Cuba and the Night

by Pico Iyer

“Now you mention it, I do remember hearing about something like that in Russia.”

  “Sure. I’ve seen more ‘Russian marriages’ than you’ve seen beers. Some kid learns Russian at school, goes for a six-week course in Leningrad, meets some Natasha who comes on strong to him. Late-night talks about poetry and politics. Late-night wedding at some deserted office. He returns home, takes care of the papers, and she comes over, and then heads off. End of affair, end of innocence. Kid’s left wondering what’s hit him, and the West has a new entrepreneur on its hands.”

  “And that happens here too?”

  “What do you think brings all these three-hundred-pound Mexican truckdrivers down here? The art museums?”

  “But I mean, it’s not always like that. You can’t deny that the Cubans are among the most openhearted and generous people around.”

  “Sure. And they know how to turn that to advantage. If they’re going to have a good time anyway, they might as well have one with a foreigner, and see where that will lead. Prostitution feeds off foreignness as much as love does.”

  It was funny, but the more he went on like this, the more I felt he was putting on a show, for himself perhaps as much as for me. Pretending somehow, or not letting on that he was vulnerable. He reminded me sometimes of those Sixth Formers we have whose very anxiety to prove their worldly wisdom makes one rather doubt it.

  “So you think it’s political?”

  “Everything’s political down here, my friend.”

  “Even falling in love?”

  “Especially falling in love.” He took another sip of beer.

  “So what do you say to something to eat?” I said, rather to dispel the mood, and then we made our way over to the glass-fronted restaurant a little further along the beach. I must say that the only good thing about Cuban food is that there usually isn’t much of it: another of those austerities for which school is rather a good training. So we reconciled ourselves to the inevitable moros y cristianos, and a bottle of Spanish plonk, and I asked him about his past. I could see that he wanted to talk tonight, and that he wouldn’t let me rest till he’d had his say.

  “However did you get into this business in the first place? Did you train at a vocational college?”

  “God, no, just the opposite. Got into it the usual way, with the usual story. You know: drugs, parental divorce, boarding school, all that, and then, in ’68 or ’69, I just decided to bag the whole thing and hit the road. Everywhere was wide open then, you could go anywhere you wanted, so I took the trail down through Iran, Kabul, and Kathmandu, and ended up in Goa. It was crazy in those days: you’d see all these people crashed out on the beach, living there for six months, nine months at a time, partying every night. Plus, there were all these guys going out to Indochina from there. It was an easy way to make a living: every few months, you could go over to Saigon, hook up with one of the big agencies—AP, AFP, one of those—and then make enough money to go back to Goa and hang out some more. None of us had any training, but none of us cared. It was the ultimate teenager’s wet dream: there we were, seventeen, eighteen, out in this exotic world of temples and jungles and bar girls, with all the dope we could want, and hammocks on the beach, and guys with AK-47s partying next door.

  “Plus, we could tell ourselves we were heroes. Risking our lives to bring back the truth. Braving the front lines to educate the masses. We were the latest Cartier-Bressons and Bischofs. And all the time we were having the party of our lives, the one that the guys back in California would have killed for. We never wanted it to end.

  “Did, though; had to. So I went and shot South Africa for a while, Beirut, Belfast, El Salvador: all the garden spots. Couldn’t get out of Southeast Asia, though: just kept on going back there. Used to stay at the Tropicana, down in Bangkok—the Troc of Shit, we’d call it—down in the old part of the city, where the glitz suddenly ends, and you’re in the middle of Indians in prayer caps and klong artists and Muslim guys with calculators working out how much a threesome costs. Where every girl looks like an Annamese princess. So there you were, with these wild trips going down every night. You’d go out with some sexy, drop-dead teenager, and the next day you’d find out she was an ax murderer—or a post-ops falsie. Then you’d go out to Site 3, and these Khmer Rouge heavies—real murderers—would come out and bow and wai and invite you into their huts for dinner. You didn’t know if you were coming or going; no knowing the lay of the land, we’d say, when you’re in the Land of the Lay.”

