Hotel Cuba, page 20
He takes her for the type who rides in taxis!
“Who’s getting married?” she asks, glad to speak Yiddish again after so much English. He doesn’t get the joke, so she says, “You’re dressed like a million dollars.”
“You’re embarrassing me,” he says.
“You’re embarrassing me. The man shouldn’t look prettier than the woman.”
He could offer her a compliment. Instead he says, “As my mother would say, is that the eleventh commandment? Isn’t that the expression?”
“Now you’re mocking me.”
“I promise I’m not,” he says. “But I apologize if I offended you.”
She dislikes hearing others accurately name her emotions aloud. “How is your health?” Pearl asks, changing the subject.
“Marvelously well. I’m drinking water by the bucketful. Say, do you really want to eat here? I know a better place on the square. Very special, unique to Havana.”
“Is it expensive?”
“You needn’t consider the cost. I’m paying.”
She hesitates. “I—I wouldn’t want to take advantage.”
“But I wish you would take advantage. I’d love to be of use to someone.”
Maybe he’s right, she shouldn’t be so formal, like a modest shtetl girl. People aren’t that way here. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll take advantage.”
“That’s the spirit!” Alexander lends her his arm. She finds it awkward to fit her arm through his, so he arranges it for her. What if the Steinbergs happen to pass by and see? Oh, well, people will think what they want. Thoughts are worth nothing.
The lightly humid air feels like a warm bath on her skin. She takes in the noises of Havana at night echoing against the buildings: cars sputtering, a woman singing in Spanish, a drunk American kicking a bottle. She hopes Alexander has remembered his promise to help her, and that his way costs less than Martin’s seventy dollars, which might as well be seven hundred dollars. Who has seventy dollars?
As if to answer that question, a Cuban woman offers them a lottery ticket, pleading, “It is sure to win a prize.”
“Really?” says Alexander. “Then keep it yourself and enjoy the prize.” He tells Pearl, “Every unemployed soul in this town sells fraudulent lottery tickets.”
“Your Spanish is excellent,” Pearl marvels.
“Mine? Merely passable, which for an American is admirable. Most Americans compel the natives to speak our language badly, to confirm our sense of superiority.”
“If you say so,” says Pearl.
“Do be careful of swindlers. Havana’s full of them,” Alexander tells Pearl. “I’ve seen every scam imaginable.”
“I’m not an innocent child. I know a few things,” she says. Why is she being so brusque? Whatever the reason, her gruff mood seems to please him.
“Of course you know things. But even Rashi himself might be fooled by these types,” says Alexander. “They’re clever and ruthless. One of my friends at the consulate told me about a case involving a pair of coolies—”
She interrupts him. “Coolies? I don’t know this word.” Another English slang term. Will there ever be an end to them?
“What’s the word for it in Yiddish . . . Chinamen.”
“If that’s what you mean, then why don’t you say Chinamen?”
He hesitates, looks embarrassed, falters before he goes on. “Anyway, these two men paid some sailors fifty dollars to go to Florida, and once they were offshore, the sailors dumped the coolies—the Chinamen—into the water to drown.”
Pearl imagines herself in such a situation. She’d kick, scratch, and scream, threaten to tip the whole thing over so they’d all drown. But perhaps his story is an opportunity for her to ask what’s really on her mind. “This friend of yours at the consulate, did you talk to him about me? Can he help me?”
“I don’t know yet,” says Alexander, his voice dropping.
“That means no.”
“No, it means I haven’t talked to him yet. But I promise to.”
Pearl unhooks her arm from his. “People like me, we get plenty of duties but we get no favors.” If Frieda had asked for help, she’d have gotten it already.
“I’m sorry, it slipped my mind,” says Alexander. “I promise to look into it.”
Look into it, how? What does he mean?
“If you didn’t talk to him, then why did you want to meet me tonight?” she asks.
Alexander stops walking. “Because I enjoy your companionship, Pearl,” he says in a gentle voice. “I thought perhaps you also enjoyed mine.”
