"¡Viejo, basta ya! We're all stunted," Irma reprimanded
him, blustering through the house as if her husband's laments could be shooed away like chickens.
Justicio hadn't heard her. He was biting into his dry morning biscuit and drinking his cup of café con leche to the dregs, recalling his old two-door Chevy Del Ray. When at last the car could offer nothing except worn parts to be sold on the black market, that's what he did: He sold them— carburetor, tires, spark plugs, steering wheel, mirrors, belts. Whatever had not disintegrated with use, Justicio sold bit by bit, eventually using the money to buy another vehicle, a Schwinn Spitfire with a two-seater cab welded to the back, a contraption composed of aluminum tubes and patched wicker and a canvas top with yellow and red stripes, long faded, and a tattered fringe, once bright white, that ran along its edges.
God has His ways, Justicio thought. He remembered looking down into his empty cup and hearing Irma on the rear balcony beating the bedroom rug mercilessly, his wife's way of expressing the inexpressible. Justicio smiled to himself, recalling the moment. We are given everything we need. The bicycle cab had allowed him to make a living for himself, Irma, and their two sons. He had been given a chance and decided to place his faith in the muscular strength God had given him and a plastic-covered image of the most charitable Virgen del Cobre. La Virgensita, the patroness of Cuba, had appeared to three desperate men from Cayo Francés, two native Indians and an African slave, who found themselves cast one day upon a turbulent sea in a fragile dinghy. Justicio wasn't sure why the three men were in the dinghy. He had forgotten that part of the story, but he knew that before the Virgin appeared in the sky, that dinghy was all they had.
Having nothing and then experiencing the good fortune of finding and purchasing the bicycle cab, Justicio had dedicated it to the Virgin, placing her image in an old plastic sleeve and hanging it from the small rearview mirror. That bicycle cab fed his hungry family for many years, including the leanest years of the U.S. embargo. After the birth of his second grandchild, deformed by malnutrition, his faith again began to falter. So he punched a small hole through the plastic's bottom edge and tied a string of brass bells to it. Every time his wheels struck a rough patch in the road, the bells would jangle and remind him of the Virgin and the common bond between himself and the poorest of the poor, the two native Indians and the slave, who centuries earlier had witnessed her appearance in the sky.
"Did you finally kill the rug?" Justicio remembered asking his wife when she bustled into the room again, carrying a pail of water and a mop.
"I'm going to kill you if you don't get out of my way, funny guy," Irma warned him.
"You'd miss me, Irma."
Justicio rose from his chair and helped her with the heavy pail, planting a kiss on her mouth.
"Don't be fresh, old man."
"I'm never stale."
"You're dirtier than this floor. When are you going to stop pedaling that cab? It's too much for you. You're too old."
"I'll see you later. Don't you do too much, Irma."
Irma didn't want him to continue doing such a physically demanding job as he got older, but Justicio insisted that he knew his limits, selected his tourists and occasional natives with great care, ignoring anyone with voluminous buttocks or belly or too many packages who tried to wave him down. In fact, though the wicker-and-canvas cab seated two, these days he normally only picked up one passenger at a time. Slim-hipped girls with only a simple handbag, he told Irma; the rounder and smaller their buttocks the better, he always added, grinning, knowing the comment would cause Irma to roll her eyes and call him a dirty old goat, which in turn made him howl with laughter.
He was wheeling the bicycle cab out of the communal garage on the ground floor when he heard a familiar voice shouting about his love for the island and then a horrible rending sound he couldn't identify. Justicio looked up just in time to see the Pérez boys falling, their bodies striking the concrete. He struggled to make sense of what he had witnessed, to cross the street and tend to their terrible wounds, and when he could do no more, to close their eyes and whisper under his breath the only bits of the extreme unction he remembered.
Justicio fretted. For some reason, he had been cast down into troubled waters. He began pedaling as fast as he could, glancing every now and then at the face of the Virgin, who appeared to him today inscrutable and aloof. The bells shook and jangled, but the sound brought him only an unbearable sense of life's fragility. What had happened to the Pérez boys could happen to his own sons; an entire generation had been stunted. The absentminded Justicio let the front wheel of his bicycle cab scrape against the curb as he slowed down to make a right-hand turn. The Virgin jangled her approval. The brothers' tragic deaths, he thought; why had he been made to witness such a sight? It must all have a higher purpose. The Virgin jangled her approval with even greater energy as Justicio, paying less attention to the road than he should as he pedaled his way toward El Vedado, let the front wheel of his bicycle cab dive into an enormous pothole. The most hopeful thing he could do was to keep to his usual routine, riding through El Vedado, then out to El Parque de los Martires later in the day, having something to eat, and taking a short nap on one of the park benches before pedaling along the avenue that flanked El Malecón, looking for that last wave of weary tourists in need of a ride back to the Hotel Nacional.
The rim of the sun's disc had barely broken through the inky plumes of clouds, residue of the late-night rain, as Justicio reached the intersection of Calle J and Avenida 17.
He pedaled past a middle-aged woman, her hair the color of brass, stooping over her buckets of white azucenas, carefully arranged on the sidewalk, the sweet scent of the flowers hanging in the air. He smiled and waved at the sleepy workers leaning against the trunks of the royal palms, their thumbs extended, waiting for the Samaritan who might give them a lift and save them the crush of public transport. He heard the cars roaring by, farcical, balletic, along the now asphalt-covered trajectories that had been laid hundreds of years earlier, their broken tailpipes thundering, spewing violet-blue smoke and gasoline vapors. Fierce, defiant, they seemed to hurtle through the air unaware of mechanical limits.
On the corner of Calle L and Avenida 23, Justicio stopped, his attention drawn to the diminutive figure of an old man standing before the statue of Quijote de América. Justicio heard the grate and rumble of skateboards on concrete and turned in time to see a raggedy band of boys flying along the marble surface of the rotunda, using its surface as a network of ramps and obstacles.
" Watch out! Hey! Hey!"
" Watch out, old man!"
"Move!"
"You're in the way."
The old man gripped his briefcase tightly and tried to get out of the way, tripping and stumbling to the ground instead.
"Why didn't you move?" asked a lanky boy, his hair shellacked into a single point at the top of his head.
The boys stopped. Two of them seemed to be trying to help the old man to his feet.
"Don't hurt me," the old man cried, clutching the briefcase.
"What's he babbling about?" the lanky boy asked.
"Who cares?" another boy said, tapping his skateboard impatiently against the sidewalk. "We don't have time. Whatever's going on'll be over."
"Please, don't hurt me," the old man pleaded.
A short muscular boy, his long curly hair pushed back off his forehead by a red headband, stood the old man on his feet and brushed him off.
"We have to go," the boy with the red headband explained.
"Please. I