Private House (5 page)

“So Murray was older?”

“Yes.”

Hugo shrugged. “I can never figure out gays. It would be like looking into a mirror and seeing a different face looking out at you. But it's okay. It doesn't bother me.”

She was surprised, somehow, by this turn of phrase, “looking into a mirror and seeing a different face”; it was not so ordinary. Perhaps he was remembering it, quoting. She was relieved however; and partly on Murray's behalf. She looked at Hugo again. It was still uncanny—he looked so . . . whatever Almado looked like. Maybe it was his eyes, which certainly could have been Cuban, or Mexican, that was true, for they were dark brown, almost black. She smiled. “You've been very kind. I really should leave you. Your friend will be coming.”

“Okay. Look, I'll try. Don't hold your breath, but you never know.” He grinned—he had very white, even teeth. And then he added, “On that card, it said your name was . . . it was hard to read . . . Lorraine—?”

“I'm sorry. Heavenly days . . . can I say it again?” She laughed, holding out her hand. “Lorraine Stowe. It was wonderful to meet you.”

He took her hand, in a firm, straightforward clasp. “You too.”

She turned—but as she did so, he called her back. “Lorraine?”

She turned around. He was looking at her. And now, all at once, she finally did see that he was not Almado, however much he resembled him. He was someone other: not who she imagined or pictured . . . someone altogether different, someone she didn't know at all. He smiled, and for a second creases formed along the sides of his mouth and he looked much older, as if his youth, not precisely a deception, was now rather worn. But then, as if to reassure her, he passed his hand over his hair and was almost an adolescent once more. “Look, if I find him,” he said, “if I was actually to meet up with him—what can I say? I mean, if he wants to know, is it worth his while? This is money, right?”

“Yes—”

“What he's getting?”

“Yes.”

“But you don't want to say how much?”

Lorraine hesitated, and then she felt her face going pink. “Ten thousand dollars,” she said, and she was going to add, explain, that it was
American
dollars Murray had left him but she'd brought it in Canadian money, twelve thousand, because the Cubans didn't want American money any more. But she stopped herself and did her best to sound casual. “It's not a fortune. . . .”

He nodded understandingly. “No, but you're right. These people have so little.” He shrugged. “Well, we'll see.”

She left him then, heading down the same path she'd come up, but as she angled toward the entrance onto La Rampa, she was looking his way again, and he waved. She waved back. He'd been curious, she thought. About the money. Of course. And what harm could he do, anyway? Nothing would come of it, though the resemblance between them was certainly amazing, and she'd done the right thing, she thought, to speak to him. But then she was in the sunshine, on the busy street. She looked around. And at the end of the block she saw a cab rank, a big one, with yellow coco taxis—which she hadn't dared yet—and plenty of regular ones. They were all parked across from a building with a high curved facade, from the same epoch as Coppelia, a movie house called the Yara, whatever that meant.
Kill Bill
was playing, or “coming soon.” She headed that way. And then, as she came up the corner, she saw a young woman with a swinging ponytail and a backpack crossing the street.
She
was a blond, as blond as Almado ought to have been. She was hurrying as fast as she could, but as she came up to Lorraine she still had time for a smile. She passed quickly, but Lorraine caught the small Canadian flag stitched to the back of her pack. Well, she thought, Hugo certainly wasn't Almado if this
girl
was his idea of a date.

4

The Santa Isabel was a small “boutique” hotel on one corner of the Plaza de Armas. The bar was in a courtyard, too open for espionage and with a tinkling fountain to hide indiscretion. Adamaris led the way, inspecting the room before taking a table, though their only company was a lady tourist in a purple T-shirt proclaiming “Liverpool.” Mathilde was bemused; she was letting herself be led around by the nose: all she had to do was walk away, and that would be the end of it, but it was
precisely because of this that she didn't . . . as if her own power in the situation could only be expressed by indulging the other.

