Cuba and the Night (28 page)

T
hat must have been the worst night of my life, just lying there, in that room, alone, wondering what was happening in their room, wondering what was not happening. Sometimes, when I heard a footfall in the corridor, I half expected it might be her. Breaking the rules, and honoring a higher law with me. But then the steps would pass by, and I’d remember the situation I’d set up was way too precarious for that, and so I was left alone with my thoughts.

I tried all the tricks I knew—imagining points of blackness, practicing the yoga exercises I’d learned in the monastery in Saigon, even thinking my way through the checkpoints in Beirut—but still I couldn’t sleep. I got up and tried to write some postcards to the agency. And as I rummaged through my bag for cards, suddenly I came upon a hair, a long, black, silky hair, that must have been a relic from that last night in Varadero. And I remembered how she’d looked along the beach; the feel of her mouth on my legs; the way she’d smiled, and put her hands over my eyes. I saw her turning the pages of her book of poems. I heard her cry, the way she’d never shouted out in Havana. Soon it made me feel like when I was in Davao, and the NPA set off a bomb, and a couple of kids got blown away, and when I moved in for the shot, and saw their girlfriends
weeping, I hardly had the will to go ahead. But I did. And that shot got syndicated around the world: “Pretty Filipinas Torn by Grief.”

T
he next day, back in Havana, I was walking toward the hospital—to get some pictures—when I saw Cari in the street, and as soon as she saw me, she came up to me with her warm smile, and hugged me, and asked me how things were going. I decided not to say anything about Lula’s marriage, so I just told her about my trip to Santiago, and how I’d got ripped off by the woman at Havanautos. I guess I’d always liked Cari, especially after that time with the letter from France. And right then, in any case, it just felt good to be talking to someone, anyone, and free, for a while, from my thoughts.

She asked me if I wanted to come along to the Malecón with her, and I thought it was better than being alone. We walked past the new industrial beach, where teenagers were swimming among the garbage and debris at the foot of a few stone steps, while half the trash of Cuba floated past. “El Condom Pasa,” I said, but she just looked at me and smiled, and it was one of those moments when I wished Lourdes had been there. She’d have got the joke.

Cari, though, was always good-natured, even though she still hadn’t heard from France, and she didn’t have much English, and she probably couldn’t find a way out. Along the wall, she looked at me with her blue eyes, and smiled with that creased expression, as if she were going to cry.

“Richard,” she said at last. “Will you take some photographs of me? For my
novio
from France? Maybe if you take some photographs, he can keep them by his bed. And remember to come back to Havana. Lourdes told me that you took some special photographs of her, in Varadero, and you sent them to a foreign magazine—
Vogue
, no? You can do the same for me?”

No harm in that, I thought; at least it would use up the time. And maybe fill up my lens with something other than the shadow of Lourdes. Might as well use the camera in a good cause: I’d looked at Cari before, in the street, and figured out how I could light her,
how she could show off her colors and her curves, how to bring out the gold in her hair, and her bittersweet eyes. I’d even worked out the jokes I would tell her to make good on her glittery smile.

“Okay. We’ll go to the beach. Get a hotel room. Do it really nice and stylish: tripod, strobes, filters, the works.”

“You will be careful? Make them big. Not like those small things.” She’d looked disgusted once when I’d pulled out some contact sheets from the shoot of Lula on the beach; she didn’t even go for slides. “You will make them big, okay? Like this?” She pulled out a photo of her sweetheart from France.

“Sure. Big like this: no problem.”

She looked at me as if I were some kind of miracle worker.
“O-ka, Richard, un momentico.”
She walked—she almost ran—back to her room (to Lourdes’s room, I thought), and told me to wait a moment in the street, while she decided which clothes to bring and collected some lipsticks and eyeliner, and then tried to remember what her mother’s shoe size was, and what kind of clothes her aunt had requested for her boy, and then what kind of coffee Lourdes’s mother liked the most.

