Cuba and the Night (13 page)

“And in the end you find …”

“You find you’re lost. Completely wiped out. There is no you. Only a few candles, and some hooded faces, and the dark, and no idea at all how to get back to where you started.”

He said nothing for a minute, and we let the silence rest. Then he held up the bottle to the waiter, and motioned for another
.

“How about you, Hugo? Here I am, spilling out my guts, and you haven’t said a thing. Just taking it all in, like a goddamn tape recorder. How about your love life?”

“Not much to talk about, really.”

“But you’ve had some adventures.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“That seems to be your favorite manner. You were to that manner born. When was the first?”

“First?”

“Romance.”

“Well, there was a girl at Oxford, she used to sit behind me at all of Thomas Phipps’s lectures. She’d been at school with my sister. I took her punting once, but neither of us was very experienced at that kind of thing, so it rather fell flat.” He was silent now, expecting more. “I suppose the first time I was involved, in a more concrete sense, was in Seville.”

“A girl with a rose beneath her teeth and a scarlet smile?”

“Not exactly. She was English, actually. Staying in the same pensión as I. We met over breakfast one morning in a café.”

“And …”

“And … well, we spent the day together. Looking at the Moorish
buildings. She was an art student, on holiday from Florence. And … well, you know Seville; it’s hard not to think of poems and guitars when you’re walking underneath all those balconies.”

“So you had her?”

“Well, not in so many words.” It struck me that he was patronizing me in much the same way the boys do sometimes: as if they can’t imagine that their teachers ever have hopes, or friends, or love affairs—or any lives out of school
.

“And—let me guess—her name was Carmen.”

“Imogen, actually.”

“So you and Imogen got cozy in the cobbled alleyways of Seville?”

“ ‘Cozy’? Yes, that’s rather a good way of putting it.”

“Okay,” he said. “End of interview. Let’s crash.”

We got up then, a little the worse for wear, and returned to our room. I must admit that I was warming to him in a way: he didn’t seem ill-intentioned, and I was beginning to suspect there might be a kindness in him that he wouldn’t acknowledge. Rather a Henry Miller type in his way. Just as we were getting ready for bed, I asked him—I don’t know what made me do it, but it seemed the right question at the time—“Do you have a girlfriend here in Cuba?”

“Do I, don’t I, do I, don’t I,” he said, stopping what he was doing. And then I understood what he’d been wanting to talk about all night. That was the first time I heard mention of a girl called Lourdes
.

“I tell you, Hugo, it’s like I was saying before.” I could hear his voice in the dark, from the next bed, as if his mind was ebbing back and forth. “This place really turns you around. It leaves you feeling like a pig at a barbecue. Like a stuffed pig at a bargirl’s barbecue. I mean, you know all these people have a native warmth and sexiness. And you know they want to get everything they can from it. And you know that in part they just want to have contact with the world.”

“Exactly. Don’t you think they’re just happy to see us because they live in such isolation? They just want to talk to us.”

“Yes, I know. But there’s more to it than that. The first time we went out together, she knew I was a foreigner, right? And she started
coming on to me so strong, I just told myself, ‘Whoa! This girl is ticketing herself faster than a travel agent!’ But then, I don’t know. I wrote her some cards, and she wrote me some, and she never asked for anything, and things got kind of blurred. And then, when I came back here, I got to thinking that maybe she liked me in spite of the fact that she had a reason to like me: that something more was going on.”

“I can quite believe she did.”

“So anyway, now I’m in kind of a state. I don’t even know whether to call her
mi novia
or
mi amiga.”

“Compañera,
I would have thought, is the usual locution.”

“Thank you, Hugo; I appreciate it.” I felt a little ashamed of myself. “You know, with the other girls, it was always real straight. Check in, sign the bill, check out again. No wasted motion, no hidden taxes. But with her, it’s different. Even when she’s not around, she’s all around me. Usually, it’s kind of like a light switch, and I can turn it on and off whenever I choose. But with her, it’s more like a night-light or something. And even when I want to go to sleep, even when I need complete darkness, even when I’m ready to close up shop, there she is, still shining, still switched on in some part of me.”

