Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

  When I got to Lourdes’s home, I saw a Havanautos car parked outside, and my heart missed a beat. The main door was locked, so I sat on the stoop and waited. A few kids, a couple of mothers, some guys in shiny guayaberas. Then, at last, a man came out—he looked like a government official—and got in the rental car and drove away, and my heart came to life again. The street hadn’t changed at all—it was off the Pan Am circuit: pockmarked walls, gutted windows, dirty clothes hanging out of balconies. Bahia in a shotgun marriage with Bombay.

  When finally a woman opened the door from indoors, I raced up the broad stairs and knocked and knocked. The door opened up, and it was her mother, rings around her eyes, in curlers and a white print dress.

  “Richard!” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. “Qué pasa? Cómo estás? Café?” Cari was sitting at the table, and when she saw me, a warmth came to her face too, and I kissed her, and held her hand, and we sat around the table, talking.

  “You have heard the news? Lourdes told you?” her mother asked.

  “What news?”

  “About the marriage.” I looked back at her. “You don’t know?” She got up, with a groan, and labored over to the same shelf where she kept her glasses and her souvenirs. She pulled out a photo album—one of those Far Eastern things, from Vietnam perhaps, with smiling pink kitties all over it—and opened it up.

  “Mira, Richard. Lourdes’s sister. You remember her?”

  Inside, there were pictures, of a party mostly, a small, sad party in some tiny kitchen: of Lourdes’s mother, and her man, dancing with their arms around each other’s waists; and Lourdes’s sister, thick and mustached, sitting on the knees of some mobster-style guy in his early forties, with bright balloons behind them on the wall; and some bread on the table, and bottles of cider here and there. Their faces in the flashlight glare looked otherworldly almost, red dots in each pupil, and later there were more pictures, outdoors, of the balding mobster lying on top of the sister on some grass, kissing her on the lips, and more dancing in front of red balloons.

  “This is her novio?”

  “Claro. They will be married.”

  “I thought it was her uncle.”

  “Uncle? No. This is Giuseppe. He will marry her soon. He brings us cheese, and wine, and balloons.”

  “So she is happy?”

  “Cómo no? We are all so happy. He is a good man, very kind to her. He works in a factory in Italy, and he comes here already three times to see her. The government says she cannot get a visa now—she is only nineteen. But when she is twenty-one, she will be free.”

  “And she isn’t sad?”

  “Look at her face.”

  It was true: she looked as happy as if she were marrying Robert Redford. Happier than I’d ever seen her sister. In the arms of this balding mobster.

  The marriage kind of took the wind out of my sails, and I could feel the room fill up with expectation. It was as if all the questions Lourdes’s mother wanted to ask, and all the things Cari was waiting to say, were everywhere around us, hovering.

  “I guess I’d better make tracks. If Lourdes comes back, tell her she can find me in the Colina. Today. Tomorrow I’ll be leaving.”

  “O-ka, Richard,” said the mother.

  “Richard,” said Cari, touching me shyly on the arm. “Can you help me?”

  “With what?”

  “This.”

  She motioned me to follow her into the room she shared with Lourdes. She gestured for me to sit on the bed. She walked across the room and locked the door. “It is safe here,” she said.

  The room was dark and musty; the sheets had traces of the perfume I’d given them. She came toward me on the bed.

  “Cari …”

  “It’s nothing. Just this,” she said, and I saw her turn toward the dresser, and open the top drawer. From where I sat, I could see a bottle of rum, some old tubes of lipstick, a stash of papers. She brought the stash over. There was a withered snapshot of the day she’d spent in Varadero once, with a Spanish businessman. One of her fifteenth birthday at the Tropicana, a teenage Lourdes smiling by her side. There were scraps of notes, a map someone had given her once of Belgrade. Then she pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.

  I saw the par avion rectangle of France.

  “Richard, will you read this for me?”

  “I’ll try. I don’t have much French, but I guess it’s more than yours.”

  I read it over quickly. What could I say?

