Onno came back and passed on Ada's regards; she would wait for them in the lobby. The black girl also reemerged.
"Everything's okay. Would you come with me?"
Their passports were not returned immediately. They had to find their baggage, and without any further checks, they arrived in the untidy square in front of the terminal, where the heat received them like a scorching block weighing on the earth. Meanwhile, in a paroxysm of colors, the sky was indulging in a sunset of a kind that in Europe could only be dreamed up by a crazed lighting technician, resulting in his immediate dismissal. Beneath it the traffic situation resembled a fairground bumper-car ride: rattling American limousines, none of them newer than ten years old, decrepit buses belching clouds of black smoke, each driver with his hand on the horn.
"Jesús!" cried the girl, and waved.
A dented black Chrysler came puttering toward them; the front windshield was cracked and one mudguard was missing. She gave the small mulatto at the wheel an envelope containing documents and told him to take los compañeros to Hotel Habana Libre.
"But what kind of hotel is it?" asked Onno. "What does it cost?"
"Don't worry, we've called them. Everything's been fixed. You're the guests of the revolution."
Onno was about to say something, but flashing an angelic smile with her innocent white teeth, she disappeared into the airport building. They put their baggage in the trunk, and when Jesús slammed it shut, the open left front door fell into the street. He cursed, spat out the cigarette, started laughing, and together with Onno lifted the door onto the backseat. He was wearing a gray T-shirt full of holes, a shapeless pair of trousers, with sandals on his bare feet. The car moved off, rattling like an old coffee mill, while on the dashboard all the dials remained phlegmatically at zero. Max and Onno tried to find a place to sit among the feathers of the torn seat, and a little while later they were driving along the highway toward Havana. Because Cuba was obviously not keen on living in a twilight world, it had suddenly become almost completely dark. To the right and left of the road there were black and white schoolchildren, workers, and women cooling themselves with fans.
"So now," said Max with his hair waving, "we are the Dutch delegation at the cultural conference. If we want, we can even claim our travel expenses."
"Yes, and it's absolutely impossible. What are we to say if they ask us what kind of cultural ambassadors we are?"
"Compañeros!" intoned Max rhetorically. "Revolutionary insights on the creation and development of the universe are also in accord with the dialectical laws of Marx and Engels! God knows," he said in a different tone, "it may even be true. There was a famous Soviet biologist, Oparin, a real Marxist, with pioneering publications on the origin of life to his name — and what applies to the origin of life may apply by analogy to the origin of the universe."
"So you've got your speech ready. But what about me? What am I supposed to say?"
"That you've made the extremely socially relevant discovery that the syntax of all modern languages reflects the mechanisms of oppression of class relationships, as is apparent from terms like subject, indirect object, and direct object. The bourgeoisie is the class of the subjectors, the right-wing intellectuals are their accomplices, and the working class is the object. In the languages of primitive communistic, classless societies this distinction did not exist, and that's why under socialism all cases should be radically abolished."
"Interesting thesis! Could I perhaps also mention a Soviet scholar? What you're saying is a little like what was claimed by the linguist N. J. Marr, and J. W. Stalin personally wrote a not entirely stupid pamphlet against it. Compared with the writings of A. Hitler, at least, it's a marvel of intellectual acuteness." Onno looked anxiously outside. "We're making jokes about it now, but meanwhile we're caught in the trap, M. Delius. Perhaps we should say we're poets. No one can check up on us. Poems are untranslatable."
"What can they do to us? We haven't forced our way in anywhere, we've been pushed in, by that sweetie just now. We are simply what we are: I'm an astronomer; you're a linguist. We'll see."
Onno shook his head and sighed deeply. "It's irresponsible, extremely irresponsible.. " Suddenly he raised one hand and cried: "Live dangerously!"
They drove into the city. Sparsely lit old streets, squares inlaid with marble, white churches in Spanish baroque style, statues from the colonial period. Decay was obscured by the heavy traffic of wrecks thundering along, the shabby but teeming street life, and the lines outside the shops, where skin colors extended across a spectrum from the blackest African black to the whitest Iberian white. Music blared out everywhere from windows and portable radios: cha-cha-cha, salsa, drumming. They passed old forts and a snow-white statue of Christ nearly a hundred feet high.
"Must be the Cuban image of Lenin," observed Max.
At the harbor, full of rusty Russian ships with hammers and sickles on their funnels, they turned onto a broad boulevard. On the left, where thousands of people were walking about, everything was lit; to the right lowered the darkness of the sea. Everywhere on the heavy stone balustrade, erected as a barrier against hurricanes, courting couples and old men playing chess were sitting above the surf below. Again there was music everywhere. Signs announced that across the water, a hundred and fifty miles beyond the horizon, in Florida, the enemy was lying in wait, el imperialismo yanqui. At the end of the long boulevard a modern district began, with high-rise buildings and better street lighting, even neon signs, where black faces no longer predominated in the street.
At the entrance to the drive of a tall, modern hotel Jesús had to show the papers; on the other side of the street, behind a barrier, stood a curious crowd. The papers were in order, because with the chilly wave of the hand that police all over the world are masters of, whether in the service of communism, capitalism, or fascism, they were allowed in. They got out of the car under a wide awning with the words Habana Libre on it. One could still see that it had once said Habana Hilton, but that had been erased. At the hotel entrance, too, people looked ominously to and fro from the photos in their passports to their faces, giving them the feeling that they might have smuggled in their faces.
"They take good care of cultural ambassadors here," said Max.
With Jesús ahead of them, they carried their cases through the cool, busy lobby to reception. While their papers were again being taken out of the envelope, they looked around the sumptuous space in astonishment.
Silent films were being shown on two large screens on either side, accompanied by loud, lively Cuban music tempting one to dance: one screen showed fighting in Vietnam, bombs raining from gray B-52's, helicopters spraying villagers with bullets, airplanes burning fields with napalm, an American sergeant spending minutes kicking to death a Vietcong soldier, tied up and lying face-down on the ground, and then, casually holding the submachine gun in one hand, firing a bullet into the back of the head, a bullet in the back, and finally a bullet in the backside for fun, so that each time the body jerked a few inches farther in the sand. By way of comparison, on the other screen American policemen were clubbing black demonstrators with truncheons. In the middle of the lobby, which was also decorated with slogans and huge photos, for example of monkeys drinking Coca-Cola, something resembling a huge totem pole was raised up to the ceiling, slung with machine guns, rifles, revolvers, sten guns, hand grenades, and anything that could sow death and destruction.