Falling Off the Map

by Pico Iyer

  Finally, he turns to Louis. “So your family name is Louis,” he begins. “No, no,” I break in, and add, “he cannot speak Spanish.” There is a hasty consultation. Then the Irishman pads off, only to return a few minutes later with a trim, round-faced boss with glasses and a tie. “Guten Tag,” cries the police chief, extending a hand toward me. “No, no,” I say. “It’s him.” The police chief spins around. “Guten Tag,” he cries, greeting Louis like a long-lost friend and proceeding to reminisce about a “Freundin” he once knew in Leipzig. Things are going swimmingly now. “Margaret Thatcher, very sexy woman!” exclaims the Irishman. “Rajiv Gandhi is not the grandson of the other Gandhi,” explains the black man to a newcomer. “Aber, diese Mädchen …” the police chief reminisces. We could almost be at a Christmas dinner, so full of smiles and clapped shoulders is the room. “If this were anywhere else,” Louis whispers, “if this were England, in fact, and a foreigner hit a local boy, they’d probably be lynching him by now.”

  At six o’clock—it is clear that the police plan to make a day of it—the police chief invites us to dinner at the town’s only hotel. Guests of the police, he says. We sit down, and Louis spots a glass of beer. He orders one, and drinks it. Then another. Then another. The chief orders more beers all round, then proposes a toast to Die Freundschaft. The waitress drops off a few beers. “She worked in Czechoslovakia for four years,” the chief proudly informs us. “How is the weather now in Prague?” Louis asks her in Czech. “I worked for four years in a Trabant factory,” she answers. The police chief, exultant, proposes more toasts to Die Freundschaft.

  “Paraguay is the only place in the world where you win at blackjack even if you’re only even with the bank,” offers Louis.

  “Gut, gut, sehr gut!” cries the chief, more animated than ever.

  We renew a few pledges to eternal friendship, then get up and return to the police station, which is sleepy now in the dark.

  Louis sits down and promptly slumps over. A group of policemen gathers round him to peer at his handless watch.

  Then, suddenly, he sits up. “I’m feeling really terrible,” he announces and, lurching out to the terrace, proceeds to deposit some toasts to Die Freundschaft in the bushes.

  The police chief, anxious, comes over. “I’m sorry,” I explain. “We haven’t eaten properly for a few days, we were somewhat dehydrated already, and he’s probably anyway in a state of shock.” With a look of infinite tenderness, the chief summons a lieutenant, and, one on either side of Louis, they take him to the hospital.

  Ten minutes later, the team returns, all smiles.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Great. All better now.”

  “Good.”

  Louis slumps over again, and I maintain our vigil for the man from the car rental firm who is due to take us to Santiago. He was expected at two-thirty. It is now nine-fifteen.

  Suddenly, a policeman walks into the room and summons me urgently over. I hurry to his side. Maybe he will give us a lift? “You are an Indian?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me something.” He points to a TV. “Two months ago, we saw Rajiv Gandhi being burned. Why did they not put his body in the ground?”

  What is the Spanish word for “cremation”? I wonder wildly. “Cremación,” I try.

  “Cremation, eh? Is that right? Thank you,” he says, and walks out.

  A little later, Louis gets up again and staggers to the terrace. More toasts to Die Freundschaft go down the drain.

  “I’m really sick,” he says. “I can’t move. Just get me a bed.”

  I relay the request to the police chief.

  For the first time all day, his commitment to our friendship seems to flag. “Hier gibt es kein Bett!” he barks. “Das ist nicht Hotel! Das ist nicht Krankenhaus!”

  “Jawohl, mein Herr,” I say, and we go on waiting for the car rental man.

  Suddenly, headlights sweep into the plaza, and a car pulls up. I hurry outside. A man gets out, with an air of great briskness, and I hurry over to him. “So you are Indian?” he says. “Yes.” “Then tell me something, please. When Rajiv Gandhi died, why did they not put his body in the ground?”

  “Cremation,” I reply with tired fluency, and, satisfied, he gets in his car and drives away.

  Watching this open-air university in action, the police chief is shamed, perhaps, by his earlier brusqueness. “Once,” he tells me in German, “I traveled for six hours by train to Dresden to meet my roommate’s sister.”

  “Ach ja?”

