Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

  “I can make it right for them. Slip the chambermaid a few bucks.”

  “Richard. You know the girls in these hotels? How do you think they stay there? How do you think they pay the police? What do you think the government does with them? This is at least a hotel for people in love.”

  I’d had enough of it then, and I walked off toward the sea. Lula came running after, catching up with me as we crossed the wide boulevard. The girls were sitting along the seawall, occasional wind blowing the hair around their eyes. The boys were sitting eyeing the girls, or watching the foreigners watching the girls. Everyone was waiting, waiting, for something, anything, to happen. Sometimes, on the rocks below, a couple gasped. Sometimes a boy gave a wild whoop and jumped over the wall, down to the rocks, to retrieve a hat carried there by the wind. The night was all expectation: the boys pushing themselves against their novias, the old women whispering prayers to the dark, the girls hiking their skirts and listening for a foreign accent.

  Everyone waiting, waiting, and somewhere, in some near-empty room, somewhere in the city, El Líder pacing up and down, memorizing the tables of international debt statistics, or coining a new slogan: like one of the gods in the old Greek myths, playing dice games for the souls below.

  What happened the next day I remember as a dream almost. As if it never happened, or can only be figured out from what came later. It seems strange, after all the trips, and all the nights in distant hotels, that it had never happened to me like that before. I guess you know it’s something like love when you run out of comparisons.

  And later, it’s as if you’ve crossed some threshold you didn’t know was there. And you notice the way she frowns when she’s putting on her makeup. Or how she holds her fork. Or which earring she takes off first.

  I remember meeting her at the Parque Central at ten o’clock, and I remember she was dressed in a sky-blue pantsuit, her hair loose below a sky-blue headband. I remember her arms were bare, and there was a thin gold bracelet around her wrist. I remember she greeted me with a smile, and a quiet kiss, and then said, “Vamos. We go to Artemisa,” and we walked toward the colectivos.

  “My mother saw you with a girl,” she said.

  “That was you, Lula.”

  “No. Before. Last year.”

  “Last year, maybe. Someone for my work. Like a model.”

  “At night—in Centro Habana?”

  “Sure. Night is when I make my best pictures.”

  “And who was this girl?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “Okay.” She looked at me again. “This time I am your guide, your model. You want to see Cuba, I show you.”

  We got into an old car then—I think it was a Plymouth, with no dials and no lights and no handles on the doors—and soon we were driving south, out of the city, past Cojímar and the Playas del Este, the lonely palms and the blue on our left. Then, as we came near Santa María del Mar, suddenly she told the driver to turn right, up a dirt road, and we bumped and banged toward some huts. “Aquí,” she said, and we got out, and walked past a few shacks, her finger to her mouth.

  “You will not tell José?” she whispered.

  “No.”

  “Come on. I give you a surprise.”

  At the last of the shacks, we passed through a doorway, into a little room, with a kitchen next door. A woman—her name was Nelida—was in the kitchen, cooking plantains and beans and rice, in a blouse and denim cutoffs, two children playing around her legs.

  “You want to use the room?” she asked. “Is okay. But tell the foreigner not to talk.”

  I wondered how often this had happened before; I wondered whether this was part of Lourdes’s guided tour.

  We closed the door to the kitchen, and she put on the TV, with the volume real high. “If they hear you,” she said, pointing to the next house, and then she drew a finger across her throat. We sat on the bed, the only place to sit in the room, with a hundred images of Paulina Porizkova looking down on us.

  “You can take off your shirt. So you will look like a Cuban.”

  I took it off, and lay back against the headboard. On the walls were pictures clipped from foreign magazines—wall-to-wall photos of Rossellini and Elle McPherson, full-page posters of Travolta, ads for Calvin Klein. On TV there was an old John Wayne movie. I reached for my camera, and she put her hand on my arm.

  “Ven acá,” she murmured, and I rolled toward her on the bed.

  She sat me up, and got out a hairbrush from her purse, and she started brushing my hair, as fiercely as a mother. I saw the opening in her dress where her skin began, I smelled the echo of her Charlie.

  She brushed, brushed, brushed my hair, and I closed my eyes.