As they sat, Adamaris produced cigarettes and lit one with slow, precise gestures, and then turned her head to one side and exhaled a neatly shaped stream of smoke. It was rather hypnotic. Mathilde found herself remembering the first book she'd ever tried to read in the original English,
Nine Stories
, by J. D. Salinger: people had smoked cigarettes like this in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé with Love and Squalor.” And in Françoise Sagan, she thought,
Bonjour Tristesse
. People said she looked rather like Françoise Sagan. . . . As the smoke dissipated, Adamaris said, “I would like a trayash.”

Mathilde noted the assumption that anything required would be supplied by her; but she didn't understand. “What do you mean?”

“For my cigarette.”

“Ah. An ashtray. Un cendrier, as we say in French.”

“I was saying it backwards?”

Adamaris noted her
gaffe
with a shrug, and when Mathilde fetched an ashtray from another table, delicately rolled a shred of ash from the tip of her cigarette and continued on. “This hotel, the Santa Isabel . . . you understand, all these hotels in Habana Vieja are owned by Habaguanex, a government company? Well, this was the first, and I think it is still one of the best though, of course, I have never stayed here. You are staying . . . ?”

“At the Raquel.”

“That is very new. Art deco. It is very beautiful, don't you think? The Raquel is in the Jewish tradition. This is Spanish. Each hotel has a different tradition.”

“The parts of the old city they've restored are very well done.”

Adamaris exhaled delicately from the corner of her full, soft mouth. “That is very true. They do a very good job. As fast as they
are going, the old city will be restored in one hundred years. Since they do little to maintain them, the first buildings will be falling down at that time, so they will be starting all over.”

No one had been tending the bar when they came in; now a man appeared. When he approached their table—since there was no doubt as to who would be paying—Mathilde looked expectantly at Adamaris. She glanced up at the waiter with disdain—he was
there
, she was
here
. She said, “I would like a . . . Coca-Cola,” the name pronounced so precisely, so plummily, that it took on a quality of reverence and Mathilde could see the trademark, ®, hanging above it. She was left with a stomach for nothing more than soda water.

“You don't like the regime,” she said.

“I love Cuba. I say nothing about the regime. Not to someone like you.”

“Like me?”

“You have ‘journalist' in your passport? On your visa?”

“If you like.”

“You think they don't watch you?”

“I haven't noticed.”

“Don't worry. But it means I have to be careful. They would do nothing to you, you are French. But I can't go anywhere, or speak to anyone they don't want. I am here all the time. I am the one who will suffer.”

Her tone had altered—was this the note of truth? She went on, “I know I made a mistake telling you my name. You must not take my picture.”

“No one will hear your name from me.”

“Good.”

Now, pursing her lips, Adamaris sipped her Coca-Cola, slipping the straw into the perfect little roundness formed precisely in the
middle of her mouth. She frowned. She was absorbed. On her face was an expression of pure devotion—wasn't that it? And yet, thinking this, Mathilde wondered if she had a right to feel so superior; there was such
need
in the face of Adamaris. What did she need? Everything, probably. The dark sweet stream moving up the straw was only a pitiful substitute. When she finished, she picked up her cigarette; yes, it replaced the straw. She exhaled. “You understand, it is difficult to talk about the regime. Such difficult conversations are only possible. . . .”

Mathilde nodded. There was no doubt now: Adamaris had won. She would give her money. Resistance was only a formality: “If I give you a little money, what will you do with it?”

She shrugged, then adjusted the strap of her top; she was so thin, it wanted to slip down her shoulder. “I would like to save a little. I would like a watch.” She extended her wrist, to show it was bare. “You see, I don't have one. It is hard, making appointments.”

Mathilde knew, at once, that here was an invitation; and yet she likely owned one—it would only be sold back to the store.

“Do you want to travel?”

She threw back her head, with a smile, and expelled a stream of smoke straight up in the air. “Of course. Yes. I would like to travel. But you know how expensive that is? I don't mean Paris, or New York—that is impossible. The whole world, and we are trapped here. I would be happy just to see Santiago.” She butted her cigarette. “I will tell you, what I want is to have a real job and to do it without interference. I want an ordinary life, that's all. With the money you give me, I will buy cleaning products for my apartment. Many things are impossible to buy unless you have convertible pesos.”

