The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  “Are you sure you didn’t buy the phone as a gift for….” I had begun to realize the man only paused to look down at his papers for effect. He knew exactly what was written there. “Ah, yes, here it is…Mariela Pérez. Is she also your friend?”

  “Uh, yes, she is. A friend.” What did he mean? What did he know? “It was for both of them really.”

  “For both of—”

  “Virgilio Montes?” It was the younger officer, impatient now. Was he the one actually in charge? “Did Señor Montes ask you to bring anything into Cuba in your luggage for him on this trip?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone ask you to bring anything into Cuba for them?”

  “No. I mean….” Did he mean all the supplies I was carrying? “No one asked me. These are just gifts. After the hurricanes, I thought—”

  “That is all, Señor Cooper.” The younger officer looked dismissively at the older one, as if to say we have learned everything of importance we need to know. It is time to put an end to this. “You are free to go,” he said. “Please,” he added, “enjoy your visit to our wonderful country.”

  And then they disappeared back out the door, leaving me alone with my luggage and Lily’s no-longer-sealed cardboard carton, as well as the uncomfortable feeling that for some unknown reason my life had become an open book in Cuba.

  ****

  Lío had been arrested. He was in Villa Marista, a Havana jail run by the Ministry of the Interior.

  “Bad, very bad,” Esteban whispered to me as he hauled my luggage from the taxi up the three flights to the casa. “Not his fault.”

  Since there were other guests—two British couples—already enjoying Esteban’s mojitos in the kitchen, he escorted me back into his and Silvia’s private quarters. I’d never been there before. It was clear the renovations had stopped with the guest area.

  Over rum and cold cuts, Silvia unfolded the story. One of Lío’s occasional customers, a Mexican businessman who travelled to Havana frequently, had asked Lío to deliver a package to an address in Miramar. It wasn’t an unusual request, and Lío thought nothing of it. He dropped off the package that same day. The man at the door thanked him and handed him a ten CUC tip on top of the twenty the Mexican had already paid him.

  “Lío leaves, go back to his car,” Esteban said, returning from another round of guest drink–making, and picking up the story. “And….” He threw his hands up in the air. “Arrested. Like that. Other man too.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Policía say package contain…boom…bomba!”

  “Not a bomb,” Silvia clarified, “but pieces to make bomb. Lío says the officers told him there was C3—plastic explosive?—in the shampoo bottles.”

  So that was why.

  “Lío no know,” Esteban insisted. “Just package is all. No know.”

  “Who? Why?” I asked. None of this made any sense to me. Except I now understood the sudden interest in me and my luggage at the airport.

  “Miami,” Silvia said simply, as if that explained everything. “They want to destroy the Revolution.”

  “What about Lío?” I asked, wanting to get back to the issue at hand. “What will happen to him?”

  “I think they will let him go,” Silvia replied. “I hope. Lío is a good man, a good communist.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. I wanted desperately to change the subject to the one that had really brought me back to Havana. “Mariela?” I said finally.

  Silvia smiled, happy too to move on. “She’s waiting for you. At Lío’s. She and David live there now. Until Lío gets out.”

  2

  The taxi driver waited outside Lío’s darkened house while I knocked on the door. It was the middle of the night in Havana. There were no streetlights, no lights in any of the homes along the street, no illumination, in fact, in any of the neighbourhoods we’d driven through to get here.

  “I wait,” the driver said. “Make sure someone answer.”

  Ah, yes, I thought. I was back in Cuba, back where people looked out for one another. And then I thought of Lío.

  Mariela answered on the first knock. She’d been sitting, waiting in the dark for me. She wore a short shift dress that might have been a nightgown, and bare feet, but she also sported lipstick. For me?

  “My darling Cooper,” she greeted me, wrapping her arms around my neck. “It is so good to see you again.” I inhaled her perfume, kissed her neck, then my lips worked their way up to her cheeks, her lips. In the distance, I could hear the taxi slowly drive away, its engine labouring from too many years of service to the Revolution.

