NAKED IN HAVANA
Book 1 in the Naked trilogy
Colin Falconer
DEDICATION
For my good friend Lynda Swain, who first suggested the idea of a book about Cuba, about Kennedy, and about the sixties and sent me down the road to Reyes and Magdalena and Angel and what destiny means.
Chapter 1
You want Havana?
I’ll give you Havana.
I have Havana right here, in this old photograph album I keep up here on the bookshelf. It’s a little tattered and the photographs are all black and white. I can’t even see them these days without my glasses. But it’s the most precious thing I own, apart from my wedding ring. Reyes had to smuggle it out for me. I don’t have much else left of those days. I left Cuba with the clothes on my back and not much else.
Here’s my papi. Isn’t he handsome? He’s standing outside his nightclub, the Left Bank, down on La Rampa. I was sixteen then. Yes, stunning - that’s what everyone says. Being beautiful is a blessing and a curse. When you’re young you think you own your beauty like you think you own your youth. You don’t realise that you’re just borrowing both and that someday life will come to take them back. Perhaps I would have done things differently if I was smart enough to know that.
Or perhaps not. What a lowdown, spoiled bitch I was. You really want to read this? Don’t. Do yourself a favour, find some other book to read, because I swear, you’ll want to throttle me when you learn the things I did. But I learned my lesson. Take some comfort in that; life paid me back, in full.
Here’s my mother. I didn’t know her well. She died when I was ten. We are on the Malecón, by the sea wall, back in the early fifties before everything went to hell. Look how she’s holding me. She must have loved me, but I can’t even remember her face now, not without this photograph to remind me.
People treat you like a princess because they love you, because you’ve lost your mother. And because your daddy’s rich, you think it’s always going to be like that. But life always finds a way to keep us honest, that’s what I found anyway.
And if life doesn’t, death will.
But I got lucky. Reyes Garcia came along and changed everything.
But first there was Havana.
Cuba, 1958
So there I was, naked. In Havana.
On the bed.
Angel, bless him, waited until he’d slept with me before he told me he was marrying someone else.
In fact, he waited until he’d had me on three separate occasions before breaking the good news. For now he sat there on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, listening to the scratchy sound of Beni Moré on the old Victrola singing Santa Isabel de las Lajas. We were in his father’s apartment on San Lorenzo, where Señnor Macheda brought his own mistresses. I suppose, in Angel’s mind, he was just carrying on family tradition.
My thoughts were in quite another direction. I imagined finally telling my father about us, wondered whether we would have the wedding at the club or in the garden at home. I knew Papi wouldn’t agree to one of the big hotels--he hated those guys taking over his country like that.
I lay on the tangled sheets, feeling the wetness on my belly turning sticky and cold as the overhead fan stirred the treacly air. He was always careful like that, my Angel; being late home from shopping was easier to explain than being pregnant. I admired the lean bands of muscle on his chest. He was a beautiful boy. A comma of inky black hair fell over his forehead and resisted all his efforts to push it back. His half-lidded eyes made him appear more sensual than he really was.
My clothes were scattered over the floor. The room smelled of sweat, sex and the French perfume my papi had bought me for my eighteenth birthday.
Angel’s hand went to his penis, stroked it casually, then he looked at me and one corner of his mouth twisted in a self satisfied grin.
“I’m getting married,” he said.
I raised myself on one elbow and stared at him. “What?”
“Father’s idea. Nothing I can do about it.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if this was a minor inconvenience that no one could have possibly foreseen.
“Married? When? To who?”
He drew on his cigarette, watched the long stream of smoke as he exhaled. “Some girl from America. He says it’s important for the family, that it’s my duty. Can you believe it?” He laughed. “My fucking father would marry me to my sister if there was a dollar in it.”
He looked at her, tilted his head, like: “you should feel sorry for me, Magdalena.”
“How long have you known about this?”
Another casual shrug. He examined the tip of his cigarette, the glowing ash I would have liked to have mashed in his eye. “Does it matter?”
Time stopped.
I could hear the waves crashing on the Malecón, children playing football on the cobblestones in the plaza below. Someone was playing a guitar and singing, quite badly. The brown barrio girls were laughing and clapping along.
I reached for the glass of iced lime juice beside the bed and threw it at him. My aim was off. If I hadn’t been so angry it would have hit him on the head and sent him toppling down into the street. Instead, it missed him by a slender few inches and smashed on the cobblestones down in the plaza. The guy playing the guitar cursed us and the girls screamed.
Angel ducked his head and ran for the door.
I looked for something else to throw. The lamp. Now the bedside table. I hauled a picture frame from the wall and hurled that as the door slammed shut behind him.
I wiped myself with his shirt and tossed that into the plaza as well. I found my clothes, got dressed. I didn’t walk out, not then, not straight away. Take deep breaths, Magdalena. Don’t let him see you cry.
