by Pico Iyer
“Look, Richard,” she said as we sat down amid the emergency patients. “For me, is better if we go out with some others. Already there are people watching us. They see us talking. They talk. They think, this cubana is with this stranger every day. They tell their friends, their friends tell their friends—in the Party. We need to change our color. Perhaps you can find a friend? I bring Rosita, and then we are like a different group.”
“Who? José?”
“Not José. He doesn’t like me.”
“Then who?”
“You have other friends in Havana?”
“Sure, some guys at the embassy, a woman who takes pictures for the New York Times, a kid I hang out with in Miramar. No one I can trust.”
“There is no one in your hotel?”
“Maybe one guy; I’ll see what I can swing.” And then, in a flash, I thought: perfecto!
It was perfect; here was a deal where everyone could gain. I never felt entirely sure of Hugo, always felt that even when I took his picture, something was missing. I could catch the face, the glasses, the mild-mannered schoolteacher: but there was still something hidden, which I couldn’t see. I still couldn’t figure out if he was here to make mulattas on the sly, or on some kind of superundercover gig like his uncle, or whether, as with many of those upper-class Brits, still waters just ran shallow. What you saw was what you got.
But I knew he’d be grateful for company. And I knew he’d be the perfect partner: better than a Cuban, who’d be a walking security risk, way better than an American, who’d have friends behind him in the bushes—or anyone else who had strong opinions about the Revolution. Hugo would fit in like the invisible man.
So the next morning I went down to the Libre, and I found him in the dining room—he always got up at eight, he’d told me, and went promptly for breakfast at eight-thirty—and then I told him to meet me outside the Yara at eight that evening, for a surprise. When I got there, I didn’t know what to think: he’d gotten himself up in this kind of white tropical suit, with a handkerchief in his breast pocket and a striped shirt. Like Humpty Dumpty playing Noël Coward.
When the girls arrived, forty minutes later, he looked kind of shocked: they were decked out in the usual style, in their spangles, Lula in her backless shirt and jeans, and Rosita in some short, frilly afterthought that ended at the thigh. Whatever else was going to happen, this was going to be worth the price of admission.
Hugo extended a hand toward them, but Lula, after what I’d told her, came up and kissed him on both cheeks, and long cool ebony Rosita, with her Ethiopian queen’s neck, and legs that never stopped, just grabbed him by the hand and smiled. I’ve got to say, the poor guy took it well: “Encantado,” he said in his best colonel’s accent, and she responded, sweetly, “Encantada.”
The girls were hot for action—this was their night on the town with dollars—and so we went to the Capri. The hostesses were lined up like sweetcakes, and muttered when they saw us, while the teenage girls winked and giggled, and a few boys shuffled pesos from palm to palm. Lula whispered something to the guy at the door, kissed someone on the cheek, slipped a few notes in the right direction, and then the doors opened, and we were in like Flynn.
Inside, María Christina was singing some love song, and boys were flashing silver smiles and running their hands up and down bare backs. A few girls in the corner were trading kisses for pesos, and I recognized Nelida, from Santa María, at a little table covered with bottles of rum. Hugo looked as if he’d landed on a different planet. “Quite extraordinary,” he said. “Unchanged in thirty years.”
“You should see the joints in Vietnam. Midget hostesses in Dior dresses, sixty-five-year-old dudes playing clarinet and saxophone like Sihanouk himself, all the vodka you can drink.” But Hugo had stopped listening to me. Rosita was standing by his side, with her arm around his waist, while the headwaiter winked and promised us a good table, a good deal. Hugo, I could see, had his hands full.
As usual, the main show, farther in, started at eleven, and the music was just a lot of Perry Como/Tony Bennett schmaltz to get the kids into a romantic mood, and soon the girls were singing along, closing their eyes, and the guys at the other tables were getting all smoochy, and I was just waiting for the fun to start.
