Cuba and the Night

by Pico Iyer

  “Sure,” said Marielita, blasé. “There is a store in Cayo Largo where you can buy everything: shirts, jeans, perfumes, todo.”

  “And Varadero too, right?”

  “Varadero is like Miami Beach,” said newly wise Marielita. “They have cable TV, and glasses wrapped up, and every day at breakfast you can eat as much as you want.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “But I’m here on assignment. I’ve got to shoot some baseball.”

  “Sure,” said Lourdes, and I remembered why I loved her. “We have baseball on this island.”

  I was staying in the Lincoln that time, so I could be close to her, and collecting receipts from a girl I knew in the Libre, and paying the difference to Lula. In any case, good hotels were not so different from bad hotels by then: most of them were serving up deprivation in equal measure. The biggest shortage of all, I always thought, was of a future; the government mass-producing images of the past, while people kept their eyes firmly focused on the present.

  Things, in fact, were not going well for El Máximo, especially now that there was a guy in the Kremlin even younger than he was. Already, the students were beginning to talk about Tiananmen Square and asking why Russian magazines were banned, and the streets were buzzing with news of Hungary and Poland. In response, the government was doing nothing but filling Granma with more and more articles about Oliver Stone, and stocking the TV channels with more and more movies about race riots and drug dealers and mafiosi in America. Sometimes, in Cuba, it was like when you repeat the same word over and over till it stops making any sense, or when you stare so hard at a spot that your eyesight blurs.

  But Fidel wasn’t hassled by any of it. You could still see his touch in every street, and newspaper article, and slogan, but he kept his person completely out of view. Living in Havana in those days was like living with some medieval depiction of God: the guy was everywhere present and nowhere visible. He was in every conversation, in every room and corner, but no one knew a thing about him. He’d created a personality cult without a personality. And the less people saw of him, the more they talked. What was he planning? When did he sleep? Who did he love? What—in Fidel’s name—was going on?

  The believers used to say that Fidel was God. But God at least rested on the seventh day. With Fidel, that was never so certain. Here was a guy who would micromanage pebbles; who would not only count how many angels could dance on the head of a pin but would tell them how they should be dancing, and what kind of pin they should be using. Here was the only guy working in a place where nothing—and no one—ever worked. And the only guy on the job in a place where everyone else was permanently on hold.

  Thirty-one years without changing his clothes; thirty-one years without refining his hairstyle. The other one-name icons—Madonna and Prince and Cher—had at least to keep changing their acts to keep themselves in the public’s eye: not Fidel. He just fixed the public’s eye to keep it on himself.

  I was shooting black and white this time down, because the whole island seemed to be turning black and white. Fewer and fewer cars now, less and less light, a whole country emptied out: instead of cars, they’d gone to bicycles, and instead of bicycles, horse-drawn carts, and soon the horse-drawn carts were being drawn by goats: the whole crazy island was slipping backward through history, moving back and back into the pre-Industrial Revolution. It reminded me of the time with Diane once, when we’d gathered to watch a video of our wedding, and someone had pressed the rewind button by mistake, so you could see us walking away from the altar, out of the church, back into our separate cars—all at top speed. A perfect augury of things to come.

  “But what about the sea?” the guy at the agency had asked. “The royal palms. The reds and greens of the old cars. That whole tropical rainbow, Cape-Cod-in-a-G-string kind of thing: Meyerowitz Goes Mambo.”

  “But what about the dark?” I’d said. “The streets without shadows. The stores without goods. The pots without rice. Everywhere, across the island, in bars and hotels and parks, just darkness.” It made me think of the line José had told me once: I have two homes, Cuba and the night.

  The thing to do, I figured, was get the baseball out of the way as soon as possible, and then get out the heavy artillery for the real stuff. So I took in a couple of night games at Estadio Latino Americano, joined the guys in the bleachers with their paper cups of beer and their single slices of cheese pizza on paper plates, under signs that read: USE YOUR FREE TIME! PRACTICE! That was as close to the Revolution as I ever got, I think, shooting the breeze with these cheerful, toothless old guys, out to enjoy the night air, and to forget all the other contests going on around them. It could have been a ballpark anywhere, except that tickets were free, and there was nothing to eat except pizza and beer, and the boards on the left-field wall said: READY TO CONQUER!

