“He seemed friendly. He asked me about the man from Miami. ‘Is he a blood relative?’ I said no. What should I have said? Then he asked if he was my boyfriend? He wasn’t, but I didn’t know the answer he wanted, so I took a chance. ‘Sí, my boyfriend,’ I told him. And then his whole attitude changed. He closed the file, looked at me, unfriendly. ‘You have no ties here, and a boyfriend there,’ he said. ‘Chances are you’ll try to stay in the United States once your visa expires. Application denied.’ Hypocrites! All of them.”
I knew I shouldn’t, knew it was not the right response, but I couldn’t stop my mind from tripping back over Mariela’s admission—declaration?—that there was no husband. Which meant there was still a chance. For me. A voice in my head—the voice of reason—told me there were things she wasn’t telling me, or things I wasn’t hearing, or most likely both. This was the moment I needed to snuff out the flame of her before it consumed me. Lick the ice cream, admire the dead, buy the T-shirt, and then get the hell back to the resort, get on the plane back home.
Bruno brought us another round.
“Maybe I should find someone with a raft,” Mariela said bitterly, staring hard into her cup. “Like Elián’s mother.”
“That sounds…dangerous.” And stupid. Don’t leave me now.
“Do you know that if a Cuban can get to United States territory by air, by land, or even on a raft, the Americans will let that person stay. Forever. Automatically. They call it wet foot, dry foot. You don’t have to fill out any forms, you don’t have to pay any fees. Just, ‘Bienvenido a los Estados Unidos…. Welcome to America.’ But me, an honest Cuban citizen who fills out the forms, pays all the fees, stands in all the lines…‘Application denied.’ They are all such hypocrites. All of them.”
I raised my plastic cup. “Fuck hypocrites,” I said. “Fuck them all.”
“I’ll drink to that, Cooper, my friend. I’ll drink to that.”
This was the wrong time, but there seemed no right time. “Cooper’s my last name,” I told her. “My first name is Elijah, but everyone calls me Eli.”
“Well, then, I will call you that too.” She waved her cup in Bruno’s direction. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Eli Cooper!”
The pleasure was all mine.
7
The beach had been Silvia’s idea. “You should visit at least one beach where real Habaneros go,” she said. In the short time I’d been in Havana, Esteban and Silvia had adopted me. I’m not sure why. They said it was just because I was alone, but perhaps they meant adrift. They were hospitable, and I felt like the most pampered guest in the casa. So, late on my last Sunday morning in Havana, we had gathered together— Esteban and Silvia, Lío, Mariela, and me—for the drive to the beach at Santa María del Mar. Mariela wore a white, gauzy dress over a modest blue one-piece swimsuit, and flip-flops. I was dressed in what had turned out to be my too-tight bathing suit and too-big Trib T-shirt that, thankfully, covered my too-much belly.
“Where’s David?” Silvia asked.
Mariela shrugged, offered what seemed like a more fulsome explanation in Spanish to Silvia before offering me the précis. “My friend David can’t get out of bed until after he’s had his first cigarette. He told me not to wait. But he’ll be here by the time everyone has finished breakfast.”
I rewound that sentence, parsed it. If David—“my friend,” whatever that meant—couldn’t get out of bed before he’d had his first cigarette, and if he’d told Mariela not to wait for him, then it followed logically she had been in the bedroom with him at the time he said that, probably in his bed. She wasn’t married, she’d told me that. But a current boyfriend? Why hadn’t I considered that?
David finally bounded into the apartment just as Silvia finished serving everyone a second espresso. David! David, the arquitecto! Lithe, athletic, languid David, still tattooed, still handsome, still shirtless. This was worse than I had imagined. He proceeded around the kitchen table, cheek-kissing each person in turn. I tried to read their emotions as he bussed Mariela. Lover? Friend? Acquaintance?
“And you. You must be the Canadian,” he said as he leaned in to kiss my cheek. He pulled his head back, looked at my face again, realized what I had already realized. “Not just any Canadian, but the Canadian fascinated by our Havana buildings.”
“David is one of Havana’s best young architects,” Silvia bragged.
“That’s what she always says,” David said to me. “Which is why I love her. But she’s never seen a building I’ve built. Because I never have.”
