Hotel Cuba, page 19
Alexander B. Lewis. Such a grand name. Maybe he’s some evil spirit in disguise.
Tired of waiting, Pearl grabs her handbag and goes to the Colon.
December evenings in Havana are not as hot as summer evenings but are plenty warm. After an entire year with so little change of seasons, she feels anxious, waiting for the cold that never comes. If only it would snow.
Pearl waits for a jitney to pass, and the conductor calls out, “Hop on board, only a nickel!” She continues walking, as if out for a stroll. A woman walking alone in the evening would be a rare sight in Turya, but in Havana, Pearl has seen far stranger things.
The streetlights flash on along the Calle San Rafael, where Chinese vendors are frying up batches of greasy Cuban snacks like fried pork skins or malanga fritters. The smell of burning fat mixes with the humid air and cigar smoke and scratchy recordings of American songs floating out of the bars. Julieta used to love those fritters. They smell nice and they’re cheap, but Pearl suspects the vendors mix pork fat with the food.
She clutches her handbag tightly as she reaches the heart of the Colon, crammed with bars and theaters and a movie house; Pearl sees the orchestra members filing inside with shabby-looking instruments to play the musical scores. There are also nickelodeons showing pornographic scenes, gambling parlors, and shooting galleries. One place, called Babylon, advertises in English: “Live Show Nightly.”
Like a scene from the wedding of Lilith and Asmodeus, King of the Demons.
Open taxis putter along, bearing American tourists who point out the local color on their way to order overpriced daiquiris at La Floridita. It’s early for the area’s regular customers. The men out at this hour are here only to gawk, not to buy. Children dart around them, fingers extended, calling out, “One dollar! One dollar!”
Pearl passes a man urinating in a doorway. She quickens her steps, averts her eyes, then turns her head again to avoid the searching stares of working women wearing slinky red and black dresses and doused in perfume. They pinch the men walking by, including a policeman, who smiles and continues on his beat. A few women rudely bump Pearl’s shoulders. God forbid they mistake her for competition, invading their turf. But she realizes quickly they don’t care about her. She’s just in their way.
Finally Pearl reaches the Gold Dollar, where tonight the doors are thrown open. There’s nothing to stop her besides her own fear. She inhales deeply, straightens her hat, plucks at her dress, then steps inside. The sticky floor is littered with peanut shells that crunch under her boots. Or roaches? No, must be peanuts. Pearl wills herself forward, squeezing between the tables and splintered wooden chairs. Four American sailors sitting by the door are getting drunk on Cuban Hatuey beers, laughing as they loudly practice Spanish phrases from those cards for tourists that are handed out at the souvenir shops.
Give me a kiss. Dame un beso.
I want to buy a good cigar. Quiero comprar un buen tabaco.
You’re very charming. Es usted muy simpático.
We want to have fun. Queremos pasar un rato divertido.
She dislikes their smug Spanish, as if it isn’t worth their time to learn the language correctly. You’re guests in this country, she thinks. Show respect.
A rumba band of women in silver dresses are setting up chairs on a low stage lit by strings of harsh electric bulbs that pulse and snap. Beside the bar, two African waiters talk in animated voices. Their bow ties hang untied around the collars of their dress shirts, unbuttoned halfway down their chests, revealing pink silk undershirts. The shorter waiter titters, stands on tiptoe, and plants a quick teasing kiss on his friend’s lips.
Pearl now realizes the waiters are inverts, little birdies. Her oldest sister Rivka had two classmates whose husbands were that way. They ran off together before the Great War. The rabbi at the Poor Man’s Shul kindly initiated proceedings to declare the two husbands dead, so the wives could remarry.
One of the American sailors, a real Yankee with a round chest and a pasty complexion, yells something at the Cuban waiters that makes his friends snicker. The shorter waiter shouts a snappy reply, miming an obscene sexual gesture with his hands.
Everyone in the room laughs: the musicians onstage, the sailors, a man drinking alone at the bar. Everyone except Pearl, who presses herself against the wall, and the Yankee sailor, who charges at the waiter like a bandit on a horse.
