Translated by Susannah Rodríguez Drissi
Illustrations by César Beltrán
1.
This would be the last one, the most grandiose and spectacular. His most guerrilla mass and the most revolutionary. A miraculous blend of Pinochet and Perón. It would be this and many other things, depending on how history would later invent a history for itself, in reverse. But above all, or after all, it would be his last, in any variation. For an Argentine, with a couple of years of magna masses, it had been lesson enough. Consummatum est. Fuck it. And, amen.
2.
It was two or two-ish in the morning. I went out anyway, hailing the first pay-in-dollars taxi that showed up. When I got to JE’s, Ahmel Ahmel was already waiting for me in the garage, with fear on his face.
“Don’t make noise, fuck, his parents’ll wake up,” he said. “Don’t make noise, blanquito, JE’s got it all figured out.”
And then, still with a terror-stricken face, “Cubano, this is it. The future’s today.”
(He means me, in case it isn’t obvious. Ahmel Ahmel likes to call me that. Sometimes “blanquito,” sometimes “cubano.” It has to do with imports from the past and other mental knots that are neither here nor there now.
3.
I couldn’t believe it—I just couldn’t believe it. Somnambulant convergence, collective insomnia, the People’s nightmare. Who the hell knows. What’s certain is that the three of us had thought the same thing, at the same time—I suppose. The Pope’s mass the following morning in the Plaza de la Revolución wouldn’t let us sleep.
No one would stop him. Nor would anyone freeze the avalanche of rodent sneers between cardinals and commanders, ministers and missioners, workers and bishops, little virgin angels and agents in grimy green. Nor would they prevent the souls of our atheist proletariat from gathering there tomorrow morning.
But as three trifling tigers of totalitarianism, we could make it ugly for the Pampas Pope. No more homilies that imitate a certain Eurocentric difficulty with the Spanish language. No more peace on earth and Hosanna in the highest of Latin America I am son and to her I am indebted. No more reconciliation with the crucified of the hammer and sickle, or atop a pair of imitation paddles.
Ahmel Ahmel was right. Cubanos, this was it. The future would really be today.
4.
JE came down to the garage and greeted us with a silent film “Hi” (the h squeaking like a Spanish j). He dragged one of those duffle bags so typical of charters that line up in the heavens from Havana to Miami, and vice versa. Hundreds of planes in both directions and going only one way: forward. The result of a citizen-driven initiative promoted by the president of the Cuban parliament, before his brain collapsed from cancer (he succeeded in resigning from all his posts, without yielding for an instant to either fear or sentimentalism).
Carefully, JE placed the duffel bag of victory by his feet. His Anglophone lips in close-up mouthed another deaf syllable: “Here.” (Two, phonetically. In Cuba, it’s justifiable that no operation ever turns out perfect. Nor a sentence.)
5.
The mulatico kneeled in reverence before the duffle bag. That’s what I call Ahmel Ahmel, not so much for the color of his skin, but for the demonym he dons on me. “Cubano” of what the fuck. I still aspire to be a barrio Belge, or an archipelago Norwegian. Or better: Icelandic, in itself—Icelandic an sich (a whole philosophical category in the Cuban meta-twilight.)
Ahmel Ahmel’s head ended up between the bulge laying on the floor like a cadaver and JE’s no less bulging crotch. We were overly aroused by our mission. It was now or now. There was no time for unexpected geometries. I helped him open the duffle bag as if an autopsy, and then we saw its fabulous fulgor.
The saver bulb from a crumbling Nuevo Vedado garage shed over us but a thin thread of light. Inside the duffle bag, however, there beat an immanent shine, a chrysalis on the brink of lashing the night with life’s flutter. That is to say, like a creature edging forward agonically toward extinction. A shine paradoxically opaque, from a hasteless shotgun: .223 caliber Bushmaster, with telescopic view calibrated in a digital HD grid.
JE gave us more manufacturing details, but we didn’t need them. Such a high-end timepiece had been used in a thousand and one amateur attacks in the United States of America. It never failed. The internet headlines didn’t lie, even in a city without internet like La Habana.cu. It was a recurrent jewel in Saturday-night, Yanqui action films, transmitted punctually by national TV. Cuba as a polygonous pirate of the worst and most profitable Hollywood, LA productions.
We knew plenty about sniper firearms. Had read Gerardo Fernández Fe’s manuals by heart. In theory, we’d mastered the electronic cause responsible for the opaque shine of certain metals. And trusted in its ergonomic architecture, so that upon shooting, not even an extra from the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television would fuck it up.
