Cuba and the Night (2 page)

I was on assignment for
Stern
that time—the Europeans never could get enough of all that Mulatta Marxism stuff—and I was also shooting for myself, using Fuji for rich colors and editing in the camera. Mostly, though, I was just happy to be away from Nicaragua for a while: after a few months of bus rides to Jinotega, and roundups of guerrilla movements in the hills, I would have given anything to get back to Havana. It was one of those places that just brought a smile to your face, even when your heart was breaking. And it always had the magic of the unexpected: at two o’clock, you never knew what you’d be doing at two-thirty. You could be in a fight somewhere, or making some girl, or on your way to prison.

I got up early the next day and went out to Vedado. I’d got most of the bacchanal stuff I needed already, and all I wanted now were some cut-price ironies: the old Mafia hotels with pictures of Che
beside their entrances; the Communist Youth halls with cartoon characters outside, advertising videos and discos; the old women with their heads in their hands, under signs that read:
NOBODY SURRENDERS HERE
.

I began with the Cuba Pavilion, the weird monolithic hulk on La Rampa that looks like some once-futuristic spaceship left over from an ancient world’s fair, and I was just trying to gauge the light while pretending to read the plaque in front of it, when I heard a voice at my side—“Excuse me, you know the time?”—and I turned to see this young guy smiling at me, slim, with narrow Chinese eyes, the usual Cuban mix of slyness and good nature.

I flashed my watch at him so I wouldn’t have to speak.

“Thank you,” he said in English again. “You American?”

I guess he could tell I was a foreigner from the fact I was reading the slogans. Usually, I tried to pass myself off as a Cuban down here, by dressing down and talking only in monosyllables. This guy, I guessed, made it his job to spot the foreigner.

“In a manner of speaking.” I’d learned something at least from Hugo.

“Great. Me too. I love your country,” he said, and then reached into the bag he was carrying and pulled out a small rectangle on which was neatly typed:

“Thanks,” I said. “If I need any facilitation, I’ll get in touch.”

“So you are a photographer?”

“Turista.”

“Tourist. Great. You have seen the Hemingway house? You know the home of José Martí? You know Graham Greene?”

“Not personally.”

“Look, I show you. That book
Our Man in Havana
, it was written on the veranda of the Nacional. Every day he comes and drinks
coffee at this place. How about I take you there, I buy you some coffee?”

“How about I take you there and we buy our own coffee?”

“Sure. Is better,” said José. “I want to talk with you. Who is your favorite writer? You know William Saroyan? Oh, I love him. That book
Papa, You’re Crazy
. And Steinbeck too. You know Hemingway …” And he went on listing his enthusiasms while we walked back to the hotel. I might as well see where this would lead, I thought: in my job, even a bad time is better than no time at all.

In the lobby of the hotel, a few girls were already working the phones, hanging around the reception desk and catching the names and numbers of unattached men, then calling up to them from couches, while a Dominican student was standing by the cashier, dialing for dollars, and the elevator boys were cadging for Chiclets. Everyone was looking at everyone else as if they were all targets or spies.

Out in the garden, it was just another Havana morning: blue sea, blue sky, stationary cannons in front of the wall. The whole city as motionless as if it were posing for a still life. We took a place on the veranda and waited not to be served.

“Mira,”
said José as a couple of girls walked past, letting the straps of their blouses fall off their coffee shoulders. “You like?”

“Más o menos.”

“Más o menos,”
he said. “Is good.”

“So what do you do for a living, José?” I thought it was better for me to be asking him questions than for him to be asking me.

“A little this, a little that.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Sometimes I translate—you know, the Top Forty Countdown from Miami. Sometimes I read the people’s future from their photographs. Sometimes I teach English, French, Italian.”

“And sometimes you just drink coffee.”

“Sometimes I just drink coffee,” he said with a broad smile, and then his eyes lit up, in a lazy kind of way, and he started making the hissy-kissy sound that Cuban males use when they want to get a girl’s attention. To my surprise, the girl in question turned round, and it was a girl with honey hair, golden skin, golden bracelets and
necklaces around her white pantsuit: gold on two legs, she seemed, on her way to the runways in Milan.
“Oye, oye! Pilar! Ven acá!”
he said, and then she was coming over to us, there was kissing on both cheeks, and exclamations of surprise, and a long golden arm, under a golden Rolex, extended toward me, and a pretty
“Encantada.”