Before the sailor can reach his target, the taller, darker waiter steps in his path and lands a solid punch to the jaw. The sailor tumbles backward to the ground, blood dribbling from his nostrils, down his lips. His friends gape in amazement, then grab their beefy mate by his armpits and feet and haul him outside. Meanwhile, the waiter and his friend saunter away arm in arm, into a back room.
A musician onstage shakes her hips and calls to the onlookers outside, “Come in! Don’t be shy! Or are you afraid?”
Coming here was madness, Pearl thinks, hugging the wall. But she must see this through. She might lack the courage to return.
Squaring her shoulders, she approaches the stage, where one of the musicians hikes up her skirt and brazenly straddles her cello so her knees and the insides of her thighs are showing. If she drops that cello, what else might be revealed?
Pearl asks, “Where can I find a Señora Martin?” That’s the name Rabbi Singer mentioned. The shameless cellist points her bow at a heavyset man at the bar. Pearl must have used the wrong word in Spanish. “No, no, Señora Martin,” she says.
Hearing that name, the man spins around on his stool—revealing himself to be a woman. A woman with short hair parted down the middle and sculpted around her forehead. A woman in a white dress shirt with decorative stitching and a vest with silver buttons. A woman in pants with a metal-studded belt and a shiny gun holster containing a revolver, its grip inlaid with mother of pearl. The comfort she shows wearing these clothes tells Pearl that they’re not a costume or for play, or even like when she dressed up in Rabbi Singer’s clothes and posed for a picture. For this woman, Señora Martin, they are her everyday wardrobe.
Pearl walks slowly to the bar. “You are Señora Martin?”
“I’m Martin. What do you want?” she replies in the English of an American. She shifts in her seat, and in the light Pearl sees a penciled-in mustache above her top lip. And that gun—Pearl’s never seen a woman carry a gun.
Pearl stammers out her explanation, that Rabbi Singer told her to come, and Martin cuts her off. “So you’re one of his projects. He never sent me no woman. What’s your name?”
“Pearl,” she says in a low voice. Pearl finds it hard to choose her words properly if she doesn’t know whether she’s addressing a man or a woman.
“Pearl? As in oyster fruit?” Martin laughs, a deep belly laugh that echoes in the room. “Tell me, Pearl, weren’t you scared to come here alone, a single gal like you?”
“No,” Pearl lies. Since Key West, Pearl’s English has improved, yet she often comes up short with native speakers. Her fallback strategy is to brusquely yank the conversation around to her own terms. “Please, can you help me? I don’t have papers.”
“You must want to go to America real bad. Why? To get rich? Or for a fella?”
“No fella,” she says. “I want to be free.”
“Bah! In America, you can’t be free. You have to be square all the time.” Martin salutes Pearl with a shot glass. “If you want to be free, my advice is stay here.”
Pearl struggles to absorb this Martin’s words. She’s distracted by the penciled-in mustache and the man’s suit.
“I can see you won’t take my advice. You folks never do. You got any money?” Martin asks.
“Now, I don’t have,” says Pearl. “But I can get. How much I need?”
“Singer didn’t tell you our price?” She downs her shot of liquor in one go as if it’s water, doesn’t even wince. “What if I told you a hundred bucks?”
Another false path. Pearl should be used to it now. Perhaps God wants her to say on this island. She’s almost glad for the excuse to get away from Martin and her frightening confidence. “I must find different way. Thank you . . . Señora Martin. Good-bye.”
Martin grabs her sleeve. “You say you’re a friend of Singer?”
“Yes,” says Pearl, trying not to hope.
“Just how much of a friend?”
Pearl shakes her arm free of Martin’s grasp. “I am friend of Singer and I am a friend of his wife,” she says, raising her chin. “And you? You are a friend of Singer? Maybe you are Jewish?”
Martin lets out a bitter laugh. “No one’s asked me that in a long time.” She taps the bar for another drink. “I used to be a lot of things. That’s why I came here, so I could be none of them.” She circles around Pearl, runs a finger down her sleeve. This Martin is nothing if not confident. Pearl’s reminded of Talia, the crass matchmaker in Turya who used to make Pearl open her mouth to inspect her teeth. “Okay,” says Martin, “for a friend of the rabbi, that’s almost a religious thing. I’d lower it to seventy.”
