by Anthony Hyde
Lorraine said, “I read in my Lonely Planet that sixty buildings fall down every year in Habana Vieja.”
“Think of those places near the hotel.”
These exchanges were easy, agreeable, normal. Mathilde walked on. It was hot, walking. After a time, she said, “I’m not sure how far I came. I wonder now if he did go in somewhere—that’s what I thought, but I could have let him get too far ahead and not seen . . . I told you. I was wandering by then. . . .” Another lie, after all. Not wandering, exactly. For it must have been around here that the men had begun shouting and calling, and she’d started losing her head. She looked around. Now, it was just another stretch of dirty, rough street. Mathilde could feel Lorraine watching her; but she hadn’t said very much. Mathilde glanced quickly at Bailey. There was no point going on; what she had to do now was bring this to an end, close the deal, as they say. What they should do, she thought, was get Lorraine back to the hotel. They could have a drink, and leave her safely there. Mathilde looked at her watch. She groaned inwardly. It was almost noon.
By this point, they’d come up to a corner. Lorraine said, “Isn’t this Cuba Street? Look, down there, that’s the church—Our Lady of Mercy.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lorraine began walking that way; in a moment, she was lost in the crowds, always heavier here, but especially so today. And it was amazing how many people were carrying flowers, daisies, lilies, roses, clutched in little bouquets or cradled in their arms.
When they caught her up, Mathilde said, “Isn’t it beautiful? You’re always seeing something beautiful in Cuba. Even in the middle of a slum.”
“I know. But look. They’re all carrying flowers.”
“It must be a saint’s day,” said Mathilde, and then, thinking it would please Lorraine that she knew: “It’s Ascension Day!”
“But that was last week,” said Lorraine.
Bailey laughed. “It’s not a saint, it’s the eighth of May—don’t you know? Mother’s Day. It’s huge here. It’s kind of their Thanksgiving.” He looked at Lorraine. “Didn’t our pal Almado say he was going to Matanzas today? That’s to visit his mother.”
Lorraine looked at him. “You’ll have to convince me.”
Bailey laughed again. “You don’t know Cuba. Even monsters visit their mothers today.”
They were right in front of the church, and Mathilde said, “What do you think we should do? Is there any point in going on?”
Lorraine said, “Well, we can at least say we tried.”
“I think that’s what you have to say, Lorraine.”
“All right. I’m saying it. There’s obviously no point going any further. I think what I’d like to do now is go into the church. And you two can go off on your own.”
Mathilde hesitated. She looked at Lorraine—and Lorraine looked at her. And even if Mathilde sensed that Lorraine was turning the tables, could she say so? “Oh, Lorraine, I don’t like leaving you.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s Sunday. I’d like to go to church.”
“Why don’t we go back to the hotel? Or somewhere. We could have lunch.”
“Mathilde, I’m going to be perfectly all right—listen, I have my pills in my bag, and from here I know my way perfectly. It’s your last full day and you must have it to yourselves.”
Bailey and Mathilde exchanged glances. Mathilde felt herself give in, but then she reached into her bag. “Here. Take my phone.” And then she went into her bag again and came up with a scrap of paper and a pen. “This is Bailey’s number—or the woman in the apartment next door.”
Bailey said, “Her English isn’t great, but just say ‘Bailey’ and she’ll understand.”
“Well . . . you don’t have to do that. I’m going to be perfectly all right.” But she took the phone and dropped it into her bag. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll see you later at the hotel—or leave a message if you’ll be late.” Quickly, she leaned down, kissed Mathilde’s cheek, and turned away.
“Be careful,” Mathilde called after her.
Lorraine smiled, and waved, and then they were standing there as she disappeared inside the church.
Mathilde said, “Do you think it’s all right?”
Bailey didn’t say anything but he took her hand, and they headed down Cuba Street. Gradually, Mathilde’s anxieties eased; the division she’d felt within herself melted away. All around, people hurried along the dusty street, carrying flowers. Cars nudged up and cheerfully blew their horns. Everyone looked happy and Mathilde smiled at a young woman, who had a glorious bouquet of daffodils in her hands—she was wearing a filmy red dress, all frilly at the neck, and she was humming to herself.