No man has ever spoken to Pearl in such a tender way. She’s not sure whether to trust it. “Yes, okay,” she replies, not knowing what else to say. “Fine.”
The restaurant entrance is framed by two bare male torsos carved into the building facade. Inside is a large noisy dining hall where fans blow furiously. Pearl feels tongue-tied in such a grand place and is glad to let Alexander take the lead. The walls are smooth and white while the floors are paved in a striking orange-and-blue tile pattern; it might make a pretty blouse. They’re shown a table by the door, but Alexander rejects it, and she’s struck by the host’s deference as he finds them a table in the center of the room.
A gramophone by the bar is playing the popular Irving Berlin song, “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A,” which trills constantly out of bars and shops for tourists. She asks Alexander to translate the lyrics.
“In short, the song says that since alcohol is banned in the U.S., Americans ought to go to Cuba to get drunk,” says Alexander. “Does that shock you terribly?”
“Not at all,” Pearl says, still annoyed that he forgot his promise to talk to his friend in the consulate. “I’ve seen plenty of Americans drunk before.”
He laughs. “Oh, Pearl, when I’m with you, I feel”—he lets out a deep breath—“I feel at home. As though I’d gotten back something I’d lost.”
“I hope something good.”
“Yes.” He looks at her intently, resting his chin on his right hand. “Very good.”
He genuinely likes her. Why? She’s not educated enough to make witty conversation as he must be used to with his American friends. As for tempting him sexually, she feels too old, too short, and, though she often goes hungry, too plump. Yet his interest is unmistakable.
Pearl squares her shoulders and says, “I’m very hungry.”
“Tell me about your day. I’d tell you about mine, but it’s boring.”
Should she tell him that only an hour before, she was cavorting with inverts and hussies at the Gold Dollar? “Nothing so interesting,” she says. “I hope the food here is good. What do you recommend?”
“Plantains,” he says. “Have you tried plantains?”
“Is it a kind of meat?”
“No, they’re like a banana, only not as sweet. Delicious with beans and rice.”
“I don’t like black beans. They’re like mud.”
He laughs so hard that she laughs too. “Then no black beans, I promise.”
His life seems very light, with lots of laughter.
Over their meal, he describes his family in America and explains the mystery of his American-sounding last name, which he changed from Levin to Lewis. “It makes things easier,” says Alexander. His father has a thoughtfully curated library of books in English, German, Yiddish, and French. His mother paints watercolors of flowers and plays the piano expertly with long, delicate fingers. To reach the farthest, most difficult keys, she can play them with the backs of her hands. “She taught me to love music,” he says. “You’d really like her. I believe she’d like you too.”
Pearl stabs her food with her fork or pushes it with her thumb, which she licks clean when no one’s looking. Alexander, however, holds his fork in his left hand and lightly guides his food toward it with his butter knife, held in his right hand. His manners are as beautiful as his suit. Determined to eat as gracefully as he does, she studies the dance of his hands.
He asks about her family, so she lists them all: Father, Mother may her memory be a blessing, her four sisters in descending order of age, and Avram.
“I have no siblings,” he says. “But I’ve always wanted one. Which of them do you feel closest to? Isn’t there one you’d confide in, tell your secrets?”
What secrets? She has only the one, a terrible one. Sometimes she fears strangers can see it in her eyes. “I don’t keep secrets from my family,” she says slowly.
“I’ve upset you,” he says.
“I’m not upset. Don’t tell me how I feel.” Something about his fine manners brings out an urge in her to speak with her true voice, to cut through his lovely words with hard truths. After all she’s been through, pretty language sounds wasteful.
And yet her plain speech doesn’t offend him. He actually seems to enjoy it, and he gives her a mock salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
“If you must know,” says Pearl, “I am closest with my sister in America. She’s mixed up in a bad love match.”
“What’s bad about it?” he says.
“She and this man are not married yet, not even living in the same city, and already they’re constantly fighting in their letters.”