  “Mamá!” It was one of Nelida’s kids, crawling in through the door, bare-chested, golden-haired.

  “In the kitchen,” she said. “Leave us alone.”

  He pushed past us, and into the hiss and crackle of the kitchen. The door closed behind him.

  I sensed her heart beating, heard her say something to herself in Spanish, saw the golden cross around her throat.

  “You will not tell José?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “I have to be careful.”

  She slipped off her shoes, and began kissing my back.

  Tingled, I rolled over, and found myself next to her face. John Wayne was shooting Indians on TV. Slowly, I tucked her hair behind her ear, and ran my finger down her cheek and along her chin. She took it into her mouth, eyes closed, as if it were a candy. I followed with my own mouth, and ran my hand down her back. It felt salty and warm, flecked with sand.

  Her lips were glistening now, and her top came off. I ran my finger up her inside thighs and heard her shiver, moan.

  “Now, Lula?”

  “Now,” she said, and I put a finger to her wetness.

  She shrugged off all her clothes then, and, slowly, she straddled me. I looked up to see her face, clenched, looking away, as she moved faster and faster and fester, her body circling around and around, my hands on her breasts, her face looking away, urging herself on, and riding me with increasing fury until she stopped for a second, and her hair fell over her face.

  Outside, there was a sudden thunderstorm. “No words, Richard,” she said, putting a finger to my mouth. And then, on the wet sheets, I could feel a cold hand on my side: Nelida’s son, in from the sudden rain.

  We went all together, the two of us and Nelida, after the rain had subsided, to Artemisa, the old car jouncing along the open sea, the driver singing canciones de amor, my arm around her shoulder, she leaning against me and whispering a line I couldn’t follow: “ ‘Luego, Después del rayo, y del fuego, Tendré tiempo de sufrir.’ ” We drove past processions of small towns, and it felt as if we were going to a wedding: every province had dressed itself up in its prettiest skirts, with new pictures of Che, and SOCIALISM OR DEATH posted up on every pillar and restaurant and doorway, and little red-and-black flags with “26” on them pasted on every inch of space. WE FOLLOW YOU, said the signs on every wall, on every house. WE WILL NOT FAIL. Take note of our Revolutionary fervor, they were saying; pass by us, Angel of Death.

  It reminded me of what José had said once, about Pascal’s wager: the Revolution was the same, he’d said. No one knew what it was going to do next, whether it was benign, whether it was god or devil; but the safest thing was always to say that it was good. Believe in it, and at least you had a chance of coming out on the winning side; doubt it, and you were doomed from the beginning.

  When we got to Artemisa, the streets were strung with party lights, and on every door, on every wall, there was a slogan. SIEMPRE ES 26. ESTAMOS CONTIGO. VIVA FIDEL! There was a fiesta feeling everywhere, and the bars were open round the clock: like a permanent Saturday night when school is let out, a white night of the soul. Every night was prom night in Cuba in those days, but this was something special.

  “You know the Moncada?” she asked, as we wended our wa
y through the crowds, toward the main plaza and its stores. “You know every fighter in the Moncada was an artimiseño? Ramiro Valdés, Julio Díaz, Ismael Ricondo? Todo, todo, from Artemisa!”

  I’d never heard her so caught up in the Revolutionary spirit, and I couldn’t tell whether it was the day or the place that had brought it out in her, but I decided to can my Moncada spiel, and not ask her what it said about the Revolution that its great heroic moment was a fiasco in which the rebels were slaughtered, and their leader himself, Fidel, had left his glasses at home. This was not the moment for that: every year, the anniversary of the Revolution was celebrated in some “model town,” and this year Artemisa was the chosen one, the place where the old man would shout hoarse promises to his bride.

  Everywhere around us, people were moving. Little girls dressed up as for church, and electric bulbs running on wires above the parks, and somewhere there was a rumor that Los Van Van was going to be playing in the park. We went to Lourdes’s aunt’s house, and when she saw us, she kissed us all, and took us in, and there were shouts and cries and kisses. A few minutes later, we were out again—some ancient family feud, and some cousin asking Lourdes why she’d been to jail.

  “Okay, Richard, tonight we sleep in the street,” she said. “You learn the Cuban way.”

