King of Cuba (26 page)

The older El Comandante got, the more he hated traveling. Even that day trip to Mexico two months ago had exhausted him to no end. The last thing he needed today was to get tricked out in his Armani suit and travel to New York City. It was too cold there no matter the season. The beds were uncomfortable and the unfamiliar noises jangled his nerves. The truth was that he no longer felt at home anywhere but on the red, clay-rich soil of his island. Long gone were the days when he’d cut a handsome figure in fatigues, inciting crowds the world over with his stirring speeches. Now he could count on one hand the places left where he remained a hero: Bolivia, South Africa, parts of Mexico, Vietnam, and—yes—Harlem.

Harlem’s love affair with him had begun in 1960, after he and his men had been evicted from their midtown hotel under pressure from Washington. El Comandante suggested pitching tents in the United Nations gardens, but black politicos rallied to bring him uptown to the Hotel Marisa, famous thereafter as the place where he and Malcolm X had met. None of his subsequent visits to the UN—not in 1979, when he’d gotten a standing ovation for condemning apartheid; nor in 1995, when he’d memorably called the U.S. embargo a “noiseless atom bomb”—could replicate the thrill of his first, hours-long harangue of the General Assembly.

Another stifling September day dawned. The tyrant loathed early autumn, when the threat of hurricanes and the dropping barometric pressure pushed everyone to the breaking point. A muscle spasm cinched his waist. He drank the water left for him on the nightstand and stared out at the Caribbean Sea. The Focsa
tower
¹
jutted high above the city’s dilapidated skyline. It’d been the last major building to go up before the Revolution. On the other side of town, the blanched dome of the Capitol seemed to mock his revolution. Carajo, he was responsible for this mess, for a society in which prostitutes were revered as “heroines” for keeping their families afloat during hard times.
²

El Comandante pulled the Browning from his nightstand drawer and slipped the tip of the barrel into his mouth. His chapped lips clung to the steel. What else did he have left to prove? The real trial was crossing the chasm from dying to dead. Non est ad astra mollis e terris via. There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. Another Jesuit chestnut. The tyrant chambered a round and closed his eyes. Memories floated behind his eyelids: Mami napping in her hammock with a flock of baby chicks; the Jamaican cutter’s girl kissing him under the tamarind tree, then pronouncing them married; the time he heard his parents fucking while Papá’s legal wife and daughters sat in the parlor, pretending not to listen.

The phone rang, and he knew without looking that it was Fernando.

“I had a terrible dream about you.” His brother’s voice swallowed the last syllable. “I thought you’d . . .”

“I’m fine,” the tyrant said drily.

“Are you—”

“Pick me up in an hour.”

In the early years of the Revolution, when their safety was continually in jeopardy, Fernando had wanted to hire body doubles for them. El Comandante had scoffed at the idea, not wanting anyone to take a bullet meant for him. Persistent, Fernando sent him one doppelgänger after another and selected a blacksmith as his own impostor. That lucky bastard enjoyed the good life well into his sixties—wining and dining minor dignitaries, cutting factory ribbons, bedding small-town beauty queens—until the day he feasted on a platter of cyanide-laced crabs at a mechanics’ convention in Varadero. There was the awkward business of “Fernando’s” resurrection after thirty-seven eyewitnesses had seen him drop dead. But the Revolution was adept, if it was adept at anything, at revising history.

El Comandante put away his pistol. His suicide would only serve as propaganda for his enemies. The best course of events would be for him to be killed in action, like José Martí. This would yield the optimum political capital, which the Revolution could then exploit for years to come like it’d done with Che and Camilo. The ultimate vindication, of course, would be to outlive every last one of his enemies. If only he could.

The tyrant grasped the bedpost. The day had barely begun and he felt wasted as chalk. He ran his tongue along the gluey roof of his mouth. How sick and tired he was of cooperating with his handlers like some sorry gelding. This was what old age demanded: reasonableness and a resignation to the obliterating sameness of meals, solitude, sickness. As he made his way to the toilet, a turkey
buzzard momentarily landed on his balcony, then flew away. El Líder pried open the iron-grilled window. The air smelled rancid, like days-old shellfish. He’d come to resemble the view, sun-faded and devoid of grandeur.

