casi completamente ficción (v)

He looked in the mirror and decided that he looked a goddamned wreck from the bicycle taxi ride and that it was probably still too hot to start circling for a chica for the evening, so he turned on the air-conditioner and pulled off his shirt and poured himself a glass of rum that was plenty cold from the hotel room fridge. These chicas must get pretty used to having sex with sweaty guys, he thought, and that thought made him feel bad. At least bad enough that he decided to shower before heading out that evening. He figured that whatever they were charging probably wasn’t enough. Same as the guy with the bike taxi. It’s a lot of work in the goddamned heat and probably worse sometimes for the chicas than the taxi drivers. Probably most of the time. But he always tried not to think about things from that perspective because that only made him feel bad and feeling bad wasn’t what he was in Cuba to do. He wasn’t sure what he was in Cuba to do but it wasn’t to feel goddamn bad about chicas.

He looked down at his glass and was surprised to find it was already empty, and he decided to wait a while before pouring another. He ran a shower for himself a little colder than he would have if he wasn’t on some godforsaken tropical island and remembered that this hotel had no shampoo. Goddamnest thing, he thought. Even the seediest shithole motel in the States has a bottle of free goddamned shampoo for you to use. He washed up as best he could with the hard latherless Communist soap, and when he got out of the shower he enjoyed the feeling of being too cold instead of too hot, so he only dried himself a little. He stood and combed his hair back in front of the full-length mirror and realized that he had forgotten to ask the pretty round-faced Venezuelan girl her name. He had taken a picture of them together in the bike taxi, though. He looked at the picture and she was smiling and that make him feel fine.

He grabbed a linen shirt that was as ironed as a linen shirt can get, which is to say it still had some big wrinkles but all of the small wrinkles had been smoothed out. It was a sort of natural-tan-brown color that wasn’t really a color at all, and he put it on with some light blue chinos, and even though they didn’t match as well as he would have liked, he decided it was fine for walking around while the sun was still up and seeing if there were any chicas around yet. He poured himself another glass of rum that was a little too tall to drink all at once, but he drank it that way anyway, and he went for his walk.