Pig's Foot: A Novel Part 6

'I told you, Aureliano, but you wouldn't listen. It's just like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes,' Jose told the coachman one day. Betina, Benicio and Geru looked at him, puzzled. 'You know the story the emperor who always wanted to wear the latest fashions and one day, having tried on a dozen outfits and finding none of them suited him, was persuaded to leave the palace wearing a suit of invisible clothes. Everyone clapped and cheered until one little boy shouted, "But the king is stark naked." This is exactly the same. I told you that the white men were a double-edged sword and you went on clapping and cheering just like the people praising the bare-a.r.s.ed emperor. It took this race war and the ma.s.s slaughter of everyone for you to finally understand.'

'I still think as I always thought, amigo Jose,' said the coachman, shaking his head. 'Our mistake was to think like sheep. This is why the Independent Party of Colour failed, because it tried to put all white men in the same basket when there are tramps on the street who are white, there are white people who are oppressed and exploited. But let's not argue, these things are not over yet.'

From the pocket of his red jacket, Aureliano took a sealed letter that smelled of ink and glue. Everyone stared at the yellow envelope.

'But that's a letter,' said Betina, looking into the coachman's eyes. 'What are we supposed to do with a letter since none of us can read?'

The coachman asked Betina to warm a little coffee and said that he would take charge of reading the doc.u.ments. Jose suddenly announced that he was going to the cemetery.

'To the cemetery?' said the coachman, surprised.

'Yes. Betina, you can tell me what's happening with Melecio when I get back. And you, Aureliano, could you please tell my son that he has been gone a long time. Just tell him that. And give him a hug from us.'

How to Conquer a Woman According to Maria.

Jose left the shack. Five minutes later Betina reappeared with the coffee. Aureliano asked what the matter was with Jose and Betina told him it was just old age. The coachman began to take sheaves of paper from the envelope; it seemed as though this letter was unending. They realised that it was not just one letter, but all the letters that Melecio had written since his departure three years earlier.

The Bacardis had shown a great affection for Melecio and had accepted him as a member of the family, especially Marina, Lucia, Adelaida and Amalia, the daughters of Don Emilio's second marriage to Dona Elvira Cape.

Don Emilio, a man pa.s.sionate about poetry and about art in general, patiently taught Melecio his vowels and consonants, the difference between subject and predicate, between adjectives and nouns. In the field of poetry, he taught him about metre, about how some poems rhymed while others did not, all the things Melecio did not know but which he had instinctively applied in the poetic improvisations when words seemed to come to him as though dictated by some supernatural being. Melecio learned mathematics, physics and chemistry. Bacardi was very happy with his results and was constantly surprised by the boy's ability to learn.

Every afternoon, the whole family would sit out on the porch of the majestic house in the shade of the almond trees and admire the talents of the boy from Pata de Puerco: Dona Elvira and her four daughters, the six children from Don Emilio's previous marriage to the late Senora Maria Berluceau, Don Emilio's brothers Jose and Facundo and their wives, and the coachman Aureliano. Melecio would delight them with a dozen spontaneous poems, which were all the more powerful now that his vocabulary had been enriched by his cla.s.ses with Don Emilio. These gatherings invariably ended with Melecio being showered with praise and with kisses, as though he were not just some poor black boy from Pata de Puerco, a village no one had ever heard of, but an exceptional individual or, as they often referred to him, an illuminato. Never had Melecio experienced such joy as in these moments. These afternoons beneath the almond trees became an attraction for Don Emilio's friends who included key figures from Cuban society, heads of government, mayors, colonels, even Americans drawn by the legend of this child prodigy of extraordinary sensibility who could recite poems that seemed to emanate from the very heart of G.o.d.