“Some couples enjoy a good scrap.”
“Would you enjoy that kind of marriage?”
“I’m hardly an authority on the subject. I’ve never been married.”
Pearl’s embarrassed. She’s genuinely enjoying their conversation and doesn’t want him to think it’s all been some kind of ruse to entice him. “My sister is young, and she’s bright,” she says. “If you met her, you would like her far more than me.”
“I doubt it.” Alexander takes a flower from the vase on their table and gives it to Pearl. Unsure what to do with it, she sniffs the blossom, then shoves it back in the vase.
“No, I promise you,” she says. “Everyone loves her.”
“Perhaps they love you too, but are too intimidated to show it,” he says.
“No, they don’t,” she says firmly. Has she become intimidating? She doesn’t see it, but then maybe she only sees herself as she once was. He sees her as she is now, even if she can’t. “Tell me,” says Pearl, “if it was your sister, what would you do?”
“Try to interest her in a hobby, to distract her mind from the gentleman in question. You know how distractible women are.”
“And men aren’t?”
Alexander laughs. “You’ve got me there, Pearl. Once again, you’re a truth teller.”
Is that what I am, Pearl thinks, a truth teller? She resumes eating, forcing herself to hold her fork in her left hand. If he can do it, so can she. With some effort, she succeeds.
After the main course, he orders for them both without asking what she wants: coffee and flan. He tells her more about America, the grand concert halls of New York, Chicago, or smaller towns like Miami. This is news to Pearl, who sees America as a place of work and money, not culture.
“Maybe in the future you will be allowed to return to America,” she says. “Many men in our shtetl ran away to Poland during the Great War. Then came Revolution, no more tsar, and they came home.”
“Even if a revolution were to occur in America, hardly likely, there’s another problem,” he says. “I’d be branded a coward, for standing up for my convictions.”
“Don’t listen!” she says, suddenly angry on his behalf. “Anyone who would say such things doesn’t know what war is. You were being true to your faith.”
“Not faith, exactly. I want to be clear. Though we are technically coreligionists, I can’t pretend to be a believer in the traditional sense.”
What other sense can there be? “What do you believe?” she asks.
“I believe in tolerance. Personal relations. Consideration for others. The unseen forces of love and goodness that help us avoid cruelty. I suppose some call that God.” He digs his fork into their flan. “Anyway, who says I want to go back to the States? I like this place, and you might too if you gave it a real chance.”
She’s thinking over his fine words when a man in a tuxedo claps for attention a few tables away, in a space that’s been cleared out among the tables. “Honored guests,” he announces, “we have a special surprise tonight.”
Alexander murmurs in her ear, “It’s the same special surprise every night. Anyway, it’s a good one.”
Surprise? But they’ve already had their dessert.
The man in the tuxedo continues: “Some friends have come to welcome you.”
Pearl hears these “friends” before she sees them: a line of African men in white robes. They slap at drums suspended around their necks, wrapped in colorful yarn nets decorated with tiny silver bells, shells, and beads. The drummers are followed by three gaunt bearded men, also with black skin and wearing white robes. They chant in nasal tones that remind Pearl of a violin that’s out of tune.
A wave of Black female dancers runs in, chests rolling, hips shaking, heads jerking, arms and elbows flinging vigorously in all directions. The women shake maracas and bend over to kiss the drums as the men bang them harder, with wide, twitchy fingers.
When the dancing stops, the audience, thinking the performance is over, begins to applaud, but one of the chanting men holds out his hand.
“That one’s the high priest,” Alexander whispers to Pearl.
“A priest?” she says. “This is a religious ceremony?”
“It’s Santeria,” says Alexander.
Julieta used to mention Santeria, though Pearl hadn’t paid much attention. She was under the impression it had to do with the lottery.
The priest says several words in his language, then points to a pretty woman seated a few tables from Pearl and Alexander, dressed in a demure flower-print blouse with a ruffled collar. The woman’s skin is tanned, like a golden piece of toast, and her bright yellow hair, which looks dyed, is curled into tight finger waves. “Lovely girl,” Pearl whispers, though she hadn’t meant to say so aloud.
