Luisá had been to university, Marta explains. She wanted to be a teacher, but she had to drop out when she fell pregnant.
Marta gestures with both hands to indicate a rounded belly. ‘Her boyfriend was doing his military service,’ Oreste interprets. ‘They were both very young, almost children … They got married quickly before he was sent to Angola. And when he disappeared over there …’
‘What, what his name again?’ Marta asks Theresa.
‘Angel,’ Theresa says, ‘Angel Perez Gonzalez.’
‘Ah, yes. Angel. I never meet him, just always hear her talk about him. After he disappear in Angola she is very bitter. She never get back to studying. She take any job to keep her and the child alive.’
‘Didn’t the state help?’ Theresa asks. ‘Didn’t she get a pension or something because she was a soldier’s widow?’
‘The state helps everyone in this country,’ Oreste interprets while Marta shrugs and takes another long drag of her cigarette. ‘But we must also help ourselves.’
‘Is that why she was bitter? Because the state didn’t offer enough help?’
No, she was bitter at Angel, Marta explains through Oreste. She did not want him to go fight so far away so soon after the child was born. Not all the servicemen were forced to go to Angola – in the beginning it was voluntary – so she begged him to stay. But he believed it was his duty, there were other men with children who went to fight, he couldn’t expect special treatment.
‘Luisá think he special,’ Marta says, angrily extinguishing the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. ‘He no special.’
Luisá stayed angry at her husband for years, Marta tells them. She cried long crocodile tears about him, but she also felt he had left her and their child in the lurch.
‘And then did she find another job? Or did she remain a cleaner?’
‘Oh, she had new job every few months,’ Marta answers through Oreste. ‘New job, new hairstyle. That was Luisá. Until she ended up in an office, answering telephone and typing, I think the year Mercedes started high school. That job she kept. It wasn’t what she dreamed of when she was young, but, well, whose dreams come ever true, anyway?’
Marta lets out a sigh and gazes into the distance for a while; then something occurs to her and she walks to a table in the kitchen in one corner of the poky living room. She returns carrying a photograph. ‘I look for this last night after Señor Borges telephone to ask if I help you. Luisá and Mercedes.’
Theresa studies the faded colour picture of a beautiful young woman and a little girl standing in a garden, perhaps a public park, everything around them very green. Luisá’s hair is worn in a voluminous, extravagant style so typical of the eighties. A side-swept fringe resting heavily on her forehead, the hair on either side of her face cut and blow-dried in careful layers. Just like Princess Diana used to look back then, and in a dress with puffed sleeves and frilled neckline like the British princess often wore. Except that Luisá’s hair is much darker than that of the princess, her nose more refined, her eyes bigger. Prettier than the princess, without a doubt. Beautiful little beast. The little girl’s dark hair has been tied in two high pigtails. She looks about six or seven, with a gap-toothed smile and a nose crinkling with delight as she stares up at her beautiful mother.
Theresa feels a lump in her throat. Overwhelmed, overcome, some or other emotion much bigger than she’d expected. For the first time she has a sense of the soldier’s wife and child as more than just names. For the first time she is looking at two living human beings.
‘I assume it’s the only picture you have of them?’
‘Yes,’ Marta says. ‘But you have it. If it help you find Mercedes.’
‘Thank you.’ Theresa takes a deep breath before she asks: ‘Does that mean there’s nothing more you can tell me?’
‘I don’t know what become of Mercedes. In the child’s last school year Luisá is ill. Stomach cancer.’ She points to her stomach and pauses again, waiting for the bad news to sink in. ‘Mercedes want to study medicine. Or her mother want her to study medicine. Luisá see all her own dreams and ambitions onto the child.’
She continues, ‘fortunately Mercedes was a smart girl, worked hard at school, got good results. And when she went to university, Luisá moved away from Havana, back to her family in Cienfuegos. That was during the bad days of the early nineties.’
‘The special time?’
