Adios Muchachos Read online

  “Naturally, I would have done the same thing,” Jan commented.

  But Victor was fascinated by the action on the bicycle seat and never heard a word. “Mother of God! Do you think she’s a whore?”

  “I don’t think so; she looks like a student,” Jan commented, his proboscis wiggling with his every word.

  “Well, in any case, Jan, I would very much like to be introduced to an ass like that.”

  Victor picked up a little speed and pulled alongside.

  The girl, a blonde with a deep natural suntan, also had a beautiful profile.

  When Victor rolled down the window and shot his best Mel Gibson smile, she glanced at him with no apparent interest. Her pedaling style was assertive. Her breasts were firm and her lips were full. Across her back she carried a gunnysack with a large T-square and two rolled up sheets of drawing paper.

  As they neared the Riviera Hotel, she stepped up the pace, signaled that she was about to turn into the left lane, and crossed right in front of them.

  “Lord in heaven, what was that!”

  The insinuating foothills of those twin orbs of blushing buttocks were overflowing on either side of the overwhelmed bicycle seat. Victor could not remember the last time he had had such a spontaneous erection.

  When she turned at the hotel, the four other cyclists continued on their way along the Malecón drive. One of them made the inevitable indecent remark; the other three, also inevitably, laughed without mirth.

  Victor’s brain was racing. That ass brought to him so graciously by the Havana rush hour might be the exact thing he so very much needed to find. And since even the longest journey begins with but a single step, he was going to follow her wherever she led him.

  Picking up women in the street was definitely not his style, but this time he would give it a try. He pulled over to the curb and turned to van Dongen. “Would you mind very much, Jan? There are lots of taxis at the Riviera stand and I don’t want to let this kind of opportunity get away from me.”

  “No problem,” smiled The Nose good naturedly, “and good luck.”

  Jan got out of the car and sauntered toward the taxi stand.

  The bicycle had turned down Third Street and Victor lost sight of the girl for a moment. He sped up and spotted her almost at the other corner; when she made her next left turn, the red Chevy was right behind her, some twenty yards away.

  Victor checked the time, pulled out his cell phone, and rapidly tapped out a number. “Hello, Margaret? Yes, it’s me. Please tell Karl Bos that I won’t be able to keep our appointment. I’m a bit under the weather. No, no! Don’t you worry about me. It’s really nothing: an upset stomach and a bit of a temperature. Yeah, that’s probably it. Would you ask him to set a new date, please? OK, thanks a lot.”

  When she was about to cross the next street, Alicia leaned over, gave the linchpin a slight tug, and off went the pedal. She let herself fall to the ground practically on all fours; but as she positioned herself to get on her feet again, she got one foot stuck somewhere under the frame, her right hand on the handlebar and her left on the pavement. That position had the immense effect of appearing very painful while simultaneously revealing an impressive view of her posterior expanses.

  Victor jumped out of his car with genuine concern and ran over to assist her. “Have you hurt yourself, miss?”

  Alicia had already gotten free of her entanglement with the bicycle and was standing with the pedal in one hand and a lock nut in the other. She looked at him furiously, as if he were to blame for her misfortunes.

  “That rat-shit piece of junk!” She threw a vicious kick at the bike and broke into sobs.

  “Take it easy, now, miss. Let me help you.”

  Alicia turned her back on him. With her hands on her hips, she leaned over, stiff-legged, to check if she had injured her knees.

  At this further exhibition of her glutei, Victor had to bite his lip.

  Still looking the other way, Alicia began to complain: “And just how do you propose to help me? Every time this crap breaks down, it means several days without any transportation at all.”

  “Well, I can at least take you wherever you’re going right now. Let me put the bike in the trunk.”

  Alicia turned and looked at him with surprise. “Do you think it will fit?”

  “Of course it will.”

  “Which way were you going?”

  “Your way,” he replied with a handsome, self-assured smile.

  Alicia did not smile back. With the discreet approval of the Mona Lisa, she gave him a thorough visual examination from head to foot, with a not-too-brief stopover at his crotch. “Thank you,” she finally said with a sigh of relief.

  And Victor smiled again, quite certain that he had passed the inspection.

  Chapter

  Six

  When a client failed to come over within the first forty-eight hours, or if he mentioned that he would soon be traveling abroad, Alicia would revert to her standard procedure and start pedaling again.

  As a young woman, Alicia had been an early bloomer. By the time she was fifteen she had a fantastic body, eyes that were an almost transparent amber and that golden skin that makes Caribbean blondes just as sexy, or even sexier, sometimes, than the legendary mulatto women.

  Alicia fell in love with her physical education teacher, a black man with a body like a Greek god. Consumed with a desire that she could no longer suppress, she practically forced him to take her on one of the gym mats.

  When she told her mother, all Margarita had to say was, “Well that’s life,” while thinking to herself, I should have known her genes would have their way in the end.

  “But since you’re into that, you might as well learn. Now look …”

  So from that day, spurred on more by her woman’s pride than by motherly love, Margarita taught Alicia all she knew. And since Alicia was no longer a child, Margarita decided to tell her the truth about her father. He had had many affairs; she suffered bitterly. Margarita loved Hermán dearly, but she would rather die than lose her dignity, so she got herself a lover, and another and another. When Hermán found out, he left her. He said that what she had done was unforgivable.

