.

    Well, I've done a little sailing on the Gulf and I know that way's a trap. Showing them the map, I convinced them not to try for Mexico. And I went down to see their big six-person raft. It was a flimsy thing made of wood and rope lashed to three airplane tires. They were planning to take a flashlight, compass, and flares. I bought some slices of melon, went over to my ex-wife's house. We're good friends now. We get along best that way. She wasn't home. I ate some melon and left the rest. I like to leave tracks. I put the leftover slices in the fridge and got out fast. I was happy in that house for two years. It's not good for me to be there by myself.

    Margarita lives nearby. We hadn't seen each other in a while. When I got there, she was washing clothes and sweating. She was glad to see me and she went to take a shower. We had been lovers on the sly--sorry, I have to call it something--for almost twenty years, and when we get together, first we fuck and then we have a nice relaxed conversation. So I wouldn't let her shower. I stripped her and ran my tongue all over her. She did the same: she stripped me and ran her tongue all over me. I was covered in sweat, too, from all the biking and the sun. She was getting healthier, putting weight back on. She wasn't all skin and bones the way she used to be. Her buttocks were firm, round, and solid again, even though she was forty-six. Black women are like that. All fiber and muscle, hardly any fat, clean skin, no zits. I couldn't resist the temptation, and after playing with her for a little while, after she had already come three times, I eased myself into her ass, very slowly, greasing myself well with cunt juice. Little by little. Pushing in and pulling out and fondling her clit with my hand. She was in agony, but she couldn't get enough. She was biting the pillow, but she pushed her ass up, begging me to get all the way in. She's fantastic, that woman. No one gets off the way she does. We were linked like that for a long time. When I pulled out, I was all smeared in shit, and it disgusted her. Not me. I have a strong sense of the absurd, and it keeps me on guard against that kind of thing. Sex isn't for the squeamish. Sex is an exchange of fluids, saliva, breath and smells, urine, semen, shit, sweat, microbes, bacteria. Or there is no sex. If it's just tenderness and ethereal spirituality, then it can never be more than a sterile parody of the real act. Nothing. We took a shower, and then we were ready to have coffee and talk. She wanted me to go with her to El Rincón. She had to keep a vow she made to San Lázaro and she asked me to go with her the next day. Really, she asked so sweetly I said I would. That's what I love about Cuban women--there must be other women like them too, in America, maybe, or Asia--they're so sweet you can never say no when they ask you for something. It's not that way with European women. European women are so cold they give you a chance to say NO at every turn, and you feel good about it too.

    Later I came home. The afternoon was already cooling off. I was hungry, which was no surprise, since all I had in my stomach was tea, a slice of melon, and some coffee. At home I ate a piece of bread and washed it down with another cup of tea. I was getting used to lots of new things in my life. Getting used to poverty, to taking things in stride. I was training myself to be less ambitious, because if I didn't, I'd never make it. In the old days, I always used to need things. I was dissatisfied, wanting everything at once, struggling for more. Now I was learning how not to have everything at once, how to live on almost nothing. If it were any other way, I'd still be stuck with my tragic view of life. That's why poverty didn't bother me anymore.

    Then Luisa called. She was coming for the weekend. And Luisa's a sweetheart. Too young for me, maybe, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. It started to rain, thunder crashed, the wind came in gusts, and the humidity was terrible. That's the way it is in the Caribbean. It'll be sunny, then all of a sudden the wind picks up and it starts to rain and you're in the middle of a hurricane. I needed some rum, but there was no way to get it. I had money, but there was nothing to buy. I lay down to sleep. I was sweaty and the sheets were dirty, but I like the smell of my own sweat and dirt. It turns me on to smell myself. And Luisa was coming any minute. I think I fell asleep. If the wind got stronger and ripped the tiles off the roof, I wouldn't care. Nothing matters.

1:2 / Memories of Tenderness

I was looking for something good on the radio, and I stopped at a station playing Latin music, salsa, son , that kind of thing. The music ended, and the laid-back guy with the rough voice started to talk, the one who'll go on about anything, his kids, his bike, what he did last night. His voice is the kind that gets under your skin, and he talks tough and slangy, like he's never been anywhere but Central Havana, the kind of brother who'll come up and say, "Hey, man, what you need? I got a deal for you."

