Cuba and the Night (12 page)

Dear Stephen
,

I fear this may turn out to be an unreasonably long letter, but the thing is, so much happens when one’s here, and later, when one’s back in the dining hall or going up to books, one can hardly believe that any of it happened at all. I suppose writing to you is a way of reminding myself that it really did happen, and that the Hugo who will later read this is the same one who was in the thick of all these tropical adventures. It’s hard to believe sometimes
.

As perhaps I told you before, in Cuba even the most unexceptional episodes have a way of coming back to haunt one, and they tend to reverberate as few excitements do. You may recall that I told you about the old cathedral in Havana, and how eager I was to attend a service there. It seems such a melancholy place, I wanted to see how it might be different as a place of worship. So I went to attend a mass there a few days ago. I don’t know if you remember, but I used to be a very keen campanologist as a boy; even now I find some kind of solace in the bells
.

In any case, it was a rather sorry gathering, as you might expect: there were only a few bare pews of worshippers, all in their Sunday best, yet still shifty somehow, and not very full-throated, as if they were all keeping an eye out lest a group of
Fidelistas
break in at any moment, and couldn’t remember that Castro himself was once a Jesuit boy. So their mumbled singing hardly began to fill the place
,
and by the end, as you can imagine, I was more than ready to take my leave
.

Before I could quite exit, however, I heard a voice address me in English: I suppose he’d seen the map inside my pocket
.

“Excuse me
, señor.
You are from Germany? Or Canada?”

“England, actually.”

“Ay, England! The land of kings!”

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, I suppose so.”

“You live near the Queen?”

“Not terribly near. But in the same general direction, yes.”

“You come here as a tourist?”

“Yes. I love it here. This is my second time.”

“Ah, for you
, señor,
it is so beautiful here. I love your country too. But I cannot visit.”

“No. It’s a shame.” There was a pause. “You have relatives abroad?”

“My mother only. And my brother, he went to Mexico three years ago. And my father, he is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Señor.
Can you take this to my mother?” He handed me a faded envelope, with a picture of the British Museum on the stamp
.

“I suppose so. The trouble is, though, I don’t live in the U.S.”

“Is okay. You live outside. That is enough.”

“Fine. Well, in that case, perhaps I’ll be on my way,” I said, with a heartiness I didn’t really feel. “Very pleasant to have met you. I do hope we’ll meet again.”

“I hope this too,” he said. “In England. At the home of the King.”

Something about the conversation rather took the spring out of my step, and I wasn’t quite in the mood to make the tour I’d promised myself of the colonial patios. So I popped instead into the Bodeguita del Medio, this very famous old place where Ernest Hemingway and Allende and everyone seemed to drink, and I bought a
mojito,
the lethal rum concoction that is the
spécialité de la maison.
Because I had nothing to do, I suppose, I opened the envelope
.

“My dearest, unforgettable Margarita,” it began—I could translate it quite easily. “I hope this finds you well, and your parents too
.
I think of you every day. I dream of you every night. Here it is always the same. We cannot get rum. We cannot get chicken. Your brother is no longer with Martita. Even in the cathedral it is not so easy to do business. The money you sent me for the passport is all gone. I gave the money to the man from Peru, but then I heard nothing. Now I think I cannot wait any longer. I cannot live any longer. If you read this letter, please send me more money. Or a ticket. Or a visa. If you do not, I think I will die. I ask God many times why he must make me suffer, when he will come back. But always I hear no answer. No answer from God, no answer from you. And every day, there is a new restriction. My darling Margarita, sometimes at night I think we are together again, and you are in my arms. But then I wake up, and there is no one. I think very soon I will die. With all my love, Ricardo.”

I don’t know why, but my heart was pounding as I read the letter. The right thing to do, I suppose, was to send it on as if I’d never opened it. But still, somehow, I felt as if I’d trespassed, as if I’d walked into a room at a time when two people were being intimate. Somewhat on an impulse, I decided to go back to the cathedral, and give it back to the man, but by the time I got there, the door was locked, and the whole square was empty, save for a young boy who suddenly materialized at my side, and—absurdly—two pigs. So I went back to my room, with the letter in my pocket, and I felt as if I were a spy somehow, or a traitor, and I half believed that even the woman at the desk was looking at me differently. I know that the Cubans are a passionate people, but still it was hard to know what exactly the letter portended. It all made me feel a very long way from home
.

