Private House (13 page)

“This is your friend's? I told you, I would have been happy to rent one.”

He closed the hatch and smiled. “This will be more authentically Cuban. Besides, it'll help you remember the era I'm from.” His clothes had the same effect, she thought. American running
shoes—black-and-white, ankle high—tan slacks and a white T-shirt tucked in tight, showing how lean he was. “I thought we'd head out to Miramar and Siboney, so you can see how the rich folks live. Then we can have lunch and take a look at the wrong side of the tracks.”

They got into the car, which smelled of warm dust and oil. The padding of the seat was so worn Mathilde could feel the curved metal of the frame under her thighs. She laughed at this. “A VW, like a race car! How old is it, really?”

“1971. It got here the year before I did.”

“Well, it's older than I am. You have to tell me about it. I knew about the old cars, but I didn't realize they were so well cared for. Is it—what do you say?— a guy thing?”

“A guy thing?” The expression puzzled him. “I don't know about that, but it's a
Cuban
thing.” The gearshift worked smoothly, his long fingers hardly seeming to nudge the knob, which was so worn the diagram of the positions was scarcely visible. He raised his voice above the chug of the engine. “You have to understand, the Revolution didn't really touch people's private property, not their personal property, anyway. If you owned a car in 1958 you still owned it in 1961. But buying a new car became very difficult, almost impossible. You have to have the money, of course, but you also need
permiso
, and that's hard to come by.”

“Why is that?”

“The government uses cars as a reward, a perk—you know? Personalities get them, celebrities . . . entertainers, athletes. It doesn't hurt if you bring in a little hard currency. The ballet dancers—”

“Of course! The famous Alicia Alonso—I suppose it keeps such people loyal?”

“Something like that. And, like I say, you also need the money— as a practical matter, a rich uncle in Miami.”

“So, if you have a car, you keep it going?”

“And you leave it to your kids.” They stopped at a light; an old turquoise Meteor went through the intersection, a tall young man at the wheel.

Mathilde said, “That was his father's car, then. Or his grandfather's?”

“Could be.” Bailey popped the car into gear, smoothly letting in the clutch. “Of course people do get hold of cars, they do it ‘with the left hand'—”

“Yes. I have heard this expression. The scams.”

“Yeah.” He pointed—

“A Peugeot,” said Mathilde—

“But look at the licence. Orange . . . and you see the number? The H stands for Havana, but the K means it is a car owned by a foreign company. It could be Mexican—they have a lot of cement plants—or German or French or Canadian . . . But it's a Cuban driving it—”

“And he gets to use it as his own.”

“Sure. But then what happens—”

“It's a kind of reward, then, but from the company, for being loyal—”

“That's right. A bonus. But what sometimes happens—there are ways you can do it—the car ends up migrating into the Cuban driver's hands. It ends up with a yellow plate—that's a Cuban private car. Like this one.” Bailey pointed out the window again, at a Skoda in the next lane. “That one—the brown plate—means it's a government director, or at least someone high up. Ordinary government cars have blue plates, the green ones are the secret police—the Ministry of the Interior.”

“I'm discovering this. In Cuba, you are always deciphering codes or tricks, or disguises.” It was a thought she'd already had, for her article.

“Here's another one,” Bailey said. By now, they were on the Malecón. The sky was a hot, hazy blue above the Straits of Florida,
where the water rippled like blue seersucker: a few clouds hung motionless, very high up. Bailey was pointing out his own side window, at a statue—monumentally Spanish, a general on a horse. Mathilde leaned forward, looking across his body. “And there's another one—”

“But they are facing in opposite directions.”

“Okay. Most people don't notice. I always forget their names and which is which . . . Maceo, Gómez . . . and there are others along here. But they are all the Cuban generals in the War of Independence against Spain. When the Americans intervened—”

“Oh yes. This is the famous ‘Remember the Maine'?”

