I Can Give You Anything But Love

one

This afternoon Abdul showed up at my apartment on Calle 21 y G. In the door’s judas eye I made out a sweat-beaded face from an old photo, scarily close and unexpected, like a sea monster humping a periscope. At first I couldn’t tell if he was Abdul or another mulatto who boned me a few times a thousand years ago, when the skin market assembled at night by the Fiat garage on the Malecón. The other guy went loco the summer a drug shipment slipped past the coast guard and flooded Havana with cocaine. Before that, even a little weed was a shrieking rarity. By September, jineteros were burgling houses for coke money and banging clients in apartment-house doorways.

After an inevitable crackdown, gay rights groups in El Norte denounced the Castro regime’s repressive measures. The Castro regime can piss up a rope, but some repressive measures are understandable. Nightlife shifted up La Rampa and the hustlers took over the cafetería at 23 y G, a block from where I am now. Then when I was away for seven years the scene trickled back to the Malecón. The Bim Bom cafetería at La Rampa and Infante is homo central these days. The old Fiat dealership has become a spruced-up café serving breakfast at sidewalk tables.

I wouldn’t want to see the cokehead again. I didn’t feature seeing Abdul much, either. I don’t like people showing up here uninvited. It’s important to maintain boundaries. Besides that, Abdul is a pig. A harmless pig, but a pig all the same. I thought to keep the barred security door between us, then realized it wasn’t locked.

I saw you last night at Bim Bom, he said, flicking the door latch and slipping into the salon. He attempted a hug. I slid out of reach and steered him out to the terrace.

I followed you up here, he proudly revealed, but it was dark.

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, exactly. People like Abdul have eyes that see in the dark with the accuracy of night-vision goggles. For that matter, they could pick up your location anywhere in Havana as if your wallet was sending a GPS signal. Some would mistake this for tropical exuberance run awry. Worse, people like Abdul expect congratulations for raping your privacy.

Abdul is an attractive man, now in his thirties. In the US or Europe, he could model underpants for Calvin Klein. There is nothing overtly crass or desperate about him. Still, in days of old, he was full of crude calculation, an annoying self-assurance that emanated from his prick. That hadn’t changed, either.

Why not say something instead of following me?

He strode to the edge of the terrace and pointed to the Parque Victor Hugo across from the Romanian embassy.

I would have! A police stopped me, over there.

Like all Havanans, Abdul refers to law enforcement officers using the indefinite article, as one speaks of an invasive plant species.

Oh. In other words, you followed me for fifteen blocks in the dark.

He pretended not to hear, tapping spatulate fingers on the glass table. He glanced at my notebooks and pencils, then pulled out a metal chair from the table. It screeched horribly against the floor tiles. Seated, he suddenly looked compressed and expectant, somebody waiting for a bus, or a doctor.

Why you didn’t come all these years?

"Porque … porque yo estaba tan feliz aqui la ultima vez." It’s hard to sell sarcasm in a second language. I didn’t succeed, or else he wasn’t having any. I was happy here when he last saw me, actually. At times.

¿Que?

Porque despues de Nine Eleven, el gobierno de los Estados Unidos lo hizo impossible.

Si, claramente, entiendo.

Do Cubans call 9/11 Nueve Once? Or something else? What Americans call the Bay of Pigs, Cubans call the Victory of Giron. Maybe they have less apocalyptically compressed terms for disasters befalling El Norte, which Americans consider infinitely worse than anybody else’s. It was a pivotal event in the modern world, obviously. But Cuba hasn’t been part of the modern world in a long time, marooned in a Marxist-Leninist time warp of sluggish totalitarianism.

I poured Havana Club and cola into a pitcher while citing punitive measures the US can take against unlicensed travelers if it wishes, notably a twenty-five-thousand dollar fine. Not worth talking about, but I was never in the habit of conversation with Abdul. When I knew him before, I spoke about ten words of Spanish. Being fluent now didn’t change things. Flutters of comprehension involving his chin and fingers as he drained his glass didn’t convince me he had any idea what I was talking about. In Abdul’s particular milieu, it’s never clear if people even try to follow what you’re saying, or listen for key words while waiting to bring money into the conversation.

