Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

  “How about you?”

  “Me? I’m fine. Today I make a party at my house. Lobster and champagne. You come at eight o’clock, okay?”

  “No time. I’ve got to make more pictures before I go to the wedding. But what about you in the future? When are you going to leave?”

  For once, José looked taken aback. For once, he paused before he spoke. “I will go when the time is right. For now, I wait. My friend makes your wedding in Cayo Largo, I help him, maybe you give him fifty dollars, and a hundred dollars for me. That will help. Then I make business.”

  “Here?”

  “Sure. I tell you something, Richard.” He leaned in closer, and put his hand on my back as if he were telling me a dirty joke. “I go to the American Embassy before, maybe three months before, and I tell them I was in prison, four years: a graduate of Combinado. So now I want to leave. Political asylum. This guy there—a fat guy, a Chicano, speaks good Spanish—he tells me, ‘You stay here. We need more guys like you. You stay here, you watch the streets, then later we’ll take care of you.’ ”

  “And your passport from Bolivia?”

  “Sure. I can get it anytime. Dominican too. But I want to make more of a dream: maybe I go to Barcelona, open up a coffee shop, a library—no, a bookshop, right? Is like what Pepe—Martí—says. ‘It is a torment of man that to see well he must be wise. And then forget that he is wise.’ ”

  I fixed up a car then—a Nissan, less conspicuous than a Benz, and less likely to attract unwanted friends from both sides of the fence—and headed for the airport. Hugo’s plane was due in at 7:50, and I wanted to get going as soon as possible, we had so much to do.

  It wasn’t hard to spot him on the sidewalk: the only guy I knew who’d come to Cuba in a cricket sweater and an old boy’s tie, with a Marks & Spencer suitcase in his hand. He looked like a district officer sent out to check on the natives. But when he saw me, he smiled so broadly, and waved at me so warmly, that I almost felt bad, to be thinking of these clothes as his wedding dress.

  “Very good to see you again,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Here too. How was the flight?”

  “Oh, not too bad. Russian service is not so different from British Rail.”

  “Are you wasted?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say so. Slept quite well on the plane, actually. Ready to go anywhere.”

  Even to your altar, I thought, and then I started up, and we drove back toward town, and then hit the Autopista and drove along the sea as the sun began to set. Later, when it got dark, we cut inland, toward the interior. The small country roads, after the main highway to the beach, were black, pitch black, no lights along their margins, no lights on bicycles or trucks, nothing but a line of fields, and sometimes, out of nowhere, a figure all in white standing by the road. Who were these people, standing by an empty road, at dead of night, alone? Hitchhikers in a country without private cars? Santeros out to placate the spirits at a crossroads? Taxi girls working the back roads? “Highwaymen,” is what Hugo decided on, ready to perform some kind of nighttime robbery.

  I didn’t want to drive too far that night—I needed time to talk to him, especially while he was still a little out of it—so we stopped at a hotel in Trinidad, a big gaudy place by the sea, sleepy, haunted by absences, its bright corridors and party-colored dining room waiting for tour groups that would never come. Outside, near the pool, some Italian boy was singing “It Ain’t Me, Babe” to a guitar, while his girlfriend lay back on a deck chair. A Euro couple or two were in the bar, listening to a canned version of “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” while the locals gathered in one corner to watch Spanish porno movies on a VCR. We had a room overlooking the sea—like Varadero again, or Cayo Largo—and when we checked in, Hugo opened the terrace door, and stretched out his arms.

  “Can hardly believe it. Woke up this morning, and I was in my flat in Winchester, after a night at the Wykeham Arms. Now here I am next to the Caribbean. Doesn’t feel quite real.”

  “You feeling the flight?”

  “No. It’s not too bad, actually. I’m rather coming to life.”

  “Let’s hit the town, then,” I said, and we went down to the pool for a drink, the faint sound of “Girl from the North Country” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” carrying through the night toward us.

  “So what prompted you to decide so suddenly on a reunion?”

  “I don’t know. Impulse, I guess. And the fact I can’t get the place out of my system.”

  “By place, I suspect you mean Lourdes.”

  “That too.”

