Zafra Lit

"Bad Blood" by Rebeca Murga

2010-09-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

Rebeca Murga (La Habana, Cuba, 1973) is professor at the "Félix Varela" Pedagogical University in Santa Clara, with a masters in "the communicative approach" to teaching languages and literature. She has won numerous awards in national and provincial contests for narrative and criticism, and in 2005 won the international award for crime fiction at Semana Negra in Gijón. Her publications include three short story collections, the novel Historias al margen and the book of literary journalism El esclavo y la palabra. She also blogs (in Spanish) at Diez Negritos.

---

"After all, what is the body, little bro’. We always go against it. And time is shorter each time. You can't catch up to it for shit. That’s why the best thing is to have a clear conscience. As the poet said: The best way of waiting is to go to the meeting."
--Guillermo Saccomanno, "Zippo."

The rats. I hate the rats. They poke their noses into gaps like puppies. They devour food with the speed of rabbits. That's what they ought to be: dogs or rabbits, but they'd rather be rats prowling around the kitchen. There are so many that they trample one another, like the sorrows of that song that I remember so as not to feel regret later, when nothing’s any use. They struggle past one another, so they don't kill me because I unload upon them, broom in hand, with the strength of both woman and man of the house, of bed, bath, and kitchen.
My house is a dump without a man, a male, a guy, a so-and-so who might do something for me and for it.
"Coffee!" shouts my greatest misfortune from the living room.
How lucky my mother was, how wise she was to die early and spare herself the heartache of a shameless amputee for a son. Why else would she name me Arminda if she didn’t intend to leave me such an inheritance?
Arminda, harmony.
Arminda, peace of home.
Arminda without a husband, on the verge of her fifties and with desires that intensify with the woodstove’s heat.
"Coffee!" repeats he who insists on being called my dear brother.
My soul brother, the bad blood who decided to get out of prison and ruin my life at whatever price, like rats after cheese.
A demon that filled his veins with kerosene, because in jail it’s hard being the bitch and in there, he couldn’t be nor deserved to be anything more than that.
A coward with no arms or legs. He doesn’t need them to live when he’s got a sister named Arminda.
A new breed. One whose tongue, to my misfortune, the kerosene didn't destroy.
In jail he promised me: "If you leave me here I'll take my life,” but he's not the type of man that thinks that a promise is a debt. When I came back to see him, his promise was already a threat: "I’ve thought it over, I'm about to take my life."
He used to be a man of threats. Not now. Now he isn’t fooling anybody.
"Freedom for the cripple,” sentenced my captain, and we brought him home in his wheelchair.
Free.
Without kerosene in his veins.
Free.
Without arms and legs.
Free.
Freedom for the cripple, because, like promises, threats get carried out.
"Coffee!" insists my love of loves.
I'm Arminda, harmony.
Arminda, peace of the house.
Arminda, the spinster that can’t even manage to light the woodstove's fire.
What isn’t birthed doesn’t grow. Such is how he recites the book of life, as if they were thinking of him when they wrote it: in the nails of his hands and the bones of his flesh. In his foolish wit.

God, what a rat! Hunger forces them to leave their hiding places and neglect their endangered-animal's intuition. Hunger and a brood to feed. So they ricochet off the cheese when I snap to attention, take command of the broom and split backbones in two.
The backbone. Nothing’s left for the cripple but a spine, thanks to my captain, who stopped me when I wanted to beat him. I considered it, yes, and not only once.
My captain is a good person. He took care of my brother in the street, and favored him in jail.
We're good friends. At times, like now, he comes to see us and ask what we need.
"I don't need anything now."
"Don't start with the same, Arminda."
“What I needed from you I should have looked for in others; but no, I preferred to grow old in the kitchen."
"Don’t play the victim."
"Freedom for the crippled, remember?" I repeat his words by way of answering him.
"He’s free, Arminda, don't complain."
He swears he helps me for old times’ sake. From what could have been and what I, out of cowardice, wouldn’t let happen.
"Without arms and legs."
"Free, Arminda."
Doesn’t he see how his words are to my ears what a knife is to meat? What a broom is to rats?"
"Alive. Without kerosene in its veins."
"Free," he says, knowing it hurts me.
Because shared pains hurt less, and because he’s as alone like I am, he repeats those words every day. At the same hour, when he comes to the house under the pretext of inquiring about the cripple. In the kitchen, the place that makes us really free.
Now my captain doesn’t like me much. We're not who we were before, and there are things that can’t be cured.
"Coffee!"
Before he became captain he wanted to make me his girlfriend, but my brother said he didn’t want stoolies in the house and I had to go on stealing kisses from pillows.
He knows about the kisses. And about my hands on my nipples. About my fingers doing their thing and the tremble of my hips.
"How could I have been such an idiot?"
"Coward is the word," I correct him, and finally I manage to get on his nerves.
"Your language is about errors. Mine is about solutions."
“You damn rat, you’re not telling the story anymore!" I protest, and he looks at me.
The captain would have made me happy, but now there’s not enough luck for a wedding.
"Coffee!"
If the cripple hadn’t killed the old woman, I’d have been like those magazine blondes, those fine-nailed, fine-footed women that shave their pussy and drive men crazy.
Would my captain like me if I shaved my pussy? Maybe not. Maybe he prefers things old-fashioned style, like they were when he wanted me to mount his horse’s saddle.
So did anyone who saw me; to my captain, I was irresistible as those blondes.
Arminda, with her ass of gold.
Arminda, with her nice tits.
But my brother had to push that old lady. And the old lady had to die; because it’s also been written in the book of life that I must suffer such bad times
The old lady stuff was an accident. An oversight, a new addition to the record of a man born with a knack for crime.
Lucky when he plucked wallets from foreign pockets.
And in moving his lecherous flesh against those multitudes of females.
Fortunate if he were begging money off someone.
And he pulled down the pants of the weak.
“Quiet again?” says my captain, who’s starting to get used to my silence now.
“Talking to myself like a crazy woman.”
“You’re not crazy, Arminda. You just need some time for yourself.”
“Finish with these rats is what I need.”
“All it takes is poison.”
“That won’t do. From you I only want kisses.”
“Arminda, please, let’s change the subject.”
“There’s a last time for everything, right?”
There was a day that, for those who weren’t crippled, came under a bad sign; the old lady falls, cracks her head and dies.
Rats are agile enough to overcome obstacles; not the old lady. Her wheelchair was her mousetrap. She went down the staircase step by step.
That staircase was colossal.
The wheelchair was slow.
Maybe the old lady was dizzy.
Maybe fright’s what got her and not the blow to the head.
He cried when they handcuffed him. And when he said, “if you leave me here I’ll take my life”. Afterward there was no crying, as if the act of thinking things over had dried up his tear ducts. I think he smiled after saying, “I’m about to take my life.”
“Coffee!” shrieks the source of my troubles, the brood that escapes my broom.
I’m the generous one. The one who puts food in his mouth. The one who pays another female to please him, when the cripple gets bored with the magazines with the hairless-pussy blondes. I don’t mean sometimes. I don’t mean kind of. Or maybe. It just is that way, like a shout that gives no margin for possibility: I’m the generous one and that ought to have been my name.
“You’re golden,” my captain consoles me.
Arminda, golden like the Golden Fleece. With my house converted into a dump without a man, a male, a guy, a so-and-so who might do something for me and for it.
Arminda, golden like the magazine blondes; those females that know nothing of rats.
The rats. I hate the rats that screw up my existence. If they were only dogs or rabbits; but no, they’re rats that grow old as my troubles.
My captain insists on poison. He can’t see that to do away with them, I don’t need his good intentions.
“From you I only want kisses,” I remind him. And I put drops of the cure in his cup.
I’ve heard that formula doesn’t fail. That no rat remains living. It’s a tiny little piece of zinc corroded in cleaning acid. A substance that, drop by drop, will break down their blood until it kills them. All in five days or less.
“Coffee!”
“Can you bring it to my brother?” I ask the captain, my love. “Here goes his pain medicine.”
Once again, he carries out the task of bringing the concoction to he who was once a man of threats but now isn’t fooling anybody. He cares for the brother he never had. For the friend who never made it. For the son he’ll never have. Men are so predictable.
He lifts the cup to his mouth. The rat stops shrieking, drinks.
After all, what is the body, little bro’. We always go against it. And time is shorter each time.
Freedom for the cripple. Not everyone has the right to cling onto life. That’s why it’s best to have a clear conscience.
My poor captain will soon be the loneliest man in the world.
Today’s the fifth day. The bad blood will finish saturating itself with the potion.
I drink from my cup. The best way to wait is to head for the meeting place. Perhaps, soon, there’ll be light for me too.

- Translated by David Iaconangelo and JC Armbruster.

"Colors" by Aida Bahr

2010-07-07T15:43:00.000-07:00

Aida Caridad Bahr Valcárcel ( Holguín, 1958) is a narrator, essayist, and anthologist whose works have been recognized by a large number of honor-bestowing bodies, the 2006 Alejo Carpentier Prize and 2002 Distinction for Cuban Culture being among the most prestigious. She has spoken and served as delegate for literary fairs in over a dozen countries, contributed stories to numerous domestic and international anthologies, edited three compilations of short stories, and published seven books of her own, in addition to having served as a juror for prizes like the Casa de las Américas, Alejo Carpentier, and the National Prize for Literature. After over a decade of positions as linguistic and literary researcher, in 1998 she became director of the publishing house Editorial Oriente and editor of the magazine SiC, both based in Santiago de Cuba, where she lives now.

---

Through the window she can make out a bit of blue sky. A blue so intense that, looking at it for a while, it begins to turn white, or really, to dissolve wrapped in a halo of mist. She realizes that she’s on the brink of falling and, instinctively, her hands seize the edge of the small table in order to support her body. Hundreds of brilliant points dance madly behind her eyelids. Nausea wraps her; heat overwhelms her. Breathe, slowly, deeply, repeating to herself that it will pass, that a few minutes will bring relief, that when done in the kitchen she will go to the bathroom and take a shower and this exhaustion that oppresses her will dissolve little by little in the water. The same thing had happened other times, but without doubt she knows that this is worse: the vertigo attack had surprised her without a single warning sign, and she had the terrible sensation that her legs were made of rags, only her hands retained strength, only her breathing responded and helped her maintain control of herself. In a few minutes the nausea wanes, her body regains its strength. When she opens her eyes the blue is still there, tender, and nonetheless furious.

She turns on the stream from the faucet and splashes water on her face. It’s a little warm, but it revives her. Looking behind her, it seems as though she sees her mother sitting in the dining room, with that expression of tiredness and bitterness that never erased itself from her face in those final months. If she were still alive everything would be different. Returning from work she would find lunch ready, and the kitchen would be clean, immaculate, instead of the plates, glasses and mugs overflowing the sink, the stains of grease on the tiles.

Shame on you.

The voice has become so real and close that she almost jumps. No, he’s not there, he’d taken a bath and went to sleep; the night before he could hardly sleep because of the girl. She didn’t sleep; her daughter needed her inhaler twice, and then she took her out to the yard, and had to wipe a damp cloth around the whole room.

Mamá, you should move to a house with a concrete roof.

The stupid doctor made stupid suggestions that she knows they can’t follow. Now she can’t even aspire to find a man who has a house and would bring her and her daughter to live with him. She can’t leave her father alone. Oscar isn’t going to return. She looked into his eyes when she sat with him at the funeral, the parlor almost empty, her father dozing on the rocking chair, and Oscar there in the back, alone, so strange in his police uniform, wrapped in a darkness that was almost like fury. When she walked up to him she tried to find the tall, skinny boy with crooked teeth, who would blackmail her into giving up her lunch, or the money mother had given her, with the threat of telling father some silly thing she had done. She was nervous and flustered, while the man in uniform maintained silent composure.

--Are you ok there?

He shrugged without answering. She looked at his chest and his arms under tight fabric. He hadn’t been hungry.

--Do you think you will stay?

Now she realized that her question was really a plea, from fear before the solitude that would follow. He said nothing. She looked into his eyes for a moment and turned her gaze to the floor.

--I may be getting married.

He’d said this later, when an answer was no longer needed, and she hadn’t protested because he left for the train right from the cemetery. He hadn’t brought a suitcase, just a briefcase that he hadn’t opened. Her father hadn’t said anything either. He spent some time sitting in the living room in silence, and came to look for her in the yard where she was playing with her daughter.

--Why don’t you make okra for lunch? I’m craving it.

As though they weren’t about to bury her mother, the woman who shared thirty-five years of her life with him. And then it went on the same, as though nothing had changed, as though she too had retired because of her heart and had all day to make the food that he liked and keep everything clean, impeccable. He wanted to have meatballs, or stuffed peppers, just when her daughter was the most cranky, or she had to stand all day waiting on an indecisive customer. At that moment she remembers the beets. According to the clock on the wall they’d already had 55 minutes, so she turns off the burner and lifts the heavy pot with difficulty into the sink. A jet of water hitting the hot metal lets off a cloud of suffocating steam, and once again she wants to run into the shower to remove the sticky layer that coats her. But she knows that she has to finish cooking first. Her daughter will be home at six-thirty, and at seven her father will come out of his room expecting to see the table ready. The pot has lost pressure and the lid gives way. She puts it to the side and stands looking at the round forms, submerged halfway in a blackish-red liquid, steaming, bloody. Nausea appears as suddenly as the vertigo before. She squeezes her lips and tightens her muscles to contain it. At that moment they start, sharply, the knocks on the door.

At first think she thinks is that it’s Arturo with their daughter. He hardly saw her, and the day that he remembers he has a daughter, instead of bringing her late, he was an hour early in returning her. He must be desperate to go drink with his buddies. The simple idea brings the memory of nights he lay beside her, completely drunk, in a way so vivid that the alcohol-breath returns the nausea she had almost beaten and she has to contract herself again to control the heaves. The knocks repeat, and she realizes they can’t be her ex-husband; he would knock violently, and she would hear the girl babbling, or maybe coughing. Clumsily she takes off her apron and passes it over her face to wipe away a little of the sweat and grease. On her way to the door the knocks come again, soft, restrained, almost timid. She hurries and, even so, when she opens it she sees the back of a man who has begun to leave.

--Yes, what is it…

Her voice shakes and her heart shocks violently as she recognizes the face that has turned towards her. She grips the door and is suspended in a vision that recalls eleven years in one stretch. He smiles and advances the two steps that separate them.

--I thought you weren’t here… I heard about your mother, and, since I’m here for a few days, I wanted to see you. Can I come in?

She moves aside, still stunned by the surprise, unable to react in a definite way before this ghost that had appeared just when she was least prepared for it. He had come in and stood beside the chair, evidently waiting for an invitation to sit, but she can’t find the right words, she can’t even find her voice, and as her legs threaten to fail again, she lets herself fall onto the rocking chair closest to the door. He takes this as permission and sits down without stopping to look at her. Suddenly she remembers her disarray, her disastrous appearance, and this takes her out of her daze. She sits up and becomes self-conscious; her right hand tries to fix the strands of hair falling in her face and the left holds the too-loose neckline of her blouse.

--How did you hear about mamá?

--I ran into Oscar in Havana. He told me that you had gotten divorced and that you have a daughter – there was a brief pause during which he looked at his hands before returning to fix his gaze on her – I come to Holguín every now and then, and sometimes I’ve even walked by the house, but I didn’t want to bother you – another pause in which his gaze circles the room and yard, but then returns, directly this time, to her eyes – How are you?

She doesn’t answer because she’s on the verge of breaking into sobs. From some unknown place in her body, the urgency of tears has sprouted, and her throat floods, her nose gets stuffy and her eyes overflow hopelessly. She sobs a few times before regaining control, breathes deeply and stifles a cough. She doesn’t want to make a scene; doesn’t want to wake her father. He has leaned forward and now takes her hand and moves closer.

--I’m sorry, it wasn’t my intention to make you feel bad.

She coughs again, clearing her throat. She dries her tears with her free hand and looks at him closely, now that she has him a few centimeters from her face. They are the same features as when he waited for her at the exit of the college, sitting on the garden wall or leaning against his bicycle. Not one line, not one mark to indicate that time had passed since the many times they had danced all night at parties and clubs; many had envied her for monopolizing the best dancer. He didn’t seem fatter or skinnier. He was the same: eyes, nose, full lips, white, brilliant teeth and dark, smooth skin that her father had hated from the first moment.

--I’d kill you before I let you marry a black.

--He’s mulatto.

--A man with any black in him is black, and if I catch you with him no one will recognize you, not even your mother.

The memories frighten her and make her move away from him almost brusquely. She straightens in her seat and prays silently that her father is sleeping deeply.

--You are the same, no, you’re more beautiful, more a woman.

They are words she had hoped for without knowing it, words that threaten to shatter her defenses, because now she should let him hold her, support her, and she knows she can’t. She fights to maintain control, but everything has happened so fast. She had forgotten, but no, sometimes a song on the radio, some comment, reminded her of Maikel, a drop of sweetness evoking how in love with her he was, a drop of bitterness at thinking that she didn’t even try to defend their relationship. Too afraid, her face still burned from her father’s slap which put out the cigarette she’d been smoking, hidden in the doorway of the school. She couldn’t forget any of it: the beating her brother took for sneaking out to a party; her mother holding her tightly and them staying that way, while they listened to the blows and screams.

--He’s going to kill him, mamá, he’s going to kill him.

--No, he’ll calm down, he’ll calm down, if we interfere it’ll be worse.

The fear stopped her from enjoying his compliments, his attempts to caress her, even when he had accomplices watching for her father to appear. They might get distracted, and her mother begged her not to seek out disgrace. In the end she told Maikel that she didn’t want anything to do with him; in the end she married Arturo who was white and became an alcoholic; in the end her brother joined the police to get a gun and get out of the house; in the end her mother died of too much to bear and she was alone with her father and, even worse, with her daughter.

The urge to cry had evaporated and all that remains is a great resentment, almost desperation. Maikel continues leaning toward her, drinking her in with his eyes. Eleven years had passed and he seems as in love as before; maybe he never married, maybe he’s lived hoping for her, dreaming of her, idealizing her and wasting the best years of his life without surrendering himself, without forming a family. She hadn’t had luck either, but at least there was a good reason for her failure, to some extent it’s even her fault. Now she places her free hand over his and presses gently.

--Tell me that you’re happy.

He smiles; his teeth and eyes light up his face.

--At this moment I’m very happy.

She shakes her head; actually she’s so moved that her only wish is that he will continue to talk, to say that his memory of her has never faded, that it has been his reason for living. The feeling of anticipation spills from her chest, and the sudden tingling in her sex scares her, but not enough to make her pull her hands back. She knows that she should say something, but is afraid she won’t find the right words, the words to encourage him without compromising herself; she searches desperately for the words while the pressure of their hands gets strong and stronger, and the heat more and more tangible; what breaks the silence is the sharp voice of her father.

--What the hell is he doing here?

She jumps to her feet, snatching her hands from Maikel’s, and he also stands but slowly, with reluctance. She puts herself between the two men and manages to say forcefully:

--He came to offer me condolences for mamá.

But her father has already pushed her aside and is in front of Maikel, who seems unsure of the right response.

--Get out of here, unless you want me to throw you out.

Maikel is silent, not retreating; her father continues gesturing with violence, moving his arms and swiping at his face, as though he were still a young man, and the other an almost-adolescent in love with his daughter. She wants Maikel to confront him, to do something in order to not repeat the eternal scene of humiliation, of Oscar, of her mother, of Arturo himself, when her father pushed him out onto the yard and he lay there while he poured bucket after bucket of water on him. If Maikel didn’t fight back, afterwards he would beat her, insult her; who knew, the fury might last until her daughter came home and he would scream at her that her mother is a bitch, getting felt up by a black before her own mother was cold in the grave.

Her father holds Maikel by his arms and shakes him, pushes him and lifts his arm to deliver the first blow. She can’t see the victim’s face, her father’s body blocks her from knowing whether he intends to defend himself, and without time to think about it she grabs the bronze frame from the side table that holds a photo from her wedding, and throws it at him with all her strength.

The sounds disappear, she doesn’t hear the crunch of skin and bones beneath the force of metal, there’s no moan; her father’s body collapsing slowly until it rests blocking the floor between the table and the chair. She doesn’t see Maikel, doesn’t see anything that isn’t the liquid red that bit by bit is forming a puddle on the tile. She leans towards him and finds that the nausea has returned, that a suffocating fever is rising to her face and she can’t breathe. Everything dissolves around her and the vomit rises in her throat. By instinct she contracts to slow it down, and when she again opens her eyes she is almost frightened to make out the shapes of the beets in the dark broth, while she hears once again the knocks at the door.

Translated by Erica Mena.

Three Short Stories by Zulema de la Rúa Fernández

2010-06-26T18:04:00.000-07:00

Zulema de la Rúa Fernández (Havana, 1979) BA in Nursing. Masters in pediatrics. Her prizes include the Premio Unión Latina de cuento 2003, Premio Abdala de cuento 2003, Premio Farraluque de Poesía Erótica 2004, Tercer Premio de cuento La Pluma de la Punta Brava 2005, Tercer premio de minicuento La Media Cuartilla 2006, Premio Juventud Rebelde en concurso de décima escrita Ala Décima 2007, Premio de cuento Luis Rogelio Nogueras 2008, and the Premio de cuento Ernest Hemingway 2009. Two books of her short stories are available: Habana Underground (2009) and No reveles tu instinto, which can be found on the webpages Createspace and Atompress.

GIRLS

Harold Pinter (2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature) once wrote about a story that I had written for a hypothetical professor of sex, in which I said: Us girls like having our asses smacked. I don’t know how he got his hands on that story, nor how he arrived at the conclusion that I could be talking about girls that I don’t even know, millions of girls who I haven’t even heard speak, millions and billions of girls from the other side of the world which, from my point of few, simply, without being manhandled, want to be smacked. In other words, the affirmation (us girls like having our asses smacked) was somehow, to him, the climax of a long and deep meditation on which I had embarked and had now honorably concluded.

I love him (Harold Pinter, of course, although perhaps my hypothetical sex professor, too. Either way. The point is that I love him.) With all my heart. I think he’s a marvelous man. I only saw him once. He turned and smiled. He looked at me and smiled. Afterward, he boarded a packed bus. He said two or three things to the conductor, positioned himself at the door, and gave me one last look through the window. Then the bus pulled away and I never saw him again.

SEXUAL REVOLUTION

If religion is the opium of the people, then is sex their cocaine?, I’d joke with Dad, facing off against Lenin’s high-level ideology along the way. The true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love, he’d answer, stealing a quote from Che. Does that mean that every revolutionary likes to fuck? More or less. So love, sex, and socialism are the same thing. Not the way you see it. But Mella and Tina fucked a lot, they made pornos. Actually they took artistic photos. No, they were soft porn, dummy. You’re a smart-aleck. No, I’m a revolutionary. Then he’d get serious, look at his Lieutenant Colonel insignia, and put aside the euphemisms: one day you’ll understand the historic responsibility of the revolution, the greatness of socialism. But isn’t socialism utopian? That’s exactly why it’s so special, why it purifies itself from its contradictions onward, and it places itself beyond sex, appearances, the impossible; can’t you tell? The revolution exists only to find the impossible and we’ve already taken the first step, we only have to perfect it. With sex or without sex? I’d ask to make him explode and start all over again.

NOTHING

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
and nodding by the fire, take down this book
William Butler Yeats

Nothing I own but wet grass under my naked feet, nothing but night’s sweet breath upon my cheeks, nothing but this bonfire on which I warm my hands, nothing but the cycads song, nothing but the rustling of dry sticks in the fire, nothing but the friendly and distant wink of yonder star perhaps snuffed out by now whose last flash has travelled millions of years so that tonight it reaches me at last.
Who wrote it? we asked her.
The neighbor put the poem down on her thighs, looked towards the bonfire.
An American writer born in Amedford (1922), she said as she took hold of a nearby branch.
She had the look she’d put on during nights of revelation. But you could also suppose that she was being pensive.
It’s a poem, she said, that talks about everything.
About us?, we inquired.
She smiled and slid the branch toward the fire until its dry leaves disappeared beneath it.
It talks about everyone, I mean.
We were attentive. Somehow we believed she’d undress for us. That night was the chance to gaze at her body. But she stayed seated in front of the bonfire, looking at us every so often.
What’s the name of the poem?, I inquired.
NOTHING, she said in a very sweet tone.
And…,someone implored, what’s it about?
Of a boy genius that discovers something.
Why a genius? someone inquired.
She threw the branch into the bonfire. She waited patiently for it to finish burning. Very beautifully. That is, the neighbor was beautiful, although the branch was beautiful too, what was left of it.
Why was Yves Moor less than a year old when he wrote this poem. And why did he write so many novels and books of poems…
We asked questions. We asked how was it possible, how did he do it. Later we’d continue to be amazed, but without making exclamations or comments. We’d limit ourselves to observing her with lust, with boldness.
In reality we had known about Yves Moor for awhile, including the unbeatable translation of his poem by Eliseo Diego. Actually, we hadn’t taken her to that spot on the patio in vain: we had a well-organized plan.
Wouldn’t you like to read a translation of the poem? I asked.
Of course, she assented emotionally, happily, finally someone had come out with a translation of her favorite poem. Finally, our poetry nights were becoming interesting.
But love comes at great cost, said someone, and she suddenly understood that her friends, or rather, we, really weren’t so friendly.
In, I think embarrassed, whispers, we explained to her the requirement: she had to read the poem naked, if she wanted to have it forever. She smiled anyway, pleased by our insignificant proposal.
Anything for Yves, she said assuredly and began to undress.
When she was totally naked, without the least bit of shame, she moved her hips, squeezed her breasts with a disconcerting smile, positioned her thighs at a disturbing angle, and stretched her hand towards us, in search of the poem. Then, hardly even looking at it, she let it fall in the bonfire. Our amazement aroused, she began to recite:
"No tengo nada
nada sino la hierba húmeda bajo mis pies
desnudos
nada sino el aliento fresco de la noche
sobre mis mejillas
nada sino esta fogata
en la que caliento mis manos
nada sino el crepitar de las ramas secas
en el fuego
nada sino el guiño cómplice y distante
de aquella estrella
acaso ya apagada
cuyo último destello ha viajado millones
de años
para llegar esta noche
hasta mí."

Translations by Isabel Perera.

"Crisis" by Johan Moya Ramis

2010-04-13T12:50:00.001-07:00

An ant wishes to reach the other side of the road. The first option for achieving her aim is to venture across a construction zone, where a group of lively workers go from one side to the other as they steal cement, sand, and bricks destined for a tourist hotel. The ant stops and thinks. She says to herself that she does not wish to die beneath a worker’s boot, and pictures her body sprawled on the sand that is collected into sacks with such swiftness, to end up being a fossil stuck to the wall of a proletariat who dreams of having a house like the hotel he builds. The second is to cross a dangerous residential avenue. But neither does she like the idea of being left embedded beneath the wheel of a luxurious automobile of some bourgeoisie capitalist and left to die, like an insignificant ant. A profound existential crisis takes hold of her. It is not the act of dying that distresses her, but the inevitable ideological connotation surrounding the probability of her death.

Translated by David Iaconangelo. Photo from Centro de Formación Literaria Onelio Jorge Cardoso

"The Old Man and the Barbie" by Edmundo Desnoes

2010-02-07T20:27:00.000-08:00

Edmundo Desnoes is the author of Memorias del subdesarrollo, a novel that defines and reveals the plight of the individual during the first ten years of the Cuban Revolution. He is coauthor of the film script based on the novel. Memories of Underdevelopment was chosen by critics and viewers in Noticine as “la mejor película iberoamericana de la historia”. The old man and Barbie is a fragment of Memorias del desarrollo, the wanderings of the original character now living in exile. Desnoes rejects the sound and the fury of most Latin American literature and seeks a more subjective and interior narrative.

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Once back on the road I felt alive, full of the emptiness I was devouring on the highway. Forging on without a destination felt delicious; I was cutting through the morning air and the fresh aroma of the dawn rushed over me. I barely pressed the accelerator. The breeze swept the soft down hairs of my arm, draped outside the window. I wasn’t anywhere. Behind me lay the slope of scattered hills, and behind the horizon, beyond the trees, the unstable, restless sea, and my life unraveling down the highway. The asphalt was a sculpture, infinite and flat. Barbara was naked and staring at the road, following the cars and trucks with her eyes. I had left all her miniature hypocritical clothes back in the room. Nothing on the unmade bed, drops of water weeping on the bathroom mirror and wet towels piled on the floor.

“Qué te parece, what do you think about heading straight to… the west?”

My little pet was seated above the glove compartment, her legs stretched out until they touched the windshield glass; the oblique sun of the morning highlighted her round, too perfect breasts, supported by two half moons of shadow. Her flesh of sheer vinyl reflected the light like Greek marble and the oils of so many nudes of the Renaissance. She was the Venus of a vast continent that I wanted to know and possess. A sleek and slippery surface.