“I’ve seen plans,” Silvia retorted.
“Plans, dreams. There’s no money to build dreams, no money to build anything in Cuba. Which is why I am—” he paused, bowed in my direction—“your guide to Havana.”
“A very excellent guide,” Lío chimed in. “One of mine.”
“It’s not too late, my friend,” David said with a smile. “Tomorrow, I’ll be guiding a group of architects from Toronto. They want to explore the buildings of Old Havana. It will be very interesting. You should join us.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking at Mariela, hoping for some sign we would be together tomorrow. There was none. “Let me think about it.”
“¡Vámonos!” Silvia cut in. To me, “Otherwise, there’ll be no place for us on the beach.”
Silvia insisted that, as their honoured guest, I sit up front with Lío for the half-hour drive to Santa María del Mar. She and Esteban sat side-by-side in the back seat on the driver’s side, and David sat directly behind me on the passenger side, Mariela on his lap. I listened distractedly while Lío explained in stuttering English mixed with some Spanish and much pointing to the many features he’d added to the car, in particular the after-market sistema de aire acondicionado an Italian friend had brought into the country for him, and which he had personally installed with some help from a neighbourhood mechanic. Also, the AM/FM/mp3/CD player with 250-watt altavoces another friend had smuggled in from Miami by way of Mexico.
“¿Te gusta?” he said, cranking up the volume. “Sí,” I told him. I’d have preferred to overhear what Mariela and David were saying to one another. Not that I would have understood. They were talking, whispering, giggling in rapid Spanish.
The atmosphere at the beach at Santa María del Mar was definitely different from the one I remembered at Jibacoa. For starters, there were many more people of many more colours and ages—all of them Cuban—and they were noisier. A middle-aged man in a bathing suit tossed high fly-balls into the air for a gaggle of kids, who deftly navigated among the beach chairs and bodies. Other children splashed noisily in the waves at the water’s edge. Teenagers clustered together away from the kids, away from the adults, away from the water, shouting to be heard above the thumping bass music from a boom box. Servers from a bar beyond the dunes scurried about selling litre bottles (bottles, not glasses!) of white rum.
While Silvia claimed a table far from the crowd, I went with Lío to rent five plastic chairs and a table umbrella. There was an unspoken understanding that I, the rich-in-Cuba foreigner, would pay. I understood. I paid again when we ordered food and drinks from a young woman who wandered from table to table carrying a small wooden fan, which she splayed open in her hand to display the available food and drink items, each one written in marker on the leaf of her fan. Cuba was endlessly confounding. The beachgoers appeared to be Cuban, yet all of the prices were in CUCs, which I’d understood Cubans weren’t supposed to use or possess, and yet sales were brisk. How did that work?
After lunch, Silvia announced something to the others in a Spanish I couldn’t begin to translate. She then turned to me. “Last one in the water!” she shouted, turned and ran toward the waves. Lío and Esteban, ensconced in their chairs with a bottle of rum between them, had already waved her off. I stood up, turned toward where Mariela and David were seated, pointedly ignored David, spoke directly to Mariela. “Care to join
me?” She looked at me, looked at the water, looked away. Was that the briefest flicker of fear in her eyes? “Mariela and I are going for a walk.” David interjected, answered for both of them.
They did not invite me to join them. In fact, Mariela had barely acknowledged me—or anyone else—since we’d arrived. She and David seemed lost in some earnest, whispered conversation to which I had no access.
After I watched them head off, hand in hand, I reluctantly joined Silvia at the water’s edge. “You should take off your T-shirt,” Silvia said as we dipped our toes into the warm water, allowing the shrinking tail of the waves to deposit its sand pebbles over our feet, between our toes. “Get some sun.”
“I’ll be fine,” I told her. I did not tell Silvia I did not want to risk exposing my loose white belly in case Mariela should return and compare my body to David’s.
“Are Mariela and David…?” I asked as we waded up to our knees in the warm Caribbean waters.
She laughed, shook her head as if to say…as if to say what? No? Don’t ask? And then she turned away from me, laughing, racing, her legs pumping as she pushed deeper into the ocean, up to her hips, and then, in one fluid motion, stretching her arms out in front of her in an arc, plunged into and under an onrushing wave.