  “In fact, I’m rather surprised you’re not spending the time with her.”

  “I’ll see her. She’ll probably meet us in Santiago in a couple of days.” I decided to play things quiet right now, just to plant a seed or two.

  “She’s such a sweet girl.”

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” I waved away a couple of boys who were about to offer us their friendship. “You really like her, don’t you?”

  “Well, there’s no denying her charm.”

  “I know. The thing is, charm can be used to good effect.”

  “Better that, I should think, than its opposite.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Don’t you ever think of marrying her?” This was all going way too fast.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is, one gathers, the usual thing.”

  “Yeah, but I’m married already. And with my job, it isn’t easy. Traveling all the time, I hardly have a home, and I’m not pulling down what you’d call a steady income.”

  “Hardly insurmountable obstacles.”

  “You’re the type she should marry, Hugo.”

  “Oh, of course. Mr. Glamour and Excitement.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “Thank you. Here’s to marriage.” And he raised his glass of orange juice and toasted me.

  “To the Queen.”

  “The Queen,” he said solemnly, and we toasted again.

  On the next day, it was more of the same. We drove through avenues of sugarcane, through long, dusty roads empty of cars but swarming with cats and chickens and dogs and kids on bicycles. Sometimes we stopped at broken gas stations with ropes across their aisles under signs that said OPEN 24 HOURS, and sometimes I felt I was in New Mexico or somewhere: the squat pumps, an empty office, a sign on the road, ESTAMOS CONTIGO.

  We passed through provincial towns that morning, with long lines of yellow and green and sky-blue houses, lined up along shuttered cobbled streets, like in Bolivia or Honduras, except the people here moved with a slow and sensuous African gait. There was something Nigerian about these towns: the bouncing-ball rhythm of the boys, the black girls with their sultry Yoruba walk, the giant florid palms. And there was something Spanish about the African rhythms too: something gilded and inert, in the churches and the lines. The way everyone hurried slowly, and moved in place with laid-back fervor.

  On the road, the signs were almost too good to be true. SOCIALISM TRANSFORMS OUR LIVES, said the billboards, presiding over empty fields and dead, deserted, one-lane roads. ALL ROADS LEAD TO VISA, said a newer one, and I remembered how, the one time I’d managed to use a Visa card here, I’d been hassled for months by registered letters from some bank in Mexico. Sometimes the signs said: SANTIAGO 969 KM. Then we would drive for ten minutes, toward Santiago, and they’d say: SANTIAGO 973 KM. The whole country moving backward, further and further from its goal.

  “Aren’t you going to take any pictures?” Hugo asked. “I would have thought these would be perfect.”

  “Too perfect,” I said, and it was true: that was the problem with the place sometimes. The symbols came too easily. Everything was just too ready-made. There was a girl on a balcony at dusk, looking forlom, and the sign across from her, half broken, was for the Imperial Hotel, and next to it another sign, in neon, with some of the letters blinking on and off: XX SIGLO—Twentieth Century. If I sent that to my editors, they’d think it wa
s a setup. The ironies here were too much to believe.

  Innocence, blindfolded, in a city of the dead? Give me a break.

  We stopped for lunch at a small town, wooden cash registers in the stores, like in some forgotten frontier town, and salty old dogs in John Lee Hooker glasses sitting on park benches. A bus, with PIONEROS on the side, sat along the square, not moving, and the little girls—young Communists—by the windows combed their hair by the reflections. The signs around them said: VICTORIA DE PUEBLO. TE SIGO PORQUE TE QUIERO.

  Outside, in the plaza, campesinos in black gaucho hats, and skinny, shirtless boys, and the girls gathering in the street to look at the foreigners, while the horse-drawn carts clopped by. A line was already forming outside the Santa Fe Confectionery door, two hours before it opened, and in the Blue Sky shop, there was, above two dusty cans, and a row of empty shelves, a sign that said: SOCIALISM IS THE ONLY WAY, AND I AM A SOCIALIST—FIDEL.