“Maybe you’d rather we go to the Deep South?”

My overworked Toyota simply flowed, glided like a dark bird of prey. Purest ecstasy, without goals or memories or destination.

“Sabes una cosa? You are enormously lucky, little one, you don’t live preoccupied, confounded by words. Ideas are always limited instruments, brutal objects compared to the porous silence. Ideas deflect you from the road, work on your nerves. Feelings shouldn’t overwhelm you, they ought to flow like the landscape. That’s why you will live forever; stones, marble lasts so long because it doesn’t wear out from thinking. You live in silence, but you are not preoccupied.” I was talking shit like anyone might say to a companion. Her silence compelled me to envelop her in words. They were lies I could believe. The sun approached its zenith, not only lending form and weight to her breasts, but hinting at two nipples of light.

Beethoven. The ninth symphony ran riot through my veins. The clamor occupied and pierced the air, so universal I couldn’t hear the siren of the police car pulling up in the adjacent lane, demanding my attention. The speedometer vacillated between eighty and ninety miles an hour. It pounced upon my eyes like a shadow. All I could think to do was remove my companion from her lookout and seat her by my side before reducing my speed and stopping at the side of the road. The patrol car parked behind us. I was still bewildered, my eyes lost when I glimpsed at myself in the rear view mirror.

“Do you know how fast you were flying?”

“No, officer, but I do now.” I hadn’t paid any attention to my speed until the patrolman caught me flying two inches above the asphalt. I leaned forward to hide the immobile naked body at my side and by the way extract my wallet and present him with my driver’s license and registration. From the corner of my eye I inspected her, naked and indifferent at my side. All of a sudden the auto grew in size, became enormous, only the diminutive doll was of my same reduced stature. Her smallness was my insignificance. Everything else throbbed out of proportion, heavy, completely adult and enormous. Only my companion existed in my reduced dimension; she alone breathed and quivered at my side. Again I bent toward the steering wheel hoping the patrolman would not discover I was traveling with someone, I was sure he noticed how I shrank before his eyes.

I saw myself judged and condemned before the eyes of authority; a ridiculous and dirty old man, traveling more than eighty miles an hour accompanied by an innocent child, unclothed, inert, naked at my side. Though to violate a vinyl doll did not figure in the laws, I had committed a crime. He would laugh at me now, torment the wizened ancient fool before arresting him.

The domineering blue bulk of his uniform expanded as I pressed the steering wheel to keep from trembling. The patrolman leaned into the window, looked at me from on high and his eyes surveyed the interior of the vehicle. The ecstasy of speed had evaporated, and I had collapsed, disappeared into a pothole.

My bladder had joined in the fun and, I couldn’t help it, I had to urinate.

“That’s a great idea,” the patrolman told me with a smile while inclining his head toward the portable woman. “You’ve got it buddy. The next time I go on vacation I’m not taking my wife.”

“She knows everything but says nothing.” I was on the verge of spilling everything, especially now that the officer had looked sympathetically on my decision to travel with a doll of few words and subtle comprehension.

“She’s a real beauty” and he returned my documents. “You shouldn’t endanger her life by speeding. It’s a precious cargo you’ve got there.” He handed me my fine and left. The patrolman didn’t need to worry: although I might die in an accident my woman would survive. Yes, Barbara was a precious cargo.

I grabbed and unscrewed a bottle of Snapple that had been rolling around the floor beneath my feet; I opened my shorts and managed to place my gland inside the neck of the bottle and began to urinate.

“No me mires, you shouldn’t look at me while…” My little pet had turned her head to the left, and was causing difficulties for my penis. “Did you hear what he said? He admired your beauty, and he told me when he takes his next vacation he would leave his wife at home, an obese woman, I’m sure.”

Now I headed down the highway at only forty miles an hour; my left hand held the steering wheel and with the other I grasped the bottle growing lukewarm with my interminable piss.

“I think we will have to buy you a miniskirt and silk blouse… Es culpa mía. You can’t keep traveling naked.

We have slipped into Mobile, Alabama. We have been rolling and rolling on for a week… maybe ten days. The expressways, I believe it and repeat it, seem like a grandiose sculpture, flat and dull, supine, black, marked by interminable white and yellow stripes. By day we devour the asphalt, we slide along the surface of the continent toward the waters of the Caribbean, and by night we sink into the mineshaft of our room. And always the same room in different motels. Perhaps the position of the lamps changes and the colors of the pictures behind the bed. Tonight we chose to stop at another Holiday Inn but we decided today to buttress ourselves in a suite with a turbulent Jacuzzi.

The abundance of accommodations and the excess of always identical products and the persistent plastic textures and the bright, incandescent lights—everything creates a rapacious void around us. We don’t go anywhere. Everything wheels and changes before our eyes beneath the sun or hides in the porous night, but everything, nonetheless, ends up being the same. Floating above clouds of asphalt. I don’t know where I am, but we are together.

The South is different. There are more dogs running loose without a leash. A trail of abandoned beer bottles lies along the edge of the road, amid the grass and the empty bags, cast off consumer products alongside our monotonous progress.

Two days ago in Charleston, while getting out of the car my love slipped out of her seat and fell on the bare pavement. We had just shut off the motor in the parking lot, in front of a monstrous WalMart when a Labrador snatched the extension of my flesh and ran off carrying my companion between its teeth. She had no power to convince the magnificent hound, she couldn’t force it to let go of its delicate prisoner. The huge dog shook its head from side to side as I implored it, begged it to drop Barbara’s terrorized body, but the Dominican sank its white teeth into her miniature flesh. He started running every time I got near him.

Finally a child hurriedly approached, calling the animal, followed by a young couple, and the Labrador, recognizing the trio, let go of the doll and began licking the hand of its master.

“You dirty old man!” exclaimed the wife and took the girl’s hand before shaking her head and moving away muttering.

“The dog could have killed her,” I protested with an aggressive and terrifying smile.

The husband turned his head to reproach the libidinous old man with a gesture. “It’s your fault!” It was my fault because it was my narration.

“The teeth went into her hips, look, they left a mark…” and I rubbed the hip of my companion with my thumb, feeling the imprint of the dog’s teeth on her slobbery flesh.

“Buy yourself another one, old timer.”

How dare he suggest I buy another doll! This is the one I have and want and even love. Lovers are not interchangeable; not everything, my friend, can be bought and sold.

“Maybe you would like to sell me your wife,” I muttered convinced he hadn’t heard the offer.

“Mommy, the Barbie had no clothes, I have an old dress…”

“That’s all right, honey,” and the wife shook her head without stopping; I could read her spiteful silhouette and hear her recriminate the perverted, sexual deviant with the defiled nude in his hands. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Upon returning to the sterile room of the motel, I carefully inspected the curves and extremities of the woman’s body that stared at me now with her enormous eyes. Two small tracks of canine teeth marked her thighs. And her fantasy ring had disappeared, leaving a hollow between her fingers. Yet still she smiled.

“Mi vida, any other woman, under the same circumstances, would be bleeding and complaining…” Her disheveled hair hid part of her face and the golden tangles, still wet with saliva, adhered to her cheeks, her shoulders and enveloped her long neck.

I feel like an imbecile, I admit I am a cretin. So what? I had to accept what happened; I stroked her violated body, recalling my passion for consumed flesh. I recognize the beauty of wrinkles, the wounds of time. Angela. Dorothy. Even the ruin of my own body.

The outspread legs of dead animals, trampled and plastered in the middle of the road turn my stomach whenever I try to avoid them as we drive somewhere. A groundhog yesterday seemed asleep on the double yellow line that divided the road. We drove across a wooded landscape. I imagined that from the vegetation a polished surface shiny from the asphalt would seem to be a peaceful spot to the eyes of a groundhog. The deer, the rabbits and chickens do not see the danger, can’t recognize that automobiles and trucks are predatory enemies. Every day we run across the carcasses of innocent victims, livers, spilled intestines, crushed ribs and blood upon the asphalt. Some corpses are already rugs, pounded sheets, beaten and leathery flesh.

I lift my eyes—we are in another room, another motel—a fresh breeze enters from the window. It is night outside; from the highway the hiss of cars and trucks consorts with us. While I write she remains seated along the edge of the screen, her extended legs concealing various icons at the base of my laptop. We have just bathed together, enjoyed the pleasures of the Jacuzzi. I helped her wash her hair and used the hair drier next to the marble washbasin making her hair luminous and styled. After drying her little body, I stroked her meticulously and my fingers squeaked on her shimmering skin; I finished by spreading an almond lotion across her arms and over her breasts, all down her tattooed back and about her bulky buttocks. Her genitals are a scarcely distinct hump. I spill out and over; I forget everything.

I’m not fooling myself. I know the fragile line between reality and fiction, and I couldn’t care less. Where in the hell is a real woman? Reality? The throbbing bodies of the past that welcomed me between their unenthusiastic arms and the plastic flesh today between my fingers are one and the same thing. My little doll with her eyes always open is as real, as concrete, as alive and true as the women of my past. As full of reality as Juliet, as my aunt Julia. And as empty, as much a part of the nada as I am here.

That the dog bit her naked body was my fault. I had the miniskirt and silk blouse… I didn’t want to dress her, I resisted, but her nakedness began to wear on me. I am in the promised land. A flowery dress, some pointed shoes, with heels that distance her from the ground, and brassieres and black lace panties—so as to reinvent her. I prefer covering her with words: Mientras por competir con tu cabello, oro bruñido el sol relumbra en vano; mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano mire tu blance frente el lirio bello; mientras a cada labio siguen más ojos que al clavel temprano; y mientras triunfa con desdén Lozano del luciente crystal tu gentil cuello; goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente*…Dressed in Spanish is she more my own?

For many days I tried to live in my creation and outside of the world.

- Translated by Al Schaller. Photos--"the author between death and Barbie's thigh"--by Felicia Rosshandler.

* While competing with your tresses the sun shines in vain on burnished gold; while scornfully in the middle of the plain your white brow beholds the lily's hue; while to both your lips, more eyes are drawn than to the first carnations; and while your lovely throat with lush disdain conquors the shimmering glass, Delight throat, locks, lips, and brow…from “Soneto” by Luis de Gongora.

"Defiance" by Ketty Margarita Blanco

2010-02-03T05:50:00.000-08:00

Ketty Margarita Blanco (Camagüey, 1984) is a poet and narrator. She is a member of the Saíz Brothers Association and a 2005 graduate of the Onelio Jorge Cardoso literary workshop, and has won or received mentions in numerous poetry and short story contests in Cuba and in Spain. Her work has been anthologized in Antología del Certamen Internacional de Cuentos Cortos ART NALÓN LETRAS 2006 and Jornada laboral y otros minicuentos, among others.

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Pablo opened his eyes with a smile that disappeared immediately. He had been dreaming again. He stood up; his briefs with the old elastic slipped down, leaving uncovered his white buttocks. With distaste he pulled up his briefs and scratched his head. In front of the pots he found a bit of fried rice in the beginning stages of decomposition. He made his way to the pants hung on the side of the bed and shook out his pockets: six pesos.

The urge to smoke was killing him, a drink would help him start the day, his intestines rumbled in his stomach. On his way out he bought a few cigarettes at the corner café; he got two croquette sandwiches and still managed to talk his way into a drink from the barman.

Optimism overcame him: this time he hadn’t had to do the Cucarachita Martina. He picked out a bench to sit down on. Business was going bad, and looking like that no tourist would approach him.

He gazed at the end of the street. Toward the sea.

He walked up to the malecón and lay down on the wall.

Watching the horizon, waiting for a sign.

Mass of water, with its old defiance.

Twice he had tried to cross it with feeble rafts: the coast guard captured him the first time a few miles from the island; the following attempt, he ran into an American patrol boat (it brought him back).

Close to the coast, that play of lights, edges of what was called paradise.

No one was left for him on the island; he lived with more than one woman, he had no children.

Federico, his best friend, had emigrated four years ago. His letters, and some money he sent, managed to get him out of tight spots in the beginning. But Federico crashed his car on the highway. Since then, each message received was a blow to Pablo, escape seeming more and more remote.

The urge to smoke returned, he turned his head, he approached a passing foreigner. “Could you give me a cigarette?” “Sure…do you speak English?” “Yes, sir…can I help you?”

The foreigner asked about the city, Pablo showed himself helpful and even suggested places to frequent. The tourist gifted him, before departing, a box of cigarettes and ten dollars. Pablo ate lunch in a diner, he could have eaten his fill, but he was a practical man and didn’t let himself be carried away by the temporary abundance.

A girl stopped at his side to buy a soda. At the point of flirting with her, he lowered his eyes and considered himself instead. Pursing his lips, he told himself it wouldn’t work out.

He wandered all afternoon.

That night he retraced his steps back to the Wall of Yearning: he liked calling it that. Always with the sea’s dull grumbling.

He lay down to contemplate the stars, remembered the girl from that afternoon, molded her shape. When he saw her clearly, he lured her toward him, masturbated until he came and, with the air heavy with peace and the noise of the waves, he fell asleep.

At daybreak, he woke up on the malecón wall with a smile on his lips.

It disappears immediately.

- Translated by David Iaconangelo

"Not Without Seeing Snow" by Mabel Cuesta

2010-01-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

Mabel Cuesta (Cuba, 1976) received her BA from the University of Havana in 1999. She has published two collections of short stories, Confesiones on line (2003) and Cuaderno de la fiancée (2005). Currently, she is a Ph.D student in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Languages and Literatures at the City University of New York, and teaches at Baruch and Barnard College. She also blogs at http://denuevayorkamatanzas.blogspot.com/.

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Now I won’t die without seeing snow; I’ll no longer sing along to Marta Valdés certain the song was written just for me. Neither will I die seeing your face in the rain. You and I both know that there are palaces and castles to discover. But not snow, not Casal’s snow. Paris, New York, snow… and it is the rain that cautions, that warns… the rain says, I can be all things, the precise leaf that heralds spring, the nostalgia of the poet who never went to China or Japan, who never arrived at any Oriental latitude outside Havana or Madrid, places with intent.

Snow is here, on the sidewalk here, the sidewalk that holds welfare, medicare, foodstamps, fastfood, moneyorders and law enforcement. The sidewalk full of snow that is not in the dining room on Mujica St. (a mayor without real importance) when I was young enough to hurt and sing with closed eyes: voy a morir sin ver la nieve; pero te miro cuando llueve* and you are somewhere I can’t yet imagine; tasting something that could be the pleasure of my lips and I persist in the feeling.

I could have told you from that moment: I saw snow in Guadarrama; but you were not in the world. Everything is the same, love has these similarities of action, vocabulary. Nothing would have been if I hadn’t returned to Madrid. History could have changed so many times, so many turns. There wouldn’t be this sorrow, this anguish of the flake, light on my cheek.

Now it’s another time. The snow on the sidewalk holds me to myself. To not giving this gift to Casal, who never asks. I cross the bridges of New York illuminated by your hand and snow reminds me of the privilege of always knowing each other. For you, you know enough of the winter that numbs you, exhausts you, your scarf beside mine; you don’t watch me pass because you come from far away, without questions of water. Jealously you keep me from blocking the view, from making noise in the night. And you stay awake so as to not disturb the passing, not abort the dream, not escape the blow.

I want to read Calvert Casey again, I say all of a sudden. I’d shed my skin just to read him. Read Casey as though separate from Casal. To understand their homesickness, their immense longing. Understand each individual drama without seeming to show too much. All that I lost might exist in that moment, after which I won’t die without having seen white flakes cover my hat. Wearing a hat annoys me. Snow has those unexpected prices. Those strange ways of assuming its shape.

I am the young Gianni, tormented in the town’s summer, when my family won’t let me travel to Rome, following you, loving you until the end of days… I am the old Casey searching for the cheapest apartment in Barcelona; traveling to Ibiza to hide myself from something that has no name.

I have struck a blow. I have left those who loved me. I do it because of Casal and because of Casey, I tell myself. I need to track you through the city’s bus station. To arrive as soon as possible in the west, to cross the river there where it returns to the ground and lose all trace of myself in the sidewalks.

You say that the ground knows that I am here, that I am a ray of light from on high; I believe you with the tenderness that intoxicates me when we are on the bank of the river, supposedly called the Hudson; where we ask Oshún to frighten the demons in your belly, where we make offerings, our hands and heads wet with pestilent water. The same offering I made before, over the metal bridge, asking for us to be allowed to realize that delirium of love in its new body, new city with or without light.

I am the young Gianni when I torment myself: I cannot reach your height, I obscure myself, pure shadow to which I am addicted. I am the passion of McCullers, once again, when I discover you and say that I will love you always, and I die in the middle of that water that could well be made clear at any moment.

Everything in me is a reference. Everything you love without an exact reason is that word you torment yourself with, the coming and going of my conscience, fear of the solitude you could leave me in at any time. Or I could leave you, who knows. We know nothing of ourselves. Nothing that might not be contemplation of the tree we’re looking at. That which will survive us. The wood house that picks up the code of those lights that you see insistently from space or the mirror. Those lights that hold the face of a woman from Versailles and a poor little shepherdess who doesn’t remember the century in which she lives, while the sidewalk is forgotten beneath the frozen white that covers it.

Now I won’t die without seeing snow, so many times I’ve seen it that my young neighbor wouldn’t believe me, Mujica St… he dreams clothes designed by Versace, dreams cars and walks with his girlfriend. I might take pictures for him and soothe him. I might tell him about Casal and see his delirious face while he asks about the exact texture of how it froze. Join myself to Casey in a voyage within your body and heal any tear. To soothe myself, soothing them.

Nothing would be like changing history, returning to my first shape above the ground and not having to search for it in the mirror by candlelight with your voice following. To return there and have the power to change the beginning. To concede the trips necessary for the dead. To not feel this bitter pity for the self that will no longer die desiring the whiteness that covers me; to stretch myself beneath your arm every night, your insistent will to become food or a pure ray of light that jumps spaces and promises unfathomable trips. To know that in the end, all the palaces are there, in the iris of your eye, and kiss it and sleep swept by the rain of the island where you are, vanishing in this useless fear, of the eternal dawn of a death that has already happened many times and that is the exact quantity of that which we don’t know; the exact quantity of those we didn’t know how to forget.

* I will die without seeing snow, but when it rains I see you.

- Translated by Erica Mena.

ZafraLit en español

2009-12-26T10:20:00.000-08:00

Attention, hispanoparlantes: stories from ZafraLit are now available for your reading pleasure in the original Spanish at http://zafralitenespanol.blogspot.com/

"Fox Fires" by Abilio Estévez

2009-11-20T06:18:00.000-08:00

Abilio Estévez (Havana, 1954) is a playwright, poet, and novelist residing in Barcelona and one of the most prominent authors in Latin America. He is the author of "Los Palacios Distantes" (published in English as "Distant Palaces"; winner of La Vanguardia's "Best Spanish-Language Novel"), "Tuyo es el Reino" ("Thine is the Kingdom"; Cuban Critics Award) and "El Navegante Dormido", among many others, and has been awarded numerous prizes of prestige in France, Spain, Cuba, and the United States.

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You can thank the tomb, the stones in the cracks of the tomb, the man who we may have once met. Since that night, since those nights, I believe in a secret relationship between things. Doesn’t life, like a novel, have a recondite structure? Although it can be thrilling, I maintain that discovering this order doesn’t prove easy. Don’t snicker. I know theory isn’t my strength. In any case, how many years have passed? Many, many years, and certainly you couldn’t describe the house. After some well-concealed indecision, you would invoke the image of some “melancholy mansion” that appeared in those novels we read so long ago (thirty, forty years back), gothic novels that thrilled us then, stories of terror that kept us up until dawn. You would say with your seasoned voice of authority and air of presumptuousness that I know so well: “The mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, the bleak walls, the vacant eye-like windows, the rank sedges, and a few white trunks of decayed trees…” And I’m convinced that you wouldn’t even realize that it was the House of Usher you busied yourself in describing.

Because we lived in a cemetery, yes, but our house owed nothing to Poe or Lovecraft. Ours was a charmed one, really. Brighter, more joyful and harmonious than any I’ve lived in since. Remember it? Do you really remember it? I’ve always suspected that you know less than you know, and that, most of the time, your memories aren’t real memories—only, I don’t believe you capable of such imagination, either. That house. Inside a cemetery. In the shade of a huge old ceiba (three hundred years old, calculated Father, the positivist). It had a high gable roof with supposedly red tiles that the sun and rain had washed to a withered pink, off-white or almost-yellow, and the edges were a black that both contrasted and matched the walls that were whitewashed every year—for the night of the Day of the Dead, what a party. The rigorously white sides opened into multiple enormous, blue windows with lace curtains of soiled chiffon that gave way to an extra porch, jammed with flowerpots, vagrant ferns, gardenias and jasmines, backed by chairs with powerful rockers and columns that weren’t real columns but wood pilasters scaled by ivy and piscuala, with its flowers of ridiculous red with which my sister and I made necklaces. The house. Extraordinarily cheerful, inside a cemetery that was equally so, strange as it may seem. Indeed, it was the house, its liveliness, that convinced Mother (aided by Chana, of course—our personal orisha). But what’s certain is that Mother was never too convinced she wanted to spend her life in a cemetery. It’s so counterproductive, she complained, feigning gloominess, her skin white and sweat-less, her hair well coiffed. And with all the time we’ll have to spend down there out of obligation, she kept grumbling, each time a little more fervently. Aren’t we tempting destiny? And she would close her eyes, her hand raised, sibylline. Father would take off his blackened Yarey hat , let out a burst of laughter. He would sweat, induced by the heat and the cheer that never abandoned him. He sweated scientifically, from an excess of convictions—a positivist.

I suppose you remember Father. You couldn’t forget him, since for a time you were his accomplice. Anyway, he’s impossible to forget. An intense man of an imposing physique. To him, there existed no other mysteries than dreams. To him, fear could be eradicated only by opening one’s eyes and taking “rightful possession of things”. How seductive—he talked about “things”. And he talked about them with the assuredness of someone in possession of a vast empire. A type of arrogance exists in those that think a lot.

“In reality there are no mysteries, only ignorance,” lectured that sweaty and merry king, spontaneous and positivistic (always with a sunny look on his face), to my sister and me every night, “There’s no mystery a good investigation won’t unravel, and if something scares you, girls, look at it close, observe it in detail, and you’ll see how ridiculous and vain the circumstances are that provoke fear.”

His absence of doubt, his insolence, his philosophy. Those things comprised, you could say, his ideology (an ugly word, right?), and maybe similar logic permitted him to work as a gravedigger—a luxury gravedigger, that is, put in charge of washing, making up, and dressing the dead, leaving them full of colorations, dead that pretended to be alive, satisfied with their silences and slaps of blush in cedar coffins. Only with this idea, this sole vanity, was he impassive until the end of his life. He was fortunate, you’re right. He never let himself be altered by what Mother called “the illegible side of life”. Quite the opposite. Over time, he became an assistant in forensics at the Military Hospital, until they named him General Director of Municipal Cemeteries in Marianao, with housing expenses paid by the city council. There are so many houses, Father would declare resolutely in his party voice, house after house whose windows allow access to the seven seas or show mountains or trees or green valleys (he adored that lachrymose movie by John Ford—there’s no man without contradictions), or open to labyrinths of other houses; blind houses too, that see nothing of the earth, of the earth of the Earth, but in our house alone, the windows let us appreciate a landscape of marble, crosses and flowers that, instead of speaking to us of death, speak of life; what else, tell me, can one ask for?

Mother asked for more, like you might have guessed, asked for other things. Mother, as you know, was on the other side, on the opposite bank from Father, settled in a distinct brand of arrogance. You must agree that no two people were more different—maybe that’s what makes a perfect marriage. That mother of mine so weakstrong, so sensitiveharsh, so dependentindependent, so courageousfearful, without sweat, owner of white handkerchiefs, tissues, and Japanese fans, well-coiffed hair (she had been a kindergarten teacher); at first she refused to live where everyone else would be enjoying themselves or suffering (the shade between the two gerunds distressed her greatly) the eternity of their eternal rest. She insisted—to idle, alive, around human ashes seemed to her so excessively high-handed that it would end up being punished. She never said it that way, it didn’t occur to her to be explicit, although I’m sure that she could murmur (and murmur only) that in reality, ignorance didn’t exist, only enigmas, puzzles, no doubt about it, puzzles; there was no appearance, certainly, that a good look wouldn’t manage to unravel into mystery, and that if something scared us (you’ve got to be sensitive, girls), it constituted irrefutable proof that dark forces existed and were sending us messages.

What strange methods of showing pride! You can be sure, however, that in spite of her reservations, her apprehensions, Mother liked the house the first time she saw it. The cemetery captivated her, too, though she wouldn’t and couldn’t admit it. We saw it in her quiet eyes, kinder than usual, in her look of wisdom, gentle wisdom, the look of someone who has reached a peaceful place, knowing many years back she had done battle with herself. And I ask you this: how wouldn’t the cemetery have captivated her? How couldn’t she admire that lovely yard full of casuarinas, avocado trees and jacaranda, fake poplars and rubber trees, crosses and marble angels, whose silence was always accompanied by a breeze that couldn’t be enjoyed anywhere else but Havana? The problem was when she dealt with “the illegible side”. In those cases, Mother never trusted herself completely.

It was because of this that, days before moving to the cemetery, she made Chana accompany her. I’m talking about the old black woman. Our family’s orisha, the old black woman from the old house on Angel Street, Number 9 (the shores of the river, the Quibú, the foul one). Behind the back of Father, the positivist, Mother counted on Chana for everything. She didn’t take the smallest step without consulting her. Remember Chana? She’s there now, in a tomb of sober granite bought by Mother, but back then there wasn’t an old woman bigger or fatter or blacker in the whole suburb of Zamora, so black she could have just arrived from the Gulf of Guinea. You couldn’t understand her when she spoke of mundane things. Referring to life’s regularities, she employed a garbled Spanish, of clumsy words, pronounced halfway or not at all, words for which she searched hopelessly with ancient, lonesome little eyes of bilious white and huge, careworn hands that she raised toward the heavens. But I remember that when she spoke of “the illegible side” (though, you understand, she didn’t use that phrase), her Spanish acquired a stunning clarity. Clean, bright words, almost pretty, syntactically precise. And I remember her hoarse, old-black-woman’s voice, how it acquired a tone of warmth, intimacy, radiance—even more so when it broke into the songs of the Calabar coast. Chana went around the still-empty house. She smoked tobacco, spreading thick smoke from corner to corner. Every now and then, she stopped, concentrating. She listened, affirmed, denied, smiled, grew angry and puzzled. She made gestures to frighten away invisible figures. Puta, out, puta mala, get out of here! In those moments Mother passed her a gourd filled with aguardiente. Tremulous, so old she could barely stand, she raised the gourd, drank a sip; no, she didn’t drink, really she held a few seconds of drink on her lips, then spat it out with frightening vigor. She shuddered. What little hair she had stood on end, stiffened with the combs of a curling iron. She threw a coconut to the floor with a force that we never imagined possible from her, breaking it. She gathered the pieces, closing eyes that already seemed shut, doing her best to hear. We listened to her whisper, weighing what she heard. Then she took a handful of basil, poppies and white flowers, soaked with cologne, cascarilla pollen that rose like smoke, and went about pounding the walls rhythmic, rhythmic, tac-tac-tac, while she sang indecipherable Calabar songs. Later, much later, she went to the ceiba, dragging her feet, trailing the smoke of tobacco and cascarilla behind her, and there she stayed, caressing the trunk as if it were a human body. Between herself and the tree she seemed to have established a secret bond that she needed. A bond that none of us had the capacity of believing. Unknown, mysterious. Until the sun began to lose itself between rain clouds of red, black-red, velocísimas, way out near faraway Santa Fe.

You smile. I don’t know if I know you well. Or if I know you too well. I’m sure, though, that you’re smiling. I foresee the habitual smile of authority, and behind the smile, the inevitable question—what good was Chana’s ebbó if the dead won’t let your mother sleep?

My sister and I weren’t scared. Or would it be better to say that, yes, we were scared, only the fear wasn’t the fear everyone knows as such, but rather a fright that gave us an immense satisfaction, a fright that startled us, how else can I explain it? For some reason that we never understood, some graves moved us more than others. I don’t mean that some were lovelier than others. I’m not talking about whether the marble shined or not, how expressive or dramatic the statues, or the epitaphs’ smaller or greater charges of passion, sometimes so unabashedly impassioned as to be comical. I’m talking about something that never had to do with architecture, sculpture, or poetry, much less piety, compassion, nostalgia or laughter. I’m talking about something secret, that participated in no physical, affective, or religious order and left my sister and me moved without knowing why. There was, for example, a small, nameless mausoleum without an epitaph by which we couldn’t stop without feeling the urge to cry. Don’t ask for reasons: it was only a small, nameless mausoleum. In the always-open common grave toward the end of the cemetery, where Father and his assistants piled the bones of those without families, there were skulls that provoked our mercy and our ire, our laughter and our circumspection, just like people do, just like people of flesh and bone, I mean. Touching a femur sometimes brought us an imperturbable peace. Other skulls made us sob all afternoon; to caress the yellowing bones seemed to put us in contact with tragedies and melodramas.