One day, after coffee, Don Emilio gave a little speech in front of the a.s.sembled company. It was time, he said, to expand his business, to take his rum to all corners of Cuba, beginning with Havana; when this was done, he would take on the world. To do this, he needed a symbol that would give his product weight, a powerful image that would mark the peak of the Bacardi empire, and that symbol, he concluded, should be a building, a building surmounted by a statue of a bat, the animal adopted as the emblem of the Bacardis since the beginning and one which had brought them their good fortune. All those present agreed with his proposals and suggested a number of possible architects, some already established and some who had recently emerged with the new tendencies and demands in the art of construction. There was talk of Rafael Fernandez Ruenes, of Jose Antonio Mendigutia and Esteban Rodriguez Castell, of Govantes and Cabarrocas and the structural engineer Jose Menendez.

Melecio listened in silence to the names of these distinguished personalities. Ideas teemed inside his brain, ideas which even he did not understand, ideas that existed only in his mind.

'Where are you going, Melecio?' asked Marina, Don Emilio's daughter, seeing the boy get up to leave.

'I don't feel well. I need to lie down,' he said, and went back to his room.

No one knew what was the matter with him. Every time they knocked on his door to ask, Melecio simply said, 'I just need some time to think.' They tried to open the door, but Melecio kept it firmly locked. There was nothing to be done but leave food on a tray on the floor outside, which Melecio would eat in the early hours when everyone was asleep.

'Melecio, we have guests, why don't you come out and recite something for us? It's getting so we can hardly remember what you look like,' Don Emilio said one day after Melecio had spent three weeks completely isolated from the outside world. Don Emilio received the usual response: 'I need time to think.' That afternoon, as on so many others, the guests had to make do with the tales told by Aureliano the coachman, Don Emilio's stories of his trip to Egypt and Emilito's accounts of the war of independence which invariably featured General Maceo who, Emilito insisted, was mulatto though Aureliano maintained he was a pureblood Negro, and so the chatter went on into the early hours.

One sunny morning, Melecio finally decided to emerge. Having hugged him as though he were a relative recently arrived back from the wars, everyone gathered in the living room. Melecio placed dozens of sheets of paper on the marble table in the centre of the room. They were covered with drawings, mathematical calculations and geometric diagrams of something that looked like a huge box or a house, projected in various dimensions that from some angles looked like crates of rum, from others like coffins or sinister towers. It was so strange that no one present had ever seen its like.

'Who are the coffins for?' asked Don Emilio.

'It's a building,' said the boy from Pata de Puerco, smiling mischievously, his hands, as always, stuffed in his pockets.

The faces around him looked puzzled as they struggled but failed to see anything resembling a building in the sketches. Until Melecio began to colour in a frontal elevation. The marble tiles of the facade were reddish; deep terracotta for the ground floor rising to a soft beige on the remaining eight floors. Each floor had eleven carved wooden windowframes and the central tower was studded with dark crystals and mosaic tiles. Melecio sketched the huge streetlamps that hung from the ground floor like opulent pendants and, on the apex of the tower, he drew a globe of the world straddled by the hairy feet of a bat. Little by little, all these details appeared before the astonished eyes of the a.s.sembled company.

Don Emilio summoned his partners to a meeting attended by some of the most esteemed architects in the country and showed them Melecio's designs. The calculations were precise and the extraordinarily ambitious project was brilliantly conceived. But what astonished everyone was the imposing, ornate style, the innovative grace of the brightly coloured embellishments. It was an expression of modern art, of sophisticated elegance unlike anything they had ever seen.

'This architect is either a genius or a fool. And I don't think he's a fool,' commented Senor Rafael Fernandez Ruenes, peering at the drawings through rimless spectacles. 'One thing is certain. This man is someone with exceptional talent and considerable experience. I would go so far as to say we are dealing with someone who has created a new style.'

Rafael Fernandez Ruenes was referring to the art deco style which Melecio unwittingly invented when designing the Bacardi Building in Havana.

'I'm afraid you're wrong, Rafael. The architect is a boy of sixteen who has never so much as designed a sewage system,' said Don Emilio, patting Melecio on the shoulder.

'Are you telling me that this was not designed by an architect?'

'It was designed by this boy standing next to me.'

