Chapter TWO
Years later, listening to her stories, her daughter, Teresa, long accustomed to a city like Miami, where she and her mother had lived for most of her life, and with her own fleeting remembrances of Havana from infancy, could only think that her mother, arriving from the bucolic countryside, must have found its very enormity overwhelming. Some twenty guajiro families had lived in her valle, in Pinar del Río, perhaps some one hundred and fifty souls at most, while Havana had a population of (roughly) 2.4 million people (in the “greater metropolitan area,” so an antiquated atlas, put out by a steamship line, circa 1946, said). Surely she must have been dumbstruck to see so many people and buildings, and probably trembled at the prospect of spending time there, as if that city would swallow her up.
And Sixto? Once they had made it to Havana’s famous Malecón Drive, and were rumbling along that crescent-shaped harbor, waves, at high tide, bursting over the seawall and onto the Avenida de Maceo in exploding plumes, Sixto, wanting to keep her around for as long as possible, decided to take María for a little tour of the center. The slaughterhouse district, way east of the harbor, could wait: Those oinking and grunting, pissing and defecating pigs be damned, I’ve got a real queen with me!
Soon enough María entered a honeycomb, a labyrinth as challenging as the depths of any forest, for Havana, with its salt-eaten walls, was monumental: a myriad of structures, that city had more than thirty thousand buildings, warehouses, hotels, and hovels, a bodega on practically every corner, a bar or saloon or barbershop or haberdashery or shoeshine stand next to it, and an endless array of alleys, courtyards, plazuelas, and more columned arcades and edifices than María could have ever imagined. With its streets of cobblestone, asphalt, and dirt (roosters and goats and hens in cages in the marketplaces, the smell of blood and flowers everywhere), that city of pillars and ornate fa?ades, of winding alleys and cul-de-sac gardens and statuary—that fellow Sixto had told her Havana’s nickname was Paris of the Caribbean—bustled with people and life. So many people, from tourists to policemen to merchants on the street, to crowds of ordinary citizens just going about their business, left María feeling as dizzy as if she had drunk down a cup or two of rum, a bottle of which, incidentally, Sixto had kept in a paper bag under the shredded leather seat of his cab. This he swigged from while showing her the sights—just getting from one end of Obispo Street to the other, in a glut of carts and taxis and lorries, took a half an hour. Driving for so many years, Sixto thought there was nothing to it, so why not a little sip of rum to ease things when the day’s work was practically over?—just like her papito’s philosophy of life.
And so, as they headed over to the slaughterhouse district, which was at the far end of the harbor, beyond the last of the Ward Line warehouses, Sixto’s manner changed somewhat, though not in a terrible way. He didn’t start rubbing himself or make burning noises, nor for that matter did he try anything with María—she was just a young girl after all, a guajira with the kind of face and figure that make men do and say things that they probably wouldn’t otherwise, and, in Sixto’s case, certainly not back home with the wife, nosireee. He just started looking as if the world was about to end, kept gulping and licking his lower lips, and staring at her like a starved man with a terrible secret. Finally, not able to take it anymore, before turning in to the chain-link-fenced entry to the Gallegos slaughterhouse, he had to pull over; and once he had, he began to cry, tears the color of amber dripping from his eyes and over the ridges of his gargoyle’s face.
María didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on—wondering if she was at fault for his sudden sadness. In his gruff and rustic manner, the poor man was so much like the guajiros back home that one part of her felt like doing something to please him. Back in her valle that had come down to letting some of the men, so weary from their days in the field, roam their callused hands over her face, so they could feel the softness of her skin; and all she had to do was just smile, and that was sometimes enough to make them happier. (Oh, but then there were the others, who, as she got older and filled out, wanted a little more from her, and, looking at her in the same way as Sixto, begged her to embrace them, or to lift her skirt just high enough so that they could see the shapeliness of her legs, which some, so good-naturedly, as if examining a foal, wanted to touch….)
“Sixto, are you okay?” she asked. “Sixto, is there something wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing at all…. It’s just that I wish,” he said, his head lowered, “I wish I could go back in time, and get to know you better in a way that would make you happy, that’s all.”
“But, Sixto, I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re so precious, you make a nobody like me wish he could start over again in life.”