There among pantheons and monuments we spent our days and part of the night. There we played. There we studied. There we gradually learned to live. There I fell in love or became enamored (call it what you want) like we only know how during adolescence.

Toward the end of the third street, under the flamboyán, lay the grave of Héctor Aquiles Galiano, born in Havana in 1904 and deceased in the same city in 1925. It was a tomb of polished cement, with an alleged work of embellishment that poorly imitated the pomp of marble, that the passage of time had chipped in various places and in whose fissures grew the highest, greenest ferns in the cemetery. In a medallion inlaid in an iron cross, protected by massive concave crystals, sat the photo of Héctor Aquiles, almost a daguerreotype. He was the most handsome boy in the world. In all the time I’ve lived since then (and this will come as a revelation to you) I’ve done nothing but search for him. To find him has been a goal of mine. To find that handsome man who disappeared from the world so many years before I was born, and in such a terrible way.

I’ve never seen another Héctor like that Héctor, like you. We’ll discuss that now.

There’s never enough time, you know, for such manias. At least, that’s what Mother, the kindergarten teacher, always said, drinking a small cup of strong coffee in a rocking chair on the porch.

I suppose it’s still there, anyway, Héctor’s photograph from 1924: he has dark, wavy hair; skin sepia from the photo, it’s clear he’s white, very white; slanted, dark eyes, voluptuous ones that look at the camera with an air of seduction; his nose is big, of course, and powerful, an invader’s nose, a nose of gold coin—of Héctor and Aquiles; his lips, also large, match his adventurer’s jaw, and they smile with timid hauteur and something of fear. I don’t deny it: it distressed me to think that “he might know”. In that moment, I loved him in the way one loves oneself, how one has always loved oneself, like a man, like a son. I arrive later with a bouquet of wild flowers, those that suit a dead man so alive, so handsome and warrior-like. In the icebox in the kitchen, where Mother places the cups of water that pacify the thirst of the fallen, his cup is the cleanest, the biggest. In the afternoons, when my sister’s gone (they’ve made her take piano classes—why are they reviving the moth-eaten church organ, so she might be a teacher too?), I kiss the photo, I kiss it over and over, and I lie down on top of the grave to await a message—I never know if it will produce something, least of all in a form that I understand. I talk to you however I can. What does it cost me?

I tell him about my short life, my projects, I beg him to Appear, man-son, in my nights, in my dreams; if there’s been other incubuses, why not you? I’ve had many dreams with incubuses and to them I owe the small and vast experience of my romances, I know you don’t want to be an incubus, no way, I know. And the only dream where he appears, he doesn’t appear. Let me explain.

I bathe, perfume my body with Colonia 1800, comb my hair, prepare myself, knowing I’m going to his meeting place, where he awaits me, naked, under the flamboyán. But the dream never moves beyond this ritual of preliminaries. Quickly, I say, there’s no time to lose, it’s going to evaporate, that’s what dreams do! and sure enough, there it ends. I don’t meet with Héctor. I meet the mirror, a mirror bigger and more adorned than any I’ve seen. In it my own body, my adolescent skinniness, my unruly hair, my open eyes, my sweat-soaked nightgown. I’m not going to his meeting place, nor he to mine. He’s not an incubus but a being of waiting.

I don’t want to dramatize it: isn’t that dream the key to all this? It makes you understand, you know? The next morning I describe my frustrations over and over, sprawled on the tomb, same as always. No one, nothing, no response. The obsession of silence. Death and silence, the dead reticent. Silence, silence, and the voices Mother hears—or says she hears. The flamboyán reddens the ground and casts damp shadows, provokes other, less notable nostalgias. Nothing else. So I take advantage and I talk to him about the voices, the voices that Mother hears at night, at dawn. Yes, to Héctor I talked about the voices, I asked him for advice; after all, he was still there, out there, distant, and he should know something, I say.

In that you’re right: Chana’s ebbó had no effect on the voices, in spite of the fact that each Monday we saw her appear (religiously, no other way to put it) with her dark eyes (open, closed, but always dark), her bag of herbs and fruits that she offered to the orishas of the ceiba (and from which Father secretly ate). Mother knew nothing of my desperate romance, which didn’t keep her from talking to the voices every now and then, with weariness or cheerfulness or nostalgia, according to how she felt. They harass me, she exclaimed, they don’t let me live. Meanwhile, from the sidelines, owner of his own kingdom of certainties, Father the positivist dealt with burials, preparing the chapel, planting the flowers, cutting others, pruning trees, planting trees, painting the trunks of the palms, setting up platbands, whitewashing walls, setting rat traps, burning heaps of dead rats and dry leaves, cleaning the dirty marble to make it shine, the marble on which birds shit again and again with that bird-like indifference. He also put up mausoleums and opened up new niches, but he knew nothing of voices, much less such distant ones. Maybe he pretended not to know about them. If he would have gotten the message, he would have felt obligated to mock it, and sometimes he preferred to turn his head, breathe heavily, sing in a low voice, and ignore it. Father wasn’t like other men, you know. At times he could be so subtle that he made you want to understand him, even accompany him on his expert incursions through the pantheons.

Back to the voices. Not even my sister or me heard them. Never. We didn’t hear the voices. We did, however, know Mother heard them. In those shadows that followed meals, when Father lay down on the floor on a coarse blanket, accompanied by a small candle-shaped lamp (the electric lantern dripped false wax), and a book by José Ingenieros, Mother resembled an old-fashioned actress who brought her hands to her head and wandered about the house, directionless, and approached (dramatically) the windows whose dirty chiffon (like in a bad autobiography) flapped in the wind that blew like no other place in Havana. Mother would go mad, fall to the floor, caught up in the midst of her acting. Later, we glimpsed the errant light, a bit more itinerant and intense than that of the fireflies and glowworms, between the graves, between the branches of the rubber tree.

They weren’t fox fires (that privilege was never granted us) but one of many porch lamps. Mother with one of the porch lamps. Mother and her shadow between funeral urns, under the pupil-less eyes of the virgins, searching for words, epitaphs, shadows, possible apparitions that would make her understand, find the secret of the voices, of the messages. I’m not aware of whether she had imagined by herself that the voices contained messages or if Chana had to do with the supposition. We would never know. Chana and Mother must have formed two faces of the same woman. The next morning, my sister and I retraced those paths over and over, not knowing what we were searching for, because we were sure, at least, that the echoes didn’t hang from crosses and trees like the clothes of survivors.

Until one day. Listen closely. One morning we discovered the cracks. No, no, pardon me, we didn’t discover the cracks, we discovered the mysterious relationship between the cracks and the voices, which isn’t the same thing. My sister. Yes, her, she paused at the grave of Héctor Aquiles’ and kneeled, the tomb cracked, decomposing, inundated with weeds and split down the center. At first I didn’t comprehend the intended fervor of that act, then I thought she had discovered my secret and meant to tease me.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said, irritated, “I’m trying to listen.” She stuck her ear to the crack, and when she straightened up, I saw in her eyes a smile of intelligence. “Well clearly, dear, we’ve got to cover everything up, in those bones one world sneaks into the other. We’ve got to look for stones.”

Although the morning was dark and the river carried the odor of slime, it didn’t rain. We brought the stones from the other side, from that field that my father kept in reserve for when the cemetery needed to grow (cemeteries also need to grow but they don’t let them; covetous, you know) and where there were royal palms, wild daisies, and hills of red earth covered with pumpkin plants that by mistake the scavenger birds pecked at insistently. We collected the stones in the empty sacks of cement stored in the equipment room. We snuck back with the stones and went around covering the cracks one by one, the effort long, time-consuming, painstaking, meticulous. Upon finishing, we were surprised by the monumental silence that had possessed the cemetery, the house, the world. Silence that covered everything, included our cries for help. Voiceless conversations at the dinner table, in afternoon by the front porch chairs. Fruitless movements, quiet, fruitless. One couldn’t hear clocks, slams, dirges, bells chiming, hammers hitting, downpours. No steps. The coldness of night no longer broke the boiling tiles of the roofs after fourteen hours of sun. Windows opened and closed. No trills—the tomeguínes stayed motionless on the branches. Branches didn’t stir, like they used to say. Branches without tomeguínes, without breezes. Because we had discovered the strange relationship between things. The silence provoked constancy. Constancy provoked darkness. Darkness turned off colors and tastes. Suffice to say, we lived long and dark and anodyne days and long and dark and anodyne nights. Trapped in a prison. Father paced from one side to another, having been proved wrong in an important argument. Clearly, he didn’t understand. Mother didn’t, either. We saw her lose herself in the house, a little less actress-like, truly dejected, stealthy, looking at herself furtively in the mirrors, touching her neck with unfamiliarity, tying around her neck the silk handkerchiefs from her time as a teacher. From Chana’s tattered throat escaped no songs from the Calabar. Her hands, they were hands that seemed to ask, what is this? I couldn’t tolerate it, believe me, and I only waited two nights. If you know me like you say, you know that I lack patience. Impatience is one of my most inconvenient virtues. Two nights. I ran to Héctor’s tomb and started pulling away the stones that blinded the cracks. Mother always said that she had heard a scream and saw a light. I’m not prepared to deny it nor affirm it—don’t blame me. In any case, I can assure you that that night I didn’t return home.

Since that night, since those nights, I believe in the secret relationship between things, in an order. Just as in novels. I walked for hours and hours, until weariness set in. You can thank a tomb, then, the stones in the cracks of the tomb of a handsome dead man, who we may have once met.

- Translation by David Iaconangelo and Isabel Perera.

"Anathema to the City" by Johan Moya Ramis

2009-10-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

Johan Ramis Moya began writing in 1999, sparked by romantic disillusionment and the death of his father. He received his first literary grant in 2006 for a book of stories titled "Post-History", and that same year won a spot in the short story collection "Internacional Dinosaurio" with "The News." The following year, "National Theater" was also published. In 2008 Johan was a finalist for the Gaceta de Cuba Short Story Prize, one of the island's most prestigious literary prizes, with the story "Anathema of the City". He now studies theology, works in the National Library as the donation coordinator, and is a fan of many English-language writers, including Hemingway, Carver, Bukowski, Pound, and Nabokov, among others.

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There’s an explanation for the bloodstained axe and corpse. You want to hear it. If not, what did you bring me here for? You shouldn’t worry about me being sincere, as I won’t omit anything. To your question if I’m the owner of the axe. My answer is yes, I am. Before I begin I want you to know that my status as a suspect doesn’t bother me, since in the end it’s a universal constant to which we’re all subjected. But don’t be confused, I’m not a criminal in the strict sense of the word. A criminal is blinded by a fixed idea until he carries it out, and that’s not my case. By the way, can you tell me what time it is….? Thanks.

I can start by saying that the origin of the axe was the city, you know. The city is a labyrinth where a man loses himself. Since I was a boy I walked through it and always felt a certain panic or suspicion of panic. No one can foretell what will occur upon turning a corner. Haven’t you ever walked down a deserted or packed street at whatever hour? It’s a disquieting sensation. I remember the afternoon when I bumped into that one individual. I was nine years old, coming home from school earlier than usual. I came by him on a narrow and empty street. I passed by his side and left him behind. Then I heard his steps stop for an instant only to hear them start up again. I crossed the street and he did the same. He started to follow me. I didn’t dare look back. The sound of his steps at my back weighed on my chest. When I sensed that he was almost touching my shoulder I took off running. You know what my persecutor did then? Laughed, I still remember his guffaw and the terrible voice that yelled one word: “Coward!” He repeated it again and again, until my escape put him out of earshot. I wanted to find a policeman but couldn’t track one down. I walked home disconcerted. Arriving there, I vomited and lost consciousness. Was I really a coward? That day I understood that in the city everything is foreseen and adjusted; the occasional barbarity doesn’t manage to disturb its harmony.

On the other hand was the contradiction of the news. Since I was a boy the newscast marked life in our home, time paused at home when the music announcing it was heard. It was the signal for us to march into the living room, listen and watch. It exasperated me then. On the news it was said that in the city everything was well. That it was a beautiful place. The television cameras always displayed people with wide smiles. All of them optimistic, evidently euphoric. I argued about that with my family, but at home it was prohibited to talk during the newscast, much less contradict the ideology of the city. For them the city was beautiful in all ways and capacities, although as I grew up I realized that my family’s opinions were only a pose. In their heart of hearts they hated the city, but at the same time they feared it and would not come out against it, and in the midst of that fear they swung toward dark doctrines and lies.
Don’t get impatient, if I relate everything to you it’s so you have a complete perspective on the issue of the bloodstained axe in my backpack that interests you so much.

It was at age fifteen that I began to consider the axe. Where did the idea come from? Well, from literature, you know. Literature and music kept me safe from the city. Although I knew that it was a false peace. Because I had the suspicion that someday the city’s dead zone would end up swallowing me to make me pay for my rebellion, and the proof of this is that I’m here. Anyway, I was saying that it was literature, a Russian novel, don’t ask me which, I don’t really retain names. My memory only picks up scenes, melodies, sounds and intensities. In that novel a young man decides to go against the oppression of the city, be above its permanent state, rise above the rules that consume him. You can’t imagine how that moved me when I read it, although I recall that at the end my hero lost his flavor upon seeing him regretful of his sublime work at the feet of a prostitute. Many say that it was love or remorse that brought my disillusioned idol to that state. But it was the city, it is the city, that eats its denizens alive without them even realizing it. You don’t think it’s like this? Look, I’ll illustrate it for you.

In pre-university I met a girl, her name is one of the few my memory has retained. A philosopher said that beyond brute existence, we owe the numerous forces that give the world physiognomy to misfortune, and it’s true. Thanks to an incurable memory I never forgot that name. Jane, her name was Jane. I nicknamed her Baby Jane, like that song from the ‘80’s. Although she never knew that I called her as such. She was a pretty girl. I remember the day that I left a poem in her place in class. She looked at the sheet like I was some kind of weird bug and let out a dumb laugh. That was her most cordial way of making fun of what had nothing to do with her. One day I asked her out and she accepted. While we walked in silence, I wanted to say profound, definitive things to her. But the sound of a car horn interrupted my train of thought. It was a modern car, metallic red. A young, handsome guy stuck his head out the car window and called to her tenderly by a name that I didn’t recognize. She turned around. Her face was illuminated. I understood that I had been a second hand alternative. She excused herself with feigned amiability and got in the car. Upon their exit, the wheel passed through a puddle and splashed me. They laughed. I looked around me and felt that the whole city was talking about me: the streets, the buildings, the houses, the people, the people…everything acquired a haughty shade of bullshit. Ah! the city…

You might think that this story is irrelevant, an exaggeration of a romantic disillusionment. If everything had concluded there, I would agree with you, but no. There was more.

Afterward I started to walk with no fixed direction, my steps labored, without a single understanding, just slight short-circuits of reflections, trying to divorce mind from body, while my head wandered in the midst of balancing probabilities. Like, for example, enumerating the times that I could have changed the course of my life and put myself on a path toward big material acquisitions, including a metallic red car. How many opportunities did I have? Many. Not in keeping with the moral of the city, but I had them and refused them. My decision had been something else: the arts, the construction of stories, bad nights, literary gatherings, fleeting romances, going to the movies like a madman and living other people’s stories. But at that instant, my choice was hurting, and that wasn’t the worst of it. The city is a confusion that hides its own chaos in a dirty game, and we are its fundamental pieces. But I still didn’t understand when in my wandering I came upon the metallic red car in the parking lot of one of those fancy restaurants. Yes, the city can become a Russian roulette, the irony of destiny made circumstance. It was already night. Upon seeing it I suspected that I was trapped in an alley without an exit, an image that is almost always the premeditated justification for acts of unfortunate boldness.

The park was dimly lit. The façade of the restaurant was made of stained glass that let you observe the interior from the street. I saw them. She was smiling and lifting a cup to her lips and the guy with the car watched her, convinced that everything was well. He leaned toward her and kissed her, kissed those lips that still drove me mad. I was there for a while, observing them. Then they got up to leave. Instinctively I retreated to a dark street, without questioning the contempt that had begun to ferment in my chest.

They left in the direction of the parking lot. I thought then of the axe. I thirsted for the axe. The idea of it became necessary, but it was only an idea, my backpack was empty. You can never tell what a man is willing to give up for the courage to trample every moral convention. In my head there was a voice, a voice without a body, the voice of the city that geometrized its labyrinth to envelop me in its nets. But first I should demonstrate my involvement in the sudden apotheosis.

Four guys appeared. As they passed scarcely meters away from the site where I had hidden without announcing my presence, I saw their profiles. They went at top speed in the direction of the park. Armed. They surrounded the couple just as they entered the car. It all happened quickly. Struggle, white arms, a breathless cry drowned out. The car pulled away with the four inside. He and she were left lying on the ground. He didn’t move, but she…she still did. Her hands trembled, her mouth opened and tried to articulate a scream that never made it beyond a brief moan. I looked in the interior of the restaurant. No one had noticed. The neighborhood was silent, aristocratic, for those who live behind closed doors. Ah! the ideology of the city. I felt defeated by the thought of undertaking any effort at getting help. I retreated down that same street. Already distant from that place, I felt calmer and more miserable. My conscience, you say? A conscience is the contemplating of the going and coming of what can’t be resolved. Besides, the spirit of the city had closed itself over my throat. You understand? It was afterward that I started to go around with the axe in my backpack. I don’t know if I did it out of fear or bravery, you never know if you need to be real coward to annihilate someone or if you’re brave if you’re above all moral convention. Two feelings rocked within me, one: that I could be the white man of hostile happenings in any situation, hour or place, and the other: by just touching lightly upon the idea of the axe I felt like a valiant braggart that could embrace the threat and flee toward danger. The only conclusion possible was that my fight wasn’t against flesh and blood but against the city authorities.

At age twenty I began living alone. My new apartment had the essentials: a sofa, an armchair, a table, a table chair, a bed, everything else set aside for my books and music, and in a spot on the wall, a shelf appropriate for only the axe. I wanted to eschew the television but I couldn’t, all because of the damn habit of listening to the newscasts. It was a kind of irresistible addiction. But I think I’ve managed to subvert its effect, I’ve really done it. I pay less attention to what they say than what they don’t say. I learned to read and interpret between the lines of what the anchors announce. You’d be surprised if I told you what I often ended up with. Don’t rush, we’re just getting where you want to go. Can you tell me the time, please? Pardon me for insisting, but it’s important. You’ll see.

It was on a rainy day that I met the girl. For the past week the city was gray with so much rain it resembled London, except for the suffocating heat. These are days where people feel the city’s oppressive weight and remain trapped in the ambiguous shape of its architecture. Long ago it was said the city was walled in, but the walls are still there. No one sees them, but people suffer them. Days where women examine the blade of knives and observe the neck or testicles of their husbands. Where the idea of tripping the impertinent elderly down stairs is born. Without suspecting it, everyone becomes trapped in the net that justifies the crime.

Night had almost fallen when I bumped into the girl. It was a chance encounter, or at least I considered it as such then. It caught my attention that we were the only ones walking in the rain as if it didn’t exist. She came from the opposite direction. We had drawn close to one another when a stray dog emerged from a doorway to bark at her and attempted to bite her. The girl, with speed and strength unusual for someone of her constitution, raised the dog by the scruff of its neck and threw it against the closest wall. The animal emitted a choked whine, then convulsed for a few seconds and stopped moving. The girl calmly contemplated the product of her work then directed a distrustful gaze toward me, but I said nothing. I passed by her side without looking and went on my way. I hadn’t gone two blocks when I realized that someone was coming up at a short distance behind me. I gripped the handle of the axe in my backpack and glanced back with discretion. It was the girl. I couldn’t help but be surprised but neither could I be sure that she was tailing me. I took a detour and went into a bar. I occupied a table facing the entrance and waited. The girl paused in the place’s doorway, looked inside. She entered and positioned herself in front of the table that I occupied. We regarded one another for a few moments, each of us studying the other. She was pretty. She wore a short flower-print dress. She had curly black hair that fell freely upon her shoulders, thick eyebrows and indescribable eyes, neither hope nor fear in them, only a bestial enthusiasm, like someone who has found something they have long awaited without hope.
“Can I sit down?” she asked.
I assented with a gesture of my hand. Never before had anything similar happened to me. I didn’t consider myself the type capable of attracting the attention of a woman in such a direct way. On the other hand, it was my pride against effusion. No emotion. The girl took a seat in front of me, her gestures free of annoyance or hesitation.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I said.
“You tense up when you’re closely followed,” she said.
I looked at her and she smiled. It was an inexpressive smile, a line that her face could alter on command.
“You know why I busted up that dog?” she said without further delay.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“If you want to say why, it’s okay by me,” I answered.
“But would you like to hear it?” she said.
“What difference does it make if I listen or not? You killed a dog, that’s it.”
“You know why what you think interests me?” she said.
“I don’t have the faintest idea.”
“I’ve seen you before, from far away,” she said.
“You don’t say.”
“Yes, you used to pass in front of my school, wandering, always with that axe and your books on your back.
“I didn’t know you all had ever noticed me.”
“Now you see, you’re not as ghostly as you’d like, right?”
“Right,” I said. Her presence had already started to unsettle me. Suddenly I wanted to get rid of her. Although I felt curious. She was something special, of that there was no doubt.
“And so,” she said in a whisper, “Are you interested in knowing why I killed the animal?”
“It’s all the same to me,” I said.
“Ah, indifference,” she said. “I suppose you’re one of those that thinks a man should only listen to himself, forge words for his own silence and be consistent with his conscience. Am I wrong?”
“Acceptable, your point of view.”
“But in the end we can’t help but succumb to the impatience of dialogue, prostitute the individuality of the soul by speaking with others. What a pathetic necessity!”
I recall how her words impacted me.
She smiled and brushed back a lock of hair that fell before her eyes. The gesture caused a capsize in my chest. I sensed it was time to go.
She leaned forward slowly with the least regard for her shirt’s neckline, shortening the distance that separated us and in a very low voice said: “I know your secret.”
My face must have managed a pretty unpleasant sneer, since the girl withdrew. She wasn’t frightened, there was satisfaction in the back of her eyes. Above all at seeing that my hand had gone slowly, instinctively, toward my backpack.
In that moment I thought…or rather, I tried to think where I would go with all this. The girl was there, imperturbable.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “It’s safe with me.”
I got up, ready to march out. Then she took my hand firmly.
“I killed the dog to get your attention,” she said. There was a certain supplication in her words.

I should have gone. I suspected that the girl was full of indifference toward everything. She was weary. And weariness can end up being the ruin of time and life. Then the unexpected happened. She stood up and drew her body to mine like only a woman knows how and kissed me. Tell me, is there such a thing as a life that isn’t pervaded with acted-out mistakes? Is there such a thing as a clear, transparent life, without embarrassing roots, without made-up motives, without myths springing from desires? No, and neither is mine exempt. I recall how I suffered from the same weakening as all men when they’re encircled by the flesh of a woman. We went to my home and spent the night there.

What happened then? Well, the following morning I thought to rid myself of her, see her no more, but she invited me to “walk around the city”. The expression on her lips sounded romantic, but I knew the weight behind her words. To walk through the city arm in arm with her meant being aware of the trick of existing in the other and led away by it. Once again the city closed in around me, and soon it would consume me in its entrails.

During our walk we entered a church. It was empty. We took a seat on a bench near the altar. She raised her eyes to the crucified Christ that hung near the roof.
“Do you believe in God?” she asked.
“No,” I told her.
She turned her eyes to me. “There was a period in my life in which I was a devout follower. But now, no…now, no,” she said.
“What happened?”
“I found the devil more attractive.”
I couldn’t help but smile. She did too.
“Then,” she went on, “I ended up feeling disdain and pity for both of them.”
“That’s something I’ve never heard before.”
“Have you ever wondered why God is so colorless, so stupidly picturesque? Why he lacks interest, vigor and relevance and seems to us so little like that which is hanging up there?” she said and gestured toward the suffering crucifixee.
“No, that question has never occurred to me.”
“The answer is very simple. God is no more than the product of our own fears in midst of our searching, a crutch for our inconsolable souls. And all because we’re sick with hope.”
“Very poetic on your part,” I said. “And the Devil?”
“The Devil’s case is different. He’s the garbage man of our existence. We’ve assigned him evil and perseverance, two of our dominant attributes, we’ve used up our time making him as real as possible; our efforts have been consumed in shaping his image—ridiculous, intelligent, ironic, and above all, miserable. Man recognizes too much of himself in him to feel love and devotion. I think that of those existing, the devil must be the most unhappy of all creatures.”
“Interesting, your point of view,” I answered.
“Really?” she said and leaned her head on my shoulder.
“Yeah, really.”
“You know what the most terrible part is?” she said.
“No.”
“That I’ve never been able to stop believing.”
“In God or the Devil?”
“In either of them,” she said. Then she went silent and lay her head on my chest.
An old woman entered the temple, shot us a look of reproof, then occupied the bench on the opposite side, produced a rosary and began to pray, every once in a while looking at us. I raised my eyes in the Christ’s direction. His eyes reflected a statuesque agony, the blood that descended from the crown of thorns seemed coagulated in time. Crucified Christ, taken down from the Calvary, spread and displayed for everyone like a circus monkey. And all that to save man from his misery. Yes, I believe that since Adam, all of man’s efforts have been to modify the existential misery of individual men. And the evolution of that idea is realized in the spirit of the city. The girl lifted her head from my chest and looked me in the eyes.
“What do you think about me?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I can’t think anything.”
She shifted her gaze. I think that she was waiting to hear something that I didn’t say.
“And you from me?” I asked.
“I think that you’re a lonely person and I sense that you’re very proud of it, but it’s a false pride. A solitary man isn’t someone who abandons all contact with men, but someone who suffers in the midst of them.”
“Interesting theory about me.”
We stayed silent again for a bit and afterwards left the church. We walked slowly, without saying anything. She was anchored to my arm and I didn’t dare to look her in the eyes. There was a moment in which she stopped and blocked my path with her body.
“You know what I appreciate most about life.”
I shook my head.
“Death.”
“Death?”
“Yes, death. Doesn’t it seem attractive?
“Sometimes I think of it, but I’ve never worried about defining it. It simply inhabits us.”
“It’s more than that,” she said. “Death is exact, it never fails, it’s deprived of all fallacy, it lacks the hypocritical mysteries that sustain life. That’s why life inspires more fear than death. You can hasten your death, but not postpone it. It’s what separates two worlds. Simply something fascinating.”
There was a strange light in her eyes when she finished talking. She watched me in anticipation of some kind of comment, but I said nothing.

Thus the day passed, upon nightfall I realized that I didn’t want to separate myself from her. Ah, yearning for another! The most truthful cunning of the city. The girl knew it and traced her intentions toward me. We spent that night together, then another and another. The days passed. During them I lived indescribable experiences, I think to have brushed up against happiness, purity; I forgot my backpack, forgot the city. But even vivid emotions repeated over and over wear themselves out in their own excesses.

Can you tell me what time it is again? Thanks. Don’t get irritated, we’re getting now to the end of it all.
One morning we woke up in each other’s arms, as was our habit. She stuck out her lips and kissed me slowly for a long time. Then she drew her mouth back a scant few centimeters from mine and said: “I need your help.”
“My help with what?” Her words aroused a shudder that traveled through my entire body.
“Help me die,” she said.
I moved her body apart from mine. I don’t think it was an excess of sentimentalism. But I admit that I couldn’t help but feel a certain sensation of emotional catastrophe at her request.
“Can I ask you why you want to die?”
“Because life is out of style, it’s outdated, like the moon, tuberculosis or romanticism. It’s nothing more than an illness, a misfortune. Help me die.”
“I’m sorry. I’m no murderer.”
“I know. You’re an executioner. That’s why you carry in your backpack what will make me free.”
I jumped up off the bed and started to get dressed.
“You’re wrong. I’m nothing, I’m not trying to be anything. You’ve gotten the wrong idea of me.”
“And the axe?! What do you carry it around with you for? For intimidation?! Being that way, you’re nothing more than a coward!”
That word again. I felt a demon dissolving in my veins at a slow boil. Again the spirit of the city appeared and took me by the neck.
“That was all you wanted from me?” I said. “Everything that happened between us was just to get here?”
“No, you moron!” she screamed, “It was out of pity, because of your hyena sadness. Because your depressing presence in this city makes the brothels and churches break out into whispers. Your errant Viking pose moved me. That was all, but now it’s over.”
“Get out,” I said.
She finished dressing. Then at the door she yelled: “Asshole!”
And she went off crying.

