Sue’s prediction did come true. John wrote from Alexandria, Egypt. ‘Please come,’ he said. ‘I need you more than ever.’ I will look after you forever, I thought. We would eat sweet dates and drink mint tea, listen to the muezzin and make love in the softest dawn. Did I understand the implications of chasing this dream to the detriment of all else? Only vaguely, like a warning shout as you swim deeper into heavy, booming surf. I rushed headlong from London as I had Edinburgh, my motives struggling to catch up. And questions become difficult to answer in the absence of motives: was I missing you, could I even miss you?
Alexandria, how it shimmered! We had enough to rent out some rooms in a little backstreet not far from Misr train station. Even the nightmare beginning became part of the dream. The ship had been docked for two hours but there was no sign of John. I was lost in the middle of a seething quayside crowd, more and more anxious, shading my eyes and scanning every face. Then he was there, but just a glimpse. I shouted but he didn’t see me and I was suddenly terrified that he would simply give up and disappear, leave me to the crowd.
Then he turned round. The happiness in his eyes has never left me. My bags tumbled as we embraced, the skinny dock boys laughing and pointing. We were the centre of the universe and I do not think I stopped smiling for the seven months we lived there. I loved the warm air and the quiet breeze, the whitewash and the dust. I loved watching John stand at the balcony in blue pastel afternoon, head down as he wrote in hot whisky night, drowsed in cool morning light. It felt so very right, the world created for us and only us. I never imagined how life could so easily flow.
You’re expecting the ‘but’, yes? Imagine a world with no tempering of the opposite, no brake on untrammelled good, evil, sadness. Is the depth of an emotion made more sweet by its opposite, the fear it could be taken away from you at any moment? Or would it be more intense still if there was no depth it could not attain?
I wish the joy of those months in Egypt could have continued forever. Even with the ‘buts’, the heroin John could not shake, the depression I could never reach. Today my imagination is dry as the desert but back then I was convinced I could set John free if I was just able to think my way into the proper strategy. That meant emptying every last secret and fear, in the hope that myself, stripped bare, would persuade him to abandon his own self and together we would combine into something untouchable. That is why I told him what I did. I thought it would bring us together, properly and finally.
I told John he was your father.
I told him it happened during our holiday in the Highlands. I wanted to believe it myself. But the gap between wanting to believe and knowing is often unbridgeable. The hurt in John’s eyes was terrible, the confusion of his dawning realisation that any reaction he decided upon was irrelevant because there was nothing he could do about it. It was too late to amend. I remember the wind rising, the way it billowed the balcony curtains. He wasn’t angry, John never got angry. His voice was a whisper when he asked what your name was.
My headache has got worse. There’s a shake to my hands. I lock the door to the en-suite bathroom and sit on the toilet. Mould is starting to creep along the bottom of the bath where the sealant has disintegrated. I bend down and start scraping at it, black muck building up behind my thumb-nail. Now I want it properly cleaned, I want to start from fresh.
I peel back the rubbery strip of sealant to reveal the narrow gap between the bath and the lino. The lino’s grubby too, and the black tiles around the mirror, splattered with water marks, toothpaste. I find a scourer behind the toilet and start scrubbing, avoiding my gaze in the mirror because that reflection is useless. Adelina’s letters are lying on the bed but so what? Let my wife open them, read them. I need to clean, this bathroom must be cleansed, like my mother emptied the trough of her life, the swill pooling stagnant on her balcony until it evaporated in the sun and maybe in time a hurricane blew away the last of the stench.
In the Mood for Love
Darkness and light. A consideration of explanations with no middle ground. I lay naked on top of the sheets in the dark of Adelina’s old bedroom. She was there, beyond the partition wall. Red shorts and t-shirt, bolt upright in bright morning sun. The events of the day before sat just beyond me, distant enough to already be anomaly, close enough to ask a bittersweet what if?
I wasn’t willing to let the day in. That meant facing each other. Across the breakfast table and Brunhilda’s scanning eyes, an awkwardness impossible to disguise. I’d leave this room only when the pressure in my bladder finally forced me to just get up, go to the damn toilet.
We opened our bedroom doors at exactly the same time, startling one another. Each of us said an overly polite good morning, formalities that hung absurdly in the air. For want of filling the yawning void opening up between us, I tapped my cigarette packet. Adelina stepped back to let me pass on the narrow passageway that led to the veranda. I smoked my cigarette, trying not to think of her in the bathroom, pulling down those little red shorts.
Brunhilda bustled in the kitchen across the patio, noticing me just as I stubbed out. I waved back to her as I stepped off the veranda, in the same moment that Adelina emerged from the toilet. We may have been reaching out even before we bumped into one another. The kiss was urgent, Adelina pulling me into her room while looking anxiously over my shoulder. But her mother was out of sight, her happy whistling drifting across the hot morning.
‘You have always been a fussy girl!’
‘I get bored with fruit.’
‘Fruit is good for you Adelina.’
‘Si, si, bueno Jim, bueno.’
Then the laugh, always the laugh. I hadn’t met anyone as contented as Adelina’s father José.
