Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

‘No, we’re targeting guys who have just finished writing matric,’ she explains.

  These are easy enough to spot because their hair is still schoolboy short – and will soon be even shorter when they report for their military service – but right now they are partying with the exuberance of young men who for the first time in their lives are old enough to be allowed inside a bar. To Theresa they seem to be drinking with a kind of despair, perhaps because they realise how little time is left before they have to go to the army.

  The growing awareness of their own mortality is how Theresa will describe it years later, although it would only be once they reached the border that most of these young men would discover exactly how mortal they were.

  On the evening of her first acquaintance with cocktails, she isn’t thinking about the future. At least not any future beyond later this evening. After a second Black Russian they plan to walk to the Seemeeu disco on the opposite bank of the river. Possibly accompanied by the group of lifeguards they were flirting with on the beach earlier. Or even better, perhaps they can grab a lift with a few young surfers with their own kombi. And then an entire evening of excitement lies ahead at the disco. The ultraviolet lights highlighting your white underwear and the whites of your eyes and teeth, the coloured lights flickering across your body while you dance to hard rock: ‘Smoke on the Water’, ‘Locomotive Breath’, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and the slower dance music towards the end of the night, ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’, ‘Nights in White Satin’, ‘Let it Be’, and the breathless anticipation and endless speculation about who might ask you for the next close dance …

  ‘Here we sit like tourists at a watering hole waiting for the animals to come,’ Lynette says and, on detecting a pun, starts giggling helplessly, her hand over her mouth, until tears and mascara run down her cheeks.

  Theresa joins in the laughter even though she doesn’t really get the joke, mostly because Lynette looks so funny with the black circles smudged below her eyes. Surely her friend can’t be tipsy from a single Black Russian? According to Lynette, she regularly drinks cocktails with vodka and rum in Pretoria.

  Then Lynette stops laughing as abruptly as she started, and stares intensely at the hotel entrance.

  Theresa follows Lynette’s gaze and notices that a long silver Jaguar has pulled up outside the hotel. There is a black chauffeur behind the steering wheel. At least she assumes he’s a chauffeur, even though he isn’t wearing a uniform or a cap on his head like chauffeurs in overseas movies. There is no one in the passenger seat beside him, only three teenage boys in the back seat who tumble out of the car, laughing. Young enough to still be at school, but with hair that’s far too long for any schoolboy. Windblown hair in various shades of blond, from white blond to dark golden blond. All three have suntanned faces, also in various shades, and all three have teeth that flash white when they laugh. Around sixteen or seventeen, Theresa estimates when they enter the hotel foyer glancing around them curiously, like colonial explorers in darkest Africa.

  ‘English guys,’ Lynette breathes. ‘Rich English guys.’

  When Theresa turns to look at her friend, she has already whipped a tiny mirror out of her handbag. She spits on a tissue and quickly wipes under her eyes to get rid of the mascara smudges.

  No Afrikaans school would tolerate such long hair, that is clear. And there aren’t many English-speaking holidaymakers in Stilbaai, something Lynette has already bemoaned because she would’ve loved to be English. There are usually a few wild English surfers who sleep in their kombis and smoke dagga at the Point on the far side of the harbour, but they are too old and experienced for the two schoolgirls.

  And here three good-looking English boys have walked into the hotel – dropped off by a chauffeur in a Jaguar, can you believe it? – and sat down at a table close to the girls. No wonder Lynette suddenly seems just as breathless with excitement as the wildlife tourists she was mocking a moment ago.

  ‘This is where we have to play our cards right,’ Lynette whispers. ‘Follow my lead.’

  ‘What are you girls drinking?’ the tallest of the three asks, the one with the broadest shoulders, the most self-assured.

  Probably the one whose dad owns the Jaguar.

  Just take her and Lynette, ask yourself which one of them has the most self-confidence, then guess whose dad is the richest.

  ‘Black Russians,’ Lynette answers, sounding bored. ‘But we were about to leave.’ She is speaking her finest Pretoria English.

