For Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who hunts the sails in order to sail.
And there is no spoiler here. I will only say in advance that she was to blame. At first her childishness was funny, that of a grown girl, a game in which her reactions seemed frivolous and were frivolous. But a new broom sweeps clean, I used to hear my grandmother say. There was no impulsive, exaggerated, or capricious reaction to which I did not respond with a soft, very soft smile.
I am not exaggerating. They say one falls in love…
Rest assured, I cannot get ahead of myself and reveal the twist in the plot because my life has never had, until today, until tonight, any twist of chance, that surprise people call destiny. There are no key scenes without details of the surroundings, because even what has just happened lacked a plot.
I swear there will be no spoiler to ruin the expectation, like last Sunday, when I was watching the next-to-last episode of a police series on Netflix and my cousin Juan Miguel came in and told me who betrayed the heroine. No. Nothing like that, I swear it by the unexpected endings of Agatha Christie, by the investigations of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s detective. I swear it, plain and simple. You will see that I keep the promise of these opening paragraphs.
To make matters worse, she is not only Cuban but from Oriente, from a town on the edge of the Gulf of Guacanayabo, I think she told me Niquero or something like that. And I say to make matters worse not only because of the pronounced curve of her intonation, what they call a singsong because each sentence falls as if it were plunging into a ravine, but also because they arrived in Havana with one hand in front and the other behind—as my grandmother also used to say. Forgive me, but my grandmother Rafaela’s phrases have stuck to my mouth like limpets. I cannot, or perhaps do not want to, pry them loose. Here they are, like her, my woman from Oriente, who had to be named Reina. My queen.
You do not have to bow before my Reina, but you should bow before the story that afflicts me. Your genuflections will console me, I think. Though I do not know, who knows, lately we are on Facebook, in a pawnshop, Instagram, attentive to ourselves. But give me a few minutes for Reina. I will tell you the story slowly, the way one savors a few sips of aged Guatemalan or Dominican rum, perhaps from the mythical Bacardí reserves in their original cellars in Santiago de Cuba. That is how I would drink Reina whole. All of her, with this diminutive not of affection but of anthropophagy, of a Caribbean cannibal addicted to redundancies.
Reina deserves a better narrator, but this is what there is, as my grandmother Rafaela also used to say when something at lunch made my spoiled-child face pout. And nothing, absolutely nothing, of a spoiler, of revealing the plot, ruining the suspense. Who was speaking from the other corner of words?
I flee from emphasis, but I have to bite my tongue when she smiles, gestures, walks, dances. I assure you that a gust of palpitations, of corny poems, comes over me. I sweat polar ice. I am, I confess, an illusory lover, a bolero man. Can’t you see it on my face? There are people whose faces show nothing, but Reina’s does; she cannot hide her mood. Either she narrows her eyes or moves her lips to one side, blushes or turns pale… She seasons her expressions with few words, she tends to keep quiet, to listen. To listen, I think, to what I say. Although sometimes I get the impression that she is off somewhere else, perhaps in Cartagena in Murcia or Cartagena de Indias, in the Caribbean of hurricanes.
Forgive me, I allow myself to move to one side of the subject: perhaps Reina will let me set aside a paragraph for a few days earlier, to fall among the stammerings of memory, when she made confidences that I pushed away. Out of selfishness. Because finding out, far from helping, would stoke my imagination; it would make me picture other men, kisses that had no reason to be different from ours.
I confess that I do not come from any Reina. Rather from queens for a day, like that program they say brightened Sundays back when television began in Havana of cacophonies, sad tigers, enlargements of this same Malecón where Reina right now leaves her unknown, her what-will-become-of-her without Andersen’s dreams from when she read The Little Mermaid.
Little room for fantasizing. I prefer delirium, like the bolero that, if I remember correctly, says that she was the reason for his existence… You, my delirium, like my Reina, who must reach the bottom of my heart so I may express to her this delirious love that embraces my soul, which they so often asked César Portillo de la Luz to sing at the Pico Blanco of the Hotel Saint John.
I walk slowly back down La Rampa in El Vedado while avoiding revealing the ending. Although her hurried gesture thrashes inside my head, the dryness of the Sonoran Desert, squeezing a sea wasp in Guanabo, one of those they call Portuguese man-of-war. Jellyfish cannot sting more than Reina… Without mistreating the spoiler, I can offer you two or three unexpected, strange traits.
Reina is not strange, why exaggerate. And neither am I, why try to make myself interesting. What is happening—what has happened—is so common that, by changing the location and placing it in Barcelona with Juan Marsé, in Thomas Mann’s Lübeck, or in Vargas Llosa’s Arequipa, no other alterations would be necessary. We are unnoticed people. Imagine another couple that resembles ours; it will not be difficult. We are more or less similar amid more or less folkloric details. That is it: anthropology on the Internet, Artificial Intelligence that in three minutes would assemble a story, though Reina and I would preserve the singularity of our spoiler.
You will see. Try not to let anxiety devour you as you read; try not to enter a small oven, a hell as feared as Juan Carlos Onetti’s, the Uruguayan of Lombardy. Be careful not to let yourself be dragged along by photos, barking, exclamations, gossip from those who love tragedies.
Know once and for all—as my grandmother Rafaela would say—that this rainy night deserves to close, that Reina arrives, smiling beneath her blue-and-white striped umbrella. But right away she shuts down the seconds of her smile, sighs, raises her hand to shake off a few drops of rain, looks at me, though in reality I realize she is looking behind me, at the sea. She says goodbye forever with an I’m sorry, while the sky falls with the squall and on the sidewalk of the Malecón there seems to be more water than on the other side. She turns halfway toward the avenue and nothing else happens. Nothing else. Didn’t I give you my word there would be no spoiler?
