Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  Here things are apparently different. Here at least everyone looks equally poor. But these are just first impressions, she reminds herself.

  ‘Most of us would prefer modern cars too,’ the friendly guide says beside her, ‘but we were trapped on this island for decades, punished with consumer boycotts, so we did not really have a choice – we just had to keep the old cars going. Hay que inventar. You have to improvise. You could say it is our national motto.’

  ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ she suggests.

  ‘See that red-and-white car across the street over there?’ He gestures with his tiny hand. ‘Next to those buses? That is our ride.’

  ‘I have always dreamed of riding in an old Cadillac or something,’ Theresa says as they cross the street. Of course that’s not the reason she’s here in Havana. But if she absolutely has to ride around in old-fashioned convertibles while she’s here, she probably shouldn’t complain.

  ‘Oh, this one is much better than a Cadillac,’ Oreste says, his eyes bright beneath the baseball cap. ‘This is a Plymouth Fury 1958. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know enough about cars,’ Theresa confesses. ‘I routinely struggle to pick out my own second-hand Polo in a parking lot.’

  ‘But you know a lot about books. That is what Nini said. You have read Christine by Stephen King?’

  ‘No. I just know it’s about a car that …’ She stops abruptly next to the buffed and shiny convertible. ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Plymouth Fury 1958!’ Now Oreste is beaming like a parent who has given a child a long-wished-for Christmas present. ‘Same car – except that this one is convertible!’

  ‘Well, I’m glad it isn’t the exact same car, or I would’ve been a bit nervous about getting in.’

  Oreste roars with laughter while he loads her suitcase into the boot, then comes round to open the passenger door with a gallant bow. ‘No, I assure you this one is safe. This taxi is my uncle’s. He is going to drive us around here in Havana.’

  ‘And where is your uncle now?’ she asks when Oreste himself slides in behind the steering wheel.

  ‘He is quickly working the morning shift in the bar of a friend. Here lots of people have more than one job. Hay que improvisar? My uncle works as barman when he is not driving his taxi. And at night he plays trumpet in a band.’

  He skilfully steers the car’s long body into the stream of traffic. Theresa looks up at the blue sky and is reminded of Marianne Faithfull’s song about the woman who lost her mind when she realised she would never ride through the streets of Paris in a sports convertible. And then there’s the vintage sports car in Thelma and Louise, a Ford Thunderbird from the sixties, according to Nini, who knows much more than her about cars. (She should probably just accept that Nini knows more than her about everything. Except for books and language editing.) Considering how Thelma and Louise’s adventures end, Theresa may have to concede that single women don’t exactly have a happy track record when it comes to convertibles.

  ‘I drop you at your hotel,’ Oreste suggests, ‘so you can at least shower and rest a bit before my uncle takes us on short sightseeing tour of the city. But maybe you are too tired and prefer to start tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ Theresa says, ‘I don’t want to waste any time. I want to start right away. Did Nini tell you I’m looking for someone who lived at a certain address in Havana forty years ago?’

  ‘No problem,’ Oreste says with a wide, reassuring smile. ‘My uncle and I do our best to help you.’

  ‘Is your uncle’s fee included in your guide fee?’

  ‘No problem.’ Oreste’s smile grows even wider across his suntanned face. ‘It is an arrangement between him and me. I snatch his back … How do you say in English?’

  ‘Scratch his back. You scratch his back and he scratches yours?’

  ‘Exactamente!’ He laughs softly to himself. ‘Is the only way to survive in Cuba.’

  In a few hours Oreste and his uncle will meet her outside the colonial pillars and palm trees of the hotel that looks like a huge white wedding cake raised on a pedestal high above the blue sea, complete with two towers that from a distance could be mistaken for kitsch decorations on top of the cake. In Havana’s glory days before Castro’s revolution it had been the stamping ground of Hollywood stars like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, who are all present in black-and-white photographs on the hotel walls, but now an air of faded glory pervades the maze of corridors leading to the rooms. Because the rooms aren’t numbered according to any recognisably logical system, Theresa spends quite some time wandering around the sixth floor before a cleaner with a trolley takes pity on her and leads her to her room.