Then she came running out into the street, all her things in a bag, and we found a car to take us to the hotel—for me to pick up my equipment—and then all the way to the Internacional. I got a room to serve as our base camp, just the way I would if I were shooting fashion, and I got into the whole thing like it was an assignment: at least it got me out of myself.

For most of the morning, I just took standard pictures to warm her up: Cari in a bikini, Cari next to the rental car, Cari in front of the religious statues, the blue-green sea behind her. We stopped for a drink in the lobby, and I took a few more pictures there, but the sun was too high, and so I figured we’d shoot indoors until dusk.

So we went back to the room, and she pulled out all the clothes she’d brought along—the black T-shirt dress, the halter top I’d seen before, the Victoria’s Secret thing the Spanish guy had given her.

“What do you think?” she asked, changing in and out of outfits in the walk-in closet. “How does it look? This is pretty? This is nice?”

“Stay there,” I said, as she was changing. “Like that. Like that. Again.”

Cari in bra, Cari in panties, Cari unfastening. Cari reclining. Cari lying on the bed. Cari …

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I thought I saw Lula coming into the room. But it was only Cari, I guess, sobbing, and whipping her head from side to side, and holding my head between her knees, and saying, “No, no, no, Richard. No, no, no.”

V
 

I
still couldn’t sleep when I got back to New York. We’d agreed that the code for my coming over would be the fourth letter I received, and before that, I wouldn’t get in touch with her or Hugo: we didn’t need a code, perhaps, but habits like that were hard for her to break. So I went down to the mailbox every day, at nine o’clock, at ten o’clock, at eleven, and always there was the same Cuban silence: a huge amount of nothing. I spent long afternoons in the apartment, just in case she’d call, though I knew it wouldn’t be safe, but there was nothing: only silence. I wondered if she was waiting but couldn’t get through, if she’d sent four already, but they’d all been confiscated or lost en route, if something had happened after I’d left. I stayed awake all night, and thought of her sitting in her room, wondering why I never came.

I called up the agency, and asked them to send me anywhere, on any gig, as long as I could get out of New York, and I found myself in Panama, then Mindanao, then stopping off to see some friends in Delhi: when I was working, at least, I was back in focus. But then one day, in Manila, I went into the Spider’s Web for a drink, and a girl—a really pretty girl—came up to me and said, “You’re so handsome, honey. You want to come dancing with me?” and then her friend said, “She’s a good girl. You can do anything with Lourdes,” and I felt sick, sick to my stomach.

I came back to New York, and still there was no letter. I tried to call José in Havana, I figured that was safe, but always it was the same: static, and a crackle, and a faint, underground voice, saying,
“Dime, dime,”
as if casting lines into the deep. I could have chanced a call to Hugo—who ever checks on telephone calls between England and America?—but still I couldn’t face the thought of hearing
his recriminations. Or, even worse, his enthusiasm. And then saying, “How’s your wife, Hugo, the great love of my life?”

Finally, I could stand it no more. I called the travel agency in Montreal, got on their next package tour to Varadero, leaving the following Sunday, and arrived, with a group of blue-rinse vacationers, at the Internacional. I went to the Havanautos desk—run as usual by the only person in Cuba who understood economics—and got her to give me a Sentra for two hundred bucks a day. I pulled out onto the highway and drove toward Havana: even two hours in Varadero was like a lifetime in a haunted house.

I drove fast down the long, empty road, so empty it looked like it was set up for some fashion shoot, with a thin line of lipstick down the middle. The night riders were out in force, like poppies in the spring, extending their brown arms, laughing and giving me the eye. Above them, there seemed to be more billboards than ever:
ONE OPTION ONLY: THE FATHERLAND, REVOLUTION, SOCIALISM
.

