Stabs at Happiness Read Online Free Page B

else, and is arrested by the S.I.M. He looks surprised: he’s been betrayed. He knows that he’ll be tortured, but maybe they’ll let him live. You never know. Maybe they only suspect him a little. A ‘little’: that means they just take off his fingernails and put an electric wire around his balls, then give him some juice.
    â€œWhy do you go with the blancos?” asks one of them, as the others are searching the house, alluding to the fact that almost all of the island’s blacks are pro-Batista—because
El Hombre
himself is mulatto, with an unmistakably Negroid face.
    â€œYou make a mistake,” says Ulpiano. “I stay out of trouble; I just take care of myself.” He’s decided to play dumb.
    â€œOh, I see,” says the S.I.M. man, with a knowing smile. “You’re a comedian. We’re gonna have some good laughs together, aren’t we? We know some excellent jokes, you’ll see; we’ll make you laugh and laugh.”
    Ulpiano’s heart falls like a brick inside his chest.

    In a dream it’s a hundred years ago and he’s a soldier on some smaller island, Martinique or St. Kitts or Barbados, wearing a blue fancy jacket with a wine-colored diagonal sash, a gold medal, and soiled white pants. He is supposed to arrest his mother, a singer who has fallen in debt.
    â€œWhy don’t you just kill me?” she says, in her hoarse, seductive voice, smiling, not seeming to care one way or the other.
    Angel feels he has to let her go. The alternative appalls him. He tells her of a ship that is sailing before dawn: she must hurry to the harbor. He’s bribed the captain; it’s all arranged.
    She takes his sword and suspends it between them, butt against his chest, point pricking her between her breasts.
    â€œKiss me,” she says, reaching out to draw him into an embrace.
    He jerks back, and the blade clatters to the rocky ground. Elena picks it up, bending over in the dark, and then, as he steps forward to help her, she stabs him, pushing the entire length into his upper abdomen, so that perhaps the point comes out his back.
    He is shocked, but feels no pain. Neither does he bleed. Elena laughs again, beguilingly, and says that as long as he doesn’t move he won’t be hurt.
    â€œIf you stay still, you’ll be all right.” She leaves him then. He doesn’t dare call out after her. He scarcely dares breathe.
    He wants to sob, but he is too afraid. Slowly, numbly, he contemplates his position, unable to measure the passage of time. He doesn’t move.
    Then he awakens, alone in his bed at daybreak. He groans, and groans again. He’s paralyzed with pain, the phantom sword still piercing him through and through.

    Everything is owned by the North Americans. The Cuban Electric Company is a subsidiary of the Electric Bond & Share Company of New York; the Cuban-American Telephone Company is a monopoly owned by IT&T. The United States controls the deposits of chrome, nickel, and manganese, and these are mined only when the Yankees are in a war. During peacetime, the U.S. wants to keep these deposits untouched, in reserve for when they need them.
    Although you can grow almost anything in Cuba, which has fine soil, plenty of rain, and virtually no winter, more than half the food consumed here is imported from the United States.
    All Cuba is good for, they say, is sugar. But even here the North Americans have control. They have a deal to buy almost all of our sugar, every year, at a fixed price.
    They need to eat a lot of Butterfingers, Baby Ruths and Almond Joys.

    â€œWhere’s Leonora?” asks Lieutenant Santamaria, looking past Justo to the interior of the house. He’s wearing his uniform, and sunglasses, and Justo is very frightened. He has dreaded such a meeting for some time.
    â€œShe’s not here. She went out to get some food.” He elaborates, nervously: “She wanted to get some peppers, you