The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  Lío and David got out of the car to hug me on my way. “Don’t worry,” David said. “I’ll talk to her. My turn to be the one giving advice.” Lío shrugged in Mariela’s direction, whispered in my ear. “Be OK. Will see.”

  I wanted to believe that, wanted it to be true. Sitting alone in the airport departures lounge surrounded by troops of exhausted, desultory tourists, all waiting for flights back to their own real worlds, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I needed to run back out of the airport, forget my luggage, find a cab, and instruct the driver to take me to Cárdenas—wherever that was—and be quick about it. Once I found Mariela—I would find her—I would beg, plead, cajole, convince her she was as in love with me as I was with her, and that we could live happily ever after. I would—I didn’t need that. I hadn’t disappeared down a bottomless hole like this since…well, since then. And where did that get me? I got up, walked over to the nearest duty free, bought one bottle of Havana Club and one bottle of Ron Santiago for new times’ sake. I found a seat as far from the crowd as possible, and wondered if there really was, as Esteban had said, sweetness in a lime.

  Bay of Cárdenas

  The dream always begins the same way. Mariela standing beside the blackboard, teaching her class. She doesn’t know what she is teaching. It doesn’t matter. Suddenly, there’s a commotion in the hallway. Maruchi, Uncle Lío’s eldest daughter, bursts into her classroom, shouting at her. “They’re leaving! Alex! Tonito! All of them! On the raft! Hurry! Quick!” On the raft? Roberto’s and Delfin’s raft? Alex and Tonito? It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t. Not with her Tonito.

  This is the part where Mariela wishes she could change what happens next in her dream, as if that could change the ending in real life. Because she didn’t believe what she couldn’t comprehend, she takes time she doesn’t know she doesn’t have. In molasses motion, she goes to see the principal. “Can you ask someone to watch my class?” she asks. “I have a family…situation.” While the Mariela in the dream explains to the principal all the lessons she’s planned for the children for the afternoon, the Mariela dreaming the dream wills the other Mariela to hurry up. She sees Maruchi hopping around like she is about to pee her pants. “We have to go,” she says again and again. “Before it’s too late.”

  But it is already too late. The dream speeds up. Too fast now. By the time the two of them finally arrive at the docks at the Bay of Cárdenas, the raft is a speck on the sparkling green-blue horizon. She cannot identify anyone aboard, or even if there is anyone aboard.

  So, in the beginning, Mariela in the dream—and in life—refuses to believe, even as reality chips away at her dreaming disbelief. The raft does not return. The days go by, then the weeks. No one phones from Florida to say they have arrived safely. No one calls at all. After a while, everyone in Cárdenas, even in Mariela’s own family, accepts that what happens has happened, that this is Cuba and that there is nothing to do but to move on with the life of the living.

  Mariela can’t. She reshapes her own dream, sculpting threads of reality into at least the beginning of a more hopeful ending. In this dream, it is still the night Tonito disappeared. What happened has happened. Mariela lies alone on Tonito’s bed in the corner of the bedroom she will no longer share with anyone. She smells the smell of her son on the sheets, on the pillow. She feels around under the pillow, searching for something she does not find. She smiles to herself. Tonito is safe. Mi Toni is with him.

  Mi Toni, a stuffed doll, has been Tonito’s protector against monsters and bad dreams since he was a baby. If Tonito has taken Mi Toni on the raft with him, they will both be safe. She knows it.

  The dream skips ahead like a scratchy recording. Now they are somewhere—there are pinks and blues and yellows and greens—but they are nowhere Mariela recognizes. Suddenly, out of the swirl, Tonito emerges. He is clutching Mi Toni, holding his doll out toward her. She runs to greet them, reaches out to swallow both of them in her arms and…she is holding air. Again.

  Cooper’s Casa

  Havana, 2017

  I examine the eggshell blue paint on the sitting- room wall. Here and there, air bubbles bubble up beneath the surface. Near the ceiling, I note peeling paint. Havana’s humidity? Lío’s black market supplier? Our contractor’s slapdash workmanship? Whatever, I will need to have the room repainted again soon. One more expense at a time when room revenue is falling.

