Cuba and the Night Read Online Free Page A

down, principles don’t. People tell lies, images never do. The first time you come into a foreign country, and everyone looks the same to you, and there’s fighting all around, there’s no way of telling right from wrong. The only thing to do is get out the lens and catch the ambiguity; and when it came to ambiguity, Cuba was the leader of the pack.
    I’d got most of what I needed from the present trip, in any case, and the only thing I needed now was some more intimate shots—the inside of houses, the texture of hopes. So I decided to take José up on his offer and track that crooked wire to wherever it would take me.
    So I followed the instructions he’d given me, walked past Coppelia—it looked kind of hungover this morning, with an after-the-party feel—and down 23, where a few old men were buying the day’s copy of
Granma
, and the kids were talking about how they’d spent the night, and the housewives were calculating lines and quotas. I went down a side street, and up some narrow stairs, past two apartments open, with little boys watching me from the sofa, and up to a floor where an old woman was on the telephone, with the door open. CDR, I figured: the neighborhood spies making sure that everything was peachy. I knocked on the door that said 7, and heard a dog barking, and then it sprung open, and there was José, a big black boy behind him. “Richard,” he said, “meet my brother,” and the big smiling boy extended a hand. I followed them in, through a small room and into the kitchen. I figured there was no way this guy was really his brother—the only thing they had in common was two eyes and two legs—but distinctions were all dissolved here. In fact, it looked like half Havana was in the kitchen: kids with university manners, and three boys gathered around an English grammar book, and some girls huddled over
Playboy
in the corner, and a few shirtless teenagers sprawled out on the floor in front of a boom box on which you could catch the stations from Key West. Another Havana slumber party.
    Around me, on the living room wall, there was a cross, and rowsand rows of books in every kind of language: worn old orange Penguins of Somerset Maugham and Raymond Chandler; Martí, Gogol, Spinoza, Wilde,
The Gulag Archipelago
, something called
The Book of Knowledge
. A rooster was strutting around the room, and I could see the mangy white dog who’d greeted me at the door slurping up water from the toilet bowl. There was a photo of the Beatles on the bathroom door, a couple of postcards of the Yucatán on the wall.
    “Too many books, eh?” said José. “It is my love. Books and friends. I have books from every country. Friends too—in Barcelona, Lima, Paris. But I cannot see them. My books I can always see and hold. Hey, Richard. This is Myra and Osman and Reynaldo,” and I smiled at them all, and they smiled back, and then went back to Cyndi Lauper and discussing whether Jesse Jackson was a Communist.
    “So how is it with you, Richard? What can I give you?”
    “Suffering. I need suffering. Images of pain, of desperation.”
    “No problem,” he said. “You come to the right place. You can take pictures of my apartment and my friends. What else?”
    “I need to see despair.”
    “Okay. Later, I take you to a typical house. But first you need something else? Some cigars, maybe? The cigars with Shakespeare on the box. Maybe the ones with that English place—the House of Kings?”
    “House of Lords?”
    “Sure; House of Lords, anything: my friend can get you. Five boxes, ten. Usually, they are fifty pesos. I can get you for twenty U.S. Just tell me how many you need. Then I visit him, get the boxes, and we go to Capri. I get some girls, we have a party. What do you say?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Sure. No maybe. This is better. You stay at the Nacional now? Okay. Maybe I give you ten dollars. You buy some food, some beer in the Tiendas there, and after, we go to the show.” Better that than another