Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

  I’d got most of what I needed from the present trip, in any case, and the only thing I needed now was some more intimate shots—the inside of houses, the texture of hopes. So I decided to take José up on his offer and track that crooked wire to wherever it would take me.

  So I followed the instructions he’d given me, walked past Coppelia—it looked kind of hungover this morning, with an after-the-party feel—and down 23, where a few old men were buying the day’s copy of Granma, and the kids were talking about how they’d spent the night, and the housewives were calculating lines and quotas. I went down a side street, and up some narrow stairs, past two apartments open, with little boys watching me from the sofa, and up to a floor where an old woman was on the telephone, with the door open. CDR, I figured: the neighborhood spies making sure that everything was peachy. I knocked on the door that said 7, and heard a dog barking, and then it sprung open, and there was José, a big black boy behind him. “Richard,” he said, “meet my brother,” and the big smiling boy extended a hand. I followed them in, through a small room and into the kitchen. I figured there was no way this guy was really his brother—the only thing they had in common was two eyes and two legs—but distinctions were all dissolved here. In fact, it looked like half Havana was in the kitchen: kids with university manners, and three boys gathered around an English grammar book, and some girls huddled over Playboy in the corner, and a few shirtless teenagers sprawled out on the floor in front of a boom box on which you could catch the stations from Key West. Another Havana slumber party.

  Around me, on the living room wall, there was a cross, and rows and rows of books in every kind of language: worn old orange Penguins of Somerset Maugham and Raymond Chandler; Martí, Gogol, Spinoza, Wilde, The Gulag Archipelago, something called The Book of Knowledge. A rooster was strutting around the room, and I could see the mangy white dog who’d greeted me at the door slurping up water from the toilet bowl. There was a photo of the Beatles on the bathroom door, a couple of postcards of the Yucatán on the wall.

  “Too many books, eh?” said José. “It is my love. Books and friends. I have books from every country. Friends too—in Barcelona, Lima, Paris. But I cannot see them. My books I can always see and hold. Hey, Richard. This is Myra and Osman and Reynaldo,” and I smiled at them all, and they smiled back, and then went back to Cyndi Lauper and discussing whether Jesse Jackson was a Communist.

  “So how is it with you, Richard? What can I give you?”

  “Suffering. I need suffering. Images of pain, of desperation.”

  “No problem,” he said. “You come to the right place. You can take pictures of my apartment and my friends. What else?”

  “I need to see despair.”

  “Okay. Later, I take you to a typical house. But first you need something else? Some cigars, maybe? The cigars with Shakespeare on the box. Maybe the ones with that English place—the House of Kings?”

  “House of Lords?”

  “Sure; House of Lords, anything: my friend can get you. Five boxes, ten. Usually, they are fifty pesos. I can get you for twenty U.S. Just tell me how many you need. Then I visit him, get the boxes, and we go to Capri. I get some girls, we have a party. What do you say?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sure. No maybe. This is better. You stay at the Nacional now? Okay. Maybe I give you ten dollars. You buy some food, some beer in the Tiendas there, and after, we go to the show.” Better that than another night with Hugo and Alfredo, I thought: better that than another night with a Célia.

  Just then there came a knock on the door. The dog barked, the rooster cried, and José went off to look out through the keyhole. The knock came again, more insistent.

  “Quién e’?”

  There was no answer.

  “Manolo? Eusebio?”

  Nothing.

  José pulled back the lock and opened up. It was a Minint man—from the Ministry of the Interior—and a guy in a white shirt and gray slacks. I figured there was safety in numbers: just sit in the kitchen and blend in with the crowd.

  “José Santos Cruz?” the man said, while his friend cast his eye around the apartment.

  “Yes.”

  “It is time to help the Fatherland.”

  “I am helping the Fatherland already.”

  “You can help it more. You do not want to go to Angola?”

  “Compañero, I want to go. But what can I do? My mother is sick. She is in Camaguëy, she is a widow. I think she will die soon. Have some feeling, compañero.”

