casi completamente ficción (ii)

At 9:30 the next morning, he sat doing the work he was sent to Cuba to do, and as he sat he marveled than any place could be this hot at 9:30 in the morning. But there was always a breeze which he guessed was because the island was so flat and you could never be too far from the sea. So he sat in the classroom next to the windows, which were really just wooden louvered shutters. As far as he could tell there was almost no glass anywhere in this city. The classroom windows were louvered shutters, and the opposite wall was made of louvered shutters, and the wall of the hallway was made of louvered shutters so that when they were all open, a breeze could blow straight through the whole building. So even as it got hotter in the afternoon you could always feel a fine breeze on you, and while he was often uncomfortable, the heat was never too much to bear.

It was remarkable to him how little difference there was between indoors and outdoors in this country. Houses seemed to spill out into the sidewalks and windows were always open and patios turned into foyers which turned into rooms without doors and at some point you could think of yourself as being “inside” but there was no way to draw a definite line. Sometimes when walking down the street past wide open houses he felt as if he had just walked right through the middle of someone’s living room.

Besides the incredible heat, the most remarkable thing about the morning was that he had no trace of a hangover, even though he was pretty sure he had drank quite a bit of rum the night before. He couldn’t be sure how much, because he had bought himself a whole bottle for the hotel room and the bottle was dark and he had not kept very good track of how much was left in it. But he had spread the drinking out over many hours and and he did walk an awful lot so he figured he must have burned off most of the bad chemicals that would have given him a hangover in his muscles instead. It seemed as good an explanation as any. He woke early with no alarm, and celebrated by downing the last bit from a glass of rum that he had left in the fridge.

He tried to focus on his work at the conference but he was tired from all the circling and the indecision of the previous night, and his brain was tired from listening to so much Spanish, which he didn’t speak well enough to ever understand more than half of what was being said. He gave his own talk in slow, careful English that he was pretty sure most people understood. At least they asked the kind of questions you couldn’t ask unless you had understood pretty well.

He didn’t understand much from their presentations, though, especially when the Cubans spoke their fast and rough version of Spanish which seemed to him to involve leaving out just as many letters as you said. Spanish always struck him as an easy language, but when you leave out half the S’s and D’s in the middle of words or mumble off all the endings it turns it into something else. There was a fellow from Peru that he understood pretty well and one gentleman from Brazil who he understood the best, on account of the fact that he spoke his second-language Spanish slowly with a Portuguese accent, Most of the presentations he was able to get the main idea, but none of the details. It was certainly not worth whatever it had cost his bosses to send him here.

Because of the way his eyes had spent the night before, it was hard for them not to also notice during the day how lovely some of the women at the conference were. And because of how the Cuban women dressed in the weather, he had certainly never seen so much cleavage at a professional meeting. He thought that one particular young graduate student who wore a thin white cotton dress may just have had the finest breasts he had ever seen but that may have just been because he could see so much of them so early in the morning. They weren’t so much big as they were perfectly shaped, like in a figure-drawing book from the 1950s.

He had always had a thing for Latinas anyway, and the spectrum of women here from all across Latin America kept his eyes plenty busy and his mind plenty distracted from the fact the he only understood about half of what was being said at any given moment. In Cuba the women ranged in appearance from what would be considered just plain “white” in the States to what would be considered just plain “black” with every shade in between. Only there didn’t seem to be different racial groups that you could draw lines between like you still could in even the most diverse parts of America. There was just a smooth transition like the transition from indoors to outdoors in all the houses and buildings. Maybe his eyes just weren’t educated to it. But he did know that there was one region of this spectrum that he liked the most, and that was a certain shade of brown just darker than a good beach tan but more real and natural looking in the way that it made the women that color look just a little better when they were sweating in the heat and the skin of their forearms glowed just so in the sun. He hoped that maybe that night he might find a chica that color and have some rum and have a fine time and leave this awful little town feeling good. Or at least not feeling bad.