  One time, I hitched onto some official delegation of “North American Sports Journalists,” dragged down here to witness the miracle of Cuban training, and we were taken to special seats behind home plate, where a Minint guy told us about Gooden and the Mets, and how Keith Hernandez had been a complex man, and Strawberry needed to get traded. He had his cousin send him tapes from New York, he told us: belonging to the government meant his boxes could get through.

  After that, I went out to one of the sports compounds they’d just built—the only modern, glittery palaces on the island—and watched the national team in training. They were something: it was like watching a carnival of gods barnstorming the heavens. The Harlem Globetrotters, taking on the world. The game was so easy for them, they had to find ways of making it interesting: stretching doubles into triples; throwing a guy out at the plate from deepest center field; stealing bases with no outs and a nine-run lead. Their only competition was themselves: in that way, too, I guess, they were like the Revolution.

  And the pictures were so easy, all I had to do was click: every guy on the team, it seemed, had a kind of smooth panther’s body, like I’d seen before only on Carl Lewis. If Linares were in America, everyone said, he’d be on every Wheaties box in the country. Mesa was flashing his golden bat. Kindelán, Gurriel, Pacheco, looked like they could close their eyes and hit it over the fence.

  And in the dugout, the manager, Fuentes, elegant, silver-haired, hunched over his notebook, like he was penning sonnets in his spare time. A poet in the company of kings.

  I finished the baseball story in a couple of days—taking pictures in the stands, in between innings, using fisheyes for the bleachers—and then I went back to Havana to pick up Lourdes.

  “Today,” I said to her as soon as I came into her sister’s bedroom, “I have a surprise for you. A birthday present; only six months early. Put on your red dress; we’re going to Varadero.”

  She was ready within fifteen minutes, and then there were thirty minutes of asking everyone which dresses she should take as extras, and then there were forty minutes of taking requests. But her eyes were sparkling so brightly that they could have lit the room in a blackout. We went down to the park and I unpeeled a few greenbacks, and soon I felt like a hooker at a bar mitzvah. The guys were swarming around me, and some women were spitting at Lula, and soon we were in the back of an Eisenhower-era Plymouth and the sea was on our left.

  We followed the blue for two hours or more, down empty roads, past Camilo Cienfuegos, Santa Cruz, Matanzas, and when we arrived at the Internacional, the bellhops hissed kisses at her and looked her up and down. We got a room on the third floor, over-looking the sea, and as soon as I closed the door, she came toward me and put her arms around my neck. I leaned in closer, and felt her untether the camera from my neck, and put the lens cap on it, and take it to the far corner of the room, and set it up against the wall.

  “No rivals this time. Only me.”

  “Only you,” I said, and I kissed her where we stood, and kissed her again, feeling the place where her hair was damp, and I unbuckled the belt on her jeans, and let her slither out of them, against me, and when she fell on top of the
bed, I fell on top of her, turning her over, and whispering kisses on the back of her neck and her ear. Long, snaking kisses that made her writhe. My fingers along her sides, my mouth at the cusp of her lobe. “No, no,” she murmured, and turned over, and I was on top of her, and running my finger down.

  Later, after it was dark, I pulled back the door to the terrace so we could hear the sea hiss and curl while we made love, I slipping into her from behind, she looking out to sea, in the distance some samba coming from an empty restaurant.

  And even later, at the silent hour of the night, when it felt like we had the whole world to ourselves—the disco had closed, and the final sandy consummations were over—she leaned up on her elbow, and looked down at me. There was moisture at the corners of her eyes.

  “Do you ever get lonely, Richard?”

  “I have my work.”

  “I asked if you get lonely.”

  “I move too fast for that. I’m never in one place long enough to notice I’m alone.”

