Cuba and the Night

by Pico Iyer

  At the back of the open field, a few boys were practicing dance moves, and the rest were heading home in streams, like a crowd in the fourth quarter of a football game when the home team’s down by 27. I saw a car circling for customers, and I flashed a few dollar bills at him, and he quickly came over to me, and as he did, I saw a couple of kids speaking English—Canadians, I figured—and asked them if they wanted to share, to bring down the costs.

  “Great. That’s really kind of you,” said the girl, shaking her head dry, and looking as if she’d just won the lottery.

  They crowded into the back, and as we began to thread our way through the crowd, the old Revolutionary battles started up again.

  “That was just magic back there,” she said. “I could feel it. Something special.”

  “Sure. Because you were with the Rent-a-Crowd guys, the ones who are paid to go and clap.”

  “Okay, Greg. That’s fine. You be cynical. That’s great. Fine for you. But I could feel something. Not always, for sure, but sometimes, just for a moment, I could feel what this whole thing was all about. Like being caught up in something bigger than yourself. Caught up in a wave, a current. Like giving yourself for something.”

  “Caught up in the rain, more like.”

  “Okay. You want to listen to Reagan or Thatcher, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. It’s just that these people have something else. Five eggs a day, three eggs, two eggs, it doesn’t matter. Because they are happy.”

  “Easy for you to say. You have all the eggs you want. And a ticket to Toronto next week.”

  “You know I don’t mean it like that. These people have dignity. They take themselves seriously. They’re trying to achieve something. They know it isn’t going to be easy.”

  “What dignity is there in waiting in line and bartering? In dressing yourself up so you can get a foreigner to buy you a tube of lipstick? In selling yourself by soft-selling your country?”

  “So you think it’s dignified to live in suburbia with Geraldo on TV and the kids shooting up in the sixth-grade classrooms and the murder rate in Washington higher than in Lebanon?”

  “I’m not saying North America’s perfect. But just because our home’s fucked doesn’t mean that this place is any better.”

  “At least it’s pledged to something. At least it still has ideals. At least it’s trying to be itself.”

  A heavy silence fell. The car grumbled through the rain.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “We agree to disagree. Okay?”

  “That’s exactly what you can’t do over here. You’ve got to agree in Cuba.”

  “Okay, Greg. Will you let it go?”

  He was silent for a moment. “It’s just that six hours in a bus to see an old guy speaking in the rain while everyone else is filing out isn’t my idea of a historical moment.”

  “Did you see them dancing in the back?”

  “Sure. They dance like that at Grateful Dead concerts. Does that mean Jerry Garcia is the savior of the world?”

  “He is for me,” I said, figuring I couldn’t take two more hours of dialectical materialism in action. “You should see the kids in Managua.”

  “I told you we should go there,” the girl told her friend.

  “You go to the Café Lennon, and you see all these students reading the works of the great Roberto Weir. Deadheads of the world unite: you’ve got nothing to lose but your brains!”

  That shut them up. And when we got to Havana, I decided just to expense-account the whole thing: this couple had enough problems without being bankrupted by a taxi ride.

  When I got back to my room, I lay down to map out the evening. I could shoot nightclubs, I thought, or the old guys with their arms around nubile teenagers. I could try José’s house, or the love hotel. But pretty soon I realized I wasn’t thinking of anything but Lourdes. It was a strange thing; I wasn’t prepared for it: it felt like I was betraying my job. There’s only one thing in photography, and it’s focus. The only thing that matters is keeping your mind sharp and clear. No distractions. No second thoughts. Keep your mind as polished as your lens. I remember once, in Seoul, I’d been working the same time as Jim Nachtwey, and just the way he stood there, in the middle of all the tear gas and the pellets, completely erect, as motionless as a Zen priest, catching moments in his lens, it was like watching a master at work.