“So when did you get here?” José asked as she sat between us, crossing her legs.

“Sunday. Just for business.”

“How is it with you now? You are in Ciudad Mexico?”

“Cuernavaca.”

“Ay!”
José turned to me, impressed. “Pilar is married with a Mexican. Doctor, right?” She nodded, and flashed me a smile. “Very old, very rich. They meet here one year before. Is good there, no?”

“Claro
. We have a swimming pool, a tennis court, a
casita
for the weekends. Is good.”

She had practiced her nonchalance, and he responded on cue, showing her off to me like a prize. “For girls here, it’s easy. They find a man, they make magic with their eyes, they get out. But for me—what do I have? Only my mind.”

“And your
pinga!”
said Pilar, reaching for his thighs.

There wasn’t anything in this for me, so I got up and told them I was going back to work.

“Okay, Richard,” said José. “I’ll catch you later. Maybe we go to Tropicana? I get some girls, we buy some rum, we have a good time, okay? You have my address? Or maybe I find you? What is your room number?”

“You can find me.”

“I can find you,” he said, and turned back to his latest project.

T
hat night, I walked in and out of the crowds along the Malecón, underneath the viewing stands, past the teams of boys in polka-dot shorts, past the cries of
“Mira,” “Digame,” “Orlando!,”
past the lines of gyrating men in top hats. At one point, I met José and a couple of other guys, checking out the action. A girl came up to me in feathers and a kind of rhinestone minidress, and I recognized a woman from the hotel reception
desk. Sometimes black kids in wild Pierrot masks danced over and began saying things I couldn’t understand, and sometimes I heard fierce whispers in the dark, and once, between the bleachers, I found myself next to a Soviet, a doctor, he said, who was looking at the dancing girls as if he were dizzy, his eyes out of focus, his face transfigured. “Fantastic, no? For me, this is a dream! A dream!”

A dream of incitations, I thought, around the clock, around the country, in every nook and shadowed cranny. Everywhere you went, it felt as if you were passing through an echo chamber of hisses, a tunnel of whispers.
“Ven acá, mi amor. Mi vida, mi alma, mi corazón.” “Ven acá, por qué no?” “Por qué no, mi amor? Por qué no?”

I left the Russian to his dreams, and wandered around groups of people sitting in the streets, while dancers like parrots and toucans fluttered all around them.

“Excuse me?” called out a woman from the blanket where she was sitting. “You are from America?”

“No.”

“Tourist?”

“Yes.”

“Here. Sit down. Meet my brother.” She motioned to the blanket, and the man who was with her—her brother or her boyfriend—made a space for me and handed me a bottle of rum.

“You study in America?”

“Sometimes.”

“I think so. I see from your shoes. Maybe you come to my store sometime. Behind the cathedral. I show you the plaza, Habana Vieja, everything.”

“Sure, great.”

“Maybe tomorrow? What is your plan?”

“I don’t know right now. I’ll look in on you, if I get the chance,” I said, and got up: she was moving way too fast for me. Besides, if I was going to get a guide, it might as well be someone who would shoot well. This woman was too sophisticated, had too much of the
hacienda
in her already. I needed someone fresher, more like an amateur: a girl alone on a bed in a broken-down hotel and, in the distance, a man along the sea, pointing his son’s gaze out to the
horizon. “The Permanent Revolution,” they could caption it, and it could run in any kind of story. Even get resale rights in Spanish
Playboy
.

Around Coppelia, the kids were sauntering about like queens waiting to be defrocked, and on the Calle 21 side, near the Vita Nuova, the girls looked so gorgeous I figured that most of them weren’t girls at all. Look for the Adam’s apple, I told myself, and remember why it’s called that. Check out the size of their wrists. In a culture where women had cornered the biggest market, everyone wanted to be one.

