Pig's Foot: A Novel Part 15

'Jose Marti would have done the same thing,' I said.

'Marti didn't go round killing people with a stone axe,' said my grandfather, then burst out laughing. I can remember that like it was yesterday. The reason I remember it so well is that the next day Elena enrolled in my school, in my cla.s.s, and soon we were inseparable.

The first time I took Elena to bed, she warned me that it was nothing serious, that she didn't want me getting the wrong idea. I liked Elena a lot, so didn't tell her that she was the one who had to be careful because I was the most cynical guy she would ever meet. I just told her that I would let her decide the boundaries of our relations.h.i.+p and that I would respect her decisions. I knew she'd been with other guys, I'd even met some of them because she always introduced me to them and I introduced her to my ex-girlfriends like it was some sort of compet.i.tion, like the Grand Prix for who had f.u.c.ked more people. All the same, I was taken by surprise when Elena referred to our first s.e.xual encounter as 'satisfactory'. I knew that 'satisfactory' was way short of the mark after the eight-hour non-stop rollercoaster of s.e.x I'd given her. We met up again a couple of weeks later and it was even better, but this time Elena didn't say anything, she just kissed me on the cheek and left.

Sometimes I would call her, usually in the afternoon when she was involved in Party meetings and all that political bulls.h.i.+t, and we'd chat for five or ten minutes about what had happened that day. It was only when she called me that we would arrange to meet up, always at her place, an apartment in a cooperatively built micro-brigada block on the Calle Jesus Maria where doctors and lawyers lived, several dentists and a couple of university professors. Our encounters always followed the same pattern. I would go up the stairs, knock twice on her door, she would open it and we would greet each other with a kiss, but without touching each other. In Act Two we'd sit down and drink rum, stare out at the neighbouring buildings, dark hulks in the faint evening light, made darker by the grimy gla.s.s of the window, and we'd talk about the Revolution, about the new edition of Sputnik and about school stuff. We'd watch the movies on Veinticuatro por Segundo or La comedia silente with Armando Calderon. Then, without any preamble, we'd go into her bedroom and f.u.c.k for hours. When we were finished, she'd put on a cream-coloured cotton bathrobe and go for a shower. By the time she came out, I'd already be dressed and sitting in the living room staring out not at the buildings, but at the bicycle on her balcony. The silence was absolute. Sometimes there would be a party in one of the neighbouring buildings; we would stare at the lights and at the people down below walking past or going up and down as though guided simply by the smell of the food or the music spilling out from somewhere. Elena would say nothing and sometimes I would have to suppress the urge to ask her questions. Or tell her things about my life that I'd never told anyone, things like that fact that I'd never known my real parents. Then she would remind me that it was time for me to leave, that her father would be home soon he was the only member of her family still in Cuba, all the others had left for Miami. I'd leave without giving her a kiss and a couple of weeks later we would meet up again and everything would be exactly the same. Obviously, there weren't always parties in the neighbouring buildings, and sometimes we didn't or couldn't drink rum, but the faint flickering lights were the same, she always took her shower, and the gathering dusk that enveloped the buildings all around never changed.

The truth is that I'd never wanted a woman the way I wanted Elena. I f.u.c.ked her endlessly in every position that exists or ever will exist, I yanked her hair, I spat on her, I spanked her a.r.s.e because she liked her s.e.x down and dirty. But Elena was insatiable. s.e.x with her was like running a marathon. Sometimes I was surprised by her capacity to screw. She f.u.c.ked like it was a matter of life and death. On more than one occasion I almost said she didn't need to make so much effort, that a five-hour f.u.c.k would be just as good, but when it came to s.e.x Elena was practical and efficient. She'd suck from me my last drop of s.e.m.e.n, my soul, what little life I believed I had left in those moments of pleasure.

Sometimes, when I hadn't seen her for several days, I would get to thinking about how different we were. She liked art; she could watch a ballet or look at a painting and recognise the painter or the ch.o.r.eographer. She read books I'd never heard of and although I liked the music she listened to, after a while it made me want to close my eyes and sleep. I tried to fit in with her, or rather to fit in my new situation with her, and sometimes I'd listen to Mozart or Beethoven. But I'd always wind up falling asleep and I'd have to put on NG La Banda to wake me up again because, unlike Elena, that was the music I'd always preferred.