Rafael Fernandez Ruenes and the others present stared curiously at Melecio as though he were a new species recently mentioned in some zoological treatise. They studied every detail of his clothes, the hands stuffed in the pockets of his shorts, the n.o.ble face, the bushy eyebrows, the square jaw, as the boy smiled at them artlessly.

'Dear G.o.d, Don Emilio, don't make me laugh. What does some poor Negro boy know about architecture?'

'Watch your tongue, Rafael,' said Don Emilio, suddenly getting to his feet. 'The boy's name is Melecio and he is not some poor Negro boy, is that understood?'

The architect apologised; he had meant no dishonour or insult to Melecio, he said, and promised it would not happen again; he simply found it difficult to believe what Don Emilio had just told them since architecture is a complicated discipline that requires years to perfect. He asked if he might be permitted to quietly study the plans at home and suggested that, in the meantime, Melecio might favour them with another of his designs.

Once again, Melecio locked himself in his bedroom for three weeks. On the third Sunday, he appeared with a sheaf of papers three times larger than the first. In these sketches there were trees, streets, children playing, shops, markets; everyone was flabbergasted.

'But, Melecio, this is a whole city,' said Don Emilio.

'I know,' said the boy. 'I call it Cabeza de Carnero.'

Don Emilio once again summoned his partners and showed them Melecio's plans. No one could believe it. 'You have persuaded me, Don Emilio,' said Rafael, studying the faces of everyone through rimless gla.s.ses. 'The boy is a genius. We must do everything possible to nurture his talent.'

And so began the voyages. Melecio travelled and designed; this was his life. He designed a dozen buildings in a city called Santa Clara, a dozen more in another called Camaguey and his fame spread beyond the borders of Oriente, reaching all the way to Havana.

Havana was an awe-inspiring city of thousands of inhabitants which had contraptions known as 'street cars' used to transport people to various destinations. It was a city that never rested, in which there was no place for silence since at all hours of the day and night one could hear the booming voices of hawkers selling their wares on the cobbled streets, the foghorns of the ships coming into harbour. A riot of noise, of traffic, of confusion: this was Havana. And yet the sea was beautiful, crystal clear, blue as the sky; moreover it was boundless, unlike the lakes and the rivers whose banks were always visible and whose waters were dark and choked with water hyacinths, mud and mossy stones. In the dawn light the capital attained a different splendour when only the buildings were visible, guarding the sleeping city like faithful watchmen. At this hour peace reigned, a silence akin to what Melecio had known in his little village.

It was about this time, having returned from his travels to various cities, that Melecio met Maria, a beautiful black girl, radiant, coy, with a cheerful disposition and a boldness that, from the first time he set eyes on her, Melecio found unbearable. She was eighteen, two years older than he, and worked in the Bacardi distillery in Santiago. She had a glorious mane of hair glossy and curly rather than dry and dull that fell over her shoulders and she used it princ.i.p.ally to flirt, winding a finger through her thick curls as she knowingly closed her eyes or, as circ.u.mstances dictated, opened them wide like two full moons.

She lived alone with her mother because her father had died during the Great War. More than once she confessed to Melecio that he looked like her father. Perhaps this was the reason she was attracted to him, some subconscious need to find someone to fill the void left by the death of the only man in her life. Melecio, barely seventeen, was already six feet tall and threatening to grow to seven; like his father Jose, he was st.u.r.dy. But he was too shy to speak to Maria, so it was she, with her typical boldness, who came up to him one afternoon in the distillery while they were working on creating a new anejo, a new blend.

'When making rum, you have to fire it up to remove the impurities. Just like a woman. You have to fire her up if you want to conquer her,' said Maria, twirling a finger through her curls. Melecio looked at her and scratched his head. If he was a genius in certain matters, he was utterly incompetent in others. 'You mean to conquer a woman you have to burn her?'

'Not burn her, you brute. You have to caress her. That's what fans the flames. Come here and I'll show you.'

