by Pico Iyer
One night, I saw her eyes shining as she looked up and ran a distracted hand along my arm. “You know, Richard, it’s funny. Before, I was different. I was proud of what we had here. I thought Cuba was the greatest country in the world. Ten million only, but we could make the yanquis tremble! When Fidel told us to think of others before ourselves, I thought he was like Martí, like our conscience. But now it is not like that. I think we are just like snapshots; like pictures in the album of El Jefe. So he can always remember his romantic youth.”
“Are you working for the government?” I said outright. It was late, and we’d let all our defenses fall away, and we weren’t even ourselves by then. Everything was possible. “Did you ever?”
“Why? Why are you saying this? Are you a spy?”
“Sure. Why else would I be here?”
“No joke, Richard. Tell me.”
“Why do I come here so often? Why so many cameras? What do you think I’m doing here?”
“Don’t joke. Tell me the truth.”
“I’m collecting information here. On you. For my files. I’m collecting images of you.”
“For whom?”
“For me. For history. For the government.”
“I don’t like this game, Richard,” she said, and she got up and walked to the window. I saw the moon, when she pulled back the curtains, I saw the outline of her face. I saw the royal palm behind her, I saw the stars. Her body silver in the night.
After that, it felt as if we’d crossed another threshold, and now there was no way, ever, of going back to the place where we’d been. Some door had closed behind us. I kissed her legs, I kissed the inside of her thighs, I kissed her where she glistened, but still I couldn’t find the person I had seen two days before. Some part of her was lost to me, remote.
“I want to ask you, Richard,” she said when I was finished. “Where is the trust in our love?”
“What do you mean?”
“What trust do we have?”
“We have each other.”
“But how has this helped me? If I trust you, if I love you, it brings us no closer. We are still here, in a hotel, for one week; you are still going to leave. If I open myself to you, if I give you everything I have, what do I get from you?”
“You have to win my trust.”
“How? What can I do? How can I ever get you to believe in me? If I am perfect, will you believe it? You will think it is a trick. If I am not perfect, you will not keep me. Or maybe I am perfect, but I am in some other room, and you cannot see me. How does it help me to be perfect? What can I do to win your trust?”
“Come to the airport with me. Meet me when you say you’ll meet me.”
“How does it help? If I am kind to you, you think it is for a reason. If I am not kind to you, you think I am bad. What can I do? Tell me, and I will do it. I will do anything. I will cut out my heart and give it to you. I will cut myself till I bleed. What do you want?”
“Just be patient.”
“How long? How much longer must I wait?”
“As long as it takes. You can’t force love. Or trust.”
“But you can deny it. It’s not fair, Richard: I can’t force love; but even if I get it, you will say it is not love. I can’t win. It is like with Fidel.”
“Of course you can.”
“Sometimes I think your job is like a poison. You go to all these wars and make pictures of the girls in the hotels in Manila and Honduras, and you tell me about the “English teachers” and “tour guides” who want to make friends with foreigners, and now you think that every girl is like that. I will be honest with you. The first time I saw you, of course I saw you as a North American. You are rich, you can go anywhere, you can fly away tomorrow. You are living in the Nacional, eating good food, and we are living like pigs. Of course I see that. But I also see you. It is not easy. Yes, you are a foreigner; yes, you are a man who can rescue me. But I see also you have a dream. Not like the Cuban men, sitting on their asses every day, and then handling us like pieces of meat. And you have a life: a job, a future, a purpose. But because I see you as a foreigner, you will not have me. You believe that if a woman has a reason to love you, it is not true love; like if you have a reason to believe in God, it is not true faith. Then maybe you should find a girl who has no reason to marry you. Marry her!”
“It’s not like that.”
“Why must you try to explain everything? So maybe you meet a girl, and you are pulled by her, and she has gold hair, and a pretty smile, and a sexy dress. But these are not the reasons you love her. There are other girls with more beautiful hair, more pretty smiles, more expensive dresses. It is something else. It is like asking why you like beer. Why your favorite color is blue. Why you eat cheese. You think you can find reasons for anything. But they do not help. There are a hundred reasons for not believing in God; and the reasons for believing in Him are bad ones.”
I thought a lot about what she’d said, after she went to sleep, and I could see that she was right in part. Maybe that’s why I liked her in the first place, maybe that’s why she’d gone deeper in me than the others. But it was harder and harder to get through to her now. Our time was running out. Two days from now, we’d be back in Havana, back with silence and secrecy and spies. It was like the curtains were pulling open, and the light was coming in our eyes.
“You know, Richard,” she said, the next morning, lying in my arms, “I think you are like Fidel.”
“Thank you.”
“No. I am serious. You are always talking about helping people, about idealism and truth. But it is all in your head.”
“I don’t buy that. Just ask my agent: I make pictures, and they sell.”
“But why do you not help the man who is starving? Why only take his picture?”
“I’m not a doctor. Soon he’ll be dead. But the picture may save people who are not dead yet.”
“But what about this person right here?”
“I help you.”
“Yes, you give me bottles of perfume, and a trip to Varadero, and when you leave, you will give me money. But what about giving me a life?”