Mother’s Day? Was that what she wanted for herself? Was that what this was all about? Well, she wanted Bailey, there was no doubt about that. She had stopped thinking about Lorraine, and she didn’t look back, as Lorraine stepped out of the church, and after the darkness inside, stood blinking against the sun.
2
As quickly as she could, Lorraine walked away from the Merced, retracing the route Mathilde had taken.
Thoughts buzzed around in her mind but what carried her on was something deeper that she didn’t examine. She was doing exactly what she wanted, purely what she herself desired, and the consequences must be dangerous and unpredictable. She was excited. She wasn’t certain if Mathilde had lied, or simply hadn’t guessed, but in any case Lorraine had out-manoeuvred her. And the freedom she now felt was transferred to the world; now the laughter of the women and the shouts of the children leapt into the sky and in the light of the sun, colours pulsed and glowed. Details jumped out at her: a black woman, in khaki shorts, was sitting in her doorway on a stool; she rocked back, and the skin tightened over the inside of her thigh, the lighter pores swelling up like a chicken’s, huge, fascinating. The world was so bright she wanted to cover her eyes but as soon as she took her hand away her sight greedily sucked everything in. She hurried on. People scarcely noticed her. On the broken, narrow sidewalk, she was always first to step out of the way and she was past before other people even looked up. A Santeria couple, as pure as black and white, managed to catch her eye long enough for a smile, but then she was by. Farther along, a group of men, with the sleeves of their Sunday-best shirts rolled up to their elbows—whose skin was grey, thick and rough, like the folds around an elephant’s trunk—were bent over the engine of an ancient Ford, discussing it learnedly: she was around them and gone before they sensed she was there. She was alone. She was all by herself. But only in a special way: she’d felt this first when she’d discovered that her note had disappeared. Then she believed, at that point she knew. Bailey and Mathilde didn’t believe, and she’d understood at once how completely her belief divided her from them; yet this only convinced her the more. After all, it was her belief; it was almost better that she didn’t have to share it.
Only when she reached her final destination did she take thought in a more ordinary way, and it was almost a relief—though she also felt a certain satisfaction, a sense of having exceeded herself in some fashion, that made her blush. But looking at the ruined block— which she’d instantly understood was where Almado had disappeared, I am going down a rabbit hole—she was faced with certain practicalities, including the possibility that she might be completely wrong. That sobered her. Did Almado live here? Had Hugo really come here on Wednesday? The building had collapsed; it was obviously abandoned. If he was living here, no one else was: but surely that was an argument for, not against. It was just where he would live. For Havana, at least the old city, a demolition site like this was perfectly ordinary, and passersby weren’t giving the building a glance. Mathilde had been right, it wasn’t much different from the buildings just down from the hotel, which had been braced to keep them falling in on each other. It was rather ugly—that suited Almado. There was never a patch of grass or garden with places like this. The facade, the exterior wall, butted right to the street, flush with the sidewalk, though here this was only a g
ravel path—the place was being worked on, a construction site.
She picked out the door. Sometimes the doors were metal grilles, and you could look through them; but this was solid. Yet she might as well try it, she thought, as a way of declaring her good intentions to anyone passing; and so she crossed over, and pushed. It was locked. Or blocked. But the obvious way in, anyway, was the rough hole that had been banged through the wall . . . to get the rubble out, she thought, as her eye followed a smooth skid mark back to a metal bin. This was stranded, like a hulk, on the side of a pile of broken masonry and debris. Could you trespass in Cuba? In a socialist state, with no private property, how was that possible? She waited a moment, until there was no one nearby, and stuck her head around the edge of the hole—thinking that children might be playing here—King of the Mountain; but perhaps they’d been warned away; and it was Sunday, besides.
But this was the extent of her hesitation; it was too sunny and bright to be afraid, as she would have been afraid at night: there was only the building itself, and its safety, to worry about. She would have to risk that. She stepped through the gap. Now she could see how the building had come down, and this struck her as odd, for the lower storeys had apparently gone, whereas the upper two or three were still intact, hanging, supported by a network of timbers and scaffolds.
