Ruins (12 page)

“Crazy old man!” someone yelled Usnavy’s way. It was a man’s voice he heard, but when he glanced in the rearview mirror there was only a statuesque mulatta, her figure shrinking in the distance, her wrists full of fantasy bracelets twinkling as she raised her fist to protest.

Finally on a straight-ahead course out of the city, Usnavy threw the car into fifth gear—he’d never, ever, driven a car with a fifth gear before—and settled back. Lidia would love this, he thought.

“You don’t know how to drive,” Diosdado said, curled into a fetal ball on the passenger’s side.

“I’m driving, am I not?”

“You’re like everybody else in this country, Usnavy, a braggart,” Diosdado said.

“This is called driving, see?” Usnavy wiggled the wheel from side to side to show he’d gained command. The car zigzagged dangerously. “I may be a braggart but at least I’m not a coward like you. You’re afraid of everything—you’re afraid to imagine our greatness as Cubans because you can’t imagine your own.”

“Usnavy, what have we ever done that’s great?”

“What …?” Usnavy spun his head toward Diosdado—the car swerved—then back to the road. “Are you crazy? We have, first and foremost, set an example—”

“Oh no.”

“Look, Diosdado, we have been robbed as a nation—everybody knows that! We have been robbed of opportunities, and we have been robbed of our real achievements.”

“No, no, no!” Diosdado covered his ears; he’d heard it all before so many times.

“The Americans took away our war of independence from Spain,” Usnavy said.

“Oh, please!”

“Alexander Graham Bell ripped off Meucci—”

“Who wasn’t Cuban but Italian!” interrupted Diosdado.

“He lived here all his life, didn’t he? Duchamp ripped off Picabia—” (This wasn’t an argument either of them knew much about but they’d picked it up when Reynaldo had been a student at the Havana Art Institute and they’d since integrated it into their litany.)

“Who wasn’t Cuban either but the son of some French diplomat stationed here.”

“That’s a lie!” screamed Usnavy.

“Picabia never even set foot in Cuba!”

“That’s a lie! That’s a lie! I suppose that next you’re going to tell me Picasso didn’t rip off Wifredo Lam?”

Diosdado sat up and turned to Usnavy. “I’ll give you that one, okay? But what if Picasso hadn’t ripped off Lam? What if Lam had been Picasso? Usnavy, look around … we’re not big enough for a Picasso. What would we have done with that much greatness?”

When Diosdado and Usnavy arrived at their destination in Santa María del Mar, the beach was quiet and deserted. The water shone bright as a plate, flat and hard. As soon as the car came to a jerky stop off a park (as Diosdado indicated), a fresh-faced young foreigner looked up, delighted at the sight of them. He had been strewn on the grass, reading
Fodor’s Cuba,
and rushed toward them like a gazelle.

Usnavy scrutinized the young man’s well-toned body, fashionable haircut, and the multilevel sports shoes that gave his step such an unnatural spring. He was close to thirty, but his expression was as trusting and clean as a toddler’s.

“This is Burt, a friend from Canada,” Diosdado told Usnavy in Spanish. Then he said to the young foreigner: “
Uss-nah-veee
.”

Burt was wearing khaki shorts and a dark Polo shirt. Wrapped around his head were a pair of sunglasses that looked like diving goggles, they were so big and all-encompassing. Dangling from the tips around his ears was a neon-green string which dropped down around his neck. It was as thick as a shoelace.

Canadians, Americans: How could two peoples be so politically different and look so much alike? Usnavy figured, if American soldiers invaded Haiti they’d look as innocent and simple as Burt, who said something bright and fast in an incomprehensible English and stuck his hand out. Usnavy took it and felt the man’s unexpectedly slippery grip.

“So what now?” Usnavy asked, uncertain, turning away from the American-looking Canadian to his friend.

“Okay, here’s what now,” said Diosdado, adjusting the bifocals on his nose and fingering his goatee like a wise old lecturer. “Our Canadian compañero first came to Cuba on a Jewish church mission.”

“It can’t be both Jewish and a church mission, Diosdado—you know better!” exclaimed Usnavy.

“You know what I mean,” Diosdado said through clenched teeth.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do—he came with one of those groups that bring bread and medicine to the Jewish community.”

“The Americans, yes.”

“No, you idiot, the Canadians—the Canadians came first.”

