20
20 June
91
Postcards
from Daniel. From La Havana and from Mexico, Cancun to be precise.
He was at
Bettys birthday party, and perhaps there is some truth to what George told me
about Amy. They were dancing close, to say the least (though she still hasnt
filled out enough to make it look sexy). But there was no time left for him to
pursue anything, since the next day he left for Toronto in order to fly to
Cuba. He took Betty with him for the weekend.
When she came
back from Toronto it was Paul who picked her up at Dorval. He brought her home,
but several hours after her plane arrived. And they gave every impression of
being young lovers. Its funny that just as she decided to become francophone
again she acquired an anglophone boyfriend. (Paul speaks French passably, and
is working hard on improving it.) But then we are a funny race, nous autres les
Québécois.
Betty has been
talking about the Toronto trip with her brother every day since coming back,
but only in trickles because she has been busy with finals. She has now
graduated from NAA. There was a little graduation ceremony last night, but at
NAA the real graduation shindig is for those who finish Grade 12, like in the
US and elsewhere in Canada. Ah, lexception québécoise!
The big change
in Betty was that she now spoke of Daniel as her equal, not her wise older
brother. If anything she was a little condescending toward him, perhaps even
dismissive about his DNA scheme. Most of all, she said, he doesnt understand
women. Il ne comprend pas le femmes, said my Betty who has just turned 17. I
could not suppress a smile, but I hope that she did not take it as
condescending toward her.
She enjoyed
Toronto enormously, and wants to go there again this summer, with me (I think
she said it to be polite) or with Paul. She loved the ROM and the Eaton Centre,
much bigger than the one here. She had fun dressing up (in the dress that I
helped her buy) for the theatre, where they saw Romeo and Juliet, though she
thought that they might as well have seen two different plays. Her brother
didnt seem interested in the romance, only in the performance and the
production. She suddenly switched to English. Now I understand why some of the
girls at school called him unromantic! she said. And we continued speaking in
English for a while, when she just as suddenly (and unconsciously) switched
back to French. Later I commented about it. Cest ton identité bilingue, I
said (facetiously). Oui, cest ça, maman, she said without a trace of irony,
in fact with some pride.
But she has a
point. I too have complained, even to you, my journal, about the Québec
requirement that one be either anglophone or francophone, and while mixed
children (like Tinas) have a choice between one schooling and the other, they
(or their parents) must still choose. It would be refreshing to have a bilingual
identity, like Bettys, officially recognized, implying bilingual schools. But
it is not likely, is it?
Anyway, it is
nice to see my daughter embracing a cause. Not merely a personal one, like
Daniels search for his father, but a public one. I am proud of her.
Cubana
Back at the house, as they passed his room her room
she breezily said, En diez minutos vuelvo, and went on in the
direction of the bathroom. He went inside the room and began to undress. The
breeze that came in through the open window felt good on his skin, better than
the air-conditioning in the hotel would have felt.
He
pondered the significance of Marisas matter-of-fact promise to return in ten
minutes. He had not felt anything sexual between them throughout the evening,
and certainly not from her to him; he had assumed that she had a novio.
But he did not have much time to ponder, for by the time he slipped under the
sheet she came in, wearing a flimsy nylon robe, with no buttons, tied at the
waist.
As
she began to untie it, Daniel saw that her breasts were as full as they had
seemed with a bra and tee-shirt over them, but surprisingly limp for someone as
young and otherwise firm-bodied as she was. Maybe shes had a baby, he thought.
She then quickly removed the robe, dropped it on the floor along with her
flip-flops, and slid under the sheet, all in one smooth motion that made him
instantly ready for sex, so that when she asked him, in a way that seemed
businesslike, ¿Estás listo? he could honestly answer Sí. Yo
también, she said as she climbed on top of him. Uh
¿preservativo?
he asked. No es necesario, she said as she began to engulf him, tengo
diafragma. And she was well prepared with lubricant.
Though
he was mechanically engaged in the sex act, he was not feeling excited. Through
his mind went the various firsts that doing it represented in his life. It was
his first time with a black woman, at least one who in North America would be
considered black, for in Cuba, he had noticed in conversation, negro and
mulato represented distinct categories, and Marisa and her family, like
Pablo Milanés, were of the latter.
It
was also his first time, as far as he knew, with a woman using a diaphragm.
Until then it had been only condoms and the pill. But, most importantly,
it was the first time that he was doing it with no foreplay of any kind,
not even a flirtation or a kiss, and, educated as he was at the hands
figuratively and literally of Gen McGrath, he felt ill at
ease; his participation in the act was quite passive while Marisa was
writhing above him, her eyes closed, seemingly concentrating only on the
pleasure her body was getting from one part of his.
