Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

  There was something too much about the room, so I put away my camera and just looked at all the heaped and abandoned hopes of Cuba laid before its patron saint. Stuffed animals, and dolls, and dancing figures of wedding couples. Military hats, models of Jesus, and, along the walls, clutches of keys. A castanet too, and yellow clippings of Ernesto Hemingway receiving the Nobel Prize, and dark flowers, in this small room lit by candles.

  It was like all the rooms in Cuba combined in one, all the private altars and glass cases pooled to make some communal appeal. There were bright medals from Angola, pre-Revolutionary coins, certificates belonging to kids who’d studied in Ethiopia. There were boxing medals and medals given to soldiers who died. And, from Fidel’s mother, Lina Ruz, the maid who’d married the boss, there was a small gold talisman.

  Lourdes left her ring by the altar, then went into the nave and prayed.

  I watched her from a distance, kneeling on the cool stone floor, eyes closed, muttering some kind of prayer, and then I got tired of waiting and went outside, into the sun.

  “What did you ask the Virgin for?” I asked when she came out.

  “That will be my secret,” she said, and linked her arm around my friend’s.

  • • •

  Dear Stephen,

  I expect this will come as something of a surprise, but I wanted you to be the first to know: tomorrow I am getting married. To a lovely girl, very intelligent, very sweet, a friend of a friend, in fact. You may think this abrupt, but things happen very suddenly here, and, what with the political uncertainty and the economic chaos, I thought it best to act decisively this time. So we are preparing the paperwork at the minute, and then shall be planning our return to England.

  Rather romantic, don’t you think? Rather like Daphnis and Chloe? With warmest wishes, Hugo

  Dear Stephen,

  This is my first letter as a married man. I don’t know that I feel entirely different, but I imagine something in me must have changed. Rather like when one gets confirmed: it seems an empty ritual at the time, but later one realizes that something in one has turned, or been transfigured.

  To tell the truth, the wedding itself was rather a sorry affair. We couldn’t find any witnesses, and Cubans aren’t generally allowed on the island, so Richard, the photographer I believe I mentioned before, simply went out into the hotel lobby, and persuaded some German tourists to come in. We said our vows, though it didn’t really feel like that at all, not least because they were all in Spanish; and since I couldn’t exactly follow what the man was saying, I just said “Sí” whenever Lourdes—my wife—nudged me. When it came time for me to kiss her, I found myself a little at sixes and sevens, and mostly watching Richard, who was standing behind her shoulder, giving her away.

  All the same, though, there was something special about it. For one thing, Lourdes looked transported that day, in a long white dress they keep for these occasions, and her happiness seemed quite unfeigned. And for my part, when I said the words, I could feel I was committing myself to something: rather like those times at school when, simply by saying something, you feel it. Like saying “God save the Queen” to give yourself strength in an emergency.

  There was also a rather lovely poem that Richard had chosen to read, by José Marti—you know, that extraordinary Napoleon-Churchill figure they have here, the George Washington of Cuba, as he’s sometimes known—who was the country’s greatest fighter and its greatest love poet. One of those extravagantly romantic Spanish kind of verses. “El corazón es un loco/Que no sabe de un color: / O es su amor de dos colores,/O dice que no es amor.” The heart is a madman that never knows a single color. Either it is a love of two colors. Or it says it is no love at all.

  That struck a suitably ambiguous note, I suppose. Afterwards, we just walked over to the hotel—the only one on the island, as it happens, and, in fact, the one from which I wrote you before, when I spent the night with Richard. We had a slightly desultory reception around the pool, and then, to avert suspicion, Lourdes and I proceeded to our room, while Richard went up to his.

  I shall spare you the details of our wedding night, but suffice it to say that one has more or less to go through the motions here, to keep the police at bay. They’re highly suspicious of these unions—visa marriages, as they’re called—and there are stories of their breaking in on couples on their wedding night and, if they’re occupying separate beds, taking them off to prison. Chastity’s always something of a taboo here. So we had to go through a charade at least, and when some of Lourdes’s exhortations grew more urgent, I couldn’t help wondering whether she was addressing them to me, or to the microphone she assumed to be somewhere in the room. It felt a little like being in the school play again—remember The Duchess of Malfi, when I had to pantomime passion with that Bettina girl?