‘The special time,’ Marta confirms with a distant look in her eyes. She never heard from Mercedes again. When Luisá died a few years later, her sister in Cienfuegos let Marta know.
Does she maybe have an address or phone number for the sister, Oreste asks.
Theresa is still battling to find her voice. Why would it upset her so to learn that Luisá had died when she had expected it right from the start? But hearing it confirmed makes her chances of finding Mercedes seem even slimmer.
‘I think she dead too,’ Marta says.
But she has an address. She flicks a bit of cigarette ash from a scrap of paper that has been lying next to the ashtray all along and passes it to Theresa. She looks genuinely sorry that she cannot offer more help.
‘You’ve helped a lot,’ Theresa assures her. ‘I know so much more now than I did an hour ago. And perhaps there is someone at this address who can help me further. I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘Oh, you buy one of my artworks,’ Marta suggests promptly.
Theresa chooses three of the most hideous ashtrays on the veranda, decked out in mosaics with mermaids painted at the bottom. The mermaids look like drag queens with too much make-up and fake fishtails. Marta instantly wants to make her a gift of another, but Theresa quickly explains that she doesn’t have enough space in her suitcase. And she avoids Oreste’s eyes, afraid she might blush. All she can do with these kitsch mermaids is hand them out as ironic gifts when she gets back home.
‘Sometimes I wish I see Luisá just one more time,’ Marta says with a sad, proud smile. ‘To show her I do not end up as a cleaner either. Now I am artist.’
Theresa embraces the woman she has known for less than an hour, ashamed of her aesthetic snobbery and her irremediable middle-class values.
‘I wish you find what you search,’ Marta says, once again hidden behind a smoke cloud, as Theresa walks away.
To Theresa, it sounds like a benediction that goes way beyond the mere hope that she may find the soldier’s daughter.
‘You know what this means, right?’ she announces back in the car with Oreste and Ruben, her eyes on the piece of paper with the address in her hand. ‘I will have to go to Cienfuegos. Is it far from Havana?’
‘About four hours by bus,’ Oreste says pensively. ‘Maybe more. Too far to go there and back in a day. You will have to stay over.’
‘Maybe more than one night,’ Ruben adds. ‘Depend on what you find when you get there.’
‘But who will interpret for you?’ Oreste looks at her with a deep frown below his baseball cap. ‘I cannot come with you – I have commitments here and I—’
‘I know, Oreste,’ she says, with a gay and determined laugh to ease his mind. ‘I knew from the start that you could only be my guide here in Havana. And I suspected from the start that I might have to search beyond Havana. Don’t worry, I’m old enough to take care of myself.’
‘We see what we can do,’ Ruben comforts her in the rear-view mirror. His deep voice drops even deeper than usual. ‘Maybe we think of someone who can help you over there.’
And to her surprise she feels comforted.
In the afternoon she and Oreste take another walk down ‘Luisá’s street’, as she now thinks of this part of Old Havana, and knock on several doors where no one answered the day before. Given that they are now armed with a photograph, they also show it at cafes and informal small businesses, to women mending clothes, men repairing bicycles, all of them apparently engaged in the task of making old possessions last longer, recycling on a grand scale rather than buying new
things. ‘That is because there are no new things to buy here,’ Oreste observes. Not critically or flippantly, just stating a fact.
But no one recognises the two people in the photograph.
How sad that Luisá and her daughter lived on this street for almost twenty years – and another twenty years later no one can remember them, she muses in the late afternoon in the car heading back to the hotel. What will remain of her own self someday, at all the addresses where she has lived?
A decade or two ago, she found the Obs vibe appealing. She liked the noisy nightlife, refused to hide in the boring northern or southern suburbs; she wanted to be close to the city and the mountain and the sea. Now she is too scared to venture out alone onto the street at night; she’s at her wits’ end about the drug dealers and gangster activities in the neighbourhood, and she is fed-up with the statistics about the increasing number of burglaries her sister keeps sending her. It may be time to accept that she has grown too old for any sort of vibe, that she should finally seek out greener and more tranquil pastures.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if she ended up, like her unloved former mother-in-law, trapped in a neighbourhood where she no longer felt at home?
