by Pico Iyer
“Sure,” said the kid. “Great to meet you.” He had no rancor: I half expected him to ask me if I could get Springsteen’s autograph for him.
“I’ll show you the way,” said Walter. We walked along a deserted street that looked like some set from a Capra movie, so quiet and suburban, a leafy calm from another time, and then a guy suddenly came at us from the shadows.
“Your papers?” he said to us in English.
Walter got out his carnet; I decided my passport would be better than the press card.
“Italian, huh?” he said. “Maybe I talk to you.” And he turned to Walter. The kid looked up at him politely, and motioned me with his hand to take myself off to the bus.
I left him there, then, paying the price of a dialogue in English.
The next afternoon, after I’d mopped up some of the side streets, I went to pay my dues with the Interests Section, listening to some guy who’d been in Moscow, Prague, all the places guaranteed to make you a Revolutionary, tell me how he’d wept when he’d seen Fidel take the country on TV, how the guerrillas had been his heroes as a kid, but “now, it’s like being betrayed by the only woman you love.” Standard State Department stuff: we hate to do this, and we respect and honor our enemy’s interests, but …
As I walked down Concordia, toward Lourdes, I heard the tinkling of a piano from a broken house; saw a bust of Martí, on the left, through falling buildings; caught flashes of a pure blue sea. As usual, there was everywhere the smell of rotting food, as much a part of Centro as the stink of spilled strawberry ice cream was the perfume of Coppelia.
Her mother was there when I arrived, sitting drably at the table, waiting for something, anything—some gossip, a new saucepan, a letter from her son in New Jersey. Around her there was a whole chattering circle of girls, like tropical birds in the treetops: Caridad, in her tight turquoise top, thick, as usual, with circles of perspiration; Lula’s cousin Marielita, dressed for a party in a sheer, braless halter, her huge brown eyes ringed in black; and Lula, in some sleeveless white thing, her gold cross delicate against olive skin. A few other girls too, whom I didn’t know, called Concepción and Aurelia and América. And there, in the middle of them all, Hugo, looking kind of embarrassed, in one of those green army-issue British sweaters, grinning at everything they said and looking a little nervous, sweating furiously around the temples and tapping his fingers on his legs.
“Hello,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Nor I you. Are you gathering intelligence?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Researching the potency of beer.” I tried to size up how they were pairing off.
“So, Richard,” said the mother. “Where do you go?”
“New York.”
“New York.” She looked appreciative. “So you know Ramón Fonseca?”
“Don’t think so.”
She looked surprised. “New York is a big town?”
“Like Havana.”
“Bigger, actually,” said Hugo. “As big as all Cuba, in fact, in terms of population.”
She ignored him. “But here in Havana, I know everyone. You’re sure you’ve never met him?”
“Sure.”
“You go back when?”
“Two days from now.”
Slowly, she got up and trudged off to her room. While she did, another girl sauntered in, and there was kissing all around. “Me voy,” said Marielita, and she stayed where she was. The new girl gave her news, and the other girls hissed and chattered, and Hugo gave an embarrassed grin, and Marielita said, “Vamos,” and went to the fridge to get some water.
The mother came back, and gave me a folded letter, addressed to someone in St. Pete.
“You can take this for me?”
“No problem.” I knew that that was the deal here: they were your eyes and ears in Cuba, you were their link to the world. A cameraman and a carrier pigeon. When I got back to the hotel, I’d check the letter out. After what had happened before, I figured that Cubans with letters were like Palestinians with bombs—willing to plant them even on their pregnant girlfriends.
Lula and Cari went into their bedroom, and the rest of us sat and talked, but no one had anything to say. “Me voy,” said Marielita, and she showed no sign of moving.
“Richard, can you tell me one thing?” someone asked. “Why does my father never write? When he went to Mariel, I was a child. I talked to him for an hour by the boat. He told me that he loved me, that he would never forget me, he told me that he’d send me money and a ticket to join him.” Her eyes were almost watering. “Every month I send him a letter. I am always waiting for him. Why does he never write?”