  Now, to recuperate, so to speak, we shall go to Varadero for four days—passionate lovers in the spell, as it were—and then the plan is for me to return home while the embassy processes the papers.

  I suppose much of this will seem very strange to you. It seems a little strange even to me: a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, at the very least, and something of a dramatic act. But I think the fact of my agreeing to this may have something to do with that letter of which I once wrote you, the love letter someone gave me in the cathedral. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but somehow, reading that letter, in that way and in that place, struck me as an augury of sorts. I’m not superstitious, as you know—the dean’s always talking about my “agnostic muddle”—but this whole episode has a kind of rightness to me that I wouldn’t presume to deny.

  I do hope that your forays in Delphi were as pleasant as ever. With warmest regards, Hugo

  Stephen—

  This is our honeymoon hotel—not exactly the Connaught, as you can see. But the sea is nearby, and the food is tolerably good, and there aren’t many holiday-makers around. I shall have quite a bit to tell you when we meet. Please do give my best to everyone; and, if you wouldn’t mind, please keep this latest development to yourself. Yours in holy matrimony, Hugo

  That must have been the worst night of my life, just lying there, in that room, alone, wondering what was happening in their room, wondering what was not happening. Sometimes, when I heard a footfall in the corridor, I half expected it might be her. Breaking the rules, and honoring a higher law with me. But then the steps would pass by, and I’d remember the situation I’d set up was way too precarious for that, and so I was left alone with my thoughts.

  I tried all the tricks I knew—imagining points of blackness, practicing the yoga exercises I’d learned in the monastery in Saigon, even thinking my way through the checkpoints in Beirut—but still I couldn’t sleep. I got up and tried to write some postcards to the agency. And as I rummaged through my bag for cards, suddenly I came upon a hair, a long, black, silky hair, that must have been a relic from that last night in Varadero. And I remembered how she’d looked along the beach; the feel of her mouth on my legs; the way she’d smiled, and put her hands over my eyes. I saw her turning the pages of her book of poems. I heard her cry, the way she’d never shouted out in Havana. Soon it made me feel like when I was in Davao, and the NPA set off a bomb, and a couple of kids got blown away, and when I moved in for the shot, and saw their girlfriends weeping, I hardly had the will to go ahead. But I did. And that shot got syndicated around the world: “Pretty Filipinas Torn by Grief.”

  The next day, back in Havana, I was walking toward the hospital—to get some pictures—when I saw Cari in the street, and as soon as she saw me, she came up to me with her warm smile, and hugged me, and asked me how things were going. I decided not to say anything about Lula’s marriage, so I just told her about my trip to Santiago, and how I’d got ripped off by the woman at Havanautos. I guess I’d always liked Cari, especially after that time with the letter from France. And right then, in any case, it just felt good to be talking to someone, anyone, and free, for a while, from my thoughts.

  She asked
me if I wanted to come along to the Malecón with her, and I thought it was better than being alone. We walked past the new industrial beach, where teenagers were swimming among the garbage and debris at the foot of a few stone steps, while half the trash of Cuba floated past. “El Condom Pasa,” I said, but she just looked at me and smiled, and it was one of those moments when I wished Lourdes had been there. She’d have got the joke.

  Cari, though, was always good-natured, even though she still hadn’t heard from France, and she didn’t have much English, and she probably couldn’t find a way out. Along the wall, she looked at me with her blue eyes, and smiled with that creased expression, as if she were going to cry.

  “Richard,” she said at last. “Will you take some photographs of me? For my novio from France? Maybe if you take some photographs, he can keep them by his bed. And remember to come back to Havana. Lourdes told me that you took some special photographs of her, in Varadero, and you sent them to a foreign magazine—Vogue, no? You can do the same for me?”