  “Not ideal, though, for long-term relationships.”

  “Not ideal at all. Not ideal for anything except war-zone love. You’d see all these guys who were completely hooked on the rush. Couldn’t get it up unless there were grenades popping around them. Wouldn’t go for a girl unless she was a killer. But still, you know”—he looked pensive—“I wouldn’t trade that life for the world. I’ll never forget the first time I went into the jungle. It was wild. I was completely green: open as a barn door. This guy just came up to me in Bangkok, on the street, and said, ‘How about going to Cambodia?’ And the next thing I knew, I was, like, thirty-five, forty clicks over the border, in this country full of crazies. And the forests were full of these spirits—you could really feel it—like something that had been uncorked after all these years. It was spooky; real spooky. And sometimes you’d see these weird images at night—just the way a woman smiled at you, or a temple suddenly appeared where you didn’t expect it—and you’d be in this whole other world, like a kind of druggy dream where everything made sense, even your Zen and your pot. And it could put you into some really weird places in yourself. And then you’d come out, and the next day you’d be watching videos with the relief workers in Aranya. Almost like it’d never happened.”

  We heard a group of guitarists practicing in a garden.

  “And through all this you never got involved?”

  “Never stopped getting involved. Involved up to the knees. Involved in every way. But if you mean married, sure, I got hitched. Like I told you before. To an Englishwoman, in Singapore. Diane. Met her in Jakarta. I was there on my way back from East Timor, she was working in Surabaya for Juliana’s. It was kind of like tonight, I guess: two foreigners far from home in a distant place, couldn’t fail but end up together.”

  “Juliana’s was a shop?”

  “No, you know, the disco company out of London that supplies half the world’s hotels with deejays? Diane had worked for them all over—Beijing, Bangkok, Damascus—even some of the men-only postings, and now she was just starting out in Indonesia. I guess there weren’t too many other romantic prospects over there.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The usual. She was a deejay, I was a photographer: the only thing we had in common was that we were never there. I’d go out usually at, like, six-fifteen in the morning, and she’d come home from work at four, four-thirty. Most of the time, we weren’t even in the same time zone. But anyway, by then, I was too far gone for anything domestic. I mean, after seeing half the people in the world living in huts with no food, you kind of lose your appetite for Dutchess County. Plus, you get spoiled.”

  “In every sense of the word, I should think.”

  “Right. You get into this thing where you know you can go any-where in the world, first class, and wherever you go, there’s a Mercedes waiting for you, and a squash court, and girls who will look at you as if you’re some kind of war hero. And you get to know all the shortcuts: how to stay in the hotel in Manila where you can charge the girls to your room; how to change money in the street in Lima and then bill the company at official rates; how to find some kid in Africa who’ll do all your hard work for you while you just sit around the Intercon counting the bikinis.”

  “And Diane?”

  “Well, Diane and I were great as long as there were about five thousand miles between us. It’s like you guys say: ‘Asia to bed, Surrey to wed.’ ”

  “And you lived in New York?”

  “We lived all over. I’d
got married before once, when I was a kid: to a girl in Saigon I met in a bar. That one lasted about as long as the flight back to L.A. But Diane and I did have something, some kind of connection. It was like telepathy sometimes. I remember this one time when I fell asleep, and she was right next to me, and I dreamed I met a woman in a restaurant. She invited me to dinner, this cute and friendly Korean girl, and we didn’t know what was going to happen. And when I woke up, Diane was looking at me, real intense, like she was haunted. ‘I’ve just had the strangest dream about you,’ she said. ‘About losing you to a Korean girl, who’d invited you to her house for dinner.’ So it was like, sometimes, on one level, I couldn’t get close to her at all; and on another level, we were so close I felt suffocated.”