    My wife and I listened to him, and we really liked it. Nobody on the radio was doing what he was doing. He'd play good Latin music, say something, pause for a minute, put on another record, and then it was on to the next thing. No long explanations or showing off. He seemed smart, and I'm always happy to come across smart, proud black guys, instead of the kind who won't look you in the eye and who have that pathetic cringing slave mentality.

    Well, we'd always listen to him at home, back when we were happy and life was good, no matter that I was earning an unhealthy and cowardly living as a journalist, always making concessions, everything censored, and it was killing me because each day I felt more like I was prostituting myself, collecting my daily ration of kicks in the ass.

    Then she went back to New York, wanting to be seen and heard. Just like everybody else. Nobody wants to be condemned to darkness and silence. They all want to be seen and heard, want a turn in the spotlight. And if possible, they'd like to be bought, hired, seduced. Did I write "everybody wants"? That's not quite right. It should have been: " We all want to be seen and heard."

    She's a sculptor and a painter. In the art world, that makes her "popular." And that's supposed to be a good thing. It's comforting to be popular. Anyway, she left again. And I was kicked out of journalism because each day I was more reckless, and reckless types weren't wanted. Well, it's a long story, but in the end what they told me was: "We need careful, reasonable people, people with good sense. We don't want anybody reckless, because the country's going through a very sensitive and important phase in its history."

    Around the same time, I found out that the guy with the rough, boozy voice wasn't black. He was white, young, a college student, well-educated. But his persona suited him.

    So I was very lonely. That's what always happens when you love holding nothing back, like a kid. Your love goes off to New York for a long time--goes to hell, you might say--and you're left lonelier and more lost than a shipwreck in the middle of the Gulf Stream. The difference is that a kid recovers quickly, whereas a forty-four-year-old guy like me keeps kicking himself, and thinks, "Not again" --and wonders how he could be such an idiot.

    The fact that it was Jacqueline made it even worse, because she holds an important record in my manly existence: she once had twelve orgasms with me, one after the other. She could have had more, but I couldn't hold out, and I went and had mine. If I had waited for her, she might have gotten close to twenty. Other times she had eight or ten. She never broke her record. Because we were happy, we got a lot of joy out of sex. The thing with the twelve orgasms wasn't a competition. It was a game. A great sport for keeping young and fit. I always say, "Don't compete. Play."

    Well, in any case, Jacqueline was too sophisticated for 1994 Havana. She was born in Manhattan, descended from a mix of three generations of English, Italians, Spaniards, French, and Cubans originally from Santiago de Cuba who scattered toward New Orleans and all over the Caribbean, as far away as Venezuela and Colombia. A crazy family. Her father had been in Normandy, was a D-day veteran. Anyway, she's a complicated woman, and too much work for a simple tropical male like me. She would say, "Oh, there's nobody sophisticated left in Havana. People just keep getting tackier, shabbier, more countrified." Something wasn't right about that. Either it was Jacqueline's elegance, or everybody else's tackiness, or my stupidity, because as far as I could tell, everything was fine and I was happy, even if the poverty got worse every time you turned around.

    When I was left alone, I had lots of time to think. I lived in the best possible place in the world: an apartment on the roof of an old eight-story building in Central Havana. In the evening, I'd pour myself a glass of very strong rum on the rocks, and I'd write hard-boiled poems (sometimes part hard-boiled, part melancholy), which I'd leave scattered all over the place. Or I'd write letters. At that time of day, everything turns golden, and I'd survey my surroundings. To the north, the blue Caribbean, always shifting, the water a mix of gold and sky. To the south and east, the old city, eaten away by the passage of time, the salt air and wind, and neglect. To the west, the new city, tall buildings. Each place with its own people, their own sounds, their own music. I liked to drink my rum in the golden dusk and look out the windows or sit for a long time on the terrace, watching the mouth of the port and the old medieval castles of naked stone, which in the smooth light of afternoon seem even more beautiful and eternal. It all got me thinking with a certain clarity. I'd ask myself why life was the way it was for me, and try to come to some kind of understanding. I like to step back, observe Pedro Juan from afar.