  No harm in that, I thought; at least it would use up the time. And maybe fill up my lens with something other than the shadow of Lourdes. Might as well use the camera in a good cause: I’d looked at Cari before, in the street, and figured out how I could light her, how she could show off her colors and her curves, how to bring out the gold in her hair, and her bittersweet eyes. I’d even worked out the jokes I would tell her to make good on her glittery smile.

  “Okay. We’ll go to the beach. Get a hotel room. Do it really nice and stylish: tripod, strobes, filters, the works.”

  “You will be careful? Make them big. Not like those small things.” She’d looked disgusted once when I’d pulled out some contact sheets from the shoot of Lula on the beach; she didn’t even go for slides. “You will make them big, okay? Like this?” She pulled out a photo of her sweetheart from France.

  “Sure. Big like this: no problem.”

  She looked at me as if I were some kind of miracle worker. “O-ka, Richard, un momentico.” She walked—she almost ran—back to her room (to Lourdes’s room, I thought), and told me to wait a moment in the street, while she decided which clothes to bring and collected some lipsticks and eyeliner, and then tried to remember what her mother’s shoe size was, and what kind of clothes her aunt had requested for her boy, and then what kind of coffee Lourdes’s mother liked the most.

  Then she came running out into the street, all her things in a bag, and we found a car to take us to the hotel—for me to pick up my equipment—and then all the way to the Internacional. I got a room to serve as our base camp, just the way I would if I were shooting fashion, and I got into the whole thing like it was an assignment: at least it got me out of myself.

  For most of the morning, I just took standard pictures to warm her up: Cari in a bikini, Cari next to the rental car, Cari in front of the religious statues, the blue-green sea behind her. We stopped for a drink in the lobby, and I took a few more pictures there, but the sun was too high, and so I figured we’d shoot indoors until dusk.

  So we went back to the room, and she pulled out all the clothes she’d brought along—the black T-shirt dress, the halter top I’d seen before, the Victoria’s Secret thing the Spanish guy had given her.

  “What do you think?” she asked, changing in and out of outfits in the walk-in closet. “How does it look? This is pretty? This is nice?”

  “Stay there,” I said, as she was changing. “Like that. Like that. Again.”

  Cari in bra, Cari in panties, Cari unfastening. Cari reclining. Cari lying on the bed. Cari …

  Somewhere in the middle of all this, I thought I saw Lula coming into the room. But it was only Cari, I guess, sobbing, and whipping her head from side to side, and holding my head between her knees, and saying, “No, no, no, Richard. No, no, no.”

  V

  I still couldn’t sleep when I got back to New York. We’d agreed that the code for my coming over would be the fourth letter I received, and before that, I wouldn’t get in touch with her or Hugo: we didn’t need a code, perhaps, but habits like that were hard for her to break. So I went down to the mailbox every day, at nine o’clock, at ten o’clock, at eleven, and always there was the same Cuban silence: a huge amount of nothing. I spent long afternoons in the apartment, just in case she’d call, though I knew it wouldn’t be safe, but there was nothing: only silence. I wondered if she was waiting but couldn’t get through, if she’d sent four already, but they’d all been confiscated or lost en route, if something had happened after I’d left. I stayed awake all night, and thought of her sitting in her room, wondering why I never came.

  I called up the agency, and asked them to send me anywhere, on any gig, as long as I could get out of New York, and I found myself in Panama, then Mindanao, then stopping off to see some friends in Delhi: when I was working, at least, I was back in focus. But then one day, in Manila, I went into the Spider’s Web for a drink, and a girl—a really pretty girl—came up to me and said, “You’re so handsome, honey. You want to come dancing with me?” and then her friend said, “She’s a good girl. You can do anything with Lourdes,” and I felt sick, sick to my stomach.

  I came back to New York, and still there was no letter. I tried to call José in Havana, I figured that was safe, but always it was the same: static, and a crackle, and a faint, underground voice, saying, “Dime, dime,” as if casting lines into the deep. I could have chanced a call to Hugo—who ever checks on telephone calls between England and America?—but still I couldn’t face the thought of hearing his recriminations. Or, even worse, his enthusiasm. And then saying, “How’s your wife, Hugo, the great love of my life?”