We knew that in the Sierra Maestra Fidel had posed for the New York Times with one of those contraptions. Bang. As early as pre-school we’d been taught that Allende fell in battle defending La Moneda with one of Fidel’s Bushmasters, autographed by the dozens. Bang, bang. They were the jewels of the La Guardia family, presidential serial-killers who used them as much in South America as in the Manhattan Trump Tower. Bang, bang, bang.
But we lacked some practice. In Defense Preparation classes at the university, we learned to load and unload some analogous models (from the socialist camp), with and without blinders. JE was the only one who passed the test by fire, breaking record time, and with a single hand.
“You stole it?” I couldn’t stop my voice from booming amidst the neighborhood’s exasperating stillness. “Where did you find that monstrosity?”
JE didn’t give a second thought to my astonishment. With only few words from our papal spring, he convinced me: “From Saturday’s third film—where else could I have found it?”
“It’s Sunday, isn’t it?” JE added, while Ahmel Ahmel cuddled the good soldier, Bushmaster, in his blackish hands.
6.
We’d met at the last Casa de la Cultura, a sort of still-standing, wannabe castle confiscated from Batista’s upper class; and where the State offered one of those literary workshops it cooked up from time to time.
We were young, we were good. We were blanquitos, mulaticos, cubanos. Hard core narrators who couldn’t get themselves to narrate their first narrative. “Prospects,” they would have called us, in other major leagues and publishing houses somewhere. We listened, debated, argued. We read every so often, although less than what the salaryless assessor imposed on us. “Tolle, lege,” the fucker would cite Saint Agustin. That salaryless assessor, like the Commander in Chief in some banners, didn’t ask his flock to “belief,” but to “read.” (The Commander in Chief didn’t charge a salary either: there’s no country without virtue, nor does professional virtue exist. And, on this matter, Chaplin could have been the ideological badge of the Cuban Revolution).
Then something happened. A glitch in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the zero years or the two thousands.’ The threesome slip of our gloryless writers’ improvised vocation (we applied to UNEAC, but they never answered). We broke the will to invent aesthetics—or it was broken for us. We got bored of crafting a narrative always on the verge of being narrated.
Ahmel Ahmel had it easier and became the editor of an official journal, extralegally paid by an anti-embargo Cuban-American. I remained floating, just as I was before playing intellectual hopscotch (Get thee behind me, Cortázar). JE became a kind of terrorist.
In one of those so-called “Disassembly” sessions, the salaryless assessor asked for JE’s opinion about a story that a workshop participant had just come up with during a class exercise. He asked him if what the other one read had been good or bad. I remember JE’s hyperdramatic pause. He looked at the ceiling of the Casa de la Cultura, plastered centuries earlier (now bubbling up). He looked at the walls of the Casa de la Cultura, wallpapered centuries earlier. He looked outside (rural and tugurized Havana, still standing through sheer spiritual static) and then, he answered:
“If it was possible to write it, then it’s already bad. If it was possible to read it, then much worse. But it’s no big deal—another pause and more panning. We don’t want any contact with any type of narrative.”
He turned to us. Ahmel Ahmel and I were stunned. And with authority that sprung from a kind of debut-terrorist rapture, he ordered:
“Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
7.
The plan was simple. Lady D, our girlfriend in common, lived in the 18-story building of Nuevo Vedado. She was a star, very rare. A sociologist given to karate, exiled in Miami for a time and later returned to Cuba—like so many poets and opposers. Unlike the three of us, Lady D had intuited nothing. At that time, she slept like a goddess. Like three goddesses: one for each one of us.
We had the key to 17-D, her floor. Silently, we burst into the Eastern European-style apartment. And woke her up, as best as one can rouse a loved one in the deep end of twilight. Each one explained the simplicity of our plan in his own way, and Lady D approved each one of us with her marvelous mnnn-mnnn-mnnn, but didn’t unglue her eyelids:
“Darling, we are going to kill the Pope,” Ahmel Ahmel told her.
“Darling, we are going to kill the Pope,” JE told her.
“Darling, we are going to kill the Pope,” I told her.
(In alphabetical order. Please note that my name does not start with an I, but with an O.)
8.
Death motivated Lady D only partially. Especially since JE spent hours and hours explaining his hare-brained desire to go on a killing spree and later die individually. A literary dystopia until today, when we’d turn it into the most radical of realisms. (The salaryless assessor would also cite Marx once in a while: Practice is the criterion of truth.)
JE pulled another key from a drawer, the key to the rooftop lock. We wouldn’t climb much more. Lady D lived in the 17th floor, the penultimate floor that, by the way, was also her age when we met her. She was standing on the eaves, on the tips of her toes, and already on the verge of a vertiginous ballet toward the void. (Absence is the true criterion of truth, our salaryless assesor would conclude, when the solidity of Marx’s maxim melted in the air.)