  “So what do I tell my boss?”

  “Tell him I will join you as soon as my mother dies.”

  The man wrote something down. “Okay, compañero,” he said, and patted José on the shoulder. “I hope your mother has a good long life.”

  His usual bravado back in place, José came back into the kitchen, all smiles.

  “Okay, Richard. Let’s go. I take you to Centro.”

  “Those guys were cool.”

  “Cool? Sure. They know it is not good to make problems for other Cubans. Come on, I introduce you to my mother.”

  I wondered what kind of mother this would be: A teenager? An Eskimo? A man, perhaps?

  We went back out into the blinding sun, and José hailed a gasping old colectivo that was on its way downtown, and there was some heartfelt pleading and shouting and numbers flung back and forth, both parties trying to keep the smiles out of their voices, and then we were bumping down La Rampa, toward the sea, and turning toward Centro, and then José was leading me through a rectangle of dirty streets to a house with an old wooden door on Virtudes. He knocked and pulled at the door—no bells here, and no telephones, so every visit was a surprise—and there was no sound for a long time, and finally a frightened-looking woman, in a soiled white nightdress, came out on the balcony above us.

  “Ay, mi vida! José, why do you come now?”

  “To see Lázara.”

  “Okay, come in. She is with Lourdes and Caridad. Ven, ven!” The door swung open before us, pulled by a thin blue string that ran along the whole length of the stairs, and we scrambled up to the room. It was empty, except for some framed Spanish banknotes on the wall, and a set of lottery tickets posted up, and an old black-and-white picture of Fidel. Beyond, there was another room, even darker, with no lights and no windows.

  “Ven, ven,” said the woman as we walked into the farther room, where three girls were sitting on a bed, sorting through old postcards.

  “Lázara,” said José, and the youngest of them, dark-eyed, with long curls—she could have been Miss Havana five years from now—got up and kissed him on both cheeks. “This is Richard. He lives in New York.”

  Her eyes brightened, and she gave me her prettiest smile. “You know this street?” she asked, and then went over to a dresser, and got out a letter, and handed it to me. It was addressed to someone on 179th Street in the Bronx.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You can send it for her?” asked José.

  “No problem.”

  “Mira, un momentico,” said another of the girls, a big, buxom blonde, with blue eyes that looked like they were going to tear. “I have a letter for my father. In New York. Wait here, I will go and get it.”

  “Me too,” said the third.

  “Sure,” I said, “but in return I have a favor too. Let me get some pictures of you.”

  The girls giggled and all but clapped their hands, and José led me back out to the kitchen. Ten minutes later, the three of them came out, ready for prime time: red lips, and loosened hair, and mascara, and perfume, and their flashiest, low-cut numbers. All at eleven-thirty on a hot morning in July. “Okay,” I said, and calculating the light in my head, trying to make it seem casual, I told them to go out on the balcony, with the dilapidated houses behind them, and then to come inside, under the picture of Che, and then in the doorway, where you could see Che and Michael Jackson and Jesus on the Cross all at once. I reeled off about fifteen, twenty frames like that, real fast, with no
film in the camera, to get them relaxed, and then a few more in the same way, till they were getting bored and forgetting their poses and coming into focus—turning into themselves again—and then, just about the time they were getting fed up, and forgetting I was there, I put some film in and clicked off a couple of fast rolls, shot after shot after shot, of Lázara in her Chanel shirt, the mother at her empty table, the three budding beauties wilting in the Havana sun. Sex appeal and political irony all in the same pretty frame.

  When we were done, José completed the introductions. “This is Lourdes,” he said, pointing to the smallest of the girls, who had dark hair below her shoulders, and olive skin, and a kind of ironic gleam in her eyes. “Very pleased to meet you,” she said.

  “You speak English?”

  “A little. It was my subject in the university.”

  “Great.”

  “So you will deliver this note for me? To my aunt in Miami?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “And this is Caridad,” said José, and the other girl, the light coming through her golden hair, sweat making circles on her tight turquoise top, said, “Maybe later I will give you my letter.”

