After another half hour of trying to show no one in particular my innocent unconcern, I heard a bustle in the corridor and looked up as a colonel arrived with his posse.
There were four of them, moving with a brisk self-assurance that said The Man was finally here. As he took the chair facing me, they arranged themselves in a semicircle around him, relegating my previous minders to the outside of whatever action was about to go down. They focused, not on me, but on him, ready to jump whenever he looked like he might want anything. One, an antsy lieutenant with a knife-blade nose, even carried a full-face motorcycle helmet in one hand, as if he needed to be ready at a moment’s notice to fetch or deliver or do something quick and cruel.
The colonel was almost a charmer. He was all kinds of cool, from his tailored uniform shirts to the way he’d just barely raise a finger, confident that a subordinate’s head would appear at his shoulder to receive a whisper. He appreciated style—there was a hint of Clark Gable in his precisely trimmed mustache—and he was one of those short, broad men who could look powerful without seeming musclebound. From the way his posse watched him, you could tell he was admired. They seemed more inspired than afraid—but then, they were on his side.
“Buenas tardes.” Good afternoon, the colonel offered. His version of the professional courtesy shown by the lieutenant and captain had a slight edge, the tone of a polite host confronting an uninvited guest. He asked me to explain myself all over again, and as I ran through the story I tried to emphasize my harmlessness.
I sat leaning a little forward, gestured with my hands open, palms up. I remembered the etiquette of Cuban eye contact: that the correct resolution to a meeting of gazes is not the New England cut away and down but an upward nod of acknowledgment. I tried to channel the determined kindness of Fred Rogers. What, I wondered, could these cops find threatening about a middle-aged yanqui in worn khakis and a tired white button-down shirt? My sandaled feet were blistered and bandaged from saving on Havana taxi fares. My old leather shoulder bag, stuffed with notebooks, tape recorder, camera, and tripod, was mended with blue duct tape. What kind of foreign troublemaker looked so glaringly low-budget, so conspicuously freelance?
“And why do you want to see the base?”
“Because it is a symbol of the sad history between our two countries. I am interested in la guerra hispanocubanonorteamericano, the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, because my great-grandfather was a soldier in that war.” True, but I hadn’t mentioned it before. I hoped that wouldn’t raise doubts. “I believe he may have come to Guantánamo.”
“Your grandfather?” The colonel nodded, frowning respectfully.
“My great-grandfather.” I corrected him, by now used to the game.
“Of course.” And perhaps the game was all he cared about, but he and a couple of his officers did a good job of looking unexpectedly pleased to hear an American using the name by which that war is known in Cuba, Spain, and the rest of the world.
I kept pushing. “My countrymen don’t remember anything about that war. They don’t know about Cuba’s long struggle, or that mambis and Rough Riders fought side by side. They don’t know that we came promising freedom but took Cuba’s sovereignty.”
“How did you travel to Guantánamo City?”
I’d been hoping we were past that. While I spun the taxi tale an officer arrived, bent, whispered, and handed my passport to the colonel, who never took his eyes off me.
“And how are you getting home?”
I told him my rendezvous lie. “In any case, I thought there’d be lots of taxis here. Was I wrong?” I liked asking questions. It broke the inevitably accusatory rhythm.
“Maybe.” The colonel tapped my passport against the back of his hand. I was glad to see it again, but tried not to look anxious to get it back. Then he smiled in a new, nasty way. “I don’t think you had such a good plan.”
I shrugged and smiled haplessly, playing a tourist who had screwed up his travel arrangements. Maybe I couldn’t pull it off, but anything seemed smarter than reacting to the accusations in his grin. “I know. Perhaps there are buses—”
A weird, roaring groan cut me off. No one else seemed to notice it, but the colonel caught my startled glance at the windows. “El hipopótamo,” he said, shaking his head. It took me a moment to decode the unfamiliar word, though I’d passed the tumbledown zoo on my way to the ministry. Then I got it, and the image melded with the city’s mean afternoon heat. Fortunate guantánameros get away to anyplace where there’s work and hope. The rest stay and sweat for no betterment, listening to the hippo moan from its cracked concrete pool.
