She continued to notice jarring contrasts in architecture. A modern, glass-fronted boutique selling designer luggage across the street from housing overcome by crumble and mildew, bundled in treacherous-looking wiring. It was as though a second city were being constructed alongside the original, accessible to only a precious few.
Clare saw codes over doorways that she did not understand, street art signatures that she did not understand. To be foreign here meant to have access only to the uppermost layers of language, to what could be said aloud in public, and she understood that her very presence could turn a moment public, even if she was standing in someone’s home.
She counted soaring gothic arches; neoclassical stone lions; bright art nouveau facades with ornamental moldings that made her think of Fabergé eggs; retro oceanside hotels; stark high-rises. This collision of visuals meant that if someone were to ask after her impression of Havana, it seemed the most honest answer would be to admit there was no impression, not yet. A photographer, and she had seen many people taking photographs, could arrange this city to look however they wanted: nostalgic, luxurious, devastated, avant-garde.
Some forms of watching were designed to obliterate the subject.
She walked the same route for two days.
She visited the Colon Cemetery, a hundred-acre labyrinth of slim paths and marble mausoleums with spires like miniature churches. Statues of angels, stone wings flung open. She found the grave for Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the great director. How shameful it now seemed for her husband to have been buried deep in the ground, in a simple coffin, no monument erected in his name—and even that simple burial had been shockingly expensive. She left the cemetery when her thoughts shifted to how easy it would be for a killer to hide behind one of those great stone graves, clutching an ice pick.
She saw films playing at the festival that were not Revolución Zombi. Films about teenage punks in Colombia and sheep ranchers in Argentina.
One film, she’d read, had been barred from the festival, a drama about the state’s persecution of queer artists and intellectuals after the revolution—despite a script for this very same film having received an award from the festival two years earlier. The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry was established three months after the success of the revolution, a testament to the state’s belief in the power of the screen, and the current director of the institute had called this film a rewriting of history—as though history was not being rewritten all the time.
At night, she tallied the streetlights that had long ago gone dark. She glimpsed a woman in a yellow spandex dress leaning into a car window, a leg bent at the knee as though she might lose her balance, fall inside. At first, she’d looked like a grown woman, but when she turned from the car and into the moonlight Clare saw that she was very young.
One evening, she sat alone at the festival hotel, the terrace bar atypically quiet because of an exclusive mid-festival party at an undisclosed locale—a ticket for this party had not been included in the information she’d received and it was not something she could buy. VIP, lady, she had been told. VIP. A famous American director had landed in Havana that morning, and she wondered if he was presently among these VIPs, perhaps in the company of the less famous American directors who’d come to mentor new Cuban talent, via labs sponsored by Sundance. The mention of the VIP party reminded Clare of the articles she’d read on the Havana Biennale, held that summer. Apparently there were glamorous parties in the Swiss and Norwegian embassies, and the biennale ushered in the first museum exchange between Cuba and the United States in decades—plus a new wave of collectors, thirsty for discovery.
On the terrace, a scattering of people sat in bamboo armchairs, studiously reading scripts. A woman clutching a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of red roses wandered around, looking for someone, it seemed. The sun had bled out into the Malecón and the water looked like velvet, like it would be soft to the touch. Already Havana was among the most beautiful places she’d ever seen the sun go down.
A man sat at the table next to her, in jeans and a T-shirt that read KEEP CALM AND SAIL ON. A gold band squeezed his ring finger. His hair was buzzed, exposing an egglike head. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a person so pink, with white ribbons of sunscreen collecting along his hairline.
Do you have the time? he asked, in English.
No one has the time. Clare knew a fake question when she heard it.
He wagged a finger at her like she was a naughty child.
A waiter arrived to collect drink orders, and then the man started going on about how this city would soon be ruined, would soon bear little resemblance to the place Hemingway had described in his books—wasn’t she glad they’d come when they had? Her ear caught on that insidious they, the suggestion of alliance.
Clare was born in Georgia, in the barrier islands, where her parents had managed a bed-and-breakfast. She remembered the way guest after guest shrank her home to fit their version—paradise, tourist trap—uninterested in local consultation. In her opinion, this was the lot of islands. In Havana, the signals were manifold and often contradictory, making it easy for a person to find support for whatever narrative they had decided to seek.
Soon there’ll be Internet, the man continued. Our phones will work. He pulled a black smartphone from his pocket and wagged it at her. The shackles will be back on, like they are everywhere else. Where’s the romance in that?
The past is a product, Clare said. So is romance.
In her world, for example, there had recently been a hunger for elevators with a vintage look.