I don’t know why, but when I got downstairs he was still standing by the door, naked, cupping his balls with one hand. Perhaps he was hoping that I’d calm down. You should not tell a naked girl you’re getting married to someone else and hold even the faintest hope that she will calm down anytime soon.
He saw the look on my face when I came out of the bedroom and panicked. He ran out of the door and down the steps into the plaza, bare-assed. The barrio girls started laughing and whistling, thinking this was a great joke.
Angel was trapped halfway between me and the rest of Havana. He made to run back inside, then saw me coming down the marble staircase. I kicked him and punched him while he cowered against the wall. But how much damage can a girl do?
Not nearly enough, nothing like what he deserved.
There was a crowd gathered, hooting and cheering on the pretty chica beating on the rich kid. This was as much fun as anyone had seen at that end of San Lorenzo for a while. Eventually I let him run back inside.
Luis was waiting with the car on the other side of the plaza. I kept my head down so he couldn’t see me crying and jumped in the back. He knew enough not to ask questions. He started the engine and put his foot on the gas. We headed back down San Lorenzo towards Vedado.
I stared out of the window, my hands balled into fists in my lap. I needed to calm down before I got home. I couldn’t let Papi see me like this.
Angel might think he was going to marry someone else, but he was wrong.
This wasn’t over. Magdalena Fuentes would see to that.
Chapter 2
When I got home, there was a black Cadillac parked in the driveway, so new and shiny you’d think the paint was still wet. A man in a fedora and sunglasses stood beside it, he was about the size and shape of a gorilla. I waved to him as I got out of the car. He didn’t even smile.
Papi was sitting in the courtyard with a man with big ears and a gardenia in the button
hole of his jacket. They were talking in whispers out by the fountain.
I went upstairs and closed my bedroom door and stripped off my clothes. I checked my reflection in the mirror looking for evidence of sin. Sure enough there was a bruise on my left breast. Angel thought I liked it; he kept biting me even when I told him to stop. Why is it boys think if they hurt you, if they make you scream or moan, that it’s always a good thing?
I slipped into the shower and stood under the faucet letting the cold water wash away the sticky residue of sex and the smell of him. I slid a hand between my legs and supported myself against the tiles with the other. It was the only way I could get any relief; I always left my trysts with Angel feeling so tense.
This sex thing, it’s supposed to be pleasure, isn’t it? But it wasn’t. I wanted give him what he wanted--I wanted Angel to be mine,--but when I got home I always needed some kind of release of my own. Today was different, I came anger and frustration and guilt, and when I was done my legs wouldn’t hold me, and I slipped onto my haunches on the tiles, feeling the needles of water in my hair. I started sobbing like I was choking up my heart. I tried to stop and I couldn’t.
That maricón.
I wanted to kill him.
When I came back downstairs, the man Papi had been talking to was gone.
Papi was sitting on the terrace where countless pots of ferns and malangas fought for space. It was shaded by avocado trees, their trunks swathed in orchids, everything still glistening after the afternoon’s rain. The air was filtered through the spray from the fountain. There was the murmur of the water and the rustling of the leaves on the custard apple and mamey trees.
Our old Labrador, Rafa, lay on the tiles at Papi's feet.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders and tried to look puzzled.
“You look upset.”
“I’m just tired, Papi.” I bent and kissed him on the forehead. I couldn’t talk to him about this. He was my father; he would be destroyed if he ever found what his baby girl had done. There were some things it was better he did not know.
Anyway, he couldn’t help me. They can love us, sometimes, but what does any man - father, husband, son - really know about women?
Perhaps if my mama was still alive I could have talked to her, she might have known what to do. I couldn’t even tell my friends , I didn’t trust them, they would look sad for me,, then when I was gone they would laugh at me behind my back or perhaps tell their parents out of malice and it would get back to Papi the worst possible way.
“What are you reading?” I asked him.
He tossed the newspaper aside. “Apparently we’re winning the war against the rebels, even though we’re not. Everyone loves the president even though no one does. Why do I read this nonsense, cariña? Because I think it makes me look sophisticated, but really it just gives me an excuse to sit out here and smoke cigars and drink rum.” He smiled.
Papi looked better today, the rings under his eyes were not as pronounced. I wished he would not smoke as much, it couldn’t be good for him, and every night he was out late at the casino. I told him to let his boys run the place, but he said he couldn’t trust them. I didn’t believe that for a moment, they were good guys, they knew what to do with or without him.
Our cook Maria said he didn’t drink and smoke this much when Mama was alive.
His glass was empty. He reached for the bottle but I moved it out of reach. “You know what the doctor said,” I told him.
“What’s the point of living till you’re a hundred if you can’t enjoy it?”
“Doctor Mendes says-”
“That man doesn’t drink and he doesn’t smoke and he looks twice my age. Is that any recommendation, sweetheart?”
“You’re always telling me not to drink.”
“You’re a young woman. That’s different. A scoundrel like me can afford to do whatever he pleases, people expect it.” He turned the tables on me. He looked pointedly at his wristwatch. “Where have you been?”