“What color was this taxi?”
Had he worked a sneer into that question? I answered, “Red,” but my throat tightened as I realized they might have already talked to someone who’d seen me with Orestes and Ildefonse. We’d even stopped in a neighborhood several blocks west of downtown so I could buy us bad chicken for lunch. How could I have been so incautious? I’d known the Santiago-to-Guantánamo tourist buses weren’t running, for some reason no one could or would divulge. I’d discounted Orestes’s fears, though an active Baptist of his age is by definition a canny survivor, a connoisseur of repressive caprice from Batista’s Mob state to Fidel’s post-Soviet “Special Period.” What if the colonel snapped his fingers and the cops dragged my two friends right up to his chair? Should I pretend I’d never seen them before? ¿No los conozco?
“And where are you staying in Santiago?”
I gratefully repeated the address of the Casa de Irma, my casa particular, adding an appreciation of the bed-and-breakfast’s convenience to the cathedral square and of the morning serenade from the music conservatory across Calle Santa Lucia. (I hoped that whatever was happening to me wouldn’t cause trouble for Irma, a woman of fearsome orderliness, but that was far out of my hands.) Every question unconnected to transport gave me hope for Ildefonse and Orestes. The downside was that every question focused more intently on the same obsessions.
“Did anyone help you make plans to see Guantánamo? … Did you talk to any other Americans about this trip? … Any Europeans? … And no one asked you to take anything, a package … as a favor?”
And around again.
The package seemed especially important. As the colonel began a second hour’s questioning, he dropped all pretense at a friendly interview, but he was far too good at his job to turn hostile and risk scaring me into silence. Instead, he became the man you didn’t want to disappoint: a righteous civil servant, a soldier made stern by responsibility.
“Guillermo,” he said, leaning close enough to tap my knee, “it’s very important that you be honest. I know you’re a good guy. Maybe someone asked you to bring something for his family?”
I answered carefully, trying to be consistent, tiring as I strained at my merely adequate Spanish. Nada. Nadie. No. Nothing. No one.
At last the colonel slowed, circling back to questions from long-ago chats with the lieutenant and captain. My hometown? Where is Vermont? And I was born there in 1957?
“Perdoname, but no. I was born in Ohio. Otro estado.”
“Hmm. And you want to see el Báse for your work?”
“No. I’m not working,” I said. “I just want to go as a tourist, as any tourist can, and see where my great-grandfather served, where my country is doing such controversial things.”
The young lieutenant came into the room. He didn’t look at me, but handed a slip of paper—my journalist’s visa—to the colonel and nodded.
The colonel stood and shouted, “Tourist?”
Maybe he didn’t shout. It had been hours since I’d heard anyone speak in anything louder than a courtroom drone. All I can say is that I nearly jumped up myself, but the colonel’s scowl pinned me to the bench. His posse and the other officers, most of whom had been ignoring me, suddenly tensed up and closed in a step or two, looking back and forth from me to the colonel as if expecting orders—no, permission—to get rough.
“¡P
eriodista! You’re a journalist! Why are you lying to me?” The colonel had transformed himself again. This rage, I thought, is the face he shows enemies who have fallen into his power. And in Cuba, all enemies are in his power. Officers of the Interior Ministry are thief-catchers, thought police, the system’s avengers. They have powers of harassment, intrusion, detention, and coercion unimaginable, until recently, to Americans.
“You disgust me!” he declared, almost hissing the words. I was shocked to feel them hurt. He could speak for the state, for his own sense of mission, for whatever he thought he was protecting from me. And we both knew I had lied. “Asshole! What’s in that bag?”
A couple of officers took a step closer, but I quickly pulled the bag onto my knees and started unzipping compartments. “Look. These are the tools of my work. Tripod. Camera. Notebook. Machine for …” Unnerved, I couldn’t remember the Spanish for my microcassette recorder. “I take them everywhere, but I am not working. I have no appointments. I have no introductions. I am here as a tourist, to see what a tourist—”
“We’ve talked to the CPI!” The colonel was growling. “You asked them to send you here.”
