Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

“Okay. You know West Broadway?”

  “Broadway? Sure I know Broadyway.”

  “No—West Broadway. It’s different.” I gave him some instructions, and a few hours later there was a pounding on my door, and there was a huge black woman there. As soon as I opened up, she walked in and hugged me, and said, “Thank you, thank you, I’m sorry.” I told her that Lázara was fine, and that she missed her, and that she was real pretty, and that she was doing well at school. I told her that she had a nice room on Concordia. Then I gave her the photos.

  The woman didn’t say anything at first—she just stared and stared and stared—and then her whole body started shaking, and she was sobbing and heaving, and sobbing and wailing. “Mi nena, mi nena. Por qué no te puedo ver? Mi nena.” And she was sobbing and wailing, and I didn’t know what to do, so I held her.

  “It’s tough, I know,” I said. “It’s been a long time,” but she was holding on to me so hard her nails were digging into my shoulders, and her whole body was leaning against mine, and she was muttering curses and phrases through her snuffles that I couldn’t catch.

  It was a crazy thing: occupational hazard, I guess. Like being in Beirut, and some woman was howling when she saw the body of her kid in the street, and you didn’t know whether to drop it, or whether to tell her that he’d left a body of his own in another street, or whether just to get the shot before the TV crews came in. And half hoping she’d keep bawling till the light changed.

  This time, though, my camera was on the other side of the room, and the woman was hugging me like a cousin, and sniffling. Finally, she stood back and turned to me. “Thank you, thank you,” she said, drying her eyes with her fists, and when I mentioned the fifty dollars I’d loaned her daughter, she said, “Thank you, I’m sorry. I put it in your door tonight. Tomorrow. By Monday, for sure.” That was the last I ever saw of her.

  II

  I didn’t think about Cuba for a few weeks after that, what with the contra clashes in Honduras and the latest coup attempt in Manila. Sometimes, from Managua, I’d try to call the number Lourdes had given me, just to see what the story was, but usually the number just rang and rang and rang, and when somebody answered, it was the old woman downstairs, and she sounded frightened when she heard a foreign voice, and quickly put the phone down. Sometimes I read reports—in the Herald—about crackdowns and defections. Del Pino, the hero of the Bay of Pigs. Even Fidel’s eldest brother, Ramón, the one you never heard about, had tried to make it out. But mostly, Cuba was on a different wavelength from the rest of the planet. The great thing about being there was that you could just screen out the rest of the world, forget everything you knew, and take a break from America. The hardest thing about being there was that when you left it, the whole place disappeared from view, and it was almost as if you’d dreamed it. Hundred-percent blackout.

  I got a few calls from José on my machine in New York—hurried, usually, asking me to send a few thousand dollars to some guy in Jackson Heights, who would send him a Colombian passport—and occasionally I got a postcard from Lourdes or Caridad, saying, “I hope that all is very well for you, and for your parents too.” Sometimes I got 3-D Russian postcards with those shiny surfaces that made all the words written impossible to read. I couldn’t tell who they were from, and what they were saying, and whether they were offering me a favor or asking me for one.

  And then, in mid-December, I got a card from England.

  Dear Richard,

  I do hope all is well with you. It was very good to have met you in Havana last July. It really made my trip a good deal more interesting than it would have been otherwise. Those nights at the bar seem almost surreal now, sitting in Winchester on these dark winter evenings. I was wondering, in fact, whether I might go again next year, at the same time, for a kind of sentimental return: Greece seems so tame by comparison. If you were planning to be there, perhaps we could enjoy a kind of impromptu reunion? I’ve half a mind to start a collection of Cuban jazz records.

  In any case, I do wish you well with your photography: I imagine it takes you quite often to Havana. Perhaps we’ll get a chance to toast the Queen again next July?

  Wishing you all success,

  Hugo Cartwright

  P.S. I think I’ve persuaded the Headmaster to let me teach my Senior History Division something about the Spanish-American War. So Cuba is now my business too.