“My abuela the same,” said América.
“Many times, the letters never arrive,” I said, though that sounded hollow even to me. “Many times, the government takes them.”
“What government?”
“Yours, mine; it makes no difference.”
“Me voy al Malecón,” said Marielita, and she disappeared into the bathroom. We heard her relieving herself—nothing was private here—and when she came out, she’d changed out of her Flintstones T-shirt into a kind of loose white vest, and her tiny denim shorts were a ball in her hand, leaving her with nothing below the waist but some flimsy white underthing and the outline of her pants. “Me voy,” she said, and Lourdes’s mother sighed as if another body was being lost to the Revolution.
“Rather a Delenda est Carthago scene, don’t you think?” said Hugo, and the girls, following nothing, looked at him in wonder.
“Sure,” I said, and there was silence again. A little later, Lula and Cari came out, ready to party, in happy colors, with skimpy T-shirts down to their brown thighs, and some lipstick they’d cadged from a neighbor who’d married a Mexican.
“Vamos,” said Lourdes, and I got up, looking to see what Hugo would do.
“Richard,” she said, “before we go, you can show my mamá your American Express?”
The whole group leaned in even closer, around the table, as I pulled out my credit card.
“And how much you can buy with this?”
“Anything. I can buy a TV. A CD player. A plane ticket. But it’s dangerous. You have to pay it all back next month.”
They looked at it in silence, and relayed questions to Lourdes. “And when does it stop? When you die?”
“More or less.”
They handed it around, and pronounced my name on it, and tried not to smudge it with their fingers, and Lourdes explained how it was run through a machine that read the code.
“You have others? Visa, MasterCard?”
“Sure,” I said, trying to show her this wasn’t my favorite line of questioning.
“Then show Mamá. Show them all.” I shook out the whole batch, including my frequent flier cards, and my library card, and a few strangers’ business cards I kept handy for giving out at roadblocks.
There was silence at first, then excited conversation.
“And you have cards you can put in a machine and get money?” “Yes.” “In any place?” “Anyplace in the U.S., sure.” “And you have computer cards for the rooms in hotels?” “Sometimes.” “Here in Cuba we do not even have keys.”
“I think we should be going now, don’t you?” I said to Hugo.
“Actually, I think I’ll stay here for a while,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll catch you later.”
“Goodbye, Richard,” said the mother, coming up to me as I rose. “Take good care of Lula. Be good to her.” She stood still for a moment, her hand resting on my shoulder. “She is a good girl. Take care of her.” I didn’t know whether it was a blessing or a warning.
That night, like most nights, we got no farther than the stoop. The taxis weren’t running, and the bars downtown were shuttered, and the girls didn’t want to walk. So Lula just went into some neighbor’s house, and came back with a bottle of rum, and Cari went off in search of a party somewhere, and then the two of us wer
e sitting against the wooden door, and I was letting her tell me about the glories of America.
“Look,” she said, taking a long swig from the bottle. “In America, you can have everything you want. Everything. You want a car, a video, a washing machine, you can have it.”
I’d heard this conversation before, and more than once. “And you don’t work, you get nothing.”
“Yes. But you have choices. Look at my brother. In Cuba, he got nothing. Intelligent. Handsome. Hardworking. But he can do nothing here. Only the same as a deaf old man. So he goes to America in March, and already he is making business. In New York; New York, New Jersey. You know this place?”
It was easier to say I did.
“And he has color TV. Swimming pool. Lincoln Continental. He is like a Party official there.”
“But I’ll bet he misses Cuba.”
“Of course he says he misses Cuba. But he never comes here. Who misses poverty?”
Some boys ambled down the street and stopped to ask the time, and one of them, noting I had a watch, asked me why Michael Jackson had a white face. Then they borrowed the bottle from Lula, took a swig each, and went on their merry way.
“You see, Richard? You see what the young people in Cuba do? Nothing. They can talk or they can drink. They can sleep or they can make love. That’s it. In your country, you can do anything at night.”
“Like sleep.”
“But you have freedom.”