  “So you’re running away from your loneliness.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I did. I know how you’re feeling, Richard. But it’s okay; I’m here. You need never feel lonely again,” and she opened her arms to me, and I rested against her chest. Coming back to her was like coming home.

  Sometimes we spent all day like that, just tracing our bodies with our lips and fingers, or tracing the history of our times together—you mean you knew even then? Even at Maxim’s that night? I never knew you noticed. You felt my hand upon your shoulder? When was the time you knew?—and sometimes we just lay in one another’s arms, safe behind our FAVOR NO MOLESTAR sign, for twelve, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, scarcely stirring, closing the world out, and replacing it with our own world, our own words, our own history. Sometimes, when I’d wake up, I’d see her looking at me from above, with a smile on her face, as rapt as if she were looking at the surface of the moon.

  One day she told me she would teach me Spanish—true Spanish, she said, a poet’s Spanish—by getting me to learn by heart some verses of Martí. “It’s very easy, Richard. Versos Sencillos. ‘Simple Verses,’ you would say. All you must do is say them after me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I say the words, you say them after, right?”

  I nodded.

  “ ‘Yo sé …’ ”

  “ ‘Yo sé …’ ”

  “ ‘Los nombres extranos / De las yerbas y las flores …’ ”

  I know, I know, the alien names of the flowers and the grasses.

  “ ‘Y de mortales engaños,’ ”

  And of deadly deceits,

  “ ‘Y de sublimes dolores.’ ”

  And of sublime sorrows.

  Sometimes she’d drop a line of Martí into my mouth like a Life Saver. “ ‘Sólo el amor engendra melodías,’ ” she said, after we’d made love. Only love makes melodies. And another time, from an essay of his, “A married man commands our respect. Woman is the nobility of man.”

  “And that line you told me in the car to Artemisa?”

  “Later, after the fire and the lights, there will be time for me to ache.”

  One day, we got up early and I asked her if I could take some pictures of her—for the memories—and she said nothing, and I shot her at dawn, along the sea, and on the terrace, into the light; in the magic hour, wrapped in green curtains; on the pink balcony in the dusk. I shot her at night in her slinkiest outfit, with the chintzy pink lamps behind her; I shot her against an old T-bird in the dark; I shot her alone, in our room, under covers. Sometimes I tried a trick a Chilean guy had shown me once, and I went over to her, and gave her a deep, long kiss, along her neck, her cheeks, her ear, and then, just as she was unwinding, and her eyes were losing focus, I stepped back, off to one side, and clicked the release, and there she’d be, in the lens, the Lula that no one knew but me, spent and tousled, with a kind of blurry sexiness.

  “Lula,” I said when we were through. “I’d like to say a prayer for you.”

  “I thought you didn’t have a God.”

  “I don’t. But that’s okay. I just want to pray to something above us that we can always be together.”

  “You’re a romantic, Richard,” she said, trying to keep the smile from her eyes.

  “Don’t say that. I’m a reporter.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  And then I closed my eyes, and thought about her happiness, and hoped that everything would come out right for us.

  When I opened my eyes, the room was black.

  “You can turn the light on again.”

  “I never turned it off. It’s a blackout.”

  “Goddammit,” I said. “Doesn’t anything in this stupid island work?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Richard,” she said to me.

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t have an editor waiting for your shipment to New York.”

  “You are making pictures for an editor?”

  “No. I don’t mean that,” though I could tell from her voice that something was gone.

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “Only that it’s impossible to get anything done round here.” I fumbled for a flashlight, and I heard her move across the room.

  “You are in Cuba now,” I heard her saying. “Learn to do things the Cuban way. Be patient. Be calm.”

  I saw her at the window. “You like the sun, the bright light, the beaches; that is the easy part to like. Like a girl at her fifteenth birthday. Where’s the skill in that? Why can you not love the mystery too? The night?”

  I felt her coming across the room, smelled her perfume drawing closer.

