Loving Che (16 page)

Again the door was opened as if by a ghost and I climbed the darkened steps up to Caridad's house. The dining room was brightly lit, and the smell of cooking returned to me the notion of home that years of travel had almost buried. The young man greeted me with a kiss on the cheek as if we were old friends. He was polite and funny and, I noted, very beautiful; and when he told me that his mother would be out in a short while I found myself at a loss for anything to say in return. He sat me down and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with two glasses and a bottle of French wine. My uncle brought a case of this last time he was here, he said, but neither my mother nor I much appreciate wine, so it has lasted us more than a year.

The wine was delicious, and a few moments later I found myself holding my glass out for more. Presently Caridad wheeled out, trailing a scent of lavender and so carefully made up that even her son smiled on seeing her. In his presence, Caridad seemed younger, lighter. Before long I found myself laughing with them and trading impressions of the city. I had the feeling—a common illusion, especially for the perpetual tourist—that I had known these two for a very long time.

After a while, Caridad announced that dinner was being served. The house had a formal dining room, which I had not seen on my first visit. And I was surprised, walking into it, to find a young black woman setting the table. She was dressed very well also, in a sleeveless silk green dress. She did not look up when we walked in, and after a while I realized that it wasn't because she was sullen, but because she was absorbed in her
task. Each napkin had been expertly folded over the pale ivory plates. The glasses were lined up, the silverware polished. The others didn't address her, and after a while she disappeared into the kitchen. Caridad held her arm out toward a chair and told me to sit. I learned that the son, Manny, worked as a tour guide with the National Hotel. He offered to give me a tour of El Vedado, since I seemed so interested in the neighborhood. It's one of Havana's newer areas, he said. The whole history of the city, Manny said, could be seen as a collective interest in outrunning the past, from the old center to La Vibora to El Vedado and on to the suburban dream of Miramar. As he talked I watched from a corner of my eye as the black woman brought out plate after plate of food and placed them on the linen runner in the center of the table. White rice, black beans, a wide basin of shrimp, potato salad, a plate of lobster tails in butter and parsley, a plate of stewed chicken. I sat back in my chair, now completely absorbed by the food and not listening to a word of the conversation. The woman brought out two more dishes filled with salad, and after arranging it all and bowing slightly, she sat down next to me at the table, raised a toast to Our Guest and we all clinked glasses. I waited for someone to make the introductions, and when no one did I introduced myself to the woman, whom I now had decided was not hired help but part of the family. The woman nodded, took my hand and resumed eating without saying a word. Neither Caridad nor her son ever directed conversation her way. This curious situation intrigued me, and I waited all evening to ask about it, but never found the right moment.

After dinner, the black woman stood, picked up everyone's dishes and disappeared into the kitchen. Then she came back for the platters of food, many of which, of course, were still more than half full. After a short time, she returned from the kitchen with a plate of flan and a small pot of fruit preserves from England, all of which she set on the table. As we ate dessert, Caridad told me that she had been in a wheelchair since 1985 and that doctors had never been able to explain why she had suddenly lost feeling in her legs. I had been very ill for some days with a terrible fever, she said. Gradually I thought that I was beginning to lose a sense of my body. As if I were floating. The doctors said it was a common effect of the medicine. But when I finally got better I discovered that I could no longer move my legs.

She looked over at her son before continuing. So I live up here, above the ground, suspended, floating again. I have friends to call in an emergency. Once, a delivery boy forgot, despite my many reminders, to close the door behind him on his way out. The system that Manny set up, you see, doesn't work for closing the door, only opening it. I hurried to the balcony and shouted out after him, but he didn't hear, or he refused to hear. So I called up one of my friends and she came and shut the door. Once a month, Caridad continued, Manny carries me and my wheelchair down and we go to La Coppelia. After, he'll take me on a little tour of the neighborhood, just to remind me. I'll see all the old places; each month, it seems, a new store has gone up or another building has crumbled. I think for Manny it's enjoyable. But I can never stay down there
for long, Caridad said: the crush of people, the smell of exhaust, the cars so close and menacing. … No, I've come to prefer the world from up here.

