by Pico Iyer
Con cariño,
Lourdes
I didn’t know now whether it was better to get the letter, or to get nothing at all; I didn’t know if I should go over right now, or wait her out. Maybe she was only writing this for the people she thought would be reading it; maybe the whole thing was a ruse.
I picked up the phone and called Alvarez. His machine picked up on the first ring. “All telephone numbers gladly and gratefully accepted. If you aren’t in my black book already, you could be soon. Price of admission: one naked picture.”
“It’s me, Mike. Richard. Pick up, will you? I need to talk to you. It can’t wait.”
“Talk away, compañero,” I heard him saying, on the other end.
“Look, Mike. I need to come and talk to you. In person. Right now.”
“Okay. Just give me forty minutes, huh? There’s some little business I’ve got to attend to.”
I knew what the business was: pretty and just shipped over from Korea. It made me feel kind of sick to think of him like that—and then I thought that maybe that was how Lourdes thought of me, and all the rest of them. Casanova with a camera.
Thirty minutes later, I buzzed him at his place near Limelight. He looked kind of groggy, but it was still Mike: the only guy I could talk to, the only one who knew the place like I did.
“What’ll it be?” he said, opening up the closet where he kept his stuff: Mike was probably supplying half the photographers in New York. “You know what they say: where there’s a pill, there’s a way.”
“I need something more than that right now.”
“What is it? Same lady?”
“Right. She’s gone.”
“Where to?”
“England. Fucking red-brick, rainy England.”
“That shouldn’t be hard to fix.” That was the thing about Mike: he always looked on the bright side of things.
“It’s not that easy. She’s married. To an Englishman. I set the whole thing up.”
“You made the bed, and now they’re lying in it.”
“Right. Poetic justice. A taste of my own medicine. What goes around comes around. I know all the easy morals: just tell me what to do.”
“Why don’t you come with me to the P.I.? I’m going there next week. ‘Faith Healing in Negros,’ or some crap. You know what it’s like over there: an all-night agony column with beauty-pageant legs.”
“It’s not like that, Mike. I want her.”
“Nothing else will do?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay. I guess there’s no cure.” He picked up the phone, and I saw him punch his way through some options, and then he was saying, “One seat. Smoking. Next Thursday. Upper Class. Picking up from West Broadway. Coming back Tuesday the seventeenth. American Express. Just a minute.”
“Your number, Richard?”
I got out the plastic and gave him the digits.
“Seven-fifteen p.m. Thursday,” he said, putting down the receiver. “Virgin 004 to Heathrow.”
The L.A. trip came up just then, and I thought it would take my mind off things to be back in the middle of the bang-bang: South-Central was the hottest story outside Liberia and Sarajevo. A nice civil war in the comfort of your own home, as some of the guys were calling it. It was like Manila or Jo’burg, they used to say: all day shooting AK-47s, and then you could go to a restaurant or a nightclub, and forget the whole thing was happening. The only trouble was, L.A. just then was Havana all over again. The hot, lazy, clear blue days, the light as sharp as a knife, the sense of suspended motion, the faint scent of jacaranda and hibiscus: sometimes I felt I was in Vedado again.
I took myself up the coast one day, to the little tract house near Santa Maria where a pretty Filipina fixed up three thousand marriages a year, her mother licking envelopes in the next room: the largest mail-order-bride service on the mainland. That story was booming now: the end of Communism had meant a flood of new bodies into the West, many of them ready to market themselves as such and not used to regular employment. Soviet girls were all over the Middle East, Czech girls were cashing in on new markets, East Germans were working Hamburg. The countries that were still committed to Marxism were going stronger than ever: three hundred thousand girls in China, so they said, and Saigon back to its Nixon-era prime. The Philippine woman in the California suburb even accepted Visa cards.
But it didn’t clear my head for long, and some nights, instead of going out, I just went back to my hotel and talked and talked into my tape recorder.
“Sometimes,” I told her, “I am back in Havana again: the quiet mornings in the sun, the sea ahead of me, the bay beside me, the sense of being in a world without movement or horizon. Alone on a wall, in a world without noise, a few listless cars curving around the sea, a couple of boys throwing stones into the water. And then the night and the music and the long walk through the dark to Concordia.
“I see you at the top of the stairs when I arrive, putting a finger to your lips, and I lead you by the hand into the room next to the kitchen. The room is dark. The child next door is crying. Your mother is sitting at the kitchen table, with her rum and cigarettes, alone. I feel your lips on mine, your hand around my back, the shiver of your hair against my skin. I kiss your arm. I hear your sighs, and then your muffled shouts, and then we are on your bed, and your mother is next door, alone.
