Untitled Havana Noir
a novel in progress by Hugo Perez

Chapter 1

Cuba!

I wish I didn’t have to say it like it was a four-letter word.

The plane touched down. A knife twisted in my gut. Through the small oval window, I could see fire red dirt on either side of the tarmac. I was home. Six years ago I had left my country. Six years ago I had left her too and didn’t look back. I did not share the sense of nostalgia that drove my fellow exiles to flock to the homeland as soon as they had their U.S. residency and enough money to visit. I left with the intention of never returning. Miami was a dreary town in comparison to Havana, but it was a great place to get lost if you were Cuban.

A phone call changed all that. The ringing woke me up, groggy from a late night of work at the bar. “Hello… hello…Lazaro.” The connection was not so good but there was no doubt as to whose voice it was.

“Hello Isabelita.” I said as I sat up against the headboard of my bed.

“I don’t have much time. I need your help… I need you in Havana.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Silence, and then a crackle.

“Lazaro. I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t serious.”

“It may be serious but why should I come back?”

The line began to crackle.

“Christ…” she said. And then, ”…died for our sins…” And then the line died, and I held the phone up to my ear until it began to buzz angrily. I waited for her to call back. I tried calling her back at the old number but only got a recorded message saying the number was not in service.

Christ died for our sins. Not the kind of talk I expected from an atheist. I was tempted by the thought of winning her back, but the past was the past, the present was tolerable, and the thought of going back to Cuba made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

I looked at the clock. Four in the afternoon. I had to be at work in a few hours. I rolled out of bed, shaved the grizzle of my face, dressed in a white guayabera and black slacks, my standard uniform behind the bar, and drove over to La Casita, the open air cafeteria where I breakfasted every evening before putting in another shift at Los Marinos lounge where the temperature was always a cool fifty degrees and the mood was always pre-Castro nostalgia. Christ dies for our sins. I couldn’t get those words out of my head. The more I tried to put them out of my mind, the more I thought of the lips that had spoken the words into a phone receiver. The more I thought about the lips, the more I thought about her. I wolfed down my Pan con Chorizo and washed it down with two cortaditos. Between the coffee and thoughts of Isabelita, I was pretty buzzed by the time I started my shift.

“What’s her name?” The gravelly voice belonged to my fellow bartender Quico, a tall Galician a few smokes shy of having to breath through a hole in his throat.

“Her name is yesterday as in yesterday’s news.”

“Doesn’t seem so yesterday to me.” He hacked out a few laughs before going back to slinging whisky.

All roads led to Cuba. All roads to the one woman I had ever loved, the one woman I never wanted to see again. I went home. I packed my suitcase. Twelve hours later I was undoing my lapbelt in Havana.

Cuba.

The new airport was all glass and tile. Immigration was shiny and bright. Low season. No lines. I walked to door number five, and presented my worn Cuban passport to a small man in military fatigues with a large clump of hair on his upper lip that was supposed to approximate a moustache but looked more like a shoe brush.

“You were born in Cuba.” He asked without looking up.
“Yeah.”
“Is this your first visit back since you left?” He looked up with eyes which tried to be dead and menacing but which looked more like glassy marbles.
“Yeah.”
“The purpose of of your trip?”
“To see friends.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Nacional.” The Hotel Nacional meant I was here to spend money. Cuba had an open door policy for dollars.

He stared down at my passport for another minute, stamped it vigorously several times as if it were a live thing that needed killing. He handed it back to me, and buzzed me through to the baggage claim. Television monitors advertised HavanaClub Rum and Mitsubishi televisions. No signs of Lenin or Marx anywhere. After a short wait, I grabbed my suitcase off the carousel, and walked out into the terminal.

The air was still and hot. Cab drivers were clumped like dust motes along the front of the terminal. I nodded to the closest cabdriver. He peeled himself from his seat, and led me to a brand new ‘Turistaxi’ sedan. Nothing seemed familiar to me yet except for the red dirt and the heaviness in the air.

Halfway into the city I began to see a familiar grime and decay shining through the thin layers of watered down paint that covered the buildings on either side of the state road into the city. Underneath the coats of peeling color I could make out the old revolutionary slogans. Venceremos! We will conquer! Billboards advertised Sony, AirFrance, and even Coca-Cola along the side of the road. New European cars surrounded the old American cars like jackals preying on aging lions. My cabdriver asked if he could turn on the radio. American pop.

“It’s the tourism station. It’s the only thing worth listening to.” He said.
“So what’s new in Havana?”
“How long since you left?”
“Six years.”
“Nothing. It’s all the same. The same guy is still in charge as when you left.”

Everything had changed on the surface but underneath it was all the same. My taxi pulled into the long driveway of the Hotel Nacional, the neocolonial pile that Winston Churchill had once stayed in. A doorman in a white suit held the door open for me. I was a foreigner now in my own country with all the privileges that that entailed.

The man at the desk asked for name.
“Lazaro Guerrero.”
“Ah, that is a very Cuban name.” He typed something into his computer. “Room 512” A clap of the hands. A bellhop led the way bent over to his left from the weight of my suitcase.

The room was not as nice as you would expect from the facade but nice enough. I opened my windows, and looked out over the harbor. A brown haze hung low over the water. Even the gulfstream couldn’t blow away all the smog. I breathed in deeply and felt a familiar burn at the back of my throat, like pulling on an unfiltered cigarette, the taste of Havana coating my mouth. I changed into a fresh short-sleeved linen shirt, walked out the front of the hotel, and walked East along O street until I left the relatively well preserved Vedado section of Havana and plunged into Centro Habana, the human cesspool where I was born, where I played stickball in the streets, where I fell in love. The smell of open sewers made me a little misty-eyed.

