casi completamente ficción (vii)

He woke up two hours later and found that all the rum had caught up with him while he was sleeping, and when he stood up he felt unsteady and real bad. He lay back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling and tried to sober up just by force of will, which doesn’t always work but this time it worked a little. After a few minutes he managed to get up and walk straight and steady downstairs and across the street to buy an ice cream to cool himself off and clear his head.

The rain had stopped but the power still winked on and off in some of the buildings and he walked in his circles to find that the city had mostly shut itself down from the storm. The discoteca was closed and most of the chicas he had seen earlier were nowhere to be found. The only women he saw on the wide commercial street to the hotel were women who worked in the stores using wide mops to gather up the gallons of rain water that had leaked through the roofs and blown into the open foyers and to push it back into the street.

He circled for an hour or so and even though the streets were starting to come alive close to midnight he had almost given up and was feeling pretty bad. Then he saw two chicas walking just past the open foyer of his hotel. One was a chica he had seen on the first night there in town almost in that exact same spot and he had talked to her and later he saw her and another chica walk off with a couple of guys and that was the first time he had felt bad about that. But here she was again and she remembered him and he decided these were both good signs and he was damned if he was going to let any more indecision ruin another night. She was pretty and thin but not too thin, and he liked her manner, which was sassy without being trashy or too whorish. It took some long negotiating in bad Spanish and some confusing back and forth to get her up to his room, and he had to pay a little extra for her at the front desk of the hotel, which made him real nervous, but once she got up to the room his nervousness let up and things went better. She seemed sincere and kind, and she claimed to be a preschool teacher during the day of all things and he didn’t know if it was true or not but he decided to believe that it was.

She was real pretty. Genuinely pretty, not even just pretty for a prostitute, and he knew the difference. Up in the room she kissed him and that was real important to him. It was even more important to him than having sex with a chica. This was good thing too because he had no condoms and apparently here in Cuba the man is supposed to have the condoms, not the chica which was a damned bit of news for him to learn too late. Some news. In the States, even the cheapest motel room has shampoo for you to use and even the cheapest whore has a purse full of condoms, but apparently neither of these things is true in Cuba. It didn’t matter to him much because even though they couldn’t have sex all the way they could do a lot of other things, and those things made him feel real good in the end. He loved to kiss a new girl and this one kissed hard and fast in a way that he liked plenty. After she left, he lay in bed and his lips hurt a little from all the hard fast kissing and that was a good thing to think about and remember. It was the damnedest thing about the condom, though, and he let that bother him a little too much. But to have a pretty brown-skinned girl in your bed when you are far from home and feeling bad was a good thing in the end and he knew it would be a good memory to have.