Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  He wouldn’t say anything more. She lay and stared at the curve of his back in the moonlight falling through the window. For some or other reason he reminded her of a beached whale. He was still thin, sinewy, no excess fat on his body, nothing that suggested a whale. But all she could see was the vulnerability of his hunched shoulders, the helplessness of his drawn-up legs. The powerlessness of an animal that was slowly dying.

  19. HEMINGWAY’S BED

  Early evening when she walks into the rancho’s modest dining hall – after fighting her way through the horde of wrinkled zombies around the swimming-pool bar – Theresa is surprised to find Ruben there. Freshly changed, without his hat, his lush hair brushed back and still damp from the shower. She’d been too lazy to change into clean clothes. The white cotton outfit she has been wearing all day, a button-down blouse and loose trousers, by now has acquired a dusty beige sheen and clings to her sweaty body in creases. After all, she hadn’t expected company at dinner.

  ‘Don’t you have a date with Benita?’ she asks, sliding into a chair opposite him.

  His broad shoulders shrug. ‘I will join her for a drink after dinner. To thank her for all her help.’

  She still hasn’t figured out what the appropriate tone is for when they talk about Benita. ‘You make it sound like duty rather than pleasure,’ she therefore says lightly.

  ‘Benita is a very, ah, needy woman,’ he says with the hint of a smile. ‘I do not believe I can satisfy all her needs.’

  He is not going to say any more. When he gets up to dish a plate of food at the buffet counter, her eyes follow him with approval. He has a light step for a man with such a massive body. He could well be a graceful dancer.

  And whatever has happened between him and Benita Madrigal Rosabal – or might still happen – has nothing to do with her anyway. ‘Gentlemen don’t kiss and tell.’ That’s what her mother always said when Jacques wanted to brag about his many conquests at university.

  The next morning at breakfast he looks more tired than usual, but his appetite is unaffected, his plate once again piled high with all sorts of dishes that have absolutely no connection to Theresa’s idea of breakfast. She resists the temptation to sound him out about his night-time adventures. Maybe he’d just slept badly because of the booming disco music next to the swimming pool.

  She asks him, as airily as possible, whether Clara’s sister had responded to the Facebook message they sent her from Trinidad the day before.

  ‘No.’ He shakes his head. She tries to keep her face expressionless, because she hadn’t really expected a response, had she? But she doesn’t manage to fool him, because he immediately adds reassuringly: ‘Not yet, but perhaps only because the Wi-Fi here is so bad. Let us hope there is a message waiting at my apartment in Havana.’

  ‘Let’s hope.’ She gulps down a glass of fresh guava juice to prevent a sigh. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask, Nini told me about a kind of bed-and-breakfast system in Cuba that is controlled by the government?’

  ‘Everything in Cuba is controlled by the government,’ he reminds her drily.

  ‘Where tourists can spend the night in local residents’ homes? Apparently cheaper than hotels? Is there something like that close to your apartment where I can sleep tonight?’

  ‘Casas particulares,’ he says after taking his time to finish chewing. ‘That is what it is called. But you don’t have to spend money unnecessarily. You can stay in my apartment.’

  But where? His place had struck her as rather cramped. And very untidy.

  ‘It is already been arranged,’ he says, as if he has read her thoughts. ‘My son will not be sleeping there tonight. You can have his room. He will put clean sheets on the bed and tidy up some of the chaos before we get there.’

  ‘I don’t want to drive Amado out of his room.’

  ‘He often spends the night with his musician friends. When they have a concert or rehearsal that finishes late. No problem.’ He looks at her over a forkful of food, sees that she still hesitates. ‘I will feel offended if you are going to pay to stay in someone else’s home. Save your money for Viñales – perhaps we have to go there also.’

  She accepts his offer with a grateful nod.

  ‘Mi casa es su casa,’ he assures her. ‘My home is your home. We Cubans are supposed to be hospitable.’