I have no words to describe the state in which all of that left me. To involve ourselves emotionally with others is to sin against the peace that solitude offers us. Before the girl I was alone, but I didn’t feel lonely. Now she had left me and it was terrible. I felt like I was going to begin to live like a point on a circumference. Time didn’t matter, or how fast or slow it made its rounds, if it advanced or went backwards, either way I was always going to end up at the same place from which I had departed. Someone said that all beings have their place in nature, man is the only one that continues being a wandering creature, lost in life, unheard-of in creation. I agree. I assumed my previous routine, but it was different, I was marked by something inexplicable. I walked the streets full of fury. I sharpened the axe every morning and kept it close. The weight of the city was overwhelming; I felt that its invisible walls and its gnawed architecture murmured things behind my back. The rumors of the streets climbed to my window and shook my body. I listened to the newscasts and the premonition that something was going to happen was latent.

Yesterday night, I was wandering as I always do. At the intersection of a narrow and dimly lit street, like the one at that park, I realized immediately that someone was following me. I quickened my step, but the person kept at my back. That oppression began in my chest. Then a hand clutched at my shoulder as a disguised voice said: “Coward.” There remained nothing else left to do. After so many years the moment had arrived. I gripped the axe and spun around. It was a clean blow, to the front. The crunch of broken bone still rings in my head. The person collapsed, there were no convulsions nor spasms. The sickly light of a street lamp revealed the face of my persecutor. It was her, the girl. I cried, I cried although it might not be any use saying it. I stuck the bloodstained axe in my backpack and went. The rest, you already know.

What time is it?...It’s eight pm! Ah, listen, listen! You don’t hear it? It’s the music of the newscast. Isn’t it beautiful? Let’s go watch television and listen to the news, I guarantee you that you’ll find the origin and banality of all crime there, in the quiet of the city.

- Translated by David Iaconangelo.

"Half a Minute of Occidental Silence" by Lia Villares

2009-10-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Lia Villares is a narrator, cinephile, guitarist, and author of the blog habanémica: "rhizomatic, multi-faceted, and nocturnal, a cyberspacial hermit". She was born in Havana, where she "lives and resists, still".

---

Taba: Astragalus (heel bone). Side of the taba opposite to the chuca. The game consists of throwing into the air a goat’s heel bone. The player wins if the side that falls facing upwards is the one called carne (meat), and loses when it’s the side called culo (ass); there is no winner if it falls on the taba or the chuca.

Got ink? A little.

The day stealthily approaches, like a leper.

Miller says that God hasn’t died. There’s osmosis left somewhere. Still. Some articulation.

And then again this being with oneself.

These silences.

This harassed being.

I lie down. The action is repeated ad infinitum.

Gottfried Benn, twice at most: feminine dark brown (dirty) staggers on the masculine dark brown (dirty).

Hold me, you, I fall. I am so tired at the nape.

So that you know, it’s also animal days that I live. I am another water hour.

In the evenings my eyelid un-rests like wood and sky.

Having tea, eating rice… my time comes dressed as the baker who was up all night on a double shift.

Not a tactile organ. Are you a happy person, are you sad… are you a sad person, are you happy?

Like wisps of dust or scattered ashes, ideas leave no trace of a path.

Passing torrent, salt desert storm. I use petals to make myself an igloo at the ancient hour, glare that blinds me not any less.

Contemporary sterile drowsiness, I award myself half a minute of occidental silence.

Nothing to do, nothing to see, in my headphones Charly is what is going on.

(Only the silence watches over the silence)

Someone approaches me and slowly tells me to be reasonable, because my ears are small and I shall tell them a sensible word.

I am not your labyrinth, bitch!, I yell thrashing my arms so that she leaves me alone.

Impertinent fly.

The couch suspends me into nothingness for a fraction of time, frozen on the floury apron. Someone makes the shot and it’s four years old me sitting on a sepia tricycle. Smiling at a sepia emptiness. In front of a trolleybus. The ways to Santiago. Narrow streets. Two ridiculous scooters hide my ears.

The extinction of double perception.

It’s Beckett’s Film: Expel the animals, block the mirror, cover the furniture, tear off the illustration, rip the pictures.

Is being to be perceived, is existing to allow being perceived?

I allow the swinging to rock me, immobilize me once again, twice at most, let the swinging go and come and go. Back. Forth. Back

Let it not sto-sto-stop. Stumblingly

I thrash my arms again, more ideas.

What appalls me is the perception of me through myself.

In-sup-press-i-ble.

Disarticulated Bayamo boulevard, marbled granite sun.

Ultraviolent sun. In spite of cold and fictional Bayamo, Bayamo for the bayamese, run.

I randomly compile samples, and when fatigue grows strong, I stop.

I lie down, I allow myself half a minute of occidental silence.

My epidermis being so sensible, I sleep through national celebration days as a preventive measure against deep scalp irritations.

I sleep as much as necessary, lengthily. Any productive effort is rejected.

Later on, I take out the camera and convince the photophobics to the sepia of their ancestral retardation, in the end I tell them a sensible word. After all, their souls’ preservation is as insignificant as their faces, degraded in silver and jelly.

I soften my hands, hydrate my body with Water from the Earth, registered trademark.

I lick my hands and ruffle my hair; I lick my cat’s legs, overhanging out of the fruit bowl, and ruffle his bluish back.

We breakfast on a piece of crap children’s dominical television show of thundering music.

The deterioration and screeching of a city –I write on the door of my balcony with red chalk– match the deterioration and screeching of its inhabitants.

It’s impossible to prevent –I keep on writing– the blood-curling outside from rubbing against the inside.

Someone approaches and tells me that I have a pessimistic tendency towards the negative. I smile back in silence.

Be reasonable, Ariadna; she asks me what the fuck I want to do, seriously.

I shouldn’t go about like that with my generational disorientation, with my weariness and lethargic sleepiness, my sterility and proneness to meditation, to contemplation and masturbation.

(Having tea, eating rice)

Dragging the hours of gambled days, Lezama was clear when he said that in La Habana we used to wager the years and gain on their loss.

Enough, I am not your labyrinth, get lost in the days, get erased out of history, my smiling silence means that I don’t want to do anything, absolutely seriously.

I am what is going on. I lie down.

I want to play until each of my bones is exhausted, until I dislocate my soul the fuck out. Anything rather than think about where I am, still, breathing dust instead of air. Anything, but not this morning sickness, this thin disgust of burnt coffee and tar through my lungs. Inside and out, the screeching. Inside and out. The screeching. Dot and dust.

To reach the absurd in the middle of the death and routine which are reserved to a dismantled city, it is necessary to cancel out all sensibility: sensibility is hope.

I turn the volume of my radio down, I stand up with the firm conviction of my reduced hands.

Juan Piñera walks in front of me. It’s his usual Vedadian night walk. I rush to give him one of my personalized little cards with a phrase by his uncle Virgilio: I hold nothing; nothing holds me up. Our great sorrow is not having any sorrows. He crooks a smile and nods.

(Sempre avanti, avanti).

And I await that in return he reveals some mystery or fascinating secret hidden in his impenetrable gaze, that of a master wizard, alchemist of unsuspected musics.

But no, insomniac nocturnal ghostly marauder just like me, he merely looks at me with his disturbing style of penetrating, dark and tired eyes and I feel stupid with my two braids beneath my hat, which covers my small ears and helps keep away the musical noise-sounds from the Street.

He only says that I take care of myself, one’s got to be careful when wandering, and bids goodbye recommending this or that urban bus route to get to the outskirts where I’m headed for at these total and complete off hours.

I stick my tongue out at him and run again much further away than I want to until I lose consciousness.

Havanemic state, so mad, weekly spell.

Confront. Traffic light and delay, I chew degree after degree.

In his baker disguise, time insists on chasing me.

Staggering.

(I hum meaninglessly, accelerating the rhythm: I-have-a-cake-a-cake-with-meringue-and-I-fear-that-someone-puts-his-finger-in-I-am-a-friend-of-the-baker’s-who-gives-me-flour-who-gives-me-eggs… and I can’t sto-stop).

It stealthily approaches, like a leper.

Is there osmosis left, anywhere? Miller’s voice slows down.

Any articulation?

I am suspended into nothingness for one last moment.

Still.

Must expel the animals, block the mirror, cover the furniture, tear off the illustration, rip the pictures.

The echo of my voice gets distorted.

My body abandoned to the excess of the atomic accident, to the accident of atomic excess, to the atomic excess of the accident...

I am allowed to award myself yet half a minute.

Silence.

- Translated by Julio Leon Banfi. Photo by author.

"Our Lady of the Ophidians" by Daina Chaviano

2009-09-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

Daína Chaviano was born in Havana (Cuba), where she published several science fiction and fantasy books, becoming the most renowned and best-selling author in those genres in Cuban literature.

In May 1991 Chaviano established residence in US. Since leaving the island, she has distinguished herself with a series of novels incorporating historical and more contemporary matters as well as mythological and fantastic elements, like the series of novels "The Occult Side of Havana". Her most recent book, La isla de los amores infinitos ("The Island of Eternal Love"), has been published in 25 languages, becoming the most widely translated Cuban novel of all time.

Daína Chaviano has received numerous international awards and recognitions: Anna Seghers Award (Berlin Academy of Arts, 1990); Azorín Prize for Best Novel (Spain, 1998); Goliardos International Award for Fantasy (Mexico, 2003); Guest of Honor at the 25th International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (Fort Lauderdale, 2004); and Gold Medal for Best Book in Spanish Language (Florida Book Awards, 2006). Her website is www.dainachaviano.com

---

The first day she felt a delightful tickling throughout her body; she stretched beneath the sheets and smiled.

The second day, while she was in the bath, she noticed a stinging between her thighs. Scratching it very gently, with lathered hands, she saw that part of her skin had come loose in small plates like transparent scales. She let the water take them away, swept up in the foam, and kept rubbing herself a while longer under the shower.

The third day she got up at daybreak for a drink of water. When she passed in front of the dining room mirror, she stopped. There was something different on her face. She touched her cheeks, her forehead, the outline of her mouth; but she found nothing. She scanned each piece of furniture reflected in the glass, and only then did she know: she saw it plain as day. She looked at herself again, frowning. Her pupils had altered like those of a cat, and they were big and long and snakishly narrow.

***

The house changed too.

The first month, the creeper plant started to grow up the edge of the wall. Flowers bloomed that perfumed the air on the other side of the grille…At first it seemed that a sudden fertility had been born with the arrival of summer, but she realized her error when she noticed that nothing had modified in the appearance of neighboring rosebushes.

The second month, the holm oak initiated a swift trip toward the clouds and its branches embraced the mansion to protect it from the sun. Four glasses on the terrace fell to the ground mysteriously; and the crash was the cry of something dying.

The third month, the few passersby that strolled through the neighborhood could scarcely distinguish what was hidden behind that jungle sprung up right in the heart of the city.

***

She saw him immediately. He was tall and, undoubtedly, concealed an unusual vigor. He wore faded blue jeans, white tennis shoes and a sweater tossed over his shoulders.

He saw her when she approached with that defenseless air of someone lost. Her expression struck him as familiar and wild at the same time. She didn’t have an exceptional face, but he liked her eyes. While he told her the address, he glanced covertly at her legs, and he imagined how they would look coiled around his own, helping the movement of his body.

Of course, she adored the beach and sure, he loved to swim; and this summer had been such a good time. They said goodbye with the promise of the following Tuesday. Early in the morning. If it didn’t rain.

***

That afternoon, passing below the branches of the holm oak, she became aware of the unusual silence. From afar the distant clamor of vehicles traveling on the avenues could be heard. No, it wasn’t that…The birds. The evening melodies of their songs were missing. She could hear the light music of a canary, the trill of a kingbird, the fluid aria of a mockingbird…from more than half a block away.

The birds had fled from the area, as if they had smelled some danger.

***

The beach was rock and liquid and silence. They greeted each other with smiles. They spoke in a low voice so as not to frighten the breeze. They murmured some pleasures, some experiences, some jokes…But aren’t we going bathing? They threw themselves into the water. The sun still floated near the horizon; the sea was still cold. But blood ran arduous beneath living skin. And the union of two lukewarms always produces heat.

First was the laugh. Then the rubbing of a hand—or maybe a leg, how would one know?—beneath the water. The contact like a caress; the caress like an embrace; the embrace like an agony. And she remembered the moment of birth: a creature that floats in watery nirvana, soothing as an orgasm. Semen enters in the shadow and it becomes a fetus; the fetus is birthed and becomes a child. It’s not possible to invert the process; so that something leaves, one should enter first. Penetrate, before leaving. Leave, after having entered. An undulating form strikes the water like a snake. She clenches her eyelids. Her muscles tense: back, legs, arms; she scarcely feels them.

A cry of terror brings her back to reality. The man drags her towards the shore, without averting his gaze from the tranquil surface of the sea.

***

She opens the garden gate and her laughter fills the afternoon, switching off the end of the story that he’s telling. A sea snake?, she teases while she looks for the key in her purse. Was it the Loch Ness monster? He couldn’t tell if it was a sea or fresh water one, but he saw it perfectly: it was moving beneath the water.

They close the front door.

If he would have been on dry land, fine; but he couldn’t fight in the water, it wasn’t his element. Yes, she interrupts, it must have been poor little Nessie. The scientists had gotten her so bored with those photography machines, dropped into her peaceful lake, that she decided to go on vacation in the Caribbean…

She realizes that he’s giving her a look, really serious, and she caresses him a little. Tired? No, just a little hot; a shower would do him good.

***

She hears the water fall in the distance, immersed in the vapor that the pots give off. She covers the food and leans out into the patio. For some reason, that story about the snake makes her remember the absence of birds. Why had they left? She recalls the flight of the sparrows over the wet grass: their little bodies full, palpitating, delightful…Why had they fled?

She leans against the wall. The skin on her back has stung her ever since last month, when the shedding started. She slides against it with the length of her spine, scratching herself with pleasure. And her pupils diminish until they become two ophidian slots.

***

She serves the meat (according to her, overcooked), the vegetable stew (over-salted), the rice (too bland). He comments enthusiastically on its flavor, which she accepts out of courtesy. He finds himself so hungry that he only notices the woman’s intact plate when he finishes. You aren’t hungry? She observes the man’s profile. His thin nose, a little long, reminds her of the silhouette of a bird. I’ll eat later, she says. And her forked tongue slips between her gums.

***

The white sheet is a plain waiting to be conquered. They observe each other, standing, at each side of the bed. Their eyes follow the slow movements of the other’s as they undo buttons, lower zippers, take off socks, reveal nakedness…

She contemplates what now comes to life: she can’t stop thinking of a dangerous animal, too primitive to survive the emotions of the world, but clever enough to shut itself away and dream a long dream until its nature cheers it up again. “It’s mine,” she thinks. She knows it’s at her mercy. She raises her gaze, searching for the eyes that don’t yet see hers, save for a certain vulnerable zone that always stays hidden beneath a mink epidermis. She lets it appreciate, dazzle. Then she advances, and enjoys her elastic and sinuous step. She knows that he won’t stop admiring it. She moves toward her prey, which breathes roughly, and discovers that love is similar to fright. She stops in front of him. Eyes locked on eyes. A hand surrounds her neck, and she feels an impulse to crawl between the man’s legs. Crawl and climb, climb up to his member; take it in her mouth, wolf it down.

The man’s hand descends slowly, averts obstacles, palpates. She’s moist as a reptile and her flesh swells with pleasure. Now it’s the woman who approaches to touch, but she stops just before grazing him. Only her fingers rush down, brushing the lukewarm fur.

His pupils grow like those of a nocturnal bird; hers diminish to the point of extinguishing.

The bodies roll across the plain. It’s the game of testing another’s resistance; the desire that is about to explode, but no. It’s so sweet, the pleasure of containing oneself.

She opens her eyes halfway, and contemplates the aquiline face that observes her almost with anguish, almost with ferocity. She knows that they have reached a border where fear and love confuse themselves with one another. She feels the mutation coming; she won’t be able to avoid it. Her vertebrae stretch prodigiously, her legs trap the man’s body…then she notices the change in her victim: the softness of hair like a quilt, the suctioning mouth like a bird of prey’s beak, his attitude of a winged creature at the verge of flight…

You’re not going to escape, she whispers, I’m a snake. He smiles, charmed by the joke: And me, I’m a snake-eating bird. In an instant, her legs release their pressure. What’s that? He leans toward her breasts. A bird that annihilates snakes. She laughs heartily and drives her venomous fangs into his neck. “I love to devour,” she thinks. Then she feels the pain: two talons grip her arms, while something pecks her breasts.

The woman closes her eyes and lets herself be wolfed down.

- Translated by David Iaconangelo.

"Charmed Shrimp in China Town" by Jorge Carpio

2009-09-08T07:16:00.000-07:00

Jorge Carpio, a narrator and graduate of the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Literary Training Center, was born in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba in 1965 and currently resides in Havana.

---

“I have great faith in the insane. My friends would call it self-confidence.”
- Edgar Allen Poe

It was lunchtime and Li told Boni that she was going to Tong Po Laug to buy something to eat. She got up from her chair and left him alone with his books and CDs. If anyone comes in asking for me, tell them that I’ll be right back, she reminded him on her way out.

Boni nodded. He had gotten to the bookstore early and was hungry; he would have liked to buy food in a restaurant too but he didn’t have any money; it was the low season and what he earned was barely enough to live on. And to cap it off, the police had installed cameras at points along the boulevard in Chinatown, and the streetwalkers and tourists had emigrated to safer places…

Soon, Boni saw Li leave Tong Po Laug with a steaming plate in her hand: she had bought a paella. As the girl approached, he smelled the food and his mouth watered; he hoped she would offer her something. Boni noted the yellow color of the grains of rice and the singed green of the vegetables. He identified the little Chinese beans. He uncovered an exalted shrimp in the middle of a mountain of rice; it was a solitary shrimp, curled up, that lent an appetizing and majestic air to the plate. With great pleasure, Boni would have stuck in her hand and wolfed down that shrimp. But he didn’t do anything; he sat there in silence, suffering the fragrances of the food and swallowing his own saliva.
“Look,” said Li, pointing to the solitary shrimp with her fork. “How beautiful!” she added.
“Yeah,” responded Boni.
“I’m going to save it for last,” said Li. “Or maybe I’ll just leave him on the plate. To see if it’s a charmed shrimp who’ll bring us something good. What do you think?”
“Definitely,” he said, looking with jealousy at the solitary shrimp.

Boni stopped thinking about food and looked toward the entrance of the boulevard. People walked by, scrutinizing the restaurants; the doormen showed off their trays and hawked their offerings. In front of the bookstore one gave a cry that was particularly displeasing to Boni: he swore that the Tong Po Laug was La Bodeguita del Medio of Chinatown and that their beer was the cheapest. Here tourists could do whatever they pleased, the man concluded.

Now Li ate slower, having devoured a good part of the rice-and-vegetable mountain. And although Boni entertained himself watching the people that entered the boulevard, every once in a while he focused on the paella. The shrimp stayed intact but always in a different position; by his count, it had made four turns around the pozuelo. One of the times he looked, Li surprised him; she was also worried, she knew he was hungry; it was possible that he could have left the house without having had a bite to eat.
“Don’t worry, Boni, I’ll leave you something; I can’t manage all this. But don’t eat the shrimp, you know. I think it’s a lucky shrimp and we need some luck,” said Li.
Boni agreed. It pleased him that she kept him in mind. With the news, his guts started to make a spectacular racket; but the worst was that he couldn’t eat the shrimp. It doesn’t matter, he told himself; anything is something; and he stopped worrying about the food.
“Here,” said Li and extended the plate to him.

Boni ate with relish. When he finished, he intended to swallow the shrimp, but just then he realized that it had changed color. He remembered that at the beginning it had a pink tonality, sprinkled with white, and now it had arrived at a scarlet-like, intense red.
“Look,” he said, surprised, and pointed at the shrimp just like she had.
“What?” responded Li.
“Look how it’s changed color,” he said.
“What has?” said Li.
“The shrimp,” said Boni.
“I don’t see anything strange; it’s the same,” she maintained, and turned her head.

Boni didn’t insist. But in the midst of watching the shrimp, its new color grew more intense and he even noticed that it had moved. What was happening to him? Was the roof falling in on him, as his Russian friend Svetlana liked to say? Then Boni thought that he wouldn’t tell anyone what happened; they’d never understand; ordinary people would figure it was a hallucination. But he was convinced that he felt something different, it was as if he was floating or being invited to go on a trip. Then Boni looked at Li and surprised himself once again: he could see the things his friend was thinking. What is this? The only answer he could find was that the shrimp had gotten to the girl’s head. Anything could happen under the shrimp’s spell, he concluded.
“Something up?” said Li.
Boni looked away; he felt mean knowing he could read her thoughts.
“No,” he answered and focused on the doorman at Tong Po Laug.

He didn’t want to know what that guy dressed in yellow with a conical sombrero was thinking, either, but it horrified him to see the little capacity that he had: in his brain flowed only a few ideas. And most alarming was that they took so long to react. Boni found that he had a green brain, as if it were rotten. And he had learned in school that cerebral material was composed of gray and white. How was it possible that he had it in another color? Suddenly, in the mind of the doorman cash appeared; it was as if it was being shown before a projector. Boni directed his gaze toward where he was looking. He noticed that the doorman was scoping out the passers-by that entered the boulevard. ¡Qué bárbaro! he thought, and came to the conclusion that he saw them as cash cows. He guessed that his capacity didn’t surpass that of a chimpanzee and felt a little bit of pity for him. But Boni would have liked to look at him, he would have loved to know what type of money was involved. Clearly he sees me engraved on Cuban pesos and, what’s more, on one-note bills, he thought; and to him it seemed both funny and pathetic.

It had been a while since he had finished with the paella. What do I do with this now? Boni said to himself upon seeing the pozuelo. He looked at the floor; he searched for a place to put it. He decided on a corner, at the foot of the clock display cabinet, there it would be out of the way; it would also be tougher for an animal, most assuredly a cat, to come across the shrimp.

Afterward he leaned his head on the CD-display table; he was drowsy. Later he felt a trickle of drool hang from his mouth and fall in his lap. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his face. He thought he had slept fifteen or twenty minutes; it was already near two. Now people were leaving the restaurants and stopping in the bookstore. Boni had realized that this time of day the tourists bought books about Ché and the Revolution; the Cubans, horoscopes and pamphlets on santería. Almost always they did good business.

Now becoming fully conscious, Boni noticed Li busy selling CDs. The girl waited on customers while never taking her eyes off their hands. They had been surrounded by a tumult of people. The nouveaux riches, the new man that came out for a stroll around Havana on Sunday afternoons, as he liked to imagine. Boni was irritated with the racket that they made; they picked up CDs; they loudly asked the prices and discussed which was best. Then he remembered the shrimp. He looked toward the pozuelo and saw it in the same place. He was delighted: it stayed phosphorescent like at the beginning but now the glow contrasted with the penumbra in the corner. Boni smiled at this. He decided to investigate what those insipid people thought. He directed his gaze at the group and went in and out of their heads. He saw more or less what he had supposed: in some, fragments of movies; in others, music concerts, Discovery Channel documentaries; in the majority he found absolutely nothing, their minds remained blank as if they didn’t exist.

Until that instant, they had done good business with CDs but not with books. Boni started to worry; it was likely that that day he wouldn’t make any money. A bit later he was encouraged by the sight of a few tourists; by their language he guessed they were German. They were dirty and stinking of sweat. He hoped they would stop in front of the library. He approached them and asked them the usual question:
“Can I help you with something?”
At first the men didn’t react; they were concentrated on some posters of Ché. Boni repeated the question.
“Yes?” said one of the men.
He pointed then at the books.
“Oh! No, no,” said the man, looking at him seriously. “No,” he repeated; but this time in a harsh tone.

Boni wasn’t bothered. He focused on the shrimp and decided to enter the head of the one who had spoken, wanting to know how foreigners thought. They’re people too. He also reflected on how they traveled across the world. They have to be different, then. His interest keen, he slipped into the mind of the tourist. First he observed his blonde, almost white hair, clumpy as if he hadn’t bathed in days. He sensed a stink similar to that of Chinatown when the restaurants’ pipes burst. Then he situated himself in one of man’s two brain hemispheres; he couldn’t identify it as the left or right. He had hopes of finding images of the city’s delights that the publicity ads suggested; however, he didn’t see anything concrete, but rather stumbled over a pile of ideas that he didn’t manage to understand: they were in German. Too bad! he exclaimed. However, upon contemplating a Hebrew medal, the tourist thought something that Boni did understand: Ich haben hunger, the man said to himself. I’m hungry too, Boni said to himself.

Still saddened, Boni watched the Germans walk away without buying anything. Afterwards, they entered the Parrillada, the restaurant neighboring the bookstore. He rejoiced; he thought that place designed like a worker’s cafeteria was the ideal site for those two morons.

It was already mid-afternoon and Chinatown stayed quiet; only the neighborhood children ran around the boulevard. Boni wondered if people were breaking the habit of reading. The world is changing, he said to himself with nostalgia. Then he remembered the Germans. He felt disgraced by them. He remembered how they had focused on the posters of Ché. He looked at them, too. He was curious about what Chéwas thinking. He decided to put it to the test and chose the famous photo by Korda that was known all over the world. But he found no idea: everything stayed black and white. He repeated the process. He thought that he had lost the spell and felt frustrated. Afterward, when he calmed down, he figured that charmed shrimp couldn’t penetrate the mind of the dead. If someone else had been put under the spell and discovers that I’m trying to figure out the intimate thoughts of a hero? Boni asked himself. Stealthily he scoped out his surroundings but no one was paying attention to him; only Li had turned around to look at him.
“This is bad,” she said, directing her gaze toward the books.
Boni didn’t respond. He didn’t like that phrase. He grumbled about Niurka, the florist, who entered the boulevard complaining, "this is bad", it was her go-to line.
“You sound like Niurka,” he said, smiling.
Li returned the smile.

The birds of the boulevard were screeching at the same time, like a great concert: the aviary was an anarchic symphony, thought Boni.
“What time is it?” he asked Li
“Ten to six,” she answered.
He glanced at the shrimp and found that the birds were intoning nostalgic melodies as if they remembered the place they had come from. Boni felt an urge to break open their cages, but he relinquished it. He noticed one that remained silent, taciturn, and wanted to know what was going on in its head. Paradoxically, he was the happiest. If I leave here, the cats will eat me, repeated the bird to himself as if conceiving a slogan. Boni loathed him, remembering past moments of his life. Then he looked above the aviary and saw two cats; they seemed like family; they were white with black spots. One was sprawled on top of the brass that made a roof in the form of a pagoda; he licked his paw and passed it across his face and behind his ears. Sometimes he closed his eyes and dozed off. The other was seated on his hind legs. Boni entered the head of the first. The animal entertained himself by contemplating images that he invented:
Countless cats seated on the Malecón wall regarding the horizon as if searching for something lost. Sardines kept jumping from the sea and falling directly in their mouths. The regular fishermen, envious, tried to open a path among the multitude of cats but they didn’t let them pass. Every time one approached, they closed ranks. Boni gave this dream a title: Feline Rebellion. And it pleased him that that an insignificant animal would be immersed in such delirium. The other cat was concentrating on the birds. It imagined it was hunting them in the air as if it were a flying tiger. Boni didn’t give much importance to that mirage; it seemed pedestrian. Many times he had thought he was like a cat; he loved shellfish and was unsociable, and had imagined himself up on the roofs.

Later, near dusk, Boni saw América and Caridad enter the boulevard together. They were conversing. He fixed his gaze on the man and thought that he wasn’t a regular black guy; he looked more like an Ethiopian with his shaggy beard. Caridad glanced toward the camera that the police had installed in front of the Pacific restaurant. The woman approached América and said something in his ear. Boni watched as he put two cartons of Marlboro cigarettes in the pocket of his shorts. Afterward, still in front of the bookstore, they waved him over. América put his hand on Boni’s shoulder and Caridad kissed him right near his lips.
“How are things?” said América.
“The usual,” answered Boni and took a peek at the shrimp.
“What’s up, baby?” said Caridad.
This time, Boni didn’t speak, only moved his head: now that he was under the spell he could know how she felt when she closed her eyes and moaned underneath him. But in that moment, he preferred to enter América’s mind. At the beginning he felt confused; eventually he adapted to the duality of his thoughts. Binary thought, Boni said to himself, and began to jump from one idea to the other: son of a bitch, and at the same time, hijo de puta, thought América while looking upon a street in Manhattan and Central Havana at once. The man mixed marijuana with campanilla, whiskey with rum, automobiles at a spectacular speed with bike-taxis that go slowly up San Nicolás, the mutiny of an Atlanta jail cell with the tired walk of some Habaneros. América also thought of Boni: he associated him with a priest in a Catholic church on Queen; with a Navy sergeant; with North West Harlem junky; with Greenwich Village loan shark; with Hudson River hermit, with a Central Park rapist…Boni was pleased that in thinking of him, América broke with his habitual binarism and associated him with such a multitude.
“Cool, América!” he said and clapped him on the shoulder. “One of these days we’ll go drink a bottle of rum.”

