Naked in Havana

NAKED IN HAVANA

Book 1 in the Naked trilogy

Colin Falconer

DEDICATION

For my good friend Lynda Swain, who first suggested the idea of a book about Cuba, about Kennedy, and about the sixties and sent me down the road to Reyes and Magdalena and Angel and what destiny means.

Chapter 1

You want Havana?

I’ll give you Havana.

I have Havana right here, in this old photograph album I keep up here on the bookshelf. It’s a little tattered and the photographs are all black and white. I can’t even see them these days without my glasses. But it’s the most precious thing I own, apart from my wedding ring. Reyes had to smuggle it out for me. I don’t have much else left of those days. I left Cuba with the clothes on my back and not much else.

Here’s my papi. Isn’t he handsome? He’s standing outside his nightclub, the Left Bank, down on La Rampa. I was sixteen then. Yes, stunning - that’s what everyone says. Being beautiful is a blessing and a curse. When you’re young you think you own your beauty like you think you own your youth. You don’t realise that you’re just borrowing both and that someday life will come to take them back. Perhaps I would have done things differently if I was smart enough to know that.

Or perhaps not. What a lowdown, spoiled bitch I was. You really want to read this? Don’t. Do yourself a favour, find some other book to read, because I swear, you’ll want to throttle me when you learn the things I did. But I learned my lesson. Take some comfort in that; life paid me back, in full.

Here’s my mother. I didn’t know her well. She died when I was ten. We are on the Malecón, by the sea wall, back in the early fifties before everything went to hell. Look how she’s holding me. She must have loved me, but I can’t even remember her face now, not without this photograph to remind me.

People treat you like a princess because they love you, because you’ve lost your mother. And because your daddy’s rich, you think it’s always going to be like that. But life always finds a way to keep us honest, that’s what I found anyway.

And if life doesn’t, death will.

But I got lucky. Reyes Garcia came along and changed everything.

But first there was Havana.

Cuba, 1958

So there I was, naked. In Havana.

On the bed.

Angel, bless him, waited until he’d slept with me before he told me he was marrying someone else.

In fact, he waited until he’d had me on three separate occasions before breaking the good news. For now he sat there on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, listening to the scratchy sound of Beni Moré on the old Victrola singing
Santa Isabel de las Lajas
. We were in his father’s apartment on San Lorenzo, where Señnor Macheda brought his own mistresses. I suppose, in Angel’s mind, he was just carrying on family tradition.

My thoughts were in quite another direction. I imagined finally telling my father about us, wondered whether we would have the wedding at the club or in the garden at home. I knew Papi wouldn’t agree to one of the big hotels--he hated those guys taking over his country like that.

I lay on the tangled sheets, feeling the wetness on my belly turning sticky and cold as the overhead fan stirred the treacly air. He was always careful like that, my Angel; being late home from shopping was easier to explain than being pregnant. I admired the lean bands of muscle on his chest. He was a beautiful boy. A comma of inky black hair fell over his forehead and resisted all his efforts to push it back. His half-lidded eyes made him appear more sensual than he really was.

My clothes were scattered over the floor. The room smelled of sweat, sex and the French perfume my papi had bought me for my eighteenth birthday.

Angel’s hand went to his penis, stroked it casually, then he looked at me and one corner of his mouth twisted in a self satisfied grin.

“I’m getting married,” he said.

I raised myself on one elbow and stared at him. “What?”

“Father’s idea. Nothing I can do about it.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if this was a minor inconvenience that no one could have possibly foreseen.

“Married? When? To who?”

He drew on his cigarette, watched the long stream of smoke as he exhaled. “Some girl from America. He says it’s important for the family, that it’s my duty. Can you believe it?” He laughed. “My fucking father would marry me to my sister if there was a dollar in it.”

He looked at her, tilted his head, like: “you should feel sorry for me, Magdalena.”

“How long have you known about this?”

Another casual shrug. He examined the tip of his cigarette, the glowing ash I would have liked to have mashed in his eye. “Does it matter?”

Time stopped.

I could hear the waves crashing on the Malecón, children playing football on the cobblestones in the plaza below. Someone was playing a guitar and singing, quite badly. The brown barrio girls were laughing and clapping along.

I reached for the glass of iced lime juice beside the bed and threw it at him. My aim was off. If I hadn’t been so angry it would have hit him on the head and sent him toppling down into the street. Instead, it missed him by a slender few inches and smashed on the cobblestones down in the plaza. The guy playing the guitar cursed us and the girls screamed.

Angel ducked his head and ran for the door.

I looked for something else to throw. The lamp. Now the bedside table. I hauled a picture frame from the wall and hurled that as the door slammed shut behind him.

I wiped myself with his shirt and tossed that into the plaza as well. I found my clothes, got dressed. I didn’t walk out, not then, not straight away.
Take deep breaths, Magdalena. Don’t let him see you cry.

I don’t know why, but when I got downstairs he was still standing by the door, naked, cupping his balls with one hand. Perhaps he was hoping that I’d calm down. You should not tell a naked girl you’re getting married to someone else and hold even the faintest hope that she will calm down anytime soon.

He saw the look on my face when I came out of the bedroom and panicked. He ran out of the door and down the steps into the plaza, bare-assed. The barrio girls started laughing and whistling, thinking this was a great joke.

Angel was trapped halfway between me and the rest of Havana. He made to run back inside, then saw me coming down the marble staircase. I kicked him and punched him while he cowered against the wall. But how much damage can a girl do?

Not nearly enough, nothing like what he deserved.

There was a crowd gathered, hooting and cheering on the pretty chica beating on the rich kid. This was as much fun as anyone had seen at that end of San Lorenzo for a while. Eventually I let him run back inside.

Luis was waiting with the car on the other side of the plaza. I kept my head down so he couldn’t see me crying and jumped in the back. He knew enough not to ask questions. He started the engine and put his foot on the gas. We headed back down San Lorenzo towards Vedado.

I stared out of the window, my hands balled into fists in my lap. I needed to calm down before I got home. I couldn’t let Papi see me like this.

Angel might think he was going to marry someone else, but he was wrong.

This wasn’t over. Magdalena Fuentes would see to that.

Chapter 2

When I got home, there was a black Cadillac parked in the driveway, so new and shiny you’d think the paint was still wet. A man in a fedora and sunglasses stood beside it, he was about the size and shape of a gorilla. I waved to him as I got out of the car. He didn’t even smile.

Papi was sitting in the courtyard with a man with big ears and a gardenia in the buttonhole of his jacket. They were talking in whispers out by the fountain.

I went upstairs and closed my bedroom door and stripped off my clothes. I checked my reflection in the mirror looking for evidence of sin. Sure enough there was a bruise on my left breast. Angel thought I liked it; he kept biting me even when I told him to stop. Why is it boys think if they hurt you, if they make you scream or moan, that it’s always a good thing?

I slipped into the shower and stood under the faucet letting the cold water wash away the sticky residue of sex and the smell of him. I slid a hand between my legs and supported myself against the tiles with the other. It was the only way I could get any relief; I always left my trysts with Angel feeling so tense.

This sex thing, it’s supposed to be pleasure, isn’t it? But it wasn’t. I wanted give him what he wanted--I wanted Angel to be mine,--but when I got home I always needed some kind of release of my own. Today was different, I came anger and frustration and guilt, and when I was done my legs wouldn’t hold me, and I slipped onto my haunches on the tiles, feeling the needles of water in my hair. I started sobbing like I was choking up my heart. I tried to stop and I couldn’t.

That
maricón
.

I wanted to kill him.