Cuba and the Night: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307764645
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

I could see this was going nowhere, so I walked her across to the seawall, our home away from home. I was getting impatient now—I’d drunk too much—and she was getting antsy too.

“Lourdes,” I said. “We can’t keep doing it like this. Always meeting in the alleyways, always making love in silence, always keeping everything a secret. It isn’t real.”

“Then you have two choices. You can marry me, or you can take me to Varadero.”

“What’s so special about Varadero? How’s it going to make anything different between us?”

“Varadero is not Cuba. I can be there with you. For that time only, I am not a Cuban. We can kiss, we can talk, we can make love there; we are not from different countries there. Here, if they find you making love to me, they put me in prison, like a puta. You understand? When you showed me the pictures, you told me how families and villages in every country are proud of their daughters, whatever they do. But here, where is there room for pride? Only if you escape.”

“And you want the freedom to find out that the places you dream of are not like your dreams?”

“Claro. I want only this freedom. If I do not have that, I am always thinking of Florida or Bolivia or Barcelona.”

We fell silent then, and I looked out at the sea. Sometimes the place was so beautiful it made you want to cry almost. It was like seeing some young, lovely woman on the arm of a short, sleazy general. The soft breeze off the sea; the intermittent lights of cars, winking along the Malecón; the Nacional above us, like a giant beached galleon: it was like a romantic’s Eden. And here I was with the brightest Eve in Havana, and she was asking me to rescue her from Paradise.

Then she was touching me on the leg, and her eyes were blazing as she talked. “Do you know what it is like, Richard, to live in a shadow? Everywhere I walk, there is the shadow of El Líder. He is everywhere I turn. His face is in the next room, and his eyes are watching through the window, and his voice is on the television in the neighbor’s house, and his words are on the radio, and in Granma. He is everywhere: there is no room left for me. Except in the shadows.

“You come here, and for you everything is beautiful: the blue skies and the quiet beaches and the colored houses and the pretty girls. But the ocean is closed to us. The beaches are for tourists only. Even the skies are forbidden. I cannot get on a plane and visit you. I cannot do anything unless I am with a foreigner. I cannot buy a sandwich, I cannot help my mother, I cannot give my friend a birthday present, unless I am with a foreigner.”

“But you don’t know what it was like before. You never saw it under Batista. You think

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