  ‘No way, you can’t leave now,’ the shortest and blondest of the three says with a grin. His smooth white fringe hangs all the way down to eyes that sparkle with mischief. ‘Just when things are about to get interesting.’

  ‘Says who?’ asks Lynette, sassier than Theresa has ever heard her.

  Theresa immediately wipes the idiotic grin from her own face and tries to look sassy too. Follow my lead, Lynette had said.

  ‘If we buy you more Black Russians, will you stay a bit longer?’ the leader wants to know.

  Lynette looks at him with disdain.

  Theresa can only stare, astonished by Lynette’s acting skills.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Well,’ Lynette hesitates as if it’s a very difficult decision.

  ‘We don’t know this town,’ says the one with the white fringe and mischievous eyes. ‘Won’t you tell us a bit about how things work around here?’

  ‘Well.’ Lynette looks at Theresa. ‘I suppose we can drink another Black Russian?’

  ‘Of course we can drink another Black Russian,’ Theresa agrees promptly.

  She’d wanted to play more hard-to-get like her friend, but her heart is thumping and her head is spinning when she looks at the third member of the troika, the shy one who hasn’t said a word so far, the one with the leanest body and the loveliest face. Finely chiselled nose, rosy cheeks, a golden downiness around the mouth. Not one of the small-town schoolboys she’s had a crush on in the past year has made her feel this breathless or lightheaded. Not even the art teacher with his sensitive fingers. This must be what it means to be ‘head-over-heels’ in love.

  Afterwards, she would often wonder how much the alcohol in her first cocktail had contributed to the sense that she was tumbling head over heels, fearlessly, like a trapeze artist who knew that someone would catch her. She stared shamelessly at Leonard with the golden down around the mouth, and he stared back, and she just knew that later on this evening she would be dancing with him at the Seemeeu. What might happen after the dancing ended, she preferred not think about.

  It wasn’t fear that prevented her from thinking beyond that point, merely a lack of imagination. Like a space traveller who couldn’t imagine what it must be like to land on the moon, the teenage Theresa was on her way to a place where she had never been before.

  The dark side of the moon.

  How strange that it takes four decades, until an evening when she finds herself sitting all alone on a hotel veranda in Havana, for her to relive the overwhelming emotions of her first holiday romance.

  She finishes her mojito and drags her body to her hotel room, too sleepy to even think of eating something, too tired to think about how difficult tomorrow is going to be, too weary for anything except a long night’s sleep. On her way to her room she gets hopelessly lost again, until an American couple takes pity on her and accompanies her to her bedroom.

  ‘Everyone always gets lost here,’ the woman with perfect American teeth reassures her.

  ‘It’s a kind of revenge on conceited tourists like us.’ The husband’s teeth are just as shiny below a lavish moustache. ‘It’s the Cuban sense of humour.’

  9. CUBAN SOAPIES

  She wakes up feeling rested for the first time in days, and full of hope for the search that lies ahead. Okay, ‘full of hope’ may be a slight exaggeration. In the enormous breakfast room of the Hotel Nacional she chooses a table as far away as possible from the violinist in a black frock coat entertaining guests with tunes from American musicals
. Without a doubt the first time in her life that a live string performance has accompanied her breakfast. Another first. She tries to ignore the trite sounds of the violin while she gulps down a cup of black coffee with her fruit salad (caffeine to make her completely alert, vitamins for energy to carry her through the day). She will need plenty of energy today.

  But at least the situation doesn’t look quite as hopeless as it did when she stood outside that ruin in Calle Obracate yesterday.

  The plan of action is that she and her guide will return to the same street and knock on the doors of complete strangers in the surrounding buildings. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, although the Jehovah’s Witnesses at least have something to offer the strangers – the promise of a heavenly reward – while she and Oreste will simply stand there empty-handed. Following Oreste’s advice, she has stuffed her handbag with all the complimentary toiletries in her hotel bathroom. In case someone needs to be bribed or rewarded, she can at least hand out soap and shampoo. Not quite the same as a heavenly reward, but for some Cubans a foam bath is apparently more appealing than going to heaven.