I passed Cojímar, and remembered the café where I’d gone for lunch my first week in Cuba, many years before, in search of Hemingway (“Sorry, we don’t know that name here,” the old man in the street had said). I came closer to the Malecón, and saw all my previous trips all jumbled up. There was the place where we’d gone after Maxim’s; there was the place where we’d kissed and kissed; there was the place where I’d almost popped the question. Down by the U.S. Interests Section, where the government still flashed a neon caricature of Uncle Sam every night, I could see the place where I’d sat, my last morning in the city the year before, and thought: If I never, ever see a sight as beautiful as this one, I’ll die happy.

It was late by now, and I was in that half-drugged, emotional state brought on by jet lag—when you feel wide open, and your mind is on cruise control, and you open up your heart to the first person you meet. I peered into the Nacional, but it was all glitzed up now, sparkling with empty conference rooms and chandeliered bars and computers in the lobby, showing you the sights of Havana in seven different colors. There was a rooftop bar now, full of goldchain Don Juans, and cops outside the entrance to make sure that the only people who wanted to come in could not.

There were more people than ever among the bushes outside,
and skinny girls posted in the Habana Libre as solemnly as guards: Semper Fidel, I thought. Eternal Vigilance.

Outside in the street, the signs that used to say, “We Are Happy Here,” now said only, “We Are Here.” Old men were selling books—liquidating their assets—along the streets, books with titles like
La Promesa
and
Whither Mankind?
, edited by Charles A. Beard. Along La Rampa, some of the old stores were turned into new “Tourist Information Centers,” open twenty-four hours a day and full of workers crowded round a black-and-white TV; outside, people were still waiting for buses that, every few hours, labored, like fat Habana Vieja mammies, off into the dark.

THE FUTURE OF THE FATHERLAND WILL BE AN ETERNAL BARAGUA
, said the new sign outside the cinema, and as I read it I wondered who the signs were aimed at. At the Americans, who weren’t allowed to come here in the first place? At the traitors, the ones who’d already left? Or at the people who still remained, and were the last ones who’d believe them? I thought of a guy who says “I love you” after his girlfriend has slammed the door.

I walked, walked, walked, just tracing the hill down toward the center of town, and everywhere I turned, I saw José Martí: his statue here, his words on that plaque, his book
Ismaelillo
number one on the current best-seller list. A hundred years dead, and he was everywhere; and Lourdes, the one I wanted, I couldn’t find. I decided there’d be even more guys trailing me now than the next day, so I didn’t even stop at Concordia, but just kept walking, the slogans tumbling slowly through my head like choruses from a Top 40 song.
Siempre es 26
, I heard, and thought of the night in Artemisa.
Resistir para Ganar
. Not every time, I figured.
Estamos contigo
. Don’t count on it, good buddy.

That night, in the Colina, I dreamed of a knot of men, in robes, by the banks of the Nile. I saw them pounding drums, chanting, clapping, saying things I couldn’t understand, these men all in a circle, by the banks of the Nile. I saw the dust rising from their feet, felt the pulsing of the ground, sensed this throbbing group of men, in dirty robes, chanting something terrible. I felt a sense of menace, of being on the outside of some circle, intruding on some sacred rite. A knot of men, chanting all together, shouting for my death.

•   •   •

W
hen I woke up, I took a shower, and headed out to find her. The still blue morning seemed almost a mockery to me. The big guy’s sex appeal was almost down to zero now, but still he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Once upon a time, he’d seemed the romantic hero of every politico’s dream. The ideologue with a passion for baseball and cigars. The only guy who could play footsie with Barbara Walters and Brezhnev and find a way to charm them both. A Revolutionary straight out of the Radical Chic catalog. Now it was as if he belonged to a teenybopper group that hadn’t been heard of for ten years. And yet, I thought, the Ortegas had come and gone, Gorbachev was history now, the dreaming kids had moved from Managua off to Prague, and the other Communist cities—Beijing and Saigon—were famous for their free markets; but Fidel was still in control, thirty-three years and going strong.