“Jazz of Ilion” by Alfredo Franco

Mariano Martinez and his pregnant wife, Victoria, were eating watery black beans and thin, breaded steaks at a café on Avenida Tercera when her father, El Capitán, burst in, followed by five henchmen with Thompson machine guns slung over their shoulders. All the patrons froze, except for Victoria, who, entering her ninth month and constantly famished, continued cramming beans and meat into her small, tight mouth.

El Capitán, wearing a crumpled brown double-breasted suit and loosened tie, scanned the room. Without acknowledging his daughter or son-in-law, he led his men, in their olive-green fatigues and Ridgeway caps, to the bamboo bar off to the side of the dining area.

“I think we should leave,” Mariano whispered, from behind the napkin he’d raised to his mouth. “Now. While we can.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Victoria said, too loudly, as if she wanted her father to hear. “I’m still eating! Not that this steak is any good. Tastes like sawdust! ¡Gracias, Fidel!”

El Capitán slammed money down on the bar.

“Johnnie Walker,” he barked. “For all my men!”

The chubby bartender, with his toothbrush mustache, smiled ingratiatingly and asked: “Not rum? Our glorious national drink?”

“You heard me! The good scotch!”

The bartender’s face flushed and clenched as he poured the now irreplaceable Red Label.

“And some sandwiches and croquetas,” El Capitán added.

“We are out of ham today,” the bartender said, carefully. It was dangerous to admit that there was a scarcity of anything and risk implying that the Revolution was to blame. Mariano and all the other patrons held their collective breath.

“Then whatever you have, carajo!” El Capitán barked, jerking his arms out with open palms, furrowing his sweaty forehead. “My sons are hungry! We’ve been hunting Batistianos and Yanqui spies since last night.”

Chairs scraped against the terrazzo flooring. A couple at one of the tables rose and hurried out, leaving money and their unfinished lunches on the table.

“We should go too,” Mariano said, half rising out of his chair.

“Can’t you see that I’m still hungry?” Victoria asked. “Sit down and give me what’s on your plate.”

Mariano obeyed. He leaned toward her. “Does he know?” he whispered.

“Sí,” Victoria said, matter-of-factly, tightening her grip on her fork and knife, as if they were weapons of her own. “And even that we bought the tickets on the black market.”

“He could arrest us just for that,” Mariano said. The machine guns made him especially nervous — those American Thompsons looked ancient, as if from old gangster movies, and likely to go off at a sneeze. Unlike other militias prowling the city, this unit seemed not to have been equipped as yet with the sleek new Czech SA58s. Mariano longed to be safe again in his modern, comfortable apartment overlooking the sea, listening to his collection of rare jazz records, which he would soon have to part with.

“Ha! Papá doesn’t have the cojones to arrest me!”

The remaining patrons in the dining area glanced at Victoria, as if to plead: Don’t make trouble; don’t you see the militiamen? She looked back at them defiantly, eyes blazing.

When Mariano first met Victoria at a branch of his father’s hardware chain, where she was working as a typist, she had struck him as mannish, a quality that his father admired in women. His father had pushed Victoria on him relentlessly. “Marry her,” he’d insisted, “You need her. She’ll toughen you up!” And at the beginning, Mariano had indeed been grateful for the way she complemented the fragility at the core of him. But their Venice honeymoon revealed their fundamental asymmetries. She was indifferent to all the art, even to the Tintoretto at San Rocco, which had made Mariano buckle at the knees (that Christ seeming to lean forward from the cross, as if to embrace him!). She broke a delicate Murano vase at a shop and lunged, fists forward, at an insolent waiter at Florian’s; Mariano, with great difficulty, had had to wrestle her back into her chair. Lately, during breakfast or dinner, she would fart openly, without shame or apology, or shit with the bathroom door wide open—things he had not experienced since military school. Only a few days ago, on the corner of Neptuno, he had felt like throwing up to see her knock back a cone of shucked raw oysters from a street vendor, her prominent Adam’s apple flicking and bobbing as she swallowed the goo, then belching.

“Vicky, we’re leaving,” Mariano said, and made again as if to stand.

“I said: sit down!”

Mariano crumpled into his chair. To busy his nervous hands, he pulled his last pack of now unobtainable Edén Superfinos from the lower pocket of his guayabera as well as a small Cubana de Aviación celluloid matchbox. He held the unlit cigarette limply in his mouth while gazing intently at the matchbox, a souvenir from a flight to Tampa in ’58, a year before the Revolution. Already a relic of a vanished world, he continued carrying it with him for good luck. On one side, it had a photo of a Bristol Britannia, those grand British airliners that had been the pride of the Cubana fleet. Now, the Revolution was replacing them with rattletrap Ilyushins as well as purging the pilot corps of apostates. Flipping the matchbox over, he looked into the smiling face of a beautiful, dark-haired stewardess, who reminded him, with a stab of regret, of Kassandra Cheng … Had she made it to Miami?

