The Stillman

by Tom McCulloch

  ‘No. Nothing. You know what? I’m not frightened of her any more. I think it’s because I can imagine her now.’

  She didn’t believe me. She couldn’t miss my anxiety every time my mother was mentioned. This wasn’t something I could ever lay to rest. Did she feel sad for me, for Helen, who had caused this pain long before Adelina knew her, that person she wouldn’t have recognised?

  I got up and padded across to the balcony, still warm underfoot. Down below, the streetside café was still open. A few old men played dominoes in the dirty yellow light, lazy cackles mingling with the clatter of the occasional scooter. Sure enough the old waiter soon appeared, staring up at me. What did the old guy want? I imagined my mother standing here, drunk as I was, looking to the building across the street where the ancient woman with the enormous pendulous breasts sat in insomniac night, staring back at her from the hidden shadows, wondering again what had brought the white-haired gringo woman to Havana.

  There was no way of knowing. Adelina was only able to pass on the story of my mother’s last few years. It seemed enough, to know something about her final manifestation and only the odd echo of a past now forever closed. Her abandonment of me was a lost story, so too John Tannehill. My overriding feeling was relief that Adelina had been unable to shine any light on potential explanations. I’d blamed myself for years but wasn’t enough of a masochist to torture myself with a truth that would only solidify the guilt.

  I listened to Havana. As she once listened on this very spot. I didn’t know enough to forget about her.

  * * *

  Rodriguez went on and on about it. How his wife had said if it was flu you wouldn’t have got out of bed! But the child was screaming again and he couldn’t stand it. Better just to agree it was a heavy cold and get to the office where he could get some peace. He then spent an hour in a bus queue and when it finally turned up it broke down after a few hundred yards. A not uncommon occurrence but most unwelcome today. Yes, Havana was a shitty place to have a cold.

  ‘I hope you get better soon,’ I said.

  The lawyer’s mood probably wasn’t helped by Basilio. It obviously wasn’t the first time his assistant had screwed up, going to the Inglaterra to collect us when he’d been told to head downtown to my mother’s apartment on Brasil. Rodriguez’s watery eyes kept roving back to Adelina, his gaze lingering awhile, amusement flickering. All those years in the profession, all those divorce cases, he’d probably developed a pretty keen nose for the whiff of sex.

  ‘My apologies for keeping you waiting for so long on this matter Mr Drever.’

  ‘That’s ok. I’ve had a chance to tidy away my mother’s things and do a bit of sightseeing.’

  Rodriguez glanced again at Adelina. ‘I am glad. Life does go on. I hope the . . . sightseeing helped your grief.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘The papers have come through. I have the sad but necessary duty of releasing your mother’s estate.’ Rodriguez shuffled in his seat and drew his shoulders back, looking from me to Adelina and then settling his gaze on me. He clearly loved this bit, his enjoyment almost sexual.

  ’12,000,’ he said, quietly.

  I leaned forward. ‘Come again?’

  ‘The value of your late mother’s estate. 12,000.’

  ‘Pounds?’

  ‘Convertible pesos Mr Drever. As I say, a not insubstantial amount, about – ’

  ‘6,000 pounds,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Un poco menos, probablemente.’

  ‘A little less,’ Adelina translated.

  ‘Less?’

  ‘Poco. And we have deducted tax, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Rodriguez wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and reached for a plastic bottle full of cloudy yellow liquid. ‘A guaranteed cure for the cold my mother-in-law tells me. I have to take a glass every three hours. It looks like the old bruja’s piss and tastes like it too. Tell me Mr Drever, what is it like to live in a country where so much money is so meaningless?’

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘What about her? Her money?’

  ‘This was never about her money. Think about it, why would she want me to come half-way round the world for so little money?’

  ‘It goes a long way here, Jim.’