  I pictured to myself the sweating red face and the spectacles, and remembered how I’d got Hugo to pose by the pool at the Capri for one of the shots I’d sent to German Geo: he was famous now. The Empire in the tropics. Hockney goes Latino. And nocturnal. But I’d pretty much forgotten about his card by the time I scheduled a trip to Havana that July. Things were quieting down in Central America, and I wasn’t billing as many days as I would have liked. Cuba, I figured, was a cinch: the government was canny enough to schedule Carnival at the same time as the Anniversary of the Revolution, so I could get two stories in one: Fun in the Sun, and the Calypso Graybeard. I also had a long-running thing I was shooting on the worldwide trade of money for love.

  I was staying in the St. John’s this time—more gritty texture—and as soon as I got off the late flight from Toronto, I walked out into the streets to get a taste of the Cuban night. It got into you like a kind of pounding rhythm: no way you could sit still while the whole country seemed to be pulsing around you. Down on the Malecón, the street was one big mess of boys in rows in color-coordinated suits, and girls in sparkly bra things, trailing boas, and lit up faces in masks. Everyone always said that the Revolution had really cleaned the celebration up. Before—that was the magic word here, “before”—it had made Rio seem like a toddler’s birthday party by comparison.

  I bought a beer and walked among the dancers. “Hola, Richard!” came a cry. “Te recuerdas de mí?”

  It was a face I didn’t recognize: black, with silver eye shadow, under a silver kind of bathing cap.

  “No me recuerdas? La amiga de José. Myra.”

  “Sure,” I said, while figures slipped past me in the dark, like peacocks on the strut, and a few Chinese guys under a winding dragon, and the gays enjoying their big public outing of the year.

  “So you’ve been to see Lula?”

  “Lula?”

  “Lourdes.”

  “No. I only just got here. Business.”

  “Bueno,” said the girl. “She’s waiting to see you. I think she’s over there,” and she pointed me over to the viewing stands. I weaved in and out of the trumpet players then, and saw sitting on the ground the same woman who’d invited me to her store the year before, and someone else greeted me by name, and there were boys bobbing around slowly, and Tropicana rejects, and women with staring eyes doing some kind of voodoo number. I looked for her eyes, her delicate features. All around me, the usual whispers and blown kisses. “Oye.” “Dime.” “Pssst.”

  And then I recognized her smile, a little shyer than most, in a body swathed in feathers: like an earthly angel among a team of twenty or so others, wriggling in formation.

  “Richard,” she cried, and her arms were around me.

  “Qué tal?”

  “Richard,” was all she answered. “Ven acá. Conmigo,” and I watched her disentangle herself from the group, and blow a few kisses at her friends, and whisper something to a tall boy with a hiphop haircut, and then she was with me, and linking me by the arm, and we were walking away from the music, away from the crowds, along the boulevard, toward the silence and the dark.

  “You got my letters, Richard? And my posters?”

  “I think so, but the government always takes a cut.”

  “Your government?”

  “Your government, my government, it’s all the same.”

  “Oh, Richard, I am so happy to see you. Qué sorpresa!” and she was holding me by the hand now, and it was cooler, and there were fewer people in evidence, and I was tucking my camera in my pocket. One thing I knew—I was back in Cuba, where you never knew how a nigh
t would end up, or who was leading whom. Where were we going now, I thought, and what was her plan? To fix me up with a cousin? To give me herself? To get me her mother’s shopping list?

  On Belascoaín we turned right, and walked past the huge, phantom bulk of the Central Hospital, and then down Concordia. She knocked three times on a decaying old door, and a black woman with a scarf opened up, and she led me up the broad stairs, and along a balcony where the washing flew in our faces, above a tiny courtyard, and then into a kitchen as small as a bathroom.

  It was empty, and dark, and a side door led into her bedroom.

  “Sit down, Richard. You want café? Beer? What can I get for you?”

  “A beer sounds great.”

  She went out to get it, and I looked at her bedside table: an old Russian postcard of Jesus, a small picture of Martí.

