Cuba and the Night (6 page)

At the airport, José got out first and, when the taxi had gone, handed me two letters—for his “brother,” he said. “So we meet again soon, Richard,” he went on, giving me an
abrazo
. “You find me an apartment in New York, okay? And a place where I can buy some books?” And then he was gone, off to another deal, and I was closing the door on Cuba, and getting ready for Tegucigalpa.

W
hen I got back to New York, I had a few days free—to do my laundry and collect my mail—and so I sent off the packets I’d been given, and went through some of the letters I’d brought back with me. You never know where contacts will appear. José hadn’t sealed the envelopes—that way, he said, the authorities would think there was nothing in them. Some of them were just messages, with lists of shirt sizes and brand names and children’s ages. Some of them were just formula recitations of love and pain. And one of them, which José had said was for his brother, was a badly typed message, in broken English, with no name at the bottom, to one Kent Ferguson at the State Department (Latin America desk), offering his services for the CIA. I spent a few moments wondering how I would have explained that one to the Cubans, or the guys at JFK, and decided that next time down, José owed me one.

Then I went through the phone calls I’d promised I would make. First I called Caridad’s father—at the 516 area code, in some place called Babylon, New York—and I got a woman with a roughened Brooklyn accent; I could almost see her, with thick dark hair and gray eyes, and makeup here and there across her face.

“It’s so nice a you to call,” she kept saying, and then, “Callie, will you turn that thing off! Now! I’m trying to talk!” and then, back again to me, “I’m sorry. You know what these kids are like. So anyway, it’s nice a you to call. If I see Luis, I’ll tell him. He’ll be real
happy to hear about his daughter. She’s the older one, right, with the black hair?”

“No, the blonde.”

“Right. The one with the blond hair. Not Mercedes.”

“No. Caridad.”

“Caridad, right.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll try again some other time. When will he be back?”

“Jeez.” She sounded worried. “I don’t know. He kind of comes and goes.”

“But he’s okay?”

“Okay? Sure; he’s okay. He’ll be back in a while.” I thought of the two cars and the mansion Caridad had told me about. “We don’t see him too much anymore, but he comes round now and then, collects his social security, wants to see Callie. He’s doin’ fine. He’ll be sorry he missed your call.”

“Okay. Catch you later,” I said, and dialed some journalist José had told me about—some young guy in Miami, at the
Herald
. But he was eager to talk, and hit me up for names, and when he got round to José’s friends—“that girl called Lourdes”—I decided we’d talked enough. “Okay. Be seeing you.”

The only other message I had left was for Lázara’s mother. It was a number in the Bronx. A ring, a long ring, another ring. Then a click, and I prepared a message for the machine, but instead there was a thick, slurred voice, sounding like it was coming from the ocean floor.

“Dime!”

“Right. I was down in Havana last week—”

“Dime! Oye!”
The connection was so bad, I might as well have been still in Havana.

“Buenos días, señora. Soy americano. Periodista.”

“You Cuban?”

“No. You speak English?”

“Un momentico.”
She shouted out for some guy, and I heard some dance music in the background, and, after a while, a male voice on the other end.

“Jes.”

“I just got back from Havana. I have some photos of Señora González’s daughter. Also a letter for her. If she wants some news of her, she can come round here and collect it.”

“O-ka.”

“She can come today?”

“Jes, jes. Sure.”

“Okay. You know West Broadway?”

“Broadway? Sure I know Broadyway.”

“No—West Broadway. It’s different.” I gave him some instructions, and a few hours later there was a pounding on my door, and there was a huge black woman there. As soon as I opened up, she walked in and hugged me, and said, “Thank you, thank you, I’m sorry.” I told her that Lázara was fine, and that she missed her, and that she was real pretty, and that she was doing well at school. I told her that she had a nice room on Concordia. Then I gave her the photos.

The woman didn’t say anything at first—she just stared and stared and stared—and then her whole body started shaking, and she was sobbing and heaving, and sobbing and wailing.
“Mi nena, mi nena. Por qué no te puedo ver? Mi nena.”
And she was sobbing and wailing, and I didn’t know what to do, so I held her.

“It’s tough, I know,” I said. “It’s been a long time,” but she was holding on to me so hard her nails were digging into my shoulders, and her whole body was leaning against mine, and she was muttering curses and phrases through her snuffles that I couldn’t catch.

It was a crazy thing: occupational hazard, I guess. Like being in Beirut, and some woman was howling when she saw the body of her kid in the street, and you didn’t know whether to drop it, or whether to tell her that he’d left a body of his own in another street, or whether just to get the shot before the TV crews came in. And half hoping she’d keep bawling till the light changed.

This time, though, my camera was on the other side of the room, and the woman was hugging me like a cousin, and sniffling. Finally, she stood back and turned to me. “Thank you, thank you,” she said, drying her eyes with her fists, and when I mentioned the fifty dollars I’d loaned her daughter, she said, “Thank you, I’m sorry. I put it in your door tonight. Tomorrow. By Monday, for sure.” That was the last I ever saw of her.

II
 

I
didn’t think about Cuba for a few weeks after that, what with the contra clashes in Honduras and the latest coup attempt in Manila. Sometimes, from Managua, I’d try to call the number Lourdes had given me, just to see what the story was, but usually the number just rang and rang and rang, and when somebody answered, it was the old woman downstairs, and she sounded frightened when she heard a foreign voice, and quickly put the phone down. Sometimes I read reports—in the
Herald
—about crackdowns and defections. Del Pino, the hero of the Bay of Pigs. Even Fidel’s eldest brother, Ramón, the one you never heard about, had tried to make it out. But mostly, Cuba was on a different wavelength from the rest of the planet. The great thing about being there was that you could just screen out the rest of the world, forget everything you knew, and take a break from America. The hardest thing about being there was that when you left it, the whole place disappeared from view, and it was almost as if you’d dreamed it. Hundred-percent blackout.