“Right, right,” nodded Usnavy, glancing up at the strapping northerner, who smiled uneasily as the two old men argued.

“Now it seems he has fallen in love with a local girl,” Diosdado explained. “She is an architectural guide, I believe. Her specialty is the Museum of the Revolution, before it was the Museum of the Revolution, back when it was the Presidential Palace. She talks to foreigners about the bullet holes from when they almost shot Batista, and the statues of Abraham Lincoln and the other heroes, and also about the chandeliers and cabinet work, all exclusively created by Tiffany & Company from New York.”

Tiffany! Damn! The universe was just throwing Tiffany in his face.

Diosdado continued, oblivious: “He has visited her many times, on various trips, and now he would like to propose marriage—this, even though she is not Jewish.”

Usnavy knew he was supposed to rejoice at the thought of love itself, and at the foreigner’s appreciation of Cuban women, but he also knew romance had become a wicked thing in recent years: These days, love was more often just a strong desire to leave Cuba, a one-way ticket to anywhere but here. And as much as he tried to lift his lips in a smile, his eyes betrayed his sadness.

“Congratulate him, Usnavy, this is good news, remember?” Diosdado said, prodding his friend with a quick cuff to his empty belly.

Usnavy nodded in Burt’s direction. “
Ber-ry gut
,” he said, ravages of his childhood efforts to learn that difficult and privileged tongue.

Burt’s sunburnt face expanded into a wide grin and he went off on an unfathomable monologue about …
what
? The girl? Cuba? Marriage? Usnavy never heard the word love—he knew the word
love
—but English was something far away and long ago for him, and the Canadian talked so strangely anyway.

“Maybe he’s a French-Canadian?” Usnavy asked.

“Of course not,” said Diosdado. “Can’t you tell the difference between French and English? We’d understand French, you cretin.” Diosdado smiled deferentially at the Canadian as he insulted Usnavy yet again.

Usnavy cringed. Where was yesterday’s defiance? Where was yesterday’s resistance to foreign whim?

Then Usnavy recalled his own mother, back in Oriente, and how she’d gone from a headstrong, independent girl to a gracious and accommodating hostess in just a few years. He tightened his fists, just like Yoandry at Lámparas Cubanas, then remembered Lidia and Nena and forced himself to relax, to extend his fingers like spider legs, to stop thinking before he became completely immobilized.

When told about Burt’s plan, it struck Usnavy as cowardly and unworthy of real love, but he knew there was no point in saying anything. For starters, he literally couldn’t communicate with this gangly stranger. Moreover, what good would it do if he could? Would the Canadian listen to him? And what exactly would he say—that if he really loved her this was all a charade? That this kind of thing revealed more about him than anything they could possibly find out about her?

Usnavy had gone this far, all the way to Santa María del Mar, to earn a few dollars and see if, somehow—he realized this as he was driving, realized it only after he was already committed—he could buy a bike for his daughter (although he was also having second thoughts now, because he didn’t want to inadvertently reward the awful incident at the hotel). He was too consumed with his own situation to worry much about some foreigner’s intimate problems.

“Let me see if I understand,” Usnavy said to Diosdado as they settled into the Daewoo again, the Canadian having folded his uncommonly large body onto the floor of the backseat. “We’re going to drive by the girl’s house to see if she’s really home, like she told him she would be. That’s all?”

“No, Usnavy, no,” replied Diosdado, clearly irritated but trying to pretend he was calm for Burt’s sake. “We’re going to drive by so he can see her with his own eyes. She doesn’t know he’s here. We’re going to drive by to make sure she’s not going out with anybody else—that she’s not out at parties or anything like that—so we need to do this very discretely. Get it?”

“If you don’t understand English, then how do you know that’s what he wants to do?” Usnavy asked Diosdado as he started the car. He felt the weight of the foreigner’s bulk against the back of his seat. “I mean, this is pretty ridiculous.”

“He’s a friend of … he’s a friend of Reynaldo’s,” said Diosdado. “My son explained it to me on the phone, before the Canadian got here. He has a whole plan. Now, c’mon, let’s go.” He pointed forward officiously, with an upturned palm, as if he were making an offering. He gazed out the window to the immense and placid blue of the ocean, then quickly at his shoes, with the most fleeting sideways glance at Usnavy before taking refuge back on the shore.

