Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘I am happy, of course, it’s just … It’s hard to accept that I will probably never find Mercedes. That tonight’s meeting with her cousin has to be a kind of consolation prize. But I am grateful for the consolation prize,’ she hastens to add. ‘Really.’

  It doesn’t look as if he believes her. After all his effort, she has to go and disappoint him with such a lukewarm reaction.

  ‘So what can I tell you about Mercedes?’ Aleja asks a few hours later in Lazaro’s noisy bar. It’s a cramped, dimly lit space packed with drinking Cubans who are hidden almost completely behind dense clouds of cigar smoke. The conversations are deafening, as if everyone wants to make sure that they can hear one another precisely because they can’t see one another properly. In one corner Ruben is playing his trumpet among a group of smiling musicians. The only spotlight in the bar shines on them, and it’s clear from their enthusiastic body language that they are enjoying the performance, but in this din Theresa can barely hear a single note.

  ‘Everything!’ Theresa takes a greedy sip of her mojito and leans across the small table that separates them. ‘What was she like as a child? Sweet and obedient? Naughty and rebellious? And as a teenager? What did she like? Books, sport, music? What did she dislike? What were her best qualities? And her worst? What was—’

  ‘Santo cielo, you really do want to know everything!’ Aleja interrupts her with a laugh, shakes her head – her curly hair is longer than her sister’s, shoulder-length, streaked with quite a lot of grey – and lights a thin cigar.

  Theresa hadn’t expected her to smoke, probably because she knew she was a nurse. But here in Cuba even hundred-year-old grandmothers seem to smoke cigars. Perhaps doctors and nurses even advise their patients to puff on a cigar now and then for the sake of their health.

  ‘Because I really know nothing about her. Anything you can tell me will help me get to know her better. Anything.’

  ‘Why do you want to get to know her better?’ Aleja takes a deep drag of her cigar, studies Theresa through the smoke clouds. ‘When you will most likely never meet her?’

  ‘For precisely that reason.’

  Theresa looks away from the nurse’s penetrating gaze, back at the five musicians in the corner. Ruben’s burly body and panama hat are unmistakable, the trumpet in front of his mouth almost ludicrously small in his broad hands, and yet he plays with a proficiency that surprises her. His heavy fingers seem to have become weightless, darting above the trumpet keys. The snatches of music she hears above the din sound more like old-school jazz than traditional Cuban rhythms. The rest of the outfit consists of a saxophone, a bass violin, a piano and a set of drums. The instruments, just like the players, look as if they have seen better days. Ruben is without a doubt the youngest member of this geriatric quintet. But they play with so much obvious enjoyment, so much infectious joy, she can’t help but smile while she watches them.

  Behind the long bar counter to the left of the band, Lazaro soars high on his elevator chair on wheels, his smile still a silver moon in his dark face, and next to him Miles is helping with opening beer bottles and mixing drinks. On this side of the counter Oreste is seated on a tall barstool with his short legs and tiny feet swinging high above the floor, his head nodding with the beat of the music. He may be the only person in the bar who can actually hear the music, as he is sitting right in front of the band and all his attention is focused on them.

  Then he looks around, as if he senses he is being watched, grins at her and raises his beer glass. She hadn’t expected to be so glad to see her valiant little guide again. Even less that he – and Lazaro and Miles! – would literally welcome her with open arms when she walked into the bar with Ruben this evening. As if she were an old friend they hadn’t seen in years. Perhaps it was nothing more than the famous Latin-American conviviality; perhaps they would’ve embraced any other woman from any other country just as joyfully. But she would like to believe that it was about her. About where she came from and what she had come here to find.

  Even though it now seemed that her search would produce nothing.

  ‘We were like this. Me and her and Andres. My brother.’ Aleja holds up her left hand with the three middle fingers entwined to show how close they had been, and with her right hand raises the cigar to her mouth. ‘I suppose we were like most other children. No more naughty or better behaved, no more obedient or less rebellious. Not as far as I can remember …’

  ‘Who was the leader among the three of you?’

