Queen of Bones Read online

  They arrived at the José Martí International Airport, passed breezily through customs and took an ordinary government-run taxi to the Meliá Cohiba. Sharon would have preferred to ride on a brightly colored almendrón, one of the old refurbished American cars she had seen online, but Juan had opposed.

  “We don’t know these drivers,” he had said. “They could overcharge us or take us around for hours.”

  “But you know the city.”

  “Yes, but they don’t know I do. Here, you have to walk around with four eyes.”

  “Walk around with four eyes” was among Juan’s preferred set of quirky Cuban expressions. Sharon chuckled at the memory and left the window, where she had been enjoying a panoramic view of Havana and the Malecón seawall.

  Juan was still sleeping. It was only 8 a.m., but she had rested long enough. It had taken him longer to fall asleep, which wasn’t new. The guy had issues, of which she was well aware. He had finally gone to a therapist once Sharon had convinced him that he could be experiencing PTSD from what had happened at sea. After all, he had arrived in Miami dehydrated and covered in third-degree burns, with Camilo’s body decomposing by his side. Though Juan had protested, saying that real men didn’t need shrinks, she had insisted, and it had helped somewhat. The alprazolam helped too, when he took it. But he hated taking it, claiming it made him feel whacked out.

  She sat on the bed, careful not to wake him. She studied his profile: his square jaw, his teardrop-shaped eyes inherited from a Chinese grandfather, his well-formed nose. Eight years ago, he had been so handsome that he could’ve been a model, she had bragged to her friends. But when they’d met, he had been a waiter at the Cooperage, a popular steakhouse in Albuquerque. He’d also had a gig on Friday nights teaching salsa classes at the restaurant. She’d signed up for one, hoping to learn how to move her hips the proper way. “Get it all loose, girl,” he would encourage her. “Swing your little tail, your colita, not your arms!”

  Three months later he declared her his best student, a claim that Sharon considered somewhat inflated, and invited her to be his partner in Salsa under the Stars, a local dancing contest. They lost, but she was sure he would have won with a better colita-swinging partner.

  Afterward, they started to spend time together, though she wasn’t interested in serious dating. Recently divorced with a teenage daughter, Sharon swore to herself she wouldn’t fall into a rebound relationship. But in less than a month, she had changed her mind.

  Juan made little money at the restaurant. He had done some construction work, a few gigs here and there, but his limited English didn’t help. When he asked, shyly, for work doing “whatever” at her company, Sharon sent him to paint an old house and was pleasantly surprised by the results. She later bought a fixer-upper in South Valley and entrusted Juan with making it look nice. The motley crew he gathered was comprised of Mexicans, Dominicans and a handful of Cubans who, like Juan himself, had made it to Albuquerque courtesy of Catholic Charities. Despite the liberal use of expletives such as coño, pinche cabrón and vaina, they did such a good job that Sharon sold the house for almost twice what she had paid for it. From that moment on, Juan was officially on her payroll.

  A good investment, all in all.

  When, a year later, he suggested living together, Sharon said yes. She also said yes when he asked her to marry him in a touching, old-fashioned manner, with a diamond ring (cheap, but nice) at a candlelit dinner at the Cooperage. He had become more active in the business, his English had improved, and Kenna, Sharon’s daughter, liked him. “Guess what?” Kenna would tell her friends. “My stepfather’s from Cuba, and he’s just a few years older than me. Mom’s pretty cool, for a mom.”

  So what if Sharon sometimes had the nagging suspicion that Juan wasn’t all that into her? After all, she was almost ten years older than him. But that could have just been her own insecurity talking, the same feeling that had made her buy her ticket to Cuba without asking him first.

  “You did the right thing,” Juan had told her on the plane.

  “I . . . was afraid you were planning to hook up with an old girlfriend,” she had admitted.

  “Ay, amor,” he had sighed. “Don’t you know you are the best thing that has ever happened to me? I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for you. How could you think I am going all the way to Cuba to cheat on you? Can you imagine what my old girlfriends look like, anyway? Women in Cuba don’t take such good care of themselves as Americans do.”