Delia appeared at his door in a lavender nightgown, her hair in disarray. She, too, had dreamt about him. “You were wallowing in the swamp like an injured crane. You opened your beak to cry for help but no sound came.” She nestled against her husband’s chest, nearly toppling him.

“It’s that fucking musical! I shouldn’t have told you anything about it.” He’d been having nightmares from that goddamn play—mostly of giant, imperialist crabs running amok in Havana.

The backfiring of a fifties Chevy in the street below startled them both.

“Don’t go to New York, mi cielo. I beg you.”

“Carajo,” he muttered, then repeated it for good measure before disappearing into the bathroom.

1.
I was a middleweight Olympic boxing champ. I could’ve defected and gone professional, but when my chance came, I choked. The state rewarded my loyalty with this plum job: head bartender at the rooftop bar of El Focsa. Views in every direction and tips enough to live better than most. Here in the skies, I mix drinks—forgive the pun—that pack a serious punch.

—Romero Fino, bartender

2.
So much history and what do the tourists want to know? Where they can get cheap cigars, the best mojitos, and where to find the women. Tell me, what has changed since 1959? What do these imbeciles care about the Grito de Yara, or the Treaty of Zanjón? My knowledge is wasted. And yet I know this much: the wheel of history will turn and our country will be free again.

—
Sebastiano Durán, tour guide

Goyo scrabbled westward in his linen suit and Panama hat, his cane barely grazing the sidewalk. This was his chance, the grand opportunity offered to him by Fate, or God, or the Devil. He stopped to rest against the display window of a Madison Avenue jewelry store. A steam vent fogged up his glasses. The back of his suit was soaking wet, and he gave off a sharp ammonia smell. A security guard emerged from behind the gleaming watches and asked if he was all right. Goyo didn’t have the breath to respond and waved him away. He reached for his inhaler and took a breath. Fear, courage, courage, fear; the two were inextricably bound.

He reminded himself to go about his usual business so that nobody would suspect his motives. Goyo agonized about leaving his affairs in such a disorganized state. His brownstone was practically in ruins. He hadn’t heard a word from Goyito since dropping
him off in New Jersey. And Alina had been evicted from the Fairchild botanic garden for swimming in its lagoon (photographing endangered waterfowl, she claimed). Maybe his dream of dying a hero was illusory—eight parts smoke, two parts vanity.

At his physical therapist’s office, Goyo adjusted the torturous quadriceps machine to the lowest possible weight. He set his jaw and attempted to raise his shins. Nada.

“Lift, Mr. Herrera, lift,” the therapist urged him. “This will strengthen your thighs and the muscles around your knees.”

Goyo put every ounce of energy he had into budging the ten-pound bar. It rose half an inch, then clanked back into place. If his legs wouldn’t raise it, then his mind would. The Jesuits used to say that the mind was the body’s most powerful organ, after the heart. Slowly, painfully, the bar rose until his thigh muscles quivered and his legs were at a right angle to his body. This was his boot camp, his antechamber to glory. He must be in the best possible shape to complete his task. In less than a day, he would restore the tarnished name of the Herrera clan. He’d lost much more than an island paradise to that tyrant. He’d lost his brief season of youth.

“You’re making progress,” the therapist encouraged him. “At this rate, you’ll be dancing in no time.”

That had to be a joke. Goyo was a pariah at dance parties, inflictor in chief of bruises and swollen toes. At the Key Biscayne Yacht Club Christmas parties, drunken bacchanalias where wife swapping was occasionally still practiced, Luisa used to dance with everyone but him.

On the culo machine, Goyo groaned like a straining rope as he lifted another stack of bars.

“Tell me about your diet, Mr. Herrera,” the therapist asked, his pen poised over the clipboard.

“No diet,” Goyo grunted, finishing his last set.

“I don’t mean for you to lose weight but for your health.”

“Cojones, what does it matter? I won’t eat my vegetables.” He pictured his insides looking like so much ground beef.

“What about fruit?”

“I eat fruit.”

The therapist brightened, clicking his pen.

“Mangoes. Papayas. Piñas.” Goyo disentangled his legs from the machine. When he was growing up, there were no such things as gyms or cardiovascular anything; only fun, and swimming, and sex. People ate whatever the hell they wanted. No one taught you how to take care of your body; your body took care of itself.

