By Marco Felix
August is a month in which Havana’s heat suffocates, especially at noon—so much so that even Cubans themselves say that “the sweltering heat gets out of hand.”
The heat and humidity are simply overwhelming, and there is no escaping that soporific blanket that falls from the sky and covers the city like a sheet of transparent steam.
It is so intense that even the sea breezes turn to fire, and when drops of boiled spray splash across your half-bare torso, you start dripping sweat like a river of warm soup. Nothing moves in the middle of the day in Havana; all you hear is the snapping of paper fans that pedestrians furiously wave back and forth, trying to invent a bit of cool air.
The stifling oppression is such that not even the mockingbirds bother to fly to the branches of the mamey trees, and even the playful swallows rest sleepily with drooping wings atop the palm trees, like rag gargoyles.
Everything is static at noon, like a slow wave that never quite breaks against the slopes of the Malecón. The heat only abates when the Caribbean sun hides behind the medieval walls of the Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro, and suddenly everything awakens: Havana remakes itself in its sunsets and mysterious nights; the sky turns a reddish-orange, looking like a watercolor postcard of a beauty impossible to describe. It is right there, in that brilliant moment, when the rumble of street rumba shakes you from your daily stupor and invites you to join the flood of fantasy that is the soul and essence of the Pearl of the Antilles.
During one of those legendary summers, which nowadays live only in memory, my friend Alfredo arrived in Havana, and together we spent a couple of unforgettable days. Not only because, as always, we had a grand time, but rather because by the end of those long days, we both ended up “injured” due to matters of the heart.
The House on San Lázaro
He would appear religiously, like a troubadour ghost, every two weeks at the home of our friends Janeiro and his wife Alicia. Almost always alone—which is better than in bad company—and sometimes, to our great surprise, he’d show up with his girlfriend in tow, which was the equivalent of carrying firewood to the forest.
Janeiro and Alicia’s home was located at 815 San Lázaro Street, a few blocks from Vedado, exactly a block and a half from the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital and the Maceo monument.
That house served as an informal residence for Bolivians, because every countryman passing through or coming to Cuba would inevitably drop by its legendary rooms, whether to escape the infernal summer heat of the city or simply to stay for free and enjoy the friendship and hospitality of our hosts.
As it turned out, around that time my friend had a very sweet jeba—as Cubans call young women—from La Paz who, by chance, lived and studied at the same institute as he did, over in Sancti Spíritus in the central part of the island.
In that blooming August, both had come to the capital to spend a weekend together and, while they were at it, celebrate her birthday. Her mother had traveled all the way from La Paz to visit her, wish her a happy birthday, and, I imagine, to make sure her daughter was doing well, behaving like a proper lady, and, most importantly, studying as she should. Naturally, since Creole nobility obliges, the lady brought along a heap of small gifts for the hosts of the house.
The mother of my friend’s girlfriend stayed, of course, at Janeiro’s place. The house wasn’t very large, but it was comfortable: three bedrooms, a living-dining room, a kitchen, and two bathrooms, if memory serves. Enough for Janeiro, his wife, and their daughter Alina, who lived as if hidden away in the back room.
That day, Alicia set the lady up in the very room that Alfredo and I used to share. It goes without saying that both of us knew the layout of that bedroom by heart, and he could find his way to that spot on all fours and blindfolded.
Many times we had shared that room, because as students we were used to barracks life, living in quarters packed with two-story cot beds, and we weren’t picky. When his girlfriend came to the capital, I would sleep on the living room sofa, and other friends would stay over to sleep off hangovers when we were out partying.
A Quarrel, a Bookstore, and a Truce
In the morning, I went to visit him and immediately noticed he looked more droopy than a strand of yarn. That day, Alfredo and his girlfriend had had a “displeasure,” as he politically termed lovers’ quarrels. He told me she had introduced him to her mother as “a very helpful countryman and friend,” and to make matters worse, the lady had sized him up from head to toe as if he were a useless cockroach, and, to top it off, had given him her left hand. Good Lord! As if doing him a massive favor. That annoyed him deeply, and he confided that he felt “slighted and belittled.” So he told me: “I’m pissed off. Let’s go have some mojitos.” And I, supportive as always, said, “You got it,” and off we went.
