by Pico Iyer
José Martí had many sweethearts, compañeros, but the one he could not leave was the one who gave him life and for whom he gave his life. Like any poet and romantic, he could only truly give his heart once. “A dawn,” he once said, “is more revealing than the best book.” For us, my friends, José Martí is our dawn, our morning star, our light in a time of unreason and despair. Let us learn from what he wrote, then, and look on our lives as the dawn of a glorious wedding night.
Kind of over the top, I thought, and a typical piece of Cuban passion: grand phrases and high ideals, but what did it all come down to? Was Fidel meant to be the new Martí, who had come to rescue the island? Or was he the ugly giant from whom the island had to be rescued? Like everything in Cuba, it seemed to point in every direction all at once, and the only thing I knew for sure was that it sounded like a teenager in love. Sounded, in fact, like the kind of person I was trying to put behind me.
When I went out into the street, though, it was the magic hour, and, for a while, you really could believe that this might be a magic place, the golden light catching the leafy lanes and faded yellow houses, the kids coming laughing out of the university’s columns and down, in smiling pairs, the famous hundred steps. A little farther along, near the Quixote on Calle 23, a group of soldiers had set up speakers, and two fat mamas were doing a tango, right there by the busy street, and an army woman was swinging round a pencil-shaped kid to the sound of a pulsing salsa. A wedding car drove by, and the couple in their fancy dress stood in the back of the blue jeep and waved to everyone they passed, like triumphant monarchs touring their city. There was a blast of horns, and they waved at the wriggling dancers, and the dancers waved at them, and then the car sped up and they raced off toward their honeymoon. Behind them was the ocean and America.
I snapped a few frames quickly, while the light was still sharp, and caught the statue of Martí next to the Colina, backlit by the sunset, and the Journalists’ Union, with its “Humorists’ Wall” and “Wall of Lamentations,” and the grand monument on which schoolkids in love wrote out their promises, and when I got to José’s, the party was still going strong—kids debating Madonna, and girls cooking up beans and coffee, and the rooster strutting around (they called him “Reagan,” someone said, because he never shut his mouth). José put on his best guayabera, muttered something to a girl, and then we were off, out into the night, and there was a buzz all around us—that nonstop coffee-and-samba, rum-and-rumba buzz that made the island feel like an African village dancing to Spanish guitars. There was never any Latin sleepiness in Havana at night—that torpid silence of the sun-baked square, the heavy church, the narrow, sloping streets. And the buzz was something different from what you find in the seethe and bustle of Hong Kong. This was something saucier, sly—to do with a curling eyebrow or a flirty smile. Sirenitas in cocktail dresses showed themselves off like treasures in a jewel case; and bright sparks in white flared trousers leaned against the railings, ready to scale their walls. Everyone was dressed up, it seemed, though no one was going anywhere; the whole island was just jiving in place, like an old man setting his memories to music. The girls sashayed around the trees like waitresses at a cocktail party, the couples chattered and gathered outside an old Costa-Gavras movie at the Yara; somewhere, in the distance, some music students who’d just graduated were setting up speakers and dancing in the dark.
At the Nacional, I took the ten dollars José gave me and went into the Diplostore, and when I gave her my passport for the chit, the girl gave me a shy smile, and the music above her suddenly speeded up so it sounded like Mickey Mouse on PCP, and she crumpled over her receipt in laughter. By the time I was at the door, the girls around the store were all beginning to laugh, and dancing like crazy to the speeding tape.
At the Capri, we waited for our dates outside the Salon Rojo, and thirty minutes later they arrived, laughing and sweating from the bus, and looking like what you’d expect to see hanging around the baccarat tables at Atlantic City. The guy at the door wasn’t taking tips tonight—there were too many better prospects, and the chance of tastier bids from the women in frilly blusitas—so José just said, “Fuck this,” and we went off to Maxim’s.
