Читать книгу The Death of Fidel Perez - Elizabeth Huergo - Страница 7

C H A P T E R T H R E E

" Wake up, Pedro. You're going to be late again," Sonya insisted.

Through half-opened eyes, Pedro Valle could see his wife Sonya standing over him. The light of the morning sun filtering through the shutters behind her made her glow like an angel.

"I'm awake. Go back to sleep, Sonya."

"I've been up for hours, you old fool. Are you really awake?"

"I'm awake."

"Your favorite neighbor was just at the door."

"That moron."

"He wants you to check the generator."

"He always wants something."

"He's not so bad, Pedro."

"Not so bad? The other day he buttonholed me. 'Hey, Professor, what'd Marx say about the dead and the living?' He must have practiced in front of a mirror for hours. 'You mean the weight of the dead on the brains of the living? I didn't know the Communist Party was scheduling meetings in our stairwell,' I told him. You should have seen the little cretin's face."

"You didn't really say that, Pedro?"

"Yes, I did," Pedro lied.

"He meant it as a compliment."

"He meant to entrap me."

"He probably read it in the paper. He knows you teach history."

"He's a cretin."

"If Carlito is such a cretin—"

"Compañero Carlito Cretino."

"Pedro, por Dios. He's so helpful."

"He's the block spy."

"You don't know that."

"You don't know he isn't. I don't know how my wife can respect a man who wears his underwear in public."

"Pedro, be charitable. He helps me when you're not here."

"I help you. I help you all the time. I wear my underwear inside."

"You wear everything inside. Are you going to get up?"

Pedro assured her he was. When she left the room, he pushed himself out of bed. He could feel his age: the life force that moved through him, and its counterpoint, the sinew-wrapped bones and skin he had become. He dressed quickly, wanting to avoid another knock on the door from his neighbor the comrade. Pedro could hear his wife opening the balcony doors that ran along the perimeter of their apartment. He could hear the mechanical clock on the dresser loudly marking the time. It was a few minutes after seven in the morning. He unlocked the front door and shuffled down three flights of stairs in his worn slippers, a box of matches in his shirt pocket.

Near the basement stairwell of the building was the water pump. The other tenants entrusted him with its safekeeping, depending on him to turn it on in the morning and off in the evening. The ritual protected the fragile pump and its miscellany of worn, half-broken parts from the power surges that followed the intermittent blackouts across Havana. Lit match in hand, he threw the switch, but instead of the familiar shudder of the engine, he heard nothing. The power was out this morning. He switched the engine off again and made his way back up the deteriorated stairwell.

"The power's out again," he told Sonya, shuffling past her in the kitchen. "You can tell Comrade Carlito the Cretin when he knocks on the door again. Tell him it's not my fault. Tell him to call for a rally against the government. Fat chance you'd ever catch our comrade doing that."

Pedro leaned into the barrel Sonya kept in reserve in the kitchen, pulled up a bucket of water, and shuffled into the bathroom. He stripped, squatted in the curtainless bathroom tub, and splashed the cold water on himself. The night before, he had fallen asleep gazing through the slats of the balcony shutters at the starlit tropical night. Now his neck hurt. He poured the remaining water over his head. He rubbed his body with the towel, stood before the mirror, and scraped away with a razor at the stubble of gray hair on his face. Nothing seemed to take away the constriction the dream had caused in his chest. This morning, for the first time, the pain continued down his left arm, coinciding with his sense of something surging up inside him, seeping through unbidden.

"Don't be mad at me, Sonya."

"Why would I be mad?"

Pedro stood in the dining room, clean shaven and dressed, peering into the kitchen, watching his wife, his coffee cup in hand.

"I have seen in the dark night over my head rain, the rays of pure light, Beauty divine," Pedro recited the lines, all the while watching his wife smiling, her head down, focusing on the dishes in the sink.

Sonya turned, and Pedro saw the young woman he had married staring back at him.

"On the shoulders of handsome women I saw wings bud ding: and rising from the rubble butterflies soaring."

"You canceled."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Your appointment. It does you so much good to talk."

"With that quack?"

"He helps you with your troubles, your memories of Mario."

"I'd rather talk to Mario."

"Dr. Otero is a nice enough young man."

"Don't be so damned euphemistic, Sonya. He's not young. He's middle-aged. And he's not nice. He sits there and never says a word. But I always know what he's thinking." Pedro looked at his wife. Sonya was an old woman again. "If you think I'm crazy, go ahead and say it."

" After what you went through, if anyone has the right to be crazy, it's you, Pedro. Why don't you tell Dr. Otero his silence upsets you?"

"I don't have time for this."

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Sonya asked, pointing at the worn leather briefcase he had left the day before on the dining room table.

Pedro walked back to pick up the briefcase before moving toward the front door.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Sonya repeated.

Pedro looked at his wife blankly.

"Your manuscript."

"It's right here." Pedro smiled, tapping the briefcase.

Sonya pursed her lips and turned away.

"I remembered my promise," Pedro said. "It's done."

"You're lying."

"I have a few more edits."

Pedro could see the tears welling up in her eyes.

"It's done," Pedro lied again.

"I don't believe you."

"You'll see."

Sonya closed the apartment door behind him. Pedro stood near the threshold, briefcase in hand, thinking that he needed to return and make amends. Instead he started down the dark, narrow stairs, carefully minding each step. Just as he was reaching the landing, Pedro was certain he heard a familiar voice.

"Mario? Are you there, my friend?" he whispered.

An apartment door opened abruptly, and Pedro felt the bright flash of a torch in his eyes.

"You get to the generator yet? There's no power. Hey, you hear me, Professor? No power."

Pedro struggled to steady his breath, barely able to contain his displeasure at seeing Carlito, in a sleeveless undershirt and boxers, the stub of a cheap cigar between his teeth.

"The power's out," Pedro said.

"I know. Why you telling me that?" Carlito stepped closer. In the darkness of the stairwell, the smell of cigar smoke and stale perspiration nearly overpowered Pedro.

"You hear me?" Carlito asked, flashing the beam of light in Pedro's face.

"I tried," Pedro stammered, shrinking away from the beam, unable to fill his lungs with air.

"What's the matter, Professor? Too old to deliver?" Carlito laughed from his belly, scratching his head with the hand that held the cigar stub.

"The power's out," Pedro repeated.

"So you say." Carlito stepped closer to Pedro, using the stub of the cigar to punctuate his words. "Did you jiggle the gizmo? The gizmo on the generator. You didn't jiggle it, did you?"

"I did everything I could," Pedro said, reaching back to find the hand rail and nearly losing his footing on the stairs.

Carlito lunged forward to catch him, the torch dropping, sounding loudly on the terrazzo floor and going dark, but Pedro pushed away in fear, shuffling down the remaining stairs as fast as he could.

"Professor, you okay?"

Pedro didn't answer. Once out on the cobblestone sidewalk, he clung to the iron gate. He couldn't name the feeling welling up inside him, folding back like a tide, striking him, each time causing every frustration, every fear he had ever felt, to rise and choke him, to demand what he couldn't give.

"Hey, Pedro—"

"I'm fine, Carlito. Do me a favor. Tell Sonya I'll finish."

"You okay?"

"Tell her. Would you tell her? I'll finish."

Pedro released his grip on the gate and stepped onto the sidewalk, leaving behind his disappointed wife and intrusive neighbor.