We headed toward Old Havana. Walking along the city’s grand, ancient avenues, I mentioned to him that I had read in El Caimán Barbudo—the literary supplement of Cuban youth—that a capital publishing house had just released a new edition of The Truce by the great Mario Benedetti. So off we went, from bookstore to bookstore, because as expected, any work by the Uruguayan author flew off the shelves and vanished within hours.
We had visited every bookstore under the sun without much luck, and just as we were about to give up, we stopped by the one at the Palacio del Segundo Cabo, at O’Reilly 4, across from the Plaza de Armas—one of those Havana bookstores where the paper is cheap, the covers are cardboard, yet you find what is sold out or banned across half of Latin America.
There on one of the counters was the novel. Two copies, which was exactly what we needed: the story of Martín Santomé, a widowed office worker on the verge of retirement, and Laura Avellaneda, the young woman who grants him a truce in the boredom of his life. Neither of us knew yet that this very book was going to ruin our evening.
With the copies under our arms, we headed to El Patio restaurant, located in the old palace of the Marquis of Aguas Claras, a magnificent 18th-century building in the Plaza de la Catedral, San Ignacio 54 at the corner of Empedrado.
We chose that grand house not for the menu—Creole and international food, all served with congrí, salad, fried plantains, tostones, and yucca—but because the central courtyard enchants with the freshness of its plants and the fountain in the middle of the vestibule, because its baroque facade and stained-glass windows amaze visitors, and above all, because in the Plaza de la Catedral the silence is sepulchral, perfect for reading. At the bar, mojitos flowed like a spring of holy water and Havana Club was poured like someone handing out water in the desert, but that afternoon we were there to read.
As was our habit when out on the hunt or fishing, we talked about everything in general and nothing in particular. But that day, as soon as we arrived, we sat at the farthest table in the courtyard, well away from the bustle of the diners, and eagerly began to devour the first pages of the novel.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friend starting to sweat—not so much from the ambient heat, but from what was written between the lines:
“I don’t want to harm her, nor do I want to harm myself. I don’t want our bond to carry the absurd situation of an engagement drifting toward marriage, nor do I want it to take on the tone of a plain, garden-variety fling. I don’t want the future to condemn me to being an old man despised by a woman in the prime of her senses, nor do I want fear of that future to leave me on the sidelines of a present as attractive as this one. I don’t want us going from one pay-by-the-hour motel to another, nor do I want us to build a Home with a capital H.”
It must have been about five in the afternoon when, after two cuba libres and three mojitos per head, we decided to leave. By then we were, so to speak, raw-hearted and with our hormones in full rebellion.
It was clear that those first pages—of a novel that isn’t necessarily a love story—had affected him deeply and stirred up his taciturn sentimentality as a long-suffering lover, to the point that he decided to go to Janeiro’s house to “make peace” with his girlfriend. I decided to go look for Regla.
Before parting ways, we agreed to meet the following day at the entrance of the Yara Cinema at six in the evening, because the Festival of New Latin American Cinema was opening with a premiere, and I had managed to get a pair of tickets to see A Successful Man by Humberto Solás.
Regla
Regla was my girlfriend, half formal and half informal. Her name, unusual as it may sound, is not rare in Cuba: besides being a woman’s name, it belongs to a seaside neighborhood in Havana famous for its religious devotion—Santería, of course—its happy, carefree heritage of mixed cultures, and a lively carnival dance troupe, the Guaracheros de Regla.
I used to tease her all the time. I told her I would never forget her because she reminded me of my grandmother. I’d tell her, between sighs, that during my early years in school I would rush through my homework because all I cared about was going out to the small square to play with my friends, and that it was my grandmother who checked my grammar.
True to her Spanish roots, my grandmother had undergone strict academic training at a school run by devout nuns, and she enforced those educational methods in our home. Every day she reminded us that “knowledge enters with blood,” and she would slap our palms five times with a ruler—a regla—for every grammatical error we made. Those ruler slaps were so hard, I told her, that they left our hands hotter than the love I feel for you. And every time we made love, I would whisper to her that I didn’t worry about using protection or condoms, because the rhythm method—el método de la regla—was something inherent to her very nature.
She was twenty-two years old and a medical student at the University of Havana. I met her at a party on the 26th of July, on the anniversary of the assault on the Moncada Barracks. From the moment I saw her, I took a liking to her because I instantly imagined her to be smart and full of life—not only because she wore an eternal smile on her lips, but because she was a painfully beautiful dark-haired woman, the kind whose mere sight makes your heart ache.
