The Golden Hops

Alberto Ortiz De Zarate
Translated by Whitni Battle

With glazed eyes he stared fixedly at his glass mug, which looked so bright, and kept getting brighter as he watched his old yearnings and memories floating up to the surface in those minute amber bubbles, sometimes intense and sometimes colorless, just like his very existence. He wasn’t trying to guess at his future; he didn’t believe he had one. He only wanted to unravel his past.

Just like every night, he’d go to the bar alone, always alone, and he’d order a beer “sometimes two, sometimes three” and if it was served in a round enough glass “just like the crystal balls of the fortunetellers” then he wouldn’t know if it was wine or cognac; but definitely not beer, and he’d linger a long while gazing contemplatively into its center before tasting the first sip. It was a special night “I don’t know if it’s proper to call it a celebration” seeing as though he was celebrating “but it was not a party” having broken his own record of losing three jobs in the same week.

The Golden Hops. That was the name of the old bar that had more the look of a saloon from an old Western, the ones in black and white that fade to gray because they’ve never been restored or remastered in HD. It was a place of the past, but with all the cracks of lost time stored away for the present. With its dark bar made of ancient wood, its long horizontal mirror that multiplied the bottles and blearily reflected the faces of the drinkers, and especially the face of that barman of indeterminate age and appearance “just like in the movies” who listened indifferently with an absent stare every night as the clients would recount their frustrations, even though he really didn’t give a shit. A bar that, to our protagonist, represented the very essence of his long-remembered and forever-primeval Old Havana.

He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when his downfall began, since he never remembered having been at his peak. He emigrated. He left, or escaped, from Cuba with his parents at a young age, at that difficult age when you’re no longer a child, but not yet an adolescent, and, as tends to happen, your parents don’t know how to act towards you, and they almost always keep treating you like a baby. And instead of integrating, as they did, into the new culture and customs, he unleashed his full youthful rebellion, not against his parents, but against society in its broadest sense, de-ideologized, and against all the flags of the world, but all said and done, it was really against himself.

He’d drunk his beer with even more anxiety than on previous nights, when he’d had the impression of drinking alone just to entertain himself or to escape from a moment of boredom, from his gloomy apartment, his cats, and his elderly mother. Like always, the bar was not well-frequented, and the few patrons were like him, lone wolves that wouldn’t even howl at the full moon. Creatures who at some time had tried to fraternize with him, but after several failed attempts, they’d given up and decided to ignore him so as not to have to bother with beating him to a pulp.

With the second beer, thirst already quenched, the memories continued to bubble up like the white foam in his glass. Middle school was a true and agonizing torture. It was like an interrogation room where he didn’t know what crime he was being accused of and couldn’t even understand the language of those trying to extract his confession. But what was more terrifying still were the jeering cackles of his classmates as they tortured him. Laughter that, to this day, he hadn’t been able to erase from his memory. He grew to hate them all together, and loathe each one separately with all of his might. But as pain is our teacher and what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger … with the power of reading, of books and more books “partially to avoid talking to or sharing with his classmates” he achieved a mastery of the English language that could outdo Shakespeare, or well, almost. But what was most important: he spoke better than his classmates, and with no accent. It was his first, and perhaps only, great victory in this new country. Seeing the envy on the faces of the other kids during their oral exams was like a sexual experience, an orgasm for his ego.

And that’s how he got to college. He passed with good grades, good grammar, and good composition whenever the topics up for debate weren’t the most highly charged or complicated. When they were, he regularly took the most extreme positions, sometimes arbitrary and sometimes truly incendiary, with a championship level of existential anarchism. And for all of these reasons he was christened with the monikers: Hangnail, Broken Record, Pain In The Neck, and other nicknames that bore the implication that no one could stomach him. Around that time he became an orthodox vegetarian as well, a real rabbit-food eater of the type that would start an all-out brawl if he had any suspicion that someone might have contaminated his rice with chicken broth or shrimp. Since he always had an excuse for a fight, he became Public Enemy Number One on campus. But what of love …? Just fine, thanks.

Up to that moment, his first and only love was named Manuela. It could be said that love slipped through his fingers. He wasn’t ugly; he was thin with light-colored eyes, of a color just as gray as his life, but which gave him a certain air of intrigue for many women. The problem lay in his inner beauty, and in that regard women, by an overwhelming majority, agreed that he was creepy. Nonetheless, thanks to beer, at one of the department’s parties that he was unable to dodge, he lost his virginity, though he couldn’t quite remember which girl it was with. And he found out in the cruelest possible fashion, when one afternoon he was walking by the girls’ locker room and he heard several of them gossiping, talking trash about the class slut, and one said to the other, “Believe me, she really is a whore; she even slept with that guy,” pointing at him with a brazen finger. That night he couldn’t sleep.