I got a few calls from José on my machine in New York—hurried, usually, asking me to send a few thousand dollars to some guy in Jackson Heights, who would send him a Colombian passport—and occasionally I got a postcard from Lourdes or Caridad, saying, “I hope that all is very well for you, and for your parents too.” Sometimes I got 3-D Russian postcards with those shiny surfaces that made all the words written impossible to read. I couldn’t tell who they were from, and what they were saying, and whether they were offering me a favor or asking me for one.

And then, in mid-December, I got a card from England.

I pictured to myself the sweating red face and the spectacles, and remembered how I’d got Hugo to pose by the pool at the Capri for one of the shots I’d sent to German
Geo:
he was famous now. The Empire in the tropics. Hockney goes Latino. And nocturnal. But I’d pretty much forgotten about his card by the time I scheduled a trip to Havana that July. Things were quieting down in Central America, and I wasn’t billing as many days as I would have liked. Cuba, I figured, was a cinch: the government was canny enough to schedule Carnival at the same time as the Anniversary of the Revolution, so I could get two stories in one: Fun in the Sun, and the Calypso Graybeard. I also had a long-running thing I was shooting on the worldwide trade of money for love.

I was staying in the St. John’s this time—more gritty texture—and as soon as I got off the late flight from Toronto, I walked out into the streets to get a taste of the Cuban night. It got into you like a kind of pounding rhythm: no way you could sit still while the whole country seemed to be pulsing around you. Down on the Malecón, the street was one big mess of boys in rows in color-coordinated suits, and girls in sparkly bra things, trailing boas, and lit up faces in masks. Everyone always said that the Revolution had
really cleaned the celebration up. Before—that was the magic word here, “before”—it had made Rio seem like a toddler’s birthday party by comparison.

I bought a beer and walked among the dancers.
“Hola, Richard!”
came a cry.
“Te recuerdas de mí?”

It was a face I didn’t recognize: black, with silver eye shadow, under a silver kind of bathing cap.

“No me recuerdas? La amiga de José. Myra.”

“Sure,” I said, while figures slipped past me in the dark, like peacocks on the strut, and a few Chinese guys under a winding dragon, and the gays enjoying their big public outing of the year.

“So you’ve been to see Lula?”

“Lula?”

“Lourdes.”

“No. I only just got here. Business.”

“Bueno,”
said the girl. “She’s waiting to see you. I think she’s over there,” and she pointed me over to the viewing stands. I weaved in and out of the trumpet players then, and saw sitting on the ground the same woman who’d invited me to her store the year before, and someone else greeted me by name, and there were boys bobbing around slowly, and Tropicana rejects, and women with staring eyes doing some kind of voodoo number. I looked for her eyes, her delicate features. All around me, the usual whispers and blown kisses.
“Oye.” “Dime.” “Pssst.”

And then I recognized her smile, a little shyer than most, in a body swathed in feathers: like an earthly angel among a team of twenty or so others, wriggling in formation.

“Richard,” she cried, and her arms were around me.

“Qué tal?”

“Richard,” was all she answered.
“Ven acá. Conmigo,”
and I watched her disentangle herself from the group, and blow a few kisses at her friends, and whisper something to a tall boy with a hiphop haircut, and then she was with me, and linking me by the arm, and we were walking away from the music, away from the crowds, along the boulevard, toward the silence and the dark.

“You got my letters, Richard? And my posters?”

“I think so, but the government always takes a cut.”

“Your government?”

“Your government, my government, it’s all the same.”

“Oh, Richard, I am so happy to see you.
Qué sorpresa!”
and she was holding me by the hand now, and it was cooler, and there were fewer people in evidence, and I was tucking my camera in my pocket. One thing I knew—I was back in Cuba, where you never knew how a night would end up, or who was leading whom. Where were we going now, I thought, and what was her plan? To fix me up with a cousin? To give me herself? To get me her mother’s shopping list?

On Belascoaín we turned right, and walked past the huge, phantom bulk of the Central Hospital, and then down Concordia. She knocked three times on a decaying old door, and a black woman with a scarf opened up, and she led me up the broad stairs, and along a balcony where the washing flew in our faces, above a tiny courtyard, and then into a kitchen as small as a bathroom.

It was empty, and dark, and a side door led into her bedroom.

“Sit down, Richard. You want
café?
Beer? What can I get for you?”

“A beer sounds great.”

She went out to get it, and I looked at her bedside table: an old Russian postcard of Jesus, a small picture of Martí.

“Mira,”
she said when she came back, and she went across the room and showed me the altar where she kept her treasures: a wrinkled old black-and-white photograph of her mother, I figured, in her prime; a Gloria Estefan tape; and some books about Russian literature that she’d studied once.
“Mira!”
she exclaimed. “Look!” And there, right next to her heart-shaped mirror, was the picture that José had taken of us in Maxim’s that night, our eyes red, the focus shaky, my arm around her shoulders, grinning in the dark. It was a weird feeling to see it there, in a homemade frame on her dresser: like when someone you didn’t think you knew asks you to be his best man or the executor of his will, or invites you to read at his mother’s memorial service, and suddenly you realize you mean more to him than you’d figured. She couldn’t have planned it, I knew: she hadn’t known I was coming till tonight.