Adios Muchachos Read Online Free PDF Page A

your things and get out.”
    It was obvious, of course, that there was no way that Carlos could be made to fit into Ali’s project. Not that she ever said anything. But it was the kind of project that required total dedication, and since her baby had made the decision, what else could she do but get rid of the excess baggage and back her all the way. And there was no time to be wasted; that ass, those boobs, that twenty-three-year-old skin, and those huge balls of hers were not going to last forever.
    The whole plan, it was true, had been Alicia’s creation—from the gimmick of showing off her ass on the bike to the operating procedure for seduction. But Margarita, like Queen Isabella of Castille, had believed, believed so hard that she sold her last jewel to pay for the first bicycle in US dollars.
    “Well, this is it; it’s now or never,” Alicia had said when they went to buy the bike.
    “It’s all his fault,” Margarita said, recalling her exhusband with loathing, “and that bald prick Gorbachev, who screwed up everything.”
    If the Soviet Union had not caved in, there would be no Special Period in Cuba. Alicia would have finished her studies at the university. She would certainly have gotten herself the right kind of husband: somebody in the nomenklatura , a technocrat, or maybe an artist, which had been her childhood dream.
    But in 1994, when the crisis was affecting their stomachs, their feet, and even their minds, Alicia’s patriotism could stretch no further, so she decided to become a whore.
    “Yes, whore, whore, of course I’m a whore,” the baby had insisted.
    With blackouts every night and daily bread rations down to a single roll per person, Alicia had made several honest attempts to rope herself a rich foreigner who could take her out of the country and set her up with the lifestyle she wanted. She said that she had only one life to lead and that she had expensive tastes. She said that she wanted to satisfy those tastes in this one life she had and that right now was not soon enough.
    On two occasions, during the years 1994 and 1995, her honest attempts had been on the verge of fruition but had fallen through at the very last moment.
    The day came, then, when Alicia decided to become a whore.
    Not a single speech more! Whenever she saw Fidel on television, she would turn it off. Well, they could just take their fucking morality and their fucking principles and stuff them. A whore, and that’s that!
    Margarita had to agree. What else could she do? She certainly had no way to stop her daughter. And finally, in a flood of tears, she confessed to herself that if she had been twenty years younger she would have done the same thing.
    “My poor baby …”
    “Poor baby, my ass! Go to your fucking church if you want to cry.”
    Alicia and her mother had never stood against the Revolution.
    Margarita was born in 1948. She studied painting at San Alejandro during the late ’60s and then did a couple of years of an Art History major at the university. Then came her marriage and the traveling. With Hermán, an official with the Ministry of Foreign Trade who was about two decades her senior, Margarita had spent five years in Belgium and three in England. She was descended from one of the old well-to-do families of Havana, but out of love for Hermán, a good-looking, virile man, patriotic and Fidelista , she had deserted her rich family when they emigrated to Miami and embraced the revolutionary process quite sincerely—always from a very comfortable position, of course, but the embrace was sincere.
    When she and her husband were recalled back to Cuba, Margarita got her first job in a museum. For the last ten years, she had worked in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, first as a secretary and then in the protocol department.
    Margarita had felt completely at home in that rarefied cosmopolitan environment, working with foreign guests and organizing the details of their visits to Havana. And although she had