Her
orgasm was pornographically dramatic, and he would have suspected that it was
faked had there been any reason for her to fake it. As soon as she stopped he
went limp. She disengaged, moved off him and only then opened her eyes and
looked at him with a smile. ¿No gozaste? she asked him with apparent
concern. He admitted that he had not come. She immediately began stroking him
back to an erection, though once more with no other contact. She then pulled
him on top of her and inside her. He made himself move forcefully and came
quickly. This time he was sure that the orgasm that Marisa seemed to experience
along with his was faked.
After
a few minutes rest she got out of bed and put her robe and flip-flops back on.
Buenas noches, she said unceremoniously and shut the door behind her.
He
began to think about the meaning of what had been the strangest sexual
encounter of his young life, but sleep quickly overcame him.
In
the morning Eva served him an American-style breakfast of bacon and eggs.
Marisa was gone.
He
decided to go to the beach. The one where the bus driver dropped him off was vast
but almost deserted on this Wednesday. It was nothing like the Varadero beach
that he had seen in brochures. It was obviously not intended for tourists, and
the amenities for bathers showers, toilets were minimal and not well cared
for. But there was a kind of caretaker (he seemed to old to be a lifeguard) who
agreed to keep an eye on his daypack into which he had placed his belongings
while he went bathing.
As
he was putting sunscreen (unscented) on himself, a very thin girl of about his
age, dark-skinned but blond and with European features, suddenly appeared
beside him and asked him if she could have some of it. He squirted a large
dollop into each of her cupped hands, and she sniffed it for a long time before
applying it to her skin. She didnt thank him perhaps because it wasnt
aromatic enough for her and he went into the water. When he returned to his
spot, she was gone.
The
caretaker beckoned him to come over. Cuidado con ésa, he said,
pointing at the girl who was now seated on the sand, about a hundred meters
away, reading a book. Tiene SIDA.
Daniel
thanked the man for warning him about the girls AIDS. Gracias por advertirme, he said, pero
ella no me interesa. The caretaker shrugged his shoulders and said
something that Daniel didnt understand (except for the word gusto, or
rather guhto it was probably the Spanish, or at least the Cuban,
equivalent of Chacun à son gout) before walking back to his shack.
After
two hours of gentle surf, moderate wind and intense if intermittent sun he had
enough. When he picked up his daypack from the caretaker he fished out a dollar
and gave it to the man, who accepted it gratefully but not without looking
around to see if anyone was observing the transaction.
He
did not feel like going back to the house and took the bus to the city center,
this time exploring parts of Vedado other than the ones he had seen before.
Among other landmarks he saw the Viazul bus station, from where he could take
buses to other parts of the island, but his enthusiasm for experiencing more of
Cuba was waning.
He
got off the bus on Calle 23 and walked down to the Malecón in search of a place
for lunch. Just before reaching the waterfront he noticed an office of Cubana
de Aviación. On an impulse he entered and asked when the next flight to Cancún
would be available. Mañana, señor, the woman at the counter told him
after he informed her that only one seat was needed. He hesitated only for a
moment before saying that yes, he would like a ticket for the next day. The flight
was at one; he would need to be at the airport by noon. For an additional ten
dollars, the airline could arrange for a taxi to pick him up at his hotel, at
half past eleven. He said that he wasnt staying at a hotel, but he didnt have
much baggage and he could be back at the airline office for the airport
shuttle. The woman told him to be there at eleven.
He
found a coffee shop where he had a sandwich cubano and café con leche,
and continued his exploration on foot, for hours, until he found himself by
another stop of the bus line that would take him back to Evas house.
He
told Eva that he would be leaving the next day. His announcement did not seem
to have much impact on her. She told him that his bill would be fifty dollars
for the two nights, and that a present for Marisa would be appreciated. He had
expected something of the sort Gustavo had, after all, presented the girl as
a kind of extra service provided by the house and, feeling generous, gave Eva
a hundred-dollar bill. ¿Está bien? he asked. Sí, chico, she
said.
He
went into his room to get some clean clothes and then to the bathroom to
shower. Afterwards he was back in his room, on the bed, trying to read the copy
of Granma that he had picked up (it seemed filled mostly with a speech
given by Fidel Castro), when he heard Marisa come in. She and Eva had a quiet
conversation, and then he heard a knock on the door. ¡Sí! he called
out, unsure of how to say Come in, and Marisa entered jauntily. ¡Esta
noche vamos a bailar! she announced breezily and went over to the bed with
a dancelike step, leaned down and gave him a lingering kiss before dancing back
out of the room.
It
was their first kiss. He wondered if this was what Cuban sex was like: first
intercourse, and then other kinds of intimacy. What would Gen McGrath say?