Or maybe the real product was nostalgia—even if people tended to be nostalgic for periods of time about which they knew little. It was, in fact, this not-knowing that made such a candied nostalgia possible. When Clare was ten, her parents relocated to Jacksonville Beach, to manage an inn called the Seahorse (even as a child she’d understood this move to Florida was not a promotion). The inn had wallpaper in the rooms that bore a striking resemblance to the cobalt flowers and green vines in the bathroom of the Third Hotel, and here they had all participated in putting nostalgia up for sale. Be transported back to Old Florida, with natural beaches and fish camps; a little farther south, the oldest masonry fort in America, no mention of its bloody history. Visitors longed for not a dislocation of reality but an insulation from reality—yet these layers of insulation were supposed to be invisible, imperceptible. People did not like to be too sharply reminded of their status as tourists. For years, she was charged with combing the Seahorse’s TripAdvisor reviews for problems; the word she counted the most frequently in the positive reviews was “authentic.”
Also: comfortable, accommodating, spotless, secure, safe.
If reviewers praised the service at reception as “welcoming,” they had interacted with Clare’s mother, who used her goodwill up on strangers. Her father hoarded his and then sent benevolence out like an unexpected flare.
Our phones make sure we know too much and too little all at the same time, the man went on.
You can try getting Wi-Fi on the Malecón. Clare pointed at the water ahead.
Earlier she had seen people sitting on the seawall with their phones. She carried a small pair of binoculars in her backpack and considered handing them to this man, so he could look for himself. All he had to do was get an ETECSA card, assuming the kiosks hadn’t run out for the day, and head to the seawall or a Wi-Fi park. Her cell carrier only offered stupendously expensive pay-as-you-go service on the island, so she was just using her phone for the offline map she’d downloaded (and found to be largely inaccurate) and for photos; at night she would scroll through images of Richard, shrinking and enlarging, searching for clues. She had not checked her e-mail or his since arriving. In order to access Richard’s e-mail, she’d had to submit a copy of his death certificate to Decedent Accounts, and it had been deeply painful for her, to write to Decedent Accounts. To be unable to guess her own husband’s password, even after trying all the
birthdays and addresses and film titles and family names and inside jokes. To learn the password was a sequence of numbers that held no meaning for her at all.
On the terrace, the man waved her off. I don’t want to know. If I know, I’ll have to contact my wife.
And why don’t you want to contact your wife? Now, Clare thought, they were getting somewhere.
He and his wife had arrived in Havana together and had been scheduled to continue on with a tour to Viñales, but they had fought and she had gotten on the bus without him.
What was the fight about?
To answer that question I’d have to start with the day we met, he said. We’d be out here all night. He added that travel turned his wife into a different person and she loved to travel, loved getting to be that other person, but he dreaded meeting this unpleasant twin and would be content to never go anywhere again.
Their drinks arrived. He tipped his glass toward Clare. She raised her glass in return, a mistake because next he asked if he could treat her to a meal, his tone entreating and paternalistic, a two-front attack: first, elicit pity for his sad situation; second, instill doubts about her ability to navigate the coming night. Wouldn’t it be nice if her dinner was simply handled? Had he not raised the subject of Hemingway, she might have taken him up on his offer, and the offer she sensed would follow, for the way crashing against his pink body would rip thoughts from her head like weeds, would make her feel sick in an entirely different way.
The sky was dark. Through the trees she glimpsed silver lights on the water. They looked like the lights from a cruise ship. A rooster screamed somewhere next door. An elderly couple wearing white surgical masks sat at a table nearby, freshly emerged from another world.
Good luck with your wife, Clare said, but he was already scanning the other tables, assessing his options.
She tucked money under her glass and hurried down the terrace.
By the water she saw that the lights had been an illusion: the cruise ship was not a cruise ship at all. A white wedding tent had been erected on the far edge of the terrace, strung up with silver lights. The bride and groom stood at the front, facing each other. The bride wore a knee-length white dress with a lace hem; huge taffeta sleeves stood up on her shoulders like a pair of meringues. The groom wore a jacket and shirt, no tie. She could not tell who was conducting the ceremony; maybe that person had yet to arrive on the scene. She wondered if this couple knew they were getting married above tunnels used in the Cuban Missile Crisis and in Revolución Zombi. All the guests were standing, and she found the attire peculiar. Ball gowns and black tie alongside untucked button-downs and jeans. There was a story here, but not one she could access. Perhaps the ceremony had been assembled in a hurry.
* * *
My husband.
In her correspondences with Decedent Accounts and the bank and the car insurance company, she did not say “Richard has died” but “my husband has died.” They did not care about who he had been but rather their relationship to his death and the role she now expected them to play in it. In the moments when she had said “Richard” aloud it had felt like a mistake, like trying to call a number that had been disconnected. “My husband” reminded her that he was no longer a person moving through the world, but a void, a hole dug deep in the ground, a tear in the atmosphere.
