by Anthony Hyde
“I don’t think so.” But at once, seeing the incomprehension on the doctora’s face, she added, “I understand. No protection.” And she imitated the doctor’s cutting gesture.
Dr. Otero smiled. “Good. All right now? You may get dressed.” She smiled again. “All over . . . I come back.”
Mathilde got into her clothes. She told herself she was already feeling better. She could stand up by the time the doctor returned. Mathilde said, “I think Adamaris gave you money . . . ?”
“Yes. But was a little more difficult.” She smiled. “You understand?”
Mathilde had certainly been going to give her more money, to be generous, but now, it appeared, she was paying for services rendered. She handed the doctor twenty convertible pesos. “Is that enough?”
“Is what I expect, yes.”
Mathilde, on the verge of thanking her again, restrained herself. She hitched her bag over her shoulder and stepped to the door, which the doctora held open. Adamaris rose as Mathilde came into the waiting room, looking past her and saying something to the doctora in Spanish. Mathilde ignored this and pushed open the glass doors, to the street. She didn’t look back; and in fact Adamaris had to catch her up.
“You are all right, Mathilde?”
It was the first time that Mathilde could recall Adamaris using her name, but whether she might have felt pleasure or annoyance was dissolved in relief; it was over and she was better. “Yes, I’m all right,” she said. “But I’m tired. I want to go back to the hotel.”
“Of course, yes. . . . The doctor was all right for you?”
“Yes.” But then she added, “I gave her more money.”
“More. How much?”
“Another twenty pesos.”
Her eyes, even narrowed, were enormous; her lips, tightening, remained lush and full. “Wait for a minute, please. I will come back and we will find a taxi.”
Adamaris didn’t give Mathilde a chance to argue, but spun around and went back into the clinic. She was gone all of ten minutes. Mathilde leaned against the building, resting. She didn’t mind being alone. She was weak, she admitted that, but she did feel better. She sent her perception down between her legs and decided she wasn’t bleeding in the slightest; but no doubt the pad was a wise precaution. Finally Adamaris came back, a plastic bag in her hand. “Here,” she said, “for you.”
Mathilde looked inside: she was astonished to see the second napkin. And then she realized that she’d been half expecting Adamaris to return with some sort of refund. Or was this it? “I don’t want it.”
“You paid too much, more than agreed.”
“So you’re giving me this?”
“Is something—”
“But, Adamaris, didn’t you go back to get your share, the extra? Wasn’t that what you were doing?”
At this, Adamaris seemed confused and Mathilde wasn’t sure, perhaps her confusion was genuine. In any case, she had read in a guidebook that feminine products were often impossible to find in Cuba, that tampons made an excellent gift for a woman or could be left as tips for the chambermaid, so perhaps they constituted a form of currency. What was money, after all? Besides, she didn’t care. She only wanted to be alone, to lie down, though of course Adamaris insisted on walking with her from the taxi to the hotel. In the lobby, Mathilde did not quite have to force herself to say, “Thank you for everything.”
“You are feeling better. This is important. I will call you tomorrow.”
Mathilde went straight up to her room.
Turning the lights off, she lay down in the wonderful darkness and fell asleep at once.
