City Beasts Read online

  Salvy listened for sounds in the water or against the hull. Would a diver come or would someone quietly paddle up? Would they go for the hull or just for the fish? The cove was silent except for a gentle lapping of the tide and an occasional sucking sound as the hull shifted her position. He could hear schools of baitfish hurrying below and lobsters crawling on the bottom. He said he could, anyway. He watched and listened all night. Just before daybreak, Anthony came.

  He did not have to say a word to his cousin. They carefully examined the boat to be certain that there weren’t any “accidents” about to happen. As the engine putt-putted out of the harbor, Anthony said, “When we come in, let’s take the fish to market. I mean, who needs this? Right?”

  Salvy didn’t answer him, but he knew that he could not stay up every night. Fog pirouetted across the water’s surface and soon erased every trace of the land behind them. The sea heaved in great gray bulges with lacy white foam edges. That rolled the boat easily, a comfortable rocking feeling.

  Suddenly an oddly large wave hit them broadside. No one did it. No one was to blame, except that Salvy might have seen the rogue wave if he was not asleep in the pilothouse. Suddenly the steel boat went up and around sideways and crashed down, deck-first. Neither Salvy nor Anthony had a chance to get out of the freezing water. It was no one’s fault, really.

  * * *

  The Fishermen’s Association was there first, assuring her that they would look after her and Domingo, that there should be no worries. She smiled and nodded appropriately, even though she was not certain how her husband had died. She was not sure that he had not been killed. When someone dies at sea you do not know anything for certain. You cannot even be sure that they are dead because there is no body. All the people who rush over to help you with the mourning seem like they are pushing you. They want you to bury him, but you can’t. Sicilian wives and widows came over in bunches with colorful broad platters of pasta and mountains of cakes and bowls of fruit as though anxious to get the party started and Angela knew that now she, too, would be with the women the way her mother had been and live a life she had never wanted and there would be no escape.

  The Portuguese priest from town and the Sicilian one from Boston both came. Beverly Boston came to tell Angela what a fine man her husband was and the two fishermen who wanted to be mayor, the Sicilian and the Irish one, came.

  Everyone came. She was trapped. There was a protocol. They all knew what to do when a fisherman didn’t come back. Each had a role to play. Even the state senator, a small man in a dark suit, came, irritating everyone with his attempts to speak Italian and not Sicilian. A tall blond man from an old Gloucester family who wanted to run for Congress made the same mistake. “Mi dispiace, signora,” he said in an accent that could have been Albanian and a language that Angela did not even speak. Lots of politicians made that mistake. It was funny if you were in the right mood.

  Bonagia came up to her and whispered, “I tried to tell you. Fish on the doorstep is a very bad sign, me amuri.”

  Angela stared at her. How had she known about the dead fish? They hadn’t told anyone. Angela said as little as possible. She could see how angry Mena was. Mena thought Salvy had gotten her husband killed for that damned fish. She stood there with Angela, talking to the priests, but their friendship would not ever be the same.

  What could Angela say? It might have been true. She didn’t know. Angela knew nothing about her husband’s death. Only that he didn’t come back. So she just smiled. She smiled at Bonagia, who she didn’t trust, and at the red-eyed fishermen who may have killed them and at the mayor, who her husband had liked too much. Whatever was said, she allowed them to take her hand and she smiled softly. This is what she had to do—what she was supposed to do. Salvy never understood how you had to act. She loved that about him.

  “It’s disgraceful,” said Venera, another fisherman’s widow who sold cannoli and looked like she ate most of them. “Her husband just dead and all she does is smile.”

  Nunziata, a stern, tough-looking woman who was Salvy’s most forceful opponent on the City Council, just shrugged. “People are complicated.”

  Angela smiled at them all and listened to their sympathy and support. It was as though they were having a contest, all saying the same lines and seeing who could sound the most sincere. But Angela knew what she had to do. She knew the red-eyed fishermen with their sincere faces and mounds of orange-greased pasta and colorful frosted cakes were going to go get the whale cod. They wouldn’t ask her. They would just take it and sell it at the auction and give her the money and act as though this was charity.

