The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  She finally returned with the man who was now Menace Man.

  “What?” he said, menacing.

  “No sex,” I replied tentatively. “I don’t want to have sex with her. I didn’t intend—”

  “No sex,” the man repeated.

  “No, I just—”

  “You pay.” It was not a suggestion.

  “How much?”

  “Sixty CUC.”

  “Sixty?”

  The man nodded. If I spoke the language better, I might have pointed out Trudes and I hadn’t actually had sex, that this was all an unfortunate misunderstanding, that I would be happy to pay for their gas and perhaps a ten CUC tip if…. The man did not look amenable to a discussion in any language.

  “I don’t have sixty CUC,” I said, smiling hopefully, patting my pants pocket. “Not with me. Not here.” I didn’t.

  “You have money?”

  “Back at my casa.” My mistake.

  “Go to casa. Get money.”

  “Uh, OK.” What else was there to say? We drove in silence, Menace Man seated in the back beside me, menacing, Trudes on the other side of him, silent, no longer smiling, no longer holding my hand.

  And now, standing at the bottom of the inky-black stairwell of Esteban’s and Silvia’s casa, I briefly considered what might happen if I didn’t come back down with the money. Would Menace Man come up? What would he say to Esteban? What would Esteban say to him? How would I ever explain my stupidity to Esteban and Silvia? I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t. Luckily, everyone was asleep. I went to my room, took three twenty CUC bills out of my duffel and returned to the street where Menace Man and his friend were waiting. Trudes was no longer with them. Was she back at the jazz club, scoping out her next score, someone who actually wanted to have sex?

  I handed the CUCs through the car window to Menace Man, who smiled at me for the first time. “Sorry,” he said as he pocketed the money. Sorry? Sorry for what? Did he think I had been unable to perform? Was that why…I wanted to tell him, no, it was all just a misunderstanding, I’m a journalist, I just wanted to talk. I tried to find words. It was useless.

  “No,” I said. “It’s OK. Thank you.” Thank you!?

  “OK. Ciao, man. Ciao.” He waved at me as the car drove off.

  4

  I had designated today—the day after my disastrous night before—as my self-directed Ernest Hemingway Appreciation Day. I’d envisioned a solo morning walking tour of Hemingway’s Old Havana haunts followed by an afternoon taxi ride to Finca Vigía, the plantation-farm-lookout on the outskirts of Havana where Hemingway spent his last years in Cuba and which was now Cuba’s official museum-veneration of the Nobel prize–winning author.

  So far, I’d only gotten as far as La Bodeguita del Medio in Old Havana, the first stop on my tour. La Bodeguita was famous for a handwritten sign above the bar, “My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita. (Signed) Ernest Hemingway.” I wasn’t sure how long I’d sat at this bar stool in front of the sign, mesmerized, while the bartender, all doctor business-like in his white guayabera, carefully lined up yet another assembly line of Havana Club glasses for mojito making. How many had I drunk? I wanted to stand up, wander around this tiny, overcrowded, come-in, drink-your-drink, be-gone tourist bar and examine the names of the famous and the obscure who’d hand-scrawled or carved their signatures on its walls. Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda…. I would liked to have found their signatures. But I did not get up. I did not inspect the walls. I did not want to lose my seat. I did not want to have to remember where I’d planned to go next. Or puzzle out how to get there.

  At breakfast this morning, Silvia had offered to arrange a taxi to take me to the Hemingway museum, which was in the suburbs near Cojímar, but I’d declined with thanks. “I’ll find a cab when I’m ready,” I told her. “That way, I can go at my own pace.”

  What pace? I’d assumed I could uncover Hemingway—and Havana—for myself. I’d walk Old Havana’s narrow, cobblestoned streets, navigate its soccer-playing boys and shitting dogs, sit on its plaza park benches and watch beautiful Cuban women parading past for my personal pleasure. And somehow, I presumed, Hemingway himself would emerge, magically, from behind a backdrop of who-knew-what combination of crumbling Cuban baroque-neoclassical-Moorish architectural wonder of the world.

