Adios Muchachos Read online

  “So what is this?”

  “Another boyfriend.”

  The retort might have been chiseled in granite.

  “Apparently you have a thing for painters.”

  In contrast to the hackneyed remark, Alicia’s response was custom-tailored to the person and the occasion: If the client could pass (at least in his own eyes) for goodlooking, Alicia would answer with a timid, well-rehearsed smile, “Well, actually, my preference is handsome men”; if the John was fat: “Well, actually, my preference is portly men.”

  The client, stunned by the unexpected reply, would listen intently as she explained that the painters of both oils were somewhat beyond portly and, in fact, close to nine or ten on the fat scale. The painter of the nude, whom she confessed to have loved desperately, was, according to a snapshot she would casually present, so immensely fat that by comparison her current roly-poly friend could feel that he was in quite good shape. Alicia would caress his paunch and fondle his double chin to show him how much she adored fat men. She would go on about a certain fixation she had with a very obese uncle who was the epitome of tenderness and the object of her infantile adoration. And when she confessed that her ideal man was a certain Sumo Yokozuna, well, those fat boys would just melt away in unspoken gratitude.

  If her fat man was uninhibited, she would let him give her a small superficial introductory kiss. If the guy had a complex, she would take the initiative and kiss him.

  And so, depending on whether the client was skinny or short or old or ugly, it always turned out that both painters were just like him, but a little bit worse. Alicia had a whole collection of photographs conveniently prepared to prove it. During that delicate stage of the seduction process, Alicia did everything to show the client that his shortcomings were actually virtues.

  Soon after that first skirmish, if in bed the client showed no signs of impotence, Alicia would offer to give him some practical classes in dancing to Cuban music—a special treat for her foreign guests in which she introduced a number of audacious pedagogical innovations.

  Alicia had a very personal theory about dance. According to her, if the student wanted to acquire that special fluid motion that any good dancer of Caribbean music had, he would have to be taught, from the very first class, a series of horizontal exercises that she herself had designed.

  The hard core of her theory was that anyone who had successfully learned how to dance in bed could not but succeed on any dance floor in the world.

  Barring special circumstances, Alicia usually started the learning process by having a dressage on a broad mat on the floor. There was rarely a veteran of Alicia’s corral who did not end up moaning in rhythmic pleasure.

  Alicia maintained that with this technique she, and she alone, had succeeded in getting a German, a Swede, and even a Cossack to swing their hips without looking like a walrus.

  It was a scientific fact that, if a man did not learn how to move his hips and get his butt gyrating, he would never be able to dance the music of the Caribbean with the grace for which it was created. But Alicia had learned that for many Europeans, heirs to a tradition of military discipline, it was quite unseemly and not at all manly to be jiggling one’s ass. They had this complex about it. But according to Alicia, she just had to get them to move it once, just one single session on their backs with a beautiful woman on top clapping out the rhythm or slapping it to them on their buttocks, and voilá… no complex.

  This treatment usually got rid of the complex permanently. They would be uninhibited for life and generally become gifted students.

  Of course, there were always some impossible students who simply could not manage to sway their hips or jiggle their butts. One time, Alicia got furious with a certain fat guy who was stiffer than a log. When she asked him to swivel his pelvis, the only thing the John managed to do was shake his arms with his elbows in the air. When the cadence got to be critical, right at the point of orgasm, the clumsy bastard jammed his elbow into her abdomen.

  Sometimes the more studious ones found it particularly difficult to get the rhythm. They were transfixed by lust as they watched her in the strategically placed mirrors, arching her torso to sway, or twisting to fire the remote at the recorder she used to accompany her classes.

  Despite the dressage, Alicia managed to move and undulate her entire body, except her legs. And if she liked the guy just a little, she surrendered to the dance. She surrendered without faking it and found satisfaction on top of her clients. She did it effortlessly and they loved it. They glowed with pride.

  Alicia had a strong stomach, but she still had her limits. If at the first encounter the guy revealed himself to be gross or repulsive, Alicia never even bothered to get into the car. With most of them, however, her behavior in her home was a standard routine. When she brought them out of the second room, she no longer led them by the hand but leaned on their arm to let them feel the firmness of her breasts.

  Yes, that was it: let them feel the power of her young flesh.

  In the meantime, she confided in conspiratorial tones that the room with the great bed and the indiscreet array of mirrors was not being used by anyone. Two years earlier, it had been her parents’ bedroom, but no one used it any more. They now reserved it for their guests.

  “Ever since they got divorced, Mother has quit using it. Well,” Alicia added with bewitching brazenness, “she doesn’t use it to sleep in, anyway …”

  Then they would stroll out into the backyard, and while they pet the huge dog, which would quit patrolling the property and sit there staring at them with cross-eyed lubricity, Alicia would allow a few quick liberties by the lemon tree.

  As they returned to the living room, Margarita would casually poke her head out of the kitchen door, holding a guitar in her outstretched hand. “Leonor wants to know if you can lend her the guitar again next Saturday.”

