Cuba and the Night (22 page)

“How about the Colina?” I asked.

“No problem,” she said, laughing again, and pushing the brown curls from her eyes. I hadn’t even formally entered the country, and already I was in some kind of ambiguous exchange.

“Okay, you give me the—”

“I know. I give you the money, you give me the receipt. I give the guy at the desk the receipt. He gives me the key to a room without water. If I want water, I give him more money.…”

“You know our country very well.”

“Not well enough,” I said, and she shot me a glance, and sent me back to the immigration officer, who gave me a conspirator’s smile, and sent me off to the customs official, who checked my case to make sure that everything was contraband, chose not to look at the nine pairs of jeans and six bottles of whiskey, and then all but pushed me into his country, with a friendly “Have a good trip!”

“Catch you later,” I said to the girl before I left.

“I hope you will,” she said. “I have the number of your room.”

I grabbed a public taxi then, told him I’d give him dollars, and we drove toward Havana in the dark, darker than I’d ever seen it, pitch black like Africa or Bali, with just a few sudden faces at the bus stops, and then monuments and convention centers and four-story paintings of Che. The Plaza de la Revolución. The shadows around Lenin Park. The broken, lonely bus stops. A city of dancing ghosts.

In the hotel, the policewomen, brown hair tucked under their blue caps, and mouths unsmiling, worked the lobby in pairs, circling around the girls who were circling around them. Female policemen were not subject to temptation, went the thinking. Here and there, display-case mulattas were arranged on sofas, and boys whose smiling eyes caught anyone’s who looked. The receptionist thumbed wearily through a huge handwritten ledger, hoping not to find my name. The six-seat bar in the lobby was all occupied, all female.

I walked out past Coppelia, past lines outside the restaurants, past bars slammed shut by shortages. Sunny girls and moony couples; a few fat English guys barreling into the Habana Libre with teenagers under their arms. On the wall near the TV station, an ad for a production of the
Oresteia
, Kabuki style, with chalky phantom faces in black leotards prowling around the stage like spirits.

I crept into a bar, and the smiling guy behind the counter said,
“No hay beer. No hay whiskey. No hay nada. Ron solamente, y agua minerale.”
Because of the Games, the stores and restaurants were even emptier than usual, he explained: food and drink were reserved for authorities and strangers. Glad to have got anything, I drank warm rum out of a dirty tin cup, next to a few old guys sitting before their empty glasses, staring into space. A girl in a pink dress was stretched out on a booth like a corpse. Two kids were strumming love songs in a corner on a guitar. A friend of theirs with a pixie smile was bouncing up and down on the lap of a Mexican with long dark hair and shades who looked like he was on the way to the slaughter-house. He pawed her fondly, and she threw back her head and laughed.

I bought the guys next to me a round of drinks, and as soon as I did, the two guys from the corner came up and introduced themselves. Ángel and Israel, they said. “Do you like Cuban music?” said Ángel. “Or you like girls?
Mulattas, chinas, qué quieres?”
I looked around to plan my escape.
“Mira,”
said the other.
“Somos amigos. No tienes miedo. Yo no quiero robarte. Somos amigos, entiendes?”

“Entiendo,”
I said, and hightailed it out of there, figuring I didn’t have the time or the energy for more of this. Outside, on the street, I heard a car honk, and I looked up to see two guys from Canada I’d met at the airport, and I was so tired I decided I’d go with them, and we ended up at a table in the Pompero tango bar, drinking water.

At the next table, a CIA man was talking about his jobs in Venezuela and the University of the Andes, while his willowy punk daughter, in a flowery peasant skirt, was handing round copies of the review her performance piece had got in the
Boston Phoenix
. “You know,” said the entrepreneur from Toronto, “they say the story of Cuba is the story of sugar. A story of exploitation. By the Spaniards, Americans, British, even the Cubans themselves.” Across the table, his friend, the semiotician from the University of British Columbia, was quoting Foucault on power while his Cuban girlfriend—a slim black beauty with a Sinead O’Connor cut—was talking about her days in Kiev. “For me, Russia was marvelous. Like a dream. For material things they have so much. But for spirit—nothing! They are like ants, like worker ants there. Every man looks out
for himself; if you walk behind him, the door will slam in your face. They are so directed. Not like here. In Russia, if I fall down in the street, nobody stops to help me. Here in Cuba, it is the opposite: people catch you before you fall.”

