The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala

Author:Marcial Gala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

MARIBEL

I saw them arrive. Now Bertica’s really fucked, I thought. She’s become a lesbian. At first, I thought that Araceli was American, she was so white and had that I-didn’t-do-it face that gave me the creeps, but later when I went to investigate, she turned out to be just another starving Cuban, although that starving part is just a saying, because the girl had cash and loads of it, and with money, everything can be smoothed over, and Aurora, Bertica’s mother, adjusted quite well to the girl’s presence even though they only had one room and people were talking. Not me. People. It’s like a cathouse over there! they would say. In there, it’s all the same if the mother sleeps with the daughter, if the mother is with the daughter’s lesbian lover, if all three of them do it at once, anything goes over there at night. They talked, but in reality, no one knew anything, and then one afternoon, I saw two well-dressed and well-put-together young women come out, and when I asked where they were going, Araceli told me they were going to Ian’s workshop.

“Whose workshop? Are you going to fix a radio or a stove?”

“Poetry,” they said. “We’re going to learn poetry.” And then I discovered that poetry can be learned.

I thought that those things couldn’t be learned, that you’re born a poet and that’s that, but, no, I was floored by that, and later Prince joined them, since he was lonelier than the Devil ever since Gringo had left, and it wasn’t enough for him to give sermons in front of that deranged cathedral that his father and the rest of the crazies never finished building. “The Black Cathedral,” the people of Punta Gorda called it mockingly, the bastards. So fine, that favorite son also got into poetry and went out every Saturday with the two girls to the poets’ workshop instead of devoting himself to his father’s trade, as if there weren’t already an artist in the family: that Johannes, who at the time was studying at the ISA in Havana and had an Italian boyfriend, a young guy, with long hair, tattoos, and pants that were ripped at both knees, who, still, was a nice guy and even went with the father as an equal to build the goddamn Black Cathedral. One time, I asked to borrow twenty dollars and he gave them to me without skipping a beat and told me not to repay him, not like that Johannes, who thought she was all that and never looked at anyone.

Both brothers studied at the high school right in the city, it wasn’t like before when students were forced to go to the countryside to become real men. You could see the Stuarts coming back in the afternoon and each going off to do his own thing: Cricket was good friends with Guts, who back then wasn’t just jerking off anymore but spent his time exercising, he had a body that not even that Arnold Swazz-a-nayer could match.

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