Maria took hold of Melecio's large powerful hands and moved them over her face, her small, pointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her firm b.u.t.tocks. For the first time Melecio could feel the fire Maria had spoken of. He felt it burning him up, blazing through his body which was unable to resist. 'Burning! I'm burning! I need water!'

'Come here, boy, don't be so dramatic, it's no big deal,' said Maria in an attempt to stop him. But Melecio was already dashing from the factory at breakneck speed back to the Bacardi house.

The factory supervisor gave Maria a stern talking to, accusing her of upsetting the smooth running of the workplace. Maria apologised and promised it would not happen again. It made no difference. The next day she was fired for being a bad influence on a child prodigy who needed to keep a clear head in order to complete his designs.

When Melecio discovered what had happened, he spoke to Emilio Bacardi and told him how much the girl meant to him, told him about the fire he had felt and said he could not bear for Maria to walk out of his life when she had only just arrived. He asked Don Emilio to give her back her job.

'Consider it done. Without love there can be no architecture, there can be no magnificent poetry,' said the great man.

The following day, just as Don Emilio had promised, Maria was back at work. Melecio tried to get close to her but Maria refused to say so much as a word. During the break, he tried again, but Maria ignored him and walked away, leaving Melecio racked with shame and guilt. He told the coachman about what had happened and everything he was going through.

'Grovel at her feet,' Aureliano suggested. 'The best thing you can do is let her see you as a fool.'

Next morning, Melecio went to the distillery prepared to do anything.

'Maria didn't come to work,' he was informed.

The same thing happened the next day and the next. It was then he realised that Maria was not coming back. He searched for her everywhere. He did not find her at her house, at the factory, or at the park where she always spent her afternoons. As the days turned into weeks and he still had no idea where she was, he began to think he had lost her for ever. He locked himself away in his room. He stopped reciting poems. He stopped drawing. He lost a lot of weight. It seemed pointless even to leave his room to see the sun.

'Maria is down on the riverbank,' read the note slipped under his door one afternoon after he had spent weeks shut away. Melecio dressed frantically and rushed to find the girl.

'Can I talk to you?' said the patapuercano, staring into her huge eyes.

'Talk to me? About what?'

'I have a gift for you.'

'Thank you, but I don't want any gifts.'

'I promise that after I've given it to you, I'll never bother you again.'

'Never?'

'Never.'

'Get on with it, then.'

Maria twirled a lock of hair around her finger and stared up at the sky and then back down at Melecio, kneeling in the mud, searching to meet her eyes. He began: I wish that I could reach across this distance, this fatal gulf that keeps we two apart, grow drunk on love inhaling the sweet fragrance, mystic and pure, that your fair self imparts.

I wish that I could be that tangled skein of grace that binds us in the shadows when you're near; and somewhere in the skies of your embrace could drink the glory of your lips so dear.

I wish that I were water, I were wave, so you might come and bathe within this torrent, and I, as in my lonely dreams, might brave a kiss, everywhere and always in one moment.

I wish, oh how I wish, that I could lure you into me as cloud into a flame, not cloud as in its lonely way endures merely to burst and melt away in sheets of rain.

I wish I could your soul to my soul bind, distil your essence, carry you within, and this same essence, filtered and refined, refashion as a scent to breathe you in.

Unblinking, unmoving, Maria sat and stared into Melecio's eyes. Her heart was pounding and beads of sweat were pearling on her cheeks.

'Did you like it?' asked Melecio.

Still Maria stared, lost for words.

'It's the most beautiful gift anyone's given me in my life,' she said when she could finally speak.

'I'm glad.' Melecio got up off his knees, brushed away the mud and walked away.

'Wait,' called Maria. The boy turned. 'You know you're the weirdest person I know? I swear. No one in the world is weirder than you.' Melecio smiled broadly and looked down at the ground. 'Come here, and this time do me a favour, don't run away.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean I want you to be still. No drama, no weirdness. This time I want the fire to blaze until it burns itself out. Is that all right? Leave it to me and I'll show you how it's done. This time we'll burn together.'