  “Fine.”

  “Vamos,” said José. “Listen, tonight we go to Capri. You want to come?”

  “Sure,” said Lourdes, again in English, and Caridad gave me her teary smile, and Lázara was told she was still too young.

  “Okay, you come to my house at nine o’clock, m’entiendes?”

  “Nine o’clock, boss,” said Lourdes, and smiled an ironic goodbye.

  So later, when you go to New York, you can give these photos to Lázara’s mother, okay?” José said as we walked past construction sites where workers sat on bricks all day, whistling at girls. “She works in New York. Big house and everything: three cars, color TV. I think she has a good life there. Maybe she can help you with your work. She left in Mariel. But now, seven years, she cannot see her daughter. Her son went to America too, on a tube, and now he is a mafioso. Listen, I give you some other letters for New York, okay? What you want to eat?”

  “Is there anywhere good in Havana?”

  “Sure. La Torre. Is only for the Russians.”

  “Like the whole country.”

  “Sure. Why not? You know what they say: the Russians sneeze, and we get a cold. Everything is for the Russians here. Everything. Just like Cubans in Angola. You know, in Africa, only Cubans can go into the clubs? Only Cubans can use the beaches. Only Cubans can buy the girls. The Russians in one world are the Cubans in the other.”

  “You ever speak Russian these days?”

  “Never. We learn Russian in school. But now everyone wants to speak English. It is like our girlfriend. Our dream of crazy love.” He smiled with his crinkly slyness, and we stopped outside what looked like a high school cafeteria—a beaten old building with a long line of people snaking around its walls, and bright pictures of smiling hamburgers and dancing milk shakes above the bodies. “Okay, Richard, now you give me your passport, and we go in.”

  “No. I hold on to my passport, and we go together.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  We went to the front of the line, I flashed my passport at the woman, and she waved us in.

  José hadn’t missed a trick. “So you are Italian? Not American?”

  “My mother is from Italy. That’s why I look like this. Anyway, it’s easier to travel as an Italian than an American.”

  “Sure. Look, Richard, I want to help you. But you can help me too. If I give you two hundred dollars, you will lend me your passport?”

  “Great. And stay in Cuba the rest of my life?”

  “No. For you is easy to get another. Then I use your passport, go to the Dominican, then give you your passport again. Then you have two.”

  “Thanks but no thanks, José.”

  “Okay. No problem.” He took everything in his stride. “So what you think of the girls?”

  “Cute.”

  “You don’t need a Cuban girlfriend?”

  “Look, I’ve had enough girlfriends to last me a lifetime. That’s what I’m trying to get away from.”

  “But which one you like?”

  “Any. They all look fine.”

  “I think they like you.”

  “Sure. Who wouldn’t like a ticket to New York?”

  “Okay. Anything is okay. But let me give you this. It is from Lourdes. She keeps these things—these underground papers—and one day, when things are different, she will show them to the world. Maybe you read it, then you can understand our country.”

  “Okay,” I said, and glanced at what he’d given me: a yellowed old scrap that said: “Martí the Lover.”

  “You know this man?”

  “Of course. The only guy in the world that both Washington and Havana have the hots for.”

  “Sure. I love Martí. You know what he says? What is that line? It is my favorite.” He paused for a second. “ ‘Dos patrias tengo yo: Cuba y la noche.’ Two fatherlands I have: Cuba and the night.”

  By then our lunch was over, and it was getting late, and I told him that I had to get back to work, so we hopped a car back to Vedado and walked through the quiet streets together. We could have been walking through a pleasant town in Oregon then: the shady parks, the old women on their rocking chairs, swinging back and forth, the little girls skipping rope outside the dancing schools. But there was a buzz to the air, a sexual charge that they’d have outlawed up in Medford: there was the sound of drumming in the distance, and the kids weren’t going to school, and it felt like the whole city was flashing its eyes as it danced its way to the bedroom.