“Why don’t you take her to America?”

“Easy for you to say. I’m married, for one thing. And anyway, what kind of life is she going to have over there? Where are her friends going to come from? And what if she is working for Fidel?”

“It’s easy, I should think, to find reasons for not taking her. But reasons aren’t really the point, are they?”

“Then what is the point?”

“Why don’t you marry her? That sounds like the usual thing. Get a divorce and marry her.”

“Sure. If I married her, I’d probably have to bill twice as many days as I do right now—two twenty, two thirty a year. I’d see even less of her than I do now.”

“Sounds like an excuse to me.”

“Great, Hugo; if you’re so hot on this idea, why don’t you marry her?”

“Thank you,” I said, and felt again as if I were back in school
.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and I remembered how Americans are so
eager not to give offense. “I guess I’m just all tangled up. I’m sorry to have laid all this on you.” And then he turned round, and I left him to his sleep
.

It had been an exceptionally full evening, and I slept in late the following morning. When I awoke, it was already light, and he had gone out. Off to take more pictures, I suppose; I had to admit, his devotion to his job was quite exemplary. It was a curious thing, being alone in the room with his things, especially after our conversation of the night before: it was like the kind of intimacy you have at school sometimes, when you’ve been through so much with someone that, whether you like it or not, at some level you realize that you’re bound together for life. And it was odd, too, to be surrounded by his things, the things he carried round with him. His press card was lying on the desk, and the wallet in which he kept his first wife’s picture—he’d shown it to me over dinner, though now I think of it, it was his second wife, the Englishwoman—and a whole folder full of clippings about Revolutionary movements, and a handy Spanish phrasebook in which you could ask how much a
duck à l’orange
cost
.

There was something oddly touching, actually, about all these things—all that they said about his various hopes and aspirations—and I suppose it was that which prompted me to do what I did next. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s also something I’m not terribly happy about keeping to myself—and it’s easier to relate on paper (maybe that’s why I’m writing this all down in the first place)—but I went across to the door, and pulled up the bolt, and then I slipped back and looked through his things. I have no excuse whatsoever for this—my only excuse, really, is that it’s a habit I developed when I was an assistant housemaster. And in this instance, it reminded me of how one would find teddy bears hidden away amongst the boys’ posters of rockets and soccer stars. Because the main thing I found in the pile was a diary. It was written in a rather childish hand, very large, with only a few sentences on every page. But the sentences were of a kind that rather shamed me. They were all about the secret book he hoped to put out that would, in his
words, “educate the world.” He had already decided he would give the profits to some organization called Direct Relief International, and take some of the money to give to some woman in the Philippines: he’d written down her daughter’s date of birth on the front page. On the frontispiece, he’d even copied down—and this is so American, I couldn’t help but think—“Changing the world is the only way of changing ourselves.”

I did feel somewhat uneasy, intruding on his private self like that, but I’d already told myself that it would make me more sensitive to his interests, and more apt to see beneath the tough guy who kept banging on about his adventures. At breakfast, in fact, when he came up to my table by the beach, I found I was looking at him a little differently
.

“Taking pictures of suffering and misery?” I said, and he looked a little taken aback
.

“No way. Not on Cayo Largo.” He looked at me strangely. “This is Bacardi country. Anyway, I’m going for a run, and then I’ll see you in the lobby at, like, eleven o’clock. They said there’s going to be a bus to the airport at eleven-fifteen.”

There was, as it transpired, but it wasn’t much of an airport, and there was certainly no plane
.

“What’s the story
, compañero?”
he asked one of the staff, who was sitting under a fern
.

“No problem
, señor.
Please wait. Be patient. A plane will come.”

So there we were, in this odd thatched hut, on an island full of turtles, engaged in the two most frequent activities in Cuba: sitting and waiting. I hadn’t brought my backgammon set with me—hadn’t brought anything other than the Kerouac and a Tom Robbins, though Richard had everything, for his work—and there wasn’t much to do, what with the salsa music blasting out of the bar, but talk
.

