Cuba and the Night (30 page)
Read Cuba and the Night Online
Authors: Pico Iyer
Crazy indeed, I thought: a whole nation holding banknotes up to the light to see the silhouette of its president’s long-dead girlfriend.
“Before, I had some problems. Big problems. In the Habana Libre. The police catch me. I was in Combinado before; if I go again, is not so good for me. So I find a lawyer, and get out.”
“And a wife.”
“Sure. A wife helps too.”
“You were buying stuff?”
“Sure. As usual. I was with a guy from Panama that time. But he gets scared, and then he says he does not know me, and I am taken to the police office.”
“What were you buying? TVs?”
“No. Only shoes.”
“How much?”
“One hundred.”
“A hundred bucks for a pair of shoes? No wonder the cops came down on you.”
“No. One hundred shoes.”
“Come on, José.”
“Is true. Why not? Everyone does it. That’s the way here. Usually is no problem. I go to the store, I talk to the guard.
Everybody knows me. I give the girl five dollars. Then, when I am finished, I go into a Turistaxi, and speak English. If the guy doesn’t understand, I say, very slowly,
Yo quier-o ir a emba-jada
. Then, if anyone sees me get out, they think I am a foreigner.”
He grinned. Life was a crossword puzzle that José solved every day over breakfast. “But this time they stop me. And the guy from Panama says, ‘It’s for him.’ ”
“So why don’t you do the buying yourself?”
“Sometimes I do. At the Diplotienda, where my brother works—my religion brother, not my prison brother—is easy. But with a foreigner is better. There are many foreigners here. You give them a hundred pesos, they do anything.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of money.”
“No. Now, for one pair of shoes they pay four hundred pesos. For jeans seven hundred. I make good business. Some people say to me, ‘Why don’t you go to America?’ I say, for me is better here. See, if you work for the government, you get one hundred twenty pesos in a month. One dollar thirty. But if you got dollars, you can live like the president.”
I bought him another drink. A girl came over, and set my beer before me with a smile.
“See,” he said, and I caught the edge in his voice again. “For her is easy. She can meet foreigners, she can meet policemen. If the policeman stops her, she says, ‘I’m sorry. What can I do? Why go to court? Why give money to the government? Maybe you and I meet tomorrow, in my room. Drink some rum, have some fun.’ Then the policeman is like a doll she keeps in her pocket.”
“That’s why Cuba’s losing all its beauties.”
“Sure. Everyone is leaving.”
He paused to sip his drink. “You remember my cousin? She is not my cousin; she is my wife’s sister. She meets this man from Spain, very rich. Every time he comes to Cuba, he takes her everywhere, like his wife. Brings her TV, camera, anything. He tells Fidel, ‘If she don’t come with me, I don’t sign the contract.’ ”
“And what does she think?”
“She thinks it’s good. He is old, he is sick—maybe he won’t last
so long. So what is the problem in giving him some happiness before he dies?”
“And inheriting all his cash.”
“Sure. Is better like this. Everyone is happy. Who is hurt?”
“Only the truth. Trust. That kind of stuff.”
“Richard.” José looked pained. “You are talking like a Communist. What are these words? Who can eat truth? Who can live on trust? These people are human, they need to live, to love, and you are talking only of ideas. If you love these ideas so much, go to a library and make love to a book. Take your trust to a love hotel, and do it up the ass.”
“Touché,” I said, and then I thought that maybe I wasn’t in the best position to be talking about trust and truth.
B
eing with José reminded me that there was nowhere I could turn: everything took me back to her. I tried to concentrate on nothing but my work, but everything was weird and jumpy now, like an old machine slowly winding down: the whole country was like one of its ancient cars, stalled, or hardly moving, a dinosaur jalopy running on empty, and being coaxed by patience and resourcefulness and sheer willpower alone to bump and stumble along a street where all the lights were down.
René Arocha, the star pitcher, had defected. The Russians were all gone now, replaced by South Americans here to polish up their name as Latin lovers. The mannequins in the former Sears downtown were all naked. And the worse things got, the more talkative the streets became.
THERE ARE NO TRAITORS HERE
, said the signs now, all around, and
THE REVOLUTION IS WITH YOU FOREVER
, just above the Quixote, where men were selling hand-painted birthday cards. Downtown, one whole wall showed the many faces of the Revolution, beginning with Pride and Jealousy, and moving to Upset and Disenchantment. The last space showed
THE BEAUTY OF SACRIFICE
. The less the people had, the government kept telling them, the more they had to be proud of; they were the world leaders now in self-denial.
