Guillermo Rosales - The Halfway House

“I earned six dollars.” He says, putting his earnings away in a wallet. “They also gave me pizza and Coca-Cola.”

“I’m glad,” I say, drying myself off with a towel.

Then the door opens abruptly and there’s Arsenio. He just woke up. His wiry hair is standing up and his eyes are bulging and dirty.

“Listen,” he says to the lunatic, “gimme three dollars.”

“Why?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll pay you back.”

“You never pay me back,” the lunatic complains in a childish voice. “You just take and take and never pay me back.”

“Gimme three dollars,” Arsenio repeats.

“No.”

Arsenio goes over to him, takes him by the neck with one hand and goes through his pockets with his free hand. He finds the wallet. He takes four dollars out and throws the other two on the bed. Then he turns to me and says, “You can tell Curbelo about everything you see here, if you want. I’ll bet ten to one that I win.”

He leaves the room without closing the door and yells out from the hallway,

“Breakfast!”

The nuts come out in droves after him, toward the tables in the dining room.

Then the crazy guy who works at the pizza place grabs the two dollars he has left. He smiles and exclaims happily,

“Breakfast! Great! I was starving.”

He leaves the room too. I finish drying off my face. I look at myself in the room’s stained mirror. Fifteen years ago I was a good-looking guy. I was a ladykiller. I showed off my face arrogantly everywhere I went. Now … now …

I grab the book of English poets and go to breakfast.

Arsenio hands out breakfast. It’s cold milk. The nuts complain that there are no cornflakes.

“Go tell Curbelo,” Arsenio says indifferently. He grabs the milk bottle carelessly and starts filling the glasses with apathy. Half of the milk ends up on the floor. I grab my glass and, standing, gulp it down on the spot in one fell swoop. I leave the dining room. I reenter the main house and sit down in the tattered armchair again. But first I turn on the television. A famous singer comes on, a man they call El Puma . The women of Miami worship him. El Puma gyrates. “ Viva, viva, viva la liberación ,” he sings. The women in the audience go wild. They start throwing flowers at him. El Puma moves his hips some more. “ Viva, viva, viva la liberación ”: El Puma , one of the men who makes the women of Miami tremble. The same women who won’t even deign to look at me, and if they do it’s only to tighten the hold on their purses and quicken their steps fearfully. I’ve got him here: El Puma . He has no idea who Joyce is, and doesn’t care. He’ll never read Coleridge, and doesn’t need to. He will never study Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire . He will never desperately embrace an ideology only to feel betrayed by it. He’ll never feel his heart go “crack” in the face of an idea in which he firmly and desperately believed. Nor will he know who Lunacharsky, Bulganin, Kamenev or Zinoviev are. He’ll never feel the joy of taking part in a revolution or the subsequent anguish of being devoured by it. He’ll never know what the machinery is. He’ll never know.

All of a sudden, there’s a big ruckus on the porch. Tables are knocked over, chairs crash, and the metallic walls shake as if a mad elephant were bashing into them. I run over. It’s Pepe and René, the two retards, fighting over a slice of bread smeared with peanut butter. It’s a prehistoric duel — a dinosaur fighting a mammoth. Pepe’s arms, large and clumsy as octopus tentacles, beat blindly at René’s body. The latter uses his nails, as long as a kestrel’s claws, digging them into his adversary’s face. They roll onto the floor in a bear hug, noses bleeding and frothing at the mouth. No one intervenes. Pino, the silent one, continues looking at the horizon without blinking. Hilda, the decrepit old hag, looks for cigarette butts on the floor. One-eyed Reyes sips a glass of water slowly, savoring every swallow as if it were a highball. Louie, the American, flips through a Jehovah’s Witness magazine that discusses the paradise to come at the final hour. Arsenio watches the fight from the kitchen, smoking calmly. I go back to my seat. I open the book of English poets to a poem by Lord Byron:

My days are in the yellow leaf;

The flowers and fruits of love are gone;

The worm, the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone!

