by Anthony Hyde
“It is interesting, don’t you think?”
Only as she spoke did Mathilde realize that a short, slight, dark young woman had been standing at her elbow for a minute or so. Without thinking, Mathilde smiled politely and said, “Yes,” realizing too late what was happening.
“You are from—?”
“I am from France. Paris.”
“You have been in Cuba long?”
All their approaches began in exactly this way, as ritualized as the quinces girl’s photo session. “A few days.”
“You will be staying for long?”
“A week.”
The woman smiled; like most Cubans she had beautiful teeth, unspoiled by candy and sweets. “I have a friend in Marseilles.”
Of course she did. For the Canadians, she would have a friend in Vancouver; no doubt it would be Frankfurt or Berlin for the Germans, London for the English.
“How nice,” Mathilde said blandly. She almost went on, “I have heard all this before, I know exactly what you’re up to.” But she didn’t. And the reason was simply the woman’s appearance, which, as Mathilde looked more closely, was startling. She was beautiful; but her beauty couldn’t have been more different than the quinces girl’s at the fountain. She was the opposite of voluptuous. There wasn’t even the promise of what the Americans called tits and ass. In fact, she had little of either, was almost flat-chested and tiny through the hips. Her beauty was in her face, dark skin stretched across sharp bones to frame her huge dark eyes: a purely Spanish face. Her beauty was so extreme it was like a deformity. The eyes were hypnotic, as black as olives but enclosed in a creamy whiteness like the smooth skin of an egg. No doubt she was conscious of their effect; her hair, tightly pulled back against her skull, and her full lips, precisely outlined but without a hint of gloss, were obviously intended to set off her eyes all the more. Moreover, as she looked up her mouth hinted at a smile, and an expression of superiority, almost mocking, flitted across her face. It was annoying. But she was superior, which of course made it worse. Mathilde now realized that previous versions of this particular scam—she’d only been here four days, but she’d already been approached like this three or four times— had involved exactly the same sort of woman: they would find it hard to compete on conventional sexual lines, at least in a city like Havana. But this woman was special, she represented an ideal of a different kind. Her dress even lived up to it: flat leather shoes (brightly polished despite Havana’s endlessly dusty streets), fawn, flat-fronted cotton trousers, and a raspberry top with a scoop neck showing a hint of an ivory camisole, discreetly contrasting with the smooth darkness of her skin; and then a small bag, with a woven leather strap, dangling from her shoulder. With a tiny smile herself, Mathilde acknowledged the impression the woman had made; and her approach had worked, after all: it would have been hard now to send her away. Instead Mathilde glanced at the blue girl, posed on the steps of the fountain. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? But perhaps not as beautiful as the girl in the white dress.”
The woman, raising her eyebrows, considered this; and it struck Mathilde that she was making a note. But she merely said, “She is about to turn fifteen, you see. For a Cuban girl, this is the most important birthday of all. She becomes a woman. She joins her mother in the house.”
Mathilde nodded. “She eats with the grown-ups.”
Perhaps the Cuban woman’s English didn’t extend as far as her own; or she simply refused to be deflected. “For most girls, you understand, such a celebration must be very modest. But these girls are from fathers who are better off. Even so, they have probably saved for years or . . .” Now her voice dropped. “Or perhaps they have a rich uncle in Miami.”
So it begins, Mathilde thought; on the other occasions when she’d been approached in this way, the “difficult subject” had been introduced in exactly this tone of voice—only, with this woman, it was perfectly done, the effect all the more dramatic because it was so entirely matter-of-fact. She decided to ignore it. “It must be an old tradition.”
“Yes. It has never been forbidden. But just because it is so old it becomes a way of protesting the regime.”
“That is obvious.” Despite her admiration for the woman, Mathilde realized that she annoyed her.
And perhaps her tone caught the woman off guard; she changed course slightly. “The Plaza de San Francisco de Assis is the traditional place. The Fountain de los Leones is based upon the famous fountain in Alhambra . . .”
She kept on, about the plaza, the fountain, the old customs house on the far side of the plaza, the basilica; and although, in fact, Mathilde hadn’t known about the connection to Alhambra, or most of the rest of it, she cut the woman off: “You are a guide?”
The woman’s lips, very full—they would have been the focus of her face if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary eyes—pursed slightly: as if to express the consideration, and rejection, of a lie, thereby validating the truth of what she now said. “Not exactly . . . I work normally for Cuban International Radio, but I have made a private study of Habana Vieja, the buildings, history . . . but I have no official licence to be a guide.” Again, her voice dropped. “I do not have friends in the Ministry of Tourism.”
Mathilde tried not to let her expression reveal her satisfaction; she’d been right. And it was amazing, they always represented themselves as journalists, though usually for television—even in this detail, the woman was not so banal. “But you do guide?” she asked.
“Yes. Sometimes, in Cuba, we do things . . . with the left hand.”