  The cleaner, solidly built with voluptuous hips squeezed into a tight little skirt worn over fishnet stockings, smiles pleasantly and assures her in broken English that everyone always gets lost there.

  How does one clean a room in such a tight little skirt? And in fishnet stockings?

  There must be special suites for the wealthiest guests on one of the ten floors, because her own room is a rather ordinary generic hotel room with heavy, shiny curtains in front of a window that looks out onto other rooms at the back of the building. A bed with a satiny cover, a nondescript carpet that has seen better days, a TV screen hidden inside a darkwood cupboard. The only channels she can pick up while she showers and changes into clean clothes are Cuban and Chinese.

  The hairdryer in the bathroom wheezes a thin stream of warm air over her head. Just as well her hair is short enough to manage without a dryer. The toilet spits out a feeble trickle of water when she flushes it. She has to flush repeatedly before the paper disappears from the bowl. Only then she discovers, to her dismay, the notice asking hotel guests to put toilet paper into the bin rather than into the toilet.

  But while she waits for Oreste and his uncle, she can explore the rest of the hotel. And after she has wandered randomly from floor to floor for a while, she decides that she rather likes its atmosphere of bygone elegance and frayed glamour. Its vague suggestion of seediness appeals to her more than a characterless hotel chain. As Nini probably knew when she booked her a room in this exact hotel.

  When she is solemnly introduced to Oreste’s uncle Ruben Torres Márquez, a massive, broad-shouldered man with a greying black beard, he instantly reminds her of Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps for no other reason than she knows about Hemingway’s connection with Havana. He raises his white panama hat in a formal gesture before he shakes her hand. Underneath the hat his greying black hair grows luxuriantly backwards, and his eyes in the shadow of the hat brim are dark and serious. Unlike Oreste, he doesn’t share his smile generously or constantly. Quieter than his jovial younger relative, and so much bigger that together they make an almost comical pair, like Asterix and Obelix. Although it has yet to be seen whether the smaller of the two is in this case also the cleverer.

  ‘Pleasure to meet you, Mister Márquez,’ she says, as her hand, which she has always considered fairly large for a woman’s hand, disappears completely inside his own.

  ‘Not Márquez,’ says Oreste, ‘Torres. That is how Cuban names work,’ he explains when he sees her puzzled frown. ‘Same as Spanish names everywhere. Everyone gets two surnames: the first one is surname of your father – Torres for both of us because he is my father’s brother – and the second one is the surname of your mother. My mother is Santana and his mother is Márquez. But you always address someone by the surname of their father.’

  ‘Does that mean that Gabriel García Márquez is really Mister García and not Mister Márquez?’ Theresa asks, dismayed.

  ‘Exactamente!’ says Oreste, delighted that she has caught on so quickly.

  But it has been anything but quick. It’s rather humiliating to discover halfway into her fifties that she has always been mistaken about a favourite author’s surname. She, who is always so quick to correct other people when they get the spelling of names or surnames wrong.


  ‘And Federico García Lorca isn’t Lorca,’ says Ruben Torres Márquez, his voice as deep as a well. ‘He is also Mister García.’

  ‘There are many, many Garcías in South America,’ grins Oreste. ‘But even many more people who are called Perez and Martinez and Gonzalez. All those surnames that end in “ez”, it is the first or second surname of every other Cuban.’

  As they pull away onto the palm-lined avenue that runs past the Hotel Nacional de Cuba – Oreste in his baseball cap in the front next to his uncle with the panama hat, and Theresa in the back seat wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat – it dawns on her that all these uniform surnames are rather bad news for her. After all, the Cuban soldier whose family she wants to find was called Perez Gonzalez. Angel Perez Gonzalez. Now she is not only looking for a needle in a haystack, she has to find one specific needle among a host of needles that all have the same name.

  Meanwhile, she is digesting the fact that her taxi driver has just referred to the poet Lorca. Another surprise. Not Lorca, she corrects herself, García. García Lorca.

