Havana Best Friends

by Jose Latour

  She didn’t ask him in, but took the card because all of a sudden the idea sounded appealing. For several days she pondered the pros and cons. Pablo’s death had ended the daily arguments and quarrels that were the main reason for swapping their apartment for two smaller units. But maybe a change would be best for her anyway. She was still haunted by sad memories of the years she had cared for her son in her bedroom. And every weekend, after cleaning, she was appalled at how physically demanding the chore was in such a big apartment. The least she could do was see what the man had to offer. So, she gave him a call and a meeting was arranged. He came, paced around the whole place, said he was interested.

  The following evening, Elena visited his home. She was introduced to Nineteen’s daughter, her husband, and two granddaughters. They all lived in one of the only two apartments on the fifteenth floor of a twenty-four-floor condo built in 1958 for upper-middle-class Cubans. It was bright and airy, had two bedrooms and floor-to-ceiling windows with an incredible view of the Florida Straits. But during blackouts, or less frequently, when the two elevators were out of order, residents had to climb the stairs, something that after four or five floors stops being exercise and becomes agony. Water was also a problem, she found out. And just as she was leaving the building, a plastic bag exploded in the middle of the street, strewing garbage all over the pavement. Some upper-floor neighbour didn’t feel like coming all the way down to the garbage dump.

  In the morning, Elena called Nineteen and explained she would see other places before she made a decision. He said that was perfectly all right, but would she accept an invitation to dinner next Saturday evening? On an impulse she said yes and learned over roast chicken and beer that his wife had run out on him in 1991 and was now living in Miami. Next came a play one midweek evening, a movie on Friday, drinks, conversation, and dancing at a dimly lit nightclub on Saturday evening, and here she was, in bed with a nice guy she wasn’t particularly fond of. Why? She wasn’t sex-starved; she never had been. For her, sex was only part of it. Her sexual appetite was soon satisfied, except when she was in love – then she became insatiable. Was that normal? Or was she some sort of freak?

  What next? Maybe she would see Nineteen a couple more times, so as not to hurt his feelings, then dump him. He seemed the kind of man who, if encouraged, would suggest they move in to kill two birds with one stone: His daughter and son-in-law would make carefree, noisy love in what was now his bedroom while his granddaughters slept peacefully in the other bedroom; and a woman would look after him as he swam in the mornings. No way, buddy, no way, Elena decided.

  Thousands of miles away, sitting very straight on an aged couch, a blind man was submerged in memories. How old had he been when his family had moved to the apartment? He couldn’t recall the month. Eight or nine, he reckoned. He did remember the Parque de la Quinta, the huge trees, the walkways, the pergola, the Prado bust, not the Ghandi monument, though; that must have been erected later. The church of Santa Rita, where they attended Mass on Sundays; Father Martin, his confessor. Bruce’s description had brought it all back to him, including the smells of earth, leaves, grass, exhaust fumes, burning candles, cigarette smoke, fried chicken, his mother’s favourite perfume – L’Air du Temps.

  A pirulero used to come to the park in the afternoons with hundreds of multicoloured, multiflavoured sweets somehow attached to a five- or six-foot-long hollow cardboard cylinder. His favourite flavour was mint-strawberry; his sister’s was mint. He would peel off the white wrapping paper and suck the hard red-and-green sweet, holding it by the wooden toothpick solidly embedded into the centre. How was the toothpick implanted there? Had to be some heating and cooling process; yeah, sure. You pour the boiling hot, syrupy mixture into a mould, it starts cooling off, and at a certain point you insert the toothpick. When the pirulí finally reaches room temperature the toothpick is stuck, no kid can pull it out. But it was dangerous, anyway. Children scampering off and jumping and hollering while sucking a sweet with a sharp toothpick.

  The blind man wore a black bathrobe and slippers. The couch was in his living room, a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a rundown tenement on Bergen Street in Brooklyn, New York. There were end tables on both sides of the couch. On top of the one closest to him was a cellphone, a tumbler with a splash of Irish whiskey, a pair of sunglasses, a key ring with five keys, and a small portable radio. A black cane rested on the seat of the couch.