  We made our way back to the plaza then, and it was more packed than ever, and I didn’t know if it was a rock-concert gig or a town-hall meeting. In a bare patch of grass next to a school, someone had set up speakers, and the word was that Grupo Sierra Maestra was going to be here any minute. For now, there was some local group, pounding out salsa dance tunes, and one whole field of young Cubans wriggling in place with the moves their mothers had taught them.

  I bought a couple of beers for the girls, and we found some seats, and they began dancing, Nelida wiggling with a cabaret dancer’s frenzy, Lula moving more slowly in place, like a rich girl in a Kuwaiti disco.

  “Hey, compañero, qué pasa?” said the black man who suddenly appeared beside us, a trim, muscular guy with a close-fitting shirt: he could have passed for Pelé.

  “Hola!”

  Lula pinched my palm, and I knew what that meant: stay quiet, say nothing, this guy was trouble.

  “My name is Fredo,” he was saying, in English, and I pretended I didn’t hear him, and jived closer over to Lula. If he wanted to hit on Nelida, this was his cue.

  But he didn’t take the hint, and came moving over to us, dancing all the while, arms moving back and forth, in a leisurely, controlled way that had more power to it than sex. “Is good, no?” he said, not leaving the English. “You like this country?”

  “I dislike this guy,” Lula whispered, with her back turned. “He’s making my skin move.”

  “Hey, compañero?” he said again, smiling to the beat. “What part of Havana do you live in?”

  I kept on dancing.

  “Ah, maybe you are an extranjero. You come from Canada, maybe? Estados Unidos?”

  “South Africa,” I finally answered.

  “South Africa? What part?”

  We were dancing all the while, Lourdes in a kind of distracted way, her mind not moving with her body, Nelida in some drum-beating trance of her own, the guy in short, compact motions, like a piston.

  “You will hear Fidel tomorrow?”

  “Come on,” said Lourdes. “Let’s move.” We tried to sidle away then, and he kept following us: to run was like setting off a burglar alarm, to stay was like admitting our guilt. “Come on,” she said more urgently, and then we were snaking through the dancers, and he was beginning to follow us, and then at last Nelida came out of her spell, and grabbed his arm, and said, “Baila conmigo, niño,” and she was rubbing herself against him and puckering her lips, and we figured that that was the last we’d see of her tonight.

  That left the rest of the night before us, and nowhere to go. We couldn’t stay at her aunt’s house, and we’d let the taxi go, so there was nothing for it but waiting at the bus station for a bus to Havana they said might never come. Outside the bars and restaurants, people were sitting on steps or standing against walls, looking into the distance: the usual three-hour cola. Every house looked like a party or a Christmas cake, but there was a man watching in every entrance, and when you turned off the main drag, you stumbled into dirty puddles.

  For a while, we made a kind of makeshift home in front of a closed door, and I bought us some beers, and we cuddled and got close. But then things started getting heavy, and she got nervous, and every time I kissed her, she looked around for the security man. So we headed back to the bus station and got into the line. There was nothing to do there, as usual, but hold one another, and gossip, and wait.

  “You know, Richard, once there was a long cola, a super cola, a tremendo cola, the longest cola in the history of Cuba. And a guy came up, with a beard, wearing army clothes, and said, ‘El último?’ and they led him to the back of the line. And as soon as everyone else saw him there, they all found ways to leave the line or go back home, until the guy was alone at the front. ‘Hey,’ he said to the last guy to leave, ‘what is this line for?’ ‘Oh, it’s for leaving the island,’ the man told him.”

  I wondered why she was telling me this kind of story in a crowded place like this—on the eve of Fidel’s visit, no less—but I figured she knew what she was doing, and decided to go with it.

  “Here,” she said, as we were pushed closer together by the line. “Let me show you this.” She pulled out from her pocket her pink wallet, and, searching through it, drew out an old sad black-and-white mug shot, not much bigger than her nail.

  “Your esposo?”

  “No. My father. I never told you his story?” She stopped for a moment. “He was a Fidelista before; he loved Fidel. He used to say that Cuba was the only country that was free. That had no bosses. He went to Russia to study for him, he gave everything to the Party. And then he fell in love with a woman, and her husband found out, and this husband was in the police, and my father was sent to jail, and that was it. The one true friend of Fidel, and they let him die.