Seventy? Some bargain. At least it’s less than a hundred. “Maybe,” says Pearl. “But I cannot go by Florida. Or New York. Too strict.”
“You can sail to Baltimore or New Orleans, maybe.”
“Agree,” says Pearl. “I return when I have the money. Good evening.”
“Hold on. You’re planning to hoof it? In this part of town at this time of night?” Again Pearl doesn’t understand. “Let me offer you a ride.”
“I can walk,” Pearl insists.
“I’m sure you can. I bet you got a nice pair of legs under that plain-Jane dress. But around here, in the dark, you’d better let me take you.”
My dress isn’t so bad, thinks Pearl. Who are you to criticize fashion? “You walk here alone in the dark, no, Señora Martin? So can I.”
“Yeah, but you’re not me. And dry up with that Señora bullshit. The name is Martin, just Martin. My driver and I will take you wherever you want. Except America. That’s extra.” She clicks her teeth and slaps Pearl’s behind. Pearl jumps, covers her backside with her hand. She thinks, I bet Rabbi Singer never invited this Martin to his garden.
Onstage, a woman with a flute asks where Martin is going. “Out,” says Martin, then tells Pearl, “That’s my old lady. A real nag. The pretty ones are always trouble, but they’re my weakness. Now let’s find the Queen of England.”
Old lady? Queen? What’s she talking about? Pearl’s feeling increasingly lost, and she doesn’t care to be found.
The tall Black waiter comes in from the back, and Martin yells, “Hey, Queenie, meet Oyster Fruit.” He looks at her quizzically. “He doesn’t get the joke. His English ain’t so hot.” Martin shouts louder as if he’s hard of hearing. “Pearl! Oyster Fruit.”
There’s a loud smash. The flute player has grabbed a bottle of rum off the bar and thrown it against the wall. The rum now drips down to the floor, pooling around a nest of broken glass. The few customers are laughing, as if it’s all for show.
“She’s jealous because I’m talking with you for so long. I told you she’s a nag,” says Martin. “And that was a good bottle of rum.”
As the flute player runs off the stage, the rumba band quickly launches into a lively song that hurts Pearl’s ears. Why would Singer send her to this topsy-turvy place, where one woman claims another as her “old lady”?
“You go on with the Queen,” insists Martin. “You’ll be safe with him. He’s got the nastiest uppercut in all Havana.” She puts an arm around the flute player’s shoulders, speaks to her softly. It’s an odd sight, this woman in pants soothing her jealous lover, but the way Martin carries herself, no one in the room dares laugh at her.
Twelve
THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND—PEARL ASKS FOR HIS REAL NAME, but he won’t tell—escorts her through an empty kitchen and out the back door to where his extraordinary Ford is parked. The front grille is decorated with artificial flowers, while Cuban and American flags are draped around the sides and trunk. “I don’t like the color black,” the Queen says, opening the passenger door for her. “Too boring.”
After she tells him where she lives, he jumps into the driver’s seat, bounces up and down a few times, and starts the engine. They whiz along the coastline, as the waves shoot up against the seawall. Pearl grips the doorframe. This car is going at a dizzying rate: thirty miles per hour on the car’s speedometer. Thirty miles. She calculates in her head—that’s about fifty versts.
Equally dizzying are thoughts of Martin and her flute-playing friend, her “old lady.” If the friend is the lady, then Martin must be the man. How can she . . . do what men do? Wincing, Pearl forces herself to think of something else, like surviving this car ride.
They reach the harbor, where taxis parked at haphazard angles compete for tourists. The Queen slams the brake to avoid hitting a caravan of donkey carts crossing their path. The tourists and taxi drivers point to their car and laugh. Pearl, mortified, digs her chin into her chest.
Impatient with waiting, the Queen of England lurches the car onto the sidewalk, shifts into reverse, and zooms backward, causing several tourists to jump against the buildings and clear out of his path. Now it’s Pearl’s turn to laugh at them, skittering like mice until the Queen jerks to a stop and shifts direction, careening down a narrow side street, and Pearl loses her balance, slides across the seat into his white silk shirt, which smells like coconut and rose water. If a man has to have a smell, Pearl would prefer it to be musky-earthy, like a fall forest.