“That's it. Which is right up here, in a minute. That was when the Americans began taking over . . . the first time, you can say, but it's all the same time. Anyway, with these statues, the generals who supported the Americans are all facing out to sea, toward Florida—”

“And the ones against them have turned their backs!”

“Exactly. But there's a little twist. Look at the horses. If they have their hooves in the air, the guy died on the battlefield—if they're on the ground, he died in bed.”

Mathilde laughed. She had turned a little in her seat, for all this was on Bailey's side of the road. She smiled now, looking at him. “You have been here a long time, to know so much.” She was enjoying this, being able to see him: it was surprising how very little you could see of the driver of a car when you were sitting beside him. He still impressed her. He made such a clear physical impact. Of course, she told herself, it was because he was black, and regardless of how sincerely she was
not
prejudiced, black people weren't a common part of her life and were a little strange to her. Yet he also impressed her precisely because he carried her beyond such feelings. He fitted so easily into his black skin, and into his black body, that his blackness took on a different quality, which she couldn't immediately define; his shoulder, his back,
his arm reaching out to the gearshift that moved so easily in his hand seemed the extension of such a definite self, his long, slender fingers adding the final touch to this clarity by the lovely contrast of the blackness of the skin on the back with the paler shade beneath. He was so clearly someone. And yet this wasn't exactly a personal statement. It had a more objective quality. It was partly his being so lean and muscular, almost like a statue, his very colour like bronze darkened by millennia; but even if this was adequately flattering, Mathilde decided, it wasn't quite right. He was hard, but not in that way; he was not so unyielding. She was certainly attracted to him. After Helmut, that had become a settled point in her mind, and as she sat beside him now, it was a familiar state, and she was comfortable with it. But what did he feel about her? That was the question.
Her
question, anyway. Whatever those feelings were, they obviously didn't trouble him. He was enjoying himself. He didn't try to convince her, or impress her, or lead her toward any particular point, which might have revealed his own thoughts and desires, and where he was heading. There was no artifice to see through. He was too open. She had wanted a tour and that is what he gave her. She saw all the sights: the U.S. Special Interest Section, bristling with antennae behind the high wire; Chason's home—the spy who was the American ambassador—in Siboney, a great house secluded within its estate, so clearly expressing proprietorship; he showed her the Copa in Mariano—Mathilde hadn't realized the performances took place out of doors—and all the rich houses and embassies in Miramar where the breeze always blew off the sea. He answered every question. Where he stood, in a general way, was always clear enough; if she sensed complexities beyond what he said, she was also pretty sure that he would have been happy to explore them if she wished . . . but why spoil a lovely day with unresolvable arguments?

There were few hints in all this about what he felt about her, or— it was probably the same thing—if he saw her as an object of feeling at all. She wondered if he'd ruled her out because of the difference in their ages, and she wasn't sure how to get over this. Did he see her as a woman? That was the question, and it was hard to test. It seemed impossible that he wouldn't simply on account of his own masculinity . . . which was finally the name she decided matched the mysterious quality in him she'd been trying to define. A pressure built in her as the day went on. She knew it was the pressure to act, though when she finally did it was quite unself-consciously.

He took her, a little before one, to the Hotel Nacional, which he described as the great monument to the period of absolute American power. Bailey had obviously been there before; he led her straight from the entrance—in effect, the back of the hotel—through to the grounds at the front. Here, gardens looked across the Malecón to the sea, trees shaded the walkways, and a cool breeze blew. The swimming pool sparkled; a wishing well awaited pennies and hopes. Quietly, waiters in white jackets moved among the guests. On the white marble lookout, a map of Cuba was set into a compass rose, for this was clearly the land that was being surveyed. It was a very quiet scene, but Mathilde felt a different hush fall upon her. She had stepped magically into the past, the world of old postcards and movies in Technicolor, the hues a little too brilliant, the faces of the actors still familiar even if their names had slipped to the edge of memory and then a little beyond. A roofed porch ran around the perimeter of the hotel. It was paved with terra cotta tiles and laid out with wicker sofas and chairs, and glass coffee tables. Eight guests were sitting here— Mathilde counted them. And five of them were drinking Coca-Cola Classic . . . from cans, not the old little bottles, but the effect was startling all the same.