  ‘Soap is better than money,’ her guide had explained. ‘Even if you have enough money to buy toiletries, you will struggle to find it.’ And when she shook her head in disbelief: ‘When you have a chance to go to a supermarket, you will see how empty the shelves are.’

  ‘Will you go show me?’

  ‘No.’ He shakes his head, with an apologetic shrug. ‘My job is I show you the positive side of Cuba. Not the … the struggle and hardship.’

  ‘But surely what we saw in Calle Obracate was struggle and hardship?’

  ‘It was you who was looking for someone there. I am paid to help you look. But I much have preferred to take you to a museum or a mojito bar instead.’

  ‘If I find what I’m looking for, you can take me to a mojito bar,’ she’d promised. Which instantly brought back his smile.

  She gets up to pour another cup of coffee. The first one hit her empty stomach like a kick from a mule. The second one goes down more easily, with a slice of toast.

  Her big hope for today is that someone behind one of the doors they knock on will remember the Perez Gonzalez family, can perhaps supply a phone number or an address for a surviving family member, or even just the name of anyone who might know someone who might know what has become of Mercedes Perez Amat.

  Might may not be much, but it is better than nothing.

  Then tonight back in her hotel room she’ll be able to continue her search on the internet. Nini warned her that the internet connection on this island was extremely unreliable, even in big hotels in the capital, but with enough patience she might be able to follow a clue that could lead to another. Or end in a cul de sac. Nini also advised her to start looking for Mercedes Perez Amat on Facebook and other social networks even before her departure from Cape Town.

  ‘You know perfectly well I’m not on Facebook,’ Theresa had countered over an al fresco lunch at their favourite Waterfront restaurant.

  Nini had sighed heavily and said that it was high time Theresa joined the twenty-first century. It wasn’t the first time she had said this to Theresa, and it would probably not be the last time either.

  ‘I don’t want to be part of Facebook and Twitter and all that sort of noise’ had always been Theresa’s position. ‘If that’s what it takes to live in the twenty-first century, then count me out. Leave me in the previous century – I’m happy there.’

  ‘Listen, Theresa.’ Nini had brushed her dyed red fringe off her forehead and emptied her glass of Viognier. ‘You cannot look for someone in this day and age if you refuse to use social media.’

  And that had settled the matter. That same evening, Nini had created a Facebook profile for Theresa, with a picture (terribly unflattering, Theresa had grumbled) and a birthday date (not a birth date, Theresa had insisted, no need for complete strangers to know how many eons ago she was born) and her relationship status (‘incurably single’, Theresa suggested). So that was how she had been dragged onto Facebook, kicking and screaming, with exactly two friends: Nini Saayman and Sandra Scholtz.

  Sandra, who had been on Facebook forever to keep in touch with her two oldest sons tramping around the world like gypsies, promptly sent Theresa a friendship request, beside herself with joy. It reminded Theresa of the horrible older sister she had been at school, when she had refused to admit Sandra to her circle of friends because at that age a difference of three years was an unbridgeable gap. Now, four decades on, Theresa had clicked meekly on the ‘Accept’ button to admit her little sister into her very limited internet circle.

  Until now, however, Facebook has been no help with finding Mercedes Perez Amat. She did discover two people called Mercedes Amat, both in Spain, but one was fifteen years old and the other one, whose profile picture looked as if she might be the right age, responded to her private message in broken English: No, I were never in Cuba, sorry, but we can be friends if you desire me. Next, she found three Mercedes Perez profiles, two in Mexico and one in Peru, but they were all either too young or too old to be the Cuban soldier’s daughter.

  ‘She’s probably been married for ages, with a different surname,’ she complained to Nini on the phone.

  ‘Cuban women don’t take their husbands’ surnames,’ Nini informed her. ‘They’re not as stupid as we are.’

  ‘I didn’t take my husband’s surname.’

  ‘Okay, rub it in. So I did.’

