The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) Page 4

  He writes a little more.

  “Okay, William. That will be all.”

  I stand up and go back to the porch. There’s a surprise for me there. El Negro has come to see me all the way from Miami Beach. He has a book in his hand and he holds it out to me as a greeting. It’s Time of the Assassins by Henry Miller.

  “I’m afraid it will ruin you,” he says.

  “Stop fucking with me!” I reply.

  I take him by the arm and lead him to a broken-down car that sits in the garage of the halfway house. It’s a car from 1950 that belongs to Mr. Curbelo. One day it just stopped forever and Mr. Curbelo left it there, at the halfway house, so it would go on deteriorating, slowly, along with the nuts. We get in the car and sit in the back seat, between oxidized springs and pieces of dirty padding.

  “What’s new?” I anxiously ask El Negro. He’s my link to society. He goes to meetings with Cuban intellectuals, talks about politics, reads the papers, watches television, and then, every week or two, he comes to see me to share the gist of his travels through the world.

  “Everything’s the same.” El Negro says. “Everything’s the same … ,” he says. Then, all of a sudden: “Well! Truman Capote died.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s it,” El Negro says. He takes a newspaper out of his pocket and gives it to me. It’s the Mariel newspaper, edited by young Cubans in exile.

  “There’s a poem of mine in there,” El Negro says. “On page six.”

  I look for page six. There’s a poem called “There’s Always Light in the Devil’s Eyes.” It reminds me of Saint-John Perse. I tell him. He’s flattered.

  “It reminds me of Rains,” I say.

  “Me, too,” El Negro says.

  Then he looks at me. He takes in my clothes, my shoes, my dirty, tangled hair. He shakes his head disapprovingly.

  “Hey, Willy,” he then says, “you should take better care of yourself.”

  “Oh, am I that run down?”

  “Not yet,” he says. “But try not to get any worse.” “I’ll take care of myself,” I say.

  El Negro pats my knee. I realize that he’s about to leave. He takes out a half-empty pack of Marlboros and gives it to me. Then he takes out a dollar and gives that to me, too.

  “It’s all I have,” he says.

  “I know.”

  We get out of the car. A nut comes up to us to ask for a cigarette. El Negro gives him one.

  “Adios, Doctor Zhivago,” he says, smiling. He turns around and leaves.

  I go back to the porch. As I am about to go in, somebody calls to me from the dining room. It’s Arsenio, the halfway house second-in-command. He’s shirtless and hiding a can of beer under the table since it’s not right for the psychiatrist who’s visiting the residence today to see him drinking.

  “Come here,” he says to me and points to a chair.

  I go inside. Besides him and me, there’s no one else in the dining room. He looks at the books I have in my hand and starts laughing.

  “Listen … ,” he says, drinking from the can. “I’ve been watching you closely.”

  “Yeah? And what do you make of me?”

  “That you’re not crazy,” he says, still smiling.

  “And what school of psychiatry did you go to?” I ask, irritated.

  “None,” he replies. “I just have street psychology. And I’ll tell you again that you, you’re not crazy! Let’s see,” he then says, “take this cigarette and burn your tongue.”

  I’m disgusted by his idiocy. His malt beer-colored body, the huge scar that goes from his chest down to his navel.

  “You see?” he says, taking a swig of beer. “See how you’re not crazy?”

  And then he smiles with his mouth full of rotten teeth. I leave. The cleaning is done and we can go back inside. The nuts are watching TV. I cross the living room and finally enter my room. I slam the door shut. I’m indignant and I don’t know why. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is snoring in his bed like a saw cutting a piece of wood. I become more indignant. I go over to him and give him a kick in the behind. He awakens, frightened, and curls himself up in a corner.

  “Listen, you son of a bitch!” I say to him. “Don’t snore anymore!”

  At the sight of his fear, my anger abates. I sit down on the bed again. I smell bad. So much so that I grab the towel and soap and head out toward the bathroom. On the way, I see old one-eyed Reyes, who is covertly urinating in a corner. I look around. I don’t see anyone. I go over to Reyes and grab him tightly by the neck. I give him a kick in the testicles. I bang his head against the wall.

  “Sorry, sorry … ,” Reyes says.

