Havana Lunar Read Online Free Page B

risk by not reporting the results to the government.”
    â€œI’ll keep it a secret if you will.”
    â€œIt’s a deal. And don’t be so sure I won’t owe you.”
    After closing up the clinic, the question was whether to spend my week’s pay from the pediátrico on a liter of gasoline or on eight ounces of coffee. Gasoline is sold in liters gracias a los Rusos, y los Chinos turned rice into kilos, but los Cubanos will always think of café in pounds and ounces. It was the night of the annual pediátrico cocktail party at the director’s home, so I opted for the liter of gas, anticipating a ride with Carlota. The station attendant tallied up my coins with the look of disgust I have come to take for granted among government workers, sitting behind empty mechanical cash registers in front of stockless shelves, taking monotonous orders for sugar water and stale congris at desultory cafeterias, their jobs served up to the humiliating doldrums of the Special Period.
    Up in the attic there was water, so I took a shower with a sliver of camphor soap scraped from a drain at the pediátrico. Before I finished bathing, Beatrice yelled up from the second floor, “MaNOlo! … TeLÉFono!” I went downstairs barefoot, dripping in a towel. Gasoline turned out to have been the wrong choice for my two hundred pesos. It was Carlota calling to tell me she had one of her headaches. “I won’t be much fun tonight. Would you mind going for a ride another night, maybe tomorrow?” Carlota, too, was on a telefono del vecino, and so for decency would say no more.
    â€œOf course not. No te preocupes. Que te mejores rápido.” I handed the phone back to Beatrice, who was grinning maliciously, and climbed the stairs to my apartment, letting the towel slip to give her a good look at my culo. I sprawled on the sofa and considered the liter of gas, wishing I had gotten café instead. Just one pot brewed on a Friday afternoon can give me a buchito every three waking hours through Sunday. With a little coffee in my belly, I don’t notice hunger as much. I might even manage to accomplish a few cosmetic jobs on the Lada. But now, with a bottle of gasoline and no place to go, Friday night was shaping up to be a long, hot migraine session sprawled on the sofa to the accompaniment of a sour stomach.
    A shout came up from the street: “¡Oye, Mano!” I pulled on a pair of pants and opened the French doors to look down. On the back of his moped sat Yorki, my best friend since el pre-universitario. While I had gotten interested in medicine, Yorki burned up jet fuel for fútbol. He played such good soccer en el pre that they compared him with a famous striker from the Czech team. All over Havana people still call him El Checo. I’d become a hard-up doctor and Yorki a sex-obsessed dishwasher, but he makes more money reselling fish the neumaticos catch along the Malecón than I do doctoring. Yorki peered up at me over his designer sunglasses. “Want to go for a walk?”
    Walking: the one thing everyone can afford in the Special Period. When I walk alone, some people, mostly children or rude adults, can’t help staring and sometimes commenting on my mark. Although for the most part the people of Vedado know and respect me for running the clinic, walking out of my neighborhood always brings new strangers. Once a Japanese tourist took a photo right in my face. There are also the regulars with their superstitions. One wide-bottomed mama with a jet-black dye always calls her children inside when I am coming down the crumbling sidewalk. But Yorki makes such an exhibition of himself with his running commentary that it eclipses my lunar.
    We trotted along the sea wall while Yorki cast piropos at women young and old, beautiful and ugly, Spandexed and army khakied. “If you cook the way you walk, mamasita, I’ll lick the burnt rice from the bottom of the