"What do you mean?"
"We have beautiful women in Cuba, too."
Onno looked at him with dismay. "But, Mr. Ambassador! I am unswervingly loyal to my girlfriend! I would never forgive myself if something so terrible were to happen."
The ambassador smiled faintly. "Mr. Quist, what happens ten thousand miles away has not happened at all." He left Onno to his fate and turned to Max. "And you — why would you like to visit Cuba?"
"Ah, in fact you've just given me the reason. Up to now I just wanted to go along as a friend of the family."
The ambassador nodded. "The new Cuba sets great store by friendship. Cuba needs friends in order to survive." He looked from one to the other for a moment. "Of course you just happen to have your passports with you?"
Ada and Bruno were going to stay in the Hotel Nacional; according to the ambassador it would be best if they arranged their own hotel at Havana airport, and after the sinister thump of the stamps, which countless times before all over the world had made the difference between life and death, time accelerated for all three of them.
The Cuban Airlines flight, for which Ada and Bruno had first to go to Prague, turned out to be fully booked. The only other airline that flew to Havana from Europe was Iberia — only fascist Spain broke the blockade against Communist Cuba. Onno believed that this was because it was the mother country of the former colony. National character was still stronger than ideology: Franco was a Spanish king; Fidel Castro, a Latin American caudillo; de Gaulle, the umpteenth Louis; Stalin, czar of all the Russias; Mao, the emperor of China; and Queen Juliana a Dutch stadholder. His political friends, who wanted to get rid of the grandees, would themselves end up as grandees, because one couldn't escape Holland — but Max must treat that prophecy as confidential.
"And what about you?"
"Me? I shall become the most appalling grandee of all. All men of goodwill will tremble before me!"
The duo rose from the ashes and Ada and Bruno had to devise and rehearse a program. Because it was too cumbersome for Ada to go to Leiden every day with the cello, and because Onno had no piano, Max gave them the use of his apartment, which he did not need during the day anyway. Ada was hesitant about the offer, but because a refusal did no one any good, she accepted. She was given the key, and on the first occasion she entered the rooms felt like someone visiting a house where there has been a death: everything untouched, everything still as it was when the dead person was alive. But in the company of Bruno, who immediately sat down at the grand piano, that soon disappeared.
When Max came home in the evening and found the two making music, and often Onno too, reading papers in his usual place, he was seized by a paternal feeling of contentment. A happy family! During the day in Leiden he looked forward to going home. Sometimes his arrival was scarcely noticed; but that superfluousness in his place did not worry him — on the contrary: to his own amazement it filled him with a sense of well-being. What was the source of this dislocation? Sometimes things were not even in their right place! He sat down somewhere, picked up a book on Cuba, and started reading as though he were their guest. He listened to the music, looked at Onno out of the corner of his eye, and reflected that the idyll would soon be over: the children would leave home and in the evening everything would be just as he'd left it in the morning.
Ada, with the cello between her thighs, sometimes felt him looking at her, but did not return the look. Things were as they were. She belonged with Onno now, and that's how it would remain, and she knew that he knew — but what she didn't like was that something still seemed to be smoldering in him, despite himself — or was she fooling herself? Was it perhaps smoldering in her? She looked at Onno in his green armchair: a child in a giant's body.
"Are you still with us?" asked Bruno.
16. The Conference
Although Ada and Bruno had left three days before, they would only arrive one day earlier: they had a twenty-hour wait in Prague for a connection, and besides that the Cubans still flew old Russian turbo-prop planes, via Scotland and Newfoundland. Max and Onno went via Madrid, with just one stopover in the Azores.
Everywhere in the plane they saw familiar faces, artistic and intellectual celebrities from all over Europe — writers, painters, philosophers, whom they recognized from photographs; there were also lots of North and South Americans, who as a result of the blockade had to take this roundabout route. They were told by the stewardess that there was some kind of cultural conference being held in Havana. Onno read Franco's party newspaper and Max looked out of the window at the unbroken carpet of clouds.
Thick cumuli like white mountains, with light-gray lakes in their valleys, which might have had names — the earth might have looked like that. The farther south they traveled, the cloud cover became thinner — until suddenly the sea became visible, frozen into blue immobility. Max dozed off and in the sound of the engines heard wonderful symphonies consisting mainly of triads, which he could conduct at will.
Land ahoy! Fasten your seat belts. Down below someone had planted countless matches upright in the earth, all of which cast their long, sharp shadows the same way: palm trees. They prescribed an arc across the bay and the white city, and landed at José Martí Airport. There were antiaircraft batteries all around the perimeter of the airport; against the control tower was a gigantic portrait of Che Guevara — that apostolic face with the beret, which here, where it belonged, suddenly took on a very different character. Below it in letters three feet high was the slogan:
HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE
When the doors opened, the October heat flooded into the plane like a wave of warm water. At the top of the steps Onno stopped for a moment and looked around.
"This is it!" he cried. "El Dorado! Goodbye to the land of the cheeseheads!"
The sun was low and orange on the horizon but still had a ferocity it never had in the north. Max momentarily placed the palm of his left hand on the concrete, which was still as hot as a griddle: a fried egg would be cooked within a minute.
In the cool, air-conditioned arrivals hall an orchestra was accompanying the chaos with guarachas. An Aeroflot plane from Moscow had also landed, and everywhere people arriving and people meeting them were embracing each other, without it being quite clear where customs and passport control were. However, there were lots of soldiers in green uniforms and military caps, some of them doing nothing more than swaying in time with the music. Waiters were walking around with large trays full of brimming glasses; when they took two and were about to pay, he shook his head amiably.
A black girl in military uniform, with stiff, straightened hair, came over to them and asked what delegation they were. Onno said that they weren't a delegation at all, but two ordinary tourists from Holland who were looking for rooms, preferably in the Hotel Nacional. She asked for their passports and studied the visas, which were on separate stapled sheets, since otherwise they would not be admitted to the United States. She scanned a list with her index finger.
"I don't have your names here."
"That's right," said Onno.
"No, that's not right. Holland, did you say? Have a seat there for a moment."
She disappeared with the passports, the zipper of her seamlessly fitting trousers running directly between her luxuriant thighs. Onno took the opportunity to phone Ada. Max looked around and sighed deeply. This was exactly what he had wanted: something completely different, something with which he was totally unconnected. For him the journey was already a success. There were welcome signs hanging everywhere for the delegates to the Primera Conferencia de La Habana, as well as huge portraits of the bearded revolutionaries of the first hour, but not of Fidel Castro; he was able to translate a slogan in red letters as: "When the extraordinary becomes the everyday, a revolution is under way." He looked at the smiling musicians on the small platform and thought of the ill-tempered fussing at Eastern European borders. Did this have any connection with that?