The Cat King of Havana

by Tom Crosshill

  chapter fifteen

  ALL THE WAY

  “If you want to go all the way with a girl, you’ve got to warm her up first.” Yosvany perched on the edge of his bed and watched me seriously. “No puedes meterle dedo si la jarra está cerrada, entiendes.”

  “Enough with the dedo completo,” I said. “Pick a different metaphor.”

  “To drink wine you must first ease out the cork.”

  On a different day, I might have protested the comparison. But I needed a plan, and Yosvany had one.

  “Dress up, guys,” I said to Ana and Yosvany after dinner. “We’re going somewhere nice tonight. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Ana looked suspicious, but Yosvany came in on cue. “I like surprises!” Which seemed to cut off any protest she might have made.

  Yosvany had predicted this. “If it’s the three of us, she won’t see it coming.”

  We dressed up. In my case, this meant pulling a rumpled dress shirt from my suitcase and running a comb through my hair. Yosvany found a pair of jeans somewhere that didn’t sag below his underwear. Ana emerged from her room in a knee-length dress, intensely blue, sleek and asymmetrically cut, an angled line of buttons down the front.

  By dint of much effort, I managed to keep my gaping to a minimum.

  Yosvany whistled. “Coño, girl, don’t give me a heart attack!”

  I expected her to snap something witty at him, but she only smiled. “Let’s go.”

  “Have fun,” Juanita told us at the door. She winked at me. “Good luck.”

  “Good luck?” Ana asked in the elevator. “What did she mean?”

  “She got stuck in the elevator yesterday,” Yosvany said. “But I think they fixed it.”

  It was a comfortable evening for early August, with gusting breezes that converted the suffocating heat into a mere annoyance. We caught a máquina to Vedado, an enormous yellow Chevy with two rows of passenger seats, the three of us clumped together behind the driver. The almendrón creaked and groaned down Neptuno in the gloom of dim streetlights, passing scores of Cubans flagging down a ride.

  I checked my watch. Eight forty. Twenty minutes to go.

  The driver pulled over to the curb and put the car into park.

  We couldn’t possibly be picking someone up. The car was full.

  The driver yanked his shiny new MP3 player from the rusted dashboard (in Havana, even the most decrepit old jalopy seemed to have one installed). In the sudden, ear-buzzing silence, he said, “Be right back.” He jumped out of the car and disappeared into the nearest apartment building.

  I stared after him, perplexed. Ana asked, “The hell?”

  Everyone else in the car sat there as if nothing surprising had happened. Some chatted among themselves in low, unworried voices. Others poked at their cell phones. I cast a questioning look at Yosvany but he only raised his hands: What can you do?

  A minute passed. Two. Five. The car’s engine rumbled on, low, even.

  I checked my watch. Hesitated. Leaned forward over the driver’s seat and honked the horn, one long, mournful blast.

  Nothing happened.

  Another five minutes.

  “Let’s get another car,” I said.

  “No way.” Yosvany gestured vaguely at the street. “It’s too busy tonight, and there’s three of us.”

  “What’s that guy doing in there?” Ana asked.

  “Saving someone’s life? Having dinner? Giving his girlfriend the ride of her life?” Yosvany shrugged. “Nothing unusual.”

  “In Cuba you’re always waiting for something,” Ana said.

  “Go shopping with my mom sometime,” Yosvany said. “You’ll find out what waiting means.”

  At this point the building door clanged open and the driver strolled out. He got into the car without a word and went about plugging in his MP3 player.

  “What were you doing, taking a dump?” Yosvany asked.

  “I had to run up and down five stories,” the driver replied. “Takes time.”

  At least we got moving again.

  I bit my lip harder with every passing minute. We got to the Habana Libre high-rise at five past nine. “Come on,” I said as we clambered out of the car. “We’re late.”

  Yosvany’s phone rang as if on cue. Okay, it actually did ring on cue, but Ana didn’t know this.

  “Yeah?” he answered. “Yeah, really? No. No, I can’t. Listen, man, no—” He was silent for a while, as if listening to someone on the other end.