But every time her thoughts start to wander in that direction, all the repressed rebelliousness of her younger years struggles back to the surface. Perhaps the main reason why she refuses to go into hiding in a security complex is simply that her sister keeps nagging her about it.
All the same, no matter how long she still manages to hold out in her cottage, she is convinced no one in the street will remember her after she moves away. Not the bearded hipster and tattooed artists who live on either side of her, even less the Nigerian drug dealers loitering on the street corner, and certainly not the students who come and go like gypsies in the rented rooms of the neglected double-storey house diagonally across the street.
She will be as completely and utterly forgotten as the Cuban soldier and his family. As if she had never been there.
Oreste follows her pensive gaze out over the sea, to where fleece clouds hang low above the water on the north-western horizon, and says confidentially: ‘Florida is there. Just behind those clouds. The USA.’
‘I never realised it was this close.’
‘It looks close on a map,’ Ruben says behind the wheel, so softly she can hardly hear him. ‘But is terribly far when you’re trying to row there in a tiny boat.’
She doesn’t know him well enough to ask if he knows someone who has tried to escape Cuba in a tiny boat. Perhaps during dinner at his house tonight, that will be her last chance. Tomorrow she will have to check out of the hotel, try catch a bus to Cienfuegos no later than the afternoon, find out what waits for her there.
The three days in Havana with Oreste and Ruben have passed too quickly. Everything passes too quickly. Everything is forgotten too soon. She is far from ready to say goodbye to them and tackle the island on her own.
12. CHRISTMAS CRACKERS
Some experiences are never forgotten, merely suppressed. If she hadn’t discovered the soldier’s letter, if she hadn’t opened Theo’s green notebook, if she hadn’t rummaged through the steel trunk under her bed for her own diary from her teenage years, if she hadn’t decided to fly to Havana, everything that happened during that summer holiday in Stilbaai might have stayed concealed in a tiny corner of her memory for the rest of her life.
Now everything is floating on the surface, like pieces of wreckage after a plane has crashed into the sea.
The Marais and Raubenheimer families celebrated Christmas together. The fathers chased the whole lot of them out of bed on Christmas morning to attend a barefoot church service on the beach. The mothers spent days sweating in front of the stove in an atmosphere of intense competition to prepare a magnificent Christmas lunch. The two teenage girls rolled their eyes while everyone at the table noisily pulled crackers and read out the silly riddles inside, roaring with laughter as if these were genuinely the funniest jokes they had ever heard. All the grown-ups drank a bit too much wine and even the two youngest Raubenheimer brothers ate enough of the port-drenched trifle to act a little tipsy. In the background Jim Reeves sang ‘White Christmas’ softly on the radio.
A perfectly ordinary traditional Afrikaans Christmas in other words.
But then again not.
A few days before Christmas Day, P W Botha, minister of defence, announced that that year’s military service period was being extended by a month. All the guys on the border who had expected to be home soon after Christmas now had to hear that they would only klaar out in February. ‘Vasbyt, min dae?’ It was suddenly vasbyt, more days. Citizen force members countrywide were warned to be ready to be called up for border duty at short notice.
It wasn’t an emergency measure, the minister insisted; it was merely to improve ‘efficiency’. ‘He protests too much,’ Theresa’s mother muttered, careful as usual that Theresa’s father didn’t hear her.
The announcement dampened the festive spirit a little. Jacques and Waldie were beginning to realise that their own military service might last considerably longer than a year. Jacques shrugged and said, what could he do – duty was duty, and he would just be a little older, then, by the time he went to university. Waldie, who was not at all inclined to study after school, said jeez, he was even thinking of joining the permanent force. ‘Then I’ll have plenty of time to give those terrorists hell!’ The two mothers exchanged worried glances in a rare moment of empathy, but kept quiet. War was a matter for men, for fathers and sons, ministers and dominees. Nothing they could do about it.