“She likes you,” he whispered under his breath as the smaller girl—the one who’d spoken English to me that afternoon—linked my arm and we walked toward the sea in the dark. The other one—Cari, I remembered she was called—went ahead of us with José, and I had time to figure out what I had in hand: a spangly suit, bare arms, hair tucked behind her ears. A white smile and a sense of quiet mischief. Most of all, a rum-husky laugh, and that gravelly cigarette-roughened kind of rasp the Cuban girls have that tells you of all the pleasures that you’re missing.
We followed Paseo for a while, in the dark, and then turned and went down some stairs into an even darker space. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, and then I could see we were in a small room—barely bigger than the ten-seat bar at the hotel—and it was more or less empty. A couple of blond kids—backpackers from Munich, I figured—were in one corner. A heavy black woman sat at the bar. A solitary man nursed a glass of rum. On the wooden shelves there were a few ancient bottles of Havana Club.
“What do you want, Richard? Some rum, perhaps?”
José went over and pushed a few coins into the jukebox, and it was so loud in this tiny space that I had to sit right up to Lourdes, and when she wanted to talk to me, I could feel her hot whisper in my ear, strands of her hair tickling my cheek. I nodded back—no way I could hear any of what she was saying—and sometimes I whispered something too, my hand on her bare back. I figured it was like the bars in Bangkok, or teenage discos everywhere: keep the volume high, and everyone has to get real close.
When the first song finished, and the next one came on—“I Want to Know What Love Is”—she turned over my hand in hers.
“You do not work?” I heard her whisper.
“Sure I do. You should see me sometimes. Nights in a hammock in El Salvador. Climbing the mountains near Peshawar. Riding the trucks in the Sudan. It’s not the usual kind of work, but it counts.”
“Never before,” she said quietly, “have I been with a man who has not been in the army or in prison.”
I liked her for that—even if it did sound like a line—and moved in closer. José and his girl had got up and begun to dance, and then Lourdes and I joined them, turning around on a dance floor the size of a paper clip and trying not to bump into each other as we moved. When we sat down, she gave me a smile, picked up her drink, turned over the coaster, and wrote, “Lourdes y Richard. La Habana, Cuba. 29 Julio 1987.” Then, smiling again, kissed me on the cheek.
I liked her for all of that, and José passed over some more rum, and Lourdes tapped out the rhythm on my leg and offered me a cigarette. She was twenty-three—she told me in my ear—and she’d had a sweetheart once, in Santiago, but that had been when she was in her teens. There’d been other guys, but you knew what Cuba was like: one night of love and then fifty nights of war. Sure, she’d met foreigners—I wondered then about her army-and-prison line—but she never trusted them: foreigners in Cuba thought they could pick up girls as easily as cigars. Her father was dead; she lived with her mother and sister and Cari. Her grandfather—this explained the dark complexion—came from Palestine.
“You like it, Richard?” asked José, smiling over at me.
“Sure,” I said, and thought that any kind of pretty companion was enough. Sometimes we danced again. Sometimes figures moved around us in the dark. Sometimes José held the woman by his side as if he were her brother, sometimes as if he were something else. She smiled at me across the table. “She is a good girl,” she said, motioning to Lourdes. “She likes you.”
“I’m sure she’s a good girl. I’m a good boy.”
Lourdes patted me on the shoulder and tapped out another cigarette.
“You know this song,” said José, as “Guantanamera” came on. “It is by Martí. From his Versos Sencillos. ‘Yo soy un
hombre sincero …,’ ” he began singing.
I got some more rum then—give these guys a good night on the town, I thought—and when I came back, I found that José had picked up my camera, and he caught me by surprise as I sat down in my place, and caught me again, with my arm around my new friend. Then he turned to his own friend, and began to look less and less like a brother, as he kissed her brown arms, and squeezed her shoulders, and plied her with more booze, and she was kissing him back with half her body, and looking over at us with the other half.
“I thought she was your sister.”
“No sister. Esposa,” he shouted back over the music. “We were married, before. Two, three years before. Now we are friends. Is better like this. In Cuba, it’s not so easy to be married. Better to be separate, no? Then you are free to love who you like.”
