Pig's Foot: A Novel Part 14

The Santacruzes, the Aquelarres, Senor and Senora Jabao, Eustaquio the machetero. They had all been cured of life and now rested in peace, lying face up in the cemetery.

They stepped inside the little shack where they had spent their childhood years. Memories were everywhere: in the wooden table bleached by time, in the bedrooms with no doors, in the c.h.i.n.ks and holes in the walls through which my grandparents had peered as children. Benicio rushed to kneel by Betina's bed.

'What's the matter, Mami?' he said, taking her hand.

'Nothing, hijo. I'm dying, that's all.' Betina hugged her children. Then she told them that before Juanita died, she consulted her cauldron and told Betina that she would die on February the fifth.

'Why do you say that?' Betina had asked.

'Because you are going to die,' said the santera and explained that Betina needed to make plans so that her children could be with her. Betina had asked how she would die and Juanita told her that first her heart would receive a terrible shock, something Juanita felt it better not to reveal to her in advance. Then, in the early hours of February the fifth, she would die of nothing specific, that eventually the hour comes for all of us, and this would be Betina's hour.

Having said this, the wise-woman stepped outside to gaze one last time at the collection of beautiful African orchids planted in her garden.

'Say my goodbyes to the village. Thank them for sharing with me the good times and the bad times of old age and tell them I will wait for them on the other side.'

The following morning, the body of Juanita was laid to rest beneath one of the forest of crosses in the cemetery.

Juanita had made a mistake, Benicio cried frantically, everyone was wrong; Betina was coming back with them to Lawton. Betina replied that the wise-woman had always had a talent for predictions and she had never been wrong before.

'Where's Melecio?' asked Gertrudis.

'Ah, now that's another story. Go warm up the coffee, Geru, and pull up a chair, because the tale I have to tell is a long one so it's better that you make yourself comfortable.'

Gertrudis warmed the dark brew and took a seat as her mother had asked.

'You both know that Melecio is not like other people, it's hardly a secret here in the village,' said Betina, sipping the coffee. 'Well, after Jose died and you left Pata de Puerco, Melecio got it into his head to turn the village into a town with paved streets and schools and hospitals. Your brother always was a dreamer, as you know. So he picked out a small group of promising pupils Anastasia Aquelarre, Ignacio and Juan Carlos el Jabao in order to teach them what they would need to know. It would be a difficult task, he explained, but a necessary one, and if they should fail it didn't matter because he knew that in the future others would carry on their work.

'After a while Melecio's pupils became experts in law and politics, even in architecture, and learned to express themselves like attorneys.

'"It's time," Melecio told them, and signalled to Ignacio el Jabao to follow him.

'Oh, I forgot . . . remember Maria, Melecio's girlfriend, the beautiful black girl he used to mention in his letters? Well, she was pregnant and she came here to live with him in a house they built down by the river. She always encouraged him to dream, he had come into this world to do great things, she told him, and I saw for myself how much she loved and respected him. And so Melecio and Ignacio went to El Cobre to see Emilito Bacardi, the son of Don Emilio, who had pa.s.sed away by then.

'They explained everything to the n.o.bleman, showed him meticulously detailed plans of the new city, with drains and aqueducts and the famous streetlamps that Jose used to dream about. Emilito loved the idea and promised to present it to all the politicians and the lawmakers who had the power to make the plans a reality.

'These powerful men could not believe that there was a village in Cuba so remote that it did not have so much as a sewerage system. They pledged to fix the problem, insisting that everyone in Cuba or at least in the district of Santiago should have electric light. But days and weeks and months went by and no one did anything. Melecio realised that he had wasted his time, that it had all been false promises and white lies.

'So your brother decided that if he could not do this by fair means, he would do it by foul. Slowly he began to bring together all the farmers and the labourers in the area who lived in similar conditions to ours and explained the situation to them. Over time, there were more and more of them, and one day they demonstrated in front of the presidential palace, carrying placards, chanting slogans and demanding improvements. Obviously no one dared to lay a finger on them. Everyone knew Melecio was the adopted son of the Bacardi family.

