Falling Off the Map

by Pico Iyer

  The proudest attraction of the Cubatur office—and its brightest hope for gaining needed dollars—is the string of coral keys that sparkle like teardrops off the coast. One day I took the flight to Cayo Largo, an absurdly beautiful stretch of fifteen miles of open beach, graced with every enticement this side of Lauren Bacall. As soon as I got off the plane, at 8:45 a.m., I was greeted with a frenzied Cuban dance band and—what else?—a Welcome Cocktail; for the rest of the day, I simply lay on the beach and gazed at the cloudless line of primary colors—aqua and emerald and milky green, flawless as a Bacardi ad. There is nothing much to see in Cayo Largo, save for some basins full of turtles and an island featuring 250 iguanas; but, as with all the most delectable resorts in Cuba, the place is utterly empty, even of Bulgarians in string vests. (This is, in part, because locals are not permitted on the beach—this is, alas, no legal fiction: I, too, while walking along the beach one drowsy Sunday morning, was hauled over, by a policeman hiding in the bushes, on suspicion of being a Cuban.)

  In recent years, in a bid to rescue its shattered economy, Cuba has begun refurbishing its old hotels with tiled patios and stained-glass windows, and trying to entice visitors with “Afro Shows” and “Smashed Potatoes”; but even now, thank Marx, the island remains roughly 90 percent tourist-proof: one still needs two chits and a passport to buy a Coca-Cola, and as in some loony lottery, Visa cards are accepted only if they contain certain numbers. This, though, is part of the delight of the place: whenever one goes out at night, one never knows how the evening will end, or when. Days are seldom clearer. One sleepy Sunday not so long ago, I waited for a taxi to take me back to Havana from the beach; and waited, and waited, and waited, for three and a quarter hours in all, under a tree, on a hot afternoon. Finally, just as I was about to lose all hope, up lurched a coughing red-and-white 1952 Plymouth, with “The Vampire Road” written across its back window. Seven exhausted souls piled into the wreck, and the next thing I knew, the quartet in back was pounding out an ad hoc beat on the seat and breaking into an a cappella melody of their own invention—“Ba ba ba, we’re going to Havana … ba ba ba, in a really sick old car …” For the next two hours, the increasingly out-of-tune singers unsteadily passed a huge bottle of rum back and forth and shouted out songs of an indeterminate obscenity, while the mustachioed driver poked me in the ribs and cackled with delight.

  In Santiago de Cuba, the second city of the island and the only officially designated “Hero City” of the Revolution, I spent a few days in the gutted home of a former captain of Fidel’s. From the hills above, where Castro and his guerrillas once gathered, the city looked as it might on some ancient, yellowing Spanish map; down below, in a peeling room that I shared with a snuffling wild pig who was due to be my dinner, things were somewhat less exalted. Every night, in the half-lit gloom of his bare, high-ceilinged room, decorated only with a few black-and-white snapshots of his youth, my host took me aside (“Let me tell you, Pico Eagle …”) and told me stories of the Revolution, then delivered heartbroken obituaries for his country. Next door, in an even darker room, one of his sons prepared dolls for a santería ceremony, the local equivalent of voodoo. And when it came time for me to leave, the old man asked for some baseball magazines from the States. Any special kind? I asked. “No,” he said softly. “But I like the ones with Jackie Robinson in them.”

  That sense of wistfulness, of a life arrested in midbreath, is everywhere in Cuba: in the brochures of the once-elegant Hotel Riviera, which now, disconcertingly, offers a “diaphanous dining-room”; in the boarded-up stores whose names conjure up a vanished era of cosmopolitanism—the Sublime, the Finde-Siècle, Roseland, Indochina; in the Esperanto Association that stands across from a dingy, closed-off building under the forlorn legend R.C.A. VICTOR. Hemingway’s house in the hills is kept exactly the way he left it at his departure almost thirty years ago—unread copies of Field & Stream and Sports Illustrated scattered across his bed—and the buildings all around, unpainted, unrepaired, speak also of departed hopes. One reason so many Cubans ask a foreigner, “Que hora es?” is to strike up a conversation—and a deal; another, though, is that they really do need to know the time in a place where all the clocks are stopped. Perhaps the most haunting site in the beach resort of Varadero is Las Americas, the lonely mansion above the sea built by the Du Ponts. Nowadays it is a dilapidated boarding school of a place, all long corridors and locked doors. The Carrara marble floor is thick with dust, and the photos in the drawing room are hard to make out in the feeble light. But along the mahogany and cedar walls there still hangs a tapestry poignantly transcribing all the lines of the poem that once contained the hopes the home embodied: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree …”