  But with Lourdes, it was like something else was coming into the picture. I couldn’t get her image out of my head. She was everywhere: at the edge of every picture I saw, there was her face, or the way her hair fell down, or her eyes in the dark of the bar. I hadn’t even taken a picture of her alone, and yet she was in every picture that I took.

  I couldn’t figure it out, this spell: it wasn’t just her face—pretty girls are a dime a dozen. It wasn’t just the way she’d shown me her world, or fallen asleep in my lap. It wasn’t even her mischief. Maybe it was just the fact that I couldn’t figure her out: when I saw her in my mind, I always saw rings of smoke curling around her head, and I could hardly make out her slow smile, her musky eyes. Sometimes, when I was tired, I played our whole time together through, like slides on a carousel, and saw it all as a story about her getting dollars, and some presents for her mother, and a way to join her aunt in America. Sometimes, when I’d just made some picture and was all fired up, I’d think of something she said, or the way she’d broken away from me that first night, and it felt as though the streets were singing. It was like the whole crazy country: look at it one day, and you’d see this grotesque, sharp-featured hag. Then click your eyes into a different kind of focus, and the image resolved itself into a beautiful girl. The kind of optical illusion they teach you in high school.

  Now, though, I knew there was no way I could work. I lay on my bed, and the more I thought of the last bed I’d lain in, and the last night I’d spent—without any bed at all—the more I felt so full up that I couldn’t stop moving.

  But there was no way of getting in touch around here—no faxes or answering machines—so it had to be the old-fashioned way, like in the old movies: the long nighttime walk to her house, the pounding on the door, the whispered thanks to anyone who’d open up, the run up the stairs, the quick survey of her kitchen. This time she was there, thank God, and I told her I had to talk, and I almost pulled her with me out into the street.

  “We can go to the Central Hospital,” she said. “It is safe there.”

  “No,” I said. “It has to be now. I can’t wait. I’ve got to be with you. Something has changed.”

  “You mean Santa María?”

  “No. I mean Artemisa. The cola, the songs, the bus. If I want sex, I can have it with any girl in Havana.”

  “So you don’t want me.” Her smile was wicked.

  “I want you now.”

  “Okay, Richard, come.” She led me down to a local bus station, and there were a few old cars parked outside in the dark. “Dollars,” she said to an old guy, and he opened up his Packard, and we got into the back. “Where are we going?” I whispered. “Nowhere,” she said, and sat close to me. I felt the down on the back of her neck, kissed the soft spot behind her ear. She said something to the driver, and he took us toward the beaches to the east. In the dark, on the seat, she ran her hand under my shirt, and I felt her tongue on the tip of my ear. Soon my hands were under her shirt too, while the driver paused to look around, and we passed through the long, ghostly streets of Havana. “Here,” she said at last, when we were on the Via Blanca. “Maybe you take a walk for fifty minutes, an hour, compañero, and then we will give you dollars.” The man got out, taking the key with him for security, and then I was saying, “Come here, angelita,” and she was flashing her anarchist smile. “So, Richard, you believe in angels, but you do not believe in God?”

  The next time it was the same almost: the long drive through Havana streets, some compañero at the wheel, dreaming of all the things he could buy with his dollars, and she guiding him through the dark, and I guiding her, and our
stolen whispers, and our urgent sighs. Then a long slow hour by the sea, in the back of some creaking De Soto, and the feeling of being a kid again, breaking every rule.

  Or sometimes the slow walk through the crumbling streets, and the clamber up the darkened staircase, and the fumbling for the light. “No talking,” she’d whisper. “No words. Here. In the kitchen.” The sound of belts unfastening, the rustle of jeans falling at our feet. The picture of Che above us, the statue of Jesus in the corner. The sound of gasps, and her fist in her mouth as she tried not to scream.

  Then the flight from the darkened apartment, down the unlit staircase, and out into the night.