I watched the water, waited for her to surface. “Cooper!” Silvia shouted from behind me. How had she gotten there? Standing waist-deep, her hair soaked, rivulets running down her body, laughing, shouting like the mischievous little girl she had once been. “Time for you to get wet!” And with that, she scooped handfuls of the ocean in my direction. There was no escape so, finally, I gave myself up to it, let my body sink beneath the surface, my face, my hair, all the way down, and paused for a moment, almost weightless, on the ocean’s sandy bottom. Free. Perhaps that was what I needed to do now. Let go. Forget the past. Plunge into the future, whatever it might be. I sat there, letting the water’s buoyancy bring me back up to the surface.
Back at our table, Lío and Esteban had been drinking rum and plotting the rest of our day. First, we would go back to Lío’s place in Cerro. “Very nice,” Lío bragged about his house. “Fix up. Nice.” Soon after Lío had moved to Havana in the late 1990s, Silvia told me, he’d acquired a dilapidated house in a neighbourhood south of Vedado near the baseball stadium. Rich Cubans used to own summer cottages there before the Revolution. For a few years, Lío shared the place with the original occupants while they plotted their escape to Miami, after which Lío became the acknowledged lord of the manor he wished to create. “Every year, Lío has a new project,” Silvia said. “Last year, he put in a new kitchen. Just like in a real restaurant. You will see. I wish it was my kitchen.”
While we gathered our stuff for the drive to Lío’s, Mariela returned. I looked around but saw no sign of David.
“David?” I said, trying to sound casual.
“He met up with a friend and they went to Mi Cayito,” Mariela answered, matter of fact. That was good. “He said to say he would find us later.” I did my best to keep my own regret unapparent.
Lío’s house turned out to be a flat-roofed, two-storey structure painted a stunning lime-green with orange sherbet trim that highlighted the outlines of the second-floor balcony, as well as all the doors, windows, and even a street-side concrete block privacy wall. On a small street of modest, muted one-storey homes, Lío’s stood out.
“All myself,” Lío declared with obvious pride. “I show.” And he did. We began in the living room where there was a large framed “before” photo of the house’s exterior. Back then, Lío’s house had looked like all the others on the street. One storey, unpainted, no privacy wall. The smaller, framed pre-renovation interior photos artfully arranged around the larger picture, were even more monochromatic and empty, with only occasional scattered pieces of furniture dotting the rooms. In the here and now, however, there was barely a square foot of brightly tiled floor without a colourful couch or chair or table. The fact none of them seemed to fit together seemed to fit perfectly.
“Come,” he said as he led me down a hallway so I could admire the staircase leading to the second floor. “Marble, best marble,” he said pointing up, smiling and rubbing his thumb and his fingers together. “Mucho dinero.”
“And many friends,” said Silvia, who’d come up behind us, holding out glasses of rum. “Lío knows everyone. He knows how to get cement when there is none, tiles that don’t exist for the rest of us. When we were fixing up our casa, we had money from my uncle in Miami, but we couldn’t get the tiles we needed…until Lío got them for us.”
Lío beamed. “Friends,” he said. “Know what on trucks. Know what not be missed.” He smiled enigmatically, gestured with his thumb and fingers again. “Have many friends….”
The tour ended in the kitchen. It was, as Silvia had suggested, a large, gleaming, modern affair filled with stainless steel appliances, expensive-looking food processors, blenders, hanging pots and pans, a preparation island with butcher block and sink. Beyond the kitchen, I could see a small pig that had been roasting all day on a spit in the backyard barbecue pit.
“Porky say hi,” Lío said, lifting his glass in my direction.
“Porky says bye-bye,” I answered, holding up my glass in response. “Where’s Mariela?” I didn’t want to appear anxious, or obvious, or proprietary, but I was. All of the above.
Esteban shrugged. “A friend lives near here. She went to visit. But she be back soon.”
“A friend?” I quizzed, as if somehow Mariela could have had a friend I wouldn’t have known about, as if friend might—worse—be a euphemism for David. No one answered me. Had I even asked that aloud? And where was David anyway? Was she with him again?