  It is that mix of elegy and carnival that defines Cuba for me, and it is that sense of sunlit sadness that makes it, in the end, the most emotionally involving—and unsettling—place I know; Cuba catches my heart, then makes me count the cost of that enchantment. Cuba is old ladies in rocking chairs on their verandas in the twilight, dabbing their eyes as their grandchildren explain their latest dreams of escape, and the azure sea flashing in the background; it is pretty, laughing kids dancing all night in the boisterous cabarets and then confiding, matter-of-factly, “Our lives here are like in Dante’s Inferno.” It is smiles, and open doors, and policemen lurking in the corners; lazy days on ill-paved streets and a friend who asks if he might possibly steal my passport.

  In Cuba, the tourist’s thrilling adventures have stakes he cannot fathom. And every encounter leaves one only deeper in the shadows. My first night in a big hotel, a girl I had never met rang me up and asked, sight unseen, if I would marry her. The next day, in the cathedral, a small old man with shining eyes came up to me and began talking of his family, his faith, his grade-school daughter. “I call her Elizabeth,” he said. “Like a queen.” He paused. “A poor queen”—he smiled ruefully—“but to me she is still a queen.” When we met again, at an Easter Sunday mass, he gave me Mother’s Day gifts for my mother and, moist-eyed, a letter for his own mother in the States. Only much later, when I got home, did I find that the letter was in fact addressed to the State Department, and the kindly old man a would-be defector.

  And one sunny afternoon in a dark Havana bar, so dark that I could not see my companion’s face except when she lit a match for a cigarette, I asked a friend if I could send her anything from the States. Not really, she said, this intelligent twenty-three-year-old who knew me well: just a Donald Duck sticker for her fridge. Nothing else? I asked. Well, maybe a Mickey Mouse postcard: that was quite a status symbol over here. And that was all? Yes, she said—oh, and one more thing: a job, please, with the CIA.

  Iceland: 1991

  ROCK ’N’ ROLL GHOST TOWN

  Even now, I find myself going back and back to Iceland in my mind, walking through its chilly, ghostly streets, pale even after midnight in the summer, and hushed, no dark to be seen for 2,400 hours or more. Somehow it is always half-light in the Iceland of my memories, and I am walking across empty fields, alone, the sun landing on the sea at 1:00 a.m. and then, after settling there for an hour or so, rising again as I walk back through the pallid light and hitch a ride on an early milk truck, round and around the cloud-covered coast. It seems as if I am always lost in the ice-blue poems of the Icelandic Romantics, and the images from the light nights that I spent there keep returning: the man with the chalk-white face who accosted me in the café of a lonely fishing village sometime after midnight and told me, through piercing eyes, of his dreams of Jesus and a flock of angels robed in white; the girl with the intense Egyptian gaze who picked me up my first day in the capital and transported me off into her visions of Tibet; the pilot of the six-seat plane who consulted his map as we flew, just the two of us, low over icefields and snow-capped peaks, to the deserted fjords of the west. Somehow I am always visiting Iceland in my memories, standing on a hill in the golden quiet, my shadow stretching for forty feet or more, then walking through
a sleeping world in the dove-gray light of 2:00 a.m.

  Perhaps it is because it is so otherworldly that Iceland leaves such an impression on the mind, because it feels so little like the planet that we know; days spent there are interludes from life, sojourns in some other, nether twilight of the mind. I knew, before I visited, a little about the epidemic oddness of the place: there was no beer in Iceland in 1987, and no television on Thursdays; there were almost no trees, and no vegetables. Iceland is an ungodly wasteland of volcanoes and tundra and Geysir, the mother of all geysers, a country so lunar that NASA astronauts did their training there; a place of fumaroles and solfataras, with more hot springs and mud pools and steam holes than any other wilderness on earth. One day I saw a crowd gathered on a Reykjavik street and looked in to see what they were staring at: it was a dog (long illegal in the capital). Iceland is a duck-shaped island with eight million puffins and a thirteen-hand horse that can not only canter and gallop but tölt.

