Free King of Cuba by Cristina Garcia Page B

paddle and, with considerable difficulty, slid to the bottom of the canoe. He laid his head against the warm wood of the seat. Exhaustion overtook him, and he slipped into a restive sleep.
    In a dream, Goyo trailed Adelina Ponti to the Almendares River. Her dress was tight from her growing belly and cut low under the arms, which exposed soft excesses of breast. After the tyrant had impregnated her, she dropped out of the university and spent her days reading worthless romance novels procured from bookshops on the Calle de la Reina. Now she was crying alone under a blooming ylang-ylang tree. Goyo lamented the thousands of days he hadn’t spent at her side. An afternoon shower cooled his brow. It trickled to his lips, reviving him. When he opened his eyes, a half-dozen men in fatigues stared down at him with mocking eyes.
    “¿Hombre, que coño haces aquí?” their leader demanded.
    The right side of Goyo’s face felt on fire, and his throat was cotton-dry. “I am Goyo Herrera,” he croaked. “And I am here to fight.”
    The men burst out laughing, but the leader stopped them with a slash of his hand. One of the soldiers sat on a stump with Goyo’s gym bag slung over his shoulder. He was examining the Chief’s Special .38.
    “I got the message.” Goyo’s lips clung together as he spoke.
    “Este viejo está loco de remate,” someone dismissed him.
    A burly man emerged from the ganglia of mangroves, advancing on Goyo like a hungry animal. The black mole on his temple looked pasted on. “Who the hell is this?”
    “I’m tired of doing nothing,” Goyo pleaded. “I can shoot. I’m not afraid to die.”
    “We have no time to waste, Herrera,” the leader said, not unkindly. “You had cojones coming out here, viejo.”
    The sun continued its maddening glare. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Around him the swamp gurgled and wheezed, attending to its grim business of decay. Goyo thought of how eventually everything would perish and decompose in this muck, far from civilization’s reach. The distant roar of a helicopter prompted the men to vanish back into the swamp. Goyo stayed put, rocking in his canoe. The helicopter grew closer. The mangroves stirred from its intrusion.
    “There he is!” The voice was unmistakable, amplified and crackling through a bullhorn. Alina descended from the heavens, as he had expected she would, in a cloud of emerald flies. Goyo had half a mind to turn over his canoe and sink into the hissing abyss. Instead, he tightened his thigh muscles as the rope ladder fell to within reach.

    Somehow Alina had convinced the park rangers to leave Goyo in her care. The two said little to each other once reunited. His daughter had trailed him to the swamp in order (purportedly) to save his life. Didn’t this mean that she loved him? Goyo wanted to be grateful, but he soon grew too enraged to speak. What next? Clamping a tag on his ankle like he was some goddamn endangered species? Sullenly, he agreed to follow her out of the Everglades. He flipped on the radio again. A news report was followed by a Haitian music program (he understood most of the Creole with his vestigial Canadian French) and a call-in show for troubled lovers.
    Goyo had taken his beloved Adelina on three chaperoned dates, the last to a ravishing performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony at the Gran Teatro de la Habana. Adelina was of Italiandescent: her father a once-heralded bass baritone from Ravenna—that Byzantine city by the sea—who came to fame and fortune in the more indolent opera houses of the New World. A week after their symphony date, Adelina fell under the tyrant’s spell and lost her senses. A year later she wrote to Goyo, asking him to meet her at the same theater, but he ignored her plea. By then he was engaged to Luisa and had hardened his bruised heart. His pride prevented him from ever approaching Adelina again, though not from sending her money. Only Carla Stracci, his longtime mistress at the UN,