Naked in Havana (13 page)

I stroked his cheek with the back of my hand. “Just get better, Papi.”

“They told me Inocencia got hurt bad.”

“Just get some rest. Worry about all that when you’re better.”

“Are you okay?” he said, stirring, like he’d just thought of it.

“I’m fine, Papi. Not a scratch.”

“That’s good then.”

“Yes, that’s good.”

He started to doze then jerked awake again. “Go and see how Inocencia is doing, okay?”

“The doctors are with her, Papi. You just rest.”

“I can’t believe they did this to my club.”

He drifted off to sleep. After a while I got up to leave, kissed his hand and murmured. “We have to get out of Cuba.”

But he wasn’t asleep. He opened one puffy eye. “Why would we leave Cuba, cariña?”

“How can we stay here now?”

“They’re not driving me out of my own country.
Maricóns!
”

It was the first time he had sworn in front of me and not even apologized. The concussion, I supposed.

“But if we did go...we could survive, couldn’t we? We could start another club in Miami. There’s a lot of Cubans in Miami.”

“My business is here, our home is here, the music is here. There’s nothing for us in America. I’d rather die than go there.” He patted my hand. “Don’t worry, cariña. We’ll fix up the club, it’ll be like nothing ever happened. Don’t worry.”

“They bombed us, Papi. That’s something to worry about.”

“I can’t leave Havana,” he said. “I’ll die.”

He didn’t even realize what he’d said. But he was getting agitated and I didn’t want to distress him anymore. “Just rest,” I said, and he gave me a kind of a half smile and closed his eyes, and this time I decided to wait until I was sure he was asleep before I left.

I looked out of the window and watched a dirty lemon dawn creep up the sky over the roofs of Havana. This was the place I was born, but I didn’t feel like I belonged here anymore. If our own people did this to us, they weren’t our people anymore.

For the first time I pictured a world without my father; I had glimpsed it, just for a moment in the broiling smoke in the nightclub when there was nothing else to see. I was terrified to face a world where he wasn’t always right about everything, and where Havana wasn’t necessarily the best place for us to be.

I didn’t know who had put the bomb in our club, but we could no longer pretend that if we played our music and pretended not to be interested in politics that the world would pass us by. Even Reyes Garcia couldn’t keep the war form touching him and those he loved - or half loved.

As Inocencia said, you couldn’t be half in and half out of anything, that was how people got hurt. For the first time in my life, I suspected that Papi might be wrong about Cuba, and that we needed to prepare for the future before it swept us away.

Chapter 20

The Cathedral de San Cristobal was one of those gaudy baroque churches that the Jesuits loved. It was small for a city cathedral and preposterous for its size. In the glare of the midday sun it looked lopsided, and the whitewashed facade hurt the eyes.

They said that a hundred years ago they found a casket with Columbus’s ashes sealed up in a niche in one of the walls. I wondered what he would think of the new Havana, at what the men from Miami were doing here, mining as much money as they could out of the island, sending it all back home. He would probably approve. The new
conquistadores
wore Bermuda shorts and loud shirts instead of steel
casques
, but Lansky and King Ferdinand would have seen eye to eye on most things.

There was a flock of doves roosting on the roof of the cathedral. A cab backfired in the square and sent them all flapping panicked into the sky, looking for refuge among the eaves of the lottery shops on O'Reilley Street. I flinched as well and threw myself against the wall. A cab driver grinned at me, showing a gold tooth; his friend, a battered flat cap pulled low over his eyes, thought it was even funnier. He mimed being shot.

I suppose it was funny seeing a girl flatten herself against the wall like that, if you hadn’t seen your music teacher’s legs get blown off by a bomb two nights before.

The
churros
sellers were doing brisk business in the square. Small children poured out of the School of the Holy Innocents in their black and white uniforms, running and shouting through the colonnades past the gourds and rattles and negro dolls in the curio shop.

It must almost be time for siesta. I gave a coin to the blind beggar on the steps outside the cathedral and went inside.

The interior of the cathedral was sunny yellow, alive with frescoes. The hush was startling after the bedlam of the square. The rows of dark pews were almost empty. I wouldn’t have blamed God for striking me down the moment I dipped my fingers into the holy water, but there was no rumbling from the sky as I walked in, just the clip of my heels on the marble.

An acolyte was busy replacing the votive candles. He interrupted what he was doing to discourage an American tourist from stepping over the altar rail to take photographs.

I slipped a mantilla veil over my head and ventured along the cloister to the statue of the virgin. I lit a candle and fell to my knees.

