Read The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) for Free Online

women belonging to millionaires. I shut the magazine and wait a minute for the excitement to pass. When it has passed, I stand up, put the magazine back and leave. I walk on. I walk on into the heart of downtown. Until I stop, tired, and realize it’s time to go back to the halfway house.
    I get to the halfway house and try to enter through the front door. It’s locked. A maid, whose name is Josefina, cleans the house inside, so the nuts have been banished to the porch.
    “Get out,
locos!
” Josefina says, pushing them all out with a broom. And the nuts leave without complaint, taking their seats on the porch. It’s a dark porch, surrounded by black metallic cloth, with an ever-present puddle of urine at the center thanks to old one-eyed Reyes, who has lost all shame and urinates everywhere all the time, despite the punches he receives on his squalid chest and gray, unkempt head. I turn around and sit on one of the porch chairs, inhaling the strong smell of urine. I take the book of English poets out of my pocket. But I don’t read any of it. I just look at the cover. It’s a beautiful book. Thick. Finely bound.
El Negro
gave it to me when he came back from New York. It cost him twelve dollars. I look at some of the illustrations in the book. I see Samuel Coleridge’s face again. I see John Keats, he who in 1817 asked himself,
    Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll
    Then Ida, the grande dame come to ruin, gets up from her chair and comes over to me.
    “Do you read?” she asks.
    “Occasionally,” I respond.
    “Oh!” She says. “I used to read a lot, back in Cuba. Romance novels.”
    “Oh!”
    I look at her. She dresses relatively well compared to the way the other people at the halfway house dress. Her body, while old, is clean and smells vaguely of cologne water. She’s one of the ones who knows how to exercise her rights and demands her thirty-eight dollars a month from Mr. Curbelo.
    She was a member of the bourgeoisie back in Cuba, in the years when I was a young communist. Now the communist and the bourgeois woman are in the same place, the same spot history has assigned them: the halfway house.
    I open the book of Romantic English poets and read a poem by William Blake:
    Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life & bid thee feed
By the stream & o’er the mead
    I close the book. Mr. Curbelo pokes his head through the porch door and motions to me with his hands. I go. At his desk, a well-dressed, well-groomed man is waiting for us with a thick gold chain around his neck and a large watch on his wrist. He’s wearing a fetching pair of tinted glasses.
    “This is the psychiatrist,” Mr. Curbelo says. “Tell him everything that’s the matter with you.”
    I take a seat in a chair that Curbelo brings me. The psychiatrist takes a piece of paper out of a folder and starts to fill it out with a fountain pen. While he writes, he asks me, “Let’s see, William. What’s the matter?”
    I don’t answer.
    “What’s the matter?” he asks again.
    I take a deep breath. It’s the same bullshit as always.
    “I hear voices,” I say.
    “What else?”
    “I see devils on the walls.”
    “Hmmm!” he says. “Do you talk to those devils?”
    “No.”
    “What else do you have?”
    “Fatigue.”
    “Hmmm!”
    He writes for a long time. He writes, writes, writes. He takes off the tinted glasses and looks at me. His eyes don’t show the slightest interest in me.
    “How old are you, William?”
    “Thirty-eight.”
    “Hmmm!”
    He looks at my clothes, my shoes.
    “Do you know what day today is?”
    “Today,” I say uncomfortably. “Friday.”
    “Friday, the what?”
    “Friday . . . the fourteenth.”
    “Of what month?”
    “August.”
    He writes again. While he does, he discloses impersonally, “Today is Monday, the twenty-third of September."
    He writes a little