  The Parque de la Quinta was a thousand times bigger than the tiny garden of the rented house in La Víbora where he and his late sister were born. It had come as news that their father owned the building in Miramar, the move a surprise, as was his enrolment in the prestigious La Salle school. It was a year of news and the new. The new 1957 Cadillac Fleetville, traded in the following September for the 1958 model, the new apartment with all the fashionable furniture (according to Rita, it was still there, although stained and dirty), new appliances, clothes, neighbours, friends. Only the three servants – their nanny, the cleaning woman, and the cook – were kept from the past.

  They used to ride his father’s black Cadillac to Coney Island in Marianao. The blind man chuckled. He was thirteen or fourteen when some Miami high-school friend mentioned a Coney Island amusement park in New York and he had thought it odd that New Yorkers had copied the name. His next recollection made the blind man chortle with pure delight. As a boy he had believed that the song “Tea for Two” had been plagiarized from “Juan Pescao,” a popular Cuban guaracha of the 1940s. It had been the opposite. “Anda, camina, camina Juan Pescao; anda camina, no seas descarao,” the blind man sang softly. Well, how could he know? Or that the original Coney Island was in New York?

  The much smaller Havana imitation had a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, a House of Mirrors, bumper cars, a contraption called the Octopus that made its riders scream in fear, ecstasy, or agony, and other “infernal machines” (their nanny’s words). Their mother allowed them to eat all the candy floss they could, slurp two or three Cokes, ride the ponies.

  There were the Sunday-afternoon matinees at Cine Miramar, watching American serial movies and cartoons, plus a cowboy B-movie and the hot new release. There were the great weekends at the Club Nautico, boys diving off the bridge and swimming under water, the less-adventurous girls splashing about in the shallow end, his mother playing canasta, his father sulking and nursing a highball with his eyes on the horizon. Only years later would he learn the reason for his father’s brooding: his application for membership at the much more prestigious Havana Yacht Club had been turned down twice.

  Then all of a sudden, everything had collapsed. His parents frantically packing, his weeping mother begging his father to calm down … The blind man shook his head, felt for the glass of Irish whiskey. He didn’t want to relive the sudden interruption of his childhood.

  Bruce had said Elena Miranda was an attractive woman. Rita had agreed, then warned, but not as an afterthought, that Elena’s brother was big trouble. After she’d left, Bruce had said not to worry about it. The blind man hadn’t liked his tone. He was extremely sensitive to the nuances of people’s voices, and he had heard Bruce adopt the same tone back in Vietnam. It had a cool edge to it and it trailed off, meaning he would stop at nothing. Quite different from his tone when he mentioned the woman, Elena, who must be a looker if she could dazzle Bruce. His friend was a connoisseur. No forty-year-old woman would catch his eye unless she was really something. Rita hadn’t impressed him at all, his tone had said. But this Elena had bowled him over.

  Not that Bruce had said much about her: tall, nice figure, good looking, a special-education teacher. He had no idea Cuba could afford special-education teachers. People were starving there. It wasn’t Rita’s impression, however. Poor, yes; starving, no, she had said. His father would have ranted at her: “You becoming a Communist too?”

  The blind man clicked his tongue. His old man had lived the second half of his life in a permanent state of bitterness. For many years he couldn’t figure
out why Papá remained unable to forget. They hadn’t arrived in the States destitute; they hadn’t applied for government loans or welfare. His father bought a 1959 Cadillac Fleetwood a week after the family checked into a Miami Beach hotel. Okay, he had lost some property to the Communist revolution, but not most of his money. He wanted Castro toppled; it figured. But at some point it became evident (at least to him) that a bunch of geezers firing M-IS and Garands in the Everglades on weekends wouldn’t bring about the downfall of Communism in Cuba.

  His father never became a wise investor or a successful businessman, and ten years after landing in Miami he was broke. Then he became frantic, obsessed, paranoid. He quoted Ché Guevara’s famous line on Vietnam: many similar conflicts were needed to bring the imperialists to their knees. “The bastard was a hundred per cent right,” his father bellowed. “It’s why Nixon should invade Cuba, napalm the whole island from one end to the other, spray Orange B over every single hectare of cultivated land, send in the Marines, the 82nd Airborne, the whole enchilada. Kill all the motherfuckers!”