The steps were a disgusting pestilence lit by strands of light from the ubiquitous lightsaver bulb. Milky spark plugs that Cuba imported to the Southern Cone by the millions, and whose ephemeral filaments went out at speeds never before seen in the history of Cuban bulbs (due, it’s said, to salt levels on the island).
We stepped onto the roof of the 18th-story building. Oblivious, Lady D slept one floor down. So we tempered our step and avoided dragging those objects that dragged us as a test of faith. On top of everything else, JE had picked up a titanic tripod from our girlfriend in common’s apartment. Heavy, like a pulsating radio star. Ahmel Ahmel was responsible for the giant duffle bag with the Bushmaster .223 and its pixelated viewfinder, in imitation of a space telescope. I went along just as I’d left my house hours earlier, floating in nothing and toward nothing. It was almost six. Time flies when ideas are vital. Read, ideas about how to intervene in the life of others (the origin of every State and every religion).
Dawn came on peacefully in a nameless city that, for us, would always be La Habana. We anchored the Bushmaster on the filmic tripod. We pointed it toward the improvised, sacrosanct altar erected in a Catholic Plaza de la Revolución. And, as god intended, we waited.
9.
When the morning’s 9am canon went off, the sun beat hard. Almost from its zenith. September’s Sunday in flames. A month that regurgitated megatons from June’s, July’s, and August’s radiation combined. And from all the accumulated years in a lethal latitude. Not a leaf from fall’s relief. Countries without seasons are a calamity. Under Cuba’s climate, it’s cruel to imagine surviving into the twenty-second century. Under Cuba’s climate, it’s cruel to imagine anything other than surviving into the twenty-second century.
We had the perfect angle. The only object higher than our 18th-story was precisely the roughbound monolith that constituted the revolupapal plaza. It was there we aimed. The ribs of Jesus’s heart against Ernesto Guevara Ché’s face, Made in Korda, converged in the collimator’s grid. And, judging from the bodyguards and the correspondents’ nervous antics, we must have been close to bull’s eye on the Pope’s Gaucho shell, on its via cuba toward the gallows. (There are metaphors of such violent beauty. Or perhaps, very beautiful violences. How to distinguish, when JE’s finger was tickling the clitoris of that major artillery).
Bushmaster. Bush’s teacher or master. The rooftop as an ideal bush for an urban ambush, amidst a magnificent maremagnum of magnicides, from Lincoln to JFK. And it was here that we saw its legs open wide, nailed to the building’s rooftop, like a compass, to gain equilibrium. A matter of finding its center of mass and other gravitational equations. Cats know about these little tricks of muscular balance. More than a post-literary workshop terrorist, JE had turned into a fascinating feline. Without a teacher, but without a master. Not Bush’s tiger, but Deleuze’s.
10.
“Bang!”
“Bang, bang!”
“Bang, bang, bang!”
11.
After leaving that “technical narratives” workshop, our gesture became known as The Three’s Protest. Ahmel Ahmel, JE and I moved our forums to the most inconceivable corners of the city. To parks punctured by anti-aerial shelters, to public pools, to obsolete bus stops, to deathly museums; and, of course, sometimes to beds and, at other times, to Lady D’s rooftop. Narrating was a pleasure. And in order to narrate, it was imperative not only that we write, but also that we reject the repetitive repression that wanting to write constituted.
Hiding in any ruin in ruins or in state of reparation was a special pleasure. As was telling each other things, complicities singed by our individual poetics. Lady D did nothing more than listen, incombustible. But this in no way means that she didn’t tell us about her own things. She did, but she did so to the beat of silence; or to the beat of that smile, half-ferocious, half-drowsy with sleep: a gentle pull of her upper lip, shedding light on her northern cheekbones. (The gums of our asbestos love blinded us three.)
Ahmel Ahmel, JE and I will never forget her generous gesture. Our Nordic girl from Nuevo Vedado. Our line of flight, without organs or orgasms, amidst the patrial pastiche that is re-mixing the miserable + markets, christs + criminals, and crosses + consummatum est + fuck it + amen. Lady D’s adolescence allowed us to survive the obsolescence of our Brave New Habana.
12.