It felt confusing to see him. A little sad. The connection was never important enough to joyfully recall it a decade later. I didn’t suppose he was in throes of fond remembrance, either. Yet we acted like old friends who had liked each other a great deal more than we actually had. Abdul isn’t old enough to find the continued existence of another person uncanny, I thought. One has to lose quite a few people before that happens. Maybe he senses something encouraging in the fact that I’m not dead by now, but he isn’t surprised. It surprises me, but that’s a whole other story.

There was nothing to do but show him the kitchen, the back terrace looking down Calle G, where it stretches to the Caribbean, passing the Hotel Presidente and the tall buildings on the Malecón. The smaller bathroom. The middle bedroom. The long blue-tiled bathroom between the bedrooms. The front bedroom with shuttered French windows that open on the narrow part of the front terrace. I keep valuables in the spare bedroom closet and dresser drawers. I learned the folly of renting a flat without a locked safe room a long time ago. Abdul doesn’t steal, I recalled. Out of habit, though, and in case, I told him it was a storage room, that the owner in Bogotá has the key.

He ogled the flat with blatant territorial lust. Everything visibly scrubbed, swept, mopped, dusted, washed, folded, and tucked into place, daily. Palatial rooms, bare looking despite many paintings and lots of heavy mahogany furniture. An enviable residence by Havana standards, though many grander ones exist, not only in Vedado and west of here in Miramar, but even in Casablanca, across the port tunnel, or the slummy outlying districts east of Habana Vieja like Regla and Cerro. In every quarter, houses built for the rich who fled half a century ago were redistributed after the Revolution, parceled into ciudadela or left intact for single families. You’d have to be a determined swine not to see something wonderful about this, considering who owned these houses under Batista.

There was a man who loved islands, the D. H. Lawrence story begins. He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself. It was said of D. H. Lawrence that he never believed in the existence of other people, and when he was forced to, he hated them. Well. There is, aside from that, this thing about islands: unlike the whole world, an island is a place a solitary person can attempt to understand.

This city was built for giant people with histrionic lives, the bygone lives portrayed in the Brazilian telenovelas everybody watches here; lives magnified by vertiginous ceilings and endless marble-floored rooms. Many not-well-off Cubans with lives of lesser grandeur inhabit the weather-beaten villas of vanished gangsters and deposed politicians with a casual dignity that isn’t entirely borrowed from a different time and a higher class. They have as much ancestral memorabilia as their former overlords, and often more impressive family histories, educational credentials, and professional attainments. That’s how it is.

The flats in this building, and the identical house beside it on Calle 21, are occupied—or unoccupied—by professionals who leave the island whenever they please. It’s not merely the flat that’s enviable, though it’s nicer than where many of my friends live, but also the privilege implied by the owner’s perennial absence, the working elevator, the copious unused space. At least two flats in this house have been empty as long as I can remember, their owners working abroad and unlikely ever to live here again.

The apartment is riddled with mirrors. An absurdly huge one framed in polished mahogany in the front bedroom, smaller ones in the bathrooms, mirrored insets in cabinets, mirrors placed strategically over bureaus and dressers to primp and knot ties in, or reflect a much-enacted primal scene. Alberto, who owns this flat and its twin in the adjacent building wing, and another on the top floor, is a famous Cuban actor currently working in soaps shot in Colombia: A Corazón Abierto, La Quiero a Morir, Milagros de Amor. His old Communist father occupies the flat directly overhead, under the roof. He’s senile. Each summer, Alberto leases the next-door place to an aunt who lives in Madrid. Alberto painted the pictures on the walls. He is highly esteemed as a painter in Cuba, besides being a famous actor. I don’t know what to say about these paintings, except that they look very Cuban.