“It’s not easy.”
“Sure. Nothing is easy. Taking your pictures is not easy. Coming to Cuba is not easy. But you do it! Why not me? Why not try helping me?”
“I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. I’m trying to find a balance.”
“So while you look for this balance, I starve.”
“You never starve, goddammit.”
“I never starve for food. But there are other kinds of starving.” Her eyes flashed, and in that moment I felt stripped: like I was in some flashbulb glare, and couldn’t see. With the other girls, it had been a different kind of game—“You help me, please? For my mamá?”—and we both knew the rules. But here things were different: like going into a strange country late at night, and going out into the streets, and finding them empty, and you didn’t even know if there was a curfew on.
“Fidel is in love only with his ideas. With these beautiful abstract things. With Communist textbooks. They say that he is reading even when he is making love. That he makes slogans even in a woman’s arms. That he has only one love, and that love is not alive. It is the same with you, I think: you and your camera. You cannot look at truth. Everything, you must change—with your filters, your special lenses, your editing. You say you are showing the truth, but it is only the truth you choose.”
I went into the bathroom then, to cut the discussion short, and I took a long, long shower. To think this over. To wake myself up. To recover strength. When I came out, she was already asleep. I couldn’t see much—the curtains were drawn, and there weren’t many stars—but I could see her body rising above the sheet. I sat on the bed and looked at her. The wisps of hair curling down her neck. The way she opened and stretched her small hands sometimes. The occasional groans or cries she made.
I sat there for a long time, just watching her, and looking at the bag in which she’d brough
t her things. I saw my camera bag next to hers, and the small necklace I’d given her from Miami. Her gold cross. Her faraway smile.
I watched her for maybe an hour or more, and as I did, I made up my mind: the next night, I would go for it. I remembered something Hugo had said, that night in Cayo Largo: say the words, and you begin to believe them. Recite the Lord’s Prayer often enough, and you become a sort of Christian. Tell her you’ll do anything for her, and maybe it comes true. The next night, after the cabaret, was the time.
We went to the big show at the Continental our last night on the beach, and we sat through the blackface minstrels and the tinselly mulattas and we watched the spectacle around us: the girls in zipped-up minidresses, bursting at the seams, the Italians looking at them as if they were a kind of dessert brought over by the maître d’. The broken words, the usual exchange. “You’re free tonight?” “For you, señor, I’m always free.”
We danced a little on the floor, and Lula shimmied like she never did in Havana: I could see how she’d been refreshed by her week away from life, how she had a new shine to her. This was a night she’d always remember, I figured: she even asked me to take a picture of her, and another, and another. At our table, with a flash, playing with her cocktail.
We watched the couples form, the hands slipping into hands, the eyes discreetly meeting. She told me which of the guys onstage were gay, she sang along with all the standards. I took a few pictures, here and there, for my “Love for Money” story. And finally, when it was over—it must have been one-thirty, two—we went out onto the beach. No stars, no lights, but the sand beneath our feet was warm. No shards of glass, no trash or tar: a virgin place where none of the usual rules applied.
As we drifted over to the surf, she took off her shoes, and her eyes were bright, and I could see she was giddy from the rum. There were long kisses sometimes, and a hand under her shirt, and her hair was beginning to escape from its comb, one lock falling over her eyes. I would have liked to catch her like that, against the sea, on a Varadero night, her earrings sparkling, her eyes on fire, her lips moistened by the rum. My half-abandoned beauty.
“So what do you think?” I said, after we’d kissed.
“Of what, Richard?”
“Our future. Next week. Next year.”
We walked a little back from the sea, looking for a warm place to sit.
“You see, I was thinking,” I said slowly, and then, as we walked, she dug her nails into my arm, and I almost shouted, and then I followed her eyes to where she was looking, against the dunes. An Italian—you could tell from his groans—with his trousers down around his ankles, his body moving up and down against something dark and silent.
That put an end to my speech. But that was okay: mañana, I figured, was the national motto.
When we got back to town, next day, she told me we could leave our things at her cousin’s house, near the Bodeguita, and then she led me along O’Reilly, then right on Habana, past the old Western Union store, and then down again, to the Royal Bank of Canada. We turned again, onto Obrapía, the Street of Good Deeds, and went up to a dark entrance, and up a lightless staircase. In a back room, in the dark, sat a wiry man in a loose white shirt.
“Encantado,” he said, when we were introduced.
“Richard speaks English,” she assured him.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the man.
“Mr. Tran can help us,” she explained, for his benefit as much as mine. “He has friends in Hong Kong, California, here too.”
“So you can get her a visa.”
“Of course. I can get anything. But nothing is cheap.” He flashed his golden smile at me.
“How much is nothing?”
“Thirty-eight hundred dollars, U.S., for Bolivia or the Dominican. You want American, you give more.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That’s Cuba.”
Sensing that we had reached a temporary roadblock, he got up and went into a little kitchen. I saw his name on a slip of paper. Nguyen Van Tran.
“This guy comes from Vietnam.”