She was quiet for a while, and we finished our desserts in silence. No one had yet spoken to the black woman so I turned to her and asked if she also lived in the neighborhood. She traded glances with Caridad and smiled at me before getting up with the dessert dishes and disappearing into the kitchen. I never saw her again.

I followed Caridad and Manny to the living room, where we took our coffee and I told them more of Teresa's story. My talk of the past caused Caridad to reminisce a little about what she called “those times”—aquellos tiempos, and I was reminded that nostalgia is not the exclusive province of exiles; or perhaps that one can be an exile without ever having left, can be an exile, so to speak, from time.

I told Caridad that a friend of mine in Miami had mentioned El Gato Tuerto and I asked her if it was still around. Caridad sat a long time with her eyes closed, then said: It was in El Gato Tuerto—this was the end of the 1950s, the beginning of the 1960s—where Miriam Acevedo would present herself, dressed all in black. Later, in the seventies, when I could still walk there on my own, I would go to hear Portillo de la Luz, Elena Burke. Caridad opened her eyes and looked at me. These names don't mean anything to you, she said. How strange that is. … Over the years, Caridad continued after a while, the place came to the point of collapse. Manny here tells me that it's been remodeled. But I doubt it's the same, she said.
If I were you, I wouldn't even bother going there. With this, she turned to her son and asked him to bring her a photo album from the dresser in her bedroom.

He returned with not just the album, but a plastic bag full of black-and-white photos. My heart did a little leap. Caridad reached into the bag and after a moment pulled out a photo of a lovely young woman dressed in a black stole and a long sequined dress. She sat for a while looking at it and then passed it to me without comment. We spent the next hour or so like this until the shadow that had been lingering over Caridad's face finally obscured it altogether and she gathered her photos and abruptly wheeled herself back to her bedroom, calling after Manny to help her get ready for bed. I stood quickly and hastened to say my good-byes, but Manny put a hand to my shoulder and asked me to sit for a bit. This I did, and after a while Manny returned, shutting the door to his mother's room behind him. He went to the dark armoire and pulled out a bottle of brandy and filled two small glasses, one of which he handed to me. She gets like that, he said. It is not about anyone or anything. He took a sip of brandy and then said, Come—I want to show you something. He led me into a small room off the dining room with a couch and a small table and, to my shock, a wide-screen television set hooked up to a satellite dish. The satellite dish was inside the room, pointed out at a high window. It's illegal to have it, he said, following my gaze; that's why it's inside. Manny smiled and turned on the set. We get about two hundred channels, I think, though I've never counted, he said. You are really crazy about sports in the U.S., aren't you? I've
never seen so many channels for sports. We get everything—French movies, Italian game shows. But you know what it is my friends always want to watch when they come up here? I raised my eyebrows in a question. He sat on the couch and hit the remote control. CNN, he said and laughed.

I sat with Manny deep into the night, watching first CNN and then a broadcast of
La Dolce Vita.
My head drifted onto his shoulder, and I must have slept. It was nearly morning when I woke. He had turned off the television and was sleeping also. I had a moment of small panic, and then I sat apart from him very carefully. Now that he slept I could look on him more closely—the dark curly hair, the fine cheekbones, the full dark lips. I wanted so much for something to stir in me, to feel something of the transcendence that Teresa had described. But once again it eluded me. Instead I was overcome by the night, the flat walls, the shabbiness that seemed ready to break free—in spite of Caridad's valiant efforts—from every corner. I kissed Manny lightly on the forehead and quietly let myself out, making sure to pull the door shut behind me when I reached the bottom of the stairs.

For the next few days I avoided Caridad's immediate neighborhood, concentrating instead on the streets to the west and north. Finally, I decided to send a cake from Pain de Paris up to their house by way of thanks. I never saw them again.

Three days before I was set to leave, I had come no closer to finding Teresa. I'd been foolish to believe that I would be
able to accomplish in one trip what I had not been able to accomplish in almost ten years of visits.

