Hear No Evil

19

Four decades of communism had not robbed Havana of its heart. But it was badly in need of angioplasty.

Everywhere Jack looked, he could find things old, things broken, things that seemed straight out of a world that had existed before he was even born. They rode in a taxi that had the hood of a 1956 Chevrolet, the back end of a 1959 Ford, and the interior of something just a cut above an ox cart. Their driver was a surgeon who earned more in tips than practicing medicine. He gave Jack and Sofia a driving tour of La Habana Vieja (Old Havana), a historic section of a magnificent city that could be either charming or appalling, depending on how closely you looked. Jack tried to envision it as his mother might have seen it as a teenager, an architectural marvel that boasted some of the most impressive cathedrals, plazas, and colonial mansions in the Caribbean. Over eight hundred of its historically significant structures were built before the twentieth century, some dating back to the 1500s. But after decades of neglect, many of these irreplaceable structures had suffered irreversible damage, and recent restoration efforts aimed at bolstering tourism were simply too little, too late. Despite some convincing paint jobs and face-lifts, it was impossible to ignore the many sagging roofs and crumbling walls. Some parts of south La Habana Vieja resembled Berlin in late 1944, whole sections of walls missing, buildings on the verge of collapse but for the tenuous support of wood scaffolding, entire neighborhoods seemingly held together by crisscrossing ropes and wires from which residents hung the morning laundry.

An old woman on a third-floor balcony was hauling up a bucket on a rope.

“No plumbing?” Jack asked the the cabdriver.

“Not here, señor. If you go for walking, is muy importante that you look over you head. Is not so bad if you get spill from buckets going up. But the ones coming down…”

“Yo comprendo,” said Jack. I understand.

They continued west along the waterfront on the broad and busy Avenida Maceo, stopping at the Hotel Nacional. The driver would have been more than happy to continue the city tour, but Jack tipped him extra to cut it short.

“Gracias,” Jack said as he handed him a couple of twenties. It was about a month’s worth of wages for a physician.

Hotel Nacional was the vintage 1930 grand dame of Havana hotels, perched on a bluff with postcard views of Havana Harbor. Its architect had also designed the famous Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, and it was built in a similar Spanish style, entered via a long driveway that was lined with slender Royal Palms. The lobby screamed of opulence if not ostentatiousness, with mosaic floors, Moorish arches, and lofty, beamed ceilings. Jack looked around, saw the tourists at the bar sipping lime daiquiris and rum mojitos. He spotted another group of businessmen feasting on shrimp as big as their fists and lobster with drawn butter. He heard salsa music from the nightclub, the laughter of people dancing, the chatter of wealthy Europeans on holiday.

And then he heard the desk clerk’s reminder: “One last thing, señor. Locals are not permitted in the hotel. It’s the law, and I’m required to tell you that. So please don’t bring them here.”

“Sure thing,” said Jack. With bitter irony he was reminded of an old Miami tourism slogan: “ Miami -See It Like a Native.” Here, the slogan should have been “ Cuba -See It Like ANYTHING BUT a Native.”

Jack and Sofia took separate rooms on the recently refurbished sixth floor. Jack pulled back the curtains and opened the window to take in the view. A warm, gentle breeze caressed his face. Looking east he saw Havana Harbor, where the explosion of the Maine had sparked the Spanish-American War. Somewhere to the west, he knew, was the town of Mariel, the launching point for the infamous boatlift that had brought a quarter of a million Cubans-“Marielitos”-to Miami in the early 1980s. Most had assimilated just fine, but twenty-five thousand of them had come from Castro’s prisons, and at least one of them was convicted of murder again and had ended up on Florida ’s death row. Jack knew that one well, because the young and only son of Governor Harold Swyteck had been his lawyer-until he was executed in the electric chair.

Jack felt a slight queasiness in his belly.

The phone rang. He stepped back inside and answered it. The woman spoke in Spanish.

“Are you lonely, handsome?”

It took Jack a moment to translate in his head, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. Then he chuckled and said, “Cut it out, Sofia.”

“My name is not Sofia. But I can be Sofia if you want me to be. I can be anyone at all. I can do whatever you want, whenever you want, however many times you want. Have you ever had a girl of sixteen? All you have to do is-”

Jack hung up. Obviously the bellboy or the doorman or someone had passed the word that an American man was alone in room 603. The desk clerk’s admonition-no locals in the hotel-echoed in his mind.

Yeah, right. And drugs are strictly prohibited in Miami Beach nightclubs.

Jack took a seat on the edge of the bed-the very edge. He wondered how many sixteen-year-old Cuban girls had lain across these sheets, and then he recalled those two pigs in the airport talking about how cheap and gorgeous the women were here. He grabbed the phone and dialed Sofia ’s room. She answered on the third ring.

“ Sofia, hey. It’s Jack.”

“What’s up?”

“I wanted to let you know: I’m checking out of here.”

“You don’t like your room?”

“The room’s fine. I just don’t want to stay here.”

“Where do you want to go?”

He didn’t answer right away. His mind flashed with visions of his grandmother living in some dumpy house for thirty-eight years with hardly anything to eat. He thought of Abuela saying good-bye to his mother, spiriting her away to Miami, unaware at the time that she’d never see her teenage daughter again. He thought of the rum-guzzling, shrimp-gorging, cigar-smoking tourists and the young girls who became whores.

But the one image Jack couldn’t conjure up was that of a little Havana suburb, the town in which the mother he’d never known had lived most of her too-short life.

“I’m going to Bejucal,” he said.