Mariano lit his cigarette, but Victoria ordered him to put it out.

“It’s bad for the baby, doctors are saying now.”

Mariano mashed the precious cigarette out slowly, with exaggerated thoroughness, into the glass ashtray, making a squeaking sound…

He obeyed, as always. After all, he was the outsider. Though born in Havana, he’d spent a formative stretch of his life in the United States. His wealthy father had sent him off at the age of eight to a Catholic military academy in Ohio, “to make a man out of him,” though it was there, precisely, that a gang of older cadets sodomized him in the refectory, among buckets of lard, behind the big, black industrial ovens where the Benedictine nuns never patrolled. Their bibbers and underwear at their feet, but still wearing their military jackets and plumed shakos, each waited their turn. “Mary-Anus,” they taunted him, “Marteen-ass.”

Oblivious and pitiless, his father had refused to let him return to Cuba for Christmas or summer vacations, much to the inconvenience of the nuns, who needed a break themselves and did not know what to do with the soft, timorous boy—they had never seen such a nervous child. Finally, they bought him a Tom Thumb “Buddy” radio to entertain himself during the long breaks, which is how he discovered jazz, the music of liberation, listening with rapt attention to Roy Eldridge, Armstrong, and Diz. It led him to take up the bugle, eventually becoming bugler of his division, a fact that helped lessen the bullying. Just as he was finally adjusting, a bout of rheumatic fever at seventeen almost killed him, and it was only then that his father brought him home, in disgrace, as if Mariano had wanted to get sick.

As much as the experimental shots of cortisol he was prescribed, the tropical warmth helped Mariano recover. He had to relearn his native tongue, and his ear for music helped. By dint of working like a Trojan (that wonderful expression he’d heard a Canadian sales rep use), plus the smooth, smiling, affable manner he’d developed to mask his humiliating secret, he’d managed to become the most successful salesman in the family enterprise, surprising even his father.

“Mami and I scraped by in sordid rooming houses,” Victoria said, cutting another wedge of steak. “The sad thing is that shabby man over there, my so-called father, could have been a doctor. He had the brains. We’d have been well off. But he abandoned his medical studies to fight against Machado, then Batista. That was his excuse to cover up his lack of discipline. He called it justice, commitment. All self-delusion.”

Mariano felt no love for his father-in-law, but Victoria’s diagnosis irritated him. That’s how she often dismissed his love of jazz, as infantilism, a desire to escape, an excuse to hang out with blacks, all that money wasted on silly records…

Victoria swallowed thickly. “Oh, now and then, yes, he’d send an occasional check—conscience-money. And some useless presents at Christmas.” She took a swig of milk from her glass.

“At least you had Christmas,” Mariano said. He remembered the dark, empty dormitories after all the cadets had gone home for the holidays. The only good thing was that, for a month, no one would jump him in his cot while he slept or ambush him in the showers, and he could turn the volume full up on his little radio, blasting “Things to Come” and “Let Me Off Uptown.”

“He expected me to worship him,” Victoria said. “The great revolutionary! Ha! It’s easier to be a revolutionary than a good father or a doctor.”

Mariano’s eyes, looking away from his wife’s milk moustache, were nervously on El Capitán, who was smiling like a proud father at his men and ordering the bartender to refill their glasses. The bartender had brought them fried eggs and smelly, ripe plantains over rice. The soldiers, lit up by the unfamiliar scotch, wiped their mouths on the sleeves of their drab green shirts and jostled each other like adolescent boys.

“Once he even got the clap,” Victoria said, more loudly. “Slept with the cheapest putas he could find. The rotten womanizer.”

Mariano winced. During Victoria’s first ill-fated pregnancy, on the eve of the Revolution, he’d disappeared for a weekend, claiming a sales trip to Oriente; in fact, he’d been in Room 511 of the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, with Kassandra Cheng, a salesgirl from the dazzling Encanto department store. She was a mix of Black, Spanish, and Chinese—the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Stylish and feminine, Kassandra often earned extra money as a model for the Manet designer dress line. Mariano made love to her furiously, as if to exorcise his disgrace, and to feel a warmth that Victoria simply did not possess—Victoria, who would stare at the ceiling impassively during sex. Mariano lost himself in Kassandra’s long, jet-black, filamentous hair, breathing her in—where Victoria smelled of institutional Castile soap, which reminded him of the laundry at the military school, Kassandra was fragrant with Lanvin’s My Sin, all jasmine, rose, narcissus, and clove …

“I’ll get a divorce,” he’d said to Kassandra, his courage, for once, rising nearly to his desire. “We’ll find an apartment in Miramar; we’ll invest in your modeling career; you’ll become more famous than Norka!”