But Waldie was like a fierce dog at the end of a chain, an animal that could smell flesh but couldn’t reach it. The wilder the rumours of war became, the harder he yanked on his chain, the more defiant he was of his father who thought it was more important to study than to fight, the more contemptuous of his mother who wanted to cosset him as if he were a baby, the bigger a bully towards his two younger brothers.
He began spying on his sister and Theresa.
On New Year’s Eve the two girls only sneaked back into their outside room at dawn, giggly from too many Black Russians and sweet sparkling wine, careful not to wake their sleeping parents.
But Waldie, who shared the other outside room with Jacques, heard them. The next day he glared at them and warned them to stop behaving ‘like sluts’.
Theresa was instantly in a huff. What was he talking about? They weren’t sleeping around! They didn’t go all the way! Had he never heard of a holiday romance?
But Lynette stopped her: ‘Ignore him, he’s just jealous because he can’t find a girl who wants to behave like a slut.’
A week later the chauffeur arrived in the Jaguar to convey the three rooinekke safely back home.
On her last evening with Leonard in the small tent, Theresa has to summon up every shred of what is left of her willpower to keep from turning into a slut. She already suspects that she won’t manage to remain a virgin until the day she finally marries the prince of her dreams – but nor does she want the precious little membrane to be torn by a rooinek she isn’t likely ever to see again. In a tent behind a noisy disco. No matter how madly in love she is with the lovely Leonard.
I’m crazy about him, but I’m not stupid, she wrote in her diary that morning. After all, I know that a holiday romance isn’t supposed to last beyond a holiday, or we would’ve called it something else.
As if she needed a pep talk before she joined the battle against Leonard’s lust – and her own treacherous body – one final time.
She is heartbroken when she and Lynette sneak into their outside room late that night, once again way after their curfew. (‘Curfew’ is Lynette’s word. Obviously.)
Lynette teases her about taking her first holiday fling so seriously. ‘There will be plenty more holidays when you can hook up with other guys,’ she whispers as they close the door behind them in the darkened room.
The next moment the lamp between the two beds is swi
tched on – its sudden brightness blinding – and they see Waldie sitting on Lynette’s bed, his expression blacker than ever before, with an almost empty vodka bottle beside him and Theresa’s diary in his hand.
‘So this is the time when you two whores come home?’ His words are slurred from too much vodka.
‘What are you doing with my diary?’ Theresa cries out, too upset to remember to whisper.
‘Shh,’ Lynette whispers urgently. ‘You’ll wake up the whole house!’
‘You scheme you can fool the old toppies with your smooth talking and your lies, hey?’ His speech is soft and slow, but his tone is so threatening that Theresa starts to feel scared. ‘But you can’t fool me. I won’t allow my sister to carry on like a fucking slut!’
He gets up and walks right up to them, so close they can smell the alcohol on his breath.
‘Waldie,’ Lynette says, ‘leave me alone or I’ll call Pa.’ Her voice is shaking and Theresa realises that she is scared too.
‘Call him,’ Waldie says. ‘Then you’ll be gated for the rest of the holiday because you only got in now.’
Theresa glares at him, tries to hide her fear: ‘If you read my diary—’
‘What will you do about it?’ he sneers. ‘If your dad knew what you were getting up to with that rooinek—’
‘You have always been pathetic,’ Lynette hisses softly, ‘but now you are beyond pathetic.’
‘Shut up, you slut!’ His fist flies out, astonishingly fast for someone with such a cumbersome body, and lands right in the middle of her face. Lynette falls backwards against the wall, her hands protectively covering her face.
Theresa screams. It suddenly no longer matters if they are gated for the rest of the holiday. ‘Stop! Leave her alone, you bully!’
‘He always picks on people who are smaller and weaker than him,’ Lynette says with a horrible grimace and a bloody mouth. ‘That’s why I say he’s pathetic. He can’t—’
The next blow lands above her eye.
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