Free Cubop City Blues by Pablo Medina Page A

several owners, the house is being rented by a group of artists who do many more drugs than art. The house is falling apart, its ghosts long gone, but the artists don’t care. They paint a few pictures or make believe they paint, then down the LSD, snort the cocaine, smoke the weed. There are many people at the party, most of whom you find unpleasant. The men are scraggly and bearded, the women thin and unwashed. They have come not because of art but because of the liquor and the drugs. An hour ago the wife of a truck driver offered herself to you in the attic and after the sex you wanted to get away from her. Her armpits were unshaven, a fact that you noticed in the postcoitus. She talked too much but said nothing. Nights are like that. Desire in, desire out. You say beauty and everything crumbles. You will make meaning out of this many years hence. Now her husband, the truck driver, wants to show a pornographic movie in the living room. Perhaps he knows about the sex upstairs. All you want to do is go outside, get away from the wife, the husband, the film. Nothing personal. A soft breeze blows in from the south and you can hear a loon in the distance, sounding serene and plaintive at once, where the bad music doesn’t reach.
    There’s a small wooden rowboat tied to the dock and you take it out to the middle of the river, where the moon is waiting for you. On both banks there are large shadowy trees and beyond them the crumbling estates where the wealthy once gamboled. The moon looms under you, big, white and pock marked.You bend over the edge of the rowboat to kiss it, aiming for the Sea ofTranquillity, but you would much prefer the dark side if you could reach it. You like the unknown, the unseen, the black kiss. Inches away from the surface you recognize the smells of benzene and untreated sewage floating over the sweet scent of decomposing leafy matter. It is not the river of your dreams, of your wanting, no matter how much you’ve drunk tonight. Still, it is the only river you’ve got.
    Moments before your lips meet the water, too late now to go back on your intent, you tip over and fall through the surface, disappearing into the brown depths and leaving behind a string of pearly bubbles that pop softly on the surface. That’s the way it always is. Glub-glub but no one listens, glub-glub where the river is the same, never the same, and the moon awaits your undoing.

THE MAGNIFICENT
(M)OTHERS
    F irst there was Tata, black Earth Mother who coddled him like his real mother never could. As a small boy Angel wanted to sink into her and disappear forever into her loving, unconditional and absolute like the ocean that surrounded him on all sides. He remembers—he thinks he remembers—her huge breasts, against which he leaned when he sat on her lap, and her soft hands the color of loam as they moved over him in the bath. In the fog of early memories there were games—she touched here, he touched there—and squirms of joy. Laughter like shallow water, like waves, broke over them. She taught him to love the night, which was in her, like the sea creature that comes in his dreams and beaches where his heart beats. Her real name was sacred, therefore secret, and so he learned never to reveal it.
    I n the first grade he and a girl named Lilian would sit together during recess and relate to each other what member of their respective families they had seen naked the day before. I saw my mother, he’d say. I saw my father, she’d respond. I saw my sister. I saw my uncle. I saw my third cousin. She’s fifteen years old and has nipples like chocolate kisses. I saw the gardener peeing. His pee-pee’s like a yellow hose. Like a banana. Like a chunk of yuca! I saw the maid after she took a bath. Her pendejera was thick as a jungle and it was dripping wet. The testimonials were only as detailed as seven-year-olds could make them, and whatever physiological taxonomy they lacked was offset