Mongoose, R.I.P. Read online

  Oh, the stories they told of their experiences!—always to engrossed listeners. Antonio had by now heard those stories almost as often as he had heard “La Flor de la Canela,” and it was getting late. But María didn’t like to close the bar as long as there were six customers left, and Antonio could count six men and three women, drinking rum mostly, and beer. Alex was talking. “I don’t care what you think, Gustavo, I say President Kennedy is going to engineer the liberation of Cuba. After all, didn’t he say practically that when he gave his speech to us? His exact words were, ‘I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.’”

  “Ay, yayayaya.” Gustavo drank deeply from his glass. “Kennedy is a politician, like all of them. He will do nothing.”

  Alex shook his head. “You are wrong, Gustavo. He cannot tolerate Castro. After all, just three months ago there was practically a nuclear war.”

  “There wouldn’t have been a ‘missile crisis’ if Kennedy had given us air cover on the beach.”

  Alex groaned. “Not again, Gustavo, not again.”

  “All right all right all right. I agree to stop talking about the failure of April fifteenth, 1961, if you will stop talking about Kennedy’s speech on December twenty-ninth, 1962. I say we let him off too easily.”

  “He got us out of Cuba, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, and the reason we were in Cuba in prison instead of in our homes was that he let us down in the first place.”

  Mario Hidalgo, silent up until then, raised his massive hand. “Stop! Stop! Enough! Both of you. Whatever happens in the future, we can’t blame Castro on Kennedy. Castro, alas, is one of us—”

  “One of what?” Gustavo banged his fist on the table. “I was never fooled by Castro. I knew all along he was a Communist snake.”

  Portly Niquita Oler, voluptuous in her tight-fitting yellow dress, reached over, snatched a half bottle of Budweiser beer from in front of Gustavo and poured it over his head. There were shouts—of anger from Gustavo, of hilarity from most of the others. Niquita had in their presence used this device before—to cool things off. Antonio judged that just the right moment had arrived to press the little button underneath the bar, whose tone sounded in the office of María Arguilla. Two buzzes meant that a disciplinary problem loomed. Three buzzes and she’d have called the police before coming into the lounge.

  María Arguilla reached the landing alongside the bar. She stretched out her hand behind the hanging tapestry on which the old, crestfallen Cuban flag was embroidered. Her hand easily found the switch. With a single upward movement she flicked it off. The entire room was suddenly without light, the jukebox dead. A moment later, she flicked it back on. All eyes were now on her, but the silence continued. There was always silence when María Arguilla came on the scene. She commanded it.

  She was what in Ireland they’d call a raven-haired beauty. In Cuba, they just said about her that she was “la huera bella,” referring to the blondness of her skin. But her jet-black hair, worn in a bun at the nape of her neck, accentuated the light skin and the pale pink lipstick, the vivid eyelashes. At age twenty-eight, she was in total command: the manager of Santos Trafficante’s Old Witch, La Bruja Vieja.

  But she knew exactly when to change her posture. The room was silent, the sound from the jukebox aborted by the electrical blackout; she had accomplished what she wanted. In a moment she was once again the genial hostess.

  “Antonio. Bring this gentleman a fresh bottle of beer on the house”—she pointed to Gustavo, who was drying his bushy hair with his shirt sleeve. “We are here, are we not, compañeros, to enjoy ourselves, to enjoy each other’s company? Any cross word between us is a victory for—” she did not pronounce the name, pointing instead to the dart board opposite the pool table, on which was engraved a facsimile of the face of Fidel Castro, his nose the center of the target, awarding the successful dart thrower 100 points. “Give me ten cents,” she reached out, palm up, imperiously over the table around which the commotion had begun. There was a race to be the first to put a dime into her outstretched hand. Mario got there first. María walked in even steps to the jukebox, inserted the coin, made her selection, and the lounge was filled with the voice of María Delores Pradera singing “La Flor de la Canela,” the love song that for twenty years had brought tears to those prepared to shed them, and the eyes of Niquita Oler moistened as she leaned over the table and kissed Gustavo forgivingly square on the lips. Forgivingly, he in turn embraced her, and his companions cheered. María Arguilla looked at Antonio, who bowed his head ever so slightly in deference to her showmanship. María brought both hands to her lips and with a pantomimic kiss to her clients returned to her study, pausing at the bar to whisper to Antonio that he should close the bar in fifteen minutes no matter how many customers were still there.

  Back in her study she sat down at the desk and took out writing paper from the top drawer, taking a pen from the neat velvet holder upright in front of her. Ever since the books for 1962 had been completed by the accountant she had decided she was well situated to make the demand of Santos. He would be in his Chicago office for a week, he had told her over the telephone yesterday, so she addressed the letter to him there.