  ‘Andres,’ Aleja says without hesitation. ‘Probably because he was the eldest. Or maybe just because he was a boy. That was just how we were raised. Boys lead and girls follow.’ She smiles ruefully and exhales another cloud of smoke. ‘And when I look at the Cuban men around me, I wonder if that will ever change.’

  ‘It’s how I was raised too. And when I look at the South African men around me …’

  Aleja’s smile grows a little wider and her gaze becomes more sympathetic.

  ‘But she was definitely the clever one among us three. She knew much more than a child her age was supposed to know, about plants and planets and animals and history, just about anything you can think of. She was always reading and she remembered everything she read.’

  ‘Was she one of those shy children who escapes into books because she struggled to make friends?’

  Aleja tilts her head as she considers the question, pushes a dark curl behind her ear, puffs on the cigar again. ‘I would not say that she made friends easily … She was quite introvertida – but she learned to hide her shyness. Her cleverness too by the time we got to high school. I think her mother told her that clever girls could be, you know, intimidantes? That boys liked charming, soft-natured girls better than clever ones. Her mother was very beautiful. Muy bonita.’

  Theresa thinks of the young woman with Princess Diana’s wavy hairstyle in the picture inside her handbag and nods in agreement. ‘Did that work? Did boys like her then?’

  ‘Of course we were never in the same school, we only saw each other in the holidays, but I never got the impression that she was, well, unpopular. She was not so studious that she was completely …’ She pauses to find the right word. ‘Awkward socially? You know? She also took part in sport. Athletics and gymnastics. She did not like team sports, really, maybe because she was hija única. An only child? She took ballet lessons also at some point, I do not know up to what age …’ Aleja smiles wistfully as she tries to recall her cousin. ‘Actually I suppose she was like any other teenager. Just smarter than the rest.’

  ‘Did she have a boyfriend? At school or university?’

  She is really scraping the bottom of the barrel now, Theresa thinks, but perhaps there was a man somewhere still cherishing sentimental memories of his first love, perhaps even a man who had stayed in touch with his first love long after they grew up.

  But Aleja shakes her head. ‘People always thought Andres was her boyfriend. If they did not know that he was her primo, her cousin. They were so openly crazy about each other. Always walking arm in arm.’ Aleja stares at the cigar she is stubbing out in the ashtray, her expression sombre. ‘I think it was just a way for Andres to hide the fact that he was homosexual. And her way of protecting him.’

  ‘Oh.’ Theresa looks at her, surprised. ‘Did you know from early on that he was homosexual?’

  ‘How shall I put it?’ Aleja stares ahead of her with a frown, pushes the same annoying curl back behind her ear. ‘I think all three of us knew without ever admitting it to each other. Never talked about it. And that is a pity, because I think it was one of the main reasons why he escaped to the US in the end. I mean, there were many things here in Cuba that troubled him more and more – and that he and Mercedes were arguing about more and more because of her blind, ehm, patriotism – but if he was not gay he would not be desperate enough to flee across the sea in a tiny boat.’

  ‘And Mercedes considered that treason?’

  ‘Alta traición. Highest treason.’ Alej
a sips her beer slowly, apparently lost in thought. ‘For her the Capitalist North America was everything her dad had fought against. You know the Americans secretly backed that war in Angola. The war killed her dad and now her cousin was going over to the enemy. That was how she saw it. There was nothing I could say to convince her of anything else. We had a few bad arguments – and then one night everything just blew up, boom, todo explotó! You know, the sort of fight where you say things you can never forget or forgive, too many words you can never take back.’

  ‘I know.’ Theresa sighs, thinking of the last year she and Theo were married.

  ‘We never saw each other again after that. Well, just the one time, at the funeral of my grandmother. But we did not really speak. And abuelita Clara was the only person in the family Mercedes stayed in contact with, so when she died …’

  Aleja shakes her head, picks up her beer glass again, glances at the group of musicians in the corner.