It was at this point that Mathilde took Bailey's arm. It was a gesture of collusion, as much as anything—a statement that whatever differences they had, they were equally in opposition to this—and it was clearly intimate: and then, becoming aware of what she had done, she broke away from him with a self-consciousness that only underlined the previous moment. She took a picture of the scene with her camera . . . and then took him by the arm again. This almost seemed a confession, an owning up. She leaned against him now quite openly and whispered, “Why don't we have our lunch with these ghosts?”

That was where they stood as the afternoon wore on. Now they saw “how the other half lived.” He took her on a tour of New Havana, the developments on the edge of the city put up after the revolution; huge tracts of high-rise apartment buildings, now decaying, crumbling, flaking away, that reminded her of horrors on the far side of the Périphérique or the “Projects” of New Jersey and Queens. And then they circled back into Regla, the black suburb across from the harbour: dusty, unpaved streets; desolate wooden shacks scoured by the rain and bleached by the sun until they'd taken on the grey pallor of poverty and age; and the newer additions, cement block structures square as forts, scabbed with crumbling grey facing. Chickens scratched in the grass: children squatted by puddles: a bicycle wobbled over a rise. Mathilde said, “It makes me think of the townships in South Africa.” Bailey didn't reply. She wondered if she'd offended him. But then he was the one who had brought her here. He kept driving, farther out; after a time she had a glimpse of the sea.

“Had enough?” he asked.

“Yes. But it's been wonderful. Thank you.”

“I was going to say, why don't you come back to my place and I'll cook us dinner—something more or less Cuban.”

She didn't hesitate. “I'd like that very much.”

“Okay, then. But first we have to commit a criminal act. I know a place out here where I can buy us a fish.”

She was astonished, of course; but apparently it was a crime for a fisherman to sell to anyone except the government, on the grounds— according to Bailey—of conservation but really to make sure the government restaurants maintained their monopoly on lobster and shrimp. “I've only eaten in government places,” said Mathilde.

“Down where you are, the
paladares
aren't very good.”

“These are the private restaurants?”

“Yeah. Supposedly in people's houses.”

“In a
casa particular
you rent a room in your house. In a
paladar
you turn your house into a restaurant?”

“That's it.”

“And they can't serve lobster?”

“Not legally. Of course they all do. You should go to one. Some of them are terrific . . . though of course Cubans can't afford them.”

“Do you want to go too, then?”

He laughed. “No, no. I wasn't hinting. I just want to cook you a fish.”

He pulled up in front of a private house, hidden by hedges and enclosed with a first-class link fence. They passed through a gate— open, but it could be padlocked—and followed a path, also tightly guarded by hedges, that jogged sharply in the middle: a large man, muscles bulging through his tank top, now blocked the way. But he recognized Bailey immediately, and the two began talking in Spanish; and as Mathilde stood silently at Bailey's side, she felt his hand come to rest lightly on her back, just below her neck: it was a simple declaration that she was with him, and indeed the guard immediately smiled and nodded at her, then ushered them on with a gesture of welcome. And when the path opened up into an area where the fish were being sold—there were stainless-steel freezers in the back, and
boxes of ice—she stayed beside him; and as he looked at a fish, an immense rose-coloured creature, with a rather puckered mouth, she bent forward, too, her arm slipping over his hip. He seemed hardly to notice this, but, after all, that also said something. They were together; that was now an assumption. He chose a smaller fish, and paid, refusing Mathilde's offer, and then they retraced their steps, along the path, past the guard, to the car.

“We are now crooks,” said Bailey.

“What happens if they're caught?”

“Don't worry, he won't be.”