“You serrit,” I palmed back at her.
The last I saw of her she was scurrying actively around, looking for handy stones to throw after me, but fortunately there weren’t any of a size that mattered lying around loose.
I joined up with one of the main arteries soon after that, and I had to watch myself. Conditions had reversed themselves, from what they’d been back there in the alley and the lanes around it; there were too many lights now instead of too few. Every thirty yards or so one of these multiple electric lampposts would show up, bearing five warm golden globes instead of just one and bleaching the sidewalk all around it like full-strength daytime sunshine. True, they alternated from side to side of the way, but I couldn’t keep crossing back and forth just to avoid them; that would have been even more of a giveaway.
There were cafés along this street, too, open to the street, with tables paid out along the sidewalk and sending out a calcium glare that made everything stand out like high noon. I had to skirt them as best I could, pretending to look the other way, or pretending to scratch my head so I could get my arm up on that side. For all I knew, one of them might be sitting down there on one of those spidery little iron chairs, staring straight out at me. It was like being on exhibition in the line-up; only you kept going instead of standing still. One thing I found out during this half-hour or so — and to me it wasn’t a point in its favor — and that’s that Havana is a town that never sleeps. They say New York is that way, but New York is a ten o’clock town by comparison. It takes the tropics to show you what real wakefulness in the early hours of the morning is. And I didn’t want to be shown right then.
Then when there weren’t cafés to buck, and I’d get a nice comparatively overcast stretch just ahead, a trolley car would come banging down on me — they ran there right in the middle — shedding turquoise sparks from its overhead traction wire and casting a livid, rippling wash along the walls from its ceiling lights. They were open, too, sideless, with the benches on them running crosswise; they were packed to the gills whenever they did show up, and there were all those rows of faces staring woodenly at you for a minute or two, while you were held impaled there in the bright backwash it threw up. At least that was what it felt like to me.
I couldn’t get off the damned thoroughfare either and try my luck with some quieter alternate farther over. Her instructions were rigid and didn’t allow for substitutions; they were complicated enough and hard to keep straight as it was, and I was afraid if I took any detours I’d get all tangled up, never be able to get back on course again. This town wasn’t laid out in rectangles like Miami; the streets were all hit or miss, like the cracks in a picture puzzle.
Well, I made it. There weren’t any shouts of recognition and there wasn’t any sudden stampede after me, so I considered that I’d made it. I came to this white marble statue that she’d told me to keep my eyes out for — some patriot or other; I couldn’t remember the name — and I turned off there, like she’d coached me to. From this point on it got better, dimmer again. I was safely on the other side of “downtown” now, opposite the one from which I’d started, and getting farther away from the feverish heart of the town all the time. Streets were cool and blue-dark again with night shadows, and the people you passed on them fewer and fewer all the time.
It was a long trek, and I kept giving my memory refresher courses in it as I went along, to make sure of not going wrong. I’ve never been book-smart and I’ve never been clever, but I’ve always had a good mechanical memory. Once you pound a thing into it often enough, it hangs onto it tight. She hadn’t burdened me with street names; that would have been hopeless. I couldn’t even pronounce half of them myself the first time, much less store them up ahead. She’d just given me the arithmetical factors of direction, with landmarks to break them up.
The night was hot. The breeze blowing up some of the streets from the harbor fooled you at times, but it was hot, and all that walking in it brought the sweat out. My mongrel attire itched, and my legs ached from the unaccustomed spread gait at which I held them distorted.
I got there finally. I passed the little movie house that was the last of all the landmarks she’d given to me; dark and dead to the world at this hour, with a sign over it, “Cine,” and big tattered posters feathering the walls all around the entrance. Some ancient forgotten film still grinding away here in the byways of the town years after all the rest of the world had seen it: “Fred Astaire en Volando Hasta Rio.” I made the turn it fronted on, and I’d hit it. Calle Barrios.
A little one-block affair with shedlike arrangements on supports roofing over a good deal of its sidewalks, so that they were in even deeper shadow than those elsewhere. She hadn’t been able to give me the exact house — her informant at Sloppy’s evidently hadn’t known that himself — so from this point on I was strictly on my own.
I moved slowly from doorway to doorway, paling them one side at a time with flickering palm-enclosed matches, looking for some placard or other indication. He was a professional photographer, so I figured he must have some way of advertising himself down below at the street door, to give people a tumble that he was up there.
I got plenty, but not what I was looking for. I got a dentist, I got a licenciado — whatever that was — I got a woman who sewed or made dresses or something. I even got a guy who changed foreign money for you; I bet he gypped you plenty, too, if you were fool enough to go near him. I got to the end of the block on that side of the street I ran out of doorways.
I crossed over to the opposite side and started to work my way back along there. Once I had to stop, a guy was coming along the sidewalk, not on my side but across the way, and I had to wait until he went past. I thought that maybe that match-fluttering act might make him suspicious, or at least nosy. He didn’t see me standing there under the gloom of the overhanging sidewalk shed. He came along whistling. He went straight through the street and turned off again at the other end. I could still hear his whistling a minute or two after that in the heavy quiet, and then it faded away. I sort of envied him, whoever he was. He hadn’t had his lady killed tonight. He didn’t have to hide out along the streets. He could go home whistling.
I shrugged and struck a new match and started in again. It came right on with the flowering of the flame, as though it had been waiting there all along, right under my hand, to be revealed to me. “Campos. Retratos y Fotografias.” I recognized him by the name she’d given me, and then the last word would have told me anyway. It was the same as ours, only spelled a little different. And then there was a picture of a hand under it, pointing inward to show that was the doorway that was meant, and not any other. Which struck me as being a little superfluous, but every man to his own taste. And then there was a small 3 under it to show the floor.
I blew out the match and I went in.
They didn’t believe in wasting lights by leaving them on all night. You were supposed to be in by now if you belonged here, I suppose. I groped until I found stairs, and then I felt my way painfully up them. I counted out two landings, and then when the next one came I knew that was where I got off. As a matter of fact, it was the last one anyway.
I went back to matches again to make sure of getting the right door. There was no difficulty about that. There were only two in sight, and one of them didn’t belong to anybody. It was the door to a water closet. I proved that by looking, but you could have told without even opening it, anyway. I went back to the other door, braced myself, and knocked subduedly.