Cuba and the Night (18 page)

I
’d had enough by now, I figured; I needed time with Lourdes; if I didn’t stop them soon, I’d end up shooting eleven rolls full of people whose faces I couldn’t recognize, and sending their pictures to all the wrong people. This never happened to Capa, I thought. So I took a few more pictures, for myself, of their pleading faces and excited smiles and knockabout hopes in
these dismal, empty, forty-watt rooms, and then I told them I was out of film, and we took off.

As we sat along the sea, old men waving bottles came up to us, and jabbered crazily, and then reeled off into the night, like Old Testament prophets shouting warnings to the dark. Girls in torn stockings primped their hair and put on smiles. Dollar changers sat along the wall, muttering numbers under their breath.

Lourdes was quiet that night, and I guess the sea made her think of the distance between us. I was quiet too, after seeing her in the cemetery. Again, it was when she was farthest from me that I felt closest to her, or could see most easily what I loved. I thought that maybe this would be the moment.

She sat with her hands around her ankles, and I tried to make it easier for her by following her eyes out to sea. I didn’t touch her; I left her to her thoughts. I was an expert at departures.

“Misterioso,”
she said quietly.

“Right.”

No oil rigs in the distance; no winking lights of cruise ships. No lights at all tonight: only the two different shades of dark. You could almost imagine how it must have looked to the strangers from some distant party, walking down the long lawns of the Nacional to look out toward Miami. But the party was long over now, and the streetlights were hardly lit, and when she needed to take a pee, she had to go across the street to the space behind the gas station that never had any gas.

“Lourdes,” I said when she came back, and, in the dark, her name sounded very intense.

She nodded.

I touched her cheek, brushed her hair, tried not to check on the light.

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“You won’t tell me?”

“If I tell you, you will be angry,” and I told myself, She’s waiting for me to ask her, and she doesn’t know, can’t know, that I will.

“I won’t, I promise.”

“I was thinking about the jeans,” she said, “and hoping you wouldn’t forget my size.”

Something broke in me then, and I left her to her silence, and a little later, I walked her home. The street outside was empty and dark. She held me, I kissed her, she held me so close it was as if she wanted to impress herself on me, to brand my body with her name. She pulled back to look me in the eyes.

“You will not let me down?” she said. “You will not forget?” Her eyes were large and silver in the dark.

“I won’t let you down.
Yo soy un hombre sincero.”

“Like Martí,” she said warmly, ruffling my hair.

“Cómo no?”

“You do not have room for me in your case?”

“I wish I did.”

“I am small. Duty-free. No tax.”

“I wish I could, Lula.”

“You will write to me often, every week, Richard? And come back soon? Please don’t forget me. Don’t forget me.” It was like seeing a photo fade before your eyes—a Polaroid in reverse. I could almost see her fading out of view, and the images getting blurry, and then just a big black space, exposed.

“Please remember,” she said, and the last thing I saw of her, as I walked away, she was behind a big car at the far end of a long and unlit street.

III
 

T
he next time I went down there, it was to shoot a piece for
S.I
. Linares,
El Niño
, was coming out of his teens then; Victor Mesa,
El Loco
, was still running the bases like a madman, wiggling his hips every time he jumped on home plate; Ajete was coming in from the bull pen to throw smoke. No one knew how old these guys were—some of them had been on the team for twenty years—but still they played like the Revolution in cleats: sharp, cocky, full of bravado. They played baseball the way Capablanca played chess: in the high Cuban style, all glitter and flamboyance. And I knew they’d be a story for years to come—the Pan Am Games in Havana, the Olympics in Barcelona, the increasing pressure to defect. Fidel’s last PR weapon, storming the world and exporting the Revolution. I’m going to shoot the latest incarnation of the Havana Sugar Kings, I told the editor, the team whose last game was canceled in 1959 because Fidel had just taken the capital; the truth was, I was going to shoot Lula.

It was never hard to find anyone in those days in Havana: you just had to walk down the street, and you’d meet eyes in the darkness, or find friends leaning out of windows, or see schoolboys coming toward you with a smile. The whole city was a circle of informers. And for someone like me, if I had a camera around my neck, a city of friends too, friends who invited you to come with them to the Diplostore where their cousin worked, friends who could tell you where José was, because his cousin’s sister used to be their
esposa
, friends who told you to forget José in any case because they had friends too. This time, when I got to her door, it was locked, and I didn’t have the patience to sit and wait all night. My first night in Havana, I was always on flame, and ready for adventure. I went up to a ginger-haired kid who was coming out of the house next door, and asked him if he knew where she might be.

“She likes the movies, right?” he said.

“Right,” I said, though that was news to me.

“There is a new Brooke Shields movie here. Near the Capitol. I think she is there.”

I went down the street to the old place where we’d gone before, and shoved a few notes under the till to the girl, and went in, the ghost of the opera house behind me. Inside, it was still pitch black, darker even than the porno cinemas in Asunción. I stood by the door to let my eyes adjust, and then I fumbled down an aisle, bumping into outstretched legs, putting my hands on shoulders, hearing cries of surprise, feeling strange hands on my thighs.

Even after a few minutes, I couldn’t see a thing. I found an empty seat and sat down. But soon I felt a hand tugging at my shirt, heard someone eerily close to me. Onscreen, Brooke Shields was immaculate as ever. Offscreen, I began to make out necks, and arms, and masses of dark curls, and sometimes I could hear sniffles too—or were they gasps? There were couples all around, the usual sea of murmurs. A flash of skin, hands on legs, a shiver of pleasure here and there. The cinema was a true democracy: everyone was equal in the dark. No way you could tell brown from black, friend from sister, rebel from spy. No way you could tell here from there. Around me, the sound of boys unbuttoning shirts and blouses, girls turning for long kisses; urgent whispers, tiny moans.