'It was then that Ignacio el Jabao showed his claws; he turned against the protestors, saying that this was no way to behave. Ignacio had ulterior motives, and besides he had always been jealous of Melecio, whose fame had now spread far beyond Santiago. Everyone was talking about the new messiah, about the madman who had dared to champion the plight of the poor. The politicians did everything they could to get rid of him. They tried to reason with him, but Melecio simply replied that there was nothing to talk about and went on dragging his people through every street of the city.

'Some of the politicians saw Ignacio as the solution to their problem. They called him up one day and promised him mansions and castles, promised he could be a councillor, a congressman, on one condition: "All you have to do is get rid of Melecio."

'No one knows for certain what Ignacio said. His brother Juan Carlos swears that Ignacio had nothing to do with what happened, that he did not betray Melecio. All we do know is that one day, some months after Melecio and Maria's son was born, Ignacio showed up to present an invitation to dinner at the house of Governor X during which the future of the new city was to be resolved.

'"In that case, we'll go," said Melecio and he and Maria left for Santiago early the next morning. Ignacio went with them. This we know because Ignacio himself told us that on the way back to the village, a group of armed men in suits and hats stopped them and forced them into a ditch. It was there that they shot Melecio and Maria.

'It was Ignacio who brought the bodies back here the following day. El Jabao swore he did not know why he had simply been knocked unconscious. Everyone in the village watched as he stood there, sobbing and writhing in agony. A week later, Ignacio el Jabao was mysteriously summoned to take up a position as councillor in the Chamber of Representatives in Santiago, which is where he lives now.

'That's what happened and, just as Juanita predicted, my heart was split in two. I ordered that the bodies be buried next to Oscar and Malena among the ruins of the old sugar plantation and I told them while they were there to dig a grave for me next to Jose since, as you know, tomorrow is the fifth of February, the day I am destined to die.'

Benicio and Gertrudis listened to all this, eyes filled with tears. Grandfather had been pacing up and down the room. 'I'm going to find that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Ignacio,' he roared, but Betina and Geru stopped him and told him it was not worth it, that revenge would solve nothing. The most important thing, said Betina, was to take the poor child sleeping in the next room as far from Pata de Puerco as possible, to a place where he might have a better future, a place where he would never know such misery.

'That will be difficult, Mami,' said Benicio. 'There are not streets enough in this country to escape from misery.' In Havana, he explained, there was poverty greater than this.

Gertrudis ran into her old bedroom. The little boy was sleeping in a wooden cot. Betina called for her to bring the baby in so they might all sit around her bed. When at last she could see their three faces, Betina let out a heavy sigh.

'Do you remember, Benicio, that day you came home cursing and swearing, using words you'd learned from Ignacio?' said Betina.

My grandparents laughed.

'And the day Melecio recited that poem in El Cobre?'

My grandparents laughed again.

'Remember the day Melecio cooked the chicken, Mami? Remember the beating Papa Jose gave him?'

Since neither Betina nor Gertrudis remembered this incident, Benicio told them what had happened and everyone laughed again.

'Remember . . . ? Remember . . . ?' And so the children and their mother went on remembering happier days that brought great comfort to their spirits. Betina told them about the first time she had met Jose down by the river. She remembered her sister Malena, her brother-in-law Oscar, recounted stories about each of her three children. Each flickering memory in her mind transported her back to distant days when the world was young, as young as she. Those far-off days were lost now in time, but still they existed, their bright, vivid colours stored in memory. Happiness filled her as it had not done in years.

'To remember is to live. Now I understand,' she said, her voice a faint whisper.

And still she and her children continued to wander the labyrinthine pathways of the past until, by midnight, all of them had fallen asleep.