  ‘Who was José Martí?’ she asks as the Plymouth Fury 1958 slowly circles the enormous Plaza de la Revolución so she can admire the monument from every angle. A massive obelisk rises from the centre of the Cuban five-point star; next to it, a statue of Martí, many times larger than life.

  ‘Our national poet.’ Oreste leans his elbow on the back of the front seat so he can look at her while he explains. ‘National hero of the struggle for independence from Spain in nineteenth century.’

  ‘Aah,’ Theresa nods. ‘A poet.’

  In a country where the biggest airport is named after a poet, it may not be all that surprising that a taxi driver is familiar with another poet’s name. Especially not someone like Lorca – García Lorca – who was executed by Franco’s Fascists in Spain. He could also be thought of as a revolutionary hero. Except for the fact that he was homosexual, and as far as she knows the Castro government has never been particularly cordial towards homosexual people. There were apparently plenty of jailbirds and homosexuals among all those ‘undesirables’ who were loaded onto boats and encouraged to sail for Florida in the eighties.

  But she would rather not engage Oreste on this topic. Not yet. She has to get him on her side, first. His enthusiastic service as interpreter is going to be indispensable if this afternoon they are going to have to knock on strangers’ doors to ask what has become of the Perez Gonzalez family. It would truly be a miracle if Angel’s daughter were still living at the same address in Calle Obracate in Old Havana. That, Theresa accepted long ago. But she hopes that she will at least, with Oreste’s help of course, find one of the family’s former neighbours, in the same building or on the same street block – someone who could at least point her in the right direction.

  Just a clue, that is all she hopes for at this stage of her search for Mercedes Perez Amat, the intended recipient of the letter. Mi querida hija, as Angel called her. Because of the bloodstain on the paper, Theresa initially thought her name was something like Querida. It was Nini who translated the beginning of the letter as ‘My darling daughter’.

  Perhaps Angel left behind more daughters. Or little brothers for mi querida hija? A more extensive family would make this impossible quest seem a little less impossible. But the wonderment with which Angel Perez Gonzalez wrote to his infant daughter convinced Theresa from the start that Mercedes must have been his first child, his first and only child. And that sentence in Theo’s journal about how young the Cuban had seemed – the sentence that continues to haunt her – merely served to confirm something she didn’t really want to know.

  Meanwhile she is growing more and more impatient with the seemingly endless ‘short sightseeing tour’ in the red-and-white taxi. The extravagant circumference of the Plaza de la Revolución, the gigantic portrait of Che Guevara on the façade of one of the surrounding government buildings, everything strikes her as megalomaniac excess. It is evident that the plaza was designed for very large crowds. Almost a million people have gathered here at once to listen to the president, Oreste says proudly. Now just a few tour buses and antiquated cars are parked there, and the handful of tourists wandering around the monument and taking selfies with cellphones make the plaza appear empty and grim and useless.

  She nods while Oreste rattles off the glorious history of the revolution, smiles at his wisecracks, gazes at his silent uncle’s panama hat. Ruben Torres Márquez hasn’t said a word to her since his remark about Garcia Lorca. Now and then he answers in Spanish when Oreste asks him something in Spanish. If it hadn’t been for that single remark about the poet Garcia Lorca, she would’ve assumed that he didn’t understand English. Now his broad-shouldered presence is making her uneasy. She doesn’t know what he does or doesn’t understand.

  Every time she hints that they should perhaps cut the ‘short sightseeing tour’ even shorter because she is eager to reach the address she has marked with a big cross on her fold-out map, Oreste says: ‘No problem! But I must help you form a picture of the city inside your head. Then it is easier for you to find any address.’

  But after what seems like hours of driving around in the Plymouth Fury, she hasn’t the faintest idea how the city’s precincts fit together. On the contrary. Before this journey – which has in fact lasted less than an hour, a glance at her watch confirms – she might’ve been able to find her way with the help of the map. Now she no longer knows east from west, except when she glimpses the sea through gaps between the buildings. According to the map, the sea lies to the north and the east of the city.

