The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  In the taxi, the driver listened to opera; at stop lights he conducted the air. The car was large as a hearse with floral upholstery and no seat belts, a small fire extinguisher fastened behind the driver’s seat. At the zoo, she was delivered into a series of lines: one to get in; one to buy tickets; one to board the slumping red Girón buses that carted visitors around the park.

  Tomorrow she would leave for the airport, tomorrow she would board a plane. The more she repeated tomorrow to herself the more the word sounded fictional, though she supposed all words were fictional in the sense that someone had invented them.

  At the zoo, the lines moved slowly. Richard had, in his former life, hated lines.

  The brochure detailed the recent overhaul the zoo had undergone, which included importing one hundred and fifty wild animals from Namibia. The project was nicknamed Noah’s Ark and the imported animals included a dozen baby rhinos and five elephants and a rare kind of crocodile. How did you get five elephants on a plane? The brochure declined to detail the logistics; rather, the reader’s attention was directed to other refurbishments. To the new fencing and resurfaced paths and the lion enclosure and the crocodile pit and the flamingo pool—all paid for with government money. The staff had received special training in the care of the Namibian animals. A breeding program had been established, with a focus on making more rare crocodiles. This zoo was part of the new Cuba now.

  In the ticket line, she kept wondering what it must have been like for those animals to wake up one day and find themselves in Havana.

  On the bus, Clare was the only single party. Everyone else was part of a family. She sat near the front, in a window seat, a child next to her, an American boy with a mop of coppery hair going on about renting a scooter. When could he ride a scooter? What colors did they come in? How fast did they go? When could he ride one? When? His parents were sitting directly in front of him. They did not acknowledge the boy and she would not have believed they were his parents at all if the mother didn’t have the same sharp chin, the father the same coppery hair.

  Oh, the thin line between love and exhaustion. The thin line between love and indifference. The thin line between I Am Like a Little Boat Cut Loose in a Storm Without You and You Are Driving Me Rapidly Insane.

  The engine roared. Her seat shuddered and she struggled to hear the driver, who was also the guide. He wore an olive uniform. His voice was being inhaled by a black microphone. The first pen, the ostrich pen, was empty, because yesterday a sinkhole had decimated a key stretch of fencing, creating an opening through which three ostriches had fled. Apparently these ostriches had already been spotted outside the Hotel Bella Habana and in the Colon Cemetery. The driver warned the passengers against approaching a loose ostrich, should they see one, as they could kick you hard enough to kill you.

  Next the bus stopped at the lion enclosure, a dilapidated cinder-block palace ringed by a moat of foamy green. The lions—some sleek as housecats, some with huge russet manes—stalked their terrain in the same lethally methodical manner as a killer. The guide, now shouting into the microphone, advised the passengers to keep the windows rolled up. A couple in panama hats fake-screamed for a selfie. Clare wondered if Yuniel Mata had considered filming a scene in this zoo.

  The guide said something Clare couldn’t catch over the engine, and the mother sitting in front of her cried out, Horsemeat! then looked at the skulking lions with dismay. She bit her knuckles. Her child kicked the back of her seat. The bus lurched down a winding, forested path and they emerged to find hippos chest-deep in mud and zebras trotting across a brown field, tails switching, and later sunset-colored flamingos high-stepping through an emerald pool shielded by palm trees. She watched one flamingo crane its neck, as though composing a thought, and dunk its head into the water.

  They ended at the crocodile pit, where those prehistoric beasts were sunning themselves on concrete slabs. These crocodiles were twice the size of regular alligators, snouts as long and narrow as the barrel of a gun, scales shining like they had been basted in oil. She asked the guide to point out the rare crocodiles and got an unintelligible reply. Maybe this crocodile-breeding program was a sham. They were moving on from the pit when a man in a baseball cap shouted, Look! and they all turned in time to see crocodiles slipping into the water and rushing toward a common point. There was a slash of bright yellow—feathers, a strangled squawk, a bird of some kind—and then the crocodiles lunged and the feathered thing vanished underwater. The boy sitting beside Clare stopped kicking his mother’s seat and cried out, with unmistakable delight, They’re killing it! They’re killing it!