“Tolerable,” says Alexander. “But then, I have little interest in Cuban women.”
The high priest in his white robe beckons her forward, and the woman rises slowly from her seat and marches stiffly toward his open hands, her face frigid and expressionless, eyes blank and hollow. The drummers tap their drums softly, and with each tap, the woman jerks a different body part, a shoulder, a hip, a hand. The dancers shake their maracas to the drumbeat, and Pearl’s foot taps too. She presses her knee to keep her leg from moving, but it wants to wriggle free.
At the blond woman’s table, a man jumps up to wake her from her trance, but his friends hold him back. Meanwhile, the priest barks out an order in his native tongue, and in response, the woman kicks off her left shoe, a ballet slipper. He speaks again, and the woman kicks off her right shoe. Next, her hands move to the buttons of her flowery blouse. She methodically undoes each one.
Look away, Pearl tells herself, but she can’t stop staring at this lovely woman, the soft neck, the ecstatic expression on her face, like a promise of something. Her blouse is open, revealing her deeply tanned shoulders, her delicate collarbone, her lacy brassiere. Now she’s loosening her skirt. Pearl breathes through her mouth and clenches the sides of her chair, in case the high priest calls her on stage too.
“What’s going to happen?” she asks Alexander. “Can’t you stop it?”
“The show’s almost over,” he says, his eyes on the woman.
What does he mean? But Pearl loses her breath to ask because the woman’s blouse and skirt fall to the floor, and she’s standing in her brassiere and bloomers, showing off her ample figure, round and firm at the hips and in the bosom. A seduction.
The whispers in the audience grow into full-throated voices. Pearl wants to rush to help the bewitched woman, cover her nakedness from greedy eyes with a warm, tight, protective embrace, but she stays in her seat. A woman at the table next to Pearl and Alexander is crying. Another woman shouts to her husband in angry English.
The male performers bang their drums, bringing the chatter in the room to a halt. Then the drumming stops, and the high priest hurls out a strange-sounding noise, as if he’d been punched in the gut, and claps twice.
The entranced woman blinks rapidly, wipes her eyes, looks down at herself, and screams. She grabs her clothes, presses them to her chest, and runs outside, screaming louder. The man at her table picks up her shoes and runs after her.
The priest, the drummers, and the dancers are bowing, and the audience is applauding. Alexander smirks and applauds too. What’s so funny?
“I want to leave,” Pearl says, so Alexander pitches a few dollars on the table for the waiter. She’s tempted to swipe a dollar or two, but she can’t take what’s not hers.
On the street, Pearl keeps an eye out for the undressed woman, in case she needs help. Alexander says, “You’re awfully quiet. You didn’t believe that was real, did you?”
“Real?” she repeats.
He passes under a streetlamp that lights up his pale cheeks. “That woman was a plant. That whole Santeria ceremony, it was staged for tourists.”
“Staged?” she says in a dazed voice. “Why would they do that?”
“Pearl, you’re amazing. Unlike anyone I’ve ever met, man or woman.” He puts his arm around her shoulders. This is another part of what he wants from her, not just the companionship. She must admit, she too has imagined this kind of moment with him. Now that it arrives, it feels warm, comforting, and she fears that if he should press further, she might not push him away. Perhaps noticing her discomfort, he lets go.
“I can manage the rest of the way,” she says, still feeling the pressure of his arm.
“I’m sorry. Have I offended you?”
Even now, he exhibits such thoughtfulness, such careful manners. She hardly knows how to react to them. “I’m not offended,” she says. “I just want to go home.”
“In that case, dear Pearl, when can I see you again?”
“Why? What exactly do you want from me?”
He takes her hand. “Please don’t embarrass me by making me say it aloud.”
Alexander is staring, waiting, and Pearl’s feeling light-headed. What does she want from him? A visa to America or a warm embrace?