Because Alberto and his family enjoy gazing at themselves (their names are carved in the fieldstone half-wall of the front terrace; I picture them grouped inside the largest mirror, arrayed in lace mantillas and brocade morning coats from another century, or from an episode of Milagros de Amor, figures in a Sargent painting), the deflating evidence of passing time snags my attention when I pass through the rooms. Time is glacially slow in this country, but my face races on, across all the mirrors, en route to the eternity of nothingness behind the finish line.

More or less by chance, I’ve ascended a few rungs of the local social ladder since my long-ago rental on Principe Street, where Ricardo and Barbara Marcet live. Which is where I had the long-ago affair with Abdul, among others. I’ve lived in this new place, sporadically, for two years. Abdul is the only person from that earlier time I’ve encountered. One day I will visit Ricardo and Barbara. I know I’ve avoided them because Principe Street will be another mirror reminding me how days become months and months become years. I didn’t know what to tell Abdul about all the time gone missing, about the money I once had evaporating like steam, or the terrifying movements of clocks when you start to be old.

Nueve Once had nothing to do with it, really. The American travel ban was ramped up, or so I was told, and the hysteria of those months and years probably deflected me from the effort coming back here would have required, in my suddenly reduced circumstances. A more pedestrian reason was a publishing lunch in 2002, where I was about to hand across the table a proposal for a book about the island—one that my editor had informally commissioned, and dangled a half-million-dollar advance for—when said editor announced she was leaving the company.

It was a decision obviously reached rather previously. (Jumped or was pushed, my agent japed that afternoon, we’ll never know which, either.) It took fantastic effrontery for her to pretend otherwise, but the betrayal itself was nothing unusual in the publishing business. After pulling the plug on my income for what turned out to be a biblical span, she dragged me to Bergdorf Goodman, where she laid out two thousand dollars for a handbag.

This came to mind this afternoon because that luncheon, more than anything else, probably accounts for the great gap in continuity, almost a geological fissure. Seven or eight years of spiritual grisaille commenced between the dessert flan and the custom handbag counter at Bergdorf’s. After those flattening years, Havana no longer seemed the place to be. But it is. It always has been. This city is my heart. I will never fully understand why I ever let it go. I would have been lost trying to squeeze the missing time through the mangle of my own language, much less explain it in defective Spanish. Abdul wasn’t really curious about it, anyway.

I came here with Ferd Eggan in May 2001. That would have been the last time until this afternoon that I saw Abdul, his perfect muscle tone glistening with coconut oil. Naked except for a leather jock strap and cowboy boots, riding a horse behind the dunes at Playa Mi Cayito.

Ferd and I had rented separate cabins at the campgrounds. He had brought along his jinetero, who was busy stuffing his face at a kiosk selling food-like substances out on the highway. Stumbling across the grounds on a foot path of dessicated mud that turned into fiery sand and prickling dune grass, we debated driving the next morning along the northern route to Santiago de Cuba, or taking roads that run through Cienfuegos, Trinidad de Cuba, and Camagüey. The customary beauty pageant swarmed over undulating humps of sand: nearly naked young men with perfect bodies catwalking to a parking lot refreshment stand, or back to rented beach umbrellas and plastic chaise lounges spread along the shore.

My nickname for Playa Mi Cayito is Porno Beach. Rent boys who hang around the Malecón at night spend their days there, promoting fantastic endowments against a majestic backdrop of foaming surf and azure skies, wearing the least possible excuses for bathing suits, often improvised from see-through materials. Beachwear magnifies their genitals to Godzilla scale, evoking commedia dell’arte phalluses.

Pingueros I recognize from the city prowl the shore in a state of elephantine tumescence, waggling their groins at likely clients sprawled on chaises and blankets. Most johns are roughly the age of a pinguero’s grandfather. In the harsh UV broiler of daylight, the effect of their tribal-looking sunscreen is that of the cold cream with which ancient goddesses of the stage wipe off their makeup after a matinee. Older men at Playa Mi Cayito are obese, emaciated, wasted from chemo, bald, decrepit, ugly, flamboyantly queeny, or several of these things at the same time.

