Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

  He paused to sip his drink. “You remember my cousin? She is not my cousin; she is my wife’s sister. She meets this man from Spain, very rich. Every time he comes to Cuba, he takes her everywhere, like his wife. Brings her TV, camera, anything. He tells Fidel, ‘If she don’t come with me, I don’t sign the contract.’ ”

  “And what does she think?”

  “She thinks it’s good. He is old, he is sick—maybe he won’t last so long. So what is the problem in giving him some happiness before he dies?”

  “And inheriting all his cash.”

  “Sure. Is better like this. Everyone is happy. Who is hurt?”

  “Only the truth. Trust. That kind of stuff.”

  “Richard.” José looked pained. “You are talking like a Communist. What are these words? Who can eat truth? Who can live on trust? These people are human, they need to live, to love, and you are talking only of ideas. If you love these ideas so much, go to a library and make love to a book. Take your trust to a love hotel, and do it up the ass.”

  “Touché,” I said, and then I thought that maybe I wasn’t in the best position to be talking about trust and truth.

  Being with José reminded me that there was nowhere I could turn: everything took me back to her. I tried to concentrate on nothing but my work, but everything was weird and jumpy now, like an old machine slowly winding down: the whole country was like one of its ancient cars, stalled, or hardly moving, a dinosaur jalopy running on empty, and being coaxed by patience and resourcefulness and sheer willpower alone to bump and stumble along a street where all the lights were down.

  René Arocha, the star pitcher, had defected. The Russians were all gone now, replaced by South Americans here to polish up their name as Latin lovers. The mannequins in the former Sears downtown were all naked. And the worse things got, the more talkative the streets became. THERE ARE NO TRAITORS HERE, said the signs now, all around, and THE REVOLUTION IS WITH YOU FOREVER, just above the Quixote, where men were selling hand-painted birthday cards. Downtown, one whole wall showed the many faces of the Revolution, beginning with Pride and Jealousy, and moving to Upset and Disenchantment. The last space showed THE BEAUTY OF SACRIFICE. The less the people had, the government kept telling them, the more they had to be proud of; they were the world leaders now in self-denial.

  Outside the National Museum, I saw they were planning a Festival of Monologuists. The government might be sinking, I thought, but it hadn’t lost its sense of humor.

  Finally, I could take it no longer; could take no more of the dead cats lying along the sidewalk, and the long lines of kids, in the dark, going into nightclubs that didn’t have any drinks; could take no more of the strains of “La Cucaracha” drifting across from the Rincón del Feelings and the waking up at dawn to find bloodstains on the sheet. Everywhere I looked, it seemed like I was seeing lovers, pressing themselves against walls, or murmuring fierce promises, or taking themselves off into the dark; lovers who looked the way that we must have looked. Maybe that was the definition of love, I thought: to feel yourself so different, and so blessed, that you hardly knew you looked like all the rest. To be so taken out of yourself that you hardly cared that you were living inside a postcard, or a cliché. To forget about the filters and the light meters.

  There should be a law, I thought, against long kisses in the street.

  The next day, as soon as I got up, I went into the Cubana office and showed them the letter I always carried from my doctor, explaining how the malaria was recurrent, and how, at its outbreak, everything must be done to get me to the nearest hospital. They talked and fretted over the letter, but I knew that there was no malaria treatment left in the local hospitals, and finally, shaking their heads, and muttering, they put me on the next plane out. A few hours later, I was back in Mexico City, among fake rubias in furs and with plastic all around.

  It was really late by the time I got back to the city, and in the dark, in the cab in to my apartment, I could hardly see the portrait of Martí up on 116th Street, in Harlem, right near the Hotel Theresa, where Fidel and his friends used to stay, carrying live chickens and shocking the country with their voodoo houngan tricks. I could hardly make out the Salvation and Deliverance Church next door. I could hardly read the Spanish signs.

  I rifled my mailbox as soon as I got into the lobby of my building, and there was an airmail envelope there, from England, and I tore it open where I stood, and took in the page of neat, curled writing.

