Bene
The first character sketch for the "Sleepless City" world, my in-progress novel taking place in Havana, Cuba, that follows Luca on his hunt for the one who haunts his dreams. Adult themes.
Bene
The first time she saw Luca was as a shadow in the alley behind the bar, running away into the darkness, a blur of youth, she could tell. She followed the wake backwards to where he had come from. Bene took in new black lines on the brick wall closest to the boulevard, a drawing, graffiti. She crossed her arms and tilted her head to take in what he’d painted in the illumination of a flickering street lamp.
It was a star, a puffy star-shape, balloon-like, large dots for eyes with eyelashes. And the arms, the legs, were in movement, a side swish of sorts. She got it. The star was dancing. There were even marks that might have been sweat beads flying off the little star body.
Bene, with her fluffy red curls, in her own dancing dress, glanced into the darkness, wondering now about the shadow who had done this.
She laughed at the star but then didn’t. There was an irony in the artwork, she realized. The soft stuffed star was smashed into rough bricks, the burnished red burning through the chest like dried blood, the chipped brick a brokenness throughout. He didn’t hide any of it with solid paint. No, it made up the star.
A smiling, performing creature, full of ruination.
Bene felt a tapping on her shoulder, and she turned, smiling, performing like the star on the wall. “I was taking a break, cariño,” she said in Spanish to the customer who had paid for a few dances. He grinned back at her and pulled her back into the bar. She’d been working several years as a dancer-for-hire. She sometimes did more. Money was easy that way. It supported her in Havana in these early aughts. She had friends, virtual sisters and brothers, in the same business. They lived together in an unofficial brothel run by an old pimp. Bene was an orphan, hardly having memory of her mother and father, raised en una casa para niños sin amparo filial, a state-sponsored group home. No complaints. The family had been kind, patient with her one remaining connection to her parents: her love of anything and everything Mexican. They had been born in Mexico and had come to Cuba seeking romanticized, communist freedom under Castro. At least, that’s what her house mother had told her. She would never know the reality.
The next time she saw Luca was in full daylight, after Bene had walked the food stalls with her bag, picking frutas y cosas para picar for the week that she would squirrel away into the antique chest in her room at the brothel.
She’d taken the beachside streets to enjoy the seagulls and roar of the waves. On one of the streets, on one of the walls of a rundown low-slung building, she noticed another version of the dancing star, the body painted yellow this time, eyes looking to the side, the puff dancing between ugly scrawled racial slurs. The “hands” reached out to each slur, as if holding them, including them in its own parade. She outright laughed this time. It was funny, but dark, too. As if nobody is immune from the violence of the slurs.
We are all part of it.
She looked around and caught a youngish person across the street, couldn’t be more than fifteen, sixteen maybe. Dark hair fell past his shoulders, wind-mussed, a backpack to his side. He was sitting on a park bench, ankles crossed, seeming to study the star. Then he turned and smiled to himself in the wryest way, eyes on a government worker who was dragging cleaning supplies. The kid lit up a cigarette and cozied even further into the bench as the worker dumped the supplies on the ground, angrily, fed up it seemed. The man stood with hands on hips, staring at the graffiti. Cursed loudly.
“Chusma!” he said aloud. “They come here and ravage our beautiful Havana!”
Bene did not know that the kid on the bench was the artist of the stars at the time. She dismissed him as he chuckled and pulled a sandwich out of a paper bag. She headed home then, to wait for night, waiting to get back to her business.
She met Luca, legitimately, mid-paint-stroke, as she stumbled breathless into the night, out the back door of a music joint for a quick smoke. She stopped cold as he turned to look at her, having heard her. He grinned and she realized he was the kid on the park bench. He smiled with a paint brush in his hand, a can of paint in his other hand. More black lines, this time an umbrella against the brick, raindrops falling all around but for the absence beneath that stayed untouched by the water, the start of something more, she figured.
“You painted two dancing stars,” she said, smiling in return.
“You are a fan of my work?”
“You are a child, what are you doing out at this late hour, vandalizing our fine walls?”
He shrugged, “I am an enigma, señorita, a child of the streets.” Sarcasm colored every word. He dipped down and sealed the can, cleaning the brush in another can before resealing that can. He wrapped up the brush in a cloth of sorts and put everything into his backpack. He stood and nodded at her, respectfully. “You are beautiful, worthy of a drawing.”
“What do you know of beauty, little peanut?”
“I know ugly,” he said, his voice aggrieved. “You are not that.”
He sauntered away, disappearing again. Bene did not know why he struck a chord inside of her, but he did. Something in his voice, something that said indeed he was an enigma, belonging to nothing, to nobody, something that said the streets did birth him and that he ran above and below and alongside, never quite occupying the main drag.
After that, she saw him repeatedly in the crowds throughout the city, in the back alleys late at night, sleeping on occasion under the stars, but mostly she saw him hunched over a dinner or breakfast in various paladares while he sketched in a notebook, fingers inked. It was unusual because he was not a tourist and the usual customers of such paladares at the time were primarily tourists or family. It seemed many mothers had decided to feed him for free, a lost chick in need of a hen. Over and over.
He had many hens tending to him, and didn’t seem to have a regular job. He was out at all times of the day or night. She didn’t understand. Teenagers in Havana were forced into housing if they had no parents. She knew he couldn’t be over eighteen.
Finally, she cornered him one evening as he sloped down an alley, headed to nowhere, looking sleepy. “Hey, kid,” she said, “who the hell are you?”
“An enigma, I told you.”
He remembered their earlier meeting. He had likely been spotting her too in the crowd.
Bene shook her head, “No, no, no. Do you not have a home?”
She touched a string of fake pearls on her chest, her face pulled into concern. The Cuban government boasted its ability to house its citizens; while homelessness existed, it was not particularly common.
“I live everywhere,” he said, looking away.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
She could tell he lied by the rocking back of his head, a narrowing of his large dark eyes.
“You are a good artist, however old you are. Where are you parents?”
He laughed, “Long gone.”
“I lived in a group home because I was an orphan. Do you not also live in a group home?”
His cheek twitched, he ran a tongue along his lower lip. He looked like he tasted something distasteful. “I live everywhere, I said. Have a good night.” He turned and started walking away.
Bene took quick steps. She didn’t think of herself as one of the hens, but he stirred something in her, she acknowledged. Catching up to him, she threw an arm around him, like she was his best friend. “Come home with me. I have an extra bed in my little room. It is a fair building, a little old like everything here in Havana. The lot of us who live in la casa de Gavín are… enigmas. Come. Would you?”
They walked down the alley, the stars above bright and sparkling.
Dancing.
“You are awfully trusting. How do you know I will not rob you blind?”
“I do not know that you will or will not. But I do not own much anyway. Unless you like fake jewelry.”
He chuckled, then didn’t. The two walked, her arm still around his shoulders, the boulevard ahead of them. He sighed, like a dog at the end of the day.
“Why the fuck not? Fine. I will grace your old place with my enigma-ness.”
And so he did.
When he slept in the extra bed, he’d used his backpack as a pillow. During the night, Bene woke to gravelly whimpers as if he ran from monsters, from dogs. Then she heard him say something she didn’t understand other than to know it was in English. A surprise in that.
“What made me the swan? Why was I the one to fly?”
She did not move there in the dark beneath the window where the moonlight flowed in. She waited for the sounds to cease. Bene knew there would be much more to come because she knew he would not leave her for a very long time. She knew they would continue far beyond tonight to share the room in Gavín’s brothel in the center of Havana, behind a bakery that no longer produced bread.
The moon told her so.
What strikes you in this piece? Are you curious to know more?