Havana Noir by Achy Obejas Page B

apartment, or even to ask me anything about the case, nothing.
    To be frank, I have no idea why I went to the trial. At that point, I was pretty serene, completely—or pretty much—recovered from my fright. I wanted to take a look at the guy, even if it was from a distance. What for? Well, maybe just to see the incontrovertible proof that I was right (and not the stupid Granma and the other little newspapers) in terms of what the guy looked like, and then leave the whole terrible story at that. Or who knows—maybe deep down I just wanted to add a little more suspense and drama to my life, since by going I ran the risk that the guy would recognize me and let slip—in public!—all that had been carefully withheld until then. But I wasn’t really sure that he could identify me. I never knew how the devil he’d hit on me, whether by just dialing numbers randomly, or from a phone book stolen from a mutual friend, or by following some numeric or cabalistic criteria, or via some other mysterious formula that I couldn’t decipher. It’s probably unnecessary to state that the guy never bothered to explain any of this to me. He assured me I’d caught his eye—those were his words—a million times, at the movie theater on La Rampa, at Coppelia, at the cafeteria on the first floor of the Focsa building, on the seawall at the Malecón, in an open-air bar across the street from Colón Cemetery…In other words, all places where any Havana resident has been at least once in her life, so that mentioning them didn’t mean anything. One night, I told him I had splendid tits, that I’m a size thirty-eight, and he thought that was great. In fact, he really got into that detail. He loooooved it, as he liked to say. Too bad it wasn’t true! I do have a good ass, but tits, no way. The sad truth is that I’m a size thirty-two, and that’s stretching it. Of course, none of this means anything either. Maybe the guy was just going along with me exactly like I went along with him about his twelve inches.
    Just in case, though, I decided to alter my appearance a bit before going to the trial. I straightened my hair and dyed it brown. I dropped a black beret on my head and wore a long leather coat, all the way down to my ankles, and donned a pair of dark glasses with smoky lenses. And to make myself look interesting, I applied a vivid red lipstick. Dressed like a character out of The Matrix (or whatever the hell), I took a taxi to Old Havana and showed up fifteen minutes before the start of the trial at the Provincial Court.
    Ufff, they almost didn’t let me in! Outside the building, on Teniente Rey Street, there was an unusual crowd of people, and there was a lot of pushing, kicking, punching, yelling, and a ferocious stink of human flesh in the air. My God! No doubt I’m a warrior, though. I refused to budge. I had to practically break an arm to push my way through the tumult, get in the actual building, and, finally—a little worse for wear with my hair out of place, sweating, and with the beret crumpled into one of the coat’s inside pockets—I arrived at Criminal Court #7. I was in luck: I managed to get a magnificent seat, not too far from the bench where they’d soon sit the most famous criminal of the decade.
    When I saw him, just a few meters from me, first face to face and then in profile, I couldn’t believe my eyes. No, no, no. No way! It wasn’t possible. I remember I took my glasses off so I could see him better. Mother of God, what was that? I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Jesus Christ! I couldn’t get over it. I elbowed a man sitting to my right and asked him if that was really the guy, the one in the brownish-gray suit, if he was the accused, the one who had allegedly committed a dozen or more murders. And it turned out that, in fact, it was him. Wow! The way he looked had nothing—I mean nothing —to do with what I’d thought he’d look like based on our phone calls. He was identical to the police sketch!