Anyway, it’s a holiday, and the parque is thronged with what appears to be the entire population of Bayamo (est. 192,600). Yes, it’s Palma Day in Bayamo and todo los Bayameses are shouting with joy! One wonderfully impassioned speech after another goes echoing around the parque, with many elected representatives taking their turn (and their time!) at the microphone, trying their best to emulate Fidel in the oratory department, and maybe even surpass him now and then. One fellow is at the mike, introducing all the visiting councillors and various elected representatives from such places as Santo Domingo and Santa Clara, and each time that he pauses, drumrolls break out from all around the square, along with multitudinous cries from the multitudes, yelling out “Vive Fidel,” “Vive Cuba Libre,” “Cuba Sí,” etc. People squeal with joy and the drumrolls continue until the speaker starts up again. There’s nothing like this in Canadian politics. Except maybe for Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day.
—
But I get tired of it and for contrast slip into the silence of the Catedral del Santísimo Salvador. Behind and above the altar is a larger-than-life statue of Jesus on a transfigured cross, with white and gold beaming out from it on all sides. Not to be disrespectful, but Jesus has his forearms lifted and his head tilted back, and he’s standing on his right foot with his left foot kinda kicked back, and it looks as if he’s doing the mambo. Maybe that’s the Cuban idea of heaven – eternal mambo.
The church is brighter and airier than many, sparrows are flitting around, chirping away and pooping on the pews. It’s off the main square and in a small square to the side. It’s pale yellow, with a beautifully designed Italian campanile and a red terra-cotta roof. There’s a large mural showing the unfolding for the first time of the new Cuban flag, which took place here in Bayamo on October 20, 1868, and right in this church a choir of twelve women sang Cuba’s fiery Revolutionary anthem of independence for the very first time, with a shocked and horrified colonial governor in attendance. The anthem was composed by a local musician and poet named Perucho Figueredo, whose statue today adorns the beautiful Parque Céspedes, standing high on a base on which is inscribed not only the heroic words – “Do not fear a glorious death / To die for the Fatherland is to live,” etc. – but the score as well, with all the little sharps and flats, semiquavers and demiquavers, clefs and staffs engraved in stone. The original church was built in 1516, rebuilt in 1733, and again after the fire of 1869. There is a huge old mural in the church that shows an independence-day gathering in the civic square in the midnineteenth century. It’s definitely Bayamo, and the crowd fills the square shoulder to shoulder, much as it did today, with the only difference being that many of the men in the mural have rifles over their shoulders, and many are on horseback. There are no goat carts pulling the children around as there are today, but everybody, blacks, whites, and in-betweens, is very excited about independence, every woman is wearing her best dress and carrying great bouquets of flowers, and every man has doffed his hat for his first glimpse of the new flag. And in the sky over all, up there in the golden clouds, Jesus is looking down and bestowing his blessings. It’s odd being all alone in this church, and hearing the speeches to the crowd drifting in from outside, while gazing up at this great mural, and knowing that outside, in the same place, history’s themes are repeating themselves, with only the slightest variations.
—
There are several stalls all around, many of them selling books for schoolkids, plus the occasional big fat novel. Much food is being sold, a couple of stalls have large roasted pigs on the table, and the ice-cream shop, where I couldn’t get ice cream last time I was here, is now so crowded because of the holiday that it looks as if I’m not going to be able to get helado even now that I have pesos. The ice-cream crowd looks very disorderly, but in fact nobody’s pushing anybody. This is the Cuba of my dreams, fully integrated, everybody equal, everyone acting as an individual and simultaneously as a member of the most famous little country in the world.
The festivities are over, but the crowd isn’t ready to disperse yet. An energetic man about forty is wielding two giant brooms, each about four feet wide, and he’s cutting a huge rapid-fire swath through the litter, and people are lifting their feet as he goes by, and giving a little hop from in front of the brooms to behind them.