  A couple of policemen stopped by in a Lada to have a chat, and when they saw we weren’t trading any dollars, they drove away, disappointed. A young waiter came up to ask us about Bush’s beliefs, and the latest developments of perestroika. Then came the daily downpour, a hot wind blowing through the open doors, and the darkened rooms where men were sitting at empty desks, and then the supermarket, where all the shelves were bare except for four bottles of baby cream, and along the verandas where the abuelas sat and rocked back and forth on their chairs. A girl—the local beauty, I guessed—with acid-washed jeans and a bare, golden midriff, came out to us in the rain, cradling a puppy in her arms. “Hola,” she called, her sheer black top clinging to her cocoa skin. “Where are you from?” “England.” “I like England,” she said, and looked up at us from where she stood, showing off her downcast eyes.

  Then, as suddenly, the rain stopped, and the wind took over. The trees bristled and shook in the gusts, and the people scattered back to houses like leaves. The plaza was empty again, and soon it was dark, and our lights caught the eyes of goats as we passed, or sometimes a lone bicyclist. We stopped in Camaguëy, in a hotel where the guys in the lobby were watching video nasties from Hong Kong, and the hard-currency lovelies were taking turns walking across the lobby, shooting us saucy, languid looks.

  Dinner would be a three-hour wait, we heard, and besides, there was no food, so we took to the road again, in the dark. Occasionally, very occasionally, we were blinded by the headlights of an oncoming jeep; sometimes we passed burning torches in the back of horse-drawn carts. The road signs were impossible to read now—no one knew where anyone was going—and, in any case, the roads were completely unmarked, so we were like blind men in an unlit house.

  When we got to Holguín, we stopped at a hotel on a hill, a huge luxury hotel full of no one except a few Argentine guys on the lookout for girls and maybe a Spaniard or two dreaming of condos. The restaurant was open, the man at the desk said, but it didn’t have any food; there was a party by the pool tonight—lots of music.

  I don’t know, maybe I was tired then, of seeing the country slowly winding down, and losing its luster and energy, and maybe I was tired of hearing the people talking more and more of Franco, and waiting out the long, painful death of a dictatorship. And sometimes, when the country sparked back to life, it was saddest of all: like an old man who just won’t let go of his bravado. “Caramba!” he shouts to all the muchachas. “How about a dance? You know, not many years ago, all the chiquitas called me El Sabroso, El Tigre. I had more girls than you’ve had beers. I was the king of the city then.” But now, when he talks, he gets red in the face, and loses his breath, and you can see where he puts shoe polish in his hair. “You know this Ava Gardner: even she wanted to go with me when she was here. Ay, how can I tell you? The way the girls lined up then, over in Miramar, to get a dance with me. I could have had anyone I wanted—rubias, chinas. Mulattas too.” And now people laugh in embarrassment when he’s around, and find excuses to slip away, or let their eyes stray around the room as he talks of all his conquests.

  Maybe it was all that, and the long drive, and the dark, and the sense that we were about to hit something, but something in me snapped when we got to the pool and the whole chorus of “No hay nada” started up again. “You know, that’s what I love about all these Communist countries,” I said, and I could tell my voice was too loud. “They have all these Three-Year Plans and Five-Year Plans and Ten-Year Plans, and they can’t even plan tomorrow afternoon. They’re just making it up as they go along. They’re treating Marx the way the Southern Baptists treat the Bible. I mean, here you are, you’ve got a funky tropical island in the Caribbean, hot, spicy, all sex and rum and color, and you try to get it to dance to some ideas laid down by a nineteenth-century German in the British Museum. Might as well tell you Brits to go Rasta.”

  “But you’ve got to concede that the people here are terribly warmhearted.”

  “Sure. But warmhearted also means hotheaded. It’s the one thing the government has achieved. They’ve got the whole island united, just the way they want it, but they’re all united against the government. Every compañero helping out every other compañero to find a way to beat the system. They’re all lined up against a common enemy, but the enemy isn’t the Yankees, it’s Fidel. He’s made a whole island of Revolutionaries against the Revolution. It’s like the island is up against the system.”

  “Cuba and the night, so to speak.”

  “That’s right. You’ve been reading Marti?”

  “Well, it’s a funny thing. You remember I was telling you about my uncle?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Used to be here in the fifties. Well, I rooted around some more in my aunt’s house. Turns out he was working for the guerrillas.”