  It is early evening now. Charles and Sandra—the only guests we have scheduled this entire week—have left for dinner. Tony is watching cartoons in the family quarters. Mariela is still out somewhere with the American businessman who hired her to act as his guide and translator during his business trip to Havana. I do my best to reign in my jealousy. I fail. I tell myself my jealousy is a sign I care. I tell myself not to tell that to Mariela.

  The paint….

  I have become the King of the Casa. Casa Havanada…Havana…Canada…Havanada. Get it? The year I moved here semi-permanently, the government issued decrees legalizing the buying and selling of automobiles and houses. While there had long been a black market in both—witness Lío’s acquisition of his Cerro house from that departing Cuban family—it suddenly became legal to engage in such transactions.

  Lío had helped Mariela and me find a large-but-down-at-the-heels second-floor apartment in a structurally sound building in Havana Centro that proved ideal for my ambitions. Mariela bought it with my money, since foreigners are still not permitted to own real estate in Cuba. That, of course, made Sarah nervous. “I love Mariela, I really do, and I trust her,” she told me, “but you need to have a written contract. Just in case.” She emailed me a draft agreement, which I did not ask Mariela to sign, did not show her.

  Truth? Mariela had seemed as nervous as Sarah, if not more so, about our domestic arrangement. Our decision to “go home” may have been Mariela’s, but it came smeared thick with dollops of regret and remorse. Mariela was still mourning, still trying to sort out her own conflicted feelings about me, about us, about all that had happened and was about to happen. I have come to understand nothing that happens now or in the future will change her past, replace her loss, fully heal her wound. So we keep on keeping on, not talking about what she will not—cannot—say.

  As for the casa, Mariela had insisted from the beginning, “It’s yours.” In fact, that became her unacknowledged declaration of independence from me. She would continue to work as a tour guide, she informed me, while I became responsible for renovating the old apartment and then running the new casa.

  And so we would live together—and separately—happily ever after.

  My renovator responsibilities had consisted mostly of accompanying Lío to nondescript buildings in shabby neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Havana. While Lío bartered with sketchy-looking Cubans I would not want to encounter in an alley in the middle of the afternoon, shouting in a rapid-fire, often angry-sounding Spanish I couldn’t begin to decipher, I waited, mute, by his side. When they finished, the men would laugh and embrace, and Lío would tell me how much to pay. Since Lío never asked me for money for his services, I assumed he got his cut from the vendors. I never knew—never asked—how much of what I paid ended up in Lío’s pocket. Probably a lot.

  A few days or weeks later, the construction materials we’d ordered, which I’d never actually seen during any of our negotiations, would magically “fall off a truck”—often an official-looking truck—near the entrance to our building. Tiles, paint, nails, pipes, appliances, everything we needed.

  Still, it took another year after that for our “contractor,” a moonlighting, jack-of-all-trades soldier Lío had hired and I paid Lío to pay (yet another cut for Lío!), to arrange all the tiles, paint, nails, pipes, appliances, and so on in their proper places.

  Which had been followed by a seemingly inevitable six more months of work by me, this time with help from Silvia, to hopscotch my way through all the many and various bureaucratic hoops i
n order to be licensed as a legal casa particular.

  And to give my own life its current shape and purpose.

  We modelled our casa on Esteban and Silvia’s Casa Centro. Let me give you the quick tour. There are three guest bedrooms, each with its own ensuite toilet and shower, a personal-sized fridge, and an air conditioner. There is a common sitting room at one end of the apartment—the room where the paint is now peeling—where guests can gather and where we serve not-included-with-the-price breakfast each morning. The sitting room spills out onto the balcony overlooking the streets. At the other end of the apartment, past the guest rooms, there is a small kitchen where Alma, one of the neighbourhood women who works for us, prepares the breakfasts, and beyond that, our own still unfinished living quarters, which consists of a combination galley kitchen, sitting room, and TV room, and two bedrooms off to one side. No air conditioning. That is for the paying customers. And, sometimes, for Mariela’s mother. Big Maria, as I call her (though not to her face), is an endlessly cheerful lady who dotes on Tony. Whenever she visits us and it’s available, we put her up in the biggest guest room. She loves the air conditioner, and often invites Tony to sleep with her “in the cool.”

