The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) Page 3

  “Get away, will you!” Hilda complains, indignant. And Arsenio bursts out laughing. And his square and sweaty torso is slashed through with a scar that goes from his chest to his navel. It’s from being stabbed in prison, five years ago, where he was doing time for stealing. Mr. Curbelo pays him seventy dollars a week. But Arsenio is happy. He has no family, no profession, no life ambitions, and here, in the halfway house, he’s a big fish. For the first time in his life, Arsenio feels fulfilled somewhere. Besides, he knows that Curbelo will never fire him. “I am his everything,” he goes around saying. “He’ll never find another guy like me.” And it’s true. For seventy dollars a week, Curbelo will not find another secretary like Arsenio in the whole United States. He won’t find him.

  I woke up. I fell asleep in the tattered armchair and woke up around seven. I dreamt I was tied to a rock and that my nails were long and yellow like a fakir’s. In my dream, although men tied me up as a punishment, I had great power over the world’s animals. “Octopi!” I screamed, “bring me a shell engraved with the Statue of Liberty.” And the large, cartilaginous octopi toiled with their tentacles to find that shell among the millions and millions of shells in the sea. Then they found it and struggled to bring it up to the rock where I was captive and they oh so humbly and respectfully handed it over to me. I looked at the shell, let out a peal of laughter, and threw it scornfully into the great void. The octopi all shed large crystalline tears at my cruelty. But I laughed at their weeping, and roared, “Bring me another one just like it!”

  It’s eight in the morning. Arsenio hasn’t woken up yet to serve breakfast. The nuts huddle, starving, in the TV room.

  “Senio!” Pepe the retard screams. “Rekfast! Rekfast! When you gonna serve rekfast?”

  But Arsenio is still drunk and snoring belly-up in his room. One of the nuts turns on the TV. Out comes a preacher talking about God. He says he was in Jerusalem, that he saw the Garden of Gethsemane. Pictures of the places where he wandered appear on the screen. There’s the River Jordan, whose clean, gentle waters are impossible to forget, the preacher says. “I’ve been there,” says the preacher. “Two thousand years later, I’ve inhaled Jesus’ presence.” And the preacher cries. His voice becomes pained. “Hallelujah!” he says. One of the nuts changes the channel. This time he puts on the Latin channel. Now there’s a Cuban commentator talking about international politics.

  “The United States has to get tough,” he says. “Communism has infiltrated our society. It’s in the universities, the newspapers, the intelligentsia. We should go back to the great Eisenhower years.”

  “That’s right!” says a nut next to me named Eddy. “The United States needs the balls to wipe them out! The first to go has to be Mexico, which is full of communists. Then Panama. And Nicaragua after that. And wherever there’s a communist, string him up by the balls! The communists took everything from me. Everything!”

  “What did they take from you, Eddy?” asks Ida, the grande dame come to ruin.

  Eddy responds, “They took almost a thousand acres of land planted with mangos, sugarcane, coconuts … everything!”

  “My husband had a hotel and six houses in Havana taken away from him,” says Ida. “Oh! And three pharmacies and a sock factory and a restaurant.”

  “They’re sons of bitches!” Eddy says. “That’s why the United States has to wipe them out. Drop five or six atomic bombs! Wipe them out!”

  Eddy starts shaking.

  “Wipe them out!” he says. “Wipe them out!” He shakes a lot. He shakes so much that he falls out of his chair and keeps shaking on the floor.

  “Wipe them out!” he shouts from there.

  Ida yells, “Arsenio! Eddy is having a fit!”

  But Arsenio doesn’t answer. Then Pino, the silent nut, goes to the sink and comes back with a glass of water that he throws over Eddy’s head.

  “Enough.” Ida says. “Enough. Turn off that TV.”

  They turn it off. I get up. I go to the bathroom to urinate. The toilet is clogged with a sheet someone stuck inside. I urinate on the sheet. Then I wash my face with a bar of soap I find lying on the sink. I go to my room to dry myself off. The crazy guy who works nights at the pizza place is counting his money in our room.

