It is getting hot again. I sit here sweating in my little shack-like structure on the third floor of a crumbling building on Brasil, just up from Plaza Vieja. It’s actually a casa particular, like a bed and breakfast for tourists. Luis has rented me the top floor and I have the red-painted balcony all to myself. The heat, I am grateful that it sometimes numbs all other considerations. Can you imagine your emaciated, white-haired mother lying naked on her lumpy bed, trying desperately to sleep? That is me. That is what I have become.
Please do not get me wrong, I am resolutely not looking for compassion. I stand by my choices and I would make them again. Being faithful to a chosen desire is the only truth. If that has yielded loneliness then so be it, but I shall not apologise for the truth. There, make your own judgement. You will have your own long nights. It does not matter whether they occur in a baking, corrugated iron hut in the middle of Havana, or a Georgian mansion in Edinburgh.
I close the laptop. John Tannehill. I haven’t thought about him since Cuba. Although the uneasy feeling is familiar, the suspicion of an impending something has swollen, become tangible. I walk to the end of the Stillhouse, past the new exhibition and demonstration spirit safe.
It’s much colder in the old Mashroom. The rusted iron vat still squats in the cold, long since replaced by the Lauter Tun. Someone walks above me on the walkway, shadow sliced into little pieces by the mesh flooring. I can’t move. I have to let the deep hum of machinery shut out all else. There’s the usual smell of electrics, something fused maybe, burned out. I feel trapped, caught in the electro-magnetic grid with nowhere to turn that won’t shock. Just breathe, son, my father would say. There’s nothing that can’t be managed, in time.
I kept a diary too, once. I was eleven and filled it in religiously, every night. But I didn’t write it for me. I’d been pestering my father about my mother again. What was she like dad, why did she leave and never come back? And the same evasive, monosyllabic answers. So the diary was for her, as if I could write her back into our life, conjure her presence from my father’s vague, irritating clues. He must’ve thought of her, maybe still does, alone and stupefied in memory’s locked house. I’ll see him forever, sitting in his little living room and staring into the fire. Did he know John Tannehill, did they meet, shake hands?
I hate her. My father’s a decent man. He endures, she’s dead. Yet her spectral presence still mocks, his endurance more evidence, somehow, of his inadequacy. They’re so different I can’t imagine them together, existing together. It’s surreal. But no-one ever truly knows another. I came close with my wife, a long time ago. Now we’re utterly changed. We’ve stopped even warily circling the strangers that emerged over time and become simple objects in the other’s life, chipped ornaments you can’t bring yourself to throw out.
Although we too may endure. Unlike my diary. I ripped up the pages and scattered them into the North Sea from the pier along the road from my father’s cottage. Almost a year I’d kept it up. My mother wasn’t coming back so what was the point? I was so angry then.
I’m hooked. I admit it. I wait for the next email attachment, I wait for the optimal time and conditions to sit down and read. I know I’m creating a melodrama, like I want to be trapped by my mother’s story. It’s probably why I didn’t delete the first email as soon as it arrived.
But I’m obsessing about the journal for another reason. It stops me wondering why vinales2004 is sending me it in the first place. Maybe I should look for clues in the PO Box, the letters that must’ve accumulated since I stopped checking. But I’ve no more intention of doing that than I do of skipping naked into the snowy gloom with a spruce branch up my arse.
My first instinct has always been to stick instead of twist. Better to let the present re-assert, the reassuring mundanity of the present. But the more it fills with my mother’s story the more unsettling it makes the present. What does she expect me to do with this new knowledge? There’s so much information pouring down, sooner or later we have to admit we’re saturated. I put the brolly up early, settled back to watch the waters rising round every other sucker. If I’ve missed out on a whole series of existential insights then so what, I’m the one in charge of the remote control and that’ll do me. The distillery doesn’t allow for change and neither do I. Here things have always moved to a geological beat. But this new knowledge, I’m not sure of it, I’m not sure of it at all. I don’t know how to deal with it.