  “No electricity…again…always…” she said to explain the lack of lights anywhere. She shrugged, pulled away from my embrace. “Come.” She took my hand, led me through the living room, past the kitchen with its gleam-in-the-dark stainless-steel appliances, and out into the small backyard where candles burned in Lío’s barbecue pit. We sat on lawn chairs, she pulled hers closer to mine.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said. I meant it. Did she? “Are you OK? I mean the hurricane, Lío, everything that’s happened.”

  “I’m good. Better now that you’re here.”

  We were not even touching, and I could already feel myself grow hard, my mind grow soft. Was love sex, and sex love, or was that just men, or perhaps just me? Mariela told me about the hurricanes. Like everyone else in her Havana neighbourhood, she and David had been evacuated to a shelter away from danger. Not once, but twice. “The first time was not so bad but when we came home the second time, even the staircase to the second floor was gone, washed away. There was still water everywhere. We slept for a few nights outside in the park, Coppelia, where we had that ice cream”—I remembered—“and then, because of the hurricane, there were some cancellations at Silvia’s casa, so she let us stay there for a few nights,” Mariela continued. “Uncle Lío had already been arrested by then, but no one knew what was going on until Esteban was allowed to see him, and Uncle Lío told him to tell us we could live in his house until he gets released.”

  “When will that be?”

  “No one knows, but soon, we think, we hope. Radio Bemba says.”

  “Radio Bemba?”

  “Gossip. That’s what we call it. It’s how we find out what’s really going on. They say the investigators already know Uncle Lío didn’t know what was in the package, but they need him to testify against the Mexican and the other one—the Cuban in the pay of the Americans, the one he brought the package to—so they’ll keep him in jail until after the trial.”

  “Is he OK?”

  “Uncle Lío?” She smiled. “He’s always OK. He’s probably selling the guards cheap construction materials to fix up their apartments.” She yawned then. With meaning. “I have some clients early tomorrow morning. Some Spaniards I met at the hotel.” I looked at her. She smiled again. “If Lío can do it, why not me?… So, we should go to bed.”

  There was no discussion, no negotiating dance. She led me upstairs and into what must have been Lío’s bedroom. Even in the dark, I could make out the fussy, over-decorated Mediterranean dressers, the oval king-sized bed, the mirrored tiles looking down from the ceiling. Lío’s style, I thought.

  “David?” I asked. Were we alone?

  “With his Italian,” she replied. “He came back to Cuba for a visit last week and I haven’t seen David since.”

  She pulled the dress up over her head, dropped it to the floor. My eyes adjusted to the lack of light very well.

  “Better than on the Malecón?” she asked. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She stepped out of her panties. I had never seen her naked before.

  “Much better,” I said. “Much better.”

  Mariela undressed me. This was so much different, so much better than that first night—I suddenly remembered the condom.
I was not eighteen this time. No excuses. I’d bought a box, plain, no colours, no ridges, no ostentation, at a drug store in Halifax before I left and stuffed it into my shaving kit. For whatever reason, the inspectors had not inspected that. Before leaving Silvia’s tonight, I removed one packet from the box and placed it in my wallet. Just in hope. And hope seemed about to be rewarded. But as I fumbled for the wallet in my back pocket, I felt my pants fall to my ankles.

  “Condom,” I said, pointing down vaguely.

  Mariela giggled. “On the night table. I am prepared.”

  I laughed. “Me too. In my pants pocket. Ready also!”

  She turned serious. “We will use yours. Mine are Cuban condoms. Made in China. The government gives them out, but they are not very good. They irritate, and sometimes they break.”

  “Canadian it will be then,” I said. “Just like me.”

  The sex was, unsurprisingly, much better this time. Gentle at first, probing, exploring, circling, hands darting here and there, speeding up, backing off, then speeding up again, becoming more intense with each pass, more urgent, sweat mingling skin on skin, lips pressed against lips, against teeth, tongues inside mouths, the mind wanting the moment never to end, the body with a mind of its own. When it ended—finally, and too soon at the same moment—I was spent, physically, emotionally, mentally.