I don’t recall every one of the details, but he gave me the kind of accounts that would have had the boys simply spellbound: actually, I had half a mind to invite him to the school sometime. He’d been to Afghanistan once, and had traveled sixty days—forty of them with diarrhea—to meet some guerrilla chieftain, whom no one had seen for four years. He’d spent a week with Lord Moynihan—the now
famous degenerate peer, from Eton I think, who used to run brothels in the Philippines, and married a new prostitute every year. He’d lived for a spell in Paraguay, with a local woman “to clean his house” and a collection of photographs of the president with his teenage girlfriends. And he was full of wisdom—if you can call it that—about how the best way to learn about a country was to cross-question the “Guest Relations” girls at all the best hotels, who apparently take their relations with guests very seriously indeed
.

All very impressive at one level, of course, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something sad about it too. Which feeling I articulated
.

“Sure, it isn’t the “Father Knows Best” dream. But someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to go out there, and give up the easy chair and the two cars in the garage, and actually bring back reports from the world. Otherwise, there’d be no artists, no newspapers, no explorers. Some people are made to stay at home; some are made to wander.”

“And you’re one of the ones who are made to wander?”

“Yeah, I think so. And now I’m on this course, it’s harder to get out than to just keep going.”

“But don’t you think there’s something dangerous in all this? It seems to me that all this moving is partly a way of not asking any questions of yourself. And even the photography is a way of giving answers—concrete images—to questions no one’s asked.”

“Sure, you could look at it like that. But the way I see it, you’ve got to keep moving. You’ve got to keep your eyes open and fresh. You can’t afford to fall into a routine. It’s like this place. The first time, the second time you’re here, it’s just terrific: adventures every day. Come here for a week or two, and there’s never a dull moment. But just imagine living here. It’d be a nightmare.”

“But yours is hardly the kind of life on which to base a future. Always moving; always on the surface of things.”

“I’m not thinking of the future: my job involves catching the moment. Right now, the here and now, the truth of this instant.”

“And that’s what you tell your girlfriends too?”

“Look, Hugo. I’m not saying this is the best life. And I’m not against commitment. But how many different commitments can you
make if you’re going to give yourself fully to anything? And don’t try coming off all high-and-mighty with me. Girls like it too. Maybe that’s something they don’t teach you in those schools of yours, but they get a kick out of romancing just like we do. It doesn’t always have to be to have and to hold. And if they’re asking for it, I’m not going to deny it to them.”

I said nothing
.

“And don’t just say it’s me. Go out East sometimes, and you’ll find half your schoolmates screwing their way across the Orient. Swire’s, Jardine’s, W. I. Carr—all those Hong Kong firms are made for British schoolboys who need to prove their virility to the world. The Empire never died; it just got privatized.”

There was silence
.

“And they don’t even get pictures out of it.”

At that point—none too soon, on every count—the plane at last arrived, and we crowded into it and took a couple of seats in the back and ordered two Bucaneros. It wasn’t exactly the Concorde: the toilet was a hole in the floor, with black knobs on the door like in all those old Tintin books set in Central Europe. One tiny hole in the wall said, “For Clothes,” another said, “For Choes.” It must have been the only door in the world where the Open and Closed signs were visible only from inside
.

Richard, however, was in no mood for diversion. As soon as I returned from the loo, he started up again, and I felt again as if I was merely an audience to the conversation he was holding with himself
.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know where one thing ends and the other begins. Like with Lourdes. My heart tells me one thing, my conscience another. Look at it one way, and it’s selfish of me to focus on her, when there are ten million others suffering on this island, whose only crime is being less attractive to me. Look at it another way, and it’s selfish of me to concentrate on their stories, when Lourdes is crying on my shoulder. You can’t win.”

“Or lose, either.” And then I thought I was being too hard. “But yes, I do see what you mean. It’s the same with the teaching, really
.
It’s not the most exciting job in the world, but one does feel as if one’s having some good influence, perhaps. Or as if one can do a little bit to help them in later life.”

“Sure. If you want to spend your whole life in a school.”

“Quite so.” Though, I’ll confess, it seemed to me that he’d been doing the same thing
.

“I’m sorry, Hugo. I’m boring you.”

“No, not at all. It’s fascinating.”

“ ‘Fascinating’!” he said, and I felt the sting
.