Guillermo Rosales - The Halfway House

I go inside. Besides him and me, there’s no one else in the dining room. He looks at the books I have in my hand and starts laughing.

“Listen …,” he says, drinking from the can. “I’ve been watching you closely.”

“Yeah? And what do you make of me?”

“That you’re not crazy,” he says, still smiling.

“And what school of psychiatry did you go to?” I ask, irritated.

“None,” he replies. “I just have street psychology. And I’ll tell you again that you, you’re not crazy! Let’s see,” he then says, “take this cigarette and burn your tongue.”

I’m disgusted by his idiocy. His malt beer-colored body, the huge scar that goes from his chest down to his navel.

“You see?” he says, taking a swig of beer. “See how you’re not crazy?”

And then he smiles with his mouth full of rotten teeth. I leave. The cleaning is done and we can go back inside. The nuts are watching TV. I cross the living room and finally enter my room. I slam the door shut. I’m indignant and I don’t know why. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is snoring in his bed like a saw cutting a piece of wood. I become more indignant. I go over to him and give him a kick in the behind. He awakens, frightened, and curls himself up in a corner.

“Listen, you son of a bitch!” I say to him. “Don’t snore anymore!”

At the sight of his fear, my anger abates. I sit down on the bed again. I smell bad. So much so that I grab the towel and soap and head out toward the bathroom. On the way, I see old one-eyed Reyes, who is covertly urinating in a corner. I look around. I don’t see anyone. I go over to Reyes and grab him tightly by the neck. I give him a kick in the testicles. I bang his head against the wall.

“Sorry, sorry …,” Reyes says.

I look at him, disgusted. His forehead is bleeding. Upon seeing this, I feel a strange pleasure. I grab the towel, twist it, and whip his frail chest.

“Have mercy …,” Reyes implores.

“Stop pissing everywhere!” I say furiously.

As I turn back down the hall, I see Arsenio there, leaning against the wall. He saw it all. He smiles. He leaves the can of beer in a corner and asks to borrow my towel. I give it to him. He twists it tightly. He makes a perfect whip of it and using all his strength brings it down on Reyes’ back. One, two, three times, until the old man falls in a corner, bathed in urine, blood and sweat. Arsenio gives me the towel back. He smiles at me again. He grabs his can of beer and sits down again at his desk. Mr. Curbelo has left. Arsenio is now the head of the halfway house again.

I continue toward the bathroom. I go inside, lock the door and start to undress. My clothes stink, but my socks reek even more. I grab them, inhale their deeply embedded muddy smell, and throw them in the waste basket. They were the only socks I had. Now I’ll walk around the city sockless.

I go in the shower, turn it on and stand under the hot water. As the water runs over my head and body, I smile, thinking of old Reyes. I’m amused by the face he made when he was beaten, by the way his frail body shuddered, by his sorrowful pleas. Then he fell on top of his own urine and asked for mercy from there. “Mercy!” Remembering that, my body shudders with pleasure again. I soap myself up thoroughly, using my underwear as a washcloth. Then I rinse myself off and turn off the shower. I dry off. I put on the same clothes. I go out. In the living room, the nuts are still watching TV. The set is broken and you can only see colored lights, but still they sit, watching the screen, paying the lack of images no mind. I go to my room and leave the towel and the soap. I go out, combing my hair, toward the living room. The nuts are still there, frozen in place as they watch the broken TV. I kneel before the set and fix it. I sit in the tattered armchair and prop my feet up on an empty chair. The announcer says something about ten guerrillas dead in El Salvador. Then Eddy, the nut who is well-versed in international politics, comes down to earth.

“That’s it!” he yells. “Ten dead communists! There should be one hundred! One thousand! A million dead communists! Someone with some balls needs to wipe them out! First Mexico. Then Panama. Then Venezuela and Nicaragua. And then clean up the United States, which is infested with communists. They took everything from me! Everything!”

“Me, too.” says Ida, the grande dame come to ruin. “Six houses, a pharmacy and an apartment building.”

Then, Ida turns to Pino, the silent nut, and asks, “How about you, Pino, what did they take from you?”

But Pino doesn’t answer. He looks out at the street and remains still, unblinking.

Just then, in comes old Castaño, the centenarian who leans on the walls when he walks. Like one-eyed Reyes and that decrepit hag Hilda, urine permeates his clothes.

“I want to die!” Castaño yells. “I want to die!”

René, the youngest of the two mental retards, grabs him by the neck, shakes him forcefully, and takes him back to his room by kicking his behind.

“I want to die!” We hear old Castaño’s voice again until René slams shut the door to his room, burying his screams. Then Napoleon, a four-foot-tall midget, fat and solid as a speed bag, comes over to me. Mother Nature placed a medieval knight’s face on that midget’s body. His face is tragically beautiful and his large, popping eyes forever wear a deeply submissive expression. He’s Colombian, and his manner of speaking is also submissive — the speech of those born to obey.

“Sir, sir,” he says to me. “That one!” and he points at a nut named Tato, whose face looks like a former boxer’s. “That one touched me!”

“Stop talking shit.” Tato says.

“He touched me,” Napoleon insists. “Yesterday, in my room, he came at night and touched me!”

I look at Tato. He doesn’t look like a homosexual. Nonetheless, the midget’s words make him sweat in embarrassment. He sweats. He sweats. He sweats. He sweats so much that in three minutes his white shirt becomes transparent.

“Don’t pay any attention to the nuts here,” he says to me. “or you’ll end up crazy, too.”

“He touched me!” Napoleon keeps saying.

Then Tato gets up from his seat, laughs suddenly in an incomprehensible way and says to me carelessly, “That’s the same thing they said to Rocky Marciano in the eighth round and he got up and knocked out Joe Wolcox. So … life sucks!” and he leaves.

Ida, the grande dame come to ruin, looks at me, outraged,

“The things we have to see!” she says. “The things we have to hear!”

The TV news hour is over. I get up. They call us to eat.

Caridad the mulata serves the food. She also served time, back in Cuba, for stabbing her husband. She lives across the street from the halfway house, with a new husband and two huge pedigree dogs. She feeds the dogs with food from the halfway house. Not leftovers, but hot food that she takes from the nuts’ daily ration. The locos know it and don’t complain. If they do complain, Caridad the mulata tells them as plain as day to go to hell. And nothing happens. Mr. Curbelo never finds out. Or if he does find out, he says, as always, “My employees have my complete confidence.” So none of what you’re saying is true. The nuts lose again and realize that it’s best to keep their mouths shut. Caridad the mulata would like to make the stew every day so she can get Mr. Curbelo to pay her those good thirty dollars more. That’s why she says to the nuts all the time, “Complain! Protest! Today’s peas are inedible! The truth is that you’re a bunch of pussies!”

But none of the nuts complain, and Curbelo saves his money by continuing to make the stew every day with his little bourgeois face.