Before Fidel: The Cuba I Remember

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER TEN “He almost died! My God, he almost died! We thought he was leaving us!” Kiko’s mother kept repeating hysterically over the telephone. I had run into Kiko, completely by chance, the previous Saturday afternoon on my way to the University to pay the tuition for the year, forty-five dollars. He asked me what I was doing and when I told him he suggested I put the money to better use—to a good meal. There would always be time for paying the tuition and, in the overall scheme of things, he argued, having a good meal ranked far above paying—paying for anything—so we went to an Italian restaurant on Prado Boulevard, not far from where we had run into each other. Kiko’s approach to money had by now grown into a full-fledged philosophical theory, and as we ate he espoused it in detail, with references to European and Eastern philosophers, literary figures, famous poets, and to the lyrics of several popular songs. Buying, he explained, was a pleasurable experience, sometimes related to something you needed, but most of the time tied to nothing else than the satisfaction the buying action provided: the transaction, the acquisition. So you bought when you felt like buying. Paying was something else, a painful experience, usually but not always the byproduct of buying, and it occurred arbitrarily in time and space with all sorts of people trying to find ways of forcing you to pay for things you had never wanted, never needed, never thought of, never seen, never enjoyed and, sometimes, never bought. So paying was to be avoided whenever possible, and you should pay only under duress, when no other alternative existed. While he spoke, he ate. He never ate in a rush but slowly, carefully, observing how each new serving of pasta reached his plate and each string of spaghetti found its proper place, and then he would pour the sauce, as 145 methodically as a chemist mixing substances, over the pasta, and last he would turn his attention to the parmesan, which he would sprinkle with precision, almost punctiliousness, as if it were gold dust, and as uniformly as he had done with the sauce, and during this whole process he would be silent, totally immersed in what he was doing. Only when the preparation was complete would he then go back to the alternating, never simultaneous, sequence of eating and talking. Eating was for Kiko the epitome of pleasure, the most enjoyable of activities, and the more he elaborated on his buying-paying theory, the more he ate. We must have been at it for not less than three hours, until all other customers were gone and only our table was being served. The pasta kept coming, with both sauce and parmesan, and I ate more than I had ever eaten in my life, and Kiko ate easily three or four times as much. When we eventually left the restaurant I found it hard to walk, and it took my system a full two days to process the meal and all its after-effects. It must have been then Thursday or Friday of the following week that I called Kiko and got the hysterical reply from his mother. The first thing that came to my mind was that the bout of tuberculosis that had made his overprotective family keep him from finishing high school had suddenly returned, especially after his mother said that he had vomited blood, that they thought he was going to die and had called the doctor. But the doctor, amidst the tears of the women and the lamentations of the father, told them that Kiko’s lungs were perfectly fine. What was not fine was his stomach, and after much examination and a trip to the hospital he concluded that Kiko had perforated it—with spaghetti. I began to doubt my interest in Neji, a girl I had been pursuing for some time with decidedly mixed results. Like it or not, whether I admitted it openly to myself or refused to let it surface, I was aware that there was something lacking in my interest in her. When I had first found myself infatuated with girls, Gloria and then Amarilis, nothing had mediated my feelings towards them. I couldn’t have cared less about their families, or their social environment, or their political connections; nothing apart from the girls themselves was important, nothing beyond how I felt when...