  That was the problem. I certainly didn’t know. I needed a guide! I should have taken Lío up on his offer to line me up with his daughter…his niece? Whatever. Beautiful Green Eyes! “Best tour guide in Havana. Show you what you want. Anything.” I rolled “anything” around in my imaginings. I could use a little anything about now. I imagined her, her life beyond those few hours in Lío’s car…. Stop. I just needed a tour guide. Perhaps I would ask Silvia tonight to ask Lío if she might still be available to show me around.

  But if not a tour guide for today, perhaps a tour book. At some point, I remembered I’d passed a bazaar-like plaza in Old Havana, which was ringed by stalls where Cubans peddled all manner of used books. Surely, one of them must offer a Havana tour guide. In English. Or even just one with pictures. Could I find the plaza again? I would try. I slid off my bar stool—

  Her! Beautiful, beautiful Green Eyes. Standing near the entrance. She was dressed today in official-looking blue—powder-blue blouse open to reveal a hint of cleavage, a dark blue skirt that landed just above her knee. She wore those fishnet stockings Cuban women seemed to favour. She looked like a tour guide. “Maria!” I called over the cacophony of music and noise, waved. She didn’t respond. Had she heard me? Was that even her name? Maria?…Marina?… Her name was…“Mariela!”

  The pale man beside her—who the hell was he and what was he doing with her?—noticed me, gently touched Mariela’s arm, pointed in my direction. I smiled at her…goofy, drunk, hey…. She looked my way. Blank. She didn’t recognize me. But then she slowly rearranged her expression, not so much recognizing me as knowing she should, trying to frame my face to some experience, to some time, or place, or person. She remembered. She smiled back. Recognition? Relief? Something. I couldn’t tell.

  “Cooper!” So she did remember. “How are you enjoying your visit to Havana, my friend?” she shouted across to me.

  I walked toward her, unsteady, following the beam of those luminous green eyes. “Great! Love it! Really great!” What the fuck kind of stupid was I? I needed to sober up.

  “Cooper, meet my friends Ellen and Hank.” Ellen! That must mean Ellen was with Hank, so Hank wasn’t with Mariela. Thank god for Ellen. “Cooper here is visiting from Canada, right?” I nodded, oddly, giddily gratified she remembered. “Hank and Ellen are—” Mariela paused suddenly, as if not sure what to say next.

  “We’re from the United States,” Ellen cut in, casting a dismissive look toward Hank. “We’re just pretending we’re not.”

  Mariela caught the eye of a waiter carrying a tray filled with mojitos, held up two fingers.

  “No,” Hank said, pointing toward the waiter, holding up three fingers. “You deserve one too,” he gestured toward Mariela, “for putting up with us.” Then he remembered me. Did he recognize something in my hangdog-hopeful expression, some pathetic eagerness not to be banished from her presence?

  “And Cooper? Can I buy you one as well?”

  I needed to say no. I was drunk, and it wasn’t even noon. “Sure, thanks,” I said.

  “Canada, eh!” Ellen took a long pull from her straw, giggled. “That’s where we are right now. In Toronto. Not Havana. Right, honey?” Hank did not look amused.

  Mariela tried to change the subject. “So, Cooper, what have you seen so far?”

  “A little.” Should I tell her the truth, or just some shade of it? “Mostly, I’ve been walking around….” I wanted to crawl into those eyes. “But it’s hard when you don’t always know what you’re looking at, or for.” I was too drunk to be casual, too me to be
suave. “Are you available—?” I asked. There were thoughts there, perhaps intended but not to be spoken. “As a guide, I mean,” I added quickly. “Your?… Lío. I remember, he said you were the best. Would you be able to show me around sometime?”

  “When were you thinking?”

  “Now. Today. Whenever.”

  She laughed. I wished I could think of ways to keep her laughing. Was that the mojitos talking?

  “I’m sorry, Cooper,” she said, sounding sorry. “Maybe another day. Today, I am busy with my friends—”

  “Look, don’t worry about us,” Hank cut her off. “We were thinking about hanging out at the pool at the hotel.”

