Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“Ron y Coca-Cola,” he said.

Music started, lights began flashing, dancers appeared onstage.

I raised my voice. “Consuelo Delacruz. Ella trabaja aquí.”

“Cuba Libre?”

“O.K.,” I shouted. He left. Was I reading incorrectly? Mispronouncing? I’d try again when the drink came.

The Marxian adage “Nothing can stop the course of history” is incontestable, but here was the Tropicana, in a Havana suburb, the creation of fifties architecture, airy and geometrical, and, on its stage, just as in the prerevolutionary days, the garish, glitzy artificiality of Las Vegas tits-and-ass dance routines.

At the next table, two men in identical white shirts, with pale, expressionless robot heads, from East Germany, were sipping beer. Beyond them, on platforms built high in the air, on either side of the stage, appeared an orchestra, chorus, and dancers, performing in the trees, with the fantastic sensationalism of show-biz Americana. Viva la Tropicana! I said to myself, and looked about for my waiter and my drink. It was coming to me in the hand of a tall, slender black woman, very handsome, about fifty or so. I got right down on my knees and started reading the Spanish in my notebook. When I glanced up, she was half smiling, her eyes softly inquisitive.

“Zev?”

I nodded. She set the drink on the table, tugged me to my feet, kissed me, and pulled me after her along the aisle that curved with the stage front, and then behind it into darkness tangled with wires. We stopped only to gape at each other, to see what couldn’t be said. She asked fifteen questions. Spanish is the fastest language in the world. Cuban Spanish is even faster, but if she’d spoken with the slow lips of death, I’d have understood none of it. She continued to hold my hand, hers quivering with eagerness to know what I couldn’t tell her. Gradually, she made out in my eyes no hope, no Spanish.

“ Norteamericano? Brook-leen?”

Then, more strongly, she pulled me after her through the dark and around behind the stage into an alley, like another part of the city, no longer the Tropicana, and pulled me toward two near-naked women, their heads glorified by mountains of feathers, their bodices all spangles. They practiced dance steps together, not noticing our approach until Consuelo thrust me in front of one of them. To me she said, “ La niña , Zeva.” To her she said, “ Tu padre lo mandó. Anda hablar con él. Háblale.” La niña looked from her mother to me, then just at me, fixing me with large dark eyes rich in incomprehension. Words came, as if experimentally. “You are from Zev?”

“He sent me to see your mother.”

She was Chester’s half-sister, Zev’s love child, my cousin. I had to tell this to myself, review the facts, before saying, “I am your cousin.” She told this to her mother, who, while she’d had no trouble kissing me earlier, seemed now to show faint reserve, though she smiled and said, “Ah.” Zeva stepped toward me. In a sweetly formal way, she kissed my cheek, whispering, “Did he send us money?” I whispered, too: “More than you can imagine.”

After the last show, I waited for them at the front gate. Zeva emerged wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and sandals. She looked like an American college student. Consuelo had gone ahead to get their car, an old Chevy, like the one Chester drove years ago, but very rusted, battered, and loud. We drove along the Malecón, where waves smashed against the seawall, stood high in the air, and collapsed along the sidewalk and onto the avenue. Facing the ocean were rows of old, grim, suffering buildings, arcades and baroque ornamentation, much decayed, and very beautiful in decay. I had glimpses of Arabic tile work and the complicated glass of chandeliers hanging amid clotheslines in rooms where the rich once lived. We turned right, passing through a large square, then along empty streets with hardly any lights. The Chevy sounded very loud, echoing in the darkness, because there were no other sounds, no voices, no music, and nobody about.

This was the Old Town, where Zeva and Consuelo had an apartment in a three-story building with a much broken façade, elaborate mortar work along the balconies fallen away, iron railings loose in their moorings, and tall windows eaten up by water and fungus. The apartment was long and very narrow, with a linoleum floor throughout. Lights hung from the ceiling by naked wires. Chests and tables were loaded with porcelain figurines, ashtrays, framed photos, and innumerable bright little cheap glass nameless things, like junkshop memorabilia. We sat in the kitchen at an oval Formica-topped table. The surface was imitation gray marble with an aluminum border. The pipe·legs were also aluminum. Right out of the fifties. In an L.A. antique shop, it would sell for about a thousand bucks — with the four chairs.

Zeva looked at her hands when I finished the story and said, “Which one?”

“Aren’t they the same?”

“Maybe only one is good. I could give you impressions of both thumbs, or I could cut them off and you bring them to him.”

“He wants all of you,” I said.

Consuelo, respectful of our deliberations, waited for us to conclude. Zeva told her where we stood. Then an argument started. I couldn’t understand it, but it touched old disagreements. Zeva wanted to go to the States. Consuelo didn’t. Consuelo rose, stood with arms folded across her chest, looking down at us. Then, from her angry rigidity, she bent abruptly and hugged me. She did the same with Zeva, then walked off down the narrow hall to a bedroom. Zeva said, “She’s tired. She’s going to sleep. You stay here tonight. She wants you to. I’ll fix a bed for you by the windows, or take my room. I won’t be able to sleep, anyway. This is terrible. Terrible. I don’t know Zev, but he must be a thoughtless man. How could he do this to me? To us? We have lived for years with promises. This apartment is ours. Almost ours. We are buying it slowly. Now you bring new promises from him. She wants to tell the authorities. It won’t be too good for you. I’m sure you’ll be detained. Come, I’ll show you.”

I followed her to the window.

The street was empty except for a man at the corner, ordinary-looking, wearing a hat, brim pulled down front and back.

“The police?”

“They will want to know what we talked about.”

“We’re cousins. We talked about Zev. You told me about yourself, how you learned English. How did you learn English?”

“I don’t really know.”

“You don’t?”

“After Zev was thrown out, my mother was in ill favor. She lost her job at the Tropicana. They gave it back to her later, but for years she did other work, mainly cooking and cleaning for the family of a diplomat. She took me with her every day. I played with their children. They spoke English. I spoke English. When they switched to Spanish, so did I. There were also other languages. The family had lived in different countries. I spoke maybe five languages. It was all language to me and I never knew which I was speaking.”

“You don’t speak a child’s English.”

“I studied it later in school. If you speak one language as a child, then another, you are left with a child’s knowledge of the first. Like changing lovers.”

“Have you changed many lovers?”

“I can count them on one thumb, but I imagine you grow and mature with the next lover, and the next. With the first you are always a child. I wanted to be in the foreign service, so I studied English. I would like to travel. I’m good at languages, but I’m a little too black, a little too much like a woman. Opportunities didn’t come my way. My mother says Zev speaks nine languages. She refuses to admit she understands a word of English.”