And now a parade has formed; numerous people are following a wild percussion band into the square and around and around, picking up a longer tail of shouting, laughing, overjoyed people as it goes, throwing their arms up and down with gleeful abandon, celebrating independence, sovereignty, and I don’t think President Bush would have a chance here. Everybody here would fight to the death. It’s all so unimaginable. The entire world would turn on Bush if he attacked this country with his ever bigger and better bombs. This is a great country, severely wounded by the boring blockade, and these constant death threats, but still dancing, and still full of joy, maybe more now than ever. The United States promised to end the blockade when the Russians were gone, but the Russians have been gone for twelve years now and still it continues.
—
Meanwhile, gently and carefully through the boisterous crowds, three men are pulling a cart on which are sitting about twenty-five oversized ceremonial cakes slathered with brilliant pink icing, the same colour as the ice cream that is being dished out. The cakes are perfectly square, about fourteen inches by fourteen. And then the cart gets wheeled into a dental office (bearing a happy-tooth, sad-tooth sign out front), and through the office to a smaller office at the back, where people learn how to use computers. Odd place to take twenty-five fresh-baked birthday cakes, but I’m sure the Cubans know what they’re doing. And one of the fellows pulling the cake cart is wearing a T-shirt that says, No I Do Not Speak English But I Promise Not to Laugh at Your Spanish. Oddly enough, I seem to be the only non-Cuban in this entire throng of people.
—
When things returned to normal, I sat in the park studying my Spanish dictionary and then a woman a bit farther along on the perimeter bench started chatting me up. She asked if it was poetry I was reading. No, I was just brushing up on some verb conjugations. She went over a few with me. She appeared to be a teacher, and the handsome younger Afro-Cubano beside her was a serious student, writing in a big notebook. He was very concentrated on his work. Nothing else existed. The woman was very pretty, maybe thirty years old. The young man, who was about twenty, his pen ran out. She asked if he could borrow mine. Of course, I handed him my green fountain pen full of black ink and we continued our chat about the Spanish language. She said she worked in a small tienda, selling stuff to Cubans such as cigarettes and spools of thread. She said the best Cuban cigarettes were Hollywood and I shouldn’t smoke Popular because they were too strong.
With the young student still writing away and consulting his book with enviable concentration, this seemingly pedagogical woman, who was small and cute in a light-skinned feline and slightly African way, suggested we repair to the Hotel Royalton for a coffee. So we crossed the narrow street and she dragged us into the bar of the Royalton rather than the coffee shop and ordered three icy-cold Bucaneros. But I just wanted a coffee and her student wanted a cola. So the waiter brought my coffee, his cola, and her beer. And I soon realized I’d made a fundamental mistake of the innocent variety. She was, whether accidentally or on purpose, touching me under the table. Oops, that was definitely not accidental. Whatever else she was – a teacher, a tienda saleswoman – she was a chica. Her young friend was her brother, she said. Hermano y hermana, she said, with pride – but I didn’t believe it. They looked nothing alike in any way. No way did they come from the same mother or the same father.
The book our hermano kept referring to, studiously writing away and ignoring our talk, as if he’d heard it all before, or as if he’d been warned to butt out, was a Spanish-French dictionary. He’s learning French! Yes, she said, Quebec French, not that fake French the people of France speak, the real French of Quebec.
When I recovered from that zinger, I asked if sh
e was teaching him French. I still somehow had the notion she was a teacher.
Yes, she said. Quebec French. So I thought, Aha, my French is better than my Spanish so I started speaking French, but she didn’t understand a word. This left me terribly confused. I guess she wasn’t the first teacher to be teaching a language she didn’t know.
Meanwhile, she handed me a postcard showing a semi-abstract and highly imaginative painting of a woman with her head turned to one side, her breasts a pair of bright swirling polymites, her legs and a hint of a long tail very reptilian, little eyelike loops all over her face and body, and a bright blue iridescent butterfly covering her genitalia. Under it was an unsigned, unattributed poem, which in my amateurish fashion I would translate as:
Your eyes are as profound as the place where the night beats its wings,
with arms of fresh flowers and a flaming aura of rose.
Your breasts are like families of white snails
which fall asleep in the nest of your abdomen like the butterfly of a dream.
