Havana Noir by Achy Obejas

Author:Achy Obejas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: akashic books
Published: 2007-08-07T22:00:00+00:00

MURDER, ACCORDING TO MY MOTHER-IN-LAW

BY ARTURO ARANGO

El Cerro

for Achy, guilty

Her name was Lucrecia, they called her Pupy, and my mother-in-law couldn’t stand her from the moment we met because it was rumored all over the neighborhood that what she liked most were black men. Whenever her name came up, my mother-in-law would make a face and say, “That pig.”

Arguing with my mother-in-law is one of my favorite pastimes.

As far as we knew, the black men that popular opinion attributed to Pupy came down to just one: Guillermo, the father of her younger children, a strapping, smiling man who had once been a police officer, and with whom Pupy lived a few blocks from our house.

“He is a great guy,” I’d tell my mother-in-law.

“He’s better than her,” she’d concur. “But she’s still a pig.”

Pupy’s oldest boy, whose father we had never met, had blue eyes and lived with his grandparents, right across the street from our house.

I was at the stadium the night “it all happened,” as my motherin-law says, always reluctant to actually let out of her mouth words such as cancer, or murder, believing that by not pronouncing them, she can keep these misfortunes from herself and her family.

To live in Havana and say “the stadium” means only one thing: the Latinoamericano, an ancient structure that’s been renovated over and over, and which, in extreme cases, can hold up to 150,000 people. At my age, I prefer the comfort of the rocking chair and the TV, with coffee in hand during the breaks, and the bed nearby for when a game gets boring. But during each playoff series, I keep a ritual of going at least once to that place which is both circus and temple, to become part of the spectacle that takes place in the bleachers.

The championship was being decided and the same two rivals were facing off as always: the most arrogant of teams, the one that can’t stand to not make it to the postseason, the one that’s so worshipped, protected, spoiled—and whose name will never come out of my mouth and I will refer to only as Las Ratas—and Santiago de Cuba, in which I always place my hopes, and always support.

Luis Lorente had been calling me since Friday night to remind me that Santiago would not be back again to play at the Latino after this because Las Ratas had very little chance of reaching even the quarterfinals that year. The stadium might be closed until November, at which time the next tournament would begin.

Saturday morning, I returned his call: I’d go by his house an hour before the game. After talking to Luis, I agreed to another duty I found considerably less pleasant: I took my mother-in-law grocery shopping.

Markets make me weary, and my mother-in-law says the same things week after week when she gets back in the car with a handful of scrawny scallions and a pale pumpkin. It’s true that prices keep going up and that she’s the one who

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