  I look at him, disgusted. His forehead is bleeding. Upon seeing this, I feel a strange pleasure. I grab the towel, twist it, and whip his frail chest.

  “Have mercy … ,” Reyes implores.

  “Stop pissing everywhere!” I say furiously.

  As I turn back down the hall, I see Arsenio there, leaning against the wall. He saw it all. He smiles. He leaves the can of beer in a corner and asks to borrow my towel. I give it to him. He twists it tightly. He makes a perfect whip of it and using all his strength brings it down on Reyes’ back. One, two, three times, until the old man falls in a corner, bathed in urine, blood and sweat. Arsenio gives me the towel back. He smiles at me again. He grabs his can of beer and sits down again at his desk. Mr. Curbelo has left. Arsenio is now the head of the halfway house again.

  I continue toward the bathroom. I go inside, lock the door and start to undress. My clothes stink, but my socks reek even more. I grab them, inhale their deeply embedded muddy smell, and throw them in the waste basket. They were the only socks I had. Now I’ll walk around the city sockless.

  I go in the shower, turn it on and stand under the hot water. As the water runs over my head and body, I smile, thinking of old Reyes. I’m amused by the face he made when he was beaten, by the way his frail body shuddered, by his sorrowful pleas. Then he fell on top of his own urine and asked for mercy from there. “Mercy!” Remembering that, my body shudders with pleasure again. I soap myself up thoroughly, using my underwear as a washcloth. Then I rinse myself off and turn off the shower. I dry off. I put on the same clothes. I go out. In the living room, the nuts are still watching TV. The set is broken and you can only see colored lights, but still they sit, watching the screen, paying the lack of images no mind. I go to my room and leave the towel and the soap. I go out, combing my hair, toward the living room. The nuts are still there, frozen in place as they watch the broken TV. I kneel before the set and fix it. I sit in the tattered armchair and prop my feet up on an empty chair. The announcer says something about ten guerrillas dead in El Salvador. Then Eddy, the nut who is well-versed in international politics, comes down to earth.

  “That’s it!” he yells. “Ten dead communists! There should be one hundred! One thousand! A million dead communists! Someone with some balls needs to wipe them out! First Mexico. Then Panama. Then Venezuela and Nicaragua. And then clean up the United States, which is infested with communists. They took everything from me! Everything!”

  “Me, too.” says Ida, the grande dame come to ruin. “Six houses, a pharmacy and an apartment building.”

  Then, Ida turns to Pino, the silent nut, and asks, “How about you, Pino, what did they take from you?”

  But Pino doesn’t answer. He looks out at the street and remains still, unblinking.

  Just then, in comes old Castaño, the centenarian who leans on the walls when he walks. Like one-eyed Reyes and that decrepit hag Hilda, urine permeates his clothes.

  “I want to die!” Castaño yells. “I want to die!”

  René, the youngest of the two mental retards, grabs him by the neck, shakes him forcefully, and takes him back to his room by kicking his behind.

  “I want to die!” We hear old Castaño’s voice again until René slams shut the door to his room, burying his screams. Then Napoleon, a four-foot-tall midget, fat and solid as a speed
bag, comes over to me. Mother Nature placed a medieval knight’s face on that midget’s body. His face is tragically beautiful and his large, popping eyes forever wear a deeply submissive expression. He’s Colombian, and his manner of speaking is also submissive—the speech of those born to obey.

  “Sir, sir,” he says to me. “That one!” and he points at a nut named Tato, whose face looks like a former boxer’s. “That one touched me!”

  “Stop talking shit.” Tato says.

  “He touched me,” Napoleon insists. “Yesterday, in my room, he came at night and touched me!”

  I look at Tato. He doesn’t look like a homosexual. Nonetheless, the midget’s words make him sweat in embarrassment. He sweats. He sweats. He sweats. He sweats so much that in three minutes his white shirt becomes transparent.

  “Don’t pay any attention to the nuts here,” he says to me. “or you’ll end up crazy, too.”

  “He touched me!” Napoleon keeps saying.

  Then Tato gets up from his seat, laughs suddenly in an incomprehensible way and says to me carelessly, “That’s the same thing they said to Rocky Marciano in the eighth round and he got up and knocked out Joe Wolcox. So … life sucks!” and he leaves.