When she awoke, at twenty past six, she was totally refreshed. But then she had a setback. A single, dreadful cramp seized her. It passed off quickly, but almost doubled her over. She had to lie down again. And then, ten minutes later, she realized she needed the toilet, and very urgently. Her bowels, liquefied, emptied. There was nothing to do but sit, bent over on the toilet, and wait for it to end. Finally she guessed it was safe, stripped off her clothes, and got into the shower. For ten minutes she soaped and washed and rinsed; and then, wary of a recurrence, she only put on her housecoat. But very quickly she felt entirely better; in fact, she was hungry and restless. She dressed. Leaving her room, she took the stairs down to the lobby, not wanting to meet anyone, and especially the nice Canadian woman she’d met that morning; she would hate to seem unfriendly, but now she wanted to be by herself. The darkness was a pleasure on this count alone; and it was cooler. She walked over to O’Reilly, where she’d been that afternoon, but now found a restaurant that her guidebook claimed made the best Italian food in the city: Dominica’s. It was a government restaurant, but run by a private Italian company so both the food and the service were better. She was heartily sick of both beer and rum and what she really wanted was a decent glass of wine. The Valpolicella was almost that; and the Caesar salad had definitely involved anchovies and garlic. Of course the pasta was overcooked but the sauce was more or less puttanesca. After coffee, feeling much more like herself, she walked back to the hotel. On the way, she passed a bar, the Café de Paris, which her guidebook also mentioned, for its music. She went in. Of course it was a mistake. A single woman was either picking up a man or waiting to be picked up; that was clearly the local assumption. Even before her drink arrived, two Cuban men had approached her, and the count quickly mounted to eight. At least two were very annoying. Finally—she was about to give up and leave—another man came over, with a smile on his face. “I think we have the same problem,” he said. He was a young German, whose name was Helmut. “If you leave here, all the men will follow you. If I go, I’ll take the women with me.” Mathilde laughed; and what he’d said was probably true. Helmut, it transpired, spoke excellent French, obviously good enough for them to drop English. That was a pleasure. The music, once they were allowed to listen to it in peace, was a pleasure as well. But sometime before eleven, Mathilde realized she was growing tired. By then, of course, it was obvious that Germany was hoping to succeed where Cuba had failed. Mathilde decided this wouldn’t have ever been very likely, but of course not tonight. Still, Helmut walked her home, though he was only mildly insistent in the lobby. Finally, alone, she got into the elevator, giving him a little wave through the grille. She felt fine now. Better than that: despite her tiredness, she felt very good. Undressing, she thought of Helmut. No, he had not been a possibility. But then she lay down in the dark. And now she admitted that she did want a man. She wanted the black man. She wanted Bailey Friede.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2005
1
Every morning, the same young man came around with a list, and checked off the room numbers of all the guests in the breakfast room. Mathilde wondered where he was placed in the complex scale of Cuban racial shading; judged by his smile, this black man was as white as snow. “Your friend? The nice blond lady?”
“Yes. Mrs. . . . Stowe.” Mathilde was self-conscious, pronouncing her name.
The young man again consulted his paper. He shook his head. “Not this morning.” He smiled again. “Not yet.”
He moved away. Mathilde sipped her coffee. Her “friend,” the young man had said; and she had accepted this description. Was that why she’d felt self-conscious? Lorraine was hardly her friend, surely. At the same time, she’d been looking forward to seeing her this morning, had immediately looked around the room to see if she was there; and when she couldn’t wait any longer—when she absolutely had to have her coffee—she’d remembered Lorraine’s trick and ordered it from the bar, and had then anticipated telling her, she was right, it was much better.
“The nice blond lady.” Again, that wasn’t right, although as a description it wasn’t entirely wrong. Lorraine had fine, smooth, cornsilk hair, becomingly streaked with grey—but rather like highlights, actually— that she pulled back on her neck in a bun. No: that also was not quite fair. Bun . . . it was slightly more complex, a knot of some kind— it must be quite long—a kind of chignon. Yes, sh
e was a “nice lady.” But the word slighted Lorraine. Perhaps it was a disguise, looking nice, camouflage, a kind of protection—that was it. Lorraine was a woman determined to participate in the world but knew that she did so from a position of relative weakness. Which had to be allowed for. Self-effacement was a tactic, reserve a cultivated habit. Of course Lorraine was an Anglo-Saxon—but Mathilde stopped herself from putting it down to that. Too easy. It was more personal. She was a widow. What was that like? And what had her marriage meant to her?