A little while later, the restaurants’ garlands made the boulevard glitter; the time for food and a resumption of movement had begun. Now I should really sell something, Boni said to himself, and he prepared himself to adjust the prices with the clients. He peered at the shrimp; this time for a long while, figuring it would make the spell last longer. But no one approached the bookstore; they passed and glanced at it and snuck into one of the restaurants; afterward they came out picking their teeth; and the majority carried doggie bags with them for home. During this time, almost four hours, Boni penetrated countless minds.

It was almost eleven when Boni leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes: he saw a bunch of little stars that appeared and disappeared.
“You feel bad?” said Li.
“No,” he answered.
“Let’s close up,” she proposed.
Boni got up and stayed standing for a bit. He stretched. Then he looked at the pozuelo, but he saw it was empty.
“And the shrimp?” Boni almost shouted.
Li was startled; she looked at him, frightened.
“I don’t know,” she stammered.
Boni picked up the pozuelo and brought it close to his eyes. When he made certain that the shrimp wasn’t there, he felt an immense loneliness; it was as if he had lost a close friend. Had he been abandoned again? Was it possible that everyone, the shrimp included, were leaving him? Now, to top it off, he couldn’t even know what Caridad thought while they made love. Then he saw the dog Canela sprawled on the sidewalk; he looked at him with his head tilted and mouth open as if smiling. Damn it! he said, wishing he would have come when he was under the spell; he would have liked to know what he was thinking; he thought it was a cute dog although it had sad eyes. Boni bent down by Canela, smiled too, and stayed a while stroking the dog’s face.

- Translated by Isabel Perera and David Iaconangelo. Photo by author.

"The Cat" by Nayra Simonó

2009-08-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Nayra Simonó (1988) is a student at the University of Oriente and a graduate of the Centro de Formación Literaria Onelio Jorge Cardoso (Onelio Jorge Cardoso Center of Literary Formation). She has been the recipient of numerous prizes and grants for her work, including first place in the Encuentro Debate Provincial de Talleres Literarios in 2007.

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The ceiling and the wall leave a crack. Through there the meows of the cat’s copulation slip at three in the morning. Since it's raining today the water drips through the slit, dampening the house. She is in the bed. There is cold and silence. A silence struck by the rain’s blows on the roof and the street. Me in the chair. The eyes on the painting of the wall that is disintegrating. A trail of color touches the floor and gathers in water puddles like the ghosts of my hands on your back, some weeks ago. The hands fearful at first, insecure, hands of bread you would say, kissing them. Hands of bread that, alone in the night’s coldness, look for a place to draw ghosts.

On the wall a few shadows barely survive. It has rained a lot. We knew at the first shower the watercolor would irrigate through the room. The unimagined was that the separation would anticipate the rain and that the ephemeral painting would be the last remaining, at least the last visible one, of what we had.

The cat jumps from the bed. Soon it will be three o’clock and she can feel it. The large drops are not over. She grows exasperated. She moves her tail, asking me about the rain’s end. The question becomes a plea that blooms from the green crystals in the face: When will it stop raining? Never. I hope it never ends. She cuddles at the chair’s feet. She fixes her eyes on mine and the crystals shine, like two spark plugs about to explode.

I put her aside and look at the wall. There we are. She in the center, you surely thought about my hands, because in the painting you had the astute look of when you want something, I smiled, guessing you wished that I would finish painting. Lucubrations. Dawns in which the moans here inside joined the cat’s on the roof. Now I hate her, because I have stayed to listen to her in this house’s solitude. She approaches again. I envy her meows, the caresses over her stomach. The rain stops and I start to become dry, inarticulate, without strength. I try to stop her from going out, but she manages to sneak through the half-open door.

The bustle on the roof. Me in bed. The bread hands circle my whole body. The moaning grows. I finish agitated like the cats, but alone. I am alone and terrified.

The cat comes in meowing; she climbs into bed and sheds some of her hairs on my breasts, still naked. She mocks my desire, the uncontainable wish to be pampered. Stupid cat, I yell, irritated.

In an attempt to avoid crashing the cat scratches her face against the painting. Outside, the silence, that muteness that devours everything. Here, something has changed, at the edge of a purple puddle that imposes itself between the others, the cat whimpers and drops her tail.

- Translation by Marcela Acosta. Photo by author.

"The Tray of Cocoa" by Mireya Robles

2009-08-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

Born in Guantánamo, Cuba, Mireya Robles has published three novels and two books of poetry as well as articles, short stories and poems in literary magazines in about 20 countries. She has received literary awards in the USA, México, France, Italy and Spain. Interviewed on radio and TV in Miami, New York, Buenos Aires, Madrid and Durban, South Africa as well as in the documentary film Conducta Impropia/Improper Conduct directed by Oscar winner Néstor Almendros. This documentary received the Human Rights Award in Grenoble, France and has been televised in France and Spain and presented in movie theaters in New York, Miami, Puerto Rico, Colombia and Venezuela.

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A small, time-weathered café. Weathered by thousands of beer-drinkers that clinked pitchers of fat crystal with a cheerful spark in their eyes, saying, “Salud! I drink to you, because you’re here, alive and well,” without speaking a word. Small tables, tiny ones, square, with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. All the tables squeezed so close to each other one can barely pass between them. The café petite and perfectly square. Walls of glass look out onto the town that isn’t a town but a beach, or a beach that isn’t for bathing but for fishermen. The sun, the light of the sun, is thick, yellow, dense and enters the café from the beach, ignoring the little densities of mist and leaving in peace the constant humidity. As if it weren’t concerned with heating or drying up, only beating into the café its torrent of heavy, brilliant light.

I come alone, without knowing why, without knowing where I’m coming from or how I got here. Only this moment matters. A moment in which I penetrate the world that talks and laughs. I don’t hear what they say. They’re unintelligible murmurs followed by laughter that seems sincere because it comes from within, as if pushed out by the diaphragm, localized just above the stomach. It’s not laughter produced artificially, with guttural sounds, forced.

I don’t have anyplace to sit. I have no place there, in this cramped, dirty, glittering world of those who laugh. Without finding a place, almost without looking for one, I see myself, in the moment, in the midst of my calm amazement, seated, waiting. I’ll say, because it has to be that way, because it can’t be any other way, that I’m twenty years old. Maybe I was seventeen, maybe sixteen or nineteen. A mature, familiar load of loneliness that I carry with me against my will tells me I’m twenty. I don’t know who, or what, I’m waiting for. I know I do not expect anything from the old, sweaty fishermen, with big cracks on their faces, with gratuitously febrile eyes, with their dirty, blue turtlenecks, with their knit caps, with their spontaneous laughter that responds to nothing. In them I’m not searching for anything. The desire to hear laughter, maybe, keeps me here, though the laughter may be a desultory sound.

Over and over, in front of my table, Ronald passes. He’s tall, sturdy—if he was a truck driver he’d be stocky—his body big and broad, his hair ash-chestnut, somewhat curly, bleached by the sun, in his eyes a brief spark that seems to announce the smile that never manages to appear on his lips. It’s him, he’s who I’m waiting for. He studies Medicine far from here. He’s not the owner of the café or a waiter, but he has for that place, for those people, for that moment, an inexplicable importance. I should say, I have to say, something leads me to believe that if it weren’t for Ronald, that moment wouldn’t exist. And with that moment absent, the café, the beer, and his smile would disappear.

Ronald passes by my side and I feel his presence, but he doesn’t approach. Ronald must know it’s him I’m waiting for. How wouldn’t he know I’m waiting for him, me being seated there by myself, alone among so many elderly men that smell of shellfish? How is it that, with me realizing he couldn’t choose anyone else and that I should wait for him, he could ignore that his predicament is the same as mine? Or maybe it’s not the same. When I leave the café, I’ll go back to my ruined parents, to the filth, to the daily hopes that die before being born, drowned in the absence of possibility.

I’m there, embedded in that chair, for an immeasurable interval of time, for days or minutes, or maybe for a life accumulated in an instant of waiting. It seems an eternity since the last time Ronald passed in front of my table. I have to find out, I have to know. Near me, there’s a stout woman, about fifty years old, her face still young-looking, dressed in all black, with big, shining, blue or greenish eyes. She sobs. She sobs inconsolably, sobs with the despair of someone that knows no one can console them. I speak to her feeling myself close to her, but without moving toward her. I know, without being told, that it’s about Ronald. I know, without being told, that it’s about that mocetón that passed in front of me, who never came to my table and to whom I imagined, so many times, saying my name and hearing his in return.

“It’s Ronald,” she told me. And I knew then it was the same Ronald and that he had been lost. A war, I thought; I kept imagining him dying in a war.
“Another of life’s absurdities,” she continued. “A bullet someone fired for no reason. With his right hand he touched the pain in his left shoulder, in his chest, his hand filled up with blood and he died right there.. I knew that she had to have another son and I asked her about him.
“He’s okay, he’ll be here soon.” I stayed there, waiting for the other without asking his name. I learned Ronald's name after his death. The name of this one was not important. The woman dressed in black disappeared from my vicinity. Because she was a vision or because she couldn’t cry in that café of laughter or because she stopped being important in that instant of my life.

Soon, very soon, the other appeared. Seventeen, eighteen, maybe. Big and powerful, but it never occurred to me to call him stocky. His hair straighter and black, his eyes big and brown, his skin olive-colored with a silky glow. This one seemed to understand, understood immediately, and soon we spotted each other in a living room empty enough where the presence of the other people mattered little. He reclined on the sofa, me at his side, and I wrapped my arms around his waist and lay my head on his chest. That was it. Maybe life wasn’t such a constant, difficult disjointedness, after all. Maybe life could be lived like this, lying on the chest that one must search for, that one has to find, and wait for death. Maybe life isn’t so difficult, maybe it isn’t a constant, painful disjointedness.

I had my eyes closed as if to accommodate myself and wake up at my destiny, but something inexplicable made me open my eyes slowly. I saw you there, in a rocking chair, in front of me, looking at me with resigned amazement and a sadness that, until then, had only been mine. You were calm and wordless, I would say that you were feeling for me a moment of compassion. You had on your face a weariness that you seemed to have literally stolen from me. You were close, with the full immensity of your devotion, but distant and incommunicable. I kept my arms wrapped around that mountain of strong and relaxed muscles and kept saying to myself that like this, with my eyes closed, lying on him, silent, in spite of everything, in spite of your compassion, maybe life wasn’t a painful, constant disjointedness. A sweet, firm movement separated my arms and I saw him, sweet nameless destiny, standing in front of me, ready to go. I didn’t ask for an explanation because it wasn’t necessary. His embrace, his closeness had been momentary. They had nothing to do with my plan to, once and for all, fit myself into life. Nothing to do with my intention to rest that way, hugging him and waiting for death. The hours of the night in which a man embraces a woman ended, the moment of departure, of disappearing without a trace into the night, arrived.

I went back to my place, walking barefoot on damp sand in the falling night. I arrived at my father’s small, ramshackle theater and saw him, with all his strength worn away, always on the verge of collapse, in the poor, overly lit stage, lashing the air as if he were threatening or punishing destiny so it would grant him the production that seemed eternally out of reach. I don’t know if he was waiting for a miracle. He was the owner of that theater, that building, that shell, but he would never have enough money to put on the show. I had grown up hearing his cries and lashes in the air. Without actors, without a script, without a team. His only employee was a flabby, pudgy young girl, her fat, eternally wet lips half-open and showing a few broad, gapped teeth. Wearing a clown dress, white with huge red dots and a straw hat like a schoolgirl, with two ribbons hanging from the back part of the round brim. Eventually, a few people appeared. The idiot collected the ten-cent per-head entrance fee. My father’s fury multiplied. He had managed to get six, ten, twenty people to come see what he had to offer; he had managed to collect a few miserable reales but he had no performance to offer them. Unwilling to admit his failure, he whipped the air and, from the stage, screamed at the girl that collected the reales with a slobbering grin: “Idiot! Idiot! It’s all your fault! Today’s going to be another failure all because of you!” I heard the screams and paid them little attention, knowing the performance would end before it started, when the audience grew bored with the screams and the lashes of the air and commenced to get up and recollect their real from the hands of the smiling idiot. I kept away, heading off to a kiosk and ordering, with an air of triumph, a cup of cocoa. They served me the chocolate in a kind of small, deep carton tray and I didn’t protest. It was already late—nine at night—and to receive service of this type in a town already totally asleep was a privilege. We lived on the second floor, in a blackish, dirty dovecot, dark for lack of electric light, or because my mother simply liked to live that way. She was waiting for me with a recriminatory attitude: “You know that here, in this house, we eat at seven on the dot.” Inexplicably, I felt free of familial ties, independent. It seemed to have been tossed out a nonexistent window, a bag full of blame. Knowing she was watching me, I flashed a cynical smile and, drinking from the chocolate tray, said, “I know.”

- Translated by David Iaconangelo and Mireya Robles. Photo by Tania Spencer.

"Quibbles" by Elena V. Molina (Spanish version)

2009-08-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: As per the author's request, we're including the untranslated version of "Quibbles".

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"Nimiedades"

Mañana:
1. (De) (en las) mañana(s), cuando aun esta oscuro, puedo oír por las persianas el ruido del radio(s), despertadores, gallos, claxons (de carros) y gritos. Si me asomo no veo a nadie y todas las ventanas están oscuras. Solo brilla el neón de la calle, y es imposible que todo eso venga de allí. si (a veces) me despierto (en medio de la noche), se que no es (de) mañana por (los ruidos/son otros) (que) (el) –silencio...- (sin embargo miro mi despertador.)

2. en las mañanas, cuando aun esta oscuro, puedo oír por las persianas el ruido de radios, despertadores, gallos, claxons de carro y gritos. Si me asomo no veo a nadie y las ventanas están oscuras. Solo el neón en la calle, y es imposible que todo venga de allí. a veces me despierto en medio de la noche, se que no es de mañana por los ruidos, el silencio. (sin embargo miro mi despertador.)

Reloj:
1. El reloj despertador tiene una pantalla lumínica en donde parpadean las horas, cuando suena. Cuando no esta la hora, el bombillito que indica AM o PM brilla mas, y se nubla cuando viene, brilla otra vez, la hora. Puedo estar tiempo mirando este juego e intentando discernir si se nubla solo o es la luz de la hora la que lo opaca.

2. El reloj tiene una pantalla lumínica, donde suena la hora, cuando parpadea. -Si-, -no-, esta el despertador, el bombillito que indica PM o AM brilla mas, y se nubla cuando viene, otra vez, brilla la hora. Puedo estar tiempo mirando este juego e intentando discernir si se nubla o es la luz de la hora que lo opaca.

Tejido:
1. Hoy llevo (mi) (ropa) tejida (blusa/pulóver) hace fresco. Llevar ropa tejida es (un sentimiento) suave, agradable, huele bien. Me gusta (mi ropa tejida).

2. Hoy llevo (mi) (ropa) tejida (blusa/pulóver) hace fresco. Llevar ropa tejida es (una sensación) suave, agradable, huele bien. Me gusta (mi ropa tejida).

Mama:
1. La madre de jorge se para en la puerta y una cosa y otra le dice. Todo (solo) lo que puedo entender (entiendo) es “oye”, entre frase y frase. Si me duermo (adormezco) parece el clic de un disparador.

2. La madre de jorge se para en la puerta y le dice una cosa y otra. Todo lo que entiendo, es, “oye, oye”, entre las frases. Si me duermo (adormezco) parece el clic de un disparador.

Problema:
1. (el problema son los libros) (aparecen) por todas partes en pilas de polvo. (están) y desaparecen, caen. A veces un libro parece otro o me lo recuerda, por eso cuando (resulta) se parecen a si mismos (ya) desconfío. Tengo una sombrilla abierta muchas (veces) van a parar a ahí, caen. El (lío) (problema) es el tiempo.

2. (el problema son los libros) (están) por todas partes, en pilas de polvo. (aparecen) y desaparecen, caen. A veces un libro me confunde, y resulta ser otro (o lo recuerda), por eso cuando se parecen a si mismos, desconfío. Tengo muchas sombrillas abiertas (a veces) van a parar a allí, caen. El (lío) (problema) es el tiempo.

"Quibbles" by Elena V. Molina

2009-08-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

Elena V. Molina is a young filmmaker, writer and photographer from Havana. She is a member of the redaction team of the digital independent literary magazine 33 y 1/3 and has performed her literary stage acts in literary festivals and public readings. She is also the author of experimental short films, organizer of the independent film club DuMMY FuEra de cAMpo and a student at the Faculty of Audiovisual Media of the National Institute of Arts in Havana.

You can find her online at:

You Tube profile: elenavmolina, mielegua.

Blogspot: 33 y 1/3 Magazine <http://revista33y1tercio.blogspot.com>

Photoblog: Havanascity <http://havanascity.blogspot.com>

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Morning:
1. (In the) morning(s), when it’s still dark, I can hear through the blinds the noise from the radio(s), alarm clocks, roosters, (car) horns, and shouts. If I lean out I see no one and all the windows are dark. Only the neon street lights shine, and it’s impossible for it all to come from them. If (sometimes) I wake up (in the middle of the night), I know it’s not morning because (the noises/are different) (than) (the) -silence.... - (I look at my alarm clock anyway.)

2. In the mornings, when it’s still dark, I can hear through the blinds the noise from the radios, alarm clocks, roosters, car horns, and shouts. If I lean out I see nobody and all the windows are dark. Only the neon lights in the street, and it’s impossible for it all to come from them. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I know it’s not morning because of the noises, the silence. (I look at my alarm clock anyway).

Clock:
1. The alarm clock has a lighted screen on which the hour flickers when the alarm sounds. When it’s not yet time, the AM or PM lights shine brighter, when it’s about to ring it dims and the hour lights up again. I can pass the time watching this game and trying to discern if it really dims or if it’s the brightness of the hour that darkens it.

2. The clock has a lighted screen where the hour sounds when it flickers. -On-, -Off- in the alarm clock, the AM and PM signs shine brighter, when it’s about to ring it dims and the hour lights up again. I can pass the time watching this game and trying to discern if it really dims or if it’s the brightness of the hour that darkens it.

Fabric:
1. Today I am wearing (my) woven (cloth) (blouse/sweater), it’s cold. Wearing woven clothing is a soft, pleasant (feeling), it smells good. I like (my woven cloth).

2. Today I am wearing (my) woven (cloth) (blouse/sweater) it’s cold. Wearing woven clothing is a soft, pleasant (sensation), it smells good. I like (my woven cloth).

Mother:
1. Jorge’s mother stands at the door and says one thing after another. All (the only thing) I can understand (I understand) is "listen" between phrase after phrase. If I fall asleep (doze off) it’s like the click of a trigger.

2. Jorge’s mother stands at the door and says one thing after another. All I can understand is "listen, listen" between phrases. If I fall asleep (doze off) it’s like the click of a trigger.

Problem:
1. (The problem is the books), (they appear) everywhere in piles of dust. (They’re there) and disappear, fall. Sometimes a book resembles another or reminds me of it, so when (it turns out) that they look like themselves (now) I distrust it. I have an open parasol many (times) they end up in there, fall in. The trouble (problem) is with time.

2. (The problem is the books), (they’re) everywhere in piles of dust. (They appear) and disappear, fall. Sometimes a book puzzles me, and turns out to be another (or reminds me of it), so when they look like themselves, I distrust it. I have many open parasols (sometimes) they end up in there, fall in. The trouble (problem) is with time.

- Translation by Anibal Gavini. Photos by author.

"Context for Understanding Desperation" by Lourdes González Herrero

2009-08-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

Readers and authors are equally desperate. Today I went to a bookstore in which two book vendors were having a bitter argument that caught my interest, it was about a recently published book, but neither of the two mentioned its title.

I feigned distraction, walking from one shelf to the other. One of them contested: it’s not readable, it’s not even clear what it’s about, if you read it and liked it, you should check out a psychiatrist.

The other looked at him defiantly, seeming ready to take action.

I would have liked to watch the two readers come to blows over a book, but the attacker controlled himself, the other let down his physical guard, the apparent calm settled in when the female clerk set off the argument again by pointing out that the book is a real piece of shit, putting herself on the side of the first vendor that now, supported by another opinion, straightened up to make very clear that lowlifes and troublemakers aren’t signs of quality in a book. To this followed the noise of the door slamming as the second vendor went out to the sidewalk to get some air, clearly trying not to let himself be provoked by a woman.
I took from the stand the first book I encountered to complete the disguise. Out of the corner of my eye I followed the steps of the clerk who joined the first vendor to tell him easy to see why he got mad, apparently he has no culture. The vendor nodded, amazed, because he knows that the other has no culture.

At any rate, I came to feel in the bookstore that typical quiet of spaces filled with art. The same as one perceives in museums and theaters. But it was only a recess, back came the infuriated vendor, this time to say in a very loud voice that neither of you two know how to really read, because you’re a pair of mediocre people that don’t look beyond things. So the nucleus formed right at my side, and I had no choice but to look at them so as not to seem deaf. The clerk shook her limp long hair, defending her right to read whatever I feel like, who are you to categorize me if you’re not even a licensed bookseller. It seems that intellectual discourse had no place there, as the unlicensed vendor turned his rage against her, making faces and mocking her, saying that in her house there’s no kind of order and that her husband is going to leave her because she’s a know-it-all that doesn’t know shit. In that moment it seemed like an opportune time to leave the bookstore, but in my haste to leave that cultural battleground, I dropped the book that had served as my cover and it fell to the floor with a dull noise and lay there with its covers on the ground and its pages open. The clerk bent and picked it up, closing it to place it on the shelves. That was the weirdest moment of the morning, her looking at me with dubious cordiality and the vendors stopped dead on both sides of her. I observed for the first time the book with the red cover and twentieth-century-style abstractions, without even daring to ask them: What? Because I hated to think that I had chosen the exact same title over which they had been fighting, although my intuition told me over and over that it was indeed the one to blame.

The clerk coughed, straightening a bit. The first vendor that spoke was the same that went out for some air. He said something to me that I can’t remember in its totality, but I’m sure that it included the words my critic partner, who knows how to read, who doesn’t let herself be influenced by bad opinions. All of it in smooth and tender diction. The other vendor started to roar with big and noisy laughter that made him lose his balance and double over the promotional table. The clerk laughed, but with total control over her forced happiness. The minute came in which, seemingly, both realized that laughter wouldn’t be enough and they led me to the seats, they sat me down, they sat down, we initiated a dialogue that I count among the most absurd of my life and that in its supreme instant of hilarity reached these sentences:

Vendor 1: You are here, supporting me in silence, and that is something I greatly appreciate. Please tell these two folks that that book marks a new mode of storytelling, that when it is necessary to write, and forgive the word, pinga, you write it, because the important thing is to save the character from false directives. Tell them it to see if they’ll finally understand that literature is life.
Vendor 2: Don’t waste your time with us, as we value books according to our tastes, not like other people (harsh tone) that just want to be fashionable. If you like the book, buy it; if it seems that you might like it, buy it, if they’ve told you that it’s good, buy it; we’re here to sell them. On the other hand, if you want to listen to us, don’t waste fifteen pesos on a few poorly arranged and expressly vulgar words that only say how you can stop thinking beautifully. You decide.

Clerk: Look, I know that all this seems unnecessary to you, and it is if at the end you take the book, but if to the contrary you leave it on the shelf, we can say that we have avoided the divulgation of a title that never should have been published, because listen! You’ve got to know what to say and what to leave unsaid, those two things are important.

To me, of course, they never allowed a single word. But, little by little, I had become interested in the book, and I watched them trying to see the possible sincerity in those moved faces. The three of them seemed like spectators. The three of them seemed exaggerated. I thought then of the terrible search of writers and readers and of that bearing of uncertainty that so often I’ve had to experience. That was when I decided to pose to them three basic questions: What bothered them about the book? Why did they complete it if they didn’t like it? How can they sell it if they had such an aversion to it?

The responses were emphatic, at first my supposed adversaries answered that what bothered them was that new wave of writing any kind of filth and calling it a book. The second response was very professional: To know what we were complaining about. The third annulled the question: We don’t sell it, we leave it to him. Indicating, of course, to vendor 1.

There was nothing to do. Nothing to add. Their mission in the bookstore was pretty clear, and although I considered their reactions not as natural but as those of a salesperson’s mindset, they had learned it all from writers. Reading them, they arrived at the conclusion that they had to have a public catharsis for the issues that might produce unease. Cause and effect were clear as day. It’s a shame that I succumbed to the face of the vendor that believed in the book with the red covers. Illusions always form from compassion and attachment to the weakest. So I left the bookstore with my acquisition between my arms, eager to be able to vote definitively for one of the two judgments, and here I am, prisoner of the most absolute boredom and fury for having detached myself from a good portion of my revenue.

At my side, with its pages closed, rests the book that starred in one clear August morning, waiting its turn to reintroduce itself in another bookstore that accepts used, and abused, books. It is the desperate situation that readers offer as resistance to the words with which authors keep their desperation amused.

- Translated by David Iaconangelo. Photo by Bagheia (flickr).

"The Sane" by Lourdes González Herrero

2009-08-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

Lourdes González Herrero is a poet, critic and novelist from the city of Holguín. She has published numerous volumes of poetry (including "Tenaces como el fuego", "La semejante costumbre que nos une", "Una libertad real" and "La desmemoria") and novels ("Las edades transparentes"), for which she won numerous awards. Her work has been translated into French and included in many Cuban and foreign publications. She is the managing editor of the art and literary magazine Diéresis, a member of the Cuban writer's union UNEAC, and in the year 1997 was included in the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature.

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He’s stopped in the middle of the street. Without shoes or a shirt. With a pipe poised above the young man that says to him: “Put it away, walk away and keep it, but don’t do it.”
This scene is the center of attention. The surrounding area is full of people with longing faces and hands like visors so they can see better, to know how this will all end.

A woman of about fifty, eager, pushes her daughter because: “I can’t see well, run over there.”
The girl touches the synthetic poppy that she wears in her hair and makes a face at her mother, who is already approaching the circle where He stammers: “This one here knows people like you, this one knows.”

The young man pushes him by the arm that raises the pipe, corners him against a garbage can, while a medium-sized man, with illegitimate blond hair, brown buck teeth, warns him not to mess around anymore with anybody, because: “It’s gonna cost you, it’s gonna cost you.”
Right then a bicycle driven by two adolescents comes down the street, the one in back pedaling and the one in front at the helm. As they pass by the group, they whistle, with their fingers jammed in their mouths. The sound is intolerable, and knowing it, they laugh and throw an empty beer can that lands square on His head, falls away from the garbage can, rolling to the feet of a young woman dressed in phosphorescent blue spandex, who upon seeing him runs to pick it up, orders him: “Get off my sidewalk, you bastard! Get a job, something you don’t have!”

The number of people increases and each time the distance between each of them is less. He’s visibly frightened, doesn’t put up much resistance when the young man takes him forcefully and sits him on the edge of the sidewalk. His bare feet cake with mud from the gutter, forming an image that disgusts the old lady that passes, and she crosses herself and coughs, horrified, that: “This man has no morals, look how he lays there in the street, calling attention.”

Two children struggle with a third over the ripe mango he carries carefully. They run, push, wrestle, bend down, talk into his ear, and finally throw the coveted mango that explodes on His naked back, like a stone. Immediately, several voices are heard shouting at them, not for having hit Him, but for playing around at a time when things have to be put in order. The mango-thrower’s mother signals to him, threateningly, with her index finger a shade of scarlet, and says to her son: “Look at what you’ll become if you keep throwing things.”

Likewise, the mother of the mango’s owner catches her own by the ear and announces to him: “That’s the boogeyman that came to take you away, now back home! Quick!”

He passes his hands over his back and puts his fingers in his mouth, covered in mango juice. Something intolerable to the girl with the synthetic poppy, who bends and, without straightening, yells: “A bum, you’re a filthy bum!”

The young man returns to try to lay down the law: “I’ll gonna call the police so they can toss you in jail, I’m gonna do it, you can’t be passing through here like this.”

He starts to cry, contrite before the ever-better-nourished group that observes him with disdain.
“I’m gonna take myself in to the police, stop!”

The young man stops. He takes a newspaper from his bag, rolls it up, and gives him a couple whaps: “Walk, walk, you already made me lose two hours.”

They start walking down the sunny sidewalk. A man, advanced in years, intercepts them with a warning: “I don’t know why you, who seems to be a decent boy, burdens himself with taking someone like this anywhere; look at him, look at him, he doesn’t disgust you? If I were you, I’d leave him lying there with his feet in the mud, that’s what he deserves; listen, you can’t wear yourself out your whole life trying to control some nut, believe me, I’m telling you for your own good.”
“He’s right! He’s right!” say several of those present. “Let him go! You’ll get covered with filth taking him to the station!”