  Angela got Domingo to help her and with a boat hook they opened the trapdoor with the Styrofoam floats and could only hope that the whale cod had the sense to leave. It seemed as though letting the fish live was as close as Salvy came to having a last request.

  Paolo hauled the big fish trap onto his dragger with its big-spooled clanky noise, but there was nothing in it except a few small baitfish, two lobsters, and a crab. For months after, men were jigging Smith Cove and then the rest of the harbor—dropping a lead-weighted hook with herring on it and bouncing it in jerky movements off the bottom. They pulled up some striper but no whale cod. The legend lived, and some fishermen searched the harbor for it for years. It was known that somewhere under Gloucester Harbor was a whale cod. Someday someone would get it.

  After Bonagia left—she stopped by almost every day now—Angela threw out the dried macaroni and thought of how her life had been written long ago and there was nothing she could have done to change it. To the snare-drum sound of the dried pasta hitting the trash she smiled ironically and thought, The macaroni really doesn’t lie.

  She looked out the window and saw Domingo staring out at the harbor and she thought she knew what he was thinking. The only enduring dream in his short life, so soon crushed like a fisherman’s dream, had been to go to sea with his father. Already he was talking about taking his lobster to market to earn money for the family. And in the evening he stood on the dock with his head cocked to one side to try to hear the whale cod swimming. Angela knew Domingo wouldn’t escape, either.

  The whale cod was not getting fed anymore, and when Angela opened the trap, the cod deserted her net home, just in time, as it turned out. She wandered the harbor looking for food. Sometimes she would see dancing jigs on the bottom, but she was not going to be deceived by that. She found some good mackerel by the harbor opening and then went out to sea to swim and hunt as she had for decades. Finally someone had escaped.

  HAVANA

  A Murder of Crows

  Life is not merely commerce or government but something more: a commerce with the forces of nature and the government of oneself.

  —José Martí

  Segundo stuck the knife in the soft part of the throat right under Miguelito’s silly bucktoothed face and ripped downward until the organs spilled out on the table. No one but Segundo called it a Miguelito. It was called a pesperro, a big, ugly, pinkish fish with yellow fins that was caught off the rocks at the bottom of Havana Harbor. Segundo looked at the triangular head with nasty thin teeth protruding from its upper lip. Did this fish not look exactly like Segundo’s dear childhood friend Miguelito?

  Miguelito had been the lightest-skinned kid in the neighborhood and also the funniest-looking and so everyone learned at an early age that whiteness was not worth the price. It was if you were a Fidel or a Che, but those were special people, and in Segundo’s downtown neighborhood white people just ended up looking like Miguelito.

  Everyone used to laugh at Miguelito, make fun of the way he looked. Silvio called him castorucho, ugly little beaver. It was, of course, painful for Miguelito, but even as a child he was an optimist. Most kids were then. He would pretend they were saying Castro and not castor and that they were recognizing something heroic in him. This was an obvious fantasy because all of the heroes of the Revolution were beautiful, wo
nderful-looking, nothing like him.

  The best moments of his childhood were when Conchita Carmelo, the ample light-skinned chanteuse everyone called La Mulata instead of her real name that sounded so fake, would wink and smile at him as she passed by. He would let her pass to get the best view, because although people bought her records and spoke of her great voice it was clear that her greatest talent was that three-beat swing of her ass when she sang a cha-cha-cha.

  Miguelito resolved to be a better revolutionary than anyone else in the neighborhood and become un hombre peso, a man to be respected. He joined all the youth programs and was active with the neighborhood committees when he was only a teenager. They were encouraged to look for suspicious activity, and if they saw something, to report it. Miguelito noticed things that others might miss. What were those boxes Juan Garcia stacked in his bedroom? Why did Eva and Otoña giggle and laugh and then become oddly silent when he walked into the room? You did not want Miguelito to listen to your conversation. It did gain him the respect he was seeking. No one made fun of Miguelito. Only his family talked to him and the rumor was that they were a little afraid of him, too.

