Private House (18 page)

“He didn't bring it up, you know. Did you tell him about it?”

“Yes. Was that all right? So he would come.”

“Of course. But we didn't talk about it. Maybe we can at dinner. It seemed to me, he needed it.”

“Yes.”

“You gave him your ring. The gold one?”

“Oh—yes.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

“And I noticed he had your girlfriend's backpack. You know, with the maple leaf ?” And when he didn't say anything, Lorraine
went on, “I wondered about that. I was afraid—well, he might have stolen it.”

“She was leaving and she didn't need it. He gave her some CDs. Cuban music.”

“That makes sense, then.”

“She wasn't my girlfriend, Mrs. Stowe. Just a friend.”

“You were waiting for her in Coppelia. You remember?”

“Oh yes. Yes.”

“Well, thank you again. And we'll see each other at La Guarida, Saturday.”

“Okay. About the money—”

“Yes?”

“It is important. For Almado.”

“We can talk about it Saturday.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Stowe.”

“Goodbye.”

Lorraine hung up . . . then picked the handset up again and pushed Off.

She sat quite still.

Something was wrong.

It began with the ring. Had Hugo really given it away? She remembered it on his hand, how it had made him seem older; that was the trouble, it was part of him, his identity. Would he really give it away— and to someone he'd only just met? But what was she saying . . . Almado had stolen the ring . . . but
Hugo
had said—but that was it, of course. Was it Hugo she'd been talking to? Somehow, it hadn't felt quite right. She hadn't recognized his voice, though probably that didn't mean very much: in Coppelia, she probably hadn't talked to him for more than five or ten minutes. But it didn't
feel
right. And then she thought, quite definitely, It was Almado, pretending . . .

She put the guidebook on her bedside table and stood up, going to the window. She looked down at the narrow street. It was so narrow, in fact, that she seemed to hang right over it. She felt a burst of fury: why can't I be afraid of something sensible, like heights?

She turned, leaned back against the windowsill, then pushed off it and paced the room—though that was so ridiculous she stopped herself and picked up her bag. She wanted to do something. What could she do? She sat down at the end of the bed, her bag on her lap. Almado wanted the money. All right.
Give it to him
. She'd already made a fool of herself with Tomayo and his “wife” and their
poquito
.
Just give it to him
. It was his. Perhaps he was a thief. He was probably no better than a prostitute. Likely he'd made a fool of Murray. But you have to face the truth: Murray would have enjoyed every minute of it. Just give him what he wants, which is what
Murray
wanted after all, and be done with it. But even as she thought this, she was telling herself that the money wasn't all that he wanted, or really the most important thing that he wanted. There'd been that one moment when he'd actually sounded like Hugo, more or less:
It was like looking at an old passport photo of myself
. Yes, that was Hugo. Or was it Hugo . . . quoted? And then something else Hugo had said came into her mind:
I always wear this. These people would kill for a passport
.

She stood up—this thought, now openly stated, was so alarming that she instantly tried to deny it. She tried to reverse course. It had to be Hugo she'd been talking to. Anyway, it was certainly Hugo who'd found Almado. She hadn't told Enrique that she was staying here. On the other hand, she had told Father Rodriguez, but he would have handled it quite differently—he would have made sure he got the credit, he would have handed Almado over like a prize. What was going on? And then she told herself all this was pride, it always was. Why did she care? Why do I give a
damn
, she thought?
Because of that stupid business with the powdered milk. She'd
hated
that. She'd
loathed
that. She'd been ashamed of herself because she'd been made a fool of,
played like a fool
, and this was the same. No. It was worse. She was taking her revenge on that awful couple, but taking it out on Almado. She was making
him
pay for what the other two had done, and what they'd really done was hurt her pride.

This conclusion, because it told against herself, immediately seemed valid; and it fortified her. She stuffed her guidebook into her bag, then opened it again to check for something that was usually there—a small, leather-bound Bible—and then she left the room, determined. She wasn't punishing herself, but she was exacting obedience. Regardless of who she
was
, she was insisting on being the person she
ought
to be. She left the hotel. A few puddles lay in the street—it must have rained, but this only made the air more humid. Without hesitating, she retraced the steps she and Mathilde had taken earlier, to Cuba Street, then down it. Before she'd fallen asleep, reading her guidebook, she'd discovered that they'd walked right past the Convento de Santa Clara; and that was where she was going now. She wanted to think. She would have liked to pray, but wouldn't have trusted herself in a church, not unless she walked all the way up to Holy Trinity. But the prayer wouldn't have replaced the thinking, anyway, precisely because the thinking would have been so close to prayer. At home, she would have chosen certain parks, or sat
outside
a church. The convent would do instead.