  ‘We Boere too. And the more I get to know your people, the more astonished I am that your people and my people were killing one another in our own lifetime.’

  They don’t talk much on the long road back to Havana in the open sports car. Theresa is starting to get used to the silences of this big man. They are not the heavy, brooding silences Theo used to build around himself like a fortress to keep everyone at a distance. Ruben’s silence is spread out like an old blanket so you can sit more comfortably beside him. She leans her head back against her seat and through her sunglasses watches the clouds flock together like woolly white sheep against the blue sky. The sheep she knows from childhood. Not the weird goat-sheep of this island.

  She is surprised by a leap of joy when at last they are once again driving through the busy streets of Havana. Not that she already knows this city, of course not, but she does at least recognise a building or a statue here and there. It no longer feels as frightfully unfamiliar as the rest of the country.

  And ‘know’ is also a relative concept.

  This journey makes her question day after day whether she knows herself half as well as she has always liked to believe.

  When they arrive at Ruben’s apartment, she feels simultaneously welcome and strange. Welcome because she has at least been here before, strange because it is such a chaotic and modest home, so different from her own and most of her friends’ stylishly renovated cottages and spacious designer houses with swimming pools. It reminds her of the digs she used to share with penniless students and struggling artists and drunken dagga smokers when she was young. Before most of them became respectable and sober and rich.

  Amado’s room, however, is a surprise. Sparsely furnished, nothing left lying about, a sober study in white and black. White walls, white bedspread, black table and chair in front of a window with white curtains that might once have been a sheet. Almost ascetic, like a monk’s cell, except for the framed black-and-white photographs of jazz musicians above the bed. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Chet Baker. The only sign of worldly excess is the chock-full bookcase that takes up an entire wall.

  ‘Does it always look like this? Or did you have to put the fear of God into him to tidy up so I can sleep here?’

  ‘He has been much tidier than me always,’ Ruben says in the doorway behind her. ‘This room is the calm in our home. The parts where I live are the storm.’

  She walks up to the bookcase. ‘I always feel at home more easily in a room with books. Anywhere on earth. Glad to see your son is a reader.’

  ‘Most of the books are mine actually.’ He scratches his beard, as if he is about to apologise although she can’t imagine why. Because a taxi driver isn’t supposed to have an overflowing bookcase? Several of the titles are in English, classical American novels by Mark Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, of course, but also more surprising British names such as Jane Austen and the Brontës. ‘They are all books Amado’s mother made me read. The rest of the apartment was too full – or too messy – for a bookcase, so Amado’s room became the library.’

  She also feels at home more easily with men who read, but she refrains from telling him that. After all, her former husband’s insatiable appetite for reading didn’t protect him from insanity. And taught her that books don’t always have the answer for everything.

  ‘You can close the door and rest or read or whatever. I have to do some things on my computer. Over there in the storm part of the house.’

  ‘Will you check if there’s a message from Aleja?’

  ‘First thing I will do. But that computer is as slow as a tortoise, so you don’t have to wait.’

  ‘And if there’s nothing?’
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  ‘Then I will contact Clara again. If I ask very nicely, maybe she can whisper a good word in her sister’s ear.’

  ‘A good word about us?’ She hardly knows us, Theresa wants to say – how can she say anything good about us?

  ‘I think everyone who meets you can see that your intentions are good. You are here to give, not to take.’

  He turns on his heel and walks away. The unexpected compliment makes her sit back on the bed, where she stares at her suitcase in stunned silence. She knows she won’t be able to rest while waiting for a message that might never arrive. Better to go and explore the neighbourhood. It may be the last chance she will ever have to wander through Havana on her own.

  She strolls aimlessly through the streets for a while, stopping to drink coffee on the roof terrace of the Hotel Ambos Mundos because the name rings a bell somewhere in her head. Paging through her guidebook, she realises that it’s the hotel where Ernest Hemingway rented a room for seven years. When she reads that his room on the fifth floor has been preserved unchanged and is open to visitors, she decides on the spur of the moment to find it. Not because she is an ardent admirer of the macho author, simply because she is here now, with nothing else to do.