Walking ahead, she discovered she was holding her breath, and as she released it and made herself, calmly, take another, she expected to inhale the strange, fresh smell that bricks and mortar dust give off, but instead she drew in a warmer, fetid odour of decay. This was a shock, almost a blow to her morale, and she faltered; the excitement she’d been feeling was immediately less real. She’d expected fear, but this hinted at horror, and was a reminder of her innocence—she at once had an image of herself standing there on a mound of broken bricks and mortar, her bag hanging from her shoulder, her straw hat on her head. What was she doing? It was an odour infinitely older than anything she might encounter in her native land; poverty, misery, and death distilled into the stench of eternity. She wiggled her nose like a rabbit—she couldn’t help herself. And then she thought, Don’t be such a prude. She made herself go on. The smell wouldn’t get any better, but then it likely wouldn’t get any worse. Now she had to pass under some scaffolding; always, she walked around ladders, but she couldn’t here. But she ducked her head. And now she was in that peculiar Cuban shade, as dark as the sun is bright; for a moment she was as good as blind. And she was holding her breath again. She made herself breathe. She could hear her breathing, the sounds of her own breath, but also detached from her, quiet, independent, autonomous: as of course breathing is, she thought, as part of the autonomic nervous system . . .
Her mind kept drifting like that; she had to pull it back. She listened. Apart from her breathing, it was very quiet. And then a brick rattled away as her shoe hit it. But now she’d emerged safely from under the scaffold. She’d taken her bag off her shoulder, and was clutching it in front of her, using both hands. She stood quite still. She was in the courtyard now, and straight in from the door—she could see the door—was a small apartment, like a porter’s lodge. Her steps crunched as she walked over to it. She peered in at the window: all she could see were bags of cement, four rows of them, piled six high. She stepped back. Beyond the lodge, stairs led to the floor above, and clearly that’s what she’d have to do, go up; but here she paused, her right foot on the first step, her knee bent. She listened. She thought, If I scream, someone will hear on the street.
But she didn’t scream. Indeed, by the time she reached the first landing, she was sure the building was empty; it was not frightening, merely spooky, as if she’d dropped into a dark, Gothic fantasy world, in which the twisted wires of the electrical service, sagging in great loops from the walls or knotting into clusters as tangled as Medusa’s hair, were the tentacles of some terrible monster she was tracing back to its lair: it was amazing, she thought, that the place hadn’t burned down years ago. Now simple curiosity filled her. Who had lived here? What had happened to them? She strolled past the apartments, looking into each, and wondered how people could have lived in places so tiny. They were all empty: not a stick of furniture, a single picture on the wall: everything, whatever this might mean, had been taken. It was obvious that people had been ordered out. When she reached the next level, this was her only fear, that the floor would give way beneath her or another wall come down. Yet everything felt solid. Nothing shook. Poverty and time had settled into an implacable inertia. The landings, running around the court, made three sides of a square; only when she came around to the outside, where the wall had collapsed, was she anxious: she stepped cautiously ahead then as if she were walking on ice. Even if everything felt solid, there’d clearly been more damage here. A window frame had been twisted right out of shape, and was falling out of the wall. She looked in. And now she saw a sign of life . . . a mattress pushed into a corner.
She stared at it a moment. Again, her heart began to beat more quickly. But when she looked around there was no one about, and when she listened there was nothing to hear: only a scratchy sound under her foot as she shifted her weight. The window was obviously the way to go in, but was a little too high to step over; she used her bag to brush away some bits of brick and lumps of mortar, then straddled it, and lifted her other leg across.
