He arrived at the restaurant about five minutes early. Café Santiago was small — maybe twelve tables — and certainly nothing fancy. Those tables were Formica. The chairs were made of well-aged wood. The decor consisted of faded black-and-white photos of the beautiful Cuban colonial city of Santiago and of its local beaches. The lights were hanging fluorescents and the food was cooked right behind the Formica serving bar.
What was luxurious about the place were the aromas emanating from the stoves and ovens. Right then they must have been roasting and/or frying the pork dishes for the expected dinner crowd. The air was suffused with the delicious scents of the meat, seasoned with traditional Cuban spices. Willie — given his Cuban-American nose — also picked up the aroma of boiled yucca smothered in butter and onions, as well as the narcotic nose treat that was fried sweet plantains. He had walked in not hungry at all. Within five minutes his mouth was watering.
Norman Cruz arrived at exactly five P.M. Willie knew who it was right away because he matched the description provided by Ursula. He was tall — about six feet — somewhere in his sixties, square-shouldered, and ruggedly handsome. His complexion was sallow — fitting for a man who had spent years in a prison. His cheekbones and chin were pronounced, his cheeks hollowed. His eyes were narrowed in a squint and were gray, approximately the color of concrete. He wore a white shirt with black stripes and gray dress pants. The clothes looked new, just as Willie had often seen with recently arrived exiles from Cuba. After years of living under a communist government, most often meagerly, when they arrived in the U.S. they got makeovers.
Cruz fixed on Willie, identified the black shirt, and shuffled over.
“Mr. Cuesta?” It was the same deep but quiet voice he’d heard over the phone.
Willie stood, they shook hands, and Cruz sat to the left of Willie, not across the table from him. He smiled slightly and pointed toward the entrance.
“I never sit with my back to the door. Any door.”
“Is that something that comes from your years in prison?”
Cruz shook his head. “No, actually it began during my time in the anti-Castro underground, although I kept it as a rule in prison as well. There were many men who could be dangerous there too. Especially the guards.”
A waitress brought menus and Cruz considered his.
“Order anything you want,” Willie said. “It’s on me.”
The other man’s eyes flared. He liked that idea. He closed his menu and when the waitress came over he ordered an appetizer of fried pork chunks, a black-bean soup, a churrasco steak, with rice, beans, fried plantains, and a beer. Despite the seductive aromas all around, Willie decided it was still a bit too early to eat and ordered only the beer.
Once the waitress was gone, Cruz looked at him sheepishly.
“I eat a lot of meat. They say it isn’t good for you, but I went so many years almost never getting meat in prison that I can’t resist.”
He dipped into the basket on the table and buttered a piece of Cuban bread.
“This also we didn’t get much of,” he said, biting into it lustily.
“You were in the prison at San Sebastian?”
Cruz nodded, still chewing. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Did you know a political prisoner there by the name of Alberto Ramos?”
It was a name Willie had found in the online accounts of human-rights disputes at the prison.
Cruz swallowed his bread and swigged his beer. “Oh yes. We all knew Alberto. He was famous for once managing to escape. He did it by hoarding salt, then rubbing it all over his body very hard, which caused a terrible, bleeding rash. That got him admitted to the infirmary. Late that first night he snuck to a phone, called the local civilian hospital, passed himself off as the prison doctor, and ordered an ambulance to have himself transferred to that hospital. With no doctor on duty that late, other prisoners on orderly duty carried him out. Once at the hospital, he ran away.”
Cruz chuckled at the memory. “What was brilliant about his scheme was that prisoners planning an escape attempt often hoarded pepper. Once outside they could scatter the pepper in their tracks so that the bloodhounds’ noses would get fouled and they couldn’t be tracked. Alberto did the unexpected; he found a way to use salt. So smart of him.”
Cruz swigged and shrugged.
“Of course, he was caught. Cuba is an island and he didn’t have access to a boat. On an island they have you trapped from the moment you make it out the gate. Do you know what they tell the troops searching for an escaped prisoner in Cuba?”
Willie said he didn’t.
“They tell them look for somebody who is unusually pale. Most Cubans get as much sun as they want. The island has plenty, but inside we got almost none. You escaped, but you looked like an albino and almost as easy to spot. Pale or not, Alberto at least enjoyed a couple of nights with his girlfriend before they grabbed him, although later they locked him in solitary for a long, long time.”
Cruz sipped his beer and so did Willie. What Cruz had related about Alberto Ramos was what Willie had read in the online accounts.
Cruz’s first course came then — the chunks of fried pork. They weren’t very big and Willie would have probably just popped each one in his mouth whole. But Cruz meticulously cut each chunk into three pieces and ate them bit by bit, chewing each morsel thoroughly. It took him a while to finish his appetizer and at one point he noticed Willie’s amusement.
“In prison you learn to eat very slowly, precisely. You have so little to do locked between those walls, you suffer so much boredom, that any activity you stretch out for as long as possible. Even if the meals were awful, as they were in San Sebastian. Sometimes we even found insects in the food. Jokesters called it Asian cuisine because in Asia people sometimes eat insects. But even then we took our time eating.”
At another point he reached across the table for the salt, which was near Willie. He froze, still holding the shaker.
“Now, that is something I would never have done in prison, reach across a dinner table for anything.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because another prisoner would instantly think you were trying to grab his food and you would find your hand pinned to the table,” he said, jabbing his fork down in the direction of the Formica.
He finished his pork and soon his black-bean soup arrived. He savored that, spoonful by spoonful, much as he had his appetizer.
“So I’m told you spent twenty years of your life there,” Willie said.
Cruz shrugged. “That’s what it turned out to be. We didn’t have calendars and you lose count. But yes, just over twenty years.”
“It must be quite a shock to suddenly find yourself free.”
Cruz spooned the last of the soup into his mouth and dabbed his lips with his napkin.
“You don’t realize all that prison has done to you until you are no longer in there. I slept in a large cell-block for years and there were always men snoring, grunting, arguing. That’s not to mention the ones with nightmares, screaming nightmares, because they had been mistreated. That went on every night, but I grew accustomed to it and learned to sleep through it all. Now that I’m out, do you know what wakes me up?”
“No. What?”
“The quiet. Every night I wake up because my mind is searching for the sounds that it’s accustomed to hearing. I lie still and listen, trying to hear something. Anything. The quiet concerns me, scares me.”
He punctuated that thought with a flick of the eyebrows, sipped his beer, and went on.
“Like I told you, I can’t sit with my back to the door. Also, when I was behind bars in Cuba I always kept a shiv tucked into my sock, along my ankle. I had made it from a piece of bedframe. I brought it with me when I left the island and I still have it here where I’m living. I can’t bring myself to throw it away.”