  She arrives outside a locked door in a dark corner of the hotel. She imagines she hears shuffling sounds behind the closed door and knocks a few times, then louder and more urgently, until it dawns on her that she hasn’t seen any sign confirming that this was indeed Hemingway’s room. Who’s to say she wasn’t standing there hammering on the door outside some innocent tourist’s room. What would she say if they opened the door? ‘Hello, I just wanted to ask if you are sleeping in Hemingway’s bed?’ The mere thought makes her feel so ridiculous that she turns around to scurry out of sight. But then the door behind her does open. An attractive woman, who looks as if she has just woken up, her long hair mussed and her clothes creased, asks if she has come to view the room.

  ‘Hemingway’s room?’ Theresa asks, confused.

  ‘Yes,’ the young woman says, suppressing a yawn while she pushes hairpins into her hair to pile it up on top of her head. ‘I am the guide.’

  Could the guide have fallen asleep on Hemingway’s bed? It would be half-fitting, such a lovely brunette on the bed of such a famous hunter of women and animals. But the bed is neatly made with an orange bedspread and a few old magazines with articles about Hemingway carefully displayed on the bedspread. Perhaps there’s an adjoining room where the guide could have taken a nap. Or perhaps she was hiding an inflatable mattress somewhere?

  The view from the corner room of the sparkling blue sea is enchanting. Theresa is almost moved to tears by the small table with the typewriter and the small, hard upright chair where Hemingway wrote the first draft of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Such a heavy body on such a fragile little chair. But she remains aware of the yawning guide watching her from beneath heavy eyelids. As if she can’t wait for the bothersome tourist to move off so she can get back to sleep.

  When Theresa takes her leave and gives her a tip, however, the guide rewards her with a smile that lights up her entire face. And as she walks away, Theresa remembers what Oreste said about how many Cubans have more than one job just in order to make a decent living. If this beautiful young woman has to work somewhere else at night, you probably can’t blame her for trying to nap here in this peaceful hotel room during the day. Even if it is on Hemingway’s bed. He wouldn’t have minded.

  This chance meeting inexplicably lifts her spirits, and for the rest of the afternoon she almost manages to forget about the letter in her handbag and behave like any other tourist.

  In the impressive colonial building that houses the Museo de la Revolución she learns more in an hour about the famous revolution of sixty years ago than in her entire life so far. Outside the museum she takes a long look at the boat in which the Castro brothers and Guevara and around eighty freedom fighters sailed from Mexico to Cuba in the fifties to overthrow the dictator Batista’s government. On 1 January 1959 this goal was finally accomplished and the Nuevo Cuba was born along with the new year.

  The following year, in the winter of 1960, Theresa Marais was born in a Karoo town very far from Cuba, in the Union of South Africa. Just a few months after the Sharpeville massacre, about which her father the history teacher told her nothing, which no one in her family ever discussed. And less than a year before the Union became a Republic. Her patriotic father and subservient mother took her and her big brother along to the Republic festivities in their town. Even took a picture so they could show her one day that she had also been present on that joyous day. That was what her father always said. That joyous day. In the black-and-white picture a baby in a knitted wool suit sits in an enormous old-fashioned pram with a tiny flag clasped in her fat baby fist, apparently busy eating the stick of the flag.

  ‘You were teething,’ her mother always said, amused. ‘You shoved everything into your mouth. Even the new Republic’s flag.’

  Theresa of course doesn’t remember a thing about ‘that joyous day’. The only detail that somehow stuck in her subconscious was the story of the symbolic dove of peace that prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was supposed to release into the sky, but which he had gripped so tightly in his hands that the dove dropped to the ground half-dead instead of soaring away into the blue sky. Probably something her mother told her. Theresa has never tried to establish whether something like that really happened – and if it did, whether it happened on that exact day. She merely accepted it like she accepted everything her parents or her teachers or the dominee told her during her teenage years. It may have been fake news, as it is called these days. Sometimes she suspects that everything she heard at home or at school or in the church, all through her childhood, had been nothing more than fake news.