Back then, Elena, like everyone else, was involved in the revolutionary process. She went from patrol leader in the Young Pioneers to head of the Student Collective at school and she was one of the first kids at school to get a members.h.i.+p card for the UJC the Young Communist League and as you know, back then being a member was the greatest thing in the world. It was every student's greatest wish . . . The Revolution was young, changes that kept everyone busy were taking place every day. The programme of agrarian reform had been enacted and land confiscated from private owners now belonged to the government who in turn transferred it to farmers so they could work the land. Illiteracy had all but been abolished and infant mortality had declined; more importantly, everyone now had the right to study whatever they wanted, and get treated in hospitals and clinics for free. Basically Cuba had already become what it is today. Well, not what it is today, because these days it is something else. Let's say it had become a beacon of hope, an example to Latin America and the world: a tiny island that had stood firm against the arrogance and barbarism of Yankee imperialism, as people put it.

Truth is, even an anti-Communist maggot like me has to admit that a whole bunch of good things were done back then that brought with them a whole bunch of illusions. I remember when I used to take Elena out for a stroll, back when I'm sure you remember back when the Cuban peso was actually worth something. A pizza cost $1.20, something even the poorest people in my barrio could afford, and the spaghetti at Vita Nuovo too. Elena always liked the ice cream at Coppelia which only cost $1.50 and I was always happy to attend to her whims.

Elena was a beautiful mulatto girl tending towards white, with thick lips that were wet as though constantly moist with dew, crowned with a beauty spot as coal-black as her piercing eyes. The most beautiful thing about her was her eyes, humble eyes that knew how to persuade. I loved to see her laugh, and I did everything I could to please her without asking for anything in return since I never believed in love that's the truth though I have to admit that Elena made my life as a cynic impossible.

Sometimes, in the evening, we would stroll down the Calzada Dolores to the little park just before the Diez de Octubre. I would hold her hand and we would silently immerse ourselves in the spectacle of Lawton which, back then, was nothing special, being one more outlying district of Havana with few houses and a vast number of ruined buildings and ramshackle hovels. It smelled of bread and guava cakes, of basil and rosemary. I would take her to the park and sometimes, during carnival season, even early in the evening, we would run into a line of drunks or some transvest.i.tes heading down Dolores to catch a bus to the Malecon. Thinking about it, I can say in all honesty that I was happy back then. Not always. Only when I was with that infuriating woman named Elena.

But anyway, like I said, it was a different time. A time when you could go to the beaches at Varadero and see hardly a single tourist. Sometimes, we'd check into the Hotel Nacional and pay in pesos cubanos, something no one would be allowed to do these days because, as you know, these days, Cubans are forbidden from going into hotels. I remember when we were back in primary, the school used to take us to Tarara. I don't know if there was something like that in Santiago. But anyway, it had never occurred to anyone to fill a campsite, which was really more of a holiday resort, with thousands and thousands of kids. Elena and I had great fun on the fairground rides in the amus.e.m.e.nt park, in the freshwater pools and at the concerts every night, and the food was, well, it was amazing, with flavoured yoghurt for breakfast, chicken, pork and all sorts of salads for lunch and dinner and, lastly, the best thing about the place was it was completely free. Excuse me for banging on about the food, it's just that I'm absolutely starving . . . And those f.u.c.king whites.h.i.+rts won't give me so much as a dry cracker.

So anyway, everyone left Tarara thinking the Revolution was the coolest thing, and, in a way, it was. Years later, when everything went to h.e.l.l in a handcart, Elena and I would remember those years as the most magical of our childhood. No one knows exactly when things started to go wrong. I don't know what you think. Elena was convinced that it started with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic a.s.sistance in '89. According to her, that's what triggered the 'special economic period' that led to people eating cats and turkey vultures and steaks made out of dishrags, pizzas made with melted condoms instead of cheese, and micro chickens, which never grew, that you could get in stores, there were power cuts twenty hours a day and I don't know what all. Nitsa Billapol's recipe for grapefruit steak became a delicacy in our house. Every day we'd sit around the dinner table and force down this experiment in silence, I felt like screaming my frustration from the rooftops but at the same time I didn't want to hurt the feelings of my grandparents who, to the bitter end, maintained their dignity and their undying faith in the Revolution.