  Even “civilization” seems to offer no purchase for the mind here: nothing quite makes sense. Iceland boasts the largest number of poets, presses, and readers per capita in the world: Reykjavik, a town smaller than Rancho Cucamonga, California, has five daily newspapers, and to match the literary production of Iceland, the U.S. would have to publish twelve hundred new books a day. Iceland has the oldest living language in Europe—its people read the medieval sagas as if they were tomorrow’s newspaper—and all new concepts, such as “radio” and “telephone,” are given poetical medieval equivalents. Roughly three eldest children in every four are illegitimate here, and because every son of Kristjan is called Kristjansson, and every daughter Kristjansdóttir, mothers always have different surnames from their children (and in any case are rarely living with the fathers). Every citizen of Iceland—even an erstwhile Wu Ziyang—must acquire a traditional Icelandic name, and the only exception ever made to this—for Vladimir Ashkenazy—prompted one disgruntled Spanish exile to ask if he could take on the new Icelandic name Vladimir Ashkenazy. People are listed in the phone book by their first names, which does not make life easy when the Jons alone take up thirty columns of the directory (the Hotel section of the yellow pages does not even fill a column).

  Iceland is one of the largest islands in the world and, at the same time, one of the smallest worlds in the island, so intimate that it has the same kind of tranquil dottiness as the northern village in the movie Local Hero, in which every day promises to fetch up enigmatic mermaids, unlikely rock ‘n’ roll bands, and the same faces that you saw yesterday, and the day before. The first day I ever spent in “Surprise City” (as Reykjavik is called), I found golden-haired princesses and sword-wielding knights enacting fairy-tale sagas on the main bridge in the capital; I came within two feet of the president (who seemed, unguarded in the street, just another elegant blond single mother); and while staring at some man-sized chess pieces in the center of town, I was interviewed by the biggest daily newspaper, Morgunbladid, so astonished were its reporters to see a foreign face. The Salvation Army hostel is only four doors away from the Parliament building here, and the Parliament building itself is a modest two-story house with a doorman less imposing than those in the nearby pubs. Prisoners are allowed to go home for the holidays, and on the main road out of town you can still see the country’s Nobel laureate in literature, Halldór Laxness, active at the age of eighty-nine.

  Yet there is something deeper about the uncanniness of the place; something arising from its silences and space. You can feel it in the contained intensity of many people here, in the enormous calm with which they say Já and in the echoing way they say nothing at all. You can see it in their eyes, as shockingly beautiful, often, and as blue, as the sea when suddenly glimpsed around mountain curves. You can sense it in the almost archetypical elementalism of the place, where honey-cheeked beauty queens rub cheeks with hatchet-faced yahoos (it is, as Jan Morris saw, the perfect setting for Beauty and the Beast); you can feel it in the settledness of the place, the weighty sense of gravitas. It is easy to believe, in this uninhabited space, that you are living once more amidst the mead halls and monsters of Beowulf, within a tiny circle of light surrounded by an encroaching dark; it is easy to believe that the Irish hermits and Viking warriors who were the earliest settlers on the island still possess it with their ascetic calm and violence. There is something allegorical—not quite real—about the place that inspired Hobbitland and Wagner’s Ring. Jules Verne’s explorers came here to find the center of the earth; Iceland was, in the Middle Ages, the literal location of Hell. And for the Nazis, its pure-blond racial clarity made it a kind of Aryan paradise (“Für uns,” said one German, “Island ist das Land”). Iceland may be many things, but it is not your average country.