  “Mira,” she said when she came back, and she went across the room and showed me the altar where she kept her treasures: a wrinkled old black-and-white photograph of her mother, I figured, in her prime; a Gloria Estefan tape; and some books about Russian literature that she’d studied once. “Mira!” she exclaimed. “Look!” And there, right next to her heart-shaped mirror, was the picture that José had taken of us in Maxim’s that night, our eyes red, the focus shaky, my arm around her shoulders, grinning in the dark. It was a weird feeling to see it there, in a homemade frame on her dresser: like when someone you didn’t think you knew asks you to be his best man or the executor of his will, or invites you to read at his mother’s memorial service, and suddenly you realize you mean more to him than you’d figured. She couldn’t have planned it, I knew: she hadn’t known I was coming till tonight.

  “I just knew I’d see you, Richard.” She smiled over at me.

  “That’s great,” I said, and decided to let her airport nonappearance ride. “You mind if I take some pictures?”

  “Of what? Of me? Señorita X, you can say. Of this?” She opened her closet, and I saw three outfits hanging there, and I didn’t know whether that made her rich in Havana terms, or poor. She must have realized how soppy foreigners could get about Cuba and its shortages: she spoke English, after all. But then, when I waited for her to make her move—no, it wasn’t prostitution, I was getting ready to tell anyone who asked, including myself: it was just an exchange of favors, what I had to give for what she had, just like in any love affair—she motioned me to get up, and led me back through the kitchen to the courtyard.

  “You see, Richard?” She didn’t seem frightened. “I was waiting for you. I knew you would come. I must go now, for my mother. But come back tomorrow. I will be waiting for you. You are staying where? Vedado? For how long? Okay, Richard, we have time.”

  And then she kissed me softly on the lips, and I was left to make my own way out into the night.

  That night, though, when I got home, I had a weird dream. I was with Diane again, or it could have been Lourdes, and some other guy came in, and she put her head on his shoulder—it looked like the most intimate act in the world—and then he was whispering something in her ear, and I was going crazy—I couldn’t take it anymore—and I ran out into the garden. And she came after, and she was crying, and through her tears she was calling out to me, “What’s wrong? What’s your problem? Don’t you trust me? I was only kissing my brother goodbye!”

  I got up kind of scratchy the next morning, but it was still early, so I went on down to the old city to catch it before the tourist buses came, while the schoolkids were still playing stickball on the ill-paved, slanting streets, and the old guys were gathering for coffee in the open-fronted bars, and the first light gilded the parks and plazas around all the aromatic sailors’ world of streets: Obispo and O’Reilly and Empedrado.

  Then, after breakfast, I went down to Lourdes’s house, walking all the way down San Lázaro—along the big road where they held a torchlight parade for Martí every year on his birthday, and Pablo sang, and everyone waited to see if he got a bigger crowd than Fidel—and then threading my way into Centro Habana, and down to her cracked green door. It was locked now, and there was no way anyone could hear the knock, what with the music coming out of radios, so I sat on the stoop and waited.

  Another bright Havana morning, and nothing much going down. A few kids playing hide-and-seek in vacant lots. A teenager cycling by, and a woman stopping to chat. Mothers with curlers dandling babies on their terraces; children crying from an upstairs window. Occasionally, a door would open, and some old woman—the last of the Fidelistas—would slouch out into the street and go off to do her errands. This street was like all the others: the paint all faded, the windows gutted, bare rooms visible through the bars—a pretty tropical afterthought where the cleaning lady hadn’t come for almost thirty years. One time, a couple of grandmas of the Revolution picked me out as a foreigner: one hurried off, to tell the local CDR; the other came over and asked if I wanted to buy a turtle.

  Then a woman came up and said, “Richard, Richard! Qué tal?” and she was kissing me on both cheeks, this woman I had never met, as if I were a son returned from Miami. “La madre de Lourdes,” she said, introducing herself, and I figured she must have recognized me from the picture on the dresser. “Ven, entra, Richard. Lourdes vendrá pronto! Ven, ven!” I followed her up to the tiny kitchen, and she called out something, and the neighbors came out to take a look at me: her daughter’s prize specimen, a captive foreigner, with a camera. “Quieres agua? Quieres café?” she asked. “Sit down.” I sat at a table in the weather-beaten room. There was a plastic bowl from China for cigarettes. A clock that didn’t work. A framed set of pictures snapped from fashion magazines. A small Jesus, almost hidden. The centerpiece glass cabinet was empty except for a few dusty books.