Okay, thought Usnavy, then Reynaldo’s still Reynaldo—that’s that. He’d have to tell Frank, even if there was no possibility of an apology, or of bringing Diosdado back to the domino game any time soon.

He slid the car into first, trying to calmly go through the other gears and not have the car vault down the street. But his first effort failed and the car died a terrible gnashing death, which caused the Canadian to pop his head up and say something no one understood.

Diosdado leaned back in his seat, gave a transparently fake smile to the foreigner, and, patting the air with his hand as if it were Burt’s head, said, “
Soh-rrreee, soh-rrreee
.” Then he turned back and scowled at Usnavy.

Eventually, with Burt occasionally materializing to mime instructions for Usnavy (his wraparound glasses still on his head, neon-green shoelaces framing his face), the Daewoo began its afternoon of cruising. The girl, it seemed, was vacationing in Santa María del Mar and Burt was able to spy her instantly, sitting on the steps of a beach house not far off the road. The Canadian laughed nervously when he spotted her, rattling off what Usnavy and Diosdado presumed were pronouncements of love and admiration, then ducked down so she wouldn’t see him.

But this time Usnavy picked up another word in the Canadian’s verbiage, and it was as clear as the light from his magnificent lamp: Reina. He knew Diosdado heard it too, squirming there in the passenger’s seat, his eyes shut so tight his lids trembled like the ocean before a storm.

The routine was simple enough: They drove by, confirmed it was still the same girl, and idled out of sight for a while. Then they cruised by again, pretending indifference. Sometimes, a middle-aged woman would stand at the door and talk with the girl; they figured she was her mother or an aunt. But mostly, the girl was alone or with a girlfriend, stretching, laughing, playing checkers, or gazing out at the world. This went on until dusk began to settle over the shore.

Usnavy couldn’t tell much about the girl from behind the wheel. She was young, she had dark hair, like Nena. She had curvy hips and slightly bowed legs. Did she, like Nena, also need more than her parents could provide? Did she still know the words to “Tengo” or had she forgotten them by now?

Maybe she could tell him more about Mr. Tiffany, later, after this episode faded … Maybe, he thought, she would prefer to stay at the museum, with its hero’s shirts and useless guns, rather than go north with the handsome foreigner. Perhaps the serenity of Canada could never mean as much to her as the din of Havana, with all its familiar anxieties.

“There’s not that much traffic, you know,” he said at one point. “Surely she’s noticed us by now.”

Diosdado shrugged. “Look, until he says to stop, we keep going.”

Usnavy turned the car around again, barely paying attention anymore. They’d circled this finite piece of pavement so many times, there was no longer a thrill in shifting gears, the ride now as level and dull as the graying blue waters on the horizon.

In his boredom, Usnavy looked out for invading soldiers, spillovers from what he was convinced would be a massive assault on Haiti. If they came here, how many would be Cuban-born, or the children of exiles? Would Badagry’s car-dealing grandson be among them, so long gone that he felt more at home on the other side than here, with them? Or would he, upon landing on Cuban shores, see that those in the crosshairs were mirror images, brothers and sisters he’d recognize on sight and embrace? Would any of them, like the Canadian stowed away in the back, fall in love? That, he thought decisively, could happen too. And then what would they do?

Diosdado yawned. The sun was shivering in its descent, still robust enough to cause them to squint, but on its way down to a watery slumber.

Then it happened.

“Oh my fucking god!” Usnavy screamed as he slammed on the brakes, his eyes having drifted from the seascape to the abrupt sight of a young man standing smack in the middle of the road: The boy held his arms out as if he were Superman and could stop the Daewoo with his bare hands.

“What the …?” Diosdado stuttered, his own arms up against the dashboard as Usnavy maneuvered and the Daewoo rocked in place, the Canadian rolling around in the back like a sack of grapefruits.

“Compañero!” shouted the young man. He was in his early twenties, cocky, muscular, wearing a tight-fitting green Polo shirt. He smoked a cigarette that he tossed to the ground as he swaggered from the front of the Daewoo to the driver’s window.

Usnavy recognized him immediately. “Yoandry, what are you doing?” he asked. It was the clerk from Lámparas Cubanas. His greasy locks uncurled with the humidity, the acne on his face a rash of tiny scabs.

“You!” the clerk barked.

“You know each other?” Diosdado asked incredulously.