After
dinner Marisa took Daniel to a club where a band that was new but already very
popular its members had all played in older, established bands was to play
Cuban salsa for dancing. The band was called NG La Banda (Marisa explained that
NG stood for nueva generación) and the music it played was called timba.
It was quite different from the salsa he had heard in New York: it was somehow
both more primitive in the way it inspired wilder and more expressive dancing
and more sophisticated, especially in its rhythmic complexity and in the
intricacy of the guitar solos that Daniel appreciated.
The
dancing also seemed both more spontaneous and more elaborate than what Cici had
taught him. After the first three songs, which Marisa danced with him, she
began to dance with other guys, while he was asked to dance by other girls.
Then she would come back to him, go off again, and so on until the break.
This
time he had no desire to go back to the house. He got a bottle of beer for each
of them, and then another. The wait at the bar was such that by the time they
finished their second beers, the band was back, and another round of dancing
followed.
In
the backseat of the taxi on the way back she was kissing and fondling him ceaselessly.
He wondered if it was gratitude for the present. Fifty US dollars, he had
noticed, was a lot of money for a Cuban who did not receive remittances from
relatives abroad.
Back
at the house she told him that he could use the bathroom first. Like the night
before, she came into his room, wearing the same robe, ten minutes after him.
And, strangely enough, the cuddling and kissing that had come before was not a
practice that she carried into bed. Her approach to sex had not changed much
from the previous night. She stayed with him somewhat longer perhaps half an
hour but her casual Buenas noches was no different.
As
on the previous day, Marisa was gone by the time Daniel had breakfast with Eva.
Perhaps it was the knowledge that he was about to leave Cuba that made his
hostess talk with him with a frankness that surprised him.
One
of her revelations was that Marisa was not really her daughter, as she had
first told him, but her niece, Gustavos sister in fact. Another was that she
had as Daniel had suspected a child, a three-year-old son who was being
raised by yet another brother, Ernesto, and his wife. The thought that Gustavo
was, in a sense, pimping for his sister gave Daniel a feeling of disgust. But
Eva insisted that Marisa was a good girl (una buena chica) who was
driven to do what she did by economic necessity and racism. ¿Racismo en
Cuba? Daniel exclaimed, astounded. Eva laughed. She showed him the front
page of the previous days Granma, which featured a photo of the Cuban
Council of State assembled to listen to Fidels speech, and asked him how many negros
or mulatos he saw in it. There was barely one or two, depending on how
one read the poorly printed black-and-white photograph. A talent for music or
sports was the only way for a dark-skinned Cuban (un cubano de piel morena)
to get ahead, Eva went on, and while Marisa had been a promising athlete in
secondary school, her pregnancy put an end to that prospect.
After
breakfast Daniel brushed his teeth and packed. It had rained in the early
morning, and the streets were still wet when he began his walk to the bus stop
after exchanging a simple Adiós with Eva. He would get to the airline
office earlier than necessary, but he could think of no reason to linger in
Evas house. The day was a little cooler than the preceding ones, but the
humidity, probably very close to one hundred percent, made up for the
difference, and the air felt stifling.
He
did in fact get to the Cubana office just as the ten-thirty shuttle was about
to leave, and he took it. The only language he heard spoken by his fellow
passengers on the minibus was Russian, though there were a few others who, like
him, kept silent. He wondered how much longer the ties between Cuba and the
Soviet Union or, for that matter, the Soviet Union itself, even with
Gorbachevs best efforts would last.
As
the passengers disembarked at the airport, two of them, a man and a woman, had
a brief chat in Cuban Spanish with the driver and headed off toward the
domestic wing. Everyone else went to the international wing, and everyone
except Daniel and a well-tanned middle-aged man headed for the Aeroflot
counter.
At
the Cubana counter Daniel found out that not only was he early for his
check-in, but the flight was delayed by half an hour. The delay due to
weather conditions over the Caribbean Sea stretched into an hour and a half,
but he didnt care. Though the terminals air-conditioning was minimal, it was
a welcome contrast to the air outside. To his surprise he found the days
Toronto Star it must have arrived on that mornings Air Canada flight
at the kiosk. He bought one of the five available copies and took it to the
restaurant with him. Eating his hamburger, though he had not gone through
passport control yet, he no longer felt himself in Cuba.
Touring Mexico, as he did for the next six weeks, filled
Daniel with an unexpected feeling of ease after his three days in Cuba, so much
so that at times he felt himself floating like a figure in an OGorman mural.