And he seemed lost to the world, not just because of the rum or the fact he knew that he probably smelled bad to others, but because he had reached inside of himself and taken hold of his own heart, squeezing it until there was nothing left but his own pain, just like her papito used to.
Or at least that’s what María thought, being such a softhearted girl in those days.
“I know I’m an ugly man and I smell of animals,” he went on. “But, please, can you do me one little favor?”
“What kind of favor?”
“Just give me one little besito—that’s all, doesn’t have to be on my mouth, but here,” he said, tapping his cheek. “Even one on the side of my face would make me feel content.”
He seemed like an animal in pain, an aging one, like those old hounds she’d see on the farm who, no longer able to roam wildly across the fields, would just lie down on their sides, waiting for someone to caress their heaving bellies. She always did.
And because María was grateful for that lift into the city, and even if it turned her stomach to do it, she gave that Sixto a cautious nip on the side of his face, saw the bristles in his nostrils, the spiderwebs in his ears, smelled the rawness of his breath, and felt sad for the man; but wouldn’t you know it, at the same time he couldn’t help but take her hand and move it towards his right leg, where something had crept forward, uncoiling gradually, a stony gargoyle’s erection, like a piece of tubing expanding inside his trousers—was it filled with tears or blood? (Of suffering, or of lust?) At the sight—and touch—of it, her knuckles having grazed that protuberance, María turned away, pulled back her hand, pretending that nothing had happened.
They both pretended, Sixto, with a deep breath, starting the truck again and driving it over to a delivery pen. There he had some kind of discussion with a foreman and, letting drop the rear gate, rousted his swine, some forty or so, into their own little compound, where they were to be counted, weighed, and, depending on that, kept to be further fattened up on palmiche or else led immediately to the slaughter. María, it should be said, for all the animals she had (reluctantly) killed herself on the farm, had never experienced such an overwhelming scent of blood and entrails in the air before. Or maybe it was all their suffering that she was feeling—squeals and blurting cattle cries resounded from the long stock houses inside. Somewhere nearby, and much worse, however, was a tannery, which filled the air with a viscous smell like lacquered rotting flesh, so foul as to turn her stomach. She had to get out. Stepping down from the cab, and feeling ashamed of herself, beautiful María, in her first act in Havana, stumbled over to a corner where she emptied her guts into a puddle of stagnant water—her lovely reflection, with her startling eyes, staring back up at her through the muck, her expression bewildered, as if to ask, Chica, what on earth are you doing here?
Oh, but the workers were nice to her. She cleaned up in one of their washrooms, its flush toilets and spigot taps delighting her. Someone gave María a bottle of Coca-Cola, someone else, a package of chewing gum, and a third offered her a cigarette, which she declined. Then, for an hour or so, she just sat waiting in an office thumbing through magazines that she couldn’t read, though the pictures of Hollywood stars always engaged her. Johnny Weissmuller, still making those Tarzan movies, was the sort of man that always made her wonder just what men in loincloths thought about as they swung through the trees. And Tyrone Power, a dazzlingly good-looking fellow whose teeth were so white she wondered if they were real (though, according to María, as she would tell her daughter a million times, he was not as handsome as her músico.) Once Sixto had settled up, he introduced María to the boss, who, taking one look and caring little about what she could do, offered her a job “cleaning,” as he put it, for a peso a day in the slaughterhouse. She turned him down—it was just too much for her, too much blood and stink, the torrents of flies alone enough to make her sick again.
Afterwards, Sixto drove her to a cheap hotel near the old quarter. And while she had pretended that everything was fine about staying there, she didn’t feel too good about the way Sixto, with a happy look in his eyes, kept promising to visit her whenever he came back to the city, about three or four times a month, he said. So for the sake of avoiding any hurt feelings, she thanked him for all his help and stood by the doorway of that hotel waving farewell and smiling as if she really hadn’t been offended and frightened by what she had seen in his trousers—men saying one thing, but meaning another. Once his truck had disappeared down a street of whose name she had no inkling, María, with her little cloth sack and her new purchases, excused herself and left the dingy lobby of that hotel. She had nothing against the sunken-eyed proprietor—he seemed nice enough in his forlorn way—she just didn’t want to take a chance of Sixto getting any ideas about coming back to find her.