Naked in Havana by Colin Falconer Page A

It must be a tough balancing act. You try to be a lady for him, but you’d like to be a bolerista or a dancing girl for an hour or two now and then. You want to be good but there’s a part of you that’s bad to the bone. You think you have everybody fooled, and you have… almost everyone anyway, but that just makes you feel even lonelier, so sometimes you just don’t know what to do with yourself. So you just keep smiling for daddy and smiling for your friends, and no one ever knows who the hell you are, you least of all.”
    I stared at him. He had just surmised every feeling and every thought I had ever had in the last twelve months. “Am I supposed to applaud?
    “Am I right?”
    “Not in the least. I thought you were a clever man but you don’t seem to know me at all.”
    “You’re not a virgin either, are you?”
    Dios mio. I couldn’t believe he’d asked me such a question.
    “Oh, come on, don’t pretend you’re shocked, we both know you’re not. But I bet Angel didn’t know the first thing to do with you.”
    “Every time I think I’m getting to like you, you say something vulgar and stupid to make me despise you.”
    “That’s a shame.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I fell in love with you the moment I saw you. First time it’s ever happened to me. I don’t believe in all that hearts and flowers nonsense. There’s been a lot of women in my life, so I don’t know what’s so different about you, but something is, and I can’t make any sense of it.”
    “Well let me know when you’ve worked it out, but I won’t be holding my breath.”
    “You know why you chase that boy? Because you’ll never catch up with him. That’s his attraction. While you’re running after him, you’re in control. You think you’re unhappy about all this, but you’re not. You ever fall in love, really fall in love, it would scare you so much you’d run till your feet bled.”
    I flung his hand away. I would have turned and walked off then and there, but I couldn’t do that in the barrio and he knew it. He grinned at me and that riled me even more. I hated him so badly right then I wanted to kick him in the shins.
    An old woman was sitting on a stool on the cobblestones outside one of the tenements, puffing on a cigar, a live rooster wrapped in a shawl on her knees. She saw us squabbling and started to chuckle. “How much did you pay for her?” she said to Reyes.
    “Two dollars. Do you think it was too much?”
    “No, I think you both got a bargain,” she said, and that seemed to amuse her even more.
    I didn’t like what he’d said about Angel, and I sulked all the way back through the cobbled lanes of Obisco. Finally I saw the familiar, wedding cake exterior of the Hotel Inglaterra. There was the comforting smell of tobacco from the Partagas cigar factory. This was the Havana I knew.
    There was a radio playing somewhere, tuned to an American station: “Peggy Sue.” I started to regain my composure.”
    “Are you still mad at me?” he asked.
    “Why should I be mad at you?”
    “Because I told you the truth about your boyfriend. What’s his name - Angel? The most unlikely name for a career opportunist I ever heard. Come on, I didn’t mean anything by it. Let me buy you a coffee.”
    We went to the Plaza Hotel near the Parque. The Plaza was elegant, one of the city’s oldest hotels. Men stood at the bar drinking espressos, their cigar smoke drifting towards the ceiling fans.
    I sat by the window watching the shoeblacks, a fat man in a white best and a battered straw hat with a wheel for sharpening knives. A woman in a bright orange turban was selling sugar cane juice from a cart that had lost two of its wheels.
    Reyes sat close. I could feel his knee touching mine under the table but I didn’t try to move away. I liked it. His shirt was open to the second button, and I stared at the knot of dark hair at his throat. I thought about that glimpse I’d had of him, naked, in Inocencia's bed. I imagined,