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By Root 2081 0

Beyond the financial attachment, Cuba was an important component to his prestige — to his manhood, really — and our man could still not accept the fact that the country had fallen to a rabble of scurvied students. Some days he was better than others, but whenever the latest news reached him of the revolution’s activities he would pull his hair and attack the nearest wall in sight. Not a day passed when he did not fulminate against Batista (That ox! That peasant!) or Castro (The goat-fucking comunista!) or CIA chief Allen Dulles (That effeminate!), who had failed to stop Batista’s ill-advised Mother’s Day Amnesty that freed Fidel and the other moncadistas to fight another day. If Dulles was right here in front of me I’d shoot him dead, he swore to Beli, and then I’d shoot his mother dead.

Life, it seemed, had struck the Gangster a dolorous blow, and he was uncertain as to how to respond. The future appeared cloudy and there was no doubt he sensed his own mortality and that of Trujillo in the fall of Cuba. Which might explain why, when he met Beli, he jumped on her stat. I mean, what straight middle-aged brother has not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas, and while the upper-class boys might have had their issues with her, the Gangster was a man of the world, had fucked more prietas than you could count. He didn’t care about that shit. What he wanted was to suck Beli’s enormous breasts, to fuck her pussy until it was a mango-juice swamp, to spoil her senseless so that Cuba and his failure there disappeared. As the viejos say, clavo saca clavo, and only a girl like Beli could erase the debacle of Cuba from a brother’s mind.

At first Beli had her reservations about the Gangster. Her ideal amor had been Jack Pujols, and here was this middle-aged Caliban who dyed his hair and had a thatch of curlies on his back and shoulders. More like a third-base umpire than an Avatar of her Glorious Future. But one should never underestimate what assiduity can accomplish — when assisted by heaping portions of lana and privilege. The Gangster romanced the girl like only middle-aged niggers know how: chipped at her reservation with cool aplomb and unself-conscious cursí — ness. Rained on her head enough flowers to garland Azua, bonfires of roses at the job and her house. (It’s romantic, Tina sighed. It’s vulgar, La Inca complained.) He escorted her to the most exclusive restaurants of the capital, took her to the clubs that had never tolerated a non-musician prieto inside their door before (dude was that powerful — to break. the injunction against black), places like the Hamaca, the Tropicalia (though not, alas, the Country Club, even he didn’t have the juice). He flattered her with top-notch muelas (from what I heard he paid a couple of grad-school Cyranos to churn ‘em out). Treated her to plays, movies, dances, bought her wardrobes of clothes and pirate chests of jewelry, introduced her to famous celebrities, and once even to Ramfis Trujillo himself — in other words, he exposed her to the fucking world (at least the one circumscribed by the DR), and you’d be surprised how even a hardheaded girl like Beli, committed as she was to an idealized notion of what love was, could find it in her heart to revise her views, if only for the Gangster.

He was a complicated (some would say comical), affable (some would say laughable) man who treated Beli very tenderly and with great consideration, and under him (literally and metaphorically) the education begun at the restaurant was completed. He was un hombre bien social, enjoyed being out and about, seeing and being seen, and that dovetailed nicely with Beli’s own dreams. But also un hombre conflicted about his past deeds. On the one hand, he was proud of what he’d accomplished. I made myself he told Beli, all by myself I have cars, houses, electricity, clothes, prendas, but when I was a niño I didn’t even