Miguel Mejides - Havana Noir

That’s when I raced home. I was dying to throw up and, though it may sound strange, to laugh as well. I had never witnessed a trial before and I hope, in what’s left of my life, that I never will again, because in American movies — and in the TV series Law & Order — I find them fascinating, but in real life, not so much. I don’t know if a legal system with twelve jurors is more efficient than this one, where the verdict is determined by three professional judges, but it’s certainly more pleasant. Two days after the trial, it was announced publicly that the Provincial Court judges had found the accused guilty on all counts and had sentenced him to death by firing squad. The sentence was upheld later by the Supreme Court.

A few months have passed since then. No one talks about it much out on the streets anymore, and I think it’s been awhile since the newspapers have published anything. Now the guy’s on death row. It’s probable that they’ll never execute him, because of all the fuss around human rights. As far as I know, after the international hullabaloo because of those fast-track executions back in the spring of 2003, they haven’t executed any other civilians.

Me, I just go on with my same routine, like always. I sleep, or at least I try, almost all day long, and then come alive at night. To sleep, I drink chamomile or valerian root tea, or I take diazepam, trifluoperazine, chlordiazepoxide, haloperidol, or some other pharmaceutical. The important thing is to sleep. Although there are days when nothing works and all I want to do is bang my head against the wall or throw myself out the window. I live alone in an apartment with a view of the sea, on the ninth floor of the Naroca building on Paseo Avenue, around the corner from Línea Street, in Vedado. Little vermin with galloping feet don’t come this high. Nothing gets up here; nothing stays for long up here either, not even a mosquito. It’s just that I suffer from insomnia. Why? Ufff, I have no idea! I’m thirty-three years old, I have twentyfive thousand cucos deposited at the Banco Financiero, pretty legs, and I’m white (well, to be frank, I just pass for white in this country, in fact I’m Jewish), divorced, a smoker, Sagittarius, I like film noir and noir stories, black clothes, Johnnie Walker Black, darkness, Rachmaninov, and Russell Crowe’s brutish face. I loathe Caribbean summers (so humid and muggy), salsa orchestras, rum, radical feminism, encounters with many kinds of people, Ayn Rand’s aesthetics, and being called “privileged.” It’s been a long time since I stopped asking myself the why of things.

These days, I’ve been seriously considering the possibility of visiting the convict. Do they allow visitors on death row? Who knows! In any case, I don’t think I’ll go. They’ll want to know who I am, what my relationship is with the guy, etc., and I couldn’t explain without getting in trouble. I can just see it: “I’m the enchanting unknown woman who the asshole psychopath would call in the middle of the night to talk to about his ups and downs, fears, successes, frustrations, and plans for the future.” Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

As I said, I’m not going. No way! Deep down, I’m grateful that the asshole psychopath didn’t tell the police about me (and didn’t write my number down anywhere). I confess that I’m surprised by so much discretion on his part. I always assumed he was a bit of a wuss, a hack, someone who wouldn’t be able to take the slightest pressure and would give it all up right away, not stop talking until he’d spilled everything. As soon as they nabbed him, I thought all was lost. I assumed they could come for me at any minute and accuse me of harboring a fugitive, or complicity, or instigation, or God knows what craziness. Those were hellish days, nights of furious anxiety. But no. False alarm. The son of a bitch didn’t turn me in. Hmm. How weird. Even today, I can’t explain it. Well, the truth is that there are a lot of things about this nefarious situation which I can’t explain.

Sometimes I have no choice but to be out during the day — as much as I hate that. I’ll need to go to the bank to get money, since everything here has to be paid in cash, or to sign for the wire transfers sent from Europe. I also need to pay the electric bill, the phone, the water, buy groceries for the week (never forgetting the pharmaceuticals nor the whiskey), return the videos, rent new videos, take a little stroll by my dentist’s office, go to the hairdresser at the Cohíba or the boutique at La Maison, or deal with the process of taking a trip abroad, which involves a head-on crash with the world’s most grotesque bureaucracy, among other needs. I hate to walk in the sun around other people. It’s true that my neighborhood is pretty safe compared to the disaster of Centro Habana, for example, or Alamar, or El Hueco in Marianao, where tourists don’t go even by accident. But Vedado also has its black holes, of course, tucked away behind the pleasant façades. Perhaps it’s my own problem, but I frequently think the streets stink. They stink of misery, of desperation, of violence. Basically, the streets are bad. If it were up to me, I’d never go out.

I can’t stop thinking about the guy, about the incredible surprise I got the first time I saw him. It was at the Provincial Court, during the trial. Until that moment, I’d only heard his voice on the phone. A low voice, beautiful, boyish, although it had something metallic about it, and sometimes even squeaky, especially when he had fits of hysteria or threatened me by describing how pretty I’d look once he’d gutted me — swish! swish! — with his lethal blade (that’s actually how the fool expressed himself), or when he screamed about how females, those degenerates, those shitty whores, weren’t worth a hill of beans, and I — the most disgusting of all! — was guilty of who knows what.

At those times, I’d hold the phone away from my ear, lean back in my chair, and light a cigarette. Sometimes I’d get up. I’d leave him there, talking to himself, without hanging up or letting him know. I’d go to the kitchen, pour myself a whiskey on the rocks, and return to the bedroom at my leisure. When I got back on the phone, he’d be going at it at the top of his lungs, threatening to strangle me with my own intestines, but not before tearing out my liver and eating it, among other lovely things. In the midst of his fits, he never noticed my absences. Or who knows — maybe he just didn’t want to let on. He was egocentrism itself. I’d happily get comfortable again in my chair, or on the bed among the big pillows, with my whiskey on the rocks and my cigarettes. I’d listen to plans for my future murder, which would be quite atrocious, while contemplating the Havana night. Then he’d finally calm his nerves, or surrender to exhaustion, or ejaculate. He was always the one who would say goodbye, until the next one, hope you have horrifying nightmares, etc. He’d hang up indignant, absolutely furious, telling me that I was a piece of shit, a goddamn cactus, a frigid neurotic, an insensitive bitch, a monster! And he just couldn’t talk to me anymore. Those farewells were never avatars of anything even vaguely healthy. Generally, the next day, or a few days after that, the mangled cadaver of some girl would be found in some tenement slum, or in a ditch, or in the bathroom at the bus terminal, or in a dumpster, or floating down the Almendares River. Not much time would pass before he’d call again, to brag about his latest prank.

Even as he gave the impression of being an inveterate narcissist, the fact is he never described himself physically. Not seriously anyway. One night, I asked him what he looked like, only to see what he’d come up with, because I never thought he’d be honest about it. (People who describe themselves physically on the phone, or on the Internet, generally don’t tell you what they look like but what they’d like to look like.) Then the guy quite delightedly swore that he was basically green, that he had three fluorescent yellow eyes, two reddish antennae, and a few exquisitely violet dots.