  Knowing there wasn’t anyone to listen to, I was impressed with the play of emotions on his face—annoyed, then worried, then resigned.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Okay, cabrón, fine. I’ll be right there.” He put away his phone, looked at us, and sighed. “I’ll have to miss the surprise. Sorry, Rick.”

  “What’s wrong?” Ana asked. “Can we help?”

  Yosvany shook his head. “The drummer for my friend’s band just passed out drunk. They’re playing in half an hour, so I’d better get on it. You go ahead.”

  “I hope his show goes well,” Ana said as we entered the glitzy hotel lobby. “I can’t imagine having to show up and play a concert with no warning.”

  “I’m sure he’ll do great.” If I didn’t sound too worried, it was because Yosvany’s plan for the evening involved a party in Centro Habana with his school friends and a bottle of Havana Club that I’d paid for. “We’re taking the elevator.”

  We rode all the way to the top. “What’s this about anyway?” Ana asked.

  I shook my head, all Mr. Mystery.

  The elevator opened on a dimly lit hallway. A short woman in a hotel uniform, clipboard in hand, blocked our way. She took us in. After a moment’s hesitation, she smiled and spoke to us in English. “I’m sorry. The Turquino is closed for tourists tonight.”

  “It’s all right,” I said in Spanish. “We should be on the list. Rick Gutiérrez and guest?”

  The woman watched me with narrowed eyes. “This event is for selected workers of the central—”

  “Please,” I said. “Check your list.”

  She did. A moment later, her eyebrows rose. She bit her lip. “This isn’t salsa or reggaeton, you know.”

  “We know,” I said.

  The woman shrugged. “Okay.”

  Ana gave me a questioning glance. I pretended not to notice. Juanita had called some of her Party friends to get us on the list, but this wasn’t the time to explain.

  We pushed through large double doors into the Turquino. The dim expanse of a nightclub greeted us. There was a central bar and a well-lit stage at the far end. The rest of the space was small tables scattered across a dark floor.

  The darkness wasn’t a defect here, though. It was there to showcase Havana, twenty-five stories below.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a landscape that shimmered in yellow and black. A flat city, except for a strip of high-rises along the coast like a breakwater, a concrete mountain range, guarding Havana from the dark sea beyond. The city too was dark in places. Many patches of shadow hid amidst the brightness, where only isolated streetlights glowed like individual pearls sown on black fabric.

  Too much shadow for a living city, it seemed—but then I was used to New York.

  “Nice,” Ana said. “Was this the surprise?”

  I looked at the stage. Still empty.

  “Not quite.”

  I supposed it had been silly to worry about being ten minutes late. This was Cuba.

  A waiter seated us at a small table in one corner. We ordered sodas.

  The people at the tables around us were Cubans, couples in their fifties and sixties, the men in button-down shirts and pressed slacks, the women in fine dresses and high heels. Only a few brown faces, a drastic contrast to the usual mix in the dance scene. (This was one of the topics Miranda had blogged about, actually—how white the ranks of government functionaries looked in Cuba, compared to the population at large.)

  Then a man with a guitar wa
lked onstage. He sat down on a wooden stool, his guitar on his knees. He was an older white man, much like many in the audience, bald on top and wearing glasses. I would have passed him in the street without a second glance.

  Silence fell on the Turquino, complete and total. Nobody seemed to breathe. Even the waiters and the bartenders watched the man with a stillness so perfect it seemed rehearsed.

  My skin tingled cold. Beside me, Ana leaned forward.

  The man’s fingers caressed the strings of his guitar. Low mournful notes sang out into the silence. Graceful arpeggios, a simple melody, faint and haunting.

  “No way,” Ana whispered, recognizing the music—and the man.

  Silvio Rodríguez sang. Of memory and butterflies he sang, of white wings fluttering in the dark, of visitors that would never come again, and of the souls of lost soldiers. His voice was as sweet and bright and rough and dark as the cries of his guitar. We listened to him and a blue unicorn wandered through the shadows around us, a blue unicorn that he’d lost and that he missed, and that we missed together with him. He sang about love and about war, about justice and about lies, and we listened, and in the end I wasn’t sure if we’d been listening for ten minutes or an hour, wasn’t sure if I’d applauded or not, wasn’t sure of anything at all except that there was silence and before there hadn’t been.