  At 11:15 p.m., the car rental man appears, and we return to the inner office to do some paperwork. “So—your name is Pico?” “Well, my family name is Iyer.” “So your father’s name is Pico.” “No …”

  At 1:15 a.m., we pull up at last in front of the Casagranda Hotel in Santiago (“simultaneously dirty and suffocating,” sings my guidebook), a famous old joint recently closed for fumigation, where we have a four-day reservation, paid for in advance in London. I leave Louis comatose in the back of our new car, sundry revelers singing and banging drums around him in the street. Inside the hotel, an enormous man is sitting next to a wooden cash register. When he sees my voucher, he looks unhappy. Party girls in backless dresses and well-coiffed boys stroll down the pitch-black staircase from the rooftop cabaret. A couple of them sit on a couch in the lobby and gaze expectantly in my direction. The enormous man looks desperate. I look worse. He picks up a telephone and starts dialing.

  Thirty minutes later, he has found us alternative accommodations. At 2:15 a.m., a convoy of two cars, including one spokesman for the house of Gandhi, one new rental car and one immobile investment banker, pulls up at the Hotel Gaviota. As soon as it does, a young boy rushes out. “Welcome,” he cries, in English. “How was your trip? Welcome to the Hotel Gaviota! It’s great to see you!”

  “Thanks.”

  “We have some Welcome Cocktails all ready for you! What will it be? A cuba libre? A daiquiri? Some ron? What would you like?”

  “My friend cannot move.”

  “No problem. A Welcome Cocktail will help. It’s on the house!”

  “But he’s already heard Margaret Thatcher impugned, almost killed a boy, and been taken to a hospital by a police chief speaking German.”

  “Sure!” says the boy. “That’s why he needs a Welcome Cocktail. Please! My friends are waiting!” He points to the bar, where two young bloods are sitting hopefully in the dark.

  I go over to Louis, now propped up in the lobby, and break the news to him.

  He does not look overjoyed.

  “The thing is, unless you order a Welcome Cocktail, I don’t think you’ll get a room.”

  “Okay, okay, just get me some mineral water.” Realizing that this could entail a long wait—yesterday we had stopped in a small town to ask two boys for water and been told, “For water you must go to the next town! Only forty-five kilometers away!”—I go to the desk to do some paperwork. On one side is a sign that advises, CRAZY LOVE IS NOT TRUE LOVE. On the other, a stack of Cubatur brochures. “Ven a vivir una tentación!” Come to live out a temptation!

  Proprieties observed, we follow our host on the ten-minute walk to our suites, made-for-mobster caverns from the fifties, with mirrors all round, and enormous makeup areas for showgirls.

  “This is okay?” the young boy asks.

  “Sure,” I say. But one thing still bothers me: why doesn’t he care about the fate of Rajiv Gandhi?

  …

  Come to live out a temptation! Every time I return from Cuba, I find myself sounding like a tourist brochure. Cuba is one of the biggest surprises in the modern world, if only because it has occupied a black hole in our consciousness for so long. If people think of the island at all these days, they probably think of army fatigues, warlike rhetoric, and bearded threats to our peace. Few people recall that Cuba is, in fact, the largest island in the Greater Antilles and, as even my sour guidebooks admits, “the most varied and most beautiful.” T
hat it has 4,500 miles of beach, nearly all of them as empty as a private hideaway. That there are more than eleven hours of sunshine on an average day, and the air is 77 degrees, the water even warmer. That it vibrates with the buoyancy of a late-night, passionate, reckless people whose warmth has only been intensified by adversity. And that it is still, apart from anything, a distinctly Caribbean place of lyricism and light, with music pulsing along its streets and lemon-yellow, sky-blue, alabaster-white buildings shining against a rich blue sea. Havana days are the softest I know, the golden light of dusk spangling the cool buildings in the tree-lined streets; Havana nights are the most vibrant and electric, with dark-eyed, scarlet girls leaning against the fins of chrome-polished ’57 Chryslers under the floodlit mango trees of Prohibition-era nightclubs. Whatever else you may say about Cuba, you cannot fail to see why Christopher Columbus, upon landing on the soft-breezed isle, called it “the most beautiful land ever seen.”