She ate a slice of pineapple, and then a slice of watermelon as she considered all these questions. And then she got up and made herself more coffee at the urn. She sipped this slowly; she knew she was still hoping that Lorraine might appear. Her formulation, though instinctively she trusted it, raised as many questions as it answered and it would be interesting to test it out. For example, what did relative weakness mean? Weakness was probably the wrong word. It wasn’t as definite as that—in fact, that was the point, it was a kind of indefiniteness, a tentativeness, an awkwardness. She was reluctant to assert herself for fear, not just of her reception, but of her ultimate ability to carry it off. But wasn’t she simply saying that Lorraine was shy? And wasn’t a good deal of all this rumination as applicable to herself ? If so, perhaps calling Lorraine a friend was closer to the mark than she’d assumed. Now she admitted something. If Lorraine had appeared Mathilde knew that she would have worked the conversation around to her difficulties yesterday, that really she was hoping for a confidante. And wouldn’t that have been an acceptance of their friendship?
But clearly this wasn’t going to happen now; she was the last in the breakfast room—the two waiters, and the young woman who did the eggs, were both giving her a meaningful eye—and so she finished her coffee. It was almost nine. She was meeting Bailey at ten. He had a friend with a car that he thought he could borrow, and if not, she’d rent one, and Bailey could give her a tour of the “unknown Havana”: the fact that this idea originated with Adamaris only made it more appealing. But first she wanted a walk, to test that she’d completely recovered from whatever yesterday’s problem had been. She got up from the table and left the restaurant—it was the Jardín del Edén in the evening—which led directly into the lobby. But as she headed toward the entrance, she abruptly diverted herself and crossed to the front desk.
“Is Mrs. Stowe in her room?”
“You want to telephone?”
“No—her key . . . is it there?”
It wasn’t; so either she’d gone out without dropping it off, or she was in her room. Mathilde rode up in the lift. And now she felt a sense of urgency, and admitted to herself that her diversion had followed an instinct of alarm: a sympathy that was already proving the friendship she’d been speculating on. Something was wrong. She remembered the room number from the previous day, when the young man had ticked it off. An “outside” room. She knocked. Even if nothing was wrong, she would get a chance to see what one looked like. . . .
The door opened. Lorraine was in her pyjamas, and her greeting sounded anxious, surprised, and relieved all at once. “Oh, Mathilde!”
Mathilde stepped into the room. Now she was less sure of herself; she was certain something had happened, but she didn’t know how to proceed. “I see,” she said, glancing at Lorraine’s pyjamas. “You were out late last night?” In her own ears, this sounded false. She rushed on. “You have a window,” she said. “You’re so lucky. On our side, we’re all in the dark.” And she crossed over to the window, with its shutter. Lorraine stood behind her, and to one side; but they were together, looking out. Lorraine said, “Every morning, I watch the children going off to school.”
“They’re lovely, aren’t they? I love the children.”
They turned away from the window together, but into awkwardness. Mathilde, for an instant, felt much the younger, and this was an inhibition. “I should let you recover from your late night. I shouldn’t have barged in like this.”
“No, please. It wasn’t a late night, not like that. And you don’t know how happy I am to see you—I didn’t know what to do. Yesterday, I had a terrible day. Sit down—please. Do you want the chair?”
“No, this is fine.” Lorraine’s room, like her own, had two beds; she sat on the corner of the one Lorraine had obviously been sleeping in, but it was closer to the chair, near the window, where Lorraine sat down. Mathilde realized now how tall Lorraine was, taller than she was, how long her legs were; as a girl, she might have been athletic and she had done a respectable job keeping her figure. “I like your pyjamas,” she said. They also made her look taller; they were rather tailored, at least for pyjamas, and had no collar, but a piping that went around the neck and down, which was picked up by the seam of the trousers: the pyjamas were champagne, the piping a deeper yellow. “You need them, don’t you, with the air conditioning.”
“Yes,” said Lorraine. “I almost didn’t bring them.”
Mathilde said, “You were going to see your priest? Yesterday?”
“That was all right. Very good, in fact.”
“He helped, then?”
“Well, not really. No one seems to know where he’s got to. Almado, this Cuban man. But at least I felt I’d done what I could. That’s what I was deciding—I’d do my best, but there’s only so much I can do.”
“Of course. So . . . ?”
