Cubop City Blues by Pablo Medina Read Free Book Online

awareness that often leads to paralysis, though he might call it comfort.
    His mind returns to the field, the way it slopes gently toward the water and then, with a sudden dip, reaches the sand. Yellow flowers, the names of which he doesn’t know, sway in the breeze. Overhead a hawk is thermalling, and far away on the ocean’s surface tiny sailboats are flashing in the sun. Off the corner of his eye he notices a figure dressed in white looking at him. This story was going to be about her and about the small house they share on the hill. It is there where he is trying to recreate the universe in his image, but every day it becomes more arduous, less like him and increasingly like a broken atomized picture where only his chin or his ears or his shadowed brow or sometimes a tooth or half a tongue is identifiable. Behind the hill on which the house sits are two ridges. A trestle bridge crosses from one ridge to the other, and it is rumored that in the old days, young pregnant women threw themselves off it into the path of oncoming trains. Nothing of the sort has happened since they’ve been here.
    The white figure that appeared on the edge of the field is his lover. She has been very good to him, keeping the house in order and making suggestions as he goes about recreating the universe. As he said, it is a difficult process and he simply cannot keep track of everything. One day he puts a gun on the table on one page and on the next he has a vase of flowers. Guns to roses? No. Sloppiness. Or a character is blonde in chapter 3 but dark haired in chapter 5. Once, he created the character of a priest who was the embodiment of goodness itself. A few pages later, the priest was unexpectedly found in bed with his niece. It was as if the universe, infinite in its possibilities, kept intruding on the fiction—no, on his writerly mind—and insisted on fighting the convolutions of actuality with the artifice of linear narrative. His lover has been quite helpful in pointing these things out and quite helpful, too, in the subtle ways in which she eases him when the writing is not going well. Just last week, for example, before she went out for the day, she left lunch on the table and next to it the Hemingway book open to his favorite passage of “Big Two-Hearted River.” He ate lunch at ten in the morning and spent the rest of the day reading and rereading that passage.
    After the dishes are done, an antediluvian quiet settles over the house. The crickets chirp and a whip-poor-will sings. His lover and he sit on the sofa and discuss the next day’s work. Her docility then is in contrast to the catlike spirit that leaps out of her in moments of anger or when she abandons herself to the pleasures of the bed. She’s had plenty of experience with other lovers, but it is mostly instinct that drives her, not knowledge. He’s flesh in her maw and he submits. She keeps him from falling into the abyss of the birds without caring what is eternal: joy or terror. Love comes in many guises.
    As she approaches he notices that her face bears an expression he’s never seen before, a stony indifference, a stern determination. Her steps are not languorous but forceful, martial even, as if she were following the orders of a higher force. When she reaches him, she looks down, and for a moment he can see the wings of pity fly across her eyes, but they are soon replaced by a rapine shadow that presses him down and keeps him on the ground in the same position from which he has been admiring the sea and the sailboats.
    Oh, she’s come to tell him that she cannot live with him anymore, that she has found someone else, etc., etc. She will leave today with her clothes and some of the things he has given her. He feels as if he must get up and be at eye level with her, but her gaze, which he himself has made all-powerful, pins him to the ground. She turns, and in her turning is such grace he can barely stand it. His heart is