It
felt relaxing to be a normal university-age tourist among many others like him
that he met along the way. It felt comforting to go into a store and buy
anything he wanted with pesos, or with a credit card without caring whether it
was Canadian or American. It felt liberating to hear, in the course of casual
conversations with strangers, unbridled criticism of government corruption. It
felt invigorating to engage in the travelers spontaneous pickup sex that was
not fraught with politico-socioeconomic considerations. It felt exciting to
discover varieties of music ranchera, huasteca, jarocha, norteña
that were not in Cicis repertoire. It was enlightening to see different points
of view represented in the newspapers, not to mention facts such as Yeltsins
election as President of Russia that did not show up in Granma. And it
was most enjoyable to understand almost every word of the clearly enunciated
Mexican Spanish that he heard spoken.
Besides
the sounds of its music and speech Mexico offered Daniel other sensual
pleasures: the tastes of its food the fresh papaya and mango, the tacos and
sopes and enchiladas and tamales and gorditas, the breakfast chilaquiles that
no two restaurants prepared alike; the sights of its scenery beach and
jungle, lake and volcano and monuments pre-Columbian pyramids, colonial
churches, modern buildings with amazing murals.
He
also discovered that it was fun to speak his mother tongue in bed. Two of the
women he met were French-speaking (one Belgian, one French), both told him that
his Montreal speech was charmant or mignon, and both stayed with
him all night, unlike the skiers at Mont-Tremblant, his only previous
francophone bedmates. He was amused to find out that European French sex
language was basically the same as Canadian French (baise, chatte, bite).
Another
source of amusement was the sight of fellow Canadians who draped their
backpacks or their torsos with maple leaf flags. It was not, he discovered, a
mark of patriotism but of a fear of being taken for Americans. It did no good
to tell these travelers that Mexicans had nothing against Americans as people,
much as they might dislike their government, but it proved useful to let them
know that he had once overheard two Mexicans discussing the meaning of what
they had taken to be a marijuana leaf.
His route took the shape of a very irregular hook with a long, multiply
curved handle. The handle extended from Cancún to Puebla, where
the hook began, taking a sharp U-turn bend in Guadalajara, with its point in
the Federal District. The first phase consisted of relatively short hops
by bus almost all the buses belonged to a company called
ADO southward along the Caribbean coast to Tulum, and then
westward: inland by way of Cobá, Chichen-Itzá, Mérida,
Uxmal and Kabah to Campeche; along the coast again this time the
Gulf to Ciudad del Carmen. From there it was a very comfortable
overnight bus to Veracruz, then Jalapa and Puebla. Then it was once again
short bus trips now with different companies to Tlaxcala,
Pachuca, Querétaro, San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, and Guadalajara;
and finally, doubling back on a more southerly arc, Zamora, Uruapan,
Pátzcuaro, Morelia and Mexico City at last. As in Germany, he
kept a detailed log of his journey, but he also jotted down every
noteworthy experience, and afterward he remembered every step along the
way, even without referring to the voluminous notebook that he had filled.
From
the capital, after four days of exploring the city and its surroundings, he
flew to Guatemala City. But after three days in Guatemala he felt that, rather
than continuing his journey southward, after another two or three he needed to
get back to Mexico, since he had missed the countrys south. (The north, he
decided, could wait for another trip.) And so after another two days he went
overland, by bus again, into Chiapas and then Oaxaca
where there were new foods to be sampled and old archaeological treasures
to be explored before going to Mexico City again. When he arrived
in San Cristóbal de las Casas, he went to a
travel bureau where he got help in organizing his remaining itinerary.
By
the time he would get back to Mexico City, after a flight from Oaxaca, it would
be near the end of July. He realized that, other than sending postcards, he had
not communicated with his family since leaving Montreal, and his departure had
left his relations with his mother and sister somewhat frayed. He felt the need
to get back there before going to New York in order to patch things up with his
family, and, incidentally, perhaps to satisfy his lust for Amy Kenner, which,
he now also realized, had been growing subliminally since Bettys party.
Accordingly he booked a flight to Montreal. Having to choose between Air Canada
and Mexicana, he chose the former for the only reason that it was an earlier
flight.
It was already August when he boarded the plane. He had
not called his mother or sister to announce his coming. The surprise, he
thought, might make the task of patching up easier. And, suddenly hearing
French all around him, it occurred to him that it might be easier still if he
spoke to them in French.
The
surprise tactic was effective. He called from Mirabel Airport. Mireille
answered in French, so that he was able to announce his presence in Montreal in
the same language. She was happy to hear from him, and seemed to appreciate
reverting to the language that she had mainly spoken with him until five years
before.
When
he arrived at the house and greeted Betty in French, her response gave him the
impression that the language tactic would not work with her. It was as if he
were patronizing her, as if her English werent good enough. When she asked
him, as they were drinking herbal tea at the dining-room table, to tell her all
about his adventures, it was in English.
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