“Yes.”
“Recognize anyone? Over there, near the statue?” I saw clusters of men standing, sitting, finger-pointing, gesticulating, hand-waving at each other, shouting words I couldn’t hear. “That’s called the Esquina Caliente, the Hot Corner. It is where Habaneros come day and night to argue about baseball. They do that because there is no point in arguing about other things. I will confess to you, but to no one else, I’ve never understood why Cubans care so passionately about grown men running around hitting a little ball with a stick. Do you?”
I shrugged. I didn’t. Not really. But I had revelled in the sense of occasion at yesterday’s game, so different from anything I experienced at any game I’d ever attended in Canada. No overpriced beer, no undercooked hotdogs, no orchestrated, desultory rah-rah-rah for the home team. Instead, Cubans ate candies by the paper cup-ful, got sugar-high, and then yelled at each other with gusto—for their team, against their opponents, against the umpires, sometimes against their own players if they failed to live up to expectations. It never became nasty. Although I couldn’t understand most of what they were yelling, I noted the laughter and hoots of appreciation from the other team’s supporters when one of their opposite number made a particularly telling insult.
“Do you realize?” It was David again with yet another tour-guider’s history lesson. “If this was 1913, we’d be sitting in air right now. The Inglaterra’s fourth storey was only added in 1914.” He raised his glass of Cristal beer. “To the fourth floor,” he said.
“Long may it stand,” I replied.
“In all its neoclassical glory,” he added. How could I explain to David I wasn’t really interested in architectural styles, or buildings at all, only in that one building I’d been trying, for reasons I should not be explaining to him, to identify, and which had turned out, if I understood what I understood correctly, a building he shared with Mariela, along with whatever else he shared with her?
Like Mariela, David knew everything about anything Havana. Especially about architecture. He’d dazzled the Canadian architects in our group this morning. They had come to Havana for some sort of convention and wanted to explore its historic wonders.
“Havana,” he told them, “is a vast architectural library, a living museum of African, European, American styles, much of it crusted and covered in dust but still very much alive.”
They’d oohed and aahed as he guided them from this Colonial, to that Moorish, to that Art Deco, to that Art Nouveau building, pointing out along the way various cornices and valances and balustrades and other gewgaws, about which I knew nothing. And cared less.
Although David was indeed a trained architect, he told me over lunch he’d ended up in a dead-end junior job in some government department after graduation, re-drawing official plans for minor construction projects that never became real. “Busy work. Everyone knew better than to imagine someone would actually build them.” One day several years ago, he noticed a tour bus pull up beside a square in Old Havana and several dozen tourists spill out. The tour’s operator had apparently designated the morning as free time. But the tourists seemed uncertain where to spend their free time so, on a whim, David approached them.
“Would you like me to show you around?” He’d made twenty CUCs that first morning. Eventually, a friend of a friend introduced him to Lío, who matched him with tourists keen to discover more about the architecture of Old Havana.
“How long have you known Mariela?” I asked.
“Ah, Mariela,” he said, “the love of my life.” He looked at what must have been my ashen expression, laughed, punched me playfully on the shoulder. “The love of yours, too, if I’m not mistaken. No need to worry, my friend. We can share our love for Mariela.” He paused. “How did we meet? She was working for Lío. I was working for Lío. After my father kicked me out of our family’s apartment, she found me a place to live.”
“With Mariela?”
“Mariela lives there as well. But it is not like that. The building has been condemned. No one is supposed to live there. So we are— ¿como se dice?—squatters, illegal occupants.”
“Why did your father kick you out?” Why hadn’t I asked that first? It felt like one of those seven-second radio tape delays playing in my head.
“Because I liked Michael Jackson too much,” he parried. “But that was my dad’s fault too. When I was a kid, one of my father’s relatives in Miami sent us bootleg cassettes of American pop songs. I became obsessed with Michael Jackson. Billie Jean…beauty queen….” David had an excellent voice. “I played them over and over. That’s how I learned to speak English. So I could understand the words. Not that they ever made all that much sense to me. Later, I would play DVDs of movies over and over, British movies especially. From Russia With Love, A Hard Day’s Night, Life of Brian…. That’s where I get my accent.
“Anyway, my father wasn’t too happy when I started to dress like Michael Jackson. Called me all sorts of names, some of them true. I mean, I knew I was gay since the day I understood such things.”
Gay! He didn’t look—what the hell did I know? Gay…was good.
“So you and Mariela?” I was still trying to be sure.
“Best friends,” he said. “I tell her everything. She tells me some things. Right now, she’s helping me through my latest drama. My boyfriend is leaving next week, going back to Italy. He’s one of the managers at the Club Arena, a little Italian resort just past the beach where we were yesterday. I met him about six months ago at Mi Cayito, the gay beach.” I looked at him. “Mariela and I went for a walk there yesterday. She was giving me courage to say goodbye to him. He’s going back to his wife and family. He never told me he was married. Bastard!”