  “Y tu mamá, tu papá?”

  “Very well,” I said.

  “Y Señor Reagan?”

  “Fine. And your children?”

  “O-ka. We survive. My son is in America. Here, mira!” She went into her bedroom and brought back a picture of a young kid, with Lourdes’s Palestinian complexion, standing in front of a tenement in New Jersey. “He says it is like heaven.” Then she looked over at me, her eyes aglow. This was her daughter’s freedom sitting in her kitchen; this was her ticket out.

  So she smiled at me, and offered me more café, and told me how she had a sister in Miami, and how for months her sister called her every week, and told her about her life. But after that, nothing. She’d got her son on the telephone once, she said, from the neighbor’s house, but he’d sounded very far away, and couldn’t understand anything she said. He’d promised to send her some spoons, but that was the last she’d heard from him. It was so good of me to remember her daughter, she said, it was so good of me to take her out.

  A few cards, I thought, and now I’m like a son-in-law: even in the Philippines, it wasn’t this quick.

  Lourdes’s sister came in—she looked about thirty-five, though I remembered José had told me she was still in her teens, despite her large thighs and bitter mouth—and sat down at the table and looked me over. “You have seen Lourdes?” she said. “She knows you are here? You will go to Varadero with her? What are your plans?”

  “I’m busy,” I said. “I’m only here for two weeks. I’ve got to work.” When the conversation dropped off, I picked up the camera, and again, as soon as I did, the two of them were up, and off like giggling schoolgirls to change into their best clothes, and I sat and sat, taking pictures out the window, till they came out again, their lips reddened with some children’s crayons, in fishnet stockings and CREO EN TÍ T-shirts. I snapped a few frames, and they gave off smiles that could have lit the room up without strobes. Then there were footsteps outside, and the door opened, and it was Lourdes, in shorts and a faded T-shirt that said WASHINGTON HUSKIES, and when she saw me, her face came to life: white teeth and olive skin.

  I decided to give them some of the presents I’d brought for them as sweeteners, and Lourdes pulled the Charlie from the box and sprayed it on the warme
r parts of herself, right there, in front of everyone: on the pulse of her neck, on her temples, on the back of her knees. Then her sister grabbed it from her and did the same, and the mother sat across from me, still glowing.

  I pulled out some Marlboros I had brought too, and handed them over to her, and the mother opened up the box, and called in the neighbors, and within a few minutes, half the carton was empty.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said, Santa Claus busy on his rounds, “but I’ve got to go and work. Before it gets dark.”

  “I’ll come with you, Richard.”

  “No, you stay here.”

  “What do you need? I can show you anything. The true Havana. The secret Havana. I can show you the old city.”

  “I’ve seen all that, Lourdes. I’ve already got all that tourist stuff.”

  “But I can show you what the people dream. What they say in private. I can show you all their hopes, next to the happy slogans.”

  She paused.

  “A violent contrast,” she continued, with her faint, white smile, and I remembered why I liked her: I never could tell how much she meant what she was saying.

  Out on the street, we passed women dressed all in white turbans, with beads around their necks—santero priestesses, she said, or their disciples—and at one corner, a whole group of numismáticos, gathered in a kind of Masonic circle, trading strange terms and shouting numbers. We passed hand-painted pieces of cardboard advertising haircuts for dogs, and women with purple hair, and boys who called out “Hola!” to Lourdes, and “Qué tal?”

  When we got to San Rafael, a small man came out from his store and put his arm around my shoulder, eyes pleading. “You have a card?” he said. “Here’s mine. I too am a collector.” I didn’t know what he was collecting, but everyone was a collector here, ready to trade anything, hoarding coins or stamps or cigarettes in the hope that one day they’d be currency. José too, I thought, was a collector in his way, of foreign friends, of foreign addresses. Lourdes too.