He was serious.
The Tropicana had two nightclubs: one was outdoors under the stars, aire libre, under towering royal palms; the other, the Crystal Arch, was a massive hall they used when it rained or when the outdoor club could not fit in any more customers.
Tonight they thought the weather would hold off so we were guided to a front row table outside. It was dazzling. There must have been a hundred showgirls in feathered headdresses and sequins high kicking in front of us, to the right, to the left, even above us, even perched among the palms like exotic tropical birds. Pink and mauve searchlights swept the floor while a man in a bright blue evening suit sang about Paris.
The table was set with white linen and crystal and the heady scent of jasmine and gardenias from the garden was overwhelming. I looked across the tables, saw Frank Sinatra talking to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Floyd Patterson was there, too, talking to some tough looking black guys.
Angel ordered a mojito for me and Brugel rum with a squeeze of quarter lime for himself. He sucked on a fat Rey del Mundo cigar, as he’d seen his father do. “Are you glad you came?” he said grinning.
I shrugged, like I couldn’t care less, and hoped my face did not give me away. It was so different from the Left Bank, this was glamour on a scale I had never imagined.
“You’ve never been here before, huh?”
“This is my first time.”
“What do you think?” he said, like he owned the place.
“It’s okay.”
He grinned. “Stick with me, you’ll do all right.”
“I wanted to stick with you, Angel, it was you that split us up.”
“We’re not split up. Come on, baby, don’t spoil it.”
“I can’t believe you’re still going through with that sham of a wedding.”
He put an arm around me and whispered, “Baby, I ache for you every night. I can’t stop thinking about you. That’s the truth.”
I wanted to believe him. Perhaps it was like that play, Romeo and Juliet: we could have been together if only it wasn’t for our parents. But in the play, didn’t Romeo stab himself through the heart when he thought he couldn’t be with her? Romeo didn’t sit in his prospective father-in-law’s club, smoking Cubans and drinking rum.
“When are you going to America?”
“Let’s not talk about that now.”
“What happens when old man Salvatore finds out you were here with me tonight? Someone’s going to tell him. He owns the club.”
“He doesn’t own the club, he owns the casino.”
“He’s still going to find out.”
“Look, the show’s going to start.”
The house lights fell.
Softly at first, then louder, came the hammering rhythm of batá drums, the chanting of bembé. It was the music of the Santería, what westerners called voodoo. I’d heard the drums in the night when there was a ritual in one of the barrios, but I’d never seen a voodoo dance for myself. I’d heard the rumours, of course: they cut the throats of chickens and goats then the priestesses had sex with the other dancers right there in front of everyone. Papi said it wasn’t true, except maybe the bit about the chickens.
I knew this was going to be just a parody of the real thing but I felt my belly tighten with excitement anyway. I remembered the chicken blood and the cigar I had seen on the cobblestones in the old city. That made me think about Reyes and I wished he were here.
The lights went up. The drummers on stage were dressed in white turbans and pants and their bare chests glistened with sweat. The primitive rhythm of the drums stirred me. I felt a trickle of sweat slowly make its way between my breasts. The night was suddenly so hot it was difficult to breathe.
A scantily dressed mulatto swayed onto the stage. She was dressed in yellow, tossing her head from side to side and swinging her skirts high in the air in rhythm with the drums. Angel leaned closer to me. “Yellow is the colour of Ochun,” he said. “She is pretending to be the goddess of love.”
She did not have to pretend very hard. She was young, not much older than me, and her body was lithe, brown and beautiful. I imagined there wasn’t a man in the room who didn’t want her as soon as he saw her. Angel crossed his legs and turned a little away from me, trying to hide how aroused he was himself.
Ochun was surrounded by dark-skinned African dancers, all chanting in high-pitched Yoruba. They had oiled their muscles and they gleamed in the torchlight. She danced with each of them in turn, grinding her hips against them, then turning her back, sliding against them in long, sinuous movements. Her body rippled like a snake.
I looked to our right. A blonde woman in a black cocktail dress was sitting with her boyfriend who was clapping along enthusiastically to the performance and shouting encouragement to the Ochun. She looked embarrassed.
The dancers moved down the stage and then several of them jumped down into the crowd. They danced in front of our table for a few moments and I panicked, thinking they were heading for us. Instead they moved towards the table to our right. The spotlight followed. The blonde woman pretended to ignore them, sipping her cocktail furiously through a straw.
The dancers circled the couple. The woman’s boyfriend seemed to enjoy it, puffing on a cigar, still clapping his hands. His girlfriend was clearly uncomfortable and appeared even more distressed as the dancers came closer, gyrating their hips almost in her face.
Ochun beckoned her from the stage. The woman realized what was coming and now she looked really scared.
I glanced at Angel, but his eyes were fixed on the blonde and the santos dancing around her. “Isn’t her boyfriend going to do something?” I asked him, but he didn’t answer.
They reached for her. She put down her drink and tried to run for the door, but they caught her by the arms and then lifted her on their shoulders and carried her struggling to the stage.