  Nini’s youthful marriage (to a Spaniard) had been brief, and after the divorce it was only through a great deal of administrative effort that she was able to shed her Spanish surname. But she would never regret that disastrous marriage of less than a year, she always maintains, because it gave her the biggest gift of her life. A daughter with dark Spanish eyes who has been living in South America for a decade.

  ‘Or maybe this Mercedes isn’t even on Facebook.’

  ‘Everyone is on Facebook,’ Nini had assured her. ‘Even my eighty-five-year-old mother is on Facebook!’

  Everyone but me, Theresa always thought. And with her luck she had probably embarked on a hopeless internet search for the only other person on earth who had not yet succumbed to social media, this Cuban soldier’s daughter called Mercedes.

  She gets up and gathers up her handbag stuffed with free toiletries. Oreste and his uncle are probably waiting outside the hotel by now. By tonight she will hopefully have a few clues to follow up on the internet. There will hopefully be Wi-Fi. Hopefully.

  ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers,’ as Emily Dickinson said.

  Love is greater than hope, the Bible says, but Theresa has always believed that hope is the most important. Perhaps because she never succeeded in making good choices when it came to love. And because even at her advanced age she continues to hope that she might learn to choose better someday.

  Not that she would admit this to anyone, not even to her only two Facebook friends.

  In the red-and-white Plymouth Fury 1958, the day’s first tiny spark of hope is extinguished right away. There has been no word from Señor Borges, Oreste says. But she shouldn’t be worried. No problem. He may still call later on today. Or tomorrow?

  She doesn’t have time to wait until tomorrow, she wants to exclaim. The clock is ticking and her budget is shrinking and in less than ten days she has to fly back home.

  Oreste’s uncle catches her frustrated expression in the rear-view mirror and says something in Spanish to Oreste, whose smile instantly grows wider again as he twists his body around to talk to her in the back seat. ‘I tell my uncle about the soldier you are looking for. He has a friend who fought in that war those same years. He wants to know if you would like to meet him?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to,’ she says immediately. ‘Does he speak English?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruben, and like every time the silent uncle addresses her directly, she is startled. It isn’t just how deep his voice is, but also that she keeps forgetting that he understands
English. ‘You have dinner at my house tomorrow night, then I invite him too?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to, thank you. Where do you live?’

  ‘Near the city centre. Oreste or I fetch you.’

  She smiles and looks at the clear blue sky as they drive along the Malecón, the ocean immediately beyond the wall on their left.

  ‘My uncle has asked his friend if he knew your Cuban,’ Oreste says, as if to warn her not to get her hopes up too much. ‘He says no, he does not know anyone called Angel Perez Gonzalez.’

  My Cuban. Theresa tests the phrase on her tongue, then shakes her head. He was her former husband’s Cuban, not hers.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve never met anyone who fought in that war on the “enemy” side. Of course, I mean the enemy as in the way we thought of the Cubans in those days,’ she adds quickly and apologetically. ‘I’ve met several former freedom fighters from the bush war. The people we called “terrorists” back then. These days we all live together in the same country and some of them have senior positions in the military or in the government. I mean …’ Why is it such a struggle to say what she means? ‘We’re no longer supposed to talk about “us” and “them”, we are just one big “us” now. But I was raised in only one part of this combined us, and I only really ever heard one side of “our story”. Of the Cubans’ story, I understand nothing.’

  The two Cubans in the front seats of the convertible say nothing, but she sees Ruben nod at her in the rear-view mirror, and that gives her the courage to continue talking.

  ‘I don’t understand how you ended up in Angola. I don’t even understand how “we” ended up there. I’ve read about it a lot, I understand the geographical and political reasons for that messy war, but … I still don’t understand how your people and my people could slaughter one another in what was a foreign country to all of us?’

  ‘We don’t really understand it either,’ Ruben tells her in the rear-view mirror as he pulls into a parking spot near the Plaza de Armas like the day before. ‘But, how do you say it? There are always two sides to any story.’