  ‘I’ve spent a few thousand coming here! That isn’t it. I don’t think she ever let go of the idea of getting back in touch. But she was too much of a coward to do it when she was alive – ’

  ‘So she arranged it when she was dead?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Come on, you can’t really – ’

  ‘Think about it. What’s the best way of getting the attention of the son you’ve never met? You offer cash, a little carrot that makes him think ‘‘yeah, fuck you, I will take your money, it’s the least you owe me’’. I mean, if she was just dead, and not dead and potentially loaded, would I have bothered? So I wing my way over and get to find out all about her. See where she lived, meet her friends. This is her way of finally making contact, when she’s dead! Even dead she’s still running away. And the best thing? There’s hardly any money!’

  ‘Do you really believe all that?’

  ‘You have to admire the beauty of it.’

  ‘I think it’s taking things a bit far.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Now I know all about her when she knew absolutely nothing about me. She never wanted to.’

  ‘I hope that my son, Floriano, never thinks that of me.’

  I thought about her ex-husband. Every day he might be sitting little Floriano down, telling the boy anything he wanted about his mother, constructing a myth that would lock her out forever. She had to find him before he became like me, steeped in revulsion for the mother who abandoned him. The rest of the walk back to my mother’s apartment passed in silence.

  The truck was waiting for us, a decrepit Soviet flat-bed truck owned by one of Adelina’s friends. The school would take charge of my mother’s belongings, find homes for her books, her clothes. I am sure this is what she would have wanted, said Adelina.

  It took an hour to carry the boxes down from her roof-top rooms, supervised by a mournful Luis who followed us from floor to street, street to floor, like a confused child who’d lost his way. He shook my hand and said something in Spanish. I looked at Adelina but this time she didn’t translate.

  Across at the café the old waiter had been standing watching, hands held delicately in front of his spotless apron. I felt his gaze again, the old man who stared at me as he passed, who always seemed to be looking up when I leaned over my mother’s balcony. I watched the waiter walk towards me with slow, deliberate steps. Then a strong handshake and more awkwardness as I accepted the condolences I didn’t want because they meant so little.

  Adelina translated in staccato bursts. I am Leonardo, a friend of Helen’s. We stayed up many nights . . . We believed in time, we helped each other’s clouds pass . . . She is eternal now, only blue skies . . . As the truck spluttered off I watched Leonardo in the side-mirror, disappearing into dust and diesel. Another enigmatic stranger with something to tell, if I allowed myself to be interested. The old bitch had guessed right. She knew if she got me to Havana I’d want to find out more about her, my mother, the woman who left only sadness behind.

  The sadness lingered into the evening, made heavier by the humidity, the silences ever more difficult to fill.

  Adelina cooked for me in her echoing flat. Black market lobster and arroz con frijoles. We ate in the cavernous living room under the crumbling cornicing. I was uncomfortably hot, the balcony door open but no breeze at all to ruffle the curtains. The roses she’d bought earlier seemed to droop lower with each passing minute, even the street noise subdued. Havana waited impatiently for rain and we ate, our cutlery scraping into the silence.

  Our last night together. I didn’t know if it was the wrong or right time to retreat to a critical distance. On one level I wanted to be disappointed
, waiting for an off-hand comment to puncture the romance and offer a short-cut back to normality, something unpleasant that would allow a line to be drawn under this impossible situation. On another I waited for Adelina to say something transcendent, a redefinition of what was possible, regardless of normality and screw the consequences. Instead, I saw my own fear reflected. Neither of us wanted to be the first to follow the concentric rings downwards, deeper into the other, adding different, more consequential memories to the stack that was already difficult to ignore. So it was inevitable that nothing very much was said at all. The setting of our final meal would instead define the memory, the rickety table with its white tablecloth and wilting roses, the echo of voices in the stairwell, my sweaty brow and the green bow in Adelina’s hair.