  We laid on our backs for a while, let our breaths settle back to their normal rhythms, our sweat cool the heat inside our bodies. We stared up at ourselves in Lío’s mirror, laughed at the incongruity of it all, me—for a change—not even cataloguing my own many imperfections.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said finally. I had. About Vince, the immigration specialist. About nine out of ten, ninety-nine out a hundred. About being that one in a million who finds true love in this unlikely place, in this unexpected way. Why not me? I thought about Eleanor too. Eleanor, loving the Donnie she could never have at the same time I was loving the Eleanor I had never found. And now she was dead. I thought about all those missed opportunities, all those wasted years. And for what?

  I hired Vince—“Five hundred bucks, friends and family price, for your ‘friend’”— to help me navigate the process before the process, which entailed gathering my birth certificate, preparing my legal proof of un-marital status, my Canadian certification of non-impediment to marriage abroad, getting all those official documents translated into official Spanish, then having them notarized by the Cuban consulate in Montreal. Just in case. Just in case I worked up the courage to actually ask Mariela to marry me. Just in case she said yes.

  Vince had thrown down warning flags. “If she says yes—and why would anyone say no to you?—the real fun begins. Getting her out of the country. But let’s fall off that particular crazy, swaying suspension bridge when we get to it, OK?”

  OK.

  I had not told anyone of my plan. Who was there to tell? Certainly not Sarah. If Mariela said yes, of course, I would have to tell my sister about her new sister-in-law. But until then, I had no desire to venture out on to that bridge only to have it come tumbling down.

  “I’m not someone who falls in love easily, or often,” I began now, circling, still looking up at the mirror instead of over at Mariela, trying, and failing, to read the expression on her face at this distance. “So this is very hard for me.”

  It was. I had been rehearsing this conversation, at home in Halifax, in my head, for weeks, ever since Mariela’s email, probably since long before that. Since when? When did I fall in love with Mariela? Not that first day in the car with Lío on the drive from Jibacoa to Havana. I couldn’t even have imagined falling in love then. Perhaps it happened that night on the roof bar at the Ambos Mundos? Mariela had seemed smart, funny, beautiful, too young, beyond my hopes or expectations, and therefore someone I could love because she wouldn’t have to love me back, and nothing would happen, and life could go on without interruption. My kind of love. Or maybe I realized I was in love that day outside the US Interests Section when I’d first sensed that other Mariela, the one who was pained, vulnerable, needing someone. Me? No, not me. Not then. I only wished. Or could my I-have-officially-fallen-in-love moment have occurred the morning before our day at the beach when I mistakenly connected the romance dots between Mariela and David, and realized I was jealous. How could I be jealous if I didn’t care?

  Forget the when for the moment. Why? Why did I fall in love? Why now? Why here? Why with Mariela? What the fuck is love, and what’s love got to do with anything anyway? I only knew enough now to know I knew nothing—and I didn’t care. Perhaps that was love.

  “That night when we were at Bruno’s, before the Malecón, before….” Before we did what we did, I didn’t say. “I probably shouldn’t have told you I was falling in love with you. I didn’t mean to scare you. But it wasn’t just the rum talking. I was. I am. I can’t explain where it comes from or why, and I know it’s crazy, and I know you’ll think I’m crazy—” Stop babbling, I told myself, this wasn’t the way the speech had unfolded in your head—“but I do know I want to marry you.” There. I’d said it.

  Mariela edged closer to me, wrapped her left leg over my body, turned her face in my direction. I kept staring up at the ceiling.

  “It doesn’t matter to me where we live,” I told the mirror. “Havana? Halifax? Maybe we can go back and forth. Winters here, summers in Canada. I’ve already got the forms we need to start the process. We can—”

  She reached out, wrapped her fingers around my jaw, turned my face to hers. “Yes,” she said simply. “Yes.” And kissed me. I could feel the wet of her tears.