I told her the card was very beautiful and handed it back to her. Then she wrote her name and address out on it and, with her “brother” still concentrating on the books, in place of a message she drew a cartoonish set of five neatly executed images with the equivalent name in Spanish alongside each: pinga, bollo, culo, tetas, nolgas. These words and images were very simply obscene, but they were too cute and well drawn to be offensive. There was a deft innocence about them. There was no doubt she had written and drawn these words and pictures many times. I was astonished and very amused that a person I took to be a teacher, an intellectual, and she certainly looked the part, and with a hard-working student following her around, could be a woman of the streets, a chica. But she was and she was not at all ashamed of it. There was nothing wrong with it as long as one did it in the proper spirit and visited the polyclinico every chance one got. Meanwhile I continued to try to speak intelligently to her while she was running her fingers along my thigh, under the table, but not so surreptitiously that the bartender didn’t know what she was doing, and the members of the hotel staff who came in from time to time didn’t need to be nudged to see what she was doing. Everyone seemed to know her well and seemed dismayed to see me with her. This could be bad for business. And whatever reputation I had established in Bayamo was swirling down the drain.
Meanwhile, her “brother” finished what he had been writing and began to copy a name and address onto a stamped envelope, in which he had folded and inserted several pages. Then Marisolita (for that was her name) showed me the name and address of the man this was going to. It was a Mr. J––– H––– Pierre, such and such a number and street, and then the name of the town: Fonds, Quebec. No, there is no Fonds, Quebec, I said. Then I realized she had merely misplaced the Pierre. I took the envelope and asked permission to correct it. I crossed out the name Pierre and inserted it before Fonds, as it was, correctly, Pierrefonds, and the fellow’s name would be Mr. J––– H–––. And then, from a slip of paper I took from Marisolita, I added the correct postal code, which our serious young man – Chichi, she called him – hadn’t written on the envelope because it seemed nonsensical. Now it will get to him, I said.
Earlier she had asked me to guess her age. I thought I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and said thirty-one. She gasped and said, Oh no, I’m only twenty-five. I was embarrassed but covered up with a little lie by saying I was only joking, she didn’t look a day over twenty-five. When in fact she was probably thirty-five. I asked how old Chichi was. He had stopped writing but was still paying absolutely no attention to us. He was in a very serious world of his own, while she was engrossed in plying her trade. He is a baby, she said. Only twenty. He likes to suckle my breast – and she squeezed one of her little breasts and made wetly obscene sucking noises. I turned to the bartender, who was watching us non-judgmentally, and put my hand on my head and said, Oy vey! He smiled knowingly and averted his gaze. I seemed to have wandered far from my state of religious adoration in the cathedral an hour or two ago.
No, I said, he is no baby. He’s a full-grown man – with a moustache and an air of great dignity.
No, she said. He is a baby.
Like all men at heart, you mean, I said.
No, even more than that, she said.
Then I became fully convinced that he was not her brother but her pimp, and what he had been doing all this time was not studying French with his Spanish-French dictionary but was busy translating a letter that she had written, in Spanish, to a former patron of hers, Mr. J––– H––– of Pierrefonds, Quebec. The note with his name and address was rather faded and crumpled so it had been a while since his visit to Bayamo. Imagine his astonishment at receiving the letter, which he undoubtedly would receive now that it had the town’s name and the postal code corrected. Maybe he’d been dying to hear from her, and was imagining all kinds of cruel things. He would note that his address on the envelope had been edited and corrected by another hand, but he would not imagine that the other hand had been that of an actual fellow Canadian! Also I was confident that the letter as translated by Chichi the pimp would contain tender reminiscences of their time together, plus hints of great poverty, and a not-so-subtle request for him to reply along with some U.S. dollars, the more the better. I of course felt trapped. I wanted to say adios but felt it would be rude of me and I was waiting for the perfect moment. No wonder Chichi had been concentrating so hard. It’s not easy to translate a letter from Spanish to French when you know no French except what you can look up in the French-Spanish dictionary. Also he was concentrating because this was a scheme – if things worked out there could be good money in the return mail.
She invited me to come to her casa. She said it would be just she and I there, it would be entirely private. This seemed odd to my ears because I was still in a state of detachment from my moment in the church, and the world around me seemed like a shadowy movie I was watching from an eye deep in my heart. Nothing is real, everything is reel.