After they buried Betina, my grandparents came back to Lawton with Melecio and Maria's son with me. This is where my story begins. I don't know whether I already introduced myself, but in case I didn't, shake my hand. Pleased to meet you. My name is Oscar. I shouldn't need to tell you my surname, you're clever enough to work it out for yourself. But I'll tell you anyway, it's Mandinga. Oscar Mandinga. That's my name.

Gunned Down.

So now you know. Oscar Mandinga, at your service. Like I said at the start, I don't remember any of this stuff. And I can hardly blame my grandparents for not asking Betina before she died about the precise date and time I was born, which means of course that I don't know. The poor things had enough to deal with, going back to Pata de Puerco after all those years only to find my great-grandmother dying. About me, Betina told my grandparents only one thing.

'Whenever little Oscar plays up, just put him in a basin of mud. It's the only way to calm him down.'

'What do you mean?' asked my grandparents, and Betina told them the story of how I was born in muck and mire in accordance with the ancient traditions and beliefs of my mother Maria's family. Imagine it. I slid down the thighs of the mother I never knew and into the mud like a slug and as soon as my mother plucked me up out of the muck, I started bawling like I'd been stuck with a fistful of needles. Only when she set me in the mud again did I calm down. So my grandparents always kept a basinful of mud in the bathroom beside the gla.s.s that held Grandpa Benicio's teeth during that phase of my life they called the 'mud period'.

They told me about a little bald man with a hooked nose called Judio and another man who owned the laundry called Augusto. They told me that when I was four I hung around with them all the time and called them Uncle. El Judio even put one of the little round caps Jews wear on me which made everyone laugh. My grandparents tell me they were magical years, but I of course have no memory of Judio or of Augusto.

By the 1950s, Lawton had changed a lot. The laundry business was booming with the introduction of new electric washing machines from America. Financially everything was fine until Batista mounted the military coup in 1952 which led to terrible unemployment. The mafia started to take over, though it has to be said that as far back as the 1930s Meyer Lanski and Lucky Luciano had been wandering round the streets of Havana dreaming of creating a casino paradise where the mafia would control not just the country's finances but its future leaders. I don't know if you've seen The G.o.dfather, Part II, the scene re-creating the meeting at the Hotel Nacional in 1946 that attracted every mob boss in organised crime from Albertos Anastasia to Santos Trafficante. The top two floors of the hotel were closed to the public, and this is where Meyer Lanski revealed his long-held dream of converting the island into the Monte Carlo of the Americas, a vast metropolis of hotels, casinos and private airports even bigger than Las Vegas. With Batista back in power, anything was possible. Once they had him in their pocket, they began building the Hotel Riviera, the Duville, the Capri, the Comodoro, and the Havana Hilton what we now call the Habana Libre.

Cash began to flood into the country, and there was a lot of conspicuous wealth; meanwhile on the flipside of the coin only a third of the population had running water, and the salary of the average family was barely six pesos a week, which resulted in starvation and dest.i.tution. Pretty quickly, the people started to rebel which only made Batista adopt a trigger-happy policy meaning that anyone caught up in any form of sedition was dead meat.

Augusto and Judio joined the underground resistance. They really hated Batista. The government was illegitimate they maintained and therefore unconst.i.tutional, that elections could not be cancelled, that the people had a right to choose their own future, their own president.

'That b.a.s.t.a.r.d Batista is sullying the reputation of Lawton,' Augusto would complain. When my grandparents asked why he said this, he explained that he knew Batista who had lived for some time above the Cuchillo Cafe near Toyo and that whenever he went to the bakery, he used to meet him queuing to buy bread. Judio said this was why he preferred people to be either black or white, because mulattoes like Batista, if they don't f.u.c.k up in the beginning, they'll f.u.c.k up in the end. In spite of everything, my grandparents still lived a relatively peaceful existence, though overnight the laundry's clientele began to dwindle because everyone was being frugal, carefully guarding what little money they had. But Cubans like to dress well, and given that the middle cla.s.ses were least affected by the slump and many of them lived in Lawton, money kept coming in.