Outside the National Museum, I saw they were planning a Festival of Monologuists. The government might be sinking, I thought, but it hadn’t lost its sense of humor.
F
inally, I could take it no longer; could take no more of the dead cats lying along the sidewalk, and the long lines of kids, in the dark, going into nightclubs that didn’t have any drinks; could take no more of the strains of “La Cucaracha” drifting across from the Rincón del Feelings and the waking up at dawn to find bloodstains on the sheet. Everywhere I looked, it seemed like I was seeing lovers, pressing themselves against walls, or murmuring fierce promises, or taking themselves off into the dark; lovers who looked the way that we must have looked. Maybe that was the definition of love, I thought: to feel yourself so different, and so blessed, that you hardly knew you looked like all the rest. To be so taken out of yourself that you hardly cared that you were living inside a postcard, or a cliché. To forget about the filters and the light meters.
There should be a law, I thought, against long kisses in the street.
The next day, as soon as I got up, I went into the Cubana office and showed them the letter I always carried from my doctor, explaining how the malaria was recurrent, and how, at its outbreak, everything must be done to get me to the nearest hospital. They talked and fretted over the letter, but I knew that there was no malaria treatment left in the local hospitals, and finally, shaking their heads, and muttering, they put me on the next plane out. A few hours later, I was back in Mexico City, among fake
rubias
in furs and with plastic all around.
It was really late by the time I got back to the city, and in the dark, in the cab in to my apartment, I could hardly see the portrait of Martí up on 116th Street, in Harlem, right near the Hotel Theresa, where Fidel and his friends used to stay, carrying live chickens and shocking the country with their voodoo
houngan
tricks. I could hardly make out the Salvation and Deliverance Church next door. I could hardly read the Spanish signs.
I rifled my mailbox as soon as I got into the lobby of my building, and there was an airmail envelope there, from England, and I tore it open where I stood, and took in the page of neat, curled writing.
Querido, inolvidado
Richard
,
Free at last! All my life I have waited for this time, and now, thanks to you and to Hugo, I am free. How can I thank you? When will I see you? When will I hold you between my legs?
Hugo is so kind to me, like a father almost: a true gentleman, like some knight from
Quixote.
We laugh together often and we often talk of you. But where are you now, Richard? I never know. And when will you come here and take me to your castle in New York? I wait for you, I wait. My body waits, my mouth waits, my darkness and my silence wait. Even the spaces between my toes wait. I am free now, Richard; free to be your Lourdes
.
Su propria
Lula
I didn’t know how that made me feel; I checked for the postmark, and found it had been sent three weeks before—must have arrived just after I took off. I read it in the elevator again, going up; I went into my apartment, and put on the light, and read it again. It was everything I wanted and had been hoping for; but was this the first letter or the second? Why had she not written before? Did she really know nothing of Cari?
I tried to sleep, but the sleep wouldn’t come. My head was electric, full of light; it was buzzing like the streets of Vedado in the old days, with a kind of juiced-up, revved-up, open-all-night buzz. I got up and turned on the light again, and all around the room I saw the pictures I’d taken of Cari: Cari sitting on the beach, Cari with her back to me, Cari with her blue shirt slipping off her shoulders. Cari like a Playmate of the Month.
I couldn’t take much more of this—I always liked to develop some prints and put them up around the room before deciding which ones to send the editors—and I figured it was easier for me to leave the prints than for the prints to leave me. So I walked out into the streets of Manhattan in the dark, and walked and walked,
almost like I was in Cuba again, along Tenth Avenue, past bars and all-night diners and black transsexuals tottering on their heels outside the leather bars. Rough stuff, not shown on TV Martí. The steaming potholes, the cafés where the cabbies went, the roughvoiced come-ons of the Korean girls.
When the sun began slanting through the concrete canyons, lighting up a window here and there, pinpointing panes of gold, I headed back and tried to sleep again, but still I couldn’t do it. I got some Valium, and emptied them on the counter, but my system wasn’t taking them right now. I could see all the images around the walls from where I lay, and they went round and round in my head, like a carousel on automatic fast-forward, out of control, jerking on and on, and I couldn’t stop its turning.