During a break in the big party, I asked Julito—a Cuban guy so popular he knew half the city, being the captain of the university baseball team—who that girl was. He looked at me and said, “Acere, don’t even waste your time dreaming about that one, because not even the Virgin of Charity could get her to date you.”
I was left lost in thought, my ego as a dime-store Don Juan slightly bruised, because I had felt an invisible chemistry between us from the second our eyes met. From that moment on, I was literally trapped beneath the sweet gaze of that beautiful woman.
I never considered myself a Don Juan—that character born from the mind of Tirso de Molina—but in the Cuba of those years, simply being a foreigner automatically turned you into a figure of that stature, whether you wanted it or not.
Nor did I consider myself a heartthrob, as I am far from being an Adonis in the flesh. But there was no doubt I sparked curiosity; I was always surrounded by women who were likely drawn to my South American accent or simply intrigued by my personality, since I treated them differently than what they were used to from local Cuban men.
Many of the girls I met told me I was a gentleman on the brink of extinction. They said so because I opened the doors of almendrones—those 1950s American cars—when I invited them for rides along the Calzada de Infanta, because I gave them flowers even if they were fake, and because I wrote little prose pieces for them on paper napkins, unbothered by the fact that they were blatant, shameless plagiarisms of verses by José Martí or Pablo Neruda.
After that night of the big party at the medical school, I didn’t see her again until one day—must have been a month later—around six in the evening. I was, as usual, sneaking off toward Havana to lose myself in the magical spell cast by the largest island of the Antilles, when I spotted her at the bus stop boarding a guagua bound for the city.
The bus was, as always, packed. It wasn’t strictly a bus, but a two-humped semi-trailer pulled by a semi-truck cab, which Cubans quite rightly nicknamed “the camel,” or also “Saturday night movie,” because it came packed with sex, horror, and violence.
She was riding squished among hundreds of students, while I, feeling deeply sorry for myself, rode in the back hump, imagining those fortunate passengers who, with the sways and lurches of the ride, were pressed so close to her that they could smell the sweet scent emanating from her body. It tortured me even more to think that their bodies might even intertwine with the stunning outline of that Caribbean woman. Those thoughts produced a jealousy sharper than the cravings of a stray dog.
I was packed tighter than a sardine, in a complete daze, overwhelmed by the smell of diesel and soot given off by my transport, sweating in buckets because those camels had no concept of air conditioning.
Under those conditions, it was impossible to push my way through the crowd of students to get close to her and at least ask her name. About another half hour of travel passed like that, and once in downtown Havana, the camel turned left onto Galiano Street, and I saw her get off.
I immediately did the same and began following her stealthily, like a shadow tracing the imprint of her steps, fully intent on approaching her, telling her right off the bat who the hell I was, and explaining that ever since that night at the party when our eyes crossed, I had been so struck that I could no longer tell night from day because I was dreaming of her all the time.
But right there my courage as a cheap Don Juan began and ended all at once, because I lacked both the nerve and the guts to walk up to her and recite the speech I had memorized.
Oh well. I kept walking like a soul driven by the devil and saw her head toward an old building on Galiano Avenue. As she passed the small park across the street, she paused to chat briefly with some kids playing baseball, and just like that, walked casually into the foyer of that ancient building.
As if by chance, I approached the kids who were still playing ball and asked: “Hey, little buddies, who’s that girl who was just chatting with you?” One of them answered without looking up: “That’s Reglita, from apartment 719.”
As you can see, it didn’t take much effort to find the exact address. Regla lived in the Central Havana district, seventh floor, apartment 719, in an old building without an elevator on Galiano Avenue between Zanja and Neptuno streets.
Roses, Forget-Me-Nots, and a Gladiolus
That night, upon returning to my dorm, I ran into Julito and briefly told him what had happened. I told him that against all odds and come hell or high water, I was determined to court her. That night, with all the honors and rank the occasion merited, I appointed him my romantic advisor right in the middle of our department’s main hall. Together, we cooked up a strategy for the conquest.
“What woman doesn’t love getting roses?” I mused out loud. He assured me that for crude Cubans, such petty-bourgeois gentlemanly gestures had ended with the triumph of the revolution. That’s where the idea was born, although at first Julito wasn’t very enthusiastic because it required his personal help and he feared she might recognize him.