  Dear Stephen,

  I fear this may turn out to be an unreasonably long letter, but the thing is, so much happens when one’s here, and later, when one’s back in the dining hall or going up to books, one can hardly believe that any of it happened at all. I suppose writing to you is a way of reminding myself that it really did happen, and that the Hugo who will later read this is the same one who was in the thick of all these tropical adventures. It’s hard to believe sometimes.

  As perhaps I told you before, in Cuba even the most unexceptional episodes have a way of coming back to haunt one, and they tend to reverberate as few excitements do. You may recall that I told you about the old cathedral in Havana, and how eager I was to attend a service there. It seems such a melancholy place, I wanted to see how it might be different as a place of worship. So I went to attend a mass there a few days ago. I don’t know if you remember, but I used to be a very keen campanologist as a boy; even now I find some kind of solace in the bells.

  In any case, it was a rather sorry gathering, as you might expect: there were only a few bare pews of worshippers, all in their Sunday best, yet still shifty somehow, and not very full-throated, as if they were all keeping an eye out lest a group of Fidelistas break in at any moment, and couldn’t remember that Castro himself was once a Jesuit boy. So their mumbled singing hardly began to fill the place, and by the end, as you can imagine, I was more than ready to take my leave.

  Before I could quite exit, however, I heard a voice address me in English: I suppose he’d seen the map inside my pocket.

  “Excuse me, señor. You are from Germany? Or Canada?”

  “England, actually.”

  “Ay, England! The land of kings!”

  “Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, I suppose so.”

  “You live near the Queen?”

  “Not terribly near. But in the same general direction, yes.”

  “You come here as a tourist?”

  “Yes. I love it here. This is my second time.”

  “Ah, for you, señor, it is so beautiful here. I love your country too. But I cannot visit.”

  “No. It’s a shame.” There was a pause. “You have relatives abroad?”

  “My mother only. And my brother, he went to Mexico three years ago. And my father, he is dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Señor. Can you take this to my mother?” He handed me a faded envelope, with a picture of the British Museum on the stamp.

  “I suppose so. The trouble is, though, I don’t live in the U.S.”

  “Is okay. You live outside. That is enough.”

  “Fine. Well, in that case, perhaps I’ll be on my way,” I said, with a heartiness I didn’t really feel. “Very pleasant to have met you. I do hope we’ll meet again.”

  “I hope this too,” he said. “In England. At the home of the King.”

  Something about the conversation rather took the spring out of my step, and I wasn’t quite in the mood to make the tour I’d promised myself of the colonial patios. So I popped instead into the Bodeguita del Medio, this very famous old place where Ernest Hemingway and Allende and everyone seemed to drink, and I bought a mojito, the lethal rum concoction that is the spécialité de la maison. Because I had nothing to do, I suppose, I opened the envelope.

  “My dearest, unforgettable Margarita,” it began—I could translate it quite easily. “I hope this finds you well, and your parents too. I think of you every day. I dream of you every night. Here it is always the same. We cannot get rum. We cannot get chicken. Your brother is no longer with Martita. Even in the cathedral it is not so easy to do business. The money you sent me for the passport is all gone. I gave the money to the man from Peru, but then I heard nothing. Now I think I cannot wait any longer. I cannot live any longer. If you read this letter, please send me more money. Or a ticket. Or a visa. If you do not, I think I will die. I ask God many times why he must make me suffer, when he will come back. But always I hear no answer. No answer from God, no answer from you. And every day, there is a new restriction. My darling Margarita, sometimes at night I think we are together again, and you are in my arms. But then I wake up, and there is no one. I think very soon I will die. With all my love, Ricardo.”

  I don’t know why, but my heart was pounding as I read the letter. The right thing to do, I suppose, was to send it on as if I’d never opened it. But still, somehow, I felt as if I’d trespassed, as if I’d walked into a room at a time when two people were being intimate. Somewhat on an impulse, I decided to go back to the cathedral, and give it back to the man, but by the time I got there, the door was locked, and the whole square was empty, save for a young boy who suddenly materialized at my side, and—absurdly—two pigs. So I went back to my room, with the letter in my pocket, and I felt as if I were a spy somehow, or a traitor, and I half believed that even the woman at the desk was looking at me differently. I know that the Cubans are a passionate people, but still it was hard to know what exactly the letter portended. It all made me feel a very long way from home.