Until it did, we made sure Hugo wouldn’t get away, and we dragged him onto the dance floor, and soon all four of us were shaking it, though with Hugo it wasn’t so much dancing as a kind of shuffling in place, his face getting redder and redder, while he pulled at the rim of his glasses every now and then, and looked as if he were practicing one of those insane medieval exercises they teach them in those schools.
“Get down, Hugo,” I shouted over to him. “Shake it like you mean it.”
“Thank you,” he huffed back, “I’m trying,” and I guess I kind of warmed to him right then. Lula had found her rhythm, and was swaying in place, very slow, very easy, none of that merengue madness but a more controlled kind of sensual shaking, beads of sweat forming at her temples, her straps sometimes slipping off her shoulders, her eyes telling me the same things they told me at home. Rosita was doing a sort of African thing, more tribal, with the spirits of the Yorubas dancing through her. Around us, on the floor, there were wet kisses and whispers, and the promise of more dollars.
“Hugo,” I said as we went back to our seats, “I think she likes you.”
“She can’t really help it, poor girl,” he said back.
“Get out there and wow ’em, Hugo.”
“Indeed I will,” he said, and I felt kind of soft on the guy again. In the craziness of Havana, he was like a long, cool glass of water sometimes; his very lack of color was what made him refreshing.
When we got back to the table, Lourdes was looking loosened up, and getting kind of amorous, and Rosita, well prepared, kept filling up Hugo’s glass. The drink was getting to me too—I felt light and reckless—and I began touching my friend under the table, and trailing my finger along her secret parts, and down the cool cleft of her spine, and she, kind of excited and kind of drunk, was flicking my ear with her tongue.
Pretty soon, we were getting carried away, and I figured we might as well be making tracks.
“We’ll see you guys later,” I said, pulling her up and slipping the cash to Rosita, who was telling some mad, passionate story about her mamá—hands flying all over the place—and Hugo, looking kind of ruffled and red-faced, was taking it all in with polite nods. “Take good care of him, Rosie,” I called as we left.
Then we were out, past the crowds, and out into the warm, still air. I led her by the hand down La Rampa, and off into one of the side streets. It was dark. It was silent. It was ours.
We found a little space in front of a boarded-up house, and we sat down in the dark. There were faint circles around Lourdes’s eyes, and the beginning of lines: twenty-four, and already a creature of darkness.
I leaned forward to give her a kiss, and she laughed, and dug her nails into my neck.
“Slowly,” I said. “Be patient. Like a Cuban,” and I slipped the straps off her shoulders, and rolled them down her arms, and kissed her skin down to her breasts. There were murmurs above me, and I turned her, and moved further, feeling the unfastening cloth with my mouth, up, up, up, to the base of her neck, and then the back of her hair, where her skin was damp, and then the side of her cheek. She squirmed and shivered. I turned her over again, and slowly, slowly, pulled down her zipper.
“Not here,” she said. “Too dark.”
“Here,” I said, and I brought down the whole rough fabric of her jeans, and pushed into her.
“Someone will see us,” she said.
“Not here,” I said, urgent in the dark, and her words gave way to cries.
The next day, when I went down to Centro, Rosita was with Lourdes at the breakfast table. The girls looked terrible: no makeup, old shirts, ugly shorts. That was the way it always was here: bright threads for the evening, and rags for everything else. The young girls loo
ked at their mothers—even their sisters—and saw that the glamour was not going to last much past tomorrow night.
“Your friend is very sexy,” Rosita said.
“I’ll bet he is. Like a cold shower—or a plate of boiled vegetables.”
“No, it’s true.” She looked hurt. “He was telling me about his life. A woman he once loved, and how he lost her, and how he comes to Havana because he doesn’t want to get old.” It didn’t sound much like the guy I knew.
“When did he impart all this?”
“Last night. At the Capri, and then we went to the Malecón, and sat on the wall. Just talking. Looking at the sea. He’s so romantic, so gentle. Not like a Cuban guy—they only want to get into your pants.”
“Or an American,” said Lourdes, looking up at me slyly.
