Cuba and the Night (14 page)

A
nd then I was back in the city of whispers, of rumors and muffled kisses, of hints and solicitations.
“Eh, Richard, qué tal?”
said Lázara, coming up to me suddenly on the street and kissing me on both cheeks, her fourteen-year-old sorcerer’s eyes flashing. “Where have you been?” “Oh, everywhere.”
“Dime
. I knew you were here. My mother says she saw you in the street last week. With a girl in blue, she said, a young girl, like a
novia.”
“Must have been José,” I said, and thought of her mother in the empty room, with its refrigerator and blinking TV, overlooked by Carlo Marx. At the window all day, watching and waiting. “No, she says it was you. She remembers your bag. From America, right?”

Later, outside the Hotel Sevilla, a bus passed, and I was sure I saw her, sitting talking to a boy with frizzy dark hair. “Lourdes,” I shouted, and then she turned, and for an instant I was sure I saw her smile, but it was too difficult to catch, and the bus was turning, and it was like a glimpse into another life, a secret self, all the sides of her I hadn’t seen. She didn’t work, she had no place to go, why was she riding the buses? And looking so different, with her hair up, and her makeup different, like an actress taking the part of Lourdes? Who was that guy I saw you with? That was no guy; that was my life.

I
was back in the spell again: I had to see her. I headed toward Concordia, and as I got closer to her house, I saw her in the street, arm in arm with the bearded guy we’d met, laughing as they walked, and she whispering something to him.

“Lourdes,” I said, going up to her and grabbing her by the arm
and pulling her toward the sea. “We’ve got to talk. I’m going crazy.”

“You’re hurting me, Richard.”

“And you me. Who is this guy? What’s going on here?”

“No one. I want to be with you.”

“As long as I take you to dollar stores and nightclubs.”

“No, Richard. That’s not it.”

“As long as I tell you stories of America and send you postcards of the world.”

“No, Richard. It’s you.”

“So what do you want?”

“I want to see your pictures.”

Of all the things in the world, that was the one I hadn’t expected.

“You’re saying that. You want to get on the right side of me.”

“Okay! It’s better I don’t want?”

“Why do you want to see them?”

“I showed you the picture of my papá: I told you my life. You said you understand. Why can I not understand your life, your hopes?”

“You really mean it?”

“Of course I mean it.”

“Okay. I have some pictures in my room. Not many: only the ones I always carry round with me. Like your crucifix, you know? To keep me from all evil, and remind me what I believe in.”

“Any, Richard. I know nothing about your life. Your house, your mother and father, your job, your dreams. All I see is your camera.”

“So we go back to my room?”

“No. That is no good. We cannot do it in the street. You come to my house tonight, we go to my sister’s room.”

“In the dark, right?”

“Why not? Always in the dark.”

I
t must have been nine o’clock when we met, and her mother was already at the table, and Cari had been sent out to a nightclub, and it felt like we had the whole place to
ourselves. But as soon as she saw me, she put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk, Richard,” she said. “Everyone here is a spy of love.”

“Entonces Español?”

“No. They will know you are no
cubano
. Please, Richard, for me: my sister’s room is next to the neighbor’s home. They will hear everything.”

So we made all the preparations in silence, brought in a lamp from her room, and collected all the lights we could, and still it was like looking at prints in a darkroom almost: no way you could see the light and shade, and the colors lost their brightness. But it was either that or nothing, I figured, and even a little light was better than none at all. I was glad to give her this; it felt like I was handing her a candle and she was stepping across another threshold inside me, like the first time someone comes to your apartment, and starts rearranging your furniture. Or the first time she says your name aloud, while naked.

I began with Managua: pathos was there for the taking in those days, a civil war in a country full of poets that had been wiped out by an earthquake, and all the bright hopefulness and sadness of the rosy-cheeked
brigadistas
from Amsterdam and Boulder, and the weeping mothers, and the little girls in their Sunday dresses, and the fresh-faced junior-high-school boys saying goodbye to their sweethearts as they went off to die. Managua was a sermon waiting to be delivered. This is what Washington’s money does. This is what Moscow’s ideas achieve. Fools on the left and rogues on the right; and the people, unsuspecting, always in the middle.

And this is what happens to people without defenses: in front of a church, the streets run red with blood. Kids practice curveballs next to ditches piled high with corpses.