“Sure. Freedom to suffer, to sit out all night, to do drugs or psychotherapy. I know it’s no party here, Lourdes. I know you can’t live. But it’s not so great in other places too. You saw my pictures.”
“That is your job. You make money out of misery. You need to find suffering. That is your mission too, I think. If you are in New York, you look only for photos of people starving in the streets, dirty people, dying people. Of course the world looks terrible to you.”
“That means it is terrible. I don’t make the news; I just record it.”
“But what I would record is different. What you see is not the truth; it is Richard’s truth.”
“Maybe.”
“And I have different eyes.”
I could see this was going nowhere, so I walked her across to the seawall, our home away from home. I was getting impatient now—I’d drunk too much—and she was getting antsy too.
“Lourdes,” I said. “We can’t keep doing it like this. Always meeting in the alleyways, always making love in silence, always keeping everything a secret. It isn’t real.”
“Then you have two choices. You can marry me, or you can take me to Varadero.”
“What’s so special about Varadero? How’s it going to make anything different between us?”
“Varadero is not Cuba. I can be there with you. For that time only, I am not a Cuban. We can kiss, we can talk, we can make love there; we are not from different countries there. Here, if they find you making love to me, they put me in prison, like a puta. You understand? When you showed me the pictures, you told me how families and villages in every country are proud of their daughters, whatever they do. But here, where is there room for pride? Only if you escape.”
“And you want the freedom to find out that the places you dream of are not like your dreams?”
“Claro. I want only this freedom. If I do not have that, I am always thinking of Florida or Bolivia or Barcelona.”
We fell silent then, and I looked out at the sea. Sometimes the place was so beautiful it made you want to cry almost. It was like seeing some young, lovely woman on the arm of a short, sleazy general. The soft breeze off the sea; the intermittent lights of cars, winking along the Malecón; the Nacional above us, like a giant beached galleon: it was like a romantic’s Eden. And here I was with the brightest Eve in Havana, and she was asking me to rescue her from Paradise.
Then she was touching me on the leg, and her eyes were blazing as she talked. “Do you know what it is like, Richard, to live in a shadow? Everywhere I walk, there is the shadow of El Líder. He is everywhere I turn. His face is in the next room, and his eyes are watching through the window, and his voice is on the television in the neighbor’s house, and his words are on the radio, and in Granma. He is everywhere: there is no room left for me. Except in the shadows.
“You come here, and for you everything is beautiful: the blue skies and the quiet beaches and the colored houses and the pretty girls. But the ocean is closed to us. The beaches are for tourists only. Even the skies are forbidden. I cannot get on a plane and visit you. I cannot do anything unless I am with a foreigner. I cannot buy a sandwich, I cannot help my mother, I cannot give my friend a birthday present, unless I am with a foreigner.”
“But you don’t know what it was like before. You never saw it under Batista. You think it was better when there were three hundred whorehouses in the city, and five families in every six lived in bohíos, and the Americans just came down and gave you ten cents to do them under the roulette table?”
“Because it was bad then does not mean it is good now. Because I was sick when I was a young girl does not mean I cannot be sick now. You keep asking me why I can only live in the dark. But what else is left for me? It is the only place where I do not have to see his face, and I do not need to look at the old posters, and I can be myself. I can only be myself here if no one is looking at me.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough talking,” because I knew where this would lead, and I knew we’d been there before. It made me think of a tide, and when it rolled out, it revealed all these glittering things along the beach, and then it came in again, and all of them disappeared.
I took her by the hand, and we left the sea, and walked down toward Habana Vieja. Along San Rafael, thumping with music beneath us, and past the red-lit nightclub in the basement of the National Theater; past the Cine Rex and the Hotel Bristol and the Cinecito. Past the América Libre electronics store, all boarded up now; past the kids circling the park. Sometimes a Chevy shuddering past, or whispers round a colectivo.