I had never been one for prayers, the sisters at the American Sisters of Clare school in Vedado had squeezed out any fondness I had ever had for religion. My father insisted I accompany him to Mass at Easter and Christmas, but apart from our ritual duties, our family had never been devout. But I had read once, in an American magazine, that soldiers had a saying during the war:
there are no atheists in foxholes.

When you have exhausted all other possibilities, who else was there to ask when all your luck had turned against you?

I fidgeted on my knees, trying to form some kind of prayer, even the first sentence of one that would actually make sense, and not sound self-serving and utterly hypocritical, even to me.

But I couldn’t do it.

I kept thinking: what could a virgin like her make of someone like me, a girl with an itch between her thighs, who only ever thought about boys and being liked? I supposed I was more like my namesake, Mary Magdalene, the whore. She should have a statue, somewhere at the back, so girls like me could go and talk to her. She understood us. She had danced for the men in the temple for money, and if you believed the talk, she did a lot of other things as well, before Jesus found her and made her one of his followers.

Even bad girls have a good side, so perhaps she would understand.

I finally just dropped my head and asked for forgiveness. There was a part of me that wondered if what had happened was all my fault, that it was God punishing us because of my lying and whoring with Angel. My father had a bomb left in his club, Inocencia had lost her legs, and I couldn’t even tell anyone that I was to blame.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

But even that prayer was hard. How could I ask for forgiveness when I knew in my black, rotten heart, that I really wasn’t sorry? I was sorry for the trouble I’d caused, yes. But I wasn’t sorry for spending those afternoons in Angel’s bed. It seemed to me you couldn’t have a passionate spirit like mine and still reckon to be holy.

My knees were starting to hurt.

So what was it I came here to ask for? For Angel not to marry that bitch - sorry, My Lady - in America, for him not to run off to Miami? Really, even I could see that there were more important things happening in the world than me and my love affairs. God was too busy to listen to all that.

So what then?

“What is going to become of me?” I said aloud, and it was an honest question rather than a prayer. I didn’t expect the Virgin to tell me, and anyway I would rather she didn’t. I thought I already knew.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I whispered to her. “We can’t all be sweet and patient like you. I’d like to be but I’m not. You see what I am, don’t you? I think it’s just that some of us make good virgins and some of us don’t. Just don’t punish other people for what I do wrong!”

I thought that by squeezing my hands together and closing my eyes even tighter some fervent feeling might come. But it didn’t. When I opened my eyes Mary was still looking at me with that same expression of boredom and cool despair.

“Please don’t let my papi die,” I murmured. “And don’t let anyone take his club away from him. It’s all he has left. He’s a good man, don’t hurt him.”

The candles flickered in the draught.

“And help poor Inocencia. Why of all the people in Havana did you have to take her legs? Now what is she going to do?”

At last, a flicker of emotion. But there was no point in getting angry with the Madonna. You came here to ask for her intercession, not to blame.

This was pointless. I got up from my knees and crossed myself. I kissed the Madonna's feet and hurried back along the aisle, past the shrines of the saints, the echo of my heels rattling the bones of the long dead. My mind was no clearer than when I walked in, it was still a jumble of terror and self reproach.

I was about to step back into the bright light of the square, but I found the door blocked by a man who was about to walk in. I squinted against the glare, trying to make out his features.

“Reyes,” I said.

Chapter 21

Reyes shook his head. “Well, whenever I’m somewhere I don’t want to be seen, there you are too. How do you think that happens?”

I hadn’t stopped thinking about him for the last two days. Now he was here in front of me, I couldn’t speak.

“Have you been to confession?” he said.

I tried to recover my poise. “No, have you?”

“That’s where I’m headed. Never miss it. I miss one day and I get too far behind to catch up. I used to write all my sins down in a book but I ran out of pages after a week. So what are you doing here?”

“I’m having an affair with a priest.”

He nodded, as if that wouldn’t surprise him.

“I was praying.”

“You?” He sounded incredulous.

“I’m a good Catholic, Señor Garcia.”

“If you were praying for me to suddenly appear I’d say the Virgin can work miracles after all. You should write to the Vatican. You could get mentioned in dispatches.”

“I certainly wasn’t praying for that. And you shouldn’t make jokes like that in a holy place.”

“Oh, God doesn’t mind me, he has more important things to worry about.”

“I lit a candle for Inocencia.”

“That’s kind.” He stepped to the side and sat down heavily in one of the pews. As soon as the trademark grin fell away he looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Do you know how she is?” I asked him.

“I just came from the hospital, she’s not so good. How could she be?” He shook his head. “I don’t understand bastards who put bombs in crowded places and hurt women and children.”