  It is always difficult, even dangerous, to return to a world that has transported you, and epiphanies rarely repeat themselves. Yet I was determined to see Iceland outside the spell of its midsummer nights’ dreams, in the lunar segment of its cycle. Not long ago, therefore, I returned to the place I had kept dreaming about. Icelandair is the only carrier that flies to Reykjavik from the U.S., linking its capital with Baltimore and, now, Orlando (as well as with New York). Keflavik Airport is the sole airport in Europe that has a duty-free shop for arrivals, and traditionally it was packed with Icelanders stocking up on beer. The most comfortable seats on Icelandair are in Saga Class, and its stunning cabin attendants sometimes wear black leather gloves. Many Americans know Iceland only as the place they were obliged to visit on what was, for years, the cheapest flight to Europe; now, ironically, Iceland is by some measures the most expensive country in the world (a fifteen-minute phone call to Japan cost me $175).

  Yet nothing had prepared me for the biggest shock of all: when I stepped out of the airport, the whole place was dark. In all the time I had spent here, in the summer, I had never seen it dark. And darkness awakens something passionate and primeval in the land, some sense of buried intensity. Our bus bumped across the rainy emptiness, and here and there I saw a few modernist blocks and eerie, red-lit geodesic domes winking in the blue-black sky: a high-tech, lit-up vision of surreal desolation. Reykjavik, at eight-thirty in the morning, was cradled in a northern silence. There was an extraordinary stillness to the place, as if it were held in suspended animation, its red roofs shining placid in the unpolluted sky. The overwhelming impression, on the tiny, empty street where I was staying, was of silence and of dark.

  It is, of course, the changes that one notices first whenever one comes back to any place, and it did not take me long to find that beer is legal now and that there are two television stations, broadcasting even on Thursdays. I saw an I Was a Teenage Zombie album amidst the slabs of strange fish and jars of bee pollen in the Reykjavik Flea Market (held every Saturday in an underground garage beneath the central bank); and Filipino women in flowing Islamic robes were walking down the street. The Holiday Inn has come to Reykjavik, and the Hard Rock Café; there is karaoke, too, and neon. Yet still, again and again, I felt I was in a kind of Alice Wonderland. Soon after arrival, I rang up to ask about a day trip to Greenland; the eight-hour tour cost $460. I called for a cab and was picked up by a hearty, shining matron driving a Mercedes. I walked into the Hotel Loftleidir for lunch and there was Anatoly Karpov, former chess champion of the world, sitting in a ring of light at one end of an auditorium, above a tiny chessboard, watched by eight old men in anoraks. Two hours later, I was being harassed by a Greenlandic dancer with black stripes down his face and a clothespin in his mouth, which he kept pushing in and out at me.

  By any standards other than the Icelandic, Reykjavik is still a quaint and quiet place, as silent as a photograph. It resembles, like most of the settlements in Iceland, a kind of Lego town—rows of tiny, clean white boxes set out in geometric grids, with roofs of red and blue and green. Much of the country feels as if it were made for children—even the ponytailed boys and ring-nosed girls are pushing baby strollers—and Reykjavik might almost be a small child’s toy, as clean and
perfect as a ship inside a bottle. Iceland is famous for having no mansions and no slums (“There is no architecture here,” complained W. H. Auden), in much the same way as its language has no accents and no dialects: with a population smaller than that of Colorado Springs, uniformity is not hard to achieve. And because nearly all the houses are geothermically heated, the city whose name means Smoky Bay shines silent in the smokeless air, as clear as if seen through panes of polished glass. Reykjavik is one place where it really is worth climbing the steeple of the highest church to see the city, mute and motionless, laid out against the silver sea.

  Yet it is not because of the capital but in spite of it that most visitors come to Iceland, and it is desolation that they seek and find. More than 80 percent of the country consists of ice fields, tundra, lava fields, and barren mountains, and huge stretches are as blank and inhospitable as anything in the Australian Outback. Such settlements as do exist look like suburbs in search of a city—a solitary farmstead here, a lonely lighthouse there, occasionally an isolated steeple: a small huddle of concrete inside a giant’s rough paw. Nature adores a vacuum here. And the ground itself is like nothing so much as a geologist’s textbook, a pockmarked mess of volcanic craters and hissing plumes of smoke till it looks as if the earth itself is blowing off steam, and the soil in parts is so hot that, only a few inches down, you can actually boil an egg. In Iceland, in John McPhee’s happy phrase, “the earth is full of adjustments, like a settling stomach.”