  “We were?” Ellen needled. There was stuff going on between these two, I thought. If I hadn’t been so drunk, I might even care. “Sure,” she said, resigned. “I’d love to hang out at the pool, cover myself in sunblock….”

  I ignored the undertones, didn’t wait for Mariela to object. I clinked my glass with my new best friend Hank. “So,” I said, “that’s it then.”

  5

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Certainly.”

  Will you sleep with me? Will you marry me? Will you have my children? These were just a few of the inappropriate questions neon-dancing around my sun-baked, rum-addled brain. I wanted to ask Mariela but couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t/didn’t. Not yet. Maybe never. “Do you love…Hemingway?” I asked instead.

  We’d spent a Hemingway afternoon. I’d learned things I didn’t know. La Bodeguita del Medio, for example, was not Hemingway’s favourite bar. He only ever visited it a few times, Mariela told me, but the bar’s founder asked him to write those famous words on a note, which he then shamelessly hung above the bar to promote his business. And that other famous Hemingway-Cuba tourist tale, the one about Hemingway writing For Whom the Bell Tolls in Room 511 of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Old Havana? Not true either, at least not according to Mariela. By the time Hemingway wrote that book, she said, he was already so famous he maintained the room at the Ambos for public show, but actually wrote in a secret hideaway at the Sevilla-Biltmore Hotel a few blocks away. “I can show you.” Who knew? How did she know? Did she?

  Still, we visited Room 511 in the Ambos Mundos, which had been carefully preserved by the Cuban government in its Hemingway state, and paid our two CUCs to stand where Hemingway himself supposedly once stood.

  “You still must see the room,” Mariela told me, “so you can tell your friends you were there, and that Mr. Hemingway was not.”

  Her smile crinkled the skin around the corners of her eyes. I did not tell Mariela I had no actual friends to whom I could tell this story. Instead, I admired the single bed with its red bedspread where Papa had slept. I marvelled at his stand-up, sit-down desk and the glass-encased typewriter where he wrote (or didn’t). Whatever. The important point was that I now possessed secret knowledge unknown to ordinary Hemingway tourists—unless, of course, Mariela told everyone the same story. Did she? Was I just another client?

  After we’d completed our pilgrimage to Room 511, Mariela suggested we take the hotel’s wheezing gated lift up to the rooftop bar—where Hemingway had indeed held court, she assured me—so I could enjoy an end-of-tour drink. I wasn’t ready for the tour to end.

  On the roof, Mariela showed me the city’s skyline, pointing out historic Old Havana landmarks and, beyond them, the harbour, El Morro, the castle, and the Christ of Havana statue that watched over the city. Though we could not see the detail from our distance, Mariela assured me the Christ figure had no eyes so he could see, and be seen to see, nothing and nowhere, yet everything and everywhere. That made no sense to me. Nothing made any sense to me. And I was fine with that.

  “Your place, the place where Lío dropped you off that night….” I was finding my geographic bearings, but it was still a question. “It’s around here somewhere? Right?”

  “Somewhere,” she said. It was a non-answer answer that did not invite further questions.

  I wished I’d brought my camera, not to take photos of the views, but to ask our waiter to take a picture of Mariela and me standing together with the Havana evening skyline at our backs, or sitting together at a table, drinks in front of us, smiling for the camera. I wanted to document this moment and send the results to Sarah. “See, I did have a good time. See, I am normal.” Or perhaps I wanted to prove to myself that this—whatever this was—had really happened.

  “Sir?” It was our waiter. “Something to drink?”

  “You go ahead,” I said to Mariela.

  She looked at me, uncertain. “Nothing,” she told the waiter. “I’m fine.”

  I suddenly realized I’d put her in an awkward position. “My treat,” I told her. “To thank you. This has been a great afternoon. I’ve had a wonderful time.” I looked at the waiter, held up two fingers. “Dos mojitos.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply. “You are my guest.”

  Her guest? We hadn’t discussed her fee, or anything beyond the bubble in which we existed. On the taxi ride back to Old Havana from Finca Vigía, I had belatedly asked, “How did you become a tour guide?”