“What does she tell you? Mariela, I mean. You said she tells you some things….”
“Not so much about you, not exactly,” David replied after a moment’s hesitation. “Oh, she likes you, I’m sure she does. But we talk about other things. She has many sadnesses.”
She did. I was sure of it. But what were they? I waited in vain for him to elaborate. He didn’t. He sat in silence guarding Mariela’s secrets, like a true friend.
8
Mariela and I had agreed to meet at Bruno’s at six. Her day had already been spoken for. She had to guide a delegation of Australian trade unionists around Havana. “Their accents are even odder than yours, mate,” she’d said by way of hello.
By the time she arrived, I was well into my second cup of Bruno’s deadly concoction. He had recognized me, greeted me effusively in Spanish, and I had responded with my best, badly accented attempt at his language, opening my arms in pretend embrace. “¡Un abrazo fuerte, mi amigo!” When I returned to Halifax, I wanted to tell him, I intended to sign up for Spanish lessons. But I didn’t yet have the words to explain, so we quickly settled into companionable, nothing-more-to-say silence while he waited tables and I waited for Mariela.
I was happy for the quiet time, happy for the drink, happier for the second one—liquid courage, which, if it didn’t kill me, would make me strong. I was leaving Havana late the next afternoon. Lío had agreed to drive me to the Varadero airport, back to the late-night charter flight to Canada filled with its by-now exhausted collection of sun-sated holiday makers, people who had probably never ventured beyond the boundaries of their beach resorts and didn’t know what they’d missed, back to Halifax, back to my lost job and my dead father and my non-life.
If I didn’t say something now—in other words, if I did what I always did, which was to say nothing, do nothing, be no one—I would never know. I needed to know. At least that.
“David tells me you’re sad,” I began after Bruno greeted Mariela with an actual hug and handed her a drink before retreating back to the bar. “Are you? Sad, I mean?”
“Aren’t you?” she replied. “Isn’t everyone? I believe we all have our sadnesses.”
That had n
ot begun well. But it turned out to be just an inauspicious prelude to what transformed itself into a grown-up version of “I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours.”
I showed her most of mine. I told her about my job, about my father, even about the circumstances of his death and the guilt that clung to me from time to time.
Mariela told me about her father, who’d died of a heart attack when she was eleven. “It is strange to say but what I remember most is not some specific memory of my father but of how our living circumstances changed after he died.” Before he died, Mariela, her parents, and two older brothers all lived together with her father’s parents and her uncle and his family. “Don’t look so surprised, my friend. That is just the Cuban way. There were no houses or apartments available, even if my parents could have afforded one.” She was lucky, she said. “I was the only girl, so I got to have my own bedroom at my dad’s mother’s place. But after my father died, we moved in with my mother’s mother. It was a much smaller apartment and I had to share a room with my mother.” She laughed. “I blamed my father for that. And for the Special Period too.”
Mariela was barely a teenager when the Soviet Union collapsed.
“I don’t know if it’s true, but my mother says life was different here before. We were poor. Everyone in Cuba was. But we were all poor equally. Doctors, fishermen, teachers, everyone the same.” She sounded like Silvia. “The state provided education, health care, jobs, rations. No one got rich, but no one starved. And everyone was happy. Or that is what they say.”
Mariela’s own memories of the Special Period were vivid and concrete. She remembered the empty refrigerator that had been disconnected because there was no electricity to run it and no food to keep cold. “At school, we often ate radish, water, and rice for lunch and called that a meal. I was always hungry. And I got sick. I remember one time I had the ’flu or a fever, and our neighbour agreed to kill her chicken so my mother could make me chicken soup—for the protein. But I was so dehydrated I fainted into the soup.” She laughed at her own tumbling memories.
“When you were growing up,” I said, trying to steer the conversation into the on-ramp of the highway I wanted her to travel down, “did you have many boyfriends?”
She laughed. My purpose was more transparent than I intended. “Not many. Just one, actually. His name was Alejandro. I called him Alex.” It sounded to my ears like Alix or perhaps Alice. “We grew up on the same street, attended school together. At first, Alex was our class imp, then our class troublemaker, and, finally, at around the time of my quinceañera, the time I became very interested in boys, he became our class ‘bad boy.’ He gelled his black hair into a spiky crown like that American actor, Leonardo DiCaprio. He kept his shirts open to the navel to show off his brown skin and the muscles of his teenaged belly.” I sucked in my gut involuntarily. “But most important, for me at that time, he knew how to play the guitar and all the words to all the American pop songs. That was when I fell in love with Alex, or at least with the idea of him.”
“And what happened? With Alejandro…Alex?”
“We got married.” She looked at me then. What did my face tell her?