“It was afterwards. Oh, I feel such a fool!” She leaned back in the chair. “I’m such an idiot!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, I had lunch in that big hotel in Parque Central, the Inglaterra. As I was coming out, two Cubans picked me up . . . you know the way they do.”
“Yes. ‘Hello. Where are you from?’ And so on. Two of them?”
“A man and a woman—except they were younger, really kids. They said they had a friend in Vancouver—”
“They always have that friend! What were you supposed to do? Mail a letter for them—I’ve had that one—”
“Well, it was the first time for me. And then it changed. They had a baby, and the baby needed milk, which had to be powdered milk because they had no refrigerator—it sounds so crazy!”
“You were supposed to buy some for them?”
“First off, I was supposed to give them the money to buy some—”
“Ah. Of course!”
“And when I hesitated . . . of course I knew it was all wrong, but it’s so hard to say so, right to their face—it sounds so cruel. Anyway, they took me to a supermarket—at least that’s what they called it— and I bought it.”
“So, they ended up with some powdered milk?”
“No. Because they took it back and exchanged it for cash—I saw them. I knew it. But I did it! I was such a fool! I followed them, almost to prove I was a fool! They gave it to the girl at the cash register . . . I could see her taking her commission . . . I suppose you can call it.”
“But you shouldn’t be so upset. It’s amazing, isn’t it—the hustling. They’ve all learned it.”
“I know . . . it’s just, I felt such a fool—”
“To be taken advantage of ?”
“I suppose. I was . . . such a sucker, I guess.”
“‘Sucker’?”
“Imbécile.Gogo.”
Mathilde laughed. “You do speak French!”
Lorraine smiled. “I only wish I did. My husband was at the Bank for International Settlements and we lived four years in Switzerland. Basel. My children speak French . . . even a little German.”
Mathilde restrained herself; she wanted to ask about the children. “Well, in French or English, no one likes it, but it’s not important. I met a young woman two days ago, and even though I knew exactly what was happening, I ended up giving her some money. It’s almost worth it just for the experience.”
“I know what you mean. But that really wasn’t the problem, anyway. Well, maybe it was. I felt so ashamed. I was ashamed of myself, I was ashamed for them—they’re so wonderful, most of them, it�
�s so terrible to be reduced to that—I was ashamed that the world was like that. It’s hard to explain. I ran. I wanted to run away from everything. I kept running . . . and then I collapsed. I mean, I froze. I went rigid. I couldn’t move . . . As a girl, I was always afraid of getting cramps when I was swimming, my mother was a great worrier—”
Mathilde shook her head. “A cramp isn’t like that. I’ve had them. It’s very painful. A spasm.”
“You’re right, then. This wasn’t like that. I was paralyzed. I was terrified. The world was breaking up. The world was coming to an end. I’ve never been so frightened in all my life and there wasn’t anything at all to be afraid of.”
“You panicked.”
“I suppose that’s it.”
“You had a panic attack.”
Mathilde’s voice was so matter-of-fact that Lorraine said, “Has this ever happened to you?”
“No, but I had a friend in university. It was the same with her—in the street.”
“I was so frightened, you don’t know. And now I’m afraid . . . if I go out, it will happen all over again.”
“That was the same, too. That’s what it is, Lorraine. Going out. Being outside. Open spaces. You know claustrophobia? This is the opposite. Agoraphobia. The fear of open spaces. You know, agora, the Greek word for ‘market.’ The marketplace.”
Lorraine smiled ruefully. “I liked the Agora.”
“Yes!”
“I remember in Athens, trying to imagine it . . . with stalls and people shopping. I certainly wasn’t frightened then. But yesterday, I was afraid of everything. It was awful.”
“I will now be annoying, Lorraine. You’re afraid of everything because you don’t want to see the one thing that truly makes you afraid.”
Lorraine almost managed to laugh. “I don’t know why, but it surprises me, Mathilde, you, a Freudian! You mean, I’m afraid that I want to make love to my father?”
“Yes. Not that, I expect—but yes. And I told you I was going to be annoying!”