In any case, I look forward to seeing you soon
.

With all warmest wishes
,
Hugo

Just two days after that
[I found myself continuing in my diary—knowing, I suppose, that I’d never send the letter, but wanting, somehow, to catch the strangeness and the drama of the place before I forgot it],
I took myself off to Cayo Largo, one of
those pristine honeymoon resorts they have over here, which are reserved exclusively for tourists, and which one can visit on a day trip from Havana. The whole thing was something of a travesty, as usual: the entire planeload arriving at eight o’clock, to be greeted by dancing bands and rum cocktails for breakfast, and offers of a tour to inspect the local turtles
.

I felt a little out of place, not surprisingly: I’m not a great one for water sports at the best of times, and I felt a little self-conscious sitting on the beach, reading
On the Road
while groups of bronzed Teutons disported themselves as if in some Aryan holiday camp. Nonetheless, it was certainly the most beautiful beach I’d ever seen, and it seemed as good a way as any to pass a morning in the tropics
.

They treated us all to a very hearty lunch (one of the waiters asking if I knew Pete Townshend, and some of the Germans cracking jokes about the advert for the beach—“Alone, virgin and yours”), and at five o’clock we gathered round to be bused back to the plane. Needless to say, as soon as I turned up, I was told that there was no bus at all, and there was no plane: I would be obliged to spend the night on the island. Not a bad way, I suppose, of their getting me to pay for two hotel rooms in a single evening. It was quite an inconvenience—I hadn’t brought my things with me, after all—but I realized that there was no sense in arguing, and that I might as well chalk it up to experience: treat it as one of those adventures one so seldom has at home
.

In due time, a minivan did arrive, and took us all to a hotel, and when we arrived at the place—a rather rickety kind of post-Stalinist extravaganza, well suited to North Korean ophthalmologists’ conventions—they handed me a key, and sent me up to the second floor. No lift, of course, and not a great deal of lighting on the stairs. Cuba is a place that can make Winchester seem luxurious by comparison
.

When I opened the door to my room, I found there was someone standing there already. Even more astonishing, it was the American photographer I’d met here a year ago, Richard. He was standing by the window, fiddling with some lenses, and when I came in through the door, he looked at me as if I were a spy. And then, recovering rather, came over and said, “Dr. Cartwright, I presume.”

An extraordinary coincidence, I suppose—but then, coincidences
seem to occur with such regularity here that one’s inclined to believe they may not be coincidences at all. For example, the nice man at the hotel suddenly appears at the table next to yours in the nightclub that evening, and you realize that he may not be just a nice man from the hotel. Or the man on the bus turns out to be the neighbor of the friend you’ve just been to see. Things have a way here of circling round. Besides, having written to Richard, I suppose I shouldn’t have been so taken aback to see him
.

Nonetheless, it was a great surprise, in its way—we hadn’t planned it—and I was glad of the company. At the very least, he was rescuing me from three hours of Kerouac
.

We went down to a bar which they have out by the swimming pool—the Medusa, as it’s called—and ordered some drinks
.

“So what brings you here?” I asked
.

“Oh, the usual. A story I’m shooting for
Rolling Stone.”

I couldn’t help but be impressed. “On Cuba?”

“Naw. Something global. ‘Love in a Cold War Climate,’ they’re going to call it. About the love trade around the world. You know: girls at the Jinjiang Hotel in Chengdu getting cozy with overseas Chinese businessmen. Poland becoming the largest center of mailorder brides outside the Philippines. The French agency that sets up guys with girls from Transylvania. Even the Americans who want to get English brides—and vice versa. The usual game.”

“Now you mention it, I do remember hearing about something like that in Russia.”

“Sure. I’ve seen more ‘Russian marriages’ than you’ve seen beers. Some kid learns Russian at school, goes for a six-week course in Leningrad, meets some Natasha who comes on strong to him. Late-night talks about poetry and politics. Late-night wedding at some deserted office. He returns home, takes care of the papers, and she comes over, and then heads off. End of affair, end of innocence. Kid’s left wondering what’s hit him, and the West has a new entrepreneur on its hands.”

