The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  What was she saying? “But you just applied for a visa to go to the United States.”

  “To visit. Not to stay.”

  “Why bother then? Why does it matter that they said no?”

  “It’s a…personal matter.” That hiccup again. “Not worth talking about.”

  I tried to think of some response that would elicit a response, that would keep this thread unspooling. I couldn’t. The silence stretched into a chasm, lying heavy between us. How had we gotten here? I needed to trace back the thread. Oh, right….

  “Willy…Chorizo?”

  She let out a hearty, full-throated laugh, leaned her head back, blew away that dark shadow. “Chirino! Willy Chirino.”

  “So who’s he?”

  “You really don’t know?” I shook my head. “Willy Chirino is one of the most famous Latin American pop singers in the world. He’s from Cuba. Or at least he was born here. He grew up in Miami and became famous. He hates Cubans—or at least those of us who stayed. Have you ever heard of ‘Nuestro Día Ya Viene Llegando’?” I shook my head yet again. “I will have to educate you, Mr. Eli Cooper. In English, the song is called ‘Our Day will Come’ and it is like an anthem for the exiles in Miami. They really think they’re coming here and taking back Cuba again, just like in the old days.”

  “And your grandmother—”

  “She hates Willy Chirino. Couldn’t stand to hear him sing. But Alex, he loved the sound of his music. He played that song over and over. When my abuela would complain, he would just shrug and say, ‘Sólo música.’ It’s only music. And she would yell back at him, ‘¡No música! ¡Vete!’ Get out. And he would leave. He would take his CDs and his boom box and disappear—for an hour, for a night, for a few days.” She paused, emptied her cup. “I should have confronted my grandmother then, said, ‘He is my husband. He lives here too.’ But I never did. And you want to know something?”

  “What?”

  “I never asked Alex where he went either. I thought if I said nothing, maybe everything would work out. But, of course, nothing ever does.”

  Doesn’t it? I had begun to believe the loss of my job and the death of my father were really just nature’s ways of working shit out, of leading me here to Havana, to Mariela, to my destiny. I hadn’t sorted through all the details yet—that would have to wait until I returned to Canada and had access to the internet—but I was certain living in Cuba would be cheaper than living in Halifax, and the weather would be better too! Perhaps I would write that novel I’d never written but must have planned to once. And now I had something to write about…. Was I letting my fantasies leapfrog our reality? Our reality?

  “Is that what happened? With you and Alex?” I asked.

  “I knew there were foreign women among the friends Alex made at the resort,” she said more quietly. “And I knew he was unfaithful. Of course, I know there are Cubans who take up with foreigners at the resorts and use them as their ticket out of the country. I knew Alex had these crazy Hollywood dreams. So I told him, ‘I’m not leaving Cuba.’ ‘Neither am I,’ he told me. But he lied.”

  “So that’s what happened? He just left?”

  She stopped, slammed on the brakes of her testimonial. We had just started down the off-ramp and she turned to me with a stony stare.

  “You know, Mr. Eli Cooper, you ask many questions. Time for me to ask questions and for you to give answers. Tell me more about you.”

  I thought for a moment, told her some. But not all. “There isn’t much to tell. I have a sister. One. Older. She left too. She’s a lawyer in Calgary, the other side of the country from where I live. I know what you mean about being the child left behind. I didn’t feel like I could ‘abandon’ my parents either. So I stayed. But here I am. And, that’s thanks to my sister too. This was all her idea.” I wasn’t certain Sarah would have agreed to “all.”

  “I would like to meet her someday,” Mariela said. “To thank her.” I wasn’t sure my sister would have agreed to that either.