  Querido, inolvidado Richard,

  Free at last! All my life I have waited for this time, and now, thanks to you and to Hugo, I am free. How can I thank you? When will I see you? When will I hold you between my legs?

  Hugo is so kind to me, like a father almost: a true gentleman, like some knight from Quixote. We laugh together often and we often talk of you. But where are you now, Richard? I never know. And when will you come here and take me to your castle in New York? I wait for you, I wait. My body waits, my mouth waits, my darkness and my silence wait. Even the spaces between my toes wait. I am free now, Richard; free to be your Lourdes.

  Su propria Lula

  I didn’t know how that made me feel; I checked for the postmark, and found it had been sent three weeks before—must have arrived just after I took off. I read it in the elevator again, going up; I went into my apartment, and put on the light, and read it again. It was everything I wanted and had been hoping for; but was this the first letter or the second? Why had she not written before? Did she really know nothing of Cari?

  I tried to sleep, but the sleep wouldn’t come. My head was electric, full of light; it was buzzing like the streets of Vedado in the old days, with a kind of juiced-up, revved-up, open-all-night buzz. I got up and turned on the light again, and all around the room I saw the pictures I’d taken of Cari: Cari sitting on the beach, Cari with her back to me, Cari with her blue shirt slipping off her shoulders. Cari like a Playmate of the Month.

  I couldn’t take much more of this—I always liked to develop some prints and put them up around the room before deciding which ones to send the editors—and I figured it was easier for me to leave the prints than for the prints to leave me. So I walked out into the streets of Manhattan in the dark, and walked and walked, almost like I was in Cuba again, along Tenth Avenue, past bars and all-night diners and black transsexuals tottering on their heels outside the leather bars. Rough stuff, not shown on TV Martí. The steaming potholes, the cafés where the cabbies went, the roughvoiced come-ons of the Korean girls.

  When the sun began slanting through the concrete canyons, lighting up a window here and there, pinpointing panes of gold, I headed back and tried to sleep again, but still I couldn’t do it. I got some Valium, and emptied them on the counter, but my system wasn’t taking them right now. I could see all the images around the walls from where I lay, and they went round and round in my head, like a carousel on automatic fast-forward, out of control, jerking on and on, and I couldn’t stop its turning.

  I tried to count shadows, or to remember acronyms, or to go over every long night in my life, but all I could recall was the night on the beach when she said, “Tonight I will show you a different way of making love,” and making love that night was like walking through the streets of Miramar in the dusk, the trees caught in the last of the golden light. Slow and sinuous, a long, slow walk, past dark, shuttered houses, and underneath old lampposts, and down empty avenues, to the sea. All night, the two of us, with all the time in the world, walking through Miramar in the dark.

  But that got me to thinking of what she might be doing with him, and how she might be showing Hugo the same kinds of love, and then, when I couldn’t control the thoughts any longer, I got up again, and started talking to her in my Sony, imagining her next to me, pretending I could whisper to her, and hear her voice beside me, and call her by all our secret names. But somehow it didn’t work. The more I talked, the more I waited for her to say my name. I waited so long it hurt; it was like calling a lover at home, at two a.
m., and just hearing the phone ring and ring and ring.

  Around noon, the day’s mail arrived, and there was another letter from her, sent ten days after the last, and I picked it up, and looked at the stamps, and smelled the envelope, and imagined how she looked when she was licking it, and how she ran her tongue along the back of the envelope, and how, perhaps, she’d spray a little Charlie on the paper. This time I couldn’t smell anything.

  Richard,

  England is so different from everything—different from Varadero, different from what I have seen on TV, different from everything I imagined! All old and gray, old and gray, red brick and gray stone, till I think I go crazy. Even the rain here has no feeling, no passion. Even the women here, I think, are old and gray, made of red brick and stone.