A thousand times Benicio and Gertrudis told Augusto and Judio not to go mixing with revolutionaries, that they were too old for such shady business, but their friends went on distributing posters for 'M-26-7' the 26th of July Movement and storing them in the laundry. They took part in strikes, marched in public demonstrations, saying they were tired of all the lies. Grandma Gertrudis asked Judio what he had to do with any of this, given that he was a Jew and came from Europe. 'I'm a Cuban Jew. That's something very different,' said Judio Aleman and went on conspiring against Batista.

That morning, the tension on the streets was palpable. Jose Antonio Echeverria had been murdered a few days earlier. 'Manzanita', as Echeverria was known, had already taken many beatings, but he had gone on fighting and in 1957, after leading students storming the Presidential Palace and the headquarters of Radio Reloj, he was cornered by a patrol near the University of Havana and gunned down. Things were spiralling out of control, people started to shut themselves up in their houses, they were afraid to go out. Some stooge had gra.s.sed up the M-26-7 sympathisers in Lawton and the cops were out looking for them with orders to shoot to kill. They searched print shops, bodegas, grocery stores and shoe shops, investigating, poking around, putting pressure on people to find out where the meetings were being held, where the posters were being printed. And that's how it happened that seven men in plain clothes, sporting the sort of hats worn by mobsters in movies about Al Capone, turned up at the laundry. By chance, my grandparents had stayed at the house, leaving me in the care of Judio and Augusto.

'Judio, grab little Oscar,' Augusto said to his friend when he saw the cars draw up outside. El Judio popped his head above the counter and then took me out the back.

'How can I help you?' said Augusto. The men pushed past him and started rummaging through everything, tossing things on the floor. It didn't take them long to find the posters in an empty washing powder drum.

'Found them,' said one guy.

Four starving dogs appeared from nowhere. One of the men who had stayed outside drew his gun, flicked the safety catch and fired. Judio and Augusto jumped. One of the scampering dogs fell dead, its body skidding across the pavement; the other three bolted as Augusto watched helplessly.

The man who had fired walked over to the dead dog and kicked it. He was a tall, blond guy with a moustache that made him look like Errol Flynn, and he was smoking. He ducked as he stepped into the laundry, like he was afraid of hitting his head on the doorframe, then smiled as though he had just pulled a prank.

'Hey, Augusto, you know what this means, don't you?' said the guy, obviously in charge. El Judio, meanwhile, was trying to sneak out the back door with me in his arms.

'Hey, hey, where d'you think you're going? Get the f.u.c.k back in here, I've got business with you too,' said the boss and his men pushed Judio back into the laundry. The man turned back to Augusto. 'Now listen up, don't think we don't know what you've been up to. We didn't arrest you before now because you're Colonel Garcia's uncle, but this is serious. This time we have no choice but to use force.'

'The reason of force cannot prevail against the force of reason,' said Augusto and the man looked at him as though he were ill, or had got the wrong person.

'f.u.c.king h.e.l.l. I didn't know you were a philosopher. Shame, actually, because I love philosophy. Got any other words of wisdom before I put a bullet in you?'

At that moment, Judio opened his eyes wide and set me down on the ground.

'Yes,' said Augusto, 'tell Pilar, that thug of a nephew of mine, that his time will come. Tell him that. Now do what you have to do and get it over with.'

Hearing this, the man tossed his cigar b.u.t.t on the floor.

'OK, in that case . . . You heard the philosopher, boys. When you're done, I'll be waiting for you at Pio Pio in Santa Catalina. Oh, and bring me the little black brat.'

The boss climbed back into his car and disappeared. His men began loading up boxes of pamphlets. They ripped the washing machines out, leaving the walls bare. A bunch of them headed out, but three of the men stayed behind.

'Don't let the kid see this,' shouted Augusto.

'Walk over to the wall,' the men ordered.