That weekend we went to the market, bought a dozen red roses, and wrapped them in cellophane. Julito went up to Regla’s apartment with the bouquet in hand, posing as a simple delivery boy. On a napkin, as usual, I had copied out a few lines by Borges for her:
Neither the intimacy of your forehead, clear as a feast,
nor the familiarity of your body, still mysterious, silent, and childlike,
nor the flow of your life taking on words or silences
will be so mysterious a favor
as looking upon your sleep wrapped
in the vigil of my arms.
I waited anxiously on that legendary street corner for Julito’s return. After completing his assigned task, he recounted the journey in vivid detail:
“I knocked on the door and I think her grandmother answered. I asked for Regla. She said: ‘One moment, please, comrade.’ A short while later Reglita came out, and seeing me standing there with a bouquet of roses in hand, she looked very puzzled, probably thinking it was a mistake. So I asked in a ceremonious tone, to disguise my role as a messenger: ‘Are you Regla?’ She answered firmly, ‘That’s me.’ ‘I have this delivery for you,’ I told her. After reading the words on the napkin, visibly moved, she asked who had sent it. I replied that I didn’t have that information because I was merely the messenger, and even if I did, I couldn’t share it, as it is our establishment’s policy to respect our clients’ privacy.”
The following week we did the same thing, but instead of red roses we brought her a bouquet of forget-me-nots, inspired by that old legend: an angel wept at the gates of Paradise, from which he had been expelled for loving a mortal woman, and he would only be forgiven if he planted forget-me-nots all over the world. When the angel told his beloved of the requirement—so difficult to fulfill—she promised to help him with the task. Such love and sacrifice moved God, who granted the woman immortality and opened the gates of Paradise to both lovers.
According to the plan, Julito didn’t go the third week. He stayed in the university dorm praying to Ochún, the Orisha goddess of love in Yoruba Santería, in the company of a few babalawo priests, so that things would go well for me.
I went to the appointment with destiny alone, armed with nothing more than a heart swollen with love. As I climbed the stairs, I confess I was afraid, not knowing what the outcome of that unexpected encounter would be.
I knocked on the door and she answered. She looked at me standing there stoically with a single gladiolus in hand and asked: “Are you the one sending me the flowers?” I told her yes. And she said: “What took you so long?”
“Come in, please, take a seat. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, hopping over the room dividers in the living room, heading toward her bedroom.
That minute felt like an eternity. After that infinite stretch of time she emerged, as painfully beautiful as ever, and said to me: “Okay, let’s go. Because I imagine that, like any good gentleman, you’re going to invite me out, right?”
We went for a walk along the banks of the Almendares River, and from there, unhurried and oblivious to the time, all the way to the Castle of the Royal Force. We sat on the edge of the pedestal of the Giraldilla statue, and lit by the accomplice moon, we kissed for the first time. That was how I met her, and the rest is history: we stayed together for a while and fell head over heels in love.
Two Accidents
That evening, after saying goodbye to my friend at El Patio, I went looking for her. As usual, I had to resort to all sorts of tricks to see her, since I didn’t want to climb seven flights of stairs or run into her relatives. So I told a young Cuban kid playing in the park: “I’ll give you five pesos if you go up to the seventh floor, apartment 719, ask for Reglita, and tell her Marco is waiting for her at our usual corner.”
About fifteen minutes passed before I saw her appear—that dark-haired beauty so stunning she could give you a heart attack, so slender and without a speck of makeup, moving with curves that made her look like a maiden in a permanent state of heat.
Holding hands, we walked off toward Las Bulerías to have dinner and enjoy some sangria. Las Bulerías was a restaurant-bar a few blocks from the famous steps of the University of Havana—those steps where Fidel and his comrades began plotting what would end in the assault on Moncada.
I always liked that place, perhaps because of its atmosphere, which closely resembled a tavern from the Spanish Cantabrian coast. Every time I went there to drink sangria or eat paella, I was reminded of my family heritage, as both the music and the food carried the flavor of the Andalusian lands from which my ancestors emigrated in the previous century.
In that bar, at night, one could take delight in the singing of flamenco couplets and watch real Romani women dance beneath the bluish glow of the night sky.
That night, after dining like gourmets and enjoying another pair of sangrias, I was, as they say, practically drooling with lust. The dancers were still performing atop the dark counter when I asked her, with ulterior motives, if she wanted to go to the beach—our code word for taking her to bed. She gave me a resounding NO. No, she preferred to go dancing, because the clacking of the castanets and the sensual swaying of the dancers’ hips had gotten her into the mood. So off we went to the club La Zorra y el Cuervo.