  “I earned six dollars.” He says, putting his earnings away in a wallet. “They also gave me pizza and Coca-Cola.”

  “I’m glad,” I say, drying myself off with a towel.

  Then the door opens abruptly and there’s Arsenio. He just woke up. His wiry hair is standing up and his eyes are bulging and dirty.

  “Listen,” he says to the lunatic, “gimme three dollars.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll pay you back.”

  “You never pay me back,” the lunatic complains in a childish voice. “You just take and take and never pay me back.”

  “Gimme three dollars,” Arsenio repeats.

  “No.”

  Arsenio goes over to him, takes him by the neck with one hand and goes through his pockets with his free hand. He finds the wallet. He takes four dollars out and throws the other two on the bed. Then he turns to me and says, “You can tell Curbelo about everything you see here, if you want. I’ll bet ten to one that I win.”

  He leaves the room without closing the door and yells out from the hallway,

  “Breakfast!”

  The nuts come out in droves after him, toward the tables in the dining room.

  Then the crazy guy who works at the pizza place grabs the two dollars he has left. He smiles and exclaims happily,

  “Breakfast! Great! I was starving.”

  He leaves the room too. I finish drying off my face. I look at myself in the room’s stained mirror. Fifteen years ago I was a good-looking guy. I was a ladykiller. I showed off my face arrogantly everywhere I went. Now … now …

  I grab the book of English poets and go to breakfast.

  Arsenio hands out breakfast. It’s cold milk. The nuts complain that there are no cornflakes.

  “Go tell Curbelo,” Arsenio says indifferently. He grabs the milk bottle carelessly and starts filling the glasses with apathy. Half of the milk ends up on the floor. I grab my glass and, standing, gulp it down on the spot in one fell swoop. I leave the dining room. I reenter the main house and sit down in the tattered armchair again. But first I turn on the television. A famous singer comes on, a man they call El Puma. The women of Miami worship him. El Puma gyrates. “Viva, viva, viva la liberación,” he sings. The women in the audience go wild. They start throwing flowers at him. El Puma moves his hips some more. “Viva, viva, viva la liberación”: El Puma, one of the men who makes the women of Miami tremble. The same women who won’t even deign to look at me, and if they do it’s only to tighten the hold on their purses and quicken their steps fearfully. I’ve got him here: El Puma. He has no idea who Joyce is, and doesn’t care. He’ll never read Coleridge, and doesn’t need to. He will never study Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. He will never desperately embrace an ideology only to feel betrayed by it. He’ll never feel his heart go “crack” in the face of an idea in which he firmly and desperately believed. Nor will he know who Lunacharsky, Bulganin, Kamenev or Zinoviev are. He’ll never feel the joy of taking part in a revolution or the subsequent anguish of being devoured by it. He’ll never know what the machinery is. He’ll never know.

  All of a sudden, there’s a big ruckus on the porch. Tables are knocked over, chairs crash, and the metallic walls shake as if a mad elephant were bashing into them. I run over. It’s Pepe and René, the two retards, fighting over a slice of bread smeared with peanut butter. It’s a prehistoric duel—a dinosaur fighting a mammoth. Pepe’s arms, large and clumsy as octopus tentacles, beat blindly at René’s body. The latter uses his nails, as long as a kestrel’s claws, digging them into his adversary’s face. They roll onto the floor in a bear hug, noses bleeding and frothing at the mouth. No one intervenes. Pino, the silent one, continues looking at the horizon without blinking. Hilda, the decre
pit old hag, looks for cigarette butts on the floor. One-eyed Reyes sips a glass of water slowly, savoring every swallow as if it were a highball. Louie, the American, flips through a Jehovah’s Witness magazine that discusses the paradise to come at the final hour. Arsenio watches the fight from the kitchen, smoking calmly. I go back to my seat. I open the book of English poets to a poem by Lord Byron:

  My days are in the yellow leaf;

  The flowers and fruits of love are gone;

  The worm, the canker, and the grief

  Are mine alone!

