But although she echoes the complaints of so many of her fellow citizens about service delivery that keeps getting worse, about the decline of state hospitals and overcrowded classrooms with incompetent teachers, she doesn’t actually feel the poverty on her own skin. Not really. She can still look away from the misery on either side of the N2 when she drives home from the airport. She barricades herself behind burglar bars in her cottage, she turns on the alarm, she watches an American series, she reads a British author, she tries to forget everything that frightens her in her own country.
Still, she doesn’t know how to explain to her guide that she hadn’t expected it here. Not in Castro’s communist paradise with good schools and outstanding medical services for all. Poverty and hardship, yes, for that she’d been prepared, but not homelessness. Not squatters.
In the surrounding buildings there are at least signs of human habitation. Dirty and worn curtains fluttering behind cracked windows. Washing draped over balconies to dry. The smell of food cooking, the sound of televisions blaring. But here is only a dark, stinking hallway filled with rubble, she sees when she follows Oreste through the open front door.
He has taken out his cellphone and turned on its torch to keep her from tripping over the rags and pieces of cardboard that are strewn everywhere. He leads her up a staircase to the first floor where faint light falls through a narrow, filthy window at the back of the building. He places his ear against a closed door and shakes his head: no sound behind the door; nevertheless he knocks loudly, waits a while, knocks again, calls out something in Spanish. No response. He shrugs and walks to the door opposite. This time he does hear something when he places his ear against the door, and beckons to Theresa to come and listen as well.
A crying baby, indeed.
After he has knocked insistently and called out several times, the door is edged open. A woman with a youthful body and the worn-out, tired face of someone much older is rocking a baby on one hip and eyeing them suspiciously.
Oreste produces his most agreeable smile while he reels off a few questions. All Theresa can catch are the surnames ‘Perez’, ‘Gonzalez’ and ‘Amat’ that are repeated several times while the woman keeps shaking her head and the baby’s cries keep getting louder, and Oreste has to keep raising his voice to be heard above the wailing.
At last he sighs, still with a weak little smile, and the tired woman closes the door.
Theresa sighs too, mostly from relief that she no longer has to listen to the screaming child.
‘She says there are two flats with old people on the next floor,’ Oreste explains as they tackle the next set of stairs. ‘If this family is living here since forty years, it will be only old people who can still remember them, anyway.’
Provided the old people aren’t so old that they no longer remember anything, Theresa thinks with a sharp pang of longing for her father.
At the first door on the second floor they hear music that sounds as if it’s coming from a radio, but no matter how loudly Oreste hammers against the door, or how earnestly he pleads for someone to open it, the door remains shut.
‘You understand why people are scared to open the door if they are living here illegally?’ he says apologetically.
‘Of course.’
When they turn around to try the door opposite, they find it already open. The occupant, a sinewy old man in shorts and a vest, has been drawn outside by the hammering and is now staring at them with interest.
Oreste flashes a thankful smile and rattles off his story before the door can be slammed shut again. ‘Perez,’ Theresa hears, ‘Gonzalez, Amat.’ The old man shakes his head with apparent indifference, and scratches his stomach underneath the vest with a skinny arm. Then he says something that makes Oreste nod eagerly.
‘He says the woman living opposite him cannot hear well and is sickly,’ Oreste translates. ‘But, as far as he knows, she is living here since the seventies. If we have a message for her, he will pass it on when he sees her.’
‘Tell him I have a letter that a Cuban soldier in the Angolan War wrote to his daughter. The soldier died and the daughter doesn’t know about the letter. That is why I am looking for the daughter.’
Under his baseball cap Oreste’s eyebrows shoot up, surprised. He turns back to the sinewy little man. Theresa watches the old man’s face soften as he listens to Oreste, the truculent attitude melting away until he wipes his eyes as if overcome with emotion.
‘He says he also lost a relative in that war. He wishes someone would bring him a letter. He will ask Señora Lopez who lives opposite if she can help us.’