  “Uncle Lío,” she said simply. “After Fidel opened our country to tourism during the nineties, Uncle Lío created his own business. He was a professor of economics at the university in Matanzas, but he quit his job and became a tour guide—”

  “Wait a minute! Your uncle was a professor of economics, and he gave that up to become a tour guide?”

  “You have to understand, Cuba is not like other places,” she told me. “Amigo?” She reached out, touched our taxi driver on the shoulder, asked him something in Spanish. The man laughed, shook his head, replied. Mariela turned back to me. “Our driver was an engineer. He drives a taxi to feed his family.”

  I wasn’t listening, wasn’t hearing, certainly wasn’t understanding. I had disappeared again deep into the dark portals in the centres of her eyes. If I sold my father’s house, withdrew all the cash I’d been hoarding for no good reason, cashed in whatever meagre pension I’d accumulated in too many years at the Trib, I could move to Cuba, rent an apartment, marry Mariela, live happily ever after….

  This was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. It was the rum shouting crazy-think in my brain. Or maybe it was a wishful response to all the self-shaking moments I’d endured these past few weeks. My job was still gone. My father was still dead. Dad? I saw him everywhere, even here in Havana. A look, a gesture, a way of walking. This morning, I followed a man two blocks along Neptuno in the wrong direction simply because his hunched-over shoulders, bobbing head, and loping stride reminded me of Dad’s ungainly gait. Following him had made me happy, then deeply sad. I would never see my father walk again. There was nothing to go back home for.

  “There is a joke in my country,” Mariela was still explaining as the exhaust-spewing taxi stuttered its way back to Old Havana. I tried to plug back in, catch up. “Or maybe it’s a Miami joke we tell tourists. But everybody knows it, even those who support the Revolution. ‘What are the Revolution’s three greatest successes?’ someone asks. ‘Health, education, and baseball,’ comes the answer. ‘So what are the Revolution’s three greatest failures?’ …‘Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.’” She laughed. The driver laughed. I laughed. But I wasn’t listening.

  “So Lío decided to call himself a tour guide,” Mariela picked up the thread of her story. He hung around outside the resorts in Varadero offering to show guests the real Cuba. “But he wasn’t very good at it,” she said, partly because he only spoke Spanish, and partly because he wasn’t willing to learn the kinds of information tourists wanted to know.

  “Like the fact the Bodeguita wasn’t really Hemingway’s favourite bar?” I said.

  “Like that, and many other things. If you’re going to be a successful tour guide here, you must know everything there is to know, everything someone might ask you.
The little things like Hemingway’s favourite bar, yes, and the big things like the architectural style and history of particular buildings. I spent months at the National Library, studying Cuban history, arts, culture—just like the official guides.”

  “Official?”

  “Licensed by the government. You’re supposed to be licensed to be a tour guide.”

  “Which means….”

  “I’m not legal.”

  “If you get caught?”

  She shrugged. “A fine, probably. Jail if they catch me too many times.”

  “And have they?”

  “No. It’s like Uncle Lío says. It’s just a rule. Nobody cares. Unless they do. I’ve been lucky.”

  While Lío didn’t have the language skills to be a tour guide, she continued, he clearly understood how to organize his own economy. He’d moved to Havana and assembled a sprawling network of bellhops, front-desk clerks, bartenders, even maids, at all the city’s best tourist hotels. He agreed to pay small but significant fees to anyone who connected him with guests seeking guides. As the middleman, Lío pocketed fifty per cent of whatever the tourists paid his guides.

  “So how did you become one of Lío’s guides?”

  “That is a much longer, more complicated story I won’t bore you with today.” Today? Would there be a tomorrow? “The brief version is that I studied languages at university. I specialized in English.” That much was clear. “And then I became a teacher back in Cárdenas where I was born.”

  “Cárdenas?”

  “Not far from the resort where you were staying. You must have heard of Elián? Elián González, the little boy whose mother drowned in the raft on the way to Florida?” Of course I remembered. When his story dominated international headlines in 2000, I’d included at least one story about Elián every day for what seemed like months.