“And that happens here too?”

“What do you think brings all these three-hundred-pound Mexican truckdrivers down here? The art museums?”

“But I mean, it’s not always like that. You can’t deny that the
Cubans are among the most openhearted and generous people around.”

“Sure. And they know how to turn that to advantage. If they’re going to have a good time anyway, they might as well have one with a foreigner, and see where that will lead. Prostitution feeds off foreignness as much as love does.”

It was funny, but the more he went on like this, the more I felt he was putting on a show, for himself perhaps as much as for me. Pretending somehow, or not letting on that he was vulnerable. He reminded me sometimes of those Sixth Formers we have whose very anxiety to prove their worldly wisdom makes one rather doubt it
.

“So you think it’s political?”

“Everything’s political down here, my friend.”

“Even falling in love?”

“Especially falling in love.” He took another sip of beer
.

“So what do you say to something to eat?” I said, rather to dispel the mood, and then we made our way over to the glass-fronted restaurant a little further along the beach. I must say that the only good thing about Cuban food is that there usually isn’t much of it: another of those austerities for which school is rather a good training. So we reconciled ourselves to the inevitable
moros y cristianos,
and a bottle of Spanish plonk, and I asked him about his past. I could see that he wanted to talk tonight, and that he wouldn’t let me rest till he’d had his say
.

“However did you get into this business in the first place? Did you train at a vocational college?”

“God, no, just the opposite. Got into it the usual way, with the usual story. You know: drugs, parental divorce, boarding school, all that, and then, in ’68 or ’69, I just decided to bag the whole thing and hit the road. Everywhere was wide open then, you could go anywhere you wanted, so I took the trail down through Iran, Kabul, and Kathmandu, and ended up in Goa. It was crazy in those days: you’d see all these people crashed out on the beach, living there for six months, nine months at a time, partying every night. Plus, there were all these guys going out to Indochina from there. It was an easy way to make a living: every few months, you could go over to Saigon, hook up with one of the big agencies—AP, AFP, one of those—and
then make enough money to go back to Goa and hang out some more. None of us had any training, but none of us cared. It was the ultimate teenager’s wet dream: there we were, seventeen, eighteen, out in this exotic world of temples and jungles and bar girls, with all the dope we could want, and hammocks on the beach, and guys with AK-47s partying next door
.

“Plus, we could tell ourselves we were heroes. Risking our lives to bring back the truth. Braving the front lines to educate the masses. We were the latest Cartier-Bressons and Bischofs. And all the time we were having the party of our lives, the one that the guys back in California would have killed for. We never wanted it to end
.

“Did, though; had to. So I went and shot South Africa for a while, Beirut, Belfast, El Salvador: all the garden spots. Couldn’t get out of Southeast Asia, though: just kept on going back there. Used to stay at the Tropicana, down in Bangkok—the Troc of Shit, we’d call it—down in the old part of the city, where the glitz suddenly ends, and you’re in the middle of Indians in prayer caps and
klong
artists and Muslim guys with calculators working out how much a threesome costs. Where every girl looks like an Annamese princess. So there you were, with these wild trips going down every night. You’d go out with some sexy, drop-dead teenager, and the next day you’d find out she was an ax murderer—or a post-ops falsie. Then you’d go out to Site 3, and these Khmer Rouge heavies—real murderers—would come out and bow and
wai
and invite you into their huts for dinner. You didn’t know if you were coming or going; no knowing the lay of the land, we’d say, when you’re in the Land of the Lay.”

“Not ideal, though, for long-term relationships.”

“Not ideal at all. Not ideal for anything except war-zone love. You’d see all these guys who were completely hooked on the rush. Couldn’t get it up unless there were grenades popping around them. Wouldn’t go for a girl unless she was a killer. But still, you know”—he looked pensive—“I wouldn’t trade that life for the world. I’ll never forget the first time I went into the jungle. It was wild. I was completely green: open as a barn door. This guy just came up to me in Bangkok, on the street, and said, ‘How about going to Cambodia?’ And the next thing I knew, I was, like, thirty-five, forty clicks over the border, in this country full of crazies. And the forests
were full of these spirits—you could really feel it—like something that had been uncorked after all these years. It was spooky; real spooky. And sometimes you’d see these weird images at night—just the way a woman smiled at you, or a temple suddenly appeared where you didn’t expect it—and you’d be in this whole other world, like a kind of druggy dream where everything made sense, even your Zen and your pot. And it could put you into some really weird places in yourself. And then you’d come out, and the next day you’d be watching videos with the relief workers in Aranya. Almost like it’d never happened.”