My mother comes so readily to mind these days. It’s a soft dusk, pink towards the horizon. The day’s indigo darkens and the bottle of Havana Club slowly empties, the first of the evening patrons arriving in the Obispo café. She’s mid-story, another story she’s been telling for years. Leonardo sits across the table and listens intently. His wife died five months ago and he’s lonely. He might hold a flame for the white-haired British woman but it’s so long since he felt these emotions he can’t be sure. He seems so sorry about something and she can’t follow enough of his heavily accented Spanish to be precisely sure what.
Angels with Dirty Faces
Flashes. Flashes of what I’d said. No detail though, just the pressing sense of something bad.
It was all about degrees of intensity, the boozy enjoyment inversely proportionate to the depression of the comedown. Not that I remembered enjoying myself all that much. No headache though, just a lingering light-headedness that meant the alcohol hadn’t flushed out yet. And that despite the sweating, the soaked sheets. I’d forgotten to put on the air-con the night before. I felt guilty. At home I would’ve shrugged it off, as per usual. Just the drink talking, the convenience of cliché, its ever-reinforcing determinism. Just the drink talking, like, what do you expect, what can be done? But this time I didn’t want to shrug it off.
I found the urn in the shower cubicle. No memory of putting it there. The shower had been dripping on it all night and I wondered if the water had leached inside, turning my mother into grey, gritty soup. She had to go. No way was I leaving her here to return to every night.
Thierry and Monique looked at me warily in the breakfast room, probably wondering what was inside my rucksack. I wanted to go over, quietly point out that there’s weirdness in all of our lives, what’s yours, what are you hiding? Instead I laid out the photographs from the wooden box I’d found in my mother’s apartment. I studied the snapshot faces as I forced down a plate of scrambled eggs and pseudo-frankfurters; my mother’s smile, my own chubby toddler face, my happy father, the man with the thin face and dark hair who was not my father.
Adelina didn’t answer her phone. Nor Rodriguez. Beyond the lobby doors it was raining hard, an actual curtain of rain. I sat outside under the covered arcade that ran the length of the Inglaterra.
I understood why the expatriate life could be so seductive. Everything was new, the shape of the palm leaves in Parque Central, the pattern of the traffic. Even the rain, the way it exploded from the asphalt like tiny creatures throwing up their hands. Freedom also came with novelty. But it seemed sad to be ever on the outside looking in, your homeland drifting too, those ever briefer return visits to more and more you don’t recognise, new judgements based on misunderstood impressions and fainter memory, your opinions tolerated by people who don’t trust you anymore because they don’t see their lives as a series of vignettes.
You’d romanticise it, of course, your homeland, when you were back under these colonnades as the rain fell vertical and the smell so different and the heat so welcome and your friends asked what was it like being back because they wanted a guide to their own return. It’s changed, but it’ll always be home. And there would be nods of sympathy but no-one believes you because they too know sweat-tossed tropical nights when you again watch your roots wither and die, one by one, and you know that even if you wanted to return you can’t.
I ordered a coffee and remembered that first step off the plane at Jose Martí. How did my mother handle the tropical heat, did it made her think about how far she was from Edinburgh?
&
nbsp; At home the rain was no doubt falling. I saw myself hurrying across the distillery bridge, anxious for the warmth of the Stillhouse. Did my mother remember rushing along Princes Street or Lothian Road, collar up against the drizzle? Did she turn to her lover in moon-dappled Caribbean night and whisper in sweet melancholy tone how the streetlight would shatter into a million pixels in the rain spray from the passing Hackneys? Or was it all long forgotten, or never even remembered in the first place because it had never been valued?
The heat rose as the rain eased. Soon the traffic was picking up again, the road already beginning to dry out. The sheltering guests of the Inglaterra began to venture out, guidebooks to hand. I stepped into a watery sun that brightened with each step and was hot and blazing by the time I reached the long and winding seafront promenade, the Malecón.