“You’re divorced, then?”
“Más o menos. You know how it is here. Comme ci, comme ça. Anyway, is time to go. You pay, and we leave,” he said, and I shelled out a few dollars, and then we were back out in the dark. “So you and Lourdes, you can go to Malecón. Cari and I, we will go back to my house and make love.”
“No, I will go with them,” said Cari, who seemed to have had plenty for one night.
“Why not with me?” said José, pursing his lips and trying to kiss her.
She turned away. “I go with them.”
“No. We go alone,” said Lourdes, and she took my hand, and we walked down toward the sea, leaving Cari to fight it out with José.
There weren’t many cars by then—must have been two o’clock, two-thirty—and things were mostly quiet. It was a night without wind, as usual. Only the occasional splash of the waves against the rocks, and sometimes the distant music of the nightclubs, or maybe a guitar somewhere playing the outline of a love song. A few boys in shorts along the seawall; sometimes a slow old car. When God created the world, I always thought, he made the Malecón last thing on a Saturday night, so sensuous was its curve as it wove around the back of the city like a languorous arm in the night.
We sat together on the wall, and she looked out across the sea into the dark.
“What is it like in America?”
“Same as here, pretty much. Lots of problems. Lots of sadness. Only a different kind of problem from the ones here.”
“But the people there have dreams, right? Money, houses, cars?”
“Sometimes.”
“And they are free to say anything? Free to visit other countries? Free to eat drugs?”
“Drugs, no. But free, yes.”
“It is not like this prison, then.”
“It’s a different kind of prison.” She fell silent then, and I ran my hand along her arm. When she turned to me, her eyes were bright, and then her hair was in my mouth, and I could feel the salt on her back, and taste the rum on her lips.
“So tell me about America,” I heard her say.
“It’s nothing. It’s crazy. There are some beautiful places, but there’s none of this salsa energy. It’s like the difference between a rich man who seems poor and a poor man who seems rich.” I kissed her again. “Isn’t there somewhere we can go?”
“There is never anywhere to go in Cuba.”
“I mean somewhere where we can be alone.”
“We are alone. It’s not like your country here. I cannot come to your hotel. You cannot come to my house.”
“And when you have a lover?”
“You kiss on the street.” I leaned in toward her again, and she moved back. “You do not understand, Richard. This is not America. Here, everything is a crime. Everyone is a spy. Everywhere, they are listening. If they hear you speak Spanish, if they hear me speak English, if they see us kissing, they talk. If we are alone, if we are private, they talk more. It is safer in the street.”
I kissed her again, more deeply, ran my hand around her side, felt hardness, heard a gasp, pressed closer.
“To the rocks?” I said.
“No, Richard. It is not right.” I almost liked her for that too—almost. “You go to the airport tomorrow?”
“Yeah. At nine.”
“Okay. I come to the Nacional at eight-thirty. We go together.”
“Okay,” I said, and leaned forward again, and somewhere I heard a guitar, and somewhere, on the rocks, a woman sobbing and sobbing and sobbing.
She never came to my hotel. When I got up, after a fitful sleep, it was already eight-forty. The phone rang, and I grabbed at it, but it was only José, telling me he’d come to the airport with me. To wait for him in the lobby. I waited and waited. Once, I thought I saw her, but it was only another girl, with an East German guy, in the same dollar-store dress she’d worn for my camera. Another time, I thought I heard her name, but then I remembered that Lourdeses here were almost as common as hopes. Finally, José arrived, and we hopped a local taxi toward José Martí.
“So how about last night?” he said.
“Comme ci, comme ça. We kissed, but nothing more.”
“In Cuba, is not so easy. Next time you can stay my house. More economical.”
“And Lourdes?”
“She’s a good girl. She’ll do anything for you.”
