Cuba and the Night (17 page)

“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.

W
e’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 smile 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.

“You see what I mean?” said Lourdes softly. “You see why I
come here? Something here is pure, is clean. Like in the days before. It is like we are no longer in Havana.”

“I see,” I said, and my anger of an hour before was forgotten.

“Here I can come and feel empty,” she said, walking away from me. “There are no posters of
El Señor
here. No slogans. No offices. Nothing can go wrong here, nothing reminds me of our world. When I am tired sometimes, when I am worried, I come here, and my mind is calm.”

“Only here?”

“Only here. Because no one is making a deal here, no one whispers from the corner, no one tries to hear what we are saying. I could say anything to you here—about Fidel, about my hopes, about Martí, anything. But I do not want to. I want to forget all that. It is like a church for me.”

“A sanctuary, kind of?”

“Sanctuary?”

“Tranquilo?”

“Tranquilo
, yes. When I am here, I am free to think.” A small family walked past, carrying roses to a marble statue. They walked slowly, and with dignity, together. “You see the people?” she said to me. “They are different here, pure. They are not thinking about money or food or sex. They are not worrying about
la situación
. They are thinking about human things; about their mothers and their grandfathers. They are innocent again. I think this is like Havana a hundred years ago. In the time of Martí.”

“And when I come here,” she went on, standing still, and looking at the grieving angels and the sad madonnas and the Milagrosa’s eyes, protective above the roses, “I feel I can talk to the old people. And ask them about their hopes and memories. Because maybe some of them never wanted to die, or had plans and feelings they never spoke. Or maybe some died who chose to die. Or someone lost his girlfriend, and had no life again. Or maybe they fought in wars, or maybe they are watching us now. All their thoughts, all their feelings, come to me here, and when I leave, I am like a different person.”

“Purer?”

“Purer, yes, and calm. Like those angels they keep in taxis? So when I leave, I have new plans, new energy. Maybe a new me. This place is like a new birth for me.”

We walked around some more, not talking, both in our own separate silence, and in silence I followed her around sepulchers, and down avenues of graves. There was no sound anywhere, except for the occasional snifflings of old women, and the sound of footsteps on gravel, and a cock crowing in the distance.

Before we left, I asked if I could make a picture of her, next to the Milagrosa. She went up to the figure and held her fingers in a ball, knocked three times on the brass lid, then walked around the marble forms, resting her joined hands on her chin and closing her eyes. Then she stood with one arm around this patron saint of miracles, a rich woman who had asked to be buried among the poor, and only later, when I got back to the city, and developed the image in my darkroom—a dark-eyed girl in the city of answered prayers—did I realize that that was the first time I ever caught a picture of her alone.

T
hat evening, Lourdes was waiting for me when I got to her home, and she told me that she wanted to make the circuit of her neighbors’ houses.

“But this is our last night together.”

“Yes. And everyone wants you to help them.”

So we made the rounds of her neighbors, and her neighbors’ friends, and the cousins of her neighbors’ friends, and all of them, as she had warned me, had letters they needed taken to New York. “Include a photo for them,” they said. “Send it to my uncle, my aunt, my cousin.” “I have a message,” they said, “for
mi padre
in New York.” “I want you to send this letter for me to Ronald Reagan. You have good connections: will you do that for me?” The addresses were smudged, or to towns not listed in any book, or to places without street names or people no longer alive. Dead letters to dead souls, saying,
Querido
 / 
Inolvidado Hermano
 / 
Padre
 / 
Abuelo
, saying, “I have not written before. I hope you are well, and your family too. Here things are not so good. I need food, I need clothes,
I need money. I do not want to ask you for your help, but you are the only person I know in North America. Please reply quickly. Please send me something. Not through the mail—the government will take it. But give it to someone who is coming to Cuba, give them the money to give me. Here things are not easy. I am waiting for your answer. Please remember me. I never forget you.”

Inside, there were sometimes prescriptions—this was the country with the best doctors in the hemisphere, and no medicines—or ill-spelled scraps listing sizes of jeans, or names of offices they’d heard from friends, or friends’ cousins. Some of the letters were left unsealed, some of them were scrawled in writing no one could read. I was used to it now: I packed light when I came to Cuba—just my equipment and my diary and things to give away—and when I went back, it was always with a full suitcase.

We went into Marielita’s mother’s house. It could have been anyone’s—it was everyone’s—and friends were shuffling in and out of all the rooms, while an old man lay outstretched on the floor next to the balcony: the extended family seemed to reach all the way through Centro Habana, as if everyone was in it together, even if brother could not trust brother, nor
novio novia
.

On the table in the living room, under glass, there were pictures of the family in Florida: their new Datsun 280Z, their condo in Coral Gables, their wet bar.
“Mis primas,”
said a fat woman in curlers, and there were three pretty girls, discernibly Cuban, with diploma hats over their big hair, and juicy red smiles and bright eyes, three Cubans who’d never heard of Camilo.

There was a large framed picture on the wall, of some pouting, curly-haired toddler; and a Marlboro packet; and a collection of ads for Heineken. There was a tiny antenna on the TV, on which, the woman said, you could get eight stations. There was no bathroom anywhere, though: one room served the entire building.

“Tell them about your house,” said Lourdes, showing me off. “How many rooms it has, how much it costs. Tell them.”

But before I could do so, the woman was pulling me by the arm.
“Mira
, Richard. Take a picture for my mother!” And she got a comb and dragged it through her hair.

“Now the two of us with the dog.”

“Now Cari, and then one of me and
mi novio.”

Photos went off, smiles went on, neighbors came and grinned from the doorway.
“Oye,”
said a neighbor, bursting in. “Can you take a picture of my baby? For my sister. She is in New York.” She copied out an address in Queens. I moved closer to the baby, and it screamed and screamed and bawled. Everyone broke up. “She’s scared of you. She sees the camera, she thinks you are a spy!”

Lourdes took the camera from me and, coochy-cooing, snuck up to the baby, and took a picture of its smiling face.

Then someone grabbed the camera and looked at it the wrong way round. Someone else wrote down, “Olympidu.” Some kid began playing with the lens cap, back and forth, back and forth. I pulled it away, and took one more. “So you will make two copies, Richard? Two copies? One for her, and one for my
abuela?”

It was Cari, at my shoulder, grabbing my arm, and her face was creased, almost desperate, and I thought this time the tears might really come. “The nice size, okay? Not small. Nice. You will not forget?”

“No.”

“One for her, and one for my
abuela
in New York.” She was talking as if the last ship was leaving the port.

“Is not too expensive?”

“No, it’s fine,” and I thought of where these snapshots would go—to drug dealers in prison, to women who couldn’t speak Spanish, to P.O. boxes that were long since reassigned, to others who wanted to forget everything that had anything to do with Cuba. To cousins who could not remember the little girl of twenty years before.