But my generation was different, something I tried to tell my grandparents a million times. We didn't know anything about the olden days; our only frame of reference was the terrible years we had to live through. To be honest, I think things started to f.u.c.k up a long time before the Russians turned their backs on us. I say that, because even back in the eighties I was already what they call a gusano a maggot, a fully fledged anti-Communist Cuban even then I had no illusions. Obviously, I did my best to bite my tongue so as not to ruin the illusions of my grandparents who were always telling me about all the injustices before the Revolution we've already talked about, but the minute I stepped out the front door, I went right on being disillusioned and I thought s.h.i.+t, things today are even more of a cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k. This was my story, it was the story of Elena, of my whole generation.

My disillusionment started with the whole business with UMAP the military units set up to eliminate bourgeois and counter-revolutionary values. I was still in primary school when they were going round arresting every kid with long hair. They'd pile them into the back of a truck and take them G.o.d knows where. They took Ricardito, my neighbour. Besides having long hair, he listened to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and any other rock band he could find. Sometimes, in secret, he played them for me on his battered RCA Victrola. I thought they were horrendous.

'Cool, right?' he'd say, smoking shave gra.s.s and pretending it was marijuana. 'It's really cool, man.' He was a quiet kid, and good-looking too, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. They s.n.a.t.c.hed him off the street, shaved off his hair, tossed him in the back of a truck and took him G.o.d knows where. Big mistake. And still no one said anything, because Tarara was still open, education was better than ever, healthcare was free, the streets were safe, there were hundreds of things to be proud of, something my grandparents never tired of reminding me.

Ricardito showed up again a year later. A lot of his friends tried to get him to talk, to tell people what had happened. But tell who? Who was the guilty party, who was he supposed to tell, and what was the point? No one ever apologised to him, no one ever said, 'f.u.c.k, Ricardito, I made a mistake.' I mean n.o.body's perfect, everyone makes mistakes, so I don't understand why people won't just stand up and say 'I made a mistake'. I don't know about you, but I think they're afraid. Afraid of losing everything, that's why their instinctive reaction is to keep their mouths shut. I mean here I am telling you all this stuff and honestly I'm s.h.i.+tting myself. For all I know you could be with the Security Service, in which case I'm truly f.u.c.ked.

But it's the same for people who make mistakes. They're scared too, and it's only logical for them to wonder what price they might have to pay for their mistake if they ever admit it to the public. 'They'll bury me in the s.h.i.+t,' they probably think. This is where our animal instincts take over: if it's a choice between me and you, I'd rather you got f.u.c.ked over. But it makes me sad, to tell you the truth. Because a society that lives in fear is a dead society, and therefore it can't move forward. n.o.body should be afraid to say 'I don't like that' or to admit that they've made a mistake. Don't you think?

I talked to Elena a lot about Ricardito's case and we always agreed, but whenever I talked about it to Grandpa Benicio, he ducked the question.

'What do you know about what life was like before the Revolution, Oscarito?' my grandfather said to me once.

'Nothing. But I can tell you what life is like now: no one is in favour of shortages and power cuts.'

'You're an ungrateful little brat,' said Grandpa and then he and Grandma Gertrudis gave Elena and me a lecture about how Machado and Batista used to have people gunned down in the street, and did whatever they had to do to cling to power. And that b.i.t.c.h Elena looked at them with her n.o.ble eyes, like a cat's eyes, as though these stories were a complete surprise.

'And I won't even bother to tell you what life was like in Pata de Puerco, a place no one cares about, a place where no one could read or write.'

'I don't know the first thing about Pata de Puerco. But you can't deny that our leaders now have completely forgotten the people. Things are serious, Grandpa. Just ask Elena. Go on, Elena, tell him, and don't go playing the little saint, because you're as much of a gusana as me.'

'A gusana? Me?' said Elena with a look on her face like a scalded cat. 'What are you talking about, Oscar? I completely agree with your grandparents, apart from one or two small points.'

'One or two small points?' I said furiously. 'You're a barefaced liar, you don't agree with any of it. Don't be a hypocrite. You're just like your father.'

'Leave my father out of this.'

'But it's true. And speaking of fathers,' I turned back to my grandparents, 'when exactly are you going to tell me about my real parents?'

And that was the end of the discussion. My grandparents sent us to my room and that was that. Elena didn't even want to f.u.c.k. I went outside with her, watched as she walked away with that s.e.xy sway of her hips that gave me gooseb.u.mps. I was right when I said she was a hypocrite. That's what she was. But G.o.d I loved that b.i.t.c.h.