  “Once you get her emotional, take her for a walk,” Yosvany had told me. “Compliment her. Tell her she’s special. Make her feel like there’s no one as beautiful and amazing as her in the world.”

  Ana got emotional all right. The problem was, so did I. We walked down Twenty-Third to the Malecón and hardly spoke a word, either one of us. I was sure she could still hear the strains of Silvio Rodríguez’s guitar inside her head the way I could.

  We sat on the concrete lip of the Malecón and watched the crashing waves for a while. “I’d never seen an audience as focused as that,” I said. “Not even at Carnegie Hall, and you know what those people are like.”

  “I don’t, actually,” Ana said. “But yeah. I think his songs meant a lot more to the locals than to us. For them it was like, I don’t know, Bob Dylan playing a gig in your living room.” She was quiet for a while. “My stepdad used to listen to Silvio, late at night with the lights out. I’d sit with him in the living room and we’d listen to song after song in the dark. Just now, at the concert, I closed my eyes . . . I could almost feel him beside me.”

  “I remembered that you asked for Silvio’s music at Yosvany’s uncle’s paladar,” I said, though of course it had been Yosvany who had remembered. “I figured you’d enjoy the concert.”

  “I used to love those songs so much,” Ana said. “Now, though . . . I mean, it was a beautiful concert. I loved it. But I kept wondering—does Silvio mean all the stuff he sings? Does he really love this Revolution? Does he love what he sees on the street when he walks around Havana? Does he know what happens to people like Miranda?”

  “So you no longer support the Revolution,” I said.

  “The Revolution was necessary,” Ana said. “Batista was a shithead and Cuba was a mess.”

  “But?”

  Ana sighed. “I’m no economist, but it’s pretty obvious communism doesn’t work. I mean, I knew about the Soviet Union and Cambodia and stuff, but I hoped Cuba was different.”

  “I’m no economist either, but I’ve learned a few things as Cat Guru of the Intertubes,” I said. “When you’re kidnapping people for being wrong on the internet, you’ve lost it.”

  Ana nodded. We sat in companionable silence for a while.

  There came a rumble. A bright red convertible jalopy pulled up to the curb. Yosvany’s friend Luis sat at the wheel looking stylish, almost macho in a tight-fitting white suit, a gold chain around his neck.

  “What’s up, guys?” he called. “You want a ride?”

  Ana stared at him.

  I realized I’d spent ten valuable minutes discussing communism with the girl I was supposed to woo.

  Too late to back out.

  “Tonight, the surprises keep on coming,” I said.

  Ana studied me through narrowed eyes. “I’m not sure I can handle any more.”

  But she got into the car.

  “Your final goal is to overwhelm her,” Yosvany had told me. “Shock her, wow her, give her an evening like she’s never had. You do that, she’s yours.”

  I was behind schedule.

  Compliment her, I thought, as the car sped along the Malecón. A fine mist of water sprayed across us from a crashing wave. I searched inside me for brilliant, witty things to say, but the only thing I found inside me was my churning stomach.

  “I remember you from the Van Van concert,” Ana told Luis over the roar of the engine. “We should dance again sometime.”

  Luis smiled in the rearview mirror and gave her a thumbs-up. He pressed a button on the MP3 player in the dashboard. Lively old son poured forth. Coincidentally, it drowned out anything else Ana might have tried to say to Luis.

  Luis winked at me in the mirror. This guy knew what was up.

  “Okay, this is getting weird.” Ana watched the road ahead as she said this, didn’t look at me. We passed the lit-up building of the Milocho on our right, going into the tunnel to Miramar.

  “Uh,” I said. “Ah.” Then, deciding that wasn’t enough, I added, “Um.”

  “What’s this about?” she asked. “Don’t tell me Luis just happened to be driving by.”

