The graveyard Don Juan

From
Havana — Summer stories                                            Read Spanish Version

The
graveyard Don Juan

By
Manuel Alberto Ramy
Maprogre@gmail.com

There
should be a month when politics goes to the beach, on vacation, and
the press reports only frothy stuff. No such thing. But I’m going on
vacation and will try to publish articles different from the usual
ones in this column. Although some of the stories take place at Colón
Cemetery, they are not funereal. I hope you enjoy them. 

From
1970 to 1971, I worked at that cemetery (ranked third in the world
for historic significance) fumigating the flower pots available to
the mourners. I was fascinated by the place’s tranquility, as well as
the stories buried in the tombs and monumental pantheons. And,
because the cemetery was practically mine, I toted a Russian camera
(brand name "Kiev") and a German tape recorder (brand name
Blaupunkt) that my wife had bought.

I made
friends with the gravediggers. With them, I played "pegao,"
a street game that consists
in tossing a coin toward a wall from 3 or 4 yards away and seeing how
close to the wall it lands. At Colón, the target was a grave,
and the player who tossed the coin closest to the grave won a
cigarette. (That was back when a box of smokes cost 20 pesos.)

In those
days, I met a man — whom I shall call Juan — who told me a good
personal story. Here goes.

In 1945,
Juan told me, he was going through "an awful breeze" (slang
for financial problems), and had to do something to make a living. As
he was a man with few scruples, fairly lazy, a womanizer, a drinker
of rum, shrewd and a smooth talker, he decided that the best place to
meet women was Colón Cemetery. His profession became consoling
widows, opening new vistas for them, and demonstrating to them that
life did go on — at least with him.

At age
39, Juan must have been a looker. He was 5-feet-10-inches tall, and
reflected his father’s Galician origin in his pink face. He had a
mustache à la Clark
Gable, thick eyebrows and black hair "pasted down with Glostora
vaseline" that he combed in the style of the hero of "Gone
With the Wind." 

Sometimes
he would rent a black suit and a black tie; others, he wore an
impeccable white guayabera, stole a yellow rose from some grave, and
stood around, waiting. Like a predator, he had a good nose and could
distinguish between honest widows (the still-devoted women who say
that "the deceased took away the key"), the flighty types,
and those amenable to discreet and gradual wooing.

The
tears were "the key," Juan said, and he could recognize
those women who cried with remorse, a term that he described as "she
felt guilty because she was not as good a wife as she should have
been." Those women spend their time digging into their
relationship with their husbands like someone scratching an itch,
"questioning not the husband, but themselves."

What did
such a woman need to become complete? That’s where Juan saw an
opening; he would patiently help them to become complete. "Look,
the thing was to demonstrate to them, cautiously, that the incomplete
partner had been the husband, not them." Cads have always been
better psychoanalysts than Freud.

I was
interested in his theory about the kinds of weeping, and I asked him
about it. Let me summarize his catalog. If the women cried while
containing herself, holding back the tears, she was serious,
respectful and would take a long time to conquer "because she
was still carrying the husband under her dress." But if she
cried with her lower lip extended, two possibilities arose.

One, she
was angry at the deceased, reproaching him for "what you did to
me, you bastard." Two, she was vengeful "because women are
worse than men when it comes to settling accounts" and these
women showed that they were intent on settling their accounts.

All
these women were "possible scores," Juan said. The vengeful
types were easier to win over, but the honest widows were more
profitable because "the relationship lasted long and provided
more."

‘Scoring’

The
widow approached the grave. Juan watched her. Did she dress in black
or did she modify the mourning? Did she wear normal colors? Did she
bring flowers? Did she cry or not? How did she shape her lips when
weeping?

At that
point, Juan — serious but not in distress, as a man widowed for some
time might behave — would approach the grave nearest to his victim.
With a small broom, he would sweep the tombstone, empty the flower
pot and place the yellow rose therein. Then, he would bow his head
and mumble something that sounded like a prayer, while studying his
prey through the corner of an eye.

After
that, it was a matter of talking to the woman, discussing life, death
and solitude, strolling down the cemetery walkways and inviting her
to a cup of coffee at the cafeteria at 23rd and Twelfth. There, the
topic would be directed at the need to go on with one’s life. He was
a vendor of hope.

That’s
how he met Marta, 42, "three years a widow and a very
good-looking woman." He lived at her expense for about four
months, telling her that he was waiting for a partner to pay him a
debt and that he planned to open a little coffee shop where customers
could play "bolita,"
a street lottery that was
illegal but played in the open at that time.

He left
her when he realized "that she was going to send me packing, but
I left with new clothes, shoes and a few pesos." Back he went to
the cemetery.

One fine
day, Gloria showed up — a young widow whose husband had died in a
tragic car accident. Gloria was remorseful because she had not
satisfied her husband. Juan gave her lessons in that endeavor, but
she was such a good student that she abandoned him for a younger,
wealthier man. "I worked for the Englishman," Juan said,
repeating an old saying.

Juan
went on to enjoy a good many relationships, until one day Yolanda
appeared — a "monument of a woman," 30 years old, who,
clad in black, stepped out of a chauffeur-driven late-model Ford. He
watched her and did his usual routine. He didn’t have to analyze her
for long. Yolanda, her eyes dry, cursed her late husband.

"That
woman hated him, and she had a lot of money," Juan told me. He
approached her and urged her to forgive her husband because "after
all, the man is on the other side." They walked through the
cemetery, her car following them, and he decided to take her to a
nice place because "she was a classy lady."

They
went to the Carmelo Restaurant, "the one in front of the
Auditorium Theater" (today the Amadeo Roldán theater),
and had an ice cream. She indicated that she would like to resume the
conversation at a later time.

They
made a date for the Carmelo. On another date, they went to the Payret
Cinema. "And we got more and more involved, until we fell into
bed in a small but well furnished apartment on Galiano Street."

There
was drinking, shared showers, heavy love-making ("What a
woman!") for several days. Until …

"It
happened at night," Juan told me. "We made love and she
told me she would fix me a Bloody Mary, a drink I don’t like, but I
didn’t want to displease her. I stayed in bed and she came back with
the drinks. I drank mine. When I woke up, I found several policemen
in the room. There was a dead man at the foot of the bed. My hands
were bloodied, and the knife later turned out to have my
fingerprints. I was sentenced to 10 years in prison." 

Juan
never found out if it was Yolanda’s personal vendetta (if that was
her real name) or if she was a woman who charged for staging a
killing. After serving his sentence, Juan went back to work at the
cemetery hoping against hope that he would find her again and get
even. No luck. He died in 1974 at the age of 68, his questions
unanswered.

Manuel
Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief for Radio Progreso Alternativa
and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language version of
Progreso Weekly.