False War
I was mute when I spoke and once it was quiet I never stopped talking. That was the truth underlying everything. People asked me how I felt and I said fine, but clearly I wasn’t fine. In fact, people don’t ask that question when you’re fine. There’s no need. The body speaks and people ask questions because the body is sending signals. Sometimes I even tried to tell the truth, but the words went astray and they led me astray.
I tried to understand what was happening. The people who could’ve helped, who maybe were genuinely interested, never figured it out. I sent them away and watched them leave for good. They were convinced my mouth made more sense than my body, and what the mouth said was important, when pretty much everybody knows you can’t trust a mouth.
I had the clear sense I never entirely understood the conversations I was part of. Reasonable people, the usual topics, but I only caught a fraction of what they were trying to say. It seemed, too, that this had always been the case and I was only noticing it now. Probably I’d been leaving behind a permanent trail of misunderstandings.
Seven years of stumbling around. I’d been through Miami, different places across the country, and now I was spending awhile in New York. In all that time I hadn’t been back to Havana. You have to do something and do it now, I remember thinking. It was the night of the Fourth of July. I was kind of with a girl, the girl I’d been seeing the last few months. I’d met her on a dark rooftop in Williamsburg, when the city still had a lot to say to me. The total light of Manhattan was falling on the waters of the East River and I convinced myself that at least a part of that wouldn’t exist if I wasn’t there. We went home together that night.
I’m not choosing New York to say all this because it’s a known name, recognizable, a place many of you—maybe all of you—have a postcard of in your heads. That’s not why I’m choosing it, since if given the choice, I would always choose the nameless places no one has heard of, the only real places, where you can run and dream in open spaces without the prescription of maps or the prison of references. I’m talking about New York to stick strictly to the facts, because it was there, and nowhere else, that things came full circle. Really, what more could there be after that?
Fireworks were bursting noisily in the sky of Inwood that night. On Academy Street, taken over by Dominicans, the Fourth translated into a jubilant handful of families and neighbors on each stretch of sidewalk, with speakers, folding chairs, and beer bottles at the foot of stern buildings. Under the public trees, children ran exultantly between cars.
The girl and I showed up after midnight. Outside we saw the glow of fireworks and heard the bang of firecrackers. The city celebrating itself, egos combusting in the concrete jungle. I immediately remembered what someone had once told me about a man walking along the sidewalk who’d been struck by a bullet fired in the air by an army officer to celebrate the New Year. How do stray bullets kill? I wondered. Since I’d heard that man’s story, I had begun to pray no one would be celebrating anything when I went out.
I didn’t even make it to the subway entrance. We took a taxi to the West Village. Huddled in the back seat, the succession of buildings and also each individual building making me aware of time held hostage, frozen. Time captive within the grand edifices of the past, parading on the stage of memory. Like something stirring within a stone, or the stone itself.
Sewer Rats
El Camello is with me in the back of the truck beneath the canopy.
R.I.P. Camello. It’s just us again now in the almost-dark, and it’s a little cold because of the wind coming in through the sides. There’s a green bulb up front, charged off the engine battery. A Christmas tree light. It glows with a shitty light and a little bit of all that always reaches the back seats. It settles on our arms and makes us look sickly, like we really are some garbage color. The truck is going full speed. The light stiffens and grabs hold of us.
People have been getting off along the way until it’s just the two of us driving with the Gringo. Same grind every day. Night comes and we go back to the barrio. The van stops in San Miguel, Regla, Guanabacoa. The same area El Camello and I cruise first thing. We know more or less the time the truck will head back and we wait for it at La Virgen del Camino.
We don’t know much about the Gringo, nothing about the bounty hunters, and no one has ever come asking me to report anything or take them anywhere. The Gringo is black but everybody knows he’s not from here. You can tell the difference: black Africans, black Caribbeans, black Northerners. And then there’s his accent. Words tangle on the guy’s tongue and pretty soon you realize they come twisted out of his mouth. It’s a struggle and they’d rather stay put. The Gringo is into silence.
But that night he suddenly starts talking, never taking his foot off the accelerator. El Camello gives himself a shake and says he’d rather be bitten by a mosquito than have one buzzing in his ear. So many conversations about so many things and for some reason that’s what hits home.
“True,” the Gringo replies.
The two of us freeze because suddenly there’s something like hand-to-hand combat going on between things we can’t fathom, maybe the speed of the van, mosquitoes, the Gringo’s words, and we aren’t sure: did he really say that? But apparently he did. He said it. El Camello and I look at each other like we’ve been wanting to join forces with the Gringo for a while, but neither of us wants anything. That has never occurred to us. The van reaches home ground and no one talks and the only sound along that final stretch is El Camello slapping himself to scare away mosquitoes. Even though I say there are no mosquitoes and El Camello is scaring away something neither of us have figured out yet. Considering what’s about to happen, he doesn’t manage to scare away anything at all.
The next night I say something to the Gringo about the truck’s rear-wheel drive, which never breaks down.
“Mitsubishi engine and gearbox,” he says, “and Chinese differential.”
El Camello asks him whether he’s ever broken an axle. The houses file past. Every so often we pass under a streetlight. The Gringo has lost two axles. One he got replaced at the shop and the second was made for him by a lathe operator. He’s driving with one hand on the wheel and the other rubbing his neck. He swivels a little while he’s talking to us, taking his eyes off the road. Then he looks ahead again.
“But axles have to be factory-made,” I say.
“They’re made out of factory axles,” says the Gringo, “usually from Russian jeeps.”
“The factory ones are better in the end, because the more you grind them down on the lathe, the weaker they get,” says El Camello.
The Gringo asks how he knows that. El Camello says his grandfather always had cars.
“At the factory they give them a treatment to make them hard on the outside and softer in the middle,” says El Gringo. “Sometimes they’re hollow to absorb vibration.”
It’s a good last sentence to hear. I see the veins in the Gringo’s arm. El Camello has fallen silent, considering what to say next. The tarp slaps the frame of the truck’s roof. Wrappers and crushed soda cans. The green Christmas light blinks in horror. My seat is hard and uncomfortable.
With the impact a huddled form flies up on the hood and seems to come at us, about to go through the windshield, but at the same time it’s like it bursts from the choked heart of the van, like something is stuck in there and we’re trying to spit it out. El Gringo slams on the brakes. Our souls slide from our mouths and escape down the street. We’re emptied out. I know I’ve turned pale and I’m shrinking down to nothing.
“We killed him,” said El Camello.
Everything is dark around us, but the collision itself is a source of energy and the flash of it lights us up. The windshield repels the huddled form and the thump on the pavement sounds like a rebuke. El Gringo is still in the same position. Hand on the wheel, blood running through his veins like alcohol through a still. He swivels his neck slowly, gracefully. No spinal cord injury. He sighs.
“Perfect,” we hear.
If that’s all he has to say, this is going to get worse, I think. You never expect to be in an accident, and when you are, you never expect it’ll be with a guy like this. El Camello shifts in his seat and El Gringo tells him to stay where he is. He lowers his window calmly, pulling a pack of local cigarettes out of his pocket. Rummaging through tools and papers in the glove compartment, he finds a brown Bic lighter. He leans out the window and lights a cigarette.
“Nobody around,” he says.
He’s right. People haven’t emerged from their houses. The only sound is the muffled moaning of the huddled form. The Christmas light goes out. The ash of the cigarette glows in the darkness of the truck. El Camello and I listen hard.
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From False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Text Copyright © 2021 by Carlos Manuel Álvarez. English translation Copyright © 2025 by Natasha Wimmer. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.