  At first, when Hugo took me to the Tandoori Centre, I stood outside in the street and waited. “No,” he told me. “There’s no line here. We can go in.” And the stores, my God, the stores are like something from the fairy tales, like nothing you can believe! They have everything here, in a hundred colors, in every size and shape, and everything you want, all brightly lit like a carnival. At first, I could not stop visiting these stores. For two days I walked in them, breathing the smells and the colors. I cannot believe I used to think the Diplotiendas were a paradise.

  But sometimes, I think, it is as if the stores here are all full, and the people are all empty, like the opposite of Cuba. Like all the color is in the boxes, and the people are only gray and old. They have this thing called “fog” here—maybe you have seen it—and this “fog” visits and you can see nothing, nothing for miles. For me, this is how it always is in England—like seeing nothing. Like all the colors are wiped out. Like all the hearts are slammed shut. Like all the music is turned off. Hugo likes this, he can live in it; sometimes, when he sits in his chair in the night, and reads a book, I think the fog is inside him too. But for me it is not so easy: I am a cubana.

  The house where we live—an old house, a very small house, not like the houses of my cousins—is like a museum, Hugo says. But how can you live in a museum? Have you seen this place, Richard? Sometimes I call it “Losechester.” A flower would weep if it was placed here; even the sun is ashamed to visit. Hugo says it will be better in the summer: there are schools for learning English here, and many girls from Spain come to these schools. I can meet them in the pub, he says, these sixteen-year-old girls from Valencia and Madrid. But what is there for me? Instead of schoolboys, schoolgirls! What is this place I have come to, Richard? Where the boys have no girls and the tables are from the Spanish times and the students wash in tin baths.

  Hugo is always kind to me; he takes me in the car on Saturdays, and we see old churches and dead bodies. Fidel would be at home here: all the martyrs of Girón and Moncada are nothing to these Englishmen! On Sundays, we go to the chapel in the college. The first time I went there, and saw the light through the big purple windows, and all the lamps, and the people there, so many of them, in different colors, so dignified, I could not believe it: it was like something from the ancient Spanish days. So beautiful, so romantic, so full of feeling. But then the music started, and I caught the tune, and I started to sing, and all the boys looked at me—all these little Nigels and Geoffreys and Ruperts, these boys like old men, in gray suits, with love poems under their pillows—they looked at me like I was una loca. As if they had never seen a woman before, or a woman in a woman’s dress. I wanted to cry, Richard. I stopped singing then, and started looking at the floor. I could not look at these boys’ faces. But Hugo was kind to me, as always. He held my hand, and the way he looked at me, I wanted to cry in a different way. So proud, so calm. As if he were looking at a Madonna. I have never known a man who looks at me this way. And after, he said that it was not me that was crazy, it was the boys. Sometimes, Richard, I think Hugo is all I have. Sometimes, I think that is enough.

  Yo te quiero,

  L.

  My head was reeling then; I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I tried to steady myself by getting out the contact sheet from the day in Varadero. I went over her pictures again and again, but they were different somehow, they had gained more shadows: maybe she was smiling at someone behind me, I thought, as I looked at the first, or maybe she was wearing this dress because she had worn it here before. Or maybe she was thinking of some Spanish businessman. Maybe, when she asked me to bring a friend along, she’d known I would bring Hugo; maybe when she kept on talking about marriage, she’d known I’d fix things up the way I did. And anyway, that had been not my plan, but José’s; maybe the two of them—maybe the three of them—had been in it together all along.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  I picked up the letter again, and read it and read it and read it, and every time I read a different letter, and all I could remember was the ending. I thought maybe I should go over right now, settle the thing quickly. But then I thought back to our plan. And I had a big assignment coming up for Time-Life in L.A.

  That night, when I went to bed, I saw him holding her in his arms, in that steady way those English guys sometimes have, and I saw him telling her how he’d never be away from her, and meaning it. And I saw her unbuttoning her shirt, her lips wet. I saw her face moving under his, calling out his name. I saw her saying the words she’d never said to me. And then—and this was the part I couldn’t take—I saw her lying in his arms, content, with a future she could hold.