‘Thank you,’ Theresa says. ‘Tell him we can come back tomorrow?’
Oreste takes one of his business cards from his jeans pocket and hands it to the old man who now introduces himself as Señor Borges. ‘He says he has a cellphone, but no money to buy airtime to phone us.’
Theresa dives into her handbag, reaches for her purse, and presses a few notes into Señor Borges’s hands.
‘That is too much,’ Oreste says quickly.
She shakes her head. ‘Doesn’t matter. This is important.’
Señor Borges hastily shoves the notes into the pocket of his shorts, as if scared she’ll ask for the money back, and promises to phone Oreste as soon as he has spoken to Señora Lopez.
Oreste doesn’t look convinced.
‘If you ask me, he will use that money to buy a bottle of rum,’ Oreste says when they walk down the dark staircase back to the ground floor.
Doesn’t matter. When she stood outside this ruin fifteen minutes ago, it finally dawned on her just how difficult it was going to be to track down Mercedes Perez Amat. Now she has a tiny spark of hope.
Out on the street her valiant little guide looks at her sternly: ‘You cannot throw around your CUCS to try and bribe people,’ he cautions. ‘It is tourist money, and worth a lot more than our local pesos, you understand?’
‘I know, Oreste.’ She is suddenly so exhausted she thinks she might collapse.
‘And who knows how many palms you have to make greasy before you find the person you are looking for. If you carry on like this, in a few days – when it is really necessary to bribe someone – you will not have any money left. Nini warned me you are not rich.’
Her knees buckle, and she puts out an arm to steady herself against the wall. The drawn-out journey and the time difference – it must be the middle of the night in Cape Town by now – and the enormity of the task she has set herself, all of it hits her at once like a blow to the back of the knees.
‘You are looking very pale.’ Oreste sounds concerned.
‘I’m just very tired. Could we have a coffee somewhere? Then I will tell you about the letter from Angola?’
‘That is a good idea. The more you tell me, the more I can do to help you.’
She will tell him how she got her hands on the letter, and how her former husband presumably got his hands on the letter, and even about her hunch that it was precisely the way in which her former husband got his hands on the letter – more than anything else that happened to him in Angola – that landed him in more than one psychiatric hospital in the final two decades of his life. But she won’t give him the letter to read. She doesn’t know him well enough, doesn’t know how enthusiastic he really is about the politics of his country; and she suspects that in his professional capacity as an officially sanctioned tour guide, he can’t afford to be openly critical anyway.
What Angel Perez Gonzalez wrote in that letter were not the words of a patriotic soldier prepared to sacrifice everything for flag and fatherland. He had known that his Cuban commanding officers would confiscate the letter if they found it. It will be a miracle if someday you read these words, mi querida hija. That was why he’d tried to give the letter to an enemy soldier, Theresa realised in the plane when she read Theo’s journal. Unfortunately the enemy soldier killed him before he could hand over the letter.
And years later when that soldier finally mast
ered enough Spanish to more or less understand the letter he hadn’t dared tell anyone about, the contents gradually drove him insane. Poetic justice? Oreste’s serious uncle, who knows something about poets, might think so. But Theresa isn’t convinced that she can still believe in any kind of justice, poetic or not.
Theo had simply been an ignorant teenager who killed someone in self-defence. As a soldier he’d had no choice; he had to shoot the enemy before the enemy shot him. Surely that is how war – any war – is supposed to work?
8. BLUE NAIL VARNISH
No, she’d insisted to Nini, she wasn’t going to Cuba to drink mojitos or smoke cigars; she was going on a quest. Like the crusaders went on quests to find the Holy Grail. Nini had laughed and asked how come she didn’t know how the crusaders had fucked and pillaged on their quests for the Holy Grail. And now here she is, on her first evening in Havana, sunk deep into the cushions of a comfortable cane chair on the hotel veranda, with a view, past the pillars and palm trees, of a dark strip of sea against a violet twilight sky. With a half-empty mojito in her hand.