  “How can I refuse?” Alicia would respond with a sigh of resignation, while opening the case and strumming the instrument. That was where she sang her first number, always the same one, by Marta Valdes. Then they would have a few more drinks and some of those delicious breaded shrimps. Margarita did her usual number, the same old bolero from the ’50s. “Oh dear, I didn’t realize it was so late.” And then, unfortunately, she had to leave.

  When they were finally alone, anything could happen. Clients with a modicum of initiative got taken right off to bed, and there Alicia played it by ear, feeling out their masculine aptitudes or shortcomings. But they all got a virtuoso performance.

  The usual reaction of the flattered male was to correspond with an invitation to dinner at La Cecilia, El Tocororo, or any one of the fine expensive restaurants foreigners frequent in Havana.

  “Now you listen to me,” Alicia would say with soft, punctuated clarity, her eyes closed, unequivocally authoritarian, “when I like a man, I have him. I like you, but I will never accept going out with you to public places where any idiot may get the wrong idea about me.”

  And if one of them should offer her money, she might even fly into a rage. “If you value my friendship, don’t ever do that again! I beg you not to insult me,” she would admonish, her index finger pointing at his chest. “The only thing we have left in this country is our dignity, and as far as I’m concerned, the only man I ever accepted money from was my father.”

  “But how could you even think …” the guy would protest.

  So the tone was set. There would be no invitations to public places. Alicia would not frequent restaurants, hotels, shops, or any other places where foreigners went. She did not want to be taken for a jinetera. Sometimes she even had to explain exactly what jinetera meant in Havana: not a whore, though very similar.

  The client then heard that Hermán, Alicia’s father, had had several appointments in the foreign service and in Cuban trade missions abroad. As a child, Alicia had spent eight years in various European countries.

  “It really hurts me to see the situation my country is going through,” she wou
ld add, staring patriotically into his eyes, “and besides, the money you would spend on me at one of those luxurious restaurants could feed a Cuban family for three months.”

  In reality, all that expensive food simply stuck in her throat. But if the client insisted on treating, well, with a lot less money her mother could whip up a meal for ten, and it would be a lot more delicious. He could even invite a few friends over, if he liked.

  One of the predictable outcomes of that pose (as had been the case with six of the fourteen clients Alicia had bewitched over the previous year and a half, with the combination of her bicycle, butt, guitar, and open mind) was that the John would turn up with a huge amount of food and beverages, enough for the two frugal and economically minded women to live on for many weeks. Part of the consignment was used for seeing to the needs of future clients; the other part was sold on the black market at unholy prices. Hey, the fact that Alicia refused to receive gifts in cash did not mean that she could not receive them in good, honest victuals.

  Alicia wore a little watch, always the same one, which invariably broke in the presence of her clients. In eighteen months on the job, she had been given eight watches, purchased for the modest sum of $2,200. She had also received two large freezers, a grand piano, three beautiful guitars, five CD players, a tabletop computer and a laptop, and a motorcycle (although she went on pedaling).

  On really hot nights: “Holy shit, that damn air conditioner is on the blink again,” and there she would go, bald-ass naked getting all full of grease and dust balls, doing her best to fix the damn piece of junk. The client would sit on the bed, shocked by the coitus that had been so torturously interruptus when Alicia’s mother knocked out the circuit breakers in the kitchen. Alicia would blaspheme and kick the rat-shit machine, crying out of frustration, just when she really needed it to work, damn it, and her wrath was so genuine, her sobbing so childlike, her gesture so coquettish as she slammed a piece of inexpensive porcelain against the floor, that the cheap son of a bitch would have to be the most hard-hearted bastard this side of the freaking moon if he didn’t show up the very next day with a shiny new air conditioner.

  Occasionally, one of the clients, beguiled by Alicia and pampered by Margarita, would insist that, despite the gracious hospitality, he had to attend to urgent matters, but would nevertheless be honored if they would be his guests at such and such. Alicia would hold her ground, and finally they would agree to dinner at Alicia’s. The John would bring the provisions.

  “And after dinner, you can sleep over, if you like,” Margarita would interject as naturally as one might offer someone a bowl of popcorn. (The sleeping over thing was great on hot summer nights because it set the stage for the air conditioner routine or the breakdown of the tiny freezer in their modest Soviet refrigerator. Oh dear, this was so embarrassing!)

  For programmed occasions when the client wanted to show off his conquest and proposed having some associates over for dinner, culinary Margarita offered two cosmopolitan alternatives: a main entrée of fondue bourguignonne (with all the right silver and china), or chicken Maryland supreme.

  Margarita’s specialty was, in fact, chicken. In forty minutes she could bone it, stuff it, and sew it up with bamboo needles. Another half an hour in the pressure cooker and it was done. But that was only for impromptu dinners. Sometimes, when a client had something good to say about traditional Cuban cuisine like they serve at the Bodeguita del Medio, Alicia’s mother would let out a soprano laugh. “What ever are you talking about? Good food at the Bodeguita?”

  By that time she would have already been treating him like an old friend, talking to him in the familiar tu, joking around, waving her restless hand in his face and inviting him to taste her own Cuban cuisine, which was much better, of course.

  And in one manner of speaking, it was.

