Read Cuba and the Night Online
Authors: Pico Iyer
Cuba and the Night (31 page)
My head was reeling then; I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I tried to steady myself by getting out the contact sheet from the day in Varadero. I went over her pictures again and again, but they were different somehow, they had gained more shadows: maybe she was smiling at someone behind me, I thought, as I looked at the first, or maybe she was wearing this dress because she had worn it here before. Or maybe she was thinking of some Spanish businessman. Maybe, when she asked me to bring a friend along, she’d known I would bring Hugo; maybe when she kept on talking about marriage, she’d known I’d fix things up the way I did. And anyway, that had been not my plan, but José’s; maybe the two
of them—maybe the three of them—had been in it together all along.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I picked up the letter again, and read it and read it and read it, and every time I read a different letter, and all I could remember was the ending. I thought maybe I should go over right now, settle the thing quickly. But then I thought back to our plan. And I had a big assignment coming up for Time-Life in L.A.
That night, when I went to bed, I saw him holding her in his arms, in that steady way those English guys sometimes have, and I saw him telling her how he’d never be away from her, and meaning it. And I saw her unbuttoning her shirt, her lips wet. I saw her face moving under his, calling out his name. I saw her saying the words she’d never said to me. And then—and this was the part I couldn’t take—I saw her lying in his arms, content, with a future she could hold.
A
nd then, around dawn, just as I was getting to sleep at last, the phone began to ring, and after that, it rang and rang and rang, off the hook. The agency knew I was back in town, and they wanted to get more prints of Cari from me. Somehow, those images was selling like crazy. The Europeans were eating them up, the Argentinians were bidding for a whole series, some French magazine was talking cover story. The pictures were dynamite. I don’t know what it was—“It’s because of the way you look at her,” one editor had said, “and that way she has of smiling, as if she’s just about to cry”—and so I went back to the darkroom: Cari, drying her hair as she came out of the bathroom; Cari, in the earrings I’d brought down for Lourdes, as a wedding gift, from Mexico; Cari stepping out of her white dress, with the light behind her. I guess it was maybe just the lure of the Revolution with a pretty, smiling, tearful girl. They used to say that Nora Astorga won more friends for the Sandinistas than Bianca Jagger ever could; in the Marcos days, there wasn’t a think magazine in New York that wouldn’t go for a picture of a pretty NPA guerrilla with a gun.
Lourdes smiled too much, I thought; Cari looked sad enough to buy. And I lay down in my bed again, and the images went tumbling through my head, and I changed the way I’d planned the story, so that the images that were meant to come last would go first, and the opening spread became an elegy.
That was when the next letter arrived.
Dear Richard
,
I cannot tell you how crazy is this place of Winchester. Everything so heavy, and all the men in ties, and I can never feel the sea. They say this is an island, but where are the beaches and the palm trees and the sky? Everything is so tired here, and the streets are small and curved, but not like in Habana Vieja; it is like they are all weighed down by stones. And nothing happens, nobody laughs, nothing changes. The streets are gray, the buildings are gray, the people go from one place to the next. Hugo is at home here, with his books and his jazz records and his sherry. But I, I feel that sometimes I will explode
.
You remember, Richard, the
postales
you showed me once, from France and Germany and Hungary, the ones you always carry with you? From that French man who you love. Sometimes I feel I have entered that same world here, as if I am living in black and white. Where are the colors? Where is the music? Where are the hopes? Hugo tells me that later I will understand; every day, he gets up and puts on his gray sweater, his gray jacket, his gray trousers. He goes out into the gray, and joins the other men in gray
.
And you know something else, Richard? There are people here living in the streets! Like animals! Like pieces of dirt. Old people, young people, sick people: people without arms, without jobs, without homes—it is like something from the end of the world. From the time of Batista! Hugo took me to a play—a Soviet play—in London, and after, we walked to the station, and everywhere there were these people, so sick you could not tell if they were dead or dying or only sleeping. It was like something from an article in
Granma;
but if I read it in
Granma,
I would not believe it. I wanted to talk to these people, to give them food for their babies, to invite them to our house. But Hugo says it is not safe. “They like it like this,” he says. “It is
our way.” And the other Englishmen walked past, or looked in the other direction
.
Last week, here in Winchester, I saw an old woman burying her head in some garbage—in the middle of the High Street! I asked her if she had lost something. “Bloody lost my mind, haven’t I?” she shouted at me. “Bloody lost it all. Fuckin’ Margaret Thatcher. Go and ask her what I’ve lost! Ask the bloody witch!”
I remember, Richard, when I was young, my mother told me stories of the Isle of Pines. If you talk loudly, she said, if you do not think who you are talking to, if you do this, if you do that, you will go to this place where there is no dancing, and no brightness, and no air. But now I am there, I think, in this world of closed doors and closed faces
.
But Hugo is happy, happy like you cannot believe. I cook him rice every night, and I make him strong coffee, like in Cuba, and sometimes I tell him stories of when I was a girl. I can talk to him so easily, and always he listens. Always he remembers. To see him so happy, Richard, to feel I am the reason for this happiness, I cannot tell you how it makes me feel. This has never happened to me before, to make someone happy in this way. Maybe this is what being free means: to give someone happiness. I think I will stay with Hugo; he tells me I can bring my mother here too, and my sister, if she wants. It is strange—sometimes I do not understand my heart—but I am happy with him, and I do not want to leave
.
I think of you sometimes, Richard, and I do not know where you are, or what you are doing. I hope one day you will look at yourself like you look at the world, through your lens. Do you know what are the times I miss? Maybe you will think I am crazy. When you were asleep beside me. I used to look at you, and I could see the face your boss, your
compañeros,
your friends could never see. And I knew that then, in that moment, you could never leave
.
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.”
T
he 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.”
W
hen 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
