Havana Best Friends. Jose Latour

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СКАЧАТЬ in 1960, and his kids would spend a couple of days playing with Daddy.

      Neither she nor Pablo were old enough to discern the reasons behind their parents’ divorce. It hadn’t been a normal home, but the break-up was still a shock because Gladys, who never talked much about her husband and didn’t seem to be particularly distraught by his prolonged absences, all of a sudden spent hours cursing the son of a bitch, a term that, like countless other expletives, she had learned in the dressing rooms of the Tropicana. She also blamed some nameless whore for her misfortune.

      After Pablo completed second grade – or was it third? – school became an important dividing factor. The boy resented his sister’s tutoring, which Gladys forced Elena to give him at home. He also detested her dedication to school issues, and her being elected Head of the Detachment of Pioneers, the children’s communist organization. It was worse in junior high. Having inherited her mother’s genes, at twelve Elena was the most beautiful and popular girl from among 165 female students. Pablo at nine was an exact copy of his father: Short, lean, and bold to the point of having been nicknamed ‘El Loco’ – The Wacko.

      In the following three or four years, the two personalities became the centre of contrasting groups. Pablo was the undisputed leader of five or six angry, frustrated, and rebellious teenagers, kids from one-parent homes most of them, who played hooky, roamed the streets, and flunked exams. Elena was his exact opposite. She became president of her school’s chapter of the Federation of High School Students at fifteen, valedictorian of her class at seventeen. They were living in a peculiar symbiosis: different species under the same roof, avoiding each other, always on a collision course.

      Tragedy struck one evening in 1980, just after General Miranda returned unannounced from Angola only to find his second wife, an extremely beautiful brunette thirteen years younger than him, in his own bed with a next-door neighbour. The general drew his nine-millimetre Maka-rov and emptied its first clip into the two pleading lovers. Their legs and arms kept jerking spasmodically, so Miranda changed clips and made sure neither lived to tell the tale. Then he drove his Lada to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and turned himself in.

      In the ensuing three or four months the lives of Elena and Pablo became kaleidoscopes of incomprehension, apprehension, and irritability that little by little evolved into indifference and insensitivity, then to some measure of euphoria and consolation when they learned the general had been sentenced to thirty years in prison, not the death penalty, which was what a much-hated prosecutor recommended.

      Like most Cubans, Gladys was firmly convinced that lambasting the living is not as unacceptable as speaking ill of the dead. So, relieved that Elena and Pablo had been spared from further traumas, she would venomously repeat to them, eighteen and fifteen years old respectively, how men become assholes when they think with their little head instead of their bigger one. ‘You’ll regret this,’ she claimed to have warned her husband the day he packed his belongings and moved out, ‘when you catch the slut cheating on you and remember that you renounced the decent home and wife you once had.’

      Since the mid-1960s, the Cuban media has been instructed to ignore all sorts of scandals involving top communist officials; the notion that all of them were paradigms of human perfection couldn’t be jeopardized. But the story was too juicy to put a lid on. Generals and colonels stationed in faraway lands considered it prudent to relate the tragic drama to their usually younger and beautiful wives and/or mistresses, who in turn told it to their friends and relatives. From the island’s easternmost town to its westernmost village, hundreds of thousands learned what had happened by tuning in to Radio Bemba – Lip Radio – among them a neighbour of Gladys and her kids who considered it his duty to inform a few discreet friends on the block. The news spread like wildfire.

      Then a very curious phenomenon occurred. The teenagers who as children had learned the meaning of the word envy with Elena and Pablo – observing them ride in their father’s cars; staring at the olive-drab, tarpaulin-covered trucks which delivered heavy cartons in late December; ogling the toys, clothes, and shoes they wore; savouring the huge, exquisite birthday cakes and slurping as many bottles of soda as they wanted to on Pablo and Elena’s birthdays – those same teenagers split into two groups. A minority provided unwavering support and encouragement. The greater number turned their back on the Miranda family after gleefully expressing a complacency which reduced itself to a simple statement: At last those who had been born with a silver spoon in their mouths would learn what building socialism was really all about.

      That same year Elena gained admittance to the University of Havana to do a BA in Education. She felt like Alice stepping into Wonderland. Nobody seemed to care whose daughter she was or where she came from. There followed the transition from high-school senior who gave the cold shoulder to juniors, to junior who got the same treatment; there was the professor in his early forties, the first mature man she felt attracted to; there were the huge buildings, the enormous library and stadium, the serious political rallies. At last she was able to shed the school uniform, ride a bus daily, have lunch wherever she felt like and her allowance permitted. She also had to study a lot harder.

      The Wacko, however, remained in the same school and was demoted from rightful heir to a generalship to son of a murderer. His response was extremely violent: in the course of two months he had fist fights with two teachers and nine schoolmates, something that could not be overlooked. But before expelling the boy, the principal wrote a letter to the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Thirty-five-year-old Major Domingo Rosas, from Army Counter-Intelligence and a psychologist by profession, was ordered to ‘look after’ the son and daughter of former general Manuel Miranda.

      Major Rosas visited Gladys first. He explained that in consideration for the outstanding merits of her erstwhile husband, the ‘Direction of the Revolution’ – an expression generally meaning Number One in person, yet vague enough to shift the blame to Numbers Two, Three or Four should something go wrong – had instructed that a liaison officer for Elena, Pablo, and their father must be appointed. He would take them to visit ex-General Miranda in prison when and if they felt like it; he would also try to win their trust and provide counselling. Gladys should feel free to call him when any problem seriously affecting her son and daughter couldn’t be solved through regular channels.

      Next, Major Rosas went to the high school and interviewed its principal and Pablo’s teachers. The information he gleaned convinced Rosas he’d be tackling a real deviant. He explained things to his commanding officer and was relieved of all his other assignments for a month, at the end of which he made a report and a prognosis. It was an excellent report and it had an optimistic prognosis; it omitted one very significant fact, though. In thirty days Major Rosas had fallen madly in love with Elena Miranda.

      

      ‘Comrade Elena, could you come over?’ Captain Trujillo asked from the door to Pablo’s closet, sounding intrigued.

      Elena approached him. The DTI officer had taken a VHS-format video cassette from a huge carton containing many more. It was cryptically labelled thirty-five.

      ‘There must be forty or fifty videos in this box,’ Trujillo said. ‘Was your brother a big video fan?’

      ‘I wouldn’t know, Captain.’

      ‘Didn’t he show these to you?’

      Elena sighed, crossed her arms over her chest, took a deep breath. ‘Listen, Captain, I think I ought to level with you from the start,’ she said gloomily. ‘As Pablo’s sister, with both of us living under the same roof, it’s perfectly natural for you to think I’m the ideal person to give you background information on my brother, what he did in his spare time, who he hung out with, if he was doing okay at his job, the sort of thing from which you can find out what happened to him. Unfortunately, my brother and I didn’t get along. He lived his life; I lived mine. We didn’t have СКАЧАТЬ