why? I shouldn’t, obviously… but I’m bereft of all that matters in this life! I don’t even have an ancestry… My goddamned grandfather, the great sluice gate operator for the Malecón waterworks, cut the family tree out from under me… and I don’t even know where I’m going to sleep. Christ, I’d rather have a conversation with a snake than have nobody to talk to.::::::
Nestor and the reporter sat at the bar and ordered coffee. Very deluxe looking, the bar at the Isle of Capri… Lights from below beamed up through an array of liquor bottles against a vast mirrored wall. The beams lit up the liquor bottles… absolutely glamorous, and the mirrored wall doubled the show. The show dazzled Nestor, even though he knew all these bottles existed for the benefit of middle-aged americanos who liked to talk about how “hammered” they got last night, how “wasted,” “smashed,” “destroyed,” “retarded,” and even how they “blacked out” and didn’t know where the hell they were when they woke up. The americano idea of being a Man sure wasn’t a Latino’s. Nevertheless, the way the bottles here in the Isle of Capri put on their light show made him feel delirious with the luxury of it all. He was also as tired as he had ever been in his life.
The coffee arrived, and John Smith of the Herald got down to business. “As I said, I’m doing a follow-up story to the man on the mast—how you saved the guy—but my sources tell me that far from looking at you as a hero, a lot of Cubans think of you as something close to a traitor”… whereupon he cocked his head and stared at Nestor with an expression that clearly asked what do you say to that.
Nestor didn’t know what to say… the coffee with the sugar he heaped in it the Cuban way was ambrosial; it made him hungry. He hadn’t had enough to eat during the shift. The fact that his existence, if that was what it was, embarrassed other Marine Patrolmen took his appetite away. John Smith was waiting for an answer. Nestor was confused as to whether he should go into all this or not.
“I guess you should ask them,” he said.
“Ask who?”
“Ask… I mean… Cubans, I guess.”
“I’ve been doing that,” said John Smith, “but they’re not comfortable with me. To most of them I’m an outsider. They don’t want to say much… when I start asking them about ethnic attitudes and nationalities and anything in that area. They’re not comfortable with the Herald, period, as far as that goes.”
Nestor smiled, but not with pleasure. “That’s for sure.”
“Why does that make you smile?”
“Because where I come from, Hialeah, people say, ‘The Miami Herald’ and in the next breath, ‘Yo no creo.’ You’d think the full name of the paper was Yo No Creo el Miami Herald. You know ‘yo no creo’?”
“Sure. ‘I don’t believe.’ Yo comprendo. And they’re doing the same thing with you, Nestor.”
The reporter hadn’t called him by his first name before. It bothered Nestor. He didn’t know how to take it. He didn’t know whether the man was being congenial or using the first name the way you would somebody beneath you… like a fumigador. Many customers called his father Camilo right off the bat. “They’re twisting everything around with you, too,” the reporter was saying. “They’re taking what you did, which I—I think I made it pretty clear in what I wrote—which I consider an act of great courage and strength, and they’re twisting it into a cowardly act!”
“Cowardly?” said Nestor. That startled him and hit a nerve. “They can say a lot of things, traidor and all that, but I haven’t heard anybody say ‘cowardly.’ I’d like to know how the hell anybody could say ‘cowardly’… Jesus Christ… I’d like to see anybody else come close to what I did… ‘Cowardly.’ ” He shook his head. “You heard somebody actually use that word, cowardly?”
“Yes. ‘Cobarde,’ they said… every time.”
“They?” said Nestor. “How do you know that? You said they wouldn’t talk to you.”
“Some of them talk to me,” said John Smith. “But that wasn’t where I heard it. I heard it on the radio, and not just once, either.”
“What radio? Who said it?”
“The Spanish-language stations,” said John Smith. “ ‘Cobarde.’ In fact, I think it was two or three stations.”
“Assholes,” muttered Nestor. He could feel his adrenaline kicking. “What’s supposed to be cobarde about it? How do they figure they can call