  Cari was looking at me bright-eyed. “Please tell me, Richard. What does he say?”

  “He says he misses you, and always thinks of you, and the times you spent together.”

  “Claro. So do I.”

  “He says that the weather is very sunny in Lyon, and he is making a trip to the mountains with his friends.”

  “A trip?” she said, and she sounded worried.

  “He says he keeps your picture next to his bed.”

  “And he will be coming back soon?”

  “He doesn’t say when.”

  Cari’s eyes were filling up.

  “But he says that he loves me?”

  “Yes. He says that he loves you very much.” I handed the letter back to her, and she folded it up carefully, and put it back in the stack. It was one of the first times I was almost glad that my job had taught me how to lie.

  Lourdes found me that afternoon, calling from the telephone in her neighbor’s room, and when I arrived to meet her, in her kitchen, she was all lit up like I’d never seen her before. I tried to maneuver her back to Vedado, or into a colectivo, or somewhere where we could be private, but it wasn’t me that made her excited this time, and it wasn’t her sister’s wedding, and it wasn’t the clothes I’d brought for her. It was something else.

  “Richard, I want to tell you something. For your job. Follow me.” We walked out onto the balcony outside the kitchen, and then up some steep stairs, tricky as in some old Tibetan monastery, up to her roof.

  “Mira, Richard. My home!” It was a bare space, enclosed on the roof, with cardboard for walls and a huge straw bag on the floor and a broken wooden table in the middle. “Later, this will be my home. My—how do you say it?—studio. Next time I will show you. The private world of Lourdes!”

  I took it all in, and made the right noises.

  “I will have videos, I will have music, I will have everything here. My own private Cuba.”

  “Nobody surrenders here,” I said.

  “Exacto. But, Richard, I want to tell you something, something very important. You can tell this to your magazine. Tell this to Jorge Bush. You can say you know this from a true Cubana. Señorita X. Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. There is a group now, a group clandestino, and they are everywhere. They are all lovers of Fidel. If you say something, if you say, ‘I am not happy’ or ‘I want a life’ or ‘Why can we not find food?’—if you say anything, in the street, even in your home, they can hear you. And they can kill you.”

  “Kill you?”

  “Of course. I know a boy who was killed by this group. Anyone can be in this group—young people, old people, my mother, anyone.”

  “But it’s always been like this.”

  “No. Before, they could only talk to the police. Now they have guns. They can shoot you—right here, in the street! They can do anything, and the police will not touch them!”

  “So you keep quiet.”

  “Yes. But it is not so easy. So sometimes I go to the cathedral and tell El Señor. And now I tell you.” Behind us, some wild merengue music from the Dominican almost blotted out her words: the whole country seemed blue and white on this scalded afternoon. Blinding light, and cool blue distances. “The police know everything,” she went on. “But I tell you only. I tell this to no one else. Not even a stranger. Maybe I tell him, and he tells another friend, and he tells his novia, and …” She drew a line across her throat.

  “But why are they forming now, these groups?”

  “Because they are afraid.
They know the Cubans in America, in Miami, are going to invade. On the eighteenth, no? So this group is ready. I know this, Richard: my cousin is a member.”

  “Marielita?”

  “No. You remember the boy in Artemisa? In my aunt’s house. He is not a true Fidelista, but he must join, because of his job, because of his family. I did not know about this group, but he informed me.”

  “But I thought you said a woman told you.”

  “Oh!” She slapped her forehead theatrically. “I forgot. That is what I had to say. To protect him!”

  Murkier and murkier. “And Fidel knows about this?”

  “Fidel knows everything. You remember Ochoa? From 1976, he was sending drugs to North America. For thirteen years. You think Fidel doesn’t know? His best friend, a Hero of the Revolution, his old compañero, is selling drugs to the yanquis, and he doesn’t know? El Máximo knows how many liters of milk come from every cow in Camaguëy, but he doesn’t know his friend is making business?”