His mouth was dry. It was an especially sad and depressing night, he saw the ghosts of his life projected onto the bar mirrors, through the bottles; faces upon faces that had meant something in his life, faces that had negatively marked him, and they scared him. He ordered a third beer to the astonishment of the bartender, who brought it to him with benevolence and even smiled at him. He brought the glass to his lips in one go, as if it was a shot of tequila, and the foam grayed his mustache, and he felt older. As if he’d aged all at once.

As soon as they gave him his college degree, they threw him into the ring without knowing how to bullfight, since you can’t argue with a bull. He was routinely gored by life’s horns, always right in the balls. He got work on the Red Chronicle for the yellow press. As a style editor for a women’s fashion magazine. And the most surreal job of all, as a crossword writer, without ever having solved one in his life. Until, at last, he found the one job that he thought would bring him all the serenity he so badly needed, as an obituary writer for the local paper. Everything was going fine until he got tired of always praising the dead “because of the thing where once you’re dead everybody’s a good person” and he decided, unasked, to do some serious investigating of an ex-mayor who had perished the day before. And the outcome isn’t hard to imagine. He found himself collecting for the first time, getting unemployment; the same guy who had refused to apply so many times because he saw it as something for social parasites. But his father had suffered a dramatic accident at work; his health was very delicate, and they still hadn’t given him any compensation, so there was nothing else for it.

“Her university was the street, and she’d gotten a PhD. She didn’t try to change the world or fight with it; she knew there was no point.”

They say love comes at the most unexpected time, and it came to him between bureaucratic paperwork and unemployment lines. That morning he had arrived at the unemployment office insecure and naked, stripped of the drapery of arrogance and imperiousness that clothed him daily and gave him that air of personal antagonism that so characterized him. He felt defeated, beaten, and he opted for not demanding anything or blaming anyone for his misfortune, he was just claiming the assistance that was his due as one of the simple and common jobless. Maybe that’s why he looked so nervous, enough to make the woman sitting next to him touch his arm gently and tell him not to worry, that it was the third time she’d come to collect and that it was easy. You just had to overact it a bit. She warned him about the things he shouldn’t say, to make a good impression and make it all go smoothly. She was older; he couldn’t quite tell by how many years, since she wore her age well and she was genuinely attractive. Her turn to be interviewed came up before his, so she affectionately took his hand and wished him good luck. For the first time in his life, he got through a bureaucratic procedure without picking a fight or arguing with the poor government worker on shift, and so it all went swimmingly. And outside, he found her leaning up against the door waiting, and she congratulated him with a warm kiss on the cheek. She told him that they had to celebrate, that she lived just two blocks away. Just two blocks separated her from the office that was like her second home.

They went inside and up the four flights of stairs, she always led the way and he could enjoy the gorgeous scenery of her toned and plentiful backside and the way she walked, swaying with all the world’s sensuality. She mentioned that she was divorced and lived alone “with a very suggestive tone” since her two children were away at college. She offered him a beer and he was about to say he didn’t drink, but he preferred not to; a day is a day after all, and he had more than enough reasons to celebrate. She came back from the kitchen with the beers and told him that beer was like a ritual for her each day when she got home from work, or the street; even if she just had one, it revitalized her. “Give us each day our daily beer and forgive us our trespasses,” and she let out a chuckle. “For they are many!” she said, laughing and clanking glasses to toast in their honor.

They talked at length, and he confirmed that she was just as anarchistic as he was, but in a more practical and streetwise sense. Her university was the street, and she’d gotten a PhD. She didn’t try to change the world or fight with it; she knew there was no point. She didn’t aspire to struggle against a system that, as she said, was designed for fucking over the ones at the bottom, and if she couldn’t burn it down, the next best thing was to benefit from it. Just like that, the minutes and hours passed until the beer worked its magic and he had to go to the bathroom. An unending stream poured the beer back in almost the same color it had been to begin with, and he felt happy. Just then he felt another hand that forcefully grabbed his member and pulled it toward her. She embraced him as if she wanted to devour him, and then she did. They made love all night until they were senseless, without sense of time, without sense of life or of death.