Her boyfriend stopped clapping his hands. He looked stunned.
My mouth was suddenly dry. Was this part of the show? I looked around at the crowd, some of the women looked confused and frightened, too. The men’s eyes were shining with excitement.
The sound of the drums was deafening now.
The dancers let the woman down and encircled her on the stage. She was still trying to escape, but every time she tried to squeeze between them they caught her and threw her back into the ring. The Ochun encouraged her to dance with her, then started shrieking and pawing at her clothes.
The woman knew there was no way out and abandoned her efforts to get away. Now the Ochun stood behind her, gripped her wrists and forced her to imitate her own movements, raising her arms and grinding her hips. The woman surrendered, slowly at first, but then with increasing abandon.
The Ochun threw her head back. I could see the whites of her eyes, she had fallen under the spell of the drums and the chanting.
Without warning, one of the men stepped forward, hooked his fingers in the neck of the blonde woman’s dress, and ripped down, tearing it off. She screamed and tried to stop him but the Ochun held her wrists and pinned her arms to her side.
She had on black lace underwear and a garter belt. She looked pale and vulnerable beside the gleaming black muscles of the dancers.
I had to look away. In the audience several of the men were fidgeting and loosening their ties. Others were smiling, nervous, none of us were sure if this was part of the show. It seemed real enough.
It was taboo for whites to attend a Santería ritual, and this tableau was a fantasy I supposed many of the men in the audience - and probably most of the women - had entertained. I had played out this same tableau in my head, being powerless, being blameless and being naked. I wanted to be the blonde on the stage, allowed to release the part of me I kept hidden. I wanted to dance like that, grind my hips against these nameless men, lose myself in this ancient rhythm.
The santos were now dancing with her in turn, running their hands over her hips and her thighs, tossing her from arm to arm between them.
The drums rose to a crescendo, the chanting swelling and falling, then swelling again. I could feel the drumming in my bones.
Then there was a sudden, shocking silence.
As soon as the drums stopped the woman seem to wake from her trance. She realized that she was half naked and that everyone was staring at her. She screamed and tried to cover herself. She picked up her torn cocktail dress, pushed her way through the dancers and jumped off the stage, running off through the tables and chairs and out of the back door of the club.
I looked around at the table where the woman had been sitting, wondering what her boyfriend would do, but it was empty. He had slipped away, unnoticed.
Just a show then, after all. Just part of the show.
After a few difficult moments the audience erupted in deafening applause. The dancers slid off the stage and the lights faded to black. Then the houselights came back on and the showgirls reappeared, smiling and glittering. It was as if everyone in the room let out a long sigh, embarrassed, relieved, enthralled.
Angel was staring at me. There was sweat on his upper lip, and his eyes were glassy. “What did you think?” he said.
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded my head.
“What a show, huh?”
He knew my dark side, Angel. It was what I loved about him but I hated it too, because he always turned it to his own advantage. I sipped my mojito. It was strong, and I wasn’t used to rum.
It was the first time I had been out at night without my father as an escort, and despite everything, I was enjoying myself. The night was warm and smelled of jasmine. Now that the show was over, many of the audience flooded into the casino but I didn’t want this to end, I wanted to see more.
But the storm was moving in now and wind shook the tops of the palms. There were lightning flashes in the sky. The waiters were stripping the tables, moving the show inside. “Come on,” Angel said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
Chapter 24
The storm battered the city, the rising wind rocking the Pontiac as it sped along the Malecón. Waves pushed in from the Atlantic to crash against the sea wall and send salt-spray arcing across the four traffic-lanes and beat like rain against the windscreen.
There were few cars out now and hardly any sign of life on the sea-wet street. Faces peered from the shuttered, eighteenth-century façades of the Carmen Bar and the Cha Cha Club and the Casa Celia. Some of the beautiful mulattas we had seen at the Tropicana worked the cathouses as well, but it was going to be a slow night tonight.
“Do you know it’s cheaper to sleep with them than buy them dinner at the Tropicana?” Angel said.
“How do you know that?”
He shrugged. “I heard.”
I turned away, looked back out of the window. I could barely make out the beam of the lighthouse through the storm. Black clouds were racing in from America, battering at our old town. I could almost see the salt eating away at the ancient walls, feel the city crumbling away beneath us.
The skyscrapers behind the Malecón looked stark against the starless night. We passed the Presidential palace. There was a single light burning in one of the upper windows. Papi said the President never slept these days, that he walked the corridors like a ghost, shouting at his servants and his cronies.
“That’s what too much power gets you,” he had said. Loneliness.
Angel turned off the Avenida and into the Barrio Chino, splashing through broad puddles, sending up a spray of water on either side. There was seawater lapping in the streets even a block back from the sea, blown inland by the wind.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“The Shanghai.”
“The Shanghai?” I had heard people whisper about the Shanghai Theatre. I had never imagined I would ever actually go there. Very few women ever did.
“It’s all right, I’ll be with you. We’ll have private seats, you’ll be safe. You have to see it, baby, it’s incredible.”