    It was those evenings of rum and golden light and hard-boiled or melancholy poems and letters to distant friends that helped make me sure of myself. If you have ideas of your own--even only a few--you have to realize that you'll always be coming up against detractors, people who'll stand in your way, cut you down to size, "help you understand" that what you're saying is nothing, or that you should avoid a certain person because he's crazy, a fag, a traitor, a loser; somebody else might be a pervert and a voyeur; somebody else a thief; somebody else a santero , spiritist, druggie; somebody else trash, shameless, a slut, a dyke, rude. Those people reduce the world to a few hybrid types, colorless, boring, and "perfect." And they want to turn you into a snob and a prick too. They swallow you up in their private society, a society for ignoring and supressing everyone else. And they tell you, "That's life, my friend, a process of natural selection. The truth is ours, and everybody else can go fuck themselves." And if they spend thirty-five years hammering that into your skull, later, when you're on your own, you think you're better than everybody else and you're impoverished and you miss out on the joy of variety, when variety is the spice of life, the acceptance that we're not all alike and that if we were, life would be very dull.

    Well, then the guy with the rough, boozy voice turned up on the radio again, fooling around a little, and slotted in a Puerto Rican salsa orchestra, and I danced for a while. Until I asked myself, "What the hell am I doing here dancing all alone?" Then I turned the radio off and went out. "I'm going to Mantilla," I thought. I roamed around until I caught one bus and then another, and I got to Mantilla, which is on the outskirts of the city, and which I like because out there you can see red earth and the green of the land and herds of cattle. I have some friends in the neighborhood--I used to live there, years ago. I went to see Joseíto, a taxi driver who lost his job in the crisis and now was gambling for a living. He'd been supporting himself gambling for two years. In Mantilla, there were lots of illegal little gambling clubs. The police made a sweep sometimes and wiped out two or three, locked everybody up for a few days, and then let them go. I had three hundred pesos in my pocket, and Joseíto convinced me to play. He was carrying ten thousand himself. He was in it for the big money. We went to one of his lucky houses. And he was lucky. I lost all my money in fifteen minutes. I don't know why the hell I let Joseíto drag me along. I never win anything when I gamble, but he was raking it in from the start. By the time I left, he had already pocketed five thousand pesos. Lucky bastard. With his kind of luck, I'd be riding high. Well, he has a good life in Mantilla, and he always says, "Oh, Pedro Juan, if I'd had any idea, I would've gotten rid of that fucking taxi a long time ago."

    I was pissed about the money. It bothers me to lose. I get irritated every time, and it bothered me that Joseíto could make a living so easily, whereas whenever I play a hand of cards or pick up some dice I start losing right away. I'm not a jinx, because I give everybody else good luck. It happens all the time. Once I bought an old, beat-up car and I left it parked out in front of the building for a week, just sitting there; it had two or three things wrong with it, and fixing it was going to be expensive. Well, a few days later, an old Spaniard came up to me to tell me that everybody in the neighborhood was playing the car's license plate number--03657--in the lottery. Laughing, the old man said, "We're going to have to pay you a commission, Pedro Juan. Last night the butcher won three thousand pesos on 57. What do you think about that?"

    "What do I think? I think the son of a bitch should at least pay for my repairs. The car's been sitting there for a week because I'm so broke."

    "Damn! Everybody making money on your car, and you making shit."

    That's right. I'm hopeless at gambling, and at a whole lot of other things too.

    When I left the little club where José was getting rich, I had a few coins in my pocket. Enough to take the bus back to downtown Havana. But I needed a shot of rum. Losing had really pissed me off, and I was feeling aggressive. A little rum calms me down. "I'll go see Rene," I said to myself. Rene (I just call him Rene because he's a good friend) is a fine press photographer. We used to work together a lot, years ago. But then he was caught taking nude photos. They were simple photos of naked girls. No fucking, no black dick sucking, nothing like that. Just nude studies of beautiful girls. There was a scandal. He was kicked out of the Party, ejected from the profession, and expelled from the Association of Journalists. The last straw was when his wife kicked him out of the house and told him she had become "disenchanted" with him. Well, that's how it was. Cuba at the height of its existence as socialist construct maintained a virginal purity, in exquisite Inquisitorial style. And all of a sudden, the guy realized that his life was over. He was living in a dump in Mantilla with a fucked-up son who supported himself by selling grass, but who spent more time in jail than he spent in their dump selling the stuff he brought back from Baracoa. He sold coconut oil, coffee, and chocolate too, on the black market, but he made his real money dealing in excellent mountain weed and he brought so much back that he could sell it cheap.

    Rene was alone now. His druggie son had left by raft for Miami in the exodus of August 1994. And he had no idea what had happened to him.