We walked across the darkness of the Parque Central, where the money changers hissed “Qué hora es?” at me, and down to a dark, small plaza. She turned toward me, and I felt her nipples through her T-shirt, and she bent down, and kissed me through my jeans, her tongue making circles on the fabric. I pulled her down, and traced her outline with my mouth. Then I stood her up again, and backed her against a tree, and we were hardnesses soldered together. For a moment, we were outside everything, far from Cuba, for from darkness, outside time, caught in a flashbulb light. Then we were alone again, in a dark plaza in Habana Vieja, with our different lives, and the eyes of the Leader watching us through the slatted windows.
We’d arranged to meet again the next morning, in Vedado, and I’d figured we’d need to do some last-minute shopping, and then maybe I could get her to come to the hotel with me for a last-night celebration. I wanted to give her something to remember me by—I realized then she still didn’t have any photos of me except the one that José had taken—so I put on the white shirt that I knew she liked, and I washed my hair at eight-thirty exactly, so it would look just right when we met at ten, and I didn’t shave the day before, so I could get an extra-close shave today. I wanted her to see I cared.
It was a bright and quiet morning, with billowing clouds, by the time I reached the ocean, and the sea looked like a pair of blue eyes, guarded but ready to sparkle: the usual Cuban mix of surrender and suspicion. I leaned against the wall and watched the buses make the turn and labor toward downtown; followed the chambermaids up above, searching the bushes of the Nacional for stray bottles to take home; saw the kids just looking out to sea. I began to get restless after a while, and looked at my watch. Ten-fifteen. Then ten-twenty-five. Then ten-thirty. I was beginning to sweat in the heat, and the lines I’d prepared for her were slipping from my mind, or souring.
“Hey, Lula,” I said as I saw her approaching, and then I realized it was just another dark girl in a spangled T-shirt, and my smi
le had been wasted. It was ten forty-five now, and I had lost forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes with no photographs. Forty-five minutes with no Lula. Was she getting cold feet? I thought. Had I got the wrong place? Was the whole thing a setup?
And then I saw her running toward me from the bus, breathless, but with a smile.
“What happened?”
“Oh, you know how it is here.”
“No, how is it?”
“Different, Richard. You have been waiting?”
“Yes. I have been waiting.”
“I’m sorry. Pero ahorita, I want to do something special for you. Show you someplace you have never seen.”
“The dollar store at the Hotel Vedado?”
“No.” She looked hurt. “I want to go to the cemetery. Cementerio Colón. You know this place?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come. I will show you. It is something I promised myself: like a prayer. Richard must see this before he goes. Then he will know how it is for me. This is the only place in Havana where I can go to be calm. I want to share it with you. So it is not my place, but ours.”
We crossed the street, and waited for the guagua. They were still running then, in the daytime, and we jumped on one, and she gave me two of the five-centavo coins that felt like play money, and we followed Calle 23 up, up, up, toward the Hemingway farm, past the Avenida de los Presidentes, past the Banco de Sangre, past the Cine Charlie Chaplin.
“You know why they like Charlie Chaplin here?” she whispered in my ear. “Because he is like the government. A fool. Small, cute, full of tricks. And always the ending is sad.”
I put my arm around her waist, and thought how everything was like the government here: the government was so ubiquitous that everything seemed to reflect on it. When we came to the baseball cafeteria José had told me about, we got out, and in front of us stood the huge ceremonial archway of the cemetery gate, the robed Virgin resplendent at its top.
We passed through the grand entrance and walked into the city of the dead. There were giant sepulchers everywhere, ornate, sculpted, with weeping angels and robed saints and family histories, and huge domed monuments and marble plaques; there were walled tombs and minichurches, and thirty-foot statues of Jesus with his arms extended for forgiveness. On Calle 1 and C, she pointed out a statue of Innocence, eyes blindfolded. At the Milagrosa—a statue of an upright figure, clutching a small cross with her right hand, and cradling a baby with her left—women were placing roses in her fingers, and touching the lid of the brass casket beneath, and walking around the statue counterclockwise, some touching the feet on the baby, others resting their flowers in tree-trunk vases at the base. There was no noise here, and no commotion. Only the silent, touching ceremony of the women and, now and then, a long, slow procession of white station-wagon hearses and mourners all in black.