Havana Year Zero

by Karla Suárez

  That evening, when we parted, Leonardo invited me to a tertulia he hosted in his home. A few friends usually met there whenever the electricity was down and they’d spent the blackout reading aloud, drinking, playing dominoes and badmouthing the government. It’s fun, he said. The only condition was that all the participants had to bring something – a candle, a bottle, a stick of bread, a pack of cigarettes, anything at all – because however much he’d like to do otherwise, he could only offer his small room. But women just have to contribute the pleasure of their company, he added. I felt it was good that Leonardo was viewing me as an independent person and not someone who was attached to Ángel. It was fundamental to my plans that he considered me as a woman he could meet up with. That way, we could establish a bond, an exclusive bond.

  I gratefully accepted his invitation and reminded him that I still owed him. We exchanged telephone numbers. He gave me his work number and a neighbour’s, just in case. I gave him mine at the Tech. I promised to call him about the tertulia and added with a smile: Clear debts make good friendships. And then we parted.

  When I phoned Euclid to update him, he was glad to hear that there would be a second meeting. After I’d rung off, I stood, playing with the telephone dial. I was in the school office, but suddenly I felt like a secret agent, a 007 of science. The thought amused me.

  4

  Perhaps because it seemed easiest, Ángel and I had established the routine that I’d phone him in advance to arrange where to meet. One day we’d agreed that he would come to the Tech after running a few errands, and then we’d have dinner at his place. When we arrived there, I discovered a girl, all in black, sitting at the door to his apartment. The moment she saw us, she jumped to her feet, hugged Ángel with tears running down her face and said: Angelito, please, let me move in with you. He put an arm around her shoulders and kissed her hair, murmuring calming words, with some difficulty, he groped for the latchkey in his pocket. She was quite young, was wearing a t-shirt, a long skirt, military boots and armloads of bangles. I stood a few steps behind Ángel, unsure of what to do, until he managed to open the door and enter the apartment with her hanging around his neck, still crying and repeating her plea. A few seconds later, I heard Ángel’s voice: Julia, come in.

  When I entered they were still in an embrace. I closed the door behind me, but clearly not as quietly as usual because the bang caused the girl to raise her head. Her woeful face was marked by two black lines descending from her eyes. Ángel stretched out a hand toward me: This is Julia. Then he pointed to her and said: Julia, meet my sister Dayani. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, said hello, moved away from Ángel, threw her bag onto the armchair and disappeared down the hall. I was still standing in the same spot. Ángel moved closer and explained that this wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. His sister was eighteen and whenever she had an argument with their father she came to stay with him. I still hadn’t said a word. He put a hand to my cheek and stroked it: Julia, my Julia, are you listening to me? I sighed and raised my head. Of course I was listening, and maybe I should give them some space. He nodded sadly, but did ask me to call him the following morning. Don’t stop calling, he insisted.

  The next day was May 1st, a detail I remember well because of what happened afterwards. I called, but things were going badly and it wasn’t possible for us to meet. Ángel was going to accompany his sister to their father’s house. He said he was tired. What he really wanted was a quiet Sunday. Why don’t you come around tomorrow at midday and stay over? I’ve got used to you being here. I bit my lip and replied that I’d be there.

  I read somewhere that Einstein said, ‘At first, all thoughts belong to love. Later on, love belongs to all thoughts’. That’s true. In the beginning, I was fascinated by Ángel. He was a vulnerable sort of guy and, as you must know, vulnerability in a man inspires incredible tenderness in women. It’s probably the maternal instinct. But who knows?

  I’m not sure just how far Ángel suffered from what’s called abandoned child syndrome, and of course I never dared ask. When he was very young, his mother left the country but couldn’t take him with her because his father refused to give his authorisation. However, some time later, the father remarried and went to live with his new wife, with whom he had Dayani. Ángel was left with his maternal grandmother, who raised him and remained with him until her death. It was from her that he’d inherited the apartment.