Then she joined her girlfriend from Canada—they both lived in the
Granma
towers—in a sweet, soaring rendition of
“Qué Linda Es Cuba,”
their voices alive with hope and light as they sang,
“Con Fidel, que vive en la montaña
 …” I could hear the CIA man saying, “We’re here to have fun,” and explaining how easy it was for Americans to come down here—the U.S. had no rule you couldn’t visit Cuba, only that you couldn’t spend money here. The sweet, honey-haired dreamer from grad school was telling us now about the Salvadoran guerrilla she’d fallen in love with here, and her hopes for working for the FMLNF in San Salvador.

As the night went on, the other four kind of paired off, and there were giggles and exploratory kisses, and the semiotician was buried in the black girl’s neck. “Hey,” his voice came out at one point. “Conchita wants to know what ‘entropy’ means.” The Canadian girl was saying, “Some people say—though it’s a bit too cynical for me—that in Cuba people think of making love as casually as smoking a cigarette.” At the piano, some guy in a faded tuxedo was playing “Try to remember the kind of September …”

By three in the morning, I figured it was bedtime, so I took my leave of the festive group and set out on the long walk home: there was still music pulsing out of vacant lots, and the outline of groups of figures along the Malecón;
CUBA
—
JOY UNDER YOUR SUN
, said the first sign I saw. The Nacional was closed for renovation, though—it was going to be closed during the Games, the only time in thirty years when they’d have a chance of filling it—and a cop on duty in the driveway told me that Alfredo had gone back to Asunción. There were some rickety excuses for samba bands now even in the cheap hotels, and an air of fake laughter and light, like Las Vegas rebuilt in Siberia.

In the hotel, there was a steady procession of unattended girls, like in some police lineup: blondes in flimsy hot pants, ebony women in see-through blouses, teenagers with Oriental features. The joke now, Mike had told me when he came back to New York,
was that any place just for foreigners was about 30 percent foreigners and 70 percent Cuban girls.

In my room, I went into the bathroom, and the door locked me in by mistake.
“Qué linda es Cuba,”
I remembered the Canadian girl singing as I set about breaking it down.

W
hen I went down to breakfast the next morning in the hotel, it was the same old craziness.
“No hay.” “No hay.” “No hay nada.”
Fat old mammies sitting on their asses, and waiters smiling in the hope of getting a piece of spare bread, and girls who snarled when you asked them for some juice. Cuba must have been the only tropical country in the world where all the juice was canned and the fruit tasted like it had been sent over, sea mail, from Pyongyang.

Around me, the local beauties were telling the hippies from Munich and Vancouver how good they had it, while the ponytail brigade was trying to tell them the same. By eleven o’clock, I knew, the guy in the black tie would be back at his piano, playing “As Time Goes By” without a trace of irony, and the waitresses would be looking at you like mothers who’ve heard their kids tell the same bad joke once too often. Even now, there were people fighting for the seats in the lobby, where the air-conditioning was free and there was a suggestion, a faint hint, of the world outside.

When I got to Lourdes’s home, I saw a Havanautos car parked outside, and my heart missed a beat. The main door was locked, so I sat on the stoop and waited. A few kids, a couple of mothers, some guys in shiny guayaberas. Then, at last, a man came out—he looked like a government official—and got in the rental car and drove away, and my heart came to life again. The street hadn’t changed at all—it was off the Pan Am circuit: pockmarked walls, gutted windows, dirty clothes hanging out of balconies. Bahia in a shotgun marriage with Bombay.

When finally a woman opened the door from indoors, I raced up the broad stairs and knocked and knocked. The door opened up, and it was her mother, rings around her eyes, in curlers and a white print dress.

“Richard!” she said, kissing me on both cheeks.
“Qué pasa? Cómo estás? Café?”
Cari was sitting at the table, and when she saw me, a warmth came to her face too, and I kissed her, and held her hand, and we sat around the table, talking.

“You have heard the news? Lourdes told you?” her mother asked.

“What news?”