The driver of a car that has had to stop because the group doesn’t let him pass, lays his finger on the horn and sounds it without interruption. It’s a noise even more intolerable than the bicyclists’ whistle, and they order him to knock it off with the horn: “Keep that shit quiet, what do you think? That we’re deaf? You can’t get through here right now, period, or do we have to spell it out for you?”

The driver loses his temper, gets out and opens the trunk, pulling out a massive gun with which he threatens them all: “Alright, who says I can’t pass? C’mon, c’mon, show yourself and say it again to my face.”

The fat man riding with the driver gets out of the car and tries to placate him, but he realizes that he’s in the right when he hears the Samaritan old man and the mother of the boy that leans forward, shouting: “This guy’s got it mixed up! All you gotta do is look at him to know he’s a pretty boy! Some kind of freeloader!”

The driver and the woman draw closer and start to wave their hands in each other’s faces until she shoves him. The girl, getting the hint, commences pushing the driver until she realizes that she has lost her plastic flower and bends down to look for it.

The blonde man with the buck teeth thinks he’s seen enough and tries to calm them down by sucking up to them, making clear that they’re all there because of Him.

Their attention centralizes again on who, standing on the sidewalk with his guide, could only manage to stick his fingers in his nose and smile. The young man leading him, disapproving of his sticking his finger in his nose, takes his arm forcefully and twists it back. His face shows pain and his mouth curves into an expression that exposes the stubs of his molars.

Now, a seven-year-old girl approaches and smiles happily, ready to touch his hand. A simultaneous cry travels through the area where numerous people are standing about in groups, expectantly—Noooo, honey, don’t touch that! Don’t even THINK about touching it! My God, she’s going to toooouch it!

But the young man explains to the girl, in a gentle tone: “No, honey, you don’t touch that, you can catch bacteria and then it’ll give you a high fever and your hands will get really red and puffy; go and find a decent person to shake hands with, go on, honey, go on. And you, walk, the police station’s a number of blocks away.”
The girl looks at the young man with frightened eyes and goes running, at the verge of tears.

The two figures continue on down the sidewalk. Him with a certain clumsiness and sorrow; the young man with a determined march and impassive expression.

As they walk, some of the spectators let out jubilant cries: “Take him in! Let them lock him up! Better yet, put him in the dungeon! Three electroshocks is what they ought to give him! And a nice bath in hydrochloric acid!”

Others still argue over the best place to watch them walk, to see them up close, so that no such comment would be lost—that lunatic makes life impossible for us. That horrible man that came to drive us mad, that human disaster, they’ll stick him with a nice little jail sentence.

He bows his head. He seems embarrassed, but still he has the spirit to look at them and dedicate a drooling smile to them all.

- Translated by David Iaconangelo

"One About Winter" by Alex Fleites

2009-08-01T10:33:00.000-07:00

Alex Fleites was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1954. A Cuban citizen, he is a poet, film scriptwriter, dramatist, narrator and journalist. To date, Fleites has published eight books in Cuba and two in Italy for which he received many awards, among these the Julian del Casal National Poetry Prize and the “26 de Julio” National Prize for Journalism. He has been editor in chief of important cultural reviews in Cuba like El Caimán Barbudo, Cine Cubano, Unión y Arte Cubano. He also directed the cultural section of the periodical Juventud Rebelde. Among others, he authored poetry collections like Un perro en la casa del Amor (A Dog in the House of Love, 2004), Omnibus de noche (Omnibus of Night, 1995), De vital importancia (Of Vital Importance, 1989), and A dos espacios (In Two Spaces, 1981), all published in Havana. His anthology of selected works, La violenta ternura (The violent tenderness, 2007) gathers the most important poems written in his thirty years of practice of the art of poetry.

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As I walked along the corner of 10 de Octubre and Tamarindo streets, I saw a man in front of me signaling. He was in the middle of the street, confused. I dodged a guagua and a bus that were going up the hill with asthmatic difficulty. The cold afternoon wind played with the leaves that fell from the few surviving trees on the avenue. He was about seventy and wasn’t very well wrapped up in spite of the dampness. I helped him get his wheel chair onto the sidewalk. Then he asked me to help him up to the doorway, up to the doors of La Diana, a place with little light and dark walls, packed with unpleasant and ill-tempered people. He got into his chair and smiled at me as if to apologize. "I’m going to drink a bit of sun," he said. And he went into the bar.

Translated by George Henson.

"Decalogue of the Year Zero" by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

2009-07-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is an author and photographer born in Havana in 1971. He graduated from the Centro de Formación Literaria Onelio Jorge Cardoso and is a member of UNEAC, a Cuban writer's union. He has been the editor of the literary magazines ExtramuroS (2001-2005), Cacharro(s) (2003-2004) and the e-zine The Revolution Evening Post (2007- ). He has published Collage Karaoke (Letras Cubanas, 2001), Empezar de Cero (Extramuros, 2001), Ipatrías (Unicornio, 2005) and Mi nombre es William Saroyan (Abril, 2006) in Cuba. His last book, Boring Home (Eds. Lawtonomar, 2009), was released digitally on the Cuban blogosphere. He is the author of the blogs LUNES DE POST-REVOLUCIÓN and BORING HOME UTOPICS and has collaborated with the websites CUBAENCUENTRO, FOGONERO EMERGENTE, y PENÚLTIMOS DÍAS.

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1.

Orlando has let his beard grow out, his hair too. Ipatria warned him that he was skinny and that the bags under his eyes, dark as they were, looked like black eyes. Orlando made a grimace of anguish. He crossed Linea Avenue and told her that he was in a crisis.

“I’m perfectly healthy, but every day Havana makes me sicker.”

Ipatria didn’t even try to suppress a smirk. It’s not that Orlando’s crazy, it’s just that sometimes he’s too Orlando, even for himself. Ipatria took him by the arm and pulled him. Or pushed him. Or both. And like this they escaped the Cuban sun, ducking into the shade of the cathedral on the corner of Linea and 16^th. It was a convent in ruins, though nothing made one think it wasn’t inhabited by God. God’s always pretty late in noticing barbarism. Maybe that itself is what God is.

“Don’t laugh.” Orlando shook the girl’s proud shoulders; they clenched. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“Because you’re the worst living writer of the millennium and the world.”

“I swear to you that this time I’m not. It’s La Habanada’s fault.” He drew the girl’s body toward him—“That’s what this new crisis is called: Habanada,”—and he kissed her lightly on the lips. “Thanks, Ipatria, for helping me name it.”

Orlando tries to explain to Ipatria that time is a retrovirus. He never manages to convince her, of course. He lacks the lexicon. He has no battle slang for stirring up the masses. He hasn’t yet mastered Shitspanish. Apparently, he’d still like to live. He drives himself crazy, but all the same he never finds a vocabulary.

“I’ve got no vo-cab-u-la-ry,” he complains, syll-a-ble by syll-a-ble, as if he were a baby.

Ipatria imagines Orlando imagining a Havana without history or histology. That Habanada between amnesia and anaesthesia which he tries in vain to describe. Even though maybe she’s useless, she’d like to make him happy. For Orlando she feels pity and a strong desire to throw him down on some church pew and right there, in the divine darkness, make love to him.

Then Ipatria reminds him of his own idea of taking photos of the city. Of giving himself a glimpse of weightlessness—the terrace roofs, gable roofs, rickety clotheslines, rusty tanks where mosquitoes breed, pigeons amongst robbery and ritual sacrifice, the million and one objects abandoned to the elements, that they both like to read like a crossword puzzle with no key.

So Ipatria extends the camera to Orlando and says: “Come up and see.”

And he lets himself move away from the bench, with the Canon now hanging by his neck like a sacrificial altar or a promise. As if Orlando were a tourist, staggering amongst the parishioners. As if everything weren’t so sad that it was almost upsetting to write or photograph.

With luck, Ipatria thinks now, the boy she loves will come up now onto the belfry, and from there he’ll invent his own observatory of photos: half private and half public, half bitter and half adorable, half Ipatria and half Orlando.

“Don’t kill yourself, honey,” she says in a low voice, so God doesn’t hear her and get excited about such a wonderful possibility.

“Better kill yourself instead,” whispers Ipatria to God.

Orlando kneeled. He focused the lens, a real half-meter telescope. The sun was wolfish—he thought he wouldn’t be able to take too much of it, but at least he didn’t have to use a tripod. The light was liquid and he almost didn’t need to shoot: the reflections would only slip through in the negatives, he smiled—light negative and hard as photons of unreal quartz.

Orlando saw the antiquated cars in high speed, passers-by in slow motion, an open sewer, and a tainted spring. He saw the bloodshot eye of a traffic light glancing through the canopy of flamboyants: trees much older and more alive than him. He saw the malecón and ten million splinters between the surf and the snow. He saw the claustrophobic line of the horizon, tidy clouds like mirrors although they reflected nothing, and he saw the sharp point of the monolith in the Plaza of the Revolution—its cosmic lightning rods always crowned with vultures. All of it an evil aleph that, after so much silent contemplation, in the end Orlando could never portray.

Orlando preferred not to. He felt once again like Bartleby, tired of such a weightless load. Photos, what for?

Now he just wants to get down. To sink towards Ipatria. But the freefall scares him. It’s impossible to reach the girl he loves by jumping. The spiral staircase frightens him more still. Even the word free terrifies him. My poor Orlando, lost in the jungle, he smiles at himself, and I can’t do anything to help you.

As a writer it will be a fiasco, thinks Orlando. But that fear is the only guarantee he’ll survive and not betray Ipatria. Words, what for?

Orlando stands. He throws a rock. Actually, he kicks it. At their backs chimed five or six strokes. The afternoon ends and the tedium begins. The echo of the metals accompanied him during his descent down the twisting rungs. Nausea and vertigo, spinning to the left—the boy arrived at the bottom dizzy, with pupils dilated by adrenaline and an excess of solar radiation. Almost blindly. Like someone looking for shelter in an atomic holocaust.

“Did you finish the roll?” Ipatria gave him a hug. “You took forever!”

Orlando answered that now they could set off. That is, he didn’t answer. He loved her too much to recount certain scenes that, day in and day out, occurred inside his thirty-six-year-old head. At the end of the day, she was only 23. All the same, Ipatria imagined a drama in there that was many times worse.

Orlando simply swung on his pack and returned the Canon to the girl’s outstretched neck—an out-of-style Modigliani.

“Where are we going?” asked Ipatria.

“To the green mountains,” and Orlando knew the expression opened between them the chasm of an entire generation shaped by television.

They walked. For him, the city had exhausted its batteries. Everything was there, but broken down. Emptied. Corrupted by its routine of heroism.

Until when would the magic between he and Ipatria last? Until when the resistance against the rhetorical substances of unreality? Until when their own cycles of untethered madness and paralyzing sanity? Would he ever again photograph the naked barbarism of a planet called Havana? And write in his diary about that carapace of concrete: first free exoskeleton of America, Kafkian arthropod that they loved and hated to the point of insults and tears? Habanized, mon amour—city with an h, a deaf letter. And Ipatria—would he ever again photograph the barbaric nakedness of her body as she complained, wide open beneath his own? Ipatrianized, mon amour—country with no h, that mordant letter.

They walked a bit further, up to 26th. They reached the top of the hill. The mid-afternoon sun extracted a lethal odor from the asphalt. A vapor. El Vedado shimmered like a posthumous tribute to the year 0 or 2000. The island was a long and lucid gas chamber.

Orlando contemplates Ipatria—a skinny, pale face that, in exchange for nothing, in a useful and unnecessary act, has decided to love him syll-a-ble by syll-a-ble. The girl stretches; she looks tired but isn’t, and her shadow suddenly transforms into an infinite tunnel, a black arrow sliding down the asphalt down to 26^th, from the hill to the sea.

Then Orlando imagines that her silhouette is the fallen hand from a nonexistent clock—a Cuban-esque shadow, outside of time. It’s the hour zero. More or less like this, the novel that Orlando preferred never to write could begin. All taking care not to betray his beloved idle Bartleby. At least he isn’t going to write anything, though he isn’t leaving behind the bombardment of slogans and commercials that for decades have crowed about the year 0 and 2000. The girl, of course, isn’t unaware of the galling effect provoked within Orlando by the excessive repetition.

“I’m thirsty.” Ipatria’s voice is a hollow echo, like the exit of a dream that neither she nor he are dreaming.

And it’s true that it made her thirsty. Enough to wake up. Although no simultaneous dream would ever be able to satiate them there.

It’s hour zero. Orlando has let his beard grow, his hair too. He’s skinny and the bags under his eyes look like black eyes. Maybe he’ll kill himself or get himself killed by someone else, it’s not a matter of a crisis, rather one of an unnamed sickness. Orlando’s expression is anguished. He’s not crazy, he’s focused, and as he rips out the photos from an album, he cuts them up with a pair of scissors. He does it meticulously, syll-a-ble by syll-a-ble, autistic-style. They’re photos of Ipatria, naked. While Ipatria, still naked in the other corner of the room, lets him create. Cogitate. She’s a bubbly girl, capricious, free, beautiful, with a decade less in her memory and for that reason almost real—Ipatria is a state of coma. Orlando knows that, after cutting up the silhouette of the girl he loves so much, it will be impossible to pronounce her three syllables again. “Her name begins where the image ends”—more or less like this, the novel about Ipatria that Orlando preferred not to write could begin.

A patrol car stirred up a cloud of dust with the halting of its brakes. The driver side door opened. Behind a pair of police shades, the man greeted them and asked for their license.

“Hand me the camera, please.”

The car didn’t waste any time in taking off. With Ipatria and Orlando inside, rigid as two strangers in the back seat. He tried to lower the window pane, but she remarked to him that the handle was missing. The car felt like a fishbowl with limited oxygen. As soon as they arrived at Zapata Station, the girl was the first to speak.

“Please, can someone explain to us what’s going on.”

“You two blind or you don’t know how to read?” was the response of the plain-clothed man. “That whole zone on the hill is an military-economic target. The wall that says, ‘NO PICTURES / PROHIBIDO FOTOGRAFIAR’ couldn’t be any bigger.”

“But no one took any photos,” was the last protest from Ipatria that Orlando understood from start to finish.

The inquiries lasted past midnight. Finally they recovered the Canon and the zoom lenses, but not the still-virgin Konica roll that was inside. It was a long process until the experts verified the innocuousness of that commercial tape. No light had filtered through there. For the moment, the suspicion of economic, military or tourist espionage didn’t apply to them.

An officer with eyes of cold light assured them in a confidential tone that the fine imposed would be the “minimum fee stipulated by current legislation”: a few pesos in national currency.

Ipatria and Orlando appreciated the gesture and in return accompanied her to the staircase by which she left and entered the station—the premises had probably been a luxurious private residence. When they emerged on the sidewalk, they turned and saw that, from the last marble step, the women with the icy eyes was still saying goodbye. Waving her hand, in proud silence—she was around fifty, but against the light she seemed like an immortal being. Orlando was tempted to ask her to let him take a photo. But he didn’t.

They walked off. Outside, the universe was a scandal of stars, each one twinkling, flash-repetition-style. Concave landscape, cloudless and moonless—a nightless night that, having left behind all that horror or error, surely wouldn’t even be worth the trouble to describe.

At the bend of Zapata and 12 they caught a P-2 with astonishing ease. It was an omnibus imported as a donation from Basque Country or Catalan—at such heights in the story, why bother distinguishing between them? What was important wasn’t how much sense the signs that hung from the roof made, but rather the air conditioning that still worked—something like the world’s first miracle, an expression of underdevelopment that somehow had never appeared.

At that hour the P-2 was almost empty, traveling at the speed limit. They stayed on foot, in each other’s arms, the pack between them as if it was a baby—the camera and zoom lenses half dismantled inside, heavy objects that they would have abandoned beneath an empty seat with pleasure. For some strange reason, neither of them thought to sit down until many kilometers later, just as they were arriving at their neighborhood’s stop and had to get off.

Orlando felt that he didn’t recognize the scenery or his escort. Ipatria felt nothing unrecognizable to anyone—in any case, it saddened her that her love once again felt like killing himself or getting himself killed.

“I have a sensation that tonight I’m going to be sick for real,” was the first sentence from Orlando in hours.

Ipatria didn’t even try to suppress a smirk. They were in the living room, facing the television lit up with static. The girl took Orlando by the arm and went from one end of the house to the other until collapsing in his room—lying on the bed folded-up hours or centuries before.

“Definitely,” she shook the boy’s slumped shoulders, which clenched, “the worst living writer of the millennium and the world.”

Orlando caressed the skinny, pale face of that insomniac Modigliani of the Cuban dawn. Ipatria drew him to her and gave him a little kiss on the lips.

Orlando closed his eyes. The cold light that hung from the ceiling disappeared. Along with the vague idea of maybe writing the novel counterclockwise. And the unphotographable aleph of the city he had tried to cut up with scissors and dismantle an album of disappeared. And his beard disappeared too. And the bags under his eyes, like a pair of black eyes. And the rest of his battle slang, all used up without a roll of Kodak film or a Canon camera. And also, of course, so close and so far out there, on the feeble string of the horizon, the pruned point of the monolith of Revolution Plaza finally disappeared, into the always-deserted night or maybe left for the vultures.

Everything disappeared from the other side of his wide-shut eyes. Everything, except the icy arms of Ipatria, mute magician in whose shadow Orlando slept or pretended to sleep.

10.

Orlando gets up and goes to the bathroom. The moon shines on his face and its image is dead ice in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. He searches in it, finally finds what he’s looking for—it’s an electric razor, no batteries. He smells the metal. It flashes so brightly in his eyes that an idea jumps, demented and perfectly hygienic, to his head. Orlando doesn’t even try to suppress a smirk. Something ends and nothing begins for him. But there’s no danger, it’s just a gesture—take the sharpened blade to his neck and think of Ipatria, lying on the folded-up bed for hours or centuries afterwards. Orlando grips the knife, helps himself with his other hand. Meticulously, syll-a-ble by syll-a-ble, autistic-style, he begins to transform into a weightless child, absent-minded, free, beautiful, with a decade more of latent memory and thus almost unreal—Orlando is another state of coma. He knows that, after radically cutting up his beard, the girl that he loves for free will never forgive him. “Her image begins where her name ends”—more or less like this, the Ipatria novel that Orlando preferred never to write could end. The hairs fall in the sink and a trickle of water erases them with a swirl against the hands of the clock—nausea and vertigo spinning to the left. Orlando shaves, dizzy, with pupils dilated by adrenaline and an excess of lunar radiation. Almost blind. The crossword puzzle, with its inverted image inside the mirror, slides down the drain too, and Orlando takes that loss as a good signal—“be less like myself”, he smiles. As always happens to him with photos and words, although still nothing’s happened, for Orlando it’s hour zero again.

- Excerpted from the novel "Boring Home", available here in Spanish. Translated by David Iaconangelo. Photo by author (self-portrait).

"The Forests of the Night" by Félix Lizárraga

2009-07-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

Félix Lizárraga has published the science-fiction novel Beatrice (David Award, 1981), and the poetry books Busca del Unicornio (La Puerta de Papel, 1991), A la manera de Arcimboldo (Editions Deleatur, 1999) and Los panes y los peces (Colección Strumento, 2001). His poems, stories, and essays have been featured in several magazines and anthologies, including Nuevos narradores cubanos (Siruela, 2000), and Island of My Hunger (City Lights Books, 2007). Prometeo Theater Group of Miami has staged his plays Farsa maravillosa del Gato con Botas and Matías y el aviador. He lives in Miami since 1994.

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"And the forests will echo with laughter"

- Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven

“The place is sealed. Don’t you see the seal?” said a soft-spoken girl, peering from the next door.

“He doesn’t live here anymore?”

The girl studied him intently from the parapet of her door; he could feel her scrutiny although he couldn’t see her eyes, since her face could barely be guessed in the weak, rusty light of the hallway, coming from a solitary bulb in a wire cage.

“You’re Elio, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Come in," said the girl, backing up a step.

“No, I just came by to drop this off. It’s a shirt he lent me.”

“Come on in," repeated the girl, her tone identical, as if she hadn’t heard him, “He left something for you.”

The living room was longish and ended on a small balcony, closed now, as was the window. Curtains and china knickknacks softened the ambiance, lending it something of their own fragility. There were no mirrors.

“Sit down.”

On the tape player a deep, ardent voice was whispering something in English that the girl hurriedly cut off.

“Isn’t that Eliseo?”

“Would you like some tea? It’s already made.”

The question was rhetorical, because the girl was already in the kitchen. Her faded blue robe and hair messily scooped up in a bun didn’t lessen her attractiveness, but a curious mix of aloofness and fatigue made her look perhaps a bit older than her years. In no time she brought in cups on saucers filled with steaming amber-colored tea.

“Do you like it sweet, or you want less sugar? Two teaspoons OK?”

The girl put four heaping spoonfuls in her own tea.

“I like it really sweet. Too bad there’s no lemon.”

“That’s all right.”

“I don’t have any coffee, my aunt didn’t buy any. Is it OK like that?”

The girl sipped at it slowly, carefully. When she sat down the robe hugged her hips, revealing her to be not as stick-skinny as she had seemed. Her hands, when serving the sugar, pressing a button, or holding a china saucer, displayed that minute, slightly artificial daintiness emblematic of femininity, and at the same time the absent air of someone going through the motions of a formal ceremony.

“You’re gonna burn your mouth.”

“I’m kind of in a hurry.”

The girl gazed at him with the vacant eyes of someone interrupted in the middle of a complicated, intense operation. She placed her cup on the coffee table, almost on the edge, and rose gracefully from her chair in a long, liquid movement. Returning, she placed in his hands a small, shapeless packet that seemed to contain something hard and irregular to the touch. It was wrapped in coarse paper and tied with a piece of cord that also enclosed an envelope. She went back to her chair but did not sit down; she put her hands on the back of the chair and looked at him from behind it.

“He left this for you.”

The envelope was sealed; it bore only his name, typewritten.

“Did he go out of town?”

The girl shook her head.

“He’s dead.”

It was said with the same dainty remoteness with which she had offered sugar.

“But…”

The girl slid back into her chair and took up her cup again with both hands, leaving the saucer on the table.

“But… how did it happen?”

“Nine days ago. Killed himself.”

“Oh.”

The girl sipped again at her tea and said without looking at him:

“You’re crumpling up the envelope.”

“When did it happen?”

“Last Sunday.”

“Sunday? But, I saw him that Saturday… We were drinking together.”

“Sunday afternoon, he gave me this. That was the last I saw of him. Monday night, I came in with my key and found him,” said the girl in summary.

“And you saw him Saturday, for sure.”

His hand meets his hand, blurrily reflected in the glass. It pushes the door, and the dense cooled air, suffused with cigarette smoke, engulfs him, welcomes him. The burnished wood of the bar supporting his elbows murkily reflects the sparse reddish light.

“Two sangrias, Pepe,” says the less fat, less bald of the two bartenders as he approaches him, wearing a black bowtie. He orders a cubanito and sees in the long mirror running behind the line of festively labeled bottles his own face and a triangular slice of his chest, cut out in the thick gloom like one of those busts of Roman emperors. He touches his damp hair, and it is then that he notices where the gaze is coming from, the eyes he has sensed watching him from the moment he came in—at the other end of the bar, a stranger, a young man in a white linen shirt. Some homo, he thinks, and returns to the statue of himself in the smoky mirror, while Barbra Streisand’s voice asserts something in celestially high notes, blending deliciously with the spiciness, the thick darkness of the tomato juice on his tongue, the rum’s warmth going down his throat and spreading slowly, like an octopus stretching awake.

“Do you like sangria?” says somebody to his left. At close quarters, the fabric of the shirt is not linen, not even white, but some light color, maybe green.

“It’s not sangria, it’s a cubanito,” comes the clipped reply. The fat, walrus-faced bartender comes toward the man in the light-colored shirt.

“I couldn’t say hi before, dude. Why didn’t you bring Solángel?”

“I haven’t seen her in days.”

“But you guys live next door to each other.”

“That’s life.”

“You haven’t changed, dude. Want another one?”

“Sure, Pepe. I only come here for Pepe’s sangrias… You don’t come here often.”

He briefly explains the prologue to his presence—she, the girl he was meeting tonight, who didn’t come, or was too late; the rain trapping him under the portals; the bar, happened upon and accepted as a haven. A cigarette pack taps his arm lightly.

“Thanks, I don’t smoke.”

“I’ll say what all smokers say: you’re smart.”

“But they all keep on smoking.”

“Always,” says the other, his teeth flashing in the gloom as he exhales the smoke.

“It’s like doctors, those eternal demagogues who tell us to do what they don’t. But everything’s bad for you, some way or another.”

“No, not everything.”

“What isn’t? Tobacco, chocolate, sex—alone or in company?”

“Exercise, for example.”

“You say that because obviously you do it. But what about muscle sprains? Cardiac hypertrophy? Same thing with culture, like reading. Nose in a book, blind as a hook. You can laugh, but it’s true.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic.”

“Why’s that pessimistic? And even if it were, so what? It’s better than being like all those dim-witted, smiley optimists.”

“You must not enjoy life much, if you feel that way.”

The other laughs, another flash of teeth.

“Who says? I talk like that precisely because I enjoy life. But don’t tell me that rum’s not bad for you. And you drink it.”

“I drink sometimes, carefully.”

“All that means is that you’re poisoning yourself carefully. Of course pleasures aren’t as bad for you as duties. Why are you laughing? At least pleasures are honest, they warn us. Duties claim to be pure health, and then they do their silent damage and you only notice it in the long run, when no penicillin can help.”

III

The girl was looking at him.

“I studied with him. In art school.”

“In his same class?”

“No, I was a year behind him. And I never finished… It had been a long time since we had seen each other.”

“Well, I swear I didn’t recognize you,” he says again, while the other clicks the switch ineffectually in an attempt to turn the lights on.

“Shit, now I remember. I blew a fuse this afternoon.”

“I’ll take care of it. Where do you keep them?”

“Usually in the bathroom.”

“What do you mean, the bathroom?”

“The cabinet.”

The flare of the match reveals a sink shaped like some sort of antique bowl. The mirror glares opaquely, its silvered backing worn away.

“You won’t find any.”

“You’ve checked?”

“Of course. See for yourself.”

“Here’s one. Look, there are more.”

“Those are blown.”

“You’re right. Why do you keep them?”

“I don’t know. I always keep the blown-out fuses with the good ones.”

“That’s why there’s so many… And none of them’s any good.”

“Forget it. I’ll light the big candle in the living room.”

The candle sputters and then begins to burn placidly, the mirrors multiply its twilight gleam. It’s a sort of shapeless tower, a stalagmite created from the wax of a thousand molten candles of mixed hues, mostly yellows and reds, with two wicks. A huge bovine skull with truncated horns serves as a candlestick. The living room is so sparsely furnished that it feels enormous.

“Let me open the balcony, or the window.”

Unbuttoning his shirt, he lies back on some kind of chaise, big and curvy and comfortable, covered in threadbare plush.

“Uncork the bottle, will you? Or turn on the tape player. Good thing it works on batteries.”

While he smacks the bottom of the bottle to pop out the cork, on the tape someone mutters in a time-worn, emotional voice:

“He goes beyond the poem, he achieves… the very presence of the tiger… Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright… In the forests of the night…”

The other leaves the glasses on the floor and hurries to click off the tape.

“What was that?”

“It was Eliseo, the poet. That was the only time I ever spoke with him, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to secretly record him. Wanna hear some Deep Purple?”

“Sure.”

The other looks a little embarrassed, for the first time. Ian Gillan’s acid voice bursts in at a gallop.

“Black night! Black night!”

The other grabs a glass and sits on the floor, on something that once upon a time was a cushion.

“I’ve sold too much of the furniture, as you might have noticed.”

“So bright… Black night!”

“You live by yourself?”

“My father left the country years ago, my mom lives with my grandmother, my sister got married…”

“Your old man was a painter too, right?”

“And a ceramist. That’s the kiln over there, in that room, the workshop. Too bad there’s no juice. I make stuff in the kiln sometimes. But I’d rather paint. Why didn’t you finish school?”

“How’d you know I didn’t finish?”

“Somebody told me, I think.”

“It was the year after you graduated. They caught us cheating in the exams. They expelled three of us: Mauro, Kindelán, and me.”

“Kindelán was the black guy, wasn’t he? He wasn’t very bright. But which one was Mauro?”

“Don’t you remember? The guy with dark hair, who used to lift weights with me and Blachito, Bladimir… He was always after Lucy, before she was your girl.”

“Right.”

“What about Lucy? You guys still together?”

“When they sent me to Oriente, it was this big drama. She would write me every day. When I came back we stayed together for a while, but finally we split. She got married, had a daughter, got fat… Interesting thing is, their daughter is actually mine. But let’s not talk about that.”

