casi completamente ficción (iv)

Only when he walked out of that day’s work meeting into the full heat of the sun did he realize how effective the breezy, louvered room had been. The sun at that latitude was just plain cruel, and he suddenly felt very pale and he felt as if his lips were becoming sunburnt after only a minute or two as he walked across the rundown Communist university campus.

The campus was open and green and the buildings were all basically identical examples of what he seemed to recall was referred to as a “brutalist” architectural style. He wasn’t sure of the name and he made a mental note to look it up when he returned home to the 21st century. But it was some architectural -ism that Communists and Fascists both liked. It was like Modernism but the idea behind it was less about artistic simplicity than just a hard and heavy-handed functionality. Whatever it was called, he thought it was ugly and that it would still be ugly if any of the buildings were clean and painted and didn’t look about to fall down. He thought that about the whole damned country except for the women who were fine.

The heat was so bad that he thought he might not be able to go out to look at chicas until after the Sun went down. He thought maybe he would shower and change his shirt and jeans and get started on drinking rum for an hour or so first. Then he would walk until he got hot, return to the air-conditioned hotel room, and drink some more. Then he would go out again and repeat this process until he made a decision or until he had decided not to make a decision and was just too hot and tired to walk anymore. He thought that this might not take as long as last night since his legs were already tired from walking and this was his last night in whothefuckknowswhere before returning to Habana, and this fact added an extra urgency to the situation. This urgency was one that he knew very well, and he know that sometimes it could make for bad decisions.

He wished that he could speak more Spanish, because even more than the chicas in the street, he liked the real girls at the work conference and it would be so much better to have even a small flirtation with a real girl than an evening in a hotel bed with a chica from the street. There was a young girl with bright eyes and a tall Venezuelan woman with fierce cheekbones and both of them carried a few extra pounds in a way that he thought Latina women managed to do best. He thought certain people might call a thought like that racist but goddamn if it wasn’t true.

After that day’s work was done they took everyone at the meeting on a bus to some party in a little grove of trees. The music there was too loud for him to understand anything anyone was saying with his bad Spanish so he sat far way from the speakers until a pretty round-faced Venezuelan girl who was traveling alone asked if he would like to share a taxi back to the hotel and he said yes. They decided to take a bicycle taxi instead of a car and it felt good to squeeze into the small seat close to her and feel her next to him for the drive back to the hotel. They talked a little bit with his bad Spanish and he realized later that he had said some words wrong, but didn’t really care much. It was hot but felt nice with the breeze from the cars passing and when they got to the hotel the bike taxi driver asked for two pesos. Two pesos seemed like a piss-poor amount of money for so much work in this goddamned heat, so he gave the man three. They walked the half block to the hotel and he said adios to the Venezuelan girl and he knew nothing would come from their little ride together but it was nice to talk to a pretty girl and to sit close for a while.