I tried Adelina again and this time she answered. She listened to my apology with a patient understanding that brought a lump to my throat. I could meet her, sure, but she’d be busy this afternoon with a kids’ baseball team she helped coach. Unless I wanted to come along?
In the guidebook I found the area called Vedado straightaway. I just had to follow the ever-stretching Malecón westwards and look for a little park off a street called Paseo. I felt a bit less paranoid although the guilty anxiety remained. A long, dreamless sleep was the only cure. I hoped Adelina would know what to do with my mother. I took the urn from the rucksack and placed it beside me on the sea wall. The two of us sat there, listening to the sea.
She was embarrassed when I gave her the flowers. ‘Where did you get these? What will my boyfriend say?’
I felt unsure for a moment until I realised she was talking about the seven year-old boy holding her hand.
‘Arturo will be sooo jealous.’ The little boy squinted up. There were about ten other skinny boys and girls with grubby faces, standing around the baseball diamond marked out in the corner of the dusty park. Some of them were giggling, pointing at the man with the flowers.
‘Adelina, I – ’
‘Jim.’ She placed a finger against my lips.
‘No. Please listen. I feel like a fuckin idiot. It’s bizarre, this sweaty guy appears from nowhere and tells you that his mother, your best friend, abandoned him when he was a child. I didn’t even bother to think how you’d react to that. I mean, it must have been a bit of a shock.’
She looked at me closely. ‘I didn’t believe a word of it. Why should I?’
‘I can understand that.’
‘You know what finally made me think you were telling the truth?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your anger, I can’t believe that anyone could pretend to be as angry as you were last night.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you knew her, Adelina. You knew my mother. That’s more than I ever had.’
‘I can only tell you about the person I knew here, in Cuba. She did not speak of her past.’
‘I know that.’
‘And that is ok to you?’
‘You’re going to tell me she was a gentle person, a good friend, all that stuff?’
‘If that is what she was then that is what I will tell you.’
I stuck out a hand. ‘Then I’m ready.’
She smiled and shook my hand. ‘Tell me, have you ever played baseball?’
‘Well I – ’
She shouted something in Spanish and a bare-footed boy sprinted over. When I pointed at his head he handed over his cap. I tried to squeeze it onto my head but it perched there like a pork-pie hat on a cartoon character. That set the children laughing again. I puffed out my chest and settled myself at the plate, wiggling my bum like I’d seen in movies.
‘Vamos!’
The pitcher hurled the ball much harder than I expected and I had to duck. The next one I missed completely and the third whacked me on the hand. I dragged the bat behind me and returned to Adelina with a hang-dog expression. ‘Think I’ve got it in me for the Big Leagues?’
‘Who knows what we could achieve together,’ she said, standing up and clapping her hands.
Just a throwaway remark but I still wondered what she meant. I watched her with the kids. She was good with them, natural, they listened closely to all her explanations. I remembered the one and only time my father came to watch me play football. First-year trials at high school. I was so nervous that I might as well have been on a different pitch. No-one passed to me and the only time I won the ball I miskicked the cross and put it out for a goal kick. I wanted my father to clap my hands like the other dads, like Adelina. Chin-up son, eyes on the ball, track back. But he just stood on the touchline looking awkward, as if placed there by mistake.
‘You got kids?’
She tensed, momentarily. ‘Yes. Do you?’
‘No. Do you just have the one child?’
‘A boy.’
I was more surprised by my disappointment than my lie. A child meant a father, which meant a husband.
‘He is called Floriano.’
There was a cheer from the kids as my nemesis pitched another fastball. ‘That kid’s got a rocket of an arm.’
‘A what?’
‘A rocket.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Like in space. 5-4-3-2-1, boooooom! ‘‘Houston we have a problem’’. A rocket.’
‘Ah, un cohete!’
She repeated the word in a shout and the boys started making whooshing noises, throwing their arms in the air. The pitcher smiled broadly, dropping into his stance and aiming the ball at me.