  Bruno had been picking up the drained cups and depositing full ones in their place while we talked. I had no idea how many I’d drunk. But I knew I was ready. Finally. I lifted the plastic cup to my face, closed my eyes, and swallowed the liquid whole. I didn’t even cough. “I’m not very good at this,” I began, looking her in the eye now, trying to focus. “I’m out of practice. Actually, I’ve never had much practice at all.” No detours, Eli, no sideroads. Forward. “But these last few days, this place, these people….” I swept my hand around as if I meant these people in this bar. I didn’t. Don’t try to explain, I told myself. “I feel like a different person since I arrived in Havana. And the best part of being here in Cuba has been meeting you.” Was I drunk? I was drunk. En el ron, la verdad…my version of in vino veritas. I tried to lock on her eyes. But she was looking down now, at her cup, at the table, at nothing. Was I embarrassing her? Was this a mistake? “I’ve never said this before…” I had. Of course I had. But that was then, and this was now. “God, this is hard.” It was. “But I think I’m falling in love with you. I do.”

  I’d said the words, and the words hung there, out to dry, for what seemed like forever. My face flashed hot, then cold, then clammy. Was it the alcohol? Or the saying it out loud?

  Mariela looked up finally. Her eyes—those eyes—were wet with tears. She blinked, wiped away her tears with her left hand. With her right hand, she reached out, took my hand in hers, squeezed. The silence again, but this time not so heavy and dark.

  “We should walk,” she said finally.

  ****

  At some point, sometime long after darkness settled over the city, Mariela and I found ourselves at the far end of the seawall, at the far end of my imagination. She didn’t want to go back to my casa. “Silvia will tell Lío, who will tell everyone.” And she refused to take me back to her place. “No, not there…let’s walk.”

  So we strolled along the Malecón, which was pulsing with Habaneros, mostly young, clustered in nesting, nuzzling couples or raucous groups of half a dozen, dotted here and there with lone musicians playing for tourist change, or jineteros waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting. I held her hand. We walked past the Hotel Nacional, past the US Interests Section, past the Avenue of the Presidents, which she told me the locals called “G.”

  When the wind rose off the water, I put my arm around her shoulder. She did not resist. Instead she melted into me. Melded. Not that she stopped performing her tourist-guide shtick. “Did you know the Malecón is an eight-kilometre stretch of coastal street and seawall? Construction began in 1901 and wasn’t completed for fifty years, so you can see we were inefficient, even before the Revolution—” I stopped, turned, kissed her on the mouth, stilled her talk.

  The kiss seemed feels-so-right natural but also, in the same moment, life-altering consequential. I do not come from a family of touchers, let alone kissers. When Sarah came to Halifax after our father died, our hugs had been—for both of us—tense, perfunctory, moments to endure and get past. There had been no kissing, certainly not on the mouth. I hadn’t kissed anyone on the mouth since…well, since Wendy Wagner. But that shouldn’t count. The time before that? I remembered. How could I forget?

  Mariela and I were tentative at first, my lips on hers—soft, warm, wet—her mouth slowly opening up, prising mine open, my tongue finding hers, hers mine. We did not embrace. Instead, we held each other’s hands by our sides, leaned our faces toward one another, the rest of our bodies not touching. I could have stayed in that moment forever. Finally, Mariela pulled back, let go of my hands, reached up with her right hand, and pressed a finger to my lips. “So, Mr. Eli Cooper,” she said.

  ****

  I would like to tell you the earth moved, as in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls or Carole King’s song, but that would be a lie. I was drunk. She was drunk. We balanced precariously on a narrow concrete wall with the Malecón roadwa
y on one side and the rock-studded shore on the other, kissing, grabbing, fondling, fumbling aside clothing, assembling our body parts so they fit together at the correct angles so we didn’t suddenly, inadvertently disconnect our connected connectors, all the while ignoring the horns and shouts from passing cars and the studied indifference of the occasional passing Habanero, who’d apparently seen it all many times before. At some point, sometime just before it would have been too late, Mariela produced a condom from somewhere—Where? And why hadn’t I thought to do that?—and expertly applied it before allowing me entry.

  This was not the way I’d envisioned the universe unfolding the first time we made love. But that was the point. It was the first time. There would be other times in better places where we could conduct, at leisure, all our lovers’ explorations of all our bodily hills and valleys, desires and fantasies.

  We.

  Our.

  How long had it been since I had imagined in first-person plural?