    "I don't know where he is, whether he got to Miami, or whether he was taken to the naval base at Guantáinamo. Or whether he's in Panama. I have no idea. To hell with it, Pedro Juan. To hell with everybody. When he was here, he spent all his time telling me that if it wasn't for him, I'd be out on the street. Everybody can go fuck themselves! I've gotten the shit kicked out of me so many times I'm sick of them all."

    He started to cry. He was sobbing. I thought he was probably stoned.

    "Come on, Rene, I'm your friend. Cut it out, man. Let's go get some rum."

    "There's a little left in the kitchen. Bring it here."

    It was rat poison. Half a bottle of cockroach repellent. I swallowed down a shot.

    "Rene, for God's sake, you're killing yourself with this aguardiente . What the fuck is it made of?"

    "Sugar, believe it or not. My next door neighbor makes it. I know it's shit, but I'm used to it now. It doesn't seem so bad to me. Fancy a joint? There are some papers in the drawer."

    "Why are you talking like that? Since when are you the big Spaniard?"

    "I picked it up from the whores who come here. They're so dumb they talk to me like the Spaniards who hang out with them. They're always saying `have a light ?' `good chap,' `let's have a word.' They're crazy. So am I. I'm crazy and I talk just like those Spaniards and their black bitches."

    We lit the joints and we sat in silence. I shut my eyes to savor mine. That Baracoa weed has a smell and taste like nothing else. But it's strong. I didn't inhale much. I was thinking I should go to Baracoa and bring back a kilo or two. Rene's son would bring back coconut oil, coffee, and chocolate too because the smell of the coffee masked the smell of the weed. I could do the same thing. And I'd make a few pesos. That's what I was thinking when I felt Rene get up, pull a photo album out of a drawer, and hand it to me.

    "Look at this, Pedro Juan."

    He was already stumbling over his words, after all the aguardiente and the grass. He dropped into his armchair again, flattened and hopeless. I had to get the hell out of there. The air in that place reeked of shit and despair. And it's contagious. It's like breathing in a poisonous gas that gets in your blood and suffocates you. I couldn't keep talking to Rene. I needed a buddy who was tough. The kind of guy who could get me out of my slump and away from all my memories of happiness. I needed to make myself hard like a rock.

    I opened the album. It was a collection of nudes. There were at least three hundred of them, in every position. Blacks, mulattas, whites, brunettes, blondes. Smiling ones and serious ones. Some were in pairs, kissing or embracing or feeling each other's tits.

    "So what is this, Rene?"

    "Whores, man. A catalog of whores. Lots of taxi drivers keep photos like this for the tourists. They advertise the product around town, the tourist picks what he wants, and they take him to the right place."

    "Then you're shooting pictures of stars! Rene, photographer to the stars!"

    "Rene, photographer to the whores! I'm finished, man. I'm washed up."

    "Don't talk shit, Rene. If you're making good money that way ..."

    "You know I'm an artist. This is crap, kid."

    "Listen, you're driving me crazy. Don't be such an asshole. Take advantage of these whores. If I were you, I'd take the damn photos for the catalogs, and then I'd take good nude shots, powerful ones of whores in their beds, in their rooms, in their world, in black and white, and then in a few years I'd put together an incredible exhibition: `Whores of Havana.' And you'd be launched with the kind of show even Sebastião Salgado couldn't put together."

    "In this country? The whores of Havana?"

    "In this country or wherever. Work and then find a place to show your work. Then if they shut you down here, go somewhere else, anywhere. But whatever you do, get off your ass and out of this fucking room."

    "Well ... it's not a bad idea."

    "Of course it's not. Try it, and I promise you'll get back on track. Listen, did your son have partners in Baracoa?"

    "What do you want to do?"

    "Bring back a little weed. I'm cleaned out, Rene. I have to make a few pesos."

    "If you go, look up Ramoncito El Loco. He lives on the way out of Baracoa, near La Farola. Everybody knows who he is. Tell him you're my partner, and that this is for me. That way he'll give you a deal. But don't hang out with him, because everybody knows the old man's always been a dealer. You'll get busted."

    "All right, brother. Take care of yourself. We'll be in touch."

    I had to hurry to Baracoa. After I took care of business, maybe I could find myself one of those big-assed Indian women who make you feel like you've got the sweetest dick in the world. The Indians there have barely mixed with whites or blacks. A little trip would be worth the trouble. The people there are different.

Copyright © 1998 Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.