  * * *

  At dawn, her period struck and she bled all over the hotel sheets (that was how it happened now, in her later thirties: a sudden, stabbing pain, blood like a crime scene, a furious reminder that in the eyes of culture and nature her body was inching ever closer to uselessness). She could not stand the thought of Isa or a total stranger discovering all that blood. She peeled off her pajamas, stripped the bed, and dumped the linens in the bathtub. She would erase the evidence; no misdeed had been committed here.

  She crouched in the back of the tub. She held the linens under the tap and watched the bloody water rush down the drain. She nudged the loose molar with her tongue. She cupped water in her hands and cleaned herself. She imagined the eel had been sliced open, that it had bled out inside her.

  She dressed and hung the sheets over the balcony to dry. She listened to motorbikes rip through the newly born morning. She felt shocked back into time.

  In the building across the street, an arched window blazed with light. Clare fetched her binoculars and made out a woman in a kitchen, washing dishes. She was wearing pink gloves that rose to her elbows. For a moment, the woman glanced up and Clare wondered if she sensed she was being watched.

  The woman vanished from the kitchen. The light in the window went out. Clare imagined her getting back into bed still wearing those pink gloves.

  Later she folded the towels in the bathroom, tossed the trash into the trash, closed all the drawers. A small part of her would forever open a hotel room drawer expecting a fingernail. She kneeled and patted the space underneath the bed, to make sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind, and felt a hole in the floor. With each of these acts, a voice inside her roared, home. In the bathroom, she brushed her hair smooth and straight, and told herself she looked just as she did when she arrived.

  At the front desk, Isa, in a white T-shirt with DESIGN spelled out in black sequins, snapped her astronomy textbook shut and asked Clare if she was leaving any magazines. Apparently the last American woman traveling alone had left behind a stack of Us Weekly.

  Clare unzipped her backpack and took out The Two Faces of January. She slid the paperback across the desk.

  I finished it last night, she said. You can have it if you want.

  She had brought the book all the way with her to Havana and had not read a single word. She recalled an article about how people told three times as many lies when they were away from home, a figure that had struck her as low.

  Isa picked up the book, started reading the back copy. On the cover, a man in a suit and a fedora stood in the shadows of a Greek ruin. She told Clare that she had taught herself to read novels in English by translating the mysteries left behind by the British and American and Canadian guests.

  I should be tired of mysteries by now, she said. I’ve never read one set in Greece.

  José Martí International, Clare said to the taxi driver. A small, stuffed bear hung from the rearview. A medical license was taped to the dashboard.

  The terminal Clare was deposited into was far more up-to-date than the terminal she had arrived at. Here there was ample seating, efficient security, shops, cafés. It was a different world, this terminal. How did she get here?

  Her flight was on time.

  At customs, she handed over her exit papers and stared into the camera until her photo had been recorded. The moment she reached the other side o
f security the inner voice that had cried out home began to soften.

  She ignored this softening. She stalked past the duty-free and the souvenir shops and the stall selling Wi-Fi and the mustard-and-white currency exchange bureau. She went into the bathroom, where two ticket agents were smoking, standing side by side and gusting into the mirror. If her husband were here, he would have called this an interior zone of vulnerability, where public and private smash together. What could be more intimate than listening to a stranger take a difficult shit? Yet this zone depended on silence. The intimacy was to be felt but never admitted. To admit would violate the rules. Another urban horror film he had been studying for his book took place exclusively in an apartment building in Barcelona, in interior zones of vulnerability, in hallways and bathrooms and elevators.