  “Cool it, Lula—someone may hear.” I began to think she was getting off on this stuff, or this was what they did to while away the afternoons. I remembered how I’d seen the kids in Prague and Leningrad make dramas of their lives to fill up all the empty spaces. Or maybe she just wanted to make herself more attractive to a sentimental foreigner with a nose for news.

  “What can they do? What more can I lose? I have nothing. I have no food, no clothes, no freedom. I have no life, no job, no husband. What more can they take away from me? Only in this way I am free. I have nothing.

  “Mira, Richard”—she put a soft hand on my leg—“I tried once to sail to America. After five minutes they caught me. They have this trick. Someone—maybe someone from school, or a neighbor—comes and says, ‘Today a boat is leaving for Miami. Near Cojímar. At twelve o’clock.’ You go there, and they are waiting for you.” She made the gesture of a manacle around her wrist. “After five minutes they catch Lourdes. And for thirteen years they do not know that Ochoa is selling drugs?”

  “So what about it? Where does that put you?”

  “I need to leave, right now.”

  “You have plans?”

  “Maybe. I thought before maybe you could help me. But I understand now you will never marry me.”

  “Why not marry someone else?”

  “No. I want only you.”

  “I know,” I said, and put my arm upon her shoulder, but our lives were not what she wanted to talk about right now. “Look, Richard. Give me your notebook.” I handed her the pad I kept for captions, and she wrote down the names of the secret groups on a piece of paper. Then she had me read them out again, read them back to me herself, and made sure I got them by heart. Then she tore out the page and put a match to it. It looked like a lighted joint, this poison for the mind, burning itself up on a Havana afternoon.

  In the evening, after a dinner we did not have, we sat on the stoop, taking long swigs from the bottle. I didn’t like to see how quickly she fell into this routine: getting a bottle from next door, bringing it down to the stoop, wiping the top before she swallowed. In every gesture I saw a whole trail of nights like this, on and on, in both directions, taking her through ten years in a week.

  “My mother told you about my brother?”

  “Your sister, you mean?”

  “No, my brother, Arturo.”

  “The one in New Jersey?”

  “Yes. She didn’t tell you? Maybe she does not want to think of this. She thinks of him, and then she cannot sleep, she goes crazy with these thoughts. So she talks about my sister’s wedding, and tries to feel happy. But inside, she is always thinking of Arturo. That is why I asked you for this Tylenol. To help my mother sleep.”

  “He’s in prison?”

  “Muerto.”

  That was all she said, but I could figure out the rest: what happens to a kid without any English, who washes up in America from Cuba, ends up with the gangs, gets into running drugs or hard-line protection jobs.

  “My aunt is a millionaire,” she said—she still believed that—“and she does not help him. She has two Chevrolets and color TV and swimming pool. But she is an American now. So she never thinks about the family. Only money.”

  “You Cubans seem to have a good eye on the dollar too.”

  “Of course,” she said, her words already slurred. “The dollar is our god. We make love to the dollar. We suck the dollar. We want to marry the dollar. But we have nothing else to do. Anything we do in Cuba, we are a traitor—or a loser. If we work hard, if we never work, it is the same. El Caballo has invited us to a party where there is no music and no drinks. And if we do not come, we will be dead.”

  “Señor Bush will invite you to a party where there are plenty of drinks, and everyone is fighting for them. And if you’re not quicker than the next guy, you get nothing.”

  “But if you are quicker?—if you have a mind?—then the world is yours, right?”

  “Right, Lourdes,” I said, and stopped the conversation with my mouth.

  She put her arm around my shoulder, woozy from the drink, red-eyed, and looked at me in a kind of blur.

  “I love you, Richard,” she said.

  “I love you, Lourdes.” And then I figured it was the moment. While she was soft like this, defenses down. Not exactly the proposal I’d planned in Varadero, but something a little more practical.

  “Listen, Lula, I have a plan.”

  “I know,” she said, eyes sparking a little.

  “No, not like that. A plan for us. For our future.”