“And they were no help at all,” I said, speaking softly, trying to drag his voice down with mine. “I gave up on coming here professionally. I came as a tourist. How could I lie when I had handed you my visa?”
“What’s on your camera? Give it to me!”
The colonel grabbed the camera from my hand as if it were not only evidence of my shame but also something I was too idiotic to possess, like a good woman’s stolen underwear. He immediately ran into trouble with the digital tool’s myriad tiny controls, which still frustrated me after six months’ use, but his righteousness transcended mockery. My offer to show him the stored images had to be wordless and meek. He passed the camera back as if this only confirmed my treachery, but he did sit on the bench beside me to look at the tiny screen.
I ran through a few images from the night before, watching locals perform boleros at Santiago’s Casa de las Tradiciones, and then began clicking through views taken on the road that morning on the way out of town: the tremendous equestrian monument to patriot martyr Antonio Maceo; the hills circling Santiago Bay; and the mountain village El Caney, where a far nastier battle than San Juan Hill had been fought on the same day in 1898, but with fewer reporters present.
The camera’s not-quite two-by-two-inch screen made little of panoramic landscapes shot from the ruins of El Caney’s old stone fort, but we could make better sense of close-ups of historical plaques and markers. I was explaining the stop at El Caney as another symptom of my innocent fascination with the past when I remembered Ildefonse posing by a cannon, and another shot of Orestes talking with some Cuban soldiers who were cutting the little park’s grass by hand. I could only keep talking and click, no louder, no faster.
Maybe the colonel’s eyes, like mine, couldn’t sharpen such miniaturized details without the help of reading glasses. For whatever reason, he let Ildefonse, Orestes, the soldiers, and the rest of El Caney pass by, but stopped me when I noted the first picture of El Maya. That’s a town much higher up than El Caney, a gateway onto the Sierra Maestra’s ridgetops.
“Erase that. Everything from there to here.”
I obeyed. The colonel got up, signaling the young lieutenant to watch over my deletions while he talked to the badass with the blade nose. I clicked and beeped, thinking hard but getting nowhere. Packages, conspirators, pictures: Who did the colonel think I could be?
As soon as I showed the lieutenant that we’d erased the last shot, the colonel was standing over me, pushing my passport at my face.
“Here!”
I took it, feeling somehow not at all relieved, and started the awkward business of stowing the camera and fishing my money belt out from my pants.
“Get up!” He shoved my shoulder.
Bad sign. What had I done wrong? What could I do? “Por favor, just a moment.” I smiled respectfully, trying to work the passport into the pouch while keeping an eye on his hands. He gave the belt a look of almost nauseated contempt, flicking a finger at it to draw his posse’s attention. Someone snickered.
“Now!” He pushed again, then grabbed my shoulder, yanking me off the bench. Still fumbling with the passport and clutching the yawning bag to my stomach, I was half-dragged across the waiting room’s gritty tiles to a lurching stop in the hallway.
Uniformed legs were all around as I tried to get my feet under me. The colonel had me by the collar. On the right was the Interior Ministry’s front door, open to the fantastically bright street. On the left, the hall darkened on the way to the cells. He yanked me to the left. Then he stopped again, as if he’d just changed his mind. Pulling on my collar, he drew me up and over to the front door like a dog on a leash.
For a moment I could barely see, and there was a confusion of bodies rushing around me, out into the day. Squinting, I watched the colonel look me up and down and sneer.
“When are you leaving Guantánamo?” he asked.
“Whenever you’d like. I’ll go now. As soon as I can find my taxi, or another.”
“Oh, no,” he said, with a mocking reprise of earlier grace, “take your time. You have two hours. Look all around.”
He pushed me through the door, out onto the headquarters building’s front steps, where the sun burned my eyes but seemed unable to warm my skin. A couple of officers had stayed with us, but the rest had vanished.
“Go! But see,” the colonel warned, leaning close and pulling down his right eye’s lower lid with one finger, “I will have my eye on you. I know everything that goes on in this town. And if you are not gone at five o’clock, things will be very bad.”