  At the age of sixteen Miguelito finally hit the kind of prize he had been seeking. He caught someone who really was working with the Yumas, really was with the CIA, and by turning him in prevented a plot that involved the sabotaging of three factories.

  Unfortunately the man Miguelito turned in was his uncle. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him. They even liked him, Aurelio, a happy, heavy man who smoked cigars and laughed in clouds of yellowish smoke. Now when they went to the Parque Central to eat pastelitos of sweet guava paste and argue with the kids who thought the Industriales were the greatest baseball team in the world, Segundo would look up the Prado, the long tree-lined boulevard, at the old stone Morro Castle, where they kept Aurelio, probably no longer fat, without cigars, and maybe not laughing. But he had tried to destroy them.

  Segundo went to the park with the other kids and sometimes ate a pastelito, and would talk to the vendor about how to make a good pastelito and what was the best guava paste. He didn’t want to argue about baseball because he did not like the Industriales, preferring the Metropolitanos or even Pinar del Río—in truth anyone but the Industriales. A lot of the kids felt that way because the Industriales won too much. But to Segundo, it was an argument not worth making because Miguelito was a big Industriales fan and that made the argument dangerous. Who knew where it would lead. Segundo wanted to make the Revolution work for him.

  In fact, it was working for a lot of the neighborhood. Segundo’s family got a large downtown house with ornate belle epoque doorways and black-and-white-tiled floors. The electricity was fed in the windows on wires he and his sister had to be careful not to touch, but it was a good home.

  Segundo became an engineer. Many of the kids in the neighborhood became engineers. Segundo worked in a factory that assembled Czechoslovakian helicopters. This was a good job, but for Segundo this was still not his chance—the big chance the Revolution would one day offer him.

  On the block was a respected babalawo, Adé Jaen, important enough that he had even been to Nigeria, sent by the government. Adé was old enough to remember his grandfather, who was born a slave and had three horizontal scars on his cheek that meant he had come from the Yoruba people. Adé knew many things. When Segundo told his mother, who was, as they say, “cut” and a follower of Adé’s, that he believed the Revolution had something special for him, she said, “Go to Adé and see what is your destiny,” and she gave him three pesos. He gave the money to Adé, who sat on the floor and rolled a number of cola nuts and muttered in Yoruba and confirmed that the Revolution did have a special destiny for him, though he didn’t say what it was.

  Not everyone in Segundo’s family was a good revolutionary. But most every family had a bad uncle. He had cousins who had left and now lived in Miami. Fidel said they had all become worms, gusanos. But they visited Cuba a few times and Segundo could see that they had not become worms, they had just become Yumas, and Yumas were slightly odd people.

  The cousins were Segundo’s father’s father’s brother’s wife, his aunt Medea, and their son Arsenio. Medea’s husband never came because he had vowed to never set foot on Cuba again until the dictator was overthrown. Perhaps he couldn’t come because he had vowed this a few too many times. But it was clear that Medea reveled in being back in Cuba, wanted to walk the streets and go to all her old places and talk about how they weren’t the same anymore. Arsenio insisted that Cuba was dangerous and didn’t want to go outside. But both of them were very sympathetic toward Segundo and his family, who they were convinced were suffering terribly living under the dictatorship and just too afraid to say so. If Segundo’s parents tried to explain why they supported the Revolution, Arsenio would give an understanding nod and begin searching the apartment for hidden microphones.

  It seemed that Medea and Arsenio believed that life under the dictatorship was very hard because the dictatorship supplied no kitchen appliances. They always brought more boxes of them than they could carry so that the family had to go meet them at the airport to help carry all the boxes. Then they had to find one of those big 1950s American cars for a taxi because the Lada did not have enough space for all of the appliances. They had fans and blenders and food processors and vegetable steamers. Arsenio would always be upset because the appliances from their last trip were not in use. Segundo’s parents would look at him with sad and earnest faces and explain that the electrical system could not take the added load. Arsenio would nod in sympathy and then shake his head at a regime so despicable that they didn’t even provide enough electricity for appliances.