“I didn’t remember you at first. When you mentioned Lucy, then it came back. Everybody in school was in love with Lucy, one by one, and never got anywhere. Mauro was crazy about her, poor guy. Me too, to a point. It wasn’t that she was pretty, there were prettier girls in school, and she was kind of skinny. But there was something about her.”

“You wouldn’t recognize her if you saw her now.”

“She’s that fat?”

“Well, there’s that, but that’s not all. It’s her personality, her eyes. She’s a different person, now… I painted her a little while ago, from memory, trying to remember what she was like.”

“Do you have the canvas here?”

“Yeah, in the workshop.”

“Let me see it.”

“With no lights?”

“Come on, let me see it.”

It’s Lucy, even in the quivering half-light of the candle: it’s Lucy, her slim shoulders even narrower in the oval frame, her way of cocking her head, her long eyelids, one hand hiding or caressing or pointing to her cleavage; even the shades of blue she is painted in are somehow Lucy, in a mysterious, covet, but unmistakable way.

“Let me see the other ones.”

“No, no, enough. By candlelight, they’ll all look like La Tours.”

He sees one that looks like a dying crab under a blood-red moon, but barely has time for a glimpse before the other throws a drop cloth over it.

“There’ll be time to look at them. Let’s go.”

The golden gleam of one ceramic figurine among the rest draws his attention. It’s a statuette in glazed clay of an adolescent boy, the elongated legs trotting or dancing, then suddenly wider in the torso, the arms raised as if in triumph, minutely detailed even in the hair mussed by a breeze, but faceless, with only a blind, smooth, shiny surface where the face should be.

“Why no face?”

“It’s the Sun.”

“But why no face?”

“It’s the Sun.”

Repeats the other, with a smile and a shrug, looking privately amused, as he almost always does.

“Let’s go, it’s a sin to look at the Sun at night.”

“And you saw him last Saturday, you say.”

“Yes, we were drinking together.”

“Here, at his place?”

“No, in a bar… And later at his place.”

“Did he say something, anything, some hint he was gonna do that?”

“No, nothing. I just can’t believe it.”

“It’s so hot in here now.”

“It’s the rum.”

“Rum? What rum? We’ve barely drunk a drop.”

“We almost finished the bottle.”

“So open the other one.”

“You wanna kill yourself tonight?”

“I don’t kick off that easy.”

He finishes taking off his shirt without getting up from the big plush couch.

“I still can’t believe you remembered me, buddy.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, man. You were Lucy’s boyfriend, and you had this reputation as a brainiac, a good painter, I don’t know. I wasn’t even especially a hardass, I was just some guy.”

“What about all the times we played volleyball? Don’t you remember? Always against each other, of course—your year against my year.”

“Shit, of course I remember. You always hit the best spikes.”

“Hell, no.”

“Shit yeah. I’d be sweating like crazy trying to intercept your spikes.”

“See, you’re already drunk.”

“You’re the one who’s drunk. Look out, you’re gonna spill your drink all over yourself.”

“Shhh, let me listen for a moment. That song…”

“That’s Deep Purple, right?”

“Crimson joy.”

“What do you mean, King Crimson? That’s Deep Purple, man.”

“Shit yeah, but they say something in the song that sounds like crimson joy… No, it’s crimson skies.”

"Marmalade skies."

“Hey, you speak English.”

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!"

“Shh.”

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!"

“C’mon, let me hear this.”

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!"

VII

“And... How...?”

The girl did not need him to finish the hanging question. She put her cup on the saucer and stared at it, slowly intertwining her fingers, as if she were searching for her reflection trapped in the amber of the tea.

“In the bathtub… With his clothes on…”

“In his clothes?”

“Yes… He had a black shirt on. I’d never seen that shirt before.”

VIII

“Sweet child in time...”

The candle is still lit between the broken horns, its crystalline drops thickening the stalagmite, red and golden, golden and gleaming like the faceless statuette, burning in double flame. The dripping wax has started to fill up the deep, hollow sockets.

“You better close your eyes...”

He has closed his eyes, but is not sleeping. Ian Gillan’s voice starts to implore in crescendo, like the endless, burning fuse, soaked in rum, of a bomb strapped to us. He does not open his eyes, not even when he feels the fuse burning in his navel. The cold shiver of surprise is not really surprise—it is the dual surprise of not being surprised. His body is there but isn’t, the navel on which the flame of a tongue has descended is not his navel. Ian Gillan’s chant trembles, panics, it is Ian Gillan who is receiving that wet burn, Ian Gillan who slowly bites into that flesh. Nothing moves, nothing exists in the whole night, except for Gillan’s voice.

“Oh Lord, I beg Your help...”

It proceeds, mounting, pressing, sputtering, it grinds the words until it empties them like cracked skulls, it peels them bit by bit like a shell. Ian Gillan’s voice rises naked, erect, a pure scream, golden, blazing, crystalline.

“Are you all right?” asked the girl.

“Read it later, at home, you don’t have to read it here”

The girl’s voice trembled imperceptibly, her eyes wide, her hand in mid-gesture as if to keep him from tearing open the envelope, but it was too late. The thin sheet of paper, carefully folded, was typewritten.

I hope that this letter finds you well. I… well, I won’t be here. It’s not normal for the dead to write letters; I imagine that receiving one will be somewhat uncomfortable. In any case, I feel I owe you this letter. I want to assure you that you have had nothing to do with this death, despite appearances to the contrary.

The ways of Eros are inscrutable, and I don’t really know why, perhaps three years ago, it was precisely you, or your body (was I looking for you in your body, was I looking for your body in you?), your body among other bodies or you among all the others burrowed into my flesh like a shiver. Now, from the abyss of death, it seems even more obscure to me. The worst part is that it wasn’t even really about you; the most painful thing was not your innocence, your indifference or your unawareness, but the fact that what I was searching for was not you, or your body, but something that seemed to have escaped from me and taken refuge in your otherness; my own otherness (to give it a name) was stalking me, crouched inside you, waiting for me in the contour of your chest or of your hands, your way of moving your head or blocking a spike shot. That is why I chose not to approach you then—perhaps. All that is certain is that I didn’t do it…

But I am overburdening you with this letter that you won’t understand, that barely concerns you, that is addressed to you only in appearance. Even in death I can only reach my hand out to myself, Socrates finding Socrates on his doorstep, Judas’s steps tending only to Judas. In the end, what better way to prove to you that you have had no part in this death, that it is only mine?

In a way, I have misled you. You thought you were giving something of yourself, when in actuality you were only giving back what, unbeknownst to you, you had taken from me; something I had, without your knowledge, without meaning to, deposited in you. You thought you were making a gift, when you were really paying a debt. But (as Hadrian would have said), “No caress goes as deep as the soul.”

Of all the gods, I am the most arcane.

I am the Moon, the Nile; at night

The Sun, emitting names and light,

Descends to my manse, concealed from your domain.

As when the steed and black bull meet

Our eyes lock first; then by degrees

Forehead and forehead brush, converge

And we are one, submerged in golden dusk.

Apex and nadir fuse

Peak is pit; soma is soma; we

The soul conjoined that rules eternity.

The two-backed beast issues its purest

Orders, duly writ by Thoth the Scribe.

Bright burns the Tyger's eye within the forest.

In any case, the debt is settled. Forgive me for having dragged you into this.

Burn this letter.

- Osiris

In the inner rooms, where the girl had disappeared with some vague excuse, nothing could be heard behind the blue curtain. The two packages (his and the other’s) seemed to weigh next to nothing, he took them with him down the stairs, where the darkness brought back to his memory the fuzzy awakening, the candle almost gone, the molten wax staring at him from the skull’s sockets like weird, bulbous, many-faceted eyes; the shock of finding himself naked next to that other sleeping body, the alarmed, imprecise memory of the night’s events, the silent flight into the ashen dawn revealing that he had put on the other’s light-colored shirt.

XII

The same stairs he now climbs, perceiving, with secret terror, the uncoiling of his flesh in the shadow, while he knocks at the door.

- Translated by Elizabeth Bell and Félix Lizárraga

"Joy Eslava" by Carlos Pintado

2009-07-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

Carlos Pintado is a poet, narrator and essayist. He has published the books "El diablo en el Cuerpo" (2005), "Los bosques de Mortefontaine" (Bluebird editions, 2007), "Habitación a oscuras" (Vitruvio, Madrid, 2007), the book of stories and essays "La Seducción del Minotauro" (Islas Canarias, 2000), and a volume of his poetry entitled "Los Nombres de la Noche" (Bluebird editions, USA, 2008), among others. His poetry has been published in literary journals from various countries and inspired music composed by Pamela Marshall and performed by a quintet in the South Beach Music Ensemble. He is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine La Zorra y El Cuervo and currently resides in Miami.

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My "place of clear water,"
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.

- Seamus Heaney

“This story didn’t take place, or it’s yet to take place, which is the same thing.”

His words echoed, reverberating in his head with the distant and imprecise sound of those things one hears in dreams. Later he would look for something without knowing what he was looking for. The room would be a desert: a waste basket with paper, some books scattered on the floor and an oval mirror, covered with gray splotches that don’t allow an exact image. The typewriter suggested that something had been left unfinished. The noise of a dripping faucet blurred the music that came from somewhere. The man blinked several times. He was sweating. He went to the faucet and turned it off abruptly.

Clannad’s music dominated the room again.

He asked himself what he had gone to Joy Eslava that night to do, and, while he was waiting for an answer, he remembered that word: Anahorish, which returned him to a poem by Heaney and to the nights he imagined to a Dublin tavern.

This is where I enter the story.

The story that was going to take place began with my going to Joy Eslava; I am trying to explain to him something about this causal conjunction, but he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t want to understand. He has a stubbornness characteristic of the Irish. I tried to explain, philosophize, remind him that there was a word in a poem by Heaney that I could never translate. I say Anahorish and I surmise that he doesn’t know how to translate it either. He merely smiled, and I couldn’t take it any longer. Want to dance, he says. It wasn’t a question. I didn’t want to dance, but I couldn’t say no; his hands (or perhaps it was just one hand) gripped mine. I looked for confirmation in the contact, but I didn’t find it: the obligatory semi-darkness made it impossible to see; lights exploded on the walls, glowing brightly in the vain darkness of the bar; his fingers, persistent, were intertwined with mine. Years later, I would write a story that would have nothing to do with this one, how a character remembers another: “You touched me with your shadowlike fingers.” I said something like that to him, but you could barely hear it. I couldn’t recall it now with any precision. His words took me back to that moment.

Clannad ceded the space to the Cranberries. The circular-roof theater would support the night. I turned my head to look at something on the second floor and he used the opportunity to kiss my neck. I was going to ask him something, but I didn’t say anything. I preferred to leave and invent the story of what could have happened; both of us at Joy Eslava, dancing, drunk; I would be the tourist passing through Madrid and he barely a shadow of a dream, an invention of mine, although he would certainly deny it. He doesn’t want the destiny that I create for him; he says that he does exist, that he isn’t a shadow of anyone. He would grab me by the shoulders and I would have to remember – in another story that I plan to write – that some really did hold me by the shoulders at that place. He would try in vain to remind me how we exchanged coats. “So you’ll have something to remember me by,” he said, handing me that fur coat that reminded me of a dead bear. At that moment I think it’s better to close my eyes; to think about that word I could never translate and that he doesn’t understand. The only thing that doesn’t exist is that word, he would cry out.

If I had paid attention to him, maybe I would have written this story better. I would write: the smell of his cigarette reminded me of the smell of other herbs. And I would admit, later, that I liked seeing him smoke amid the colorful crowd of that place. Dublin Smoke, I thought. And, as if he were reading my mind, he asked me if I knew Ireland. We stared at each other. The smoke was a blue cloud before my eyes; I inhaled it; the tobacco’s perfume was different. Dublin Smoke, I would write years later, in another story that would have nothing to do with this one. I explain to him – I try to explain to him – that someday I will write this story, but he doesn’t pay attention. Then we play the same game of inventing ourselves with words spoken in the dark, in that sea of kisses and elbows and loud music.

I woke up with a fire burning in my chest. I had tried to translate Heaney before falling asleep. I woke up thinking about that translation. I whispered Anahorish as if I weren’t alone in the room and someone, from the shadows of sleep, could hear me.

I waited a few minutes, but nothing happened. I owe this story to my ignorance of that word. I got up with the certainty of going somewhere. I thought about that place that recalled a “Slavic joy.” I didn’t know if I should go or stay. Somewhere on my neck I still had the mark, still moist, of a kiss.

Upon entering, I would see him dancing. Exactly like this: smiling without looking at anyone, with his cap tilted down covering his eyes. I don’t know if I should approach him. The paleness of his skin surprises me, as if it hadn’t seen the sun in years. Minutes later we were dancing. It fascinates me when the light of the lamps envelopes him. His body seems fragile against the light and almost losing itself in the darkness. I walk up slowly. How do I explain to him that just a few hours ago I dreamt of him? Will he think I’m crazy? That notion frightens me. I don’t want to scare him. Maybe the dream has continued until now, until this moment we are finally in: him dancing slowly, smiling like a little boy; me here, a statue, observing the unreality of the whole situation. Is it possible that I’m still dreaming? I wonder, until Dolores O’Riordan’s voice calms me.

We’re in Joy Eslava. This story is true. It’s happening, I tell myself. The singer’s voice mumbles in your head, zombie, zombie… And I think again that it’s all been a dream. It’s November: Joy Eslava is packed with beautiful people, tourists, and Madrid natives who, to escape from the cold, come to places like this. The people move to the rhythm of an unattainable trance. I know that I’m in a strange dance and it makes me uncomfortable. I go to the bar and order a drink to get rid of my shyness. I would have preferred to smoke. It’s been years since I haven’t put a cigarette to my lips. I hear and the violence causes silence, who are we mistaken? and everything spins without a fixed center, without gravity, full of shadows that trade kisses and embraces. I think about the boy from the dream, which little by little loses a place in my memory; the dream turns everything unreal, like that poem by Heaney that speaks of a serene place, surrounded by warm waters, in which to lay down and talk. I repeat the word, as if to remember a spell – at this point I don’t know if I’m repeating it because of a spell or an act of schizophrenia – and just then a couple sits beside me; I see them holding hands; she looks at me and says hello; he makes the same gesture; she stops looking at me and whispers something to him; the guy’s gaze lingered; I looked down; his hands intertwined with hers, persistent. Say Anahorish amid the throbbing pulse of music. After that I lose the notion of everything. There is a very brief thread between reality and dreams, I thought just as the girl rid herself of the guy and went to dance alone. My eyes and the guy’s eyes found each other in the sea of shadows and blurred contours. He wanted to dance and I would say yes, of course. His hands – or perhaps it was just one hand – gripped my hands. I recalled the brush or the image of a brush. My skin on edge because of his touch. I looked at his face: he was smiling. In another story, and attempting to describe it, I would write down: “I will be able to forget everything about him except his smile, soft, sensual, like a girl. Later I would realize that his skin, or rather the whiteness of his skin, is as memorable.

It was here that he smiled for the last time and we kissed.

When she returned, he and I were dancing. Her hands – much smoother than his – embraced me from behind. I felt her tongue thrust into the nape of my neck, playful. Right now I confuse the two stories; years ago I painted a wood full of paths that intersect beneath the English mist. That image returns to my memory at that moment. I think that tomorrow they will both be but a shadow. I, regretfully, will be on the other side of that shadow. I will recall his words: “tomorrow you’ll think that all of this was a dream”. That’s when I noticed that the girl was no longer there. Surprised, I think I saw her running off somewhere. I tried to yell something to her, but I realized that it was useless; the music grew louder as if we were deaf. He and I kept dancing with our shirts open, stuck together; luminous drops oozed on his chest. We smiled and I thought I could die looking at that smile.

Night dropped us there like castaways. Air was becoming less air. I didn’t stop hugging him as I looked for her face amid the hundred faces that looked at us. I realize here that this isn’t his story or mine, rather hers. Tomorrow she’ll be the one who writes this story: he and I in Joy Eslava, dancing and kissing. “Don’t worry,” he would calm me, and his words would ricochet as if in a tunnel, on top of the music. “She’ll know how to finish this story the best way she sees fit.”

I saw her talking to the bartender from the distance: her body looked like an arch; seconds later she was finishing a blue drink, very blue. Beneath the cone of light her face filtered a certain likeness to the guy’s who was now embracing me. Her silhouette was imprecise in the glass of the bar, deformed. Traces of diffuse light gripped her reflection in the glass. I feared that the image would go beyond a dream. I sense that she looked at us with envy. “Don’t pay attention to her. You and I are where she can’t go,” I heard, “that’s why she’s dreaming us.” I ask, She’s dreaming us? without understanding very much. The desperation of not knowing what would happen when she left overwhelmed me. “She dreams us or invents us?” I ask again, but he didn’t know how to respond or preferred not to. Finally he mutters: “Only she knows that. We’re from this side of things.” He made a gesture with his hands that I didn’t understand. I danced, not for the pleasure of dancing, but because of the distance that dancing provides when there is little to say. I wanted to organize my thoughts. His last words left me with a strange sensation: “if she stops dreaming us, we’ll stop existing.” As I looked up I saw his smile again. I told him my dream, the book of poetry by Heaney and that word that resounded in my dream like the echo of cymbals that I will never be able to translate. “It’s an unbearable litany,” I told him, while he tried to explain to me that in dreams things are an untireless repetition; then he spoke about an eternity in dreams that I didn’t understand. “This story didn’t take place, or it’s yet to take place, which is the same thing,” he said upon seeing my face shadowed by doubt. I closed my eyes. I recalled those words. A wild, drunk crowd rushed toward me from everywhere. The memory of arriving in Madrid was just another ruse. I tried to resist being the one who was dreamed, but I lacked the innate desperation that some possess in the face of such unusual situations. It was then that one of the doors of the bar opened and induced me to escape. I took a few steps, but his hand gripped mine. “Don’t be crazy, no one escapes from a dream; if she dreams you here, it’s because you are supposed to be here.” I listen and close my eyes. Her face comes to my mind. When I open my eyes the three of us are dancing. I don’t know how it happened. Her hands were moving across my chest like a snake, she thrust her tongue at the nape of my neck. I rested my hand on his nude torso and I pushed him away from me; when I turned around she was looking at me; I wanted her to be surprised. “Why did you push him away?” she asked. Her voice sounded like metal. I shrugged my shoulders. “It was an instinct,” I said then tried to grab her by the waist. We danced, our bodies touching, the music almost inaudible. The air was more smoke than air: a thick fog – the result of so many lit cigarettes – floated above dozens of bodies. We danced as if we weren’t touching the floor. I asked her what her name was, but she didn’t answer; “I want to see you again,” I asked, and she smiled. I felt the weight of silence. Out of the corner of my eye I could see how the mirror duplicated us. My hand caressed the skin of her back as if it sensed that she was about to escape.

“I’m not going to escape; I’m a prisoner of the dream too,” she answered. We stared at each other until he came back and grabbed my shoulder. I felt his teeth playfully nibbling my earlobes. She looked as us; she laughed for no reason. She said, “I am her reflection in your world; she can’t come this far, that’s why she invented me…” I tried to respond, but she continued: “…and he invents you”; I told her to shut up and as if she weren’t listening to me, she concluded: “and she invents him. The three of us are the matter of her dreams. Nothing of this will remain tomorrow.” I tried to say that it didn’t wasn’t true, but decided to leave.

I started walking through the crowd. I imagined that the bar door opened and closed constantly. I walked toward it. When I pushed it, I was in the room in the hostel. There was still the muffled sound of the other place. I close the door and look at the book of Seamus Heaney that’s in my hands. I think that I’ve gone to sleep reading the poems. I repeat Anahorish reluctantly, trying to remember that I have imagined a story in which someone imagines the meaning of the word. I’ll write that story tomorrow, I tell myself and fall down on the sofa. To my right there is a basket full of papers, an oval-shaped mirror full of grey clouds. The sound of water comes from the kitchen. I can barely hear Clannad’s song. I think: “This story didn’t take place, or it’s yet to take place, which is the same thing.”

I get up and go turn off the faucet.

Madrid, December 2, 1998.

- Translated by George Henson. Picture by Eduardo Peiro (flickr).

Reference page for "Photos on the Walls"

2009-06-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

(1) Largest pantheon in Cuba

(2) Havana’s Cemetery of Cristobal Colón, where Colombus’ remains are supposedly interred. See above photo (© hoyasmeg, flickr)

(3) Literally, "skinny girl".

(4) Cuban soft drink brand. See photo below (© roitberg, flickr)

(5) Folk saint interred in Havana’s Colon Cemetery; mother who died during childbirth and buried with son positioned at her feet; exhumed years later, her body was said to be intact and the child’s body nestled in her arms.

(6) Grave of Juana Martin, a domino fanatic said to have died with the double-three in her hand.

(7) “Sailors are we and on the sea we go” (song lyrics).

(8) Very fair-skinned black person, usually with kinky hair and African features.

(9) Literally, “wheat-colored person”.

(10) “one cent”

(11) People from the island's eastern provinces.

(12) English-speaking foreigners. See "The Cuban Triangle" for an explanation of the term's history.

(13) Cubans who attempt to cross the straits into Florida on makeshift rafts.

"Photos on the Walls" by Yoss

2009-06-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

Yoss (real name: José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) is a writer of science fiction, erotica, humor and realist fiction as well as an anthologist, critic and essayist. He has published ten books ranging from novels to short story collections and has won numerous awards, including the Ernest Hemingway, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Aquelarre, and Domingo Santos prizes, among others. Yoss has attended workshops and book conventions in various foreign countries and currently resides in Havana.

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To the victims of exile...and insile.

The Sambo was the one that discovered her. It was about seven and he was making the rounds before doors closed when he saw her leave with the last mourners.

Right there she caught his eye. Even though the brown girls, thick girls and busty girls, elegant girls, and super-made-up girls all liked him and she was skinny and flat. Dressed in plain black, no heels, no exposed navel or cleavage, no belly pants, and with even her hair tucked up under a black handkerchief, almost a monk. She could pass for thirty or forty just as easily as twenty. Not much to look at…

Apparently, that afternoon the Sambo still hadn’t gotten any commitments from funeral sluts to go do dirty things on the pantheon of the Naturales de Ortigueira (1).
And the chick was the only one in the entourage younger than the pyramids. But even though he kept watching her for a sign that he could approach, he never got to; she didn’t even look at him.

The Sambo had a sixth sense for mourner chicks. As decent as they might have seemed or hidden as they might have been in a pack of relatives, as soon as he spotted them he knew if they were ripe for the picking. And then the rest was routine: offering to show them, alone, the tomb of their loved one if they calmed down and behaved, he eventually got his rocks off. Not just airhead widows like I thought at first, he also racked up one bombshell after another, above all those freaky sluts that came to search for skulls and bones and perform their satanic rituals between the graves. And since the Vulture always said it was all for one and one for all, sometimes he shared them.

I never took part in this action: women used up by other men kind of disgust me. I preferred to spend my hard-earned dough on street girls—what good was money if I didn’t? But the Vulture did every once in a while and said that they got pretty crazy.

It could have been the confusion of their loss, repression of their urges or a grudge against their unfortunate fate, or the desperation that they say makes some people feel like facing down cyclones, forest fires, or earthquakes.

Or most likely they just let themselves get drunk. Because the Sambo is uglier than voluntary work on the day of an Industriales playoff game; if before not even beggars would bother with him, no one would’ve guessed he would eat so much and so well when he started working in Colón (2).

And the Vulture...the Vulture is the Vulture, it’s not that he didn’t look good, he looked like he used to be a refined type, it wasn’t for pleasure that he almost became an ambassador, but now not even hydrochloric acid could get the stink of corpses off him, hence the nickname.

Everyone has their pride, and coming up empty-handed that afternoon had to have fucked with Sambo; the thing is, the image of that flaquita (3) dressed in black had become etched in his mind. So when he saw her again the next day with another entourage, by a whole other tomb, he was struck stone still.

That same night he told us about it. At first, we didn’t make a big deal out of it…after all, he’s always making up stories about strange lights and apparitions, as if you didn’t even know what a will-o’-the-wisp was. Of course, when he swore by his mother, dead and buried right here, we believed him. The Vulture shrugged his shoulders and said that for someone who has relatives die on them twice in a row, better to put it behind them instead of bringing it up again.

But the Sambo insisted that no, that wasn’t it. Yeah, she was close with her relatives, but she didn’t cry or anything; it occurred to him that the key lay elsewhere and it was pretty weird. Could it be she’s a necrophiliac? Right there we scared ourselves, because if some relative discovered a mussed-up cadaver, they’d put a hideous hex on us, like a year ago when that goddamn Crime Offensive sacked the people here before us.

Or worse yet, if she was in the same business as us with dresses, clothes and teeth? And definitely in combination with someone from outside; chicks never work alone on these things, apparently they make too big of an impression. Although the dead leave an impression on almost everyone. Starting with me, when I got here. Now, not so much, now I prefer them to the living. Yeah, they stink, and their odor sticks to you and doesn’t come off with anything, just ask the Vulture…but at least they’re good and quiet and don’t fuck with you.

Not to mention there weren’t enough beds for so many people nor cemeteries for so many scavengers. He had to watch her close, catch her soon as she made any strange moves, eventually she’d try to pull something.

When we started keeping guard, we saw right away the Sambo was right: there was something fishy going on. The chick showed up early every day for the first burials of the morning, at noon she cloistered herself in a dark corner to eat some bread and a Tukola(4) that she took out of her bag, and afterwards made laps through the graves until close. But she didn’t carry a flower vase or a wreath or nothing, never came back to the same vault, and that had us nervous because we couldn’t understand it.

We got to thinking that she could be undercover, preparing some kind of operation, and just in case, for a week we postponed the most dangerous shit—the pulling out of teeth—until dawn, even though she wouldn’t be around for all that at night.

The Vulture even talked about going to visit the previous Manager in Diosdado Penitentiary to see if he knew something about that chick, but that idea never took off: no one liked to rush what they knew was waiting for them sooner or later. Especially if you’d already been there, like us.

It wasn’t until fifteen days later that we realized what her deal was, and it was the Vulture that cracked the code. He’s not the Manager for nothing.

The chick was taking photos. Of the relatives, the coffins, everything. With one of those real little digital cameras that looks like a toy but costs a pretty penny. And she didn’t have authorization, a license or whatever, because she took advantage of whenever no one was looking and until then concealed it under her shawl.

That really freaked us out: a cop she wasn’t, but couldn’t she be Security, hunting someone they knew nothing about other than that he wouldn’t miss a certain grave? Thank goodness for the Sambo, who got that kind of paranoia out of our heads right away, even though he put it there in the first place: the State has those long-distance lenses so they can watch in comfort from far away, and they weren’t going to send in some crippled dove to hang around the cemetery all day, since if we had discovered anything we could make the first move and hunt her down. Besides, if they were behind someone, where were the dark ninjas with their show-window bodies to grab him? The Vulture said they’d better have someone with rifle with a long-range scope, and I said that for all we knew, skinny as the chick was, she was a Sixth Dan black belt. But the Sambo told us to go to hell and said we watched too many videos.

Basically, we relaxed. That same night we dug out four 18-carat gold teeth from someone that had been vice consul in I don’t know what African country, and nothing happened. And not even three days later we had gotten back to the old racket with the dresses and shoes. There’s just never enough money, and the streets are tough.

It wasn’t stealing, no. Stealing is stealing from the living. The dead don’t count. Yeah, everyone likes to bury their folks in their best. But at the end of the day, after they die it doesn’t do anyone any good and so many Christians walk around this island without sharp threads or half-decent shoes…

Same with the teeth and the clothes. The Vulture, who studied and all, said the word was “recycle”. I didn’t say anything, and it didn’t make much difference to the Sambo if at times he forgot to claim his portion; he was all about his funeral sluts and nothing else. He wanted it so bad it was like he’d never gotten laid; he said that skinny as he was and all he had had days with five or even six. Sometimes we’d give him shit about how while in the tank he must have been somebody’s bitch, which explained the determination in recuperating lost time as a man, but he got so serious and gripped the shovel with such anger that we changed the subject right away. Because everyone’s got their secrets and certain things you don’t play with.

She kept on coming. We named her the Photographer and got used to her, just like we got used to the constant commotion by the tomb of La Milagrosa (5) or to the foreigners that always wanted to see the tomb with the double-three domino (6). Live and let live. Marineros somos y en el mar andamos (7). She didn’t bother us, we didn’t get in her business. The only one that watched her was the Sambo. Little peeks, no more, but without speaking or touching, which violated what went down fifteen years earlier.

And her, always as if he didn’t even exist.

Me...well, we crossed paths a bunch of times. She liked to eat lunch sitting on the steps of the firefighters’ monument, and I’d take my siesta on the bench back there, where it’s well-shaded and the marble’s cool. But still, not a word.