'Wait a minute,' said Judio. 'Oscarito, come over here.' I tottered over and gave Judio a kiss, and one to Augusto. The men grabbed me roughly by the arm and dragged me away. Then, without wasting a second, they gunned down my grandparents' friends, riddling them with bullets. The sound of the shots could be heard all over Lawton. They killed them right before my eyes. Someone ran to tell my grandparents what had happened. My grandmother started wailing.

'Stay here, Gertrudis, and try to calm down,' said Benicio and set off running down the Calzada Dolores.

Arriving at the laundry, a grey pall of steam from the boiling clothes slowly rose to the ceiling where it formed a dense, dark-yellowish cloud that obscured everything. He groped his way around, and heard a moan like a child trying not to vomit. He came upon the bodies, drenched in blood and soapy water. He shook Augusto and Judio, but they could no longer speak, could no longer moan. He stumbled out on to the street again and saw the dead dog on the pavement. He screamed my name. 'They took him, Benicio,' people told him, 'they took him down towards Santa Catalina.'

He ran on down the Calzada del Diez de Octubre. He almost upset a flower cart that appeared from nowhere. He dodged the cars, the streetcars, the motorbikes, and when he finally arrived at the Avenida Santa Catalina he looked around. There was no sign of me. He looked in the cinema and searched the lobby then came out again and wandered up and down Santa Catalina and then along Soledad through a little square that locals used as a car park, then he carried on down Santa Catalina and as he came to Avenida Mayia Rodriguez he saw a line of cars parked on the avenue outside Pio Pio. The sound of celebrations reached him on the breeze. The sound of people having fun. Some men were forcing two small boys to fight. One of the boys was me. I had blood around my mouth and tears in my eyes. Grandpa waded into the crowd, elbowing his way through the circle of men and was just about to pick me up when one of them grabbed him by the shoulders. It was the same man who, minutes earlier, had given the order to kill Augusto and El Judio. Grandfather turned and instinctively threw a left hook that hit him square on the jaw, knocking him unconscious.

The other men pulled their guns. Some ran to help their boss Rolando Masferrer who lay sprawled in the road. The others simply aimed their pistols at my grandfather's face.

'Don't touch him. Leave him to me,' said a uniformed man of average height with the sort of pot belly that comes from too much beer. He asked my grandfather to walk with him to his car. The other men went on trying to revive Masferrer, but he was not coming round. We got into the sw.a.n.ky car and the man floored the accelerator.

For a while we all sat in silence. My grandfather hugged me to him as though afraid that the car would hit a pothole and I would go flying through the windscreen. The driver was smoking panatella cigars. He was staring straight ahead as though he did not know what to say.

'If there's one thing about me, it's that I never forget a face,' he said finally.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' said my grandfather.

'I'm talking about thirty years ago. You and your wife had just arrived in Havana. My uncle gave you a lift in his cart. I'm Pilar, the kid who was sitting next to you. Remember?'

'Of course I remember. Just as I won't forget that you had your uncle murdered.'

The man took a deep breath and tossed the cigar out the window.

'Yes. I know,' he said. 'It seems n.o.body forgets anything. I'll never forget the beatings my uncle gave me, or the sweets your wife gave me. You'll never forget that I ordered men to kill your friends. And Masferrer will never forget you knocked him out with a single punch.'

When Grandma Gertrudis saw us arrive back in the car, she rushed over and hugged me.

'Thank you, senor. Thank you for bringing them back safe and sound,' said Grandma, sobbing. From his pocket the man took another panatella and lit it. Then he turned to Grandpa Benicio. 'Now that no one owes anyone anything, I'd advise you to get out of here.'

'Is that what a man has to do to live in peace? Go somewhere else?' said my grandfather, still cradling me in his arms.

'I don't know,' said Colonel Pilar Garcia. 'You could try. Go somewhere else, go back to the country, go back to Oriente. Hide in a cave if you have to. But don't trust to hope. There's no hope left in this country.'

Having said this, Pilar Garcia climbed back into his car and took off with a squeal of tyres down the Calzada Dolores.