Inside, she stood quite still. The wall—the far wall—was part of the one that had come down; the window there was broken and twisted as well. But the floor was level, and if Almado was staying here—if anyone was—that was presumably a guarantee of its safety. Still, she trod carefully as she stepped toward the mattress. She looked down at it. It was filthy, and the only blanket was pushed up like a dirty rag at one end. She remembered that the mattress at Hugo’s had caught her eye, too. But this was worse. It was an awful sight. And yet now she knelt, sinking down through her own astonishment, and placed the palm of her hand on it and then forced herself to clench her fingers, seizing a fold of the cloth. Pity flowed into her, when she might have expected disgust. She reached out again, and with the tips of her fingers touched a dark, stiff patch of the fabric, like a scab or the lesion of some ghastly disease. Now she wanted to weep: behind her eyes was the pressure of tears, and it was all the worse because she couldn’t weep. She knew she wasn’t pitying Almado, certainly not, not even Hugo. Was it Murray? Dear Murray, lying on this bed. He had lain with this man. He had shared his body, on some bed. And wasn’t it only chance, or the grace of God, that had placed Murray in his bed, and Almado here? But then that was true of everyone, including herself. She reached out, trailing her fingers across all the dreadful stains she could reach, blood, shit, semen, whatever they were; but they were what everyone was, even if their feather beds and their silk pyjamas allowed them the delusion that they were deserving, and something else. She closed her eyes. You can pray anywhere, Don used to say, but no, I can’t, I can’t pray here, she thought. It was too terrible a place. And she was relieved to think this, for it carried the sound of her own voice: and she wanted to say it out loud, to reassure herself, but all she could do was whisper it, “What a terrible place.” Then she looked around the room again, and saw a cardboard carton, pushed into the opposite corner. It was filled with rubbish. She picked it up, tilted it and shook it, and then picked over its contents. There was no actual garbage—would that not attract rats?—but there were two empty Buccaneer beer bottles and some food wrappers. A cigar end. She found a condom, used, and it was streaked with blood, but this was so expected, so fitting, that she only noted it. What more attracted her interest was a ball of paper, scrunched up. She put the carton down and worked out the paper, stretching it out and smoothing it between her hands. She recognized what it was at once: a page from The Lonely Planet Guide to Cuba. It was too mangled and filthy to read easily, but she didn’t have to, for she could make out the page number—425—and she had her own copy of the book in her bag. Her hands, taking it out, were trembling. Why would Almado Valdes need a
guide to Cuba? Her hands trembled as she turned to the page. He must have taken this from Hugo. And the topic that would interest him was exactly the one to which the page referred: Getting There and Away. AIRPORTS & AIRLINES . . . AIRLINES FLYING TO & FROM CUBA . . . Air Canada (www.aircanada.com) . . . A box in the lower corner had been circled in pencil, DEPARTURE TAX . . . Everyone must pay a US$25 departure tax at the airport. It’s payable in cash only. This was out of date, she thought; the Cubans didn’t want American dollars, but convertible pesos. Would he get it wrong? It was something you wanted to know, if you were leaving. And Almado was leaving, there was no doubt about it—with Hugo’s ticket and his passport, she was sure.
Hugo had been murdered. Here was the evidence to prove her conviction. Yet, as she folded the paper neatly in two and tucked it into her bag, some hint of her previous doubts returned. There was, after all, “no sign of foul play.” Her piece of paper was hardly proof of that. But these doubts, and all the reasoning around them, and all the imaginings, were revolting. Lorraine recoiled. She was disgusted. It was all so . . . dirty. Filthy. Like the taste of a copper penny in your mouth. It was all so dark: which was surely the reason she now sought the light. She went over to the window in the outside wall and looked out over the way she had come in: the hole that led in from the street, the pile of rubble, and the steel dumper that was being used to haul it away. From here, she was looking down into the bin. A few bricks, and one big timber, were scattered in the bottom, and the whole of the inside was coated with the white, floury dust of mortar and plaster . . . except for one corner, which revealed, as perfect as an angel in the snow, the outline of a man, the stain of a man, blood red: a ghastly, ghostly impression, a tracing, a palimpsest, of a man spreadeagled. She stared. And she drew her hand up to her mouth, in the classic expression of a woman dismayed; and then, quite slowly, she made the sign of the cross. She turned then. She fled. She tore her skirt getting out of the place. She ran down the stairs. Desperately— she could not pass by that terrible box—she tugged at the door, the proper door to the street, and with a screech it came free. Now she was into the light. Her eyes were dazzled. She wanted to cover her face. She felt she would die. She tried to run but the gravel sank under her feet like quicksand. She was gasping. She felt herself flailing, drowning. All the impressions that had made the world so real before now broke away and flew at her, darting like shards of glass into her eyes. There was too much, much too much, to see. Oh, no, she thought. Oh, no. It was happening again. Now. Oh, how could it. She could hardly move. Not now, not now. Her back was stiff. Her thighs had locked, her gait became a jerky goose step. And then she could go no farther. She sank down, in the blinding sun, against a filthy wall. Her heart was racing in her chest and her mouth was dry. She tried to spit: the taste of herself was gone.