There are some attractive older parties on the beach who arrive there preattached to comely young consorts. If they are well-off and foreign, they’re the guys all pingueros want to hook up with (though a pinguero will settle for just well-off, if need be), hoping for a ticket off the island, some capital to start a business, or a house they will own instead of having to live with their parents.

The faintest sign delivers the desired merchandise to any parasol or blanket. It’s simple to make a date. Some pingueros will perform anything short of full penetration on the spot. Some will fuck right there in the water.

I’m not wild about Playa Mi Cayito. There are two gray-uniformed cops forever glowering from under a beach umbrella, and they’re bad news. They’re planted like shrubs for a cop’s-eye panorama of the whole beach, easily spotting their victims. Bored and malevolent, they seize selected youths and drag them off to a holding tank a couple miles up the highway. The more aggressive exhibitionists and public sodomites pay them off, the price of a beach cop being two dollars or a beer and a sandwich. Instead, they pick out young guys who aren’t soliciting, who came with a tourist friend. The police consider any non-Cuban a tourist. There’s no law against Cubans fraternizing with tourists, but cops make their own laws everywhere, and here you need to bribe them to leave you alone.

You feel okay? Ferd asked.

We had stopped on the way for chicken kebabs and beers at a roadside stand. Minutes after driving away we had to pull over. I felt my guts trying to spray through my nose. I scrambled out in time to redecorate the road instead of the Lexus upholstery. Now I felt the beach path spinning slightly.

I’m fine, I think so. It feels like it all came up.

A horse’s muzzle snorted beside my head.

Abdul was peering down from the saddle of a pure white quarterhorse gelding. When it registered that it was Abdul, and that the expensively-bred animal he was on was rented to anybody at the beach, twinges of nausea pinched my stomach. I felt sorry for the gelding. Abdul didn’t belong on him. Abdul in a jockstrap riding a white horse was a pretty astounding visual, though. He looked like Mellors in a telenovela adaptation of Lady Chatterley.

Would I care to meet his mother, he wanted to know. I envisioned a crumbly old slut striking Hollywood poses on a moth-eaten blanket, slathering wrinkled bosoms with tanning oil. I was finished with Abdul. A flicker of curiosity ran through me, but I fought it. I said I’d prefer not.

Six months earlier, I had brought him two pairs of ridiculously pricey Barker Black shoes from the Melrose Avenue Fred Segal’s in West Hollywood. One pair pinched his toes when he tried them on. His instant petulance was too brutal a reminder of the cold equation underlying our supposed romance. I only travel with one suitcase and a shoulder bag, ever. Even if I’m going to be gone for months. In most cities of the world, if you need socks or a burner phone you can buy them anywhere. Cuba isn’t a consumer society, though, and even in Havana there are shortages of what little there is: you bring what you’ll need with you, right down to disposable razors and pencils. Half my luggage consists of things my friends want: sunglasses, shirts, computer batteries, all kinds of provender that’s insanely expensive or else nonexistent on the island. Abdul’s shoes had taken up a lot of premium space in the suitcase. As I saw it, he should have been pleased to get one set of elegant footwear, and I’d given him two. He could sell them if they didn’t fit, for more than he made peddling his pinga in a month. I saw that this icy, churlish indignation over the normal tightness of new shoes was going to be his stock reaction to any expensive gift, as if he were some sought-after courtesan from a Balzac novel.

I avoided him after that. When he showed up at Principe Street I didn’t let him in. Abdul has his pride. He went away, and stayed away. At Playa Mi Cayito, he stared at me for an uncomfortable minute, then tapped his stirrups on the horse’s ribs and cantered off.

I collapsed as Ferd and I strolled back to the cabins hours later. The doctor on call at