The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  I am writing today to apologize if I led you to believe we could be anything other than friends. But I do hope we can be friends.

  If you ever return to Cuba, dear Cooper, it would be my privilege to be your guide.

  Your friend,

  Mariela

  I knew Mariela didn’t intend it that way, but I read her email as encouragement. She had written to me!

  ****

  “I’m sorry. I really am.” She was the still-late, still-apologizing Wendy Wagner. Dressed today in a neat, business-like black pantsuit with a gold top, she looked her new role. And sounded it too.

  “We just got a whole bunch of FOI/POP responses this morning and I needed to make sure someone was following up on a couple of them.”

  The Wendy Wagner I remembered wouldn’t have known a freedom of information protection of privacy act request from her discarded nose ring. The new Wendy was assigning reporters to do what she herself wouldn’t have been able to accomplish six months ago.

  “Most of what we got back is blacked out or total crap,” she confided, “but there’s some stuff about a contract for a new school in the minister’s riding that looks, like, really juicy.”

  The waitress had returned. She seemed to know Wendy. “The sashimi sampler and Perrier, right?” she said.

  “Right,” Wendy replied. Now I knew where the puppy fat had gone.

  “And for the gentleman?” Was our waitress thinking the father?

  “I’ll have the Bento 2,” I said, ordering a lunch special that would do nothing to dissipate my own old-dog fat. “Oh, and another Sapporo.” I’d already finished most of a first waiting for Wendy to arrive. What the fuck? Wendy—aka Morning Hi—was paying and I had nothing to do this afternoon that required sobriety.

  Wendy prattled on about her job, and the paper, and the surveys that showed how well its new format was working. “Our readers like it short and sweet,” she allowed, “with lots of pictures…. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do real journalism too. We do.” I still had doubts, though I kept them to myself. “What I really miss is having all you guys—you, Liv, Peggy—to show me the ropes. I learned so much from all of you in such a short time. I really loved you guys, especially you.”

  If I remembered correctly, this sounded like the beginning of the conversation that had ended with sex in the bathroom. Wendy seemed oblivious. Did she even remember that? Part of me hoped she did, most of me prayed she didn’t.

  “And, now,” she continued, “I’m like the most experienced person in the whole newsroom. Crazy? Right?”

  Right.

  “That’s one reason I wanted to talk to you. The publisher says we’re doing so well he’s authorized me to hire a columnist. Our first. Freelance, of course. I talked to Liv and Peggy, and they both suggested you.” Had she offered them the gig first and only thought of me after they’d turned her down?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never written a column.”

  “Liv says you have all sorts of great opinions, like, just waiting to write.” She did? Did I? “What do you think? Do you want to give it a try? I can’t pay much, just a hundred a column to start.” One hundred dollars a column! “I can see that look on your face. I know, I know. It isn’t much, but we don’t have all that much room for copy either. You’d only have to write, like, three hundred words.” Three hundred words! “But—”

  “What about copy-editing?” I offered. As much as I’d admired the new paper’s energy and feistiness, its pages were rife with Wendy-like typos, grammatical errors, missing facts, missed connections. That I could help with. “I could maybe come in and do some copy-editing for you.”

  “Oh, we don’t do any editing in Halifax,” she replied breezily. “We send everything to Toronto and they, like, do all that stuff there.” Using real people or algorithms, I wanted to ask her, but didn’t. “I wish we did. I’d love to have you in the office.”

  “Listen, Wendy, you know, I just wanted to say I’m really sorry about….” What was I sorry about, and how could I say that now?

  “Never be sorry,” she said. “Life happens. And life goes on. We’re OK.” She paused, looked straight into my eyes for just an instant, and then breezily returned to the subject at hand. “So will you think about it? The column, I mean.”

  “I will.” I wouldn’t.

  The food arrived. We ate. Wendy finished. I had ordered too much.