“Afterward, you bring me a pad of paper from your drawer. Write something, you say, write anything. Something for me to keep when you are gone. Something for me to remember. Something that will be a little piece of Richard when I cannot touch you. So I tear out a piece of paper and write, ‘For Lourdes García Milan. This voucher entitles the holder to a free trip anywhere in the world, at any time, with the photographer of her choice. All expenses paid. Valid for all eternity. Redeem with a kiss.’
“When I leave, you say, ‘Shh, Richard, shh,’ as I mumble things in your ear. I kiss you once before I go, and, halfway down, I look up to see you close the door behind you.”
When I got back from the Coast, there were two letters waiting for me from England. I picked up the thicker one first, a fat blue envelope addressed in that precious, spidery scrawl that all those high-class Brits affect, as if making their words hard to read gave them some kind of historical importance, or just helped them keep their secrets to themselves. Two snapshots fell out from the tidily folded pieces of blue stationery with a crest on the top: one of a typical English house, red brick, with milk bottles outside the door and a scruffy garden in front; and another, which they must have taken with a self-timing mechanism—the composition was all wrong—of the two of them, smiling, his arm around her shoulder, in front of the cathedral.
My dear Richard,
You will doubtless have heard from Lourdes already about how she has settled down here, and how she is finding her exotic new home. Actually, I think it is a trifle exotic to her—and even to me, seeing it through her eyes. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve never lived in Winchester before. Never really lived, that is. All the old places have a different texture now, a different timbre almost, now that she’s among them; it almost feels a little like Havana.
I dare say you have intuited much of this, but Lourdes is so happy to be out. I don’t think she expected England to be quite so different, but I do think she’s well on her way to adjusting. We lead a rather quiet life, very domestic, and to you it must seem terribly dull and mundane. But Lourdes likes it, I think. After all those years of uncertainty in Havana, I suspect she’s glad of some stability.
As doubtless you know, too, the visa part went quite without a hitch, and the authorities seemed more than ready to accept us as a man and wife. I suppose the £500 they get from every departing Cuban reconciles them somewhat to the prospect. I can’t pretend that Winchester is entirely to Lourdes’s liking—she wears a heavy coat even in the daytime, and her requests for papayas have not invariably borne fruit. But I do think she is ready to appreciate what Hampshire has to offer, and will make a good life
here once her initial homesickness subsides. She is an extraordinary woman, as you know, in her intelligence and poise: as you may have gathered, the two of us have grown quite close, and I find there is a great deal she can teach me. This intimacy is nothing I’ve encouraged—and, naturally, I feel rather awkward about mentioning it to you, especially at this distance—but it does seem to agree with both of us, and I’m happy to support her, whether her affection is for me or for her new life.
We both think of you often and, though perhaps it would not be easy for you, agree that it would be wonderful if you could find a way to visit. The house itself is too small, I think, for guests, but we could easily arrange a room for you at the college, and there’s quite a lot to do here: not least, as you’ll recall, the Quiristers. I enclose the photographs as a kind of vade mecum. But really, to lure you here, I suppose we’d probably need a civil war. Or a minor insurrection at the very least.
We’ll see what we can do.
Do stay well, wherever you are; Lourdes joins me in giving you very best wishes for the Easter holidays.
All the best,
Hugo
The other letter, on the same blue paper, was very short.
Richard,
I saw the picture of Cari in the beauty shop here: in the same hotel we used in Varadero. Maybe even in the same room. I think I always hoped that you would change. I thought that if I loved you enough, you would learn to love and trust. I thought I could make a new Richard. But I was wrong.
I hope one day you will see yourself in a picture. Then maybe you will understand why I will always stay with Hugo.
Lourdes
There were still three days before the flight. Three days to wonder why I’d done it: did I go with Cari in order to get the pictures, or did I get the pictures in order to go with Cari? Was it release or revenge—or both? Had it been because Cari was waiting for me? Or only because I couldn’t wait for Lula? I had three days to go through all the possibilities, and none of them was flattering.
• • •
It was raining—of course—when the plane touched down, and the Tube into town took us past rows and rows of tired, washed-out houses, with overgrown weeds in their gardens, and dirty lines of clothes. The Industrial Revolution had never died here; it hadn’t even grown up. I got out at Victoria, and found myself a bed-and-breakfast near the station, one of those rock-bottom places full of Eurailpassers, and Japan Travel Bureau types who’ve paid two months in advance, and girls who didn’t even make sure the toilets flushed. Just a place for the night, to freshen up and get some sleep before I met her.
When I woke up, late at night, out of sync, I went out to a phone booth and made a reservation for two at the Dorchester. Called Virgin too, to get another seat next to mine, on the seventeenth; bought some flowers at Covent Garden. One time I even tried their number, just to hear her voice. “Eight-double one, four-nine-three,” she answered, and I could hear his voice in hers as I hung up.