Her building was still smoldering. Cordoned off by the Havana’s men in blue. Clumps of neighbors stood in doorways. A withered old man stood in a doorway across the street chewing on the nub of a cigar. His belly hung over pants that must have fit around the time el jefe came down from the mountains.

“Aurelio.” I called to him. He turned.

“Lazaro…” He looked down at his feet. “It’s… it’s good to see you.”

“What happened? Do you know where I can find Isabelita?”

Aurelio walked into his meagerly furnished living room and motioned for me to follow. I sat in a chair whose box spring had caved in. Aurelio brought out a bottle of rum and poured shots into a pair of Spanish coffee cups. Something tried to tear it’s way out of my stomach, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“Lazaro, she’s dead. She burned up with the building.”

My coffee cup was suddenly empty. Aurelio poured some more rum for both of us. “The police. They say she killed herself.”

“Where did they take the body?”

“The funeral home at Calzada and K Street. They plan on holding a wake for her tomorrow.”

“Does Raul still work at the cafeteria in the funeral home?”

“Do you think Raul would ever give up that job?”

I laughed without smiling. Raul was very good at keeping his inventory sheets balanced, and keeping himself well fed. Aurelio took a swig from the bottle, and looked at me hard in the eye.

“Lazaro. Why did you come back?”

“To see my friends. I have such good friends here.” Aurelio snorted.

“Thanks for the rum. I’ll be by tomorrow.” I said as I walked out the street.

Isabelita’s building still smoldered as I headed for Calzada.

Raul’s cafeteria was on the ground level of the funeral home. Raul was nervous to see me, more so when I asked him to take me into the morgue.

“Lazaro. I am sorry for your loss but there is nothing left of her. Nothing. Why would you want to go in there?”

“Raul, I need to see her. I came from the yuma to see her, and dead or alive I’m going to see her. You have the keys to the whole building. I’m asking for your help.”

Raul sputtered but he led me to the other side of the building, through a side door, down a corridor.

“In there.” He gestured with one hand as he raised a handkerchief up to his nose. “Don’t take too much time.” I walked into the morgue. Only one body was laid out, barely making the white sheet rise off the table. It smelled of smoke, and of something even worse. I pulled the sheet back and found a piece of charcoal shaped like a crumpled ragdoll. Parts of it glistened wetly.

I remembered Isabelita the way she looked when she was alive. She looked like one of those women you saw in photos of Havana before the revolution, slender but well shaped, elegant, dark-haired dark-eyed, with an olive complexion and Spanish from the old country features. Somehow anything she wore seemed fashionable even the green military outfit that she wore when she was a member of the party. I was always struck by how small and tight the skirts were that the government issued to its female officials. The system preached for a proletarian society, but it always managed to put the female proletariats in miniskirts.

There were many Isabelitas. There was the pixie Isabelita that fell in love with me and sang me bits of old songs until sunrise as we sat on the seawall of the Malecon. There was the scared Isabelita that I would find on the verge of suicide sometimes, and spend hours holding her until the hot tears ran dry and she could smile again. There was the strange Isabelita who could barely talk to me. And there was the Isabelita that promised to leave the country with me and didn’t show up the night that I left Cuba in a fishing boat with fourteen others. Hansel, one of the boys in the neighborhood, came running down to the dock that night with a note from her, “Lazaro, I can’t see you again. I hope that you can find a better life without me on the other side.”

I almost stayed behind. Out of stubbornness I left. I held the crumpled ball of a note in my hand as the fishing boat was launched. I held the note in my hand for hours looking back at Havana until I could no longer see the lights of the city. When I could no longer see Havana, when I could no longer see the dark lump of Cuba on the horizon, I opened my fist and the ball rolled out of my hand and into the breakwater. For a brief while I could make out the ball of white bobbing up and down in the waves and then it was gone.

That was six years ago. The burnt husk of a human on the slab in the funeral home’s morgue was all that was left of her.

Through the handkerchief he held over his mouth, Raul said, “I think it’s time to go. I’ll get in trouble of the director comes down and finds us here.” He spoke to me without looking over to where I was standing by the corpse.

Time to go. I pulled the white sheet back over what remained of Isabelita. Raul was out on the sidewalk wiping the sweat from his brow.

“I’m sorry Lazaro.”

I nodded to him.

“One time the director asked if I could help take some garbage over to the incinerator and I helped him load this heavy bag into the back seat of his Lada, and when we drove off he told me that the bag held all the guts that had been cleaned out of the bodies for embalming that day, and I had to have him stop the car so that I could throw up in the gutter. Doesn’t it make you sick... being that close to death I mean.”

“Death is close to us at all the times, Raul.” I said. “A corpse is just a reminder.”

“I feel better without the reminders.” He replied wiping the sweat off his brow again.

“Thanks for the favor. I owe you one.” I slapped him on the back and made my way down Calzada to the Malecon. I bought a cheap bottle of rotgut rum at a stand, and walked down to the darkest part of the old seawall taking long swigs from the bottle as I walked. The bottle was half empty by the time I didn’t feel like walking anymore. I sat down on the seawall and stared out into the darkness of the ocean. Fishermen in inner-tubes were fishing fifty yards out. The rotating light of the lighthouse across the harbor lit up the sky. The sky spun in time to the light. The bottle got empty. The sky seemed to get bigger and bigger.

Cuba…

copyright Hugo Perez 2005
all rights reserved