She had to pay to get in, of course . . . a convertible peso in a tin box by the door. Yet this wasn't so far removed from what she was thinking about to disturb her. The entrance took her under a roofed section of the courtyard, dark and cool; she stepped out into dazzling brightness on the other side. Here was the cloister, and it was as peaceful as a cloister ought to be. It was almost possible to imagine nuns here, slipping through the quiet. No—there would be the click of beads. And birds
twittered everywhere, invisibly, so the place was almost like an aviary. The city disappeared; this was a place apart. A portico, supported by columns and arches of lemony stone, ran around the inside—the roof was wood—and as Lorraine walked slowly around she imagined Mother Superior keeping pace above. But of course she wasn't there; the doors that opened led to the offices of an archaeological group and through one she glimpsed a metal table arrayed with pieces of statue, half of a head with curly hair. She reached a corner; stairs led higher up: a light-skinned Cuban, in blue overalls, was sitting on the bottom step, smoking a cigarette. He gave her a bored glance then returned to studying the ground between his feet. Lorraine turned, going along the other side, but halfway down, she stepped off the portico walkway into the garden. This was so untended that it didn't quite deserve the name; leaf-strewn, patchy, tangled . . . but shaded with some lovely shaggy palms. To one side a low wall enclosed a separate, raised terrace; here was a well, two of them. She swept a stone clean with her hand and sat down, her back against the wall, under the shade of the palms.

So much had happened. She closed her eyes. The shadows cast by the palms moved across her face with the breeze. A palm had grown in Enrique's garden in Vedado, she remembered. All those gardens were overgrown, like this one. She remembered the door, the way it had stood open within the shadow. Always, there was the brightness of Cuba viewed from within. And then the opposite, stepping out of the shadow into the sun—or stepping from the sun, to be swallowed up by the shade. Was this Manichean? Murray had always said that there was nothing like the temptation of heresy to strengthen true faith; no wonder he had loved it here. Cuba . . . a world of exile, embargoed by history. An island in every sense of the word. Utopias and dystopias required them. The whole island was a cloister, in a way . . . though that didn't fit, unless ironically, with Murray's carnal pursuits. But then
Arcadia always echoed to the pipes of Pan. Where had everything gone wrong?
Her
arrival, really. Was she Eve or Pandora? Pandora seemed more likely since she hadn't brought knowledge so much as released calamity. On the other hand, hadn't she created temptation?

She opened her eyes. She was quite alone. She couldn't see the man who'd been sitting on the step, and all the offices she'd passed had been empty. Looking up, she tried to see if someone might be inside the building, but there were few windows, and the palms rather screened her.

She took her Bible from her bag. Often, she simply began reading at the page she opened; but now she turned to Timothy, which she'd often read in the first months of her widowhood, because Paul dealt explicitly with a woman in her state.

Honour widows that are widows indeed . . . Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications night and day. But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.
There was Paul's characteristic note: suspicion. Widows were liable to sin, prey to temptation.
Let not a widow be taken into the number under threescore years old, having been the wife of one man, well reported of for good works; if she have brought up children, if she have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints' feet, if she have relieved the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work
. That, so to speak, was the one hand; then Paul went on to the other.
But the younger widows refuse: for when they begin to wax wanton against Christ, they will marry; having damnation because they have cast off their first faith. And withal, they learn to be idle, wandering about from home to home; and not only idle but tattlers also and busy-bodies, speaking things which they ought not.