  But the truth was that they didn’t want to use appliances. The importance of appliances was something Cubans learned from the Yumas. Everyone Segundo knew who had visiting relatives had appliances that they could trade for things they wanted. Segundo’s best friend Silvio traded appliances for clothes, designer clothes—well, not really, but he thought they were—Chinese-made Armani suits and Italian silk shirts from Vietnam, all with designer labels occasionally misspelled. As in the “Versache” pants.

  Segundo just kept all the appliances in their boxes. His mother argued that they should take them out of the boxes and spread them around the apartment when the relatives came. They tried that one year, but Arsenio did not appear to be fooled by the eggbeater by the sofa or the waffle maker in the bedroom.

  Segundo preferred to keep everything packed away safely. He said that one day the Revolution would offer him an opportunity and he would need the appliances. Arsenio thought he meant an opportunity to go to America, but Medea thought he simply meant enough electricity. In reality he meant something entirely different. And he would just dream up appliances and they would find them. “We have no nata on our flans because we don’t have a Mixmaster.” Such was the reality of life in Communist Cuba—flan sin nata. The next visit, they came with a shiny chrome Mixmaster. It even said in embossed letters “Mixmaster.” Segundo had not even known such a thing existed. It just sounded like an American name, so he said it. And here it was!

  While in Cuba, Medea always bought several large Cohiba cigars that they hid in their clothes when they reentered the U.S., no doubt to be smoked by her husband, who was boycotting Cuba.

  * * *

  Fidel announced “a special period in time of peace.” In a very long speech he explained that the Soviet Union was crumbling and Cuba was in for some very difficult times. For example, since there was no longer a Czechoslovakia, there was no longer a Czechoslovakian helicopter, and so there were no longer engineering jobs for Segundo and Silvio and their friends.

  This happened shortly after Segundo married Esperanza in a small revolutionary service in which he promised to do his share of the housework. In truth, he did considerably more than his share. While Esperanza was working at the pharmacy he had absolutely nothing to do other than cleaning, s
traightening, and polishing their home. They lived in the house where he had grown up, with its high, splendid doorways, crumbling moldy walls, and tiled floor with only a few cracks. There was still room for his parents, and his sister had married and moved to Vedado.

  The house was getting cleaner and better organized every day. But soon they wanted to have children and Esperanza said that it would not be good for children to have a father who did nothing but clean house.

  “That is a counterrevolutionary attitude,” said Segundo with a smile. But it was clear that his wife, the first educated member of a family of black-sugar workers, did not find this funny. “Don’t worry,” said Segundo. “The Revolution will offer me a good opportunity very soon. I can feel it.”

  And it did. Things were changing. Policy on foreign currency was changing. The island was opening up for tourism. The Spanish were coming with Reconquista haughtiness, the French with great intellectual curiosity, the British on hard-drinking holidays, the Canadians were very affable, and the Scandinavians were very tall.

  Segundo and Silvio went to the new hotel school. Silvio studied to be a restaurant manager, and Segundo? Inching closer to his never-spoken dream, he studied cooking. The instructor was from Spain and he taught Segundo how to prepare the local octopus in olive oil with red chili powder, which was a national dish of the instructor’s native Galicia. Coming from the fishing port of Vigo, he taught Segundo many fish dishes, especially with olive oil and garlic. When Segundo completed his program he imagined going somewhere like the Hotel Nacional, where Silvio went, but instead he was assigned to a wealthy Basque from San Sebastián who had come to Cuba to develop hotels and restaurants with the Cuban state.

  The Basque taught him to make dishes from food he brought in himself—salt cod with various sauces and little green chilies that had no sting, which he learned to grill and sprinkle with coarse salt from Guantánamo. The Basque ate every night at midnight in his apartment on Fifth Avenue near the Spanish embassy that was a six-story baroque palace. The apartment was new and clean-looking, unlike any place Segundo had ever been, and the kitchen was better than the one at the hotel school, though slightly smaller. The Basque knew everything about food and Segundo learned from him, but this was not the great chance the Revolution would offer him. That was still to come.