  “So it was all right for him, but I was unforgivable. Can you beat that?” she recalled with rage, her gaze lost in the distance.

  Regarding Alicia’s decision several years later to work the foreign market, turning tricks for treats, as she used to say, getting along quite well without euphemisms, Margarita had a clear conscience. The idea had been Alicia’s. Her own original creation. And she had made that decision when she was over twenty-one, legally of age, and with a body that was all woman, in some ways a hell of a lot more mature than her mother. And with a pair of cojones that would be the envy of any man.

  No, she did not condemn herself for her performance as a mother. Nor did she regret having helped Alicia so enthusiastically when she finally made her decision. Alicia herself had told her that as long as the Johns were not unpleasant, whoring was a lot of fun, challenging and stimulating.

  What else could Margarita do? As a contribution to the new family business, Margarita had even sacrificed her relationship with Carlos, her latest lover, who had been living with them for a few months. It was really a shame. The guy was good in bed, quiet, sufficiently in love to do everything he could for her, and he had never broken her balls with petty jealousy or with that routine about not getting enough attention. But he was not an asset; the dummy would just be getting in the way.

  So she chucked him out with no explanation. “It’s over! Finito, gone with the wind. And that’s it! Pick up your things and get out.”

  It was obvious, of course, that there was no way that Carlos could be made to fit into Ali’s project. Not that she ever said anything. But it was the kind of project that required total dedication, and since her baby had made the decision, what else could she do but get rid of the excess baggage and back her all the way. And there was no time to be wasted; that ass, tho
se boobs, that twenty-three-year-old skin, and those huge balls of hers were not going to last forever.

  The whole plan, it was true, had been Alicia’s creation—from the gimmick of showing off her ass on the bike to the operating procedure for seduction. But Margarita, like Queen Isabella of Castille, had believed, believed so hard that she sold her last jewel to pay for the first bicycle in US dollars.

  “Well, this is it; it’s now or never,” Alicia had said when they went to buy the bike.

  “It’s all his fault,” Margarita said, recalling her exhusband with loathing, “and that bald prick Gorbachev, who screwed up everything.”

  If the Soviet Union had not caved in, there would be no Special Period in Cuba. Alicia would have finished her studies at the university. She would certainly have gotten herself the right kind of husband: somebody in the nomenklatura, a technocrat, or maybe an artist, which had been her childhood dream.

  But in 1994, when the crisis was affecting their stomachs, their feet, and even their minds, Alicia’s patriotism could stretch no further, so she decided to become a whore.

  “Yes, whore, whore, of course I’m a whore,” the baby had insisted.

  With blackouts every night and daily bread rations down to a single roll per person, Alicia had made several honest attempts to rope herself a rich foreigner who could take her out of the country and set her up with the lifestyle she wanted. She said that she had only one life to lead and that she had expensive tastes. She said that she wanted to satisfy those tastes in this one life she had and that right now was not soon enough.

  On two occasions, during the years 1994 and 1995, her honest attempts had been on the verge of fruition but had fallen through at the very last moment.

  The day came, then, when Alicia decided to become a whore.

  Not a single speech more! Whenever she saw Fidel on television, she would turn it off. Well, they could just take their fucking morality and their fucking principles and stuff them. A whore, and that’s that!

  Margarita had to agree. What else could she do? She certainly had no way to stop her daughter. And finally, in a flood of tears, she confessed to herself that if she had been twenty years younger she would have done the same thing.

  “My poor baby …”

  “Poor baby, my ass! Go to your fucking church if you want to cry.”

  Alicia and her mother had never stood against the Revolution.

  Margarita was born in 1948. She studied painting at San Alejandro during the late ’60s and then did a couple of years of an Art History major at the university. Then came her marriage and the traveling. With Hermán, an official with the Ministry of Foreign Trade who was about two decades her senior, Margarita had spent five years in Belgium and three in England. She was descended from one of the old well-to-do families of Havana, but out of love for Hermán, a good-looking, virile man, patriotic and Fidelista, she had deserted her rich family when they emigrated to Miami and embraced the revolutionary process quite sincerely—always from a very comfortable position, of course, but the embrace was sincere.

  When she and her husband were recalled back to Cuba, Margarita got her first job in a museum. For the last ten years, she had worked in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, first as a secretary and then in the protocol department.

  Margarita had felt completely at home in that rarefied cosmopolitan environment, working with foreign guests and organizing the details of their visits to Havana. And although she had always considered herself to be a revolutionary, her patriotism and convictions were heavily compromised in 1991, when Hermán left her.

  From that day, Margarita and Alicia lost many of the privileges that had flowed to them through Hermán. He had, it was true, left them the house in the exclusive Miramar district: two floors, five bedrooms, garden, backyard, trees, a garage, and the old Triumph they had brought back from England (although it had never been repaired since the engine had burned out two years earlier).