  In Communist Cuba, of course, you will find shortages of everything except ironies. The Bay of Pigs is a beach resort now, and San Juan Hill is most famous for its “patio cabaret.” The Isle of Youth, long the most dreaded Alcatraz in the Caribbean, entices visitors with its International Scuba-Diving Center. There is a “Cretins’ Corner” in the Museum of the Revolution, featuring an effigy of Ronald Reagan (“Thank you, cretin,” says the sign, “for helping us strengthen the Revolution”). And one beach near Matanzas (the name means Massacres) has, somewhat less than romantically, been christened Playa Yugoslavia. Cuba, in fact, has edges and shadows not often found in other West Indian resorts: the billboards along the beach offer stern admonitions (“The best tan is acquired in movement”), and the gift stores in the hotels sell such deck-chair classics as The C.I.A. in Central America and the Caribbean. Everything here takes on a somewhat unexpected air. “Cuba’s waiting for you,” runs the official tourist slogan. “We knew you were coming.”

  Cubatur’s most intriguing attraction is undoubtedly its four-hour excursion each day to a psychiatric hospital. But when I asked one day if I could sign up for the tour, the laughing-eyed girl at the desk looked at me as if I were the madman. “It isn’t happening,” she said. “Does it ever happen?” “No,” she replied, with a delighted smile.

  Yet the seduction of Cuba, for me, lies precisely in that kind of impromptu roughness, and in the fact that its streets feel so deserted; the whole island has the ramshackle glamour of an abandoned stage set. Old Havana is a crooked maze of leafy parks and wrought-iron balconies, where men strum guitars in sun-splashed courtyards, inciting one to the pleasures of a life alfresco; its singular beauty, unmatched throughout the Caribbean, is that it feels as if it has been left behind by history, untouched. Here, one feels, is all the quaintness of New Orleans, with none of the self-admiration. And the freewheeling gaiety of a Sunday afternoon in Lenin Park, where soldiers twirl one another about to the happy rhythms of steel bands, is all the more intoxicating because it is so spontaneous; here, one feels, is all the hedonism of Rio with none of the self-consciousness. Everything in Cuba comes scribbled over with the neglected air of a Lonely Place; everything feels like a custom-made discovery.

  The other great achievement of the Castro government, of course, is that its overnight arrest of history has left the island furnished with all the musty relics of the time when it was America’s dream playground, and many parts of Cuba still look and feel like museum pieces of the American empire. Yes, there are troubadours’ clubs, bohemian dives, a film school run by García Márquez, and a Humor Museum. But the most aromatic of the culture’s features are, in many respects, the backward-looking ones: the savor of rum in the bars that Hemingway once haunted; the friendly dishevelment of the seaworn old Mafia hotels, crowded now with Oriental-featured tourists from Siberia; the rickety charm of white-shoe bands playing the theme from The Godfather in red-lit Polynesian restaurants that must have looked modern when first they were built, half a century ago. You can almost feel the city where typical honeymooners from Connecticut could stay at the Manhattan (or the New York) Hotel, take care of their needs at the Fifth Avenue Shoe Store, and cash their checks at one of the First National Bank of Boston’s six local branches, before whiling away their evenings at the Infierno Club (or, in better circles, the Country Club). You can almost taste the tropicolored island where the Dodgers used to hold spring training and Fidel Castro was just another pitching prospect for the Washington Senators. You can almost hear Basil Woon exclaim, in his 1928 book, When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, “ ‘Have one in Havana’ seems to have become the winter slogan of the wealthy.”

  Yet it is something more than poignant memories, and something even deeper than sun-washed surfaces, that keeps me coming back to Cuba, and it is, I think, the fact that every moment is an adventure here, and every day is full of surprise. I never want to sleep in Cuba. And even after I have returned home—and the place has disappeared entirely from view—I find that it haunts me like a distant rumba: I can still hear the cigarette-voiced grandma in Artemisa who took me in from the rain and, over wine in tin cups, spun me family tales strange with magic realism, before leading me across puddles to hear Fidel; I can still taste the strawberry ice creams in Coppelia, where languorous Lolitas sashay through the night in off-the-shoulder T-shirts, beside them strutting Romeos as shiny as Italian loafers; I can still see the round-the-clock turmoil of carnival, and the Soviet doctor who sat next to me one year, blowing kisses at the dancers. Sometimes, when I go out at night and sit on the seawall alone, feeling the spray of the salt, the faint strumming of acoustic guitars carried on the wind, and the broad empty boulevards sweeping along the lovely curve of Havana Bay, I feel that I could never know a greater happiness.