The Shanghai Theatre was a shabby building on Zanja Street, between Manrique and Campanario, originally built as a home for the oriental drama of the Chinese immigrants. But the Chinese had instead developed a taste for local culture, and the Shanghai fell into disrepair before finally re-opening as a burlesque hall.
The ticket sellers were huddled in the entrance, trying to keep out of the wind and rain. The tickets were sold out in the street, Angel said, because there wasn’t room for a box office. That wasn’t quite true, as I saw for myself when we ran inside. The box office had simply been replaced with a pornographic book shop.
But we didn’t have to worry with tickets anyway. Angel just walked straight in and headed for the stairs to the side.
Angel led me to a private box high in the theatre. Black pimps stared at me as we passed them on the stairs; they weren’t used to seeing fancy white women in this part of the barrio. A man in a battered trilby offered Angel a packet of pornographic postcards for a peso. An usher asked me if I would like some marijuana.
Finally we reached our box. Angel pulled aside the curtain and gave me a simple black carnival mask to put on before I went in. “So no one recognizes you,” he said.
“But will I see anyone I know?”
He grinned. “You’d be surprised.”
But when I went in I still sat well back in the shadows so that no one could see me.
I’d always imagined that the Shanghai was a seedy little shed, but the theatre was huge. I guessed there were a thousand people inside, there were very few spare seats in the stalls or the balcony. It was all men: Chinese, Spanish, Negro, Cuban, as well as a few turistas. Angel was right, I did see some men I recognised, businessmen who had been at his engagement party, a few others who were friends of my father. I was shocked.
It was shabby beyond belief. Posters on either side of the stage advertised other clubs in the neighbourhood, and there was a notice in Spanish and bad English warning patrons not to molest the dancers; the curtain was clearly left over from the days when the stage hosted the screeching songs and clashing cymbals of Chinese opera.
But as the houselights dimmed, it drew aside to display a scene very different from anything imagined by the Mandarins. The stage was instead filled with girls of every shape and size, posing on a series of platforms, all dressed in shorts and brassieres.
The orchestra swung into a fast rumba. The girls broke their poses, formed a ragged chorus line and advanced. They reached behind their back as one, unsnapped their bras and took them off, dangling them enticingly as they two-stepped back. There was tremendous fanfare from the orchestra and the curtain swept shut again.
Angel glanced at me to see what I thought. I knew already what I thought: this was not the Tropicana.
The orchestra started another number and the curtain re-opened. The girls were now completely naked, their modesty covered with parasols. Once again they danced to the front of the stage, twirling their parasols to a number of clumsy steps. The only thing they were able to coordinate was the snapping shut of their parasols, and then they all stood there, naked. Another fanfare from the orchestra and mild applause from the audience.
They ran off and the curtain closed once more.
“It gets better,” Angel said.
How could it not?
There were a number of skits to follow; one about adultery; another of a boy’s first visit to a brothel; yet another about old men who couldn’t satisfy their wives. The actors ad-libbed with the audience, the crowd loved it and laughed uproariously at every bawdy joke. In between, the lights went up to reveal the chorines in yet another nude tableau.
Why did Angel think I would like this?
As the lights went down again, he seemed excited. “It’s time for Superman,” he whispered urgently. “This you have to see.”
The lights went down; there was a tableau of a man and a woman seated in a restaurant. A waiter appeared, dressed in a cape. “Where’s the tableware?” the woman asked him.
On cue, Superman produced knive
s and forks, spoons and napkins from his pockets. There was a sprinkling of laughter from the audience.
After a long discussion about the items on the menu, the woman finally told him she’d just have coffee. Without missing a beat Superman produced a cup and a saucer, even a coffee pot from the folds of his cape. He set down the cup and poured the coffee.
“Salt and pepper?”
“Si, señora, right here in my pocket.”
“Sugar?”
“Claro.”
He handed her a sugar bowl from his breast pocket.
“Where’s the cream?”
He unbuttoned his fly and held his penis over her coffee cup. The woman duly obliged him. The audience roared.
I stared, open-mouthed. I saw now how Superman had earned his nickname: his penis was huge, impossibly so. He was more sideshow freak than sensuality. I turned away.
“Amazing, isn’t he?” Angel said, grinning.
I saw him for the first time. My beautiful boy was not beautiful at all. I had seen this same expression before, on the faces of men in the casinos, those who couldn’t leave the tables until everything was gone, the ones who did not know when to stop, who just couldn’t stop.
I could not believe I had not seen it before.
Superman had the woman bent over the table now, and he was about to penetrate her. No, I couldn’t bear to watch this. Perhaps this poor woman did this every night, perhaps she knew that thing would somehow fit inside her, but she certainly wasn’t enjoying the experience. Her hands were balled into fists around the edge of the table as she braced herself. Men in the audience were cheering and shouting encouragement.
I shook Angel’s arm. “Get me out of here.”
“But the show’s just starting.”
Naked In Havana (Naked Series Book 1) Page 10