I told her, as I had told others, that I was not interested in sex, and I made a drooping motion with my right forefinger. She asked my age and when I told her she said the man from “Fronds” was much older than I and he was very erect for hours and hours. Sigh!
So I upped the ante and politely told her that alas I found sex mucho aburrido. She insisted we need not have sex per se, but she would caress me lovingly in a way that would give me intense pleasure. So then I pulled all the stops and told her that intense pleasure would have been of great interest to me ten years ago but now I find other pleasures more intense, such as working on my stamp collection.
By this time Chichi had gone to post the letter and Marisolita had to go to the washroom. So I went to the bartender and paid the bill for all our drinks and cigarros. When I turned around Chichi had returned to his seat and I told him the bill had been paid and I shook his hand, said mucho gusto, and went to my room. For the next while my phone rang repeatedly. At first it rang thirty-seven times. Then a few minutes later it rang again but only twelve times. And then eight. And then five. And then one lonely ring, a dying gasp, and everything was silencio y finito.
I must add that Chichi and Marisolita were very excellent people in spite of, or maybe because of, their rather unprestigious and lowly calling as workers in the sex trade. I was very impressed with her sense of dedication and her very intriguing methods of trying to get me interested. No Canadian hooker would ever try so hard, unless the fellow was a clergyman of high standing, or a professional hockey player.
And look at Chichi! He was concentrated and purposeful. I didn’t get to check out his translation all that carefully, but it looked to me as if he knew what he was doing. Mr. J––– H––– will know the letter is not from Marcel Proust, but he’ll be able to figure it out if he tries.
So yes they were bright, dedicated, inventive, intelligent – and although Chichi was a bit dour he was a good man and Marisolita had a sly sense of bawdy h
umour. And they really did look like a pretty little teacher thrilled to be alive and a big dumb student doing lessons out of class. She will possibly remember me as the man who got away in spite of all her attempts. She also had an excellent way of making me almost feel that she wanted me because she genuinely liked me – and she laughed gleefully at my pathetic jokes such as “I have zero desiro,” etc. And that I enjoy “mucho camelar mas no cama.” It boggled her mind that I had not had sex with anyone all the time I’d been in Cuba. She was astonished. She kept stroking her cute little turned-up nose with an exaggerated Pinocchio gesture. She even asked if I was “normal.”
I told her I thought Cuba was a very hot and sexy place – perhaps the sexiest country in the entire galaxy – but I knew in Toronto many men my age who are no longer into it, and many women too. Cuba caliente, Toronto frijo, I said, and I added that I considered myself perfectly normal but just a fellow who prefers intellectual and emotional stimulation to the perilous and frivolous excitement that lies in the lower chakras. She seemed to understand but preferred to pretend she didn’t.
Marisolita had perfectly exquisite heart-shaped lips, naturally pink, but there was a nasty little scar just above her upper lip. It looked as if she’d been stabbed with a ballpoint pen. What happened? She glanced at Chichi, who was in a world of his own. “He did it.”
—
Parque Céspedes is very different tonight. It has undergone another transformation, this time with little card tables and chairs set up for games, all the way around the outside perimeter. There’s a dwarf smoking cigarettes (to show he’s not a kid?) and playing checkers with a normal-sized kid about his size (who is not smoking), and they’re playing with bottle caps. One side has bottle caps up, the other has bottle caps down. There’s a young woman there sitting patiently by herself with a box full of dominoes but nobody wants to play with her. Maybe the idea of women playing dominoes doesn’t seem quite right to the macho men of Bayamo. Or maybe she’s waiting for her friends. And then there are four guys playing dominoes, with a fifth guy watching and doing a lot of excited kibitzing. Christopher P. Baker says dominoes is not a child’s game in Cuba, having developed to a very subtle and complex level, but these guys were just looking at the board, looking at their own hand, and then figuring out what the others must have in their hands. It’s not complicated. Chess is complicated. And there are many chess games going on, with a lot of kids half my size playing high-speed chess.
An Innocent in Cuba Page 24