Until the mortician business. It was Monday, the first burial the mother of a mulatto girl married to a well-off Italian, but they were short a few wreaths. They raised a huge stink, called the Manager and everything. The Vulture got there, real serious, soaked in cologne so they wouldn’t notice the stench of cadavers that always emanates from him when he has to deal with people of good standing, and he tried to smooth things over; folks, it’s not our responsibility, we’re very sorry and all that…motherfucker had the gift of gab, I’ll give him that.

But the mulata and Italian didn’t understand, so when they threatened to get police and a judge involved, the Vulture wisened up and sent me on a scooter to see what the hell happened with the goddamn wreaths.

I couldn’t have gone faster in a helicopter. Although they didn’t even tell me where they buried the old lady, I went straight to that fatass Cadalso from Chapel 2. If there’s anyone capable of stealing the bones of a dead man and selling them as fertilizer to his widow, it’s that potbellied jabao (8). He even sold, for five pesos, the names of the dead they were keeping vigil for to the people hoping to get a job at the Interests Office, years ago, when you had to know everything, up to and including the last name of the dead guy or else you couldn’t spend the night on the chapel sofa.

The bad part was, although he knew every trick in the book, Cadalso had no grand vision, didn’t think big. So he stays where he is, and look how many years it’s been. The Vulture always told him to watch his step, that if he fell he’d die of hunger, because it wouldn’t even occur to that cotton ball he had for a brain to eat grass, and that shithead laughed, beating his chest and everything like it was some kind of joke.

Of course it was him that screwed up with the wreaths. I ran the situation by him and he coughed them up pretty reluctantly. But it’s well known that you don’t mess with foreigners, since if they end up filing a complaint with the Embassy, they’ll buzz down and shit on all of us.

It was about seven in the morning and not a soul out on Calzada and K. I mentioned it to Cadalso while he helped me mount the wreaths on the scooter and he laughed, drying his sweat, because that jabao sweated like a pig.
“Yeah, it’s always pretty quiet here about now; even the Photographer left a little while ago, probably to take a bath.”

I stopped cold, speechless. And pretending to be nonchalant, I asked him who that was. Not the skinny trigueña(9), always dressed in black, with a handkerchief on her head?

It was her, all right. Turns out that night after night she went there and took photos half-concealed, most of the people there none the wiser. For the fatass jabao she was just another loonie, but as she was clean and didn’t get in anyone’s way or spark any scandals, sometimes he even kept coffee for her. And how long had she been coming for? Well…and he counted it out on his fingers: he had been there like eight years on Calzada and K, and before that was Toribio, who says that she came then, so at least since ’95.

Ten years? That did it: I had to go talk to her, come hell or high water.

Looking back now, I don’t really know why it happened. Since I left the joint I had had a few flings, sure, a man’s a man and after two years without a woman the savings pile up, but it never went through my head to really shack up with someone…nothing’s changed, and I’m still pissed off about what happened with Claudia, that fucking bitch.

But that flaquita intrigued me. One Friday afternoon I waited for her. When she came out, I lit a half-smoked cigarette and didn’t beat around the bush:
“Hi. I got to talk with you. They call me…”
“…the Puya,” she finished (10), looking right in my eyes. Hers were big, brown and kind of wet. Strange, but not ugly. I don’t know how I didn’t notice them before. “And you’ve worked here as a gravedigger for about a year. Want to come home with me?”

Just like that. The ugly chick from the cemetery, she gave it up? To me? The Sambo wouldn’t have accepted, he said that he was jaded now, that outside of Colón he wouldn’t be able to get it up even for Julia Roberts. Same with the Vulture: he didn’t go home with anyone since the machete blow they gave him in the neighborhood of Canal. They hunted him down in the house of a whore he went to see every now and then and he couldn’t denounce anyone because there was Mary Jane involved.

But I accepted. He who owes nothing fears nothing. Or he who owes everything to everyone gives equally to everyone.

We walked off together, not talking much. Her least of all. I asked her if she knew why they called me the Puya. She said she wondered but it didn’t matter to her, and that I liked. As to why she was taking me home if she barely knew me or if she was afraid I’d assault her, rape her or something like that, she didn’t even respond, all she did was shrug her shoulders like that didn’t matter either.

Or maybe she just trusted me. The Vulture said all the time that my face inspired confidence, that I seem like good people, incapable of harming a fly. Claudia must have thought that too, so she figured she’d fuck me over…and it damn well cost her.

She lived by Paseo and 17, in a corridor sunk way back inside. Havana isn’t what it was, even El Vedado’s filling up with tenements and bunkhouses. The Vulture was always going on about the orientales (11) that don’t stay on their own land, and right there the Sambo piped up that they’d have to set him on fire before he’d go back to Contramaestre, that out there the only future he had was as a beast of burden, that’s why he came to La Poma, to be a person.

“Don’t mind the mess,” she said when she opened the door of her little room. Every women I’ve known says the same thing when they invite you home for the first time. Claudia too.

She flicked on the lights.

The mess was the last thing I would have thought to notice. The room wasn’t anything from another world, nothing like those rooms up in high places but tiny: a bed (why it was lofted I don’t know, since it barely fit), a frayed wardrobe and a table with two chairs. No chest of drawers or mirror or nothing. The door we came in and one window.

And the photos. A ton of photos. Never had I seen so many in one place.

All of people in the cemetery or in the funeral parlor. The living dressed in black or normally but serious, with long faces, tearful and bearing handkerchiefs. Balancing themselves on the parlor chairs. On foot in sad groups of relatives at the side of the pantheon. Walking behind the hearse.

And the dead with closed eyes, calm, face up, with that tranquility and dignity they all seem to have even if, in life, they were hysterical lunatics at best.

But every corner of those four walls was filled with photos. They were yellowed from old age, in black and white, those taken with Orwo film blue-colored, new and shiny, digital computer-pressed. Also two or three pages of magazines, newspapers, most yellowed of all.

There were so many that they piled on top of each other, half covered-up, as if they were trying to climb to the highest point, up to the ceiling. And in two or three places they almost managed to.

She had sat down on the bed, with her legs joined close together, serious, as if she were hoping I’d stop flitting around her house.

“You preparing an exhibition or are they family of yours?” I asked her to say something, and soon as I opened my mouth I knew it was an idiotic question, but it was already done.

She got up and stroked the photos, almost with tenderness, without answering me. Then she opened the dresser with a tug. There were various cameras, from an old Russian Zenith to another big one, either Canon or Pentax, the type you can tell is good just by looking and that costs an arm and a leg.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t show this treasure to the first person that came to your house,” it occurred to me to say, and again I felt I was talking bullshit. “Someone might give you a crack to get ahold of those irons, you can tell they’re worth something.”

Nothing. Like I was talking with the people in the photos. She kept watching me, fixed, with those huge, wet eyes, a moment that seemed interminable, and finally she sighed and took the handkerchief off her head and let her hair fall. She had it down to her shoulders, shiny and extra black, like the mulatas with Chinese blood, but flecked here and there with grey.

“What a terrible housewife I am, I don’t even have coffee to offer you.” She sat down again on the bed, smiled, and it was like a smile glimpsed through a mosquito net: distant, opaque. “The truth is, I never eat here, you notice I don’t have a stove or refrigerator.”
“I didn’t come to drink coffee,” was the only thing I could say. I was uncomfortable and I wanted to leave; better yet, I wished I had never gone there with her.
But I had made my bed and now I had to lie in it.
“I already know why you came,” she sighed, pulling open her black blouse. A button popped off and rolled underneath the bed. She didn’t use a bra, didn’t need one. Fatass Cadalso had bigger tits than her.

The Vulture always joked about how a girlfriend without tits is more friend than girlfriend. But she wasn’t my girlfriend, and besides, she had big nipples and areolas, so dark they were almost purple.

I undid my belt.

It wasn’t a great lay. I don’t remember very well, or rather I don’t want to remember. None of the crazy shit the Sambo spent his life getting, chicks with shaved pussies who suck you off so good the sheets get stuck in your ass, who give you their ass even without asking for it and come five or six times before you blow your load. The Vulture said it was true but maybe the Sambo had gotten too much ass and it had gone to his head.

No. She was skinny and didn’t even take off all her clothes. Neither did she move much, or sweat, or scream or scratch. She was just there, closed her eyes and took it. Maybe that was why I took so long.

When we finished I lit a cigarette and lay there smoking, like in the movies.

“And now?” I said, but I was talking to myself.
“Now, whatever,” she answered quietly and curled up on the bed beside me.
I threw out the $64,000 question: “Tell me, why all these photos? All the nights in the parlor, all the days in the cemetery…when do you sleep? You don’t work? Your family sends you money?”
“I don’t sleep. I don’t work. I don’t have any family,” she said. She got up and started to get dressed. “You’d better go. You’re not what I thought you were, Puya.”
That set me off. It bugs me when people expect things from me without telling me. I grabbed her by the arm and shook her, shouting at her:
“And what the fuck did you expect? That I’d tear out your liver, leave you lying there and take off with all your cameras?”

She didn’t resist. She smiled.

That was the last straw. I let go of her and got dressed without saying anything, all pissed off. No woman was going to mess with me again, never. I swore that day, with each one of the fifteen punches I gave Claudia, to be better than that.

As I was leaving, my hand on the doorknob, I noticed a framed newspaper cutout, above the lock, Alone, with no other photos around it.

It was in English, and I don’t understand much of the yumas’ (12) language. I could only recognize the word “balseros ”, which was in Spanish (13). But there were two photos.

The first was one of those family classics, with well-dressed men and women around a table with a cake. A girl, nine or ten years old, blowing out the candles. In the other, the same girl crying and two huge blond policemen with dark glasses leading her away by her hands.

The girl was skinny and trigueña, with big, wet eyes.

Suddenly I understood why she took so many photos.

What do you say in situations like that? Nothing serves as relief or consolation or anything.

But at least I tried: “Forgive me. I didn’t know…”
“Elian was lucky, really,” she said as if to apologize, “At least his mother and grandmother stayed here.”
“When did they go? You were the only one that survived?” I asked, real quietly.
“The whole family. They fell off one by one, my mother last, after she tied me to the raft. I was alone on the sea for three days until the Coast Guard picked me up. In ’84,”—she sighed—“since no one had stayed in Cuba to claim me, they gave me citizenship right away. And in ’95, when I turned 21, I asked for repatriation. It wasn’t for me. But this…”
“This isn’t for you either, right?” I completed the idea.
“It’s like I stayed in the sea for good, between Cuba and Florida, without landing anywhere. Life is shit, right?” She sat back down and snapped at me, almost with fury: “Take a camera if you want, but if you don’t go right now I’m going to scream.”

I reached out my hand, grabbed the first camera I saw and left. What else was I going to do?

As always, my luck was bad luck. It had to be the Zenith. I couldn’t even get ten dollars for it.

Afterwards we crossed paths numerous times in Colón. Without talking, as if we didn’t know each other, as if that night had never existed.

Three months later I left behind the gravedigger gig and went to work making pizzas with my aunt’s neighbor. Right on time: the Vulture and the Sambo got nabbed about the same week I left. There’s no search that lasts forever and no fighter so slick they’ll never catch him. They gave them about ten years, the Vulture fifteen since he was the Manager.

Not long ago I heard they had raped and killed a chick that took photos in the cemetery. I thought it could be her and didn’t know whether to cry or be happy. But since she never told me her name, and anyway those things never come out in the newspapers or on the news here, I can’t be sure.

The pizza gig also fell through, and now I’m pedaling a bike-taxi in Chinatown. It gets me my dollars but every night I come home with swollen legs.

Life is shit, but it’s the only one there is. In the present, keep on pushing. Sometimes I’d like to see her again to tell her as much.

May 17, 2005

Translated by David Iaconangelo

"Alms" by Alejandro Zamora Montes

2009-06-17T16:07:00.001-07:00

Alejandro Zamora Montes is a narrator currently living in Havana. He won the 2005 Letras Cubanas Award and was a finalist in the Internacional Minatura and Internacional Francisco Garzón Céspedes Contests, both in 2007.

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"Alms"

Every dog in town awaited their collars allocated for alms. Many of them debated how the new gift should best be used. Some would wait until Christmas to show it off, others would put it on an altar and pay tribute to the god of the collars. There was even a Chihuahua delivering a moving speech about canine fidelity. From a nearby tree a one-eyed cat with thinning fur watched the spectacle. He mocked them silently and thought: Thank heaven I was born a cat, independent and nihilistic.

Translated by David Iaconangelo

"The Pip" by Robert Arellano

2009-06-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

Big Ass had the Pip. This is an ailment that attacks a chicken’s nostrils similarly to how a cold obstructs our noses. But unlike the common cold, it does not go away in two weeks; in fact, it is often fatal. The hen becomes morose, refuses to eat and of course stops laying eggs.

Now, Big Ass was the best layer we had and there was no way we could find a substitute for her. We had to cure in the month that was left or there was no way we could win the contest.

Father bought some drops, which were a specific cure for the Pip. Twice daily he started pouring them down Big Asses’ nostril. He assured me that the problem was solved, these drops would cure the illness. However, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to use other remedies as well. Therefore, I dropped fifty cents in the box by the altar to St. Jude and lit five candles. He is the patron Saint of the impossible problems. Might as well start at the top, I thought.

And then, of course, there was Cleo. I approached her with the problem—of which she was perfectly aware—and asked for her help. Oh yes, there is a sure cure, she told me, she had learned it from her grandmother. The only requirement was a red rooster. Using his red feathers she would rid Big Ass of the evil which was affecting his nostrils.

“Where are we going to get a red rooster?” I asked.
“You know perfectly well where you can get a red rooster.”
“Neighbor Gonzalez?” I cringed when I said this. I liked Gonzalez.
“That’s the one,” she said. “You’re small enough and thin enough to crawl under the fence.”
“But that would be stealing,” I complained.
“You’d be borrowing it so I could pluck a few red feathers from its tail.”
“Can’t I pluck the feather and bring him to you?”
“You must bring me the rooster so that I may perform the ceremony. It’s like a priest saying mass. He takes the bread and the wine and only he can say the magic words. Tonight I am the priest. I will carefully say the words of the incantation over the red feathers as I pull them from the rooster’s tail.”

I sneaked out of my room at eleven that night and walked with Cleo toward the pen in Gonzalez’ farm. I carried a small hood like the ones you put over a falcon’s head. I had no trouble catching the sleeping rooster and slipping the hood over his head. He made no noise as I crawled under the fence once more. My clothes were quite dirty by then, since it had rained that afternoon, but Cleo said she would wash them herself.

Red Rooster struggled fiercely as Cleo held him firmly and pulled the red feathers from his tail. With them she stroked the beak, head and body of Big Ass several times while mumbling some words which were as strange as the priest’s Latin.

“It is done,” she said. “Fat Ass will be alright. Here, put the rooster back in his pen.”

As I took the rooster in my hands I noticed that something was very wrong. His neck was limp and his head was hanging down.

“Cleo,” I said, scared. “He’s dead.”
She took a good look at the bird. “Yes, he is. If he hadn’t struggled so much he’d be alive. Let me have it, I’ll bury him in the morning. Red roosters must be buried.”
“I stole the rooster.” I was close to tears.
“You borrowed the rooster. Unfortunately, it died. That could happen to anyone, it’s not your fault.”
“But now I couldn’t return it.”
“Of course not. You can’t return a dead rooster to Gonzalez, that is not what you borrowed. You borrowed the rooster, remember. The fact that it died does not change your intentions. You merely borrowed it.”
“I have done something wrong to Gonzalez.”
“You borrowed it, forget about the death. That was an act of God.”

Something I felt like I was listening to Father Legal.

Big Ass got well.

"Arroz, Huevo, y Picadillo" by Robert Arellano

2009-06-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

It’s so nice being young! You feel so free, so happy, so sure life will go on forever. It’s so sad to find out that youth lasts so little…

Well, I was very young at the time, seven years old, and it was my first formal contact with education. True, I had gone to kindergarten, but that was more like playing. Now I was attending classes in an imposing building downtown where the Jesuits had their elementary school.

Now I carried books around and even a notebook where I scribbled important things. I brought the school home with me, for I had homework to do.

Not only school came home with me but also a schoolmate now and then. My mother had encouraged me to bring home for lunch one of my new friends whenever I wanted, so I brought home my best friend, a kid I had known for almost two months.

He seemed to enjoy it, so a few weeks later I asked him to come for lunch again. After the dinner he said to me:
“This is quite a coincidence, last time I was here we had arroz, huevos, picadillo, harina y papas, and today we had arroz, huevo, picadillo, harina y…”
“Coincidence?” I interrupted. “We have that every day for lunch, doesn’t everybody have the same thing for lunch every day?”

"Stupid" by Robert Arellano

2009-06-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

On Robert Arellano, by his nephew Bob:

"My uncle Roberto Arellano was born in Cuba in 1918. He went to a Jesuit School in Havana, and as a young man expressed interest in the priesthood. My grandmother Fefita Cano y Arellano forbade it, and subsequently refused to send my father, who was 10 years younger than his brother Roberto, to a Jesuit school so that they would not "brainwash" him. Roberto came to the U.S. for college and obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering from M.I.T. Soon after graduation, Roberto got a job at the Johns Hopkins University in the sciences as a lab assistant, but soon thereafter he changed his specialization to the humanities and creative writing. For three decades he taught at the the Johns Hopkins writing seminars. During his tenure at Hopkins, Roberto taught dozens of writing workshops, hosted the great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges during his several visiting-writer residencies, and co-produced student/faculty theater literally all over campus – I remember one adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” that had the audience walk en masse from green to green to encounter consecutive scenes. There is still a performance space at Hopkins that
was dedicated to him: the Arellano Theater."

-----
"Stupid"

I was very close to a small animal once, a rooster by the name of “Stupid”. That was the name by which I always knew him.

We lived in a farm not far from the big city where my father raised chickens. The laying hens and the mature roosters were in the back of the farm, in the front there were two padlocks, on the right were the young roosters and on the left the future laying hens.

I didn’t imagine it that way myself; on the right were the chickens (hens?) with the long combs and on the left those with the short combs. I was only seven and my knowledge of sex was very meager.

When I came home from school I was to feed the chickens. Our cook, Leopoldina, would give me two or three pounds of corn and I would throw it up in the air and all the chickens would scramble and try to eat as fast as they could, and the fastest eater got the most. This was a lot of fun.

One day while I was feeding the hens with the long combs, I noticed that one of them wasn’t scrambling like all the others for the corn. He just stood between my feet and ate all the corn that dropped from my hands. He was so stupid I had to be careful not to step on him. And so I named him “stupid”.

Our friendship grew as the days passed. By the time I arrived, Stupid was waiting for me right behind the door, I had to open it carefully so as not to knock him down. The other chickens were ten, fifteen feet away from me, Stupid was between my feet.

One day I came back from school and ran to greet Stupid, but Stupid wasn’t there. Not only wasn’t he there, but neither were the other five hundred or so of his companions. The whole yard was empty.

I ran to find Leo…where are the chickens? Another revolution?, I asked. I knew that revolutions, of which we had many, did horrible things.

No revolutions, she said, and she took me to my father. He carefully explained that most young roosters are sold, killed and eaten. I burst out crying, “You sold my rooster.” He was a kind man. “I tell you what,” he said, “from the next batch, which is a very good one, I’ll give you two of them all for yourself.”

I started to cry. This went on for some time, I wasn’t very good at most things but I was good at crying. After an hour, my father broke down. He called the man who was going to butcher the chickens, a friend of his, and we got in the car and drove to his place.

This man was also a good man. When he got there he looked at my tearful eyes and, opening the door where the roosters were, said to me: “You can have any two of the biggest ones you can find.”

I said: “I don’t want two chickens, I only want one, and it doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be stupid.”

He sort of laughed. “You can have as many stupid roosters as you…” then, looking at my face, he became serious. “If you can find Stupid, he’s yours.”

I knew I was going to find him. The room was small which meant that they were standing shoulder to shoulder, but even so they managed to stay away from me…until I heard a scream, a crow, whatever, and realized I was stepping on something, someone. I picked up Stupid and went triumphantly to my father and said, “Dad, this is Stupid.”

"The News" by Johan Moya Ramis

2009-06-10T14:13:00.000-07:00

The emissary showed up at the tent out of breath, bursting into the Meeting. They’ve kidnapped her again! They’ve kidnapped her again!, he yelled in the midst of the warriors. We went silent, dismayed, not knowing what to say, some at the verge of tears. It had only been a few months since we returned from Troy.

- Translated by David Iaconangelo

"National Theater" by Johan Moya Ramis

2009-06-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

"Look What Time It Is" by Juan Cueto-Roig

2009-06-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

Ten bombs had exploded in various parts of the city. But this was long after Mario left his house. He didn’t hear about it because he was at the movies. At eleven that night, now in the street, he sensed something strange. The few passers-by, more serious and aloof than usual, moved quickly. At the bus stop, someone commented on what happened. Mario thought of his mother. He was her only son, and she became very nervous when these things happened. Now she would be worried.

“You know the dangers that youths face these days,” she always said, in vain, to dissuade him every time he went out at night.

He stopped the first bus that he saw coming. It wasn’t the one that passed by his house, but he decided he would transfer closer to his neighborhood.

He arrived at the place where he had to get off in order to change buses.

“Be careful, kid, it’s dangerous walking alone out on a night like this,” murmured the driver in a paternal tone.

The street was deserted. For the first time he felt fear. He was the only person on that corner. Suddenly, from the shadows, as if created by the night itself for the sole purpose of changing his fate, a cop approached him, slapped him in the face, and accused him of being one of the revolutionaries that had planted the bombs.

“You’re mistaken, sir, I was at the mall … at a movie.”
“In what theater? Bombs were also planted in theaters.”
“Not in the one I was in.”

The boy’s response infuriated the man.

Mario searched in his pocket for his ticket stub, not finding it.

“You live around here? What are you doing on this corner at this time?”
“Waiting for the bus … Look, here’s my transfer.” And he waved it in his hand like a flag of salvation.

The policeman snatched it from him and threw it on the ground. Then he beat him. While he bled profusely from the nose and an eye, the cop made him walk several blocks while he pointed his pistol at his back. A patrol car passed and the thug signaled to it. They threw Mario into the back seat and continued beating him.
His mother never slept until her son returned. That night he was later than usual. She looked at the clock. It was already 2:00 in the morning. And as if someone could hear her and respond with a reason that would calm her, she said, “Look what time it is and Mario still hasn’t returned.”

And several times a day, until the end of her life, in a voice that was almost a wail, she kept repeating, “Look what time it is and Mario still hasn’t returned.”

- Translated by Charles Iaconangelo

"The River" by Juan Cueto-Roig

2009-06-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

We were two handsome princes. Rulers of all the lands that we could see from the high window, the watchtower that permitted us to separate allies from enemies. Covered wagons guided by loyal subjects provided the provisions for the besieged castle. Bandits positioned behind the trees waited for an opportune moment to strike. Camouflaged spies pretended to fish in the small river that irrigated our kingdom. Meanwhile, various women washed amidst the murmur of the waters and a flock of sheep grazed, indifferent to the plot being devised around them.

Now the river has disappeared. Still, this is the same room where he showed me to hold the thermometer to the light bulb to fake a fever, which would make it possible to stay in the clinic one extra day. His last day. Because he didn’t have to invent fevers or pains. He was so bad off he died the next morning.

They dressed him in his Sunday clothes and laid him out in the chapel. We filtered past the body that, according to rumors, had been stretched out. It was true: in death he grew two inches. The pink color had also disappeared from his cheeks. A rosary and his hands highlighted his paleness against the Prussian blue jacket of his uniform.

The following day the family arrived. They came from very far, from the other side of the country. As I had been the only witness to his death, the director steered me to the salon where his parents waited.

“He fell asleep after we went up to see the river,” was all that I could tell them. But they wanted to know more.
“Did he talk about me? Did he mention my name?” asked his mother.
“Did he complain?” questioned his father.
“No, after we went up to see the river he lay down, said good night to me and fell asleep,” I responded.

The worst part was having to leave him alone for the night in the chapel. Because he told me that what scared him the most was being left alone. That’s why he showed me how to hold the thermometer to the light bulb.

And now, what have I come to? What am I doing 40 years later in this room that is no longer what it was, just a warehouse full of boxes and junk? There is nothing to indicate that Paulino died between these four walls. By now, nobody remembers what happened here. I myself sometimes forget that the boy existed. Even the river has disappeared.

- Translated by Charles Iaconangelo

"The Empty Niches" by Juan Cueto-Roig

2009-06-06T20:40:00.000-07:00

Juan Cueto-Roig was born in Caibarién, Cuba. Exiled from the Island in 1966, he now resides in Miami. In 1996 he published "En la tarde, tarde" (Poetry) Editorial Sibi, Miami. In 2000, "Palabras en fila, en clase y en recreo" (Poetry), Editorial Verbum, Madrid. In 2002, "Ex-Cuetos" (Stories), Ediciones Universal, Miami. In 2004, "Hallarás lobregueces" (Stories), Editorial Ultragraphics, Miami and "En época de lilas" (Spanish translation of 44 poems by e. e. Cummings), Editorial Verbum, Madrid. In 2007, "Verycuetos" (Chronicles), Editorial El Almendro, Miami. In 2009, "Veintiún cuentos concisos" (Stories), Editorial Silueta, Miami.

---

"...and happily we slaughtered the gods."
- J.L. Borges

On the 20th of January in the year 2030 the heads of state of the world’s most powerful countries gathered in an extraordinary assembly of the UN. They had been urgently convened due to the religious wars that were breaking out in various regions of the world at the cost of millions of lives.

Suddenly, in the middle of the debates, The All Powerful appeared, and, after a moving speech in which he declared himself guilty for the imperfections and calamities of his Creation, announced his intention to commit suicide.

The crying and begging of those present were useless. It is well known that the pleas of men have rarely changed the designs of the Almighty.

After the great act was consummated, which by virtue of its supernatural nature none of the witnesses were able to describe precisely, a state of emptiness and helplessness overtook the members of the global community, which sunk into an eerie silence. Minutes later, cutting through the terror that the unusual event had provoked, the scarcely audible voice of the Secretary General ended the session.

The following day a committee was named with the purpose of redacting those statutes and amendments pertaining to a world orphaned from God. And unanimously the committee declared what had been ordered by The Great Suicide in his dramatic final speech: delete the divine clauses and references in the constitutions, oaths and official acts of the nations, along with any invocations to or praise of the Disappeared Creator.

The contending religions ended immediately, but the panic and insanity that the Divine Absence caused provoked bloody disturbances. And like a fire that spread and spread, an iconoclastic fury spread throughout the world.

Angry mobs invaded the estates of the Vatican and sacked them. When, hours later, the police succeeded in reinstating order, the Pope lay dead in a puddle of blood beside the cadavers of his guards.

The plundering and destruction of churches, temples, monasteries, pagodas, mosques, and synagogues became a popular pastime.

A wave of suicides amongst monks, healers, the beatified, the devout, Daughters of Mary and Gentlemen of Colón broke out in nations with the most deep-rooted Catholic traditions.

And where fundamentalist Muslims were the predominant faction, the immolations and killings decimated so much of the population that many of those nations ceased to exist, at least in the form that they had been created.

Afterwards, as if by magic, the violence stopped. And for ten generations there was peace in the Land – a peace unlike any other known by humanity.

But one day strange rumors began to spread. Someone was said to have seen some burning bushes floating in the sea. A crowd gathered and many put their faith in the miracle. Lost in the desert, a Bedouin followed the bright tail of a star that guided his caravan. And the tribe genuflected and gave thanks for the miracle. Two Croatian children drew the face of a being that appeared in the foliage of an olive tree. Various people opined that it was of an ancient deity. In a country of the Orient a stone idol leaked tears of blood.

So many extraordinary facts were reported that an investigation was ordered of what happened that 20th of January 2030.

As the witnesses of the divine suicide had already died, it was very difficult to verify. The books of acts and other documents were reviewed, and after endless discussions that lasted many months, an entire special session of the UN declared that the portentous event had been nothing more than a colossal fraud, a ruse of the members of the global assembly of the era in order to secure peace in the Land.

Once they signed the rigorous protocols, the people began to resuscitate their gods. Recently sculpted images came to occupy the niches that had remained vacant for decades, and the ancient sacred books that had been relegated to museums and libraries returned to their lecterns. And with rites and liturgies of great pomp, a new era of the world began.

A few years later, the heads of state of the main countries of the world met in an extraordinary assembly of the UN. They had been urgently convened due to the religious wars that broke out in various regions of the planet, at the cost of millions of lives.

- Translated by Charles Iaconangelo

Listo para hacer la zafra

2009-06-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome to ZafraLit, the only online archive of contemporary short fiction from Cuba. Here you will find stories by many of the island's finest authors (some of whom currently live abroad), translated for your reading pleasure. Beholden to no political agenda, we are partisans only of the power and narrative possibilities of the short story.

I wish you all happy readings.

- David Iaconangelo, Editor.