  I thought about David. An easy role to play, if I wanted. I understood why the Frenchman had laid on all those romantic clichés and impossible promises that Adelina told me about. Anything was possible if you drew a distinction between yourself as existed in this strange situation and your real self, who saw this episode as a deviation from reality. The same justification explained sex-tourism, those fat Europeans fucking the local teenagers. It all centred on the ability to delude yourself that it wasn’t really you doing it. Problem was, David had fallen in love at the same time and couldn’t handle the tension between those two selves. The poor fool wanted to be a continued presence in Adelina’s life, not a memory. He couldn’t handle being forgotten, his love nothing but ego-driven narcissism.

  At the same time, it was kind of appealing to step outside myself like that. For a while anyway. It was another reason to keep quiet. I didn’t trust myself enough in the pressing heat, with a head full of Cuba Libres and half a dozen beers, not to blurt out something stupid, impossible to reel back in. The silence was just as bad, dripping with expectation, begging to be filled with whatever hokum tip-toed into my traitorous gob. I was glad of the sudden, insistent hammering at the door, Adelina hurrying to find out who it was.

  The old woman who bustled in to the living room behind Adelina’s near shouts was about four feet tall, near-bald, and improbably round. She bowled around the room, bug-eyes darting here and there, babbling and gesticulating as I stared and Adelina shouted. Eventually she spied the vase of roses on the table and swiped it up triumphantly, quickly trundling to the door where she suddenly stopped and turned. Quien te crees que eres? she hissed, looking from me to Adelina with utter disgust. Then she was gone, the door slamming and Adelina returning, bemusement on her face and a bunch of dripping roses in her hand.

  ‘What the hell was all that about?’

  ‘That was Esme. My grandmother borrowed her vase. The day after my grandmother’s funeral she was round here demanding it.’

  ‘Bloody hell! Imagine what she’d have been like if you’d slept with her husband.’

  Adelina’s face crinkled up. ‘What a horrible thought.’

  ‘I dunno. She’s got a certain . . . something.’

  It was crazy Esme, I realised, looking back, who turned the evening inside out. The old crone freed us from the oppressiveness of my last night. There wouldn’t now be a premature goodbye, Adelina wouldn’t have to drink the second bottle alone. Instead we laughed for fifteen minutes then made love on the dark balcony, quietly and intense, the city’s silhouettes crowding close, all Havana echoing with our unacknowledged expectations.

  Afterwards we listened to JC’s music. Guitars and accordions. Sorrowful and so apt. And then to the ocean, down along the Malecón, an iPod earphone each. Where the seawall stretched away below us a floodlight blinked, briefly illuminating white froth, broken concrete and a little Cuban flag painted by the waterline. Looking closer I realised the flag was actually a jigsaw, stuck onto the wall. One side was incomplete, the missing pieces stuck loose beside the finished section, as if waiting for someone to come along and complete it.

  ‘Quite a metaphor,’ Adelina said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Cuba is crumbling for me. Piece by piece. I don’t have any reason to stay.’

  ‘Everyone’s got a reason to stay.’

  ‘My reason is in Miami, growing up without me.’

  Still she stared at the little flag.

  ‘It isn’t easy but other people manage to leave here all the time. My stupid husband managed it.’

  ‘Would you really do it? Leave the country.’

  She turned then, eyes flashing in the floodlight’s blink. ‘If I could? Of course.’

  ‘I can help you with that.’

  Only at the airport the next day did Adelina accept the money. My mother’s money that is. 6,000 pounds could get her out of Cuba. A little left over to set her up in Miami. People come and go from our lives, I said. Don’t let your son be another. She held me for a long time at the departure gate. She told me she’d return to that spot beside the painted flag to stare at the sea and listen to JC’s sad guitar. That was when I said it. I don’t know why. Cuba had become such a parade of impossibility that maybe I even believed it. 30,000 feet and 4,000 miles later I was more willing to consider the alternative, that I was emotionally illiterate, unable to read situations properly. So what was the truth? It didn’t really matter. I was going home.

  ‘I’ve fallen in love with you.’

  Nine

  At least, that’s how I remember Cuba. I think. Maybe that’s just how the story should’ve unfolded.