  “Do you know what I’m thinking?” I asked. We had readjusted our clothing, rearranged our bodies, and were now sitting facing the lapping waves, the water, our legs dangling over the side of the wall. “Besides the fact I really am in love with you, I mean.” The words did not yet roll off my tongue, but they had begun to feel more natural to speak. There was time for them to feel more lived-in.

  “What are you thinking, Mr. Eli Cooper?”

  “I’m just thinking about what it would be like to live here. In Havana. If I sell my house in Halifax—maybe fix it up first like my sister says—we could live here on what I earn from that until my pension kicks in. I can start collecting my Canada pension—that’s the government one—when I’m sixty. It won’t be much, but when my company pension kicks in at sixty-five, there’ll be plenty of—”

  “I’m sure that will be very nice for you,” she cut me off, the chill in her voice suddenly colder than a nor’easter. We were still seated physically side by side, thigh to thigh, heat to heat, but there was a now psychic iceberg between us.

  “Us,” I said quickly. “I meant us.”

  “I know what you meant,” she replied without any change in tone.

  We walked back to my casa. She did not hold my hand, her body did not meld into mine. She offered a terse no when I offered to walk her home. “Good night, Mr. Cooper,” she said. And was gone. Without even a kiss goodbye.

  9

  The idea—Lío’s idea—was that I would buy the cellphone for Mariela but register it in my name, and then leave enough cash behind to cover the costs of the cell service and any calls she’d make to me.

  “Mariela like,” he said, though I realized later he’d never asked her if she would. And David agreed. “More practical than an engagement ring,” he told me. “It’s a gift that keeps on giving.”

  So David, Lío, and I had spent my last morning in Havana standing in an endless line outside the Old Havana offices of ETECSA, the Cuban telephone company. When we finally reached the desk, Lío and David did the talking. I did the signing and paying. No one questioned what we were doing, even though ordinary Cubans, I had learned, were not supposed to own cellphones. “Only government, big people,” Lío explained. But every second person I’d seen on the streets of Havana seemed to have a cellphone glued to their ears.

  “Everybody do,” Lío conceded. “Nobody care. Unless they do.”

  It was his go-to explanation for why everything that wasn’t supposed to happen in Cuba actually happened.

  “Cubans aren’t allowed to own cellphones, but foreigners are” was David’s more fulsome explanation. “So Cubans get foreign friends to buy cellphones in their names, then give them back to the Cubans to use. Sometimes, the foreigner pays, sometimes the Cuban. It depends.”

  In my case, I would pay. “So she call you,” Lío explained.

  After I finished paying, Lío suggested we walk over to Mariela’s apartment so I could present the phone to her in person. After last night, I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. I had shuffled the deck of our conversation, tried to make sense of the words, sound out the silences between the words. “Good night, Mr. Cooper.” Sobering-up second thoughts? Lover’s remorse? Something I did? Or didn’t do? There had been a time—perhaps before last night—when rejection, if that’s what it was, would not have bothered me. I would have moved on with barely a backward glance. It didn’t matter. Now it did. Which may have been why I didn’t tell Lío or David about what had transpired the night before, allowed them to believe—tried to believe myself—that there was something to this self-created myth of Mariela and me.

  “Mi casa, tu casa,” David had bowed as he opened the gate for us. “And Mariela’s casa, of course.” He led us up a wide circular concrete staircase. “Watch the railings,” he said. There were no railings. “And careful of those hanging wires. We ‘borrow’ our electricity from the building next door.” The second-floor landing was a rubble of broken chunks of concrete. “Now you see where the staircase to the third floor ended up,” David continued sardonically. “Luckily, we have this ladder.” It was not so much a ladder as a collection of mismatched boards cobbled together in an approximation of a ladder. “After you.” He held the ladder while Lío and I climbed to the top and then he scrambled up after us. The rear of the third floor was open to the sky. “The roof collapsed a few years ago,” David said. “That’s when they condemned the building. And people—me, Mariela, others too—moved in. Because we needed a place to stay.”