  And what if in July 1960 she’d been born in the New Cuba instead of in the Old South Africa? Or if, say, she had indeed been born in South Africa, but her father was a black teacher in a township rather than a white teacher who believed in God and apartheid?

  It is always an unsettling thought that the entire course of your life is determined by chance – by a random day, month and year when you are born in a random place somewhere in the world – but today it is making her feel almost panicky.

  She must get away from this museum that is prising loose such sombre thoughts, sinister things at the bottom of a dam that suddenly float to the surface. She should rather go drink a mojito somewhere, in some twilit bar with cigar smoke hanging heavily in the air, like a perfectly ordinary tourist.

  Before she can knock on Ruben’s door, while she is still waiting to catch her breath because she has raced up the stairs to the third floor too fast, he eagerly flings open the door. ‘We have made contact,’ he announces with his rare wide smile.

  ‘With Aleja?’

  ‘She agreed to meet us this evening.’

  She gives him a spontaneous hug, right there on the threshold, laughing with relief. She has to stand on her toes to fling her arms around his neck, a surprisingly pleasant experience for a woman as tall as she. He’s laughing too, simultaneously thrilled and embarrassed, it seems, his fingers patting her back.

  ‘How on earth did you manage that?’

  Before she can sit down on the threadbare couch, she has to move aside a stack of old newspapers, a plastic basin with clean laundry, and a few record sleeves.

  ‘I can be very charming when I want to be.’ He sits down opposite her on a wire chair that looks as if it would be more at home outside on the small balcony.

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt that at all. Not after seeing for myself how you wrapped Benita Madrigal Rosabal around your little finger. But Aleja you had to seduce on Facebook!’

  ‘I asked Clara to appeal to her sister’s feelings a little.’ He takes his cellphone from his shirt pocket and hunts for something on the screen while he carries on talking, more rapidly than usual: ‘To tell her that you used your last savings to afford this journey and that you had j
ust three days left to find their prima. Their cousin. And then Aleja actually sent a message.’

  He leans forward eagerly to show her the phone screen.

  She has never seen him this excited. Perhaps he too had feared that the search had come to an end.

  ‘What does she say?’

  ‘I cannot help you find my cousin,’ Ruben translates from Spanish. ‘My sister says I should see you anyway because anything I can tell you about Mercedes will help you feel better even if you never find her.’ Ruben lowers the phone. ‘That is true, is it not? You want to get to know this Mercedes better, even though maybe you never meet her?’

  Theresa nods silently. I cannot help you find my cousin. That wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear.

  ‘I called to ask if she could meet us somewhere this evening. She did not want to because she is back on duty at the hospital early tomorrow morning, but she lives near Lazaro’s bar, so I, ah, invited her to come there for just an hour. Just to have a drink with you.’

  ‘And where will you be?’ she asks, slightly alarmed.

  ‘I’ll be playing the trumpet. It is the bar where I make music with a few friends. But Aleja speaks English, like her sister, so you will not need me to translate.’ When she still looks unconvinced, he adds: ‘And Lazaro or Miles or Oreste will be able to help if you get stuck.’

  ‘What will they be doing there?’

  ‘Well, Lazaro is always there – it is his bar – and Miles works there.’

  ‘Of course.’ She gives an embarrassed laugh.

  ‘And Oreste is coming to say goodbye, because if we drive to Viñales tomorrow, there maybe will not be another chance to see him.’

  ‘Oh.’ There’s a heaviness in her chest.

  He looks at her expectantly, but she turns to face the open glass door that leads out onto the small balcony, bites her lip, and stares at the neglected building across the street.

  ‘I thought you would be much happier?’