  When the blind man had been shipped to Vietnam, his father’s farewell had been: “Kill as many Commies as humanly possible.” His misfortune, but he’d had to go. He was an American citizen by naturalization, a Cuban refugee, a Republican, a Catholic, and an anti-Communist. His further misfortune was to have returned a blind man.

  In March 1997, on his deathbed, Papá revealed to his only son what had lain hidden for more than forty years in Apartment 1 of their old building. Only then did he fully comprehend why his father had remained fixated on Cuba. He was amazed at how discovering a single act in the past of a person you’ve known since birth can reveal new, unimaginable sides to their personality. After the funeral, he had tried to put the information out of his mind. “So what? I’m blind. I can’t go to Cuba. Other people are living there. It’s impossible. Forget it.”

  But as things got worse, as his pension, in real terms, kept shrinking with each passing month, he racked his brain for a way to get his hands on it. He had met Rita at a party a year earlier, but although they had become close, he had never thought of her as a possible collaborator until the evening when his best friend, Bruce Lawson, had made an unannounced visit. They hadn’t seen each other in six years. Standing in the doorway, he had gasped at the sound of his buddy’s voice. A hundred flares had exploded in his brain, illuminating the way. How come he hadn’t considered Bruce! The only person he trusted enough to pick his brains on the subject; the only person capable of organizing an operation to recover the prize. If he couldn’t do it, nobody could. He lacked one vital prerequisite, though: fluency in Spanish, which was precisely what Rita could provide.

  The backslapping and rejoicing and reminiscing and updating had lasted little more than an hour. Then he’d revealed the secret. Bruce couldn’t believe it. He’d asked, “Have you considered the possibility your father might’ve been suffering from some … kind of delusion?” which was a perfectly reasonable question. But his tone said, Carlos, I respect your father’s memory, you know that, but he was crazy – apeshit. Case closed.

  So, he’d made clear that his father had died of a heart attack and had been mentally sound to the end. Then he told the story step by step, as his father had told it to him. Finally Bruce, after what seemed like a thousand questions – figuring things out, weighing alternatives, looking at the problem from different angles – said that he would definitely think about doing it. “But I don’t speak a word of Spanish,” he said.

  “I’ve got the right interpreter for you,” Carlos said, and arranged an introduction without telling Rita she would be sized up. After she left the restaurant, Bruce said, “She’s an actress, Carlos.” His tone said, A fucking actress? You have the nerve to suggest I should pair up with a two-bit Latin actress?

  Maybe the sheer enormity of the prize spellbound him, perhaps his adventurous side got the better of him, or possibly both, but Bruce had finally agreed to make a first, exploratory trip. He could almost hear his friend’s brain beginning to work it all out. Next, he had to persuade Rita. That evening he didn’t play the CD of piano concertos she enjoyed so much, didn’t recite the poems she adored. She would have ripped his heart out if he had tried to soften her up with music or poetry before presenting his part business proposition, part request. He had asked her to sit, then talked for half an hour straight. He heard her sniffle twice, a mark of her compassion. But as the story progressed, she had been simply amazed.

  “I’ll participate in this recon, as you call it, for you and for me,” she managed to say at last. “I don’t know if I’ll go on the recovery op. It depends on Sean. If he promises the deal goes ahead without threats and violence, I may go.”

  “He has assured me he won’t do anything of the sort.”

  “Fair enough. You think now we could … go to bed?”

  The tone and the words matched.

  The blind man returned to the present. In a few days, Stage Two, the recovery op, would begin. He should go to St. Patrick’s, pray, light a candle.

  “God, it’s about time you gave me a fucking break,” the blind man said in Spanish before fumbling for the tumbler and draining the dregs.

  Two

  4

  Sean Abercorn and Marina Leucci returned to Havana on August 4, 2000, a Friday. They rented a Hyundai Accent at the airport and headed for the Copacabana Hotel, on First Avenue and 44th Street in Miramar. Marina was elated after clearing Customs without a hitch. With the car’s air conditioner blasting away, Sean was driving them to the hotel, while Marina was wondering how people could work in such an oppressive heat. How could those men rake steaming asphalt on a street in the middle of the afternoon? That woman toil in a vegetable garden? Those athletes jog on a sports complex track? Unbelievable. She had read somewhere that one reason for low productivity in tropical countries was temperature. Maybe.

