a braided rug where I throw my dirty work clothes, three walls of books, and a sofa where I sleep beneath a poster of El Ché. I got rid of the bed after Elena left. The saving grace of this atticâadded during pre-revolutionary days less for the servant-occupantâs enjoyment than to appease the façade of proportion at the timeâis a pair of French doors that open onto a shallow balcony facing the sea: a living blue movie where imagination paints ninety-mile-away views of that most unobtainable peninsula. On good days I get up and put Beny Moré on my fatherâs old tocadisco. I open the French doors and let the shipsâ whistles blow in from Havana Bay. On bad days I awaken too early, hours before dawn, and stay on the sofa with my eyes squeezed shut but getting none of sleepâs reprieve.
I lit a cigarette, brand Popular: black tobacco packed in sweet rice paper, ten cents a pack on the ration card, but thatâs for just one pack a week, and everybody who smokes Populares craves at least a pack a day. Now two packs of Popular go for an American dollar on the black market, so nobody who gives up smoking ever surrenders his weekly ration. Most people I know who have recently quit did it so they can go on eating. Coffee can help the headaches, when there is coffee. I use the grounds four or five times, dehydrating them in the window between infusions and preserving them with a bit of plastic in the refrigerator. Then again, coffee can be the cause. Neurons become greedy for caffeine, and when abruptly there is no more caffeine they become confused and send messages to the pain center. Coffee can hurt or coffee can be a remedy. When I was interning thirty-hour triples, I could try to plow through the migraine, but lately the pain has been making me dizzy. Thereâs no more aspirin or ibuprofen. Iâd have to steal it from the pediátrico, and that would mean directly from the patientsâ provisions. I wonât stoop that low. Not yet.
There was no coffee, not even tea, but as a psychosomatic tactic I got an empty cup from the kitchen and took imaginary sips. Sometimes it stems the migraine. Every day is pervaded by headaches. Hunger headaches, heat headaches, just missed the bus and have to wait four more hours for the next one headaches. Berliners on la tele chiseling chunks of concrete to sell to American collectors headaches. Desperation headaches. Headaches of locusts pealing invisibly from saw grass and palm, of shrill locusts flying smack into your eye and crunching under your feet. Headaches that make your jaw ache. Headaches that begin between midbrain and cerebellum and rise, pausing to rock the pons, and shudder back down the spinal cord through the medulla oblongata. Headaches that settle into one shoulder or the other. Headaches that make you vomit. Headaches that make music, their very own music, broadcasting on low-frequency radio waves that shake the bowels of passersby.
â¡Radio Reloj! Son las doce de la noche.â I lit another cigarette and turned on la tele, thinking there might be something good on Cine de Medianoche. There was: Oliver Stoneâs Jota-éFe-Ka . But just as it was beginningâ ¡ñó! Otro apagón. Blackouts follow schedules as faithfully as the Friday-night features.
12 August 1979
â¡Q ué calentico y rico está!â Aurora bounced me in the furrow of her glorious thighs, off-key harmonizing with the man mamboing down 23rd Street. â¡Ya no se puede pedir mas!â With her ebony-smooth skin and pendulous breasts, it was the housekeeper, Aurora, who was the light of my young life. Not Mamá. Mamá was downstairs in her room, shutters closed against the heat of the Havana afternoon. She stayed in bed for long periods of time, days sometimes. My father had left for Miami in â69, two months before I was born, and now it was my tenth birthday and Mamá was dying of cancer. Aurora would insist