The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Read Online Free PDF Page A

out and didn’t trust his English as a second language skills. He also wanted to hire me to find a place where he could practice what he did know on the cheap, as he was saving to open a small café of his own.
    He told me he’d been a chef and worked at some of the best Varadero hotels in Cuba before making his way out to sea, officially becoming a balsero (a rafter) and spending almost two years at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp for refugees during the 1994 exodus, before coming to Miami.
    He was six feet tall, all bony muscle and energetic, fast-moving limbs. He walked fast, and it was a while before I noticed he slumped a bit from the habit of bending over the counter to be almost eye level with whatever he was cutting, chopping, or seeding. Instead, what I noticed the first time I saw him, was the wavy brown hair that looked good even though it seemed to go every which way, and his eyes, big and dark, giving him an air of mournful thoughtfulness. Until he smiled. Then they brought out his true nature: friendly and flirty, earnest, like a shy boy who has learned how to be daring, and I hadn’t been able to resist him.
    He’d taught me how to dance salsa casino, how to cook, and how to tell a good joke using my body and all of my face. He also taught me how to play dominoes like an expert and the correct way to kiss the sides of fingers and ankles, the inner wrists, and the backs of the knees. (Open your mouth a little, push your lips out, and then softly drag the warm, fleshy, moist part of your lips over the chosen body part until your lower and upper lips meet on the skin. Stay there for a second. Breathe into the skin. Now kiss.)
    How could he do all this with me while being married? Ay, my friend, I should tell you, if you don’t already know it, that when it comes to Cuba and Cubans, it’s always complicated.
    After being in Miami for a while, he’d been allowed to go back to visit his mother. During the visit, he met Yuleidys, a nurse. They’d married sometime after that, but she couldn’t leave and he couldn’t go back there to live. After almost two years of visits and paperwork, she got her release papers from the Cuban government just before I met him, and for months had been supposed to arrive “any day now.” Theirs, I thought, was the most romantic relationship, made perfect by the ninety miles of sea between them, romanticized with letters, pictures, home videos, and long $1.29 per minute phone calls even in the post-Skype era of free international calling.
    He had a kind heart and often stayed the entire night if he was off from the restaurant. He’d bring me café con leche in bed and always treated me as if what we had was real, as if he loved me, even though I knew I was just his temporary medicine against the loneliness and frustration with the politics of politics.
    Not that I was his only remedy. He often dealt with his nostalgia by partying with his chef friends after he got off work, drinking wine and smoking pot until the wee hours of the morning, sleeping ’til all hours, and living his “promised land” life during the few hours before he had to be back for his shift.
    â€œYou’re so talented.... I don’t know why you treat your life like a light version of a Miami Vice episode,” I told him once.
    It was a variation of something I’d say more and more frequently over the six months we were together. He’d always answer the same thing:
    â€œMi vicio eres tú,” which meant that I was his vice, and sounded just as corny in Spanish as it does in English. But he’d say it in the softest voice while looking at me with the look you give the people you know you could never say no to.
    One day, after a bowl of heavenly seafood soup, too much homemade tinto de verano (Place the following ingredients into a big glass jug: two cups of cheap Spanish rioja wine, one quarter cup of grenadine, a squirt of