  “Your next trip?”

  “Your next trip. How would you like to get married?”

  That stopped her in her tracks. “I think I am drinking too much rum. Say it again.”

  “Do you want to get married?”

  She looked at me again, her eyes more in focus now.

  “Not to me. I mean, to me, in our hearts, but on paper, to someone else.”

  “What are you saying, Richard?” She felt my forehead. “You are sick, I think. Too much rum?”

  “Listen: it happens all the time. I choose a friend—Hugo, maybe—and we go to Cayo Largo, with you. You marry him. Then he gets you a passport—and a visa. You go to join him in England, and I meet you there.”

  “But why? Why do you not marry me?”

  “It’s not so easy. I’m American. I’m here on a different kind of visa. And I’m still married.”

  “You can divorce.”

  “It’s not that easy. Divorce is something your government is better at than mine.”

  “So you want me to marry Hugo?”

  “For one day only.”

  “And we go to England?”

  “Right. And I pick you up there. It is a way for us to be together. For you to see New York.”

  “And Hugo? He likes this idea?”

  “I haven’t asked him yet. I will tell him this weekend in Santiago.”

  It wasn’t the way I’d planned it, to be asking her like this, on a stoop, with a bottle of rum between her legs, her breath stinking, I on my way out of town. It wasn’t Varadero. But it was practical.

  “So, Richard,” she said, taking another long swig. “You will make the wedding photograph?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But all the pictures will be private ones. And the groom will not be in any one of them.”

  She kissed me then, mostly on the lips, and she waved her bottle blindly at the dark.

  I hadn’t managed to hook up with José that day, to square away the details of our honeymoon, but the next morning, when I went to the Havanautos office next to the Capri, as soon as I sat down in the cola, next to some Swiss granola kids, I heard a voice behind me. “I think you get the ’54 Plymouth. Is better for you.”

  It was José—who else?—working some Irish guys, and when I turned round, he flashed me his smile. “So what are you up to, my friend?”

  “A little this, a little that,” he answered, leaving the Irishmen to their calculations. “Capi
talismo, más o menos. Look, I tell my friend to give you his best car—you would like a Mercedes?—and we go and have a drink in the Capri.”

  Half the hotels on the island were being tarted up, or closed off, for foreigners, so we sat in the lobby, among the Vegas statues, and ordered Taoro mango juice.

  “So the car’s no problem?”

  “No problem, Richard. Look, you want an Oldsmobile, I can get for you. My friend has a friend who sends them to Ja-my-ca. Thirty thousand pesos. Only five thousand in your money. If you want, I tell him, he shows you the car, you give the money, and it’s yours. Or, if you want, he keeps it here, drives it every week, keeps it clean, until the old man goes. Then you can come and get it.”

  “It sounds like your plan for Lourdes.”

  “Sure. Women and cars, that is what everyone wants from Cuba now. The cars are old, the women are young, both are worth much money. But anything, if you want, I can get for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So what is happening with Lourdes?”

  “That’s what I wanted to fix up with you.”

  “Sure. No problem. My friend can do it. Twenty-four hours, forty-eight hours. ‘While you wait,’ as you say in America.”

  “So what’s the deal?”

  “You have a friend?”

  “Yeah. He doesn’t know the whole plan yet, but he flies in today, from Shannon. He has a reservation at the Inglaterra, but we’re going to bag that, drive down to Santiago as soon as possible. A couple of days alone on the way to talk things over. Then we come back here on Monday, and there’s still five days for Cayo Largo.”

  “Is good. Look, I make the plan for you. When you go to Santiago, you visit my father, okay? You will like him. He speaks English, I think. I have never heard it, but he learned from his father in Jamaica. He was in the hills with Fidel. So you stay one night at my father’s house.” I wondered how many fathers José had, strategically placed around the island.

  “Okay.”

  “Then you wait, two months, three months, I think. You don’t see her, you don’t talk to her. Then she gets her papers. And it is the same as you are husband and wife.”