  Now her suspicions embarrassed her. But she didn’t regret having accompanied him. Havana, or what little of it she had seen from the taxi, was beautiful, with its faded facades, colorful buildings, wrought-iron balconies and elaborate roofs. She had spotted Coppelia, the city’s most famous ice-cream parlor, on the way to the Meliá Cohiba. They would visit it soon. Dinner the previous night at the hotel restaurant, Plaza Habana, had been excellent: chicken in garlic sauce, black bean soup and fried plantains. A Cuban band had been playing, and there had been more well-dressed and affluent-looking young locals than tourists. They all danced with abandon. Sharon felt a bit out of place—too tall, too foreign, too . . . old—but didn’t mention it. She was determined to make this a fun vacation. Juan had promised to take her to the best places in the city, the ones that weren’t listed on Yelp or TripAdvisor.

  “That is, if I can find my way around,” he had said. “I’m sure the city has changed a lot since I left.”

  A fly buzzed around the bed and landed on his nose. Sharon was about to swat it when Juan woke up with a start. He sat up, his face contorted in a panicked expression. It took him a few seconds to collect himself, but that was nothing new.

  “We’re in Havana, dear,” she reminded him. “Havana,” he repeated.

  Juan was one of the few men who looked good before washing his face. He didn’t even have morning breath, at least in Sharon’s opinion. She kissed him.

  “My first day here in twenty years,” he mumbled, pushing her away.

  After taking a shower, Juan made a call on his cell phone.

  “Víctor, we arrived last night,” he said. “Ah, my wife came too. Where exactly do you live now? Yes, I have the address, but—”

  The call was lost. He dialed again. It didn’t go through this time.

  “That hijoeputa from Verizon told me the phone would work here,” he complained, chucking it onto the bed. “He forgot to say for three minutes only!”

  “If you have the address, we’ll find the place,” Sharon replied. “The city isn’t that big.”

  “Yes, but I’m an Old Havana guy. I’ve never been familiar with this fancy-schmancy neighborhood.”

  “Does your friend live around here?”

  “I think so.”

  Sharon took her purse and checked that it had everything they needed: money, sunglasses and a card with the hotel’s address.

  “Do you want to carry your passports?” she asked Juan. “At least the American one, just in case?”

  “No. I’m afraid to lose them. It’s one of my biggest fears, losing my American passport while in Cuba and not being able to get back.”

  She placed the three documents in the hotel room safe.

  They still had to exchange dollars for CUCs, Cuban Convertible Currency, the only kind of currency accepted in the tourist stores. Juan hadn’t wanted to do it at the airport, claiming that they would be overcharged. Now he wasn’t sure that the hotel was a good place either.

  “Aren’t you being a little paranoid?” Sharon asked.

  “If you had lived here for the first nineteen years of your life, you would be paranoid too,” he answered curtly.

  “Sorry.”

  Then his expression changed, and he took her into his arms.

  “I’m relieved you came with me,” he blurted out. “To save me from my own paranoia and comemierdería.”

  Com
emierdería, a well-used word in Cuban slang, was literally “shit eatery,” but also meant “stupidity.”

  She put a dab of perfume behind her ears and on her wrists. Pleasures by Estée Lauder, her favorite.

  “I wanted to ask you something, amor,” Juan said tentatively. “After we spend some time with Víctor, would you mind taking a walk and leaving us alone for a while? There are things we need to discuss privately.”

  The suggestion made Sharon uncomfortable. Did Juan expect her to just wander around Havana by herself while he and his friend had a tête-à-tête? But she attempted to take it in stride.

  “Like what?” she asked. “I don’t need to go at all, really. I trust you. But I’d like to know.”

  Juan walked toward the window and began to talk with his back to her, looking intently at the Malecón. He spoke Spanish, as he always did when the topic was Cuba.

