Adios Muchachos Read Free Page A

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 would 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