At least no cigar so far.
Don’t laugh, Nini. This is a complimentary mojito offered to every guest who books into the hotel. And you know what they say about not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
She would in fact have preferred a glass of chilled white wine, but she has already discovered that wine is a luxury here, too expensive for her limited budget. Especially if she is going to keep blowing her money on Cuban strangers who may or may not – probably not – be able to give her information. She’d been surprised at the force of her little guide’s reprimand after they’d left the squatter ruin this afternoon. When shortly afterwards she told him the story behind her search, over a cup of impossibly strong Cuban coffee, he immediately recovered his usual, over-friendly nature. Or at least that part of his nature he had so far revealed to his client.
While on this island she is going to have to forget about wine, and drink beer and rum instead. Or coffee so strong that she may never sleep again. Although not even the strongest Cuban coffee could keep her awake tonight – that she can tell from the weariness spreading through her entire body. After the complimentary mojito, she is of course feeling even wearier, weaker, lazier.
She tips an ice cube from the empty glass into her mouth and rolls it around while she studies the other hotel guests on the veranda. They’re gathered in happy, noisy groups, hailing one another with loud American accents and the seemingly innate self-confidence of the citizens of a powerful country – even in this small country they can finally visit after decades of travel restrictions. Perhaps precisely because of those former travel restrictions. Now it is evident they are here to conquer the island with their dollars. To fuck and pillage, Nini would probably have said, like the crusaders of old.
But it’s not all rowdy Americans on the hotel veranda, she imagines telling Nini. Here and there are couples in love whispering in each other’s ears so softly that you can’t tell in which language they’re whispering. Some could be honeymoon couples. Earlier today while she was waiting to collect her room key at the reception desk, a rather vulgar British couple next to her were protesting noisily that they had expressly booked ‘Frank and Ava’s honeymoon suite’ and that no other room would do.
Imagine being that much in love and that naive. The mere thought is enough to make Theresa decide on a second mojito. (Just to help her sleep even better.) As if the ghosts of Frank and Ava could safeguard a marriage. How foolish, is the verdict from Theresa’s middle-aged single-woman cynicism before she walks up to the bar counter on the veranda to order a second cocktail.
She has been wary of cocktails ever since her teenage years. It was the first alcohol she learned to drink, at an age when she wasn’t yet legally permitted to drink any alcohol at all, simply because the taste of a sweet cocktail was the closest thing to the taste of an innocent sweet cooldrink. In the Stilbaai Hotel, during the long summer holiday at the end of her standard seven year, her friend Lynette introduced her to an exotic drink called a Black Russian. Vodka and coffee liqueur with plenty of ice and Coca-Cola.
She was fifteen years old, Lynette already sixteen, and with a thick layer of make-up on their schoolgirl faces they were able to persuade the barman to overlook their underage youthfulness. That first Black Russian made her feel instantly older and smarter and prettier and skinnier. Christmas 1975, when she experienced her first proper ‘holiday romance’. The romance began rather soon after she tasted her first Black Russian, and to this day her memory connects cocktails with being foolishly in love.
On the other hand, during her student years in Stellenbosch she would learn to drink wine, cheap box wine, and that didn’t exactly help her steer clear of romantic folly and other imprudent experiences. On the contrary, it just turned out to be cheaper to fall in love with the aid of wine rather than cocktails.
But in December 1975, Lynette’s family and hers were on holiday together, in an old house that stood on stilts high above the riverbank like a heron, and Lynette ushered her into a whole new world of cocktails and sex. Not ‘actual’ sex. They didn’t go ‘all the way’. Theresa barely went a quarter of the way, but once you were headed that way, it wasn’t that easy to turn around. Your head and your body refused to speak the same language. Your head knew what you were supposed to do and your body knew what you really wanted to do.