As usual, with Paul, there was something offensive about this; all the same, it wasn't so wide of the mark—he was annoying that way. Did it cover her case or not? She had been fifty-eight when Donald died, thereby missing the threescore cut-off line; then again, being
“taken in to the number” didn't apply to her, she'd been part of “the number” all of her life. She never thought of herself as a younger widow anyway. And she refused to imagine herself waxing wanton. Yet something had disturbed her since she'd arrived in Cuba. She couldn't deny that. And it wasn't all tied up with Almado. It was obvious that something had happened between Mathilde and her Black Panther. Black Panther! That was wanton enough. Was she jealous? Had it stirred something in her? By modern standards, she probably
was
a young widow. The trouble with Paul wasn't in what he said, but how he said it, his tone of voice; if she was a young widow, he was an old maid. But it wasn't such a bad description of her behaviour,
wandering about from home to home
. She wasn't exactly a tattler, but, all the same, her speculations, even though unvoiced, fell into that category; did she know anything more certainly than gossip? In the same way, wasn't she being a busybody? Perhaps she'd not spoken of things which she
ought not,
but she'd failed to speak when she should have. That was meddling. She had created temptation, teased almost. Because she hadn't mentioned the money. Yes. Why hadn't she brought it along, handed it over? She knew why. Because she hadn't thought Almado was good enough for Murray, and then because she thought Almado was a thief, and then because—but all that was “tattling,” meddling, being a busybody, not minding her business. Her business was to keep the faith.
This
faith, the faith within these walls . . . give or take. Her faith with Murray. Her faith—

But now she broke off this series. She smelled the green, leafy fragrance of the garden, and caught the yellow flash of a bird as it flew from the palm over her head. All the soft sounds of peace settled around her. It was a cloister—but the city was outside. What was she to do? Because she was sure that something was wrong, even if she didn't know what it was. Was she to blame?

She opened her Bible again, at the same spot; for the relevant passage lay just a few verses on from Paul's discussion of widowhood.
But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

Money.

That was what she had brought. And from money came all the hurts, the destruction, perdition. Should she just hand it over? That's what Christ had done, flung the filthy lucre back in their faces. Whatever had happened, why did she care? What could she do about it? It was none of her business. To pretend otherwise was pure vanity. But then money was vanity, a golden mirror in which you were trapped, an endless reflection, an exchange, back and forth, from which you could never escape. She bit her lip. She knew all this was true. But could she just wash her hands of it?
Here
, yes, she could—inside these walls. But could she out there?
Almado was a thief, but what had he stolen?

She closed her eyes and let the peace of this place enclose her. Even if she hadn't reached a conclusion, she felt much better. The light and the shadow shifted over her face, like soothing hands. Her whole body relaxed. Don't walk like a duck, she whispered to herself. She smiled. She was safe here. She thought she would sleep. She'd be awoken, she thought, by the touch of rain on her cheek.

5

Adamaris, Mathilde was deciding, knew only self-interest. Always looking out for herself, she saw herself everywhere. What she offered was always in exchange: she gave nothing, since everything always came back to her.

Again, sitting on the other side of the table, Mathilde realized that the enormous dark eyes of the Cuban woman, flicking up for an instant to meet her own, were not seeing her at all, but only a reflection of Adamaris's own desiring, an appropriation and transformation of Mathilde's profession, freedom, and wealth that had nothing to do with who she really was. The shift was decisive, and a little disconcerting. A prism? Perhaps this was the structure of the mirror that filled the space between them. Now, Mathilde peered through it. Adamaris had puckered her full, dark, sensual lips, stretching them so that the soft, crumbly texture of her immaculate lipstick could be seen in the fine wrinkles of the everted, delicate skin, and precisely in the little O at their centre she had gripped the clear plastic straw and with a further distension of her mouth, the subtlest inflection of her cheeks, she now drew up the sweet, caramel liquid from the shiny red tin of
Coca Cola
on the table before her—the words having been pronounced this time with even more precision than before, so that each syllable was granted a life of its own and the hyphen was lost. She drank. It was hypnotic, watching her; but what came into Mathilde's mind—the refraction of the image that reached her—was her own mouth stretched around the thick, swollen flesh of Bailey's penis, her lips drawing up from the black well of his testicles the creamy whiteness of his semen, all chlorine and salt on her tongue. It was a shock— this ejaculation of her imagination. Yet it seemed to define the difference exactly, what she accepted and Adamaris denied. At the same time, oddly enough, it now occurred to her that the equivalent caress Bailey might bestow was his lips on her breast, her nipples, and that was not what she would have expected. As a matter of fact, he had never performed cunnilingus on her at all—and, she realized abruptly, she would not want him to. Looking at Adamaris, Mathilde smiled to herself. She thought, I am not who you think I am—I'm not you.
This gave her a definite pleasure: she waited, patiently. Finally, with an expelling pressure of her lips, a kiss goodbye, Adamaris released the straw and took it between her forefinger and thumb: her nails, Mathilde noticed, were as perfectly polished as her lips, in a paler, but complementary, shade.