Her response was to laugh and slap his buttocks playfully, at which he suddenly backhanded her in the face.

“Oh!” she said, catching her breath, wiping the blood from her mouth.

“No, no, I’m sorry, it’s just that you touched me where I—”

Without another word, Kassandra rose, washed herself, put on her sleeveless Christian Dior dress, and quietly closed the door of the hotel room behind her.

Meanwhile, in his absence, Victoria had been taken to the hospital, where she miscarried and almost bled to death. No one could locate Mariano. When he arrived at last, disheveled and unshaven, his father, in a wide-brimmed Stetson hat, loomed over him.

“I smell puta all over you. You are unworthy of a wife like Victoria!”

Get off my back! Mariano wanted to say. You should have married her yourself.

After her recovery, Victoria insisted they try again. It was their Catholic duty, she said, though Mariano could not recall the last time they’d attended Mass. “And you can forget about that tin of White Trojans you hid in your blue serge suit!” she’d added scornfully. “I threw it out.”

Then the Revolution hit. Mariano was horrified by the show trials in the public squares; the firing squads; the neighborhood committee leaders, verbose with false courage; the Comandante’s seven-hour speeches; the Russian officers, giddy with the remnants of capitalism, gorging at expensive restaurants, washing lobster thermidor down with large gulps of Coca-Cola.

And yet, there was something exhilarating about the apocalypse. It was as if, suddenly, everyone had been absolved of responsibility. Jazz sessions were more ecstatic and feverish than ever at the little clubs along La Rampa, where Mariano snuck off to some nights, alone. Daily work became lax; there was always a demonstration or procession that blocked one’s path to the office. There was no choice but to sit at an outdoor café and watch the unfolding spectacle of it all. Bosses didn’t dare complain, lest their employees accuse them of being counter-revolutionaries. Even Mariano’s own father had to permit his lower-level staff to hold Marxist-Leninist discussion groups during peak operating hours, and Mariano rejoiced to see the old man boiling with repressed rage. Yes, stick it to him!

One morning, on Carlos III Street, Mariano was delayed by a mock funeral for Reddy Kilowatt, celebrating the expropriation of the American-owned Cuban Electric Company. A life-sized cutout of the gringo mascot—its cartoon body consisting of red lightning bolts and a lightbulb head—was glued to the top of a coffin borne on the shoulders of six smugly grinning militiamen, followed by a gaggle of rumberos banging on congas and blowing shrill horns. It was a pyrrhic victory, for sure, as rolling blackouts were becoming the norm. Mariano could see the stupidity of it, yet he couldn’t help falling in step with the cortege, moving ecstatically to the drumbeats, something viscerally Cuban overtaking his body. He missed all that day’s business appointments…

“Just look at them,” El Capitán, pointing, shouted after his fifth Johnnie Walker. “Sitting there. That gringo and his puta. How innocent they look.”

Everyone in the café turned to stare at Mariano and Victoria.

“I told you,” Mariano said, his voice trembling. “We should have left…”

“Shut up, and let me handle this,” Victoria said.

“Okay, okay… But remember: he’s got the guns.”

“But, oh no, comrades, they are not innocent,” El Capitán said. “Not innocent at all! They have used illegal Yankee dollars to buy airline tickets to Miami on the black market. They want to abandon this paradise that we have created and paid for with our sacrifice and our blood. They prefer the land of the oppressor. Perhaps they are even helping him topple our great Comandante. They are disgusting worms!”

El Capitán pushed himself off the bar and lurched toward his daughter.

“So, you are going to the imperialist United States to drop your litter. After all that we, the Cuban people—your people!—have sacrificed!”

Mariano knew he should stand up to him and shut him up. Any upset might cause Victoria to miscarry again. But his legs were unresponsive.

“You could have married a true Cuban,” El Capitán pressed on. “Not this—this—what is he? Why, not a man at all …”

Mariano’s mouth fell open: did El Capitán know that—that!—too?

Victoria calmly brushed some crumbs from the front of her red maternity dress. Then she stood up slowly from the table, her body swollen and huge, but her chin lowered, like a boxer’s, forehead forward, eyes alert and fearless. Her thick arms seemed capable of delivering devastating uppercuts. From his chair, Mariano watched the two of them, shocked by how they mirrored each other, each trying to intimidate the other with identical piercing stares. For all her hate of him, she had the same bravado as her father—even down to his snarling upper lip. Father and daughter looked at each other with the intensity of quarreling lovers. Mariano realized how little he actually mattered in all of this.