  From the very beginning, Ángel’s stories had entranced me. He’d been married and claimed it had been true love. They were so close that his father, who at the time had an important post in the tourism industry, had interceded and found them jobs in a Cuban-Brazilian company. The problem was that, after she’d been working there a while, Margarita – that’s his ex’s name – had built up close contacts on the Brazilian side of the corporation. As a consequence, when they’d been married for only two years, she left him to move to São Paulo on an indefinite contract. My angel was heartbroken. Later, he was sent to São Paulo on a short training course. It was a chance to see Margarita and an attempt to win back her love. But she wasn’t interested, and in fact had already found someone else. Ángel returned to Cuba, his world shattered, and couldn’t even bear to go on working in the same office. So, despite the fact that a job in a joint enterprise company was something everyone longed for due to the advantages it offered, Ángel handed in his notice and became unemployed. As far as I can remember, he told me that story the day I first met Leonardo. Yes, that’s it – in the evening, after the author had left, Ángel apologised for seeming a little brusque, and explained that Leonardo was more his ex-wife’s friend than his own. Then he told me about Margarita. Later, I learned that he’d only had casual affairs since then. He’d never been able to forget her and she had gradually become a ghost who haunted his home. That was why Ángel liked to define himself as ‘a solitary soul, forever alone’, as the song he loved to sing goes: ‘If I could only find a kindred soul.’

  So you see, that’s one of the reasons why it took so long for us to get together: the ghost of ‘Margarita, the sea is beautiful, and the wind carries a subtle scent of orange blossom’. Sometimes, as a joke, I used to recite that poem, although I couldn’t have imagined then how much I’d come to detest it.

  Ángel was a mix of a child in need of protection and the man I wanted to get into bed. My mathematical brain firmly believes that small results lead to final outcomes, so from the first I suspected that things would move slowly. It had taken me over a month to get between his sheets, and I had no idea how much longer it would need to break through his solitary-person shell. I sometimes wondered which of us was really the mathematician. Which of us was calculating the moves.

  As we’d arranged, I arrived at his door at the stroke of twelve on Sunday. I tried the bell but it made no sound, so I had to knock until he opened up. He’d only just got out of bed. His hair was tousled and there was alcohol on his breath; there’s no disguising the smell of rum. I followed him into the kitchen and, while making coffee, he told me that he’d taken his sister home but as their father even worked on May 1st, he’d got home at some unearthly hour. Ángel paused there since nothing happened when he turned on the gas. There was no electricity or gas and he wasn’t one of those handyman-Cubans who’d installed a kerosene stove or any other kitchen gadget. Fortunately, his father had given him some money and a bottle so we went out to a nearby house selling cartons of takeaway food.

  The night before, Ángel and his father had had a long chat over drinks. In the end, it seemed likely that he’d have to take Dayani to Cienfuegos one weekend to stay with her paternal grandmother until her stress levels descended.

  Ángel thought it odd that the passing years had turned him into the family mediator. Fate was playing a trick on him. And like I said, after his mother left, his father didn’t stay single for long. He was a lucky man, he’d always worked in tourism and had never lacked for anything: he had his professional
skills and his women provided the domestic comforts. First Ángel’s mother had invited him into her home in El Vedado and then his second wife had opened the door to her place in Miramar. Except that in the new arrangement, there was no room for his son. Ángel grew up spending occasional weekends with his father and vacations at the beach. His sister was born when he was thirteen, in mid-adolescence, with a seething mass of hormones and a declaration of war on the father. All the things that usually happen during teenage years, Ángel experienced in triplicate due to that little girl who gradually supplanted him in the non-starring role he’d already accepted, reducing him to a mere extra. And that was why he’d learned to hate her early on, although the hatred diminished with time, until he came to feel a deep love for the girl. She loved him like crazy.