On another occasion, when my grandparents were calmer, they told me for the first time that my parents had died long ago. That their names were Maria and Melecio. That's all they said. They didn't like to talk about the past, so they only told me as much as they had to. Like that time when I came back to the house in tears because I'd never had any brothers and sisters, never had a mother or a father, just grandparents, and Grandpa Benicio told me he had never known his mother and barely knew his father. This all happened in the late 1980s. My grandparents were really old by then; they were fragile, with papery skin, while I had just turned twenty-eight and was still getting it on with Elena who by now was my steady girlfriend. By then all the stuff with the writers had happened, the Padilla Affair and all that, and books by Reinaldo Arenas, Cabrera Infante and Virgilio Pinera were banned in Cuba.

'So you're just like me,' I said to Grandpa. 'Parents are s.h.i.+t. When they don't get themselves killed, they dump you at someone else's house and let them bring you up. If it weren't for the fact that grandparents are always prepared to take responsibility for their kids' mistakes . . . I suppose you could say we're united by the same misfortune?'

Grandfather took a deep breath, as though a great weight had been lifted from him. He asked me to fetch him a gla.s.s of water.

'Actually, bring me a litre of milk.'

'A gla.s.s of milk?'

'No. Bring the whole bottle.'

I ran into the kitchen and came back with the milk. Grandpa poured himself a big white gla.s.s and drained it in a second. Then he told me that when he was young, there was no such thing as gla.s.s, there were no litres, no milk, no cows. Only rich landowners had cattle, and a few Chinese people who traded in contraband.

I told him that, thinking about it, we were united by more than one misfortune, since even now no one could buy a cow, still less eat it. Grandfather tilted his head to one side. Gertrudis was still sitting on the sofa in the living room, listening to our conversation. 'And as for gla.s.s,' I said, 'sure, people these days know what it is, but who wants a litre of empty gla.s.s? If Antonio the milkman didn't sell it to us on the sly at an exorbitant price, you wouldn't even have that gla.s.s of milk.'

The old man stared at me with his big, bewildered owlish eyes. He wondered if I was comparing the times I lived in with his own. I told him I wasn't, but that he couldn't deny that we didn't have milk these days.

'Maybe you don't have milk these days. But you have paved roads, you have electricity. Imagine living in a place with no electricity, no television, no radio, completely cut off from the world.'

'What's the difference today, Grandpa? Cuba is completely cut off from the world. And ever since the Russians turned their backs on us and the "special economic period" started we don't have electricity, or radios or television. The streetlights outside are just decoration, they're there just to make the place look ugly. We were lucky this morning the electricity came on early, but you'll see, they'll cut it off in a minute. I don't know if you've noticed, but the fridge is broken. I asked Elena to ask Colonel Heriberto on the corner if he'll store our meat and fish in his fridge so it doesn't go off. I'm just worried that everyone else in the neighbourhood will have got in before us, since he's the only one round here with electricity. That's just how things are. A hundred years later and the only thing different is that at least we have lampposts.'

My grandfather said I didn't know what I was talking about, that for all its faults Cuba was much better today than it had been, that young people these days knew nothing about history and spent their lives complaining, not realising how much worse things used to be.

'Fine, Grandpa, have it your way,' I said, wiping his forehead. That was the last time Grandpa and I talked about politics. I'll never forget what happened next. Grandma Gertrudis, who had been sitting in deathly silence, suddenly started to laugh.

'What have you got to laugh about, Gertrudis?' asked Grandfather. The laugh began as a trickle but slowly caught like tongues of flame until it became a thunderous belly-laugh that startled Grandpa and me. 'Gertrudis, what's got into you? What on earth are you laughing at?' Grandma went on laughing uproariously, tears in her eyes, spraying spittle everywhere. I tried to calm her, I fanned her with the ration book, brought her a gla.s.s of water, but her laugh was contagious and I caught it. I ended up laughing like her, doubled over and clutching my belly. Only Grandfather remained solemn, probably because he knew what would happen next. He barely had time to take her hands in his before Grandma Gertrudis's heart burst as she suffered a heart attack.

Grandfather tried to pick her up in his thin, feeble arms, to lift her from the bed and run. I stopped him and said this was madness. I took Grandma's pulse, checking for any sign of life, but her spirit was already somewhere else.

