The Ship of the Alvares Family

Why is that, my love – they looked into each other’s eyes seeking deep into their irises the darkish sands of Varadero.

Real men drink their tequila in one gulp, Sophia used to say before she poured the rest of the drink down her throat. Then she winked behind her dioptric lenses and with a swinging motion of her hip disappeared towards the bedroom. She had learned to walk like a real Cuban woman – straight-backed while her hips fluently transferred their weight of her rounded buttocks from left to right, from right to left, again and again, resembling a sand-clock on stilts. It is not that she didn’t have a good body, but under her very slim waist her hip swelled out like an excessively large balloon. This is because I gave birth to your three wonderful children, she smiled at him when in their rare nights of lovemaking his palms roamed the mounds of her body.

Of course, my dear, the man replied and the guilt for the unawakened erotic passion engulfed him like a rap wave.

One day Lazaro didn’t come back from work. Three times Sophia looked at her watch and three times her heart jumped a somersault. She watched every single soap on TV, she send the girls to bed, she drank three shots of tequila, she smoked eleven cigarettes and almost fell asleep on the sofa, exhausted by the tension and some vague fears.

Lazaro just didn’t want to return home.

He was sitting in Toni’s smoky little pub, where 11th street crossed 22nd and the whole life of the city paraded in front of his eyes – hurried or slow, smiling or grumbling, in love or out of love. But he, Lazaro Alvares, a 39 year-old engineer at Empressa de Hydroeconomia, was out of the game.

During those hours the man had no recollection of Sophia and his three daughters, nor of his house with a den as large as a tennis court. For only a moment, the taste of crocodile meat just consumed, reached him. He needed a place to throw up.

Hey, hombre, I’m not sure if it’s the rum you serve, but I feel sea sick, Lazaro shyly smiled at him, because he had never talked to a barman like that. He felt ashamed that he could easily let himself go all over the bar where his elbows were stuck.

They all say so, Toni replied and dropped his glass noisily back in front of his client, never return your drink half-drunk, he concluded wisely.

I have no idea what you are talking about, my friend, I don’t even know why I’m here, and more interestingly, I don’t want to remember who I am, where I am from and all the rest…

I think you need a girl, Toni smiled.

A girl, you say? I have already forgotten how you do these things with girls, I’ll fail shamefully. Toni squinted his eyes at him – the man in front looked quite well for his age, his hair was still where it should be, his sideburns partly covering the cheekbones, not unlike young Elvis’s. Cuban girls liked lips as