  She followed a sign for coffee down a flight of stairs. She waited in line behind a man toting a plastic doll the height of a child, bound in Saran wrap and standing upright in a shopping bag. The doll was facing her, eyes open and horrible through the plastic. Clare sneezed and a familiar voice called out, Bless you! She spun around and there was Davi, leaning against a red cement pillar and smiling wide, his duffel bag at his feet, black headphones looped around his neck. All the major films had screened during the festival’s first week, so he was heading home. What luck, his smile seemed to say. What luck to meet on the plane and find each other again at the airport. The circle had been closed.

  They sat together at a table, Clare facing the stairs. A brown-and-white spaniel in a faded K9 vest lay at the bottom, keeping a listless watch. Their coffees had been served in white china with pink flowers, the cup and saucer so tiny she could not help but think they had been designed for the hands of a child.

  This airport will be renovated before long, Davi said. A French architecture firm got the job. Can’t happen soon enough. He added that soon there would be better hotels to look forward to as well: a Swiss company was bringing the first five-star hotel to Havana, in partnership with Gaviota. There was to be a massive spa and five different restaurants and a luxury shopping mall. The hotel would be constructed by the same French architecture firm tasked with renovating the airport. Foreign money and foreign labor, so much for anticapitalism, and it wouldn’t do fuck all for anyone who lived here—apart, he supposed, from attracting more tourists, the benefits of which were debatable.

  But if you come back, you’ll know where to get a good Swiss massage, Davi said, raising his cup. Am I right to think that you wouldn’t complain?

  Near Parque Central, Clare had passed the hotel site rising from the ground, the scaffolding looming over the surrounding buildings; one afternoon she had spotted two teenage girls in school uniforms taking a selfie by the structure. In airplane magazines, she had seen advertisements from this same hotel group that featured a woman in a snug black hospitality uniform holding a tray with a bourbon on the rocks, her mouth a red lacquered O, ready to serve.

  What will happen when you go home? she asked, because she was truly uncertain what would happen when she went home. She thought of the empty condominium in New Scotland. Through a window she glimpsed a plane ascending into a cloudless sky. She thought of her father’s voice on the phone, and the glass trembled.

  What will happen? Davi sipped his coffee. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. The films out of Colombia will be the big story. Buying my girlfriend something so perfect and lovely for Christmas she’ll forget she’s mad at me for traveling all year. When she’s angry, she tells me to go stand in front of the mirror and ask myself if I see the center of the world looking back.

  He shook his head and laughed, acquiring the air of someone accustomed to being out of favor with the women in his life, but he could afford this disfavor because he always knew the way back in.

  For Christmas, she would be expected in Florida. There would be recipes to cook and wreaths to hang and gifts to buy. She had spent Thanksgiving in a hotel room in Lincoln. At a gas station, she’d bought two packets of an off-brand sleep aid—enough to pull her under. She’d woke feeling like she’d been up all night. Her mother had wanted her to come to Florida; Clare had claimed the trip to Nebraska was unavoidable. At this moment there were far fewer miles between them than when Clare was in New York.

  A trip to visit family in Olinda, Davi continued. Maybe a little time by the sea. And you?

  By the stairs the spaniel barked. A woman in a khaki skirt suit and a tangerine scarf, the uniform of a security officer, appeared. She unleashed the spaniel, plucked a blue rubber ball from her pocket. She tossed the ball and the spaniel dove after it.

  Clare would find a way to live full-time on an airplane. She would forget her father was dying. She would forget she had ever seen her husband here, had allowed her reality to become so dislocated, had fallen into the age-old tourist trap of arriving in a place and projecting the thing she wanted most in the world onto a screen.

  Work, she said.

  Davi raised an eyebrow. And?

  A security camera was mounted on the red pillar. Her husband once said horror films often started by plunging the viewer into the sight of the killer—heavy footsteps in the woods, a gloved hand clutching a knife—because when you see as they see, when you watch the victim transform from person to object, you are thrilled and then you are implicated. She stared into the lens and tried to turn herself into an object, a sight. She tried to imagine the killer telling her that it was time to go, that soon her flight would leave and when it did she would be on it, her nose pressed to the oval window.

