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to this end they’d taken over part of a cemetery in Guanabacoa which had been abandoned in the ’60s by Jews fleeing to New York. That’s where I had quite an adventure after Pascualito ordered us to make a grave.
    “You and Jeremías will dig the final resting place for a brother who’s died,” he said.
    I’ve always been scared stiff of cemeteries. We went in terrified, with Jeremías muttering angrily. The cemetery was on a small hill, full of ceiba trees and rounded by a crumbling wall. The graves of the Jews were lost among the fallen leaves and only patches of the Hebrew lettering could be seen on the tombstones. In the back, next to the wall, we found the small mounds under which the dwarves were buried. We began to dig and by noon we had a pretty decent hole.
    When Pascualito showed up alongside the wall, he offered us swallows of a potion made from roots and said he was going to give the go-ahead to start the funeral. He immediately asked us to leave, saying that the ceremony was only for denizens of the underground. We took our time collecting our tools and that way we managed to catch a glimpse of the entrance of the Grail’s court, with a huge chalice up front held by a dwarf boy. For the first and only time I also saw the Supreme Chief.
    “Art among arts, guidance and splendor, sovereign of the sun!” proclaimed the boy.
    The Supreme Chief was fat, pot-bellied, and bare-chested, with a navel as big as a tomato. That’s about all I got to see before Pascualito shooed us away.
    A week later, I was promoted to work in a special service delivering household goods. Tulle, flowers, and good champagne—the underground was ready to offer it all. That’s how Rosendo Gil came into my life. He’d set up a laundromat in his house on Muralla Street at the request of the dwarves. There was a sign at the entrance that read: Lightning Laundry: washing and ironing in a flash.
    Rosendo would give me a list of deliveries every morning. I don’t think, to this day, that I’ve ever worked as hard. I was always loaded down with lace dresses on the buses, traveling all the way to Miramar and Nuevo Vedado. I saw so many pretty girls completely untouched by bad times! But what I didn’t like about those grand mansions with gardens and dogs was that the people there always looked at me as if I was a criminal. To fuck with them, I stopped wearing my glasses. Whenever I went to ring one of those bells à la “Avon calling,” I’d make myself even more cross-eyed.
    That’s how things were going for me in Havana, although I was growing a little disconnected from Jeremías. We continued to share the room at the Packard, but our different work schedules made it so we hardly ever saw each other anymore.
    That is, that’s how it was going until an angel came along—or just bad luck. I remember it was a Wednesday, during my second Christmas season in Havana. It was December 25 and a delivery was slated for Masón and San Miguel streets, headquarters of TV Cubana; I was to ask for Reinita Príncipe. So off I went, and I asked for her when I arrived and they brought her to me right away. She was the actor who played the servant on the latest hit telenovela. I’d taken off my glasses and my crossed eyes had gotten worse and I wanted nothing more in that moment than for my eyes to be uniform, straight. The woman told me that we’d have to wait, that Lucecita was taping. “She’s my daughter, you know, Lucecita,” she clarified. “I want her to try on the outfit, then we’ll figure out the bill.”
    Later she invited me to the studio and I saw a TV show for the first time. They were taping Snow White . Lucecita had the starring role. I’d never seen a girl like that. I’ve never again seen such beautiful eyes. Reclining on a rock, she seemed the picture of happiness, radiant. It was the scene in which the prince saves her, when he arrives and kisses her and Snow White comes back to life. Then the dwarves danced and ran