“And you? Are you married, Mr. Eli Cooper?” When Mariela spoke to me now, she seemed to prefer pronouncing my full name rather than just Eli, which did not trip off her tongue, or Cooper, which she now understood was incorrect. I was fine with whatever she wanted to call me.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“If you were a Cuban, my friend, I’m sure you would have been married many times by now.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Cubans don’t take marriage as seriously as people in other countries, that’s all. Uncle Lío? He’s been married four times, and he’ll probably marry at least once more before he’s done. Maybe it’s because religion isn’t as important here in Cuba, or because there is nothing to fight over at the end. In Cuba you fall in love, try it on for a few years and, if it doesn’t work, you get divorced. In Cuba, all it takes is one hundred pesos—that’s five American dollars—and you’re divorced.”
“Did that happen with you?” I asked hopefully. “Are you divorced?”
“We are not together,” she answered, not exactly answering my question. I recalled her turn of phrase when she’d recounted her conversation with the US foreign service officer. What did “no living husband” mean?
“What is he like?” I asked. I considered “was,” fishing for additional explanation, but decided to let her lead.
“He’s not like me,” she said, speaking in the present. “We’re very different.”
Mariela had been the youngest in her family by many years, a shy “little mother” whose favourite schoolyard game consisted of teaching younger schoolmates their sums and letters. She always knew she would end up a teacher, she said, always understood she would marry and have children and grandchildren and never stray far from the place where she was born. “That was me…then.”
Alex, on the other hand, was born restless, impatient with the classroom. He had grander dreams. He quit school after Grade 10, landed a job on the grounds crew at a Varadero resort. But he didn’t rake lawns or pull weeds for long, Mariela said. Alex chatted up the tourists, charmed the bosses, eventually sang-and-danced his way into an audition to be a backup performer in the entertainment department, filling in whenever one of the travelling regulars was sick or couldn’t make it.
“He’s a very good musician, a wonderful singer.” After the shows, Alex would bring out his guitar and play by the pool for those tourists who weren’t ready to call it a night. He made friends, and more. “He was very good at making friends,” Mariela said, without apparent judgment.
The tourists had called him Alex, or Al, and marvelled that his last name was Jones. When he recorded a CD to sell to the tourists, Mariela told me, Alex billed himself as “the Cuban Tom Jones.” He was going be a singing sensation, he told everyone, and not just in Havana, but in Hollywood. “He believed that.”
“What happened?” I asked. “With you and him?”
“We got married. In 1998. He was twenty-two, I was twenty-one.”
I did the math. She had been born in 1977. Which meant she was now thirty-one. And I was fifty-four. Twenty-three years in the difference. Jesus!
After their wedding, Alex had moved into her grandmother’s apartment with Mariela, her grandmother, her mother, her older brother Frankie, and her even older brother Fidelito. Mariela’s mother had volunteered to move into her own mother’s bedroom so the newlyweds could have privacy. “But, of course, there is no privacy in Cuba. Just frictions. Always. Alex would play Willy Chirino’s music on his boom box, even quietly in our bedroom, and my abuela would order him to turn it off or leave the apartment. ‘Willy Chirino!’ she would scream, and then make as to spit on the floor. ‘¡Gusano!’ She called him a worm.”
“Who’s Willy Chirino?”
“You have much to learn, Mr. Eli Cooper.”
“Teach me,” I said.
“My abuela divides her life into two unequal parts,” Mariela explained around my actual question. “Before Fidel and After Fidel. Before Fidel was bad, awful, ‘worse than you can ever imagine, little girl.’ After Fidel, my grandmother learned to read and write, became a proud revolutionary. She convinced my parents to name their first-born son Fidel in honour of her El Jefe.” Mariela laughed. “But Fidelito was the first to leave.” One night soon after Alex had joined the household, Fidelito left for a three-day business trip to Havana. He never returned. “My mother only learned he’d left the country when a policeman friend of hers showed up a week later to ask questions and to commiserate with her on her loss.”
“Where did he go?”
“He disappeared. We never heard from him again.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
“The good news is that, after Fidelito and Frankie
left, my mother got her own room.”
“Frankie left too?”
“Everybody leaves.”
A few years later, Frankie—a doctor—received a visa to attend a medical conference in Montreal. Once he got there, he slipped away from the Cuban delegation and snuck across the border into the United States. Mariela shook her head, the bile bitter in her throat. “The Americans let him stay. Just because he had set foot on American soil. He had arrived illegally, but he had arrived, so that made it OK.”
“Is he still there?”
“We think so. At first, he moved to Los Angeles where he became a taxi driver because he wasn’t allowed to practise medicine. He lived with an American woman, a hairdresser, and her two teenaged daughters. He would call my mother sometimes, telling her how much he missed her, and Cuba. He would send pictures too, but my mother refused to look at them. At some point, he told her he was thinking of starting over in New Mexico. And then he stopped calling, stopped writing. So…we don’t know.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That must have been awful for your mother.”
“Worse for me, I think. It is hardest on the last child left, especially if that child is a girl. How do you leave your mother? I could never do that.”
The Sweetness in the Lime Page 10