  “Can you pack this?” I asked the waitress, thinking it might save me the trouble of cooking dinner, wondering if Wendy would see it as a sign of my penny-pinching or poverty, or both.

  “You went to Cuba last winter, right?” Wendy said, making conversation while we waited for the bill.

  “I did.”

  “I thought somebody told me that at Peggy’s party. Anyway, my boyfriend and I are thinking of going this winter.” Boyfriend? Wendy had a boyfriend? “Did you have a good time?”

  Did I have a good time? What did “good” even mean in that context? But that wasn’t what Wendy was asking. “I had a great time,” I answered. “I highly recommend it, especially Havana.”

  “Good to know. But did you hear the news this morning?”

  “What news?”

  “About the big hurricane. Bigger than Katrina. I just read it on the wire. They say it’s going to kick the shit out of Havana.”

  ****

  It began very badly, and then it got much worse. The shit-kicker hurricane Wendy had referred to was Gustav, already the third named storm in what those who were paid to know about such things were gleefully predicting would be an especially destructive 2008 hurricane season.

  Gustav—birthed as a nondescript tropical depression in the warm waters southeast of Haiti—had suddenly, inexplicably morphed into a full-blown, raging hurricane, and set off on a swirling, whirling rampage targeting Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and Cuba. Since Gustav’s final destination appeared to be New Orleans and since it might make landfall exactly three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city, its trajectory became worthy of breathless American cable news coverage. As an editor, I understood the journalistic joy of anniversaries combined with serendipitous coincidences, and I appreciated CNN providing round-the-clock coverage for its American viewers. But I was now an ex-editor and all I really wanted and needed to know was what the fuck was actually happening in Havana.

  I had been trying for three days to get through to Mariela. No one answered her cellphone. I called the landline number I had for Esteban and Silvia’s casa, but all the phones seemed to be dead. Emails disappeared into the void.

  “Meanwhile…”—it was the CNN announcer again with his “aside” voice after reporting on the latest news from New Orleans—“people in the Caribbean are cleaning up from the mess Gustav left. The State Department estimates half-a-million people have been affected by the storm in communist Cuba, including in the capital of Havana where waves crashed over the Malecón and flooded already crumbling seaside neighbourhoods.”

  The screen showed images from mid-storm as huge waves washed over the seawall. Images from the aftermath followed as rescuers in rubber dinghies navigated Central Havana’s narrow streets. I was certain I saw a shot of the street where Mariela and David lived. Or did I just imagine that? The streets all looked the same.

  “We’ll be right back,” the announcer said, “with more on the latest from New Orleans.”

  Within days of Gustav’s dissipation and before anyone could recover, Hurricane Hanna stormed by, delivering Cuba another glancing blow in its wake. Its mere existence left me paralyzed, transfixed in front of my television awaiting the Next Big One. Which turned out to be Ike. As Hurricane Ike barrelled toward Cuba, news reports said 2.6 million Cubans had already abandoned their homes to seek shelter from the storm. That represented almost one-quarter of the country’s popu
lation! Where could they have gone? Was Mariela among them? She must have been.

  By the time this storm passed over, thirty thousand Cuban homes had been destroyed across the island, another two hundred thousand damaged. In Havana, sixty-seven buildings—four in a single block in the old city—had collapsed. While CNN showed close-up images of rubble it said came from collapsed Havana infrastructure, the announcer gloated. “The Castro regime likes to brag no one in Cuba dies in hurricanes. That may technically be true, but the communists are far less willing to talk about what happens afterward. Like much of Havana, this apartment building in downtown Havana”—on the screen, a fleeting image from mid-storm of what could have been Mariela’s and David’s home—“was in sad shape structurally even before Ike. After the storm passed, some residents tried to return to their home here. But the building collapsed with them inside. A man and a woman are believed dead.”

  Fuck!