  Cuba, in fact, is in many of its moods the most infectiously exultant place I know: it sometimes feels as if the featureless gray blocks of Marxism have simply been set down, incongruously, on a sunny, swelling, multicolored quilt, so that much of the sauce and sensuality of the louche Havana of old keeps peeping through. “Every step I took offered up a new world of joys,” wrote Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, who felt himself a prince surrounded by graces “in that bright Island [where] kindness and solicitude surrounded me.” Norman Lewis, after sixty-five years of traveling, told me that he had never found a place to compare with Havana. And even during these days of post-glasnost privations, the fact remains that windows are thrown open so that reggae floods the streets, and passengers waiting for a plane draw out guitars and improvise sing-alongs in the departure lounge. Many Cubans have made an art form of their appetite for wine, women, and song—all the more precious in the absence of everything else; one young friend of mine in Havana knows only four words of English, which he repeats like a tonic each day, accompanied each time by a dazzling smile: “Don’t worry! Be happy!” Very often, in fact, the island reminds me of that famous statement of the eighteenth-century Englishman Oliver Edwards: “I have tried, too, in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”

  This exhilarating sense of openness hit me the minute I landed in Havana on a recent trip: the customs officials in the airport were dressed in khaki but winkingly turned the other eye whenever they saw cases piled high with fifteen pairs of new ready-for-the-black-market jeans; the immigrations officials, when not cross-questioning tourists, made kissing noises at their female colleagues. Out in the streets, I was instantly back inside some romantic thriller, with crimes and liaisons in the air. Dolled-up señoritas looked at me with the sly intimacy of long-lost friends; rum-husky men invited me into their lives.

  By the following night, I was sitting along the seawall with a group of earnest students eager to thrash out Hermann Hesse, Tracy Chapman, yoga, Henry Fielding, and liberation theology. Later, walking past the commercial buildings of La Rampa, I heard the joyous rasp of a saxophone and, following my ears through the video banks and rainbowed portraits of the Cuba Pavilion, found myself in a huge open-air disco, free (like most
museums, concerts, and ball games in Cuba) and alive with teenagers jiving along to a Springsteenish band in WE STICK TO FIDEL headbands and Che Guevara T-shirts; thus—the government hopes—are party-loving kids turned into Party-loving comrades. When the concert ended, round about midnight, I walked over to the ten-stool bar in the old Hotel Nacional, where four cheery, red-faced Soviets were singing melancholy Russian ballads to a flirty mulatta of quick charm. The girl counted off a few numbers on her long pink nails, then swiveled into action. “Ivan, Ivan,” she cooed across at a lugubrious-looking reveler, “why don’t you dance with me? Ivan, don’t you like me?” At which Ivan lumbered up, popped a coin into the prehistoric Wurlitzer, and, as “Guantanamera” came up, threw his hands in the air and began wriggling in place with all the unlikely grace of a bear in a John Travolta suit. This, I realized, was not Club Med.

  The country’s beaches—289 of them in all—start just twenty minutes from the capital. At Santa María del Mar, a virtual suburb of Havana, lies one of the loveliest, and emptiest, strips of sand you’ll ever see, with only a few old men—salty castaways from Hemingway—standing bare-chested in the water, trousers rolled up to their knees, unreeling silver fish. Behind them, across a road, reclines a typical Cuban seaside hotel, filled as always with something of the plaintiveness of an Olympics facility two decades after the games have ended. Inside its once-futuristic ramps, bulletin boards crowded with eager notices as happily crayoned as a child’s birthday card invite foreigners to “Workers Shows” (“a very nice activity,” offers the unread board, “where you will see the workers become artists for your pleasure”) and “Happy Shows.” Every Monday, at 4:30, there are “Cocktail Lessons,” and every afternoon, “Music, Dance and Many Surprises.” But when I looked at my watch, I realized it was 4:45, and Monday, and not a single cocktail student, not a sign of music or dance was in sight; somehow, in Cuba, it is always out-of-season.