After a few minutes of cruising, I decided to cut into Karachi for a drink. The place was dead tonight—who wanted to dance in a bar when there was an all-night orgy going on in the streets?—and there were only a couple of pros there, watched hungrily by some boozy spies from the Ukraine.

A girl came up to me, in that slow, hip-swinging way they have, with memories of their grandfathers and hot days in West Africa. She had a big gap in her teeth, but when she didn’t smile, she looked fine. Silvio was singing on the jukebox—“La Prisión”—and we moved around a little in the dark while one of the bartenders slept in the corner and the other changed his pesos into dollars. I had nothing to lose, I figured, and anything was better than returning to my hotel room alone.

After we’d danced through a couple of slow ones, I bought her a drink at a table in the corner, and she told me how she had a kid, how she lived with her mother, how her boyfriend was in Angola and her brother was in Miami. A millionaire, she’d heard. How she’d had
esposos
, but nothing serious. I returned the favor in kind—told her I was Robert, from Toronto, a tourist here for a month, and poor, very poor—and she took it all in like it was holy writ, looking at me in that bright-eyed, teasing way the Habaneras have, and I figured I might as well go for it: the night was getting on, and nothing else was developing.

“You want to go somewhere?”

She nodded.

“Round here?”

“Not here. Habana Vieja.”

“Okay.” We walked back to the Capri, and found a Turistaxi, and I stuffed five dollars in the guy’s hand. We drove down backstreets—the Malecón was closed tonight for the party—and then Neptuno, and we got off near a place she knew. We went up some creaking stairs and came to an empty reception desk. Past it, there was a door that led out onto a half-lit terrace. A few girls were sitting there in demure white dresses as if lined up at some debutantes’ ball, and the guys beside them were staring at their feet as if on their way to war.

My girl—she told me to call her Célia—knocked at a door, and it opened, and there was a shout of surprise, and some tired blonde who was in there with an even older guy came out and started babbling.

We tried the next door down, and it gave pretty easily, and we were alone in a bare room, with a shelf and a chair. There was a naked lightbulb, and a towel at the foot of the bed. There were two pairs of cartoon slippers from Shanghai.

“You want a shower?”

“Okay,” I said, and then we went into the bathroom, and it was bare too—just one worn faucet in the wall, and a trickle of cold water. I decided to take a rain check on the shower—a rain check on the whole thing, in fact: she’d taken off her clothes and folded them as neatly on the chair as if she were a schoolgirl, and I saw raw bruises on her side, and scars across her belly, and one of her breasts looked kind of lopped off. It was no kind of body for a girl of sixteen.

“Look, Célia. This is fine. Enough. How about we talk for a little, and then I take some photos, and we go?”

“What’s wrong? You don’t like me?” She came up and began kissing my neck.

“I like you fine. It’s just that I’ve been drinking too much.”

“No problem. I can help. We have to make love. We cannot leave until we have done it.” Plaintively almost, she moved her mouth down my stomach.

“I can’t.”

“Qué pasa, mi amor?”

“SIDA,”
I said.

“SIDA?”

“Soy americano.”
And then she nodded respectfully and backed off.

I didn’t have the heart to take any pictures of her then, and just as I was reaching for my pants, the light went off, and she gave a little gasp, and then I heard her sniffling and felt her shivering beside me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s a blackout. It’s nothing.” But she was shaking now, and I could tell she had closed her eyes, and a sad kind of terrible moan came up from her. “It’s okay,” I said, “don’t worry,” and I reached out to hold her, and she grabbed at me like I was a life jacket, and I thought of nights in Aranya, and the shelling overhead, and some fourteen-year-old in my arms, more scared of me than of the war.

Célia was helpless in my arms now, just a trembling, terrified bundle of nerves, and I fumbled around for a candle and couldn’t find one, so I got out my lighter and struck a light. From outside, there came the sound of footsteps pacing back and forth.

“Come on, Célia,” I said. “You can dress by this light,” and I smoothed her hair, and held the lighter out while she put on her clothes, hands fumbling.

When she was through, I did the same, and we walked out into the street. Kissing her on both cheeks, I pressed a few notes into her palm.