  Finally, I could stand it no more. I called the travel agency in Montreal, got on their next package tour to Varadero, leaving the following Sunday, and arrived, with a group of blue-rinse vacationers, at the Internacional. I went to the Havanautos desk—run as usual by the only person in Cuba who understood economics—and got her to give me a Sentra for two hundred bucks a day. I pulled out onto the highway and drove toward Havana: even two hours in Varadero was like a lifetime in a haunted house.

  I drove fast down the long, empty road, so empty it looked like it was set up for some fashion shoot, with a thin line of lipstick down the middle. The night riders were out in force, like poppies in the spring, extending their brown arms, laughing and giving me the eye. Above them, there seemed to be more billboards than ever: ONE OPTION ONLY: THE FATHERLAND, REVOLUTION, SOCIALISM.

  I passed Cojímar, and remembered the café where I’d gone for lunch my first week in Cuba, many years before, in search of Hemingway (“Sorry, we don’t know that name here,” the old man in the street had said). I came closer to the Malecón, and saw all my previous trips all jumbled up. There was the place where we’d gone after Maxim’s; there was the place where we’d kissed and kissed; there was the place where I’d almost popped the question. Down by the U.S. Interests Section, where the government still flashed a neon caricature of Uncle Sam every night, I could see the place where I’d sat, my last morning in the city the year before, and thought: If I never, ever see a sight as beautiful as this one, I’ll die happy.

  It was late by now, and I was in that half-drugged, emotional state brought on by jet lag—when you feel wide open, and your mind is on cruise control, and you open up your heart to the first person you meet. I peered into the Nacional, but it was all glitzed up now, sparkling with empty conference rooms and chandeliered bars and computers in the lobby, showing you the sights of Havana in seven different colors. There was a rooftop bar now, full of goldchain Don Juans, and cops outside the entrance to make sure that the only people who wanted to come in could not.

  There were more people than ever among the bushes outside, and skinny girls posted in the Habana Libre as solemnly as guards: Semper Fidel, I thought. Eternal Vigilance.

  Outside in the street, the signs that used to say, “We Are Happy Here,” now said only, “We Are Here.” Old men were selling books—liquidating
their assets—along the streets, books with titles like La Promesa and Whither Mankind?, edited by Charles A. Beard. Along La Rampa, some of the old stores were turned into new “Tourist Information Centers,” open twenty-four hours a day and full of workers crowded round a black-and-white TV; outside, people were still waiting for buses that, every few hours, labored, like fat Habana Vieja mammies, off into the dark.

  THE FUTURE OF THE FATHERLAND WILL BE AN ETERNAL BARAGUA, said the new sign outside the cinema, and as I read it I wondered who the signs were aimed at. At the Americans, who weren’t allowed to come here in the first place? At the traitors, the ones who’d already left? Or at the people who still remained, and were the last ones who’d believe them? I thought of a guy who says “I love you” after his girlfriend has slammed the door.

  I walked, walked, walked, just tracing the hill down toward the center of town, and everywhere I turned, I saw José Martí: his statue here, his words on that plaque, his book Ismaelillo number one on the current best-seller list. A hundred years dead, and he was everywhere; and Lourdes, the one I wanted, I couldn’t find. I decided there’d be even more guys trailing me now than the next day, so I didn’t even stop at Concordia, but just kept walking, the slogans tumbling slowly through my head like choruses from a Top 40 song. Siempre es 26, I heard, and thought of the night in Artemisa. Resistir para Ganar. Not every time, I figured. Estamos contigo. Don’t count on it, good buddy.

  That night, in the Colina, I dreamed of a knot of men, in robes, by the banks of the Nile. I saw them pounding drums, chanting, clapping, saying things I couldn’t understand, these men all in a circle, by the banks of the Nile. I saw the dust rising from their feet, felt the pulsing of the ground, sensed this throbbing group of men, in dirty robes, chanting something terrible. I felt a sense of menace, of being on the outside of some circle, intruding on some sacred rite. A knot of men, chanting all together, shouting for my death.