The sirens must have been heard as much in the Vatican as in the White House. It seemed to be the cyclical noise from police cars, firetrucks and ambulances; but chaos meant a little more today. Music, mulatico. The sound of future, blanquito. Melodies we, Cubans, miss. A speeding up of time in capsules of calibre .223; history’s particles sped up to 666 meters per second, multiplied by each one of JE’s six shots (six rams executed without a symptom of doubt or desperation). Bang, bang, bang. Like childhood’s onomatopoeias. Bang, bang. A game without rules, other than precision and reproducibility. Bang. The cardinals’ epaulettes were the first to be tainted by a deep red.
JE stopped shooting, and we began to take turns on the viewfinder. We didn’t have the faintest idea that the Pope would have so much blood in his veins. Nor did they have the faintest notion from where the shots came—if they were, in fact, shots. So they looked to the sky, perhaps suspecting a satellital threat. (Weeks earlier, the Cuban government had squabbled with high executives at Google Maps.)
The minutes that follow will remain in our faulty, threesome memory, depending on whose turn it was on the magic viewfinder. We attempted to record, but the card demanded we download an App from iBush, which implied that the rifle should have access to the internet. (In any case, it’s known that Cuban telephone enterprise only recognizes the oldest AK models: those dated before 1994).
I limit myself, then, to recall a series of images that I either saw in person or that together, Ahmel Ahmel, JE and I narrated to ourselves—extraordinarily narrated to ourselves:
“I saw some Talía,” I told, “covering the body of army general, Raúl Castro Ruz, with her journalist’s guile. Once they’d overcome their initial confusion, the personal security team resumed the labor of risking their own life, in favor of saving the Premier’s, leaving Talía behind—not having instructions that indicated otherwise. (The papal guard was left unemployed ipso facto: from JE’s first mini-missile, not one of those Jesuit converts had much to entertain themselves with. Dead Popes don’t give masses.
“I saw the Cuban flag,” I told. “its ruby-red triangle fading drop by drop over the commoners’ rabies (distance slows down the perception of events: what’s called the Doppler Deffect). It seemed equally a performance in slow motion, imported with airs of provocation.”
“I saw a Cubana plane gliding in reckless pirouettes above the faithful,” JE told. “The aircraft’s door was opened. And the half body of a half-naked Thais, Juan Cremata’s fetish actress, hung from it, surrounded by children in parachutes, or corsets, perhaps.”
“I saw a coffin spinning like a weathercock above the National Library,” said Ahmel Ahmel. It could also be a book in the shape of a coffin. Or a coffin that has taken the shape of its many books.
“I saw Eliecer Ávila,” told JE, “drinking blood from Ricardo Alarcón’s four-pieced, open cranium. A family meal.
“I saw Ernesto Guevara, El Ché,” said Ahmel Ahmel. “He winked at me with his gaucho eyebrows, disguised in ministry—his features, Made in Korda, without transparency or superimposition, captured through the hole on the pontiff’s chest, mid sternum.” (JE had a medal-winning aim).
“I saw John Paul II alive,” I said. “Drooling with a liberating shine, and saying through his tears, in another Sunday that wasn’t the same but that, in fact, was: Thou art a very enthusiastic people.”
“I saw a dead Pampas Pope,” I said, “as dead as we’d imagined the night before. Dead, and in the middle of his last grandiose and spectacular, guerrilla and revolutionary mass, or from a Pinochet-Perón remix.
There were many more mirages of the kind, but none of them were a big deal at this point. We didn’t want any contact with any kind of narration. JE stood up and made the Bushmaster disappear inside the duffle bag, without giving Ahmel Ahmel a chance to take his turn (we spied counterclockwise). JE unscrewed the tripod, folded it by the joints, and like a dot-dot-dot, handed it to me. Then, with an unrecognizable indifference for someone of his tiger and terrorist disposition, he invited us diplomatically:
“Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
13.
Lady D was still asleep. We decided not to wake her. Much like other times when we’d arrived at odd hours, we took a shower for three, and returned cautiously to her room. Outside, the sirens lulled themselves to sleep. All would pass, as always. As always, all would have to be left behind.
We laid down by the foot of her bed like criminal cubs, so as to not squeeze her too much against the mattress. It was the first noon of a false Cuban autumn and the heat was unclassifiable, in spite of the hush-hush from the air conditioner. We turned it down to the maximum. That is, we turned it up to the minimum: 59 degrees Fahrenheit was the most that console, bought in a Dantesque, Miami-Dade mall, could cool.
It hadn’t been necessary to put it in words, but at the level of her floor’s glacial granite, we enjoyed an ecstatic state, as from a pristine peace. To top it off, Lady D turned several times in the sheets, and whispered to each one of us (or mumbled, as in a dream):
“Mmm,” for Ahmel Ahmel.
“Mmm,” for JE.
“Mmm,” for me.