“About the marriage.” I looked back at her. “You don’t know?” She got up, with a groan, and labored over to the same shelf where she kept her glasses and her souvenirs. She pulled out a photo album—one of those Far Eastern things, from Vietnam perhaps, with smiling pink kitties all over it—and opened it up.

“Mira
, Richard. Lourdes’s sister. You remember her?”

Inside, there were pictures, of a party mostly, a small, sad party in some tiny kitchen: of Lourdes’s mother, and her man, dancing with their arms around each other’s waists; and Lourdes’s sister, thick and mustached, sitting on the knees of some mobster-style guy in his early forties, with bright balloons behind them on the wall; and some bread on the table, and bottles of cider here and there. Their faces in the flashlight glare looked otherworldly almost, red dots in each pupil, and later there were more pictures, outdoors, of the balding mobster lying on top of the sister on some grass, kissing her on the lips, and more dancing in front of red balloons.

“This is her
novio?”

“Claro
. They will be married.”

“I thought it was her uncle.”

“Uncle? No. This is Giuseppe. He will marry her soon. He brings us cheese, and wine, and balloons.”

“So she is happy?”

“Cómo no?
We are all so happy. He is a good man, very kind to her. He works in a factory in Italy, and he comes here already three times to see her. The government says she cannot get a visa now—she is only nineteen. But when she is twenty-one, she will be free.”

“And she isn’t sad?”

“Look at her face.”

It was true: she looked as happy as if she were marrying Robert
Redford. Happier than I’d ever seen her sister. In the arms of this balding mobster.

The marriage kind of took the wind out of my sails, and I could feel the room fill up with expectation. It was as if all the questions Lourdes’s mother wanted to ask, and all the things Cari was waiting to say, were everywhere around us, hovering.

“I guess I’d better make tracks. If Lourdes comes back, tell her she can find me in the Colina. Today. Tomorrow I’ll be leaving.”

“O-ka
, Richard,” said the mother.

“Richard,” said Cari, touching me shyly on the arm. “Can you help me?”

“With what?”

“This.”

She motioned me to follow her into the room she shared with Lourdes. She gestured for me to sit on the bed. She walked across the room and locked the door. “It is safe here,” she said.

The room was dark and musty; the sheets had traces of the perfume I’d given them. She came toward me on the bed.

“Cari …”

“It’s nothing. Just this,” she said, and I saw her turn toward the dresser, and open the top drawer. From where I sat, I could see a bottle of rum, some old tubes of lipstick, a stash of papers. She brought the stash over. There was a withered snapshot of the day she’d spent in Varadero once, with a Spanish businessman. One of her fifteenth birthday at the Tropicana, a teenage Lourdes smiling by her side. There were scraps of notes, a map someone had given her once of Belgrade. Then she pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.

I saw the
par avion
rectangle of France.

“Richard, will you read this for me?”

“I’ll try. I don’t have much French, but I guess it’s more than yours.”

I read it over quickly. What could I say?

Cari was looking at me bright-eyed. “Please tell me, Richard. What does he say?”

“He says he misses you, and always thinks of you, and the times you spent together.”

“Claro
. So do I.”

“He says that the weather is very sunny in Lyon, and he is making a trip to the mountains with his friends.”

“A trip?” she said, and she sounded worried.

“He says he keeps your picture next to his bed.”

“And he will be coming back soon?”

“He doesn’t say when.”

Cari’s eyes were filling up.

“But he says that he loves me?”

“Yes. He says that he loves you very much.” I handed the letter back to her, and she folded it up carefully, and put it back in the stack. It was one of the first times I was almost glad that my job had taught me how to lie.

L
ourdes found me that afternoon, calling from the telephone in her neighbor’s room, and when I arrived to meet her, in her kitchen, she was all lit up like I’d never seen her before. I tried to maneuver her back to Vedado, or into a
colectivo
, or somewhere where we could be private, but it wasn’t me that made her excited this time, and it wasn’t her sister’s wedding, and it wasn’t the clothes I’d brought for her. It was something else.

“Richard, I want to tell you something. For your job. Follow me.” We walked out onto the balcony outside the kitchen, and then up some steep stairs, tricky as in some old Tibetan monastery, up to her roof.