* * *
At the Third Hotel, Clare got into bed and slid into a state of unconsciousness that did not quite feel like sleep, and when she woke the sky was dumping rain. Where am I? She had not experienced that thought since arriving, as though the city remained inescapable even when bundled in the twilight of unawakeness. She turned onto her side and thought about driving with Richard out to Grafton Lakes, as they sometimes did. They would walk the frozen ground and look out at the lake, the ice silver and crackling. They would watch the sun go pale. They thought this place was most beautiful in winter, and given how rarely they saw another person at Grafton Lakes, they understood this love of winter beauty was a sentiment few people shared. On the way home they would stop at a gas station for coffee and share a cup in the car. They stopped at signs for garage sales too—they found an oil painting of a roaring sea in Sycaway, a watercolor of a train station in Troy. Once she emerged from the depths of a cavernous garage, a glazed vase tucked under her arm, and could not find her husband on the sidewalk or browsing the tables. It turned out he had gone to the corner store at the end of the block for a snack, and in the time before he returned, she was seized by the terrifying thought that she had dreamed their entire marriage. Sometimes, if Clare was just back from a trip, she would fall asleep in the passenger seat, slumped against her husband, and she would feel very warm. She remembered Richard waking her in their driveway, his hands in her hair, his breath on her neck, his voice saying Clare. She felt a mist on her skin. Was someone spraying her? No, it was coming from the balcony, a blade of rain-soaked night visible through the open door.
The next afternoon, Clare’s walking route led her to Parque John Lennon. On the edge of the park, a man in an AC/DC shirt sold disposable razors to passersby. She stood at the foot of a bronze statue of John Lennon sitting on a bench, translating a commemorative plaque in the shade of royal poincianas. A man in slacks and a checkered shirt appeared and sat next to the statue. He was carrying a black case, the kind that might hold a musical instrument, a clarinet or a flute. Did she want to see John Lennon’s glasses? He formed two circles with his fingers and pressed them to his eyes, lashes fluttering as he spoke. She wondered how John Lennon came to have a monument in Havana. Was it the sole purpose of this man to oversee the glasses? She told him yes, she would like to see these glasses very much.
He opened the case, lifted out a pair of bronze glasses from the black velvet interior, and slipped them onto John Lennon’s face. The longer Clare stood before him, the more she felt certain she had seen this man somewhere before, and then it came to her: he had been an extra in Revolución Zombi. He had tried to attack Agata Alonso in a garden, and she had dispatched him with a shovel.
The man asked if she wanted to take a photo, and while Clare was contemplating the possibility of a photo, she noticed a woman passing on the sidewalk. She was walking quickly in wedge sandals, hands deep in the pockets of loose black pants, face shielded by cat-eye sunglasses. She wore a sleeveless navy tank, and it was her shoulders that caught Clare’s attention: slim and graceful, shaped with the precision of sculpture. She had seen those precise shoulders somewhere before too. She had seen them on a movie screen in Cine Charlie Chaplin.
The eel whispered: movement.
Clare could ask if Agata Alonso had chosen to vanish herself from the festival or if she was in some kind of trouble; on this front, progress could be made. She could apologize for fleeing the theater in the middle of the movie, for drawing the viewer’s attention away from her image on the screen. She could compliment her performance as the virginal daughter; she could say that she did not blame her character at all for living with her mother in Germany. Her father, frankly, seemed to be a bit of an asshole.
She excused herself from the man and John Lennon’s glasses.
She sprinted across the park and fell behind Agata Alonso on the sidewalk. Her hair was not the copper bob that Clare had seen on-screen and in the press photos. Instead she wore a long wig, the frosted blond ends striking her shoulder blades.
On the corner of Avenida Paseo, not far from the sea, the actress slipped inside a pistachio-green house with cream moldings and an enclosed front garden that reminded Clare of a giant birdcage. Behind the bars pink bougainvillea slumped across a metal trellis and a fat black cat with a gold bell sunned itself on a stone bench. From the street, she tried to get a look through the windows, but the blinds were closed tight. The cat rolled onto its back, batted a paw at a column of dust. A powerful wind tore down the avenida. She smelled overripe fruit and salt. Thanks to the heavy bamboo blinds, the windows were impenetrable; she could not see so much as a silhouette or a shadow.
Earlier, in the drink line, Arlo had been in front of her. From eavesdropping, she’d gleaned he was from Havana but had been away. He’d been recently approved for a job with the ICAIC, he told one person, where his uncle enjoyed a well-placed position. After that person left the line and he was greeted by someone else, he claimed to have returned because his twin sister had decided to commit suicide at the age of thirty-three, like her idol Hart Crane.
There are tunnels under our feet, Clare told the bartender when it was her turn, and got no reply.
When Davi saw Clare coming, he raised his glass in greeting. His hair was damp and combed back. His shirt was cuffed at the wrists, showing off a handsome watch. Her gaze flitted over the gold-tinged treetops of the forest mural. Her pulse quickened, her tongue dampened and swelled. She felt driven to do things with her body that she did not understand.
You know the mural kisser? Arlo rattled the ice in his glass. He had a powerful nose, delicate eyelashes. He and Davi had been speaking in Spanish, though the moment she appeared Arlo had switched into fluid English—a rebuke, she assumed, of her language skills.
The Third Hotel Page 4