'There's nothing to be done, Grandfather,' I said.

Then he began to sob like a little boy. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen in my life. Elena arrived a little while later and together we tried in vain to comfort him.

The neighbours helped us to dress Grandma in her favourite dress. Elena did her make-up, using her lipstick and blusher, and she tucked a pink rose behind her ear. She looked like a sleeping Madonna. There was not a hint of pain on her face, as though she had not suffered. Later we called the Funeraria Mauline on the Calle Diez de Octubre near Santa Amalia, the most respectable undertakers in the area, and they sent a hea.r.s.e. With a few of the neighbours, I helped lift her on to the gurney. Then we all headed to the funeral home where we held a vigil until dawn, then we cremated her. Grandma had always been one for staying at home, and recently she had barely left the house so there were only three neighbours at the vigil. Afterwards, they tossed a flower into the coffin and left, terrified by the eerie smile on her face. Grandma was laughing still.

Alone.

Grandpa Benicio ceased to be the cheerful man everyone knew. That's what people said in the neighbourhood. He walked around with his head bowed, his arms hanging by his sides, he no longer talked to anyone when he went to get bread at the store, no longer went for a drink at the bar on the corner. 'Cheer up, Benicio,' the neighbours would say, 'why don't you come and play a game of dominoes.' But he simply ignored them and went on his way, looking like grief incarnate. Everyone said my grandmother's death had put years on him, but I think it was Facundo's death that really finished him off.

A week after Grandma died, Facundo, our dog, suddenly became ill. We went to fetch the local vet, who, after examining him, wrung his hands, saying he realised it was a bad time to give bad news, especially since we were mourning Senora Gertrudis, but there was nothing he could do to save Facundo.

'I hate to give bad news to people like you. Especially you, Benicio, you being the only man who ever knocked out that son of a b.i.t.c.h Masferrer, but Facundo will die four days from now.'

We had had Facundo for fourteen years. He was a black and white English pointer and my grandparents adored him, especially Grandpa Benicio who always said that, after Gertrudis, he loved Facundo more than anyone.

'All of my friends are s.h.i.+ts,' I'd heard him say at times. 'Facundo, now he is a true friend.'

Facundo's liver and spleen were enlarged and, given his age, there was little that could be done for him. On the fourth day, just as the vet had predicted, his body lay beneath a mound of black earth, having been buried at the foot of the mango tree in the garden.

After that, Grandpa Benicio never put in his false teeth again. He stopped eating, stopped was.h.i.+ng and more than once we found him sitting in the middle of the Calzada Dolores. Elena and I were worried about him, we tried to get him to talk, but he preferred the shade of the mango tree, the hammock, silence. He felt strange sleeping in his bed. Most nights he did not sleep. Soon he started to talk to himself; in the cracked mirror in the bathroom he would see a young man who gradually transformed himself into the balding ninety-year-old man who stared back at him sadly.

Then came Grandma Gertrudis's will: two letters. Nothing more. One for Grandfather, and one for me which I was not to open until Grandpa Benicio died. Grandfather's letter read: 'The greatest happiness I have had in life was to have you as my husband. I will be waiting for you by our flame tree, but before that, tell Oscar everything. Everything. It's time that he knew who he is.'

I read it to my grandfather and he listened carefully, without so much as blinking. Then he asked me to fetch him a gla.s.s of milk. I brought it to him and then took a shower while Elena cooked something. A few minutes later, when I came out of the bathroom, I found Grandpa lying on the living-room floor.

Elena and I carried his six-foot frame to the vast marriage bed where for the past two months he had been sleeping alone. His frail body looked like a wild flower in a meadow, fragile and defenceless.

'I'll be right back,' said Elena and went out into the streets of Lawton, half naked, wearing the floral top and checked cotton trousers she used as pyjamas. I saw her run past the window that served as a headboard for my grandparents' bed, watched her vanish into the narrow streets, into the crowds.

Grandpa Benicio regained consciousness just after Elena left. For a moment he stared at me like he did not recognise this boy sitting by his bed. He looked at me curiously, as though he had seen me somewhere before but could not remember where. His mouth suddenly opened. He said that if there was one thing I should learn, it was that events never begin in the moment that they happen. As he said this, he set the pillow up against the window so he could lean back and get a better look at me.