“I went shopping in the Nacional.” I held up the bag and showed him the dress I had bought in a rush on the way home. I held it up for him to see. It was awful; I hadn’t had time to pick and choose. He smiled and said that he liked it. He was almost as good a liar as his daughter.
Maria brought me an iced lemonade. I pulled my cane chair closer to his and put a hand on his shoulder, played with the long black hair that hung over the collar of his white shirt. He smiled and closed his eyes. There were flecks of grey in his hair now but he was still a handsome man. There were always women flocking around him at the club, but he repelled their advances in the most gallant way. He had told me he would never marry again. “There is no one like your mother,” he said.
“Who was that man?”
“What man?”
“The man who just left, he came in the black Cadillac.”
“It was just business.” A casual wave of the hand.
“Meyer Lansky.”
“If you knew, why did you ask?”
“What was he doing here?”
“I told you, it was a business matter.”
“Does he want to buy the Left Bank?”
A long and theatrical sigh, like it was not even worth mentioning. “He wants a piece of the club for a casino, he’s offered me twenty percent of the action. But I’m not selling.” He drew on his cigar and grinned at me.
“Everyone else has given in to him.”
“I’m not everyone else. I told him there’s no point, my club’s too small, it’s no competition to him.”
“He obviously doesn’t think so.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then: “These bastards. It’s all about money, everything now is about money. They think they can throw dollars at me and I’ll give in. They want to turn Havana into another Las Vegas, and maybe they will. They have Batista in their back pocket, the government’s handing out visas to these people like lollies to little children. But it doesn’t mean I have to be a part of it. You know their trouble? They have no honour.”
Honour. Here was a man to whom the word still meant something. He was so old fashioned, a man of the last century. But how I admired him for it. I felt ashamed, I knew I could never live up to this man; he always did what was right, my only talent was for doing what was wrong.
I was bursting to ask him about Angel, but I knew I must not appear too eager. I watched the smoke from his cigar dissipate on the still, heavy air, while the smells from the kitchen made my stomach growl. Maria was preparing a spicy broth of chicken cazuela, frying cumin and garlic and onions in a heavy iron griddle.
“I hear Angel Macheda is getting married.”
“Some American girl. Her family’s very wealthy, they say.”
I would be such a good actress, I thought, pretending to be only vaguely interested while I imagined getting a knife and cutting my boyfriend’s heart out. Or anything else that came easily to hand.
“Is she pretty?”
“I’ve not seen her. I don’t suppose it matters, she’s a Salvatore.”
“I’ve never heard of the Salvatores.”
“They own half of Miami, old man Salvatore has shares in the Tropicana and the Sans Souci. It’s a match made in heaven.”
“So Angel is doing this for his family?”
“I think so.”
“ Would you ever make me do something like that?”
“No, cariña, I wouldn’t dare! I know who’s the real head of this family.”
He relit his Cohiba cigar and peered at me through the blue smoke. “You don’t have a soft spot for Angel Macheda, do you?”
“Of course not!” My laugh sounded brittle, even to me. “I was just curious. We’ve known each other a long time.”
“I thought he would have told you himself then.”
“So did I. How long have you known about this, Papi?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “A while.”
I felt my
cheeks burn. I wondered how long “a while” was. Days, weeks - months? Did everyone know about this but me? Angel had made a complete fool of me.
Those times Angel went to America with his father, it must have been to meet her and her family. He was screwing me in his father’s apartment during the week, and then Saturdays taking some rich American slut to dinner in Miami.
Perhaps the look on my face gave me away. Papi was looking at me with his eyes narrowed, that look he had when he sensed something wasn’t right. “Are you sure you’re not carrying a flame for that boy? Because I’m telling you now, this girl is getting a bad bargain-- he only cares about one thing, and that’s money.”
“Oh, Papi! I don’t care who he marries. It just seems a shame, that’s all. I’m glad you’re not like that to make me marry someone I didn’t love.”
“I don’t care who you marry. I just want you to be happy, cariña. And I’ll tell you this, you’d never be happy with a boy like that. I’d never let you marry a Macheda, and they’d never let him marry you.”
“Why? We’re old blood, just like them.”
“They’re hardly old blood; they’re from Argentina. They only got here a hundred years ago. Their ears are still wet.”
“So why aren’t I good enough for him?”
“Good enough? That has nothing to do with it, cariña. Angel’s father wants to get out of Cuba, and the best way is to marry his son to a wealthy American girl, like Esmeralda Salvatore.”
I screwed up my nose. ““Esmeralda,” is that her name? It will never last.”
“Because her name’s Esmeralda?”
I almost said: “because can you imagine shouting: “Esmeralda!” in bed?” Four syllables. Angel wouldn’t have time to shout her whole name before it was all over. But I bit my tongue just in time. Instead, I said: “Esmeralda is an unlucky name.”
“Well it’s unlucky for her, if you ask my opinion.”
Naked In Havana (Naked Series Book 1) Page 1