  Ida, the grande dame come to ruin, looks at me, outraged,

  “The things we have to see!” she says. “The things we have to hear!”

  The TV news hour is over. I get up. They call us to eat.

  Caridad the mulata serves the food. She also served time, back in Cuba, for stabbing her husband. She lives across the street from the halfway house, with a new husband and two huge pedigree dogs. She feeds the dogs with food from the halfway house. Not leftovers, but hot food that she takes from the nuts’ daily ration. The locos know it and don’t complain. If they do complain, Caridad the mulata tells them as plain as day to go to hell. And nothing happens. Mr. Curbelo never finds out. Or if he does find out, he says, as always, “My employees have my complete confidence.” So none of what you’re saying is true. The nuts lose again and realize that it’s best to keep their mouths shut. Caridad the mulata would like to make the stew every day so she can get Mr. Curbelo to pay her those good thirty dollars more. That’s why she says to the nuts all the time, “Complain! Protest! Today’s peas are inedible! The truth is that you’re a bunch of pussies!”

  But none of the nuts complain, and Curbelo saves his money by continuing to make the stew every day with his little bourgeois face.

  “Do you want to move to a different table?” Caridad asks me at dinner time.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you like those disgusting locos?”

  “No.”

  “Come on,” she says, “sit here,” and she swipes the midget Napoleon out of his seat and seats me in his place. And so I stop sitting at the untouchables’ table, with Hilda, Reyes, Pepe and René. Now I’m at a table with Eddy, Tato, Pino, Pedro, Ida and Louie. That afternoon we had rice, raw lentils, three pieces of lettuce and salpicón. I had three spoonfuls and spit the fourth out onto my plate. I left. As I pass by Mr. Curbelo’s desk, I see Arsenio eating. He’s eating on a plastic tray, brought from a nearby diner. He’s eating with a fork and knife, and his food is yellow rice, pork, yuca and red tomatoes. And beer, too.

  “Hey,” he says to me when I pass by. “Take a seat.”

  I sit down. He waves at me with his hand to wait until he’s done. I wait. He finishes eating. He takes all the leftovers and throws them out, along with the tray, in the waste basket. The empty can of beer, too. He burps. He looks at me with lost eyes. He takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers me one. We smoke. Then he says, “Okay … let’s get right to it. Do you want to be my assistant here?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m not interested.”

  “It will be great,” he advises me.

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Fine.” he says. “Friends?”

  “Friends.” I say.

  He shakes my hand.

  “I am the way I am,” he says. “I smoke marijuana, I drink beer, I do blow, I do it all! But I’m a man.”

  “I get you,” I say.

  “I see you give the old one-eyed man a beating and I could give a shit. Now, I expect the same of you. Everything you see me do around us stays between us men. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I say.

  “Mafia?”

  “Mafia,” I reply.

  “Great.” He smiles.

  I get up. I go to my room. I lie down on the bed. I don’t like what just happened. I regret having beaten the old one-eyed man. But it’s too late. I’ve gone from being a witness to being complicit in what happens in the halfway house.

  I fell asleep. I dreamt that I was running naked along a wide avenue and that I was going into a house surrounded by a beautiful garden. It was Mr. Curbelo’s house. I knocked at the door and his wife answered. She was a dish. She let me hug and kiss her. She said “I’ll give you whatever you want. My name is Necessity.”

  “I’ll call you Necess,” I said. And I yelled loudly, “Necess!”

  Then Curbelo pulled up in his gray car. I tried to escape through the garden, but he grabbed me by the arm. My body was covered in white scales.

  “Here!” screamed Curbelo, and a police car showed up in the garden. That’s when I woke up.

  It was about twelve at night. The crazy guy who works in the pizza place snores like a pig. I head out, shirtless, toward the living room. There I find Arsenio and Ida, the grande dame come to ruin. Arsenio has his hand on her knee. He sticks his tongue in her ear. Ida resists. She sees me and resists even more. I pass by them and sit in the tattered armchair.

  “Arsenio,” Ida says angrily, “tomorrow I’m going to tell Mr. Curbelo everything.”