  In matters of traditional Cuban cuisine, however, Margarita was a great fraud. If the guest was from Europe or from the southern cone of South America, for example, Margarita replaced the yuca con mojo with well-seasoned baked potatoes; the pork she prepared very lean and dry and just slightly pink in the center of the slices; the congri rice was never runny, and she seasoned it with a whole list of ingredients that congri was never meant to take. But she did produce a range of haut cuisine tastes, light with the slightest touch of bittersweet, which everyone praised.

  She also did herself grand with Italian pasta: cannelloni, lasagna, fettuccini, ravioli, gnocchi; with sauces like il bolognesa, il pesto, le vóngole, l’arrabiata, la puttanesca. And when there were more than eight to dinner, there was the ever popular paella that never let her down.

  When Alicia had Johns who were timid or impotent, what you might call difficult clients, she took special care that everything was perfect. A certain fatalistic bent deep inside her soul kept telling her that her Prometheus, the one who was going to free her from the blackouts and the scarcities of the Special Period, was going to come to her in the guise of one of these impotent clients. So if some guy’s pecker petered out when Alicia had already reached her third stage of stimulation, she would feign an uncontrollable immediacy, take off all her cloths to masturbate a little, and then beg the John, who was still fully dressed, to go down on her for some cunnilingus, which she helped along with expert finger work until she came to a genuine orgasm: tremors, whines, bites, sighs and all.

  If after all that, the guy still couldn’t get it up, she never pressed him, but rather thanked him for the pleasure he made her feel. And if she noticed the slightest quiver in his virile member, she would pounce on him with all her energy and art until he felt like his very marrow was seeping out of his bones. It had not failed yet. And afterward she would flit around, hyperactive, happy, and thankful. She would take the guitar again, sing. The client had to let her do his toenails, his hair; he had to let her bathe him, put up with her changing the way he combed his hair, and let her play with his little china doll, her “wittle” flippy-floppy.

  Alicia had learned from her mother that there were many men who had fantasies of being a big doll. Of that variety Alicia had only had two (Guido and Jack), and both of them had proposed trips abroad. It was with them that she discovered something she would never have suspected she had in her: the soul of a geisha.

  Of the fearsome variety of pigs (sadists, masochists, drunks, bed farters, etc.), Alicia had not had a single one (knock on wood). But if by some mistake or stroke of bad luck she should ever wind up in the clutches of a pig or a crazy, she had her routine thoroughly rehearsed, culminating in the big turn-off: “OK, lover boy, that’ll be five hundred dollars up front, and I’m a lesbian working girl, so forget the charm.”

  Chapter

  Five

  Victor King was driving a red Chevy along one of Havana’s main thoroughfares, accompanied by Jan van Dongen, the man with the prodigious nose. The rounded sounds of American English could barely be heard over the salsa playing in the background. Van Dongen was explaining to Victor why he was convinced that the Cuban government was going to go for their sunken-galleon tourism project.

  “Shit!” Victor interrupted with a savage blast of the horn. Using his chin, he pointed at the four bicycle riders who were taking up the full width of the street.

  “Can you believe those assholes?”

  Another two blasts. Then a fourth, and the cyclists did not even blink. One of them, who was pedaling along steadily as if he had all day, reached his arm around and shot Victor a bird without even looking at him.

  “That’s for your mother,” Victor muttered in Spanish. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  It was true, of course, the cyclists were not using the bicycle lane but were taking up the entire Malecón drive.

  Beep, beep, beeeep!

  “No way, sonofabitch! Just look at those pricks; just bullshitting away like they were in the fucking park!” Victor tried to speak a neutral kind of Spanish with the officials he met in Cuba and elsewhere in South America, but every time he got piss
ed, he reverted to the colorful Spanish he had picked up in Mexico.

  To get around the bicycles, he took a double left, crossing over the twin yellow lines and racing ahead; but instead of continuing on, he deliberately slowed down beside another bicycle. This one was advancing correctly along the lane set aside for bicycles. Somehow, amid the split-second action involved in that dangerous maneuver, his subconscious monitor had noticed those honeydews bouncing around on either side of that tiny seat and he slowed down almost to a halt to let her go by. He was so dazzled by what he saw that he hardly heard the impotent protests and insults coming from the jerks he had just cut off.

  Several months after this unexplainable act that would leave an indelible mark on his life, if someone asked him exactly why he had been so stupid, Victor would have been hard-pressed to explain. He could not even explain it to himself.

  Did I do it just to piss off those four assholes? Was I seized with some transcendental inspiration to teach them that he who lives like a road hog dies like a road hog? Was I trying to provoke them?

  No. He was not in the habit of pissing off other drivers and trading sterile insults. And running a dumb risk to teach someone a lesson was not his style at all.

  A fuzzy flash of his subconscious had on several occasions led him to wonder if that unprecedented and dangerous tromp on the breaks might not have been the result of a hormonal reaction, a categorical imperative emanating from the very essence of his testicles and unthinkingly relayed by his brain down to his break leg in milliseconds.

  “No wonder! With that ass staring them in the face, who would be riding single-file in the bicycle lane? And then, when the car blocked their view, the two on the right tried to jam over with the others to keep the quarry in their sights.”