  “I believed in Fidel too, before. He had so many dreams; he was so strong; he gave himself only to his country. I was a good Pionera in school; I wrote essays about Che. But then they killed my father. And after, I told you, there was one time I was engaged. He was a good boy. Very good. Kind. Patient. Not like the others. It was my first love. And then, one day, it was like this: there was a fiesta, and there was a cola, and I was young, and I could not control myself, and the police were trying to command us, and telling women they could go first if they would go behind the wall with them for five minutes, and I got mad, and I kicked a policeman there, and they took me to prison. My esposo, he was there, and he shouted at them, and told them to go to hell, and they called him a traitor, an imperialist, and he was in jail for six months. When he came out—it was different. It was never the same again.”

  I looked at her then, and saw that it was about something more than bread and plane tickets, and as tangled as any family history. “That is why I learned English,” she went on. “That is why I love Martí. Because he wanted to do something with his life. Not only to wait, to sit, to visit a foreign country and hope that things will change. He tried to change things himself, to make things better.” She smiled up at me then, and said, “Better we kiss. You must enjoy this Cuban evening,” and she relaxed her body into mine.

  The minutes passed, the hours passed, it seemed, and the line got longer, and there was never a bus in sight. At one point—it must have been three a.m. or later—someone got out a guitar, and a few drunken boys began beating out a rhythm on the walls, and a girl started singing, and Lula joined in from where she was standing, and, in a faint, high voice, she sang boleros and then Cuban songs, and then Yoruba songs and Beatles songs and even Russian songs. The time moved more quickly then, and the cola itself became a party, with frantic strumming and the beating of walls, and voices, two or three, taking melodies for a walk. Then the bus
came, and suddenly the line, so patient, broke into ranks, and there was a scuffle, and someone shouted Hijo e’puta, and a big white guy took a swing at a black, and someone kicked at Lourdes, and hit her in the leg, and we climbed up amid the mob, and grabbed some seats, and she fell asleep in my lap as we lurched back toward Havana. It must have been five-thirty then, and the sun was just beginning to rise, but I was too wired to crash out—I had too much to think about—so I just sat there, with her head resting in my lap, stroking her hair and watching her face, and seeing the sun come up over the sugarcane, another morning-after in the glorious Revolution.

  The next day, I went back to Artemisa to shoot Fidel. I knew I could get him easily this time—the crowds weren’t as big as ten years before, and the backdrops, with all the dignitaries seated on the stage, framed by huge billboards of Lenin and Marx, would be perfect. I went early, by bus, almost as soon as I’d taken Lula home, and I took with me my Olympus OM2, the kind they don’t make anymore: small enough for me to shoot from the hip. It was a good move. There was some other guy nearby—a freelancer, from Tacoma or somewhere—who’d set up a tripod in front of the stage. He’d waited six hours to get this place, I heard him saying. But before Fidel even came out, the security guards moved over, and started hauling him away. He didn’t speak English, he said, in good Spanish, but they knew that trick, and they handed him over to a bystander who spoke English, and who explained to him, “They want to know why you are taking so many pictures.” “This is a great day for me,” he said, deciding that he did speak English, and I almost felt like cheering him on. “Fidel is my hero. All my life I have waited for this moment.” “That’s fine,” said a guard, speaking through the bystander. “Please enjoy this moment,” and he opened the back of the camera, and tore out the film.

  I got a few good shots early on—with negative space above, and room for a banner in case someone wanted to use it as a cover—and Fidel kept talking, talking, in a rolling, slow Spanish so clear even I could follow: that was his gift, I thought again, to make a declaration simple enough for even a child to understand. But pretty soon the rain began to come down, really hard, and people started filing away, or just gathered closer in circles on the muddy ground, huddled over their picnics of bread and beer. The light was going fast now, and Fidel was still standing there, gesturing, roaring, shaking his fist as he recited the year’s harvest statistics, and I decided that I’d had my moment, and began to pick my way around the puddles, and over the people sitting under plastic bags and the kids reveling in the muck.