“You know, he never even kissed me.”
“Probably gay.”
“Gay?” Rosita said. “No way. I can tell he’s not gay. I know.”
“He’s just jealous,” said Lula. “Wishes he could be more like that.”
“Yeah, right. Wish I could say, ‘Oh, sorry. Do you think it would be possible for me to come?’ ”
“Be quiet, Richard,” said Lourdes. “Can you find Hugo again? So we can go out tonight?”
• • •
And we did end up going out a few times after that, till it felt like quite a team. He really did seem to go well with them—I guess shyness or inexperience or whatever can seem like a turn-on in a place where everything’s always hanging out—and he warmed to their attention. He still seemed kind of a soggy chair to me, washed out in some way—always sitting for some Snowdon photograph—but he was easy company, and when the heat was around, which it always was, I felt better with him there. Lula was right. In Russia and China, they only get uptight if a foreigner’s with some woman who isn’t a professional.
Sometimes, though, the whole setup made me kind of queasy. Usually, I could just tune Hugo out—it was like, when they’ve got dance music in one corner of the room, you never notice Debussy in the other. But I remember there was one night at the new bar in Marianao, one of those open-air places that had begun to open up, not far from the Tropicana, for Cubans to dance in—a kind of counterrevolutionary Tropicana. We’d been there for a while, and I was feeling pretty juiced, and Lula was in the mood, and I kind of forgot Hugo was around.
It was the usual scene: teenagers mooning into each other’s eyes, the colas an excuse for everyone to stand closer to one another, the boys holding the girls, with their arms around them in all the right places. The boys from Habana Vieja wriggling on the floor—their homemade kind of break dance—and their sisters waving their asses around. We went off for drinks, and on the way, I took Lourdes’s hand and led her to a corner of the garden and told her what I’d like to do with her, and she gave me her soft, thoughtful kind of smile, and I leaned forward and kissed her through her T-shirt.
When we got back, Hugo was just sitting there, alone at the table, watching us in that schoolteacher way of his.
“Where’s Rosita?”
“Believe she went to the loo,” he said. And then, pointing to my pants: “I believe your slip is showing, as they say.”
I looked down, and saw that Lourdes’s bra was hanging out of my pocket, where I’d stuffed it. It made me feel kind of funny, to tell the truth, him telling me that, and her sitting there too, and the wet round circles on her T-shirt.
The very next day, Lourdes had to go to the dollar store. For a pot her mother needed.
“Okay,” I said. “Vamos.”
“No, Richard.” She pulled at my arm. “It’s too dangerous. If we go again, they will begin to see us. They look for these things. They make notes. The guards at the counter. The taxi drivers. They know us too well.”
“Then what do you propose? I give you my passport, you go alone?”
“No, no.”
“I go alone?”
“No. You don’t even have a pot—you tell me you do not have a kitchen. How will you know what to look for? I remember you told me that in your refrigerator you keep only film.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Find a friend to come. Maybe Hugo.”
“Hugo, Hugo, always Hugo.”
“What’s wrong? Are you jealous of Hugo?”
“Sure. I’m really jealous of an out-of-shape teacher whose idea of a good time is reading a new translation of The Peloponnesian War.”
“You sound jealous. You do not marry me, but you want to own me.”
“I’m just tired of Hugo, that’s all. Hugo’s become like our dog or something. He’s cute, we take him everywhere, we always want to cuddle him. We’ve become hostage to him. Dangling like puppets on a string. I don’t know why you have any time for him.”
“He sees me. Rosita too. He listens to us. With him, I never feel like a jinetera, or a Tropicana dancer. It’s as if I have a true life. He’s not a bailando suave kind of guy; not a playboy. He treats me like a woman.”
“Maybe that’s because he’s scared shitless. He doesn’t know what to do or say with a woman—he’s probably never been with one before.”
“So what? How does that change anything? Maybe it makes it better. Anyway, I think he is sweet, and anything you say is not going to change it. He is the first man I’ve met who is not always thinking of his machismo. For him, the pinga is not everything.”