  What she said to Santos Trafficante was that she had earned her ransom. She wanted back the 16-millimeter film Trafficante had had taken one night of his infamous show at La Gallinera on Calle M, in the riotous heyday of Batista’s permissiveness. Nowhere this side of Copenhagen can you see such an erotic spectacular! was the word. The staff made a great show of pulling down a black shade over the single rose window high over the customers’ heads. It wasn’t that Trafficante was afraid of the police—he had taken ample care of them. Such good care that at that hour there was always a policeman outside; his assignment wasn’t to come into the club to disturb the proceedings, but to prevent anyone else from coming into the club to disturb the proceedings—a holdup man, or even an angry wife or sweetheart. One of the waiters stood by the inside door of the club, conspicuously prepared to bolt it shut after those clients who wanted to leave could do so, whether out of scruple or merely to avoid paying the twenty-five-peso surcharge. But there were few of those. Most of the fifty-odd Americans and a few Cubans who had come to La Gallinera had come precisely to see Trafficante’s notorious show.

  And then that one night after the show, after all the customers had been ushered out, Trafficante had told his little troupe that they must go through it all again, as he was going to film it. They grumbled, until he pointed to the box with the envelopes—an extra week’s pay for each of them. They laughed when he added that they could all have a drink or two while waiting to revive the, er, spirits of the principal actor. And, a half hour later, the tableau began again. Its climax, to appropriate musical accompaniment, featured the seduction of María Raja, as María Arguilla was then known, by the star stud of the season. When the customers were there the lighting was dim, but not so dim as to deprive the audience of all the detail they could wish for. But that night, María remembered as she wrote out her letter, the lighting was necessarily vivid to accommodate the camera. She remembered closing her eyes, not from the feigned fear and then rapture of the regular theatrical performance, but to protect them from the glaring brightness of the floodlights.

  “I have worked for you for one full year at La Bruja Vieja,” she wrote, “and you promised me that if I did well you would give me back that film. You made it to sell in Havana, but we both know it was never released after Batista appointed Salas Cañizares as police chief. And it is no good to you here. In America there is much competition for pornography, and anyway your cameraman was an amateur. I made you over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars last year. Tell me now that I can have it.”

  She completed the letter and closed her eyes, remembering the words of her lover in Havana a year earlier. “I saw that show in La Gallinera, and I’ve wanted you ever since. I quiver, even now, when I think about it. You were unforgettable—you have not cha
nged. Someone told me there was a movie made of that show. I want a copy of that movie. Can you get it for me?”

  “No, no, Fidel. The man who took it lives in Miami.”

  “Qué lástima!” he said, what a pity. “Well, I guess I will have to settle for all Cuba and you, María, live, instead of on celluloid.”

  3

  Rolando Cubela was a medical intern in Havana at the time of the accident in Mexico. He had become accustomed to the sight of blood, following his father about, mostly around the bullrings of Mexico, before returning to their little farm in Placetas in Las Villas. His father was a farmer in the sense that he had inherited a couple of hectares. By trade he was a bullfighter—more particularly a picador, whose job, every Sunday in the arena, was to thrust his heavy, armored frame onto the wooden pole with the steel point at the end into the fighting bull, piercing the animal’s tossing muscle, into which eventually the matador would thrust his lethal blade. The idea was to lower the bull’s carriage of head, and hence his horns; and simultaneously to correct faults in the carriage of his head when the bull charged.

  Rolando, from the age of six, excitedly accompanied his father around Mexico while his mother tended the little farm. Hand in hand they would go together to the bustling dressing room and from there to the callejón, the circular wooden partition that surrounds the bullrings, shielding the bullfighters. If there was an empty ringside seat—a barrera seat—above, Rolando was permitted to occupy it. Otherwise he would stand by the ruedo, peering out over it into the ring. He needed elevation—the ruedo is very high. Even so, some acrobatic bulls succeed in leaping over it when chasing their antagonists or when, in a seizure of cowardice, they charge forward to escape the torture, bounding over the ruedo into the callejón, quickly dispersing the bullfighters there into their reserve sanctuaries.

  One such bull had knocked Rolando from his contadero perch right into the ring, causing a great uproar in the crowd and a much greater uproar at home.

  Either from his makeshift seat or hoisted by an idle and friendly peon, he had seen—he could count them—one hundred and sixteen fights before he was nine, and this means a great deal of butchery, including two dead novilleros, and a dozen horses impaled by the bull, never mind their mattress-thick carapaces. And there was blood at the farm where the Cubela family lived: it was Rolando who would kill the chicken when his mother decided to serve her pollos fritos. As a young student at the parochial school, Rolando was recognized by his classmates as a martial type: he boxed and he wrestled and often he picked fights, and there were often bloody noses.

  But by age fifteen Rolando had decided he wished to go into an entirely different kind of life—bloody yes, but bloody-salutary, not bloody-destructive. He wished to become a doctor. If he was going to make it into the medical school, and be content as a doctor, he would need to make a major commitment, namely to protect life rather than mutilate it. He came to this decision rather solemnly, and during the week he let pass several schoolboy provocations which, a fortnight earlier, he’d have thought casus belli. That weekend when his mother told him to go out to the barnyard and kill a chicken, he announced to his stupefied parents that to do so was really a violation of the Hippocratic oath. They had never heard of this oath, but Rolando gave them an earnest reading of it, emphasizing what it permitted, what it did not, to medical doctors—which, he shrugged his shoulders, he would one day be. The father suppressed a smile and told Rolando’s sister Elena to go kill the chicken, and Rolando to shut up about that doctor’s oath, to remember that he was not yet a doctor and would never be one unless he maintained very high grades in school, and even then only if his father, forswearing the Hippocratic oath, could help kill enough bulls to pay Rolando’s fees at medical school.