  Dayani had been a spoilt child. When they holidayed in Varadero, she always had the best room and was allowed to leave the table if she didn’t want to eat. That wasn’t the case for Ángel; he was a boy and the oldest, so he had to respect his father’s rules. But then she too had reached adolescence, as we all do, a seething mass of hormones, declaration of war on the father, and that’s when the problems really began. Once, for example, she’d dyed her hair half red and half green and went to school like that. She’d hardly set foot inside the building before she was sent to the principal’s office, and from there back home, with an appointment for her parents. And what did Dad do when he returned from the meeting? He grabbed his daughter’s arm and told her that if she was trying to attract attention, well, he was going to make sure she did. They went to a hairdresser’s and he asked them to shave her head. Dayani was in tears during the whole time it took her hair to grow back. Ángel and Margarita, who were married by then, were shoulders to cry on, particularly Margarita, he stressed, because they got along so well.

  The thing was, Ángel explained, battling with their father had become his sister’s favourite sport; but their father couldn’t have cared less, he insisted there had been too much pampering when she was a child, and all that had come to haunt her. Ángel suspected that she and her friends were taking drugs, because she’d once or twice turned up at his apartment looking pretty wasted, asking for a place to sleep. Dayani knew better than to go home in that state, and Ángel couldn’t bear that she was harming herself, was in open rebellion against herself. Now she’s obsessed with getting enough money to leave the country, he sighed, and he felt powerless to help. However much he’d have liked to, all he had to offer was affection, because he had nothing else; certainly not cash. He lived by occasionally renting one of the rooms on an informal basis and with assistance from his father, who sometimes gave him money or stocked his pantry shelves. That said, he invited me to share a ‘slap-up’ dinner he’d cook himself.

  That evening, as was the case of so many others later on, we sat on the sofa drinking rum, ‘courtesy of Dad’. Me sitting, Ángel stretched out with his head in my lap. From above, Ángel looked very beautiful. He raised a hand to stroke my hair and asked if I wasn’t tired of his stories. No way, I said. Listening to him was a means of entering his world and beginning to belong there, even though I formed no part of his past. He smiled and enquired how things had been for me since we’d last seen each other.

  I met Leonardo, I said. I wanted him to hear it from me before blabbermouth Leo could mention it. Ángel stopped stroking my hair and asked: Leonardo? I smiled and told him that I’d passed by his office to make some phone calls. Ángel twisted his body around to pour himself another rum while saying that he’d never really felt sure about the guy. He says he likes you a lot, I assured him. He took a sip of his drink, settled his head in my lap again and rested his glass on his abdomen, cupping it with both hands. According to him, I should watch my step when it came to Leonardo; they had known each other for quite a while but had never been friends because there was something about the guy that didn’t ring true. He didn’t know how to explain it, it was just a matter of intuition, so he was polite but didn’t feel like trusting him too far and, from his point of view, neither should I.

  It suddenly occurred to me that Ángel was the sort of man who was jealous of his girlfriends’ male friends. He was jealous that I’d met with the writer, and this pleased me. Look, the thing is, I said, Leonardo invited me to a tertulia in his home. Ángel gave me an irate look and then, after a few moments, said that Leo never ceased to surprise him. He was invited too; in fact, he’d been meaning to tell me about it, but their host had got in first. I was overjoyed to have confirmation of his jealousy. The knowledge that we both had invitations made the evening a simple get-together rather than an opportunity to develop my friendship with Leonardo, but I’d find another moment for that. In any case, it wasn’t such a bad thing that Leonardo, in addition to being my number-one objective in the search for Meucci’s document, could be used as a threat in my quest to make Ángel mine and mine alone. I bent to kiss his lips and murmured: Could the reason you don’t like him be that he was a friend of Margaritatheseaisbeautifulandthewind? He grinned and stuck out his tongue to pass it quickly over my lips. Then he said: Witch... He added that his ex and the writer were already friends when he met Margarita, that he knew Leonardo had been up for it, but she’d preferred him. That last phrase was said with great pride and I smiled. I leaned over, took a sip of rum and, without swallowing, returned to his lips so that the liquid would run into his mouth and then disappear down his throat, mixed with my saliva, the taste of my mouth. I felt the urge to ask him when he was going to boot Margarita’s ghost out of the house, but I restrained myself. What was the use? I suspected that she was one of those stories that just get in the way, like when you lay a rug in an awkward place so that every time you pass, one corner curls over and trips you up, and you think about moving it somewhere else but then you forget until the next time you trip over it.