  While Theresa waits for her to continue talking, she realises that she can hear the music for the first time. Ruben and his companions have finally managed to silence at least some of the people in the packed bar, or at least got them to lower their voices, in order to listen to a surprisingly tender rendition of ‘Round Midnight’. Ruben is certainly no Miles Davis on the trumpet, and the sinewy grey-haired man who is playing the tenor sax is not a patch on John Coltrane, but the visible emotion of all five musicians nevertheless compensates for their lack of brilliance.

  ‘But how is it possible for a family member to just disappear?’ Theresa asks carefully, because she doesn’t want to upset this woman with something that might sound like an accusation.

  ‘Oh, it is easier than you think,’ Aleja replies with a joyless little laugh. ‘We are not a big family. On the side of my mother everyone is dead; it is only me and Clara and Mercedes who are left. And Andres who is now living in Los Angeles.’

  ‘Don’t you miss her sometimes? You were so close …’

  ‘I miss her more and more, the older I get!’ Aleja says, with startling force. ‘Especially now the US is finally making peace with Cuba, after all these years, and the whole capitalism-versus-communism argument becomes more and more … meaningless. Sin sentido. But I have no idea where she is, so I cannot make peace with her.’ She quickly drains her beer and relights the cigar. ‘I tried to look her up about three years ago. The last I heard she was working at a medical clinic in Viñales, and I went on holiday with a friend to a beach near Viñales, and I thought, well, I am here now … I went to ask at the policlínico, but she was not there any more. And no one could tell me what had become of her.’

  ‘Oh.’

  One small sound, Theresa thinks when she hears her own voice, that can express so much disappointment that it sounds like a lament. When the final notes of ‘Round Midnight’ fade away, Oreste leads the applause from his tall barstool.

  Aleja and Theresa join in the applause, but Theresa is battling to smile.

  ‘They are not too bad, sí?’ Aleja comments.

  ‘No,’ Theresa says, watching Ruben smile at the audience and acknowledge the applause with a nod. ‘They are not at all bad.’

  ‘Well, I am afraid I must go to bed,’ Aleja says from behind yet another smoke cloud. ‘I warned you that I could not help you. But if you ever find her, please tell her that Aleja would like to hear from her again?’

  She digs around in her shoulder bag as she gets up and takes out her purse, but Theresa quickly stops her: ‘It was me who invited you. Thank you for being willing to come and talk to me.’

  ‘Here is a picture in my purse that I almost forgot about.’ Aleja shows Theresa a faded colour photograph of three teenagers on a tropical beach. Two dark-haired girls on either side of a boy in cut-off denim jeans. ‘The three of us in the late eighties. Or the early nineties? We must have been around fifteen, sixteen.’

  The two girls are slim and suntanned with identical carefree smiles, clearly related. Aleja sits on the right in a red bikini – Theresa recognises the eyes and nose of the forty-year-old woman standing in front of her – which means that Mercedes has to be the one in the white bikini on the left. Her hair is less curly, her body leaner, her skin browner than that of the other two. Or perhaps it’s just the bright white bikini that makes her appear darker. But it is the boy in the middle who would draw the attention of any casual observer. He isn’t smiling, just staring into the camera with a look so smouldering that Theresa swears it could set the old picture alight even a quarter century after it was taken. The girls are attractive, the way all young people are attractive to people who are no longer young.

  But Andres is beautiful. No wonder he’d had to flee. This kind of beauty could not be confined to a remote island.

  She stares at the picture so intently that she hardly notices that the band has taken a break. It’s only when she hears Oreste’s cheerful voice beside her that she looks up and returns the picture to Aleja. She wraps the nurse in a tight embrace, a gesture that surprises her even more than it does Aleja. Perhaps the Cuban displays of affection are infectious too. The famous Latin-American warmth that Nini was always going on about.

  Her eyes follow Aleja as she walks away through the smoke clouds in the bar.

  Her search for the soldier’s daughter has reached another dead end, but right at this moment she isn’t even thinking about that. What moves her, more than she can explain, is that this woman has carried a picture in her purse, for who knows how many years, of her two closest family members who had both slipped out of her reach.