  Rolando pursued his studies and, ten years later, after surviving the financial crisis brought on by his father’s accident, was a devoted student of medicine, and a devoted revolutionary. His hot blood aligned him, as a first-year medical student, with the young men who were actively in opposition to the reigning Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Ernesto Sánchez, his roommate, was deeply read in Marxist literature and talked incessantly of the need to organize “at every level.” Rolando managed to learn (as much as he wanted to learn) about the theory of class struggle while walking to Dr. Alvaro Nueces’s class on hematology; Ernesto talked and thought more, even at the baseball games. As Rolando’s indignation against President Batista, who had taken power by military coup four years earlier, heightened, his enthusiasm mounted to help overthrow him. Ernesto introduced him to members of the loose fraternity of young professionals—students of law, engineering, architecture, medicine—who felt the revolutionary bond. Their undisputed leader was Fidel Castro, at times wonderfully conspicuous, orating to captive audiences, at times furtive, exhorting carefully concealed little knots of fellow revolutionaries. And then one day Castro stormed into a radio station, seizing the microphone and inveighing against Batista and praising freedom and democracy and social justice and anti-imperialism for a full ten minutes while his companions kept watch for the police.

  Again, at times Fidel was mysteriously gone—but never impalpable: he was “somewhere,” fighting the noble fight. Mexico, maybe; Colombia; at the other end of the island; in the mountains; and of course there was the nineteen-month period when Castro was in prison, after the Moncada Barracks attack in Santiago de Cuba. But whatever Fidel Castro was doing, he was always a presence and Rolando, though temperamentally skeptical of authority and temperamentally assertive about his own rights, was greatly humbled at the thought of that singular presence in Cuba—in the Caribbean. Indeed, in the world—Rolando tended, after a great deal of Marx and Lenin, to think in planetary terms.

  Rolando Cubela was assigned, on graduating, to Hospital Calixto García at Vedado in Havana, and was kept busy binding wounds in the Emergency Room and helping the doctors in surgery while studying their techniques. Every week he reported to Dr. Alvaro Nueces who, in addition to teaching, supervised the work of the interns at Calixto García. One night in August, after a very long day in surgery, Rolando arrived back in his quarters, shared still with Ernesto, and was given in breathless tones by Ernesto the message: Fidel Castro wished to confer with him. Rolando’s brown eyes widened. Slowly, he let himself down on his cot.

  “When? Where?”

  With some exasperation Ernesto, the professional revolutionary theorist, said to him, “I did not write down where you were to go. One doesn’t do that. I memorized it.”

  “Tell me, tell me,” Rolando said, his whole face under his tousled hair pleading.

  Ernesto lowered his voice. “Your instructions are to knock on the door of Calle O number 198 at exactly twelve minutes past midnight. Someone will open the door. You are to say, ‘I am looking for my sister Ernestina. Is she here?’ You will then be led to Fidel.”

  Rolando Cubela gave thought to exactly how to dress appropriately. Fidel was of course hirsute, while Rolando had only the trace of a shadow. He wondered whether to shave, as he would do if he were going to a social engagement, or to leave his chin as it was. There was no way to accelerate the growth of his beard between nine o’clock at night and midnight, though as a doctor he knew enough about cosmetic techniques to darken his general appearance … No—that would be, well, foolish.

  He decided he would go neatly dressed, but without a tie (just a hint of the proletarian disposition). He would wear a jacket, but his shirt sleeves would be rolled up, in the event Fidel should ask him to take off his coat. Would Fidel quiz him on any particular matter? Certainly he would not be asked the kind of theoretical-philosophical questions that Ernesto would be so much better qualified to handle … No—there was simply no guessing what it was Fidel wanted with him, Rolando Cubela, a medical intern.

  The interval before he set out went slowly. But, relishing the coolness of the tropical evening and the balm it brought from the awful heat of August, he walked toward the meeting place, a matter of two kilo
meters or so. He had set his watch by the radio, and at exactly the designated time he crossed the street and knocked on the inconspicuous door, in a block crowded with two-story houses cheek to cheek.

  When the door swung open, Rolando Cubela saw a stooped, skinny old man wearing a leather apron. Rolando spoke his lines metallically. The old man stared him in the face and asked to see Rolando’s identification. Rolando handed over his intern’s card, with his photograph. The old man, after an interval, said simply, “He is waiting for you. Number 257.”

  Flustered, Rolando asked, “On this same street?”

  The old man nodded, and shut the door.

  Number 257 was only two blocks away. The building was obviously an aging private house, probably built during the twenties: wooden, shuttered, the paint a flaky pastel blue, a hint of grass on the slender private land between the street and the slightly recessed entrance. Again he knocked.

  He was greatly surprised. “Good evening, Rolando,” said Alvaro Nueces, opening the door and quickly shutting it.