  4

  “So if we’re all here, compañeros, I think we should get started,” Jack began, scanning the earnest faces of the dozen or so folks squeezed tonight into his small dingy living room, sitting on his saggy couch and mismatched living-room chairs, or perched on the hard-backed, garage-sale wooden chairs he’d imported from the kitchen for the occasion. One young man—one of the few among us who might be described that way— sat cross-legged on the floor.

  “We’ve got a long agenda and lots of urgent items tonight, especially about hurricane relief,” Jack said. “But before we get to that, I want to welcome our newest member. I know some of you met Eli Cooper at the fundraiser on Wednesday.” Nods and greetings. “Eli and I go way back. The old Dal Gazette days, right Eli?” Right, I nodded. “Back when revolution was still cool, back before Eli sold out to the Media Man.” He laughed his familiar room-filler laugh. I smiled weakly. No one else paid attention. “Just kidding, Eli,” Jack jumped into the silence he’d created. “Anyway, the good news is that Eli has finally discovered the power and beauty of that wonderful little island we’ve all known about forever, and he has decided to join our little cell. Welcome compañero.”

  I am not usually—you may have assumed this already—a joiner, even of groups that might welcome me. But here I was, joined, welcomed. I dimly remembered Jack from university. He was one of a small group of political hangers-on who attended Gazette staff meetings but never seemed to write a word. Even so, he championed others who proposed stories interpreting Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for the peasant masses among our readership of party-hearty college students, and loudly criticized what he called “rightist tendencies” in stories lesser revolutionaries had written about issues that actually had something to do with what was happening on campus. I lost touch with him after I joined the Tribune, though I recalled hearing from someone he’d become a welder because he refused to put his university education “to the service of the Man.” He also occasionally published pamphlets attacking multinational corporations and local business owners about topics which the Trib’s lawyers inevitably deemed too libellous for us.

  Jack’s interest in Cuba was longstanding. During the seventies, he told me, he’d travelled by tramp steamer to Cuba to be part of a brigade harvesting sugar cane, and he still flew back to the island at least once or twice a year for conferences and to support the Revolution. He was now the president of NovaCubaCan, a small pro-Cuba group, mostly, it seemed to me, because no one else wanted the job. NovaCubaCan had sponsored last week’s “Cuba Hurricanes Relief Fundraiser,” which Jack had organized, and I had attended.

  He had begun those proceedings by reading a letter from a national Cuba solidarity organization of which NovaCubaCan was obviously a branch plant.

  “Cuba has been assaulted in quick succession by three powerful hurricanes,” he began as if the storms themselves had been part of a planned attack against the island. “That Cuba should be a victim of the increased frequency of such ‘natural disasters’ is both unnatural and a striking injustice,” the letter continued. “Under the inspired leadership of Raúl and of their workers’ and farmers’ government, Cuba is the country least to be blamed for the deteriorating climatic conditions that fuel hurricanes.”

  Ah, yes, climate change as an imperialist weapon of mass destruction. I wished I hadn’t sat so far from the exit.

  “As usual,” the letter continued, slowly circling its point, “Canada’s government is providing no aid to Cuba in this time of crisis. And the Canadian media, which has reported extensively on hurricane damage in Louisiana, has been all but silent on the devastation in Cuba. In the face of this inaction and silence, it is imperative for those of us who are supporters of the Cuban Revolution to show our solidarity.”

  Jack paused, looked around the room. “Viva!” he shouted. “Viva Fidel! Viva Cuba!”

  “Viva!” a few voices shouted back, while the rest of us mumbled something incoherent, approximating viva.

  Was I a supporter of the Cuban Revolution? Mostly, I was desperate to find out if Mariela was all right. I’d attended the fundraiser after seeing a notice about it in The Coast. I contributed two twenties when they passed around the baseball cap. “For Mariela,” I said to myself as I tossed the bills into the collection of mostly fives and tens.