“You all right?” he asks.
“Yes.” She’s strangely moved by his concern. It occurs to her that because he is an invert, she’s as safe with him as she’d be with a woman.
Thankfully, the narrow streets of Old Havana oblige the Queen to bump along at a more reasonable speed. Pearl loosens her grip on the edge of her seat and inhales slowly. The night is humid, perfumed with rotting fruit and human sweat. The Queen is humming a little song. She’d like to talk to this man, to learn more about him, so she asks what the song is about, and he says sadness. Everyone’s life needs sadness to make it interesting.
Really? she thinks. Mine is too interesting.
Then he asks her in English. “You a friend of that famous Rabbi Singer?”
Pearl says, “Why do you ask? He is very famous?”
He lets go of the steering wheel to make the hand gesture for “so-so,” and she begs him with her eyes to grab the wheel again, which he does. “What’s so great about America? Weather, we got much better over here. Better music. Better food. Lot better drinks. Better men. Better women too, if that what you like. You think you gonna get rich in America? Over there, rich people like Vanderbilts, Rockefellers use people like you to work for they. They keep all the real money they-selves. You don’t got no chance.”
“How do you know? You’ve been there?”
“No, but I hear plenty. I hear everything. I’m good at listening.”
She sees a deep mark on his cheek, a scar, and gestures toward it. “Who did this?”
“This? My ma. She the only person I let touch me. Understand? Anyone else, I do to him like I did that American in the bar, you know?”
“I am sorry. It hurts?”
“I don’t think about it much.”
“Why she did this to you?” Pearl asks.
“She don’t like how I live my life.” He laughs. “My ma, she crazy.”
No mother should do this to her child, Pearl thinks. She’d like to touch his cheek or pat his shoulder to comfort him, but it feels presumptuous. “You live your life as you want,” she says. “And don’t be ashamed for nothing.”
“I’m not ashamed. You talking about me or you talking about you?” he says.
Before she can answer, Pearl notices the time on an oversized clock, with rum bottles for hands, hanging above the entrance to a bar. She’s late for her meeting with Alexander, so she asks to be let off at the café rather than at home.
He laughs. “You don’t want the people you live with to see me, right?”
“Not true, I live alone,” she says. Perhaps she shouldn’t have admitted it. “I go to this café because I must meet someone there.”
But she is embarrassed when she spots Alex, Alexander, Mr. Lewis—she’s unsure what to call him—standing near the café, wearing a dark suit and a fedora. His lovely clothes bring out the dowdiness of her simple frock.
Alexander, she decides. That’s the right name for someone so elegant.
Seeing her, Alexander touches his hat. He doesn’t seem upset that she’s late, though he does look surprised to see her arrive in the way that she has. Pearl struggles to appear at ease, sitting up tall, pretending to adjust her collar, which needs no adjusting.
“He’s your meeting?” says the Queen. “Good work, sister. He’s beautiful.”
“No, no, it’s not like that. You don’t understand.”
“You don’t want him? I take him from you, no problem.”
“Please,” she begs him, “not so loud. He’ll hear you.”
He comes to a stop and holds her hand, helping her get down from the car. She blushes at his touch, feels Alexander’s eyes on the two of them. “Be a good girl, okay?” says the Queen. “You don’t want to become a mama before you get to America.”
“Quiet,” Pearl says, but he laughs uproariously, then drives away.
She slowly approaches Alexander, wonders what he’ll say about her extraordinary arrival. Imagine what he’d think of Martin and the Gold Dollar.
He smiles politely and extends his hand for her to shake, as if to close a business deal. His palms are soft, like he’s never pulled a weed in his life. She’s not sure she likes such a feeling in a man’s hands, too slippery. It’s a different feeling, that’s for sure. “What a colorful taxi,” says Alexander, to her deep embarrassment. “The Cubans are nothing if not a creative people. Even the taxi drivers.”
