Cuba and the Night (7 page)

“I just knew I’d see you, Richard.” She smiled over at me.

“That’s great,” I said, and decided to let her airport nonappearance ride. “You mind if I take some pictures?”

“Of what? Of me? Señorita X, you can say. Of this?” She opened her closet, and I saw three outfits hanging there, and I didn’t know whether that made her rich in Havana terms, or poor. She must have realized how soppy foreigners could get about Cuba and its shortages: she spoke English, after all. But then, when I waited for her to make her move—no, it wasn’t prostitution, I was getting ready to tell anyone who asked, including myself: it was just an exchange of favors, what I had to give for what she had, just like in any love affair—she motioned me to get up, and led me back through the kitchen to the courtyard.

“You see, Richard?” She didn’t seem frightened. “I was waiting for you. I knew you would come. I must go now, for my mother. But come back tomorrow. I will be waiting for you. You are staying where? Vedado? For how long? Okay, Richard, we have time.”

And then she kissed me softly on the lips, and I was left to make my own way out into the night.

T
hat night, though, when I got home, I had a weird dream. I was with Diane again, or it could have been Lourdes, and some other guy came in, and she put her head on his shoulder—it looked like the most intimate act in the world—and then he was whispering something in her ear, and I was going crazy—I couldn’t take it anymore—and I ran out into the garden. And she came after, and she was crying, and through her tears she was calling out to me, “What’s wrong? What’s your problem? Don’t you trust me? I was only kissing my brother goodbye!”

I
got up kind of scratchy the next morning, but it was still early, so I went on down to the old city to catch it before the tourist buses came, while the schoolkids were still playing stickball on the ill-paved, slanting streets, and the old guys were gathering for coffee in the open-fronted bars, and the first light gilded
the parks and plazas around all the aromatic sailors’ world of streets: Obispo and O’Reilly and Empedrado.

Then, after breakfast, I went down to Lourdes’s house, walking all the way down San Lázaro—along the big road where they held a torchlight parade for Martí every year on his birthday, and Pablo sang, and everyone waited to see if he got a bigger crowd than Fidel—and then threading my way into Centro Habana, and down to her cracked green door. It was locked now, and there was no way anyone could hear the knock, what with the music coming out of radios, so I sat on the stoop and waited.

Another bright Havana morning, and nothing much going down. A few kids playing hide-and-seek in vacant lots. A teenager cycling by, and a woman stopping to chat. Mothers with curlers dandling babies on their terraces; children crying from an upstairs window. Occasionally, a door would open, and some old woman—the last of the
Fidelistas
—would slouch out into the street and go off to do her errands. This street was like all the others: the paint all faded, the windows gutted, bare rooms visible through the bars—a pretty tropical afterthought where the cleaning lady hadn’t come for almost thirty years. One time, a couple of grandmas of the Revolution picked me out as a foreigner: one hurried off, to tell the local CDR; the other came over and asked if I wanted to buy a turtle.

Then a woman came up and said,
“Richard, Richard! Qué tal?”
and she was kissing me on both cheeks, this woman I had never met, as if I were a son returned from Miami.
“La madre de Lourdes,”
she said, introducing herself, and I figured she must have recognized me from the picture on the dresser.
“Ven, entra, Richard. Lourdes vendrá pronto! Ven, ven!”
I followed her up to the tiny kitchen, and she called out something, and the neighbors came out to take a look at me: her daughter’s prize specimen, a captive foreigner, with a camera.
“Quieres agua? Quieres café?”
she asked. “Sit down.” I sat at a table in the weather-beaten room. There was a plastic bowl from China for cigarettes. A clock that didn’t work. A framed set of pictures snapped from fashion magazines. A small Jesus, almost hidden. The centerpiece glass cabinet was empty except for a few dusty books.

“Y tu mamá, tu papá?”

“Very well,” I said.

“Y Señor Reagan?”

“Fine. And your children?”

“O-ka
. We survive. My son is in America. Here,
mira!”
She went into her bedroom and brought back a picture of a young kid, with Lourdes’s Palestinian complexion, standing in front of a tenement in New Jersey. “He says it is like heaven.” Then she looked over at me, her eyes aglow. This was her daughter’s freedom sitting in her kitchen; this was her ticket out.