  And then, around dawn, just as I was getting to sleep at last, the phone began to ring, and after that, it rang and rang and rang, off the hook. The agency knew I was back in town, and they wanted to get more prints of Cari from me. Somehow, those images was selling like crazy. The Europeans were eating them up, the Argentinians were bidding for a whole series, some French magazine was talking cover story. The pictures were dynamite. I don’t know what it was—“It’s because of the way you look at her,” one editor had said, “and that way she has of smiling, as if she’s just about to cry”—and so I went back to the darkroom: Cari, drying her hair as she came out of the bathroom; Cari, in the earrings I’d brought down for Lourdes, as a wedding gift, from Mexico; Cari stepping out of her white dress, with the light behind her. I guess it was maybe just the lure of the Revolution with a pretty, smiling, tearful girl. They used to say that Nora Astorga won more friends for the Sandinistas than Bianca Jagger ever could; in the Marcos days, there wasn’t a think magazine in New York that wouldn’t go for a picture of a pretty NPA guerrilla with a gun.

  Lourdes smiled too much, I thought; Cari looked sad enough to buy. And I lay down in my bed again, and the images went tumbling through my head, and I changed the way I’d planned the story, so that the images that were meant to come last would go first, and the opening spread became an elegy.

  That was when the next letter arrived.

  Dear Richard,

  I cannot tell you how crazy is this place of Winchester. Everything so heavy, and all the men in ties, and I can never feel the sea. They say this is an island, but where are the beaches and the palm trees and the sky? Everything is so tired here, and the streets are small and curved, but not like in Habana Vieja; it is like they are all weighed down by stones. And nothing happens, nobody laughs, nothing changes. The streets are gray, the buildings are gray, the people go from one place to the next. Hugo is at home here, with his books and his jazz records and his sherry. But I, I feel that sometimes I will explode.

  You remember, Richard, the postales you showed me once, from France and Germany and Hungary, the ones you always carry with you? From that French man who you love. Sometimes I feel I have entered that same world here, as if I am living in black and white. Where are the colors? Where is the music? Where are the hopes? Hugo tells me that later I will understand; every day, he gets up and puts on his gray sweater, his gray jacket, his gray trousers. He goes out into the gray, and joins the other men in gray.

  And you know something else, Richard? There are people here living in the streets! Like animals
! Like pieces of dirt. Old people, young people, sick people: people without arms, without jobs, without homes—it is like something from the end of the world. From the time of Batista! Hugo took me to a play—a Soviet play—in London, and after, we walked to the station, and everywhere there were these people, so sick you could not tell if they were dead or dying or only sleeping. It was like something from an article in Granma; but if I read it in Granma, I would not believe it. I wanted to talk to these people, to give them food for their babies, to invite them to our house. But Hugo says it is not safe. “They like it like this,” he says. “It is our way.” And the other Englishmen walked past, or looked in the other direction.

  Last week, here in Winchester, I saw an old woman burying her head in some garbage—in the middle of the High Street! I asked her if she had lost something. “Bloody lost my mind, haven’t I?” she shouted at me. “Bloody lost it all. Fuckin’ Margaret Thatcher. Go and ask her what I’ve lost! Ask the bloody witch!”

  I remember, Richard, when I was young, my mother told me stories of the Isle of Pines. If you talk loudly, she said, if you do not think who you are talking to, if you do this, if you do that, you will go to this place where there is no dancing, and no brightness, and no air. But now I am there, I think, in this world of closed doors and closed faces.

  But Hugo is happy, happy like you cannot believe. I cook him rice every night, and I make him strong coffee, like in Cuba, and sometimes I tell him stories of when I was a girl. I can talk to him so easily, and always he listens. Always he remembers. To see him so happy, Richard, to feel I am the reason for this happiness, I cannot tell you how it makes me feel. This has never happened to me before, to make someone happy in this way. Maybe this is what being free means: to give someone happiness. I think I will stay with Hugo; he tells me I can bring my mother here too, and my sister, if she wants. It is strange—sometimes I do not understand my heart—but I am happy with him, and I do not want to leave.