And then, just at the moment when the father sees David and Jade going for it on the living room floor, I saw her, or what looked like her: a small face, dark hair, a thin white shirt, two or three rows ahead of me to the right. I couldn’t be sure it was her, but it looked like her, the way she turned, when she smiled at the person beside her, and sometimes the smiles became open-mouth kisses. I saw the way her jaw moved, wondered if that was how she moved when we were together. I thought I saw her tuck her hair behind her ear, with the quick, impatient flip that was hers and hers alone.

I tried to get closer, thought of moving down the aisle, but the place was packed, and the audience was preoccupied, and all I could do was sit there, amid the whispers and gasps, looking at Brooke Shields, looking at her, looking at her looking at Brooke Shields. Looking at her not looking at Brooke Shields.

When the lights came on, there was a final chorus of snuffles, and a sudden rush of black and brown and golden limbs. I tried to follow her, but I lost her in the crowd, distracted by some other black hair, another white shirt, and when I pressed out into the street, she was nowhere to be seen: just hugs, kisses, tears, and then someone calling “Ricardo”: José, at my side, eyes red. “So what you think, Richard?” he asked, as if I lived down the street. “I think is too sad. I see this movie three times, and every time I cry.”

“Sure; me too. Look, José, I’m sorry: I’ve got to split. I’ll look in on you soon.”

“Sure, no problem,” he said, and then I was running back the way I’d come, hardly caring why José had seemed so calm to see me, and what he was doing, crying over Brooke Shields and then materializing by my side.

When I got to her door, it was open, and I took the stairs two at a time.

“Lourdes,” I said, knocking on the kitchen door. “Are you here?”

“Claro,”
she said, opening the door, and hugging me.

“Where were you before?”

“Only here. Same as usual. Doing nothing. With Mamá and Marielita.” She looked so happy to see me, I thought she couldn’t be faking it. Her shirt, I noticed, was blue.

“You were here all night?”

“Where else? I’ve been waiting for you, Richard: you said you were coming tomorrow.”

“I got an early flight.”

“Good, is good for me.” She looked me all over. “Oh, Richard, I am so happy to see you,” and it was true, I could tell, she was glowing all over. “Marielita was in Varadero last month. At the Siboney. Before, in Cayo Largo.”

“Cómo no?”
said the saucy teenager with the jet-black curls.

“She met a man, a Spanish man. Very kind. He’s old—sixty, maybe seventy—but he takes good care of her. He has come here three times already. Every time, they have to hide her from the wife. But he takes her to Varadero, Cayo Largo, everywhere.”

“Sure,” said Marielita, blasé. “There is a store in Cayo Largo where you can buy everything: shirts, jeans, perfumes,
todo.”

“And Varadero too, right?”

“Varadero is like Miami Beach,” said newly wise Marielita. “They have cable TV, and glasses wrapped up, and every day at breakfast you can eat as much as you want.”

“That’s great,” I said. “But I’m here on assignment. I’ve got to shoot some baseball.”

“Sure,” said Lourdes, and I remembered why I loved her. “We have baseball on this island.”

I
was staying in the Lincoln that time, so I could be close to her, and collecting receipts from a girl I knew in the Libre, and paying the difference to Lula. In any case, good hotels were not so different from bad hotels by then: most of them were serving up deprivation in equal measure. The biggest shortage of all, I always thought, was of a future; the government mass-producing images of the past, while people kept their eyes firmly focused on the present.

Things, in fact, were not going well for
El Máximo
, especially now that there was a guy in the Kremlin even younger than he was. Already, the students were beginning to talk about Tiananmen Square and asking why Russian magazines were banned, and the streets were buzzing with news of Hungary and Poland. In response, the government was doing nothing but filling
Granma
with more and more articles about Oliver Stone, and stocking the TV channels with more and more movies about race riots and drug dealers and
mafiosi
in America. Sometimes, in Cuba, it was like when you repeat the same word over and over till it stops making any sense, or when you stare so hard at a spot that your eyesight blurs.

But Fidel wasn’t hassled by any of it. You could still see his touch in every street, and newspaper article, and slogan, but he kept his person completely out of view. Living in Havana in those days was like living with some medieval depiction of God: the guy was everywhere present and nowhere visible. He was in every conversation, in every room and corner, but no one knew a thing about him. He’d created a personality cult without a personality. And the
less people saw of him, the more they talked. What was he planning? When did he sleep? Who did he love? What—in Fidel’s name—was going on?

The believers used to say that Fidel was God. But God at least rested on the seventh day. With Fidel, that was never so certain. Here was a guy who would micromanage pebbles; who would not only count how many angels could dance on the head of a pin but would tell them how they should be dancing, and what kind of pin they should be using. Here was the only guy working in a place where nothing—and no one—ever worked. And the only guy on the job in a place where everyone else was permanently on hold.

Thirty-one years without changing his clothes; thirty-one years without refining his hairstyle. The other one-name icons—Madonna and Prince and Cher—had at least to keep changing their acts to keep themselves in the public’s eye: not Fidel. He just fixed the public’s eye to keep it on himself.

I was shooting black and white this time down, because the whole island seemed to be turning black and white. Fewer and fewer cars now, less and less light, a whole country emptied out: instead of cars, they’d gone to bicycles, and instead of bicycles, horse-drawn carts, and soon the horse-drawn carts were being drawn by goats: the whole crazy island was slipping backward through history, moving back and back into the pre-Industrial Revolution. It reminded me of the time with Diane once, when we’d gathered to watch a video of our wedding, and someone had pressed the rewind button by mistake, so you could see us walking away from the altar, out of the church, back into our separate cars—all at top speed. A perfect augury of things to come.