Guillermo Rosales - The Halfway House

I look at him, speechless.

“Mafia!” he yells at me with a smile. He takes a swig of beer and leaves the room.

I’m left alone. I don’t know what to do. I start looking out the window. A group of ten or twelve members of a religious order dressed immaculately in white go by. The homosexual dressed as a woman goes by again, this time on the arm of an enormous black man. And cars, cars, cars go by with their radios at full blast. I leave my room without any particular destination. Mr. Curbelo is still talking to his friend about yesterday’s competition.

“They gave me a plaque,” he says. “I hung it with the rest of them on the living room wall.”

The house smells of urine. I go and sit in front of the television set, next to Frances again. I take her hand. I kiss it. She looks at me with her trembling smile.

“You look like him,” she says.

“Who?”

“My little son’s father.”

I get up. I kiss her on the forehead. I hug her head tightly in my arms for a few minutes. Then, when my tenderness is exhausted, I look at her with irritation. Once again, I feel like harming her. I look around. There’s no one. I put my hands on her neck and start to squeeze slowly.

“Yes, my angel, yes,” she says, with a trembling smile.

I squeeze more. I squeeze hard, with all of my strength.

“Keep going, keep going…,” she says, in a small voice.

Then I let go. She has passed out and falls sideways in her seat. I take her face between my hands and start kissing her forehead madly. Little by little, she comes to. She looks at me. She smiles weakly. That’s enough for me.

I leave. I pass by Curbelo’s desk. He’s done talking on the phone already.

“William!” he calls out to me. I go over to him. He takes a bottle of pills out of a drawer and grabs two.

“Open your mouth,” he says.

I open it. He throws two pills inside: clack-clack.

“Swallow,” he says.

I swallow.

“Can I leave now?”

“Yes. Find Reyes for me and bring him over so he can have his pills too.”

I go to Reyes’ room. He’s lying down on a sheet soaked in urine. His room smells like a latrine.

“Listen, pig,” I say, punching him in the sternum. “Curbelo wants to see you.”

“Me? Me?”

“Yes, you, you filthy pig.”

“Okay.”

I leave holding my nose. I go to my room and throw myself on the bed. I look at the blue, peeling ceiling covered with small cockroaches. This is the end of me. I, William Figueras, who read all of Proust when I was fifteen years old, Joyce, Miller, Sartre, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albee, Ionesco, Beckett. I who lived twenty years within the revolution, as its victimizer, witness, victim. Great.

Just then, someone pops up in my bedroom window. It’s El Negro .

“Are you sleeping?”

“No, I’ll be right out.”

I button my shirt, smooth my hair with my fingers and go out to the garden.

“Hey,” El Negro says when he sees me. “If you were sleeping, keep sleeping!”

“No,” I say. “It’s okay.”

We sit down on some steps, at the foot of a closed door. There we shake hands effusively.

“How’s that life of yours in Miami?” I ask.

“Same old, same old,” El Negro says. “Oh!” he suddenly remembers. “Carlos Alfonso, the poet, went to Cuba. He was there for two weeks.”

“And what does he have to say? What does he have to say about Cuba?”

“He says everything’s the same. People are wearing jeans on the streets. Everyone in jeans!”

I burst out laughing.

“What else?”

“What else? Nothing,” El Negro says. “Everything’s the same. Everything is just as we left it five years ago. Except, perhaps, Havana is in ruins. But everything’s the same.”

Then El Negro looks me right in the eye and slaps my knee with his hand.

“Willy,” he says to me, “let’s leave here!”

“Where to?”

“To Madrid. To Spain. Let’s go see the Gothic neighborhood in Barcelona. Let’s go see El Greco in the Cathedral of Toledo!”

I start laughing.

“Someday we’ll go, yeah …,” I say, laughing. “With only five thousand dollars,” says El Negro. “Five thousand dollars! We’ll retrace allll of Hemingway’s steps in The Sun Also Rises .”

“Someday we’ll go,” I say.

We’re silent for a few seconds. A nut comes over and asks us for a cigarette. El Negro gives it to him.

“I want to see where Brett … you remember Brett Ashley, don’t you? The heroine from A Moveable Feast .”

“Yes,” I say. “I remember.”

“I want to see where Brett ate; where Brett danced; where Brett screwed the bullfighter,” El Negro says, smiling at the horizon.

“You’ll see it,” I say, “Someday you’ll see it!”

“Let’s make our goal two years,” El Negro says. “In two years, we’ll go to Madrid.”

“Okay,” I say. “Two years. Okay.”

El Negro looks me right in the eye again. He slaps me on the knee affectionately. I realize he’s about to leave. He gets up, takes a nearly full pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and gives it to me. Then he takes out two quarters and gives them to me, too.

“Write something, Willy,” he says.

“I’ll try,” I say.

He bursts out laughing. He turns on his heels. He gets farther away. When he gets to the corner, he turns around and yells something to me. It seems like part of a poem, but I only hear the words “dust,” “silhouettes,” “symmetry.” That’s all.

I go back inside the halfway house.

In my room, I throw myself back on the bed and fall asleep again. This time I dreamt that the Revolution was over, and that I was returning to Cuba with a group of old octogenarians. An old man with a long, white beard guided us, outfitted with a long staff. We stopped every three steps and the old man pointed out a bunch of ruins with his staff.

“This was the Sans Souci Cabaret,” the old man then said.

We walked on a little bit and then he would say again, “This was the Capitol building,” pointing at a field of weeds full of broken chairs.

“This was the Hilton Hotel,” and the old man pointed at a bunch of red bricks.

“This was the Paseo del Prado,” and now it was just a lion statue half-sunk into the ground.

So we walked through all of Havana like that. Vegetation covered everything, like in the bewitched city in Sleeping Beauty. Over everything reigned an air of silence and mystery akin to what Columbus must have found when he first landed on Cuban soil.

I woke up.

It had to be about one in the morning. I sit on the edge of the bed with an empty feeling in my chest. I look out the window. There are three homosexuals dressed as women on the corner, waiting for lonely men. Cars driven by these men without women prowl around the corner slowly. I rise from the bed, depressed. I don’t know what to do. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is sleeping under a thick blanket, even though the heat is unbearable. He’s snoring. I decide to go out to the living room and sit in the old, tattered armchair. I go. As I pass by Arsenio’s room, I hear the voice of Hilda, the decrepit old hag, who is complaining because Arsenio is messing around with her behind.

“Keep still!” Arsenio says. I hear them struggle. I reach the armchair and sink heavily into it. Louie, the American, is sitting in a dark corner of the room.

“Leave me alone!” he says to the wall, his voice full of hate. “I’m going to destroy you! Leave me alone!”

I hear Hilda’s frantic voice coming from Arsenio’s room again.

“Not there,” she says. “Not there!”