  The detachment I look back with suggests a certain lack of authenticity. My life has been mainly imagined, after all, hyper-edited for dramatic effect like a shitty reality TV show, my characters pre-assigned to roles that each cut simply reinforces. Adelina might think I’m real when she pulls back on me as I drag her round the side of the house but in truth I’m my own derivative concept. My persona’s as hollow-shelled as a production lot at Paramount.

  She wants to know why I’m being so rough. Des has stopped again a few houses down the road and is looking back at us, Maggie staring out of the living room window bold as you like, the net curtain slung back. I want Adelina out of sight, back in the recesses where she’s been for six years. Let go of me, she’s saying, but I don’t until I get her into the shed.

  I push her towards the back wall and down onto the old wooden chair. When she stands up I push her back down and realise she’s scared. Our breath rasps as we struggle, fogging the cold sawdust air. I smell her, a hint of a perfume I think I remember. I don’t want to get aroused but can’t help the swelling hard-on and feel immediately disgusted at myself.

  ‘Please Jim,’ she pleads, a near whisper.

  I let her wrists go. She immediately barges past me and throws open the door. I sit in the chair, head in my hands. I’m shivering, can’t get it under control. The distillery pulses in the background, a cosmological constant. She’s probably fled to the front gate and gone, run into the house in the hope of denouncing me to my wife. But when I look up she’s still at the door.

  ‘I missed you,’ I say.

  She stares at me for a long, long moment. ‘No you didn’t.’

  Is she right? She could say anything and I’d believe her. ‘What are you doing here, Adelina?’

  ‘You never told me you had a wife, a family. Why did you never tell me?’

  ‘Is that why you’re here? To break it up?’

  She looks as if she’s about to burst into tears. ‘I would have walked away. If you had told me.’

  I feel that familiar lump rising in my throat.

  ‘I made it out of Cuba. I couldn’t have done it without your money. I wanted to thank you.’

  ‘I’m happy for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy, I – ’

  ‘Why are you sending me my mother’s journal?’

  She shuffles on the snow. ‘I found her notebooks after you had gone home. They were in a drawer in her teaching room at the school. I decided to make them into computer files, to make them easier to send to you. If you wanted. Then you stopped writing to me. You just stopped.�
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  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? Why didn’t you send it?’

  Her fists suddenly clench. ‘Because I hated you. For a long time. Almost as much as I hated myself.’

  ‘Course you did.’ This coldness, again I feel I’m forcing it, creating anger to smother the guilt.

  ‘You didn’t deserve it. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Why do I deserve it now? All of a sudden. Why the endless drama for fuck’s sake, sending it one piece at a time?’

  She seems to sag then. She stares at the ground, foot scuffing the snow, round and round in little circles. ‘You said you wouldn’t read any more of my letters. You told me the situation was impossible. But I got out of Cuba. In October I finally made it to London, to my aunt. I cannot begin to tell you how difficult it was. Over five years. Those journeys made anything seem possible. We were in the same country now. We might be able to see each other again.’

  ‘After five years!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘And the journal?’

  ‘Because I knew you would read it, you would not be able to ignore it. You were so eager to find out about Helen, but so fearful. I thought she might be a way back. Each time you read her words you would think of me, you would wonder why I was sending these emails, what I wanted. I wanted to be in the back of your mind. I wanted you to think of me again.’

  ‘You think I don’t think of you?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. I think you decided to lock me out, like you locked your mother out. You’re right, it is a drama, the emails, me being here. But life is a drama. Your money got me out Jim, to Miami. It would have been impossible without you. I will forever be grateful.’

  I want to go to her, hold her so tight, but I’m terrified of the implications. ‘Why just turn up like this? Why didn’t you write anything in the emails, give me some kind of warning?’

  ‘You ignored my letters. You would have ignored my emails. But what if you had replied? What if you told me not to come? I might have changed my mind. I did not want to be persuaded not to come. I was so sad when you ignored me after your friend’s concert, I did not know what to do.’