I showed her the other pictures I’d brought for her, most of them of kids: the eleven-year-olds on the streets of Angeles, the smiling boys, with young monks’ faces, who join the Karen fighters in the Shan States, the orphan centers along the Cambodian border. I showed her some pretty stuff too—laughing dancers in Ubud, and lantern festivals in Hiroshima, and the strange stone faces you find if you ride horses through the valleys of Colombia. And I finished with the picture of her and the girls on the balcony.

I couldn’t tell what she made of it, but when she was through, she looked at me, again without words, and motioned me to go through the pages again, and then, when we were done, she said, simply, “Thank you, Richard.”

Then we undressed quickly, in silence, and when I wanted to say,
“Mi amor”
or “I want you,” she put a finger to my mouth, or kissed me into silence.

And so, in the half-light, I took her in silence. I ran my hand along her body, and her eyelids fluttered, but she never murmured. And I pulled her to the bed, and lay on her back, kissing her up and down, on the pulse of her neck, on the underside of her ear, under her damp, tousled hair. And we went through the whole strange ceremony without words, like a married couple—no involuntary gasps, no statements of love, no shivers or gasps or moans. No promises, too, and no lies.

“If we were in Varadero,” she whispered, afterward, and I said, “If we were in Varadero, what? You could be yourself? You could make up a part to please me? You could say all the things you think I want to hear?”

“Why so difficult, Richard? You know my situation.”

“I know you’re scared. But what’s more important, your fear or your love?”

“This is Havana: how can I tell them apart?”

I stroked her hair, then, in silence, and she rested her head on my shoulder, and we both thought back, I knew, to the pictures we had seen. And every time, I thought, it was the same choice between talking and love: either we could talk freely in English, along the Malecón, or in Maxim’s, or in the Central Hospital, or we could make love, and leave our speaking selves outside. Either we shared our minds, or we shared our bodies.

Afterward, there was the silent promise, and the sudden departure, and the walk through the darkened streets, and the long night, in our beds, alone.

T
hose were the days of midsummer heat: scorching afternoons and sultry nights. Clothes were getting looser,
straps were falling off shoulders, shorts were getting shorter. Sometimes there were kisses when we met, but when I kissed her sometimes, I sensed her looking over her shoulder, or speaking under her breath. “Come,” she said one day, “it is safer in the hospital.” When we got there, they checked my camera bag at the entrance, and the woman got out my Olympus and looked at Lourdes through the lens.
“Qué bonito,”
she said, and handed it back to me with a smile. “Here it is always safe,” Lourdes said to me quietly, “no problem,” and sometimes I wondered whether she was turned on by all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, and sometimes I wondered whether she wanted to turn me on with it. Or maybe it was just that whispering was a habit here, the way bowing might be in Japan.

“Look, Richard,” she said as we sat down amid the emergency patients. “For me, is better if we go out with some others. Already there are people watching us. They see us talking. They talk. They think, this
cubana
is with this stranger every day. They tell their friends, their friends tell their friends—in the Party. We need to change our color. Perhaps you can find a friend? I bring Rosita, and then we are like a different group.”

“Who? José?”

“Not José. He doesn’t like me.”

“Then who?”

“You have other friends in Havana?”

“Sure, some guys at the embassy, a woman who takes pictures for the
New York Times
, a kid I hang out with in Miramar. No one I can trust.”

“There is no one in your hotel?”

“Maybe one guy; I’ll see what I can swing.” And then, in a flash, I thought:
perfecto!

It
was
perfect; here was a deal where everyone could gain. I never felt entirely sure of Hugo, always felt that even when I took his picture, something was missing. I could catch the face, the glasses, the mild-mannered schoolteacher: but there was still something hidden, which I couldn’t see. I still couldn’t figure out if he was here to make mulattas on the sly, or on some kind of superundercover
gig like his uncle, or whether, as with many of those upper-class Brits, still waters just ran shallow. What you saw was what you got.

But I knew he’d be grateful for company. And I knew he’d be the perfect partner: better than a Cuban, who’d be a walking security risk, way better than an American, who’d have friends behind him in the bushes—or anyone else who had strong opinions about the Revolution. Hugo would fit in like the invisible man.

So the next morning I went down to the Libre, and I found him in the dining room—he always got up at eight, he’d told me, and went promptly for breakfast at eight-thirty—and then I told him to meet me outside the Yara at eight that evening, for a surprise. When I got there, I didn’t know what to think: he’d gotten himself up in this kind of white tropical suit, with a handkerchief in his breast pocket and a striped shirt. Like Humpty Dumpty playing Noël Coward.