The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  As I said, there were reasons for how I behaved, but those reasons were not good reasons. I would like to see you again, my dear Cooper, to rewind back to that moment on the Malecón when you said you loved me and start again from there.

  Muchos abrazos fuertes, mi amor,

  Mariela

  Mi amor? Mi amor! I printed Mariela’s email so I could read, and re-read, and then re-read it some more. “I would like to see you again….”

  I decided to concoct myself a celebratory Esteban mojito, but discovered there was no lime in the fridge to cut the sweetness of the sugar. Who needed lime when life was so sweet? I drank my Havana Club neat. Mi amor.

  ****

  “I won’t kid you,” he said after I’d finished laying out some of the facts. “What you’re talking about is eighty per cent of my business these days. A guy—women too, lots of women, maybe even more women—they travel on their own to some exotic spot for a vacation, adventure, whatever. Usually the Caribbean, but hey, also Asia, eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, all these such-and-so-stans, countries I’ve never heard of, with names I can’t pronounce. So they go to these places, maybe they get too much sun, maybe they drink too much, maybe they’re lonely, whatever. And then they meet some local Casanova, or whatever a lady Casanova is called, and they get romanced and loved like they were never loved or romanced at home, so, naturally, they fall in love and, naturally too, they want to bring their new joy-toy back home with them, get married, have beautiful brown or yellow babies and live happily ever after. Whatever. Nine times out of ten? It ends badly. Bad, fucking-ly bad. Is that the kind of situation you’re talking about, compadre?”

  No…well, yes. Maybe. Was it?

  I’d ended up in the office of Vincent—“call me Vince”—Peterson, Attorney and Immigration Consultant, under what might be described as a slightly misleading artifice. I’d explained to his secretary I was a freelance magazine writer working on a story about a trend I’d noted on the internet. This was partly true. I might one day become a freelance magazine writer, and I had indeed discovered on the internet what seemed to me to be a disturbing trend. North Americans seemed to be falling in love with Cubans to no good end. I even found one web forum called “Cuba, No Amor” filled with shared horror stories about…well, about the impossibility of getting a Cuban government exit visa for your Cuban lover, about the improbability of getting a Canadian government visa for your Cuban lover to come to Canada, about the disillusionments, the betrayals, the recriminations, and inevitably, about the inevitability your relationship will go south after your lover comes north. I didn’t want to believe.

  “There must be some happy endings,” I said to Vince.

  “Sure, there are,” he replied, “But few and fucking far between in my experience. I said nine out of ten ends badly? Make that ninety-nine out of a hundred.”

  “But if I…if someone, say, wanted to marry a Cuban and bring them back to Canada, what would be the process?”

  I had now decided my mistake with Mariela had been in suggesting I’d move to Cuba to be with her when the right answer was the one behind door number three. I would apply to bring her to Canada to live with me. The real reason I had asked to meet with Vince was to figure out how to go about it.

  “How many years do you have, pal? I’m not trying to discourage you…or someone,” he said, arching his eyebrows in my direction as if to indicate he was on to me, “but it’s a very complicated, time-consuming process. And expensive, especially if you want to involve me. She has to convince the Cubans they really don’t want, or need, her around anymore, and then you—someone—has to convince the Canadian government this is a legit fucking relationship, in the best sense of that term, and not just a way for her to get the hell out of Cuba. You have to guarantee the government she isn’t going to end up on the public tit when she gets here. Given what I told you—nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred—you can understand why the government might be a little skeptical your situation is going to end up any different.

  “My advice? What I tell my clients all the time. You’re in love. Fine. Go down there. Be in love. Love. Have sex. Bring a few presents for her family. Play the big man. Three, four months. And then get the fuck out before Big Mamma and all her family and friends get their claws too deep in you. That’s my advice, compadre.”

  Thanks.

  “By the way, what magazine did you say this was for?”