  “Why can you not learn to love the dark?” she said, and her lips were on mine. “In the dark we can feel closer.” Her breath on my cheek. “In the dark we can hear things more.” Her sigh in my ear. “In the dark we can sense more.” She was unbuttoning my shirt, and her lips were on my chest. “In the dark we can smell more. Things are warmer in the dark.” Her hair along my chest, her hands warm along my back. “Learn to love the dark, Richard. Learn to make love like a blind man.”

  “Don’t shout,” I heard her saying. “Why shout when you can make a dark new world?”

  After that, the blackouts happened every night almost—I felt I could set my watch by them—and sometimes we just lay there in the dark, and listened to the clatter of “Dime”s and keys and crackly music in the corridor. One time, she picked up a candle from the table, and when she lit it in front of her, I saw the hollows in her face, strange ridges and indentations, and circles around her eyes, as if we were ghosts now, in our own shadow kingdom.

  “Lula,” I said softly. “I’d do anything for you.”

  “Then marry me.”

  “Is that the only thing that will make you happy?”

  “The only thing. What are you afraid of, Richard?”

  “Of losing you.”

  She lay beside me now, and I felt my lie between us like a block of ice.

  That was how it was in our Varadero life: my hand on her moist neck, her hair draped around my wrist. I wetting a finger and running it along her lips till they glistened, she taking me in her mouth and brushing my sides with her hair.

  “This is our own Revolution,” I whispered to her in the dark. “Our own new Cuba. See no evil,” and I kissed her eyes. “Hear no evil,” and I dandled her ear in my mouth. “Speak no evil,” and my lips were on hers, and there was moistness above and below and around us.

  • • •

  Only once did I almost break the spell. It was our fifth day there, and I could feel our departure beginning to gain substance between us. She had gone into the bathroom, to take another shower—she was taking four or five showers a day then, even in the heat, she was so excited to have hot water—and while she was gone, I got out my camera, and set up the strobe, and when she opened the door to the bathroom, hair tangled, eyes bright, in a perfect state of trust, I ran off a few frames, and her eyes began to blaze.<
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  “So this is how it is, Richard? What do you want me to do for you? Who do you want me to be? You want more images for your magazine?”

  “It’s just for us, Lourdes. I want something to remember you by.”

  “Why not take me? Why not make more memories? Why settle for a photo?”

  I could feel the impatience rising in her like desire. “It’s not so easy. This way at least we can have time together. If you come to America, you’d never see me. And you wouldn’t see your family, either. You don’t know how it is for foreign women there.”

  “And you won’t give me the chance to know.”

  “It’s not like Cuba there, Lourdes.”

  “I know, Richard. I’m not stupid. I can speak English. I can teach Spanish. I can work.”

  “But it’s better like this.”

  “Better for you.”

  “Better for us both,” and she turned and stalked into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

  She was in there for a long time, and I had a chance to cool off, and I tore out a piece of paper from my diary, and wrote:

  Querida Lula,

  What do I miss when you’re not here? Your eyes, your arms, your voice, your face. Your mouth, your hair, your hands. Your thighs, your lips, your tumbled hair. Your heart, your mind, your soul.

  I put it under the bed, to give to her when she came out, but something made me forget it there, and when I tried to find it two days later, I guess a chambermaid must have taken it away.

  Those days felt like a holiday from life, like a trip into some other kind of self, as if we had stolen away from Cuba, from America, from everything we knew. From ourselves even. And now, with the curtains drawn, we were in some other, unknown land. And it wasn’t like any of the other times I’d been on R and R breaks, it wasn’t like Ko Samui, or Búzios, or Cozumel, or Barranquilla. There was something different about it, the way Lourdes kept taking me by surprise, and just when I thought I’d got a bead on her, she’d show me something new. Almost as if she were tiptoeing through me, with her candle, down corridors that hadn’t been visited for years, and opening doors, and letting in fresh air, and exploring all kinds of forgotten places in this drafty haunted house. It was as if she were throwing open the windows in me and brushing away cobwebs, and somehow, every time she found the key to open a long-locked door, she showed me a new part of herself too, and I saw her in a different light, at a new angle, in the sun. I couldn’t even remember now the unknown girl who’d come on to me so strong in the dark Havana nightclub.