And the Black Russians didn’t make listening to your head any easier.
Lynette’s and Theresa’s fathers had been student friends who both became teachers, although Lynette’s ambitious father soon traded the classroom for a more lucrative position in the Transvaal Education Department. The Raubenheimer family went to live in Pretoria, in a house with a double garage and a swimming pool in the well-to-do eastern suburbs, and hardly ever saw the Marais family, except during summer holidays. That December of 1975 was the first time the two households rented a house together, the first and only time, because to be honest it was more than Theresa’s parents could afford. The following year Lynette’s father bought his own holiday house elsewhere. And after that ‘event’ involving Lynette’s brother, Theresa’s mother didn’t want to go on holiday with the Raubenheimers anyway. That was how the Raubenheimer parents referred to the violent incident: ‘an unfortunate event’.
But that would only take place later on in the holiday, in the new year, January 1976.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Theresa still considered herself a country mouse, especially compared to an older and more sophisticated city girl like Lynette, and she was keen to follow Lynette’s lead in everything. From how to paint her nails (bright blue, their favourite colour that holiday, sharing the same bottle of nail varnish) and how to light a cigarette in a sexy way (fingers extended to give full display to the gleaming blue nails), to how to dance. In Pretoria that year everyone apparently danced on oddly stiff legs, which Theresa found very funny until Lynette convinced her it was the latest dance trend that had blown in from overseas.
Anything that came from overseas was good enough for Theresa.
She even tried to copy her friend’s speech pattern and vocabulary. A Pretoria girl, Lynette spoke ‘Afrikawns’, with lots of English words thrown in, and all the English words pronounced the English way. ‘I am so dephwessed today,’ Lynette might sigh, while Theresa, in the unlikely event it occurred to her to become downcast in the middle of the most exciting holiday of her life, would have rolled her ‘r’s: ‘I am so deprressed.’ But she was a quick study.
On the evening she tastes her first cocktail, the two girls are sitting in the hotel lounge, near the entrance to the ladies’ bar. They are wearing halter tops to show off as much as possible of suntanned shoulders and backs, and their long shiny hair falls smoothly over their bare shoulders. Theresa’s hair is blonde and naturally straight; Lynette’s is dark brown, almost black, with frizzy curls you would never guess at because she goes to bed every night with pantyhose wrapped tightly around
her head. (No suffering is too great for a desirable hairstyle, Lynette believes.)
Theresa remarks jokingly that they resemble Betty and Veronica in the Archie comics. She thinks of herself as the more level-headed blonde Betty, while Lynette of course is the more daring brunette. Lynette approves of this comparison: ‘Although Archie isn’t my type,’ she says with a saucy little laugh. ‘I don’t find his red hair sexy.’
Theresa recalls that the comics also refer to Betty and Veronica as ‘best friends and worst enemies’, but thinks better of reminding Lynette of that.
She finds old Archie quite ‘bakgat’, Theresa ventures, but an impatient click of Lynette’s tongue signals that she has made yet another mistake. She has used a word from the forbidden list. Dumb words like ‘bakgat’ and ‘doedie’, Lynette alleges, were invented by adults in an attempt to discourage Afrikaans kids from peppering their conversations with English words. The same goes for ‘aster’ to describe a girl, not a flower. ‘I ask you,’ Lynette frequently exclaims, rolling her eyes melodramatically.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Theresa asks, a touch wilfully. ‘That Archie is quite groovy?’
Lynette almost chokes on her cocktail. ‘Would you please come back from the sixties?’
Theresa turns her attention to the tinkling of ice in her tall glass, now almost empty, her head feeling wonderfully light. From their position near the entrance they have an excellent view of both the hotel foyer (so if any new talent arrives, they’ll be first to notice), and of the bodies already crowding around the counter in the ladies’ bar. Several of the most attractive guys appear to be students, very desirable to Lynette, but too old and too experienced for a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl pretending to know much more than she in fact does.
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