  I don’t read any further. I lean my head back in the armchair and close my eyes.

  Mr. Curbelo arrived at ten in the morning in his small gray car. He was jovial. Caridad, the mulata who hands out the food to the nuts, praises how youthful and elegant he looks today to get in his good graces.

  “I won a solid fourth place.” Mr. Curbelo says.

  Then he explains, “In deep-sea fishing. I won fourth place. I reeled two in that were forty pounds each.”

  “Oh!” Caridad the mulata smiles.

  Mr. Curbelo enters the halfway house. All of the nuts immediately run up to ask him for cigarettes. Mr. Curbelo takes out a pack of Pall Malls and hands cigarettes out to the nuts. He doesn’t look at any of them. He distributes the cigarettes quickly, impatiently, as irritated as Arsenio when he hands out the milk in the mornings. The nuts have their first smoke of the day. Mr. Curbelo buys a pack of cigarettes daily and hands them out each morning when he arrives. Because he’s a good person? Not at all. According to federal law, Mr. Curbelo is supposed to give each nut thirty-eight dollars a month for cigarettes and other incidentals. But he doesn’t. Instead, every day he buys a pack of cigarettes for everyone, so the nuts don’t get too frantic. This is how Mr. Curbelo robs the nuts of over seven hundred dollars monthly. But even though they know all that, the nuts are incapable of demanding their money. It’s tough on the streets …

  “Mr. Curbelo,” I say, approaching him.

  “I can’t see you right now,” he says, opening the closet where the medicines are kept.

  “I’ve had my television set stolen,” I say.

  He ignores me. He opens a drawer in the closet and takes out dozens of bottles of pills which he places on top of his desk. He looks for mine. Melleril, 100 milligrams. He takes one.

  “Open your mouth,” he says.

  I do. He pops the pill in it.

  “Swallow,” he says.

  Arsenio watches me swallow. He smiles. But when I look right at him, he hides the smile by drawing a cigarette to his mouth. I don’t need to investigate any further. I know perfectly well that it was Arsenio himself who stole my television set. I understand that to complain to Curbelo is useless. The guilty party will never turn up. I turn on my heel and go toward the porch. I get there just as old one-eyed Reyes takes his small, wrinkled penis out and starts to urinate on the floor. Eddy, the nut who is well-versed in international politics, gets up from his seat, goes over to him, and delivers a brutal punch to his ribs.

  “You’re disgusting!” Eddy says. “One day I’m going to kill you.”

  The old one-eyed man moves back. He shakes, but doesn’t stop urinating. Then, without putting his penis away, he falls into a chair and grabs a glass of water off the floor. He drinks, savoring the water as if it were a martini.

  “Ah!” he exclaims, satisfied.

  I leave the porch. I go out to the street, where the winners are. The street is full of big, fast cars with heavily tinted windows so that vagabonds like me can’t snoop inside. I pass a café and hear someone call out to me,

  “¡Loco!”

  I turn quickly. But no one is looking at me. The customers are drinking their drinks, buying their cigarettes, reading their newspapers silently. I realize it’s the voice I’ve been hearing for fifteen years. That damned voice that insults me relentlessly. That voice that comes from a place unknown but very close. The voice. I walk on. North? South? What does it matter? I continue. And as I continue on, I see my body reflected in the shop windows. My whole body. My ruined mouth. My cheap and dirty clothes. I continue. On one corner, there are two female Jehovah’s Witnesses selling the magazine Awaken. They accost everyone, but let me pass without saying a word. The Kingdom was not made for down-and-out guys like me. I continue. Somebody laughs behind my back. Infuriated, I turn around. The laughter has nothing to do with me. It’s an old lady praising a newborn. Oh, God! I start walking again. I get to a very long bridge over a river of murky water. I lean on the railing to rest. Winners’ cars speed by. Some of them have the radio turned all the way up, blasting pulsating rock songs.

  “You’re going to tell me about rock and roll?” I scream at the cars. “Me! I who came to this country with a picture of Chuck Berry in my shirt pocket!”