I don’t read any further. I lean my head back in the armchair and close my eyes.

Mr. Curbelo arrived at ten in the morning in his small gray car. He was jovial. Caridad, the mulata who hands out the food to the nuts, praises how youthful and elegant he looks today to get in his good graces.

“I won a solid fourth place.” Mr. Curbelo says.

Then he explains, “In deep-sea fishing. I won fourth place. I reeled two in that were forty pounds each.”

“Oh!” Caridad the mulata smiles.

Mr. Curbelo enters the halfway house. All of the nuts immediately run up to ask him for cigarettes. Mr. Curbelo takes out a pack of Pall Malls and hands cigarettes out to the nuts. He doesn’t look at any of them. He distributes the cigarettes quickly, impatiently, as irritated as Arsenio when he hands out the milk in the mornings. The nuts have their first smoke of the day. Mr. Curbelo buys a pack of cigarettes daily and hands them out each morning when he arrives. Because he’s a good person? Not at all. According to federal law, Mr. Curbelo is supposed to give each nut thirty-eight dollars a month for cigarettes and other incidentals. But he doesn’t. Instead, every day he buys a pack of cigarettes for everyone, so the nuts don’t get too frantic. This is how Mr. Curbelo robs the nuts of over seven hundred dollars monthly. But even though they know all that, the nuts are incapable of demanding their money. It’s tough on the streets …

“Mr. Curbelo,” I say, approaching him.

“I can’t see you right now,” he says, opening the closet where the medicines are kept.

“I’ve had my television set stolen,” I say.

He ignores me. He opens a drawer in the closet and takes out dozens of bottles of pills which he places on top of his desk. He looks for mine. Melleril, 100 milligrams. He takes one.

“Open your mouth,” he says.

I do. He pops the pill in it.

“Swallow,” he says.

Arsenio watches me swallow. He smiles. But when I look right at him, he hides the smile by drawing a cigarette to his mouth. I don’t need to investigate any further. I know perfectly well that it was Arsenio himself who stole my television set. I understand that to complain to Curbelo is useless. The guilty party will never turn up. I turn on my heel and go toward the porch. I get there just as old one-eyed Reyes takes his small, wrinkled penis out and starts to urinate on the floor. Eddy, the nut who is well-versed in international politics, gets up from his seat, goes over to him, and delivers a brutal punch to his ribs.

“You’re disgusting!” Eddy says. “One day I’m going to kill you.”

The old one-eyed man moves back. He shakes, but doesn’t stop urinating. Then, without putting his penis away, he falls into a chair and grabs a glass of water off the floor. He drinks, savoring the water as if it were a martini.

“Ah!” he exclaims, satisfied.

I leave the porch. I go out to the street, where the winners are. The street is full of big, fast cars with heavily tinted windows so that vagabonds like me can’t snoop inside. I pass a café and hear someone call out to me,

“ ¡Loco! ”

I turn quickly. But no one is looking at me. The customers are drinking their drinks, buying their cigarettes, reading their newspapers silently. I realize it’s the voice I’ve been hearing for fifteen years. That damned voice that insults me relentlessly. That voice that comes from a place unknown but very close. The voice. I walk on. North? South? What does it matter? I continue. And as I continue on, I see my body reflected in the shop windows. My whole body. My ruined mouth. My cheap and dirty clothes. I continue. On one corner, there are two female Jehovah’s Witnesses selling the magazine Awaken . They accost everyone, but let me pass without saying a word. The Kingdom was not made for down-and-out guys like me. I continue. Somebody laughs behind my back. Infuriated, I turn around. The laughter has nothing to do with me. It’s an old lady praising a newborn. Oh, God! I start walking again. I get to a very long bridge over a river of murky water. I lean on the railing to rest. Winners’ cars speed by. Some of them have the radio turned all the way up, blasting pulsating rock songs.