Free The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) by Guillermo Rosales Page B

know.”
    I look up and down the street. Then I point vaguely at a place they call Little Havana. We start to walk. This might be the poorest ghetto of the Cuban section. Here live the great majority of the 50,000 who arrived on Miami’s shores in that last spectacular exodus of 1980. They haven’t been able to get a leg up yet, and you can see them any time of day sitting in the doorways of their homes, sporting shorts, brightly colored t-shirts and baseball hats. They flaunt thick gold chains on their necks with medallions of saints, Indians and stars. They drink canned beer. They fix their rundown cars and listen, for hours on end, to loud rock or exasperating drum solos on their portable radios.
    We walk. When we get to 8th Street, we turn to the right and head toward the heart of the ghetto. Bodegas, clothing stores, opticians, barber shops, restaurants, coffee shops, pawn shops, furniture stores. All of it small, square, simple, made without any architectural artifice or aesthetic concerns. Created to make a few cents and thus cobble together that petit bourgeois life-style to which the average Cuban aspires.
    We walk on. We walk on. When we reach the big, gray arcade of a Baptist church, we sit at the foot of one of the pillars. A protest march of old people passes on the street, toward downtown. I don’t know what they’re marching for. They raise signs that say, “Enough already!” and they’re waving Cuban and American flags. Somebody comes over to us and gives us both typewritten pieces of paper. I read:
    It’s time. The “Cuban Avengers” group has been started in Miami. From today on, take heed all the indifferent, the mean-spirited, the closet communists and all those who enjoy life in this hedonistic and bucolic city while an unhappy Cuba moans in chains. “Cuban Avengers” will show all Cubans the path to follow.
    I crumple up the piece of paper and throw it out. I start laughing. I lean against the pillar and look at Frances. She gets closer to me and sinks her shoulder into my ribs. She takes one of my arms and places it over her shoulder. I squeeze her a little more and kiss her head.
    “My angel,” she says. “Were you ever a communist?”
    “Yes.”
    “Me too.”
    We’re silent. Then she says,
    “At the beginning.”
    I lean my head back against the pillar and sing an old anthem from the early years of the Revolution in a low voice:
    Somos las brigadas Conrado Benítez
Somos la vanguardia de la revolución
    She continues:
    Con el libro en alto, cumplimos una meta
Llevar a toda Cuba la alfabetización
    We burst out laughing.
    “I taught five peasants how to read,” she confesses.
    “Oh yeah? Where?”
    “In the Sierra Maestra,” she says. “In a place called El Roble.”
    “I was around there,” I say. “I was teaching some other peasants in La Plata. Three mountains from there.”
    “How long ago was that, my angel?”
    I close my eyes.
    “Twenty-two … twenty-three years ago,” I say. “Nobody understands that,” she says. “I tell my psychiatrist and he just gives me strong Etrafon pills. Twenty-three years, my angel?”
    She looks at me with tired eyes.
    “I think I’m dead inside,” she says.
    “Me too.”
    I take her by the hands and we stand up. A black convertible goes by in front of us. A Miami teenager sticks his head out and yells at us, “Trash!”
    I flash him the longest finger on my hand. Then I squeeze Frances’ hand and we start walking back to the halfway house. I’m hungry. I’d like to eat, at the very least, a meat empanada. But I don’t have a single cent.
    “I have two dimes,” says Frances, untying a handkerchief.
    “They’re no good. Everything in this country costs more than twenty-five cents.”
    Nonetheless, we stop in front of a coffee shop called
La Libertaria
.
    “How much is that empanada?” Frances asks an old server who looks bored behind the counter.
    “Fifty cents.”
    “Oh!”
    We turn around. When we’ve gone a few