“Yes?” Now Mathilde made a decision. “I am also a journalist. I work for a magazine.” She’d not done this on the previous occasions, and she was curious to see the effect her challenge provoked. And for a moment, the woman lost her aplomb. Mathilde pressed the advantage. “If you like, I could show you my credentials.” The woman shook her head.
“Are you sure?”
“It is not necessary.”
Mathilde smiled. Of course. Otherwise, she would have had to offer her own, and since they didn’t exist . . . “But perhaps you don’t have time right now . . . with your job.”
The woman regained her footing. “In Cuba, having a job and not working are often the same.”
“I see.”
“You would be interested, then? I could show you this. . . .” She nodded, a gesture taking in the square, the old city. “But there is also the Havana that is not so easily seen. Perhaps that would interest you, too. Of course, that is a difficulty—you understand? For me. It is a risk. I would like to say, I would do it from interest. But that is not going to be possible.”
Mathilde laughed, a laugh at herself; she’d known it was coming, but here it was. “We can talk about it,” she said.
The woman was disturbed by the laugh; she’d missed something. “I do not think it is funny.”
“No.”
She nodded, apparently satisfied at this acceptance. “Not here. It is too open.”
“Where, then?”
“In the Plaza de Armas there is a small hotel, the Santa Isabel. In the bar, you can always see who is listening.”
The Plaza de Armas: it was where she’d wanted to go in the first place.
“My name is Mathilde. Mathilde Delores.”
By the fountain, the girl in red was lifting her skirts, ready to replace the blue girl.
“I am Adamaris.”
3
Lorraine knew Calle K must be ascending because her hips ached with every step and her body was tilting forward, so that now she had a pain in the small of her back. And it was hot. And her feet hurt. After twenty minutes, all she wanted to do was sit down. But she kept on, walking with her head down, just concentrating on putting one foot in front of another: and so she was surprised when she came to a corner, almost stumbling.
She took a breath. Where was she, exactly? It didn’t help, not knowing; she didn’t really feel anxious, but she felt alone in all this heat. She looked around. This was a
side street, not a main thoroughfare. In Vedado, she’d discovered, there were no street signs; intersections were marked by cornerstones cut in the form of pyramids, whose faces indicated the corresponding streets. Sometimes the stones were missing, but she found this one on the opposite sidewalk, and by tilting her glasses she could read it. She was on the corner of K and Calle 21. In fact, she realized, Calle K ended here. Ahead, where the ground rose abruptly, was a park and trees.
She’d put away her map; now she dug it out of her bag, which was her old brown leather bag, with a drawstring, quite long, rather a nuisance to pull open. And then she had to unfold the map, and get it the right way around.
Everything was harder in the heat but finally she worked things out.
There was no Calle 22; for some reason—another discovery—they only used odd numbers. But Calle 23, better known as La Rampa, had to be on the other side of the park . . . a green square on her map. And that’s where she wanted to get to. La Rampa. She said it over in her mind, giving it a twist: it sounded as Cuban as salsa. Then, looking at the map, and looking up, she realized what the green represented: Coppelia. A name she recognized, and she sighed with relief. She’d been planning to come here. Murray had gone on about it as the source of the finest ice cream on the planet, because that’s what it was, a huge ice cream parlour. But who cared, she thought. There’d be a place to sit down. A toilet. She’d be able to think.
Lorraine crossed the road and by the time she reached the other side, she was beginning to feel more like herself. She smoothed her hair under the brim of her hat and patted her face with a tissue. She also checked her guidebook, The Lonely Planet ; it said there were several entrances, including a “dollar café” especially for tourists; but even in her exhausted state she felt that was beneath her dignity. The book also promised lineups, but only a few people were clustered around the sign—it was a menu—marking the entrance at Calle 21 and L, the next street over. They all seemed to be Cuban. She wasn’t quite sure where to go, so she stood a little apart, waiting, and then followed at a discreet distance as they strolled along a path that wound into the trees, and finally up a curving ramp.
The ramp carried them into a strange building—strange because it was completely old-fashioned, but old-fashioned precisely because it was so “futuristic” . . . the word came into her mind, along with a rush of memories—1958? A whole era came back to her. This was what the future had looked like, back then. Inside, the ramp branched off, leading to a number of pavilions, conical rooms with pointed roofs— “pods”—separated by alternating panes of coloured plastic, of the kind that had once divided “rec” rooms. She could almost hear the theme of Walt Disney Presents.
Letting the Cubans go on, she slipped into a pod by herself. It was almost deserted: two young men sat together, hunched over stainless steel bowls filled with ice cream—helado; further back, a young mother was treating her baby daughter, who was licking a chocolatey spoon, and a tall, slim black woman was sitting off on her own.
Lorraine sat away from all of them, sinking down with perfect gratitude on her little chair. The waistband of her trousers itched, her feet throbbed, and for a horrible moment she felt like an old, bothered lady: she hated that feeling. But then she got herself settled; she was sitting down, she was out of the sun. She felt relief spreading through her. The waitress came over. When she realized Lorraine didn’t speak Spanish, she began to jabber and point—probably meaning the dollar café—but Lorraine insisted, and they managed to communicate. Three fingers. Chocolate . . . she remembered fresa, strawberry, from somewhere . . . and when she was struggling for a third, the waitress smiled kindly and suggested vainilla, which was her favourite, anyway.
