The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) by Guillermo Rosales

Author:Guillermo Rosales
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780811223263
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2009-05-27T05:00:00+00:00

In my room, I throw myself back on the bed and fall asleep again. This time I dreamt that the Revolution was over, and that I was returning to Cuba with a group of old octogenarians. An old man with a long, white beard guided us, outfitted with a long staff. We stopped every three steps and the old man pointed out a bunch of ruins with his staff.

“This was the Sans Souci Cabaret,” the old man then said.

We walked on a little bit and then he would say again, “This was the Capitol building,” pointing at a field of weeds full of broken chairs.

“This was the Hilton Hotel,” and the old man pointed at a bunch of red bricks.

“This was the Paseo del Prado,” and now it was just a lion statue half-sunk into the ground.

So we walked through all of Havana like that. Vegetation covered everything, like in the bewitched city in Sleeping Beauty. Over everything reigned an air of silence and mystery akin to what Columbus must have found when he first landed on Cuban soil.

I woke up.

It had to be about one in the morning. I sit on the edge of the bed with an empty feeling in my chest. I look out the window. There are three homosexuals dressed as women on the corner, waiting for lonely men. Cars driven by these men without women prowl around the corner slowly. I rise from the bed, depressed. I don’t know what to do. The crazy guy who works at the pizza place is sleeping under a thick blanket, even though the heat is unbearable. He’s snoring. I decide to go out to the living room and sit in the old, tattered armchair. I go. As I pass by Arsenio’s room, I hear the voice of Hilda, the decrepit old hag, who is complaining because Arsenio is messing around with her behind.

“Keep still!” Arsenio says. I hear them struggle. I reach the armchair and sink heavily into it. Louie, the American, is sitting in a dark corner of the room.

“Leave me alone!” he says to the wall, his voice full of hate. “I’m going to destroy you! Leave me alone!”

I hear Hilda’s frantic voice coming from Arsenio’s room again.

“Not there,” she says. “Not there!”

Tato, the ex-boxer, comes out of the shadows wearing only a small pair of briefs. He sits in a chair in front of me and asks for a cigarette. I give it to him. He lights it with a cheap lighter.

“Listen to this story, Willy,” he says to me as he exhales a cloud of smoke. “Listen to this story, you’re gonna like it. Back there, in Havana, in the age of Jack Dempsey, there was a man who wanted to be the avenger of mankind. They called him ‘The God of the Starry Skies,’ ‘The King of the Underworld,’ ‘The Terrible Man.’”

He’s quiet for a few seconds, then he reveals: “That man was me.”

He lets out an incoherent peal of laughter and repeats,

“Do you like my story, Willy?”

"Yes.

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