'Don't talk, Grandpa. Just lie there and rest, Elena has gone to fetch a doctor. What's happened has happened, and there's nothing to be done about it now.'

'Ah, that's just the problem. If you think it was the deaths of your dear grandmother and poor old Facundo that caused my heart attack, then you don't understand anything. This heart attack began a long time ago. Now get me some coffee and listen to what I have to tell you.'

I went into the kitchen. I picked up the coffee pot and poured a little of yesterday's coffee into a plastic mug, then ran back to my grandfather's room.

'Now listen to me and try not to interrupt, because we don't have much time. The time has come for you to know who you are.'

I told him I knew exactly who I was and rather curtly told him to get some rest.

'Don't speak to me in that tone, I've not been fitted for a wooden suit just yet, which means I'm still your grandfather . . . You think you know who you are, yes? Well, tell me then, how can anyone who does not know their history truly know who they are? Now, listen to me carefully, and don't interrupt.'

All I could think about was that Elena was not back yet as I stared at the wrinkled, careworn eyelids of that toothless old man who had given me everything. These were his last moments on earth so I had no choice but to do as he wished and say nothing. And then he told me that in the 1800s, Pata de Puerco was just a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre. That the earth was so red and so green that it looked as though this was the last place G.o.d made. About the Santistebans, about Jose and Oscar; he told me everything I've told you here.

'I know how you must feel right now, Oscarito. I'm sure you're wondering why I'm telling you all this now just as the last of your relatives is about to die,' said Grandpa Benicio when he had finished. 'At this stage, I'd rather not fill your head with problems that can't be solved, but I have to fulfil your grandmother's last wish. All I can think to say to you right now is that the best time to plant a tree is always twenty years ago. If, for some reason, you did not plant it then, the next best time to plant a tree is now. I hope that helps you.'

I hugged him hard and looked into his eyes for the last time; he said he hoped I would have lots of children with Elena and, more importantly, that I would come to understand the value and the meaning of things so that I might finally find peace. Before I could say anything, there was a power cut and at that moment Elena burst through the door with the doctors who, despite the darkness, evaluated my grandfather's condition. Elena wept inconsolably. As she did so, I realised for the first time that my grandparents were in fact my uncle and aunt, though really they were my parents.

'We're sorry for your loss,' the doctors said, adding that I shouldn't hesitate to call them if I needed tranquillisers. Elena and I walked them to the door and, after they left, Elena put her arms around my neck, a gesture that turned my trickle of tears into a never-ending flood.

We sat vigil for Grandpa Benicio at the Funeraria Mauline as we had two months earlier for Grandma Gertrudis. He had had more friends in the neighbourhood and so more people came to pay their respects. Towards dawn, just before the body was taken to be cremated, a little black man appeared with prominent cheekbones and thinning, grey hair meticulously slicked back. He wore a black suit and shuffled slowly through the crowd, dragging his feet. He stood for a long time staring into the coffin and Elena asked me who he was. I shrugged. Then we saw him throw a red rose into the coffin and whisper, 'Cross and hook, Choco!' A moment later we watched as Kid Chocolate disappeared into the crowd, not knowing that the famous champion would die a few weeks later.

We brought Grandpa's ashes back to the house and placed them next to the urn that held Gertrudis's ashes. Their absence was a heavy cloud that crushed us and there were times when I forgot what had happened and found myself about to call to Grandma to make me some coffee. But there was no one in the house now but me, Elena, the mosquitoes and the power cut. I didn't know whether it was a different blackout or the same one that, only hours before, had carried off Grandpa Benicio's soul. Elena and I lay down, our bodies sweaty. Memories flooded back, the good and the bad, but mostly memories of those times when for some reason or other I had shouted at Grandma Gertrudis and made her cry, the times I had argued with Grandpa Benicio about politics, the times he had been angry at my insolence. It was too late now to apologise, too late to hug them one last time. My grandparents were gone and I was left with so many things unsaid.

I hugged Elena to me until the heat of her body fused with mine. I didn't dream that night, but I woke up with my eyes red and swollen. It was Elena who woke me to tell me she'd had a nightmare: she'd dreamed the mop and the floor cloth had been chasing her and trying to eat her. The mop had lifeless black eyes and could only move up and down to signal to the floor cloth to go after Elena.