We heard a group of guitarists practicing in a garden
.

“And through all this you never got involved?”

“Never stopped getting involved. Involved up to the knees. Involved in every way. But if you mean married, sure, I got hitched. Like I told you before. To an Englishwoman, in Singapore. Diane. Met her in Jakarta. I was there on my way back from East Timor, she was working in Surabaya for Juliana’s. It was kind of like tonight, I guess: two foreigners far from home in a distant place, couldn’t fail but end up together.”

“Juliana’s was a shop?”

“No, you know, the disco company out of London that supplies half the world’s hotels with deejays? Diane had worked for them all over—Beijing, Bangkok, Damascus—even some of the men-only postings, and now she was just starting out in Indonesia. I guess there weren’t too many other romantic prospects over there.”

“So what happened?”

“The usual. She was a deejay, I was a photographer: the only thing we had in common was that we were never there. I’d go out usually at, like, six-fifteen in the morning, and she’d come home from work at four, four-thirty. Most of the time, we weren’t even in the same time zone. But anyway, by then, I was too far gone for anything domestic. I mean, after seeing half the people in the world living in huts with no food, you kind of lose your appetite for Dutchess County. Plus, you get spoiled.”

“In every sense of the word, I should think.”

“Right. You get into this thing where you know you can go any-where in the world, first class, and wherever you go, there’s a
Mercedes waiting for you, and a squash court, and girls who will look at you as if you’re some kind of war hero. And you get to know all the shortcuts: how to stay in the hotel in Manila where you can charge the girls to your room; how to change money in the street in Lima and then bill the company at official rates; how to find some kid in Africa who’ll do all your hard work for you while you just sit around the Intercon counting the bikinis.”

“And Diane?”

“Well, Diane and I were great as long as there were about five thousand miles between us. It’s like you guys say: ‘Asia to bed, Surrey to wed.’ ”

“And you lived in New York?”

“We lived all over. I’d got married before once, when I was a kid: to a girl in Saigon I met in a bar. That one lasted about as long as the flight back to L.A. But Diane and I did have something, some kind of connection. It was like telepathy sometimes. I remember this one time when I fell asleep, and she was right next to me, and I dreamed I met a woman in a restaurant. She invited me to dinner, this cute and friendly Korean girl, and we didn’t know what was going to happen. And when I woke up, Diane was looking at me, real intense, like she was haunted. ‘I’ve just had the strangest dream about you,’ she said. ‘About losing you to a Korean girl, who’d invited you to her house for dinner.’ So it was like, sometimes, on one level, I couldn’t get close to her at all; and on another level, we were so close I felt suffocated.”

It may sound strange, but for all his worldly wisdom, I really did feel that in some way he was an innocent. Not in the way that one usually understands it; God knows, he’d seen plenty of wars, and enough corpses to stock a brigade. But there was still something undeveloped in him. Like one of those boys who’s been so much the class leader that he’s never really had the chance to be something less
.

“You know, it was always truly weird with Diane,” he went on, “but there was always something between us, and I could never get a handle on it. It was like sometimes I felt I was in a souk, in Cairo or Damascus, and the night was falling, and I was getting deeper and deeper into this maze, and there were people calling me from
their stalls, all these men in hoods, with leering faces, and the last few words of English were disappearing, and the night was falling, and I was lost in some crazy swirl of patterns and colors and smells. And somewhere there was a muezzin calling. And this wild Arabic music in the dark. And men—only men—lined up along the outside of their stalls in hoods, their faces lit by candles, calling out to me, and all these swirling letters like sand on every side, and I could hear them calling, saying, ‘Here, my friend. My friend, over here. I have something for you, friend. America, over here!’ ”