  The larger bedroom in the family quarters, which is not nearly as large as the smallest guest bedroom, contains a double bed and dresser where Mariela and Tony sleep.

  The smaller bedroom, the one I now call mine, features a single bed and desk. That was not the plan, but let me come back to that.

  Delusions of Eleanor

  Halifax, Fall 2008

  1

  “So what do you think?” Sarah asked, sipping her stress-free peppermint tea, fondling one set of drawings and then another, and another.

  “I think they’d all be too expensive,” I replied. Sarah had asked Arthur, an architect friend of George, who was a lawyer friend of Sarah’s, to stop by our father’s house and suggest some renovation options for us to consider and commit to.

  “George and I worked together in Calgary,” she’d told me. “Then he got posted to Halifax for two years to handle a big offshore project for one of our major international clients.” After he and his wife purchased a house in the city’s expensive—naturally—south end, “they hired Arthur to do a major makeover for them,” she explained. “Major. I mean he gutted the place. But now it looks fabulous.”

  No doubt. Arthur appeared to be big on fabulous. He had come up with three different options—“depending on the price range”—for renovating my father’s house. They were: fabulous, even more fabulous, and beyond fabulous. Even the least fabulous of these, I was sure, would set me back more than my father’s house could ever command. He and Sarah had spent several hours going room to room, measuring, and tut-tutting, and oh-dearing, while I trailed behind.

  “Do you really think I could get my investment back?” I asked Arthur after he sketched out the options on his drawing pad.

  “Well,” Arthur allowed after making a few more notes, “this is Halifax and not Calgary.” He seemed to be directing his answer to Sarah more than to me, even though I was the one asking. “And we’re talking the north end, so there’s a limit to what this market will bear. But Halifax isn’t close to its peak yet and you’re on the peninsula, which is where people want to be…. So yes, I do think you could make your investment back. And more.”

  After that, Arthur had taken his leave, “So you two can discuss what you might want to do.”

  Sarah repeated Arthur’s economic justification and upped the pro-reno ante. “There’s no mortgage, so it’s all equity. You could borrow what you need against the value, then pay it back when you sell.”

  “If I sell.”

  Sarah breezed past my caveat. “You don’t really have a choice, you know, especially if you don’t find another job soon. Have you even looked?”

  I hadn’t, not really. How could I when I still hadn’t decided where I wanted to be, or with whom, or even what I wanted to be when I grew up? If I grew up? Now that I couldn’t help but grow up.

  “I’m looking,” I said.

  “I’m not sure you should consider another newspaper job,” Sarah said. “Saul and I gave up our subscription to the Calgary Herald last year. And he wants to drop the Globe too. Everybody is reading online now, and it’s free.”

  I wanted to tell her it was only “free” because morons like my sister and her husband imagined real news didn’t cost money to produce. But I didn’t want to turn down that low road, in part because some piece of me didn’t want to acknowledge she was more right than wrong, and, in part, because I didn’t want her visit to end badly.

  We’d had a falling out nearly six months ago, soon after I’d returned from Cuba—over Mariela, of course.

  “She was just a fantasy,” Sarah had pronounced after she called to find out how my trip had gone. “I understand you needed that. After…everything. But a woman like that is bad business. I was talking to a guy in our office who specializes in immigration.” There was always a “guy” in her office. “He says women like her prey on vulnerable men like you. Looking for money, looking for a way out of whatever third-world shithole they’re stuck in. You were her ticket—”

  I hung up on her. She called back a week later, didn’t even mention how our last conversation ended. Instead, she told me spring wouldn’t be a good time for me to visit Calgary. “Things are really busy at the office, and Saul and I are trying to start this renovation business on the side. Oh, and Amy’s coming home from college at the end of the month—she had a great semester, loves law—and, well, I just think it would be the wrong time for you, for us. Is that OK?”