  20. A FIREARM

  How do you know when it’s time to give up hope? That is the question Theresa wrestles with in Amado’s bed. Her head is spinning from too much rum and perhaps even more from the fat cigar she shared with Lazaro towards the end of the evening. They had been dancing, he in his wheelchair and she flitting around the wheelchair like a bee around a flower, after the bar was already closed and only a few friends remained.

  Things had threatened to get out of hand. She’d been in a reckless mood, unwilling to say goodbye to her new Cuban friends, eager to party on through the night like in her younger days. Ruben reminded her that they had to be up early to drive to Viñales, a voice of reason she didn’t feel inclined to listen to. Or perhaps it was his dogged hopefulness she’d wanted to ignore. What could she still hope to find in Viñales – besides more disappointment? Let’s forget about Viñales, she’d wanted to tell Ruben; let’s forget about this woman we won’t ever find and about the letter I won’t ever deliver. Let’s rather drink more rum with Oreste and Miles and Lazaro.

  But because Ruben didn’t drink rum and because he was the only completely sober one among them, she did listen to him in the end. She took leave of the rest of the group with a heavy heart, and then came to lie here in his son’s bed like an exemplary woman waiting to fall asleep. But sleep won’t come, and now her thoughts are wandering in all sorts of directions she cannot control. If Ruben were to knock on the door right now, if he gave the smallest signal that he was interested in her the way he’d been interested in Benita Madrigal Rosabal earlier this week, she would admit him to her bed without a murmur. To his son’s bed.

  But Ruben Torres Márquez’s conduct towards her has been irreproachable all along, from the first moment they met beside his red-and-white Plymouth Fury 1958 and he raised his panama hat to her ever so gallantly. Like an old-fashioned gentleman, her late mother would’ve sighed. Ruben’s socialist secularity might not have earned him her mother’s approval, but the rest of him would have been entirely to her taste, no question about it.

  Hannie Marais always had a weakness for a big, strong, silent man with a kind heart. Adriaan Marais had been strong and silent with a kind heart (which he’d tried very hard to hide), but Hannie’s lifelong hero had been the rugby legend Frik du Preez. ‘Now there is a Man with a capital “m”!’ she would swoon. Though of course not when her husband was present.

  Before tonight Theresa hadn�
��t thought of Ruben as a possible lover, not even for a second. Granted, at her age she didn’t really think of any man she met as a potential lover. That sort of wishful thinking was a ship that had sailed from the harbour and disappeared from the horizon many moons ago. The winds of lust did still blow into the harbour occasionally, stirring up a few storms, but in those instances Theresa made do with lying in the bedroom of her Cape Town cottage fantasising about someone as unlikely as her young neighbour with the hipster beard, while caressing her own body. The next morning she would blush furiously if the neighbour happened to be standing on his stoep when she went to work, his toned upper body shirtless, his hair and beard still mussed from sleep.

  It made her wonder whether such lovely young men could ever guess that the prim and proper tannies who lived next door – women old enough to be their mothers – harboured such lascivious thoughts about their youthful bodies.

  But tonight’s unexpected and unwelcome amorous mood is impossible to explain. She would like to blame the rum and the cigar. Or perhaps the general air of sensuality – it’s not as though Nini didn’t warn her – that was starting to infect her after less than a week. The way Ruben played that trumpet earlier tonight has unravelled something inside her that has long been suppressed. Too long, probably.

  You waited too long, Theresa Marais. It’s too late.

  But no, she didn’t come to Cuba to abandon herself to wanton pleasure-seeking. She is here to perform a duty, pay a due, settle a debt incurred by her late husband. And now that there are less than three days left to complete her mission, she cannot afford to let go of hope.

  But tossing and turning in an unfamiliar bed, she also can’t help remembering the heights she and her former husband reached in bed together. Their sex life had been the one good thing about their marriage. There surely had been other good things too, but tonight the sex is the only thing she can remember. It’s true that it became infrequent towards the end, but then, when it did happen, the very fact of its infrequency seemed to make it that much better. In the last year or two before he moved out, it was only those rare sexual fireworks that kept her from losing hope.