  We walked down blocks of crumbling old houses with overgrown lawns—like a suburb in Peru after twenty years of Burmese rule—and yellow and blue and tangerine homes, with beat-up Chevys on cinder blocks outside, and men hammering away at old motorbikes with sidecars, and open windows, and broken gates, and then we came to a bigger place, white, with grand porticoes and Spanish moss in the garden, and men in white suits gathered at its entranceway.

  “Okay, I go in here,” said José. “Maybe you take some pictures, you read this article, you come to my house at eight o’clock.”

  “No problem,” I said, leaving him at the Writers’ Union, and then I went back to the hotel to get ready for the night. I napped for a little, wrote some captions, then picked up the clipping José had given me. It looked like some transcript of a speech—I couldn’t tell the date—and it was printed in the special type that Granma now used for speeches by Fidel. I opened up a beer and began to read.

  “Compañeros, compañeras,” the piece began, and I pictured an audience in some airy lecture hall, “my topic today is José Martí. Libertad y Amor. Freedom and Love. Amor y Libertad. For Martí, they were the two words that rang through the world from its dawning. For Martí, they were the sun and the moon of his every day. They were the first words of his teenage love poems, and the last words of his obituary. They were the words for which he fought and yearned as poet and as martyr, as philosopher and as fighter. For Martí, there could be no love without freedom; and there could be no freedom without love.”

  Kind of flowery, I thought, but I might as well go on.

  You know, all of you, the details of his life—less a life, I believe, than a fairy tale. The boyhood of the Apostle on Paula Street, here in Havana, near the sea. At 16, he writes for La Patria Libre; at 17, already, he is in jail. He is an art critic, a poet, he lives in Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He is consul of Uruguay, teacher of Spanish at New York City High School, author of seventy books. And then, my friends, you all know how he died, charging at the Spaniards on a white stallion; and that he died, this man of bridges and crossroads, in a place they call Dos Ríos.

  But today, on this golden afternoon, on this enchanted island that Pepe loved as a sweetheart all his life, I want to tell you about another Martí, a private Martí, Martí the apostle of love. For him, ever
y poem was a love song, and every act an attempt to rescue his beloved from imprisonment. For Martí, nothing was abstract or dead; as he wrote of Emerson, so of himself, he “made idealism human” and looked on the universe as a living, breathing creature. And like Emerson, he strode from mountaintop to mountaintop, imploring us to join him. The Five-Year Plan he discovered was a Ten-Thousand-Year Plan; he looked on millennia as the rest of us look on tomorrow. Truly, he was, all his days, an avid suitor of Eternity.

  Many of you know that the father of our country spent many years among the North Americans; that he worshipped and befriended the Transcendentalists; that he found in their noble souls an echo of his own. Many of you know that he hailed the United States as a paragon of freedom, “a nation of men,” he said, full of freshness and possibility. And why should he not: this daring young man, from a land of poetry and revolution, coming to another young land, born of Revolution and driven by ideals? One dreaming rebel drawn to another.

  Yet deeper than any of this was his love of love. Read his glowing essays, and you can feel the paragraphs burn your fingers. And beneath the fire, you will see again and again that what draws him, and animates him, what lifts him up and shakes him, is always and only love. Of Ulysses Grant, he wrote, “He fell deeply in love, which is a sign of personality. He married young, which is a sign of nobility.” Of Emerson, he said, “All Nature trembled before him like a new bride. His whole life was the dawn of a wedding night.” And of Whitman, he declared, “He was loved by the land, the night, the ocean.”

  But in all of this, I say, in every word and line, he was writing only of himself, a man for whom everything was love and love was everything. Humanity and Justice and Freedom were not just cold ideas to him, but warm bodies that he could embrace and hold, take to his wedding bed, kiss and make weep. For Martí was a lover all his life, who wooed his dreams as a young man does his beloved, singing outside her balcony, pacing her streets at night turning phrases in his head, never resting or stopping till he has won her hand and made her his.

  I sighed but went on to the end.