I needed a drink. Another one. Now. This was the part I’d hated most so many never-forgotten years ago when I might have once been in love—the tortured, self-inflicted uncertainty of the love-torn. But that was not this, I had to remind myself. We were not in love, or at least Mariela was not in love with me. Otherwise, why would she have gone off with David, or disappeared with a “friend” without saying a word to me? Was I in love with her? I was not. I had just been through “stuff”, including the job, my father, finding myself disconnected from everything I had ever known in a place where I had no connection to anything or anyone. It was only natural to grab for the nearest life buoy, the unattainable illusion that was Mariela. I needed to go home, deal with all the realities I’d been holding at bay. Just three more days. I was ready to go home. Or, at least, I needed to believe I was ready to go home. I picked up Lío’s bottle of rum from the counter, filled my glass to the rim, took a long swallow.
“She’ll be back. Don’t worry,” Silvia said as she cut wedges from a watermelon before declaring the obvious. “You have feelings for Mariela.”
“I don’t know. It’s just—I do worry about her,” I said, trying to recast my complicated feelings as platonic concern for her well-being. “She seemed upset yesterday when I ran into her at the Interests Section.”
“She was,” Silvia replied matter of factly. “Americans. You can never trust them.”
I wasn’t sure. Based on what Mariela had told me, it didn’t seem the Americans were solely to blame. But I let that pass.
“Does she have family in the United States? Is that why she wants to go so badly?”
“Every Cuban has family in the US. Mariela? It’s complicated. I can’t say. She will explain when she’s ready.”
“And David?”
“She helps him, he helps her. They are friends.” She laughed. “You have nothing to worry about, Cooper, nada.”
“But what about—?” If I had nothing to worry about from David—and I was not yet convinced of that—what about all the other issues, impediments? “I’m…you know…and she’s—”
“Age difference is not so important here,” Silvia answered the obvious question I hadn’t managed to make my
self ask. “Not between Cubans and foreigners. You see that all the time.” Somehow, I was not reassured at the notion I might become one of those foreigners.
By the time Mariela returned from wherever she had been, four hours and too many more rums had passed. The rest of us we were seated in the backyard at a table under a matching orange-and-white awning, eating the most succulent pork I have ever tasted.
“OK?” Silvia asked Mariela, without apparently needing to expand further.
“OK,” Mariela answered, without apparently needing to explain further.
Over a dessert of flan—Where had that come from? Who made it?—Mariela announced David was expecting me to join him tomorrow for his architecture tour with the group from Canada. “They’re staying at the Saratoga, so you should meet him in the lobby at ten.”
So she had been with David!
“Cooper, my friend,” Esteban cut in, interrupting further questioning. “Have you been to a Cuban baseball game? You must. My Industriales are playing Matanzas later at the Estadio Latinoamericano. Very near here. We will all go and cheer on the best team in Cuba.”
Lío snorted. “You must mean my Matanzas Cocodrilos—”
“The worst team in all the world,” Esteban teased.
Silvia shook her head. “Havana Club…Ron Santiago…. Those two. They never stop.”
We all laughed.
Except Mariela. She seemed to be watching me, considering. Considering what?
****
I stared at him. He was laughing at me. Had I missed something? Body language? Gestures? Or was there anything there to miss? If there was nothing, how was anyone—how was I—supposed to know?
David had brought me to the Inglaterra Hotel’s rooftop bar for lunch. “It has the best views,” he’d told me in the elevator.
“Better than the Ambos Mundos?”
“Much better.” To prove it, he’d taken me on a guided tour around the bar’s outer edges. He pointed out the Capitolio (“Inspired not by the Capitol Building in Washington, as many imperialist Americans prefer to imagine, but by the Pantheon in Paris…”), the ornate Gran Teatro de la Habana across the street (“Originally built as a social centre for Spanish immigrants from Galicia, opened in 1915…. See those sculptures on the exterior…ninety-seven altogether…each one telling a story full of hidden meanings about theatre, or education, or benevolence. Ah, those benevolent Spaniards.”), and, of course, Parque Central across the street with the white marble statue of José Martí. “They say it was the first monument ever erected in his honour. Now they are everywhere—public squares, schools, even in many Cuban homes. We love our Martí. Even more than Fidel. Well, maybe not that much. You went to the baseball game?” he asked, seeming to segue suddenly.
The Sweetness in the Lime Page 9