Free Havana Lunar by Robert Arellano Page B

square torn from a brown paper sack. “Where do you get this stuff?” I asked. He smiled but didn’t answer. We smoked. We could hear Manolito and Lydia yelling at each other in the bohío. “Such an unhappy marriage,” I said. “That’s redundant, Manolo. All marriages are unhappy.”
    â€œWhat about Abuelo y Abuela?”
    â€œThey don’t count.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œThey’re from another time.”
    I thought about what Emilio said and realized that there’s no way to explain what actually makes me shack up with someone. It hasn’t happened with enough women for me to identify a common quality. Something in the eyes contributes to it, but something different every time. In Elena it was that pure clarity. In Carlota it was smoldering lust. And Julia? She simply wanted to sleep with me, and it showed in her eyes. Why me? Maybe she had a little bet with her friends that she could get me. Good for her. Maybe she had a thing for my lunar. I should let myself enjoy this teenage girl, ¿no?—a reformed, or at least reforming, sex worker who wanted nothing more than to entertain me up in my little crow’s nest above this Socialist island adrift. I knew that one way or another, if I let her get her hooks in me, all I would want is to press our bellies together—again and again.

12 August 1980
    W hen I first came to Pinar del Rio at age eleven, I was in awe of what a different world existed on this island. All I had known before was Havana, a crumbling city of stone like a necropolis for the living. In Viñales all was green, and sugarloaf mountains hulked around the valley like slumbering elephants, sheltering the soil of tobacco country.
    My cousin Emilio met the bus where it let me off at the mural prehistórico, and we wound our way between the rows of tobacco plants across the valley and up the side of our grandfather’s mountain. At the top, Abuelo sat in his chair in front of his house. “I saw you coming an hour ago.”
    I kissed his cheek. “Tienes los ojos de águila, Abuelo.”
    Abuela emerged from the bohío and pressed me to her breast. “Pobre Manolo, tu mamá en el cielo y tu papá mas lejos que eso.” When Abuela said my father was further away than heaven, she meant Miami.
    Together with my uncles, aunts, and cousins, our number breached a dozen, but somehow Abuela managed to seat the entire family in two shifts and feed us all in under an hour. Abuelo had made the table out of the remains of one of the last trees he had cut for the walls of the bohío.
    For the first serving with his eldest sons, Abuelo sat at the head, where one leg was a little shorter than the rest. Abuelo kept it this way because if he had to make a point, one thump of his rock fist served to upset every dish down the entire length.
    During the second sitting, a stray pea or garbanzo rolled off someone else’s plate and into my domain. The instant I shoved the legume into my mouth, Manolito hollered, “¡Pendejo, Mano! ¡Ese era mi frijol mágico!” Unfazed, I gobbled up the tidbit. Manolito then expanded on his patent outburst with sadistic little remarks like, “Todo el día mientras sudaba en la cosecha, guardaba ese frijolito aquí en mi culito.” My cousins shrieked with glee and collapsed all over each other, troubling the tippy table with volcanic tremors. Abuela whacked the back of Manolito’s skull with a serving spoon. “¡No seas sucio!”
    Abuelo typically ignored Manolito’s comments on my lunar, but when he heard Manolito say that I probably wouldn’t be wanting cake on my birthday, Abuelo turned savage, lunging halfway down the length of the table and hammering his youngest son with a closed fist, cutting off the customary hyperactivity and leaving all the cousins sullen.
    My first girlfriend was a Pinareña that first summer in Viñales. She lived in town.