‘Yes, I don’t know why she’s so picky. I’d eat mango every day if I could get it.’ Brunhilda’s wizened face cracked into a smile and she gave a little wink, Adelina poking me in the ribs.
‘Don’t you start!’
Everyone laughed expect Brunhilda, whose gaze flicked from me to Adelina. She’d already picked up on the slight tension, a new shyness in her daughter when she talked to me. Her mother’s gaze was burning and Adelina was over-doing the attempt to appear normal. José was oblivious for now but I foresaw an imminent briefing. He would be sat down by Brunhilda and informed, like a melodramatic Brazilian soap opera. I was glad I’d insisted on treating them to breakfast at the little café on the main street. It meant distractions.
‘Have you enjoyed Viñales, Jim?’ asked Brunhilda.
‘It’s a beautiful place. You’re very lucky to live here.’
‘Oh, I am sure it is no more beautiful than your own home. When are you going home?’
I looked away from the piercing glance that accompanied this question. A heat rose in my neck.
‘I have to wait until I hear from the lawyer about my mother’s financial matters. It could be a few more days.’
‘Oh well that’s good then. Isn’t it Adelina, a few more days with your friend until he goes back home?’
Adelina’s father began nodding his head. ‘Si, si. Yes, home. Mi casa.’ He stood up and slowly lifted his coffee cup in my direction. ‘Mi casa es su casa. Me house, your house, yes?’
I smiled and raised my own coffee. ‘And you would be welcome in my . . . casa.’
‘Gracias, gracias.’
‘If only it were possible,’ said Brunhilda. ‘It is very difficult to leave Cuba. You will, most probably, never see us again.’
In that moment Brunhilda definitely knew. She couldn’t have missed the look that passed between myself and Adelina. The silence too was a giveaway. For a long moment no one wanted to hold anyone’s gaze, all except José, beaming away as he slurped his coffee.
A shout from the roadside punctured the tension. A horse and trap had pulled up, a powerfully-built man in olive green army fatigues talking animatedly and gesticulating towards us.
The happy face of Adelina’s father filled with anger, his daughter reaching for him as
he began shouting at the uniformed man. Adelina covered her face in her hands and Brunhilda sat poker-straight, staring directly ahead. Across the street people gawped, listening to the furious argument so completely out of place in this sunny, peaceful place. The uniformed man was pointing at me as he shouted, Adelina’s father’s hands cupped like a bowl as he turned to me and back to the man in the trap, as if in supplication, explaining something indefensible. The man jumped down and stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to the café balcony. He fixed me with a stare and spat viciously on the ground.
Only when the horse’s slow clip had faded away did Brunhilda return to the moment. She put a hand on her husband’s arm, looking tired and drawn as she spoke to Adelina in Spanish.
‘This is why I do not come home often.’
‘What the hell was all that about?’
Even in the car she wouldn’t tell me. The farewells had been brief. Her father was already half-way up the path by the time I turned the Audi. Brunhilda stood in the middle of the road with one hand on her hip and the other shielding her eyes, as if making sure we were gone.
The rural was always public, whatever the country. I remembered a shouting match with my father one night outside our house. I was seventeen, daft and drunk. The next day a woman I worked with in the local café leaned close to me. Next time you take a pot shot at your dad keep the noise down eh? It was amazing how quickly the story had transformed, transcended its mundanity in the re-telling to something more interesting. It was the first time I realised that this would happen again and again in a place where nothing ever did.
‘I don’t like bullies.’
‘What’s that?’
She turned back to me, tear streaks on her cheeks. ‘I don’t like bullies, Jim.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘Turn round.’
I’d just swung onto the autopista beyond Pinar del Rio City.
‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
I did as I was told and followed her directions back into the city’s lazy bustle. Again that low-slung colonial architecture going to seed, sudden tapering pot-holed streets, criss-crossed by a confusion of sagging phone and electricity wires. She made me stop outside a school in a quiet neighbourhood, the dusty playground empty. Steady chanting was coming from behind the wooden classroom shutters. Times tables perhaps: I wondered if I could remember them.
‘You wanted to know about your mother. Well your mother stood up to bullies. We came to this school on an exchange visit. We were helping out in a mathematics class one morning and when a student got a question wrong the teacher slapped him on the face. Your mother was shocked and asked the teacher to stop. He did it again. You want to know what your mother did? She walked up to him in front of the class and slapped him. He complained, yes, but the children had told their parents what happened and how they were sometimes hit by the teacher. So the parents complained and the teacher was sacked by the end of the week.’
She smiled then, leaning across and kissing me on the cheek. The diversion seemed to have helped her mood. I must have looked confused because she decided to provide me with the missing link in the morning’s drama. ‘The man with the horse. He is a friend of my ex-husband and the godfather to Floriano. He blames me for my husband taking Floriano away.’
‘I see.’
‘I doubt it. He is a stupid person and stupid people always make me feel trapped. I would leave this country if I could Jim, get away from all the stupid people that hate me, find Floriano and start another life somewhere else.’
‘So let’s do it!’
‘Pardon.’
