Havana Libre by Robert Arellano

Author:Robert Arellano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2017-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

MIERCOLES, 10 SEPTIEMBRE

On my second day in America, I see that Coroalles is right: 90 percent of customers are in too much of a hurry to check the expiration dates. It is impressive to me, the conversion rate: five, ten, twenty dollars per transaction. Laborers younger than me with money. Children with money. Kids with “allowances” from their parents­—so that they’ll “take care of themselves”—for the most part buying chips and sodas at our store instead of eating nutritional meals cooked at home. Kids with fives and tens and twenties crumpled in their pockets, smoothing them out at the cash register to see what they have, never thinking about paying four dollars for an eight-ounce bag of chips—and with every price, the ubiquitous .99 on the end, one cent shy of next dollar amount, deceiving them that they are only paying four instead of five.

The one population that does not seem to have money to throw away is the senior citizens, again: they-who-check-the-dates. Only the viejitos look at the prices and count their change, Cubano or Americano, their children and grandchildren too busy to check in on them except for birthdays and holidays and maybe the occasional Sunday afternoon. They live like castaways in the materialist system of the most capitalist capital of Latin America. Life has become a perpetual shipwreck.

Nobody warned me about the dogs. It is not that they are particularly vicious, like the feral mongrels along the beach in Miramar. That is not what merited a warning. Instead, it is their domesticity. I should say infantilism. Breeds of every variety get walked, carried, and pushed in strollers into the store wearing little tailored clothes. Rich ladies share licked kisses with poodles and pugs whose tongues just seconds ago were probing their own butts. It makes me dizzy to see it. I overhear some customers joke about it: “My little Chula’s food is more expensive than a meal at a fine restaurant!” I do not find this funny at all. I watch them walk their pampered pets back home past old women pushing all that they own in stolen shopping carts down Calle 8. If anything, this is the most aberrant perversion of capitalism’s extremes: dogs living better than people. Martí, I am glad you did not live to pass through this particular intestine of the beast’s belly, but I do wonder whether you could have turned it into poetry, and if so, how.

Coroalles extends his address of my father as doctor into the public. Doctor Rodriguez, although appearing nowhere on the signs inside the store or on any of the pharmacy’s printed materials, is frequently heard in the aisles and around the counter, and emanating nowhere more than from the mouth of Martín Coroalles. He calls me amigo. Is it sarcastic? He does not pronounce it with the least overtone of irony, but the word selection alone makes me wonder. It sounds to me like the choice of someone who would rather not remember my name, rather

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