  You know, Margarita is leaving the apartment, Ángel said when we’d done with kissing. I froze. It was as if he’d read my mind. Then I straightened up and took a sip of my drink like someone who hasn’t heard anything special so that he wouldn’t notice my curiosity. He added that I should be grateful because she was feeding us. I raised my eyebrows. I’m selling her clothes, he said. He told me that she was an unresolved problem, something beyond his control, a cycle that had been violently aborted.

  When Margarita left Ángel to go to Brazil, he was still in love with her and so hadn’t believed the separation was permanent. He thought she was going through a crisis and needed to be alone, nothing more; to spend some time alone and regain her inner balance. They had always been very close, too close. Margarita needed to prove herself as an independent being, and what could be better than a trip abroad to a place where you can be by yourself and everything you do depends on your own personal and professional abilities. That’s what he’d imagined was going on. But when he went to São Paulo, she told him that she had no intention of coming back to him, that in fact she was truly happy to have put such a distance between them. The way the brain functions is incredible, he said. It really is, because even though she’d rejected him, he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, hadn’t wanted to accept the break up. For him, it was just a matter of time. Margarita was the love of his life and she couldn’t just vanish in that dumb way. So he was very low when he returned to Havana, but still hoping to receive a letter announcing her return.

  It goes without saying that the letter never arrived. Margarita wasn’t going to come back either to Ángel or to Cuba, which was by then in the early stages of its major crisis. And she even had a local boyfriend, which is the first step anyone takes when they’re thinking of staying in a place. It had all happened very quickly. One night they were in that living room where he was telling me the story, when suddenly they started arguing. That had been happening quite regularly but the dispute was more bitter that night, and they went from one thing to the next until they found themselves going over their life together as a couple. The argument came to an abru
pt end when Margarita announced that she was leaving him and that she would soon be leaving Cuba too.

  Ángel paused to pour himself another rum. She left carrying a small suitcase the same night, as if she would be back soon. That was why he’d decided not to change anything in the apartment, leaving her clothes and shoes in the wardrobe, her books on the shelves, even her toothbrush in the bathroom. Everything was ready for her return. And that was how he’d lived for years, until time made him understand that, even before she’d left him, Margarita had been thinking of quitting the country.

  Ángel sighed and gave a sad smile before adding that he’d recently begun to dispose of her belongings. It was a good decision because selling things was bringing in money and, besides, it was as if Margarita were slowly beginning to fade, to leave him in peace. But he had to be the one to close the cycle in order to finally exorcise her ghost. I’ve got a plan, he said. Do you want to hear it? I nodded; of course I did. Well, he’d begun with the clothes and shoes, then the books, followed by their romantic mementos, and finally the most personal things, which he was going to send to Brazil with a letter that said just one word: goodbye. While he was speaking, I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to sell anything that would bring in some cash and bin the rest, but Ángel had made a plan and that had to be respected. I merely smiled. He said that the whole process was really important, that it wasn’t simply a matter of forgetting and writing off his marriage as a failure. No, the thing was to close the cycle, keeping what was beautiful, acknowledging what he’d learned and locating Margarita in her proper place in his memory. I liked what he was saying, as I liked the faraway look in his eyes. Ángel sat up next to me, finished his drink in one gulp and said that it was important to preserve the past so we knew who we were.