  7

  “Please call me Kim,” Kimberly said as she sat down across from me at the table in the restaurant.

  When she first entered, looked around, I’d called out, “Kimberly!” Although she had no social media profile and no online photos I could find—of course I checked!—I would have recognized her anywhere. Tiny, perfect—in that same blonde Eleanor way. Except that she was pregnant. Six months, she told me after we hugged hello. Is this what Eleanor looked like when she was six months pregnant? I hadn’t seen Eleanor then…or ever after. I stared at Kim as she eased herself into the seat, searching for something of me in her face, her hair, her manner? If there was, I couldn’t see it.

  Should I have said “Call me dad”? I shouldn’t. I didn’t.

  We’d agreed to meet at Jane’s on the Common. “It’s my favourite restaurant,” I said. It was, though I hadn’t been back since that night with Sarah, the night of the “you-deserve-a-break” Cuba ticket, the night my life began to change.

  “You can’t go wrong with their daily special,” I said, trying not to let my mind wander off the track.

  We both ordered the special. Kim asked for a club soda.

  “My doctor says I’m not supposed to drink any alcohol until after the baby is born.”

  I asked for rum. “What kind of rum do you stock?” I wanted to know.

  “Appleton. It’s from Jamaica,” the waitress answered.

  “You should get Havana Club,” I suggested. “From Cuba. It’s very good too.” I was stalling, not sure if I should start, or how to start if I did, or where this might go. “But yes, Appleton will be fine. Thank you.”

  “My mother died three months ago,” Kim said finally. “I didn’t want to tell you that on the phone.

  I didn’t want to hear that, not on the phone, not in person.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m sorry too,” she replied. “I’d really hoped she’d live to see her grandson. It’s a boy, by the way.”

  How could Eleanor be dead when she was still eighteen? I realized, even as I thought such thoughts, these were wrong thoughts for me to be thinking. How could I still obsess about this person I had known only flickeringly briefly in the context of my whole life, and hadn’t seen in the flesh since 1972, when my actual daughter, flesh of my flesh, sat in front of me now, carrying inside her my grandson, a next generation me! Part of me wanted, needed to know everything that had happened in the thirty-six years since my sperm had commingled with Eleanor’s seed in the bathroom of that cottage/mansion in Chester to create this Kim person now sitting, full-grown, pregnant herself, across from me. But another part of me didn’t want to know, couldn’t wrap my mind around the reality I had an actual daughter. Before, the idea of having fathered a child—I had not known Kim had a gender or a name until very recently—had been an abstraction. I did not carry her inside me for nine months, was not there for her birth, or her growing up, or her all grown up. We never had the chance to father-daughter bond, to share experiences, to care about one another. But perhaps that was just another excuse for my lifelong failure to connect, to care, about anyone beyond myself. And yet, here I was, sitting across from my daughter, caring suddenly, deeply about who Kim was, and where she’d come from, and who she’d become. Maybe I didn’t need the ghost of Eleanor past. Or the (im)plausibility of Mariela future.

  “Tell me about you,” I said. She didn’t, not exactly, not at first. Instead, she tol
d me about everyone around her. It turned out they were all dead—Eleanor from cancer (“three months from diagnosis to death”), Charles, the man Kim had called “dad,” from a heart attack two years before that, both sets of grandparents, including George and his wife, from various age-related causes many years before.

  The father of her own child, she said, a tax advisor at the same Toronto firm where she worked in human resources (she’d moved there for university and trained as a psychologist), was “not in the picture.” Like I had not been in her picture? “And I’m an only child,” she added. So there hadn’t been another. “Which means I have no one.” She paused. “Except you.”

  She had only accidentally discovered my existence and my fleeting but significant (seminal) role in her life while helping her mother organize Charles’s papers after he died, and discovered her adoption folder among them.

  “They never told me,” Kim explained. “Mom said they always planned to, but then they kept putting it off and it got harder and harder to bring it up. So they just let me think Dad— Charles—was my father.”