  “Víctor and I were best friends from the third grade on. We were accepted at the Instituto Superior de Arte, the ISA, after finishing high school. He wanted to study theater, and I hoped to become a classical musician. I’d played the guitar since I was six years old and knew a little piano as well.”

  “Well, I didn’t know that!” Sharon said, surprised. “How come I’ve never heard you play?”

  He turned, but still didn’t look at her. He didn’t appear to have even heard her. Behind his eyes, he seemed to be watching the movie of his past.

  “The ISA was so far from where we lived that it took us an hour by bicycle to get there every morning. It was in the middle of the Special Period, when there was no public transportation except for eighteen-wheeler tractor trailers. There were blackouts every night—the programmed ones that were advertised in the paper and lasted from five to seven hours and the unprogrammed ones that could happen at any time and last for a whole day. Even well-off families had trouble getting food. Everything was scarce, from beans to eggs. Red meat was a luxury. We were all thin as rails, and many suffered from polyneuritis, a kind of aggressive anemia. That’s why when I see people spending thousands of dollars to lose weight, I want to kick their flabby asses.”

  Sharon smiled. It wasn’t the first time Juan had expressed his feelings about the American obsession with dieting.

  “Despite all that, we had fun,” he went on. “We were young and horny. Hunger makes you horny, I discovered. After class, and sometimes during it, there was a lot of apretamiento, hanky-panky, going on.”

  “I bet you had your fair share of—hanky-panky,” she said, choosing not to repeat the Spanish term.

  “There wasn’t too much competition.” Juan grinned. “Víctor and I were among the few straight males on campus, and all the girls liked us. They favored me, I must say, because Víctor was skinny and a bit awkward. Looking back, I think he might have been bisexual, though nobody used that term back then. You were either straight or maricón, period. But he liked girls at least. It was why we had a falling out.”

  “You fought over a girl?”

  “It was a strange fight. Well, you know about Camilo.”

  Juan sat on the bed. He seemed more present now, remembering his past but not anchored in it. Sharon encouraged him softly.

  “The friend you traveled with. The one who—”

  “Yes. We were inseparable: Víctor, Camilo and me. People called us the Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “So we were buddies until Camilo introduced us to Elsa. That changed everything.”

  Elsa. The name on the scanned picture. Sharon tried not to betray any emotion as she asked casually, “And Elsa was . . . ?”

  “My girl!” Juan answered with pride.

  Sharon winced. There was a twinkle in his eye she hadn’t seen before.

  “Lucky her,” she said with an irony that Juan failed to notice.

  “She was lucky,” he said matter-of-factly. “Her father was a pincho.”

  “You mean pinche?” Sharon asked, thinking of the Mexican curse word.

  “No, no! Here, a pincho is someone who is part of the government, a guy who can pull strings. He was a lieutenant general in Castro’s army. Their family lived in a nice house and was ‘connected.’ That was why Elsa had been admitted into the school, though in truth, she had no talent for acting. Couldn’t capture an audience, the instructors said.”

  Sharon was absurdly happy to hear that.

  “We were the ISA ‘it couple.’ She was the prettiest girl, and . . . well, I wasn’t hard on the eyes myself. When we started hooking up, Víctor and Camilo tried to be cool about it, but they were jealous. And that was the beginning of the end.”

  He fell silent. Sharon waited a few seconds, then prodded him.

  “The end came when you left?”

  “In a way. We were all sick and tired of the situation. You Know Who,” Juan said, pretending to stroke an imaginary beard, the way he usually did when referring to Castro, “started talking about ‘Zero Option,’ where we all would live in shelters, eat in communal kitchens and cook with fire instead of electricity. Then El Maleconazo happened. People took to the streets and broke the windows of the dollar shops, stores that were reserved for foreigners, the ones Cubans weren’t even allowed to enter. They threw stones at hotels like this one. You Know Who realized people were angry, so he opened the valve. He said that those who wanted to leave on rafts were free to do so. Elsa, Camilo and I decided to take our chances. Elsa didn’t need to. She lacked many things, like everyone else, but her family was much better off than most. She didn’t even have to bike to school every day, because her father had an old Jeep and drove her around. But she wanted to ride with me, she said.”