I tried to count shadows, or to remember acronyms, or to go over every long night in my life, but all I could recall was the night on the beach when she said, “Tonight I will show you a different way of making love,” and making love that night was like walking through the streets of Miramar in the dusk, the trees caught in the last of the golden light. Slow and sinuous, a long, slow walk, past dark, shuttered houses, and underneath old lampposts, and down empty avenues, to the sea. All night, the two of us, with all the time in the world, walking through Miramar in the dark.
But that got me to thinking of what she might be doing with him, and how she might be showing Hugo the same kinds of love, and then, when I couldn’t control the thoughts any longer, I got up again, and started talking to her in my Sony, imagining her next to me, pretending I could whisper to her, and hear her voice beside me, and call her by all our secret names. But somehow it didn’t work. The more I talked, the more I waited for her to say my name. I waited so long it hurt; it was like calling a lover at home, at two a.m., and just hearing the phone ring and ring and ring.
Around noon, the day’s mail arrived, and there was another letter from her, sent ten days after the last, and I picked it up, and looked at the stamps, and smelled the envelope, and imagined how she looked when she was licking it, and how she ran her tongue along the back of the envelope, and how, perhaps, she’d spray a little Charlie on the paper. This time I couldn’t smell anything.
Richard
,
England is so different from everything—different from Varadero, different from what I have seen on TV, different from everything I imagined! All old and gray, old and gray, red brick and gray stone, till I think I go crazy. Even the rain here has no feeling, no passion. Even the women here, I think, are old and gray, made of red brick and stone
.
At first, when Hugo took me to the Tandoori Centre, I stood outside in the street and waited. “No,” he told me. “There’s no line here. We can go in.” And the stores, my God, the stores are like something from the fairy tales, like nothing you can believe! They have everything here, in a hundred colors, in every size and shape, and everything you want, all brightly lit like a carnival. At first, I could not stop visiting these stores. For two days I walked in them, breathing the smells and the colors. I cannot believe I used to think the Diplotiendas were a paradise
.
But sometimes, I think, it is as if the stores here are all full, and the people are all empty, like the opposite of Cuba. Like all the color is in the boxes, and the people are only gray and old. They have this thing called “fog” here—maybe you have seen it—and this “fog” visits and you can see nothing, nothing for miles. For me, this is how it always is in England—like seeing nothing. Like all the colors are wiped out. Like all the hearts are slammed shut. Like all the music is turned off. Hugo likes this, he can live in it; sometimes, when he sits in his chair in the night, and reads a book, I think the fog is inside him too. But for me it is not so easy: I am a
cubana.
The house where we live—an old house, a very small house, not like the houses of my cousins—is like a museum, Hugo says. But how can you live in a museum? Have you seen this place, Richard? Sometimes I call it “Losechester.” A flower would weep if it was placed here; even the sun is ashamed to visit. Hugo says it will be better in the summer: there are schools for learning English here, and many girls from Spain come to these schools. I can meet them in the pub, he says, these sixteen-year-old girls from Valencia and Madrid. But what is there for me? Instead of schoolboys, schoolgirls! What is this place I have come to, Richard? Where the boys have no girls and
the tables are from the Spanish times and the students wash in tin baths
.
Hugo is always kind to me; he takes me in the car on Saturdays, and we see old churches and dead bodies. Fidel would be at home here: all the martyrs of Girón and Moncada are nothing to these Englishmen! On Sundays, we go to the chapel in the college. The first time I went there, and saw the light through the big purple windows, and all the lamps, and the people there, so many of them, in different colors, so dignified, I could not believe it: it was like something from the ancient Spanish days. So beautiful, so romantic, so full of feeling. But then the music started, and I caught the tune, and I started to sing, and all the boys looked at me—all these little Nigels and Geoffreys and Ruperts, these boys like old men, in gray suits, with love poems under their pillows—they looked at me like I was
una loca.
As if they had never seen a woman before, or a woman in a woman’s dress. I wanted to cry, Richard. I stopped singing then, and started looking at the floor. I could not look at these boys’ faces. But Hugo was kind to me, as always. He held my hand, and the way he looked at me, I wanted to cry in a different way. So proud, so calm. As if he were looking at a Madonna. I have never known a man who looks at me this way. And after, he said that it was not me that was crazy, it was the boys. Sometimes, Richard, I think Hugo is all I have. Sometimes, I think that is enough
.
Yo te quiero,
L
.