She ate slowly, turning over the plastic spoon, and licking into the hollow, as she finished each bite. She wanted to stretch this out. The relief she was feeling told her how upset she had been. She had to get hold of herself, she thought. She had to get some perspective. For her, she knew, that was always retrospective. She was always better at second thoughts, and the right word always came too late—on the other hand, it always did come. For example, looking around her pod, and recalling the earlier run of her thoughts, it was now perfectly obvious that her encounter with Enrique and the woman in the green curlers had been a lost episode of I Love Lucy . . . all it lacked was Desi screaming babaloo!
She smiled; there was no sense blaming herself for this morning.
She watched the young mother fussing at her little girl, dabbing her mouth, and the child, noticing her, waved a greeting with her spoon. Desi had been a Cuban, but would these people remember him? Probably not. Probably no one did. And then she found herself recalling another show, as everyone had always called them, The Millionaire. An immensely wealthy figure, who was never seen, gave away a million dollars each week to some unsuspecting individual, then watched the ensuing drama unfold. It always began the same way, a heavy-faced man with slightly oriental features and the demeanour of a butler would take a slip of paper from a leather portfolio. “Good afternoon. My name is Michael Anthony. I have here a cashier’s cheque, made out in your name, for the sum . . .”
But this brought her mind back to the subject at hand, for even though the money involved was much less, it was, in effect, the role Murray had cast her in. She closed her eyes: fatigue welled up again. It had sounded so simple, as he’d described it, almost fun, but apparently not. She quietly cursed Almado Valdes—and Enrique—and then—did Cuba have voodoo?—she stuck her spoon into the bola of chocolate, which had always been Murray’s favourite flavour; this was all his fault in the end. But that made her smile once more. Besides, she liked chocolate too. She ate some. Then she glanced over at the two young men who were sitting together; she wondered if they were gay. Almado was, Enrique was. The Cubans weren’t good about gays; they were not “gay-friendly.” Murray hadn’t cared. Few people ever guessed in his case. He never camped. He didn’t look gay, whatever that meant. She could see him in church, singing the hymns he loved, his voice blending with the others: he had a wonderful tenor. She remembered being with him once when someone had described him as “a pillar of the church,” and he’d given her the most marvellously vulgar wink. That was Murray all over; he always saw his homosexuality ironically, an amusing twist of fate. Lately, it had frustrated her that she could never remember when she’d learned about his “orientation”; it was simply there, a fact of life. When she’d asked Don—her husband, who had died three years before—when he had learned about it, he only shrugged and said that he had always known, though obviously that couldn’t have been true. Of course some of their friends thought that Murray loved Don, others that Don harboured a secret passion for Murray, but she’d always known such ideas were ridiculous, and missed the point. They were friends. That was true enough, and for years she’d accepted it as the answer to every question; only toward the end had she wondered what this answer meant. She was still not sure. Their sexual disagreement, to put it like that, had been entirely amicable; having agreed to disagree, they could find common ground everywhere else. And then there’d been the question of how she had fitted in. Again, she was never sure. She took up her spoon; in turn, she scraped a smidge of the chocolate, strawberry, and vainilla, a taste for each of them—Don making do with strawberry, though he probably liked butterscotch best. But of course they hadn’t been arranged in a line like the bolas, had formed, rather, a triangle: isosceles, not equilateral—she had always been the shorter stroke. It had been their friendship, after all. She’d been the third wire, the ground; she occupied the neutral corner, like a referee; she’d been the go-between. And finally their audience. It was how they’d used her. It had been the price of her admission into their friendship, and all it represented. Knowledge, and knowingness—a little different—and culture: doorways into other worlds . . . but one door was always closed. They were men, she’d finally concluded, despite their different ways of being male, and they kept that a secret, a mystery she wasn’t a
llowed to penetrate. Had they mocked her? That wasn’t exactly right. But she hadn’t known the rules, even known what the real game was. No doubt that was why she resented this “little mission,” as Murray had called it. So often her rewards had been obligations. Of course she couldn’t have refused him; he’d been dying. But it was undeniably galling. As she tilted her bowl to get the last of the melted vainilla—her flavour—it occurred to her that it went further still. Although she was here, officially, at Murray’s behest, she was really here as much because of Don; she was here for both of them together, but this only meant, so far as they’d be concerned, that she was also here for herself. For herself ! No wonder she resented it. To make it all worse, it was true. They were both dead, but she was still their creature. She smiled ruefully and whispered softly, “Damn you, Don, my love! Damn you, dear Murray!” She put down her spoon. After such damnation, she surely owed them both a prayer. And one for herself, of course. And of course she’d be forgiven. They had both loved her; she had loved them. She was stuck with it—they all were.