Adios Muchachos Read Free Page B

the most hard-hearted bastard this side of the freaking moon if he didn’t show up the very next day with a shiny new air conditioner.
    Occasionally, one of the clients, beguiled by Alicia and pampered by Margarita, would insist that, despite the gracious hospitality, he had to attend to urgent matters, but would nevertheless be honored if they would be his guests at such and such. Alicia would hold her ground, and finally they would agree to dinner at Alicia’s. The John would bring the provisions.
    “And after dinner, you can sleep over, if you like,” Margarita would interject as naturally as one might offer someone a bowl of popcorn. (The sleeping over thing was great on hot summer nights because it set the stage for the air conditioner routine or the breakdown of the tiny freezer in their modest Soviet refrigerator. Oh dear, this was so embarrassing!)
    For programmed occasions when the client wanted to show off his conquest and proposed having some associates over for dinner, culinary Margarita offered two cosmopolitan alternatives: a main entrée of fondue bourguignonne (with all the right silver and china), or chicken Maryland supreme.
    Margarita’s specialty was, in fact, chicken. In forty minutes she could bone it, stuff it, and sew it up with bamboo needles. Another half an hour in the pressure cooker and it was done. But that was only for impromptu dinners. Sometimes, when a client had something good to say about traditional Cuban cuisine like they serve at the Bodeguita del Medio, Alicia’s mother would let out a soprano laugh. “What ever are you talking about? Good food at the Bodeguita?”
    By that time she would have already been treating him like an old friend, talking to him in the familiar tu , joking around, waving her restless hand in his face and inviting him to taste her own Cuban cuisine, which was much better, of course.
    And in one manner of speaking, it was.
    In matters of traditional Cuban cuisine, however, Margarita was a great fraud. If the guest was from Europe or from the southern cone of South America, for example, Margarita replaced the yuca con mojo with well-seasoned baked potatoes; the pork she prepared very lean and dry and just slightly pink in the center of the slices; the congri rice was never runny, and she seasoned it with a whole list of ingredients that congri was never meant to take. But she did produce a range of haut cuisine tastes, light with the slightest touch of bittersweet, which everyone praised.
    She also did herself grand with Italian pasta: cannelloni, lasagna, fettuccini, ravioli, gnocchi; with sauces like il bolognesa, il pesto, le vóngole, l’arrabiata, la puttanesca. And when there were more than eight to dinner, there was the ever popular paella that never let her down.
    When Alicia had Johns who were timid or impotent, what you might call difficult clients, she took special care that everything was perfect. A certain fatalistic bent deep inside her soul kept telling her that her Prometheus, the one who was going to free her from the blackouts and the scarcities of the Special Period, was going to come to her in the guise of one of these impotent clients. So if some guy’s pecker petered out when Alicia had already reached her third stage of stimulation, she would feign an uncontrollable immediacy, take off all her cloths to masturbate a little, and then beg the John, who was still fully dressed, to go down on her for some cunnilingus, which she helped along with expert finger work until she came to a genuine orgasm: tremors, whines, bites, sighs and all.
    If after all that, the guy still couldn’t get it up, she never pressed him, but rather thanked him for the pleasure he made her feel. And if she noticed the slightest quiver in his virile member, she would pounce on him with all her energy and art until he felt like his very marrow was seeping out of his bones. It had not failed yet. And afterward she would flit around, hyperactive, happy, and