I didn’t want to sleep—it’d only be worse if I slept and dreamed, or tossed and turned all night—so I found an all-night café and filled myself with milky tea until it was light, and I thought of all the things I’d say to her. I had a few lines of Martí prepared—the ones she’d taught me on the beach—and I thought I’d tell her she could use her voucher now. We had a room, I would say, we had two seats on the Tuesday flight to New York.
Then I went to Waterloo and bought a day return to Winchester. I made the 9:05, got off at a sleepy country station—as mild and motionless as all those British places—and then I walked down the hill toward the school. Winchester’s not a big place, and it wasn’t too crowded. All the signs show you how to get to the “College.”
I walked down the pedestrians-only thoroughfare, the medieval areas, past the kind of buildings that must have made her think she’d never left Old Havana. I looked out for the Wykeham Arms, and tried to guess which shops she’d use. One time I thought I saw her, but it was just an au pair, laughing as she came out of an off-license.
I imagined her walking the aisles in Sainsbury’s, sipping rum in the pubs, going for runs across the playing fields at dusk.
Under the arches, everything became much quieter. The college had a secluded air, as if it belonged to another century. Not many visitors were around. The little lanes were generic English quaint. A few candy stores. A post office. Some little houses with pots of flowers on their windowsills.
I threaded my way through lanes and streets, and followed Kingsgate down Canon Street to Culver Road. I looked around for a phone booth: I thought he’d be out now, so I could invite her for a drink, or even get myself inside. Just long enough to show her the ticket and give her the flowers and tell her the lines from Martí. No problem with the visa, I’d explain: now she was English, she could go anywhere she wanted.
And then, as I walked past number 18, I saw them, through the window. Hugo was sitting at a piano, in the same sweater he’d been wearing in the bar that first night, but something in him had changed. He was singing along, for one thing, sort of quietly, and when he played, it sounded nothing like the kid’s tinkling I’d expected. Nothing fancy, to be sure, but it had the sound of someone who knew what he was doing, and wasn’t shy.
Lula was sitting in a chair across the room, a stuffy kind of professor’s room with framed pictures of cathedrals and even one of a soccer team. On the coffee table, there was a picture of the two of them together, at their wedding, the one I’d taken to keep the witnesses happy. Her eyes were bright, and she was smiling as he played. Her skin had lost something of its healthy color, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her clothes were as drab as the English designers could make them. But she looked calm, and settled.
Then he stopped his playing, and looked over at her like a man who’d just come out of church, and she looked back at him and smiled. It wasn’t much, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was a different smile from any I’d seen in her before. Not the one I’d caught in the hotel that night, not the one I’d taken in the plane. Not any kind of smile I could have gotten in my lens.
She leaned down to pick up a book from the table. From where I stood, it looked to be Martí.
Also by PICO IYER
“Pico Iyer’s remarkable talent is enough justification for going anywhere in the world he fancies.”
—Washington Post Book World
FALLING OFF THE MAP
Some Lonely Places of the World
What does the elegant nostalgia of Argentina have in common with the raffish nonchalance of Australia? And what do both these counties have in common with North Korea? They are all “lonely places,” cut off from the rest of the world by geography, ideology, or sheer weirdness.
Travel / Adventure / 0-679-74612-9
THE LADY AND THE MONK
In Kyoto, Pico Iyer sets out to find Japan’s traditional world. Along the way, he meets a vivacious, thoroughly educated wife of a Japanese “salaryman” who seldom leaves work before 10 p.m. From their relationship, Iyer fashions a book that is a delightfully fresh way of seeing both the old and very new Japan.
Travel / Adventure / 0-679-73834-7
VIDEO NIGHT IN KATHMANDU
Mohawk haircuts in Bali, Yuppies in Hong Kong. In Bombay, not one but five Rambo rip-offs, complete with music and dancing. And in the People’s Republic of China, a restaurant that serves dishes called “Yes, Sir, Cheese My Baby” and “Ike and Tuna Turner.” These are some of the images that Pico Iyer offers in this brilliant book of travel reportage.
Adventure / Travel / 0-679-72216-5
Also available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
NEW FROM
PICO IYER
THE OPEN ROAD
The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
One of the most acclaimed and perceptive observers of globalism and Buddhism now gives us the first serious consideration—for Buddhist and non-Buddhist a
like—of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s work and ideas as a politician, scientist, and philosopher. The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.
Available in hardcover from Knopf
$24.00 (Canada: $28.00) • 978-0-307-26760-3
PLEASE VISIT WWW.AAKNOPF.COM