Near the end of the week I awoke early and realized that I could not bear another conversation with strangers. The tendency of the Cuban to talk about everything but the subject at hand had worn me down to the size of a pencil stub. I'd come to see it as a kind of aggression, a particular type of aggression perhaps indigenous to people who felt they had no other weapon at their disposal but the power to drive someone slowly mad through endless soliloquies, performed with aggrieved tones and an upraised, scolding finger.

Remembering the printmaking studio that Ileana had told me about, I took a taxi to the cathedral. I had no trouble finding the studio, which stood at the end of a narrow alley. I stepped inside without anyone stopping me or asking if I needed anything and spent the better part of an hour wandering around the vast room alone.

Finally a man approached and, recognizing his name, I told him Ileana had sent me. The man who ran the place—I made the mistake of calling him the owner, and he laughed—led me to his office on the top floor. I asked him if he had anything by an artist named Teresa de la Landre. He pursed his lips and thought for a while. No, he said. I don't think I've ever heard of that name. Is she a young artist? No, I said, from the fifties. I'm sorry, my love, we really don't have much here from that time. He smiled. The artists we have now—he opened his hands—are from a different era. I laughed, and suddenly afraid that I had been impolite, I asked if he would mind giving me a little
tour of the vast gallery. I ended up buying two pieces, one by Bonachea and another by Jose Omar, which now hang in my house.

I returned by taxi to the hotel with my paintings. It was already late, and the evening crowds were gathering: the young scruffy backpackers from Germany, the oily old Spanish men, the beautiful prostitutes. I paid the driver, and he put his hands to his chest and said, Where are you going tomorrow, I will come and wait for you. I will wait for you my entire life. Charmed and perhaps a bit intoxicated by the slow work of the city on my senses, I kissed him lightly on the cheek. I gathered my things and made my way to the entrance. But before I arrived there, a young woman stepped in front of me. I had once before been propositioned in this way, and I turned my face away and continued walking until she whispered, Are you the woman who has been looking for Teresa de la Landre? I stopped, my hands suddenly trembling on the paintings. Who are you? I asked. Come with me, she said. I hesitated. Every trip to Havana is a dance between wanting to believe in the good of people and protecting oneself from the desperation that poisons every interaction. After a moment's considering, I said, No, you come with me. I motioned for her to follow me through the glass doors of the hotel. The porter who opened the door for me hesitated and then made eye contact with a security guard inside. The man rushed over and very politely asked me in Spanish if we were staying in the hotel. In English, I told him that in fact we were. The man let us through. I sat with the woman at the lobby bar and ordered two mojitos for us.

The short confrontation with the security guard had given me new confidence, and, quite able to hide my shaking, I asked the young woman what it was she really wanted.

I am the daughter, she said, of a woman who used to work for a woman who I think is the one you are looking for.

I remained impassive. Yes? I said.

You've been asking for a Beatrice, she said. But my mother's name is Matilde. And you've been looking for a Teresa de la Landre, but my mother worked for a woman named de la Cueva. Still, she said, I think she is the woman you are looking for.

What makes you think so?

The woman reached into her purse and pulled out a rumpled sheet of paper. She handed it to me. De la Cueva gave this to my mother some years back, she said.

I took the paper and unfolded it. Neruda's poem had been carefully handwritten, and though it was faded in parts I thought—or maybe I wanted to think—the writing seemed familiar.

I raised my eyebrows. I've mentioned the poem to several people, I said, trying to keep my voice even and steady. It's not so hard to reproduce.

The young woman had grown more and more fragile the more confident I became, and it wasn't long before I began to feel some pangs of guilt. Still, I was not going to be taken for a fool. The unlikely coincidence was not lost on me. For years I had visited the country, walking the streets far more assiduously than I had this time, and nothing had come of it. Why now? What were the chances? In the intervening years, the
world had not changed very much, but Havana had. People were desperate in a way they had never been. Might not they be tempted to construct an elaborate lie? I cursed myself for having been so promiscuous with my information, for once again failing to note every detail of my interactions.