  It wasn’t until after her mother was diagnosed with cancer and Kim’s pregnancy had been confirmed that Kim finally began to press her mother for details. “I wanted to know for me, but I really needed to know for the baby. And that’s when she told me about you.”

  What did she tell you, I wondered?

  As Kim recounted the story, Eleanor’s parents had shipped her off to the west coast, to Portland, Oregon, in August 1972, where she lived with her mother’s sister until after Kim was born.

  “My great-aunt took care of me while my mother went back to school, to community college for a year and then to Portland State. That’s where my mother met my dad. They got married right away. I’m not sure she ever really loved him, but he was a good husband, a great father. He adopted me. I wasn’t even two, so I never knew him as anyone but my dad, and no one told me any different.”

  Never really loved him…. “When you were talking with your mother when she was, you know, in her last months, did she talk at all about me, about what happened?”

  “A little. She told me you were really sweet to her, that you became her best friend in high school, that I was an accident but a lucky one.” She stopped, tried to decide where to go from that. “What can you tell me about Donnie Brandon?”

  “Donnie?” Me trying to decide too. “The three of us,” I said. “We were best friends. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, just before she died, my mother was talking to me about those times, just rambling on, maybe medicated, and she said this Donnie person had been the love of her life, but that he had died.” She stopped. The silence hung between us until I couldn’t bear it.

  “Yes,” I said finally. “He did. A car accident.”

  Eli loves Eleanor. Eleanor loves Donnie…. I need to go to Havana before it’s too late.

  “All right,” she said finally. “Now you know all about me. Tell me about you.”

  The Money Dance

  Havana, 2009

  1

  The man in the tan uniform with the Ministerio del Interior badge on his breast pocket was polite but insistent. “This way, sir. Por favor. Bring your luggage. All of it.” He led the way—as I pushed two suitcases, balancing a cardboard box on the larger one—into a small windowless room away from the luggage carousel.

  Two other men, also in uniform, waited inside the room with a tail-wagging dog that had the colouration of an Irish Springer Spaniel but probably wasn’t.

  The older man nodded toward the dog. “Only routine.”

  “Of course,” I said. What was I supposed to say?

  I had flown into Havana’s José Martí International Airport from Toronto late that night. Because it was no longer tourist season, there had been no direct flights from Halifax to Varadero or one of the other Cuban tourist destinations. It was after midnight when we landed, and the airport was mostly deserted as we stumbled, bleary-eyed, toward Customs. My fellow passengers were different from those I remembered from my first charter-flight holiday. There were a few all-weather tourists, of course, and some others, dressed conspicuously in suits, probably deal-seeking businessmen, but many, perhaps a majority, appeared to be lone older men. Like me. A few women too. Most were well-dressed, tropical-casual. I’d noticed them when we boarded the plane in Toronto, but I became more conscious of what brought them to Havana as we waited in line for our luggage. They were already on their cellphones, connecting with people beyond the airport exits, making arrangements. Too late for me, the Cuban government had made it legal for Cubans to own their own cellphones soon after I bought Mariela’s. Were these men calling their Cuban wives or girlfriends? As their luggage spit out onto the carousel, I noticed the men scooping up oversized hockey bag after antique steamer trunk after awkwardly stuffed cardboard box…booty for their Cuban families? Was I the same cliché?

  I had arrived better prepared than on my first visit. Instead of a duffel, I’d brought my newly acquired, matching, big and not-quite-so-big red soft-sided suitcases, each with four-wheel rollers. The smaller one contained my clothing, much of it the same as on my last trip, but with a newly acquired bathing suit and fresher socks and T-shirts, which left plenty of room for the spillover from the larger suitcase’s collection of gifts for Mariela. There were towels, sheets, toilet paper, soap, vitamins, shampoo and conditioner, toothpaste, makeup, moisturizer, deodorant, even feminine hygiene products, all chosen by Lily, my new NovaCubaCan friend.