  Arsenio starts laughing. He touches one of her flaccid breasts. He presses himself against it.

  “For God’s sake!” Ida says. “Don’t you realize I’m an old woman?”

  “It’s like cod,” Arsenio says. “The older, the better.”

  Then he looks at me. He knows I’m looking at him and says to me, with all familiarity, “Mafia!”

  “Mafia,” I say. I light a cigarette and lean back in the armchair.

  “Let me go, Arsenio,” Ida begs. But Arsenio laughs. He tries to stick his hand under the old lady’s dress. He kisses her on the mouth. “Please … ,” says Ida.

  “Let her go.” I say. “Let her go already.”

  “Mafia?” Arsenio asks.

  “Yeah, I’m part of your mafia, but leave the poor old lady alone already.”

  Arsenio laughs. He lets her go unexpectedly.

  Ida quickly leaves and shuts herself in her room. I hear her lock it from the inside.

  “I am a beast, just like you,” I then say, looking at the ceiling. “I’m a beast.”

  Arsenio gets up. He goes to his room. He throws himself onto the bed.

  “Mafia!” he says from there. “Life is just one big mafia! No more.”

  I’m left all alone. I smoke my cigarette. Tato, the homosexual boxer, shows up. He sits in a chair in front of me. A ray of light bathes his pockmarked face.

  “Listen to this,” he says to me. “Listen to this story. Which is my story. The story of the avenger of a painful tragedy. The tragedy of a final melodrama without any prospects. The fatal coincidence of an endless tragedy. Listen to this, my story. The story of someone imperfect who thought he was perfect. And death’s tragic end, which is life. What do you think?”

  “Great,” I say.

  “That’s enough!” he says, and leaves.

  I fall asleep.

  I dreamt about Fidel Castro. He was taking refuge in a white house. I was shooting at the house with a cannon. Fidel was in briefs and an undershirt. He was missing a few teeth. He was yelling insults at me out the windows. He was saying, “Cabrón! You’ll never get me out of here!” I was frantic. The house was already in ruins but Fidel was still inside, moving around as agile as a mountain lion. “You won’t get me out of h
ere!” He yelled hoarsely. “You’ll never get me out!” It was Fidel’s last refuge. And even though I spent the whole dream shooting at him, I couldn’t flush him out of those ruins. I wake up. It’s already morning. I go to the bathroom. I urinate. Then I wash my face with cold water. I leave like that, dripping water, to go have breakfast. There’s cold milk, cornflakes and sugar. I only drink milk. I go back to the TV and turn it on. I settle into the armchair again. The American preacher who talks about Jesus comes on the screen.

  “You, sitting there in front of the TV,” the preacher says. “Come now into the arms of the Lord.”

  My mouth becomes dry. I close my eyes. I try to imagine that yes, everything he says is true.

  “Oh God!” I say, “Oh God, save me!”

  I remain that way for ten or twelve seconds, with my eyes closed, waiting for the miracle of salvation. Then Hilda, the decrepit old hag, taps my shoulder.

  “Do you have a cigarette?”

  I give her one.

  “You have very, very pretty eyes!” she says sweetly.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I get up. I don’t know what to do. Go outside? Shut myself in my room? Sit on the porch? I go outside again. Go north? Go south? Who cares? I walk toward Flagler Street and then I turn to the left, going west, where the Cubans live. I walk on, I walk on, I walk on. I pass by dozens of bodegas, coffee shops, restaurants, barber shops, clothing stores, stores selling religious articles, tobacco shops, pharmacies, pawn shops. All of them are owned by Cuban petit bourgeois who arrived fifteen or twenty years ago, fleeing the communist regime. I stop in front of a shop mirror and comb my messy, straw-colored hair with my fingers. Then, it seems like someone is yelling “son of a bitch” at me. I turn around, furious. There’s only an old blind man walking with a cane on the sidewalk. I walk on a little more along Flagler Street. I spend my last bit of change on a sip of coffee. I see a cigarette on the floor. I pick it up and bring it to my lips. Three women working in the coffee shop start laughing. I think they’ve seen me pick up the cigarette and I’m infuriated. It seems like one of them says, “There he goes! The wandering Jew!” I leave.