An old woman on a third-floor balcony was hauling up a bucket on a rope.
“No plumbing?” Jack asked the the cabdriver.
“Not here, señor. If you go for walking, is muy importante that you look over you head. Is not so bad if you get spill from buckets going up. But the ones coming down…”
“Yo comprendo,” said Jack. I understand.
They continued west along the waterfront on the broad and busy Avenida Maceo, stopping at the Hotel Nacional. The driver would have been more than happy to continue the city tour, but Jack tipped him extra to cut it short.
“Gracias,” Jack said as he handed him a couple of twenties. It was about a month’s worth of wages for a physician.
Hotel Nacional was the vintage 1930 grand dame of Havana hotels, perched on a bluff with postcard views of Havana Harbor. Its architect had also designed the famous Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, and it was built in a similar Spanish style, entered via a long driveway that was lined with slender Royal Palms. The lobby screamed of opulence if not ostentatiousness, with mosaic floors, Moorish arches, and lofty, beamed ceilings. Jack looked around, saw the tourists at the bar sipping lime daiquiris and rum mojitos. He spotted another group of businessmen feasting on shrimp as big as their fists and lobster with drawn butter. He heard salsa music from the nightclub, the laughter of people dancing, the chatter of wealthy Europeans on holiday.
And then he heard the desk clerk’s reminder: “One last thing, señor. Locals are not permitted in the hotel. It’s the law, and I’m required to tell you that. So please don’t bring them here.”
“Sure thing,” said Jack. With bitter irony he was reminded of an old Miami tourism slogan: “ Miami -See It Like a Native.” Here, the slogan should have been “ Cuba -See It Like ANYTHING BUT a Native.”
Jack and Sofia took separate rooms on the recently refurbished sixth floor. Jack pulled back the curtains and opened the window to take in the view. A warm, gentle breeze caressed his face. Looking east he saw Havana Harbor, where the explosion of the Maine had sparked the Spanish-American War. Somewhere to the west, he knew, was the town of Mariel, the launching point for the infamous boatlift that had brought a quarter of a million Cubans-“Marielitos”-to Miami in the early 1980s. Most had assimilated just fine, but twenty-five thousand of them had come from Castro’s prisons, and at least one of them was convicted of murder again and had ended up on Florida ’s death row. Jack knew that one well, because the young and only son of Governor Harold Swyteck had been his lawyer-until he was executed in the electric chair.
Jack felt a slight queasiness in his belly.
The phone rang. He stepped back inside and answered it. The woman spoke in Spanish.
“Are you lonely, handsome?”
It took Jack a moment to translate in his head, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. Then he chuckled and said, “Cut it out, Sofia.”
“My name is not Sofia. But I can be Sofia if you want me to be. I can be anyone at all. I can do whatever you want, whenever you want, however many times you want. Have you ever had a girl of sixteen? All you have to do is-”
Jack hung up. Obviously the bellboy or the doorman or someone had passed the word that an American man was alone in room 603. The desk clerk’s admonition-no locals in the hotel-echoed in his mind.
Yeah, right. And drugs are strictly prohibited in Miami Beach nightclubs.
Jack took a seat on the edge of the bed-the very edge. He wondered how many sixteen-year-old Cuban girls had lain across these sheets, and then he recalled those two pigs in the airport talking about how cheap and gorgeous the women were here. He grabbed the phone and dialed Sofia ’s room. She answered on the third ring.
“ Sofia, hey. It’s Jack.”
“What’s up?”
“I wanted to let you know: I’m checking out of here.”
“You don’t like your room?”
“The room’s fine. I just don’t want to stay here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
He didn’t answer right away. His mind flashed with visions of his grandmother living in some dumpy house for thirty-eight years with hardly anything to eat. He thought of Abuela saying good-bye to his mother, spiriting her away to Miami, unaware at the time that she’d never see her teenage daughter again. He thought of the rum-guzzling, shrimp-gorging, cigar-smoking tourists and the young girls who became whores.
But the one image Jack couldn’t conjure up was that of a little Havana suburb, the town in which the mother he’d never known had lived most of her too-short life.
“I’m going to Bejucal,” he said.
20
Two hours later Jack and Sofia were in a rental car approaching the outskirts of Bejucal.
“You didn’t have to come,” said Jack.
“How were you planning to get around without me?” asked Sofia.
“My Spanish is fairly functional.”
“I’ve heard you speak, Jack. And while it’s very impressive that you were able to learn Spanish while you were a drainpipe, it probably wouldn’t get you very far in a small town.”
“A drainpipe? Is that what I said?”
She smiled. “It’s okay. Your Spanish is really pretty good.”
“How good?”
“Probably just good enough to get you beat up and ripped off. Which is why I came along.”
“Oh, so you’re here to protect me, are you?”
“No. I came to watch you get beat up and ripped off. Beats the heck out of Cuban television.”
Touché, he thought.
The actual driving time from Havana was only thirty minutes, and they reached Bejucal around dinnertime. Abuela had often told him that it was the prettiest town in all of Havana Province, and she was probably right. There were colonial facades everywhere, and just enough of them were freshly painted to allow the imagination to color in the rest. In the heart of town was a quaint little square with an ocher-colored colonial church. It was precious enough in its own right, but for Jack, just the sight of the old church took his breath away. His mother had been baptized there. The Cine Martí was nearby, and Jack wondered if his mother had ever gone there with her friends, or maybe even a boyfriend, dreaming of being an American movie star. Then his gaze drifted toward a billboard at the end of the square that read, SOCIALISMO O MUERTE (Socialism or death), and at once he understood Abuela’s comment about Bejucaclass="underline" It was exactly as it was forty years ago; and it was totally different.
“You okay?” asked Sofia.
Jack had been unaware, but they’d spent that last few minutes stopped at an intersection for no apparent reason. He’d been absorbing it all. “Yeah,” he said, shaking it off. “Just spacing out a bit there.”
“You hungry? The Restaurante El Gallo looks pretty good.”
“Sure,” said Jack.
Jack parked the car, and they walked to the restaurant and took a table near the window. The house specialized in criollo dishes, so Jack ordered roasted chicken and plátanos a puñetazos. The waitress was extremely friendly, and naturally she recognized them as tourists. She insisted that they visit Plaza Martí, which she claimed was the setting for the movie Paradiso, based on the novel by José Lezama Lima. Jack didn’t know if that was true or not, but it made him smile to hear it, as if it had been his own small town featured in a motion picture. In a way, it was his town.