  Sharon waited. Were those tears in Juan’s eyes or just the sun’s reflection?

  “We knew we had to act quickly because Fidel’s decision wasn’t going to last. We agreed on a day, and I went to see Víctor the night before. He didn’t want to go, but I thought I could convince him.”

  Sharon tried to imagine Víctor. She pictured a skinny, gawky young man.

  “Was he a Communist?” she asked.

  Juan shrugged. “He sympathized with the government, but he wasn’t hard-core. He said we should all stay and bear it: that the Special Period wouldn’t last forever, that things were bound to improve. But I think he really refused to go because he couldn’t stand the fact that Elsa was leaving with me. For me. We got into an argument, a stupid argument about You Know Who, and had an ugly fight. I knocked him flat and left.”

  Sharon looked out the window. Small waves crashed against the Malecón seawall.

  “And that’s the friend you’re going to see today?” she asked after a moment.

  “Yes, yes.”

  She chewed her lower lip, but before she could find the appropriate response, Juan said, “Elsa was going to take her father’s Jeep and drive me and Camilo to Brisas del Mar, a secluded area on the coast where we had stored the raft. She had also promised to get antidehydration fluids in the black market. If the bitch had at least done that, maybe Camilo wouldn’t have died.”

  The bitch. Sharon smiled again.

  “She was supposed to pick up Camilo first. I waited in my apartment until he arrived on his own, all sweaty, with the few supplies he had gathered and a couple of big tires we used to reinforce the raft, which later saved our lives. When it became clear she wasn’t coming, my dad paid five hundred pesos to a neighbor with an old Chevy to take us to Brisas del Mar. He hugged us before we left. ‘May the Virgin accompany you, hijo,’ he told me. That was the last time I saw him.”

  He had begun to sob quietly as he spoke. Sharon put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry, my love,” she said. “That must have been awful. How did your dad feel about you leaving?”

  “He wasn’t happy, but he knew there was nothing for me in Cuba. The music s
cene here was dead.”

  He wiped the tears from his eyes and then acted as if he hadn’t cried at all, speaking in a macho overtone when he went on.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I just need to clear the air with Víctor. I bet he’s sorry now that he didn’t follow us.”

  He stood. Sharon couldn’t help but ask, “What happened to Elsa?”

  Juan hesitated.

  “I heard she got married,” he said finally.

  “Not to your friend, I hope.”

  “Ah, no. A Spaniard, an old guy.”

  Being sort of an old girl herself, Sharon felt a sting at his dismissive comment.

  “I don’t know much more. I found out through other people because Dad wouldn’t talk about Elsa. He always thought she wasn’t the right girl for me. So did Abuela.”

  “Nobody in your family liked her? Why was that?”

  He shrugged. “They said she was too independent and wouldn’t defer to her elders. She was like an American.”

  “Did she ever contact you?”

  “No. I guess she was ashamed, or maybe she’d never really been in love with me. In the end, it doesn’t matter. I’m not here for her.”

  “That’s a sad story,” Sharon said slowly. “But why are you here, then?”

  “I told you, to see Víctor!” he answered impatiently. “When Dad got sick, Víctor took care of him. He went to his apartment, bathed him, cooked for him. They were still neighbors. When I wanted to talk to him, I called Víctor’s apartment, and though he didn’t speak to me, he would go and fetch my father.”

  “I don’t understand. Why did you call him at your friend’s house? Why not at his own place?”

  Juan sighed. Sharon wished she hadn’t asked.

  “Because he didn’t have a phone, mi vida,” he said. “We never did. At that time, I could send Dad some money, but not much, just enough to buy food. It was before you and I met. Víctor would find him milk, meat and other stuff on the black market. He was there when Dad died.”