The next day, at six o’clock sharp as agreed, I saw my friend walking mournfully toward the Yara Cinema, his head wrapped in a roll of white gauze like a half-dressed mummy. Unable to hold back my laughter, I asked him what had happened. “When I left you yesterday you were already half-plastered; you must have fallen,” I said. He looked at me mournfully and said: “I wish it had been that. Something infinitely more surreal happened to me—much worse, you can’t even imagine.” And he began to tell the story.
It turns out that my friend, to build up his courage, had stopped by the Monserrate bar and downed two more mojitos while reading the novel. Before leaving, he craved one for the road and knocked back a shot of chispa de tren—that infamous moonshine made with drugstore rubbing alcohol.
“It must have been about midnight when I started my retreat, turned into a walking distillery,” he told me. “And in that supreme state I arrived, stumbling drunk, at our friends’ residence, but with every good intention of making peace with my girlfriend and, with any luck, getting a little action.”
But since he was more wasted than a shot in the dark, he had forgotten that her mother had arrived from La Paz, and had no idea that at that moment the lady was sleeping alongside her daughter.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, just as he had always done, before entering the bedroom he undressed in total silence so as not to wake anyone. Like a Siamese cat, he crept slowly to the edge of the bed. In a low voice, with a terrible reek of alcohol, he pressed his mouth to the ear of one of them and exclaimed: “Oh, move over a bit, give me some space…” And just like that, as naked as the day he was born, he slipped between the sheets right between the two women, like the meat in a sandwich.
“Suddenly,” he continued, “I heard a shriek that almost shattered the windows of the whole neighborhood. The mother bolted out of bed with unbelievable fury, screaming at me: ‘You bastard! You scoundrel!’ She grabbed a white object from the nightstand and beat me to the bone.”
“Imagine! Right then and there my drunkenness vanished in a flash, and I didn’t even have time to zip up my pants, because as I was escaping, the old lady hit me over the head with a plaster Ekeko doll she had brought from La Paz as a gift.”
He unwrapped the gauze like party streamers and said to me: “Look! She left this huge hole in my skull!” And to top off his misfortune, his girlfriend threw all five stuffed animals he had given her out into the street and broke up with him on the spot.
I responded with roaring laughter, quoting a Cuban idiom: When the trouble calls for a toilet, green guavas won’t stop it. And I thought to myself that one has to have a very particular kind of luck for the god of abundance—that chubby, smiling little statue that in my homeland is loaded with gifts to bring good fortune—to crack your head open in someone else’s house in the middle of the night.
“And how did it go for you?” he asked me. “Surely something happened to you too, that’s why you’ve got a black eye,” and he burst out laughing as if it were payback.
So I began telling him that after dancing for a while at La Zorra y el Cuervo, I convinced Regla and took her to the Las Casitas del Ayestarán motel.
Those famous posadas—pay-by-the-hour motels—didn’t offer much comfort: no clean sheets, no hot showers, very few refreshments, just the bare minimum. But they did feature high-fidelity audio and video in their rooms—not because they had cameras or sound systems installed, but because of the peepholes the motel owners had drilled into the walls, allowing guests in neighboring rooms to sneak a peek. And sometimes, to make extra money, they charged non-insignificant fees to offer that free show as an appetizer to the folks waiting their turn.
“Imagine,” I told him, “after the first round of lovemaking, I decided to step out to buy a bottle of rum to keep the party going.”
By that point I was higher than a kite, and after waiting like a sleepwalker for about fifteen minutes, dozing at the motel’s bar counter, I returned to what I assumed was the room where Regla was waiting for me.
“Just like you, I felt my way into the bed. And believe it or not, just like you, I was greeted by a scream that nearly burst my eardrums. Before I could recover from the shock and escape the room, I caught a slap across the face that made me see stars. What happened was that I was so drunk I got the wrong room and crawled in with a couple making love.”
And so that is how both of us ended that long day injured by the effects of love: he with a gash on his head, and I with a black eye.
That night, as we sat on the Malecón seawall with our two copies of The Truce on our laps—one of us wearing a bandage and the other with a shiner—we agreed that the title had proven too big for us. Benedetti had written a novel about a man to whom life grants a truce. To us, that August, it granted barely a recess—and charged us admission at the door.