  “Sure.” I’d forgotten she’d invited me.

  “But I’ll still come down at the end of the summer. Help you go through mum’s and dad’s stuff, get all that organized. OK?”

  “OK.” She had arrived. And organized. And conquered. And now she was all packed for her return flight. We had not mentioned Mariela since I’d hung up on her that night nearly six months ago. Until today. She couldn’t help herself.

  “I really hope you’re still not pining after that Cuban woman. What was her name?” Sarah had already called the limousine service.

  “Mariela. Her name is Mariela.”

  “Well, really, it would have been a terrible mistake for you to get involved with someone like that. I know what you’re like. You remember the last time you did that. Mooning over that girl back in high school…I’ll bet you don’t even remember her name now.”

  Sarah may not remember, but I do. Her name was Eleanor. She had been my first love. Until Mariela, I thought Eleanor had also been my last. Who knew? Perhaps I’d been right.

  I tried not to think about that. I only knew that, after all my years of needing no one, I now found myself desperately wanting someone. Whether that was Mariela or just someone, anyone, I still wasn’t sure.

  ****

  After Sarah left, I sat in the kitchen, poured myself a glass of Havana Club—my small, insignificant show of solidarity with Esteban, with Cuba, with the Revolution—and contemplated my Sarah-set tasks ahead. She had mounded a mountain of stuffed green plastic garbage bags in one corner of the room, the last remnants of the contents of my parents’ closets, drawers, attic storage, and basement boxes, all of which she had carefully sorted and organized for disposal or pickup. There were written instructions on the kitchen table to call Big Brothers Big Sisters. Sarah had scheduled a truck from the consignment furniture shop to pick up our parents’ furnishings. “It’ll be easier to renovate if the house is emptier,” Sarah explained. I didn’t tell her I still wasn’t sure I would. “Besides, it’s all worn and out of fashion.” As if I cared.

  Sarah had taken only a few small pieces of my mother’s jewelry for herself. She gave me our father’s war medal and left the urn of ashes on the mantel in the living room.

  “I can’t deal with that now,�
�� she explained. “Later?” Worked for me.

  She also left the family photo albums, all except her own baby album, on the bed in my parents’ bedroom for me to sort. I would do that…later.

  I wished I’d had a photo album of my trip to Cuba. But I didn’t have a single photo of Mariela, nothing to compare, no proof she had even existed. Truth? The longer we were apart, the less I found myself able to fit even the picture pieces of Mariela’s face back together in my head. I couldn’t forget her eyes, of course, but the rest? Dimples? Did she have them? I believed she did. How big was her nose? Did her mouth turn up, or down?

  In the first months after I returned to Canada, I frequently dialled the number of the cellphone I’d bought for Mariela. Lío was the only person who ever answered. So, the phone really was for him. He promised to pass my message on to Mariela. “She call.” I left my number. “Tell her to call collect.” She never did. After a while, no one answered the cellphone at all. I tried the casa email address I had for Esteban and Silvia. Silvia wrote back cryptically, “Not a good time.” I also emailed David, who for some reason had a Spain-based email address, but he didn’t reply at all.

  I had starred in this life movie once before, too many years ago, and it had ended badly. For me. I won’t pretend to you that I didn’t know how I’d screwed up that first time, or what I should do this time to avoid ending up in the same wrong place again. I needed to go back to Havana, talk to Mariela. But in truth, I was more afraid Mariela would reject me than I was hopeful she would not, and that fear paralyzed me. Twice, I’d gone online to book a flight to Havana. Twice, I’d snapped my browser window shut after I’d filled out my credit card information but before I’d hit Confirm Booking. Déjà vu, this time on the internet.

  Mariela had become my fantastic, phantasmagoric fantasy woman. Not my first fantasy, of course. But I now understood, better than before, that my fantasy of Eleanor had led me to more than thirty years of an anesthetized, feelings-free, nothing-nowhere existence, which is what I’d somehow assumed must be my personal happy place. This had lasted until Mariela’s presence jolted me into an understanding I really did have feelings—strong ones.