“Everyone here is so clean,” said Mathilde. “The children look scrubbed. Their clothes. All the washing hanging out. Everyone.”

Adamaris drew on her cigarette. “It is our greatest protest. Despite everything, we are still human beings. We are decent, despite them.” She exhaled another smooth stream of smoke.

“Where is your apartment?”

“Centro. If you don't mind, why do you need my address? I have no phone. I cannot afford one, and even if I could . . . There is one in the house, but people only speak Spanish.”

“You are very suspicious. You will not even trust me with the number?”

She hesitated; then she shrugged, and took a scrap of paper from her bag. She wrote down the number and pushed it over the table. Then she said, “You ask me about the regime. I will tell you. Cuba is one hundred percent Fidelista—you understand?—but zero percent Communista. And now that Fidel is so old . . .”

Mathilde nodded. She thought, I can quote that. I will get something for my money. “All right,” she said.

“If you want, you can rent a car. We can drive around. I will show you Havana. And you will see, driving, that you will come to . . . traffic circles? Where you go around?”

“Yes.”

“They can be difficult. They have accidents. So at many of them you will see big signs, posters, for safety. They are all the same. They have a big picture of Fidel and they all say
Vamos bien
! which means ‘Go safely,' ‘Go well.' You know what every Cuban thinks who drives by, every time they see that?”

“What do they think?”

“ Why don't you?”

Mathilde smiled. She sipped her own drink. And then she said, “How much do you want me to give you for this?”

“You will decide. One hundred convertible pesos.”

“That is a lot of money.”

“Not for you.”

That was true, thought Mathilde. So why did she resist? Because it had all been arranged. Because Adamaris had seen her across the Plaza and thought . . .

“I don't have that much with me, anything like it. We will have to go back to the hotel.”

They walked through the hot, dusty, broken streets in silence. At the corner of Cuba Street, all around the red water tank—drinking water was trucked here, then carried home in buckets—children were playing in a vast muddy puddle. Women were lining up at the government store, with their ration books. In the little market, three stalls displayed a few fruits and vegetables, onions, yucca, watermelon in slices. The hotel lobby was dark and cool, a different world altogether, the art deco columns rising toward the elaborate ceiling, with the stained glass dome in the roof high above. Adamaris stopped by a couch. “I will have to wait here. They don't let Cubans into the rooms.”

Mathilde knew this, although the eyes of the three uniformed men in the lobby, the
protección
, were always discreet. It was another humiliation for the Cubans: in their own city, doors were barred to them, in a kind of apartheid. She went up in the elevator. She had an “inside” room, with no windows, but it was dark and cool and always quiet. She switched on the lights. She was alone: it was a shock—she realized now how strong a personality Adamaris really was. How much to give her? Fifty was surely enough—she could live on it a month. Two. And she had that much in her wallet, she wouldn't have to open the room safe.

Deciding to go, she turned around, to switch off the light—but was struck by a sharp pain in her abdomen. What was that? Not her
stomach. It came again and she closed her eyes. Her uterus . . . something there. Not her stomach . . . She waited by the door. It passed off, and she went down the stairs, sliding her hand down the curving marble rail.

Adamaris was sitting on the sofa, primly, upright, on the edge; and Mathilde now recalled what she'd thought watching the
quinces
girls, her sense during these past days that Cuban women belonged to some category of sex to which her own admission was not automatic. Did the pain she'd just felt confirm this or deny it? Was Adamaris the same as herself in those regions or not? It was a question, too, that seemed to be raised by the expression on her face, or rather the lack of it. The great dark eyes were still, the mouth perfectly composed. It was as if the passing of the money was inevitable, the result of some natural law about which neither of them had a right to a feeling—as if they, the two women, were merely the ether through which the lightning flashed or the fluid displaced by the body. No feeling, no expression—no trace of will or desire: although, surely, it was this point that Adamaris had willed and desired most strongly. And of course there wasn't a hint of thanks . . . and then the money had disappeared inside her little bag.