  “I know Cuban women,” she said. “Your friend will appreciate these.” Cuban women, maybe, but Mariela? Charity? I would soon find out. Lily had also packed a separate cardboard box of gifts for her husband’s cousin in Central Havana, the one who’d helped find Mariela. “Don’t worry,” she said, “he’ll come to your casa to get it.”

  As the dog sniffed the box’s exterior, I realized with a start I had no idea what Lily had packed inside. The younger officer held up a box cutter and waved it in the direction of the cardboard box.

  “Uh, OK,” I replied. Did I have a choice? He carefully sliced open the box along the tape lines, reached his arms in—he was wearing latex gloves—felt around, removed a few items of clothing, held them up, put them back. He pulled out a couple of vitamin bottles, opened the screw tops, checked carefully to see that the seal had not been broken, replaced them too. After he’d completed his silent search and gave the mutt his doggie reward, the older officer began questioning me. His younger partner now opened my large suitcase and began picking up each item individually. He seemed especially interested in the half dozen bottles of shampoo, handling each one carefully, opening the top, sniffing, closing.

  “So Señor…Cooper….” The older man was holding my passport, my tourist visa. “Your airline ticket says, ‘open return.’ Why is that?”

  “Well, I don’t have a job,” I began, smiling. Neither man seemed to see the humour. “I mean I’m sort of retired, so I don’t have to be back for work on a particular day or anything, so I thought I’d….” Shut up, Eli.

  “This is not your first time in Cuba?”

  “No.” I decided to answer only the questions I was asked, to volunteer nothing until I understood what this was about.

  “When were you last in our country?”

  “February.”

  “Yes. I see that.” He was looking at a piece of paper. “For two weeks. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “You flew into Varadero. You had a reservation at a resort hotel in Jibacoa, but you did not stay there the whole time. Correct?”

  “Correct.” Perhaps I should answer more fulsomely, I thought, get this over with, or at least figure out where all these questions were leading. “I was bored at the resort and decided I wanted to see Havana.”

  “And yet you chose not to go to our capital on an official excursion. Correct?”

 
“Yes. But there weren’t any excursions to Havana during that week.” Stop volunteering.

  “So, tell me, Señor Cooper, how did you get to Havana?”

  Shit. Was this really all about Lío driving me into Havana? No one care…unless they do. And then I in trouble. Big trouble. “A friend drove me.”

  “This friend of yours? Would his name be Virgilio Montes?”

  Silence.

  “Perhaps you knew him as Lío.”

  “Yes, that’s him,” I said reluctantly, feeling like I was being sucked deeper down into a rabbit hole with no exit.

  “You say this Lío is a friend of yours. How long have you two been friends?”

  “Not long then. Actually, we’d just met.”

  “Just met?” the older officer arched his brows. “And yet you say you were friends?”

  “We became friends. After. I asked the bell captain—” Christ! Throw everyone under the bus. “I asked someone at the resort to find me a drive and they—”

  “Do you remember the name of this ‘someone’?”

  “No.”

  “Could that someone have been—” he consulted another piece of paper—“Reynaldo Sánchez?”

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” I really still didn’t remember. Just that his name started with an R.

  The younger officer finally closed the lid on the small suitcase. He nodded a “no” to the older one.

  “Did you buy a mobile telephone for your friend Lío?”

  “No…I mean, yes, but it wasn’t….” Shit. I couldn’t implicate Mariela in this, whatever this was. “Yes, I did,” I said finally, “but as a gift. I hadn’t realized I couldn’t use my credit card in Cuba.” I stopped. “Bloqueo!” I declared with what I hoped was the proper vehemence. “Lío helped arrange for my sister in Canada to send me money. Legally.” I only hoped now that what Lío did had been legal. “So I bought him a phone. It seemed the least I could do. For…his…help.”