When my friend Pedro isn't working, he lives in Las Negras -- a village about 10 miles from Puerto Perdido. In Miami, the Cuban American mafia take every opportunity to uphold the Cuban Adjustment Act, which fuels many profitable Mexico-bound human trafficking operations. She got up and put on her coat and I drove her back to her dorm.
The public market is noisy, sometimes odoriferous -- especially where they sell the pig meat -- filled to overflowing with cucumbers, tomatoes, tomatillos, satsumas, ugly but delicious oranges, five varieties of banana, 12 varieties of pepper hot and cool.
They look inside and, amid the winking red and yellow and violet lights, gander at the ladies sitting around the tables.
Pedro was sewn up without benefit of anesthetics and blood transfusions too expensive and was laid out, presumably to die. Those of us who had been around him for a while knew that, despite appearances, he wouldn't hurt a fly, but he was a menace to a bottle of mescal if he happened to pass one.
Then we would go through the peculiar rituals of neo-intellectuals of the '50s, trying to be in neo-intellectual love.