We buried Augusto and the Jew in Colon cemetery. They were solitary men, with no family, no friends, and so the only people at the wake were my grandparents, Gertrudis and Benicio, and me. We went on living in Augusto's house since we had nowhere else to go and no heir came to claim it. Batista fled Cuba in the early hours of 31 December 1958 after a farewell c.o.c.ktail party as the revolutionaries were marching into Havana. Gradually, American businesses were nationalised and eventually private property was abolished. The Bacardis moved their rum business to Puerto Rico. Masferrer was blown up by a bomb placed in his car in Miami in 1975. Pilar Garcia died of cirrhosis of the liver.

I remember none of this. The psychologists diagnosed me with elective amnesia, a defence mechanism used by people to forget traumatic events. I don't remember Augusto or El Judio or the day they were riddled with bullets before my eyes. All I remember is that time when I strangled the f.u.c.king cat. That I remember only too well.

The Biggest Maggot in the World.

This is where I begin . . . but before we get to my part of the tale, you need to know that it's difficult to tell a story and be objective when you're locked up in a dark room. What I mean is it's not the same as telling the story lying on a sandy beach with a mojito in your hand. It's difficult not to talk about depressing things when you're strapped to a bed in a bare cell and have whiteshirts who, like I told you earlier, are really members of the Cuban Ku Klux Klan come by every two days and split your skull in two. Commissioner Clemente says that not only did I make all this stuff up, but he even insists that I don't exist. Imagine if someone told you that you are not who you think you are, that your grandparents, your neighbourhood and everything you've ever known is a fiction, that you're a ghost, a head case, a fabulist who goes through life spouting fairy tales and bulls.h.i.t. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d has tried to convince me that I'm mad and that's what really p.i.s.ses me off. It's enough to make you want to kill somebody.

But that's what that d.a.m.n fool Clemente said to me when he interrogated me. I'm not going to bore you with all that s.h.i.t though, or with stuff about when I took my first steps or what my first word was. The story about the cat is simple, there's nothing else to add to it except that the cat ate my lunch: fried chicken, vegetables, rice, black beans and guava jelly. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d cat only left the guava jelly. 'I'll get you,' I thought. I went back into cla.s.s and after the last lesson, at about six o'clock, I came across the cat, rummaging though a garbage bin. I went over and held out a piece of bread. The cat came over to me. It started eating the bread and I stroked its back. When I got it to trust me, I grabbed it by the neck and strangled it. All the way home, I gripped it tightly. People were staring at me and shouting, 'Leave that poor cat alone.' But I ignored them. I kept on walking. Grandma jumped when she saw me appear in the doorway. I told her what had happened and she yelled at me, told me that was no reason to strangle a helpless creature. I tossed the cat on the ground, the head came off the body and rolled across the pavement. Then I slammed my fist into the front door so hard I broke my wrist. And that was that for the quadruped.

My grandparents said that they used to have to take me by the hand and lead me to school because otherwise I'd head for any river or marsh or swampland along the way. Can you imagine? You have to remember that I took the stories Grandpa Benicio told me very seriously. He used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. One day he told me about the brave feats of Marti and Antonio Maceo, the same tales his father had told him when he was a boy. The next day, I came home with a face covered in bruises, two black eyes and my nose bent out of shape.

'Oscarito!' said Grandpa Benicio. 'What on earth happened to you?'

Well, what had happened was during the game of marbles we played every day in La Loma del Burro park in Lawton, this boy named Enrique everyone called him 'the Terror of Lawton' took some other boy's marbles. None of the other kids had the guts to stand up to him because Enrique wasn't called the Terror of Lawton for nothing. But the story my grandpa had told me convinced me that I too had been put on the earth to free mankind.

'If you don't give Congo his marbles back, I'm going to kill you with my stone axe,' I told the Terror of Lawton. When he heard this, fifteen-year-old Enrique drew himself up to his full height and launched himself at me. Then he blacked both my eyes, covered my face in bruises and broke my nose.

Grandpa Benicio angrily asked me who I thought I was to go round saving people.