The mediocrity of his days hadn’t changed at all, but that of his nights had. His days added up to helping his old mother cope with his father in his daily routine. His old man had been left paralyzed by that accident that changed their lives, when he didn’t have time to dodge the bullet coming towards him, as if it was engraved with his first and last name, in the robbery of the department store where he worked as a guard. Day after day he saw him consumed by pain, like a fizzled out candle that struggled to produce a flame, and he filled up with hate and impotence because the compensation case still hadn’t been resolved. Meanwhile his nights started off with a kiss and a beer and proceeded with a long nightshift of love and sex. He had never received love from anyone except his parents, or given it, and so it felt strange and like rubbing. For him she was a true teacher of many things, but she also initiated him into the dangerous world of credit, of plastic money, of how to juggle credit cards instead of the colored balls used by the juggling clowns of his childhood. Of paying off some with money that he took from others. She initiated him into the dangerous world of indebtedness, which he would never leave. This way his father could spend his last days in certain comfort, and they could slightly improve their quality of life, which was somewhat better than when he had been working. The death of his father crumbled the false stability he had gained, and once again he felt just as irritable and embittered as ever. She got tired of having one more child to care for and protect, and over time she realized that as a lover he left much to be desired. Her real children came home on their vacations and altercations occurred nightly until she couldn’t take any more and decided to expel him from her house and her life. And he was left an orphan, orphaned by his father and by his second mother, alone in the care of his true mother, who at long last had been granted a modest monthly pension for the death of her husband, plus the check from the state for rent and food, along with her health insurance. His death had turned her into a somewhat decrepit old woman, who took up the habit of collecting endless numbers of cats that soured the atmosphere with their odor, and of watering the plants on her balcony so many times a day that she nearly drowned them.

His short amorous stint had expired right alongside his unemployment pay, and his former insecurity slipped back into his life, now accompanied by a new unsettling element, the terrifying phone calls. The sound of each ring reminded him of the debts that he’d acquired and stopped paying off, and now he didn’t have the option. These threatening knells reverberated over and over inside his ears, penetrating his mind until literally taking away his sleep, and they were now his waking nightmare.

But a fortuitous event brought a new twist to his strange existence. One afternoon in a subway car brimming with rush-hour passengers, at five o’clock as always, he was bitter about being jostled around and unable to retaliate, and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until he got home. He’d been pickpocketed. Of course, money was one thing he didn’t have on him. The bulging billfold that caught the eye of the petty thief was only packed with credit cards full of debt, his ID, and his residency papers. All that identified him had been stolen; they had robbed him of the life he’d wished to escape from, as fortune would have it. He had simply stopped existing, as he didn’t have a single document in his possession that corroborated his presence in this world.

Since his mother had been given an apartment for the low-income elderly, when he moved to the new building he decided not to change his mailing address. Officially he lived nowhere, he didn’t even have a phone number. Everything was in his mother’s name and the persecuting phone calls abated for several months and the horrifying ring ring ring stopped tormenting him. He was in exile from the world. He’d disappeared from the map, or at least that’s what he thought.

His vegetarian diet was so austere that one might have said that he lived off of air, on leaves of lettuce like small birds. He ate a bit of vegetables, couscous, or tofu, and that was enough for him to feel full. As he spent close to nothing on food, the poor old woman’s pension was more than enough to feed them both. Even the cats ate more than they did. He’d altogether resigned from the profession that brought him so many headaches, and as a type of self-flagellation, he now only accepted the occasional odd job under the table. These were so poorly compensated that official documents were not a requirement. At the core, he only did it to have a little extra money for his daily beer, which was the only memory he had left of her. And even these small jobs “due to his vinegary nature” would last him about as long as an ice cube on a hot day. As always, he wagged his tongue, saying, “I’ll give anyone a piece of my mind,” though the saddest part of the situation was that no one had the slightest intention of listening to him.

He ordered a fourth beer “such that it seemed as though he was drinking to every job he’d lost” but maybe because he lacked practice, this one was taking its toll on him. He felt dizzy, uncommonly dizzy. The visions and frustrations of his life resurfaced just like the phone calls from his creditors who once again made demands on him by telephone. He was his debt, and though no one else bothered him, he saw them ridiculing him with laughter from the depths of the mirror, between so many bottles.

He wobbled in his chair, collapsing on top of the table. He tried to right himself and slowly brought his hand to his waist, to the side ever so close to his back, searching for something. He found the old pistol “that had once been his father’s” and he brandished it, aiming at the mirror with a trembling hand, and began to shoot at himself “at his reflection in the mirror” and at all of the intervening bottles. The gunshots, the impact of the bullets, turned the mirror into endless spider webs that multiplied his fragmented face into infinity. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, and all at once he crumpled, falling between the tables and toppling several bottles on the way down. He brought his hands to his heart and his fingers began exploring a warm and sticky substance. His blood flowed from his wounds, while the fallen bottles also spilled out their golden contents in spurts. The red and amber mixed together in a big dark and bubbling stain on the floor, encircling his body. Bubbles that in their movement turned to foam, pale and overflowing, white and bright and all became light, blindingly.