  It may sound strange, but for all his worldly wisdom, I really did feel that in some way he was an innocent. Not in the way that one usually understands it; God knows, he’d seen plenty of wars, and enough corpses to stock a brigade. But there was still something undeveloped in him. Like one of those boys who’s been so much the class leader that he’s never really had the chance to be something less.

  “You know, it was always truly weird with Diane,” he went on, “but there was always something between us, and I could never get a handle on it. It was like sometimes I felt I was in a souk, in Cairo or Damascus, and the night was falling, and I was getting deeper and deeper into this maze, and there were people calling me from their stalls, all these men in hoods, with leering faces, and the last few words of English were disappearing, and the night was falling, and I was lost in some crazy swirl of patterns and colors and smells. And somewhere there was a muezzin calling. And this wild Arabic music in the dark. And men—only men—lined up along the outside of their stalls in hoods, their faces lit by candles, calling out to me, and all these swirling letters like sand on every side, and I could hear them calling, saying, ‘Here, my friend. My friend, over here. I have something for you, friend. America, over here!’ ”

  “And in the end you find …”

  “You find you’re lost. Completely wiped out. There is no you. Only a few candles, and some hooded faces, and the dark, and no idea at all how to get back to where you started.”

  He said nothing for a minute, and we let the silence rest. Then he held up the bottle to the waiter, and motioned for another.

  “How about you, Hugo? Here I am, spilling out my guts, and you haven’t said a thing. Just taking it all in, like a goddamn tape recorder. How about your love life?”

  “Not much to talk about, really.”

  “But you’ve had some adventures.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “That seems to be your favorite manner. You were to that manner born. When was the first?”

  “First?”

  “Romance.”

  “Well, there was a girl at Oxford, she used to sit behind me at all of Thomas Phipps’s lectures. She’d been at school with my sister. I took her punting once, but neither of us was very experienced at that kind of thing, so it rather fell flat.” He was silent now, expecting more. “I suppose the first time I was involved, in a more concrete sense, was in Seville.”

  “A girl with a rose beneath her teeth and a scarlet smile?”

  “Not exactly. She was English, actually. Staying in the same pensión as I. We met over breakfast one morning in a café.”

  “And …”

  “And … well, we spent the day together. Looking at the Moorish buildings. She was an art student, on holiday from Florence. And … well, you know Seville; it’s hard not to think of poems and guitars when you’re walking underneath all those balconies.”

  “So you had her?”

  “Well, not in so many words.” It struck me that he was patronizing me in much the same way the boys do sometimes: as if they can’t imagine that their teachers ever have hopes, or friends, or love affairs—or any lives out of school.

  “And—let me guess—her name was Carmen.”

  “Imogen, actually.”

  “So you and Imogen got cozy in the cobbled alleyways of Seville?”

  “ ‘Cozy’? Yes, that’s rather a good way of putting it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “End of interview. Let’s crash.”

  We got up then, a little the worse for wear, and returned to our room. I must admit that I was warming to him in a way: he didn’t seem ill-intentioned, and I was beginning to suspect there might be a kindness in him that he wouldn’t acknowledge. Rather a Henry Miller type in his way. Just as we were getting ready for bed, I asked him—I don’t know what made me do it, but it seemed the right question at the time—“Do you have a girlfriend here in Cuba?”

  “Do I, don’t I, do I, don’t I,” he said, stopping what he was doing. And then I understood what he’d been wanting to talk about all night. That was the first time I heard mention of a girl called Lourdes.

  “I tell you, Hugo, it’s like I was saying before.” I could hear his voice in the dark, from the next bed, as if his mind was ebbing back and forth. “This place really turns you around. It leaves you feeling like a pig at a barbecue. Like a stuffed pig at a bargirl’s barbecue. I mean, you know all these people have a native warmth and sexiness. And you know they want to get everything they can from it. And you know that in part they just want to have contact with the world.”

  “Exactly. Don’t you think they’re just happy to see us because they live in such isolation? They just want to talk to us.”