  “I wouldn’t have come to Cuba if not for you.” The words surprised me coming out, but I kept talking. It was easier while the darkness of the tunnel hid my face. “I mean, not this summer. You inspired me. When I saw you dance, how much you loved it . . . and then the way you helped me with the show for school, when you didn’t have to . . . I realized you were a real friend. I knew that we’d have a great time if we went together.”

  Ana was quiet for a moment. We entered Miramar. In the yellow light of a streetlamp I saw her looking at me, thoughtful, maybe a little surprised.

  “I wanted to say thanks tonight,” I said smoothly, feeling satisfyingly devious. “Show you I really appreciate you being here with me.”

  Ana smiled then. “Thanks, Rick. I’m happy I came.”

  At some point we left the main road and wound through side streets populated by smaller family houses and tidy little gardens, uncommonly well-maintained for Havana. At last we pulled up before a low boxy building with tan brick walls, no windows and a single metal door—the kind of place that might have been a run-down bar in some forlorn corner of Brooklyn.

  Luis put the car into park but kept the engine running, left the music on, only gestured grandly at the building.

  Ana studied it for a moment. “Do I dare ask?”

  I got out of the car, silent per Yosvany’s advice, and went around to open her door. She slid out beside me.

  I led her to the building’s simple metal door. Held my breath as I pulled on the handle.

  The door slid open with a creak. Inside, all was dark, pitch-black. I beckoned for Ana to enter.

  “Okay,” she said, “if someone jumps out at me, you’re eating my fist.”

  But she went in. I followed her into the dark. The fresh, sweet smell of growing things enveloped us.

  I closed the door behind us.

  Perfect blackness. Not a sound, except for the two of us breathing.

  Faint strains of fear rushed through me, but I suppressed them. I knocked on the door behind me—three sharp, loud bangs.

  The lights came on.

  For a long time Ana stood there beside me, staring about her. As did I, startled even though I’d known what to expect.

  Flowers. Kaleidoscopic color, like a Photoshop palette made real. Vases wall-to-wall, on tables and stools and shelves and the floor. Enough flowers to blanket a New York intersection.

  “Pick one.” My heart gave a jump, painful in my chest. “Any one. It’s yours.”

  Ana took a step forward, slow, hesitant, then an
other. She walked the aisles between the metal tables, wove her way around the vases on the floor, with their cargo of orchids and tall roses and a hundred other flowers that I couldn’t have named at gunpoint. Here she paused to sniff a long-stemmed lily (or was that a daffodil?), ran her fingers over a bright yellow bud that looked like an upturned church bell.

  Then she looked away from the flowers. Came walking back to me, calm and sure.

  I felt blood rush to my face.

  “This was Yosvany, wasn’t it,” she said.

  My mouth popped open. No sound came out. No air went in.

  You’ve got to lie to women, Yosvany had told me. The more lies, the better.

  I gathered my strength to do that.

  “How did you know?” I croaked out.

  Ana’s shoulders sagged. She turned away from me. Looked at the flowers once again. “You promised me you wouldn’t do this,” she said. “Not this summer.”

  I could only stand there.

  “Don’t you understand how it feels?” With every word Ana spoke, there was more force in her voice, something hidden boiling to the surface. “Every day you watch me, every day you’re waiting for something from me. I came to Cuba to get away from everything, not to deal with . . . this.”

  “I only . . .” I cast about for words. “I thought maybe if I showed you how much I—”

  “Rick, you’re a friend.” Ana looked at me earnestly. “Back in New York I thought . . . I thought there could be more, maybe. But these past few weeks, well, I’ve realized I don’t really like you that way.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Something inside me deflated. It was hope departing me like a turbulent fart. Not unlike the sensation of getting dumped, except worse—because there hadn’t been anything between us to start with.

  “Let’s forget this, okay?” Ana asked. “We’ve got a few more weeks in Cuba. Let’s dance. Let’s have fun. How does that sound?”

  I could have told her how it tasted. Like a mouthful of wet ash.

  chapter sixteen

  BED OF NAILS

  On the way back, Ana told me her plans for finishing her film. At least, I think that’s what she was talking about. She told me things and I sat there not listening, shrunk into the corner of the seat. I suspect she needed to talk as much as I needed to pretend I didn’t exist.