  While he led us down a hallway past closed doors and curtained-off rooms, I tried to square what I was seeing with my visit to Lío’s house in Cerro, to Silvia and Esteban’s third-floor casa. Was this what Mariela had meant when she talked about how life had become more unequal after the Special Period? Halfway down the corridor, David pulled back a curtain and invited me to look inside. There were perhaps a half a dozen older men in their undershirts sitting around a table, smoking, drinking, playing dominoes. They looked up at us, nodded. “This is our condo’s games room,” David said grandly. “And totally free for the use of the residents.” He continued, stopping at a door where cardboard boxes were stacked one on top of the other, each one filled to bulging with empty rum bottles. “Mi tía Eva lives behind this door. She drinks to forget. But she never forgets to save her empties so she can take them back to the bootlegger and get more rum…. And this is my room,” he said as he reached into his pocket, pulled out a key, unlocked a padlock, invited us inside. It was nothing like Esteban and Silvia’s casa, but still night-and-day different from the rest of this building. There was paint on the walls, for starters, hot pink but paint nonetheless. And a tacked-up poster of Michael Jackson, a fully stocked bookshelf, a living room chair, a coffee table weighted down with architectural and art books, some open and scattered across the surface, and a double mattress in one corner. “Home sweet—”

  He stopped. Mariela had heard the noise and come to investigate. She was not amused. I did not understand her words in Spanish, but I immediately understand the daggers-in-all-directions look she gave us. Why did you bring him here? Him, meaning me.

  “Uh…” David seemed clearly taken aback. He sputtered something about ETECSA and mobile, and he waved his hand around the room, perhaps to implicate all us in whatever she was accusing him of doing, or not doing. Lío looked down at his feet, knowing better than to interject.

  “I…we…”—should I invoke the deflective “we” here to spread the blame?—“We got you this.” I held up the box. “It’s a phone.” The box showed the phone. “For you.”

  “I don’t need a phone,” she replied.

  “Everybody need phone,” Lío jumped in finally, trying to be helpful. “I text where you meet client….”

  I wondered if that was really what the phone was for. Lío’s convenience. Was this all some sort elaborate set-up for a scam I didn’t yet understand?

  Mariela ignored Lío,
waved away my offer of the phone. “So now you know where we live,” she said, turning to—on—me. “Still think you want to live like a Cuban?”

  And with that, she turned and went back down the hall, entered her room, closed the door behind her. At least she didn’t slam it.

  We stood for a few minutes in awkward silence. Finally, Lío held out his hand. “Phone. I take. Give her. Later.” So the phone was for Lío.

  “You know,” David said finally, “on days like this I’m glad I’m gay.” We all laughed at that. Because we couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  ****

  I hadn’t known Mariela had already asked to hitch a ride to Cárdenas with Lío when he drove me to the airport, or that David would decide to accompany us, or that he would decide to sit up front with Lío, perhaps to avoid being caught again in Mariela’s crosshairs, or maybe to allow Mariela and me to talk.

  Not that that happened. Despite my best efforts at small talk—Will you be staying with your mother? What will you do in Cárdenas? When will you go back to Havana?—her cryptic, monosyllabic responses did not encourage follow up.

  Luckily, David had brought along a bootleg CD (50 Best Songs—The Motown Years: Michael Jackson & The Jackson 5), which he played through Lío’s stereo system at high volume, negating the need to fill the silences. After a while, I gave up my futile attempts to engage Mariela in conversation and breathed in the lush beauty of the Cuban countryside one last time.

  When we arrived at the airport after a quick stop in Jibacoa to pick up my duffel, I tried again. “I’m so happy I got to meet you,” I said, sliding—as unobtrusively as a man dressed in shorts with sweaty bare legs could slide across a plastic-covered seat—toward her half of the seat. I put my arms out, hoping for a melt/meld. She shook her head like a wet puppy, continued to look straight ahead.

  “Can I at least, maybe, call you sometime…on our phone?” I asked. The faintest flicker of a smile. And then it was gone.