  ‘I have to walk in a city to get to know it.’ She hopes her tone is friendly and yet firm enough to convince her guide. ‘And after all those hours of sitting in aeroplanes, I really need to stretch my legs.’

  Ruben says something to Oreste and veers down a side street.

  ‘My uncle says I must stop boring you with all these facts,’ Oreste laughs.

  ‘No, it isn’t boring,’ she remonstrates half-heartedly.

  ‘He is going to drop us next to the Plaza de Armas, then we explore Old Havana on foot. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Theresa says, staring gratefully at the back of the uncle’s head.

  In the streets surrounding the Plaza de Armas, where most of the people she encounters are American tourists, the buildings are as colourful and for the most part as well maintained as the cars from the fifties and sixties that are as ubiquitous here as elsewhere. Bright yellow walls with bright blue doors, stone walls with wooden shutters painted in cheerful shades, gleaming iron grates on tiny balconies on the upper floors. Small groups of elderly men dressed in white entertaining the tourists with Latin American street music. Beautiful black women in colourful carnival outfits, long frilled skirts and tight-fitting tops in the same fabric and matching turbans piled sky-high on top of their heads, like clones of Carmen Miranda in an old-school Hollywood movie. These Carmen Mirandas are selling paper cones filled with snacks to tourists, or posing (for a fee) in their brilliant outfits. Smiling with bright white teeth against velvety black skin.

  But there is just too much here that reminds her of the Hollywood of the past. Everything is just a little too touristy. Like virtually all modern tourists, she would like to believe that she is different from virtually all modern tourists. She wants to be more adventurous, wander off the well-worn tourist paths. In short, she wants to be a tourist without feeling like one.

  Although, when Oreste steers her towards the south, to the lowest part of Old Havana in the direction of the Belen neighbourhood, her courage starts to fade. The streets here are narrower and dirtier, the buildings more dilapidated. Even the rickety chairs that wait outside front doors all over Old Havana for someone to sit on them seem thin on the ground. As if ancient broken chairs are scarcer in this neighbourhood than elsewhere. And the locals don’t look all that genial or smiling either. They walk past two teenage girls wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes. Prostitutes? And several young men she’
s convinced look like drug dealers.

  Or at any rate like drug dealers would look in a Hollywood movie.

  There are no tourists to be seen anywhere.

  And the closer they get to the address on her map, at the bottom end of Calle Obracate, the more anxious she becomes.

  Until Oreste stops outside an abandoned ruin, four storeys that must once have been a stately colonial building that at some point may have been painted a blinding white, now dull grey with crumbling plasterwork above shattered windows. Broken wooden shutters sag outside other window frames where there is no glass left. On the top floor she glimpses a square of clear blue sky through the remains of a shutter in a part of the building that no longer appears to have a roof.

  ‘Is this the address?’ She is almost tearful from disappointment.

  Her guide’s smile wavers a little. ‘This is what makes me afraid when you give me the address. There are many ruins like this in the old part of the city.’ Then, with some effort, he recovers his usual dogged grin. ‘But that does not mean that no one is living here. Come, we have a look.’

  In a few steps he reaches the front door, turns the doorknob and drives his shoulder into the door to open it.

  ‘Surely people can’t be living here?’ Theresa mutters.

  ‘You will be surprised to see where some people live.’ He is standing on the threshold. It is dark behind him and the smell of urine reaches Theresa all the way in the street. Probably cat piss, she tries to convince herself, not human pee.

  ‘Many people squat in the old ruins. Live there without electricity or water. If you come from the provinces to look for work in the city, sometimes that is the only option. Hay que inventar.’

  Theresa is tempted to tell him that she comes from a country where millions of people live in far worse conditions, in shacks built out of corrugated iron and cardboard, squatters who could teach anyone a lesson in hay que inventar. Even more than twenty years after the first democratic election, the poverty remains overwhelming. The only impact the past two decades have had on the distribution of wealth, she believes in moments of despair, is that these days some of the wealthy are also black.