  We made love again, a second act I would not have believed myself still physically capable of performing until I did. We used her Cuban condom this time since I’d only brought one with me. This time, when it was over, we stayed wrapped in each other, me still inside her for as long as possible, not wanting to break that bond.

  “Let’s call this our ‘Special Period,’” she whispered finally, drowsy, her hot breath in my ear.

  “I thought that was a bad time here, the Special Period,” I said.

  “It was,” she answered, “Fidel’s Special Period. But I still like the sound of those words inside my head. The phrase seems magical. The ‘Special Period,’” she said again, almost whimsically. “That time when you’re first in love, and there is nothing but love. Do you know what I mean?”

  I did. She meant that Special Period before….

  Before what?

  3

  The next morning, Mariela made us café con leche. “I’m sorry there’s no food in the house,” she apologized, opening and closing Lío’s massive stainless-steel fridge to confirm the fact. “I usually just buy bread on my way downtown.”

  What had really happened last night? Mariela, who’d basically refused to even look at me when I tried to get close to her the day I left Havana in February, and who had not responded to almost any of my six months’ worth of phone calls and emails and messages since, had greeted me last night as “my darling Cooper.” As her long lost. We’d had sex, the best sex I could remember. Was it? What about Eleanor? How soon you forget. I thought about Vince.

  “Don’t ever let them get too close, my friend, or they’ll take you for more than you’re worth.”

  I thought about Sarah, who would say “I told you so” when it all went to shit.

  “You’re very quiet this morning,” Mariela said, sliding up beside me, offering a cheek to kiss. “Are you OK?”

  “Oh, yes. I am…OK.” I kissed her cheek. “Just thinking. About how wonderful last night was.”

  She smiled. “Me too,” she said. Did she mean that? Or were we in When-Harry-Met-Sally territory? Fake orgasms? Fake love? Why was I allowing myself to wander into that messy morass?

  She gave my arm a squeeze. “I’ve been thinking too. About the wedding. Silvia’s sister’s daughter got married last year.
She had a wonderful dress. We’re about the same size, so I’ll talk to Silvia, see if I can borrow it…. We could have the reception at Bruno’s. Just a small group. I can ask Silvia to supervise the making of the wedding cake. And—”

  This was fast. Too fast? What was the rush? But, of course, I was the one who’d asked Mariela to marry me. And why would I want to wait? I didn’t. But…now that we were engaged—were we?—I sensed the webs of our relationships must inevitably spider outward to include Sarah, Mariela’s family….

  “What about your mother and grandmother?” I asked Mariela. “Should we go to Cárdenas and tell them our good news?”

  “No,” Mariela snapped, too quickly, it seemed to me. “I will tell my mother and she can tell my grandmother. It will be better that way. My mother will be afraid I will leave forever. Like my brothers.”

  “Will they come to the wedding— your mother and grandmother?”

  “No…maybe….” Her verbal hiccup had returned. “My mother doesn’t like Havana,” she explained. “And my grandmother’s health isn’t the best. We will see.” She stopped, retreated inside herself.

  What did I really know about Mariela? About her family? About her life before me? About her current relationship with her first husband—what was his name?… Alex? Not that Mariela knew anything about me either. I’d never mentioned Eleanor, but that was different. It was. Really.

  “I have to go now, and find my clients, or they will wander off on their own,” she said as if she hadn’t said what she’d just said. “Let’s meet for drinks after. At Bruno’s. You will be OK here by yourself?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” I would need all the hours left in the day to rearrange the dangerous thoughts in my head, to swim back from edge of that abyss I was creating in my mind and back to the beautiful still pool of love from the night before, to my special place and my own Special Period.

  ****

  “There is something I have not told you,” Mariela declared as Bruno deposited a second round on the table. “About Alex and me.” I waited for the other boot to kick me in the head.