Rita Indiana

Rita Indiana Hernández

An electric tale of apocalypse, sex and time travel from one of the Caribbean's most extraordinary cultural figures.

Tentacle

Before she worked at Esther’s house, Acilde sucked dicks at El Mirador, without ever taking off her clothes, under which her body—with its small breasts and narrow hips—passed for that of a fifteen-year-old boy. She had a regular clientele, mostly married men, sixtyish, whose dicks only perked up in a pretty boy’s mouth. She’d usually wear a polo shirt a size too big so she’d look even younger and, rather than assiduously pacing the block like her colleagues, she’d sit on a bench under an orange streetlight pretending to read a comic. The more disinterested she made her boyish self seem, the more clients she had. Sometimes she took such great pains to come off like a schoolboy out for fresh air, just leaning back on the bench, her legs crossed with a foot on her knee, that she’d forget what she was there for until a booming car horn brought her back to El Mirador and the desperate men checking her out from behind the windows of their BMWs.

This was how she’d met Eric, Esther’s right-hand man, and shaken him up. A Cuban doctor with movie-star good looks, Eric didn’t need to pay for sex but he was crazy about those middle-class white boys who sold themselves so they could buy the pills they were addicted to. That night in the presidential suite—what they called the patch between the bushes where the grass was softest—Acilde sucked him and let him grab her head. Eric touched her hairless cheeks and pumped them with cum, recovering his erection almost immediately. “Get naked cuz I’m gonna stick it in you,” he ordered, while Acilde spit to the side, brushed off the knees of her Levis with both hands, and asked for the five thousand pesos the blow job was worth. “I wanna screw you,” Eric said, jerking off as the car lights raced over his chest and belly. Acilde hadn’t quite finished saying “gimme my money, faggot” when Eric launched himself on top of her, immobilizing her, face down, and stifling her screams of “I’m a girl, shithead” with the gravel stuffed in her mouth. At this point, Eric didn’t care what she was and just shoved his dry dick up her ass. When he finished and Acilde stood to pull up her pants, he flicked a lighter and approached her to confirm it was true that she was a woman. “I’m gonna pay you more for the special effects,” he said. And when she saw how much more, she accepted his invitation to breakfast.

“Wake up, Goya, get it together. You have impeccable technique but nothing to say. Look around, damn it, do you think a bunch of little angels is what’s needed here??”

[...] a public car, a 2007 Honda Civic, which still preserved the original ash gray paint job twenty years later [...]

Iván had seen Cremaster 2 in Madrid at the Reina Sofía the year before and Elizabeth had seen it in Chicago in 1999. Malagueta had never left the island and Argenis had only been as far as Cuba, to a camp for the children of revolutionaries, so they had to make do with Iván’s narration.

The reading competed with the associations Argenis was making in his mind: They are referring to me, I’m never going to get ahead, the dead buccaneers have come to find me, Goya’s engravings are a sign: they are going to mutilate me.

They’re in Playa Bo. The Menicuccis’ beach is almost unrecognizable, the sea full of shoals, fish swimming in circles in the hundreds, some a meter long that could be pulled from the water by hand. A galleon with its sails furled is anchored a short distance from the coast and two small rowboats approach to pick them up.

this double transition....rita indiana u ate

Iván never shut up. He had a special talent for closing down the most disparate and extreme arguments, which had nothing to do with Cuban history, with anecdotes about Cuba, Fernando Ortiz, or Fidel. Argenis was completely out of it. This had happened to him in high school all the time: the teacher would talk and, in his mind, he’d be concocting fantasies, usually sexual and involving classmates, while the teacher, the desk, and his companions all disappeared, lost to the hormonal onslaught of his mental movie. But this was different. He hadn’t tried to conjure anything, and he wasn’t inventing; he had no control whatsoever over what he was seeing as clear as a memory. He was once more in the hut from his dreams.

its always the worst characters that are the funniest

He hated Professor Herman and the pretensions he had picked up from her. I have to get committed to an insane asylum or become an evangelical, he thought, wishing for a relief that neither painting nor the comforts of Playa Bo had brought him.

like 2 days after i read this passage our tour guide on this puerto rico rainforest tour mentions the taínos

She loved to look at the images of her ancestors in the illustrated history books, hunting, sowing, fishing, and dancing the areíto, though she knew what was written in those books wasn’t true. The books said there were fewer than six hundred Taínos by 1531 and that, a little later, they had completely disappeared. Her family, descended from caciques and behíques, had survived, like many others in the Republic they’d stayed in contact with to marry their young people and enact their rituals. The books said nothing of the men from the water, who came every so often to help them, nor of the Spanish, who’d stolen power from the Arawaks to conquer the other tribes on the continent. Ananí had been taught never to speak of these things with anyone, and she had always complied with that order. She left school in fourth grade. Nenuco made it to eighth grade; his parents had said that to deal with those who were sleeping, you had to know what they were thinking.

Even amidst the dryness of the beach, the garden blossomed in the shade of the almond trees, roses, bromeliads, dwarf palms, and ferns, which Nenuco brought from the gardens he tended so beautifully in the houses and hotels where he found work.

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