‘Consider it done. Enough of the past. Today the future happens.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We’ll go somewhere else, to the mountains because it is too damn hot, we’ll hide in the mountains and you’ll be Mrs Drever and we’ll be on holiday. You’ll be looking out of someone else’s eyes, just for a while.’
‘But – ’
‘No buts! Tell me somewhere you’ve never been. The mountains though, please, it has to be the mountains, look how sweaty I am!’
* * *
Time would stand still, I reckoned, if a sense of presence could be maintained for long enough. Then the always-approaching endpoint could be indefinitely delayed. Once or twice I stood in the back garden, sure that the sounds of the distillery had ceased, that the clouds scooting across the moon had paused. What if I had caused this, breathed deeply enough at just the right moment to stop the universe? Perhaps it sometimes stopped for Adelina too, when she held that impossibly delicate purple flower on our rainforest walk, or when she suddenly stopped and stared into the deep canopy, watching the trogon bird watch her.
For me time came to a halt in other moments: in the scatter of her clothes, watching the ceiling fan while she sang in the shower, Spanish that I didn’t understand but wouldn’t forget.
Certainties, ever-stamped in the memory but framed by transience. From the hillside vantage of Hotel Moka the landscape around Las Terrazas village unfurled like a scroll-painting, the papaya and palms never still, walking the valley in slow-rising mist, up the hidden slopes of the Sierra del Rosario. We stayed at the hotel for two days. Each afternoon the sky erupted. Purple swelled the eastern sky and the storm darkened the green, wrapping the tree line in grey fuzz. The palms quivered even before the thunder, the rain on the leaves a frantic, multi-directed percussion. Once Adelina stepped out from the shelter of the terraced bar, twirling and laughing in the deluge, the thin cotton dress clinging to her body.
We slept together. And no awkwardness. It had been over twenty years since I’d been with another woman. Not that I felt guilty. My wife had no place here. She made sense in a cold landscape like the bones of the earth revealed, as out of place in these tropical greens as Adelina would be there. This relieved me of any responsibility to tell either of them about the other. I reached for Adelina again. My wife and children would remain unstated.
She lay with her head on my chest. I thought about this Frenchman, David. Maybe she made a habit out of this, I could be the latest in a line of European men bedded in luxury hotels.
‘What was he like?’
‘Who?’
‘David.’
‘Why do you mention him?’
‘What do you think he’s doing, right now?’
She sat up on her elbows, surprise on her face. ‘You’re not jealous, are you?’
‘Course not.’ But I was, a little.
‘He was a romantic. And then he went home. At the moment he is probably falling in love with someone else.’
‘Are we a bit old for this?’
‘For what.’
‘For this, I don’t know how to describe it.’
‘Then does it matter?’
She was right. It didn’t matter. I knew that endings were written by expectations, and because I didn’t have any expectation of the situation having a future I threw myself into making the most of it, letting the present unfurl as naturally as the Las Terrazas landscape. I stuck my head outside the igloo of my inhibitions and maybe she tried to convince herself that history doesn’t repeat, that I wasn’t another David. This didn’t mean I thought of myself as a lover. I was too shrewd for that. Being a lover implied an end-point, a transition to another kind of relationship that was impossible. Not that this stopped me behaving as one; staying up all night, fucking for hours, uncorking the past with a drunken freedom that slightly unnerved me with its greedy need to tell Adelina all about myself, right now.
The hope of a different future wasn’t completely absent. It revealed itself in occasional loaded silences, in the walk through the rainforest with stern Manuel, who glanced in disapproval and was peeved we didn’t pay more attention, in the river where we swam with the kamikaze teenagers leaping from the high, slick rocks, in the café where we drank beer and watched swollen cumulus so close we could touch, so far away we’d never get there.
�
��No promises?’
‘What could I promise?’
‘David promised.’
‘I’m not David.’
Adelina, she was so open. Her words went off in my head like little fire-crackers, illuminating considerations so long forgotten I almost flinched. She talked about Floriano and I had an urge to tell her about my own children that I only just suppressed. She talked about her husband who took Floriano and I realised there were others crueller than my mother.
‘Is everything broken?’ I asked.
‘No, everything is so complicated to put together we missed out an important bit and then it fell apart!’
‘It shouldn’t really be complicated. Isn’t that the giveaway that something’s not right? This. Me and you here just now. This feels right.’
‘It’s always right with someone, for a while, you can remember that?’
I finished my wine and motioned to the waiter for another bottle. I did remember, I remembered when it was my wife sitting across the table, a different table, snow slipping down the window. The difference was that I couldn’t imagine it anymore. ‘You’re saying there’ll be a time when it won’t be right. Even if I stayed here, in Cuba, that time would come?’
‘I don’t know if it is right. But we’re here. The only time we ever have is now, tonight, and I’m fed up with questions. Remember, no promises.’
‘I think you spent too much time with my mother.’
‘I think you spent too long without her.’
‘That’s hardly my fault!’
‘I didn’t say it was. I am sad. I am sad you did not know your mother.’
‘I’m sad about Floriano.’
‘I will find Floriano. I think.’
The Stillman Page 18