Melecio came back and kissed her tenderly, then pa.s.sionately. And then it began. Maria grabbed his hands and moved them all over her body, over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her a.r.s.e, took Melecio's muddy fingers into her mouth and their bodies began to blaze. They didn't care that it was the middle of the day. They stripped off their clothes and rolled in the mud; Maria climbed on top of him and they f.u.c.ked right there . . . I mean that, right there, Melecio lost his virginity.

Hormones are unstoppable. I don't know about you, but just thinking about the scene is giving me a hard-on.

The Transformation.

By the time Jose got back from the cemetery, Aureliano had already left. Betina told him about everything Melecio had written in his letters. 'That boy fell to earth with an angel. Now let's talk about what you two are going to do. Geru, you're a young woman now, you have to keep your eyes peeled because the sharks will start circling. I don't want you having anything to do with the Jabaos, do you hear me? The man you will be promised to must be pure inside, and black.'

That night, Grandpa Benicio could not sleep. He lay curled up in bed thinking about Melecio's letter. He felt a little envious, a harmless jealousy that he did not have a fraction of his brother's talent. Neither Jose nor Gertrudis ever talked about Benicio's qualities though Melecio was not the only one who had changed in the past three years. Benicio too was almost as tall as Jose and had grown into a handsome lad with a strong, chiselled, muscular body that had not gone unnoticed in the village. Betina was the only one who would walk around the village with him, slipping her arm through his with typical maternal pride. Geru always preferred to follow at a distance and she never responded when old crones and some young women told Betina what a handsome lad Benicio was, a fine specimen of a Mandinga.

'That's because you're jealous,' Benicio said to his sister.

'Me, jealous? Of who? Of some little chiquillo who thinks he's the centre of the universe?'

'You're jealous because Jacinta is my girlfriend.'

Geru burst out laughing and said witheringly, 'Don't you think that for her to be your girlfriend, she should know about it first?'

She was right. Jacinta did not know she was my grandfather's girlfriend. How could he let her know? The only person who could teach him how to court a woman was Jose. But recently his father had seemed distant and barely spoke to him. Benicio felt Jose no longer loved him; after all, unlike Geru and Melecio, Grandpa was not his real child so there was no reason for him to show him the same affection. Even so, it was worth trying to ask him for advice.

'You've come to the right person,' said Jose. 'It was I who taught your father and look how well that turned out. The first thing you need to do is . . .' Jose gave Benicio the same advice he had given Oscar years before: flowers, make her laugh, ma.s.sage her feet, her back and . . . 'Absolutely no s.e.x. You don't want to get the girl pregnant and screw everything up. You're both too young and we're too old to be starting the whole rigmarole of babies again.'

Jacinta was the elder sister of Ignacio el Jabao. She was sixteen, the same age as Benicio, with a beautiful body and pale skin. Betina had once suggested to her children that they advance the race, that they go out and find mulattoes or pale-skinned blacks, and Jacinta fulfilled this requirement since she was an octaroon a mixed-race girl with blonde hair and a pinkish complexion. Grandfather liked her, in spite of Geru saying that she was an ugly, freckle-faced freak with a shock of lank blonde hair she never washed.

One morning, Benicio went to see Jacinta and brought her a gift Jose had suggested.

'That's no way to treat a woman. What are you thinking, giving me a bunch of thorns?' said Jacinta, licking blood from fingers that were swollen from the bouquet of sicklebush wrapped in banana leaves Benicio had offered her. Crestfallen, Benicio went home and told Jose what had happened.

'Don't worry, hijo,' he said. 'These things happen. The next step is the most important. If you can make her laugh, you're halfway there.'

Grandfather went to see Jacinta again the following day.

'Two skeletons were out for a walk and one of them lit up a cigar. The other skeleton looked at his friend and said: you do know that smoking can kill you?'

When he finished telling his joke, he waited for Jacinta's reaction. She stared at him, as though she could not believe her ears.

'It's a joke. Don't you think it's funny?'

'Funny? It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.'