'Jesus, Elena, what goes on inside that head of yours?' I said as I made breakfast. She told me it was the most surreal dream she'd ever had in her life. Usually, she had the cla.s.sic nightmare of falling from a skysc.r.a.per and waking up just as she hit the ground. She had even had dreams about being buried alive, in which she felt herself suffocating, felt the maggots eating away at her. This thing with the mop and the floor cloth was a completely new addition to her collection of nightmares.

And yet Elena's dream made sense, since in the past two months we had barely left the house except to go to the funeral home, and I knew that the deaths of my grandparents had affected her as much as they had me because she thought of them as family. And then, not everyone is as lucky as I am: I never dream about anything, ever, or at least I never remember my dreams. Elena remembered her dreams in astonis.h.i.+ng detail and every morning she would tell me about them, talking about the colours of the clothes, the things she could smell around her, the vividness of the scenery, as though they were movies she had recently watched.

What was most worrying was that, even five months after my grandfather died, Elena was still having horrifying nightmares: the avocado trees in the garden were trying to devour her. The neighbour in the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution who lived in her apartment block wanted to devour her. Everyone was trying to eat her. She would talk about these dreams to me and sometimes to her girlfriends, one of whom suggested she should go and see a babalao. Elena didn't believe in babalaos or santeria or any of that s.h.i.+t but even so she went to see Babalao Alfredo, a famous Ifa priest in Lawton.

'You have a dark aura. That is why you feel you are being persecuted,' said the extraordinarily tall black man people called Babalawo Alfredo. He walked us to the door and then, squeezing Elena's hands, he told her she had to leave here immediately.

'Leave here? And go where?'

'To America,' said the babalao, 'to Miami. Is that not where your family live? Then you must go there for no good awaits you here.'

Elena thanked the man and we headed back to my house.

'Don't listen to that guy, Elena,' I said, 'he doesn't know what he's talking about.' But when I looked into her eyes I saw they were s.h.i.+ning and I realised that something inside her had changed, that Alfredo's words had brought back all the dormant hopes she thought she would never feel again.

That night, I undressed her slowly, with a tenderness I rarely demonstrated. I covered her beautiful body with oil and ma.s.saged her every muscle to relieve the tension that for months now had been causing her nightmares. Then I gave her everything I had saved up, my whole erection, every inch of the slippery c.o.c.k just dying to slide between her legs. That night I didn't tug her hair, I didn't spank her a.r.s.e, I didn't spit on her like I usually did. Thinking about it, it was the only time we didn't f.u.c.k. We made love, as it's more elegantly put, and I can tell you now, it was good for me. I wanted to repeat that night of ma.s.sages, of trembling skin, of whimpers produced not by violence but by the compa.s.sion of two souls s.h.i.+elding one another, two bodies sheltering one another, trying to protect each other from the pain caused by the emptiness of the everyday, the inability to understand the young, by everything we are daily confronted by when we open the door. It was good for me, but it was not good for Elena. Her eyes stared at a fixed point, at the huge spider's web hanging from the ceiling. Her mind was already in Miami. Her body followed a week later. She got in touch with old student friends and they encouraged her to come with them and leave from the Playa Santa Fe. She asked me to go with her. I told her it was all the same: Miami, Havana, London, Paris, it's all the same, I said. She thought about this but in the end she couldn't accept that it was all the same, though it saddened her to contradict me, so she said nothing.

In the early hours of the morning, I went with her to the slipway with a wariness that verged on paranoia, glancing around looking for any suspicious characters who might be from the Security Service. Back then, the borders had not been opened and it was illegal to try to leave the country. The raft was little more than a platform made with tractor tyres and some oars. They had no compa.s.s, no idea of what the weather would be like, nothing. It looked like a storm might break at any moment.

'This is madness, Elena. Better a known evil than an unknown good.'

'I'm sorry, Oscar, I can't stay here another day. I have to try to be happy somewhere else.'

It was then I realised that my hopes had been castles in the air, illusions which in that moment crumbled to dust. I begged her again to stay, but Elena had made her decision. She kissed me on the lips and I watched her melt into the darkness that instantly swallowed them all.