“I remember,” she began, “how you once said: ‘If Fidel gets to power, we’ll have to kill him. He’ll be just another dictator.’ And now you end up offering your culo to him. Fidel, tall and strong, has mounted you, you squat little man.”

“Liar! How dare you! Do you know who I am? ¡El Capitán! My job is to shoot traitors like you. And I shall! For the Revolution always takes precedence over family! I shall defend not only my honor but the honor of the motherland for whom our exalted José Martí became a martyr!”

(You can’t make it up, the American within Mariano thought. Cubans really talk like this.)

“Go ahead,” Victoria shouted. “Shoot me, right here, in front of all these people, you failure, you shameless old drunk!”

El Capitán, face blanched, turned and walked back to the bar. The bartender’s lower lip was trembling.

“Give me your Thompson,” El Capitán demanded of one of his men.

The soldier hesitated.

“Mi Capitán, I think—”

“Now, imbécil! How dare you disobey me! Should I kill you, too?”

“Run!” Mariano said. “We might just make it out!”

“No, stay in your chair!” Victoria commanded. “I’m going to show him.”

El Capitán kissed the barrel of the Thompson. “This,” he murmured, “is what we use to kill fascists…”

He swung around, pulling back the bolt and aiming at them. Some of the remaining patrons took cover under their tables.

“Let’s see how brave you are now, ungrateful daughter.”

“You gave me nothing to be grateful for,” Victoria said, unflinching. “But everything to be ashamed of. Would your gang of thugs there like to know what you did to me that day Mami dropped me off at your hotel in La Habana Vieja? Remember? Remember?‘Don’t be afraid, hijita,’ you said. ‘Trust me. I studied medicine.’ Hey, muchachos, listen! Listen closely! Gather round! Let me tell you what a degenerado your Capitán really is!”

“Shut up!” El Capitán roared, his quivering face glistening with sweat and tears.

She laughed at him derisively.

Mariano braced himself against the back of his chair, eyes shut tight. He was back at the military school, his face pressed into the linoleum floor of the refectory, the captain of cadets shouting: “Show the spic who’s boss, Roark! Deeper! Deeper!”

Screams—his own or someone else’s—made him open his eyes. He saw the militiamen tackling El Capitán, wrestling the Thompson from him.

“I’ll have you all shot, traidores!” El Capitán bellowed, writhing on the floor.

“Please leave with me now, señora,” one of the militiamen said. “I shall accompany you to your car. No one will harm you.”

The militiaman saluted as he held open the passenger door of Mariano’s Edsel for Victoria. Mariano thanked him, but the soldier did not acknowledge him; one did not acknowledge men who wouldn’t stand up to defend their women. The demented shouting of El Capitán kept coming from inside the café.

Mariano let his forehead fall against the steering wheel. He released a long sigh. He wasn’t sure if he was alive or if his father-in-law had shot him, and this was the afterlife, trapped for eternity in a car with a woman sweating steak and soap of Castile. Perhaps it would have been better to be shot. Mariano dreaded the future, their plan to continue up to Ohio once they reached Miami…Ohio! The land of his first undoing! The nuns from the military school promised to help him and Victoria secure green cards; they’d even found a job for him at a small hardware store in Akron. He should be grateful, but he saw himself wasting away amid power saws and Troy-Bilt lawn mowers…

Sitting back, he wiped his sweaty face on the sleeve of his guayabera. Turning to Victoria, he contemplated her distended belly. He felt a sudden and bitter envy of the child waiting there. Its life was not yet ruined. It would be loved as he had never been. Curled up in there was his future enemy, his unforgiving judge, who would root out his rape and feel ashamed of him… A dark hope surged savagely within him: Victoria might miscarry on the plane, due to the air pressure, and maybe, even, die herself… After all, the Batistiano doctor they’d confided in had warned this could happen. Why, yes! Then he would be free to seek out Kassandra in Miami, start life afresh, rebuild his collection of jazz records…

But just then, Victoria began to cry, unleashing all her pent-up pain. It was the first time that Mariano had ever seen her cry. He hadn’t thought her capable of it. It frightened him more than her aggression. He did not know what to do. Some part of him wanted to lean forward and embrace her, but he had lived too long inside his own wound. Doubled over her womb, Victoria’s body heaved and trembled. Mariano looked around in panic, patting himself frantically for the Edén Superfinos and the matchbox, only to realize that he’d forgotten them inside the café.