“I think six years ago, more or less. He was a student here. He makes this business. He brings cars, batteries here to Cuba. He knows the yanquis too. He knows how you guys think. He has fought against imperialism.”
“And you trust him?”
“Trust is not important. He is …” But the man was coming back now, with a pot of jasmine tea.
“You see, Mr. Richard, in Cuba you must always be patient. It is not like your country. Wait, and you shall be given—isn’t that what you say?” The yellow smile again. “If you have dollars, you can get what you need. If you have patience. If you can wait. For the right moment. The right place.”
This character was giving me the creeps: it was too much like being in Phnom Penh again, after the “liberation” of Cambodia. I could imagine his smile as he offered you a bargain on his teenage daughter.
“How long must I be patient?”
“If you know how long you must wait, it is not patience. You Americans always want everything so fast.”
The old Vietnamese line—except, in this case, he was right.
“Okay, I’ll think about it,” I said, and motioned Lourdes for us to leave.
“No tea?” he asked. “Too bad.” And we left him to his papers and his pot.
I guess that was the second time something broke, and the crack went deeper than before. Out on the street, Lula was mad, restless—why wouldn’t I pay, why couldn’t I wait, wasn’t this her life we were talking about—and I was feeling the way I often did in Havana: like everything was complicated, and behind every transaction there was some kind of shadow deal going down.
“Look, I’m sorry, I’ve got to think,” I said, feeling I had to step away in order to see her again, and I went off to the Habana Libre, which the Spaniards were busily tarting up for 1992.
While I was looking around the lobby, suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I whirled around, tired of whispers and deals and unwanted friends.
“Jesus, Richard, what’s the problem?” It was Mike Alvarez; the last time I’d seen him was when I’d crashed the Magnum party in Paris a couple of years back. We’d worked together a few years before on A Day in the Life of the Philippines, and he’d done all these double-truck shots of Olangapo at two a.m. and then they’d canned the whole spread because he’d been shooting in Fujicolor instead of Kodak.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh, the usual. Baseball. El equipo del sueño. Pan Am warmup, Olympic preview.”
“Shit, no kidding? I’m here for the Geographic. Three months. With Miguel over here.” He pointed to a guy standing beside him in the lobby. “Miguel makes sure I see light from dark.”
“So how are you spending your time?”
“How do you think? Checking out my roots. Shooting dawn to dusk. Trying out a few friendship offensives. Hey, you want a drink?”
“What about Miguel?”
“Ah, Miguel’s happy as long as I’m not talking to Cubans. He loves everyone in the world except his fellow Cubans.”
“A true Communist.”
“Right.” We went to the wicker-chair bar they have over there that’s always empty except for a few Ecuadoran trade fair delegates getting blitzed to “Guantanamera.”
“So what’s the matter?” he said, after we’d toasted the Yellow Book. “You look upset. Not getting any?”
“Kind of the opposite.”
“Too many crooks spoil the broth?”
“Just one. And she’s no crook. That’s the problem, Mike. I’m in, in really deep. I met this girl, like three years ago, took her with me to Varadero, now she’s trying to decide whether to wear white or cream at the wedding.”
“What about Diane?”
“What indeed?”
“The import duty on this one figures to be really heavy.”
“Don’t I know it!”
“Just bag it, man! Say sayonara
, hasta la vista, stay out of the city for a while. She can survive. There are plenty more where you came from.”
“You don’t need to tell me that. I know she’ll survive. It’s me I’m worried about.”
“You’re really gone on her?”
“Really gone. Far gone. Not like before. You’ve never seen me like this, have you?”
“Well, there was that one time, in the Camino Real …” But it was true, and we both knew it.
“So how about you?”
“I’m great. Come prepared, don’t you know?” He pulled out a do-it-yourself AIDS test he must have bought in Bangkok or somewhere. “Doesn’t do any good, of course, but it scares away the wild ones. Also, this.” He pulled out one of those over-the-counter pregnancy tests. Mike was like a pharmacy on two legs. “Only thing to do here is stay away from the politics. Far away. I remember this one time I was in La Rampa—that bar down near the Sofia restaurant—and I was shooting with a flash, a big one, and these guys suddenly came over from a booth and said, ‘You’re a North American,’ and hustled me out of there. I was shitting bricks, man, seeing my visa getting revoked, watching the boys in Washington freak out. I flashed them a ‘dazzler’—you know, one of those official-looking letters with embossed seals the Geographic gives out—but they weren’t buying it. ’Let’s just go to the hotel and talk it over,’ this guy says, so we come back here, and they order some drinks, and I kind of tell them how I’ve set up the thing with the Foreign Ministry guys, and they order some more, and ask me if I’ll give them twenty bucks apiece. I do, and then they just stand up, shake my hand, and head off. ‘You’re safe now,’ one of them calls back to me. ‘Your friend’s back.’ And I turn around and see this guy darting behind a pillar. Crazy: like something out of Groucho Marx. That’s the kind of Marxism they have here. And they also tell me that everything we’d said had been recorded, which was great since we’d been mostly talking about Robert Redford, and this deal he’s got going with García Márquez.” He looked around him. “Man, I just love this place; la situación comedy.”