  “Fidel and Company?”

  “Exactly. When they were still just starting. I suppose he was one of those imperial types who’d been trained to go forth and do good deeds for the provinces. And with the Empire gone, he came over here.”

  “And …”

  “Well, I think it all ended rather badly. His girlfriend turned out to be a government informer. And so he rather left with his tail between his legs. But it did get me to rethink things a bit. And I found some books of Martí among his papers. He really was quite an extraordinary character. You know he went into battle armed only with a revolver and a collection of speeches by Cicero?”

  “Sounds like one of you guys.”

  “Maybe so. But I do think there was something terribly stirring about him. Look, I’ve got one of the books here. ‘His whole life was like the dawn of a wedding night.’ ” It was the tribute to Emerson again. “ ‘What raptures filled his soul, what visions swam before his eyes!’ ” I saw where he had made some of his black hieroglyphics next to a line about how friendship, for Emerson, “had the solemnity of twilight in the forest.” “And you know this one?” he was going on. “ ‘The desire to rise above oneself is an unrelenting human longing.’ ”

  “That’s great, Hugo. But where did all that get him? Where did all the noble sentiments end up? The first time he went into battle, he got shot.”

  “But his memory is all around, his precedent.”

  “Sure. Giving Fidel a rationale for more heroic blundering.”

  “The thing is, he completely believed in all these things. He really had conviction.”

  “A typically Cuban conviction.” I thought back then to the talks we’d had those first nights in the hotels. It sounded like we were on opposite sides of the table now: that was how Cuba worked on you. Suddenly you found yourself taking up the same position you’d been arguing against the day before.

  I watched him sip his beer. “I mean, after all the pretty words, what comes next? What about the reality?”

  “Well, I’ll grant you that the main problem for Castro is that he did so much so early. So dramatically. He pulled off so many miracles when he took over that everyone expects him to keep on doing it all his life. Even he expects it, I suspect. Having seen lightning strike
once, he can’t believe that it won’t happen again. So he keeps trying to pull a new rabbit out of the hat.”

  “And while he’s playing with his hankie, ten million people are starving.”

  “I know. It’s always easy, don’t you think, to sympathize with people who are victims of circumstance? But much harder to find sympathy for those who are the victims of themselves?” He gave a sharp laugh.

  “Like you and Carmen, you mean?” and I don’t know why I was trying to hurt him.

  “Not really. She’s probably married to a solicitor now.”

  “But you have no one to blame for all that except yourself.”

  “I know. It’s not as if I haven’t realized that.”

  “And now you’re back in school, just the way you started.”

  “In a manner of speaking. I did actually try to be an antiquarian bookseller for a while, but it wasn’t really my thing. So I thought I might as well go back to Winchester, and do some teaching there while I was making up my mind. Path of least resistance, so to speak.”

  Just then something in me, and it wasn’t the best part, just wanted to shove his face in it: to bring out my black portfolio and show him all the pictures I’d taken that the editors wouldn’t run. Because they were too powerful. The refugees in their burned-out shacks in Somalia, their babies two or three days from the grave. The girls in the ruins of Smoky Mountain, not yet past puberty, offering blow jobs for their dinner. The kids in the townships getting necklaced for choosing the wrong girl to date. Here he was, worrying about Latin adverbs, while half the world was starving, or living amid war and poverty and oppression. I don’t know why I suddenly felt like that: maybe I was angry Hugo wasn’t more like me. Maybe I was angry I wasn’t more like him.

  The next day, when I got up, it was as if the storm had passed, and blown through town, and I felt as open and cloudless as the sky. On the last leg of the drive, I decided just to pass the time with war stories: about the time I’d done acid on the beach in Thailand, with a girl, and we were making love in our hut, and then I’d heard helicopters overhead, and I thought I was freaking out, and I ran out to the beach, and there were all these Hueys, and a beach littered with the corpses of dogs. About the time I’d been on patrol with the Tigers in Sri Lanka, and been reported missing at sea for two weeks. About the time I got kidnapped in the Bekaa for six hours before they decided I wasn’t valuable enough for them. I guess I was talking to myself as much as him.