That left almost everything open, and José pointed out places of interest—the new wedding hall, the huge bust of Martí in the plaza, the site where the Mambo used to serve up girls to Yale boys fresh off the plane. Then he started talking about “our friend” and “our cousin” and how Elvis was an informer for the FBI, and I noticed how the taxi driver was watching us through his rearview mirror.
At the airport, José got out first and, when the taxi had gone, handed me two letters—for his “brother,” he said. “So we meet again soon, Richard,” he went on, giving me an abrazo. “You find me an apartment in New York, okay? And a place where I can buy some books?” And then he was gone, off to another deal, and I was closing the door on Cuba, and getting ready for Tegucigalpa.
When I got back to New York, I had a few days free—to do my laundry and collect my mail—and so I sent off the packets I’d been given, and went through some of the letters I’d brought back with me. You never know where contacts will appear. José hadn’t sealed the envelopes—that way, he said, the authorities would think there was nothing in them. Some of them were just messages, with lists of shirt sizes and brand names and children’s ages. Some of them were just formula recitations of love and pain. And one of them, which José had said was for his brother, was a badly typed message, in broken English, with no name at the bottom, to one Kent Ferguson at the State Department (Latin America desk), offering his services for the CIA. I spent a few moments wondering how I would have explained that one to the Cubans, or the guys at JFK, and decided that next time down, José owed me one.
Then I went through the phone calls I’d promised I would make. First I called Caridad’s father—at the 516 area code, in some place called Babylon, New York—and I got a woman with a roughened Brooklyn accent; I could almost see her, with thick dark hair and gray eyes, and makeup here and there across her face.
“It’s so nice a you to call,” she kept saying, and then, “Callie, will you turn that thing off! Now! I’m trying to talk!” and then, back again to me, “I’m sorry. You know what these kids are like. So anyway, it’s nice a you to call. If I see Luis, I’ll tell him. He’ll be real happy to hear about his daughter. She’s the older one, right, with the black hair?”
“No, the blonde.”
“Right. The one with the blond hair. Not Mercedes.”
“No. Caridad.”
“Caridad, right.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll try again some other time. When will he be back?”
“Jeez.” She sounded worried. “I don’t know. He kind of comes and goes.”
“But he’s okay?”
“Okay? Sure; he’s okay. He’ll be back in a while.” I thought of the two cars and the mansion Caridad had told me about. “We don’t see him too much anymore, but he comes roun
d now and then, collects his social security, wants to see Callie. He’s doin’ fine. He’ll be sorry he missed your call.”
“Okay. Catch you later,” I said, and dialed some journalist José had told me about—some young guy in Miami, at the Herald. But he was eager to talk, and hit me up for names, and when he got round to José’s friends—“that girl called Lourdes”—I decided we’d talked enough. “Okay. Be seeing you.”
The only other message I had left was for Lázara’s mother. It was a number in the Bronx. A ring, a long ring, another ring. Then a click, and I prepared a message for the machine, but instead there was a thick, slurred voice, sounding like it was coming from the ocean floor.
“Dime!”
“Right. I was down in Havana last week—”
“Dime! Oye!” The connection was so bad, I might as well have been still in Havana.
“Buenos días, señora. Soy americano. Periodista.”
“You Cuban?”
“No. You speak English?”
“Un momentico.” She shouted out for some guy, and I heard some dance music in the background, and, after a while, a male voice on the other end.
“Jes.”
“I just got back from Havana. I have some photos of Señora González’s daughter. Also a letter for her. If she wants some news of her, she can come round here and collect it.”
“O-ka.”
“She can come today?”
“Jes, jes. Sure.”
“Okay. You know West Broadway?”
“Broadway? Sure I know Broadyway.”
“No—West Broadway. It’s different.” I gave him some instructions, and a few hours later there was a pounding on my door, and there was a huge black woman there. As soon as I opened up, she walked in and hugged me, and said, “Thank you, thank you, I’m sorry.” I told her that Lázara was fine, and that she missed her, and that she was real pretty, and that she was doing well at school. I told her that she had a nice room on Concordia. Then I gave her the photos.