  “Yes, I know. But there’s more to it than that. The first time we went out together, she knew I was a foreigner, right? And she started coming on to me so strong, I just told myself, ‘Whoa! This girl is ticketing herself faster than a travel agent!’ But then, I don’t know. I wrote her some cards, and she wrote me some, and she never asked for anything, and things got kind of blurred. And then, when I came back here, I got to thinking that maybe she liked me in spite of the fact that she had a reason to like me: that something more was going on.”

  “I can quite believe she did.”

  “So anyway, now I’m in kind of a state. I don’t even know whether to call her mi novia or mi amiga.”

  “Compañera, I would have thought, is the usual locution.”

  “Thank you, Hugo; I appreciate it.” I felt a little ashamed of myself. “You know, with the other girls, it was always real straight. Check in, sign the bill, check out again. No wasted motion, no hidden taxes. But with her, it’s different. Even when she’s not around, she’s all around me. Usually, it’s kind of like a light switch, and I can turn it on and off whenever I choose. But with her, it’s more like a night-light or something. And even when I want to go to sleep, even when I need complete darkness, even when I’m ready to close up shop, there she is, still shining, still switched on in some part of me.”

  “Why don’t you take her to America?”

  “Easy for you to say. I’m married, for one thing. And anyway, what kind of life is she going to have over there? Where are her friends going to come from? And what if she is working for Fidel?”

  “It’s easy, I should think, to find reasons for not taking her. But reasons aren’t really the point, are they?”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “Why don’t you marry her? That sounds like the usual thing. Get a divorce and marry her.”

  “Sure. If I married her, I’d probably have to bill twice as many days as I do right now—two twenty, two thirty a year. I’d see even less of her than I do now.”

  “Sounds like an excuse to me.”

  “Great, Hugo; if you’re so hot on this idea, why don’t you marry her?”

  “Thank you,” I said, and felt again as if I were back in school.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and I remembered how Americans are so eager not to give offense. “I guess I’m just all tangled up. I’m sorry to have laid all this on you.” And then he turned round, and I left him to his sleep.

  It had been an exceptionally full evening, and I slept in late the follow
ing morning. When I awoke, it was already light, and he had gone out. Off to take more pictures, I suppose; I had to admit, his devotion to his job was quite exemplary. It was a curious thing, being alone in the room with his things, especially after our conversation of the night before: it was like the kind of intimacy you have at school sometimes, when you’ve been through so much with someone that, whether you like it or not, at some level you realize that you’re bound together for life. And it was odd, too, to be surrounded by his things, the things he carried round with him. His press card was lying on the desk, and the wallet in which he kept his first wife’s picture—he’d shown it to me over dinner, though now I think of it, it was his second wife, the Englishwoman—and a whole folder full of clippings about Revolutionary movements, and a handy Spanish phrasebook in which you could ask how much a duck à l’orange cost.

  There was something oddly touching, actually, about all these things—all that they said about his various hopes and aspirations—and I suppose it was that which prompted me to do what I did next. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s also something I’m not terribly happy about keeping to myself—and it’s easier to relate on paper (maybe that’s why I’m writing this all down in the first place)—but I went across to the door, and pulled up the bolt, and then I slipped back and looked through his things. I have no excuse whatsoever for this—my only excuse, really, is that it’s a habit I developed when I was an assistant housemaster. And in this instance, it reminded me of how one would find teddy bears hidden away amongst the boys’ posters of rockets and soccer stars. Because the main thing I found in the pile was a diary. It was written in a rather childish hand, very large, with only a few sentences on every page. But the sentences were of a kind that rather shamed me. They were all about the secret book he hoped to put out that would, in his words, “educate the world.” He had already decided he would give the profits to some organization called Direct Relief International, and take some of the money to give to some woman in the Philippines: he’d written down her daughter’s date of birth on the front page. On the frontispiece, he’d even copied down—and this is so American, I couldn’t help but think—“Changing the world is the only way of changing ourselves.”