  During the milling and socializing after the official fundraiser, I’d met a Cuban Canadian couple named Lily and Umberto. Umberto, dark, young, and virile, was dressed for the seasonably cool fall night in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Lily, a doughy, middle-aged university librarian, was wearing a full, almost floor-length peasant skirt over fire-engine red sneakers. Her husband, Lily told me, had lots of relatives in central Havana. “If they don’t know your friend,” she assured me, “they will know people who will.”

  Umberto looked doubtful.

  “I try,” he said.

  He was calling his cousin later in the week. He would ask him to check on Mariela.

  Which was the real reason I’d decided to attend NovaCubaCan’s regular monthly meeting tonight. To find out what Umberto had found out. Unfortunately, Lily and Umberto arrived late, so I’d had to wait while Jack waded his way—democratically, slowly, painfully—through all the interminable urgent items on his agenda. It began with a report on the “tremendous success” of an ongoing letter-writing campaign in support of the Cuban Five, Cuban intelligence agents in prison in the United States. There was a lengthy discussion about arranging a visit to the city by the Cuban ambassador to raise public consciousness about the need for donations to rebuild after the devastation and a decision, reached after what seemed an endless debate, not to send the pitifully small one-hundred-and-forty-three dollars raised during the fundraiser to the national organization immediately, but to wait instead until we could assemble a “more respectable sum reflecting our commitment to the cause.”

  “So, thank you again, compañeros, for your continuing support for the Cuban Revolution, for the Cuban people,” Jack summarized. Finally, we were coming to the end. Somehow—mostly because Lily had agreed to chair it—I’d volunteered to serve on a committee organizing the collection of supplies to send to Cuba.

  “Hasta la Victoria…. Viva!” Jack called out like a high school cheerleader. “Viva Fidel! Viva Cuba!”

  “Viva,” people replied in distinctly lower-case voices as they scrambled for the door.

  Lily found me. “Great news,” she said. “Umberto’s cousin knows someone who knows your Mariela. She is OK, she is fine. She told him to tell you she has your number and she will call you tomorrow night.”

  5

  There was still only one phone in the house, the black rotary dial number on the little table outside my parents’ bedroom. The next evening, sometime before seven o’clock, I pulled out the small, uncomfortable bench seat from under the table and sat down in front of the phone. I stared at it, willing it to ring, dreading what I might hear when it did. I fretted, rehearsed, discarded, revised, and then rehearsed anew what I
would say to Mariela when it rang. If it rang….

  Three hours later, the phone did ring. I waited, took a deep breath, picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to calm the quaver in my voice, the quiver in my soul.

  “Hello.” A woman’s voice. But not Mariela’s.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Elijah Cooper?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Cooper, my name is Kimberly Sanderson….” She paused, hopeful, as if that might mean something to me. It didn’t.

  “Yes?”

  “My mother’s maiden name was Pattison…Eleanor Pattison.”

  Silence. More silence.

  “Do you know who I mean, Mr. Cooper?”

  I tried to find my breath, which had seemed to have been sucked from my lungs.

  “I do,” I gasped.

  “I’m her daughter,” she said, “and I believe you’re my father.”

  I tried to think of the right words to say. I couldn’t. A long pause.

  “How’s Eleanor?” I asked.

  I know that was not the right—certainly not the appropriate—first question to ask the daughter I didn’t know I had, but it was the question that had been bubbling at the tip-top of my simple, single-tracked mind for thirty-six years. There was a time when I knew not only the number of years I’d been waiting to ask it, but also the months, days, hours, minutes. Time does not heal. A love wound may eventually scab over and the scab fall off, but the wound memory remains—and it remains real.

  Eleanor Pattison was my girlfriend. My first. My only. When we met in Grade 11, she was my best friend Donnie Brandon’s girlfriend. I was not jealous. Eleanor was so far out of my league as to be beyond my galaxy. She was a high school cheerleader—beautiful in that blonde way that was popular back then, probably still is—petite, perfectly proportioned with tousled, down-to-her-breasts hair—and therefore the perfect arm-candy complement to Donnie’s football star quarterback