So she smiled at me, and offered me more
café
, and told me how she had a sister in Miami, and how for months her sister called her every week, and told her about her life. But after that, nothing. She’d got her son on the telephone once, she said, from the neighbor’s house, but he’d sounded very far away, and couldn’t understand anything she said. He’d promised to send her some spoons, but that was the last she’d heard from him. It was so good of me to remember her daughter, she said, it was so good of me to take her out.

A few cards, I thought, and now I’m like a son-in-law: even in the Philippines, it wasn’t this quick.

Lourdes’s sister came in—she looked about thirty-five, though I remembered José had told me she was still in her teens, despite her large thighs and bitter mouth—and sat down at the table and looked me over. “You have seen Lourdes?” she said. “She knows you are here? You will go to Varadero with her? What are your plans?”

“I’m busy,” I said. “I’m only here for two weeks. I’ve got to work.” When the conversation dropped off, I picked up the camera, and again, as soon as I did, the two of them were up, and off like giggling schoolgirls to change into their best clothes, and I sat and sat, taking pictures out the window, till they came out again, their lips reddened with some children’s crayons, in fishnet stockings and
CREO EN TÍ
T-shirts. I snapped a few frames, and they gave off smiles that could have lit the room up without strobes. Then there were footsteps outside, and the door opened, and it was Lourdes, in shorts and a faded T-shirt that said
WASHINGTON HUSKIES
, and when she saw me, her face came to life: white teeth and olive skin.

I decided to give them some of the presents I’d brought for them as sweeteners, and Lourdes pulled the Charlie from the box and sprayed it on the warmer parts of herself, right there, in front of everyone: on the pulse of her neck, on her temples, on the back of her knees. Then her sister grabbed it from her and did the same, and the mother sat across from me, still glowing.

I pulled out some Marlboros I had brought too, and handed them over to her, and the mother opened up the box, and called in the neighbors, and within a few minutes, half the carton was empty.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, Santa Claus busy on his rounds, “but I’ve got to go and work. Before it gets dark.”

“I’ll come with you, Richard.”

“No, you stay here.”

“What do you need? I can show you anything. The true Havana. The secret Havana. I can show you the old city.”

“I’ve seen all that, Lourdes. I’ve already got all that tourist stuff.”

“But I can show you what the people dream. What they say in private. I can show you all their hopes, next to the happy slogans.”

She paused.

“A violent contrast,” she continued, with her faint, white smile, and I remembered why I liked her: I never could tell how much she meant what she was saying.

O
ut on the street, we passed women dressed all in white turbans, with beads around their necks—
santero
priestesses, she said, or their disciples—and at one corner, a whole group of
numismáticos
, gathered in a kind of Masonic circle, trading strange terms and shouting numbers. We passed hand-painted pieces of cardboard advertising haircuts for dogs, and women with purple hair, and boys who called out
“Hola!”
to Lourdes, and
“Qué tal?”

When we got to San Rafael, a small man came out from his store and put his arm around my shoulder, eyes pleading. “You have a card?” he said. “Here’s mine. I too am a collector.” I didn’t know what he was collecting, but everyone was a collector here, ready to
trade anything, hoarding coins or stamps or cigarettes in the hope that one day they’d be currency. José too, I thought, was a collector in his way, of foreign friends, of foreign addresses. Lourdes too.

“Look,” said the man, and he pulled me into his house, where he had all the business cards he had ever received, arranged in albums, a gallery of foreign hopes. “Look,” he said. “This is my passion.” On all six surfaces, there were mementos of Carlos Gardel, tango posters, old records, tickets to concerts in Buenos Aires. “This is my life,” he said. “My life, my love, my heart.”

I signed his visitors’ book and gave him a card—one a carpet salesman had given me on the plane coming down—and in exchange, I got some shots of him, smiling rheumy-eyed against the multicolored posters. He asked to take my picture too, in his house, and laboriously wrote out his address, so I could send him copies, and then we went on to the Sailors’ Store, the only place in Cuba where you could get most Cuban goods.