I went back home feeling more depressed than ever, dragging with me a loneliness that seemed never-ending. All I could do was think about Elena and remember the last words my grandfather had said to me before he died, about the tree that I should plant, about his hope that Elena would bear me lots of children. I wondered if I had made a mistake in not going with her to Miami. But two days later I heard that they had hit a storm while at sea and everyone, including Elena, had been drowned. My heart skipped a beat. For a moment I thought I was having an asthma attack because I couldn't breathe. I collapsed on the living-room sofa and for a long time I sat there trying to make sense of things. I thought maybe Elena's nightmares about everyone wanting to eat her had been a signal for her not to leave, that it wasn't the avocado trees or her neighbour in the CDR who would devour her, but the sharks. Who knows?

All I know is that it would be impossible for me to describe what I felt in the days that followed, when the stars came out and I realised that I was alone in this vastness; those moments when the events of my life flickered past inside me as though fading, as if some mysterious virus were coursing through my veins. It is true that man is born to suffering, but I would never have guessed that in the end I would wind up making do with the pockmarked moon that every day s.h.i.+nes down from the heavens. All I know is that within the s.p.a.ce of five months I found myself utterly alone. Alone in a house that hurtled on towards privation rather than plenty. Alone in my own cell. Alone, alone. In a country where I served no purpose.

To the Roots.

As I said when I began this story, it's impossible to imagine the man you'll become when you find yourself alone. I had several options: I could go on breathing, ignore everything that was happening around me, or I could go whoring because the market for wh.o.r.es was well established by then, and for a few pesos I could find beautiful young women all along Quinta Avenida or on Calle Monte. But I couldn't get Elena out of my head. I didn't feel like f.u.c.king a wh.o.r.e or waking up alone again.

On the other hand, for a while now Lawton had become a madhouse. Neighbours poked their noses into everyone else's business, followed each other around like they were spying. Caridad, a member of the CDR, gave me an earful when I built a pigeon loft on the flat roof, then some inspector came and told me to take it down. I tried to bribe the guy, offered him a pile of cash, but he was ruthlessly incorruptible and completely inflexible and in the end the son of a b.i.t.c.h ordered me to rip it down right away and warned me that if I got mixed up in anything else, he'd have me banged up. He was like some retired colonel because he talked like he owned you.

Then there's the double standards everyone has these days. They think one thing and they say something different, hiding behind words to make their lives easier. I was tired of everything; all I wanted was to know how to deal with the situation I was in. Then one morning, everything was clear to me; suddenly I knew what I had to do.

I found a rope, tied it to the mango tree, but the first time I tried to hang myself, the branch snapped and I was left with a bruise around my neck. I refused to give up. At eight o'clock in the morning, when the traffic on Calzada Dolores was heaving, I sat in the middle of the road and waited. I didn't get run over by a car but I did manage to get myself thrown in jail. The next day they let me go. I walked into the centre of Havana and climbed to the roof of the FOCSA Building. I thought about the air rus.h.i.+ng past my face, imagined the moment when I hit the ground, and I realised I didn't have the b.a.l.l.s to jump. So I took the easy way out: I managed to get hold of twenty haloperidol tablets; I gulped them down and sat on a kerb with my face to the sun. My belly growled like a dog and promptly threw up everything, I coughed a couple of times and just then some woman came over with a gla.s.s of water and saved my life. I had no temperature, no bellyache and no luck killing myself.

That was the fourth night I didn't sleep. I couldn't get used to this empty, funereal house. I spent most of the time sitting on my bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking, until I realised that too much thinking was the problem. I got up and on the dresser I saw the letter that my grandma had left me in her will. I read what it said on the envelope: 'to be opened only at the right time'. I tore it open and found a note inside that read: 'Don't let our deaths stop you. Follow the cobweb in the bedroom.'

My eyes focused on the long spider's web strung between the window and the wardrobe door in my grandparents' room. Without knowing why, I went to the wardrobe and took everything out: two of my grandmother's dresses, her high heels, my grandfather's suit, his two white s.h.i.+rts, his tie and his boots, but I found nothing out of the ordinary. Then I looked at the cobweb again and followed another strand that was connected to the toilet bowl. I didn't need to investigate the contents, since I could see them. There was a thread connected to the ceiling, another to a plant and a third to a shoe: I carefully checked every thread leading from the web and found nothing special about any of them. The last strand was attached to the drawer of the dressing table. I opened the drawer and found a pig's foot which turned out to be some sort of necklace, and a note in my grandmother's handwriting that read: 'Your happiness is in the amulet. Follow the pig's foot.'