“I’ll say. For him, it’s nothing.”
“Okay. You laugh. But you are the same. Before, I thought it was only Cuban men who were like this. But now I see the strangers—I mean, the foreigners—are all the same: Mexicans, Argentinians, Spanish, Italians. Why do they come here? Why do you come here? When you meet a woman here, do you think of what her life is like? No, you only think of how long it will take.”
“Fine. If that’s how you feel, you can go out with him. The only straight man in Havana who won’t attack you. I don’t have to take care of you, and help your mother.”
“Richard, don’t be crazy.” She leaned across the bed then, and, in the dark, she took my hand, and slowly, very slowly, she guided it here and there. I felt the static of her hair, the cold skin at the back of her neck. I felt the warmth coming up from various places, I felt hard places and soft. She slipped my hand under her shirt, and she collected one finger and took it in her mouth. Another night of darkness. Darkness and silence and wetness all around.
There was nothing much going down the next night. I’d told Lula we’d take a break—allow the plainclothesmen to spend at least a night at home with their wives—and I’d taken all the pictures I needed already. There wasn’t much I could work with at night anymore, because everything was undercover now, like a samizdat whisper just beneath the sound barrier. The sound of deals being made, and love, plots being hatched and leaked, friends being made and exchanged, the whole gray surface of the day peeled back like a sticker on a package. In the Colina and the Presidente, around the side streets of Centro and the corners of the Parque Central, from one end of the city to the other, the steady rustle of questions. “Change money?” “Qué quieres?” “Por qué no, mi amor, por qué no?”
I figured I might as well drum up some action of my own this time, so I went to Coppelia, and checked out the kids along the circumference, then got in line for an ice cream. A tall black kid appeared at my side. “Hey, how you doing?” he said in slick English. “You remember me? Walter. From Habana Vieja. Before, we talked about the nueva trova. You like the Cuban music, right?” I remembered him, and the smooth lines he’d picked up from his Jamaican father. “We’re having a party tonight. Right now, in Miramar. Come along,” he said, and I figured it was as good as anything—a trip into the unknown—and so we hopped a bus and drove along the wide deserted avenues, past rows of decaying mansions.
Inside the house—two large, empty rooms—a Danish professor was sitting on the couch, politely sifting through some Cuban records. A boy with golden hair was showing off the La
ura Branigan records he’d bought in Africa. The party, I guessed, would be the four of us and the empty room.
“Great to meet you,” said the kid, in the easy deejay patter he’d picked up in Angola, and when I heard he’d been in Africa, I decided to become a Canadian again.
“How you like our country? It’s great, isn’t it? Greatest country in the world.”
“I think so. But not everyone in Cuba seems to think so.”
“What do they know? They haven’t seen the world. I tell them, ‘You go to Africa, you come back a patriot.’ ”
“Sure. I can see that.” He smelled of aftershave, and gave off the kind of sheen you didn’t usually see around here. “You picked up a lot over there.”
“Sure. I learned English. I got records, stereo system, everything.”
“And the war?”
“It’s nothing. It’s something we’ve got to do, right? Help our friends in need. Like the yanquis in Grenada. Like the Russians in Afghanistan. Before, we had help from the Germans in our Revolution. Now it is our turn to help others.”
“You think you are helping the Angolans? I was down in Kinshasa one time …”
“Sure. We’re helping the world. Teaching them things. Showing them they can make it. A small country does not have to be a weak country. The yanquis don’t understand this. They just say, ‘Communist menace,’ ‘Red under the bed,’ all that shit. They have these guys—like Springsteen—say, ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ Just imperialist propaganda.”
“You think Springsteen’s an imperialist?”
“Of course. Why does he sing that song?”
The Dane was studiously reading liner notes, Walter was sitting on his hands against the wall. I knew this was a conversation that was going to get a lot worse before it got better. “Look, I’ve got to cruise now. It’s been great meeting you.”