  “It’s so hot,” she said.

  Sean just nodded, his eyes on the road. The fucking iceman, Marina thought. He still wore his sports coat, which was okay in Toronto, inconceivable in Havana. When Carlos had introduced them four months earlier at a restaurant on Manhattan’s East Side, she had been impressed. Standard-looking guy, late forties or early fifties, casually dressed, a nice smile when he felt like it. For a couple of days after agreeing to the reconnaissance trip, she had even entertained the notion they would have a good time acting together, as, essentially, it was an acting job. But the moment Sean began explaining how they would go about it, he became insufferably domineering and pompous. Her kind of men were more malleable. Guys she could make, by a combination of wit and pussy, do whatever she wanted. Sean seemed about as malleable as reinforced concrete.

  Yet, she had to admit he was good at figuring out all the angles. The scheme to get into Elena’s apartment was based upon the fact that its front door was the first one inside the building. Had the siblings lived on the third floor, he would have concocted a totally different approach, unrelated to jogging and needing a glass of water. Yeah, he was good. The best, Carlos had said with his usual tendency to root for the people he admired. But on this occasion it seemed as if the blind man hadn’t exaggerated.

  Her thoughts shifted to him. One of the nicest, kindest, most attractive men she had ever met, living on a pension, alone in New York. The worst kind of unmalleable macho, the kind who made women foolishly believe he was at their beck and call. Poet, pianist, lawyer, bilingual, charismatic. She recalled the evening, two or so years earlier, at a party, when someone asked him how it happened. Nine or ten people had polished off a dozen bottles of wine and tongues were loose.

  She had never dared to ask him, nobody had in her presence. They were introduced in 1996, she met some of his friends, heard him recite the poems of Neruda, Mistral, Machado, Dario, and reminisce about his childhood in Cuba. She had taken him to her favourite places in Greenwich Village, Central Park, Chinatown, accompanied him to innumerable parties. Nobody had ever dared ask him how it hap
pened.

  “I had a premonition,” he began in his flawless English, head high, glass in hand. Then he chuckled. “We all saw it coming. You know when something really bad is going to happen to you. To us grunts on the ground, I mean. Not to the colonels hovering five thousand feet above in command-and-control choppers. You tread into the swamps, into the jungle, into the rice paddies; five months to go, four, three, two. The ultimate countdown. With each passing day the probability of being sent home crippled for life or in a body bag increases. We were being screwed by everybody: the brass and the VC. The brass needed body counts for its charts, and we were sent out so the gooks could ambush us, and then our hardware could wipe them out. The gooks knew and prepared for it. That particular day I was up behind the point man walking along a trail when the point man snags a tripwire. I heard a blast, then blacked out. I learned later we had walked into a claymore mine rigged alongside the trail. The platoon retreated, the whole area was napalmed, but no VC bodies were found. Of course. You plant booby traps, then flee. So, there was no body count, only an eyes count – mine.”

  “Do we take a left here?” Sean asked as he waited for an opening in the traffic along the Luminous Fountain, his eyes on 26th Street.

  Marina consulted the map on her knees. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Let’s stick to the road we know. Keep going straight ahead. Boyeros all the way to Malecón. Left onto Malecón.”

  “Okay.”

  There had been resigned bitterness in Carlos’s voice. When he’d finished the story, he’d shrugged, then smiled, and it suddenly hit her. Before that evening she had never lost a moment’s sleep over the fate of soldiers, over the enormous price war exacts from ordinary people, the lunacy and injustice of it all. She had been thirteen when he was wounded in 1973. Back then, Vietnam was for her a remote corner of the world with funny-sounding names (Saigon, Ho Chi Minh, Vietcong; it sounded like Japanese music: tong, ting, tang, bong) where most people were named Nguyen, and where some bloody war was going on that the Buenos Aires media reported daily in all its gory detail. Later, her family moved to the United States. When a military coup happened in Argentina and news of torture and disappearances made headlines in New York, it all seemed as distant and alien as Vietnam.