‘You don’t need to feel bad, Jim,’ she said when they were packing away the baseball gear.
‘I do. You’ve gone out of your way to be friendly. I’m sorry Adelina, I don’t know how long I’m going to be here and I can’t get through to Rodriguez. I feel like I’m chasing a ghost.’
‘There are no ghosts Jim, just people we don’t yet know. I told you I’d tell you about your mother.’
‘Talking about my mother.’ I bent down and opened the rucksack, taking out the urn.
‘You’ve been carrying that around all day?’
It was my turn to look embarrassed. ‘I thought you might know where I could scatter the ashes.’
She looked perplexed, as if wondering whether this Scotsman was completely insane.
‘I can’t keep her in my room. Have you got any ideas? Maybe just over the sea wall and into the sea?’
‘You can’t do that. There are rules. I think. You might need permission.’
‘Who’s going to find out?’
‘I don’t know, someone might. You should make it official.’
‘How long will that take?’
She studied me for a moment then shrugged. ‘Sometimes we can live with a little more excitement than usual.’
‘Can you think of anywhere? She’s weighing me down, who’d have thought the dead were so heavy?’
‘Don’t say that!’ And then she was laughing, which set me off. It was a relief, she could easily have fled from this lunatic with his sunburned face and skinny, painfully white legs. And his dead mother. In a rucksack.
‘Help me take these things home and then we can go there.’
‘What about your husband?’
‘I don’t have a husband.’
There wasn’t much evidence of anyone in Adelina’s apartment. She lived on the third floor of one of Havana’s ghost mansions, the memories of a lost prosperity still visible, almost, in the stained, peeling columns and the ornate, rusting balconies. Where aloof ladies once fanned themselves, lines of washing now stretched from one grand shuttered door to the next, the appalled spectres tut-tutting the ham-hock women shouting to each other across the street.
She’d shared the flat with her grandmother, who died a few months back. I am packing her away, it is so sad. I waited as she took a shower, wandering the echoing rooms stacked with boxes. Only the small room which opened onto the balcony contained any clues to life continued; a mirror and a sideboard
with beauty products, a shelf of English-language teaching materials, a huge TV-set. I couldn’t shake a feeling of sadness, a pressing weight of life examined and found wanting. I was glad when we were back out in the baking streets.
‘Your mother walked everywhere you know. In the department she was called The Wanderer. It was the boots she wore, she got them when she climbed Machu Picchu, you know, in Peru?’
I nodded.
‘I can imagine her now, striding along. She had long white hair down to her waist, as white as sand.’ She looked at me, searchingly, as if trying again to find an echo of my mother.
We headed back into the city. I watched my feet, saw a pair of battered old hiking boots, the rustle of a long skirt and maybe a quiet song, my mother humming as she angled through Havana’s mess, always knowing where she was going, always smiling, yes, she was someone who smiled at strangers, who waved and bent down to talk to children, an eccentric and respected for it, for living in Havana, for matching the old domino men shot for shot into blue dusk, her white hair a lantern lighting the wasted concrete canyons of fast-falling night, the old men staring and some held a flame but she’d never responded to any of them.
I may have glimpsed her then, a suggestion in sun-dazzle on white stone, there on the edge of vision, turning the corner ahead but gone when we got there. The rucksack began to weigh heavier and I remembered my father sitting me down when I was fourteen. You’re a man now James. And then he told me about my mother and when she had left. But not why. He never had anything to say about the why and I despised him for his arrogant refusal.
‘Did she have a good life?’ I asked.
‘We have lots of lives Jim.’
‘I mean your grandmother.’
‘My grandmother? She had lots of photos, hundreds and hundreds. In the last few years she spent so much time looking at them. Was she trying to return to a time of happiness? Or was she looking for the clues for where she went wrong? The truth is I don’t know. She was a good person, I know that. If that is the measure of a good life then that is what she had.’
The Stillman Page 9