  There is no and, she wanted to tell Davi.

  Or, at least not an and that she could name.

  The softening turned into a melting, an avalanche.

  Work, she said again.

  Clare felt something spring across her feet and then the spaniel was diving under the table, its fur brushing her shins. The dog snapped up the ball and trotted back to the woman with the tangerine scarf, tail erect, proud.

  She overturned her tiny cup and coffee rushed across the table, dripping onto Davi’s slacks. For a moment, she did nothing but watch the liquid stream down.

  Christ, I’m sorry, she said after she snapped to, mopping at the table and then his knee with a paper napkin, flushed and clumsy.

  The dog, the dog, he said, waving her away. He excused himself to the bathroom. The woman in the tangerine scarf leashed the spaniel and began to lead him around like a show dog, to the delight of the waiting children.

  See the green fields laced with fog. See the city turn miniature. See the great blue yawn of the sea.

  Or.

  She rose from her seat. She gathered her bags.

  Davi had been wrong. The circle was not closed.

  The circle was not closed because she was going to break it.

  * * *

  On her way back to Vedado, Clare devised her lie: a canceled flight; an indefinite departure date, given the peak season. She could almost hear the obfuscating language of a customer service representative, language designed to strip the speaker of all agency and accountability. A problem has arisen. This system does not have any more information for you right now. Language she had used herself when something went awry in the world of elevators.

  At the Third Hotel, the German college student was at the front desk, asking Isa questions about the schedule for the Viazul Bus to Varadero. Before leaving he tucked another pink carnation into the plastic cup serving as a penholder. When Isa saw Clare in the doorway, she placed a white coffee mug on top of The Two Faces of January and gave her a long look. Clare made a mental note to e-mail her boss with the news that a problem with her flight had forced an extended stay.

  In the room, she returned her passport and the white box to the safe. She was very nearly out of pesos and the line for the exchange counter at the airport would have taken hours, so she had walked from the terminal to the nearest bus stop, along a roadside not so unlike the one Richard had been walking when he was struck. Traffic trickled by at a comfor
table speed and then a fleet of tour buses screamed past and she leapt into a ditch. In Havana, she had disembarked at the first stop that looked familiar, though it would turn out the intersection she thought was familiar was, in fact, not—and so she had wandered for some time, half lost, before finding her way back to Vedado. From the Third Hotel, the closest CADECA was on La Rampa, on a street corner shaded by a banana tree, the roots cracking up through the concrete like claws. She fell into the back of a long line.

  When she reached the front, the man behind the window would not exchange her money because she had neglected to bring her passport, required for government records. She went back to the Third Hotel, retrieved her passport, and returned to the CADECA—delighted to find that the line had evaporated until she realized that was only because the window had closed for the day.

  And then, at the corner of La Rampa and Calle M, there was Richard, buying a mango from a fruit cart hitched to a blue bicycle. The sidewalk trembled. Heat traveled upward through the concrete and the soles of her shoes, stunning her immobile. The mental note to write to her boss fluttered away. The tear in her own atmosphere widened. This time, Clare told herself that she would not repeat her past mistakes. She would not approach him. She would not use the name he had once gone by, the name she had forced herself to stop saying. Those old signifiers did not mean anything to him here.

  She stayed on the opposite side of the street until her husband carried the mango away in a brown paper bag. She darted across, ignoring the traffic signals, and trailed behind him. She was covert, allowing pedestrians to drift between. It was hot, and each person she passed on the street seemed to be omitting a slight glow.

  A pair of long-backed dogs trotted away from tourists armed with cameras, disinterested in being turned into subjects. Clare was terrified to take a photo—that the brief freezing of time would shatter whatever reality she had slipped down into, that she would look up and find Richard was no longer there, the anguish of having chosen an image of a person over the person himself.