“Compañero,”
Lourdes said to the fat guard at the door. “This is a very important man from Italy.”

“Very important,” I said, and he let us in with a smile.
“Niña,”
he called after her, “remember me next time your brother has a chicken!”

In the aisles, they were selling telephones shaped like red high heels.

“In America, how much does this cost?”

“Too much.”

“Nothing is too much in America,” she said, and we went upstairs, to the eating area, where all the Africans were hanging out, sipping guava juice or dusty bottles of flat 7-Up while they traded stories. This was how they lived here, the students from abroad, using their dollars to buy goods they could resell to Cubans, or buying fans and juicers they could take back to the Isle of Youth to trade for human company.

“Now, Richard,” she said, “I show you the true Revolution. The one the bearded one never talks about.”

And then we went back out into the street, and she led me up to a small brown door. A woman with glasses opened up, brushing her hair back, and waved us hurriedly in, then led us through the
darkness of a corridor. We passed a circle of chairs, set around some bottles of Jack Daniel’s—a homemade, private bar. We passed two chihuahuas from Mexico and a Siamese cat she was raising in order to sell. Then we went through a door, and she flicked on a switch, and I was standing in a room full of spooky treasures: porcelain figures, elephant vases, the masks of African gods, crammed into every spare inch of glass cases that reached all the way to the ceiling. A whole cathedral of voodoo, with eerie dark faces on seven different levels, and different colors for every god. A sanctuary of darkness.

“The only one in Cuba!” said Lourdes proudly. “Nowhere is there anything like this.” I wandered farther in, and took a few close-ups of the coconut faces and model cars on display. “This is Shango,” she said, pointing to one deity. “The same god as
El Jefe
. And this is Obatalá,” fingering another mask. “And this one is Oshún.”

“And you believe in all this?”

“Sure. Why not? Even Fidel believes in this. Even Fidel went to Africa to learn from the gods.” She stopped, and let her voice go down. “Usually, of course, I believe in Jesus Christo. But how long was Jesus Christo on the cross? Three days. And how long have we been on the cross? Twenty-eight years! How can I believe in him?”

While she spoke, two men came in, and as we moved into the shadows, the first of them threw himself flat out on the floor and started babbling something, muttering so fast I couldn’t make it out, and shaking a maraca as he did so, and then stuffing some money into a jar. And then the next man came up and did the same, shaking the instrument wildly in his hand, and then the woman came in, and gave them both some pieces of cake and wine. There were bows, and whispered thanks, and smiles. It was like some ungodly inversion of a first communion.

“And over here,” said Lourdes, motioning me toward a corner, after the men had gone out, “over here is
my
religion. My altar. Now you can see what I believe in.” And she pulled open the lid on a huge Chinese vase. Inside, there was a mass of papers. There were scraps of faded newspaper clippings like the one I’d already seen, old pictures of the Prado when it must have been like Patpong, a
few tattered copies of
Bohemia
. There were copies of ancient guidebooks telling New Yorkers where they could find whites-only clubs, and ads for nightclubs from the time of Prío and Batista. There were old articles from the
New York Herald Tribune
.

“You see, Richard? You understand? This is my bank account. This is my dream: one day, when he is gone, to make the true story of our country. The story the government never tells us about. This is my private Museum of the Revolution.”

“I see,” I said, though it seemed to me that the whole island was one dusty, glass-cased Museum of a Revolution that had faded long ago. “And so the Catholic churches are a cover for
santería
. And
santería
is a cover for this.”

“Maybe,” she said, and then, carefully, put the clippings back inside the jar, just the way she’d taken them out. “This is my secret treasure. This is why I learned English.”

“And you keep it here because …”

“Because it is more secure. If they find it, they think it is from some traitor who went to Mariel.”

I looked around again, at the grinning gods and the scraps of meat, at the broken axes and clunky pots, and then she led me back through the darkened corridor and out into the street. We passed rooms with their doors open, where old men were strumming guitars, and a man was selling copies of
The Godfather
. We passed North Koreans in white guayaberas, with pictures of Kim Il Sung pinned to their lapels. We passed boys selling ice creams from behind the bars of ground-floor windows, and kids from Chernobyl off to see their doctors.