“What else do you—”

“I’m very busy today. Can we finish this next time?” Good move, Goyo thought. When the FBI interrogated the therapist, he would have to say that his client had come to his regular appointment and behaved normally; that is to say, crankily. No one would think him capable of committing such an act.

His daughter called and sounded uncharacteristically forlorn. “When are you coming home, Papi?”

“Pronto, mija. Muy pronto,” Goyo said, and his voice broke.

He limped down West Forty-Sixth Street, tempted to stop in for a feijoada at Via Brasil, but he feared even a modest bowlful might knock him unconscious for days. He decided to head to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral instead. It’d been a regular stop for him on his travels to boarding school in the 1940s. Goyo had filled an entire album with the photographs he’d taken of the magnificent bronze Atlas across the street. Atlas represented the sort of man the Jesuits admired, someone who not only inhabited the world but also literally shouldered its burdens.

Goyo hoisted himself up the front steps of the cathedral, tucking in behind a group of Korean tourists. The cool, Gothic interior reinforced the ideal Catholic view of the world as orderly, righteous, enlightened. Pain seared through his joints as he knelt
down in a back pew. Mass was under way. Luminous white gladioli girded the altar. When he was a boy, the priests’ sartorial splendor had appealed to Goyo’s sense of style, and for one fervent week following a bout of post-tonsillectomy quinsy, he’d deluded himself into believing that he’d been called. The organ bellowed a hymn in G minor that echoed throughout the cathedral. Goyo tried to imagine the bells of Saint Patrick’s and every last church from here to Tierra del Fuego pealing jubilantly with the news:
Murió el tirano!
The tyrant is dead!

If he were lucky enough to survive an assault on the bastard, he’d be hailed as Cuba’s new liberator, take his place in history alongside José Martí. Goyo bent his head and recited an Our Father and two Hail Marys. He was seeking inspiration, a definitive direction, but no answer came.
So it is for your own glory that you contemplate this?
The voice was his, and not his, metallic and oddly feminine.
I want to redeem my life,
Goyo answered.
I want it to mean something.
He felt a sudden, unexpected tenderness for his broken body. How fragile it’d proved against life’s slow river of ruin.

Goyo hailed a cab and headed to Central Park. The trees were in their last summer fullness, and a couple of softball teams in bank logo jerseys battled it out on the Great Lawn. Everywhere, old people with their polished-apple skin sat on benches with newspapers and books. In another month, the leaves would turn an ember red in the unforgiving chill of fall.

“Pull over here.”

“We get ticket!” the driver protested.

“I’ll pay, don’t worry.” Goyo flashed a wad of cash and stepped outside. He wanted to breathe in the world one last time, take notice of everything he usually ignored—the resinous air, the immaculate gray of the clouds. A turkey vulture peered down at him from the top of a pin oak. With a great flap of its wings, it rose
high into the sky before wheeling away. Goyo got back in the cab and returned home.

The contractor was on the sidewalk, shouting into his cell phone. He flung out his arms in exasperation.

“Where’s Víctor?” Goyo asked.

“Inside with his fucking feather duster. Listen, we got business to discuss.”

Goyo’s temples ached, and the pain was spreading to the back of his skull.

“Hey, you don’t look so good.”

“Son of a bitch,” Goyo managed to gasp.

“Let’s get you upstairs. I got the elevator fixed.”

Johnny helped Goyo inside, then up to his apartment, where Víctor put him to bed. Goyo was sweating so profusely that his clothes left stains on the coverlet. It couldn’t be another heart attack, he reassured himself, because his chest didn’t hurt. He closed his eyes and tried to steady his breathing, to tamp down the anxiety he felt. Víctor propped Goyo’s feet on a pillow and pressed a cool cloth to his forehead. A swirl of colored dots swam beneath his eyelids before he passed out.

When he awoke hours later, it was dark out and a mug of chamomile tea steamed on the nightstand. This meant that Víctor was nearby, probably watching reruns of
Gaucho Love
and wearing one of Luisa’s old bathrobes. A votive candle flickered on the dresser. Goyo shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts and prepare himself for the day ahead.