  I continue. I get to a place they call downtown, full of gray, slapdash buildings. Elegantly dressed Americans, black and white alike, leave their workplaces to eat a hot dog and drink Coca-Cola. I walk among them, ashamed of my threadbare checked shirt and of the old pants that dance around my hips. I end up going into a shop that sells pornographic magazines. I go over to the rack and pick one of them up. I feel my penis stiffening a little and I crouch on the floor to hide my erection. Oh, God! Women. Naked women in all the positions imaginable. Beautiful women belonging to millionaires. I shut the magazine and wait a minute for the excitement to pass. When it has passed, I stand up, put the magazine back and leave. I walk on. I walk on into the heart of downtown. Until I stop, tired, and realize it’s time to go back to the halfway house.

  I get to the halfway house and try to enter through the front door. It’s locked. A maid, whose name is Josefina, cleans the house inside, so the nuts have been banished to the porch.

  “Get out, locos!” Josefina says, pushing them all out with a broom. And the nuts leave without complaint, taking their seats on the porch. It’s a dark porch, surrounded by black metallic cloth, with an ever-present puddle of urine at the center thanks to old one-eyed Reyes, who has lost all shame and urinates everywhere all the time, despite the punches he receives on his squalid chest and gray, unkempt head. I turn around and sit on one of the porch chairs, inhaling the strong smell of urine. I take the book of English poets out of my pocket. But I don’t read any of it. I just look at the cover. It’s a beautiful book. Thick. Finely bound. El Negro gave it to me when he came back from New York. It cost him twelve dollars. I look at some of the illustrations in the book. I see Samuel Coleridge’s face again. I see John Keats, he who in 1817 asked himself,

  Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?

  A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,

  Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll

  Then Ida, the grande dame come to ruin, gets up from her chair and comes over to me.

  “Do you read?” she asks.

  “Occasionally,” I respond.

  “Oh!” She says. “I used to read a lot, back in Cuba. Romance novels.”

  “Oh!”

  I look at her. She dresses relatively well compared to the way the other people at the halfway house dress. Her body, while old, is clean and smells vaguely of cologne water. She’s one of the ones who knows how to exercise her rights and demands her thirty-eight dollars a month from Mr. Curbelo.

  She was a member of the bourgeoisie back in Cuba, in the years when I was a young communist. Now the communist and the bourgeois woman are in the same place, the same spot history has assigned them: the halfway house.

  I open the book of Romantic English poets and read a poem by William Blake:

  Little Lamb, who made thee?

  Dost thou know who made thee,

  Gave thee life & bid thee feed

  By the stream & o’er the mead

  I close the book. Mr. Curbelo pokes his head through the porch door and motions to me with his hands. I go. At his desk, a well-dressed, well-groomed man is waiting for us with a thick gold chain around his neck and a large watch on his
wrist. He’s wearing a fetching pair of tinted glasses.

  “This is the psychiatrist,” Mr. Curbelo says. “Tell him everything that’s the matter with you.”

  I take a seat in a chair that Curbelo brings me. The psychiatrist takes a piece of paper out of a folder and starts to fill it out with a fountain pen. While he writes, he asks me, “Let’s see, William. What’s the matter?”

  I don’t answer.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks again.

  I take a deep breath. It’s the same bullshit as always.

  “I hear voices,” I say.

  “What else?”

  “I see devils on the walls.”

  “Hmmm!” he says. “Do you talk to those devils?”

  “No.”

  “What else do you have?”

  “Fatigue.”

  “Hmmm!”

  He writes for a long time. He writes, writes, writes. He takes off the tinted glasses and looks at me. His eyes don’t show the slightest interest in me.

  “How old are you, William?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Hmmm!”

  He looks at my clothes, my shoes.

  “Do you know what day today is?”

  “Today,” I say uncomfortably. “Friday.”

  “Friday, the what?”

  “Friday . . . the fourteenth.”

  “Of what month?”

  “August.”

  He writes again. While he does, he discloses impersonally, “Today is Monday, the twenty-third of September."