  In any case, I look forward to seeing you soon.

  With all warmest wishes,

  Hugo

  Just two days after that [I found myself continuing in my diary—knowing, I suppose, that I’d never send the letter, but wanting, somehow, to catch the strangeness and the drama of the place before I forgot it], I took myself off to Cayo Largo, one of those pristine honeymoon resorts they have over here, which are reserved exclusively for tourists, and which one can visit on a day trip from Havana. The whole thing was something of a travesty, as usual: the entire planeload arriving at eight o’clock, to be greeted by dancing bands and rum cocktails for breakfast, and offers of a tour to inspect the local turtles.

  I felt a little out of place, not surprisingly: I’m not a great one for water sports at the best of times, and I felt a little self-conscious sitting on the beach, reading On the Road while groups of bronzed Teutons disported themselves as if in some Aryan holiday camp. Nonetheless, it was certainly the most beautiful beach I’d ever seen, and it seemed as good a way as any to pass a morning in the tropics.

  They treated us all to a very hearty lunch (one of the waiters asking if I knew Pete Townshend, and some of the Germans cracking jokes about the advert for the beach—“Alone, virgin and yours”), and at five o’clock we gathered round to be bused back to the plane. Needless to say, as soon as I turned up, I was told that there was no bus at all, and there was no plane: I would be obliged to spend the night on the island. Not a bad way, I suppose, of their getting me to pay for two hotel rooms in a single evening. It was quite an inconvenience—I hadn’t brought my things with me, after all—but I realized that there was no sense in arguing, and that I might as well chalk it up to experience: treat it as one of those adventures one so seldom has at home.

  In due time, a minivan did arrive, and took us all to a hotel, and when we arrived at the place—a rather rickety kind of post-Stalinist extravaganza, well suited to North Korean ophthalmologists’ conventions—they handed me a key, and sent me up to the second floor. No lift, of course, and not a great deal of lighting on the stairs. Cuba is a place that can make Winchester seem luxurious by comparison.

  When I opened the door to my room, I found there was someone standing there already. Even more astonishing, it was the American photographer I’d met here a ye
ar ago, Richard. He was standing by the window, fiddling with some lenses, and when I came in through the door, he looked at me as if I were a spy. And then, recovering rather, came over and said, “Dr. Cartwright, I presume.”

  An extraordinary coincidence, I suppose—but then, coincidences seem to occur with such regularity here that one’s inclined to believe they may not be coincidences at all. For example, the nice man at the hotel suddenly appears at the table next to yours in the nightclub that evening, and you realize that he may not be just a nice man from the hotel. Or the man on the bus turns out to be the neighbor of the friend you’ve just been to see. Things have a way here of circling round. Besides, having written to Richard, I suppose I shouldn’t have been so taken aback to see him.

  Nonetheless, it was a great surprise, in its way—we hadn’t planned it—and I was glad of the company. At the very least, he was rescuing me from three hours of Kerouac.

  We went down to a bar which they have out by the swimming pool—the Medusa, as it’s called—and ordered some drinks.

  “So what brings you here?” I asked.

  “Oh, the usual. A story I’m shooting for Rolling Stone.”

  I couldn’t help but be impressed. “On Cuba?”

  “Naw. Something global. ‘Love in a Cold War Climate,’ they’re going to call it. About the love trade around the world. You know: girls at the Jinjiang Hotel in Chengdu getting cozy with overseas Chinese businessmen. Poland becoming the largest center of mailorder brides outside the Philippines. The French agency that sets up guys with girls from Transylvania. Even the Americans who want to get English brides—and vice versa. The usual game.”