In Cuba, a figure of speech is still something more than a metaphor. In a santero’s front parlor, I once saw a little painting hanging from the ceiling. The painting was in the shape of an eye. From the eye protruded a tongue. Through the tongue, a hand thrust a knife. “You don’t talk about what you see here.” I got it. I understood the colonel, too. I thanked him. I regretted our misunderstanding. He stared. I descended the ministry’s front steps slowly, trying to look both innocent and duly chastened.
Guantánamo City hadn’t changed in my hours away, but I felt transformed, radioactive. For one thing, there was the nasty frisson of being watched. Just a quick-cut glance across the street picked two waiting-room cops out of the thin sidewalk traffic. I was onstage, stuck with the part of the guy I’d lied about being; no choice but to turn left, toward the park where I’d need to look like a man looking for a red taxi. I glowed, as well, with some professionally administered dose of guilt and shame. Did the ministry send its officers to interrogation school, or did they just make colonels of the naturals, the ones who know how to make any transaction feel like a forced fuck?
El hipopótamo or some other miserable creature moaned as I passed the zoo. A cop up ahead was looking in my general direction and talking into a radio. I slowed down, joining a knot of people inspecting items arrayed for sale on the sidewalk: a belt buckle with most of the nickel plate worn away, a scattering of odd forks and spoons, a pencil, a few reggaeton CDs. Was stopping the right thing to do? Did it make me seem innocent, or did it undermine the taxi story? How should I know, when I still had no idea what made the colonel so mad?
I moved on up the street, passing cop after cop on the corners and wondering whether any others were following me. How could I spot plainclothesmen? I stopped in front of shop windows, the few displaying wares, and watched reflections pass behind me. Hadn’t that heavy guy in the striped guayabera been by a couple of blocks back? In one window I saw a motorcyclist in a full-face helmet putt slowly past, staring at my back.
The last shop before the park was a bookstore. I went in and browsed over long folding tables topped with pathetically pulpy, crumbling books. The advantage was the shop’s full-length plate-glass storefront, tilted out in modish ’50s drive-in style. Standing at the tables, I could discreetly
scope the street for minders.
The illusion, at least, of momentary relief from scrutiny gave me a chance to plan. Ildefonse and Orestes might already have left town, but I couldn’t count on it. They might still be waiting for me back at Orestes’ friend’s house, unaware of the cops’ interest or, worse yet, aware but too kind to abandon me. I had to find some way to warn my friends without betraying them. Then I had to find a ride out of town before the colonel changed his mind.
I returned to the street tucking a copy of the monograph El bolero cubano into my shoulder bag. Sure enough, there was no red taxi waiting on the park’s near side. I tried my best to look chagrined but unsurprised. Walking all around the square, I asked an old man sitting on the bandstand whether he’d seen a red cab. I made sure to put the same question to two or three more guantánameros before I quit the square. Nobody on the next street over had seen one, either; then I started asking where I could find a new taxi.
Those two questions took me on the most random zigzag walk I could contrive, back and forth, around and through several blocks. Perhaps my twentieth interviewee was the young man I found smoking on the little tiled patio in front of Orestes’ friend’s house. By then, if anyone was following me down those comparatively empty backstreets, he was too far behind to overhear our conversation. I made it quick and continued on to the next stranger, and the next.
About an hour later, I was on my way back to Santiago. The driver was a nasty, chain-smoking old man, apparently the only cabbie for blocks around. I’d had to wait in the parlor of his daughter’s collapsing three-room house while he was roused from his couch, and watch him smoke a wake-up butt while she pressed his shirt. The family had nothing, but they were particular about clothes. The eldest granddaughter, a heartrendingly pretty, long-legged fourteen-year-old, came home in a crisply ironed school uniform, blouse smartly fitted, and skirt tailored to miniperfection. When she stood near his couch to talk to her mother, the old man squeezed his granddaughter’s ass like a market melon. He turned to me to share his delight, but I was watching her face, her falling smile.
Yankee Come Home Page 35
