Free Cubop City Blues by Pablo Medina Page B

by rich metaphorical references that delight him now whenever he enters the country of the past. After their exchanges deteriorated into vulgar catalogues of fleshy parts, he started elaborating—her breasts are like balls of cheese; his pee-pee is the size of El Morro Castle when it stands up.
    I n the fourth grade, he, a girl named Miriam, and his friend Oscar had to stay in the classroom during recess for talking in class. After the teacher warned them they were not to talk among themselves, she said, It’s a beautiful day, and went out to catch her breath and smoke a cigarette. While she was gone, in silent glee and without exchanging a word, the three of them went to the blackboard and drew huge penises entering equally huge vaginas in a sort of scholastic cavern-painting orgy. They erased the drawings when the bell rang.
    B y the water fountain, a girl whose name he never learned asked him if he wanted to see su cosita. It would cost him a real, ten cents. He looked at her fingers. They were white and puffy. She was American, from the state of Kentucky. The nails were pink and culminated in white slivers of moon. Only then did he notice her red hair and freckled face. Of course he paid the price. He keeps paying it, even now when his memories are copies of his memories and the original is lost under many layers of remembering.
    S unning herself on the beach of his making is his cousin, Martica. She was a plain girl, thin and bony. Through her face skittered the permanent scowl of disenchantment. She appeared, even to an eight-year-old with limited experience, moody and irksome, and she had to be handled as one handles a sea urchin. Angel had been invited to spend the day at the beach by Martica’s mother, Ada. He dreaded the idea. He was not keen on sitting on the sand in the middle of the day, certainly not with his boring cousin and officious aunt, but his mother insisted he go. It would do him good, she’d said, to swim in the ocean, splash around in the waves, play with children his own age. He hated children his age.
    Angel sat on the edge of the beach blanket watching a group of children chasing the waves, hoping they wouldn’t ask him to join them, when he lowered his eyes and came upon Martica’s feet. Her toes were perfectly proportioned, her middle and third slightly longer than her big toe and gently curved, as if in response to the arch, which was a marvel of skeletal architecture, parabolic and fleshy, yet not so pronounced as to break completely with the line of the heel. Oh, he was transfixed, he was smitten. A surge of fluids within him quickened his heart and made the small bud between his legs stand straight away from his body. From that day on he became an adorer of feet.
    S amara, whose father was an important functionary in the Communist Party, winked at him in math class. She assumed that superior attitude of someone who believes hers is the only truth. Her feet were glorious appendages, of the sort that, when he was older, would make him swoon. He saw them once, at the school’s annual swim party and barbecue. He remembers them now as patrician and high arched, with toes like minnows—not at all the proletarian feet one would expect, given her family’s political inclinations. Her behavior was colored by ambivalence born of equanimity. To this day he does not know what that wink in math class meant, everything or nothing. Samara, that little Marxist, stands forever in his mind’s eye and ear, singing “The Internacionale.”
    N ot long after that, Martica and her family left for the United States. His family left a year later and he was not to see her again for many years. Over time, by dint of careful observation coupled with the focus of someone seeking, beyond all other ambition, perfection lost, he grew to acquire an extraordinary knowledge of the female foot. As a teenager he looked through newspapers and magazines in search of advertisements for