  And so it was that when Alicia did not have a steady client to occupy her attention for a couple of days, she would bring out her bicycle and go hunting. If the hunting was slow she would pedal seven days a week, from ten to twelve and four to six.

  Her technique was unique, and it worked.

  The proof in the pudding was that just a few months after getting started she had already received four firm proposals for stable relationships abroad: Panama, Argentina, Germany, and Italy. The Panamanian was very rich and good-looking, but he was a despot with the word “Mafia” written all over him. The German was even wealthier, but much too old and a bit too crotchety even for Alicia’s broad margin of tolerance. The Argentine was a typical rich kid, a little crazy, with a huge inheritance and a big business, but immature and far too demanding. Of the four, Alicia would have chosen the Italian, but he did not have enough money, was much too fat, and was just a bit of a dummy.

  The pedaling had to go on.

  Chapter

  Seven

  An array of appliances was scattered around a room that looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. Several electric fans, an electric range, a refrigerator, a couple of guitars, two bicycles, and a motor-bike were all strewn about.

  Margarita, wearing an apron and rubber gloves, picked her way through the stuff, raising her legs like a great wading bird. She paused, briefly studying the label on a large air conditioner. “This one’s a Westinghouse. I can let you have it for a thousand.”

  A mulatto in his late forties, wearing a floral-patterned shirt, a gold chain around his neck, and a straw version of a Tyrolean hat (feathers and all), with a big black cigar clamped between his teeth, threw his hands up as if asking for clemency.

  “And you can have this other one for eight hundred.”

  “This is murder, Margarita. You’re really putting us up against the wall.”

  “Yeah, sweetheart,” added a young blond man with a nice build, “give us a break. We’re going to take both of them off your hands.”

  Margarita, confident in her knowledge of the market, replied in her friendliest tone, “No way, sweetie! One thousand eight hundred for both of them is a bargain; so take it or leave it.”

  Hearing the unmistakable crunch of tires on gravel, Margarita peeked out of one of the windows to see who was coming. “Shit! It’s Alicia with a guest, and I haven’t prepared a goddamn thing …”

  She rushed into the living room, picked up a guitar, and put it in the closet. Then she opened a drawer and took out the usual group of pictures, with one of the nudes of Alicia that she carefully laid out casually on the little round table in the corner. She checked the stock in the bar, holding the amber bottles up against the light to verify that they were not empty, and hurried into the kitchen.

  Opening the refrigerator, she removed a few beers and put them up in the freezer along with a couple of glasses. She took a few jumbo shrimp out of the cold and set them to defrost in the microwave. Lastly, she opened a small plastic jar, poured the contents into a saucepan, and set the range to a low simmer. Finishing her preparations, she ran over to the window again, peering anxiously out onto the driveway and muttering something under her breath.

  When she returned to the two men, the mulatto was just finishing his last count of the money. “OK, here’s your thousand eight. What’ll you take for the motorcycle and the fridge?”

  “Don’t give me any money now, I don’t even have time to count it. Come around later this afternoon or tomorrow morning. That’s it, tomorrow morning. Now hurry on out the back way, and don’t make any noise.”

  The two men departed and Margarita closed the patio door. She ran the curtains, took off her gloves and apron. Then, straightening herself up, she shook her hair, threw her arms in the air just once, lifted her chin, and with the demeanor of a grand lady, moved to open the door. Passing by the mirror in the living room, she took a quick look, was satisfied with the reflection, and continued toward the door.

  Margarita opened the door to welcome Alicia just as Victo
r was taking the bicycle out of the trunk. Alicia took the bike by the handlebars and walked over toward her mother with the guilty pedal in her hand. As she entered the small garden next to the front door, her mother launched into the customary reproaches: “I told you that thing was going to leave you stranded. You should throw that thing away and ask your father to buy you a scooter.”

  “Mother, this is Victor … Victor, my mother.”

  “Wow, Mel Gibson,” Margarita interjected without really paying him too much attention. “You’re just too hardheaded; I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to tell you …”

  “Please, Mother, that’s enough,” Alicia protested.

  “I beg you to excuse my lapse of manners, sir, please come in.” And turning again to Alicia, “But you really have to ask your father …”

  “Mother, will you shut the hell up … please!” And turning to Victor, “She has this thing with getting my father to buy me a scooter, as if it were that easy!”

  When her clients were around, Alicia made a point of using strategic bits of profanity. Two elegant women who knew how to employ timely profanities gave the impression of being above it all, emancipated, liberal, chic. No decent woman of humble origins would ever curse in the presence of someone she was trying to impress. And these foreigners, accustomed as they were to the subjugation of prostitutes in the Third World, found the offhand use of obscenity by these two Cuban women surprising and, ultimately, captivating.

  “You’re not Cuban, are you?”

  “No, señora, Canadian.”

  “But your Spanish is perfect. I would have guessed that you were Mexican.”

  They moved into the living room.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ve lived a long time in Mexico. I consider it my second home.”

  “How I envy you! Let me see now, my husband once …”

  “Please, Mother, you can tell him your life story some other time? Now, why don’t you offer our guest a drink? Me, I need a beer. My throat is so dry it hurts.”